DAV I D K AC Z Y N S K I

Afterword by James L. Knoll IV , MD

every
last
tie
T H E S TORY O F T H E U N A B O M B E R
A N D H I S F A M I LY
Every

Last

Tie
 Every

Last

Tie
THE STORY OF

THE UNABOMBER AND

H I S FA M I LY

DAV I D K A C Z Y N S K I
Afterword by James L. Knoll IV, MD

Duke University Press Durham and London 2016

 © 2016 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-­free paper ♾
Designed by Heather Hensley
Typeset in Arno Pro by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data

Kaczynski, David, [date] author.
Every last tie : the story of the Unabomber and his family / David Kaczynski.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-­0-­8223-­5980-­7 (hardcover : alk. paper)
isbn 978-­0-­8223-­7500-­5 (e-­book)
1. Kaczynski, Theodore John, [date] 2. Bombers (Terrorists)—
Family relationships—United States. 3. Capital punishment—
Moral and ethical aspects—United States. I. Title.
hv6248.k235k33 2016
364.152′3092—dc23
[b]
2015019794

All photographs in the gallery are courtesy of the author.

Cover art: Teddy with Parakeet and David, 1952
— For Sylvia Dombek —
Re t u r n

Hard to believe
that the past is
completely gone, not
a closed room that
we might one day
reenter accidentally,
without anticipation,
the same way we
came in before.

Then how can we

fail to experience
the room’s emptiness,
the lack of walls,
the weather?

—DAVID KAC Z Y N SK I
 CONTENTS

Preface  xi

1. Missing Parts
1

2. Life Force
31

3. Ghost within Me
61

4. North Star
81

Afterword
by James L. Knoll IV, MD
105

Acknowledgments  137

Index  139

Photo gallery appears after page 60.

 P R E FA C E

In the late summer of 1995 , my wife, Linda Patrik, sat me down

for a serious talk. She put her hand on my knee. I could hear stress
in her voice.
“David, don’t be angry with me,” she began. I expected her to tell
me about something that was bothering her, perhaps some habit of
mine that she found irritating. Linda could be blunt. I’d learned to
appreciate her direct approach. It didn’t leave me guessing what my
life partner thought or needed.
“Has it ever occurred to you, even as a remote possibility,” she con-
tinued, “that your brother might be the Unabomber?”
At first I wasn’t sure I’d heard her right. “What?”
She repeated her question, and I felt a mixture of consternation and
defensiveness. This was my only brother she was talking about!
I knew Ted was mentally ill, plagued with afflictive emotions. I’d wor-
ried about him for years. I’d entertained unanswered questions about
his estrangement from the family. But it never had occurred to me that
Ted was capable of violence. So far as I knew, he’d never been violent.
At that time, the hunt for the Unabomber was the longest-­running,
most expensive criminal investigation in the history of the fbi. Over
seventeen years, the shadowy Unabomber had sent through the mail
or placed in public areas sixteen explosive devices that had claimed
three lives and injured dozens more, some seriously. Within the last
year, the Unabomber had killed two people—Gilbert Murray, a for-
estry industry lobbyist, and Thomas Mosser, an advertising execu-
tive. The Los Angeles airport had recently been shut down after it
received a threatening letter from the Unabomber. Meanwhile, the
Unabomber had sent a seventy-­eight-­page manifesto to the New York
Times and the Washington Post and demanded that it be published, or
else more bombs would be sent to unsuspecting victims.
At first I assumed Linda had let her imagination run away with
her. She pointed out that although the manifesto had not yet been
published, it was being described by media sources as a critique of
modern technology. She knew my brother had an obsession with the
negative effects of technology. She mentioned that one bomb had
been placed at the University of California at Berkeley, where Ted was
once a mathematics professor.
“That was thirty years ago!” I countered. “Berkeley is a hotbed for
radicals. Besides, Ted hates to travel. He has no money.”
“But we loaned him money, didn’t we?”
I didn’t like the way the conversation was developing. The human
mind can take any fixed idea and patch together evidence to support
it. That’s what I thought was going on. But I wondered why Linda had
focused such attention on my brother.
“If the Unabomber’s manifesto is ever published, would you at least
read it and tell me honestly what you think?” she pleaded.
Well, I could do that much. In fact, reading the manifesto might
be the best way to allay Linda’s fear. At that stage, I wasn’t capable of
imagining that the Unabomber and my mixed-­up brother could be

