The Megyn Kelly Show - The Unabomber: A Megyn Kelly Show True Crime Special | Ep. 227

Episode Date: December 22, 2021

It's a "Unabomber" episode of The Megyn Kelly Show's True Crime Christmas Week. Megyn Kelly is joined by Terry Turchie, one of the FBI agents who helped bring down the "Unabomber," Ted Kaczynski, to talk about how the Unabomber hid his tracks, publishing the infamous manifesto, going inside the cabin, the story behind the famous composite sketch, looking insider the mind of a serial killer, and more.Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/MegynKellyTwitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShow Find out more information at: https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow 

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations. Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to a very special Megyn Kelly Show episode. This week we are taking a look back at some of the most infamous true crime cases in American history. Today's show focuses on a twisted genius who terrorized this country for nearly two decades, building and sending bombs so untraceable our best law enforcement agents could not figure out who was behind the carnage. The targets? Universities, airlines, and sometimes random other places to throw off the investigators. Three people ultimately were murdered, nearly two dozen others injured, in many cases severely.

That is until the feds finally got a break in what would become known as the Unabomber investigation. The man behind the bombings sent a 35,000-word manifesto to multiple newspapers and TV stations across the country, claiming to explain his motives and vowing to stop the attacks if they would publish it. They did. And it caught the eye of someone very unexpected, who ultimately flagged him to the FBI. On April 3rd, 1996, Ted Kaczynski's reign of terror came to an end. Investigators arrested him in Montana at a primitive cabin with no electricity or plumbing. And there they found a wealth of bomb components, 40,000 handwritten journal pages, and one live bomb ready to be sent. Today, Ted Kaczynski spends his time in a federal prison in Colorado, put there in large part thanks to my next guest.

Terry Turchy has been described as the heart and spirit of the investigation. Between 1994 and 1998, Terry directed the Unabom Task Force, as it was known, that helped identify and then arrest Kaczynski. He retired from the FBI in April 2001, having served as the first deputy assistant director of the newly created Counterterrorism Division. His book is Unabomber, How the FBI Broke Its Own Rules to Capture the Terrorist, Ted Kaczynski. Terry, thank you so much for being here. Megan, thank you very much for having me. bomber, so I feel like I have a decent handle on how it all went down. But my biggest takeaway in reading your book was how it was a meticulous, painstaking, teaspoons-in-the-ocean effort, bit by bit, day by day, week by week, month by month, year by year, to put together the evidence that cumulatively would ultimately be used to take this guy down. Well, that's a really good description, Megan. And I think that description also matches the

team that eventually came together to make all of this happen. And we often joke. And of course, back then, we weren't joking too much. We were really serious and usually stressed out. But we really look back on this and think that we were very fortunate that all of the people who were in all of these places at the right time really played an important role in making this all happen. And when I say that, I'm thinking of Jim Freeman, the special agent in charge of our office in San Francisco, who was in charge of all the investigations that San Francisco did in the FBI there. Max Knoll, who was just a tremendous, awesome criminal agent who never wanted to be assigned a Unabomber and was pulled off of his organized crime work to go work there.

Joel Moss and Kathy Puckett, both of whom worked with me on counterintelligence in San Francisco, they volunteered to come over from counterintelligence and work on this case. And then, of course, Director Free and Janet Reno, who was the attorney general at the time, and someone named Molly Flynn, who was an FBI agent who played a major and key role in our Washington Metropolitan Field Division. So all of this came together, a number of agencies, the Postal Inspection Service, the FBI, the ATF. And I was really proud to be able to serve with that team and on that team and be a part of that. And it's because of so many people and certainly those people I mentioned that so much of this came together. I love this character, Max Knoll.

I mean, I realize he's a real person, but in the book, I love him as a character because he is the constant naysayer. He's the one saying this is BS. You can't put together a profile based on comparing words of one thing to words that sound similar in another thing. You need hardcore criminal evidence. That's how you make a case. And and almost to the end, he had real doubts about whether this was the guy. But the kind of evidence Max wanted was it was so hard to get in the Unabom investigation. The guy, I mean, we now know is Ted Kaczynski. He was so clever. He was brilliant in hiding his identity, he was at least a couple of steps ahead of you guys on how you might detect identity and even actively taking steps to plant evidence in his bombs that he knew you'd run down to make it look like it was accidentally placed there. But it was, in fact, an attempt to mislead you. He actually spent just as much time doing that, Megan, just as you laid out as he did building the bombs. For example, at one point, and of course, we confirmed all this later.

We found this out when we searched his cabin. But at one point, he was in the men's room in the bus station in Missoula, Montana, and he found a couple of hairs on the floor. And later, he would put those two human hairs between layers of electrical tape in one of his bombs. What was he thinking about? Well, he was thinking that when we found the debris in this terrible crime scene, he would actually, we would actually think that it was someone's DNA, probably the bomber, when in fact it would have nothing to do with this case. He would use wood and metals in putting these bombs together. At one point, the FBI lab referred to him as the junkyard bomber.

And so he would file down the metals so he could eliminate fingerprints if he thought there were any there. He would sand the wood. I mean, he thought of everything. He thought of disguises when he would go purchase and acquire everything from junk at a junkyard to something he might buy at a hardware store. He would take the jackets off of batteries so that we couldn't trace the batch of batteries. So he was doing everything he could think of to try and deceive and lead us in another direction and confuse. And I think that certainly worked to his advantage for those years. Right, because it's not in reading your book and so on, it's not like the FBI was full of a bunch

of fools who just didn't know what they were doing, though there was a lack of appetite for a period of years to really devote all the resources necessary toward this case, because he went quiet for about six years. And so the FBI kind of, you know, maybe died, whatever. It wasn't that the FBI was a bunch of dunderheads. It was that this guy was clever in a really disturbing criminal way. When I heard your description of the bombs, the one just now, the ones you give in your book, it occurred to me, weirdly, there was love put into them. Like, the guy loved the bomb itself, though he hated anybody involved in sort of the university or industrial complex and so on. We'll get into the reasons he was doing it. But he loved his bombs.

He was very, very careful, very meticulous in putting those bombs together, and would really take it hard when he would later read, as he was doing his research, that the bomb didn't function properly. And you see that in a number of these bombings. He would later write something to the effect that, damn, I messed this up or I didn't do this right, really bothering me, really making me angry. I've got to build a lethal bomb. And that's the way he was thinking. And to kind of add to one of the points you made, we also didn't understand at that period of time as much as we thought we did about the lone wolf serial bomber. We simply hadn't had many cases

like that. And we hadn't really shared information or been trained in that kind of thing. So we had to almost put together our own training, our own educational process, not only for us who were responsible for the case, but for everyone who was touching it. And so we actually built that into this case so that we could all be thinking of and learning as we went along. And also we wanted to make sure we could pass all of this along if in fact it all came out as it ended up so that other people would be able to use some of this and some of the things we did later on. Yes, I definitely want to get into that, like what was learned because what's fascinating about the story is you spent all this time trying to figure out who this was. What is the profile of this

person? Kathy Puckett, you mentioned, who tried to come up with a psychological profile of what he was and what you could expect. And then nuggets of information. And I wonder, because one thing you don't get to in the book is once you find him, how did it match up? How'd you do? That needs to be part two, but we can just try to handle it live. Okay. So let's just start before we get to all that. Let's go through a little bit chronologically, because I think that's probably the easiest way of understanding his crimes. Start with this. Why was it called the Unabom investigation, and why was he dubbed the Unabomber? Certainly. Well, in the first few years, the targets of his bombs seem to be university campuses, university professors, and airlines, and especially the first four bombs.

So the FBI, particularly on major cases like this, finds that it's helpful to add some sort of title such as we added to this. And they call this case Unabomb for UNA, universities, and A, airlines, bombing. So Unabom became the name of this investigation, major case that it was. And then at some point, someone, I think back East, started referring to him as the Unabomber. So Unabom and Unabomber not only became how we identify with the case, but it also really stuck with the public when they finally started learning about the Unabomber and what was going on. So that's how Unabomb came into existence. I never knew that until I started studying for this interview. I always thought it was

like uni, as in one guy, Unabom know, and I guess I just never paid attention to the spelling or thought much about it. It's universities and airlines. That's how it started. Exactly. Yes. Fascinating. Okay. So first he starts off, the first couple of bombs were at universities in Chicago? Yes. In fact, the first bomb, and we'll go back and do this however you would like, but later on when we assembled as the ultimate team that took this to the finish line, we went back and reinvestigated all of these crimes. So we learned so much.

But the first bombing was at the University of Illinois Chicago Circle campus. And essentially a passerby, a lady named Mary Gutierrez, was walking by there one day. It's the science and technology parking lot of the campus. And she saw a package between two cars, two parked cars. She picked it up. She looked at it and she took it home. And it sat there, you know, with her children on the floor for a day or two. She saw that there was a return address and there was also a recipient.

