Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Categories
Memoirs

MADMAN IN THE WOODS

Jamie Gehring

Life Next Door to the Unabomber

MADMAN IN THE WOODS is a haunting account of the sixteen years when a young Jamie Gehring and her family lived closer than anyone to Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber. They shared their Montana land, their home, and their dinner table with a hermit who had a penchant for murder and this book chronicles Gehring's investigative quest twenty-five years later to reclaim a piece of her childhood by answering the questions, why, how?

As a child in Lincoln, Montana, in the 1980s and '90s, Jamie Gehring had no idea that Ted Kaczynski - the self-sustaining hermit in the adjacent cabin - was anything more than the neighbor who brought her painted rocks as a gift. Ted was simply Ted, and erratic behavior, surprise visits, and chilling events while she was riding horses or helping her dad at his sawmill were dismissed because he was "just the odd hermit." He was, in fact, the Unabomber, for seventeen years mailing explosives to strangers, the longest-running domestic terrorist in American history.

As an adult with this knowledge, the innocence of her youth robbed, Gehring needed to reconcile her lived experience with the evil that hid in plain sight. In this book, through years of research probing Ted's personal history, his writings, his secret coded crime journals, her own correspondence with him in his Supermax prison cell, plus interviews with others close to Kaczynski, Gehring unearths the complexity, mystery, and tragedy of her childhood with the madman in the woods. And she discovers a shocking revelation - she and her family were in Kaczynski's crosshairs.

A work of intricately braided research, journalism, and personal memories, this book is a chilling response to the question: Do you really know your neighbor?

Jamie Gehring spent her Montana childhood in endless exploration of a backyard held in common with the Unabomber?a serial killer obsessed with dismantling technological society. She earned her BA in visual communications and has been an investment advisor, private mortgage banker, and graphic designer. She lives in Denver, Colorado.

Available products
Book Published 2022-04-12 by Diversion
Book Published 2022-04-12 by Diversion

Comments

Combining the observations of a one-time close neighbor with extensive research and empathy for the many lives affected, Jamie Gehring's book might well be the best attempt yet to understand the strange life and mind of my brother, Theodore J. Kaczynski.

Interview the author did for Elle Magazine about the book. Read more...

Gehring's Madman in the Woods is a captivating look at Ted Kaczynski - the Unabomber - from a perspective that no one else on the planet has. It is insightful, unique, and fascinating!? A must read for all true crime fans and anyone who loves to know the real story behind the story.

Jamie Gehring has written a fascinating account of unknowingly growing up in an isolated rural area near the nation's most wanted serial bomber and domestic terrorist. Her exhaustive research and numerous interviews of Kaczynski's neighbors and Lincoln, Montana, townspeople give her account a unique perspective. I believe Madman in the Woods is a must-read for true crime aficionados.

Every time a madman commits a ghastly crime, TV reporters find that dumbfounded neighbor who swears, 'He was such a nice boy.' It only proves that we cannot see through the darkest windows, no matter how close we get. But Jamie Gehring's compelling, smartly-written memoir peers through the smoky glass of memory to glimpse a complex lunatic - and her own reflection. This is a worthy addition to our canon of intimate crime stories.

I was captivated by Gehring's memoir of a rural Montana childhood abruptly divided into before and after by the arrest of the hermit next door - Ted Kaczynski. Her search for the truth about her family, Kaczynski, and the evil within that familiar cabin in the woods is riveting.

Jamie Gehring sets off on an epic quest across the Big Sky landscape of Montana into the heart of a murderer and her own soul. In doing so she gives voice to those who live behind the headlines. And what an extraordinary voice it is - compassionate, challenging, unerringly honest, and always poetic. Both universal and deeply personal, this is not just true crime, it's true life. It will linger in the imagination long after the final page has been turned.

...arresting... Gehring's insights into the life and mind of a madman make fascinating reading for true crime fans.

I imagine that at every dinner party, when the subject of strange neighbors comes up, Jamie Gehring wins every single time. That's a good thing for readers. Not only does Ms. Gehring have a story to tell - in this case about growing up within a stone's throw of Unabomber Ted Kaczynski - she finds a way to use his reign of terror as a pathway to her own self-discovery. No easy task. Madman in the Woods is the kind of book I live for... one that drives me through the drama of a story but gives me the unvarnished heart and soul of the storyteller. This one is a winner.

A revealing, firsthand addition to the literature of domestic terrorism.