Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters (29 page)

 Ted Kaczynski—Harvard, the “Unabomber,” and His Mission

Ted Kaczynski, who mailed and placed bombs targeting high-technology researchers and executives, supposedly believed that technology had advanced to a state where it posed a threat to mankind. A brilliant Ph.D. in mathematics, Kaczynski withdrew from society to a primitive cabin in Montana, from which he made his bomb-running forays into civilization for twenty years—during which he seriously injured several victims and killed three. Known only as the Unabomber, he persuaded several media outlets to publish his manifesto protesting against society’s becoming too dominated by high technology and global corporate power interests. He was identified after his family recognized the phraseology in the manifesto and alerted the FBI.

There was some controversy over the effectiveness of the FBI profiling of Kaczynski (see Chapter 9). Moreover, there are some disturbing questions over Ted Kaczynski and the nature and motive of his crimes. A brilliant mathematician with a Harvard undergraduate degree and a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan and a one-time assistant professor at the University of California at Berkeley, Kaczynski is probably the most educated serial killer on record. When identified and captured, he showed no signs of organic mental illness. What made this brilliant man cross the line to kill?

Apprehended and tried by federal authorities, Kaczynski was portrayed as an unkempt hermit nutcase who suddenly “cracked” after teaching for two years at Berkeley and retreated into the wilderness to a Montana cabin, from which he emerged only to kill. Because Kaczynski’s beliefs, and even his homicidal actions, garnered sympathy in some segments of society, it was important to discredit him and his mission as the actions of a crackpot.

The media coverage of Kaczynski’s trial in Sacramento, from where this portrayal emerged, was highly controlled by the very corporate powers he so hated. Authority for press passes to the trial was delegated to a consortium of major news organizations, led by the Associated Press.
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The consortium established the Unabom Trial Media Group, which issued press passes only to “bona fide” journalists. Furthermore, all courtroom passes were reserved exclusively for major media outlets, with only two passes available on a daily lottery basis to independent or small media organizations. The rest of the journalists could use a room where audio was pumped in on speakers from the courtroom—but only if they paid a $5,000 initiation fee and took out liability insurance costing another $1,500.
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Very few independent journalists or writers could afford such a privilege.

The truth is slightly different. Kaczynski was hardly a hermit, and maintained friendly relationships with some of his neighbors and people in town. And while his cabin was primitive, it was hardly remote by Montana standards. Author Alston Chase, who actually took the trouble to go to the site of Kaczynski’s cabin, writes:

Ted’s place, far from being a “wilderness,” bordered on suburban. Standing outside his door, one could hear traffic on the Stemple Pass Road . . . Just a few hundred feet down the creek from Kaczynski stood a row of vacation cabins . . . And quite a few townsfolk liked Kaczynski.
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There was no “crack-up” at Berkeley—Kaczynski took the position there with the specific objective of financing a rural cabin and a planned retreat from society. Kaczynski’s lifestyle might have been kooky compared to the New York–L.A. routine led by the journalists who reported on him. But deeper down, Kaczynski was no nuttier than the eminent American thinker Henry David Thoreau, who in 1845 went to live in a primitive cabin on Walden Pond, “not to walk in procession with pomp and parade, in a conspicuous place, but to walk even with the Builder of the universe, if I may,—not to live in this restless, nervous, bustling, trivial Nineteenth Century, but stand or sit thoughtfully while it goes by.”
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Kaczynski of course, did not sit thoughtfully. He killed coldly, wearing disguises as he planted lethal devices and cleverly left misleading evidence by wearing different-sized shoes attached like snowshoes below his regular ones.

Now that Kaczynski is locked away in a federal facility, all sorts of weird background is coming out about him. Recently it was discovered that Kaczynski was a survivor of a series of brutal personality-breaking psychological experiments in 1959, conducted at Harvard by Henry A. Murray, a towering figure in the world of intelligence agency personality analysis, brainwashing, and interrogation techniques. During World War II, Murray worked for the OSS, the precursor of the CIA, designing tests intended to identify the best recruits for clandestine work. Murray was particularly interested in how well recruits could withstand interrogation designed to break down their personalities.

In the 1950s, Murray served as an advisor to the U.S. Army on various drug tests on human subjects.
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This was around the time that the CIA and the Department of Defense were experimenting with LSD. Harvard researcher Timothy Leary, the future civilian guru of LSD, recalled in his autobiography that Murray was “the wizard of personality assessment who, as OSS chief psychologist, had monitored military experiments on brainwashing and sodium amytal interrogation. Murray expressed a great interest in our drug-research project and offered his support.”
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The sixty-six-year-old Henry Murray himself was experimenting with taking LSD when he subjected the brilliant but odd and lonely seventeen-year-old Harvard undergraduate student Ted Kaczynski to personality formation experiments. Students were asked to describe everything they fundamentally believed in, and then suddenly subjected to surprise attacks on their beliefs by hired lawyers. Murray described these as experiments in “stressful interpersonal disputations” or “dyadic interaction of alienated subjects.”
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There is no documented proof that Murray was at the time working for any of the CIA programs focused on the use of LSD as a method for programming “Manchurian candidate” assassins, interrogating prisoners, and disabling chosen target victims. We know, however, that under code names MK-ULTRA and Project Artichoke, such programs existed. University psychiatric and psychology professors in the United States and Canada received grants from the CIA to conduct these experiments, and one such program at McGill University in Montreal became the subject of extensive lawsuits.

