Original subtitles

- I remember the guards brought Kaczynski in

and he was in shackles,

and he was wearing a white jumpsuit.

And he looked very small and...

I was, I was nervous.

Okay, so...

The killer called, the Unabomber,

has terrorized this country for nearly 18 years now.

In addition to killing three people,

his attacks have wounded 23 others, some seriously.

- Ted Kaczynski is known as "the Unabomber".

- Those kinda guys are rare and they're terrible.

And Ted was terrible.

- This guy was a pop culture icon.

I mean, people wanted him to run for President.

- I love this one. This is one of my favorites.

- The Unabomber to a lot of kids was inspiration.

- He's inspired Hollywood movies.

- And the blood will be on your hands.

- Why would somebody try to kill you?

Why would they do that to you?

- I was shocked by the...

the three years at Harvard University in an experiment.

- It's perverse. It's sick. It doesn't work.

But that's what Kaczynski was subjected to.

- Well, I think it, it takes a whole perfect storm

to create someone as violent as my brother.

- He was a good friend.

It was as if he was in pain, but I couldn't say why.

- I never would have thought

that my neighbor was sitting in that little cabin

creating bombs and killing people.

- It was the most expensive investigation

in the history of the FBI.

Are you the Unabomber?

- It was Linda who cracked the Unabomber case.

- For me, it was easy. We had to do something.

- Every journalist in the United States, in the world,

would love to get the first interview with Ted Kaczynski.

By his invitation, he approached me.

My writing and his writing were very similar.

He comes right out and says it.

No. It was simply anger and revenge,

and I was... was gonna strike back.

Try not to get blown up.

- You have an individual living

in a little cabin by himself

in essentially a wilderness area

right outside a very small town.

He doesn't have a car, doesn't have electricity,

doesn't have power tools, doesn't have a job...

- I figure he's one of those guys holed up somewhere,

obsessing, reading every article he can find

on the ills of society as he sees them,

and, you know, pounding his fist on the table saying,

"I gotta do something about this."

And the kinda guy that the neighbors say,

"He was a little torqued, but he kept to himself.

Kinda quiet."

The cabin is 10 by 14 feet

uh, and is full of stuff.

His heat is provided only by a potbelly stove.

It's smoky, there's soot everywhere,

it's dark.

And he's been doing a great deal of work in there.

Apparently, the work to construct these bombs

has all been done in the cabin.

Good evening.

We begin tonight with an emergency security alert

issued in California today.

The government says there is a credible threat

that a passenger jet may be bombed

from a man the FBI calls the Unabomber.

He's causing all kinds of havoc,

he's causing all kinds of public concern.

Police are swarming around the terminals

at Los Angeles International Airport.

Airlines have stopped loading the 200 tons of mail

that leave here daily.

It's being screened at a nearby postal facility

for the possibility of letter bombs.

- LAX is closed

and security goes to, you know, DEFCON 4.

Security has been heightened

and with it, anxiety.

The Unabomber's unique campaign of terror started in 1978 -

in 16 separate bombing incidents.

Three people have been killed, another 23 injured.

He's been going on for decades it seems.

The FBI is warning everyone

to look out for unusual packages.

- If it appears suspicious in any way, shape, or form

then they should contact their local police.

Nobody knows who he is.

It's, it's creepy. It's creepy.

- Not knowing is a hard thing.

I didn't know who this was for nine years.

So, basically, you're dealing with a ghost.

- It's a killer on the loose

and he's got a wide range of targets.

- There's a tremendous sense of public fear at this point

and there doesn't seem to be any clear sign

that the task force is going to be able to stop him

anytime soon.

- More than 100 FBI agents

are working the Unabomber case.

- It was the largest manhunt in American history,

and it was estimated to cost $50 million.

- Is he a terrorist or a freedom fighter?

Is he a revolutionary or a serial killer?

- What you have are the facts of the case to work with.

If you can figure out the why,

you may be able to figure out who's doing it.

- The interview I did with Kaczynski

was the first interview he allowed,

three years after he was arrested,

and it was an historical opportunity.

I struggle with this because I don't know

exactly what happened to Ted.

I thought my brother was the best human being on earth;

that he would change the world and do a great deal of good.

- I didn't like the guy.

But Dave loved his brother all the way through, I think.

And his mother, of course, loved Ted as well.

But I didn't.

He may have been a nice person at some point in his life,

but something happened and he became a...

a killer.

