Fallout: The Unabomber’s Crimes and Manifesto (with Candice DeLong)
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Due to the nature of this case, listener discretion is advised. This episode includes discussions of violence and suicide. Consider this when deciding how and when you'll listen. To get mental health help, visit Spotify.com slash resources.

Around 12:25 in the morning on June 10th, 2023, officials at a North Carolina prison find an 81-year-old man unresponsive in his cell. Personnel attempt to save the man's life, but it's no use. He's taken to a hospital where medical professionals pronounce him dead on arrival from an apparent suicide.

The man's name is Ted Kaczynski, but he's better known to the world as the Unabomber.

He waged a terror campaign across the United States for 17 years. He built 16 bombs that caused three deaths and countless permanent scars, both mental and physical. In life, he was called a lunatic, a monster, the devil. But the manifesto he wrote before his capture, in part to justify his actions, led some to consider him a folk hero.

Since his death, more and more people, including tech billionaire Elon Musk, have taken to the internet to suggest that maybe his anti-industry, anti-technology, and pro-environment ideals were right. But Candace DeLong, one of the FBI agents who helped capture Kaczynski in 1996, believes he was only motivated by one thing.

I mean, he wanted to kill. He was a disturbed individual and killing made him feel good. It all is that simple. I'm Vanessa Richardson, and this is Serial Killers, a Spotify podcast. You can find us here every Monday. Be sure to check us out on Instagram at Serial Killers Podcast. We'd love to hear from you. If you're listening on the Spotify app, swipe up and give us your thoughts.

This week, we're diving into the Unabomber case with the help of Candace DeLong, one of the FBI agents who helped capture the man behind the attacks back in 1996, and Gary Wright, one of the Unabomber's surviving victims. More than two decades later, the Unabomber is dead. But his ideas are more mainstream than ever before. What does that mean for his legacy?

In addition to being a former FBI agent, Candace is also the host of two different podcasts, Killer Psyche and Natural Selection, Scott v. Wild Bill, a 10-part series about a successful con artist who just so happened to also be a serial killer. The last episode just dropped. After you listen to this, I recommend you check that series out. We're thrilled we were able to speak with them. Stay with us.

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The first time I heard the name Unabomber, I was head nurse at the Institute of Psychiatry at Northwestern University. And the Unabomber's crimes started in Chicago. It was 1978. A package sat on the ground outside a mailbox in a Chicago parking lot. The sender left it there after realizing the box was too big to fit inside.

A young boy is the first to find it. He brings the package to his mother without opening it. She notices the return address lists a man named Buckley Crist as the sender.

Christ works as a professor at Northwestern University, so she makes arrangements to return the package to the school. When it arrives, Christ contacts campus security. He's concerned because he doesn't remember sending it. A campus security guard intervenes and opens the package for him. When he does, it explodes. The guard suffers minor injuries from the shrapnel and survives.

It's what we at the time called a kitty bomb, not kitty as in cat, but K-I-D-D-I-E, kitty, child. Because it was something, it was so simple, it looked like something a child would build.

And then shortly after that, when I was driving home from work one day listening to the radio and I heard a story of someone at Northwestern University in a student lounge in the engineering department opened a cigar box that was on a table looking for a pencil and it exploded. The victim of this second attack also survives suffering only minor burns.

About a year later, in 1980, Candace becomes an agent with the FBI. She works as both a field agent and a criminal profiler as the bombings continue to escalate.

By the fall of 1994, the Unabomber has carried out a total of 14 attacks. The nameless, faceless assailant has become more skilled at creating homemade weapons, managing to maim and kill some of his victims. But it's been more than a year since his last bombing.

That December, a package arrives at a home in New Jersey. It's addressed to Thomas Mosser, a 50-year-old husband, father, and the vice president of a New York-based advertising firm. Mosser's wife signs for the package and leaves it on a table somewhere for her husband to find it.

The holidays are fast approaching, and the Mossers throw a party for their neighbors later that day. Everyone eats, drinks, children play and run around the house, all while the package sits on the table, untouched. By chance, Thomas Mosser doesn't open it until the next morning, sometime around 11. He had just come home from a trip, and his wife was holding their daughter.

