When FBI agents finally closed in on the prime suspect in their Unabomber manhunt Wednesday, the eccentric Harvard graduate was living as a hermit in a cramped tar-paper shack in the mountains of Montana.
There, without electricity or plumbing but surrounded by books, he grew vegetables and shunned companionship.
"He was a really strange man,'' said Bob Orr, manager of the Lincoln, Montana, Telephone Co. "He left people alone, and people left him alone.''
Kaczynski was born May 22, 1942, in Chicago. He grew up in suburban Evergreen Park, where he lived with his parents and brother David.
Dale Eickelman, who went to junior high school with Kaczynski, remembered him as being good at chemistry and said the two of them used to experiment with small explosives.
"We would go out to an open field, and I remember Ted had the know-how of putting together things like batteries, wire leads, potassium nitrate and whatever, and creating explosions,'' Eickelman, a professor of anthropology and human relations at Dartmouth College, told the Daily Southtown in Chicago.
Kaczynski was a National Merit scholarship finalist, played in the high school band and joined the German, math and coin clubs. He graduated in three years with a scholarship to Harvard. At 20, he graduated from Harvard, where he left dismal memories with one of several former roommates.
"He was the least communicative of the whole bunch,'' Patrick McIntosh said on ABC television's "Nightline.'' He said Kaczynski played his trumpet loudly at night and that his room was untidy.
Another picture emerges from his professors at the University of Michigan, where Kaczynski received a doctorate in mathematics in 1967.
Kaczynski was "a very serious student, very able,'' said George Piranian, now a professor emeritus. One problem that stumped him and a faculty colleague was easily solved by Kaczynski.
"I mentioned it in class and Kaczynski picked up the ball and ran like hell,'' Piranian recalled. "I never would have accomplished what he could.''
Kaczynski became an assistant professor of mathematics at the University of California at Berkeley in 1967, during the height of the Vietnam War, when the school was awash in campus radicalism. But two years later he dropped out for the life of a loner.
He lived in rural Utah in the 1970s. A decade after he left Berkeley, he was back in the Chicago area and later moved to Montana.
Lincoln residents said Kaczynski had bought his land in the mountains outside town about a dozen years ago and built his shack there.
"He was real shy, real quiet. His conversations were short,'' said neighbor Butch Gehring.
Neighbors said he pedaled into town on a dilapidated bicycle to order obscure volumes at the library and buy supplies.
Investigators have hunted for a killer fitting a psychological profile drawn of the Unabomber: a white, middle-aged man, well-educated, meticulous and antisocial. They believed he was someone who lived in the West but had ties to Chicago.
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