The Icepick Surgeon

by Sam Kean

  Then he met Murray. Again, you might or might not buy the comparison to torture, but the most effective way to break detainees under interrogation is clear: you isolate them, you stress them, and you keep it up over time. The sixteen-year-old Kaczynski was already isolated when he arrived at Harvard, and things only got worse in the ghetto for grinds. Murray’s study then heaped unnecessary stress onto him, stress that the stubborn Kaczynski endured for three years. In fact, prolonged stress can cause permanent changes to the brain, atrophying some parts and putting others—like the circuits that process anger and fear—on a hair trigger. This doesn’t mean that we can pin the blame on Murray for Kaczynski’s murders, any more than we can pin the blame on the kids who wouldn’t play games with Teddy growing up. But adolescence is a formative time, and Murray’s unethical, years-long experiment could well have pushed an already fragile young man over the edge.

  With all this in mind, it’s instructive to compare Kaczynski to his younger brother. If anything, David was even more alienated than Ted as a young man. They both attended Ivy League schools (David went to Columbia) and then retreated to the wilderness to spurn society. In fact, David lived far more primitively than Ted ever did in his Montana cabin. At least Ted had walls and a proper roof. David simply dug a grave-shaped hole in the Texas desert and pulled a tin sheet over the top at night. Biblical hermits lived more luxuriously. Yet, despite feeling equally alienated from society, and despite growing up in the same home environment and sharing many of the same genes, David’s orchid survived—perhaps because he never endured something like the Murray experiment. After eight years, David finally quit the Texas desert and married his high-school crush. Even more telling, while Ted scorned traditional morality as a bourgeois tool of mind control, David had a strong enough moral compass to turn his brother in3 after reading the so-called Unabomber manifesto in a newspaper years later.

  To be sure, Kaczynski himself downplays the link between the Murray study and his crimes, a connection he sees as simplistic and sensationalistic. (He blames his parents for his troubles, which seems equally reductive.) But Kaczynski’s own words betray just how formative the experiment was. His now-famous manifesto focuses primarily on how modern technology degrades and debases the human spirit; its first line reads, “The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.” But he also takes repeated swipes at psychology and psychologists, mentioning them dozens of times. During his trial he told his lawyer, “I am bitterly opposed to the development of a science of the human mind.” He then wrote the judge, “I do not believe that science has any business probing the workings of the human mind.” Even back at Harvard, Kaczynski was already having trouble sleeping, and for years afterward he was wracked with nightmares about psychologists “trying to convince me that I was ‘sick’ or… trying to control my mind through psychological techniques.”

  Coming from anyone else, this would sound like tinfoil-hat paranoia. The CIA is invading my brain, man. But a psychologist with ties to the intelligence world really did experiment on Kaczynski, and really did try to break his mind.

  The Murray-Unabomber case is unusual in the annals of unethical science in that the victim ended up committing sins far more grievous than the perpetrator.

  There are few studies out there on geniuses who commit crimes, but one strong predictor of trouble is a mismatch in the brain between IQ and EF, the so-called executive function. Executive function is located primarily in the frontal lobes (the lobes that were removed in the chimpanzees Becky and Lucy). It helps us manage our impulses, make decisions, and impose self-control, among other things. As one psychologist put it, “IQ operates like the raw horsepower of a car engine, while EF… operates like the transmission, directing the power” toward useful ends. But if someone’s IQ greatly outstrips their EF, then you essentially have a drag-racer without a steering wheel: the car can easily careen out of control and send the owner flying off the path of acceptable behavior. What’s more, while geniuses typically commit crimes for the same basic reasons as the rest of us schlubs (greed, jealousy, etc.), their crimes are often more complex and require more sophisticated planning. Kaczynski spent years designing and testing his bombs, keeping meticulous encrypted notes4 on each “experiment.” He also took elaborate steps to conceal his tracks, like soaking every component in saltwater and soybean oil to remove fingerprints.