The return address was a professor named Buckley Crist at Northwestern University. And the intended recipient was a professor at RPI in Troy, New York. So she eventually called the police, the police come and get the package. They took it to Buckley Chris because his address was on there as the return address. He said, I don't know anything about that. So it was opened at school by a police officer named Terry Marker. And he suffered some injuries because it turned out to be a bomb. So that was the first device the Unabomber actually sent. But at that point in time, it was not looked upon as anything other than another bomb. Back in those days, as you well know, the Weather Underground and all kinds

of other organizations were committing bombings. They were attacking police. They were active on universities. So there was a lot of activity. So since this didn't hurt anyone and there wasn't much to go on, it just kind of got lost in the shuffle, other than recorded at the ATF lab and the evidence tucked away. And, you know, there are quotes from the Unabomber throughout the book. And I know a lot comes from that 35,000 word manifesto, but he was writing letters from time to time. Was he not during the course of the bombings? Actually, he only wrote two letters, was he not during the course of the bombings? Actually, he only wrote two letters. The first letter during the course of the first 14 bombings.

The first letter was actually to Percy Wood, who was the president at the time of United Airlines. And in June of 1980, he received a letter from an individual who identified himself as Enoch Fisher. And Enoch Fisher said, look, I'm going to be sending you a book. And the book is called Ice Brothers by Sloane Wilson. And this is a book that you should pay great attention to because you make decisions regarding the social welfare of people. And so when you get the book, think about that. So Percy Wood subsequently got the book. He went to open the package and then open the wrapping. But essentially, the book was hollowed out and it was a bomb. It was an explosive device. And so this was the fourth Unabombed device, by the way. And that letter was interesting, but there wasn't much they could do with that either. So that became later on something that actually first got us into the words of the Unabomber, and we'll talk about that probably later. So that was the first letter. During one of the Unabomber events, as we started calling them, of 1985, he sent his second letter, And that letter was to an individual named James McConnell.

James McConnell was a professor at the University of Michigan. And what the Unabomber sent him was a letter saying, I'm a student. I'm doing a thesis on something called the history of science. And I'd like you to consider being my thesis advisor. And that letter was signed Ralph C. Kloppenberg. And of course, this was in a three-wing binder, like it would be some sort of student's essay maybe. And when Professor McConnell's assistant went to open that package, it exploded, just very similar to the book that Percy Wood received. Again, we were fortunate that they suffered injuries, but certainly they did not suffer something critical or die from those explosions. Those were the two letters that the Unabomber wrote between 1978 and around 1993.

In 1993, all that changed when the Unabomber started corresponding with the New York Times and eventually with the New York Times and several other entities and people. So that that is kind of how his letters would evolve over the years between 78 and 93 and then subsequently through 96. And then later, when you finally started to figure out who it was, you managed to get a treasure trove of letters between the Unabomber and his family members, which would prove really helpful and useful eventually. But so he's bombing universities, he attempts to bomb an airplane. And this is still back in the late 70s, I gather. But it didn't work. Thank God. It went off, but it kind of fizzled and it didn't bring down the airplane, although it did cause a lot of injuries to the people on board the plane. You were so right, Megan. In 1979, an American Airlines flight 444 was leaving from Chicago, headed for National Airport.

And the plane got up in the air. Suddenly the pilot and the passengers felt this jolt. The plane started having some problems. And it turns out that there was a package on board that plane put in the mail stream. The U.S. Postal Service was actually able subsequently to determine the path that mail package had taken when the bomber put it in the mail in Chicago. So they were able to trace a package that a witness had touched and eventually got on board this Flight 444. And it turns out the bomb that he designed had some deficiencies with respect to the explosives. So when it detonated, instead of blowing up, it started smoldering and it started burning in the cargo hold. So as the plane was getting closer and, of course, declaring mayday, wanting an emergency landing, it was diverted to Dulles Airport where they had the equipment to deal with this. When the plane landed, the pilots were actually prepared to testify many years later,

when we were ready to start the Unabomber's trial, that had they not landed the plane on the tarmac when they did, they were literally minutes or seconds maybe away of the fire in the cargo hold burning through the main hydraulic system. They said if that had happened, the plane would have fallen out of the sky and everybody would have been killed. So this is one of the reasons, certainly, that in 1979, this became a significant major case. It was a crime aboard aircraft. It was an explosive device. And so we knew from that point on we had a real problem, but it wasn't until Chris Rone, who was a laboratory supervisor and explosives examiner, started looking at this. He felt that this is the first time I've seen this kind of craftsmanship in putting together a bomb because all bombers do their bombs differently.

No two bombers build their bombs the same. And that goes whether it's an international terrorist or a domestic terrorist. They all do something a little differently. He had not noticed this before, but he thought that the bomber had to have put together other bombs because it was done so well. So he sent out a bulletin to other law enforcement agencies. This is all back in 1979. And the ATF, which had handled the first two Unabomber devices, again, in that era that we talked about, actually responded and said, you need to see these other two devices because they kind of sound like what you're describing. And Chris Rone was then able to say, we have a serial bomber at large. So it was on the third bombing, the attack on the airplane, that we knew we now have

a serial bomber. And shortly after that, in 1980, we would have the fourth device, the attack on Percy Wood, the president of United Airlines. Hmm. Later in the investigation, as the Unabomber gets better and more efficient at making deadly bombs, he will threaten to take down another aircraft. And you can see from Terry's description why they took that so seriously and were so concerned he could do it and had the will to do it as well. There's so much more to go over. The profile of the Unomber. What what drove Ted Kaczynski to do this?

How how and how did the FBI ultimately nab him? Don't go away. More with former FBI agent Terry Turchy on the Unabomber investigation. Terry, let's fast forward. So he tried with the airplane. He failed. He continued bombing. But it wasn't until 1985 that he had his first kill. He managed to kill the first person out of all those he attempted to kill, though he had wounded many. So who was that and what happened with Hugh Scrutton? Yes. In December of 1985, the Unabomber finally got what he wanted. He wanted to kill someone. And Hugh Scruton was a businessman. He ran a very successful computer store in a outside type mall, outdoor mall in Sacramento, California. And he walked out into

the back of the store one day and saw what looked to him like a road hazard, Megan. And it was essentially two by fours nailed together with nails protruding out of the wood. And so his thought process was this could hurt somebody. Somebody could pull up here with a car and have some problems. So he leaned over to remove the road hazard and to put it in a nearby dumpster. And at that point, this was what we call the passive device, as he broke the connection between the ground and that device, the two-by-fours were actually hollowed out, and the Unabomber had built a lethal bomb inside the wood.

And Mr. Scrutton just simply took the full impact of that explosion and died outside in the back of his store from that device. And it would be two years before we would cut from the same pieces of wood, he made another similar bomb and was involved in placing it outside of a computer store called Cam's on February 20, 1987 in Salt Lake City. And this time, as he kind of knelt down to finish up preparing the bomb so that it would detonate, one of the employees of Cam's named Tammy Floyd was looking out a back window. And she started yelling that someone is out here doing something in the parking lot. What happened within minutes is the son of the owner of Cam's, Gary Wright, pulled up. He saw this and he thought the same thing because he would tell us later, I thought it was a road hazard. I thought it was something that would

hurt someone. So I went to move it, but instead of kind of leaning over the two by fours, when he went to pick them up, he kind of knelt and then kind of brushed against it before he actually picked it up or moved it. And the bomb exploded, but he was spared the full blunt of that explosion. And so this is when the Unabomber was seen with the gray hooded sweatshirt and the aviator sunglasses. So after all of these years, between 1978, 1987, and all these stops and starts on this investigation, someone had finally witnessed this individual who up until then was a major mystery. And this is when everyone kind of got involved. I mean, Reader's Digest did a big story on the composite. They did a big story on what he

looked like with the hooded sweatshirt and the aviator sunglasses that you're showing there. And so they also became very familiar with that word Unabom. Later, as we reinvestigated all of this, something else significant happened. And so I think this is a good time to tell you the story. During the investigation in 1987, that witness was interviewed by the police, by the FBI. She had a really good recollection of what she saw and what she was hearing. So someone told her along the way, we think the police officer, to take notes and make sure those notes were with her and kept fresh in her mind. And somebody would stop by later and pick them up. Well, no one ever stopped by to pick up those notes. And even in subsequent interviews, no one asked about those notes. And so in fast forward to 1994, Max Knoll had reinvestigated

