Unabomber Psychiatric Report Released

A long-awaited prison psychiatrist’s report on Theodore Kaczynski was released Friday, detailing the Unabomber’s fantasies about mutilating a girlfriend, killing psychiatrists and having a sex-change operation.

The 47-page report, compiled in part from interviews with Kaczynski in his Sacramento County Jail cell and from his writings dating to the 1960s, said Kaczynski’s frustrated desire for a sex-change operation set him on the path to being a serial killer.

Kaczynski wrote that his 1966 visit to a psychiatrist to discuss his desire to become a woman was a major turning point in his life. He left the doctor’s office without speaking of his fantasies, consumed with a visionary new hatred, according to psychiatrist Dr. Sally Johnson.

“Like a phoenix, I burst from the ashes of my despair,” Kaczynski wrote. “My very hopelessness had liberated me because I no longer cared about death.

“I no longer cared about consequences and I said to myself that I really could break out of my rut in life and do things that were daring, irresponsible or criminal,” he said.

The report had been sealed since January in U.S. District Court in Sacramento. It was released Friday by U.S. District Judge Garland Burrell after a joint legal challenge by the San Francisco Examiner and CBS News.

Johnson diagnosed Kaczynski, a former Berkeley mathematics professor and backwoods hermit, as a paranoid schizophrenic, but said he was competent to stand trial.