[ty6853]

Most everyone agrees turning in Kaczynski was a good thing. And in the article it mentions he made peace with the fact it was a good thing.

The thing I think David had to contend with was not whether it was good or bad, but the impetus with which it was conducted. His wife hated Ted before any of this. You can almost see the rage in her eyes about him when you watch documentaries on the subject. She led him in every way in getting Ted tossed away (and I think knowing this victory for her would come at the cost of her husband)-- David would have left it in his subconscious and Ted would have been found later (probably after more victims) in some other way.

David had to contend with the fact that you did the right thing because your hateful wife nudged you to do it, and that intent seemed to be more like 'how do we get rid of Ted' than 'lets save people'. AFAIK he is still married, so this is the key bit left out of these articles that David can't write our say out loud and you just have to read it between the lines.

I don't know that there were any good solutions for him. Probably the only way that wouldn't have felt like betrayal would have been for him to go up to Montana and deal with the problem himself, man to man, without the bit of giving him up to the FBI behind his back. Whether the prison time from that would have been worse than living with a lifetime of guilt, I have no idea, a difficult decision no doubt.

[pmags]

This is an odd interpretation if the details cited in the NY Times articles are correct:

> When he informed Ted of his marriage plans, Ted, who had never met Ms. Patrik, fumed, and warned him, in what David called a “vicious” letter, that he was making the biggest mistake of his life. Ted then severed virtually all communication with him.

From this quote it seems like Ted Kaczynski had already cut off most communication with his brother w/out ever meeting the wife.

[ty6853]

Ted wrote Dave many times after that when he needed something. Like money. The last memoir I could find on that link indicated Dave's wife went out of her way to stop Dave from attempting to see him again before the arrest.

https://www.thetedkarchive.com/library/ted-kaczynski-david-k...

[watwut]

I love how you made the wife into the evil one ... despite the fact that if you are right, she was completely in the right and nudged him to do the unambiguously right thing.

Also, per article, Ted cut most contact off whe he found out the brother is marrying and they were living isolated life with little to no in person meetings ... so the idea that she somehow needed to get rid of an absent person ... sounds mostly like motivated reasoning.

[ty6853]

Get rid of doesn't just mean get the body away from their proximity. Ted wrote David letters about how much he disliked the woman and marriage. The wife and Ted hated each other by my assessment.

I don't think her obsession with matching up Ted to the Unabomber was driven by evil. It was driven by hate. Hateful people can do good things.

[watwut]

Or maybe it wad driven by realization he is likely the person killing people.

Considering it was Ted who had the provable track record of being the hateful one ...

[onlypassingthru]

Who knows? Maybe David's wife was the very first person to ever tell her spouse, "Your brother's an asshole."

/s

[potato3732842]

Any misgivings he has regardless of why he has them are surely compounded by the fact that Ted's written work aged like wine.

[ty6853]

I also doubt he knew the realities of supermax. I won't debate the merits of supermax for Ted but even by prison standards there is an extreme level of isolation that is particularly psychologically damaging.

I honestly would not know how to handle knowing a family member was there, regardless of the severity of their crime. For me it would be much worse than knowing they were executed by firing squad or some maximum security prison where they can play paper chess with their cell mate all day.

[JohnMakin]

Honestly, and I’d been reading this over the years - he seemed to have been thriving (in his own way). forgive the yahoo article:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/the-unabomber-s-not-so-lonely-pri...

guy was extreme end of the loner spectrum, probably into personality disorder range, and didnt mind solitude at all, the lack of freedom was probably what bothered him. he did maintain a ton of correspondence and probably ended up forming more relationships in a supermax than he ever had his entire previous life, by quite a bit.