All language subtitles for Unabomber.In.His.Own.Words.S01E02.720p.NF.WEBRip.DDP5.1.x264-AMRAP

- He's smart because
he was figuring out

how to build the bombs better
as time goes on.

There's an amazing, meticulous
quality to the bombs.

They were very cleverly done.

- The bomber has been moving,

the targets have been
different.

Most cases don't go on
this length of time

without some sort of solution.

- So far, he hasn't killed
anyone.

Uh, he's clearly trying to.

The next package was sent
May 15th, 1985.

That was discovered

at the University of California
at Berkeley.

He's back to Berkeley.

Is that significant?

Why did this person feel
comfortable

coming back to this campus
again?

- Zap!
You know, it exploded,

threw my hand over to the side.

I could see my hand was really,
really torn up very badly,

then I noticed that I had this
big gash out of my arm

and blood was starting to...
to bubble up out of there.

- I respond to the crime scene,

along with the other members of
the San Francisco FBI office.

It is, as with most bombings,
a rather horrific scene.

Uh, there is debris
all over the room,

there is blood.

- I also had my Air Force
Academy ring

on my right ring finger

and when I, when I opened
the device

it blew my fingers
and the ring off

and left an imprint in
the wall itself.

No. It was
simply anger and revenge

and I was...
was going to strike back.

Try not to get blown up.

- It's kind of odd.

He's putting clues inside.

He punches a little uh...

stamps 'FC' into the bomb
material

or he puts it on
the little plate.

- No one knows what
it means.

These are just two initials.

There's a great deal
of speculation

and investigation

to try to figure out
what this could mean.

There are all kinds
of ideas presented

within the task force
and outside the task force

As to what 'FC' could
stand for.

- This is a guy who is really
paying attention to his craft,

the bits that he left in
his bombs

referring to the 'FC',

and the wood references
that he makes,

Percy Wood, and the bits
of wood used in his bomb.

He was probably too vain,

you know, thought he was too
clever to avoid it,

but they're clues.

- "Does the Unabomber mean
anything to you?" "No".

"Do the initials FC mean
anything to you?" "No."

Only in terms of a DOS command,
you know?

Nothing there that I could
think of.

- We pursued it as far
as it could be pursued

to see if it meant something,

and it was another dead end.

- "I'm no longer
bothered

by having crippled this guy.

I laughed at the idea of having
any compunction

about crippling an airline
pilot."

- Thousands and thousands
of pages -

22,000 pages - of hand-written
material,

entries about what he'd been
doing on a particular day,

to things he was eating,

to his history,

people he knew, jobs he'd had,

to experiments about how
to make bombs.

- "I think that,
perhaps,

I could now kill someone.

I emphasize that my motivation
is personal revenge.

My ambition is to kill
a scientist,

big businessman,

government official
or the like."

- It's the world that was
inside his head.

Nobody would have been able
to see that.

- There were entries
that were entirely

just mathematical,
just numerical entries.

Pages and pages of numbers

and it turned out a key
within the writings

allowed translation

of these numerical documents.

Those turned out to be
direct confessions

to all of the Unabomb crimes

and how he felt about them.

So, he had gone to great
lengths

to write them in a code,

such that if anybody stumbled
into the cabin,

burglar or whomever,

they wouldn't be able to make
anything out of it.

Yeah.

- Butch didn't know he had
a college degree.

He knew he was smart.

I mean, Ted would come up here
and help him work on the house.

And the math he could do in
his head was phenomenal.

You have to do a lot of math

to know how to do the lumber.

So, I always was impressed
with Butch's knowledge of math.

He said Ted was so much faster
than him

that he knew he had to be
an educated man.

- Sometimes he would tutor me
in mathematics

'cause he was very,
very gifted in mathematics.

I'm remembering one time
he was-

I was probably in fourth grade

and he's trying to show me
how to do algebra

and I'm thinking, I don't
really understand this.

And my parents are saying,
"You know, Teddy,

I don't think David
really understands."

And Teddy says,
"Yeah, yeah, he does.

You understand,
don't you, Dave?"

And I said, "Yeah, I think so."

- I think one of the reasons
that he...

gravitated towards math,

it's something he could do
in isolation.

It's not a team project.

- There were parts of him

that were a little different.

He was a little um...

Oh, what I... I, I don't know
how to describe it.

Ted did not have many friends.

There were periods of time

when nobody ever came to
the house to visit Ted.