- I've spent much of my life trying to understand that.

I mean, why?

- The Unabomber's first bomb

ended up at Northwestern University

based on a return address.

The return address on the package was to a professor

in the technological institute.

The bomb was found in a parking lot.

- It's got a label on it, it's got postage on it,

it's ready to be mailed.

So why wasn't it mailed?

Why is it laying in this parking lot?

We reconstructed it exactly how it was,

and that's when we found it wouldn't fit

through the door of the mailbox.

So, the bomber probably built it,

got to the mailbox

and it wouldn't fit.

And then what do you do? Well, you drop it and you leave.

- And it was retrieved by an officer

from the, uh, Department of Security.

It did partially detonate which caused minor injuries.

- No one recognizes this bomber.

No one has seen this bomber's work before.

The bomber is clever,

but he's clearly not an expert bomb maker.

- He's making these clumsy bombs

with wooden ends to them,

using black powder as a propellant.

He's using this kind of very crude detonating system -

match heads.

They're not all that sophisticated.

Bomb 2 was sent May 9th 1979,

at Northwestern University as well.

And this one was left on a table.

- The bomb is built in a cigar box.

Um, it's not terribly large.

It's simply left there for whoever is going to open it

and someone eventually does.

It's got batteries and wires,

and the explosive mixture is smokeless powder,

the sort of propellant you would find

in a firearm cartridge,

and, in some cases, match heads,

which have been meticulously cut off of matches

to fill a tube or a container.

So that tells us, again, that we're dealing with someone

who, at this point, is not terribly sophisticated

in building bombs and delivering them.

He's figuring it out.

- After bomb number two, he wrote,

"I had hoped that the victim would be blinded

or have his hands blown off,

or be otherwise maimed.

Well, live and learn.

I wish I knew how to get a hold of some dynamite."

- Most criminals aren't able to operate

in such a vacuum. People know what they're doing,

either because they boast about it,

or because they have people around them,

or... for whatever reason,

they can't keep their activities that secret.

He was able to. He lived in the middle of nowhere.

- Here in rural Montana,

for someone to live off the grid

and be reclusive, be a hermit,

it didn't raise any red flags to us

because if you want to do something like that,

then rural Montana is the perfect spot.

- Ted was the kind of person that you, you could meet

and you could know him for 25 years, like me,

but never know any more real details about him

than you did in the first few years.

- All the neighbors got like junk cars sitting around

and he'd just go and help himself to...

whatever parts and pieces he needed to make his bombs.

And it was like he didn't even think

he was doing anything wrong.

- I have quite a large boneyard,

uh, with everything that anybody could need

to do pretty much everything.

There's hundreds and hundreds of feet

of every kind of color and gauge of wire,

and you're not going to miss something like that.

Did I suspect Ted of taking stuff?

No.

- I think it started when I was about five years old.

I was terrified to sleep in my room.

And I was hearing something

in the middle of the night -

footsteps, rummaging around.

I would run into my parents' room and say,

"There's somebody out there."

And they would just be like, "You're dreaming.

Go back to bed."

The third bomb is a package

which is sent through the mail

and it ends up on an airliner,

on an American Airlines flight.

This one is different in its design.

And it is designed to function

based on being triggered by an altimeter,

an altimeter which is constructed from a barometer

such as you might find in a,

a home weather station.

So, when the plane reaches a certain altitude,

the device functions,

can cause an explosion.

- The FBI says an American Airline 727

with 80 persons aboard landed safely today

at Washington's Dulles International Airport

after a small bomb exploded

in a mail pouch in the cargo hold.

American Flight 444 en route from Chicago

landed without injury to any of the passengers or crew.

- It's rather sophisticated

in the sense that the builder has created an altimeter

and, of course, where it was placed

had the potential to cause mass casualties.

So it's, it's incredibly serious.

- "The plan was to blow up airliner in flight.

Unfortunately, plane not destroyed.

Bomb too weak."

- At this point, connections begin to be made.

US government recognizes that they're dealing with

a serial bomber.

- He becomes known as the Unabomber:

university and airline bomber.

That's what the, the FBI tags the project as, Unabomber.

Uh, or Unabomb.

- Ted's mother would send him money.

He would say, "I've got some chest pain

and they say I should have some tests,

but I don't have the money,"

and would, in a sense, scam her into sending money,

which he would then use to make, uh, bombs.

