February 20, 2020 • 41 mins
What do you do when you suspect that your own brother is to blame for the seemingly random acts of violence sending shockwaves through the country? Do you keep it to yourself in order to protect him? Or do you turn him in, potentially saving the lives of hundreds of strangers, but putting him at risk of a death sentence? David Kacyznski talks about his impossible choice, and the unlikely friendship he forged in the wake of his brother’s destruction.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. It
was an impossible dilemma in the sense that we realized
that any decision we made could lead to somebody's death.
We'd have to go through the rest of our lives
knowing that someone had died because we had failed to act.
(00:23):
On the other hand, I had to ask myself, what
would it be like to go through the rest of
my life with my brother's blood in my hands. That's
David Kazinski, author of the book Every Last Tie, the
Story of the UNI Bomber and his family. David is
the younger brother of Ted Kazinski, a brilliant, troubled, reclusive
(00:47):
former mouth professor who began sending bombs through the mail,
in killing three people and injuring twenty three others. When
the FBI finally closed in on Ted kasins g after
a nationwide manhunt that spanned years, it was because they
received the ultimate tip the UNI Bomber's brother had turned
(01:09):
him in. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets,
the secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we
keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves.
(01:35):
There were four of us in our family Mom and dad. Uh.
Dad made sausages at his uncle's delly. Mom was a
stay at home mom, at least until I get to
high school. My older brother, Ted is seven and a
half years older, was you know, idolized him. He was
kind to me. UM. But in addition, he seemed to
(01:58):
exemplify the family's values, which focused on integrity education. Um.
He was very very smart, skipped two grades in school,
went to Harvard at the age of sixteen on a scholarship.
Is a Q was tested it I think a hundred
and sixty seven at one. So you know, he represented
(02:21):
everything that I wanted to be at that point in
my life. And I never doubted for a moment that
I was loved by any of my three family members.
And you know, I'm very very grateful for that. And
I have to say, you know, our our parents values.
There were there were two working class people, both of
(02:41):
whom had to drop out of school in high school
in order to support their families during the depression. I
had to go to work, and then they finished their
high school at night school. Sometime later. I think they
actually met in a book discussion club. So there was
this attraction to the life of mind um, a sort
(03:01):
of very powerful optimism, a belief that by developing your mind,
you've developed your spirit, you became someone who could really
contribute to the world. So it was part of it.
It wasn't only that I modeled myself and Ted. You know,
our family sort of had this framework of values that
(03:25):
it was around the life of the mind, the arts.
But even though David idealized and idolized Ted, there was
also a sense that there was another side to Ted
that had nothing to do with the families shared values
or academic achievement. There was a time a little bit
later when I asked my mom what's wrong with Teddy?
(03:50):
And she was a little taken aback. You know, what
do you mean, David, there's nothing with your brother? And
I said, well, he doesn't have any friends. Why is that?
Doesn't he like people and games? He did seem to
shy away from folks, you know, somebody would come over
unannounced and he would sort of leave the room quickly,
like he was upset that they arrived, a little frightened.
(04:14):
And it was then that Mom said that, you know,
Ted had had an experience as a child. He is,
at the age of nine months, he had gotten sick.
They took him to the hospital. Some kind of rash
had covered his body, apparently an allergic reaction, but they
couldn't diagnose it, and they kept him there for I
(04:35):
think well over a week, and our parents were only
allowed to visit during the regular visiting hours. Mom always
faulted the hospital for for that, and you know, she
felt that when they brought Teddy Holme from the hospital,
he was a very different child, at least for a while.
He didn't smile anymore, he didn't make eye contact. And
(05:00):
it was at that point that my mom had said
to me, Dave, whatever you do in your life, don't
ever abandon your brother, because that's what he fears the most.
And of course I love Teddy, I said, oh, I
love Teddy. I'd never abandoned Teddy. And I remember crying
thinking about the pain he had suffered this a little baby.
(05:22):
And I think there was another lesson that my mom
sort of wove into that sort of teachable moment, and
the lesson was that it takes some compassions empathy to
try to understand another human being. And how old were
you when she imparted this lesson? More or less would
think I'm not exactly sure, probably somewhere between seven and
(05:44):
nine years old, and when you said to your mom
what's wrong with Teddy? What? What was it beyond that
he didn't seem to have any friends? What prompted you
to say that? Do you think, Oh, I don't know
that I've been that question and it's an interesting one. Um.
I think there were times when Teddy just seemed like
(06:07):
kind of shut down, UM, like something was bothering him,
but he wouldn't express it. A strong sense of privacy,
an introversion that was unusual, I think, at least in
my experience, and I tended to be a fairly social person.
I mean, I had friends, you know, it was natural
(06:28):
for me to to be interested in people and too,
I want to interact with people, and with Teddy it
was quite different. So probably I was trying to explore
wire Teddy and I different in this way. Did you
share a room? We did for a while until I
was maybe six or seven years old, and then our father, Um,
(06:53):
we had an attic that was unfinished. We had moved
at from Chicago out to one of the suburbs when
I was about three years old, and my father finished
the attic and you know, a beautiful knotty Pine just
made it another story of the house, and then that
became Ted's room, so that he and I weren't together
(07:16):
in a small bedroom. You know. In some ways it
was wonderful for Teddy. On the other hand, it became
a very very convenient escape for him. So on those
occasions when he wanted to avoid company, he would just
walk up the stairs up to his attic. And you know,
I call it an attic. It wasn't like it was,
(07:36):
you know, some place of banishment. It was very very nice,
nice room up there. Ted goes to Harvard as a
very young freshman. During his first year, he's identified as
a candidate for a psychological study, an experiment that Ted
took part in for three years during his undergraduate career.
(07:57):
The study, titled a Multiform Assessment of Personality Development among
Gifted College Men, was masterminded by a famous psychologist named
Henry Murray and was meant to measure the effects of
trauma ungifted male students. But here's the thing. In order
to study the trauma, first they had to inflict it.
(08:21):
Students were berated, emotionally and psychologically, beaten down, humiliated, these
students chosen for their vulnerability and high degrees of social alienation,
were purposefully being traumatized and gas lit because they weren't
told the purpose of the experiment, so they had no
idea why they were being treated. So sadistically, it's a
(08:44):
study that would never pass MUSTER today. At least I
hope that you know there are institutional review boards at
colleges and universities. I think that would look at a
study like this and say, no way, this is unethical
for various reasons. Um In fact, even if you go
back for the time of the study, there was the
Nuremberg Code that came out of World War Two, and
(09:04):
part of the code was that people should not be
harmed or deceived, and this study did both. To my brother.
He was asked by his defense attorneys, why didn't you
drop out? Why didn't you quit? And he said, well,
I wanted to prove I could take it, that I
couldn't be broken. And in some ways this is so
(09:26):
much like Ted, because he has this kind of indomitable will,
this stubbornness, and yet what occurs to me is that
in some ways he may have been broken without realizing
it at the very least he was hardened. We didn't
know about it. Actually, Mom had had to sign a
release because Ted was only seventeen when he went into
(09:49):
this study, and so he needed parental permission. And Mom
is thinking, oh, you know Ted, he has some social
adjustment and issues. Maybe these nice psychologists could help him.
