The Unabomber: A Megyn Kelly Show True Crime Special | Ep. 227
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 40 minutes
Words per Minute
177.03926
Summary
Ted Kaczynski was a twisted genius who terrorized this country for nearly two decades, building and sending bombs so untraceable, our best law enforcement agents could not figure out who was behind the carnage. But when the FBI finally caught up with him in 1996, they found enough evidence to bring him to justice.
Transcript
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Like that woman over there with the designer jeans.
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Your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
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Welcome to a very special Megyn Kelly Show episode.
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who terrorized this country for nearly two decades.
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our best law enforcement agents could not figure out
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between he would write you can't uh eat your cake
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and have it too which is a reversal of the saying
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the saying is you can't have your cake and eat it
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too and he reversed it and and what like where did
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places but that showed up in the um the manifest
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the um the 23 page essay and it showed up when we
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went to visit wanda and uh his mom and she had uh
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information and all kinds of things in a steamer trunk
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that theodore owned and he had left it with her many
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years earlier and said i don't want it anymore do
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whatever you want well she kept it all these years
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so it was essentially abandoned property and uh we went
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into the steamer trunk and found written on a a draft
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of uh of the essay you can't eat your cake and have it too
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and so all of these things start coming together
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and uh they're just too many of these um coincidences i guess you
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could call them but it was all about words it was all about
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language and and so earlier when we uh when you and i spoke and we talked
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about those two early letters the ralph kloppenberg letter and the
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history of science and then the enoch fisher letter that had prompted us to do a
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project and we had a number of investigative projects that we worked on
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and one of those projects had to do with uh interviewing professors at
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universities so we had become in fact joel had become our expert on the
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history of science and we found that there were um 44 american universities
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and colleges across the country that enrolled 400
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science none of us had ever heard of it and we just wanted to mark this
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territory not to forget it so he actually went joel actually went to a
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history of science convention one year in new orleans
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and i guess that was a big splash they loved having the fbi there it was very
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exciting but he was there to learn about what history of science means so
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all of this is fresh on our mind when theodore kaczynski shows up
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as a suspect and lo and behold when we go to start doing all the basics that we
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always did with any suspect and one of them was to get all their
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school transcripts lo and behold there's a course that
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theodore took early on in harvard or university of michigan
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called history of science the introduction to history of science
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science so he had a creative side and he would pull on that when uh he was
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putting together these bombs or putting together ideas
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so this is how all of these things uh whether they were phrases or uh those
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kinds of things from the investigation or passages from the manifesto
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or passages from the um 23 page essay that matched the manifesto
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all of this started falling together and these pieces became the the foundation the
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building block of this search warrant the thing is
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this was not dna this was not fingerprints this was not eyewitness stuff
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this was words and so doj said knock yourself out but this
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this is a probable cause and of course our response was wait a minute
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this is as good as any of the things you just mentioned almost because
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first of all this is all we have but knowing all of this and seeing every day
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more stuff was coming together i mean there was no question
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more and more of these pieces were coming together
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we always would do a timeline and one of the things david was able to do
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eventually is he gave us uh well over a hundred envelopes
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with postmarks on them they represented the envelopes that the letters between
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had had received over 30 years he kept all of that
