Speaker 1: Put yourself in this exact moment, right, it is eleven
to fifty am. Yeah, November fifteenth, nineteen seventy nine. You
are sitting on an American Airlines Boeing seven to twenty seven.
Speaker 2: Oh wow, okay, setting the sea.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you departed Chicago maybe thirty minutes ago. You're climbing
through that really cold November air and you're cruising toward Washington.
Speaker 2: D C. Just a totally routine flight.
Speaker 1: Exactly completely routine, and you might be reading a newspaper,
maybe sipping a coffee, just kind of looking out the
window at the cloud cover, right, and then out of
absolutely nowhere you hear it. Oh yeah, a muffled thump
from deep down in the baggage hold.
Speaker 2: And I gotta say that is just It's not a
sound you ever want to hear on an aircraft. No,
absolutely not, because it's not the normal rattle of turbulence,
you know, or or like the mechanical whine of the
landing gear deploying. Is this distinct structural concussion, right, a fump.
Speaker 1: And it's instantly followed by this terrifying, just hollow sucking sound.
Then think about the crew up in the cockpit for
a second thing, I have absolutely no idea what just.
Speaker 2: Happened because they don't have cameras down in the cargo
hold back.
Speaker 1: Then exactly all they know is that a massive bang
just went off somewhere inside the belly of their aircraft,
like directly beneath the passenger cabin.
Speaker 2: And within seconds, I mean, the reality of the situation
just hits everyone on board.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because thick, acrid smoke starts pouring into the cabin
through the ventilation system.
Speaker 2: And the pure panic of that enclosed space. I mean
it's hard to overstate. You are thousands of feet in
the air, right the oxygen masks dropped down, People are
scrambling to put them on while breathing in this blinding smoke,
and the pilots are basically forced into immediate evasive maneuvers.
Speaker 1: Because they don't know if the plane is literally coming.
Speaker 2: Apart exactly, They don't know if there's an active fire
melting through their control cables or what.
Speaker 1: So the plane just goes into this steep, desperate dive.
I mean, they are trying to get to the ground
as fast as the laws of aerodynamics will allow them to.
We were talking about descending at over six hundred miles in.
Speaker 2: Which is insane. That is what twice the normal speed
of approach for a landing.
Speaker 1: At least twice. It's a plummet. The air traffic controllers
are frantically clearing the airspace. On the ground, You've got
fire trucks and ambulances already.
Speaker 2: Scrambling rushing out to the runway.
Speaker 1: Yeah, rushing to meet an aircraft that is essentially falling
out of the sky.
Speaker 2: And the physical forces exerted on the plane during a
dive like that are just extreme. I mean, the airframe
is shuttering, the engines are screaming.
Speaker 1: This is the incredible part. The pilots managed to hold
it together.
Speaker 2: They did. It's a miracle they did.
Speaker 1: It, really is well. Welcome to Thrilling Threads everyone. I'm
so glad you're joining us.
Speaker 2: It's great to be here to get into this one today.
Speaker 1: Our mission is to unravel the eighteen year saga of
one of the most elusive, brilliant, and honestly terrifying figures
in American history.
Speaker 2: And we're relying strictly on detailed historical transcripts, investigative records,
and case files to piece this all together.
Speaker 1: Right, we're looking at the puzzle that literally parallel nation.
And I want you, the listener listening to this right now,
to imagine a world where the everyday act of just
opening the mail.
Speaker 2: Or just boarding a commercial flight to go see your.
Speaker 1: Family exactly where that suddenly feels like a game of
Russian roulette. You just never know if the next mundane
package holds a deadly secret.
Speaker 2: And what's fascinating here is the central mechanism we are
examining today. It's really about how the collision of a
brilliant and I mean genuinely genius level mind for sure
with a deep pathological alienation created this decades long nightmare
for the American public.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and perhaps even more compellingly, we'll look at the
specific logistics of how an unprecedented, incredibly risky media gamble
finally brought that nightmare to an end.
Speaker 2: Such a wild story, it really is.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's unpack this and get right back to that
terrifying dive on flight seven twenty seven.
Speaker 2: Right, the American Airlines fight so.
Speaker 1: The pilot manages to successfully land the plane. It is
a total masterclass in emergency aviation, incredible flying. The doors
blow open, the slides deploy, and all the passengers are evacuated,
but at least twelve passengers are immediately rushed to the
hospital for severe smoke.
Speaker 2: Inhalation because that smoke was thick. Yeah.
Speaker 1: But once the plane is on the tarmac, the passengers
are safe, the fire is extinguished. The investigators finally step
into the scorched baggage hold.
Speaker 2: And they're looking for the source obviously, right, they.
Speaker 1: Want to know what nearly brought a commercial airliner out
of the sky. And what they find it isn't some
highly sophisticated military grades surface to air missile. Right, It's
not a complex time device with the digital countdown.
Speaker 2: No, it is jarringly rudimentary. I mean, they discover the
remnants of a pipe bomb.
Speaker 1: A simple pipe bomb.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it had been housed inside a very basic
wooden box.
Speaker 1: A wooden box wrapped in everyday craft.