  Finally, criminal geniuses seem especially prone to nihilism—a rejection of conventional morality in the belief that life is meaningless. Kaczynski certainly subscribed to this idea, as his journal made clear. (For example, “Morality is simply one of the psychological tools by which society controls people’s behavior.”) Perhaps he would have come to this conclusion on his own, no matter what happened to him during his life; plenty of people do. At the same time, it might not be a coincidence that the hotshot lawyer in Murray’s study had been specifically coached to attack the students’ values and expose them as meaningless. If you want to make a nihilist, that’s a pretty good start.

  Like many lawbreakers, genius and otherwise, Kaczynski began with petty crimes. After moving to his cabin in Montana, and finding the area far less isolated than he hoped, he began destroying nearby logging equipment. He also chopped his way into a neighbor’s luxury cabin and trashed the place, then smashed the man’s motorcycle and snowmobiles for good measure. Kaczynski soon graduated to more serious offenses like shooting rifles at passing helicopters and stringing up wires to snag snowmobiles. Eventually he started building bombs and either mailing them to strangers or leaving them in well-trafficked public places. He didn’t quite pick his targets at random, but he didn’t put much thought into them, either. Nor did he delude himself that a few explosions would take down the whole “system” of “psychological controls” that he despised. He was simply angry and lashing out, hoping to kill.

  Sadly, he succeeded. In all, Kaczynski set off sixteen increasingly sophisticated bombs between 1978 and 1995, maiming several people and killing three. The FBI dubbed him the Unabomber because he targeted universities and airlines, and the manhunt for Kaczynski was the longest and most expensive case in FBI history, outstripping even the raging monster of a quest to find Harry Gold.

  Kaczynski took advantage of his notoriety to promote his theories about the corrosive effects of industrialization on the human spirit. He even promised to stop killing people if the New York Times, Washington Post, or Scientific American published his manifesto. (Oddly, Penthouse volunteered to publish it as well, but Kaczynski reserved the right to kill one last person if it appeared only there, given its less salubrious reputation.) The Post did publish the manifesto, but like a good nihilist, Kaczynski had no intention of keeping his promise. Just before his arrest, he was rasping bars of aluminum into powder for yet another bomb.

  Despite his unkempt hair and clothes, Kaczynski’s cabin was actually pretty tidy when the FBI raided it. Agents had been staking out the place for weeks, and on the morning of April 3, 1996, several of them began crawling through a dry creek bed toward it; others hid out in the surrounding woods. A local forest ranger whom Kaczynski knew then approached the cabin with two undercover agents, and pretended to be having an argument about the exact boundary of Kaczynski’s property. “Hey, Ted,” the ranger finally hollered. “Can you come out here and show us where it is?”

  Inside the Unabomber’s cabin in Montana. Contrary to media reports, it was fairly neat and tidy. (Courtesy of the FBI.)

  Kaczynski popped his head out. He was habitually wary, but said, “Sure. Just let me go back in and grab my jacket.”

  As soon as he turned his back, one of the undercover agents sprang, pouncing on Kaczynski and wrenching his wrists into handcuffs. The other agents then burst out of the woods, swarming the cabin and keeping their eyes peeled for booby traps and other dangers.

  To their amazement, the agents found that Kaczynski owned suits and ties and had dozens of classic works of literature on his shelves (S
hakespeare, Twain, Orwell, Dostoyevsky, etc.). Poignantly, he also had a copy of Henry Murray’s paper on the abusive interrogation of gifted young men. It ran just nine pages, and was the only thing Murray ever bothered publishing on the experiment. The study contained no profound conclusions, and no sense of regret or apology—Murray mostly talked about the subjects’ heart rates. In the end, the patrician Murray blithely forgot about the young men and the abuse he’d heaped on them. Kaczynski never could.

  After his capture, Kaczynski pleaded guilty to thirteen federal counts. In its illustrious history, Harvard has had just two alumni executed for capital crimes. The first was George Burroughs, for witchcraft, in 1692. The second was John White Webster from chapter four, for killing George Parkman in 1849. By pleading guilty and accepting a plea bargain, Theodore John Kaczynski narrowly avoided becoming the third.5

  In trying to explain Kaczynski, the media mostly focused on his life after Harvard. He ended up earning a Ph.D. and becoming a professor of mathematics at the University of California at Berkeley. This was late 1960s, a radical decade, and “Bezerkeley” was the most radical college in the country. Calls to violence and revolt were everywhere, and to armchair psychologists in the media the connection seemed obvious: the tumultuous atmosphere at Berkeley must have corrupted the young genius, and driven him to evil.