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and we had thus a timeline during the entirety of the unabomb series of events
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and we only ended up finding one contradiction in that entire uh 16 years
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using all these postmarks and all the other things we used
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so it was all falling together and we kept going back and saying no
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we're close to having what we need to get into that cabin
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and we need to do it and um doj uh was not sold
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and eventually it took the fbi director louis free
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and the attorney general to simply bypass all the advisors and committees set up
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to uh give us advice about this it took the two of them
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to say uh look we trust the utf we trust the people on it
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we've been following this case we know this case like the back of our hand i mean
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janet reno would carry around her uh copy of fact fiction and theory
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and you had to be careful if you were talking to her because she'd listen
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and then you go wait a minute isn't this part of theory for her
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and so uh she was that into this case and of course
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director free was was really into it from day one but
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so that was the kind of relationship we now i mean we're almost
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it may be that they're high level government officials
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but everybody as we said at the beginning everybody was at the right
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at the right time and and you know the egos had been
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tossed to the floor uh the emotion you could you could show your emotion
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uh i mean it was it was amazing i mean i look back on it now and as i'm talking
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it wasn't like people might think uh the attorney general the director of the fbi
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the the sac of san francisco the agents we were all equal in this boat and uh if
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we didn't help each other we were all going to drown in it
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and uh i think that's at some point that became
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the reason that we were successful in bringing all this together
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hence the the piece of the title about breaking the rules
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the um they got their search warrant this group uh not the arrest warrant they got
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the search warrant which wasn't all they wanted but it was good enough as it would
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turn out and wound up uh in the snowy mountains of montana
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um tons of agents waiting for ted kaczynski there was a whole
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ruse as you can imagine had to be executed very carefully so that no one got hurt
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understanding this is a bomb maker inside of this cabin
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suspected but for very good reason uh and eventually
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they would have to affect that arrest under circumstances they never foresaw
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so now you go out to the mountains of montana the middle of nowhere
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and you've got to start putting the the pieces in place for you know what you
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hope will be an eventual arrest and the what i the question i had in
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reading your book were you talking about you know now you got to start
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interviewing the locals you get some important locals on your side
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you you start interviewing bus drivers because ted kaczynski only has a bicycle
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so how is he getting from the middle of nowhere down to sacramento
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into utah wherever he's going there's got to be a way so you got to find bus
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drivers you got to figure out routes taken you got to see
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where did he stay what are the do we have any receipts let's get the bank
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accounts let's build a case a case that max would love
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to show um actual proof that this guy has been in the places we suspect he's been
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during the relevant time frames and what i kept thinking reading how you guys had to do
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this was a just arrest the damn guy you know it's
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him right like you can't do it that way and b weren't you worried someone was
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going to leak either you know outside you know to to
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random people who might spread it but or b to to ted kaczynski like how could you
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assure yourself that people weren't friends with him or maybe they just
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blabbed to somebody some random person like the fbi contacted me they asked me
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all these fun questions they think if there's some guy in the woods and then word
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would get out you know how do you control that me and everything you said
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was so right on uh we were we were worried about so many things that that
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was the most stressful time of this entire investigation there could be leaks
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he could have something in the cabin that eventually is going to hurt somebody
