On this episode of Family Secrets, host and author Dani Shapiro talks to David Kaczynski, who grew up idolizing his older brother Ted: “He was kind to me...IQ was tested at 167 at one point…he represented everything that I wanted to be,” he says. But as they got older, Ted became more and more isolated, writing cruel, abusive letters cutting off contact with the family. One day in 1994, several newspapers published the Unabomber’s manifesto in an effort to stop the spate of 16 bomb attacks that had killed three people and injured 23 more, and David had a horrible realization: his brother was the Unabomber. He had an impossible choice to make: allow Ted to continue mailing bombs to innocent people, causing more death and destruction? Or take his suspicions to the police, and possibly sentence his own brother to be executed?
David was a junior in college when Ted wrote to the family saying he was going to quit his job at UC Berkeley as a math professor to go live in the woods, saying that he thought technology was unhealthy. “I thought it was wonderful,” David admits, recalling that he thought Ted had a lot of courage to follow his own instincts instead of conforming to society. But his mother was less enthused, saying she feared he was “running away from a society he didn’t know how to fit into.” That’s when the hostile letters started, first to David’s parents, and then to David, when he told Ted that he was going to marry his childhood friend Linda. They had never met, but he sent David a letter telling him that Linda “was a horrible person” and that he “couldn’t take being my brother anymore, don’t contact me again.” David was angry at the time, but wonders now, “Did he think love was finite? That it’s like a pie, and if Linda gets a piece, he won’t get a piece?”
In 1994, neither he nor Linda have even heard of the Unabomber, but after killing an executive named Thomas Mosser, the Unabomber contacted several newspapers and told them that if they printed his manifesto, the bombings would cease. Linda saw it, and told David she thought it sounded like Ted. He and Linda worked to prove their suspicions before going to police, and agonized over the decision, “because no matter what, someone would die,” David says. “I had to ask myself what would it be like to go through the rest of my life with my brother’s blood on my hands?”
There’s so much more to the story, from how David’s mother reacted to the news, to how the press treated the family, to the unexpectedly beautiful outcome when David contacted one of the Unabomber’s victims; find out all this and more on this poignant and compassionate episode of Family Secrets.
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