- His adolescence is now
troubled.

I wouldn't say it's necessarily
traumatic,

uh, but it's troubled.
It's the beginning.

- I actually asked mom,

"Mom, what's wrong with Teddy?"

And, you know, mom's saying,
"What, what do you mean?

There's nothing wrong
with Teddy.

What are you talking about?"

And I said, "Well, he doesn't
have any friends.

I mean, why?"

It was at that point
that mom decided,

uh, she needed to share
something with me,

so that I could hopefully
understand my brother better.

And this was a memory
that had haunted her

really all her life.

As mom described it,
he originally, you know,

he was like a laughing,
active baby.

He had gotten sick.

Like good parents, they took
him to the hospital.

He ended up being in the
hospital for over a week

as they tried to like diagnose
what the problem was -

there were rashes on his body.

Mom always faulted
the hospital.

They would have been there
every day visiting him,

but the hospital said no.

It's kind of like, we don't
want parents to be in the way.

We've got our work to do,

we have our, our little baby
to cure,

so keep your distance.

They were only allowed
to visit him

two times a week,
for two hours.

After that, he was like
completely shut down.

Like there was no smiling,
there--

the eye contact was no longer
there.

She and our father tried for--

it took them a couple of weeks

after Ted came home
from the hospital

to get him to the point

where he would seem to trust
a little bit

and make some eye contact.

- There is this theory that
an infant

that doesn't bond
with the mother,

develops psychopathy as
a defensive mechanism;

that they feel no pain,
they feel no trauma,

but, of course,
at the same time,

they lose the sense of empathy,

a moral compass.

- At the tail end of that
conversation, she said,

you know, "Ted may have felt
abandoned as a little baby.

Don't ever abandon
your brother, David,

because that's what he fears
the most."

And of course, I'm thinking,
well, I'll never abandon Ted.

Why would I abandon Ted?
I love Ted.

But, of course, those words
echoed in my mind

years and years later

when we had to deal
with Ted's violence.

- He's clever,
really meticulous,

probably obsessive-compulsive,

fastidious, and super-smart.

- There is an indication that
the bomber

has some familiarity

with construction techniques

and has access to machine
tools.

They're getting better
in that sense.

- I was up in on a job that
I was working,

so nobody was home,

and the UPS driver come roarin'
up into the driveway

and Ted was inside of
an open-ended shed.

And I have a little work bench
in there with the drill press

and, you know, files,
different drill bits.

There's a vice.
And here was Ted.

He had nowhere to hide,
nowhere to go.

And I asked the UPS driver
after,

"Well, what was he workin' on?"

And he said,
"Well, I didn't see.

He put his body right
in front of the vice,

whatever he was working on
there."

And I said, "Well, what was
his body language like?"

He said, "Consternation".

You know, very serious face
and "Chris isn't home."

- I just think we should've
been more observant.

In this community, you...

you help your neighbor,

but you also give 'em
their space.

- He was so reclusive
and secretive

that there's just really no way
we could've gone

from the hermit in the cabin
to the Unabomber.

It's just such a far stretch.

- His clothing was ripped
and tattered and still--

hair wild, eyes wild.

Filthy dirty, just...

the layers of dirt on his skin

was like crusted.

- One thing that really
sticks out, to me,

in my memory,

there was one day
where I was walking up

to our rock quarry,
which I did frequently,

and just taking a walk
by myself.

And I rounded a corner...

there was Ted,

and we almost just ran into
each other,

and it startled both of us.

But at that point,
I just remember being scared.

The hair on the back
of my neck stood up,

and I knew something was wrong,

something was out of place.

Not a word was said,

and I remember just...

almost running back home

and constantly looking over
my shoulder

to, to see if he was still
there.

I was truly fearful of him.

- We begin trying to
figure out ways

to match up, now, these
different geographic areas.

So you have a series of bombs
in Chicago,

Utah, and now Northern
California.

Bombs are being placed

and mailed from these
locations,

so the bomber has to be
physically there.

Are there data sets
that you can acquire

that you could begin filtering

to look for somebody

who follows this pattern?

No one has seen the bomber,

but we have behavioral experts
who give us their assessments,

and one of the things that
is most likely

is that the bomber is
a, a white male,

uh, between 35 and 45,

who is at least comfortable
on University campuses,

perhaps works at a University
campus.

All these things taken together

mean that you can begin
to paint a picture

of the person
who is doing this.

- It did detonate.