those two, a couple of those events that were related, the CAMS bombing and the RENTEC bombing. And so Max was interviewing Tammy, and she mentioned the notes. And he said, wait a minute, what notes? And she went and retrieved them. She said these notes. And so what appeared to us is that she was never comfortable with the initial composite. So about that time in San Francisco in the Bay Area, there was another very, very significant investigation. And that was the disappearance and subsequent murder of Polly Klass. And we ended up having a major break in that case, because again, Jim Freeman, who was a special agent in charge of the FBI in San Francisco, ran that as well. And Jim ended up bringing in a artist named Jeannie Boylan to do a composite of who somebody had seen in the vicinity when Polyclast disappeared. And so it turned out that

that composite was almost a spitting image of Richard Allen Davis, who was eventually convicted of murder, kidnapping and murdering Polly Class. So Jeannie Boylan was contacted by Max. We said, Max, go find Jeannie, see if she can do a composite this many years later and sit down with Tammy and see if Tammy would be more happy and more satisfied with whatever Jeannie Boylan comes up with based on Tammy Fleury's description. So lo and behold, she came up with a composite. You just showed it. And it was a composite that Tammy Fleury really, really liked. She said, that is the person I saw on February 20, 1987. So eventually we ended up taking the other composite, getting rid of that and showing

this. It was introduced by Jim Freeman at a press conference with the media back in around the end of 1994. And it was a major step for us and a major break for us because we had a witness now satisfied with what she was trying to articulate. And we had a composite, which we really believed in. eyewitness testimony and how notoriously unreliable it is. But her, if you pictured, you know, we'll show Ted Kaczynski in the YouTube version of this, that guy was very scruffy and sort of the perp walk we saw him in. But you picture him years earlier with a hoodie and the aviator glasses. And you could see how accurate she was. And she went on saying, he's a white male. I think he had strawberry blonde hair. He had a mustache. He was on 5'10", about 165 pounds, a reddish complexion, gray hooded

sweatshirt, aviator style sunblock. I mean, this is an eyewitness that's a dream, right? It's like you don't get a lot of these. It was wonderful. And as you can imagine, we were really buoyed at that time because when you're years later trying to put all this together and you get a break like that and a witness like that, it really is important. One funny story though, earlier we were talking about Max Knoll and you mentioned the word brusque. Well, Max took Jeannie out to Salt Lake and sat down with Tammy Floyd. But while Tammy Floyd was articulating this to Jeannie Boylan, she had a daughter. So Max was there entertaining the daughter by showing her the Lion King. So he was crawling around on the floor showing Lion King

while the business was taking place in the other room. So we do a lot of different things, but that was the call of duty for Max at that particular couple of hours. That's amazing. This senior respected FBI agent trying to solve a serial bomber case out there but this would have been right up max's alley because he was like hardcore evidence not bs word comparisons eyewitness pictures like that's up his alley um okay so so so while you're getting the eyewitness uh id shorn up and so on the fbi is trying to gather data like what what can we figure out about this guy? We've had bombings in Chicago. We've had bombings in California. We've had bombings in Utah and you're trying, I mean, it sounds like so simple in retrospect, once you know who he is, but it's,

it truly is like trying to find a needle in a haystack because yes, you can come up with a profile of somebody who lived here and then there, and then this third place and this fourth place. But you don't know when the person was born. You figured out he was probably a college educated guy, right? So like, how do you begin and you talk about this in the book to create systems that will siphon down the enormous pool of people who would fit into those descriptions? So when I first came over, Jim Freeman said, here's what I want you to do. This is the first thing I want you to do.

Give me a proposed strategy for how we're going to address exactly what you said, Megan. So I went out and I met with Max. I met with everybody on the UTF and started reading files and then sat down with everyone, the entire UTF at that point in time,

which was about 25, 30 people from those agencies we talked about, and said, here's what I think, and here's what I've learned, and I'm going to articulate this to the SAC. First of all, we need to reinvestigate all of these Unabombe crimes one more time. Only this time, we're going to do it different. We're not going to use the FBI system of lead offices and auxiliary offices and office of origin. What we're going to do is send Unabom task force teams back to these offices where all these police departments or the FBI and the other agencies, ATF and Postal, had already done investigation. And we're going to have these teams that are currently on Unabom take a good, clean look at all of these crimes again. So secondly, I want everybody to partner up. Find a partner because it's going to be a long, hard show. And so I want you to get somebody that you like being around. You're going to be basically living with these people or with each other. So they all chose up sides. It didn't matter if you were an ATF and FBI agent.

It didn't matter to me what it was. Just choose a partner that if you're going to go work out in the morning before you start the day, fine. But the rest of the day, you're going to be together and maybe late into the evening even. So that's what we did. And we started the reinvestigation. But then as we started having tons of new information come in, we've talked about the example of the composite. Well, there was tons of new information that we had missed the first time around and in

subsequent tries at this. So we had to have a way to sort it out. And we realized at a certain point, as we were together, as the kind of modern day UTF in the 1994-96 timeframe, that there was a lot of Unabom myth. There was a lot of fiction. There were a lot of theories. And sometimes those had crossed the boundaries and Unabom myth or fiction had become Unabombe fact. So we realized this is toxic and we're going to have to separate all this. So we created something called Unabombe fact, fiction and theory. And everyone on the Unabombe task force, when we had the first draft of this document, received a copy. And every single week when we brought everything together, and we brought everything together by separate types of

meetings that went on all week, every week, we had to be familiar with, I mean, it was your responsibility, I mean, almost your solemn obligation, be familiar with the most updated version of Unabombed fact, fiction, and theory. Another thing, since you know how the FBI works, Megan, we did something that we hadn't done before either. That is, whether you were an FBI agent, or you were an FBI analyst, or you were an FBI support employee that did something in connection with logistics or the hotline, everybody was expected to be at

Unabombe meetings. Everybody had a seat at the table. Everybody's opinion and eyes and ears was important. And everybody was encouraged to speak up because we needed every voice and every brain we could get. So that was our guide to those discussions, the Unabombe fact, fiction, and theory document. Finally, to really get to your question and the point here, over all those years of investigation, all kinds of agencies assembled this information through all kinds of databases. None of them were compatible. So we brought in an outsider. The Bureau approved this. They brought in an outside consultant who, for one year, from 1994 to the, I'd say, early summer of 1995, took this massive amount of literally millions of bits of data, put it all together in one system, and prepared it so that we could do one thing. And that was to suddenly turn Unabom into a proactive search for Unabom suspects who we could tie even when we first opened the case up to specific geographical areas. And we'd never been able to do that before. And that was the entire purpose of doing this

major computer project. And by the time that the Unabomber actually started getting more active and corresponding with us, we were ready to actually flip the switch, got approval from FBI headquarters for 24-7 operation to then send analysts to work in San Francisco around the clock. And what was really ironic is when we asked for terrorism analysts, the Bureau said, well, we don't have terrorism analysts, but we'll send you all the analysts that we can send you so that you can get this job done and staff a 24 seven operation. And that's exactly what they did. So shortly after that, and after the attacks in 1995, we began the 24-7 operation of developing proactive Unabombs suspects, which would eventually teach us so much that when the right person came along,

it was almost miraculous. It just all started to fall together. Well, it was fascinating because, first of all, it's very interesting that this is during the Clinton administration and preceding as well, and we had no counterterrorism force going in the FBI. And of course, we all know what happened at the end of Bill Clinton's presidency in the beginning of George W. Bush's with 9-11-2001. We learned a lot in the ensuing decade about the need for that kind of analysis, proactive analysis. But I one of the things I wondered in in sort of watching all this unfold was at what point did it become clear to the public that there was a Unabomber? Because one thing you think about is why was anybody opening a package that they weren't certain was safe and from someone they knew, you know, past bomb number three, right? Like, did it need more publicity? Were we not publicizing it enough? Like, how could people still be confused into opening unknown packages? I think one of the big problems was that as these investigations

were preceded right after a bombing, people became very familiar with something, particularly after Hugh Scrutton was killed, was murdered by the Unabomber. And then after 1987, when the composite came out and places like Reader's Digest ran these big articles, people were tuning into that. But then as the leads in the investigation would run out, the contacts with the press would kind of stop and the FBI would become distracted by other things. And same for the Postal Inspection Service, same for the ATF. We always had one agent. His name was John Conway. And he's an amazing guy because during all this time, he was still assigned as the case agent for Unabomber. And at one point in time, you earlier had mentioned that

break in Unabomber activity from 87 to 93. And that's very significant. After he was spotted, after he was spotted by the eyewitness Terry. Exactly. And so during that time, someone at FBI headquarters actually told John he should close the Unabomber case because Unabomber was probably dead since we hadn't heard from him for years. And John Conway, singularly working that case with no big authority helping him at all, said, look, that's just a bad idea. You cannot close this just because we haven't heard from this guy. He cannot be presumed dead. And indeed, he was not dead because come along June of 1993, there were two more bombings within 48 hours and 3000 miles of one another. And I want to go back

to Kathy Puckett for a minute, the behavioral assessment person. And she had concluded that, and I'm quoting here from your book, safety, security, and secrecy are of paramount importance to Unabomber. He has a strong sense of self-protection. He would have no direct connection to either of the individuals targeted, saying that would have risked exposure. His careful and cautious nature, she believed, is what drove him underground after having been spotted by Terry. So in a way, that eyewitness moment with Terry could have saved a lot of lives. I mean, who knows? He might have

been above ground bombing for all that time, but it took seven years before he regained his confidence. And what was the nature of the bombings in June of 1993? In June of 1993, after not hearing from the Unabomber, we heard from him, as you said, simultaneous bombings. The first one was directed at a geneticist, Dr. Charles Epstein, who lived in Tehran, California. And he received a bomb one day in his home. And the device went off. When he went to open it, it was a much smaller compact bomb. It was about the size of a video cassette as far as a package. And later, we would see the