They're chit-chatting. He's opening his mail. The little girl starts to kick. Mom puts the little girl down and the little girl takes off, runs out of the kitchen. She's just learning to walk, right? And mom follows her just as dad was opening a bombing device that exploded, cut him in half.

destroyed everything in sight. Of course, that little girl and her mother would have been killed. They weren't. Mosser and his family were supposed to pick out a Christmas tree that day. By early 1995, the Unabomber has officially become a serial killer. The unknown assailant has caused the deaths of three people, including Mosser, while racking up a victim count in the 20s.

Within the year, Candace relocates to San Francisco and because the Unabomber's most recent bombs have been mailed from the Bay Area, she's quickly assigned to the case. Candace says at the time, it's the FBI's number one priority. The term Unabomber actually comes from the FBI's case name, Unabomb, which was inspired by the primary targets of the attacks, namely universities and airlines.

Some bombs were mailed, others had been placed, and the placed bombs become the FBI's biggest leads. They know the Unabomber had to have been in those locations at those specific times, which gives them a short checklist to cross-reference potential suspects.

Number one is that they lived or worked or were in Chicago during the late 70s, early 80s. That they lived or worked or had a reason to be in Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah.

during certain time in the 80s and the similar criteria for Sacramento. This rudimentary criteria allows them to rule out names as they come in. Given the high profile nature of the case, there's no shortage of tips. The FBI set up a 1-800 line for the case. People were always calling saying, "Hey, I think so-and-so is the inner bomber." "A man missed an alimony payment." "Hey, I think my ex is the inner bomber."

I actually answered a call one day. A young man said, I think my chemistry professor is the Unabomber. And I said, really? And why do you think that? And he said, well, he's really smart and he's really strange. And I said, and did...

You really get a D or an F from him by any chance? Well, yeah, but that doesn't matter. We had so many phone calls like that. According to Candace, the FBI's suspect list eventually reaches around 2,000 names. All open files are handled by a suspect squad that takes each one seriously, but none could be placed at all the right locations at all the right times.

By the summer of 1995, it's been 17 years, and the country's top investigators are still at a loss. The Unabomber is clearly meticulous. They never leave behind any identifiable evidence. No fingerprints, no hairs, nothing. Agents bide their time, expecting an inevitable mistake. But it never comes.

Then, in the fall of 1995, the FBI finally gets a break in the case. The person behind the attacks writes a 35,000-word manifesto titled "Industrial Society and Its Future." They mail it to three media publications: The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Penthouse Magazine.

They include a letter with it, demanding the manifesto be published in full, or else, they threaten, the attacks will continue. After conversations with the FBI, both the New York Times and the Washington Post print the manifesto in its entirety that September. Though a controversial decision at the time, it ultimately pays off.

The newspapers put the Unabomber's manifesto in front of David Kaczynski and his wife, Linda Patrick, two people who recognize many of the ideas presented. It begins with the sentence: "The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have already been a disaster for the human race." It sounds like letters they've received themselves before. And eventually, it dawns on David:

I think my brother Ted Kaczynski may be the author of this manifesto.

Though David can't imagine his reclusive brother could possibly be behind the violent attacks, he can't ignore certain turns of phrases. One of them was an expression. The expression, "You cannot have your cake and eat it too." In the manifesto, the individual that wrote it had it backwards. "You can't have your cake and eat it too," or "Eat it and have it..." At any rate, whatever the real expression was, he flipped it on its head. And his brother David knew that his older brother Ted

did that. After agonizing internal debates, David works up the courage to contact the FBI, and the phone call kicks off a series of events that sends Candace into the remote wilderness of Lincoln, Montana, undercover to catch the most wanted criminal in the United States. This episode is brought to you by SimpliSafe.

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In February 1996, Candace DeLong flies to Montana with two other FBI agents. They're tasked with finding evidence that can connect their primary suspect, Ted Kaczynski, to the Unabomber's 17-year crime spree. Lincoln, Montana is very small. There is one stoplight in the middle of town on a road called Stemple Pass Road. I'll never forget it.

