What happened to David Kaczynski after helping FBI identify his brother as the Unabomber

Nearly three decades after handing the FBI the tip that ended America's longest-running bombing campaign, David Kaczynski is still grappling with what it meant to turn in his own brother.

David is the younger sibling of Ted Kaczynski, the man known as the 'Unabomber,' who killed three people and injured at least 23 more during a 17-year bombing spree that ran from 1978 to 1995.

It was David who alerted investigators after recognizing his brother's turns of phrase in the anonymous manifesto published by The Washington Post and The New York Times in September 1995.

Ted was arrested at his remote Montana cabin the following April and later pleaded guilty to all charges, receiving a life sentence without parole. He died by suicide in prison in June 2023.

The Kaczynski brothers' story is back in the spotlight following the Netflix premiere of Unabomber on September 25, a film starring Jacob Tremblay that dramatizes Ted's crimes.

That's renewed interest in what happened to David, and how he's spent the years since making the call that ended his brother's freedom - and their relationship.

Ted Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber. (Associated Press / Alamy Stock Photo)

How did David Kaczynski help catch the Unabomber?

David, seven years younger than Ted, grew up close to his brother in Evergreen Park, Illinois, the sons of first-generation Polish American parents. He later worked at a Montana zinc smelter, where the pair bought the land Ted's cabin was built on, before David went on to teach English and work on a novel of his own. It was David's wife, Linda Patrik, who urged him to read the newly published manifesto and first raised the idea that Ted could be behind it. "Without Linda, I probably would have shoved it in a drawer and tried my best not to think about it," David told The New York Times.

The decision fractured the brothers permanently.

Ted wrote to David from prison accusing him of acting out of jealousy, telling him the informing was 'your own gnawing sense of inferiority' and calling his imprisonment 'a fate far worse than death,' according to letters David later shared.

David responded with dozens of letters over nearly 30 years, depositing money into Ted's commissary account and sending him books, but Ted rarely wrote back and never added David to his visitors list.

David Kaczynski has described his role in his brother's capture as leaving him with "my brother's blood on my hands." (Photo credit should read RICH PEDRONCELLI/AFP via Getty Images)

Where does David Kaczynski live now?

David and Patrik retired from work at a Buddhist monastery in Woodstock, New York in 2015 before relocating to Texas.

Since then, David has given talks on mental illness and published a 2016 memoir, Every Last Tie: A Memoir of the Unabomber and His Family.

He's also built an unlikely friendship with Gary Wright, one of Ted's surviving victims, who was injured by a bomb left outside his computer store in 1987.

"We were both on healing journeys of a sort," David told CBS News, "and we had so much in common." The pair appeared together at a Yom Kippur event shortly after Ted's death, where David called Wright 'my brother in spirit.'

Reflecting on the toll of coming forward, David said, "There aren't gonna be any innocent victims now, but maybe gonna have to go through the rest of my life with my brother's blood on my hands."