The Freedom Club

·27 min·10 clips

Mystery, Murder, and Mayhem opens episode 107 with some housekeeping and a lot of real life, as the host explains the confusion from the prior week and the COVID scare at home before settling into the case. Once the story gets going, it focuses on Ted Kaczynski, who was 25 in 1967 and working as an acting assistant professor in mathematics at UC Berkeley. The episode notes that he was promoted to assistant professor the following year, which suggested he was on track for tenure, before he resigned in 1969. After that, he moved to his parents’ home in Lombard, Illinois, and later to a remote cabin he built outside Lincoln, Montana. He wanted a simple life without much money, electricity, or running water. He supported himself with odd jobs, received a scholarship, and got some financial help from his family. He also used a bike to go back and forth between the cabin and town. As development crept closer to the area around the cabin, he hated what was happening. In 1975, he answered with sabotage, including arson and booby traps near the developments around him. The episode frames this as his anger at losing peace and quiet. In 1978, he began building and mailing bombs, and sometimes hand-delivering them, all marked with the letters FC for Freedom Club. The host explains that he placed misleading clues inside the devices and took care not to leave fingerprints. The first mail bomb was directed to Buckley, a professor of materials engineering at Northwestern University. On May 25, 1978, a package containing the bomb, with a Chris return address, was found in a parking lot at the university. The story continues through the wider bombing campaign and the way the FBI initially had almost nothing concrete to work with because the devices were so carefully made. The episode keeps returning to the sense that Kaczynski was deliberate and hidden, but also increasingly driven by his own isolation and fury. Later, the host moves on to the legal and prison years. Kaczynski was held at ADX Florence in Florence, Colorado. In December 2021, he was diagnosed with late-stage cancer and transferred to the Federal Medical Center in Butner, North Carolina. At 12:23 a.m. on June 10, 2023, he was found unresponsive in his cell and taken to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead. The host says prison officials believe he died by suicide, though the specific reason they reached that conclusion has not been revealed. The episode then closes by naming Kaczynski as the Unabomber and inviting listeners to check the episode description for links, including his manifesto.

As heard by us

A plainspoken, conversational account of Ted Kaczynski's story.

The episode moves through Ted Kaczynski's years teaching mathematics at UC Berkeley, his shift to a remote cabin, the sabotage, the bombings, and the later prison and death details in a clean chronological line.

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Why you'd press play

You want the Unabomber story told like a case file at the kitchen table.

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