  By his own account, however, Kaczynski was already broken by the time he arrived in California. He in fact took an academic job mostly to save up money, so he could buy land somewhere and start enacting the fantasies of murder and revenge that had crystalized back East. That he’d ended up in Berkeley was nothing but a coincidence, and he barely noticed the mayhem around him. His real troubles traced back to his twisted childhood, and the hours of abuse he endured in a building at Harvard with a white whale emblazoned on the door. Not to mention the Cold War paranoia that convinced the CIA and its allied scientists that the suffering was worth the human cost.

  Still, as we’ve seen, science has enemies on both sides of the political aisle. In fact, while the Unabomber case revealed the danger of conservative bias run amok, our next case involved a small boy whose happiness, and ultimately life, were sacrificed to the far-left dogma of yet another rogue psychologist.

  Footnotes

  1 In case you’re wondering, there are methods out there for getting useful, reliable information during interrogations.

  In the rock-’em-sock-’em 1930s, cops would often coerce confessions by dunking suspects in water or dangling them out of windows. Eventually, these techniques were condemned as barbaric, and replaced by supposedly advanced psychological methods involving harsh lights, isolation, and the good cop/bad cop dynamic. Unfortunately, despite their scientific veneer, these new methods didn’t work very well and led to thousands of false confessions over the years. Equally bad, even when police officers collared the right suspect, their aggressive questioning often caused him to clam up and stop talking, which stymied investigations.

  Nowadays, the best interrogation methods focus less on seeking confessions and more on getting bad guys to incriminate themselves by talking too much. The thinking is that the more people blab, the more likely they are to contradict themselves or else spill details about their movements and alibis that detectives can check into and trip them up with. Cops can also use tricks like asking people to tell a story backward, or having them sketch an unrelated picture while going over their story, since doing so increases the “cognitive load” on them and makes it harder to keep their lies straight.

  Admittedly, these “soft” methods don’t satisfy our need for revenge—the sense that bad guys deserve rough treatment. But innocent people get arrested on false charges all the time. And if your goal isn’t to enact revenge as much to see bad guys actually convicted and locked away, then helping them relax and letting them blab until they screw up is far more effective.

  2 During high school Kaczynski actually helped make a bomb once, but at the time it didn’t register as a big deal. The whole thing wasn’t even his idea. He happened to have a classmate who was fascinated with bombs. Being a good chemistry student, Ted knew how to produce an explosion by mixing ammonia and iodine together; if you then touch the mixture—even with a feather—voilà, it’s a crude bomb. When the classmate heard this, he begged Ted to teach him how.

  Now, Ted probably shouldn’t have relayed this information. But he did so in a sad attempt to impress the other boy, a popular wrestler, and make a friend. It didn’t work. The bomb did, unfortunately, and when the boy deployed it during chemistry class one day, it blew out two windows and one girl temporarily lost her hearing. Thankfully, everyone else in the vicinity escaped unharmed. The school’s principal saw the incident for what it was—a knucklehead stunt—and suspended Kaczynski for a day, then forgot about the whole matter. Only decades later, in retrospect, did it seem ominous.

  3 To be accurate, it wasn’t David as much as his wife Linda who cracked the case. After reading the manifesto, Linda asked David if it were possible that Ted (whom she’d never met) might be the Unabomber, given their mutual contempt for industrial society. David rejected the suggestion at first, but eventually admitted the idea might hold water, based on several clues he couldn’t ignore.