Speaker 2: Paper like you'd get at any supply store.
Speaker 1: Exactly. And let's talk about the specific detail that makes
the so insidious. The stamps. The box was completely covered
in ordinary postage stamps. They designed it to look like
a completely nondescript package. It was like a trojan horse,
it really was. When investigators trace it back, they find
it was mailed from a postal facility in suburban Chicago.
But I have to ask why stamps. Why not just
take it to the post office and pay the clerk
to put a metered label on it.
Speaker 2: Because metered mail requires human interaction. Ah right, it requires
actually handing your package to a federal employee who might
remember your face, or your height or the sound of
your voice. That makes sense, And it also generates a
paper trail. You get a specific time stamp at location
barcode even back then, in the late seventies.
Speaker 1: So the stamps were intentional.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, stamps are the ultimate analog encryption. You could buy
them at a grocery store.
Speaker 1: With cash, no credit card receipting.
Speaker 2: Right, you can fix them in the privacy of your
own home. And crucially, you can drop that package into
any blue collection box on any street corner in America
in the dead of night.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, so you never talked to anyone.
Speaker 2: It completely bypasses the human element of the postal system.
Speaker 1: That is, I mean, it's social engineering at its most lethal.
The bomber didn't need to hack the airline security. He
hacked human psychology.
Speaker 2: He made the bomb look agonizingly mundane.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it bypassed every human instinct for danger because it
looked exactly like a birthday present or a package of
books from an eccentric.
Speaker 2: Uncle, completely invisible in plane sight.
Speaker 1: But here's what I don't fully grasp. How does someone
even know that an airmail package won't be scanned? I mean,
in today's post nine to eleven world, you can't even
bring a bottle of water onto a plane. Was this
just a lucky guess by the bomber that cargo mail
wasn't being x rayed.
Speaker 2: It wasn't a guess at all. It was an acute
observation of the systemic vulnerabilities of the nineteen seventies.
Speaker 1: Really.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we have to contextualize the area here. The security
infrastructure we rely on today simply did not exist.
Speaker 1: Right. Things were way looser, exactly.
Speaker 2: Passenger screening was minimal, and cargo screening was virtually non existent.
The postal service relied on volume and.
Speaker 1: Speed getting the mail there overnight.
Speaker 2: Exactly if you tried to x ray every single piece
of mail going onto a cargo plane in nineteen seventy nine,
the entire American economy would have ground to a halt,
and the bomber recognized this logistical reality. He understood that
the system's greatest strength, which was its massive frictionless volume,
was also its fatal flaw.
Speaker 1: So he just slips this lethal device onto an aircraft
with absolutely no alarms raised anywhere in the supply chain.
I try to picture those investigators standing in the cargo hold,
piecing together this burned wooden box and just realizing that
the postal system had been weaponized.
Speaker 2: Terrifying thought.
Speaker 1: The lifeblood of American communication had just been turned into
a delivery mechanism for a.
Speaker 2: Bomb, and it fundamentally shifted the paradigm for law enforcement.
I mean, think about it. If someone plants a bomb
in a public square, there is a physical.
Speaker 1: Perimeter, right, you can take it off.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there are witnesses, there's a geographic focus. But a
bomb moving invisibly through the mail system, it could be anywhere.
That means the threat is totally decentralized. It could be
anywhere at any time. The vector of attack is literally
the smiling letter carrier walking up to your front porch.
Speaker 1: That is chilling. But wait, if this was his first attack,
trying to take down a whole commercial airliner seems like
an incredibly ambitious starting point, doesn't.
Speaker 2: It highly ambitious?
Speaker 1: I mean, most criminals escalate, they don't just start with
a mass aviation disaster.
Speaker 2: And that is exactly the logic the FBI applied. They
realized this likely wasn't a first attempt, Okay, So they
began cross referencing this specific bomb design, you know, the
use of wood, this specific type of pipe, the trigger mechanism,
looking for a signature exactly, cross referencing it with other
unsolved palmings nationwide, and they got a.
Speaker 1: Match, actually two matches, right, Yes, two matches. They trace
the bomb's unique physical signature back to a pair of
attacks that had taken place at Chicago's Northwestern University, right,
And the timeline is what really paints a grim picture here.
The first of those attacks at Northwestern happened a full
year and a half before the American Airlines.
Speaker 2: Flight right under their noses.
Speaker 1: So this single incident in the sky was actually the
escalation of a much darker growing web on the ground, and.
Speaker 2: The realization that they had a serial bomber on their
hands forced the government into an unprecedented posture. How so, well,
you suddenly have three massive, notoriously territorial agencies forced to
work together. Oh boy, you have the FBI, which handles
federal crimes and terrorism, right. You have the ATF, the
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, who are the
technical experts on bombs.
Speaker 1: Okay, yeah, and you have the.
Speaker 2: US Postal Inspection Service, who have jurisdiction over literally anything
sent through the mail.
Speaker 1: I can only imagine the bureaucratic friction in those rooms.
I mean, the turf wars must have been legendary. Well, absolutely,
ATF probably thinks it's their case because it's an explosive.
