Holly Bailey and Krystal Johnson
The woman who fell in love with one of America's worst serial killers
Updated 28 January 2016
As a free man this serial killer never had a girlfriend, but as a notorious prisoner he attracted the interest of dozens of women and fell in love with one of them, this is their story.
Yahoo News have published a series of articles from a University of Michigan archive, shedding unprecedented light from the mind of the genius, madman and murderer.
Theodore John Kaczynski terrified the US in 1978 and 1995 by mailing and planting homemade bombs in a bid to spread anarchy, leading authorities on the nation's longest and costliest manhunt.
The Harvard-trained mathematician lived as a recluse in a Montana cabin and was caught in 1996 when his brother recognised his idiosyncratic writings and tipped off authorities.
Kaczynski pleaded guilty in 1998 to avoid a trial where he offered an insanity defence which resulted in him avoiding the death penalty.
The madman wrote about his support for Hillary Clinton, his 9/11 theories and curiosity over al-Qaeda and his unfamiliarity with the latest advances on the internet, including YouTube.
He is now serving eight life sentences without the possibility of parole in the country's toughest and most isolated prison and has since become a popular pen pal.
He spends 23 hours a day in isolation where adoring male and female fans also confess their sexual desires for the murderer while he sit, deteriorating in a jail cell.
But one of those letters has led to the most unlikely love story.
“I’m in love with Ted Kaczynski,” Joy Richards blurted out while confessing at a California church in 2006.
She had been diagnosed with terminal cancer and wanted to make things right with God and to her, that meant being honest about a secret she’d been keeping from those closest to her.
Ms Richards was living in Montana when she read the serial killer's manifesto and thought it was wonderful “brilliant.”
The two began writing to each other after Kaczynski’s arrest in 1996, and she first Kaczynski in prison disguised as a journalist in late 1999.
Kaczynski referred to Ms Richards in letters as his “angel” and “Lady Love,” a title he sometimes accentuated with a tiny hand-drawn heart.
“[Joy] is an angel. I mean a real one. I’m sure she could fly if she wanted to,” Kaczynski wrote to a pen pal in April 2002.
“My friend has suffered more than anyone deserves to suffer, and I can do nothing to help her."
“You don’t see her halo because she’s too modest to wear it. She keeps it hung up in her closet. But really she is an honest-to-goodness angel. Absolutely perfect.”
He drew her cards using colored pencils from the prison commissary and wrote her original pieces of classical music.
With help from other pen pals, he sent her books he thought she might like.
The lovebirds could never touch or kiss and were separated by a thick pane of security glass.
So under the circumstances, Kaczynski tried to be the best boyfriend he could be to the first girlfriend he’d ever had.
But it wasn’t easy, in 2002, a woman who was a librarian began writing to him asking to be his second “Lady Love” in his life.
“Could I be your second lady love?” the woman asked.
“I’ve put that question to Lady Love #1, and she says ‘no,’” he replied.
“You will not hear from me again.”
He couldn’t stop gushing to people about Richards and told a former member of his legal team: “She’s beyond my wildest dreams!”
The following year, Kaczynski sold his half of the land he owned in Montana to Richards for $7,500 to help fulfill her dream of having a wilderness escape, while his brother, David, owned the other half.
Richards family and friends stopped speaking to her after the purchase, leading to an estrangement that lasted until shortly before she died.
On September 11, 2001, Kaczynski sat and listened to newscasters describe the dramatic events of 9/11 play out in stunned tone from inside his tiny prison cell. Photo: AP
That Christmas, she made a three-day trip to Colorado, where she spent hours talking to him through security glass. But while there, Richards, only 50 at the time, began to cough up blood.
The diagnosis was lung cancer. Surgeons removed part of her right lung but warned her the cancer would likely return.
Breaking the news to another pen pal, Kaczynski wrote, “If she dies, it will break my heart because I love this woman.”
In July 2006, doctors told Richards she had only months to live and Kaczynski had run out of money but one of the killer’s pen pals sent her $2,400 and promised more if she needed it.
But her health only worsened and Kaczynski wrote letters to the manager of her apartment complex and to members of her family. He didn’t know if she was alive or dead.
Richards had to stop working as a teacher and had became increasingly religious and decided to move in with friends.
Her letters "cooled off", which created agony and despair for the murderer the convicted killer, sitting helplessly in his Colorado prison.
In one of his final letters to Joy, Kaczynski asks where to send the Christmas presents he has for her.
“I love this woman truly, even though her love for me has cooled,” he wrote to a pen pal.
Joy was reconciled with her family in her final days but they still did not help with her funeral arrangements.
Richards died on New Year’s Eve 2006 and one of Kaczynski’s pen pals from Los Angeles drove out to visit her and had one final message from Kaczynski for his Lady Love.
The man, a musician, put headphones on Richards and played a piece of music - “a trombone duet” - that Kaczynski had written for her and the man had performed on his synthesiser.
“I wouldn’t have wanted her to die thinking I had let her down,” he said.