Unabomber write that I took the time off or while I was taking the time off, I perfected, or we, he always referred to Unabomber as we, the terror group FC, and I should make sure I say that here. And we perfected a smaller, more lethal bomb that we can put in the mail stream. And that's exactly what Professor Epstein went to open and was very, very seriously injured. Two days later, on the entire opposite coast at Yale University, a computer scientist, Dr. David Galernter, received a bomb in the mail. He was at his office at Yale. And when he went to open his package, the same thing. And right after that, the New York Times has a letter postmarked before it and before those events and they get a letter from the Unabomber the terror group FC as he calls them and it says

look our group is providing you with a number this is our own secret identification number the FBI knows of us we're the terror group FC, the reason he said that is on some of the bomb on the plugs of the pipes and on debris in the bomb bomb crime scenes. We had found embedded on the metals, the the letters FC. So not on all the bombs, but on some of them. So we knew that the Unabomber was also going by the letters FC. So he told the New York Times this. And of course, the New York Times turned the letter over to us. And now we know, and this was significant, and it certainly was significant to the then AG, Janet Reno and FBI Director Free, both of them were relatively new on the job, they knew that the Unabomber now has come back to life in a big, big way.

We hadn't heard from him for all those years. Now he's back. Now he's killed two or almost killed two people on each coast. And so we have to really get after this. And so they ordered that a task force be established, that it be set up in the San Francisco division of the FBI. And they sent FBI officials out from FBI headquarters to run that task force. So between June of 1993, and around April of 1994, eight or nine FBI officials were running the Unabomber investigation from San Francisco. And this is when, according to your book, Max Knoll pulls aside some top FBI officials. I believe it was at a meeting where the director, Free, was present and says the truth, which is we're not getting the resources we need. Loops are not being closed.

This needs to be taken more seriously. I want my evidence. And he gets taken more seriously. I want my evidence. And he gets taken very seriously. The FBI does start to throw resources at this after these double bombings. But two more people were about to die. That's where we're going to pick it up with Terry on the Unabomber investigation right after this quick break. And programming note for you, remember that you can find The Megyn Kelly Show on Sirius XM Triumph Channel 111 every weekday at noon east and the full video show and clips when you subscribe to our YouTube channel, youtube.com slash megynkelly.

If you prefer an audio podcast, go ahead and subscribe for free and download on Apple, Spotify, Pandora, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. And there you will find our full archives, over 200 shows now. Back with me now, Terry Turchi, who directed the FBI task force that helped identify and arrest Unabomber Ted Kaczynski. The book intersperses bits of Ted Kaczynski's manifesto, the Unabomber's manifesto,

in between the crimes and helps us get to know him and understand him to the extent one can. There are quotes like this, quote, since committing the crimes reported elsewhere in my notes, I feel better. You can see him working something. I'm starting to feel better now that he's starting to hurt more people and kill more people. And Kathy's assessment of him was that this is a guy who wanted to present himself as a rational revolutionary attacking the industrial technological system that he opposes for the good of the public. She said he's simply seeking attention for himself.

She believed he had obsessive compulsive personality, that his devices are meticulous, a real pride in its workmanship. She says people like this are very organized perfectionists, can be very polite, may seem very cold to others. I would later find this interesting, Terry, myself, because he probably was obsessive compulsive and a perfectionist. But when you guys found him, he was totally unkempt and disgusting and smelled bad and hadn't showered. And I just that was one of the things that sort of jumped out at me is like, oh, how how weird you think of that, you know, obsessive, you think it'd be, you know, rigidly clean. But anyways, sort of to jump back, you're trying to figure out a psychological profile. And now

you've got the full team on it. Now Director Free has stepped in, Jana Reno has stepped in, they're listening to you guys, finally giving you the resources. And yet two more people are about to die. And that's within six months of you guys really sort of lighting a fire under the powers that be. Take us to December 10th, 1994. Yes, it was a terrible day. Jim, it was a weekend. I got a call from the East Coast, and there'd been a bombing in North Caldwell, New Jersey. And it turned out to be at the home of Thomas Moser, who was a major ad executive at the firm Burson Marsteller. And he had been traveling out of the country. This was near Christmas. So the family was getting ready to go and find a Christmas tree. So he was in the

kitchen going through his mail. And one of the things he picked up was this package that looked like a videocassette. And the kids had just left the kitchen when he went to open this. And one of the things he picked up was this package that looked like a videocassette. And the kids had just left the kitchen when he went to open this. And this was such a terrible, lethal bomb that it killed Mr. Moser just about instantly. And the shrapnel from this bomb filled, you know how people will have their frying pans over their stoves, those kind of presentations. So some of these nails, actually, the force of the blast drove them through these cast iron skillets. And so there was debris everywhere. I called Jim Freeman, told him what had happened, told him what we were thinking might be going on. We couldn't exactly say or declare it was a Unabombe crime scene at that time.

But I called Tom Manal in Washington, D.C. Now, at the time, Tom was our main laboratory examiner. And Tom was this fabulous bomb explosives person who not only knew Unabombe, but he could just about talk with his eyes closed about bombs and explosives. And so we asked him to go. I'm sorry. Was he the postal service guy? No, he was at the FBI lab and was our FBI lab examiner who actually had the ticket on Unabomb as far as forensics now, because all of the lab examinations that had been done all those years, we folded into just the FBI lab.

So he was kind of in the hot seat when there was an explosion. So Tom went to New Jersey. He called when he got there. They got him to the house in North Call. Well, he called before he went in. We had to wait a while because after an explosion, there are significant gases in the house. There are a lot of things going on. You have to be really careful, of course.

And so when Tom went in there, he almost came out immediately, Megan. And he got on the phone. He said, he called me back. He said, Terry, this is Unabom. I saw the fragments on the floor, some of the switches that were fragments of switches from this bomb. All of this has Unabom written all over it. So called Jim,

Jim came into the office, called and dispatched some of our, a couple of our agents and a postal inspector to New Jersey. They would work on the ground there and help coordinate the actual investigation. And then by Monday morning, that was on the weekend, by Monday morning, we were having conferences with FBI HQ. Of course, this now really raised the temperature. And during one of those conferences, someone at FBI HQ said, well, Churchill, you need to be back in New Jersey. Jim Freeman basically put his finger on the mute part of the phone. He goes, I'll answer that question. And said, no, you're not going back to New Jersey. Told them I'm not coming back to New Jersey. And about this time, Max said, and another thing, you people don't even know this case. You don't even understand

some of the leads were working in the case. And so that started us down the road of what you mentioned at the break. Before we knew it, a couple weeks later, Director Free was on his way to see us all at the FBI in San Francisco. And of particular concern, and kind of to show you how things can work in the Bureau, he put out the word and he told the SAC, you don't need to be at this meeting. I want to talk to the Unabom agents and the people working Unabom and, and Turchy. So of course you can imagine how Jim is feeling about all this. So Jim met him at the airport. They had a cordial meeting and then we had a meeting of all the, the brass from the other agencies. And then I found myself, it was like all of a sudden, okay, Terry and I are going to go down and address the Unabom

task force. And I found myself alone in down and address the Unabombs Task Force. And I found myself alone in the hallway with the FBI director and walking down the hall. And I referred to him as Director Free. And he immediately turns and says, call me Louie. Oh, boy. And so we walk into the, and I couldn't do that. It was just hard to say that. But anyway, we walk into the office and the UTF is there. And you can imagine, or probably maybe you can't imagine, or maybe many people couldn't, how you feel when the case is now dramatically different. You've been working to identify and get this person off the street, but now on your watch, someone else is murdered. And this now is happening to us. It was our absolute most worst nightmare. And that's how everyone felt. I mean, everyone was absolutely depressed.