Speaker 2: Yep.
Speaker 1: The Postal Service says, no, it used our stamps, it
went through our boxes, it's our jurisdiction, right, And then
the FBI steps in and says, well, it crossed state
lines and hit a commercial airplan, So we're taking the lead.
Speaker 2: And the friction was immense, But honestly, the sheer terror
of the situation eventually forced them to break down those
traditional silos.
Speaker 1: They had to collaborate out of sheer desperation.
Speaker 2: They did. They formed a JAINT task Force, but the
logistics of combining their databases, their field agents, and their
forensic labs was a monumental undertaking.
Speaker 1: Especially in an era before digital networking was really a thing.
Speaker 2: Right, there's no cloud sharing here. It's all paper files
and phone calls.
Speaker 1: And from that massive inner agency task force, we got
the name that would basically haunt the country.
Speaker 2: The unabomb task Force.
Speaker 1: Exactly. They needed an administrative case file name, so they
created an acronym unabomb short for University and Airline bomber,
which is very little, very literal. And from that sterile
bureacratic file name, the media and the public extract a
moniker that becomes synonymous with domestic terror, the unabomber, the unabomber,
and that's the name that would dominate headlines for eighteen
agonizing years.
Speaker 2: Eighteen years, over nearly two decades, the unabomber sent sixteen
bombs to homes, academic institutions, and corporate offices.
Speaker 1: The human toll was just devastating.
Speaker 2: It was twenty three people were injured, and many of
them suffered life altering wounds. We're talking about losing fingers, hands,
their sight just off, and three people were killed.
Speaker 1: Let's just pause on that timeline for a second.
Speaker 2: Eighteen years it's lifetime, It.
Speaker 1: Really is if a child was born on the day
of that first attack at Northwestern University, they would be
graduating high school putting on a cap and gown by
the time this bomber was finally caught.
Speaker 2: That really puts it in perspective.
Speaker 1: That is nearly two decades of millions of Americans living
in a state of low level, pervasive anxiety because it
was no longer just a local incident in Chicago or
an isolated threat to airlines.
Speaker 2: Right, the unpredictability of the targets was the true source
of the terror. Yeah, because, like we said, it started
at a university, then escalated to a commercial airline, but
then just fractured out.
Speaker 1: He started picking individuals.
Speaker 2: Yes, he targeted a computer store owner in California. He
targeted a genetics researcher. He targeted a timber industry lobbyist, which.
Speaker 1: To the public just seemed entirely random.
Speaker 2: Completely random. There was no apparent geographic or demographic pattern
that a regular citizen could use to assure themselves they
were safe.
Speaker 1: You couldn't say, oh, I don't work at a university,
so I'm.
Speaker 2: Fine, exactly. Anyone receiving an unexpected package could potentially be
the next victim, which.
Speaker 1: Brings up a really crucial question about his methodology. Does
the shift from leaving a bomb on a university campus
to trying to bring down an airliner to then mailing
highly targeted packages to specific individuals. Does that suggest his
own underlying rage was escalating.
Speaker 2: That's a great question.
Speaker 1: Or was he simply treating this like an engineering problem,
testing his technical confidence as his bomb making skills evolved.
Speaker 2: Well, the forensic evidence suggests it was an evolution of
both his technical mastery and his ideological focus. Okay, so
early on the bombs were relatively crude. The device on
flight seven twenty seven, for instance, actually failed to detonate properly.
Speaker 1: Wait really it failed?
Speaker 2: Yeah, the barad trigger worked the thing that detects altitude,
but the main explosive charge didn't ignite completely. Oh, it
mostly just burned, which is what produced all that smoke.
Speaker 3: So if it had detonated fully, that plane likely wouldn't
have survived.
Speaker 1: That is terrifying.
Speaker 2: But as the years went on, his devices became horrifyingly efficient.
He learned how to maximize fragmentation. He learned how to
disguise the trigger mechanisms so that the simple act of
just lifting a flop on a wooden box would complete
the circuit.
Speaker 1: But there is a limit to how much a pipe
bomb can actually communicate, right exactly. I mean, a bomb
can communicate anger, it can communicate destruction, but it cannot
communicate a complex ideology.
Speaker 2: No, we can't.
Speaker 1: And for years the FBI only had the physical remnants
of these bombs to communicate with the killer, the twisted metal,
the fragments of wood, the specific choice of batteries.
Speaker 2: They were basically analyzing the metallurgy looking for microscopic clues.
Speaker 1: But eventually the unobomber realized that if he actually wanted
to change society, he had to stop just destroying it
and start talking to it.
Speaker 2: He decided violence wasn't enough. He needed an audience. The
violence was no longer a sufficient vehicle for his grievances.
He needed the world to understand why he was doing this.
Speaker 1: And that leads us to June twenty fourth, years deep
into this massive, frustrating manhunt, an envelope arrives at the
New York Times.
Speaker 2: Now, given the history of male terror at this point,
you'd expect the building to be evacuated immediately.
Speaker 1: Right, Well, absolutely, call the bomb squad. But this envelope
doesn't contain a bomb. No, it contains a letter, and.
