Inside the Mind of a Madman?

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SACRAMENTO: In the field of incriminating evidence, writing "I intend to start killing people" in your diary must rank up there with dropping a smoking gun or owning a pair of Bruno Magli shoes. But that entry is exactly what was found and released by federal prosecutors Wednesday in the journal of Theodore Kaczynski, the suspected Unabomber.

Kaczynski's trial hasn't even begun. Jury selection is barely halfway through. But already, with the release of the journal extracts, the former Berkeley professor's defense that of schizophrenia is starting to fall to pieces.

"There will be some speculation in the news media as to my motives for killing," Kaczynski allegedly writes in the undated entry. "They are bound to try to analyze my psychology and depict me as 'sick'."

This prescient, coldly-calculating writing is hardly likely, experts say, to have come from the pen of a mentally ill man. The defense maintains that Kaczynski's "superior intellect" should not be confused with mental health. But given the weight of this evidence, not to mention jury sympathy in recent terrorist trials Oklahoma and the World Trade Center, for example they probably shouldn't hold out too much hope.