Ted Kaczynski rises early every morning in his cell at the Pleasanton, California, federal prison. He does push-ups, jogs, then settles in for a day of reading. He speaks politely, though little, to guards. In short, he's a model prisoner.
When his trial starts in Sacramento on Wednesday - barring a last-minute plea bargain, jury selection will begin in US District Court - the drama will not turn on whether Kaczynski waged a 17-year reign of terror as the Unabomber. Instead, the case's essence will center on a very personal question: What sort of man is Theodore John Kaczynski?
Federal prosecutors will paint him as a brilliant, enraged criminal mastermind who systematically mailed bombs that killed 3 people and injured 23 others. Kaczynski's lawyers, likely blocked from invoking a formal defense of criminal insanity, will still build their case on their client's state of mind. Confronted by piles of incriminating writings they concede their client wrote, they will try to show that he suffered from emotional disturbances made deadly by the extreme deprivation of his life in a Montana shack.
Defense attorneys' focus, both in plea-bargain negotiations reported Sunday by The Sacramento Bee and in their public pre-trial maneuvering, is not on exonerating Kaczynski, but on saving him from execution.
"The evidence is overwhelming," said Michael Rustigan, a criminology professor at San Francisco State University. "Now the question is whether he's mad, or just bad."
Said Rustigan, who has closely followed the case and trial proceedings: Kaczynski's fate "is going to be based on mercy and sympathy" from the court and jurors.
Charged in 4 of 16 attacks
In the Sacramento trial, Kaczynski faces 10 counts related to 4 of the 16 Unabom attacks. Prosecutors will try to prove he planned and carried out bombings that killed Sacramento business owner Hugh Scrutton in 1985 and California timber lobbyist Gilbert Murray in 1995, and separate 1993 attacks that severely injured two academics, Yale computer scientist David Gelernter and University of California, San Francisco geneticist Charles Epstein.
In the course of the 1978-1995 bombings, the hooded, mustachioed, shades-wearing figure depicted in a police sketch became known not just as a serial killer, but an ideologue. He gained attention because of his ability to evade, even mock, law enforcement, and for his professed disdain for postindustrial society.
"Most serial killers are run-of-the-mill sadistic lust killers," Rustigan said. "This is the most intellectual serial killer this nation has ever produced."
If Kaczynski is indeed the Unabomber, his intellect apparently did not admit the possibility that authorities might one day visit his primitive living quarters outside Lincoln, Montana. Among the most compelling evidence prosecutors are expected to present are the voluminous writings recovered from the mathematician's shack.
For instance, the FBI says its search of the premises turned up a carbon copy of a 1995 missive to the radical environmental group Earth First. It read in part: "This is a message from FC. The FBI calls us the 'Unabomb.' We are the people who recently assassinated the president of the California Forestry Association" - an apparent reference to the killing of Gilbert Murray.
Regarding the bomb that killed Sacramento businessman Hugh Scrutton, an entry in one of Kaczynski's purported diaries reads, "I planted bomb disguised to look to like scrap of lumber behind Rentech compute store in Sacramento. According to San Francisco Examiner, Dec. 20, The 'Operator (Owner? Manager?) of the store was killed, 'blown to bits.'"
In addition to the diaries and letters, the cabin also contained typewriters that match letters written to victims, and the 35,000-word Unabomber Manifesto, published in 1995 by The New York Times and The Washington Post, which details its author's disgust with the late-20th-century world. According to court records, the cabin also contained travel logs and records of his bomb construction.
To persuade the jury to sentence Kaczynski to death, the government must first prove that he demonstrated a criminal intent to kill. According to court papers, government attorneys believe they have ample evidence.
"The defendant's writings, with their repeated statements of the defendant's desire to kill, his joy when he does so, and his frustration when he does not" prove the intent, a prosecution brief reads.
Insanity plea difficult
The defense has said it will not try to show that Kaczynski is innocent by reason of insanity. This is rarely a successful ploy, and it has become even more difficult since 1984. That's when Congress, following the trial of the would-be assassin of Ronald Reagan, John Hinkley, changed the law so that the defense must prove their client is insane, rather than the state having to prove him sane.
However, the defense may try to show that Kaczynski suffers a mental disease or deficit and thus did not exhibit the criminal intent to kill, said former US Attorney Joseph Russoniello. Russoniello said that if the defense is permitted to present evidence of mental disease or deficit, and if it makes compelling points, the judge may allow the jury to find Kaczynski guilty of a lesser charge than first-degree murder.
Quin Denvir, the lead attorney for Kaczynski, has asked the judge to allow the defense to call mental-health experts to assist in the defense. The prosecution is seeking to exclude those witnesses, in part because Kaczynski refused to be examined by government psychiatrists. Judge Garland E. Burrell has scheduled a 21 November hearing to discuss the matter.
In an interview, Denvir hinted that he plans to show Kaczynski suffered an emotional deficit, possibly brought on or exacerbated by his surroundings. He argues that if jurors see Kaczynski's cabin - a 10-by-12-foot structure that the FBI removed from its Montana site and that Denvir wants to enter into evidence - they will gain insight into how Kaczynski "was reduced to living and functioning."
"There were two small windows, a potbelly stove, no water, no plumbing, no electricity," Denvir said. "The reality of his life says a lot about him as a person."
Eric Hickey, a criminal psychologist at California State University at Fresno who spent three years on the government's Unabomber Task Force, concedes Kaczynski may have "psychological problems," but argues he was fully cognizant of his acts.
Angry loser vs. convinced neo-luddite
Hickey said he believes Kaczynski will be exposed as angry, desolate, and deeply insecure, not as a convinced neo-luddite. In fact, Hickey believes the diatribe against technology now attributed to Kaczynski was a form of denial.
"It was a front for what he really felt - his own self-loathing, his own failure, his own sense of being a loser," Hickey said.
Hickey said Kaczynski found the limelight when he started bombing. Hickey and others who have followed the case bolster that conclusion by pointing out that the Unabomber, after a six-year hiatus, started bombing again shortly after the 1993 World Trade Center attack.
"His bombs were his identity," Hickey said. "He took great pride in his bombs."
Rustigan, the criminologist from San Francisco State University, said he believes the defense may be able to show or imply that Kaczynski had a "mental illness festering for years" and that he "slipped through the system."
One matter about which observers seem universally curious is whether Kaczynski himself will testify and, if he does, whether he would ever go along with a diminished capacity or insanity ploy.
"Here's a guy who wrote a lengthy manifesto with the aim of destroying industrial" society, Rustigan said. "If he agrees to go along with a mental-illness stance, he undercuts the whole manifesto."
