Let’s Call a Murderer a Murderer : Unabomber: This serial killer’s past behavior provides our best insight into what he’ll do in the future.

Here are some established facts concerning the Unabomber’s behavior. They have important implications based upon what we know about such criminals:

The Unabomber is a not a professor of the history of science; he is a serial murderer. This person, likely a male in his mid-40s, has injured 23 people and killed three others--all strangers to him--in 16 purposeful, planned and discrete acts of violence. He is a mission-oriented serial murderer who has the conscious goal of eliminating a certain group or class of people, initially defined and diagnosed in his polemic as “leftists” and then later identified as those involved in science or technology. He is an unusual serial murderer, however, in that he selects a lethal and long-distance means of killing dependent on the technology he abhors. He eschews being intimately involved with the death of his victims.

He is likely to continue to be homicidally violent despite the noble but misguided attempts of the Fourth Estate to stop him. A major axiom of behavioral science is that the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. His deeply endogenous homicidal impulses and the gratification he receives from each act of violence will not be satiated by a veil of intellectual respectability. This man likes to frighten, injure and kill people. The most likely inhibitor of his violence, if he isn’t caught, is his aging--he is becoming older and more tired.

The Unabomber has made no attempt to publicly articulate his philosophy until his 17th year of killing. He rationalizes his predatory violence and desire to repetitively kill strangers with a cluster of beliefs that blame technology, “because the system is guided not by ideology but by technical necessity.” Our countenance of this plausible but false, late-in-the-game reasoning is as absurd as our acceptance of serial murderer Angelo Buono’s reason for killing women in Los Angeles two decades ago: “Some girls don’t deserve to live.”

The Unabomber successfully used persuasion and threat to have his treatise widely disseminated. The editors of the New York Times and the Washington Post accepted partial responsibility for the future killings of the Unabomber because he told them they would be if they didn’t do what he wanted. He succeeded because he admired in them what they most admire in themselves and what he most wants: their sense of specialness and omnipotence in influencing the minds of others.

This is a person whose narcissism (sense of entitlement) and psychopathy (callousness and cruelty to others) are immutable. The Unabomber wrote, “in order to get our message before the public with some chance of making a lasting impression, we’ve had to kill people.” Like most serial murderers, these personality characteristics are prominent in both his writings and behavior. The feelings, impulses and perceptions that constellate around these traits are the likely motivators for his criminal acts and not, in the words of the Unabomber, “to propagate ideas and give encouragement to those who hate the industrial system.”

This man deeply hates even those he has never met. He kills because it gratifies his homicidal impulses. He is haunted and persecuted by the specter of technology, a vague term that carries with it an intensity of feeling and meaning known only to him. Yet he is more widely known than ever because we place our imprimatur upon his thoughts.