I mean, I think people look at FBI agents as well. They're the professionals. They're going to get this done one way or the other. We were absolutely devastated. And so this is the backdrop as Director Free walked in to address all of us. So during this conversation, and he was very gracious and very nice, and we had a very good talk. But at some point, Mac said, look, I have to tell you, there's a lot of things that are not getting done. I've sent 62 questions off to the FBI lab about previous bombings. They've still never been answered. Terry's been on the phone, but they're still not answering our questions. We are trying to do certain things with leads and with investigation. And many of the special agents in charge aren't prioritizing this. Exactly. So let me just pause you there. Let me pause you there because there's so much to pick up on. Because Max, I won't say lit a bomb, but lit a fire, as did your small group. And finally, they listened how they caught the Unabomber right after this break. So by the time Terry of that meeting with FBI Director Free and Max going

off and you and Jim Freeman just trying to jump up and down and say, you know, we need resources, come on, like this is inexcusable. And he listened and you got him. The Unabomber had already just killed another man. He would go on to kill yet another man, Gilbert Murray in Sacramento. And then he would threaten to bring down an aircraft in flight, which you took very seriously for the reasons we discussed earlier. So but the biggest and most important break in the case was about to come. When did you first get word of the quote manifesto? So Mr. Murray, as you mentioned, had been murdered in Sacramento, California in April of 1995, and just several days after the Oklahoma City bombing. So a number of people were concerned that maybe the bombing in Oklahoma City is connected to the Unabomber. Well, Kathy was very significant there as well, because she provided the opinion that, look, our guy is a very meticulous killer of individual people. I mean, he's sending

singular bombs to people, and he's very careful in doing it. The person who wreaked havoc in Oklahoma is a mass murder. They're two separate kind of people. And I worked with Kathy for a long time. So whenever she had an opinion like that, to me, it was as close to gospel as you were going to get. Well, the FBI agreed with that. So we were able to maneuver through that because you can get distracted very easily in something like this. So now the Bureau has two major things going on because within days of the Oklahoma City bombing, we have the death of Gilbert Murray at the hands of the Unabomber, another terrible crime scene. Tom Manal came out. He actually went to Oklahoma City to gather evidence and get things back to the lab. Then he came to San Francisco, went up to Sacramento, and get things back to the lab. Then he came to San Francisco,

went up to Sacramento, and helped us with that as well. And so all of this is going on. And in the wake of this, the Unabomber starts firing off more letters. And they went to the New York Times. Eventually, they would go to Bob Guccione at Penthouse Magazine. They would go to a couple of Nobel Prize-winning scientists, to a University of California professor named Tom Tyler. And they all had a little different theme. But by and large, the Unabomber wanted the world to know that the terrorist group FC has a manifesto and we want it published. And if it's published, we will desist from committing acts of terror. But we will reserve the right to commit weather underground terrorist. And he said something very similar. He reminded you that, look, we only went after people and or after property,

we didn't go after people. Well, that is exactly what the Unabomber, the lone serial terrorist was telling us years later. And I found the mindset interesting. And of course, the question that is begging there is that, look, you can't guarantee that you're only going to damage property. You're going to kill people. And so you must not care. And so that was where we were at with the Unabomber. And again, Kathy weighed in.

And she said something very, very interesting that would factor into our deliberations eventually on what to recommend about publication. And that is that the Unabomber will probably not be able to stop himself from sending other bombs, even if he says he wanted to. This is something that he does. This is who he is. So getting a promise or a pledge from him is almost as useless as it can be. So this is the situation we found ourselves in as we were trying to determine what to do. And as we then received the call from the Bureau, what is going to be your recommendation?

What are you going to ask about the demand from FC, from the terror group FC, to actually publish this manifesto? I mean, it's so much responsibility. If you, if you don't publish it and he bombs again, there'll be second guessing. If you do publish it and he bombs again, there'll be second guessing. And it's like, you've got people's lives in your hands here. Before I forget Terry, just quickly, what, what did FC wind up standing for? We're never really going to be sure. We never, of course, were able to talk to Theodore Kaczynski about it.

And there are some suggestions that it stood for Freedom Club, something like that. But nothing certainly that helped us on the trail of trying to identify who the terror group FC was. Okay, so you ultimately decide, publish it, tell them to do it. And the, the, you really thought in the end, there will be somebody out there in reading a 35,000 word manifesto who will recognize phrases, words, ideas, philosophies that this guy holds so strongly, there's no way he hasn't expressed them to others. And you did it. The Washington Post, right, printed the manifesto. You had FBI agents staked out at the various locations in the relevant location where you thought the Unabomber could possibly be California watching. No, no luck. But there was there was luck in one particular person who read that

manifesto can we jump to that part of the story sure we can uh so between the time of the publication of the manifesto in on september 20th or 19th uh 1995 in the middle of february we received probably close to 55 000 phone phone calls and tips with people turning in, you know, wives turning in their husbands for the rewards, girlfriends turning in boyfriends and all that kind of thing. But by this time, we really knew a lot about the Unabomber. In fact, the behavioral science unit said, look, you basically solved the case. You just don't know the guy's name. And we're all looking at each other like, well, you basically solved the case. You just don't know the guy's name. And we're all looking at each other like, well, that would be hopeful, wouldn't it? So when we got the manifesto and we recommended eventually publication,

it was based on the idea that we had a lot of meetings, as I mentioned to you. And I mentioned in one of the meetings that I had a high school teacher. His name was Larry Lawson, and he taught creative writing. And ironically, I stayed away from math and tried to stay into stuff like creative writing in high school. And he told us, no two people write alike. And so we talked about that. And so we said, look, we know so much about Unabom. We need to recommend now that there's one piece we're lacking. This

manifesto could now be the thing that gives us that piece. And so we need to recommend publication. And so off we went, Jim Freeman and Kathy Puckett and myself to Louis Free. We had a meeting with all the bureau brass there, briefed the case, and said, we recommend publication of the Unabomber Manifesto in the Washington Post. We went across the street to the AG, did the same thing. They approved it, and it was published on the 19th. And by February 14th, we got the call we needed. And it was essentially, like all things Un Unabomb, it didn't come easy. It was on the overhead speaker system.

There was a paging. Anybody from the Unabomb task force, can you pick up on such and such a line? Well, Joel Moss, who was the supervisor of the suspect squad, listened to this paging for about three tries. And finally, he puts down what he's doing. He picks it up because he obviously hoped somebody else would answer it. He's up to his eyeballs in alligators with thousands of Unabombed suspects. And he gets on the phone with another agent, Molly Flynn, in Washington Metropolitan Field Office. She has received a 23-page essay from an individual,

an attorney named Anthony Beseglie in Washington. Anthony Beseglie had dealt with the FBI before. He'd had a client approach him who gave him this, and they were worried that someone close to them could be the Unabomber. But they wanted to find out a little bit before they volunteered who they were. So Molly Flynn the uh essay to the bureau uh and the bureau lab looked at it and they came back and said this isn't typed on the unabomber's typewriter and that was it well she didn't stop there she thought wait a minute you know this is what we're all about so uh she called the san francisco utf she ends up getting a hold of Joel Moss. She starts explaining this. Joel listens for a while.

He said, get it to me right away. He immediately understood the significance or potential significance of some of the passages she read. So he came to my office after he had a fax copy of this. And after he and Kathy had talked, they said, let's go to lunch. I said, I can. I'm committed to going to lunch with Jim. And Joel literally. Your boss, Jim Freeman. the three of us had worked together a lot he grabs me by the arm we go to lunch and I cancel out on Jim well we end up sitting there when Jim Freeman

comes into the same place we're eating and so you stood me up for your friends here huh well we had the the the talk about the 23 page, started reading it that night, and our world had changed forever. You could not read the 23-page essay, believe in the strategy we were following, and not believe that this was the golden ticket. There were phrases that he used in both what turned out to be letters to his brother and in the manifesto that were just too identifiable and unique to him, Ted Kaczynski. It was chilling. I took it home that night, took home my copy, and my wife was watching

television and I was laying on the couch in the family room. And I just jumped out of the couch and headed into the den to get my copy of the manifesto. Because in the 23-page essay, there was a phrase, the sphere of human freedom. Well, that exact phrase was in the Unabomber Manifesto. And I went and I started looking at other things at that point in time. I called Joel. I called Kathy. And I went back in and I just told my wife, I'm going to go on and work some. And I just said, I think we might have

found the Unabomber. And that's all I said to her. And the next morning, of course, our entire discussion now turns to the 23-page essay and the manifesto. As it turned out, David Kaczynski, Ted's brother, was married to a woman named Linda, and she would later describe the genesis of her suspicion as between the two of them, she apparently was the first to suspect that it was Ted, David's brother. You write in your book, she was in Paris in August 1995 when she read an article about the Unabomber in an international edition of a newspaper. Her anxiety grew as the Unabomber was described as a loner, probably from Chicago.

