Evergreen Park Back In Spotlight As 'Unabomber's Hometown'

EVERGREEN PARK, IL — The death of Evergreen Park’s most infamous resident — Ted Kaczynski — is likely to thrust the south suburban village back into the glare of notoriety as the boyhood home of the Unabomber.

The 81-year-old anarchist was found unresponsive in his cell at a medical facility in North Carolina federal prison, where he was moved in December 2021 due to health issues. He was previously held at a maximum security facility in Colorado. His death has been reported by the Associated Press and other news outlets as an apparent suicide.

From 1978 to 1995, Kaczynski, a reclusive genius building bombs in a cabin no bigger than a backyard tool shed in rural Montana, terrorized the nation by mailing bombs seemingly at random to universities and airlines. For 17 years, the nation knew no more about the mysterious Unabomber than the iconic composite sketch of a mustached man wearing aviator sunglasses and a hoodie — which later turned out to be the witness describing the artist who made the composite. Kaczynski’s bombing spree killed three people and injured 23 more, some maimed for life.

When Kaczynski threatened to bring down a commercial jetliner in 1995 unless the Washington Post and New York Times published his warped manifesto, the FBI narrowed the Unabomber’s origins to Chicago’s suburbs that same summer. Federal agents were off by 20 years in their timeline of when the serial bomber attended high school and college. Investigators placed the elusive bomber as graduating from high school during the 1970s in Chicago’s north suburbs.

For several months, the FBI focused its search on student records dating back to the 1970s at the University of Illinois-Chicago. The FBI went so far as to surmise that the Unabomber may have been a disgruntled college dropout attending the city university. When Kaczynski’s younger brother, David, recognized the ideas and idioms expressed in the manifesto as possibly being those of his brother, the FBI moved in on Kaczynski’s cabin in Montana, where they found bombs and bomb making materials, and 40,000 pages of journal entries.

The capture of the nation’s most deadly serial bomber in April 1996 caught many Americans off guard, but none more so than the residents of Evergreen Park. Some remembered him as the excruciatingly shy Evergreen Park Community High School classmate who hung around with a group of other young men known as the “Briefcase Boys,” known for doing mathematics equations in their spare time and carrying their textbooks in briefcases.

As the American public relished stories of Kaczynski’s capture in April 1996 after 17 long years on the lam, making bombs in his Montana cabin and allegedly fertilizing his vegetable garden with his own feces, Evergreen Park went on a soul search of its own. Former neighbors, classmates, teachers and shop owners contemplated Teddy Kaczynski, wondering if there was some personality tic or something about the town set off in the reclusive “walking brain” boy that triggered his future as a serial bomber-by-mail.

“I was the village clerk at the time of all the crisis and hoopla when he was arrested,” former Evergreen Park mayor Jim Sexton said. “A lot of news media were camped out by childhood home."

Sexton said the village did a good job securing the home, occupied by new owners who were under considerable duress until the uproar of Kaczynski’s arrest blew over.

Kaczynski was born May 22, 1942. He was 10 years old when his Polish immigrant parents, Ted “Turk” Kaczynski, a sausage maker, and his mother, Wanda, moved to a tract home at 92nd Street and Lawndale Avenue in Evergreen Park. When Kaczynski was in fifth grade, a counselor at Central School, then a K-through-8 grammar school, gave young Ted an IQ test, on which he scored 167, putting the boy in the genius range.

At Evergreen Park Community High School, Kaczynski played trombone in the marching band, and was a member of the math club, biology club, coin club and German club. His classmates regarded him as something of an oddball. Although viewed as “quiet” by most of his peers, a Chicago Tribune story from 1996 describes teenage Ted as a “talker once you got to know him.” While still in high school, Kaczynski eschewed traditional morality at age 14, writing a journal entry recounting a girl he had seen in the street when he was 13.

"Something about her appearance antagonized me, and, from habit, I began looking for a way to justify hating her, within my logical system. But then I stopped and said to myself, 'This is getting ridiculous. I'll just chuck all this silly morality business and hate anybody I please.' Since then I have never had any interest in or respect for morality, ethics or anything of the sort."

Kaczynski graduated from EPCHS in 1958, several years ahead of the other 16-year-olds in his school and neighborhood. He was shipped off to Harvard University, where he had won a scholarship in mathematics the year before, but did not mix well socially with the more mature university students. Some attribute Kaczynski’s madness (he was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic during his 1996 trial) to a CIA-backed mind control experiment he participated in while an undergraduate student, according to the Washington Post.

The wild prairie of Kaczynski’s youth, where he took refuge from his happier peers in the bit of urban nature it provided, has been bulldozed and replaced with big box stores. Sexton doesn’t want the village he loves to be identified solely as the “Unabomber’s hometown.”

“Those things don’t identify a village or city. This is one isolated individual who had some mental problems,” Sexton said. “We’ve turned out hundreds of thousands of young people who’ve been superstars. Ted Kaczynski was fine when he was in Evergreen Park. Maybe Harvard took him in the wrong direction.”