- Here's a guy who is targeting victims

that he has no personal relationship with.

It's unclear exactly what the pattern is.

- The librarian, who he befriended,

she was, unknowingly, giving him books

which he used to target, uh, people for his bombs.

- And it was a pretty long list.

He was going to start killing people

as soon as the weather got better.

- We don't know who's on the list.

You have to wonder, "Am I next?"

- Some dots can be joined but they are few

and a little bit fuzzy.

You have a bomber who's not terribly skilled

at creating bombs

and is clearly spending a great deal of time creating them

based on the... the parts

that he has to accumulate from various places

or, in some cases, make himself.

So, all of these things tell you

something about the bomber,

but is it, at this point,

enough to lead to the bomber's identity? No, it's not.

I assumed that he might've been a, a GI -

that had had a real bad experience in Vietnam -

coming home and just wanted to be off in the woods by himself.

I saw him walking and uh...

you know, he had a little knapsack,

hiking down the road.

So, I'll stop and offer him a ride,

and he was very cordial, and he said, "No, thank you."

- This is a bomb that's different from the others.

This is in a hollowed-out book.

A book called "Ice Brothers", by Sloan Wilson.

It is accompanied by a letter

and the letter is intended to encourage him

to want to read the book.

So, the book has been hollowed out

and turned into a box

to contain an explosive device.

Bleeding heavily from cuts in his face,

left hand and leg,

Wood managed to walk next door for help.

There was blood all over his face,

and he had... his hand was really bloody.

He was shocked that somebody would do such a thing,

but he didn't-he had no idea who it was from or why.

- You talk to someone who's been blown up,

or who's had a loved one blown up,

and it's awful.

That doesn't go away.

The fear and the anguish

and the trauma that gets burned into their beings

by an attack like that

does not dissipate.

- Hospital officials say that surgery

to remove bomb fragments from his leg was successful

but Wood is expected to remain in intensive care

for at least a few more days under police guard.

"I feel better.

I'm still plenty angry.

I'm now able to strike back."

- The task force is being asked

to find solutions to all of this

by catching this person before he can do anything else.

The pressure was just incredible.

- He's mailing things.

There are components that get found at the scene.

Why haven't the clues led to him yet?

- We have a lot of evidence to work with.

We have bombs to work with,

we have a handful of letters from the Unabomber.

A number of them have Eugene O'Neill stamps

attached to them.

Is that a message? Does it have some meaning to the bomber?

Or is that simply what the bomber got

when he went to the postage machine? We don't know.

Is there significance to the fact

that these devices use a great deal of wood

in their construction?

Does the bomber have some interest in wood

or is it just happenstance?

- We're trying to figure this thing out.

We're trying to figure out where the clues might lead,

what people...

in the investigative community already know.

Uh, it's very, it's very frustrating.

- Criminals often operate in the areas

in which they are most comfortable.

The first devices are placed in Chicago.

So, this is a person who is probably,

if we're guessing at this point,

probably from the Chicago area.

- Our family had moved from a...

inner-city neighborhood in Chicago

out to a home in the suburbs.

It was our first like single-family dwelling.

You know my memories of growing up

with my brother and my family

were very, very positive, very warm memories.

This one I think... I think is Dad, Ted and myself,

taken, I believe, at one of our favorite hiking places,

a state park called Starved Rock,

where they had some lovely cliffs

that we would climb.

My father had really loved the nature.

I think the love of nature,

I think, came to both of us through Dad.

- Our family valued intelligence,

success in school.

My brother had skipped a grade

and then went through high school in three years.

He was at Harvard University at the age of 16,

and I remember one of my buddies telling another kid,

"Hey, Dave's brother's really smart, he's in Harvard.

He's like another Einstein.

Well, maybe not another Einstein, but..."

I said, "What do you mean, not another Einstein?"

- He was a bit on the shy side,

but definitely not antisocial.

Once he got to know you - not once you got to know him -

once he got to know you, he could talk and talk.

And we were talking about things

that weren't trivial, they weren't bullshit,

they were just, they were about what was right and wrong.

And Ted was concerned,

and was more savvy than I was, about corporate

and, and governmental impact

on the environment and on...

and on us.

And some of the ideas that he articulated later,

I distinctly have memories of talking about.

- One roommate said that, uh,

if they went down to the dining hall and...

saw him there and sat down with him,

he'd just-they never saw anybody finish his food faster

and without saying a word, would just leave.