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uh he could get on a bus and place another bomb or mail another bomb all these
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things are going on our on in our minds and so we had to try to deal with each of
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these contingencies so uh what we did is that uh around i don't know it was
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probably around the third week of february uh called max max was on leave at
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the time i said we're sending you to uh montana i know you don't think much of
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uh theodore kaczynski as the unabomber but you're the guy that has to be in
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montana all the time to take care of and manage the small team we're going to send
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with you and uh we need you to go to those hotels motels try to try to somehow
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place this guy out of that cabin start interviewing people um and of course all
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this has to be done discreetly and uh we can't even mention the word unabomb
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so uh max of course being max he he he came right back he goes into montana buys all
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his winter clothes and uh and sets about doing what he has to do
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and he and i talked several times every day uh and uh he directed a team of
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about three people which would start to grow almost every day after we first got
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started but in that time a lot of things happened and we needed all these things
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for our search warrant max was able to go pay a visit to butch gearing it was on
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the butch gearing lumber mill property that theodore kaczynski and his brother
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david has had actually purchased the house or the the land for the the cabin
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that kaczynski built in 1971 so max went and had a talk with
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gearing to learn about the unabomber or you know you learn about kaczynski
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and uh gearing was uh where as we said wearing the team jersey after that he he was
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willing and ready to help and provide whatever kind of information or help to
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us we needed so that was kind of uh uh secured so then uh max was able to
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develop jerry burns jerry burns became just vitally
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important everybody's heard of the u.s forest service
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very few people know that the u.s forest service has their own special agents and
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and law enforcement and uh i've worked with so many of these people over the
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years and they're really really good well jerry burns was uh
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uh absolutely amazing and so we befriended him and and kind of put the
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team jersey on him his supervisor agreed that he didn't need to know what jerry
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was doing on behalf of the fbi but jerry was briefed on everything he was
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brought into the whole unabombed picture of this
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and uh so he was able to be a goal might of information about kaczynski because he
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was always running into him out into kaczynski out in the forest
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that was important the ssra the senior supervisory resident agent
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in helena montana was an individual named tom mcdaniel
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he was amazing and and was there every step of the way with us
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and then finally bernie hubley bernie was the assistant
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u.s attorney in the district there and lo and behold
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our luck again bernie hubley was a former fbi agent
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so he was brought into this and almost fell over on a bar stool one day when
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and uh we're here because in your territory it's so crazy
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it's crazy to think about like these guys being like wait what the unabomber
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like the most notorious criminal in the country right now at large
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so okay eventually i gotta skip ahead because i there's so much more important
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things to get to so you do get your search warrant it
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wasn't easy but but just long story short on that so much of the that
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painstaking fbi work went into it and it wasn't a guarantee that you were
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going to get it but all those years and hours of of collective effort
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paid off you got the warrant you go to execute the search warrant
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jerry who you mentioned the local who ted knew and he was important he was
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the front man and then there are two other guys who went
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to knock on the door with a ruse about we need to check your property line and it
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was something jerry ted kaczynski had to see jerry's face otherwise
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he wouldn't have opened that door he would have been suspicious
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so he was critical and lo and behold he was home ted kaczynski and you you got
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him you grabbed him um he said he was going to go back in he would show you the
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property lines he's going to go back in and grab his coat and no he was not
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going to grab the coat the fbi grabbed him pulled out a six hour that was the
