madman in the woods life next door to the unabomber

I was impressed with her on the Netflix Unabomber Documentary, so I knew she was special and had an on air talent. Once I heard she was the audible narrator, I couldn’t wait to hear this Ted Kaczynski story in Jamie’s voice. I read Jamie Gehring’s book and then I listened to it on audible because I really enjoyed “Madman in the Woods”. Your heart will warm and then chill one paragraph later.

The story that she shares with us is personal in both a heartfelt and terrifying way. Jamie knew him since she was a toddler until his arrest when she was 16. See the world of Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber through the eyes of his young neighbor, Jamie Gehring, while he lived in Lincoln, Montana. And she discovers a shocking revelation–she and her family were in Kaczynski’s crosshairs.Ī work of intricately braided research, journalism, and personal memories, this book is a chilling response to the question: Do you really know your neighbor? 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 and the hermit on the hill.

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.Īs 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.

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?Īs 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.

Madman in the woods life next door to the unabomber