Speaker 2: That letter fundamentally alters the trajectory of the entire investigation.
Speaker 1: It really does, because it claims to be written by
a member of a group with the initials FC.
Speaker 2: The letter says FC stands for Freedom Club.
Speaker 1: Right now, anyone can write a letter to a newspaper
and claim to be a famous criminal. Sure, we see
it all the time in high profile cases, you know,
attention secrets just muddying the water.
Speaker 2: Was Zodiac case had tons of those.
Speaker 1: Exactly, But the author of this letter doesn't just make
empty claims. They provide definitive proof.
Speaker 2: They included a secret code for all further communication, ensuring
no one else could falsely take credit.
Speaker 1: But more importantly, the FBI already knew exactly what FC meant.
Speaker 2: And this is where the forensic brilliance of the FBI
labs really comes into play. What the public absolutely did
not know at the time was the significance of.
Speaker 1: Those initials because they kept it a secret.
Speaker 2: Right inside every single one of the devices. The unabomber
had said and over the years there was a hidden
physical signature. Yeah, the bomber had embedded a small metal
disc with the letters FC stamped into it.
Speaker 1: But and this is what always gets me, how does
a small metal disc survive the explosive force of a
pipe bomb?
Speaker 2: It's a great question.
Speaker 1: I mean, the whole point of a pipe bomb is
that the immense pressure tears the metal casing into microscopic shrapnel.
How did he guarantee the FBI would find these little
calling cards?
Speaker 2: It requires a really deep understanding of explosive physics. Okay,
he engineered those specific metal discs to withstand the extreme
heat and force. He would place them in areas of
the device that would be thrown clear of the primary
blast zone. Or he would manufacture them from alloys that
had a higher melting point than the surrounding materials.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, So it was entirely deliberate.
Speaker 2: It wasn't an accident when they survived. It was a
calculated engineering choice.
Speaker 1: So he's essentially a twisted artist signing his canvas.
Speaker 2: That's a good way to put it.
Speaker 1: He wanted credit just as much as he wanted destruction.
And the FBI knew about those discs. They had kept
that detail strictly classified.
Speaker 2: So when they saw the letters FC. In this communication
to The New York Times, they knew instantly, beyond a
shadow of a doubt, that they were finally talking to
the person who had been terrorizing the country.
Speaker 1: And the communication didn't stop there. He began sending more letters,
expanding his audience to the Washington.
Speaker 2: Post as well, And these letters gave investigators their very
first unfiltered insight into his actual motives. They were no
longer just looking at the type of wood he used.
They were looking at his philosophy.
Speaker 1: He starts laying out his ideology. And it is fascinating
to look at these documents purely as historical artifacts. And
I want to pause here and explicitly state for our
listeners we are not taking a stance on the bomber's
political or anti industrial views. Today. We are simply reporting
the contents of the historical documents to understand the psychological
profile of the subject.
Speaker 2: Exactly. It's about understanding the mind behind the crimes.
Speaker 1: Right, because if you strip away the violence for a
second and just look at the text, you see a profound,
almost paralyzing anxiety about technology. Yes, he argues that computerization,
the industrial complex, and modern technology are fundamentally destroying human autonomy.
Speaker 2: He believed that the systems we were building would eventually
enslave us, and that the only way to save humanity
was to violently dismantle the technological infrastructure.
Speaker 1: It's a hyper extreme manifestation of technopessimism.
Speaker 2: And then comes the ultimatum.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the deal.
Speaker 2: The unabomber offers a deal to the media and the
federal government. He states that if a major newspaper publishes
his thirty five thousand word manifesto exactly as written, the
bombings will cease.
Speaker 1: Thirty five thousand words. Let's just put that in perspective
for a minute. That is the length of a short novel.
Speaker 2: It's huge.
Speaker 1: It's not a quick op ed. He wants this massive, sprawling, dense,
academic thesis printed in the most prominent newspapers in the world.
Speaker 2: Which puts the government in an incredibly precarious.
Speaker 1: Position because it forced this is a collision between the
fundamental principles of counter terrorism and the desperate need to
stop the bloodshed.
Speaker 2: This raises an important question about the ethics and risks
of negotiating with a terrorist. The debate within the highest
levels of the Justice Department and the FBI was just intense.
Do you negotiate?
Speaker 1: Right? Doesn't that violate the cardinal rule of counter terrorism?
Speaker 2: Usually yes.
Speaker 1: By giving in to his demand and publishing the manifesto,
you are literally letting a murderer hold the free press hostage.
You are setting a precedent that, if you kill enough
innocent people, the New York Times will print your personal essay.
Speaker 2: It's a terrifying precedent.
Speaker 1: How did Attorney General Janet Reno and the FBI possibly
justify that risk?
Speaker 2: It was a highly controversial, incredibly calculated gamble, but the
justification was rooted in behavioral analysis. The FBI profilers realized
that the bomber's need for intellectual validation, his desperate desire
to be recognized as a visionary philosopher rather than just
a common murderer, was his Achilles heel oh I see.
They hypothesized that by publishing the manifesto, they weren't just
giving him a platform, they were setting a linguistic trap.