We were told Ted Kaczynski lived about three miles from there. He would get to town either by walking or bicycle. Now, the town consisted of a tiny little library, a tiny grocery store, a couple of restaurants, a bus stop, a gas station.

and lots of hunters' cabins. There was always some activity going on because the bus stop and the motel that I stayed at. But I was there in the dead of winter. Temperature was 25 below zero. Candace and her partner John follow every lead that comes their way, no matter how seemingly insignificant. They talk to hunters, travel to scrap metal yards, libraries, local businesses.

and they spend all of their time in Lincoln undercover. We had to be, of course, you don't want to say, "Hi, I'm an FBI agent. How are you today?" Our cover was that we were working for National Geographic magazine. I was writing an article on a silver mine that had been closed in the area, and there was an effort going on to reopen it. And John, my partner, was a photographer, and he would walk around with camera around his neck.

We weren't questioned other than, "Oh, what are you doing here?" "Oh, I'm doing an article for Nat Geo on the mine that's been..." "Oh yeah, okay, that's interesting." That's it. People see what they want to see, hear what they want to hear.

They learn Ted would travel by bus all the way to California to mail his bombs. Candace says the trips would take him 29 hours. The bus would stop outside of a small cafe in town every other day at 4 p.m. It becomes Candace and John's job to surveil the area.

Then one day they see a man who matches Ted's description get on the bus headed out of town. So Candace follows him on board. I'm pretending that I am a passenger and I'm walking to the back of the bus and all the way back I'm looking right and left, right and left, looking at people, hi, how are you, that kind of thing. And then I see the guy. It's like, oh my God.

This is him. And I looked at him and he looked me right in the eyes. And I said, excuse me, I just got off this bus coming from Helena. And I think I left my purse here. Can I look around the seat? He goes, oh, yeah, sure.

It was nonsense. It was a lie. I was trying to get close enough to him to determine if he was and he was not. It was not him. But that's the kind of thing, you know, your heart soars and your pulse just doubles.

As thrilling as the moment is, investigators are no closer to being able to make an arrest or file for a search warrant. The closest thing they have to hard evidence is saliva they extracted off the back of a stamp that the Unabomber used to mail his manifesto. Investigators compared the DNA to a sample that Ted's mother gave them, and the results come back mostly positive, but inconclusive.

They determined the DNA was a match to a very small percentage of Montana's male population. While Ted was included in the percentage, the sample size was too big for the DNA to be a smoking gun. It was still circumstantial. People get convicted all the time on circumstantial evidence, but the prosecution needs a mountain of it, not one thing.

A mountain of it. And so Candace and her partner continue searching. At some point, Ted's brother, David, brings new information to the FBI. He says he remembers that his brother saw a doctor in Missoula at some point. He was concerned about his heart. And he wrote a letter to the doctor in advance of his appointment explaining everything to her.

and kind of demanding that she be ready to do blood work, x-rays, all the things she needed to do because he didn't have much money and he could not hang out in Missoula at a hotel for many days. Candace and John pay this doctor a visit. Turns out she remembers Ted. And she just so happened to have retained that letter. She gave it to me. It was pages and pages.

As my partner and I are driving back from Missoula to Helena, which was about 60 miles, I'm reading it. And I think on about page three of seven pages, he's telling the doctor about his history. He said, I've been under stress since 1978. And then he goes on to say, and I've been under extreme stress since 1985. Wow.

I could be wrong on that date. It was actually 1987. But Candace realizes the two dates in the letter align with critical moments in the Unabomber's past. 1978 marked the year the first bomb was placed, and 1987 was the year a woman looked out her window and saw the Unabomber placing a bomb in the parking lot of a small business. He was wearing a hooded sweatshirt and aviator glasses. Yes.

the iconic composite sketch of the Unabomber. Both of those hallmark events in the history of the Unabomber's criminal activity. And I remember calling my boss on my cell phone. Cell phones were as big as a brick.

And I remember I said, "Max, it's him. It's him. I've got it. I've got the evidence right in my hand." The evidence is still circumstantial. But by the beginning of April 1996, the FBI finally has a mountain of it. They present a 100-page affidavit to a magistrate. Then April 3rd came, the magistrate said, "Go get him," and the rest is history.