Oh my gosh, it was just the opposite. I think
there's a theme in a way running throughout this story
(10:11):
of misplaced trust and institutions in some way. You know,
the hospital at that time isolating a baby, I'm sure
thinking that they were doing the right thing, but you know,
with repercussions. And then Harvard itself, the idea that you know,
Ted would go to Harvard and find many other very
high i Q individuals just like him, and it would
(10:35):
be somehow a soft and gentle place, which is a
more accepting place, a more accepting place, right, And then
these psychologists under Harvard auspices who run a study like that, well,
surely that's going to be a good thing. Ted graduates
and continues his academic rise. David goes off to college himself,
(10:55):
and even though they're very different young men, they have
a really tight relationship for a pure of time, they
both love the woods and far At preserves, and they
go on joint camping trips. But then the summer after
David's junior year, Ted decides that he's going to quit
his job as an assistant professor at UC Berkeley. He
wrote a letter to our parents saying that he's decided
(11:19):
to quit that you know, he did not find mathematics fulfilling.
That in addition to that, he'd come to this conclusion
that technology that most people celebrate kind of uncritically is
actually has many, many negative consequences. And he did not
like the mathematics supported technology. But also on a personal level,
(11:43):
he wanted to get as far away from it as
is he good, and he wanted to go in and
live in the woods someplace. And I remember at that time,
I don't know if you're old enough to remember the sixties,
but it wasn't that uncommon, you know. I think there
were time magazine had say a cover stories about people
dropping out, quote dropping out or going back to nature.
(12:07):
You know, there was a little bit of a movement
to countercultural movement that Ted, you know, wasn't that he
wasn't personally aligned with it, but we could understand where
he was going, and remember hearing what he was planning
to do, and I thought, oh, this is fantastic. Wow.
You know, I've always admired my brother, but this is
(12:28):
even better. I mean, how many people um get to
do what they really want to do in life instead
of what other people expect them to do, And how
many people have the courage to follow their own deepest
instincts instead of sort of conforming with the social expectation.
So I thought it was wonderful. Our parents, you know,
(12:50):
were accepting. They didn't try to talk Chet out of
what he was doing. But I remember Mom saying to
me at one point, you know, they've just I don't
really think this has a lot to do with technology.
I'm afraid that the problem is that Ted doesn't doesn't
really know how to relate to people, and he's running
(13:11):
away from a society that he doesn't know how to
fit into. It gave me pause. That summer Ted said
he was going to go look for land up in
Canada and Alaska, and did I want to join him
in that search? And so we spent a couple of
months together camping in British Columbia. Mostly we've got up
(13:34):
to the Yukon. There was definitely a brotherly closeness. I
remember we took one long hike and I don't know
if it was something I ate or if it was
altitude or something, and I got a very upset stomach,
and we were like four or five miles from the
car and Ted ran back to the car to get
(13:56):
some tept this fault that we had there, and ran
came all the way back to help me so that
I could feel better. You know, there was a kindness
in him towards me that I always sensed, but there
were also the times when he was very shut down
and I didn't know what to make of it. I
remember sitting around the campfire one morning and he just
(14:19):
looking into the flames and he stopped talking, and I
asked him a few questions and he just didn't respond.
It was like a stone there and that. So I
went off and took a walk, and by the time
I got back, he was back to talking again, and
I asked him, you know, what was that about. What
Why wouldn't you answer me? Says So I was just
just deeply thinking. So I accepted it. But there were
(14:42):
a couple of times when he was in a state
that Gosh seemed close to what you would call catatonicum,
and I sometimes wondered, if, you know, if he was
coming to terms with the idea that you know, maybe
Mom was right, maybe the really wasn't the answer just
(15:02):
running away. Both David and Ted are drawn as young
men to living solitary lives, but that, it seems, is
where the similarity between them ends. While Ted seems to
be pushing further and further away into a world that
appears dangerously hermetic, with nothing but the contents of his
(15:23):
own mind for company. David's solitary time has more of
a feeling of a pilgrimage. Ted's in Montana, David's in
a small cabin in the Texas Desert. The brothers are
both geographically, psychologically, and spiritually on very different paths. Ted
is becoming angrier, more and more hostile. He's written a
(15:45):
series of terrible letters to their parents, blaming them for everything,
cutting off all contact. David uses his time to arrive
at a deep sense of self knowledge, and eventually he
comes to realize that he's in love with his old
friend from childhood, Linda, and that he wants to marry her,
(16:05):
and so David writes to Ted to tell him the
good news. At one point I told him that I
was going to be leaving the desert. I said, be
happy for me. I finally found the person I want
to get married to. It's it's Linda Patrick, this girl
I've known since elementary school. And he just wrote this
(16:27):
very cruel letter. He had never met Linda, and yet
he was saying, it's obvious, just David, just from your letter,
that she's a horrible person. You know she's going to
take advantage of you. But no, you never listened to
my advice. So um, you know, it's just too painful
for me to be your brother anymore. So don't don't
(16:48):
contact me. I don't want to have anything to do
with you anymore. It was just a shock and surprised
to me, although I had some precedent with his sort
of out of the blue abuse of letters to our parents,
angry letters to our parents. And also puts you in
a situation where by choosing to love another person, you're
(17:09):
losing this person who you love deeply. Yeah, and it's
you know, it's kind of like was Ted thinking that
love is finite. You know that it's like a piece
of pie, and if Linda gets a piece, he has
less um. Now love isn't like that, it's it can
expand um amazingly. You know, I thought maybe he just
(17:32):
didn't understand that, maybe he felt abandoned in some way,
and again my mother's request but I never abandoned came
to mind at that point. But I was also pretty angry.
I have to admit thinking, how dare he? You know,
our parents were just I think, lovely parents and kind
to him and generous to him, and he hurt them
(17:55):
terribly and now he's lashing out as another person. But
I love as it turned out from his diaries later. Ever,
of course, nobody ever read his diaries until after he
was arrested and the defense team and asked me to
read through his diaries. It was like thirty thousand pages
(18:15):
of diaries. It was unbelievable, um, But it was like
opening a window into a tortured soul because I realized
he had this tremendous longing for human contact, for companionship,
would have liked nothing better than to be married and
to have a family. We'll be back in a moment
(18:38):
with more family secrets. David and Linda Settle into married life.
David works as an assistant director of a shelter for
runaway and homeless youth. Linda is a professor of philosophy
at a local college. He and Ted are completely estranged.
(19:00):
David's never even heard of the unibomber. Remember these are
pre internet days, where news stories are run the old
fashioned way, the literal actual newspaper, or, if the story
is big enough, the nightly broadcast news. David and Linda
are living in Schenectady, New York, and it's before the
unibomber story makes headlines near them after a mail bomb
(19:23):
kills New Jersey advertising executive Thomas Masser. At this time,
the unibomber contacts several national newspapers and asks them to
publish what he refers to as his manifesto. He says
that if his manifesto is published, the bombs will stop.
So then Linda, who's never met your brother, has this
(19:48):
kind of lightning Boltova thought, And as to you, I
think that Ted maybe the unibomber, and I was very
moved by the way at the two of you navigated
that whole period of time after the manifesto was published,
(20:10):
because your your initial response was that that was completely
out of the question, of which, of course it was.
