My Neighbor, the Madman

"One of them was Jamie Gehring, whose grandfather had sold Kaczynski the piece of property in Montana for his 10x12-foot cabin. The recluse was an irascible oddball, Gehring knew, but he sometimes brought her gifts he'd made himself. They'd talk about gardening. When her dog died from poison, she never suspected him. So, when Gehring heard years later that Kaczynski was the deadly Unabomber who'd killed 3, injured 23, and intended far greater harm, she couldn't grasp it."

"Gehring hoped to find some goodness in the man or at least a "greater good" justification for his bombings. She said, "...then I thought I could recognize a part of the man I saw as a child." Yet all she discovered during her psychological excavation was Kaczynski's lust for revenge. As he wrote in the journals she read, "I don't pretend to have any philosophical or moral justification.""

Jamie Gehring grew up near Ted Kaczynski and knew him as an irascible hermit who sometimes brought handmade gifts and spoke about gardening. Dogs reacted viciously to him. After learning he was the Unabomber, Gehring struggled to reconcile the neighbor she knew with a killer who had killed three and injured twenty-three. She conducted painstaking research into his life and journals, seeking moral justification or goodness but instead found a lust for revenge and Kaczynski's own confession: "I don't pretend to have any philosophical or moral justification." He was a mathematical genius who abandoned a promising academic career to live in a cramped cabin and operate under the radar.

Read at Psychology Today