It caused injuries
to the assistant,

the grad assistant
that opened the package,

and some temporary hearing loss

by both Professor McConnell
and the assistant.

- I remember specifically

a sense of the package
expanding in my hands.

There's got to be
a reason

that the bomber is choosing
these people.

Does he know them?

Do they represent something
to him?

What is the connection that's
making him pick these people

out of the universe of people

that he could use
for his devices?

- I was in Ann Arbor,

and that's how I became
involved in the case.

I was doing a lot of
investigation

regarding Professor McConnell,

trying to figure out--

basically, doing what we call
a victimization,

where you try to figure out

who he might be in contact with

or for what reasons somebody
would send him a bomb,

and what the connection
was between McConnell

and the previous victims,

and we weren't coming up
with much.

- Doctor McConnell is a
professor of psychology.

That is a new element
to the case.

Why now? We have a very -

what appears to be a clear
connection to universities

and the airline industry,

but now a psychologist.
What does that mean?

It must mean something,

but that's left for us
to figure out what.

Some traditional
Michigan activities,

curricular and extra
curricular.

- Ted was accepted into
Michigan

when he graduated from Harvard.

He got here in 1962.

He stayed at Michigan
until 1967,

when he got his Ph.D.
in mathematics.

And for the first three years
he was here,

he lived in East Quad,
right here.

We know a lot about
what Ted was thinking.

He wrote, hand-wrote,
a very voluminous journal.

This is what he wrote:

"During my years
at Michigan,

I occasionally began having
dreams.

Some psychologist would either
be trying to convince me

that I was "sick"

or would be trying
to control my mind.

I would grow angrier,

and finally, I would break out
in physical violence.

At the moment when I killed
the psychologist,

I experienced a great feeling
of relief and liberation.

It was pretty obvious
that he had

some psychological problems
that were pretty serious.

I think in some ways,
you know, the family was,

"Okay, well, let's not talk
about it.

Let's let things settle down

and then we'll recover
normalcy."

You know, it was significant
enough that,

you know, probably we should
have sought help then.

- According to his diary,

those were not happy times
for him.

He apparently had issues

with his social awkwardness

and I think it was a turning
point for him,

in a lot of ways,
in his thinking

about his interaction
with society.

- He had difficulties
with the opposite sex

and ultimately,
that manifested itself

into some thoughts about
actually killing people.

He became that angry.

I think maybe initially
with himself,

and ultimately with society,

because he felt that uh...

he was a victim to some extent.

- He writes he was
at the library

and there was a girl there

that, uh, he chatted with

and he had a desire
to spend more time,

to connect with her.

And she seemed available.

- He talks about trying to get
up the nerve to call her.

And ultimately,
he never makes the call.

He said something derogatory
about the female

and I think that says
something about,

you know, Ted's maybe feeling
of inadequacy.

- At the very end of his last
year in Michigan,

for about two weeks he had been
having erotomanic fantasies

about being a woman.

Now, it's not that Ted wanted
to be a woman.

There wasn't any kind
of gender dysphoria.

Ted fantasized about being
a woman

because I think he couldn't
have relationships with women.

He'd never had an experience
with a woman.

So, for whatever reason,
he wanted a sex change.

- So, he made an appointment
to go see

the University of Michigan
psychologist

at the health service and uh...

he went to see them
and at the last minute,

decided he didn't want to talk
about having a sex change.

- He decided he couldn't go
through with it.

He couldn't talk about
his erotomanic fetishes,

he couldn't talk about
his desire for a sex change.

He described feeling extreme
violent anger

towards the psychiatrist.

Feelings of rage and shame

and humiliation.

And in 1966,

this is where Ted begins
to fantasize about killing.

- "And so,
I said to myself,

why not really kill
that psychiatrist

and anyone else whom I hate?"

- All of his anger bubbles
to a point

where it's no longer contained.

Just thinking about
the homicides,

writing in his diary,

all of this provided him
with a sense of relief,

and also, sexual satisfaction.

Ted describes leaving this
appointment

as a major turning point
in his life.

In fact, he said,

"Like a phoenix,

I burst from the ashes
of my despair

to glorious new hope."

- "I will kill,

but I will make at least
some effort to avoid detection

so that I can kill again."

- He didn't do it
for a while after that,

but that's when he first
thought of it,

of actually killing human
beings.

- It is typical.

The majority of serial killers
don't start killing

the second they get
the inclination to.

