Madman in the Woods
Life Next Door to the Unabomber
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4.0 • 4 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
One woman’s haunting sixteen-year account of her youth when she and her family lived closer than anyone to Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber.
As a child in Lincoln, Montana, Jamie Gehring and her family shared their land, their home, and their dinner table with a hermit with a penchant for murder. But they had no idea that the odd recluse living in the adjacent cabin was anything more than a disheveled man who brought young Jamie painted rocks as gifts. Ted was simply Ted, and erratic behavior, surprise visits, and chilling events while she was riding horses or helping her dad at his sawmill were dismissed because he was “just the odd hermit.” In fact, he was much more—Ted eluded the FBI for seventeen years while mailing explosives to strangers, earning the infamous title of Unabomber.
In Gehring’s investigative quest twenty-five years later to reclaim a piece of her childhood and to answer the questions, why, how, she recalls what were once innocent memories and odd circumstances that become less puzzling in hindsight.
The innocence of her youth robbed, Gehring needed to reconcile her lived experience with the evil that hid in plain sight. In this book, through years of research probing Ted’s personal history, his writings, his secret coded crime journals, her own correspondence with him in his Supermax prison cell, plus interviews with others close to Kaczynski, Gehring unearths the complexity, mystery, and tragedy of her childhood with the madman in the woods. And she discovers a shocking revelation—she and her family were in Kaczynski’s crosshairs.
A work of intricately braided research, journalism, and personal memories, this book is a chilling response to the question: Do you really know your neighbor?
Praise for Madman in the Woods
“Combining the observations of a one-time close neighbor with extensive research and empathy for the many lives affected, Jamie Gehring’s book might well be the best attempt yet to understand the strange life and mind of my brother, Theodore J. Kaczynski.” —David Kaczynski,?author of?Every Last Tie: The Story of the Unabomber and His Family
“A captivating look at Ted Kaczynski—the Unabomber—from a perspective that no one else on the planet has.?It is insightful, unique, and fascinating!? A must read for all true crime fans and anyone who loves to know the real story behind the story.” —Jim Clemente, retired FBI supervisory special agent/profiler and writer/producer of the Audible Original Series Where the Devil Belongs
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Gehring's arresting debut recounts how she has tried to reconcile her memories of her bucolic childhood in Lincoln, Mont., sharing a backyard with a friendly hermit, with the later revelations that the hermit, Ted Kaczynski, who held her as a baby and gave her painted rocks as a child, was, in fact, the Unabomber. For 16 years she had no idea that Kaczynski, though often erratic and reclusive, was the nation's longest running domestic terrorist, using bombs to kill three and maim 23 people from 1978 to 1995. It wasn't until Kaczynski published his manifesto in September 1995 that his own brother realized he was the likely bomber. The FBI recruited Gehring's father to spy on him and aid in the operation that led to his arrest in 1996. Only then did the author realize that her entire childhood had been lived in the shadow of danger: by Kaczynski's own account, he had poisoned her dog, sabotaged her father's sawmill, and once almost murdered her stepmother and baby sister. In 2017, Gehring began researching this book and even wrote to Kaczynski, but his reply changed nothing. It was like the man himself, both superficial and only hinting at the rage below the surface. Gehring's insights into the life and mind of a madman make fascinating reading for true crime fans.
