WASHINGTON (AP) — Theodore “Ted” Kaczynski, better known as the “Unabomber,” a Harvard-educated mathematician who retreated to a squalid shack in the Montana woods and waged a 17-year campaign of bombings that killed three people and injured 23 more, died at the age of 81 in a federal prison in North Carolina. He admitted to carrying out 16 bombings between 1978 and 1995, permanently maiming several of his victims.
Dubbed the “Unabomber” by the FBI, Kaczynski died at the federal prison medical center in Butner, North Carolina, US Bureau of Prisons spokeswoman Kristie Breshears told The Associated Press.
He was found unconscious in his cell on Saturday morning and pronounced dead around 8 am, it added. At the moment the cause of his death is unknown.
Prior to his transfer to the prison’s medical facility, he had been held at 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 sent campuses into panic. of all country.
Years before the 9/11 attacks and mail-order anthrax shipments, the “Unabomber’s” deadly homemade bombs changed the way Americans shipped packages and boarded planes, to the point of virtually paralyzing air travel in the west coast in July 1995.
Kaczynski forced The Washington Post, along with The New York Times, into the desperate decision to publish his 35,000-word manifesto, “Industrial Society and Its Future,” in which he asserted that modern society and technology they were creating a feeling of powerlessness and isolation.
However, it was precisely this act of blackmailing the press that led to his downfall. His brother, David, and his wife, Linda Patrik, recognized the tone of the manifesto and informed the FBI, which had been searching for the “Unabomber” for years in what has been the longest and most expensive manhunt in the country.
Authorities found him in April 1996, in a 10-by-14-foot (3-by-4-meter) shack outside Lincoln, Montana, stuffed with magazines, an encrypted personal journal, explosives ingredients, and two finished bombs.
As an elusive criminal mastermind, the “Unabomber” had some sympathizers and was compared to three famous Americans: pioneer and pioneer Daniel Boone, writer and environmentalist Edward Abbey, and writer, poet, and philosopher Henry David Thoreau.
Yet once he was exposed as the wild-eyed, long-haired, bearded hermit enduring Montana winters in a small shack, many people saw Kaczynski more as a pathetic loner than a romantic anti-hero.
Even in his own journals, Kaczynski appeared not as a committed revolutionary but as a vengeful hermit driven by petty grievances.
“I certainly do not claim to be altruistic or to act for the ‘good’ (whatever that may be) of the human race,” he wrote on April 6, 1971. “I act simply out of a desire for revenge.”
A psychiatrist who interviewed Kaczynski in prison diagnosed him as a paranoid schizophrenic.
“Mr. Kaczynski’s delusions are largely of a persecutory nature,” Sally Johnson wrote in a 47-page report. “Central themes involve his belief that he is being maligned and harassed by family members and modern society.”
Kaczynski hated the idea of being seen as mentally ill and when his lawyers tried to put up an insanity defense, he tried to get them fired. When that failed, he tried to hang himself with his underwear.
Kaczynski ultimately pleaded guilty rather than allow his defense team to proceed with an insanity defense.
“I’m sure I’m sane,” Kaczynski told Time magazine in 1999. “I’m not delusional or anything.”
He was definitely someone brilliant.
Kaczynski skipped two grades to attend Harvard at age 16 and had published papers in prestigious math journals. His explosives were carefully tested and meticulously packed in handcrafted wooden boxes sanded to remove possible fingerprints. Later bombs were signed “FC”, for “Freedom Club” (Club de la Libertad).
The FBI dubbed him the “Unabomber” because his first targets appeared to be universities and airlines. An altitude-activated bomb he mailed in 1979 went off as planned aboard an American Airlines flight. A dozen people on board suffered smoke inhalation.
Kaczynski’s devices killed computer rental store owner Hugh Scrutton, advertising executive Thomas Mosser, and lumber industry lobbyist Gilbert Murray. California geneticist Charles Epstein and Yale University computer expert David Gelernter were maimed by bombs two days apart in June 1993.
When Kaczynski intensified his bomb-and-letter campaign to newspapers and scientists in 1995, experts speculated that he was jealous of the attention paid to Oklahoma City shooter Timothy McVeigh.
A threat to fly a plane out of Los Angeles before the end of the long Independence Day weekend caused chaos in air travel and mail delivery. Later, the Unabomber claimed that it was all a “joke”.
The Washington Post printed the Unabomber’s manifesto at the behest of federal authorities, after he said he would desist from terrorism if a national outlet published his treatise.
