I watched the four episodes of “Unabomber - In His Own Words” on Netflix over my weekend. On Netflix, it says it came out in 2018, I guess, but on IMDB it says it’s a 2020 series. I didn’t notice it until this last weekend. I think the general public might like it but people like me who followed the Unabomber case closely I think will like it a lot more. CAUTION: SPOILERS AHEAD It covers a lot of the well-trodden ground of Ted Kaczynski’s path of terror. It reviews many of the bombings and has interviews with the victims, still damaged from the attacks decades ago. And it covers how his brother turned him in. There’s much in the documentary I didn’t get in reading daily newspapers and weekly news magazine. For instance, the guy killed in Sacramento had actually been a student on the Berkeley campus when Kaczynski taught there. It’s not clear if Kaczynski targeted him or if this was a coincidence. We know the Unabomber’s brother turned him in, but the documentary shows it was the brother’s wife – who never met the Unabomber – who suspected him first and prodded her husband to report him to the FBI. The biggest surprise for me was that Ted Kaczynski – who was admitted to Harvard two years early – took part in a Harvard psychology study for three years in which he was mentally beaten down. The professor in charge of the study was developing interrogation techniques for the CIA. Kaczynski was likely already a bit damaged. This could have been what permanently warped him. The documentary relies on a tape recorded interview that Ted Kaczynski gave to an editor of a publication for “Earth First!” That is an environmental organization labeled as a terrorist group by the U.S. government. The documentary seems to gloss over some of the worst acts of the group, instead focusing on monkeywrenching like digging ditches to block roads and peaceful resistance. Earth First! used to put spikes in trees. Loggers suffered permanent injuries, and I think a few were killed, when their blades hit the metal spikes. I have a personal interest in the Unabomber because I covered a case where a man arrested by the Nevada Highway Patrol trooper in front of his daughter later mailed a package bomb to the trooper in September 1993 that badly maimed him. I sat through a couple of cases in that case – a gun store owner helped him build the bomb – and I wonder how much he was inspired by the Unabomber. He actually had a clever design that allowed him to arm the dynamite in the box and then close the hinges. The next time anyone opened the lid controlled by those hinges the dynamite in the box would go off. I think he actually had a better mail bomb design than the Unabomber, although he just used standard dynamite while Kaczynski made his own explosives. Both are serving time at SuperMax in Colorado. I wonder how frequently they talk.
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