Dead Ringer: The Story of Ted and David Kaczynski
When God asked ‘Where is Abel thy brother?’ Cain answered: “I know not, am I my brother’s keeper?”
They were “civic-minded” parents, according to the neighbors. One added that they “sacrificed everything for their children.” Theodore Sr. and Wanda Kaczynski were a working-class couple living in the gritty streets of 1950s Chicago. Their mission was to instill in their two sons the mantra that they could go as far as they wanted, and with hard work, they could achieve anything they dreamed.
It turned out to be eerily prophetic.
The older brother was born in 1942, and the younger sibling came along in 1949. Despite a seven-year difference, in brotherly terms, a lifetime of separation, they shared numerous similarities. Both of them were exceptional students from their early days. Ted was highly intelligent with an IQ measuring 167, placing the older Kaczynski sigling in the 99.9996th percentile. As a result, he skipped the sixth grade.
During this period, Ted became intensely interested in mathematics, spending hours studying and solving advanced problems. He started to hang out with a group of ‘nerds’ who were equally interested in science and mathematics, known as the “briefcase boys” for their habit of carrying briefcases to school. At the age of 16, Ted gained admission to Harvard. Ted was going places. David would have to settle for Columbia University. After Harvard, Ted found an assistant math professorship at Berkeley. David went into social work.
Despite astonishing differences, the brothers were close growing up and shared similar passions. For example, both were passionate about the rustic life, living in isolated cabins in remote rural areas. Their age difference and emotional troubles began to drive them apart, and they communicated less frequently once Ted moved off the grid to a cabin in Montana. Then there was a strange newspaper article.
When Ted Kaczynski published the Unabomber’s manifesto, David’s wife, Linda, recognized her brother-in-law’s writing style from the bizarre letters he wrote occasionally. She posed a chilling question to David one morning: Could Ted be the Unabomber?
As David delved deeper into the article, he became suspicious and contacted a linguist and criminal profiler. They confirmed the similarity. The Unabomber was Ted. According to the FBI, in 1978, he came on the public scene when he exploded his first primitive homemade bomb at a Chicago university. Over the next 17 years, he mailed or hand-delivered a series of increasingly sophisticated bombs that killed three Americans and injured nearly two dozen more. Along the way, he sowed fear and panic, even threatening to blow up airliners in flight.
David alerted the FBI, and the hunt for the Unabomber was over.
Good Brother, Bad Brother
In our work on the factors contributing to extraordinary lives, we were naturally led to the phenomenon of sibling differentiation. Despite similar backgrounds and genetics, siblings often take divergent paths, leading to vastly different outcomes.
Our initial take was to find out why one brother succeeds while another fails, bringing us to the desperate and tragic case of the Kaczynski brothers. Their stark differences amid trivial similarities made us question whether genetics is as powerful an effect as many researchers consider. That one brother inspired the incarceration of the other — echoing Cain’s answer in Genesis 4:8–9, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” only added to the mystery of their story.
A recent study confirmed, “Siblings who are 50% similar genetically and grow up within the same family, nevertheless differ markedly in personality and psychopathology, and most of these sibling differences cannot be explained by genetic factors. These findings from the field of behavioral genetics imply that within a family, habits and the environment of their early days can lead to significant sibling differences. Psychologists call this a “nonshared environment,” and they are crucial for understanding individual development.
This brought us to look into the influence of environment over genetics — and the experiential factors associated with it — on what the specialists called success propensity. Do they play a more significant role than genetics? A study conducted by researchers at Kings College, London, emphasized the dynamic outcomes of genetics mixed in with the environment during child development. It highlighted the importance of individual responses to the environment and the broader social context. We aren’t just who we are; when we are seems to be a louder message.
In another study at Penn State on sibling differentiation, researchers confirmed that environmental similarities outweighed genetics. The 720 sibling pairs were grouped by age difference (0–4 years). However, siblings one year apart were more similar to each other than siblings two years apart, suggesting that a single year could account for nonshared environmental influences. Note the median age difference between siblings is between 2 and 2.5 years. The implication is that your children’s siblings will likely be more different than similar.
Reflecting on Ted Kaczynski’s life, he attributed his problems to skipping the sixth grade; he previously socialized with peers and was a leader. After missing sixth grade, he was placed directly in seventh with older peers who bullied him. By his freshman year of high school, his father observed a melancholy in Ted that he had not noticed before.
“Ted was actually a really good big brother,” said his younger brother, David Kaczynski. “I can recount some instances where he showed unusual kindness to me. You can see that sparkle in his eye. He was in the present. But in his 20s and 30s, there’s a coldness showing that became deadly.”
The contrasting destinies of Ted and David, born into the same family and community, evoke a perplexing tale of divergent lives. To an outsider, they may appear to inhabit the same world, but their experiences are as distinct as if they were raised a thousand miles apart.
As the wise ancient philosopher Heraclitus once observed, “No man ever steps in the same river twice. For it’s not the same river, and he’s not the same man.”