Speaker 1: Here's where it gets really interesting. They were using his
own enormous ego against him, exactly because it takes a
staggering level of narcissism to write thirty five thousand words
and assume that the entire country needs to read your
thesis to hold lives hostage, just to force people to
consume your academic paper.
Speaker 2: It reveals a line that believes it operates on a
plane entirely superior to the rest of humanity. Yeah, but
that arrogance is exactly what the FBI banked on. They
knew that a thirty five thousand word document contains millions
of data.
Speaker 1: Points linguistic data points, right.
Speaker 2: It contains specific vocabulary choices, unique structural cadences, philosophical references,
idiosyncratic phrasing.
Speaker 1: Things he couldn't hide exactly.
Speaker 2: They hoped that by putting all of those words out
into the public sphere, someone somewhere out in America would
read it and recognize the voice.
Speaker 1: The FDI essentially crowdsourced the investigation.
Speaker 2: They did.
Speaker 1: They told the Washington Post to go ahead and print it,
and they waited, hoping that a coworker or an old
college roommate, or maybe a neighbor would.
Speaker 2: Call in a tip, just waiting for the phone to ring.
Speaker 1: But the wild twist of fate here is that the
trap didn't spring in America at all.
Speaker 2: No, it didn't.
Speaker 1: It sprang all the way across the Atlantic in Paris.
Speaker 2: It is late nineteen ninety five. The investigation is dragged
on for seventeen years. At this point, WOA, and we
introduce Linda Patrick, a philosophy professor from Schenectady, New York,
who is currently on a sabbatical in Paris.
Speaker 1: I love this part of the historical record because it
hinges on such an ordinary moment. She is sitting in
Paris reading an English language newspaper, the International Herald Tribune,
which happened to print extensive excerpts of this recently published
Unabomber manifesto. She's reading it over coffee or maybe on
a train, and the tone of the writing just stops
her cold. It seems eerily uncomfortably familiar.
Speaker 2: This is where Linda Patrick's specific professional background becomes the
absolute lynchpin of the entire case.
Speaker 1: Because she's a philosophy professor.
Speaker 2: Exactly as a philosophy professor, she is professionally trained to
analyze texts. She doesn't just read for content, she reads
for structure.
Speaker 1: She sees how the arguments are built right.
Speaker 2: How grievances are framed, the specific syntax of a logical progression,
and the structural cadence she saw on the newspaper contains
striking similarities to a very specific private set of documents.
Speaker 1: She recognized the skeleton of the argument. It mapped perfectly
onto letters that her husband, David Kotsinski, had received from
his estranged brother. Yes, and these were not casual catch
up letters. They were dark, furious.
Speaker 2: Diatribes, extremely hostile.
Speaker 1: The estranged brother was absolutely livid that David was marrying Linda.
Keep in mind, the brother had never even met Linda,
never met her, yet he wrote these long, vengeful essays
to David, disparaging their relationship and attacking the very institution
of marriage itself.
Speaker 2: The intellectual arrogance, the tone of absolute certainty, combined with
deep personal grievance. It all alive.
Speaker 1: It really did.
Speaker 2: So, She tells David about her suspicion, and you really
have to put yourself in that room. Having that conversation,
she looks at her husband and says, I think there's
a chance that your brother could be the un a bomber.
Speaker 1: And David's initial reaction is to try and quantify the
absurdity of the claim. He estimates it. He says, Okay,
maybe there's a one in a thousand chance.
Speaker 3: It seems mathematically remote to him, right, But Linda, with
that incredible philosophical clarity, replies that a one in a
thousand chance of your brother being the most wanted domestic
terrorist in American history.
Speaker 1: Is significant enough that you cannot ignore it.
Speaker 2: You can't just brush it off.
Speaker 1: No, you have a moral obligation to act on that
one tenth of one percent.
Speaker 2: So David has to face the unthinkable. He goes into
his personal files, his attic or his desk, and he
pulls out year's worth of letters he's received from his brother. Well,
he pulls up the full text of the publicish manifesto,
and he and Linda sit down at a table and
begin to read them side by side.
Speaker 1: The emotional toll of that exercise is just unfathomable. Spreading
out those old, hateful, deeply personal letters that attacked his wife,
his happiness, his choices, and reading them next to a
terrorist's manifesto. As they read, the agonizing reality sets in.
They aren't just similar. They share the same unique vocabulary, the.
Speaker 2: Same unusual spelling quirks.
Speaker 1: Exactly, they share the same underlying obsessive resentment against modern
societal structure.
Speaker 2: And this realization forces David Katynski into what is arguably
the most profound moral dilemma a human being can face.
Speaker 1: How does a family member even process that kind of
betrayal and grief?
Speaker 2: It's tearing him apart. On one hand, he is fighting
a deep, innate biological instinct to protect his own blood
his brother naturally. On the other hand, he has an
overwhelming civic and moral duty to protect the public from
a man who has already killed three people, maimed dozens more,
and promised to keep going if his demands weren't met.
Speaker 1: The brother's rage wasn't just directed at society either. It
was deeply personal, directed at David's happiness. And the butterfly
effect here is just staggering.
