Two big, macabre, largely forgotten news stories came lurching out of oblivion together this week. The F.B.I. confirmed that it is looking into the possible involvement of Theodore J. Kaczynski, the Unabomber, in the 1982 Tylenol poisonings in and around Chicago. The poisonings, an unsolved crime and not previously connected to Kaczynski, killed seven people, caused a national panic, and brought tamper-proof packaging to over-the-counter drugs. (In a court filing, he wrote, “I have never even possessed” the poison in question.) I covered Kaczynski’s 1998 trial, in which he pleaded guilty to sixteen bombings that killed three people and injured twenty-three, for The New Yorker. He was primarily a mail bomber, and his campaign targeted people whom he held in some way responsible for environmental destruction or for the progress of technology and science, which he considered fundamentally malign. Random poisonings were not his M.O.
The trial had an unsatisfying ending. I came to believe, at least, that an alliance of convenience between prosecutors, psychiatrists, death-penalty-prevention specialists, Kaczynski’s own lawyers, and even the judge on the case, checkmated Kaczynski into a guilty plea and a sentence of life without parole. For a variety of reasons, nobody wanted the Unabomber to have his day in court, where he might explain why he did what he did. A psychiatrist hired by the defense told me that his anti-technology views were in themselves evidence of paranoid schizophrenia. In fact, those views had been amply aired in a thirty-five-thousand-word essay called “Industrial Society and Its Future,” which the Times and the Washington Post had been prevailed upon to publish in 1995, in exchange for a promise from the author to quit with the bombings, and that essay—better known as the Manifesto—was, while not light reading, pretty compelling stuff. James Q. Wilson, the conservative social scientist, wrote, in a Times Op-Ed, “If it is the work of a madman, then the writings of many political philosophers—Jean Jacques Rousseau, Tom Paine, Karl Marx—are scarcely more sane.”
But there was a big disconnect between Kaczynski’s closely reasoned anarchist politics and his murderous rage. “A totally satisfactory result,” he wrote in a journal after killing Thomas Mosser, a New Jersey father of two who happened to be an executive at an advertising firm that did work for Exxon. Kaczynski’s targets could be even more indiscriminate. In 1979, he tried to bring down an airliner with seventy-two people aboard. He succeeded only in forcing an emergency landing. Years later, he expressed relief that the airline bomb had failed. But one of his motives for that attempt had been pure peevishness. Kaczynski was hypersensitive to noise and hated the jets that flew over his home in Montana. The F.B.I.’s new interest in him in the Tylenol case may be connected to the fact that Kaczynski was originally from Chicago, where the poisonings took place, and was bitterly estranged from his parents, who still lived there in 1982. He was well embarked on his terror campaign by then.
As it happens, his belongings were put up for auction this week, with the proceeds to go to his victims. The auction, which is being conducted online, will continue for two weeks. The officials overseeing it still seem irked by Kaczynski’s basic argument. Albert Najera, of the U.S. Marshals Service, said, “We will use the technology that Kaczynski railed against in his various manifestoes to sell artifacts of his life.” There are fifty-eight lots. By Friday evening, a handwritten version of the Manifesto had drawn a bid of $17,525.
