Unabomber Ted Kaczynski found dead in US prison cell

Ted Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber, has been found dead in his prison cell, federal officials confirmed.

Kaczynski, 81, killed three people and injured 23 more during a mass mail-bombing spree between 1978 and 1995. He later pleaded guilty to his crimes.

He was sentenced to life without parole in 1996 after evading capture for almost 20 years.

The Harvard-trained mathematician was eventually caught in a Montana cabin.

He was a man who fascinated America for decades, and he became the focus of numerous TV documentaries.

Kaczynski spent the past three decades held at prisons across the US – most recently at a North Carolina prison medical facility.

Prison guards at the Federal Medical Center in Butner, North Carolina, discovered Kaczynski’s body this morning at around 00:25 local time.

Before suffering from declining health which prompted his transfer to the facility in December 2021, he had been held at the federal Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, since May 1998.

His violent campaign left a number of his victims permanently maimed.

But his crimes were uncovered after he forced the Washington Post and the New York Times to publish his unhinged and violent manifesto, called Industrial Society and Its Future, in September 1995.

They agreed to print the manifesto on the recommendation of the FBI and the US attorney general after Kaczynski said he would end his campaign if a national paper published his treatise.

The 35,000-word anonymised document railed against modern life and claimed that technology was leading to Americans suffering from a sense of alienation and powerlessness.

After reading the papers, Kaczynski’s brother and sister-in-law recognised the tone and alerted the FBI, who had been searching for him for years in the nation’s longest manhunt.

In April 1996 authorities finally found the Harvard trained mathematician in a 10-by-14-foot (3-by-4-meter) plywood and tarpaper cabin outside Lincoln, Montana.

The hut was filled with journals, a coded diary, explosives and two completed bombs.

While the manifesto struck many as being overtly political in tone, Kaczynski never sought to embody the revolutionary mantle some attributed to him.

In his own journals he wrote that he didn’t claim to be “altruist or to be acting for the ‘good’ (whatever that is) of the human race”, instead insisting that he acted “merely from a desire for revenge”.

His crimes seemed to begin shortly after he was fired from the family business by his brother for posting abusive limericks to a female colleague who had dumped him after two dates.

From there he retreated to the Montana wildness and to the cabin he had built by hand, without heating, plumbing or electricity.

The attacks earned him the monicker Unabomber from the FBI, as his targets seemed to be universities and airlines.

Timeline of Unabomber Devices

May 25, 1978: A passerby found a package, addressed and stamped, in a parking lot at the University of Illinois, Chicago Circle Campus. The package was returned to the person listed on the return address, Northwestern University Professor Buckley Crist, Jr. He did not recognize the package and called campus security. The package exploded upon opening and injured the security officer.

May 9, 1979: A graduate student at Northwestern University is injured when he opened a box that looked like a present. It had been left in a room used by graduate students.

November 15, 1979: American Airlines Flight 444 flying from Chicago to Washington, D.C., fills with smoke after a bomb detonates in the luggage compartment. The plane lands safely, since the bomb did not work as intended. Several passengers suffer from smoke inhalation.

June 10, 1980: United Airlines President Percy Woods is injured when he opened a package holding a bomb encased in a book called Ice Brothers by Sloan Wilson

October 8, 1981: A bomb wrapped in brown paper and tied with string is discovered in the hallway of a building at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. The bomb is safely detonated without causing injury.

May 5, 1982: A bomb sent to the head of the computer science department at Vanderbilt University injures his secretary, after she opened it in his office.

July 2, 1982: A package bomb left in the break room of Cory Hall at the University of California, Berkeley explodes and injures an engineering professor.

May 15, 1985: Another bomb in Cory Hall at the University of California, Berkeley injures an engineering student.

June 13, 1985: A suspicious package sent to Boeing Fabrication Division in Washington is safely detonated, but most of the forensic evidence was lost.

November 15, 1985: A University of Michigan psychology professor and his assistant are injured when they opened a package containing a three-ring binder that had a bomb. The bomber included a letter asking the professor to review a student’s master thesis.

December 11, 1985: A bomb left in the parking lot of a Sacramento computer store kills the store’s owner.

February 20, 1987: Another bomb left in the parking lot of a Salt Lake City computer store severely injures the son of the store’s owner. A store employee sees the man leave the bomb, and that witness account helped a sketch artist create the composite sketch.

June 22, 1993: A geneticist at the University of California is injured after opening a package that exploded in his kitchen.

June 24, 1993: A prominent computer scientist from Yale University lost several fingers to a mailed bomb.

December 19, 1994: An advertising executive is killed by a package bomb sent to his New Jersey home.

April 24, 1995: A mailed bomb kills the president of the California Forestry Association in his Sacramento office.