This Intelligence Report looks at the curious connections some people have made between both deadly cases.
Top FBI agents in Chicago say they want DNA from Kaczynski merely as a matter of normal investigation by a task force looking at the unsolved Tylenol killings. An attorney for Kaczynski tells the I-Team that federal authorities may have been prompted by a small, but loud, chorus of armchair criminologists who believe that the Unabomber is also the Tylenol killer.
Several websites proclaim Kacyzinski is the Tylenol killer. The conspiracy theory popped up several years ago based on Kaczynski's initials, T.K., Tylenol killer.
And the common element of Kaczynski's bombs, targets and attack sites is an obsession with wood, from wooden boxes to victims named wood, including North Shore resident Percy Wood, president of United Airlines when he received a unabomb in 1980.
Those who believe Kaczynski was also the Tylenol killer cite the wood connections to those cases in street names, city's and victim names as well. They also show a surveillance photo of one Walgreens where poisoned Tylenol was purchased which shows a bearded man near the shelf, suggesting that it was Kaczynski.
The web matrix of unabomb-Tylenol connections had nothing to do with FBI officials here in Chicago asking for Kacynski's DNA.
"Nothing new prompted the request for the DNA," FBI spokesman Ross Rice told the I-Team late Thursday afternoon. It is "just part of the normal investigative process that the task force looking at the 1982 murders felt was appropriate."
When mail bombs started showing up across the country in the late 1970s and early 80s, federal agents scrambled to find a connection.
In 1982, when seven people died after taking cyanide-tainted Tylenol in metro Chicago, many of the same law enforcement agencies that were working on unabomb were assigned to Tylenol.
At the time, they considered every possible motive and suspect according to a high ranking law enforcement official at the time. And when Kacyznski was arrested authorities processed every speck of evidence in his Montana cabin.
Kaczynski's lawyer tells the I-Team that if the feds had found a grain of Tylenol evidence in the Unabomber's cabin, he would have been a target back then, not 15 years later.
Kaczynski was born in Chicago and his family lived in the Chicago suburbs before he moved to Montana. Unabomb/Tylenol conspiracy theorists say that too is among the proof that he was behind both crimes.
