Unabomber Trial About Tortured Soul Or Methodical Killer?

BERKELEY, Calif. - Thirty years ago this fall, a shy, young mathematician named Ted Kaczynski walked onto the University of California campus armed with an IQ of 170 and the social skills of a man half his age.

He was 25, single and brilliant. Two years later, amid the turbulent upheaval of the late '60s, he abruptly resigned as an assistant professor of math, then from life itself, exiting to a primitive Montana cabin just beyond the harsh scrutiny of society.

"He said he was not only leaving Berkeley, but mathematics," recalled John Addison, who chaired Berkeley's mathematics department at the time. "We asked him what he planned to do, and he said he didn't know."

That fateful day on the strife-torn campus in the Berkeley hills proved to be the most decisive in a series of turning points in the life of Theodore John Kaczynski. From early childhood, it has been a twisting trail of desolate anger, rarely interrupted, that has led ultimately to his trial - beginning tomorrow in Sacramento - as the suspected Unabomber.

Kaczynski's own lawyers are preparing to mount an insanity defense.

Prosecutors, who are seeking the death penalty, reject that argument.

Aided by reams of incriminating evidence gathered from his cabin, prosecutors will argue Kaczynski is a methodical killer who carried out a campaign of terror, responsible for at least 16 bombings from May 1978 to April 1995 that killed three people and injured 23.

He is specifically charged in four California bombings. They include two blasts a decade apart in which two Sacramento men, Hugh Scrutton and Gilbert Murray, died.

A troubled soul

Kaczynski has thrown his own lawyers for a loop by refusing to submit to a court-ordered psychiatric examination.

Whichever version of his life prevails, a series of traumatic events in Kaczynski's life reveals a deeply troubled soul.

Family members declined interviews. But court documents, including interviews with his mother and brother, paint a picture of a boy genius always separated from his peers, becoming a man who shunned the very companionship and affection he yearned for.

It is also the tale of an angry individualist who, in a self-imposed exile, refined a messianic theory that by his actions, he could reverse the "disaster" brought on by the industrial-technological revolution.

Trial attorneys are expected to draw from these recollections, Kaczynski's own diaries and correspondences, and other evidence gathered from the Montana cabin where he lived for 25 years.

There Kaczynski found the isolation he seemed to have always sought. David Kaczynski, the man whose gnawing suspicions about his older brother led to his arrest, later said Ted "always had a lack of connection to others, an inability to understand others."

By his family's own account, Kaczynski's alienation began with his relationship to his own parents. He would come to accuse them of "ruining his life," at one point writing them that "I can't wait until you die so I can spit on your corpse."

His behavior had always baffled his immediate family, who were considered close and loving by others. His mother often wondered whether his bouts of rage had their beginnings in an incident that has haunted her since early 1943, when Wanda Kaczynski was forced to hospitalize her son after he contracted a dangerous case of hives.

The baby, only 9 months old, was terrified and somehow altered by the experience. "When I finally came back to take him home, what they handed me was not this bouncing, joyous baby, but a little rag doll, that didn't look at me, that was slumped over, was completely limp," she said in an interview last fall with CBS's "60 Minutes."

Wanda Kaczynski said she felt the incident began a pattern of withdrawal that continued thereafter. "He became a very sober child."

He became more than that. The mother began to notice an aloofness about her son, who kept to himself behind closed doors upstairs in an attic. Whenever she or her husband tried to bring him out of his shell, he resorted to "shutdowns," periods of extreme anger when he would refuse to talk.

The rage endured. In an interview with FBI agents David described an incident at dinner when Ted was 12 or 13, after the family had moved to Evergreen Park in Chicago. Wanda was carrying a dish of hot food to the table, when Ted drew her chair out for her in an apparently gentlemanly gesture.

When Wanda smiled and began sitting down, Ted jerked the chair out from under her and she fell to the floor, the dish falling onto the table. Wanda began screaming at Ted, while Ted stood and laughed at her. Their father sternly ordered Ted to go up to his room in the attic, which Ted did, still laughing.

Yet in school, his teachers praised him, and he progressed so quickly he was able to skip two grades. One high-school incident marred his reputation: He handed a female classmate a wad of paper filled with chemicals that blew up in her hands. Ted was temporarily suspended.

At 16, the boy genius entered Harvard. For his parents, it was an accomplishment tinged with worry. They wondered how he would interact with older, more experienced students.

Their concerns weren't misplaced. Ted did not excel at Harvard, where roommates remember him living slothfully and generally ignoring their presence, slamming the door behind him. He remained a loner.

