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For Ted, 1990 also appears to have been a turning point, but in the opposite direction. He didn't attend his father's funeral. For some time he had been cutting back his already grudging contact with family members, complaining he had developed a heart arrhythmia made worse by dealing with them. To identify any "urgent and important" letters they might send, he asked them to draw a red line under the postage stamp. When they used it to mark the letter in which they broke the news of his father's suicide, Ted wrote back complaining that the message didn't merit a red line. From that point he retreated even more firmly into the Montana woods, his books and himself.
Was Ted different almost from the start? Investigators say that at the age of six months he was hospitalized for several weeks after suffering an allergic reaction to a drug. During that time, his parents were not allowed to hold or hug him. When he came home, they found him listless and withdrawn. In light of that early denial of human contact, investigators are intrigued by the fact that one of the Unabomber's early targets was James McConnell, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan who eventually became well known for researching the benefits of sensory deprivation for autistic children.
Investigators were told that in childhood Ted seemed to avoid human contact. As their firstborn sulked through grade school, his parents suspected that he might be unhappy because he was so much brighter than his peers. In those years "he was a discipline problem," admits Robert Rippey, a retired math teacher at Evergreen Park High School who remembers Ted fondly as one of his brightest students. "He drove his teachers up the wall. So in high school we had to figure something out." What his parents and school officials arrived at was the accelerated curriculum that allowed him to skip his junior year of high school and shot him to Harvard at age 16. But while his brother David also skipped junior year, Ted may have been more deeply affected by a fast track that landed him among older kids.
However maladroit he could be in conversation, or maybe because of that, Ted liked to put his thoughts and feelings down on paper. In the early 1970s, after abruptly leaving his teaching post at Berkeley, he wrote a long essay that opposed funding for scientific research, particularly in the field of genetics. (The same points appear in the Unabomber manifesto.) In the hope of getting his essay published, or at least publicized, he sent it to columnists around the country.
David, who graduated from Columbia University in 1970 with a degree in English, is a writer too, but of a different temper. In recent years he has produced stories and poems. Stuffed somewhere in a drawer, say friends, is an unpublished novel about baseball. "He's a man of few words," says Mary Ann Welch, a friend in Schenectady. "So it all comes out in his writing, very detailed and descriptive."