Whether Murray’s experiments involving Kaczynski were part of the CIA’s mind-control research programs is unknown, but considering Murray’s history as a veteran of military and intelligence personality and interrogation research programs, it is likely that they were. Between 1960 and 1966 the CIA funneled $456,000 to thirteen Harvard programs and unnamed professors in the departments of psychology, philosophy, and social relations.
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After Alston Chase wrote an article in June 2000 in
The Atlantic
about Kaczynski’s participation in these experiments, Harvard quickly sealed the test records documenting what Kaczynski went through. Some of the other participants, however, recall the experiments as being devastating of their belief systems and personalities, although none of them became serial killers.

Perhaps most ironic is that Murray’s “dyadic interaction of alienated subjects” became the foundation for the therapeutic programs during the 1970s and 1980s aimed at “curing” serial killers and other types of psychopathic offenders in criminal psychiatric facilities. By the end of the 1980s this type of therapy was under severe criticism, as it appeared to do more damage than good.
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We know from the journals that Kaczynski kept, and which were entered into evidence during the trial, that he had expressed anger and desire to kill years before he planted his first bomb.

My motive for doing what I am going to do is simply personal revenge. I do not expect to accomplish anything by it. Of course, if my crime (and my reason for committing it) gets any public attention, it may help to stimulate public interest in the technology questions and thereby improve the changes for stopping technology before it is too late; but on the other hand most people will probably be repelled by my crime . . . I certainly don’t claim to be an altruist or to be acting for the “good” (whatever that is) of the human race. I act merely from a desire for revenge. Of course, I would like to get revenge on the whole scientific and bureaucratic establishment, not to mention communists and others who threaten freedom, but, that being impossible, I have to content myself with just a little revenge.

After he started planting his bombs seven years later, he wrote again:

I emphasize that my motivation is personal revenge. I don’t pretend to any kind of philosophical or moralistic justification. The concept of morality is simply one of the psychological tools by which society controls people’s behavior. My ambition is to kill a scientist, big businessman, government official, or the like. I would also like to kill a Communist.

In the end, we see that Kaczynski was actually a nutter, but not the one that the press depicted him as. Somewhere inside him, beneath that Harvard-educated 170 IQ—or perhaps, as Alston Chase argues, because of it—lurked a homicidal psychopath. Typically, and especially of missionary-type serial killers, Kaczynski felt that he was somehow special and “entitled.”

One thing we will see later in this book is that serial killers are frequently isolated and lonely children. Whether it is because of a domineering mother, a physical disability, a behavioral disorder, a mental handicap, or an overabundance of intelligence, serial killers as children and teens are frequently isolated from their siblings and playmates and increasingly live in a fantasy world. It is of course, a “chicken-or-egg” paradox—do children grow up to become serial killers because they are isolated, or are they isolated because there is something deadly wrong with their behavior in the first place? The problem is that millions of people have not killed, but have the same or worse childhood symptoms that serial killers frequently have: bedwetting, fire starting, animal cruelty, domineering mothers, broken families, head injuries, and isolation from peers. So while these things are often present in the childhoods of serial killers, they alone are not the solution to the puzzle—there is still an unknown factor sought by criminal psychologists to explain the existence of serial killers.

As we will also see in later chapters, serial killers often need some kind of trigger to set them off on the inevitable path to murder. Whether the psychological experiments in 1959 unleashed Kaczynski’s rage to homicidal action by breaking down the remnants of his personality is not an easy question to answer. Sealed in Harvard’s archives are the details of Kaczynski’s time in the “dyadic interaction of alienated subjects” that Professor Murray was conducting. Obviously, Murray was not “deconstructing” the personalities of psychopaths at Harvard—he was experimenting on the personalities of ambitious, highly intelligent scholars, attacking their fundamental beliefs and personality traits. Kaczynski was definitely isolated from his childhood peers by both his intelligence and his parents’ ambitious management of his intellectual development. Whatever rage he might have developed, his intelligence and acceptance of basic ethics might have kept it in check, until Murray’s “dyad” got hold of him at the weakest and loneliest point in his life—away from home for the first time as a college undergraduate. That could be the elusive trigger in Kaczynski’s murderous career—a trigger that, with his intelligence and sense of organization, he did not act on impetuously, but carefully and smartly, evading apprehension for nearly two decades.

HEDONIST COMFORT KILLERS

Hedonist comfort killers are perhaps the oldest recognized and simplest type of serial killer. They kill for profit and gain—for comfort. They were highly prevalent in previous centuries in times of anarchic disorder or in frontier territories where the institutions of justice were weak and the value of life was low. Pirates, bandits, urban slum landlords, baby-farm matrons, black widow husband poisoners, bluebeard wife murderers, landlady killers, innkeeper murderers, medical cadaver harvesters—all these categories dominate the descriptions of nonaristocratic serial killers from the past. These types of crimes continue to occur in rural areas or in economically depressed urban communities, where victims are often transients who are not missed. Organized-crime contract killings likewise unfold in a type of underworld anarchy and the victims, often other criminals, are not missed or valued.