History begins with 100 FBI agents on the ground in Lincoln, prepared for the presentation of the search warrant. Bomb technicians, evidence technicians, legal advisors, you name it. We had plans how we were going to lure them out. We had recruited the assistance of the local forestry agent. If you live in a very rural area or desert,

you are going to know the local federal forestry agent because your life might depend on that person someday. And this guy's name was Jerry Burns and he had known Ted for years. He's one of the very few people Ted liked and Ted trusted. Ted Kaczynski only cared about two things: his property, his little quarter acre in Lincoln, and killing people. So,

My boss and Jerry Burns stood outside of his door talking with each other about, and they'd use the word property and line, kind of loud. And then Jerry said, hey, Ted, are you in there? Can you come out and show us where your property line is? Candace says that was enough to get Ted's attention. He opens the door, peeks his head out, and says he'll be right out. He just needs to grab his jacket.

There was no letting him go back in because, number one, he had a rifle. And I suspected, as did some of us, his cabin was a bomb factory.

So when he turned, my colleagues grabbed him and he put up quite a fight. There was another FBI agent from Helena, Montana with us. He was a great big guy, looked like a linebacker. I called him Haas from Bonanza. That cowboy show looked just like him. And they're rolling around on the ground with this guy, this skinny little runt guy, 5'9", 140 pounds, hadn't had a bath in four or five months. And he's rolling on the ground fighting.

with FBI agents. And then they were able to cuff him and they brought him down to the cabin where I was waiting with another agent for the interview and interrogation. And I remember to John, I said, "His clothes are all torn. Wow, it must have been a real knockdown drag out." And then as they got closer and I could see him better, his clothes were not torn.

They were rotting off of his body. And when they walked by me, he smelled like wet dirt. Ted is led to a nearby cabin where Candace waits. Candace says he's handcuffed behind his back before sitting at a makeshift table across from her boss, Max.

And no one had ever used the word "unabomber" or "bombing" or "murder" anything. We're letting him stew and figure out, you know, like what is going on. The FBI can't arrest Ted yet. After serving the search warrant, they have 24 hours where they can detain him while they search his cabin for more evidence to connect him to the crimes.

As they wait, Candace and her boss present him with their search warrant. Since his hands are cuffed, Candace flips the pages for him while he reads. Once Ted looks up from the pages, Candace says he asks for a lawyer. From that point forward, according to constitutional law, they can't discuss any matter related to the case. So Candace is forced to make small talk. It was awkward.

For a while, I felt like I was on a bad date. By the way, this guy had the brightest, most beautiful blue eyes you've ever seen. And his hair looked like a bomb went off in his hair. If you were to draw a caricature of the mad bomber running around, it would be what Ted Kaczynski looked like. And he told me how to cook turnips on an open stove and other mundane subjects, like I care.

As Candace keeps Ted busy in one corner of the woods, FBI agents search his cabin in another. Candace says the remote cabin is tiny, only about 8 by 10 feet, with just one small window to let light in. There's a stream nearby where Ted would bathe, presumably a few times a year. Inside there's a bench to sleep on, a workbench, and not much else besides books and scattered materials.

Now when the agents went in the cabin, one thing that they were particularly cautious of was booby traps. Serial bombers of all kinds tend to booby trap their bomb factories. And it turns out he was working on a bomb when we learned him out of his cabin. There were three jars of chemicals.

We knew what chemicals we were looking for that he used. One of the jars on his bench was labeled with one of the exact chemicals we were looking for that was a precursor to an explosive device.

Normally, that would have been confiscated, labeled, and shipped to the lab and let the lab check it for, to see if it's identical, two chemicals found at the site where someone opened a bombing device and was killed. Well, there was no time to send it. We had 24 hours to link him to the crimes we suspected him of and take him to jail.

So the agent field tested the chemicals that were in that jar on his bench, and it was an identical match to a man who opened a bomb in his kitchen. Identical, like a DNA match. The chemicals are connected to the bomb that killed Thomas Mosser. It's what the FBI needs to make the arrest. Meanwhile, in the other cabin, Candace notices Ted is trembling at some point.

In my opinion, he was trembling, and he was trembling from fear. April 3rd, it was the warmest day in the six weeks I had been there. Nevertheless, he was wearing a soaking wet T-shirt, and it was cold. I took off my—I was wearing my son's ski parka.

took it off, put it over his shoulders. And that is where you see that iconic picture of him being led to the Helena jail by two FBI agents, one on each side, and he's in the middle wearing this over-his-shoulders parka with a bright red stripe.

