Journo Cleaning Attic Makes a Stunning Find: 'It Can't Be Him'

Jack Epstein found letters from Ted 'Unabomber' Kaczynski: 'Thankful I hadn’t been rude to him'
By Jenn Gidman,  Newser Staff
Posted Sep 21, 2021 9:35 AM CDT
Updated Sep 25, 2021 7:00 AM CDT
Journo's Attic Find: Letters to Him From the Unabomber
In this April 4, 1996, file photo, Ted Kaczynski, also known as the Unabomber, is escorted into the federal courthouse in Helena, Mont.   (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson, File)

Most people might expect to find old tchotchkes, photos, and letters when cleaning out the attic, but two letters found by Jack Epstein this summer while cleaning out his own attic weren't yellowed love notes or ancient report cards—they were letters to him from Ted Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber. Epstein, a travel writer and journalist with the San Francisco Chronicle, pens an essay for the paper on last month's discovery, which he says was prompted by his wife insisting he undertake a pandemic project to get rid of some of the files in their attic.

Among the letters from readers Epstein had collected over the years, he found a pair from a "TJ Kaczynski," written in 1979, 17 years before Ted John Kaczynski was identified by the FBI as the man whose mail bombs killed three and injured nearly two dozen. Kaczynski had written the "formal and polite" notes to Epstein in search of off-the-grid travel advice, based on a budget travel book on Latin America that Epstein had written. "I thought, 'It can't be him, it can't be the Unabomber,'" Epstein tells CNN.

"I'm looking for a refuge in South America, where the closest person is five miles away," Kaczynski wrote in the first letter, dated May 24, 1979. "You seem to know South America well." He mentioned he was looking for a plot of land in the "wilderness," for him and his brother (ostensibly the brother who eventually turned him in), and that he hoped to avoid tropical jungles and areas near Andean glaciers, Epstein notes in the Chronicle. "I can only theorize that Kaczynski wrote me because he knew that one day he would need to flee US law enforcement for a South American haven," Epstein writes.

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Epstein notes this letter was sent just two weeks after Kaczynski had left a mail bomb that injured a Northwestern University grad student. Kaczynski sent a handwritten follow-up thank-you letter to Epstein three months later. Epstein still is in disbelief he was contacted by the Unabomber, known as such "because universities—that's the U-N—and airlines—the A—were the early targets of his bombs," per Newsweek. "I was ... thankful I hadn't been rude to him," Epstein writes in the Chronicle, adding he doesn't remember what advice he gave Kaczynski. More on his stunning find here. (More Unabomber stories.)

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