Check. Check. Who had likely lived in Utah and Northern California. Check. Check. Linda had never met Ted, but this was consistent with her knowledge of him. And it goes on from there. And then it had excerpts of the manifesto, which seemed a lot like Ted's letters to her husband. You go on to say that one of the things she realized was that she and David had been asked by Ted Kaczynski, David's brother, for money a

couple of times. And he'd been living like a hermit in the middle of Montana in some cabin. So they were a little puzzled by why he would need money anyway. But they deduced that he used their money to make bombs. They were mortified. Exactly. And especially the last two bombings. In November of 94, he'd asked for $1,000. And in December of 94, he asked for $2,000. And so of course, we had the December 94 event involving Mr. Moser, and then the follow up Mr. Murray in 95. So it was just frightening to think that they were absolutely right. And we felt really badly that that could be the case. But in fact, that's what it turned out to be. He was getting money from them to finance those last two bombings.

Now, another phrase in the writings that matched, that there was a comparison between, he would write, you can't eat your cake and have it too, which is a reversal of the saying. The saying is you can't have your cake and eat it too. And he reversed it. And where did you see that? How did that come together?

Yes. Eventually we would see that in several places, but that showed up in the 23-page essay. And it showed up when we went to visit Wanda. His mom. And she had information and all kinds of things in a steamer trunk that Theodore owned. And, uh, he had left it with her many years earlier and said, I don't want it anymore. Do whatever you want. Well, she kept it all these years. So it was essentially abandoned property. And, uh, we went into the steamer trunk and found written on a, a draft of, uh, of the essay. You can't eat Your Cake and Have It Too. And so all of these things start

coming together. And there are just too many of these coincidences, I guess you could call them, but it was all about words. It was all about language. And so earlier when you and I spoke, and we talked about those two early letters, the Ralph Kloppenberg letter and the history of science, and then the Enoch Fisher letter, that had prompted us to do a project. And we had a number of investigative projects that we worked on. And one of those projects had to do with interviewing professors at universities. So we had become, in fact, Joel had become our expert on the history of science. And we found that there were 44 American universities and colleges across the country that enrolled 400 people in the discipline history of science. None of us had ever heard of it.

And we just wanted to mark this territory, not to forget it. So he actually went, Joel actually went to a history of science convention one year in New Orleans. And I guess that was a big splash. They loved having the FBI there. It was very exciting. But he was there to learn about what history of science means. So all of this is fresh on our mind when Theodore Kaczynski shows up as a suspect. And lo and behold, when we go to start doing all the basics that we always did with any suspect,

and one of them was to get all their school transcripts, lo and behold, there's a course that Theodore took early on in Harvard or University of Michigan called History of Science, the Introduction to History of Science. So he had a creative side, and he would pull on that when he was putting together these bombs or putting together ideas. So this is how all of these things, whether they were phrases or those kinds of things from the investigation or passages from the manifesto or passages from the 23-page essay that matched the manifesto, all of this started falling together. And these pieces became the foundation, the building block of this search warrant. The thing is, this was not DNA. This was not fingerprints. This was not eyewitness stuff.

This was words. And so DOJ said, knock yourself out, but this is a probable cause. And of course, our response was, wait a minute, this is as good as any of the things you just mentioned almost. Because first of all, this is all we have. But knowing all of this and seeing every day more stuff was coming together, I mean, there was no question, more and more of these pieces were coming together. We always would do a timeline. And one of the things David was able to do eventually is he gave us uh well over a hundred envelopes with postmarks on them they represented the envelopes that the letters between he and ted that he had received from ted had had received over 30 years he kept all of that

and we had thus a timeline during the entirety of the unabombs series of events. And we only ended up finding one contradiction in that entire 16 years, using all these postmarks and all the other things we used. So it was all falling together. And we kept going back and saying, no, we're close to having what we need to get into that cabin, and we need to do it. And DOJ was not sold. And eventually it took the FBI director, Louis Freeh, and the attorney general to simply bypass all the advisors and committees set up to give us advice about this. It took the two of them to say, look, we trust the UTF. We trust the people on it. We've been following this case. We know this case like the back of our hand. I mean,

Janet Reno would carry around her copy of fact fiction and theory. And you had to be careful if you were talking to her because she listened and then she'd go, wait a minute, isn't this part of theory? And so she was that into this case. And of course, Director Free was really into it from day one. But so that was the kind of relationship we now have. I mean, we're almost, it may be that there are high level government officials, but everybody, as we said at the beginning, everybody was at the right, for us, was the right person in the right spot at the right time. And, you know, the egos had been tossed to the floor. The emotion, you could show your emotion. I mean, it was amazing. I mean, I look back on it now, and as I'm talking to you, I almost have chills because it wasn't like people might think. The attorney general, the director of the FBI, the SAC of San Francisco, the agents, we were all equal in this boat. And if we didn't help each other, we were all going to drown in it. And I think that at some point, that became the reason that we were successful in bringing all this together.

Hence the piece of the title about breaking the rules. They got their search warrant, this group. Not the arrest warrant. They got the search warrant, which wasn't all they wanted, but it was good enough, as it would turn out, and wound up in the snowy mountains of Montana. Tons of agents waiting for Ted Kaczynski. There was a whole ruse, as you can imagine, had to be executed very carefully so that no one got hurt, understanding this is a bomb maker inside of this cabin, suspected, but for very good reason. And eventually they would have to affect that arrest under circumstances they never foresaw. We pick it up there right after this.

So now you go out to the mountains of Montana, the middle of nowhere, and you've got to start putting the pieces in place for what you hope will be an eventual arrest. And the question I had in reading your book where you're talking about, now you've got to start interviewing the locals. You get some important locals on your side. You start interviewing bus drivers because Ted Kaczynski only has a bicycle. So how is he getting from the middle of nowhere down to Sacramento into Utah, wherever he's going? There's got to be a way. So you've got to find bus drivers.

You've got to figure out routes taken. You've got to see where did he stay? Do we have any receipts? Let's get the bank accounts. Let's build a case, a case that Max would love to show actual proof that this guy has been in the places we suspect he's been during the relevant timeframes. And what I kept thinking, reading how you guys had to do this was, A, just arrest the damn guy. You know, it's him, right? Like, you can't do it that way. And B, weren't you worried someone was going to leak either, you know, outside, you know, to random people who might spread it, but or B to to Ted Kaczynski? Like, how could you assure yourself that people weren't friends with him? Or maybe they just blab to somebody, some random person like the FBI contacted me, they asked me all these fun questions, they think if there's some guy in the woods, and then word would get out,

you know, how do you control that? Megan, everything you said was so right on. We were we were worried about so many things that that was the most stressful time of this entire investigation. There could be leaks. He could have something in the cabin that eventually is going to hurt somebody. He could get on a bus and place another bomb or mail another bomb. All these things are going on in our minds. And so we had to try to deal with each of these contingencies. So what we did is that around, I don't know, it was probably around the third week of February, called Max. Max was on leave at the time. I said, we're sending you to Montana. I know you don't think much of Theodore Kaczynski as the Unabomber, but you're the guy that has to be in Montana all the time to take care of and manage the small team we're going to send with you. And we need you to go to those

hotels, motels, try to somehow place this guy out of that cabin, start interviewing people. And of course, all this has to be done discreetly and, uh, we can't even mention the word Unabom. So, uh, Max, of course, being Max, he, he, he came right back. He goes into Montana, buys all his winter clothes and, uh, and sets about doing what he has to do. And he and I talked several times every day. Uh, and, uh, he directed a team of about three people, which would start to grow almost every day after we first got started. But in that time, a lot of things happened, and we needed all these things

for our search warrant. Max was able to go pay a visit to Butch Gehring. It was on the Butch Gehring lumber mill property that Theodore Kaczynski and his brother David had actually purchased the house or the land for the cabin that Kaczynski built in 1971. So Max went and had a talk with Gering to learn about the Unabomber or learn about Kaczynski. And Gering was, as we said, wearing the team jersey after that. He was willing and ready to help and provide whatever kind of information or help to us we needed. So that was kind of secured. So then Max was able to develop Jerry Burns. Jerry Burns became just vitally important. Everybody's heard of the U.S. Forest Service. Very few people know that the U.S. Forest Service has their own special agents and law enforcement. And I've worked

with so many of these people over the years, and they're really, really good. Well, Jerry Burns was absolutely amazing. And so we befriended him and kind of put the team jersey on him. His supervisor agreed that he didn't need to know what Jerry was doing on behalf of the FBI, but Jerry was briefed on everything. He was brought into the whole Unabomber picture of this. And so he was able to be a goldmine of information about Kaczynski because he was always running into him out into Kaczynski out in the forest. That was important. The SSRA, the Senior Supervisory Resident Agent in Helena, Montana, was an individual named Tom McDaniel. He was amazing and was there every step of the

way with us. And then finally, Bernie Hubley. Bernie was the assistant U.S. attorney in the district there. And lo and behold, our luck again, Bernie Hubley was a former FBI agent. So he was brought into this and almost fell over on a barstool one day when Max briefed him and said, here's why we're here. And we're here because in your territory. It's so crazy. It's crazy to think about like these guys being like, wait, what? The Unabomber? Like the most notorious criminal in the country right now at large. So, okay. Eventually I got to skip ahead because there's so much more important things to get to. So you do get your search warrant. It wasn't easy, but just long story short on that, so much of that painstaking FBI work went into it and it wasn't a guarantee

that you were going to get it. But all those years and hours of collective effort paid off. You got the warrant. You go to execute the search warrant. Jerry, who you mentioned, the local who Ted knew, he was important. He was the front man. And then there are two other guys who went to knock on the door with a ruse about we need to check your property line. And it was something he Jerry Ted Kaczynski had to see Jerry's face. Otherwise, he wouldn't have opened that door. He would have been suspicious. So he was critical. And lo and behold, he was home, Ted Kaczynski. And you got him, you grabbed him. He said he was going to go back in, he would show you the property lines.