That's my son's key parka. When I got it back, it had what I call official Unabomber dirt on the collar. That's what I came away with six weeks chasing Ted Kaczynski. One of the first calls Candace makes after the arrest is to her son. So I called him and I got his answer machine. I said, hey, it's mom.

It's over. We got him. No shots fired. Everybody is safe. And then I started bawling like a baby.

Because, oh my God, we were under tremendous stress to not make any mistakes. If that guy had slipped through our fingers and gone somewhere to mail a bomb, end of my career, and everybody up there that was supposed to be keeping an eye on him. And I said, oh, so I'll talk to you when I get home to San Francisco. And I hung up. And they went, oh, yeah. So I called him back. I said, hey, I almost forgot to tell you. You might want to watch CNN. The Unabomber was wearing your ski parka today. Bye.

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After Ted Kaczynski is arrested in April 1996, he's indicted on 13 charges, including three counts of murder. And he wanted to go to trial. I had personal feelings about the death penalty in this case. I thought it was wrong because his brother turned him in. And make no mistake, if his brother had not turned him in, we'd still be looking for him.

Theodore Kaczynski's name was not in any of our many, many databases that we had. He was not in a suspect file. There are people that claimed they called and turned him in. It's absolutely not true. Nobody did that. His brother did the right thing. And who knows how many other people would have... Like I said, he was building a bomb. And a bomb was found...

in his cabin, complete and ready to go and addressed. Ahead of proceedings, a judge appoints a psychiatrist named Sally Johnson to evaluate whether Ted is fit to stand trial. Johnson conducts a 22-hour interview and, at the end of it, determines Ted has been living with schizophrenia.

Four other doctors agree with Johnson's assessment, but the prosecution's doctors disagree. And so does Candace. I worked with paranoid schizophrenics when I was a psychiatric nurse. Ted Kuczynski, in my opinion, is not a paranoid schizophrenic. He's a very organized thinker. Paranoid schizophrenics that are psychotic are not.

Ted's family has maintained that Ted's crimes stemmed from mental illness. It's part of the reason they fought so hard for the death penalty to be taken off the table. But Candace isn't alone. Others, like psychotherapist Gary Greenberg, share her opinion.

Greenberg communicated with Ted for years and has suggested that his diagnosis was a way for the judicial system to avoid a major media trial. It was easier to dismiss the ideas and principles presented in his manifesto as "symptoms of a disease."

Leading up to a trial, Ted's lawyers try to use the diagnosis to enter an insanity defense, but Ted doesn't allow it. He even tries to defend himself before ultimately taking a plea agreement and accepting all charges. A judge hands him four life sentences without the possibility of parole, but not before he has to listen to impact statements from surviving victims, including Gary Wright.

And I read mine, but there did come a point where I said, "Look, Ted, I don't hate you. I forgave you. I have no idea how far you'd go, you know, how much kindling you needed for your cause." I mean, was it three people, 30 people, 3,000 people? But it was the strangest thing because when I told him that, he had been writing notes kind of furiously on a legal pad, and the pencil dropped. He looked up. We locked our gaze right eye to eye because I was sitting in the witness stand. I knew I had transferred all the ownership.

It wasn't mine to carry anymore, and it was a very freeing moment. It was a long road to forgiveness for Gary. Back in 1987, he owned a computer company in Utah. One morning, he pulled into the parking lot and spotted a wooden object near the tire of a car. It looked like two 2x4s nailed together with some nails so shiny they almost looked like mirrors.

Gary says he hesitated for a second, but worried that someone would be injured if they stepped on it or ran it over with their car. And the second that I went to lift, there was like a slight click and an immediate sense of pressure. And at the same time, it sounded like a fighter jet went over. And the next thing I knew, I was standing 22 feet back in the parking lot, jumping up and down as if I were on a pogo stick.

And my first thought right as I was standing there was somebody had come around the corner of the building and shot me with a shotgun. And as I was standing there, I looked up and I could see where the telephone and electric wires that go into the building were moving in this slow motion sine wave, just very slowly up and down. And there was these little pieces of white kind of floating down like snow, but there was no snow. It was very sunny day.

So everything was in slow motion and I just thought, "Oh wow, this is so strange." About that same time I heard this huge voice that just said, "You'll be alright." Gary was in a state of shock.