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end of his attempt to go back in the house and he was not placed under arrest
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but taken to another cabin where questioning began and i have to ask you you
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know after all this effort right he's in this cabin you've got him you and your
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point you know because the pictures do show this disheveled crazy
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looking mountain man who looks just like he hasn't seen a brush or a shower in 20
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years like what are you thinking well max couldn't wait to take a bath i mean he
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he already felt really dirty he wanted to get away from here take a shower as soon as
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he could but he would end up being with kaczynski just about the rest of the day
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and end of the night at about one o'clock uh i was thinking more of what we had to
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do next i i mean it was almost like uh okay that part of this is over and now we
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can breathe a little easier but not really because we've got a lot of work to
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do so now we start bringing in everybody else all these evidence response teams
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and uh and then we call the bureau but now the bureau is saying well you you don't
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have anything but a search warrant what are you doing well we're taking him out
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and putting him into another cabin to be on ice here for a while while we decide
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what to do and of course our plan was to take him up the mountain and over to
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helena and um and of course doj said you can't do that you can't arrest this man
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well we're not gonna let him go back in the cabin and so by late that night after
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hours of debating that occurred back east we'd already taken theodore kaczynski into
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paul wilhelmis a postal inspector uh they took him into helena to get him
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booked at the jail eventually uh and jim and i were following him up the
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mountain and into helena and we were uh eventually on the phone with the
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director and and he's getting kind of a a lot of information that i'll i'll call
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it what it was it was fiction from doj people that that had no no they had no
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clue of what they were talking about and so people were a little concerned are you
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making an arrest that you can't make but by about midnight uh howard shapiro the
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fbi chief legal counsel got on the phone with me i said just let me go through
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everything that's going on in the other room and lo and behold he said i don't need
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to hear anything else i'll brief the director do what you're doing and get
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this person locked up and we'll we'll deal with the rest of this tomorrow and
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that's exactly what happened you uh eventually after sort of de-rigging
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the house and making sure it was safe to enter and there were all sorts of
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things you gotta you gotta read terry's book to hear like the painstaking
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efforts to make sure that it was safe but you you get into his cabin and this to
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me is where it all comes together 20 years of clue gathering would match up
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with what you found in that cabin forget enough to make an arrest now we're
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talking we need enough to put this man away for the rest of his life and it was
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all there you know i think about let me just give you one i think about um terry the the um
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right the eyewitness is that tammy tammy sorry tammy the eyewitness who had given
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us the aviator sunglasses and all that back at the one bombing years ago now nobody ever
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made an eyewitness nobody ever matched that picture up with ted kaczynski and said i know
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that guy so okay did she really make a difference a hundred percent because tell us about some
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of the things she described that you found in ted kaczynski's cabin well of course the infamous
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portrait of the uh aviator sunglasses and the guy wearing the gray hooded sweatshirt and lo and
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behold there in the cabin were aviator sunglasses and gray hooded sweatshirt hanging up on a on a hook
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over in the corner to the left as you were facing from the outside uh we found a live bomb on the second
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day of the search wrapped and ready to mail ironically it had a return address of the seattle fbi office
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and so he was getting ready to taunt us again uh we we we saw across the cabin remember the cabin
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nine by twelve in size and then it had a loft so uh across from where we were looking through this
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the only door of the cabin uh were all kinds of containers cartons and bottles some were labeled
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they were labeled with explosive uh or ingredients that you could use to make explosives and in fact
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the unabombers early bombs had some of these combinations uh like potassium chlorate and sodium
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chlorate and things like that uh we found a oatmeal container quaker oatmeal container with uh pre-made
