My brother, the bomber
And how one woman ended a terrifying reign of violence
It was a lazy Saturday morning in December 1994 in the Mosser household. Thomas Mosser, then 50, curled up inside his daughter’s playhouse and read stories to his little girl, Kelly, then 15 months.
Afterwards, she wanted to play tea parties.
Kelly toddled to the living room, picked up a toy teapot.
Meanwhile, Thomas checked the post.
His wife Susan had signed for a package the night before. It sat on the kitchen counter of their home in North Caldwell,
New Jersey.
‘I don’t recognise the return address,’ Thomas said.
‘Neither do I,’ Susan called back from the living room. He tore it open.
Then a horrifying explosion sent shockwaves throughout the house.
After checking Kelly was safe, Susan ran to the spot where the kitchen had been. Now, it was just rubble. Thomas lay on his back, blood pouring from his torso.
Susan grabbed towels and Kelly’s pink baby blanket and tried to stem the bleeding.
She held a hand to her husband’s charred face, his eyes still open.
‘I love you,’ she said. A fireman dragged her away from the wreckage. Thomas was pronounced dead. Killed by a bomb sent in the post.
But why? Shockingly, it wasn’t the first bomb attack of its kind. Sixteen years earlier, in May 1978, a parcel was posted to a professor at Northwestern University in Illinois. It had exploded, injuring a security guard in the process. The beginning of a spate of parcel bombings. In 1979, smoke alerted pilots to a bomb on an American
Airlines flight from Chicago to Washington DC that had been posted via airmail. The bomb malfunctioned. Had it detonated correctly, it could have obliterated the plane.
But authorities didn’t connect the crimes.
In June 1980, the president of United Airlines was injured in another blast, and over the next five years, a series of detonations caused injuries at universities across the USA.
The crimes were eventually linked and the suspect was dubbed the Unabomber, the university and airline bomber.
But 1985 saw the first fatality. A nail bomb was left in the car park of a computerrental shop in California and claimed the life of 38-year-old store owner,
Hugh Scrutton. A $25,000 (around £19,000) reward was offered, but the attacks continued.
In February 1987, a bomb left outside another computer shop in Utah exploded, severely injuring Gary Wright.
More than 200 pieces of wood and metal were removed from his body.
But authorities were no closer to identifying the Unabomber.
For six years, things went quiet, but two bombings in June 1993 proved he was still out there.
And in December 1994, advertising executive Thomas Mosser became the Unabomber’s second fatality. After opening the package, nails perforated his heart and brain. And pieces of razor blade ripped out his stomach.
Then, in April 1995, another letter bomb claimed the life of Gilbert Murray, President of the California
Forestry Association.
Yet the Unabomber still evaded capture.
He’d killed three people, injured another 23.
Then, in 1995, a letter was sent to The New York Times and The Washington Post.
In it, the Unabomber claimed he would desist from terrorism if his 35,000word manifesto was published.
He wrote how he loathed technology, that it destroyed human freedom, and said his attacks were a necessity.
At the recommendation of the FBI, the editors of both papers agreed to publish.
But when Linda Patrik read the letter, the ramblings sounded familiar.
Her husband David Kaczynski, had a brother named Ted.
He had previously worked as a university maths professor, but he’d given up on mainstream society and built a cabin in the woods, where he lived alone.
He wrote angry letters to David, raging against the modern world.
Linda couldn’t shake the feeling.
‘I think maybe your brother is the Unabomber,’ she told her husband.
David wasn’t sure.
His brother had never been violent.
But after reading the manifesto, he recognised his brother’s ramblings and agreed it was possible.
They contacted the FBI.
On 3 April 1996, armed officers showed up at the cabin in Montana. They found bomb materials, nails, and notebooks, detailing his crimes.
In 1998, Theodore ‘Ted’ Kaczynski, then 55, pleaded guilty to 10 counts of illegally transporting, mailing and using bombs, and three counts of murder.
The court heard some of the confessions from
his journals.
I often had fantasies of killing the kind of people I hated, ie, government officials, police, computer scientists, the rowdy type of college students who left their beer cans in the arboretum, he wrote.
Refusing an insanity plea, a plea bargain meant he avoided the death penalty.
Instead, he was given four life sentences, plus 30 years, without the possibility of being released.
Victims and their families were in court to see the man responsible for the crimes that had terrorised the country for 17 years.
Susan Mosser recalled the ‘unbearable pain’ of telling her daughters, ‘Daddy’s dead, it was a bomb.’
Now 79, Ted Kaczynski is being held in a prison medical facility in North Carolina. To this day, he shows no remorse for his actions. But David Kaczynski apologised for his brother’s crimes.
Survivor Gary Wright helped David find forgiveness, and the two formed an unlikely bond.
And David will remain forever thankful to his wife for voicing her suspicion.
‘I don’t know if Linda understands how grateful I am,’ he said.
‘Linda saved lives.’
When Linda read the letter, the ramblings sounded familiar...