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		How mad was Ted Kaczynski? page 2 of 2 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - How does a genuine concern become a murderous preoccupation? Many of these mass killers have a long-term cumulative set of grievances. That's why they don't typically kill until they're middle-aged men. If you want to understand Ted Kaczynski's motivations, you have to go back to his days as a young assistant professor at Berkeley. Apparently his life started to fall apart then. He was not good in the classroom and he was very frustrated in the role of academic. Things apparently got worse from there. He never found his niche, his place in life. And as he made it into middle age -- at the very time when he might have reached the pinnacle of success -- he went in the opposite direction. I'm speculating here, but that's what I would look for. He was able to carry out this slaughter and maiming over 18 years. What does that say to you? First of all, serial murderers are the greatest challenge to law enforcement. Most homicides are solved within the first 14 hours after they're committed, and most of them are not really murders; they're manslaughter, in the heat of the moment without malice aforethought. These guys can get away with murder for months, years, decades. Some serial murderers are never caught at all. Once reason is they're so organized and methodical. But the Unabomber, you say, was operating out of the heat of revenge. Yes, but like other mass killers it was methodical and selective. He thought long and hard before he committed his crimes and as result got away with it for a long period of time. That doesn't surprise me. We've got a pretty large country here, 260 million people in 50 states, and keep in mind, he literally blew up his victims and all the evidence with it. What about the taunting? It seems very arrogant. I think his motivation changed over the years. As a young man he may have been seriously concerned about the direction of American society and he may have felt strongly about the role that high-tech was playing and then decided he was going to try and reverse that. But I think later he became more interested in power and feeling important than he did in changing society. That's why it always aggravates me that the Washington Post, among others, published his 35,000 word manifesto. I realize that is part of how the Unabomber was apprehended, but I contend we could have caught Kaczynski with excerpts from the manifesto. By giving this killer what he wanted, which is a perverted form of "publish or perish," we have inspired serial killer or mass killer wannabes all over the country, people who want to gain some attention. Would we have printed Jeffrey's Dahmer's 35,000-word manifesto? One of the things that bothers me about this case is that we treat the Unabomber as some sort of anti-high-tech Robin Hood, who went astray but whose intentions were honorable. He had a Harvard education and a Ph.D. He was better able to justify his killing spree in a way that would play in Peoria. To me he's just another mass killer and he should be treated that way. Reportedly, his defense team will argue that his childhood was traumatic. Is that enough to make someone a mass killer? That's the hardest question. There are those who would argue it's faulty wiring, some kind of genetic defect, or some repeated head trauma. There are others who would say it has more to do with some profound interruption in early childhood that occurs so that a young child never bonds with adults. Either way, they're going to plead insanity. But they haven't so far, and Kaczynski has refused to take court-ordered psychological tests. The insanity defense is a last-resort defense, but in this case it's the only possibility. The physical evidence is irrefutable. How do you think they will argue insanity? They'll have to show profound suffering as a child. They have to show where it comes from, so they'll have to look for things like abuse, abandonment, neglect, sexual molestation. The question is whether they'll find that without fabricating. My guess is they'll have a very difficult time. Especially when you see his brother who dropped out, came back in to society and now by all accounts is a moral, mild-mannered social worker. And here's a factor that people never talk about: Most serial and mass murderers are middle-aged men. If it were caused by early childhood or some genetic factor, why didn't they start killing when they were 12 or 18 or 20? I think there are critical variables in the transitional phase toward adulthood and middle-age and we ignore them. Such as? There are many men in this country who are drifters, transients. They have no place to turn. They lack the support systems, the encouragement; they're psychologically on their own. Maybe if they had the right kinds of support when they needed it, they would grow out of the problems they had as youngsters. But instead they make the same mistakes over and over and they begin to drift in and out of jobs from one state to another. I think that explains why states with large numbers of transients and drifters have the largest number of serial killings. His defense lawyers have said Kaczynski probably suffers from paranoid schizophrenia. That's the other possibility. Often paranoid schizophrenia develops in late adolescence and early adulthood, and they may argue that Kaczynski's psychosis developed in this transitional stage. But even psychosis as a defense, because of a tightening of the standard since the Hinckley case, really doesn't work in federal trials. It's not enough. What is enough? Before Hinckley, some sort of mental defect, like psychosis, could absolve someone for responsibility for a criminal act. Now we're back to the basic standard: Does he know the difference between right and wrong? Does he realize what he did is wrong? Could he control his murderous impulse? Did Kaczynski? Gosh. I think he understood very well that he was killing human beings not gophers. He may have rationalized his behavior as doing something wonderful for humankind, but that doesn't let him off the hook. Lots of serial killers kill prostitutes and they say they're cleaning the streets of filth. One other thing: The fact that he killed from a distance may indicate that he had a conscience and he couldn't face his victims. So you don't hold out much chance for a defense insanity plea? The insanity defense is usually ineffective. It's only attempted in 1 percent of all felony cases, and it's successful in just one-third of those cases. I don't think a jury will buy it. It's very hard to predict, but I would say he's going to be found guilty and he'll get the death penalty. SALON | Nov. 14, 1997 Ros Davidson is a regular contributor to Salon. Is Ted Kaczynski toast? Join the discussion of the Unabomber trial in Table Talk's Headlines area.