Of course it was. But then you read the manifesto
and somewhere within you a tiny little sliver of doubt
creeps in. There's a phrase that I came across when
I was writing my most recent book. It's a psychoanalytic phrase,
(20:32):
and it's the unthought known. What we what we know,
but it's a live wire. We cannot it's way too
dangerous to think. And so you're somewhere in the territory
of the unthought known, and you and Linda are parsing,
you know, the manifesto, looking for clues, and at the
same time it's like played out against this backdrop of
(20:56):
this profound impossible choice. When you finally do reach the
sense that it's possible, you know that it's possible that
Ted is the UNI bomber. I mean, can you talk
a little bit about that. Of course I had talked
a bit about my brother a lot. Perhaps Linda had
(21:17):
many questions why he didn't come to the wedding. I
hadn't showed her the letter that Ted had written to
me because it was so awful. But you know, I
remember some years earlier it was shortly after our father died.
Ted reconnected with my mom briefly. Um she invited him
(21:38):
to explain a little bit about why he had been
so angry before, and then he wrote a letter that
just sailed off back into that anger. And Mom sent
me the letter. I showed it to Linda. Remember this
is years before David or Linda have ever heard the
term unibomber. Linda's looking at this letter. This is in
(22:01):
so it's shortly after we're married. She's looking at this
letter and she says, she looks up at me and
she says, Dave, you know your brother is sick, don't you.
I mean he's mentally ill. And I said, no, no no, no, no,
he's really really smart. He's got a you know, a
genius like you, and this is the way he thinks.
(22:22):
And Linda said, David, look at this passage. You know,
people who are healthy in their minds don't think like this.
She actually persuaded me at that point to bring some
of my brother's letters to a psychiatrist who we knew socially,
and his viewpoint was that yes was sick. He said
(22:42):
he couldn't make a diagnosis based on some letters, but
possibly it was schizophrenia, which ends up being because eventual diagnosis.
So now we're in the mid nineties, you and a
bomber has been at it for you. Between ninety he
(23:03):
placed or mailed sixteen bombs that killed three people and
injured twenty three others. Linda reads his manifesto and she's
able to have the clarity of thought that this letter
and the letter she read and had analyzed by the
psychiatrist years earlier, may well have been written by the
same person. Yeah, I mean, it was an impossible dilemma
(23:27):
in the sense that we realized that any decision we
made could lead to somebody's death, and my brother was
the un obamber. Of course, we didn't know at this
point that if it turned out he was and another
person was killed, we'd have to go through the rest
of our lives knowing that someone had died because we
had failed to act. On the other hand, at this
(23:51):
point in time, the un obamber was like public enemy
number one, and if he was sentenced to death and executed,
I had to ask myself, what would it be like
to go through the rest of my life with my
brother's blood in my hands. You know, Ultimately we realized
there was one thing we could control. We could save
(24:14):
the next person's life. We could set the violence, and
then maybe, since you know, we had some evidence, we'd
already gone to a psychiatrist, maybe we could convince the
Justice Department that Ted was mentally ill and that there
was reason to mitigate the sentence of death, and maybe
he could get a prison sentence. Sad anyway, that was
(24:35):
the hope. I'm struck again and again by the care
and thoughtfulness David and Linda put into their impossible decision.
They want to be certain, or at least as certain
as possible. Linda's oldest friend is a private detective, and
she submits one of Ted's letters anonymously to an expert
in forensic analysis of language. The expert comes back at
(25:01):
that the author of a letter and the author of
the manifesto are one and the same person. Her father
was gone at this point, but Mom was still alive,
and we had another choice to make. Do we do
involved Mom and this, Do we tell her what's going on?
Do we ask her advice? Certainly she was a stakeholder
(25:22):
in this thing, But you know, my sense at the
time was, oh my god, I just can't this could
kill mom, And what if Ted's innocent? You know that
her paying her sleeplessness would be for nothing. Anyway. I
don't know if that was the right decision, but we
decided to go forward without telling them. But then ultimately,
(25:44):
when it turns out that it is Ted and that's
been confirmed and it's about to be public, you you
go to your mom and she reacts really remarkably right right.
I mean, it's probably my defining memory of my mother.
I mean, of all the memories I have of her,
(26:05):
but the moment that I told her that I suspected
Ted and that I had gone to the authorities, she
looked at me for a moment like she just couldn't
believe what she was hearing. And then she, you know,
she got up and came up to me and put
her arms around my She was very short woman, like
(26:26):
five ft tall and about six ft tall, and so
she had to kind of pull me down and put
a kiss on my cheek, and then she said, David,
I can't imagine what you've been struggling with. But then
she said the thing that I most needed to hear.
She said, David, I know that you loved Ted. I
know that you wouldn't have done this unless you truly
(26:49):
felt that you had to, And that was that was
the greatest relief I could have experienced at that moment.
It was just amazing, and in some sense too, it
exemplified the family values. The values were raised with to
do the right thing. So David and Linda do the
(27:11):
right thing. They are promised they'll be treated as confidential informants,
that their names not be revealed publicly, But then the
opposite happens. Their suburban home is surrounded by reporters and
camera crews. Their names and faces are plastered everywhere. Someone
in the huge chain of people, who I guess had
(27:34):
knowledge of this, made a mistake. At this point, they
had investigators planted in the woods around my brother's cap
and apparently, from what I understand, one of them revealed
things we should not have revealed to a person in
the media. We were, in a sense barricaded in our house.
At one point, there was this reporter who got up
(27:55):
on a little ladder and tried to film something inside
our house through one of our windows, and and I
remember Linda putting a blanket over all the lower four
windows to block the media's few of us, and you know,
people were asking themselves questions like what kind of a
(28:15):
family would produce the univalm or what kind of a
brother would turn in his own brother. But there was
one of the late night comedians, I think I didn't
see this myself. I guess he thought it was being funny,
but he says, yeah, I think of this um in
one family. You've got the un Obama and the Unite snitch. Yeah, man,
(28:38):
I thought that was called. When the authority surrounded and
then swarmed Ted's cabin in the woods, any lingering doubts
that David and Linda might have harbored about whether turning
him in was indeed the right thing, we're starkly addressed.
Among the incriminating evidence found was another live bomb beneath
(29:02):
Ted's bed, wrapped up, ready to be mailed to someone.
But though one very hard part of this story is over,
Ted is a UNI bomber, he's now been arrested and
can cause no more harm, another new, very hard part
of this story has yet to unfold, a hard part
that eventually becomes a beautiful part. David and Linda begin
(29:27):
reaching out to Ted's victims, so does David's mom for
a family who has always been set on trying to
do the right thing, the ethical thing. It seems the
next logical step, if anything here can be called logical.
One of these victims is a man named Gary Wright.
One February morning, Gary Wright pulled into the parking lot
(29:51):
of a computer company he owned in Salt Lake City.
A piece of lumber appeared to be in his way,
and when he went to move it, a homemade bomb
blew up, grievously, injuring him. He went through three surgeries,
spent three years in and out of casts, and had
two hundred pieces of shrapnel removed. It was years before
(30:11):
that bomb was connected to the unit bomber. I gave
him a call and, UM, you know, my heart skin
of in my throat, and at this point I'm trying
to think what am I going to say, and don't
want it to be too rehearsed. I wanted to be natural.