You know, so I felt hurt at first

that, that he had just sort of ignored

or, or obliterated our friendship,

but I wasn't alone.

I mean, he was... he was not just shy,

now he was really antisocial.

- Ted had come home from school.

You know, I was getting a little more intellectual,

reading more serious books, and I had some ideas

and I couldn't wait to tell my big brother about my ideas,

but it seemed like, wow,

he was very dismissive of my ideas.

And he said, "You know, Dave,

real smart people have a sadistic streak.

Almost all of them do."

I was a little surprised by that,

but the behavior he showed to me in putting down,

dismissing my ideas

was what he had encountered at Harvard

when people were demeaning toward him

when he-he expressed his philosophy of life.

- When he resigned,

his department chair said,

"Gee, you know, I want you to stay."

And Ted Kaczynski wrote in his diary,

"This fool thinks I want to remain at the university,

when all I wanted was a job to save enough money

so that I could buy a piece of land

to live in the wild."

- "Wow, Ted, great! Go for it!"

You know. "This is wonderful.

You're your own person, you know, you're doing what--

You're living in the way that you want to

rather than in the way other people expect you to live."

- So back behind here

is the road in which Ted would use

to leave his cabin

and walk or bicycle into town.

And every time he would do that,

he would pass my father Butch Gehring's sawmill

over here on the right.

The sawmill is very loud

and probably very disruptive.

It's almost like a very loud humming

as a log would go through the saw,

and so that was constant all day long

while the mill was active.

Ted probably would have been very irritated

to, to hear that noise.

- He sanded the sawmill,

putting sand into the engine

so that it just goes through the entire, the entire unit

and shuts it down,

and they had to repair everything

to be up and running again and it was a huge cost.

My dad, well, there was nothing, really, he could do.

He thought it could have been, you know,

some kids playing a prank.

I mean, he just didn't know who, who did it.

- There were those little times

when I realized that there was a whole side

to this person that I did not know.

I just shudder to think

how I had, uh, unknowingly, helped him

do the things that he did that were so heinous.

Ted was actually at his home cabin

and some motorcycles went riding real loud, real fast,

and he was livid, uh, furious.

- I mean, somebody was very angry.

He didn't break the door in to gain access,

he chopped a hole right through the wall.

- He went in and just destroyed their cabin

and then took a poop in their tub

and, and left.

- He took a risk, you know, looking back now,

of being caught.

The sheriff came and talked to me.

He knew that I knew Ted and he said,

"Well, do you think that that friend of yours,

do you think he coulda done that?"

And I said, "Oh, no."

I said, "He wouldn't do...

you know, he's got his quirks. We all do."

And I believe I was instrumental

in getting him removed as a suspect.

- The FBI prides itself

on being able to solve big crimes,

and a lot of the way they do that is you get tips.

You get information coming' in.

It's not so much you knocking' on doors.

You gotta know where to knock on doors,

and they're not getting the door-knock tips.

It's not coming to them. It's driving 'em nuts.

- It's not unusual when a serial killer's apprehended

that the police had already interviewed him

once or even twice, all right?

They... you know, they have an eye on a group of people.

Ted Kaczynski never showed up on that kind of radar.

- One of the things that's very interesting about Kaczynski

is the personal is political.

Everything that he's writing about

and talking about in the abstract,

is also... related to very concrete experiences

that Kaczynski has had.

- It is frightening,

sometimes, you know, terrifying,

to find out what he was doing.

- We had this logger

that was learning to log with Belgian horses.

So, they're huge animals.

And, um, when he brought the logs off the hill,

it tore up the grass,

and so, one day, Butch said, goes,

"Seed that area up there."

And Tessa was maybe three years old.

And uh, so, I was up there seeding.

And the trees were about 3 feet high,

so she was just a toddler and she would disappear into 'em.

And the hair on the back of my neck went up,

and I thought it was a mountain lion,

and uh... so I told her, "It's time to leave."

But it turned out it was Ted.

He had a... a gun on her.

And I asked the FBI after they figured out it was Ted,

he had written in his journals.

He had written something about...

it would be easy to take the little bitch out,

but then the big bitch could get away.

Or if I shoot the big bitch,

then the little bitch would be, um, left on the hill.

But it's too close to his home,

and that's, you know,

he didn't want to bring attention to himself.

It's probably the only thing that saved us.

- The next bomb was October 8th, 1981,

and was found by a maintenance worker

in the University of Utah,

and was defused.

