Kaczynski was living in Lombard, Illinois during most of the Zodiac
events.
Kaczynski's official residence in Berkeley lasted long enough to cover
only the December 20, 1967 and July 4, 1969 Zodiac events. Following those dates,
Kaczynski's official residence was his parents' house in Lombard, Illinois.
David Kaczynski informed the FBI that shortly after Ted's June 30, 1969
resignation from Berkeley, the two brothers took a trip to Canada, "searching for
land." No one knows the exact itinerary of the trip, or whether it involved an
excursion back to the Bay Area. The trip, however, may have overlapped with Zodiac's
correspondence of early August, 1969. Extant is a correspondence from an Idaho resident
who claims she met Kaczynski at a dance at the University of Idaho in the spring of 1969,
during which time Kaczynski informed her that he was traveling with his brother looking
for land. This correspondence casts suspicion on the notion that the trip occurred in the
summer of the same year.
In the latter third of 1969, Kaczynski moved his domicile from Berkeley,
California, to Lombard, Illinois. Though he was now far removed from the scene of the
Zodiac events, his distance from them attaches greater suspicion to his movements over the
next two years. Once domiciled in Lombard, Kaczynski did not stay put. Statements by his
mother show that he left his parents' residence on several occasions without informing
anyone of his whereabouts. Official documentation shows that in the summer of 1970, a
period corresponding with several Zodiac letters, Kaczynski traveled to the western U.S.
"looking for land" — a theme that is repeated several times as a pretext
for a long disappearance with no accounting for his whereabouts.
In the late winter to early spring of 1971, Kaczynski moved permanently
to Montana, arriving at his brother's apartment in Great Falls after an absence of several
weeks. This disappearance coincidences with the two March, 1971 Zodiac correspondences
mailed from the Bay Area.
In the winter of 1974, Kaczynski wrote his parents a letter saying that
he would be "away camping for a while." This corresponds with the January 29,
1974 "Exorcist Letter," mailed from Alameda County.
Official sources show that Kaczynski spent the entire winter of 1975 in
Oakland, California. Had he done in the same in 1974, he would have been perfectly poised
to mail the Exorcist Letter in January of that year. Not only can Kaczynski not be
eliminated as a Zodiac suspect on the basis of his whereabouts alone, but the act of
traveling a considerable distance from his official domicile towards key areas of Zodiac
activity lends greater suspicion to his movements than had he been a resident of the Bay
Area during the times in question.
Apart from the observation that Kaczynski was domiciled in Illinois
during the majority of the Zodiac events, no alibi for the Zodiac events — official
or otherwise — has been presented by Kaczynski or the authorities.
Kaczynski makes no mention of the Zodiac events in his thousands of pages
of journals and autobiographical notes.
Conventional wisdom maintains that Kaczynski could not have committed the crimes of
Zodiac because nowhere in his written journals does Kaczynski mention the Zodiac events.
Further, Kaczynski’s journals seem to imply that not until 1978, years after those
events, did he work up the nerve to take a human life. The journals hint of strong
inhibitions fostered by a lifetime of social conditioning.
Authorities uncritically assumed that the journals were factually correct, contending
that a journal writer would not lie to himself. This may be taken as granted, so long as
he is writing for himself, and not for someone else. One of Kaczynski’s primary
motivations in writing the journals was to leave a public record that would prove to
posterity that he was “not sick,” but rationally motivated to commit his crimes.
The journals were intended for public, not private, consumption, to present Kaczynski and
his motives in the most favorable light. Accuracy, to Kaczynski, implies a rendition of
the truth that best fits his image of himself and his worldview. If he is perceived to
have committed his crimes as gut reactions to the circumstances of his life, he will be
forced to admit that he has been a complete failure as a man — something that his ego
cannot sustain. His protestations that he has not been able to commit a crime are few and
far between, and he shows no evolution of the process by which he finally succeeded. One
instance in which he specifically denies having committed crimes is demonstrated to have
been a deliberate falsehood. His writings become the vehicle by which the Kaczynski’s
“truth” will be disseminated to the public and the world. And no lie, however
great, will be found too egregious not to serve that truth.
Why would Kaczynski not have taken credit for the Zodiac events? Zodiac’s crimes,
upon their face, were those of a warped and twisted mind. The murders were impulsive
actions, driven by an explosive mix of personal envy and sexual frustration. The same
qualities festered in Kaczynski’s brain during the last half of the 1960s and would
have lent an immediacy to his desire to lash out impulsively. Once the impulse had been
satisfied, his highly logical and reasoning mind would have led him to recoil from what he
had done while laboring under the influence of his first irrational desires.
A quote from Kaczynski’s
court-ordered psychological survey supports the contention that the Unabomber’s first
foray into violence occurred sooner than his personal writings might suggest:
He
wrote in his journal about him not fitting into organized society and not wanting to fit
into it, and seeking avenues of escape from it. In his words in the early 1970s,
he wrote "True I would not fit into the present society in any case but that is not
an intolerable situation. What makes a situation intolerable is the fact that in all
probability, the values that I detest, will soon be achieved through science, an utterly
complete and permanent victory throughout the whole world, with a total extrication of
everything I value. Through super human computers and mind control there simply will be no
place for a rebellious person to hide and my kind of people will vanish forever from the
earth. It's not merely the fact that I cannot fit into society that has induced me to
rebel, as violently as I have, it is the fact that I can see society made
possible by science inexorably imposing on me." [My italics]
Dated in the early 1970s, the quote specifically states that Kaczynski has violently
rebelled against society. This directly contradicts the elaborate scenario presented in
his journals that depict him as not having had the nerve to commit violence until the late
1970s. Further, it shows Kaczynski attempting to shift the motive for the violence from
his social ineptitude toward the rationalization that science and technology have imposed
their will on him. The passage shows him acknowledging that his actions have, up until
that point, been driven by his personal frustrations, while he attempts simultaneously to
shift his motives for the violence by wedding them to a newly-minted way of thought.
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