David Kaczynski

He started writing.

My guest today is James R. Fitz Fitzgerald, the retired FBI criminal profiler and forensic linguist whose analysis of Ted Kaczynski's language played a key role in identifying him and obtaining the warrant to search his remote Montana cabin.

Fitz later served as a consulting producer on the Discovery series Manhunt Unabomber.

Today, we are separating Hollywood from reality.

What Manhunt got right, what it invented, and how Fitz used Ted Kaczynski's own words to help finally catch him.

James, welcome to Killer Thriller.

Thank you so much for being with me today.

I'm obsessed with what your job is, essentially, in general.

He was a thinker, a philosopher, a man engaged in the grandest of all experiments.

His name was Henry David Thoreau.

He built a small hut on a piece of land owned by his friend and mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson.

The hut hugged the shore of a little glacial lake in Massachusetts called Walden Pond.

It was the dream of an idyllic, undisturbed natural world, which meant that adherents to transcendentalism were no fans of capitalism or industry or the whole westward-ho fever dream of manifest destiny.

Unlike today's tech fanboys who are every bit as fired up about individual freedom, you know, for themselves, not you, while taking a giant dump on the same natural world that the transcendentalists so revered.

Henry David Thoreau spent his mostly solitary days on Walden Pond crafting a collection of essays that would go on to be printed in nearly every language on earth.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and to see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

And every Monday is Killer of the Week, where we go inside the minds and motives of the world's most notorious murderers.

This week, we're opening the file on Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber.

And this story isn't finished.

Kaczynski died in federal custody in June 2023, but questions about his radicalization, the FBI's handling of the case, and the chilling relevance of his anti-technology manifesto to today's AI debates have kept researchers, journalists, and investigators talking.

Not only that, but you'll get complete access to an exclusive limited series every month and early ad-free access to all CrimeHouse shows and bonus episodes.

Go to CrimeHousePlus.com or on Apple Podcasts, tap Try Free at the top of the CrimeHouse 24-7 page.

Now, Dr. Tristin Engels is back with me as we follow Ted Kaczynski to his shocking unraveling and ask what it really means to be heard.

By the late 1970s, 36-year-old Ted Kaczynski was living alone in a remote cabin in Lincoln, Montana.

Um, but he, he asked me, "What do you suggest I do?" And I was like, "I would suggest you go to him and tell him to knock it the hell off or you're gonna turn him in." He's like, "So you're fine with turning him in?" I'm like, "Well, I mean, I would give him the opportunity to stop, but I am, you know, family first kinda guy.

[chuckles] Family first kinda guy." But, uh, the, I won- I won't get into the, the details of my, uh, my, my, uh, time with David Kaczynski, but Ted Kaczynski was the Unabomber.

So they put out this movie, and it's fascinating.

A friend of mine recommended it to me.

Um, but that's, I guess, my issue with the Netflix series, and it's exactly what you're talking about.

As soon as you treat these people, uh, whether it's Ted Kaczynski or, or you Or, um, you know, Charles Manson or, or anyone.

As soon as you start treating them as characters in a play, you're no longer gaining any insight.

Um, and I felt in terms of Kaczynski, they really did a poor job of chu- showcasing the trajectory of how someone can fall into this, uh, a-and the actual motivations driving their behavior.

And it almost-- I wanted to yell out like Tom Hanks in A League of Their Own, "There's no crying in baseball." Or, "There's no crying in catching bad guys." You know, so then it, then it ends there.

Some of the word slides, Kaczynski's in, he went to prison, conv- you know, uh, pleaded guilty, and died of, uh, suicide in 2023.

Then who shows up on the screen but the real Ted Kaczynski-

Right

...

it was the woman who first noticed that Ted Kaczynski's writings sounded like his brother.

Right.

You know, 'cause, 'cause they published his manifesto.

Mm.

And then the brother read it, and he's like, "Yeah, that's my brother Ted," and he turned him in.

And so the story, the, the podcast tried to make a point that, like women are who brought Ted Kaczynski down.

Oh, okay.

And sometimes they want the rest of us to understand.

This former college professor, Ted Kaczynski, taught at Berkeley for two years, a math genius.

For nearly two decades, Ted Kaczynski carried out a bombing campaign across the United States, killing three people and injuring more than 20 others.

His targets were universities, airlines, computer stores.

And then there's the Manifesto, a document that has outlived Kaczynski and continues to find new readers, including a new generation of offenders.

When the name Ted Kaczynski finally came to me, and actually, I didn't even have his name first, just a document written by him, that's all I knew.

I said, you've got your man.

30 years later, there is still wild speculation about Kaczynski.