Unmasking the Unabomber

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McPheeters: At that point, how did the two of you proceed?

Patrik: We were emotionally a mess at that point. It was hard for us to see people. We spent every evening talking about this for two or three or four hours. David dug out letters from his brother so that we could match the writing style. I was pretty convinced it was Ted, but I couldn't tell for sure. David knew the writing style, and I knew that the ideas were Ted's, so together we became convinced. It became a matter of strategy at that point. And of also being very scared. I had been afraid of Ted long before this, and I had told David that he was never to allow Ted into our house.

Kaczynski: I think the process for the family was that Ted's deterioration took place so gradually that we were able to normalize it and say to ourselves, “Well, that's just Ted.” We needed a perspective from someone outside the family to wake us up to just how far out on a limb he had gone by that time. We had many family memories of very tender and close experiences with Ted as well. I remembered the brother who offered to give me a prized possession, his coin collection, when I returned from the hospital after an illness.

There was also a time in Linda's and my relationship that was very important to me, having to do with an incident that had happened the last time I saw Ted. I had been sawing up some firewood with one of his saws, and the sawhorse collapsed. I fell down, and the saw and the logs and everything all tumbled down together. I was lying on the ground, and my brother ran up to me and said, “Are you OK?” I answered, “I hope I didn't break your saw,” because I knew that he lived so simply, that every possession was important to him and he took care of them very well. But he said, “To hell with the saw, it's you I care about.” When I told Linda that story, I turned to her and saw that she was crying. And to me that meant that now she, too, saw that this was a real human being, and not just someone who was potentially a monster.

Once the Kaczynski family finally made the decision to turn Ted over to authorities, they campaigned vigorously to have him exempted from the death penalty by reason of insanity.

Becker: Realizing that the government was going to seek the death penalty was something of a surprise, wasn't it?

Patrik: That's somewhat inaccurate, because we had talked about the possibility of the death penalty before we went to the FBI. In our discussions between the end of October and about mid-December, when we submitted the manifesto to writing analysis, the death penalty was one of our main issues of contention.

McPheeters: Contention between you and government?

Patrik: Between David and me. I argued that even if it meant the death penalty, we needed to turn him in to the FBI, whereas David was reluctant to turn him in if it meant the death penalty. I used a number of philosophical arguments and all kinds of womanly subterfuge [laughter]. David and I went into it knowing that it could mean that the government could seek the death penalty. We bit the bullet and just went ahead.

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