Madman in the Woods: Life Next Door to the Unabomber
A haunting account of the sixteen years when a young Jamie Gehring and her family lived closer than anyone to Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, sharing their Montana land, their home, and their dinner table with a hermit with a penchant for murder—and Gehring’s investigative quest twenty-five years later to reclaim a piece of her childhood by answering the questions, why, how?

As a child in Lincoln, Montana, in the 1980s and ’90s, Jamie Gehring had no idea that Ted Kaczynski—the self-sustaining hermit in the adjacent cabin—was anything more than the neighbor who brought her painted rocks as a gift. 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.” He was, in fact, the Unabomber, for seventeen years mailing explosives to strangers, the longest-running domestic terrorist in American history.

As an adult with this knowledge, 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?
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Madman in the Woods: Life Next Door to the Unabomber
A haunting account of the sixteen years when a young Jamie Gehring and her family lived closer than anyone to Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, sharing their Montana land, their home, and their dinner table with a hermit with a penchant for murder—and Gehring’s investigative quest twenty-five years later to reclaim a piece of her childhood by answering the questions, why, how?

As a child in Lincoln, Montana, in the 1980s and ’90s, Jamie Gehring had no idea that Ted Kaczynski—the self-sustaining hermit in the adjacent cabin—was anything more than the neighbor who brought her painted rocks as a gift. 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.” He was, in fact, the Unabomber, for seventeen years mailing explosives to strangers, the longest-running domestic terrorist in American history.

As an adult with this knowledge, 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?
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Madman in the Woods: Life Next Door to the Unabomber

Madman in the Woods: Life Next Door to the Unabomber

by Jamie Gehring
Madman in the Woods: Life Next Door to the Unabomber

Madman in the Woods: Life Next Door to the Unabomber

by Jamie Gehring

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Overview

A haunting account of the sixteen years when a young Jamie Gehring and her family lived closer than anyone to Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, sharing their Montana land, their home, and their dinner table with a hermit with a penchant for murder—and Gehring’s investigative quest twenty-five years later to reclaim a piece of her childhood by answering the questions, why, how?

As a child in Lincoln, Montana, in the 1980s and ’90s, Jamie Gehring had no idea that Ted Kaczynski—the self-sustaining hermit in the adjacent cabin—was anything more than the neighbor who brought her painted rocks as a gift. 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.” He was, in fact, the Unabomber, for seventeen years mailing explosives to strangers, the longest-running domestic terrorist in American history.

As an adult with this knowledge, 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?

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781635768169
Publisher: Diversion Publishing
Publication date: 04/19/2022
Pages: 288
Sales rank: 416,419
Product dimensions: 5.60(w) x 8.60(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Jamie Gehring spent her Montana childhood in endless exploration of a backyard held in common with the Unabomber—a serial killer obsessed with dismantling technological society. She earned her BA in visual communications and has been an investment advisor, private mortgage banker, and graphic designer. She lives in Denver, Colorado.

Table of Contents

Preface ix

Part 1 First Impressions of a Serial Killer

1 1984 3

2 The Sale 10

3 A New Friendship 18

4 In Search Of… 25

5 Neighbor 29

6 Born To 43

7 Time to Buy a Watch 54

8 A Day at the Mill 61

9 Junkyard Bomber 65

Part 2 The Signs

10 Happy 73

11 D. B. Cooper 84

12 The Meadow 91

13 Not Street Legal 97

14 A Ghost in the Woods 106

15 Evil in the Gulch 112

16 Couldn't Be Ted 119

17 A Funding Proposition 145

18 Sabotage. Sawmill Sanding. 152

19 Pretty Little Boxes 163

20 Home Alone with Ted 168

21 In the Crosshairs 171

Part 3 The Moment Everything Changed

22 Bad Guys and Other Childhood Memories 179

23 Ted's Woods 185

24 Manifesto-Pride Goeth Before the Fall 208

25 Then They Arrived: Meeting the FBI 217

26 One Step Closer 222

27 A Favor 225

28 The Capture 231

29 Breaking News 246

30 The Aftermath 254

31 Grief Is a Space in Between 260

Epilogue. The End 267

Acknowledgments 273

List of Ted Kaczynski's Crimes 275

A Note on Sources 276

Sources Cited 278

About the Author 280

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