They wait, they think,
they plan.

Especially somebody like Ted
who is so methodical,

so thoughtful, so calculating.

He-he wasn't going to kill
right away.

And he didn't express those
thoughts to anybody.

Not to family, not to friends.

He wrote them in his diary,

but that's private.

So how would you have been able
to see

whether or not Ted was going
to be a homicidal offender?

- We didn't know, of course,

nobody knew what was waiting
for Ted.

It kind of looked like,
"Wow, Ted is...

Ted's future is bright,
it's open, it's beautiful."

I remember a picture of
my brother in which he's...

he's not quite looking at
the camera,

he's looking off to the side,

and I saw, "Wow, he's looking
into the future."

A future maybe only
he can see, you know?

This hopeful vision of a future

that would be full
of accomplishment

and uh... good works.

I think the first really
awful crisis

we experienced as brothers

was when I got a job working
in the same factory

that my father worked at

and I was, um, living at home,

and Ted said he wanted
to earn some money.

He came back to work
in the same factory.

- Something really surprised
me.

He asked one of the girls there
to go out with him

and she started going out
with him.

They had three or four dates

and he came back seeming
really happy.

I mean, he even told me,

burst into my room one day
and said, "She kissed me."

And then, after a few dates,

the girl said that she really
didn't--

wasn't romantically interested,

that maybe they could be
friends,

and Ted was extremely upset.

He wrote these limericks
that he--

you know, very unflattering,

ugly sort of limericks
about her

and he posted them around
the worksite.

I confronted him. I said,
"Why are you doing this?"

And she-he said, "You don't
know what she did to me."

And I said...

I basically threatened him
that I would fire him,

'cause I had a small little job
as a supervisor there.

And sure enough,
the next day, he came back

and put another one of
the limericks up.

"So, are you gonna fire me?"

And I said,
"Yeah, Ted, go home."

- After he had been fired
from his brother's factory,

he ended up waiting
in that woman's car.

He had contemplated
mutilating her,

but decided against it.

- There are a lot of elements
of Kaczynski that are,

that are hyper-masculine.

- In my opinion,
he hated women.

He had no use for us.

Butch was a bachelor,

so his house was a little
messy.

So the first like two weeks
or so

I was just kinda cleaning up,

and I was just dinking around -

I was 23,

wasn't wearing many clothes.

I turned around and there's
this nasty looking guy

peeping through our plant
window.

And I'm like, "What the heck?"

So, I run into the bathroom
and I throw some clothes on.

I'm like, "Why didn't Butch
teach me

how to shoot a gun yet?"

It was Ted, he wanted to know
what day it was

and what time it was and it...

He was very polite,

but it was like,
this is really weird

that you would, you know,

wanna know what day it was
and what time it was.

- Ted had such an ideal
situation with my place,

because he could sit across
in total hiding

and peer out from behind a...

a big gravel pile,

and trees growing out of it,

and he could sit and watch.

He could sit and watch my wife,
you know,

jump into the hot tub with me.

He watched. He would watch.

I mean, that sounds like
a silly thing,

but it does change things.
You feel violated

that your privacy has been
taken away from you

and now you no longer trust,

well, is he there
or is he not there?

- Just like Ted Kaczynski

continually improved
on his bombs,

a sexual serial killer will
continually improve

on his rapes and abductions
of-of women.

And so, it's an addiction.

And definitely that repetitive
pattern,

we, we certainly see in
Kaczynski's bomb making.

I think the bombs were his sex.

- So, if you keep having enough
of these devices

sooner or later someone will
get killed.

They're, they're that good.

It's not just a worry,
it's a... a belief.

They just haven't had the right
set of circumstances

for anyone to die yet.

38-year-old
Hugh Scrutton died

when he spotted a paper bag
by a dumpster

at the back of his store.

When he picked up the device
it exploded.

Debris was blown through
the walls of the building.

Shrapnel was strewn 150 yards
into a back parking lot.

- Hugh Scrutton was a student
at UC Berkeley

at the time that Kaczynski
was teaching there.

And I think there's a good
chance Scrutton

wound up on Kaczynski's
victim list

because he'd caught his eye
somehow.

- He didn't forget anything.

Someone offended him some way
or another,

I would not doubt that they
wound up on his victim list.

- "Excellent.

Humane way to eliminate
somebody.

He probably never felt a thing."

- He expressed pleasure

because he had been able
to increase

the power of his bombs

as he became, you know,
smarter with each one.

