FOR 18 YEARS, the Unabomber terrorised America. Working from a hut he built himself in the Montana wilderness, with no water, electricity or sewerage, he sent out lethal homemade letter bombs, killing three and injuring a further 23. For nine years, FBI agents were clueless: they didn't even know whether they were looking for a group or an individual, a man or woman. He may never have been found had his ego not got the better of him and he began writing letters. And even then, he may still have eluded the FBI but for the strong, gut feelings of an American philosophy lecturer that her brother-in-law, Theodore J. Kaczynski - whom she had never met - could be the Unabomber. She was right.
For Linda Patrik and her social-worker husband, David Kaczynski, it was the start of months of discussion, soul-searching and fear, during which David became convinced his wife's suspicions were correct. Finally, they had to make a decision: should they tell the FBI of their suspicions, knowing Ted may have to face the death penalty, or should they keep quiet? In a joint interview, Linda says: 'We had no real evidence that he was the Unabomber, all we had were suspicions. It was an ethically ambiguous situation. There was no clear obligation on our part, because we didn't have any certainty.' In the end, says David, they decided 'we morally and ethically had to stop him'. So the couple went to the FBI, a move that led directly to Ted Kaczynski's arrest and subsequent conviction (he is currently serving 30 years in prison).
Linda picks up the story. 'It took me a month or two to convince David to take the possibility seriously that Ted was the Unabomber. I had gone to Paris in summer 1995 and because there were bombings going on in the Paris trains and subways, the Parisians had newspaper articles on bombers all the time. They became fascinated with the Unabomber and ran articles every day on him. It was a time when the FBI was releasing more information to the public, about his woodworking ability, about the cities that he had lived in, and the fact that he was now considered to be a loner rather than part of a revolutionary group.' She became absorbed in the suspicion that Ted was the Unabomber; then terrified she might be right. 'I was very scared ... I couldn't let this thought of Ted being the Unabomber out of my mind. I was obsessed, and I couldn't tell if it was a realistic obsession or a fantasy obsession.
'At first David thought I was nuts. But I couldn't drop it, so we discussed the situation intensely for a couple of days. We used to walk around the Bastille and talk about it. I used to go to a newsstand every day to pick up the paper and I would find myself thinking, 'Oh my gosh, the CIA is planting these International Herald Tribunes just for me to find.' I can remember walking around the Bastille worried that the CIA was following me and David.' After weeks of discussion, she says, 'we came to an agreement that David would read the manifesto when we returned home'.
The manifesto was a 35,000-word document titled 'Industrial Society And Its Future' written by the Unabomber and sent to both the Washington Post and the New York Times in June 1995. He had promised to end his campaign of terror if it was published. After much public debate, it finally appeared in September that year as a special supplement to the Washington Post at the urging of the Attorney General and the FBI, who were confident it would prove to be his undoing. In it, the Unabomber railed against technology, which he claimed was destroying souls and ravaging nature.
It struck many chords with David Kazcynski when he finally read it in October. 'I was very confident when I approached the manifesto that I would able to tell Linda in a page or two that this was certainly not my brother,' he says. 'I felt a sudden fear when I realised I couldn't give her that assurance. I was the one who knew Ted. Ted had never met Linda; Linda had never met Ted, except through my stories about my brother. But she had very strong intuition. After we retrieved more letters from my mother's home and compared them to parts of the manifesto, I said there might be a 50-50 chance. And I felt how immediately disturbed Linda was: for the first time I was confirming her intuitions, her fears, might be accurate.' He found many similarities between the letters and the manifesto, including a curiously twisted cliche. In a letter to his mother, Wanda, Ted had written, 'We can't eat our cake and have it too.' The same phrase appeared in the manifesto. As did the words 'cool-headed logician'. Later, David would tell a veteran FBI agent that he remembered, years ago, his brother turning to him and saying: 'You know the trouble with you, David, you are not a cool-headed logician.' Later, he discovered a 23-page essay written by Ted in 1971 which could have been a prototype for the manifesto.