I looked down and I could see that my pants were gone from about the knee down. I had a white dress shirt on and I could see that there was blood starting to come out of my left arm and different little places. And really oddly, I noticed these things that looked like long needles that were threaded through my shirt and I was having difficulty getting my chin to go down so I could look at it.

But those needles were, they were slivers because the wood had fragmented and the slivers impaled under my neck, kind of like a porcupine. At that point, most of my family and coworkers came running out the back door into the parking lot and I was having trouble recognizing what they were saying, but I could tell by the look on their face, it must be something fairly bad.

Gary was rushed to a hospital where he received life-saving treatment. Afterwards, he says there were two aspects of his recovery, the physical and the mental.

The physical side was a number of surgeries. The day of, they removed as much debris as they could. It's very difficult when you have organic matter because they can't really see it on the x-ray as if it were metal. So I spent a lot of time with that coming to the surface over probably a four-year period where these random slivers would just eject themselves from my skin.

When the bomb exploded, it was moving at about 20,000 feet per second, so it liquefied the metal. The razor wire came in, went through my arm and impelled itself in the artery, but it severed the nerve on the way in.

It was lucky because with the metal being molten, it basically cauterized itself into the artery so I didn't bleed out, which was good. So the physical piece went through a lot, probably a dozen surgeries between mouth surgery, T-surgery, the body taking stuff in and out.

They had to go in and do tendon transfers and capsulodesis where they move the bones basically on the tendons in your fingers and had to do that while I was awake. So the physical side was what it was. The mental side of it, whole different story. I wouldn't know who it was for about nine years.

So that whole piece of wondering, gee, why or who or whatever was big, the person could die as a ghost, I'll never know. I came to a point where I didn't sleep real well. It was like a light switch kind of on or off. I was kind of happy or pissed and

struggled because I had tried to find anyone who could help me from the counseling side. And at that time, there really weren't any people that I could go to. I mean, there wasn't anyone assigned for physical therapy. There wasn't anyone assigned for mental therapy. So I kind of had to read and build it on my own until I found this gentleman in Salt Lake City who had worked with Vietnam vets. And he said, look, you probably got elements of PTSD.

Over the years, many have tried to pin down why Ted Kaczynski killed. There are certain life events some point to. For example, he was hospitalized as an infant and, according to his mother, she was only allowed to visit for a few minutes at a time.

I can tell you that is how pediatric wards were back then. Now, personnel welcome parents to be there as much as possible, but not back then. She said when he came home from the hospital, something was wrong. He was, she used the word listless. It was like he was drugged. He was no longer learning words. He was, he didn't like to be held. He wouldn't look her in the eye.

We know now maternal deprivation can damage an individual for the rest of their life.

Then, during his sophomore year at Harvard, Ted was tapped to participate in a three-year-long mind control experiment led by psychologist Henry A. Murray. According to the Washington Post, the study has been widely reported as being part of the CIA's disturbing, corrupt, and illegal classified program codenamed MK-ULTRA.

Experiments associated with MKUltra used explosive amounts of substances like LSD to try and control subjects' minds.

There's been no evidence to suggest Ted was drugged during his time at Harvard, but Murray subjected participants to interrogation techniques that he himself described as, quote, "vehement, sweeping, and personally abusive." Evolutionary psychologist Nigel Barber has said that the study violated all of the main ethical principles set forth by the American Psychological Association.

Some have theorized the study could have exacerbated pre-existing mental health conditions. But separate from the life events that could have triggered Ted's crimes, there are also the ideas and motives Ted laid out in his own words. In his manifesto, Ted basically suggested he chose his targets because they were associated with technology and/or supported anti-environmental causes.

Gary says he read it as soon as the manifesto came out. It took me a minute to get a hold of a copy in Salt Lake City. I went to a Barnes & Noble and purchased one and still have it. And I started to read through it. And at that point, it took me a minute. It was written in a way that I don't find real comfortable to process things.

It can read as dry and academic, but some might find Gary's reaction to the manifesto's contents surprising. Yeah, the manifesto itself is deep. It's got lots of nuanced stuff, lots of things you can dig in at whatever level. I know that Ted had followed a number of folks who had similar thinking, but I do think there are extremely key points in it that today I think are very, very relevant, especially as it comes to

technology impact on kids, our minds, efficiencies, jobs. One of them was that technology and humankind can't live together necessarily because when you choose technology, which is always evolving, something has to be given up on the human side.