And so, it's kind of chilling,

and there is no tone of
remorse.

It is more pleasure

in improving his skills
at killing people.

- You've had four devices
in 1985,

one with a fatality.

Everybody, of course,
is expecting

that the pace will pick up.

- In order to put the FBI

off their track,

he deliberately went to a men's
room in the bus station,

picked up a number
of pubic hairs

and brought them back

and inserted them
in his next bomb,

so that when the FBI

did their analysis of
the bombing,

that they would find DNA strands

that had nothing to do with him.

- February 20th, 1987,

another bomb was found

in the parking area
of a computer store

in Salt Lake City, Utah.

- I noticed there was this
piece of wood

sitting kind of next
to the building,

between the cars where I'd park.

One of my employees saw him
place the device

in the parking lot.

Um... didn't know it was
a device, obviously.

She got busy,
the office got busy,

and it was just like,

"Enh, it's a piece of wood,
whatever."

There were four nails sticking
out of this piece of wood.

And I was thinking to myself,
"That's kind of odd."

But it was only a second,
you know?

I just hesitated for a second.

I reached down.
I put my fingers on the end,

on the bottom piece,

and when I lifted it,

it sounded almost like
a fighter jet.

Just a screech.

And I thought, "Oh, God,
I might not make it."

Everything went in slow motion

and the only way I can describe
it is like, um,

if you think about The Matrix,

when he's dodging bullets
and things like that.

And I noticed these things that
looked like needles, kind of,

that were threaded through
my shirt.

- When you make a pipe bomb,

the explosion will take
the path of least resistance.

And the pipe actually expands
like a balloon

to a point when then it,
it bursts.

And the pipe itself becomes
shrapnel.

And then if you surround it
with additional shrapnel,

it makes it extremely deadly.

- You can see where the pieces
of shrapnel tracked,

directly along... along my face.

You can see where it came
into my chin,

through the lower lip,

under the upper lip.

The piece of metal that
embedded below my nose,

had it been out a fraction
of an inch,

probably would have gone
straight in the brain.

The guy before me was killed
with the same bomb,

just in a different package.

I was experiment 121.

I'm reading journal entries
from what he calls experiments.

"My device detonated,
but the results,

as far as we could find out,

did not do enough
to satisfy us."

This is a picture of
my left leg.

I mean, I'm looking at,
you know,

lots of different sizes
of pieces,

but, you know, you've got one,
two, three,

four, five, six, seven,
eight, nine,

ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen,
fourteen,

fifteen, sixteen, seventeen.

I mean, that's one small
section,

so I'm gonna take a guess

that there's maybe fifty or so
pieces of shrapnel

on the one side of the leg.

- A bomb is so impersonal.

Unless you're physically there,
you can't actually see it.

You can't see the person
suffer.

You can't see the pain.

- Common question asked of all
serial killers,

well, you know, what did it
feel like to kill someone?

And, and most serial killers
say the same thing -

didn't feel anything.

- As investigators, you cannot
help but want to end this

before it happens
to the next person.

And to give to the people
who've been victimized

some sense of...

an answer to why this happened.

Why was his store chosen?

You know, he's probably asking
himself that.

But we don't have any good
answers for them at this point.

- The part that just becomes
so weird is...

why,

and then why, and...

and why again, right,

um, would somebody try
to kill you?

Because it did come down
to somebody tried to kill you

and they're a murderer,

so why would they do that
to you?

- What's different
about this is that

for the first time in the case
the bomber is seen.

It's huge.

An employee inside the store

notices some sort of movement
through the window,

they exchange looks for
a couple of seconds perhaps.

He finishes what he's doing
and walks away.

Immediately, the task force,
the authorities there

set to work creating a sketch

of what the...
the person had seen.

- He was wearing a hoodie,

a hooded sweatshirt,

and aviation sunglasses.

Now investigators
were able to derive

the first police sketches
of the elusive killer.

A mustached man,

apparently in his late
twenties.

- So, everybody is speculating
what he's like,

including, you know,
law enforcement.

It-it's, of course, it's a
feeding frenzy for the media.

Who is the Unabomber?

This man is one
of the most wanted

criminals in America.

He's a white man,
five foot ten inches tall,

with reddish blond hair,

but no one knows his name.

The FBI hopes
that someone,

in the northern California,
San Francisco area

the bomber is believed
to live in,

will recognize this man
and turn him in.