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switches that he had already made ahead of time so he could literally reach onto the shelf and pull off
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a switch that he might use in a bomb he wants to construct we found thousands of pages of typed or
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handwritten notes and we found a uh autobiography of of him he had he had literally uh laid out his
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entire life uh in all of these notes and we also found admissions and or confessions to all 16 unabomb
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devices now what in fact we did find with about 500 pages of those uh admissions is that he had taught
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himself spanish and he wrote those admissions and confessions in spanish so now we had to get on
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the phone and start assembling every fbi spanish speaker we had so that we could get those translated
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and stop any bombs that might now still be in the maelstrom so we we have all these things still
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going on because of this guy's nature and personality one question i wanted to ask you having read the book
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was you one of the queries one of the one of the oddities was the fbi uh agents analyzing the case
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before you knew who it was believed that um the forensic experts they said the unabomber is melting scrap
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aluminum for his more recent bombs he would need an electric powered kiln to do that and he ted kaczynski
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only had like a wood burning stove in there he had no electricity and so did we ever solve the mystery
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of how he melted scrap aluminum with just a wood burning stove which the forensic experts said he
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could not do well they may have said he could not do it but we've all all learned about experts and uh
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the experts were simply wrong and he had the potbelly stove and he had a big fire pit dug in front of the
01:22:46.280
cabin and uh he melted his own aluminum the hard way and that's how he was meticulously making these
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bombs and i know we knew this from the manifesto but we haven't really gotten into it in this
01:22:58.380
interview but from the manifesto and the materials he found in his cabin and the interviews with his
01:23:03.000
brother david and so on because ted was not talking he clammed right up what what do we know about
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why about the reason for his terror campaign over 20 years yes he actually goes into that and he says
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people are going to uh give a number of motives to what i'm doing uh but i'm doing this because i'm
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getting personal revenge i'm doing this because i'm angry uh there was really no rationality to
01:23:34.540
uh all of these things that look so organized like like he might have had an anti-technology beef of
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course he kind of did but it was all when you get down to it when you think of airlines he was mad
01:23:46.840
because the uh the planes flying over the wilderness area where he lived made too much noise so then he'd
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write i'm i'm embarking on a plan to get even and this is kind of how he was thinking and uh as kathy
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had said early on uh this is about anger it's about what a person like this a serial killer
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a serial criminal uh has welled up inside them they are angry and uh certainly theodore kaczynski
01:24:15.840
was angry and so he wrote about his anger he wrote about personal revenge as a motive and uh he gave
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other motives of course but this is what it all came down to for him anger and revenge at what he
01:24:29.000
thought were slights against him all right we'll get into you know more about his past in one second
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but before we get to that he there's a reason why he was not um facing the death penalty by the time
01:24:43.300
you got your hands on him and he would have to face justice can you explain just with the criminal
01:24:47.620
trial what happened because you didn't have to try him and there was a reason why death was not on the
01:24:52.560
table in the lead up to this uh david had requested that we have some sort of deal where he will help
01:25:00.580
us but there will be no death penalty well of course we had to say no to that we couldn't talk like that
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uh with anybody before any kind of trial so ultimately there was death penalty attached to
01:25:10.680
the indictments that uh or the trial process in both sacramento and had we gone there new jersey
01:25:16.560
uh on the main cases uh that we were we were indicting him on uh but at some point in time uh
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right before the trial jury was to come in uh and and we were going to start the trial he just kind of
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threw it in you know he didn't want to plead guilty at all to anything they tried to um have a
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conditional plea where we would uh you know kind of take his plea but he could appeal things all his life
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he said no and finally they said well look if you um if you take the death penalty off the table
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you know we'll plead guilty unconditionally to all of these crimes and that's exactly what happened
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and that happened literally i mean the beginning of that happened literally minutes before the judge
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had kind of read his final words and and told the courtroom okay i'm going to bring in the jury
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and all of a sudden you know kaczynski basically threw something or made some noise they were done
01:26:15.440
the attorneys got up the whole thing was over that day and uh within an hour we were told he's he
01:26:21.800
wants to plead guilty i mean so terrified about the thought of having his own life taken from him
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and of course not a shred of concern or care for the lives he took and and the people he maimed and
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you know i think about those poor children and that wife um of poor um thomas mosser who had to run
