It’s just 10-feet by 12-feet but the Newseum’s newest exhibit is considered by many as larger than life.
The tiny structure that sits within the massive Washington museum once housed one of the nation’s most notorious criminals—-Unabomber Ted Kaczynski. The cabin is on public display for the first time in the new exhibit “G-Men and Journalists: Top News Stories of the FBI’s First Century,” which opens Friday at the Newseum, a museum about the news.
For more than a decade the cabin, which once stood in a wooded area in Montana, has been sitting in an FBI evidence facility collecting dust. FBI agents transported the structure back to Washington after they captured Kaczynski and put an end to his bombing spree that spanned from 1978 to 1995. Kaczynski is currently serving a life sentence with no possibility of parole.
When FBI agents found Kaczynski, they reportedly also found a live bomb in the cabin. It was in the cramped building that the Unabomber constructed his homemade bombs that killed three people and injured 23 others.
The exhibit also details the ethical dilemma editors at The Washington Post and The New York Times faced in deciding whether to publish Kaczynski’s anti-technology manifesto, which is also on display at the Newseum.
According to the Newseum’s vice president: “In the end they did publish it, and in the end that’s what led to his capture, because his brother saw phrases that looked familiar to him and tipped off the FBI.”
The new exhibit also features stories and artifacts from other memorable FBI investigations, including the Branch Davidian siege in Waco, Texas, the Oklahoma City bombing two years later and, more recently, the 2002 Washington-area sniper shootings.
The area of the exhibit that highlights the sniper shootings includes a replica of the car trunk used by John Allen Muhammad and his teen accomplice Lee Boyd Malvo during their shooting spree that left 10 people dead. The two criminals reportedly hid and shot from the trunk of a Chevy Caprice.
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