From Smithsonian Magazine by William Finnegan:
Sketch of the Unabomber
The Unabomber cut a swath both deep and narrow through the country’s psyche. His attacks were frightening and unpredictable, but, in the later stages of his 17-year terror campaign, he emerged from the shadows as a vengeful philosopher bent on changing history. He was a riveting, infuriating figure. I wanted to write about him, but not from the police point of view and not speculatively, when nobody yet knew who he was. He finally came into focus, for me, at his trial. I covered it, and in the end surprised myself by thinking that he had been deprived of his day in court.
“Ever since my early teens I had dreamed of escaping from civilization,” he later told an interviewer. He built a bare-bones cabin in the woods near Lincoln, Montana, where he lived without electricity or indoor plumbing. He hunted and gardened and kept to himself, eating squirrels, rabbits, parsnips, berries. In 1978, he began sending parcel bombs to scientists, businessmen and others whose work enraged him.
Law enforcement dubbed him the “Unabomber” because his early targets were universities and airlines.
Read the rest of the article at Smithsonian Magazine
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