Ted wrote about how a technological society destroys nature and limits our personal freedoms, which removes our power and impacts our health, causing factors like depression, low self-esteem, anxiety, guilt, frustration, hostility, sleeping disorders, and more.

He wrote that technology can't be regulated through legislation or other forms of technology. He wrote that it must be destroyed, and that may or may not require physical violence. There are environmentalist ideals, a distrust of big government, a fear of artificial intelligence taking over, which he equated to the danger of nuclear war. And he expressed extreme disdain for certain types of social rhetoric.

As the Wall Street Journal pointed out after Ted's death in 2023, the manifesto merged ideas that today fall under distinct left- and right-wing camps. The result resonated with some back in 1996, but it's become even more mainstream since. The manifesto remains one of Amazon's top 10 best-selling books in the radical political thought category.

It's got different factions of people that follow it, right? I think the mainstream people who are latching onto it right now are

a lot of folks who are struggling with the effects of, say, social media. There's another faction that has followed Ted's work for a very long time that kind of almost felt like he was somewhat almost of a deity or a prophet. When he was in prison, I mean, there was this group that was Ted for president, and there was a fear at one point that they would carry out some works similar to his in order to

you know, back up what he was espousing. With the continued interest in Ted's ideas, that fear is still present for some. To those quick to idolize Ted and his writing, Gary's message would be... I would say read it. Find the things that are interesting. Dig deeper. Look at other perspectives around the same point. And then finally start to pull together your own conclusions and say, how am I going to act or respond, right?

It seems like in society today, people are willing to back something whether they know the whole story or not. I mean, it's around us everywhere and a lot of anger out there these days. And I would say you have to take all kinds of research or data points in order to truly form an opinion and realizing that the fallout of a lot of that

that Ted espoused by choosing to be radicalized and dangerous and kill people and maim people, I was considered an experiment. I was experiment number 121. And if you minimize people to an experiment, we got really big problems at that point. Until the day he died, Ted never expressed remorse for any of his actions.

We asked both Candice and Gary how they reacted to Ted's death. My feelings were probably really honestly quite settled. I had known that he was diagnosed with cancer when he got transferred. The Board of Prisons has to notify me that he's being transferred, and I knew it was to a medical-type prison. So...

I knew the end was coming. I wondered if he would apologize to people who, you know, he'd killed their family members or something. Would it be strictly a clinical exercise for him? Or would he actually feel like he owed something more? You know, I didn't need an apology. I have a statement I say all the time is that you can be a victim or a survivor, but you can't be both. I always have the same thought when a serial killer dies, and it's this.

Well, you lived a lot longer than any of your victims, didn't you? Thanks for tuning in to Serial Killers, a Spotify podcast. We'll be back Monday with another episode.

We'd like to give a special thanks to Gary Wright and Candice DeLong for lending their experience to today's story. You can check out Candice's podcasts from Killer Psyche and Natural Selection on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. And stay tuned for a trailer of Natural Selection, Scott v. Wild Bill.

You can learn more about Gary and his work at gbright.com. He also says he's working on a podcast that he's expecting to release soon. Stay safe out there. This episode was written and researched by Connor Sampson, fact-checked by Laurie Siegel, and sound designed by Alex Button. Our head of programming is Julien Boirot. Our head of production is Nick Johnson, and Spencer Howard is our post-production supervisor.

I'm your host, Vanessa Richardson. What would you do if you were framed for murder by a serial killer? I am retired FBI criminal profiler Candace DeLong, and my new series begins in the heart of a tropical paradise where a darkness lurks, a serial killer on the loose, and a community living in fear. Listen now to Natural Selection, Scott vs. Wild Bill.

This episode is brought to you by Hills Pet Nutrition. When you feed your pet Hills, you help feed a shelter pet, providing dogs and cats in need with science-led nutrition that helps make them happy, healthy, and ready to be adopted. It's an initiative that Hills has supported since 2002. And since then, the Food, Shelter, and Love program has helped more than 14 million pets find new homes,

changing their life forever so they can change yours. Science did that. Learn more at hillspet.com slash podcast.