Ted Kaczynski had been a boy genius. Then he became the Unabomber. After years of searching for him, the FBI finally caught him in his remote Montana cabin, along with thousands of pages of his writing. Those pages revealed Kaczynski's hatred towards a field of psychology called "behaviorism," the key to the link between him and James McConnell.
This is part two of our three-part series. If you haven't heard part one, listen here first.
In this episode, we hear from:
- Philip Bradley, Harvard contemporary of Ted Kaczynski
- Alston Chase, author of A Mind for Murder: The Education of the Unabomber and the Origins of Modern Terrorism
- Donald Max Noel, former FBI agent and author of UNABOMBER: How the FBI Broke Its Own Rules to Capture the Terrorist Ted Kaczynski
- Chuck Seigerman, former student of James McConnell
- Greg Stejskal, former FBI agent
- Larry Stern, Professor of Sociology at Collin College
Hosted by Kai Wright. Reported by Amanda Aronczyk.
WNYC’s health coverage and The Stakes is supported in part by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Jane and Gerald Katcher and the Katcher Family Foundation, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Thank you to Lizette Royer Barton at the Center for the History of Psychology and Diana Bachman at the Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. Special thanks to Larry Stern, Professor of Sociology at Collin College and to Alexandra Rutherford, Professor in the Department of Psychology at York University in Toronto and author of Beyond the Box: B.F. Skinner's Technology of Behaviour from Laboratory to Life, 1950s-1970s.
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