"I Don't Want To Live Long. I Would Rather Get The Death Penalty Than Spend The Rest Of My Life In Prison"

(3 of 6)

David Kaczynski, seven years younger, had an easier time of things. He too was bright--he would go on to study literature at Columbia University--and he was far more socially adept.

The brothers got along fairly well, although Ted admits to taking out his teenage frustrations on David. Nevertheless, it was Ted whom David most admired, especially as Ted began to speak about abandoning civilization to live in the wilderness. The boys' father often took them on hikes outside Chicago, and Ted read extensively about nature, wondering what it might be like to live beyond the reach of the modern world.

At Harvard, Ted felt socially isolated by other students. He recalls that "their speech, manners, and dress were so much more 'cultured' than mine." There was an even greater unease in Ted's life; he suffered from what he calls "acute sexual starvation." Sexual references run throughout his book, and although he never ties them into a knot, one cannot help wondering if sexual frustration was his main despair. As an adolescent, he recalls, "my attempts to make advances to girls had such humiliating results that for many years afterward, even until after the age of 30, I found it excruciatingly difficult--almost impossible--to make advances to women... At the age of 19 to 20, I had a girlfriend; the only one I ever had, I regret to say." According to a psychiatric report compiled before his trial, Ted, while in graduate school at the University of Michigan, experienced "several weeks of intense and persistent sexual excitement involving fantasies of being a female. During that time period, he became convinced that he should undergo sex-change surgery."

In the face of such constant sadness and humiliation, Ted Kaczynski eventually decided he would live out his life alone in the wilderness. His retreat to the Montana mountains could simply be viewed as an embrace of a desire he harbored much of his life. Or it could be viewed as a rejection of the world that had rejected him--a world full of purposeful academics and scientists, of happily married couples, of people who weren't humiliated by daily social interaction--and that would someday pay for its ease.

Growing Apart
When asked about the fondest memories he holds of David, Ted cites a day in the early 1970s in Great Falls, Mont. David had moved there first, after college, and was working as a copper smelter. Ted was building his cabin on land the brothers had bought together outside Lincoln. One day, Ted recalls, they took their baseball gloves to a park. "We were as far apart as we could get and still reach each other with the ball," Ted says, smiling, as if lost in the moment. "We were throwing that ball as hard as we could, and as far as we could... And so we were making these running, leaping catches. We made more fantastic catches that day than I think we did in all the rest of our years together."

Their bond now was perhaps as strong as it would ever be. They were a pair of anti-careerist Ivy League grads united by their love of the outdoors--and also, frankly, by their failure at romantic love. David had been only slightly more successful with women than Ted. He had already decided that there was only one woman he could ever love--her name was Linda Patrik--and though they had a few dates during college, things didn't work out.

In Great Falls, Ted often spent the night at David's apartment. One day, while David was not at home, Ted came across some letters from Linda, whom Ted had never heard David mention. "They were in a drawer," Ted writes, "not lying out in the open, and I knew that he would not want me to read them, but I read them anyway... Why did I do it? I was full of contempt for him, and when you have contempt for someone you tend to be disregardful of his rights."

Ted thrived on his brother's adulation but was also "disgusted" by it, he writes. While they shared a disdain for materialism and an "oversocialized" lifestyle, Ted considered David undisciplined, physically and intellectually lazy. He also felt David was prone to manipulation, especially by women--as Linda Patrik's letters seemed to illustrate. "The letters were not very informative," he writes, "but they did make this much clear about Dave's relationship with Linda Patrik: He had a long-term crush on her; his relationship to her was servile." Ted saw David, derisively, as more companion than mate to Linda, "a shoulder for her to cry on."

David and Linda had grown up together in Chicago, and he had never given up on her. They kept in touch while David lived in Montana, and throughout the 1970s, as he taught high school English in Iowa, wrote an unpublished novel and drove a commuter bus near Chicago. But Linda eventually married another man. Faced with this reality, David slipped off to the wilderness--interestingly, not to Ted's Montana mountain area but to the Big Bend desert region of western Texas. He had $40,000 in savings and, like Ted, a vague plan to spend the rest of his years alone.