Speaker 2: It really is.
Speaker 1: Think about the fragile chain of events. If Linda Patrick
hadn't taken that sabbatical to Paris, if she hadn't picked
up that specific English language newspaper on that specific day,
if David had simply thrown his brother's hateful letters in
the trash years ago instead of keeping.
Speaker 2: Them, which most people would have done.
Speaker 1: Exactly, or if Linda hadn't possessed the specialized analytical mind
of a philosophy professor capable of connecting a diatribe about
the Industrial Revolution to a personal letter about marriage. The
unabomber might never have been caught.
Speaker 2: He might have died a free man. The margins of
history are incredibly thin.
Speaker 1: Youre really are.
Speaker 2: But to truly understand how this situation came to be,
how an estranged brother sitting alone in isolation could wage
a highly sophisticated, lethal war on the modern world, we
have to rewind.
Speaker 1: Yeah, let's go back.
Speaker 2: We have to look at the life of the boy
who became the bomber. We have to examine the two distinct,
conflicting lives of Ted Kasinski.
Speaker 1: Let's dive into that backstory, because it is the definition
of a tragedy. Ted Kasinski was born in Chicago in
nineteen forty two to working class parents, and from an
incredibly early age it is abundantly clear that he is
not a standard issue child.
Speaker 2: No, not at all.
Speaker 1: He is profoundly gifted, particularly in the realm of complex mathematics.
Speaker 2: If we connect this to the bigger picture, his intellectual
capacity wasn't just high, it was a statistical anomaly. He
scored a one to sixty seven on an IQ test. Wow.
To put that in perspective, he was operating on a
level of cognitive processing that is vanishingly rare. The school
system literally didn't know what to do with him, so
they accelerated him. He skipped two entire grades in high school.
Speaker 1: He graduates high school at the age of fifteen. I
want everyone listening to think about what they were doing
at fifteen years old.
Speaker 2: I was probably playing video games, right.
Speaker 1: The emotional maturity you possessed at fifteen. Meanwhile, Ted Kasinski
at fifteen was hacking his bags and enrolling at Harvard University.
Speaker 2: And that is where the psychological fracturing likely begins. You
think so, Yeah, The intellectual environment at Harvard in the
late nineteen fifties was intensely competitive. Putting a fifteen year
old boy into that environment surrounded by older, more socially
developed young men, creates a profound isolation.
Speaker 1: So his intellectual development vastly outpaced his social and emotional
development exactly. He finishes at Harvard, and despite whatever social
struggles he's having, his academic momentum is just unstoppable.
Speaker 2: He goes to the University of Michigan, gets his master's degree,
and then his doctorate in mathematics.
Speaker 1: And his dissertation is so complex that supposedly only a
handful of professors in the entire country could even understand
the math he was proposing.
Speaker 2: His rise in academia is meteoric. He is quickly hired
by the University of California.
Speaker 1: In his mid twenties, Yes.
Speaker 2: Placed on a tenure track as an assistant professor at
one of those prestigious research institutions on the planet. By
all conventional metrics, this is a young man who has
won the lottery of life.
Speaker 1: He has a limitless, brilliant future ahead of him.
Speaker 2: But the archival records show a completely different reality.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the parallel track of Ted Konsinski's life is one
of a person who felt profoundly, painfully alienated from his peers,
very much so, despite all his brilliance, he had extreme
difficulty forming even basic human connections.
Speaker 2: The records from his time at Berkeley are telling. Was
it the pressure of academia or the realization that even
at the pinnacle of his field, he was entirely alone
that caused him to snap?
Speaker 1: That's the big question.
Speaker 2: Because he wasn't well liked by his students. They didn't
find him to be a charismatic genius. They found him
to be dull, unengaged, rigid, and pathologically shy. Really, he
would deliver his lectures looking at the chalkboard, rarely engaging
with the class.
Speaker 1: I picture his life like a high performance supercomputer running
on a completely corrupted operating system.
Speaker 2: Oh that's a good analogy, right.
Speaker 1: The processing power that one sixty seven IQ was phenomenal.
He could compute complex topology that most of us couldn't
even read. But the software required to connect him to
the outside world, the basic human interface of empathy, conversation,
and relationship building, was entirely broken.
Speaker 2: It is a highly functional analogy.
Speaker 1: So what does this all mean is extreme intelligence sometimes
a liability? Does being that much smarter than everyone else
inherently lead to the kind of profound alienation that breeds resentment?
Speaker 2: Well, in his case, the inability to connect didn't just
make him sad. It caused a deep, festering resentment. He
began to view the society that he couldn't participate in
as inherently flawed and corrupt.
Speaker 1: So he blames society, Yes.
Speaker 2: And so in nineteen sixty nine, after only two years,
he abruptly resigns from his highly coveted ten year track
position at Berkeley, just quits. He gives absolutely no explanation
to the administration. He just packs up and walks away
from it all.