He's going to go back in and grab his coat. And no, he was not going to grab the coat. The FBI grabbed him, pulled out a six hour. That was the end of his attempt to go back in the house. And he was not placed under arrest, but taken to another cabin where questioning began. And I have to ask you, you know, after all this effort, right, he's in this cabin, you've got him, you and your team. And like, what are you thinking at this point? You know, because the pictures do show this disheveled, crazy looking mountain man who looks just like he

hasn't seen a brush or a shower in 20 years. Like, what are you thinking? Well, Max couldn't wait to take a bath. I mean, he already felt really dirty. He wanted to get away from here and take a shower as soon as he could, but he would end up being with Kaczynski just about the rest of the day and end of the night at about one o'clock. I was thinking more of what we had to do next. I mean, it was almost like, okay, that part of this is over. And now we can breathe a little easier, but not really, because we've got a lot of work to do. So now we start bringing in everybody else, all these evidence response teams. And then we call the Bureau. But now the Bureau is saying, well, you don't have anything but a search warrant. What are you doing? Well, we're taking

him out and putting him into another cabin to be on ice here for a while while we decide what to do. And of course, our plan was to take him up the mountain and over to Helena. And of course, DOJ said, you can't do that. You can't arrest this man. Well, we're not going to let him go back in the cabin. And so by late that night, after hours of debating that occurred back East, we'd already taken Theodore Kaczynski into Helena. He was in the car with Max and Tom and Paul Wilhelmus, a postal inspector. They took him into Helena to get him booked at the jail eventually. And Jim and I were following him up the mountain and into Helena. And we were eventually on the phone with the director. And he's getting kind of a lot of information that I'll call it what it was. It was

fiction from DOJ people that had no clue of what they were talking about. And so people were a little concerned. Are you making an arrest that you can't make? But by about midnight, Howard Shapiro, the FBI chief legal counsel, got on the phone with me. I said, just let me go through everything that's going on in the other room. And lo and behold, he said, I don't need to hear anything else. I'll brief the director, do what you're doing and get this person locked up and we'll deal with the rest of this tomorrow. And that's exactly what happened.

Hmm. and we'll deal with the rest of this tomorrow. And that's exactly what happened. You eventually, after sort of de-rigging the house and making sure it was safe to enter, and there were all sorts of things, you gotta read Terry's book to hear like the painstaking efforts to make sure that it was safe, but you get into his cabin. And this to me is where it all comes together. 20 years of clue gathering would match up with what you found in that cabin.

Forget enough to make an arrest. Now we're talking we need enough to put this man away for the rest of his life. And it was all there. You know, I think about let me just give you one. I think about Terry, me just give you one. I think about Terry, the eyewitness. Tammy, Tammy, sorry. Tammy, the eyewitness who had given us the aviator sunglasses and all that back at the one bombing years ago.

Now, nobody ever made an eyewitness. Nobody ever matched that picture up with Ted Kaczynski and said, I know that guy. So, okay. Did she really make a difference? A hundred percent, because tell us about some of the things she described that you found in Ted Kaczynski's cabin. Well, of course the infamous portrait of the, uh, aviator sunglasses and the guy wearing the gray hooded sweatshirt and lo and behold, there in the cabin were aviator sunglasses and gray hooded sweatshirt hanging up on a on a hook over in the corner to the left as you were facing from the outside

we found a live bomb on the second day of the search wrapped and ready to mail ironically it had a return address of the seattle fbi office and so he was getting ready to taunt us again. We saw across the cabin, remember the cabin nine by 12 in fact, the Unabomber's early bombs had some of these combinations, like potassium chlorate and sodium chlorate and things like that. We found a oatmeal container, a Quaker oatmeal container with pre-made switches that he had already made ahead of time. So he could literally reach onto the shelf and pull off a switch that he might use in a bomb he wants to construct. We found thousands of pages of typed or handwritten notes. And we found a autobiography of him. He had literally laid out his entire life in all of these notes. And we also found admissions and or confessions to all 16

Unabombed devices. Now, what in fact we did find with about 500 pages of those admissions is that he had taught himself Spanish and he wrote those admissions and confessions in Spanish. So now we had to get on the phone and start assembling every FBI Spanish speaker we had so that we could get those translated and stop any bombs that might now still be in the maelstrom. So we, we have all these things still going on because of this guy's nature and personality.

One question I wanted to ask you, having read the book was you, having read the book, was you, one of the queries, one of the oddities was the FBI agents analyzing the case before you knew who it was, believed that the forensic experts, they said the Unabomber is melting scrap aluminum for his more recent bombs. He would need an electric-powered kiln to do that. And Ted Kaczynski only had like a wood-burning stove in there. He had no electricity. And so did we ever solve the mystery of how he melted scrap aluminum with just a wood-burning stove, which the forensic experts said he could not do?

Well, they may have said he could not do it, but we've all learned about experts, and the experts were simply wrong. And he had the pot-bellied stove, and he had a big fire pit dug in front of the cabin, and he melted his own aluminum the hard way. And that's how he was meticulously making these bombs. And I know we knew this from the manifesto, but we haven't really gotten into it in this interview. But from the manifesto and the materials he found in his cabin and the interviews with his brother David and so on, because Ted was not talking, he clammed right up. What do we know about why, about the reason for his terror campaign over 20 years. I'm angry. There was really no rationality to all of these things that look so organized, like he might have had an anti-technology beef. Of course, he kind of did. But it was all, when you get down to it, when you think of airlines, he was mad because the planes flying

over the wilderness area where he lived made too much noise. So then he'd write, I'm embarking on a plan to get even. And this is kind of how he was thinking. And as Kathy had said early on, this is about anger. It's about what a person like this, a serial killer, a serial criminal, has welled up inside them. They're angry. And certainly Theodore Kaczynski was angry. And so he wrote about his anger. He wrote about personal revenge as a motive. And he gave other motives, of course, but this is what it all came down to for him, anger and revenge at what he thought were slights against him. All right. And we'll get into more about his past in one second. But before we get to that,

there's a reason why he was not facing the death penalty by the time you got your hands on him and he would have to face justice. Can you explain just with the criminal trial, what happened? You didn't have to try him. And there was a reason why death was not on the table. In the lead up to this, David had requested that we have some sort of deal where he will help us, but there will be no death penalty. Well, of course, we had to say no to that. We couldn't talk like that with anybody before any kind of trial. So ultimately, there was death penalty attached to the indictments or the trial process in both Sacramento and had we gone there in New Jersey on the main cases that we were, we were indicting him on. But at some point in time, right before the trial jury was to come in and we were going to start the trial,

he just kind of threw it in. You know, he didn't want to plead guilty at all to anything. They tried to have a conditional plea where we would, you know, kind of take his plea, but he could appeal things all his life. He said no. And finally, they said, well, look, if you take the death penalty off the table, you know, we'll plead guilty unconditionally to all of these crimes. And that's exactly what happened. And that happened literally. I mean, the beginning of that happened literally minutes before the judge had kind of read his final words and told the courtroom, OK, I'm going to bring in the jury. And all of a sudden, you know, Kaczynski basically threw something or made some noise. They were done.

The attorneys got up. The whole thing was over that day. And within an hour, we were told he wants to plead guilty. I mean, so terrified about having his own life taken from him. And, of course, not a shred of concern or care for the lives he took and and the people he maimed and you know i think about those poor children and that wife um of poor um thomas mosser who had to run into that kitchen after they heard a bomb go off and see the remains of their loved ones i mean like and ted kaczynski's worried of course to the end about himself and what he might have to go through. Has he ever spoken, Terry?