So a bomb that is not detonated

provides a substantial amount of evidence,

a better idea of how it's constructed.

- The design is essentially a can of gasoline

with a small pipe bomb inside of it.

Apparently, the intent is that the pipe bomb will explode

and create a large flame out

of the gasoline.

It doesn't function that way,

uh, because it's recovered intact,

but it's very significant.

Apparently, he's branching out.

He has come to Utah.

He shows no sign of stopping,

there's no reason to think he will stop.

And it's sort of a race against time now,

whether he can be caught before he does another bombing.

- Ted was sly

because we would think he was holed up in his cabin,

but he was in Salt Lake.

He would come back

and stay in the woods until he got all scruffy again,

and then we would see him.

I think he planned a lot of that.

- So the device which is mailed to Vanderbilt University,

which is not opened by its intended victim

but by the victim's assistant,

is significant in, in a couple of ways.

It's mailed from Utah,

so now we have another connection to Utah.

It's also another design in that it's a pipe bomb,

but the pipe in this case is a P-trap,

a plumbing pipe that you'd find under a sink.

So, it appears that the bomber is still experimenting

with different designs.

Fischer was the intended victim of a bomb

sent to Vanderbilt University by the Unabomber,

but his secretary, Janet Smith, intercepted the package,

opened it and was seriously injured when it exploded.

- Your usual serial killer is hunting for women,

hunting for young boys,

hunting for vulnerable people in dark alleys

or lonely roads.

It's, it's not someone hunting for... scientists.

That stands out.

- Unfortunately, despite years of detailed investigative work

and the extraordinary talents

of the three law enforcement agencies

represented on the Unabomb taskforce,

we have no viable suspects.

- Pressure to solve the case is coming from all quarters.

There's political pressure;

a lot of politicians weighing in,

criticizing the task force for not having solved the case.

You have all the victims and all their families

who want to know why you haven't solved this case yet.

What haven't we thought of?

What investigative technique

or program have we not undertaken?

- He plans ahead carefully,

he selects his targets.

He is very forensically aware.

- The bomber is clever.

You can leave fingerprints on any of the components,

you can leave fingerprints on the inside of the tape.

There're simply lots of ways

to have your fingerprints appear, and they don't.

There're also lots of opportunities

to leave hair behind.

There's no hair found in any of these devices,

nothing's stuck under a piece of tape.

Professor Diogenes Angelakos remembers

he was in the faculty lounge

of the electrical engineering building,

when he saw a package sitting on the floor.

And it took all the flesh off these fingers

and left just the bones in the upper part.

- "Frustrating...

that I can't seem to make a lethal bomb."

- The 1982 Corey Hall device

contains a note.

It's a very short type-written sentence:

"Wu," W-U, "It works!

I told you it would, R.V."

Now we have potentially a clue

or potentially an intended red herring,

but it has to be run out in either case.

You try to find people named Wu.

Do they know anybody who has initials named R.V.?

And if they don't, we still will try to find

all the people in that area

who have, uh, the name R.V.

- You know, you could tell it was a guy

who was intellectually enjoying this,

and is not stupid.

Because a lot of criminals are stupid,

or at least ignorant,

and they don't do things like the Unabomber did.

They don't conduct their campaign of terror

the way the Unabomber is conducting

his campaign of terror.

- It makes you ask where has this person gone?

What's happened now?

So, the possibilities you have to consider

are that he's already some sort of criminal

and perhaps he's ended up in jail or prison.

It's just one more factor to add to the picture

that you're trying to build,

the picture you're trying to paint of this bomber.

- I happened to be up doing some digging,

getting some gravel,

and I had-it was about five o'clock.

I remember it vividly. I was going home.

It was an explosion.

And I thought...

uh... the sound couldn't carry from anybody mining

on the other side of the divide.

It was a mystery.

It was a mystery that I, I never did solve.

- Now the explosive mixture changes to

ammonium nitrate and aluminum powder.

You have to go to some effort to create this.

In 1985, the Unabomber reappears.

and he reappears in a significant way.

'85 is a very busy year.

If it was possible to ratchet up the pressure further,

it did.

I think fear is a... is a good word

for what the public is feeling.

There doesn't seem to be a clear pattern

that allows people to say,

"Well, it won't affect me."

So, there are very few people in the United States

who can say, "There's absolutely no chance

that I could ever encounter the Unabomber."