Speaker 1: He doesn't just walk away from his job, though, he
walks away from the entire concept of modern civilization. In
nineteen seventy one, he relocates to a tiny, rudimentary cabin
he builds himself in the remote woods of Lincoln, Montana,
middle of nowhere. He begins living a life completely off
the grid, no electricity, no running water.
Speaker 2: Now we need to demystify off grid living for a moment,
Please do it is not a peaceful pastoral vacation. Living
in a cabin in Montana with no modern amenities is brutal, exhausting,
constant physical labor.
Speaker 1: Yeah, winters in Montana are no joke.
Speaker 2: You are chopping wood to survive the winter. You are
hunting and foraging for every calorie. His move to that
cabin wasn't just a physical retreat. It was a total
hostile rejection of a society he felt utterly rejected by.
Speaker 1: But despite the extreme physical isolation of the Montana woods,
his mind was absolutely not at rest. He's living the
low tech life he supposedly ideal, but he is spending
his nights hunched over by candlelight, writing these furious letters
to his family and drafting these intense diatribes against the government,
against socialization, against computerization.
Speaker 2: The isolation didn't cure his rage, had acted like a
pressure cooker for it. Yet with no one around to
challenge his ideas or offer perspective, his worldview became entirely.
Speaker 1: Distorted, which brings us back to the investigation in nineteen
ninety six, while Ted was living a low tech life
in the woods, the highest tech law enforcement apparatus in
the world was finally zeroing in on his front door.
Speaker 2: The FBI, after receiving the tip from daviian Linda Kosinski,
are highly optimistic, but they are also very cautious. Sure,
after eighteen years of chasing ghosts, false leads, and dead ends,
they have a genuine suspect.
Speaker 1: They bring in their behavioral analysts and linguists. They sit
down and speak extensively with David, they interview Linda, and.
Speaker 2: The more the FBI linguists compare those old handwritten letters
Ted had sent to his family with the published manifesto
the more certain they become. The linguistic fingerprint is a
definitive match.
Speaker 1: So what does this mean? Logistically? It means the FBI,
with its forensic labs, satellites, and massive databases, is finally
going after a man living a deliberately analog, low tech
life in a shack in the woods.
Speaker 2: The contrast is striking, but the FBI knows they are
dealing with an incredibly dangerous individual. This leads to the
climax of the entire decades long saga. April third, nineteen
ninety six.
Speaker 1: The FBI arrives in Lincoln, Montana. But they don't just
roll up with sirens blaring and knock on the front door.
Speaker 2: Oh absolutely not. They know exactly what this man is
capable of building.
Speaker 1: They bring full tactical operations teams to this remote, heavily
wooded location. They have snipers quietly positioned in the tree.
Speaker 2: Line, bomb squads on standby.
Speaker 1: They are entirely ready in case this turns into a
violent standoff, because stepping onto the property of a paranoid
master bomb maker is like walking into a literal minefield.
Speaker 2: Every floorboard, every door handle could be rigged exactly the
tactical approach was slow and methodical. Consider the sheer tension
of the raid. The FBI knew they were walking into
a potential death trap, but their primary objective, aside from
securing the suspect without loss of life, was preserving the evidence. Right.
Speaker 1: If the cabin burned down in a firefight, they might
lose the case.
Speaker 2: They needed everything intact to prove their case beyond a
shadow of a doubt in a court of law. When
they finally breached the cabin and secure Kasinski, they begin
to process the scene.
Speaker 1: And what they find inside that tiny, cluttered space is
just a definitive, overwhelming treasure trove of forensic evidence.
Speaker 2: Let's talk about what was in there. They find the
raw bomb making materials, pipes, wires, batteries, chemicals, the components.
They find the exact specific Smith Corona typewriter that was
used to type the manifesto and the letters sent to
the newspapers.
Speaker 1: And how do they know it's the exact one Because
typewriters have physical fingerprints, right. The metal striking arms wear
down over time, and he might have a microscopic chip
on the surf. The team might strike slightly heavier on
the left side due to bent metal.
Speaker 2: It acts exactly like ballistic striations on a bullet.
Speaker 1: The FBI lab matched the typewrit and manifesto directly to
the physical imperfections of that specific Smith Corona machine.
Speaker 2: The forensic link was undeniable. But the most staggering find
wasn't the typewriter. No, the investigators discovered over forty thousand
pages of handwritten journal entries.
Speaker 1: Forty thousand pages. What was in them?
Speaker 2: Everything? This is where the profound irony of Ted Kasinski's
ego truly destroys him. Those journals meticulously, obsessively explained every
single bomb he ever built over the past eighteen years.
Speaker 1: Are you serious?
Speaker 2: He detailed how to construct them, the specific materials used,
the rationale for targeting specific individuals, and his reaction to
the media coverage of the explosions. Wow. His intellectual pride,
his belief that his actions were historically significant, demanded that
he document his work.
Speaker 1: He essentially he wrote out his own meticulous forty thousand
page confession, organized it, and wrapped it in a bow
for the FBI.
Speaker 2: Pretty much.
Speaker 1: I mean, if he had just burned those journals in
his woodstove, the prosecution would have had a much harder
time proving he was the sole architect of the bombings.