That would continue through his post-graduate years at the University of Michigan, where he garnered praise for his work, and into 1967 when he began a tenure-track job as an assistant math professor at Berkeley. Once again, fractions, not people, were his friends.

Kaczynski had arrived on a college campus at the height of the Vietnam War and its accompanying protests. While apparently uninvolved, he was clearly developing a set of ideological views.

"I think the social atmosphere of the late '60s was at least as important in understanding the turn his life took than was the week he spent in the hospital, away from his mother," said James Alan Fox, dean of the College of Criminal Justice at Northeastern University.

"All his life, he was good at math," said the expert on serial killers. "It gave him a feeling of self-esteem, whereas relationships with people were intimidating and threatening."

But as tens of thousands of young men began dying in Vietnam, math may no longer have seemed relevant. "It was very difficult to focus on the fourth derivative," said Fox, a former math major who was a Penn State undergraduate at the time.

For Kaczynski, who apparently had begun to question mathematics - the very essence of his being until then - the realization must have been devastating.

"He rejected those same fractions that were his friends," said Fox, "and he was friendless at that point - without support."

On Jan. 20, 1969, with no explanation, Kaczynski signed a letter of resignation effective June 30, when he returned home to Illinois without warning. In a Washington Post interview, Wanda Kaczynski said he told her he was tired of teaching engineers "math that was going to be used for destroying the environment."

Moves to Montana

With his brother's help in 1971, Kaczynski bought 1.4 acres of land just outside Lincoln, Mont., where he built a 10-by-12-foot plywood shack that had no running water or electricity. He began writing letters to newspapers and magazines, railing against advertising, machines and other aspects of modern society.

In June 1978, a month after the first bomb attributed to the Unabomber exploded at Northwestern University near Chicago, Kaczynski returned to his parents' home. A humiliating experience eventually sent him right back to his enclave.

He had begun working at the same foam-cutting plant where his father and his brother were employed. There he met a co-worker whom he dated twice until she lost interest.

Furious, Kaczynski scribbled an offensive limerick about the woman and posted it around the factory. David fired his brother, and Ted eventually fled to Lincoln, thereafter communicating with his family only through a series of increasingly angry letters.

It was the first time David began to understand his brother was sliding out of control.

But the family tried to make amends, writing and even visiting Ted. On their last trip to Montana in 1985, Ted took them to see the flowers in the meadow, and they generally had a great time, his mother later recalled. Not long after, Ted sent an angry letter saying he did not want to hear from the family anymore.

As the years slipped by, the hostile letters continued. "The rejection I experienced at home and at school even affected me physically, in case you wonder why Dave is three inches taller than I," Ted wrote his mother.

By 1987, 11 more bombs had been mailed or planted by the Unabomber, most in places familiar to Kaczynski: four either in or near Chicago; two on the Berkeley campus; and one at the Ann Arbor home of a University of Michigan professor. And then, for the next six years, no more bombs were mailed.

In 1989, David wrote saying he was planning to marry, and asked Ted to be his best man. Ted was devastated, writing back letters filled with criticisms of the woman he had never met.

In 1990, Ted's father, struggling with lung cancer, committed suicide. Ted did not return home for the funeral.

As the Unabomber continued his destructive spree - and confounded the FBI as to his identity - it was David's wife who half-jokingly began to suspect her husband's brother was behind the acts of terrorism. He not only seemed to fit the FBI profile - a reclusive, white male in his 40s, who was familiar with university life - but, she noted, the bombings had occurred in places Kaczynski had lived.

By September 1995, the Unabomber's 35,000-word manifesto had been published by the Washington Post and the New York Times. Intrigued, David's wife asked him to read the treatise.

"The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race," it began. "The continued development of technology will worsen the situation. . . . We therefore advocate a revolution against the industrial system."

David's suspicions were aroused by the language and the twisted logic of the document, both of which echoed the thoughts of his brother.

Not long afterward, he stumbled across something that would seal his brother's fate. While helping his mother prepare to move from her Chicago home, David opened a foot-locker of his brother's that contained a 23-page essay written by Ted in 1971. It sounded eerily familiar. Troubled, David contacted the FBI through an intermediary, eventually meeting with them himself.

Today, David Kaczynski remains deeply pained about a decision he knows could eventually lead to the execution of his brother.

"What an awful irony," he told CBS, "if I were to take action to prevent the loss of further life and it ended up in the loss of my own brother's life."