The Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, was discovered dead in his North Carolina prison cell on Saturday, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Ted Kaczynski was serving a life sentence without the possibility of release for a string of bombings around the country that claimed the lives of three people. He was 81.
Ted Kaczynski was detained in North Carolina after being moved from a maximum-security security Colorado jail in 2021 due to his declining health. Kaczynski received a conviction for a string of explosions that had been planned to target scientists. The cause of death wasn’t disclosed.
Ted Kaczynski was in prison after being captured in 1996 in the primitive cabin he was residing in western Montana. He confessed that between 1978 and 1995, he had set off 16 explosions across the nation, resulting in the deaths of three individuals and the injuries of 23 more.
The deadly homemade bombs that Kaczynski mailed, including one that detonated as intended on an American Airlines flight due to altitude, altered how Americans sent items and boarded aircraft.
Air travel and postal delivery were disrupted in 1995 after a threat to blow up a jet leaving Los Angeles before the end of the July 4 weekend. Later, The Unabomber insisted that it was a “prank.”
The Harvard-trained mathematician led investigators on the longest and most expensive manhunt in the country while railing against the impacts of modern technology. He was given the nickname “Unabomber” by the FBI since his initial targets appeared to be colleges and airlines.
His anti-technology polemic, “Industrial Society and Its Future,” was published in September 1995 by The Washington Post and The New York Times. Federal authorities pushed for the printing of the manifesto after the bomber threatened to stop using terrorist tactics if his book was published by a major newspaper.
His brother David and David’s wife, Linda Patrik, were alerted to his authorship by the treatise and turned him intoto the FBI.
Authorities discovered Kaczynski west of Lincoln, Montana, in an incomplete cabin measuring 10 by 14 feet (3 by 4 meters), where he had been residing since the 1970s. It contained two finished weapons of mass destruction, two completed journals, a coded logbook, and explosive materials.
Kaczynski attempted to fire his legal team during his trial when they tried to assert an insanity defense because he hated the concept of being viewed as mentally ill. He finally chose to enter a guilty verdict rather than allow his lawyers to continue.
Ted Kaczynski referred to his motivation as “simply personal revenge” in his personal journals that the government turned over to the prosecution during the trial at the families of the victims’ request.
I frequently thought about killing the types of individuals I disliked, such as law enforcement officers, computer scientists, loud college students who dumped their beer cans in the arboretum, etc., he wrote.
Hugh Scrutton, the owner of a computer rental business, advertising professional Thomas Mosser, and lobbyist Gilbert Murray for the forest industry were all murdered by Kaczynski. Two days apart in June 1993, attacks injured Yale University computer scientist David Gelernter and Californian geneticist Charles Epstein.