  For instance, David noticed that some of the bombs had been detonated shortly after the Kaczynski family had sent Ted money. Ted also knew carpentry (several bombs had wooden components), and he’d lived in several cities where the bombs killed people. Finally, David recognized certain phrases in the manifesto that his brother used in letters (e.g., “cool-headed logicians”), as well as his brother’s idiosyncratic spelling (e.g., “analyse,” “wilfully”). Along those same lines, one of the FBI agents later noticed that both Kaczynski’s letters and the manifesto contained the phrase “can’t eat your cake and have it too,” rather than the more common “can’t have your cake and eat it too.” If you think about it, the second one is illogical, since you can indeed have your cake, wait a while, and then eat it. What’s logical is the first one—you cannot eat your cake and then have it. Ted had of course thought this through and insisted, to his doom, on using the correct version.

  4 Kaczynski’s encryption system was genius. It started with a list of numeric substitutions: 4 = THE, 18 = BUT, 1 = the present tense forms of TO BE, 2 = the past tense forms of TO BE, and so on. This list included individual letters, too, with 39 = A, 40 = B, et cetera. But he also introduced some twists. Both 62 and 63 equaled S, for instance, and 45, 46, and 47 all equaled E, to throw off any attempts to use letter-frequency counts in deciphering the text. He even used different letters for a voiced and unvoiced “TH,” and lumped all forms of ME, MY, and MINE together under one number. Even more devilishly, he intentionally misspelled words, included strings of nonsense sometimes, and swapped in German and Spanish words (he spoke both languages) whenever it suited him. All these ploys—and the addition of other encryption techniques—would have made the codes nearly impossible to decipher without supercomputers and dedicated effort.

  5 In 2012, Kaczynski sent a cheeky update to the Harvard alumni magazine for the 50th anniversary of his graduation. Incredibly, in a monumental editorial lapse, the magazine published it. He listed his occupation as “prisoner,” his address as a supermax prison in Colorado, and his “awards” as eight life sentences from the U.S. district court in California.

  11

  MALPRACTICE: SEX, POWER, AND MONEY

  For no reason at all, the nurse reached into the bassinet and, rather than Brian, plucked out his twin brother, Bruce. The eight-month-old Reimer twins from Winnipeg both had phimosis, a disorder that prevented their foreskins from retracting and interfered with peeing. In that surgery-first era, the mid-1960s, their doctor recommended circumcisions to clear the condition up. The Reimer parents obliged, and the morning after they dropped the twins off at the hospital, the nurse plopped Bruce down on the operating table.

  The pediatrician who normally performed circumcisions was off that da
y, so the duty fell to a general practitioner. He fit a bell-shaped metal instrument inside Bruce’s foreskin, to stretch it out, and used a metal clamp to hold the skin in place. Rather than a knife, he then reached for an electrocauterizing needle. It was a whiz of a device, the latest thing: it sent electric pulses through a needle tip to both cut and seal flesh simultaneously, minimizing scars and bleeding. Unfortunately, this second-string doctor was apparently ignorant about the danger of mixing electricity with metal.

  When he first touched the needle to Bruce’s foreskin, nothing happened, so he turned the current up. Nothing happened this time, either, so he cranked it up more. This time something happened. The electricity burned through the diaphanous foreskin and flooded the metal bell beneath. From there, the current enveloped the entire penis in a sheath of heat. The anesthesiologist on hand remembered hearing a sound “like steak being seared.” The room smelled like frying meat, too, and a plume of smoke leapt up from between Bruce’s legs. The GP yanked the needle back, but it was already too late. By the time the emergency urologist arrived, Bruce’s penis looked blanched and bloodless, like an overdone bit of pork. It felt strangely spongy, too.

  Bruce’s parents, Ron and Janet Reimer, soon got a call at home. The hospital wouldn’t tell them what the problem was, only that they needed to hurry. A freak April blizzard had hit Winnipeg, and it took them agonizingly long to navigate the streets. But there was nothing they could do anyway. By the next day, Janet remembered, Bruce’s entire penis had “blackened, and it was sort of like a little string.” It dried out and crumbled off in pieces over the next few days.

  The hospital never circumcised Brian, whose phimosis cleared up on its own. This was small comfort to Ron, twenty, and Janet, just nineteen, who suddenly had a mutilated baby and no idea what the hell to do.