And then I get this voice that says, you have
reached the right house at the wrong time, please leave
(30:34):
the enough So I wasn't prepared for that, but I awkwardly,
you know, said you know my name is David Kazinski.
I think you know who I am, and I would
like to talk to you. If you're open to that,
I'll try calling that. And then a few days later
I called back and again I didn't didn't get Gary directly.
(30:55):
I think it was his daughter and I heard her say, Dad,
you know, some of these un a line for you,
And then Gary came up. Though most of Ted's victims
and their families wanted nothing to do with anyone named Kazynski,
Gary Wright had a very different response. I wanted to
understand what was going through Gary's head, how he was
(31:16):
able to afford a sense of compassion for the brother
of the man who nearly killed him. I've asked Gary
Wright to join this conversation now here on family secrets.
It was really kind of I guess for both of us,
uh nervous dance if you will, in the beginning, But
I think I quickly got over it in that I
(31:37):
had had quite a bit of time to process, um,
what I've been through, whereas David and his family had
much less time. So um, when we first began to speak,
you know, Dave called and said, you know, I want
to apologize on behalf of my family, um for what
had happened to you and you know, we're really sorry.
And I just told him, I said, look, David, everybody
(31:59):
has someone in their family they probably want to apologize for.
And I know my family probably wants to apologize for
me on a lot of fronts, maybe not at the
same level, but um, you can't carry it up the
rest of your life. And we went back and forth
a little bit and kind of chatted briefly, but I
did let him know. I said, look, sometimes you might
(32:19):
need to speak with someone outside of family, close friends
or whatever. Um, just even if it's the screaming get
something off your chest. And I said, feel free to
call me anytime. I mean Gary's invitation to talk at
any time, I mean it was like wow. And believe me,
he was incredibly helpful. Um. That's just the notion that,
(32:44):
you know, the people affected in different ways could have
something in common that we could not be divided by
our relationship to Ted. Gary was Ted's victim, as Ted's brother,
that if we could build a bridge across this chasms
(33:05):
abyss of human suffering, then there was hope. And I
really felt that deep in my heart. The first time
that David and Gary actually meet, David is driving across
country After Ted enters an insanity plea in court in Sacramento, California,
the plea that will ultimately spare him the death penalty,
(33:28):
David realizes that the drive will take him right through
Salt Lake City, where Gary lives, and with that first
meeting begins an important friendship that David describes in his
book as being like virtual blood brothers. Our bond forged
through violence is as powerful and deep as any other.
He writes, nothing can compensate me for losing Ted, but
(33:51):
I find a poetic balance in having gained a new
brother in Gary. Our choices end up reshaping the universe,
at least the universe we know. I'm so struck by
this beautiful idea that our choices end up reshaping the universe.
We know that really could be the model for this podcast.
(34:13):
I think something that's very important when you take one
of these risks to reach out to the what people
think of is the other side, is is to do
so without a lot of expectations, Like I couldn't say
I want this from Gary, I want X, I want Y.
I guess with openness comes some vulnerability, but you have
(34:34):
to just be open, I think, and drop the expectations. David,
you were describing what you and Linda were afraid of
when the news broken. Your house is surrounding reporters are
trying to, like, you know, crawl in through every cravass
in your house, and that you know, it seems from
what I've read and watched that your friendship in both
(34:57):
directions has been I know I hesitate to you this word,
but you know, a healing one. Would you characterize it
that way? From my aspect? And I'm definitely one of
the things I think that seems to be missing or
has been pushed off to the side these days, just
in regular day life is empathy and being able to
(35:19):
visualize yourself in someone else's shoes. There's so much of
the inwardly focused or you know, me focused stuff out
there that I mean, there's just not that time taken
to look at what would this be if it were me?
And I think in my case, I feel like the
(35:40):
ability to be empathetic with what I had seen David
and his family go through UM and being open genuinely
allowed for us to be able to have conversations and
believe me, we've had crazy conversations, but it's really cathartic
in a way, both on my end and I won't
speak for David, but it's cathartic in that Number One,
(36:04):
you realize there's a great human being on the other
side of a divide, right um, the event doesn't describe
an entire family, even though some families are completely stigmatized
by an event that they had no control over. So
you realize the human on the other side and the values,
(36:25):
and you you get the opportunity to dig into what
really lies behind a family. And when you do that,
that's when the opportunity for friendship comes into play. And
friendship in my case, you know, I count maybe on
two hands who I call friends, and David is one
of those. Right If I called him up and said, hey, Dave,
(36:48):
I need a B C or D if it was
within his power, he would do it. And if I
needed him there and he could do it, he would
be there. I'm thinking a little bit about, you know,
the notion of rust, and it's been a bit of
a theme of our conversation from the beginning, and where
is that balance between you know, sort of trust and
(37:09):
self protection. I think if I'm going to err, I
probably want to err on the side of trust. David
and Garry's friendship deepened into the two men doing healing
work together, appearing at speaking engagements to spread their message
of trust, healing and forgiveness. David and I have. He's
(37:33):
been really gracious to invite me to a lot of
events um to speak, but one of the things that
has always stuck in my head from day one, the
very first time we were ever asked to speak. I
can still remember. My thought process was, if I can
just shorten the amount of time that it takes a
person to heal, and I'll do this forever. It could
(37:54):
be a room of five hundred, but if one person
goes away and says, wow, you made me think differently,
or I can incorporate some of what you've been through
into my own personal space and developed my own path forward,
that was pretty much my motivating factor. I feel sometimes
I'm just a human experiment on myself, on my own
(38:15):
guinea pig, but happy to share the results. Gary describes
picking up the phone and taking David's call as probably
one of the top five decisions he's ever made in
his life. Remember when I said earlier that something beautiful
would come out of all this violence, pain, and horror.
Just think what would have been lost if Gary or David,
(38:38):
either one or both of them had shut down, Had
either man allowed himself to be made smaller rather than
larger by the circumstances he found himself in, then the
ripple effect of the peace and healing each of them
together and separately has brought into the world would never
have happened. You know, we we live in a culture,
(39:00):
be in a species that has practiced a lot of violence.
And I think, you know, violence looks powerful because you
can impose on somebody else something that you know they
can't change, and it may be irreversible. Violence has this
illusion of power. But I think one thing that I
(39:21):
feel I've truly learned is that violence is not powerful.
It's it's weak. It it is only destructive. It only
makes the world worse. Love doesn't look so powerful. I mean,
it's works in more subtle ways. It's results are not
(39:42):
immediate often. But I think I've known through my parents,
through Linda, through Gary, through others, so many others, that
love is by far the more powerful force in this world.
And the more we recognize that love is powerful and
violence as week um, the better chance we'll have to
(40:06):
make this world a better place. Many thanks to David
Kazinski and Gary Wright for speaking with me today. David
is the author of Every Last Tie, the story of
(40:28):
the UNI Bomber and his family, and Gary is an
activist and speaker. Find out more about the work Gary's
doing at g B Right dot com. Family Secrets is
an I Heart Media production. Dylan Fagan is the supervising producer.
Julie Douglas and beth Ann Macalouso are the executive producers.
(40:49):
If you have a family secret you'd like to share,
get in touch with us at listener mail at Family
Secrets podcast dot com. You can also find us on
Instagram at day any Writer, Facebook at Family Secrets Pod,
and Twitter at fami Secrets Pod. For more about my
book Inheritance, visit Danny Shapiro dot com. For more podcasts.
