Theodore “Ted” Kaczynski, the Harvard-educated mathematician who retired to a wilderness cabin in Montana and led a 17-year bombing campaign that killed three people and injured 23 others in United States, died Saturday. He was 81 years old.
Nicknamed “Unabomber” by the FBI, Kaczynski died at Federal Prison Medical Center in Butner, North Carolina, Federal Bureau of Prisons spokeswoman Kristie Breshears told The Associated Press. He was found unconscious in his cell early Saturday morning and was pronounced dead around 8 a.m., she added. The cause of death was not immediately known.
Prior to his transfer to the prison medical facility, he had been held in the Supermax federal prison in Florence, Colorado, since May 1998, when he was sentenced to four life terms plus 30 years for a campaign of terror that has sent universities across the country into turmoil. He admitted having carried out 16 bombings between 1978 and 1995, maiming many of his victims for life.
Years before the 9/11 attacks and the anthrax shipment, the Unabomber’s deadly pipe bombs changed the way Americans shipped packages and boarded planes, virtually shutting down air traffic on the west coast in July 1995.
He forced the washington posttogether with the New York Timesto take the heartbreaking decision in September 1995 to publish his 35,000-word manifesto entitled “Industrial Society and Its Future”, in which he argued that modern society and technology were driving to a feeling of helplessness and alienation.
But it led to his downfall. Kaczynski’s brother, David, and David’s wife, Linda Patrik, recognized the tone of the treaty and tipped off the FBI, which had been searching for the Unabomber for years in the longest and longest manhunt ever. the most expensive in the country.
In April 1996, authorities found him in a 3 by 4 meter plywood and tar paper shack near Lincoln, Montana, filled with newspapers, a coded log, explosive ingredients and two bombs finished.
As an elusive criminal mastermind, the Unabomber has won his share of supporters and been compared to Daniel Boone, Edward Abbey and Henry David Thoreau.
But once revealed as a wild-eyed, long-haired, bearded hermit who braved the Montana winters in a one-room cabin, Kaczynski appeared to many as a pathetic loner rather than a romantic antihero.