01:26:42.080
into that kitchen after they heard a bomb go off and see the remains of their loved ones i mean like
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and ted kaczynski's worried of course to the end about himself and what he might have to go through
01:26:52.100
um has he ever spoken terry has he ever given an interview or you know done anything other than
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the manifesto to help people understand no not really he's he's turned down most interviews i think
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he eventually might have spoken with someone briefly i uh but i'm not sure i i remember vaguely
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at some point he might have but uh he certainly is not talking to us he um uh he has developed or he
01:27:19.800
had developed i think a relationship of some sort with timothy mcveigh before he was executed uh and
01:27:26.600
of course he's on uh he's at the supermax and i think right down the row from him is eric robert rudolph
01:27:34.040
another loner uh serial bomber from the olympic bombing of 1996 so uh he's really never talked
01:27:41.600
he's really never said much and uh i don't think he plans to say anything he's never talked at all
01:27:46.640
uh since then to his brother and of course he hadn't talked to his brother for years before that
01:27:51.560
right he would he cut off his brother and his mom and i think his dad was alive for some of that
01:27:58.040
um unclear why that the brother married a college professor when it was a question about whether he
01:28:04.060
was he was upset about that he didn't like universities as we covered earlier um and yet
01:28:10.200
the brother loved him david kaczynski loved his brother ted and really seemed to wrestle with that
01:28:16.340
phone call he made after reading the manifesto and you know again he tried to bargain for his brother's
01:28:22.080
life but knew he had to do the right thing i mean he's he's really kind of an unsung hero in the whole
01:28:26.680
thing because even though we have so many fbi agents working tirelessly around the clock for years to
01:28:32.320
catch the guy boy oh boy you know a lot of people would say i wouldn't i wouldn't do it wouldn't turn
01:28:37.020
my own brother in i'd do something else uh but he did the right thing and he and in large part you know
01:28:42.400
he he played a major role in in apprehending the brother okay the profile of ted kaczynski is where i want
01:28:48.420
to pick it up next because i read some crazy stuff about this guy and i would love to go through some
01:28:54.500
of it with you not it wasn't in your book but i want to understand ted kaczynski a bit better and
01:28:59.980
lessons learned now that now that you can look back on your investigation and know who it is
01:29:04.620
what would you have done differently okay we're gonna pick it up there with terry churchy
01:29:10.220
so an important piece of the story is who was this guy like what turns you know some normal
01:29:20.280
american who by all accounts didn't have an extraordinarily odd childhood into a serial
01:29:26.080
killer that's what ted kaczynski is a serial killer so um let's just start with what do we
01:29:31.480
know about his you know one through 20 about that period of his life sure well his brother kind of sums
01:29:37.300
that up the best i think because he thought a lot about that and he would constantly remind us
01:29:42.160
we came from the same family we were raised in the same way by the same people i don't even
01:29:49.300
understand how he can attach certain meaning and value to some of the things he was taught in the
01:29:54.540
way he was raised that he talks about that's what he would say about ted i don't understand how we
01:29:59.400
could come from the same family because my recollections and memories of growing up
01:30:03.340
are nothing at all like his i have no idea how he got these notions
01:30:08.000
and therein i think lies the problem for us uh in future cases and in trying to identify or prevent
01:30:16.560
some of these types of things i think it's very difficult to figure out uh how to see these people
01:30:21.880
ahead of time how to how to uh figure out how one person is going to be fine and how another person
01:30:28.240
becomes a serial terrorist i i don't know if uh we're even close to that kind of uh assessment
01:30:35.300
right now i know we've tried to articulate things that were missed and uh yet they're only um on the
01:30:43.560
surface like uh someone acted a certain way in school or didn't get along with anybody or was
01:30:49.880
constantly angry uh kathy says that uh and she did a major study we one of the things we did to try to
01:30:56.160
answer your question is uh when i went back to the bureau at the end of my career uh we got the
01:31:01.320
money and we brought kathy back to do a study on loan serial bombers and she concluded that these are
01:31:08.960
people who are trying to make a mark in society they want to be known uh they fail at being known
01:31:15.020
they fail at group identity they cannot become part of a group they simply cannot socialize to where
01:31:20.680
they can become part of any kind of group so uh what they start to do is create their own group
01:31:27.080
thus the unabomber created theater kaczynski created the terror group fc and then they seek
01:31:32.740
this uh major type of event uh like a bomb in a terrible tragedy to get traction and be known and so
01:31:40.260
uh that's about as close as we can get but she based that on a number of serial killers and a number
01:31:46.580
of people because we don't have many serial bombers of course uh but there are certainly uh very similar
01:31:52.920
patterns going on there so we passed that study along uh to the uh to the bureau i mean that it was
01:32:01.480
bureau property we passed it along to use in the future and in fact it was used uh initially when
01:32:08.240
they were trying to deal with the anthrax case because if you recall there was a real wave a very strong
01:32:14.440
wave initially that the anthrax attacks on the east coast had to be committed by an international
01:32:20.880
terrorist it just had to be and uh kathy and i at the time were in the lawrence silvermore lab we'd
01:32:26.740
retired we were working there and the bureau actually called and they said we have a meeting coming up
01:32:31.440
and we're trying to be the voice in the wilderness telling the entirety of the rest of the government
01:32:36.760
that the fbi thinks the anthrax attacks are domestic terrorism and we would hate to see them go off
01:32:43.700
in a different direction and you know end up attacking iraq or something based on this and
01:32:48.660
right so that's the kind of thing that can happen in the kind of discussion that we were literally
01:32:53.600
having after that study and um and after we had left so just a couple of items he was brilliant he
01:33:02.220
what i read that he skipped two grades uh he went off to harvard at age 16 um he graduated with a phd
01:33:11.560
in mathematics in 1967 he would go on to teach mathematics at the university of california at
01:33:17.120