(41:24):
For my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. It
was an impossible dilemma in the sense that we realized
that any decision we made could lead to somebody's death.
We'd have to go through the rest of our lives
knowing that someone had died because we had failed to act.
(00:23):
On the other hand, I had to ask myself, what
would it be like to go through the rest of
my life with my brother's blood in my hands. That's
David Kazinski, author of the book Every Last Tie, the
Story of the UNI Bomber and his family. David is
the younger brother of Ted Kazinski, a brilliant, troubled, reclusive
(00:47):
former mouth professor who began sending bombs through the mail,
in killing three people and injuring twenty three others. When
the FBI finally closed in on Ted kasins g after
a nationwide manhunt that spanned years, it was because they
received the ultimate tip the UNI Bomber's brother had turned
(01:09):
him in. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets,
the secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we
keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves.
(01:35):
There were four of us in our family Mom and dad. Uh.
Dad made sausages at his uncle's delly. Mom was a
stay at home mom, at least until I get to
high school. My older brother, Ted is seven and a
half years older, was you know, idolized him. He was
kind to me. UM. But in addition, he seemed to
(01:58):
exemplify the family's values, which focused on integrity education. Um.
He was very very smart, skipped two grades in school,
went to Harvard at the age of sixteen on a scholarship.
Is a Q was tested it I think a hundred
and sixty seven at one. So you know, he represented
(02:21):
everything that I wanted to be at that point in
my life. And I never doubted for a moment that
I was loved by any of my three family members.
And you know, I'm very very grateful for that. And
I have to say, you know, our our parents values.
There were there were two working class people, both of
(02:41):
whom had to drop out of school in high school
in order to support their families during the depression. I
had to go to work, and then they finished their
high school at night school. Sometime later. I think they
actually met in a book discussion club. So there was
this attraction to the life of mind um, a sort
(03:01):
of very powerful optimism, a belief that by developing your mind,
you've developed your spirit, you became someone who could really
contribute to the world. So it was part of it.
It wasn't only that I modeled myself and Ted. You know,
our family sort of had this framework of values that
(03:25):
it was around the life of the mind, the arts.
But even though David idealized and idolized Ted, there was
also a sense that there was another side to Ted
that had nothing to do with the families shared values
or academic achievement. There was a time a little bit
later when I asked my mom what's wrong with Teddy?
(03:50):
And she was a little taken aback. You know, what
do you mean, David, there's nothing with your brother? And
I said, well, he doesn't have any friends. Why is that?
Doesn't he like people and games? He did seem to
shy away from folks, you know, somebody would come over
unannounced and he would sort of leave the room quickly,
like he was upset that they arrived, a little frightened.
(04:14):
And it was then that Mom said that, you know,
Ted had had an experience as a child. He is,
at the age of nine months, he had gotten sick.
They took him to the hospital. Some kind of rash
had covered his body, apparently an allergic reaction, but they
couldn't diagnose it, and they kept him there for I
(04:35):
think well over a week, and our parents were only
allowed to visit during the regular visiting hours. Mom always
faulted the hospital for for that, and you know, she
felt that when they brought Teddy Holme from the hospital,
he was a very different child, at least for a while.
He didn't smile anymore, he didn't make eye contact. And
(05:00):
it was at that point that my mom had said
to me, Dave, whatever you do in your life, don't
ever abandon your brother, because that's what he fears the most.
And of course I love Teddy, I said, oh, I
love Teddy. I'd never abandoned Teddy. And I remember crying
thinking about the pain he had suffered this a little baby.
(05:22):
And I think there was another lesson that my mom
sort of wove into that sort of teachable moment, and
the lesson was that it takes some compassions empathy to
try to understand another human being. And how old were
you when she imparted this lesson? More or less would
think I'm not exactly sure, probably somewhere between seven and
(05:44):
nine years old, and when you said to your mom
what's wrong with Teddy? What? What was it beyond that
he didn't seem to have any friends? What prompted you
to say that? Do you think, Oh, I don't know
that I've been that question and it's an interesting one. Um.
I think there were times when Teddy just seemed like
(06:07):
kind of shut down, UM, like something was bothering him,
but he wouldn't express it. A strong sense of privacy,
an introversion that was unusual, I think, at least in
my experience, and I tended to be a fairly social person.
I mean, I had friends, you know, it was natural
(06:28):
for me to to be interested in people and too,
I want to interact with people, and with Teddy it
was quite different. So probably I was trying to explore
wire Teddy and I different in this way. Did you
share a room? We did for a while until I
was maybe six or seven years old, and then our father, Um,
(06:53):
we had an attic that was unfinished. We had moved
at from Chicago out to one of the suburbs when
I was about three years old, and my father finished
the attic and you know, a beautiful knotty Pine just
made it another story of the house, and then that
became Ted's room, so that he and I weren't together
(07:16):
in a small bedroom. You know. In some ways it
was wonderful for Teddy. On the other hand, it became
a very very convenient escape for him. So on those
occasions when he wanted to avoid company, he would just
walk up the stairs up to his attic. And you know,
I call it an attic. It wasn't like it was,
(07:36):
you know, some place of banishment. It was very very nice,
nice room up there. Ted goes to Harvard as a
very young freshman. During his first year, he's identified as
a candidate for a psychological study, an experiment that Ted
took part in for three years during his undergraduate career.
(07:57):
The study, titled a Multiform Assessment of Personality Development among
Gifted College Men, was masterminded by a famous psychologist named
Henry Murray and was meant to measure the effects of
trauma ungifted male students. But here's the thing. In order
to study the trauma, first they had to inflict it.
(08:21):
Students were berated, emotionally and psychologically, beaten down, humiliated, these
students chosen for their vulnerability and high degrees of social alienation,
were purposefully being traumatized and gas lit because they weren't
told the purpose of the experiment, so they had no
idea why they were being treated. So sadistically, it's a
(08:44):
study that would never pass MUSTER today. At least I
hope that you know there are institutional review boards at
colleges and universities. I think that would look at a
study like this and say, no way, this is unethical
for various reasons. Um In fact, even if you go
back for the time of the study, there was the
Nuremberg Code that came out of World War Two, and
(09:04):
part of the code was that people should not be
harmed or deceived, and this study did both. To my brother.
He was asked by his defense attorneys, why didn't you
drop out? Why didn't you quit? And he said, well,
I wanted to prove I could take it, that I
couldn't be broken. And in some ways this is so
(09:26):
much like Ted, because he has this kind of indomitable will,
this stubbornness, and yet what occurs to me is that
in some ways he may have been broken without realizing
it at the very least he was hardened. We didn't
know about it. Actually, Mom had had to sign a
release because Ted was only seventeen when he went into
(09:49):
this study, and so he needed parental permission. And Mom
is thinking, oh, you know Ted, he has some social
adjustment and issues. Maybe these nice psychologists could help him.