Has he ever given an interview or done anything other than the manifesto to help people understand? No, not really. He's turned down most interviews. I think he eventually might have spoken with someone briefly, but I'm not sure. I remember vaguely at some point he might have, but, uh, he certainly is not talking to us. He, um, uh, he has developed or he had developed, I think, a relationship of some sort with Timothy McVeigh before he was executed. Uh, and, uh, of course he's on, uh, he's at the super max.

And I think right down the row from him is, uh, Eric Robert Rudolph, another loner, uh, serial bomber from the Olympic bombing of 1996. So he's really never talked. He's really never said much. And I don't think he plans to say anything. He's never talked at all since then to his brother. And, of course, he hadn't talked to his brother for years before that. He cut off his brother and his mom. And I think his dad was alive for years before that. Right. He would he cut off his brother and his mom. And I

think his dad was alive for some of that. Unclear why that the brother married a college professor. It was a question about whether he was he was upset about that. He didn't like universities as we covered earlier. And yet the brother loved him. David Kaczynski loved his brother, Ted, and really seemed to wrestle with that phone call he made after reading the manifesto. And, you know, again, he tried to bargain for his brother's life, but knew he had to do the right thing. I mean, he's really kind of an unsung hero in the whole thing, because even though we

have so many FBI agents working tirelessly around the clock for years to catch the guy, boy, oh boy, a lot of people would say, I wouldn't do it. Wouldn't turn my own brother in. I'd do something else. But he did the right thing. And in large part, he played a major role in apprehending the brother. Okay. The profile of Ted Kaczynski is where I want to pick it up next because I read some crazy stuff about this guy. And I would love to go through some of it with you. Not it wasn't in your book, but I want to understand Ted Kaczynski a bit better and lessons learned. Now that now that you can look back on your investigation and know who it is, what would you have done differently? OK, we're going to pick it up there with Terry Turchy on the Unabomber investigation next.

So an important piece of the story is who was this guy like what turns you know some normal american who by all accounts didn't have an extraordinarily odd childhood into a serial killer that's what ted kaczynski is a serial killer so um let's just start with what do we know about his you know one through, about that period of his life? how he can attach certain meaning and value to some of the things he was taught in the way he was raised that he talks about. That's what he would say about Ted. I don't understand how we could come from the same family because my recollections and memories of growing up are nothing at all like his. I have no idea how he got these notions. And therein, I think, lies the problem for us in future cases and in trying to identify or prevent some of these types of things. I think it's very difficult to figure out how to see these people ahead of time, how to

figure out how one person is going to be fine and how another person becomes a serial terrorist. I don't know if we're even close to that kind of assessment right now. I know we've tried to articulate things that were missed, and yet they're only on the surface, like someone acted a certain way in school or didn't get along with anybody or was constantly angry. Kathy says that, and she did a major study. One of the things we did to try to answer your question is when I went back to the Bureau at the end of my career, we got the money and we brought Kathy back to do a study on lone serial bombers. And she concluded that these are people who are trying to make a mark in society. They want to be known. They fail at being known. They fail at group

identity. They cannot become part of a group. They simply cannot socialize to where they can become part of any kind of group. So what they start to do is create their own group. Thus, the Unabomber created, Theodore Kaczynski created the terror group FC. And then they seek this major type of event, like a bomb in a terrible tragedy, to get traction and be known. And so that's about as close as we can get. But she based that on a number of serial killers and a number of people, because we don't have many serial bombers, of course. But there are certainly very similar patterns going on there. So we passed that study along to the Bureau. I mean, it was Bureau property., a very strong wave initially, that the anthrax attacks on the East Coast had to be committed by an international terrorist. It just had to be. And Kathy and I at the time were in the Lawrence Livermore Lab. We'd retired. We were working

there. And the Bureau actually called. And they said, we have a meeting coming up. And we're trying to be the voice in the wilderness, telling the entirety of the rest of the government that the FBI thinks the anthrax attacks are domestic terrorism. And we would hate to see them go off in a different direction and, you know, end up attacking Iraq or something based on this. And so that's the kind of thing that can happen in the kind of discussion that we were literally having after that study and after we had left. So just a couple of items. He was brilliant. I read that he skipped two grades.

He went off to Harvard at age 16. He graduated with a PhD in mathematics in 1967. He would go on to teach mathematics at the University of California at Berkeley. Of course, we would see bombings in California and universities there. Abruptly returned to Chicago to live with his parents. And then he wound up purchasing this land in Montana and living in this cabin. Now, I also read online that he was at one point, he considered himself trans and actually went to seek the operation or at least psychiatric affirmation of that. Is that true? I think there's some discussion in his journals of something like that. To be honest, I didn't pay a lot of attention to that at that time.

But I think he wrote something very similar to that. Yes. And there was never a woman in the picture from what I read. I never hear anything about this girlfriend, that girl, no ex-wife, like no women. There weren't. And he was very disappointed and bothered by that. And in fact, so disappointed that he put an ad in a newspaper in the San Francisco Bay Area, in the Oakland Berkeley area. And the ad is probably the reason he never got what he wanted. He said he was an individual seeking a squaw, someone who could live a wilderness life and essentially be told what to do. And he said he was shocked. He was shocked in his journal because then he wrote it. And I'm shocked. No one responded. So I mean, maybe I'm so smart in some ways and not so smart in other

ways. Now, what about there was some reporting that when he went to harvard they did this experiment it was voluntary to take part in it but he was a young kid when he started i mean 16 is very young to be at university um he participated in it with some sort of an experiment to see how well you handled stress and criticism given to you like on a loop about you about your writings and And some theorized this may have been a turning point, you know, like somehow it drove him crazy. What do we know about that? Well, Megan, we know that's a theory. He never says much about it. There's another kind of companion thing that he was involved in some, unbeknownst to him, some secret kind of experimental

testing that the CIA was doing in some places using students. But he doesn't really look at any of that as the reason that these things happen. He himself says people are going to ascribe all kinds of motives and all of these things to me as the reason I'm doing this. They're all wrong. I'm doing this because I'm angry and I'm revengeful and this is how I'm going to get even. And that's really the strongest thing we have to go by. Everything else pretty much falls back into the old fact fiction and theory. But there's so many people out there now because they have access to a lot of his library of journals and documents and things.

And so now everybody is going to weigh in on what Theodore Kaczynski must be thinking. But as you mentioned, does he take questions and does he get involved in discussions? And sadly, in some ways, the answer is no. We'll never know for sure what he's thinking. He hated technology. He hated advancement. He wanted rural caveman type living and really hated anybody or anything that pushed for, I would say now, 21st century type advancements. And I can't imagine what the Ted Kaczynski of the bombing years, you know, 1998 minus 20, would have thought of Twitter and Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates and all of it. I mean, I'm sure I know. So final point, looking back now at the investigation and then comparing it against the real killer,

what do you think were the biggest lessons learned? I think the biggest lessons learned are kind of almost contrast with each other. First of all, you have to follow the basics. You can't overlook things that you would do in any case, whether it's a bank robbery case or anything else, you have to follow the basics and get them recorded. And then remember what is important as you're doing that. And at the same time, you can't be tied to a system which doesn't move fast enough to keep up with what you're trying to do. And in this case, when you've got a bombing and then you could have another bombing and

another bombing, you've got to be getting that information out and distributed and then assessing it for a long time in all kinds of cases. The biggest criticism of the FBI is that it has all this information. Its biggest weakness is it doesn't really know what it has because it has so much. And so that is what we try to overcome. And so you have to be doing that. But then the other significant thing that I think you see all through this, and I think today it is true and it will always be true, and it was true before I ever became an FBI

agent. We are nothing without the public, without the help of the public, without the trust and support of the public. And if we lose that, and we can debate how people may feel today, if we lose that, we're in trouble. And that ought to be at the forefront of every mind who runs the FBI, works in the FBI at any level, that if you lose that trust with the public and you don't trust them to help support you and help you with these cases, then you've got some big problems. Law enforcement in a constitutional republic in a free country is about the people and it's about teaming up with those people. The FBI used to have an old pamphlet. It was called cooperation, the backbone of law enforcement. And by golly, that was the basis of all of our media, of everything we did. And if I had it to do over, I would have done it faster in greater quantity. And by golly, I would be educating everybody who ever walked into law enforcement that it's about you and the public and they've got to trust you and you've got to depend differently now. And you know what? Reading how the media worked with you guys on the leaks and

trying to protect the public made me think about how the media has changed, too, and not for the better. So appreciate your hard work. You're telling the story. It's an honor to know you, Terry. I hope you can come back, too. Thank you, Megan. You, too. Thank you very much on behalf of every other one of these kids. All the best to you. Thanks for joining us today. Download The Megan Kelly Show on your podcast, youtube.com slash megankelly to watch it. Thanks for listening to The Megan Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear. you