When the Unabomber was arrested in 1996, the world got its first glimpse of the serial bomber who had terrorized the nation for 18 years and murdered three people. Bearded and disheveled, he was the perfect depiction of a mad bomber. But what actually happened during those 18 years? What drove Ted Kaczynski to his dystopian vision of people overrun by technology, and why does it feel so familiar? And why did it take nearly two decades to catch him? With new original reporting, host Eric Benson tells the story of a nation reckoning with an increasingly deadly bombing campaign and a family coming to grips with what was happening inside a tiny cabin in the Montana woods. Project Unabom is an Apple Original podcast, produced by Pineapple Street Studios. Listen and follow on Apple Podcasts. https://apple.co/Project_Unabom
You might know the story of Ted Kaczynski.
Harvard trained math genius, drops out of society, builds a cabin, then goes on a bombing rampage that lasts 17 years.
The most elusive terrorist bomber in us history.
They call him the Unabomber.
A series of letter bomb attacks at universities.
Three have been killed and 23 injured.
He mailed bombs to scientists, placed them in the parking lots of computer stores, killed an advertising executive and a logging industry lobbyist.
We don't know what his motivation is.
We don't know what his demands are.
Eventually, he made his demands clear.
He had written a 35,000 word manifesto, and he would continue his terrorism campaign unless the biggest newspapers in the country agreed to publish it.
I mean, blackmail is minor compared to what the Unabomber was saying.
Unabomber was going to kill people.
So the newspapers published it, and millions of people read the Unabomber's litany of grievances and his dire warnings of a dystopian future.
And not long after, Ted Kaczynski was arrested and even more, millions saw the mugshot of this small, unkempt Woodsman staring blankly into the camera.
But who is this guy, really?
How did his ideas, his frustrations, his life come to this?
And why did it take nearly two decades to catch him?
The answers to these questions were stranger and messier than I'd expected.
And the more I dug, the more I realized how much of it had been untold.