Oh my gosh, it was just the opposite. I think
there's a theme in a way running throughout this story
(10:11):
of misplaced trust and institutions in some way. You know,
the hospital at that time isolating a baby, I'm sure
thinking that they were doing the right thing, but you know,
with repercussions. And then Harvard itself, the idea that you know,
Ted would go to Harvard and find many other very
high i Q individuals just like him, and it would
(10:35):
be somehow a soft and gentle place, which is a
more accepting place, a more accepting place, right, And then
these psychologists under Harvard auspices who run a study like that, well,
surely that's going to be a good thing. Ted graduates
and continues his academic rise. David goes off to college himself,
(10:55):
and even though they're very different young men, they have
a really tight relationship for a pure of time, they
both love the woods and far At preserves, and they
go on joint camping trips. But then the summer after
David's junior year, Ted decides that he's going to quit
his job as an assistant professor at UC Berkeley. He
wrote a letter to our parents saying that he's decided
(11:19):
to quit that you know, he did not find mathematics fulfilling.
That in addition to that, he'd come to this conclusion
that technology that most people celebrate kind of uncritically is
actually has many, many negative consequences. And he did not
like the mathematics supported technology. But also on a personal level,
(11:43):
he wanted to get as far away from it as
is he good, and he wanted to go in and
live in the woods someplace. And I remember at that time,
I don't know if you're old enough to remember the sixties,
but it wasn't that uncommon, you know. I think there
were time magazine had say a cover stories about people
dropping out, quote dropping out or going back to nature.
(12:07):
You know, there was a little bit of a movement
to countercultural movement that Ted, you know, wasn't that he
wasn't personally aligned with it, but we could understand where
he was going, and remember hearing what he was planning
to do, and I thought, oh, this is fantastic. Wow.
You know, I've always admired my brother, but this is
(12:28):
even better. I mean, how many people um get to
do what they really want to do in life instead
of what other people expect them to do, And how
many people have the courage to follow their own deepest
instincts instead of sort of conforming with the social expectation.
So I thought it was wonderful. Our parents, you know,
(12:50):
were accepting. They didn't try to talk Chet out of
what he was doing. But I remember Mom saying to
me at one point, you know, they've just I don't
really think this has a lot to do with technology.
I'm afraid that the problem is that Ted doesn't doesn't
really know how to relate to people, and he's running
(13:11):
away from a society that he doesn't know how to
fit into. It gave me pause. That summer Ted said
he was going to go look for land up in
Canada and Alaska, and did I want to join him
in that search? And so we spent a couple of
months together camping in British Columbia. Mostly we've got up
(13:34):
to the Yukon. There was definitely a brotherly closeness. I
remember we took one long hike and I don't know
if it was something I ate or if it was
altitude or something, and I got a very upset stomach,
and we were like four or five miles from the
car and Ted ran back to the car to get
(13:56):
some tept this fault that we had there, and ran
came all the way back to help me so that
I could feel better. You know, there was a kindness
in him towards me that I always sensed, but there
were also the times when he was very shut down
and I didn't know what to make of it. I
remember sitting around the campfire one morning and he just
(14:19):
looking into the flames and he stopped talking, and I
asked him a few questions and he just didn't respond.
It was like a stone there and that. So I
went off and took a walk, and by the time
I got back, he was back to talking again, and
I asked him, you know, what was that about. What
Why wouldn't you answer me? Says So I was just
just deeply thinking. So I accepted it. But there were
(14:42):
a couple of times when he was in a state
that Gosh seemed close to what you would call catatonicum,
and I sometimes wondered, if, you know, if he was
coming to terms with the idea that you know, maybe
Mom was right, maybe the really wasn't the answer just
(15:02):
running away. Both David and Ted are drawn as young
men to living solitary lives, but that, it seems, is
where the similarity between them ends. While Ted seems to
be pushing further and further away into a world that
appears dangerously hermetic, with nothing but the contents of his
(15:23):
own mind for company. David's solitary time has more of
a feeling of a pilgrimage. Ted's in Montana, David's in
a small cabin in the Texas Desert. The brothers are
both geographically, psychologically, and spiritually on very different paths. Ted
is becoming angrier, more and more hostile. He's written a
(15:45):
series of terrible letters to their parents, blaming them for everything,
cutting off all contact. David uses his time to arrive
at a deep sense of self knowledge, and eventually he
comes to realize that he's in love with his old
friend from childhood, Linda, and that he wants to marry her,
(16:05):
and so David writes to Ted to tell him the
good news. At one point I told him that I
was going to be leaving the desert. I said, be
happy for me. I finally found the person I want
to get married to. It's it's Linda Patrick, this girl
I've known since elementary school. And he just wrote this
(16:27):
very cruel letter. He had never met Linda, and yet
he was saying, it's obvious, just David, just from your letter,
that she's a horrible person. You know she's going to
take advantage of you. But no, you never listened to
my advice. So um, you know, it's just too painful
for me to be your brother anymore. So don't don't
(16:48):
contact me. I don't want to have anything to do
with you anymore. It was just a shock and surprised
to me, although I had some precedent with his sort
of out of the blue abuse of letters to our parents,
angry letters to our parents. And also puts you in
a situation where by choosing to love another person, you're
(17:09):
losing this person who you love deeply. Yeah, and it's
you know, it's kind of like was Ted thinking that
love is finite. You know that it's like a piece
of pie, and if Linda gets a piece, he has
less um. Now love isn't like that, it's it can
expand um amazingly. You know, I thought maybe he just
(17:32):
didn't understand that, maybe he felt abandoned in some way,
and again my mother's request but I never abandoned came
to mind at that point. But I was also pretty angry.
I have to admit thinking, how dare he? You know,
our parents were just I think, lovely parents and kind
to him and generous to him, and he hurt them
(17:55):
terribly and now he's lashing out as another person. But
I love as it turned out from his diaries later. Ever,
of course, nobody ever read his diaries until after he
was arrested and the defense team and asked me to
read through his diaries. It was like thirty thousand pages
(18:15):
of diaries. It was unbelievable, um, But it was like
opening a window into a tortured soul because I realized
he had this tremendous longing for human contact, for companionship,
would have liked nothing better than to be married and
to have a family. We'll be back in a moment
(18:38):
with more family secrets. David and Linda Settle into married life.
David works as an assistant director of a shelter for
runaway and homeless youth. Linda is a professor of philosophy
at a local college. He and Ted are completely estranged.
(19:00):
David's never even heard of the unibomber. Remember these are
pre internet days, where news stories are run the old
fashioned way, the literal actual newspaper, or, if the story
is big enough, the nightly broadcast news. David and Linda
are living in Schenectady, New York, and it's before the
unibomber story makes headlines near them after a mail bomb
(19:23):
kills New Jersey advertising executive Thomas Masser. At this time,
the unibomber contacts several national newspapers and asks them to
publish what he refers to as his manifesto. He says
that if his manifesto is published, the bombs will stop.
So then Linda, who's never met your brother, has this
(19:48):
kind of lightning Boltova thought, And as to you, I
think that Ted maybe the unibomber, and I was very
moved by the way at the two of you navigated
that whole period of time after the manifesto was published,
(20:10):
because your your initial response was that that was completely
out of the question, of which, of course it was.
