Why is the Unabomber a hot property again?
the true crime that's worth your time
It’s been 28 years since Theodore John Kaczynski — nicknamed “the Unabomber” by the media — was arrested in his Montana cabin (April 3, 1996, to be exact). Not much has happened in the case since then: prosecutors contended at the time of his trial that he killed three people and injured 23 others through bombs sent or placed between 1978 and 1995; neither new victims or surprise developments have come up since.
And yet, it seems like Kaczynski is on the tip of every true-crime tongue these days, from the recently released Ted K to Jamie Gehring’s new memoir Madman in the Woods: Life Next Door to the Unabomber. Slate notes that that book joins several other recent tomes on the Ted topic; and more than once in the last few months I’ve seen Reddit threads from folks breaking down Industrial Society and Its Future, Kaczynski’s manifesto that is — somewhat ludicrously, given the company’s impact on the environment — available on Amazon for $18.99. (Don’t buy it! You can find it online for free, or I can send you a copy.)
As my long-foggy oceanside neighborhood grows warmer by the year and it regularly snows in April in the Midwest (sorry, Prince, it’s not the rarity it was in 1986), I’ve started to develop my own theories on why, after decades of anger at and fear of Kaczynski, some folks are looking at him a bit more charitably these days. (This rethink is more comfortable if you dismiss the 2011 suggestion that he was also behind the 1982 Tylenol murders.) That said, given the new level of interest in domestic terrorism, I can also see why Kaczynski might be an OG worth studying to understand the root causes of the issues we’re seeing now.
But that’s just me, thinking aloud. Why do you think Ted K is seeing so much renewed attention? What is it about his case that makes him an attractive true-crime subject in 2022? — EB