ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, April 8, 1996 TAG: 9604080099
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: CHICAGO
SOURCE: CHICAGO TRIBUNE
note: below
DAVID KACZYNSKI WAS the happy-go- lucky, bright and precocious brother, neighbors say. Theodore ... well, ``You never got too close to'' Theodore.
The brick Cape Cod on Lawndale Avenue in Evergreen Park was by all accounts a bosom of caring, liberalism and education in the 1950s.
An inviting place, some recall - the first house in the neighborhood to get FM radio, a place where Theodore R. Kaczynski held forth on philosophy and politics, and his wife, Wanda, who loved red, red lipstick, tutored her two children.
The elder boy, Theodore, was brilliant, though his shyness belied his emergent alienation. David, seven years younger, was outgoing and caring.
Ultimately, the story of the two Kaczynski boys turns into one as old as stories themselves: one son good and dutiful; one son, investigators claim, bad.
If authorities have the right man, the nation's most elaborate and high-tech manhunt - the search for the Unabomber - has ended in a way primordial.
With blood and loyalty wrestling with his strong sense of duty, the good son turned in the bad.
Several weeks ago, David Kaczynski, 46, who works for a nonprofit organization that provides shelter for youths, took the train from New York to Chicago for the heavy-hearted purpose of helping his elderly mother clean out the house she had lived in for decades.
There, in a desk drawer, he found documents that told him something he had long suspected and feared - that his brother, living a hermit's life in remote Montana, was the Unabomber, sources said.
The two are not unalike: David, too, had been a hermit, living for a time in nothing more than a hole in the ground in an isolated part of Texas.
Thursday, David Kaczynski was holed up in his Schenectady, N.Y., home, reportedly horrified that the public had learned he had turned those documents over to investigators, leading to his brother's arrest Wednesday.
``He's mad,'' one investigator said. ``We no longer have a relationship.''
The neighborhood where the boys grew up in the 1950s was tight-knit.
A few doors from the Kaczynskis, the O'Connell house was put on quarantine when their daughter got polio.
The Kaczynskis came to the front stoop, placed dishes of food there, and left. ``They are really concerned about people, and they taught their boys that,'' Dorothy O'Connell said.
But the boys, she said, were very different.
``David was extremely bright and precocious with a wonderful vocabulary; he was outgoing, pleasant and sweet, and happy-go-lucky,'' she said.
Theodore, another neighbor said, was withdrawn.
``You never got too close to him,'' Evelyn Vanderlaan said. ``He was in a different world.''
High school proved difficult for Theodore. At Evergreen Park Community High School from 1955 to 1958, he was acclaimed for his intelligence, yet alienated because of it.
Russell Mosny, a classmate at Evergreen Park and now a computer programmer who lives in Schaumburg, Ill., remembers he and Kaczynski formed a bond based on academics. Mosny skipped a grade, and Kaczynski skipped two - one in elementary school and one in high school.
``He was the smartest kid in the high school,'' Mosny said. ``We just kind of fell together. We were the eggheads.''
At once younger and brighter than their classmates, they both withdrew into books. ``His parents wanted him to move ahead,'' Mosny said. ``He was young for his peer group. He was pretty shy. He had a hard time making friends.''
Kaczynski showed an emergent interest at that time: he was curious about explosives.
Mosny recalls Kaczynski mixing iodine and ammonia together, making an unstable compound that popped when it dried. ``I know he was interested in that kind of stuff, explosive-type things,'' Mosny said. ``But it was sort of, like, we were all kids.''
But Theodore J. Kaczynski wasn't a kid for long.
``They packed him off to Harvard at the age of 16,'' Mosny said. ``He didn't even have a driver's license yet. I imagine it was tough.''
On the academic level, at least, Theodore prospered at Harvard, and again in graduate school at the University of Michigan.
In 1969, Theodore, who had been a brilliant Ph.D. student in mathematics, abruptly resigned from the teaching position he had held at the University of California at Berkeley for two years.
On March 2, 1969, J.W. Addison, chairman of the university's math department, wrote to college officials about the ``sudden and unexpected resignation of Assistant Professor Theodore Kaczynski.''
``Dr. Kaczynski has decided to leave the field of mathematics,'' the letter said. ``Vice Chairman Calvin Moore and I have tried to persuade him to reconsider his decision but have not been successful.''
Later, in a letter to the professor who had been Kaczynski's doctoral thesis adviser, Addison wrote: ``Kaczynski seemed almost pathologically shy and as far as I know he had made no close friends in the department. Efforts to bring him more into the swing of things had failed.
``He left no forwarding address.''
In June 1971, brothers David and Theodore Kaczynski bought a plot of land outside Lincoln, Mont. But it was Theodore who went to live there in a house with no electricity, no running water - not even an outhouse, according to one investigator.
The whole cabin was no bigger than most kitchens.
When his mother came to visit, she always stayed in a nearby motel.
Over the years, David sometimes bought airline tickets for his brother, made destitute, it seemed on the surface, by his peculiar career decisions.
In fact, two of those trips were to cities where the Unabomber struck, according to law enforcement sources.
David, too, withdrew for a time.
In the 1980s, David went to Texas, where he found a plot of land in an isolated spot. At first he lived in nothing more than a hole he had dug, which he covered to protect himself from the elements.
Later, he built a two-room cabin with limited electricity, said a friend, Tim Bennett. There he worked on books and short stories, writing them out in long-hand.
Eventually, he moved to Schenectady and took a job working with youths.
On July 14, 1990, David married Linda Patrik in a Buddhist ceremony in their back yard in Schenectady. Patrik is an associate professor of philosophy at Union College in Schenectady.
After returning to Chicago and finding what he thought was proof that his brother was the Unabomber, David sought out a friend, a Washington, D.C., lawyer, to turn over the writings to federal authorities. Even then, it took ``many discussions, many interviews'' before he agreed to meet face-to-face with FBI agents.
``He was torn, as anyone would be, between doing what is societally right and loyalty to his brother,'' said one agent. ``This was not some guy who walked in with information to collect the $1 million reward.''
The reward will be given only after a conviction, if at all.
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