Of course it was. But then you read the manifesto
and somewhere within you a tiny little sliver of doubt
creeps in. There's a phrase that I came across when
I was writing my most recent book. It's a psychoanalytic phrase,
(20:32):
and it's the unthought known. What we what we know,
but it's a live wire. We cannot it's way too
dangerous to think. And so you're somewhere in the territory
of the unthought known, and you and Linda are parsing,
you know, the manifesto, looking for clues, and at the
same time it's like played out against this backdrop of
(20:56):
this profound impossible choice. When you finally do reach the
sense that it's possible, you know that it's possible that
Ted is the UNI bomber. I mean, can you talk
a little bit about that. Of course I had talked
a bit about my brother a lot. Perhaps Linda had
(21:17):
many questions why he didn't come to the wedding. I
hadn't showed her the letter that Ted had written to
me because it was so awful. But you know, I
remember some years earlier it was shortly after our father died.
Ted reconnected with my mom briefly. Um she invited him
(21:38):
to explain a little bit about why he had been
so angry before, and then he wrote a letter that
just sailed off back into that anger. And Mom sent
me the letter. I showed it to Linda. Remember this
is years before David or Linda have ever heard the
term unibomber. Linda's looking at this letter. This is in
(22:01):
so it's shortly after we're married. She's looking at this
letter and she says, she looks up at me and
she says, Dave, you know your brother is sick, don't you.
I mean he's mentally ill. And I said, no, no no, no, no,
he's really really smart. He's got a you know, a
genius like you, and this is the way he thinks.
(22:22):
And Linda said, David, look at this passage. You know,
people who are healthy in their minds don't think like this.
She actually persuaded me at that point to bring some
of my brother's letters to a psychiatrist who we knew socially,
and his viewpoint was that yes was sick. He said
(22:42):
he couldn't make a diagnosis based on some letters, but
possibly it was schizophrenia, which ends up being because eventual diagnosis.
So now we're in the mid nineties, you and a
bomber has been at it for you. Between ninety he
(23:03):
placed or mailed sixteen bombs that killed three people and
injured twenty three others. Linda reads his manifesto and she's
able to have the clarity of thought that this letter
and the letter she read and had analyzed by the
psychiatrist years earlier, may well have been written by the
same person. Yeah, I mean, it was an impossible dilemma
(23:27):
in the sense that we realized that any decision we
made could lead to somebody's death, and my brother was
the un obamber. Of course, we didn't know at this
point that if it turned out he was and another
person was killed, we'd have to go through the rest
of our lives knowing that someone had died because we
had failed to act. On the other hand, at this
(23:51):
point in time, the un obamber was like public enemy
number one, and if he was sentenced to death and executed,
I had to ask myself, what would it be like
to go through the rest of my life with my
brother's blood in my hands. You know, Ultimately we realized
there was one thing we could control. We could save
(24:14):
the next person's life. We could set the violence, and
then maybe, since you know, we had some evidence, we'd
already gone to a psychiatrist, maybe we could convince the
Justice Department that Ted was mentally ill and that there
was reason to mitigate the sentence of death, and maybe
he could get a prison sentence. Sad anyway, that was
(24:35):
the hope. I'm struck again and again by the care
and thoughtfulness David and Linda put into their impossible decision.
They want to be certain, or at least as certain
as possible. Linda's oldest friend is a private detective, and
she submits one of Ted's letters anonymously to an expert
in forensic analysis of language. The expert comes back at
(25:01):
that the author of a letter and the author of
the manifesto are one and the same person. Her father
was gone at this point, but Mom was still alive,
and we had another choice to make. Do we do
involved Mom and this, Do we tell her what's going on?
Do we ask her advice? Certainly she was a stakeholder
(25:22):
in this thing, But you know, my sense at the
time was, oh my god, I just can't this could
kill mom, And what if Ted's innocent? You know that
her paying her sleeplessness would be for nothing. Anyway. I
don't know if that was the right decision, but we
decided to go forward without telling them. But then ultimately,
(25:44):
when it turns out that it is Ted and that's
been confirmed and it's about to be public, you you
go to your mom and she reacts really remarkably right right.
I mean, it's probably my defining memory of my mother.
I mean, of all the memories I have of her,
(26:05):
but the moment that I told her that I suspected
Ted and that I had gone to the authorities, she
looked at me for a moment like she just couldn't
believe what she was hearing. And then she, you know,
she got up and came up to me and put
her arms around my She was very short woman, like
(26:26):
five ft tall and about six ft tall, and so
she had to kind of pull me down and put
a kiss on my cheek, and then she said, David,
I can't imagine what you've been struggling with. But then
she said the thing that I most needed to hear.
She said, David, I know that you loved Ted. I
know that you wouldn't have done this unless you truly
(26:49):
felt that you had to, And that was that was
the greatest relief I could have experienced at that moment.
It was just amazing, and in some sense too, it
exemplified the family values. The values were raised with to
do the right thing. So David and Linda do the
(27:11):
right thing. They are promised they'll be treated as confidential informants,
that their names not be revealed publicly, But then the
opposite happens. Their suburban home is surrounded by reporters and
camera crews. Their names and faces are plastered everywhere. Someone
in the huge chain of people, who I guess had
(27:34):
knowledge of this, made a mistake. At this point, they
had investigators planted in the woods around my brother's cap
and apparently, from what I understand, one of them revealed
things we should not have revealed to a person in
the media. We were, in a sense barricaded in our house.
At one point, there was this reporter who got up
(27:55):
on a little ladder and tried to film something inside
our house through one of our windows, and and I
remember Linda putting a blanket over all the lower four
windows to block the media's few of us, and you know,
people were asking themselves questions like what kind of a
(28:15):
family would produce the univalm or what kind of a
brother would turn in his own brother. But there was
one of the late night comedians, I think I didn't
see this myself. I guess he thought it was being funny,
but he says, yeah, I think of this um in
one family. You've got the un Obama and the Unite snitch. Yeah, man,
(28:38):
I thought that was called. When the authority surrounded and
then swarmed Ted's cabin in the woods, any lingering doubts
that David and Linda might have harbored about whether turning
him in was indeed the right thing, we're starkly addressed.
Among the incriminating evidence found was another live bomb beneath
(29:02):
Ted's bed, wrapped up, ready to be mailed to someone.
But though one very hard part of this story is over,
Ted is a UNI bomber, he's now been arrested and
can cause no more harm, another new, very hard part
of this story has yet to unfold, a hard part
that eventually becomes a beautiful part. David and Linda begin
(29:27):
reaching out to Ted's victims, so does David's mom for
a family who has always been set on trying to
do the right thing, the ethical thing. It seems the
next logical step, if anything here can be called logical.
One of these victims is a man named Gary Wright.
One February morning, Gary Wright pulled into the parking lot
(29:51):
of a computer company he owned in Salt Lake City.
A piece of lumber appeared to be in his way,
and when he went to move it, a homemade bomb
blew up, grievously, injuring him. He went through three surgeries,
spent three years in and out of casts, and had
two hundred pieces of shrapnel removed. It was years before
(30:11):
that bomb was connected to the unit bomber. I gave
him a call and, UM, you know, my heart skin
of in my throat, and at this point I'm trying
to think what am I going to say, and don't
want it to be too rehearsed. I wanted to be natural.
And then I get this voice that says, you have
reached the right house at the wrong time, please leave
(30:34):
the enough So I wasn't prepared for that, but I awkwardly,
you know, said you know my name is David Kazinski.
