Unabomber on Display #AtoZChallenge2021

Research often spawns more research. While writing one of my AtoZ2021 posts, Notorious Prisoners - Orphan and Prodigy, which I initially titled Alcatraz Prisoners, I mentioned the Unabomber. Curious about any updates on the captured prisoner, I then learned that he is housed in Colorado at Alcatraz East where they have a museum containing a display of items about the now 75-year-old Ted Kaczynski. (More questions led me to even more research: according to Wikipedia, his original hand-written 35k word manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future, was auctioned off along with typed copies and the typewriters to raise money for his victims.)

Among the items on display in the exhibit at the Alcatraz East Crime Museum that focuses on the Unabomber are his passport photos. Also included in the display is a postal scale that the Unabomber used to determine postage for mailing his packages. The scale was discovered in his Montana cabin along with a finished bomb ready to be mailed. The arrest of the Unabomber was made without incident when a forest service agent and FBI agents approached his cabin and stated they were doing a property survey and might need to cut down a tree.

Also on display at the museum is a wanted poster for Belle Starr, reward: $750.00. An American outlaw, Myra Maybelle Shirley Reed Starr associated with the James-Younger Gang and other outlaws. Convicted of horse theft in 1883, she was fatally shot in 1889. The case was never officially solved.

1933 Hudson Essex Terraplane 8 (thomasironworks.com)

John Dillinger's 1933 Essex Terraplane

Sometimes ending the research and getting back to the task of writing that novel, short story, or blog post ultimately becomes rather difficult! 

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PRISONS and PUBLIC ENEMIES #AWorldOfCrime

Wisconsin Reformatory

John Dillinger was named Public Enemy #1 by J. Edgar Hoover. Other public enemies on Hoover’s list were Machine Gun Kelly, Bonnie and Clyde, Ma Barker, and Baby Face Nelson. Gunned down in fire fights, Bonnie, Clyde, and Dillinger never served prison time.

During the years that Alcatraz, the federal prison known as “The Rock”, was in operation, many gangsters got to see the inside, including Public Enemies Al Capone and members of Ma Barker’s gang.

John Walsh’s Public Enemies describes how America’s Most Wanted assisted in capturing an accused terrorist who resurfaced twenty-five years later as a ‘soccer mom.’

According to Alcatraz Rules and Regulations, prisoners were entitled to “food, clothing, shelter and medical attention.” I guess they paid for everything else, one way or another.

Orange is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison , Smith College alumna Piper Kerman’s book, tells of her incarceration at the “infamous federal correctional facility in Danbury, Connecticut” after she was caught delivering a suitcase of drug money.

Not only gangsters do prison time. Right now, former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich is learning that, along with the withholding of shoelaces, neckties and razor blades, the law also disallows hair dye.