A handwritten version of the Unabomber's manifesto, calling for a worldwide "revolution against technology," fetched $20,053 at a government auction. The Smith-Corona typewriter that he used to click out the 35,000-word manifesto inside a Montana cabin drew $22,003. The hooded sweatshirt and sunglasses that appeared in FBI wanted posters went for $20,025.
All told, the two-week online sale of Theodore Kaczynski's personal effects raised $232,246, the U.S. Marshals Service announced Friday, a day after the bidding closed.
The money will go to victims and relatives of the three people killed and 23 wounded by the bombs the former UC Berkeley assistant math professor mailed to scientists and industry executives between 1978 and 1995.
It's only a small fraction of the $15 million in restitution that Kaczynski was ordered to pay when he was sentenced to life in prison in 1998, but it's the most substantial sum his victims are likely to receive.
"It's good news and bad news," said George Grotz, a now-retired FBI agent who helped trace Kaczynski to his wilderness cabin and arrest him in 1996. "I hate to see him glorified, ... yet if there is some good that comes out of this for the victims, obviously that's on the positive side."
One of the winning bidders was the National Museum of Crime and Punishment in Washington, D.C., which paid $1,766 for three items: a scale and a wood saw that Kaczynski used to build his handmade bombs, and a set of black-and-white 1971 passport photos.
"I don't like to use positive words for us getting artifacts that had a negative impact on so many lives, but they belong in a museum like ours," said Chief Operating Officer Janine Vaccarello. "People come here to give honor to law enforcement and to those who lost their lives."
She said the Kaczynski display would join museum exhibits such as the 1968 Volkswagen that serial killer Ted Bundy used to lure and kill many of his victims in the 1970s, a death mask of 1930s gangster John Dillinger, an electric chair from Tennessee, and interactive displays of "Law and Order"-style forensic science.
A federal judge in Sacramento ordered the auction over the objections of Kaczynski, 69, who is serving his sentence at a maximum-security federal prison in Colorado. He argued that he needed some of his property to defend himself in a new FBI investigation into whether he killed seven people with poisoned Tylenol in Chicago in 1982.
Of the 58 items sold at the auction, a set of 20 journals, in which Kaczynski reflected on a quarter century of life in the wilderness and described some of his crimes, brought the highest price: $40,678.
A handwritten autobiography, in which he recalled deciding in graduate school that killing people might relieve his unhappiness, sold for $17,780. His doctoral degree from the University of Michigan and an earlier bachelor's degree from Harvard brought in $7,503.