I think you know who I am, and I would
like to talk to you. If you're open to that,
I'll try calling that. And then a few days later
I called back and again I didn't didn't get Gary directly.
(30:55):
I think it was his daughter and I heard her say, Dad,
you know, some of these un a line for you,
And then Gary came up. Though most of Ted's victims
and their families wanted nothing to do with anyone named Kazynski,
Gary Wright had a very different response. I wanted to
understand what was going through Gary's head, how he was
(31:16):
able to afford a sense of compassion for the brother
of the man who nearly killed him. I've asked Gary
Wright to join this conversation now here on family secrets.
It was really kind of I guess for both of us,
uh nervous dance if you will, in the beginning, But
I think I quickly got over it in that I
(31:37):
had had quite a bit of time to process, um,
what I've been through, whereas David and his family had
much less time. So um, when we first began to speak,
you know, Dave called and said, you know, I want
to apologize on behalf of my family, um for what
had happened to you and you know, we're really sorry.
And I just told him, I said, look, David, everybody
(31:59):
has someone in their family they probably want to apologize for.
And I know my family probably wants to apologize for
me on a lot of fronts, maybe not at the
same level, but um, you can't carry it up the
rest of your life. And we went back and forth
a little bit and kind of chatted briefly, but I
did let him know. I said, look, sometimes you might
(32:19):
need to speak with someone outside of family, close friends
or whatever. Um, just even if it's the screaming get
something off your chest. And I said, feel free to
call me anytime. I mean Gary's invitation to talk at
any time, I mean it was like wow. And believe me,
he was incredibly helpful. Um. That's just the notion that,
(32:44):
you know, the people affected in different ways could have
something in common that we could not be divided by
our relationship to Ted. Gary was Ted's victim, as Ted's brother,
that if we could build a bridge across this chasms
(33:05):
abyss of human suffering, then there was hope. And I
really felt that deep in my heart. The first time
that David and Gary actually meet, David is driving across
country After Ted enters an insanity plea in court in Sacramento, California,
the plea that will ultimately spare him the death penalty,
(33:28):
David realizes that the drive will take him right through
Salt Lake City, where Gary lives, and with that first
meeting begins an important friendship that David describes in his
book as being like virtual blood brothers. Our bond forged
through violence is as powerful and deep as any other.
He writes, nothing can compensate me for losing Ted, but
(33:51):
I find a poetic balance in having gained a new
brother in Gary. Our choices end up reshaping the universe,
at least the universe we know. I'm so struck by
this beautiful idea that our choices end up reshaping the universe.
We know that really could be the model for this podcast.
(34:13):
I think something that's very important when you take one
of these risks to reach out to the what people
think of is the other side, is is to do
so without a lot of expectations, Like I couldn't say
I want this from Gary, I want X, I want Y.
I guess with openness comes some vulnerability, but you have
(34:34):
to just be open, I think, and drop the expectations. David,
you were describing what you and Linda were afraid of
when the news broken. Your house is surrounding reporters are
trying to, like, you know, crawl in through every cravass
in your house, and that you know, it seems from
what I've read and watched that your friendship in both
(34:57):
directions has been I know I hesitate to you this word,
but you know, a healing one. Would you characterize it
that way? From my aspect? And I'm definitely one of
the things I think that seems to be missing or
has been pushed off to the side these days, just
in regular day life is empathy and being able to
(35:19):
visualize yourself in someone else's shoes. There's so much of
the inwardly focused or you know, me focused stuff out
there that I mean, there's just not that time taken
to look at what would this be if it were me?
And I think in my case, I feel like the
(35:40):
ability to be empathetic with what I had seen David
and his family go through UM and being open genuinely
allowed for us to be able to have conversations and
believe me, we've had crazy conversations, but it's really cathartic
in a way, both on my end and I won't
speak for David, but it's cathartic in that Number One,
(36:04):
you realize there's a great human being on the other
side of a divide, right um, the event doesn't describe
an entire family, even though some families are completely stigmatized
by an event that they had no control over. So
you realize the human on the other side and the values,
(36:25):
and you you get the opportunity to dig into what
really lies behind a family. And when you do that,
that's when the opportunity for friendship comes into play. And
friendship in my case, you know, I count maybe on
two hands who I call friends, and David is one
of those. Right If I called him up and said, hey, Dave,
(36:48):
I need a B C or D if it was
within his power, he would do it. And if I
needed him there and he could do it, he would
be there. I'm thinking a little bit about, you know,
the notion of rust, and it's been a bit of
a theme of our conversation from the beginning, and where
is that balance between you know, sort of trust and
(37:09):
self protection. I think if I'm going to err, I
probably want to err on the side of trust. David
and Garry's friendship deepened into the two men doing healing
work together, appearing at speaking engagements to spread their message
of trust, healing and forgiveness. David and I have. He's
(37:33):
been really gracious to invite me to a lot of
events um to speak, but one of the things that
has always stuck in my head from day one, the
very first time we were ever asked to speak. I
can still remember. My thought process was, if I can
just shorten the amount of time that it takes a
person to heal, and I'll do this forever. It could
(37:54):
be a room of five hundred, but if one person
goes away and says, wow, you made me think differently,
or I can incorporate some of what you've been through
into my own personal space and developed my own path forward,
that was pretty much my motivating factor. I feel sometimes
I'm just a human experiment on myself, on my own
(38:15):
guinea pig, but happy to share the results. Gary describes
picking up the phone and taking David's call as probably
one of the top five decisions he's ever made in
his life. Remember when I said earlier that something beautiful
would come out of all this violence, pain, and horror.
Just think what would have been lost if Gary or David,
(38:38):
either one or both of them had shut down, Had
either man allowed himself to be made smaller rather than
larger by the circumstances he found himself in, then the
ripple effect of the peace and healing each of them
together and separately has brought into the world would never
have happened. You know, we we live in a culture,
(39:00):
be in a species that has practiced a lot of violence.
And I think, you know, violence looks powerful because you
can impose on somebody else something that you know they
can't change, and it may be irreversible. Violence has this
illusion of power. But I think one thing that I
(39:21):
feel I've truly learned is that violence is not powerful.
It's it's weak. It it is only destructive. It only
makes the world worse. Love doesn't look so powerful. I mean,
it's works in more subtle ways. It's results are not
(39:42):
immediate often. But I think I've known through my parents,
through Linda, through Gary, through others, so many others, that
love is by far the more powerful force in this world.
And the more we recognize that love is powerful and
violence as week um, the better chance we'll have to
(40:06):
make this world a better place. Many thanks to David
Kazinski and Gary Wright for speaking with me today. David
is the author of Every Last Tie, the story of
(40:28):
the UNI Bomber and his family, and Gary is an
activist and speaker. Find out more about the work Gary's
doing at g B Right dot com. Family Secrets is
an I Heart Media production. Dylan Fagan is the supervising producer.
Julie Douglas and beth Ann Macalouso are the executive producers.
(40:49):
If you have a family secret you'd like to share,
get in touch with us at listener mail at Family
Secrets podcast dot com. You can also find us on
Instagram at day any Writer, Facebook at Family Secrets Pod,
and Twitter at fami Secrets Pod. For more about my
book Inheritance, visit Danny Shapiro dot com. For more podcasts.
(41:24):
For my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Family Secrets News
Host
Dani Shapiro
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