berkeley of course we would see you know bombings in california and the universities there abruptly
01:33:21.980
returned to chicago to live with his parents um and then he wound up purchasing this land in montana
01:33:29.040
and living in this cabin now i also read online that he was at one point he considered himself
01:33:36.120
trans and actually went to seek the operation or at least psychiatric affirmation of that is that true
01:33:45.340
i think there's some discussion in his journals of uh something like that uh to be honest i don't uh
01:33:54.760
i didn't pay a lot of attention to that uh at that time but uh i think he wrote something very
01:34:01.400
similar to that yes and there was never a woman in the picture from what i read i never hear anything
01:34:06.000
about this girlfriend that girl no ex-wife like no women there weren't and he was very disappointed
01:34:13.800
and bothered by that and in fact so disappointed that he put an ad in a newspaper in the uh san
01:34:20.800
francisco bay area in the oakland berkeley area and um the ad is probably the reason he never got what
01:34:26.520
he wanted he said he was uh individual seeking a squaw uh someone who could live a wilderness life
01:34:32.940
and essentially be told what to do and he said he was shocked takers he was he was he was shocked in
01:34:41.540
his journal because then he wrote it and i'm shocked no one responded so i i mean maybe i'm so smart in
01:34:50.120
some ways and not so smart in other ways now what about um there was some reporting that when he went to
01:34:55.900
harvard they did this experiment it was voluntary to take part in it but he was a young kid when he
01:35:00.860
started i mean 16 is very young to be at university um he participated in it was some sort of an
01:35:05.800
experiment to see how well you handled stress and criticism given to you like on a loop about you
01:35:12.500
about your writings and and some theorized this may have been a turning point you know like somehow it
01:35:18.680
drove him crazy what do we know about that well megan we know that's a theory he never says much
01:35:25.440
about it there's a there's another kind of companion thing that he was involved in some
01:35:29.440
unbeknownst to him some secret kind of experimental testing that the cia was doing in some places
01:35:35.440
using students uh but he doesn't really look at any of that as the reason uh that these things happen
01:35:43.080
he himself says people are going to describe all kinds of motives and all of these things to me
01:35:50.200
as the reason i'm doing this they're all wrong i'm doing this because i'm angry and i'm revengeful
01:35:57.820
and this is how i'm going to get even and that's really the strongest thing we have to go by everything
01:36:04.320
else pretty much falls back into the old fact fiction and theory but there's so many people out
01:36:10.040
there now because you know they have access to a lot of his uh library of journals and documents and
01:36:15.080
things and so now everybody is going to weigh in on what theodore kaczynski must be thinking but
01:36:20.160
as you mentioned does he take questions and does he get involved in discussions and
01:36:24.360
sadly in some ways the answer is no we'll never know for sure what's what's he what he's thinking
01:36:29.260
he hated technology he hated advancement he wanted rural caveman type living and really hated anybody or
01:36:36.180
anything that pushed for i would say now 21st century type advancements and i can't imagine what the
01:36:42.800
what the ted kaczynski of the bombing years you know 1998 minus 20 would have thought of twitter and
01:36:50.520
jeff bezos and bill gates and all of it uh i mean i'm sure i i know but so so final point looking back
01:36:58.080
now at the investigation and then comparing it against the real killer what what do you think were the
01:37:05.640
the biggest lessons learned i think the biggest lessons learned are uh kind of almost contrast with
01:37:12.660
each other first of all you have to follow the basics you can't overlook things that you would
01:37:18.020
do in any case whether it's a bank robbery case or anything else you have to follow the basics and get
01:37:22.380
them recorded and then uh remember what is important as you're doing that and at the same time you can't
01:37:28.680
be tied to a system which doesn't move fast enough to keep up with what you're trying to do and in this
01:37:35.300
case when you've got a bombing and then you could have another bombing and another bombing uh you've
01:37:39.820
got to be getting that information out and distributed and then assessing it uh a lot for a long time in all
01:37:46.540
kinds of cases the biggest criticism of the fbi is that it has all this information its biggest weakness
01:37:52.640
is it uh it doesn't really know what it uh what it has and uh because it has so much and so uh that is
01:38:00.320
what we try to overcome and uh so you have to be doing that but then the the other significant thing
01:38:05.520
that i think uh you see all through this and i think today it is true and it will always be true and
01:38:11.360
it was true before i ever became an fbi agent um we are nothing without the public without the help of
01:38:19.400
the public without the trust and support of the public and if we lose that and uh we can debate
01:38:26.120
how people may feel today if we lose that we're in trouble and that ought to be at the forefront of
01:38:32.540
every mind who runs the fbi works in the fbi at any level that if you lose that trust with the public
01:38:39.540
and you don't trust them to help support you and help you with these cases then you've got some big
01:38:45.080
problems law enforcement in a constitutional republic in a free country is about the people
01:38:51.480
and it's about teaming up with those people the fbi used to have an old pamphlet it was called
01:38:57.260
cooperation the backbone of law enforcement and by golly uh that was the basis of all of our media
01:39:03.860
of everything we did and if i had to do over i would have done it faster in greater quantity uh
01:39:10.260
and and by golly uh i would be educating everybody who ever walked into law enforcement
01:39:15.960
that it's about you and the public and they've got to trust you and you've got to depend upon them
01:39:20.840
and that's that's the kind of relationship we have with david yeah and that's where we are today
01:39:25.860
boy oh boy i have things changed since uh you were solving this case and have things
01:39:31.880
and how they need to change back the fbi is seen very differently now and you know what reading how
01:39:36.620
the media worked with you guys on the leaks and trying to protect the public made me think about
01:39:41.080
how the media has changed too and not for the better uh so appreciate your hard work you're
01:39:46.440
telling the story uh it's an honor to know you terry i hope you can come back too thank you megan
01:39:51.560
you too thank you very much on behalf of every other work this case all the best to you thanks
01:39:56.720
for joining us today download the megan kelly show on your podcast youtube.com slash megan kelly to
01:40:01.200
watch it thanks for listening to the megan kelly show no bs no agenda and no fear