CNN
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Theodore “Ted” Kaczynski, the Harvard-trained mathematics professor who unleashed a deadly bombing campaign from a cabin in rural Montana and became known as the “Unabomber,” has died, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons. He is 81 years old.
Kaczynski was found unresponsive in his cell at the Federal Medical Center in Butner, North Carolina, around 12:25 a.m. Saturday morning, the bureau said in a statement.
Federal prison officials believe Kaczynski died by suicide, according to a person familiar, and an investigation will be conducted to determine an official cause of death. The news was first reported by the Charlotte Observer.
“Responding personnel immediately began life-saving measures,” the bureau said in its statement. “Staff requested emergency medical services (EMS) and life-saving efforts continued. Mr. Kaczynski was transported by EMS to a local hospital and later pronounced dead by hospital staff. ”
Kaczynski is serving eight life sentences after pleading guilty in 1998 to sending mail bombs that killed three people and injured 23 others from 1978 to 1995.
The FBI spent nearly two decades trying to track him down, fighting a killer who made untraceable bombs and delivered them to random targets – the first sent to a university in Chicago in 1978, the agency says on its website.
An FBI-led task force – which eventually grew to more than 150 full-time investigators – was formed in 1979 to investigate the “UNABOM” case, an acronym made up of the words university, airplane and bombing.
Kaczynski was arrested in 1996 in a small, remote cabin in western Montana.
In 2021, Kaczynski was transferred to a federal medical center in North Carolina, according to the bureau. She was held at Supermax in Florence, Colorado, before being transferred to FMC Butner on December 14, 2021.
Elaine Thompson/AP
Ted Kaczynski’s cabin in the woods in Lincoln, Montana.
Described by prosecutors as a vindictive loner, Kaczynski published a 30,000-word treatise known as the Unabomber Manifesto.
In the document, Kaczynski claimed the moral high ground for his deadly campaign, justifying the attacks in the name of preserving humanity and nature from technological attack and exploitation.
“I have no faith,” Kaczynski wrote. “I don’t even believe in the cult of nature worshipers or wilderness worshippers. (I’m very willing to throw trash in parts of the woods that are useless to me – I always throw cans in logged-over areas.)
A sentencing memorandum quoted from Kaczynski’s journals, where he wrote a deep hatred for people.
Since a tip from his brother David led to Kaczynski’s arrest in April 1996, the family claims the writings reflect the mind of a paranoid schizophrenic, not a cold-blooded killer. A federal prison psychiatrist agreed, paving the way for prosecutors to drop their demand for the death sentence and allow a plea bargain.
Merrick Garland, now the attorney general, oversaw the investigation and prosecution of Kaczynski.
Michael Macor/The San Francisco Chronicle/Getty Images
Kaczynski was escorted to his arraignment in Helena, Montana, in April 1996.
After apparently trying to commit suicide in his prison cell before his plea, Kaczynski asked the judge to allow him to fire his lawyers and take up his own defense. He said he wanted to base his defense on his belief that technology would destroy humanity.
Kaczynski agreed to undergo tests by a federal psychiatrist, Dr. Sally Johnson, to prove that she is mentally competent to defend herself.
While Johnson concluded that Kaczynski was mentally competent, he was also diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic.
A last-minute plea deal was struck before his trial began. Prosecutors rejected their request that Kaczynski be given the death penalty and asked that he be given life in prison without parole.
US. District Judge Garland Burrell Jr., sentencing Kaczynski, said: “The defendant committed unspeakable and heinous crimes for which he has no remorse.”
The plea bargain saved Kaczynski from a trial and possible death by lethal injection.
“Because of these heinous acts of terrorism and because of the reckless nature of the crimes, Theodore Kaczynski poses a great danger to society and should be sent to a facility where he can be closely monitored,” Burrell said.
At the sentencing hearing, Susan Mosser, who lost her husband in an Unabomber attack, urged Burrell to “make the sentence bullet-proof, or bomb-proof, lock him up until he dies, he is closer to hell. There is the devil.”
Her husband, Thomas, an advertising executive in New Jersey, was killed in a package bomb in 1994.
He spoke above occasional sobs in the courtroom, announcing that his 15-month-old daughter Kelly saw her father bleeding after the bomb.
“No, no, no, not my Dad!” cried the little girl.
“Justice has been served, and Theodore Kaczynski will no longer threaten anyone,” Attorney General Janet Reno said in a statement at the time.
Kaczynski’s other victims were computer rental store owner Hugh Scrutton and timber industry lobbyist Gilbert Murray. Geneticist Charles Epstein and computer expert David Gelernter were crippled by the bombings.
Epstein spoke publicly about Kaczynski for the first time in 1998 after he was critically injured in a 1993 bombing, calling him “the personification of evil,” CNN reported at the time.
In a 1998 news conference, Epstein said Kaczynski’s guilty plea and sentence would never give the victims a sense of closure, CNN reported.
“There’s no closure,” said Epstein — who lost three fingers on his right hand and suffered a severe stomach injury, a broken arm and permanent hearing loss in the attack.
“Every time I look at my hand, it’s still there. Every time I have to have someone speak up, it’s still there,” he said during the news conference.
A prosecutor called Kaczynski’s brother David, who provided the information that led to his brother’s arrest, “a true American hero.”
David Kaczynski, in a statement after the plea, said: “My mother and I want to say again our deep sorrow and regret to the victims…
Ted Kaczynski quit a tenure-track position at the University of California, Berkeley in 1969 to build a cabin near Lincoln, Montana. He lived there without water or electricity for more than 20 years.
Kaczynski launched his 17-year “anti-technology” bombing campaign from a 13-by-13 shack.
With the deaths and injuries he caused, Kaczynski threatened to blow up the planes. He planted a bomb on a flight in 1979, forcing the plane to make an emergency landing when a fire broke out in the cargo hold.
At one point, Kaczynski managed to force newspapers to print his 35,000-word manifesto, which threatened to blow up a plane from Los Angeles and said he would stop the bombings if The New York Times and Washington Post published it.
The manifesto criticized technology and the destruction of nature. Its similarity to the letters he sent to his family alerted his brother, who made the decision to extradite Kaczynski.
In 1999, Kaczynski told Time magazine that he would “rather face the death penalty than spend the rest of my life in prison.”