Speaker 2: But amidst the journals, the tools, and the typewriter, the
investigators find something else, something that chillingly proves the true
extent of his deception.
Speaker 1: What was it?
Speaker 2: Underneath his bed, investigators discover an aluminium wrapped package. It
is fully prepped, taped up, and already addressed to an
aerospace company executive in Texas. And inside that package is
a fully constructed live bomb.
Speaker 1: Wait, wait, let's pause there, because that completely shatters the
narrative he sold to the public. That live bomb already
addressed and ready to mail proves that the manifesto negotiation
was a lie.
Speaker 2: Exactly.
Speaker 1: He had explicitly promised in his letters to The New
York Times and the Washington Post that if his manifesto
was published, the bombings would permanently stop.
Speaker 2: And the media held up their end of the.
Speaker 1: Bargain theif ffesto was published in full, Yet there under
his bed was the next lethal device, ready to be
dropped in a mailbox.
Speaker 2: The ideology was a shield for his compulsion. He was
never going to stop. The violence had become an intrinsic
part of his existence.
Speaker 1: But on that cold day in April nineteen ninety six,
one of the longest, most expensive, and most terrifying manhunts
in the United States history is finally over. The invisible
threat has a face, and he is in custody.
Speaker 2: Yes.
Speaker 1: Fast forward through the legal proceedings to January of nineteen
ninety eight. Ted Kasinski, facing a mountain of insurmountable evidence,
pleads guilty to all charges.
Speaker 2: He does this primarily to avoid the death penal okay right.
Speaker 1: He is subsequently sentenced to life in prison without the
possibility of parole. He has moved to an isolated cell
in the Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, the most secure
facility in the country, where he ultimately dies by suicide
many years later in twenty twenty three.
Speaker 2: And while the legal saga concludes there, we really must
look at the deeply poignant aftermath for the family that
brought him justice.
Speaker 1: Yeah, David, Linda.
Speaker 2: David Kasinski lived for years with the agonizing weight of
his decision. He turned in his own flesh and blood,
knowing it could lead to his brother's execution.
Speaker 1: It's an unimaginable burden, but he followed through on his
moral convictions to the very end.
Speaker 2: The FBI had offered a one million dollar reward for
information leading to the capture of the annabomber, and because
David provided the definitive tip, he was awarded that money.
Speaker 1: And he doesn't keep a dime of it, not a
single dime. David tongs that entire one million dollar reward
over to the families of his brother's victims and to
the survivors who remained.
Speaker 2: It is the ultimate heartbreaking contrast in a brotherly relationship.
Speaker 1: It really is. While Ted devoted his brilliant once in
a generation mind and his entire adult life to causing pain, destruction,
and terror, David devoted his lowest, most difficult moment to
offering restitution.
Speaker 2: He used that reward money to try and bring some
small measure of financial and emotional healing to the families broke.
Speaker 1: It is a profound testament to the divergence of their paths.
Two brothers raised in the same house. One chose absolute
isolation and violence, the other chose connection and accountability.
Speaker 2: And Ted Kasinski tried his absolute hardist to violently destroy
the modern world because he felt entirely, irredeemably disconnected from it.
But in the end it was a human connection, the distinct,
recognizable voice of a brother echoing through the pages of
a newspaper in a foreign country that proved to be
his undoing. The permanence of human connection is what ultimately
stopped the terror.
Speaker 1: We've covered an incredible, harrowing arc today on thrilling threads
from the terrifying muffled thump in the cargo hold of
Flight seven twenty seven, through an eighteen year labyrinth of
systemic fear, agency turf wars, and a high stakes media
gamble with a thirty five thousand word manifesto.
Speaker 2: All of it ending at a dilapidated, explosive filled cabin
in the woods of Montana. It is a historical case
that forces us to constantly examine the very thin, fragile
line between extreme genius and profound madness.
Speaker 1: And the incredible weight of moral responsibility when those two
things intersect. But before we sign off, I want to
leave you with a lingering thought that builds on everything
we've just discussed. Ted Kasinski was utterly terrified of technology.
He believed that computers would eventually track our every move,
dictate our social interactions, and destroy our human autonomy. He
went to unimaginably violent lengths to try and stop that future. Today,
we voluntarily carry advanced tracking devices in our pockets. We
let algorithms carrate our news, our entertainment, and even our
social lives. Did the society he went to such horrific
lengths to prevent actually come to pass anyway, just with
our willing consent.
Speaker 2: That is a very heavy thought.
Speaker 1: And that leads me to my final question. And I
am turning the microphone over to you listening to us
right now. I want you to really think about this.
If you were in David and Linda Kasinski's shoes, sitting
at a table in your home, looking at per personal
letters from your own brother and knowing that turning them
into the FBI meant potentially sending your own flesh and
blood to face the death penalty, do you think you
could have made that same call?
Speaker 2: Where do you draw the line?
Speaker 1: Exactly where do you personally draw the line between deep
family loyalty and the greater good of society? Let us
know what your stand is and drop a comment. Belowed answer.
Thank you so much for joining us for this edition
of Thrilling Threads. We'll be back to unravel more mysteries
soon but until then stay curious.