A First Look: Exhibit Offers a New Perspective into Unabomber's Workshop

WASHINGTON—Before he became known as “the Unabomber,” Ted Kaczynski was a brilliant 20-something raised in Evergreen Park, looking to leave society behind. 

Today, Kaczynki is known as one of the nation’s most infamous domestic terrorists. From 1978 to 1995, he mailed 16 bombs that killed three people and wounded 23 others.

The National Museum of Crime and Punishment in Washington, D.C., recently that gives visitors a glimpse into the secluded life of the Harvard-educated professor-turned-serial killer more than a dozen years after his conviction.

The museum purchased the items for the exhibit last month in an online auction operated by , the hideout where he lived in isolation while plotting his attacks.

“We put the new display in our CSI lab of the museum to talk about forensic linguistics, (which were) used to actually catch Ted Kaczynski,” curator Rachael Penman said.

Analyzing the language a criminal uses—forensic linguistics—is how FBI agents, with the help of Kaczynski’s brother, finally caught the man mailing deadly bombs.

In September 1995, the Unabomber sent his manifesto to The Washington Post and New York Times, offering to stop the mailings if the major publications published his words. After consulting with the FBI, the Washington Post, with funding from the Times, published the Unabomber’s manifesto, a 35,000-word philosophical rant against industrialized society. Kaczynski’s brother, David Kaczynski, ultimately read it, and a light bulb went off over his head.

Included in the manifesto were turns of phrase that reminded David Kaczynski of how his brother communicated. Ted Kaczynski liked to say, "You can’t eat your cake and have it too,” a reversal of the well-known idiom. That example, along with lines such as “to gain one thing you have to sacrifice another,” put detectives on the path to catch the million-dollar suspect.

Seventeen years and 500 agents later, the FBI finally tracked down Kaczynski. After turning his brother in, David Kaczynski donated his reward to his brother's victims.

Some parts of the museum exhibit offer a new perspective into the life of the Unabomber, showing him as that brilliant 20-something.

“Everyone pictures him as the bearded wild hermit that he was portrayed as later, but when he went to the wilderness he was a young man,” Penman said. “He had had a teaching job at Berkeley. He didn’t look that different than anyone else.”

Passport photos at the museum show Kacyznski as a young man.

“The passport photos were taken only a couple months before Ted and his brother David bought the land in Montana and he built the cabin,” Penman said.

It’s unclear why Kaczynski took the photos months before entering into a hermit life in rural Montana.

“You almost wonder why he had passport photos taken at the same time he was going into isolation,” Penman said.

The museum also purchased a scale Kaczynski used to weigh explosives. It includes text on the side that describes how to calibrate the scale. Unbeknownst to museum staff before the auction, the words on the scale are written in Kaczynksi's own pen.

Kaczynski's remaining possessions—drafts of his manifesto, the sweatshirt and sunglasses he allegedly wore in an artist’s rendering of him during the investigation, bomb plans and other items—are in the hands of private collectors.

The exhibit confirms “that most of the big artifacts that we want are sitting in people’s knick-knack cabinets (which) is interesting,” said Kevin Nash, a Philadelphia-based photographer who toured the exhibit with his teenage son.

Nash said he would never want the items for his own collection but saw historical value in housing them in a museum.

Other visitors seemed at once in awe of the Unabomber exhibit, which opened last week, but troubled by what it represents.

“It’s uncomfortable,” Sharla Fenchel, of Jacksonville, Fla., said after viewing it. “A lot of the exhibits (in the museum) were painful, they were so real. That was one of them.”

Museum staff worked alongside David Kaczynski when putting together the exhibit. Penman said the museum did not speak with living victims of the mail attacks or survivors of the three people killed.

“One of the reasons we were interested in getting these Unabomber items is our educational initiative at the museum,” Penman said.

Part of the museum’s mission is to encourage careers in law enforcement and forensic science. The Kaczynski exhibit is now a permanent fixture at the museum.