A brother lost, a brotherhood found

The two brothers hiked high into the Montana wilderness, cooked beans beneath the stars and talked like they hadn't in years.

By a campfire outside his one-room cabin, Ted read to his younger brother from a book on Roman history. For a time, they were just kids again, Teddy and Davy Kaczynski from Evergreen Park.

Gone was Ted's long-festering animosity toward their parents, or at least any mention of it. He had sent venomous letters accusing them of not loving him, blaming them for his social awkwardness.

But his brother's visit had gone so well that Ted even considered traveling to Dave's own retreat in southwest Texas. On their last day together in the fall of 1986, though, Ted declined.

"I just really don't have the time to come and visit you, Dave," he remembers Ted saying. "I have too much to do."

Dave was perplexed. Ted's life in the woods didn't appear to hold many obligations.

What Dave didn't know was that his brother, from his remote cabin near the Continental Divide, had been waging a bizarre eight-year campaign of terror. Constructing bombs from fertilizer, razors and screws, the man dubbed the Unabomber already had killed one person and injured 27 more.

Ted's rebuff of Dave would mark the beginning of the end of their brotherhood. Not long after Dave's visit, in his next brutal attack, Ted unwittingly would spark the beginning of a new bond.

Through an improbable chain of events, that victim would forge a lasting connection to Dave, becoming his confessor, friend and ally.

Interviews, rare access to letters and Ted Kaczynski's unpublished writings offer a new perspective on the Unabomber and his relationship with his family, including the sibling who turned him in. Thirty years after Ted planted his first bomb in Chicago, a story emerges of brotherhood lost and found.

I. 'Dad, what's wrong with Ted?'

Ted beckoned Dave to the door. It was a summer day in 1952 on South Lawndale Avenue in Evergreen Park. Three-year-old Dave had once again shouldered his way out the back door, only to find he wasn't tall enough to reach the handle to get back in.

But this day he found Ted, 10, fiddling with the screen door. In one hand, his brother held a spool of thread from their mother's sewing kit; in the other, a hammer and nails from their father's toolbox. Dave watched as Ted unwound the thread and hammered the empty spool into the wooden screen door.

It dawned on Dave what Ted had done. He had devised a makeshift doorknob, about chest-high, for Dave--an emblematic act of kindness from his protective older sibling.

The Kaczynskis had moved to Evergreen Park from Chicago's Back of the Yards neighborhood, partly to escape the claustrophobia and danger of urban life. The boys' father, Ted "Turk" Kaczynski, was a sausage maker who passed on his love of the outdoors to his sons.

He and his wife, Wanda, also wanted better schools for their sons. Though Turk dropped out of high school to help his parents during the Great Depression, he and Wanda put great value on education. And both boys excelled in school; each graduated early from high school and went off to the Ivy League.

When Ted was in 5th grade, a school counselor gave him an IQ test and he scored a 167, well into genius territory. The counselor told Wanda that he could be "another Einstein." In junior high, he was correcting his algebra teacher. As he progressed academically, though, Ted withdrew further into books, into himself. His intelligence only exacerbated his lack of social skills.

Dave revered Ted, but even at an early age he recognized Ted's nervousness, his suspicion of people. In a book Dave is writing, he recounts asking his father as a young boy: "Dad, what's wrong with Ted?"

"How do you mean?" Turk said.

"I mean, he doesn't have any friends or anything," Dave said. "He doesn't seem to like people."

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