Theodore Kaczynski was sentenced to four life terms plus 30 years for a terror campaign that put universities across the country on edge.
Theodore “Ted” Kaczynski, the Harvard-educated mathematician who retreated to a dingy cabin in the Montana wilderness and led a 17-year bombing campaign that killed three people and wounded 23 others, died on Saturday. He turned 81.
Kaczynski, branded by the FBI as the “Unabomber,” died at the federal prison medical center in Butner, North Carolina, Kristie Breshears, a spokesperson for the federal Bureau of Prisons, told The Associated Press. He was found unconscious in his cell Saturday morning and was pronounced dead around 8 a.m., she said. A cause of death was not immediately known.
Before being transferred to medical prison, he had been incarcerated at the federal supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, since May 1998 when he was sentenced to four life terms plus 30 years for a terror campaign that put universities across the country on alert. He admitted to committing 16 bombings between 1978 and 1995, permanently disfiguring some of his victims.
A loner since childhood, the Harvard University graduate targeted academics, scientists and computer store owners, even attempting to blow up a commercial airliner in a campaign against what he believed to be the evils of modern technology. For years, he frustrated the police with no solid leads on the killer’s identity.
The Unabomber’s deadly home-made 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 Post, in conjunction with The New York Times, to make the painful decision in September 1995 to publish his 35,000-word manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future, which argued that modern society and technology were leading to a sense of powerlessness and alienation.
But it led to his downfall. Kaczynski’s brother David and David’s wife, Linda Patrik, recognized the tone of the treatise and tipped off the FBI, which had been searching for the Unabomber for years in the nation’s longest and most expensive manhunt.
Authorities found him in April 1996 in a 10-by-14-foot (3-by-4-meter) plywood and tar paper cabin outside Lincoln, Montana, which was filled with magazines, a coded diary, explosive ingredients, and two completed bombs.
As an elusive criminal mastermind, the Unabomber won his fair share of sympathizers and comparisons with Daniel Boone, Edward Abbey, and Henry David Thoreau.
But once revealed as a wild-eyed, long-haired and bearded hermit who endured Montana winters in a one-room cabin, Kaczynski seemed to many more like a pathetic loner than a romantic anti-hero.