xii  —   P R E F A C E
the same person. I’d had extensive correspondence with Ted; I knew
how he thought and how he wrote. Surely after reading the manifesto
I’d be able to say to Linda, “It’s not him!”
A month later, when I read the newly published manifesto, Indus-
trial Society and Its Future, I found that I couldn’t in good faith tell
Linda it wasn’t written by my brother. Nor could I tell myself that it
was written by him. I’d been an English major, a lover of literature. I
assumed that a person’s writing would be as distinctive and identifi-
able as their voice. But if it was indeed Ted’s “voice” that I heard in the
Unabomber’s manifesto, it came to me muffled through thick layers
of dread and denial.
Over the next two months, we read the manifesto repeatedly and
made careful comparisons with letters that Ted had sent me over
the years from his one-­room cabin in rural Montana. Sometimes I
thought I was projecting my worry, seeing what I feared to see, since
Linda had planted a strong suggestion in my mind. At other times I
thought I might be in denial, unable to see the painful truth because
I lacked the wherewithal to deal with it.
Yet the day came when I finally acknowledged to Linda that she
might be right. “Hon, I think there might be a 50–50 chance that Ted
wrote the manifesto.”
Now our question Is Ted the Unabomber? led me to a seemingly
endless series of other questions and concerns: What will this do to my
brother? What will this do to my mother? (I thought they both might
die.) What will this do to us—to Linda and me? What kind of life will
we have if it turns out that my brother really is the Unabomber? And, of
course, the most urgent and compelling question: What should we do
with our suspicion that we know the identity of the most wanted criminal
in America, a serial killer?

In the aftermath of Ted’s arrest, in April 1996, our home in

Schenectady, New York, was surrounded by the media. They hounded

P R E F A C E   —  xiii
us. They somehow gained access to our bank records. They dug
through our garbage. They called our unlisted numbers. They besieged
our friends and relatives with interview requests. A picture of our little
cabin in southwestern Texas showed up in the New York Times. The
same U.S. government that had promised us complete confidentiality
turned into a leaky sieve of information about the Kaczynskis. It felt
as if we had not a shred of privacy or dignity left.
At first it looked like the media were trying to dig up dirt in answer
to their questions. What kind of family would produce the Unabomber?
What kind of person would turn in his own brother?
The early stories were floundering, scattered. A late-­night come-
dian dubbed me the “Una-­snitch.” But eventually a narrative began
to take shape. The New York Times, in an editorial titled “His Brother’s
Keeper,” characterized me as a moral hero, someone willing to ex-
change family loyalty and personal happiness for the lives of people
he didn’t know. The press calmed down and decided to more or less
respect our boundaries. Linda and I soon embarked on a new and
equally desperate mission: to try to save my brother from the death
penalty.

For all the many invasions of our privacy, the media never truly
“saw” us. The emerging story was reductionist, flat, even somewhat
trite in its characterization of the two brothers, one bad, one good.
Linda’s crucial role was first downplayed and then eliminated from
the narrative entirely.
If the media really wanted to identify a moral hero in our saga, it
could have discovered heroism in a couple rather than in an indi-
vidual. Or it could have discovered that, far from being the leader
of a righteous quest for truth, I was a reluctant follower. The leader
of the righteous quest was Linda, who probably had to assume that
role, considering my deep attachment to my brother. But these truths

xiv  —   P R E F A C E
are complex, incompatible with the media’s need to tell a simple tale
pitched to readers’ expectations.
The purpose of this book is not to set the record straight. Rather,
my intention is to tell the one story that I’m uniquely situated to tell
by exploring my memories of the family I was born into—a family I
see as both unusual and typical. The more I delve into these memo-
ries, the more clearly I see that I am made of my relationships, and
the more deeply I appreciate our profound interconnectedness within
the human family.
The memoir that follows is a contemplation inspired and energized
by a mixture of loving memories and painful outcomes. May it be of
some benefit!

P R E F A C E   —  xv