The U.S. Sheriff prepares to take Theodore Kaczynski down the steps of federal court to a waiting vehicle on June 21, 1996, in Helena, Mont. A spokesman for the Bureau of Prisons told the AP news agency Saturday that Kaczynski, known by his nickname “The Bomber,” died in federal prison.
Elaine Thompson/AP
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Elaine Thompson/AP
The U.S. Sheriff prepares to take Theodore Kaczynski down the steps of federal court to a waiting vehicle on June 21, 1996, in Helena, Mont. A spokesman for the Bureau of Prisons told the AP news agency Saturday that Kaczynski, known by his nickname “The Bomber,” died in federal prison.
Elaine Thompson/AP
WASHINGTON — Theodore “Ted” Kaczynski, a Harvard University graduate mathematician who frequented a rundown shack in the Montana wilderness and waged a 17-year bombing campaign that left 3 dead and 23 others Another was injured and died on Saturday. He was 81.
Kristie Breshears, a spokeswoman for the federal Bureau of Prisons, told The Associated Press. He was found unresponsive in his cell early Saturday morning and was pronounced dead around 8 a.m., she said. The cause of death was not immediately known.
Before being transferred to the prison’s medical facility, he had been held at the federal Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, since May 1998, when he was sentenced to four life sentences plus 30 years because of a terrorist campaign that put universities across the country in jeopardy. He admitted to carrying out 16 bombings between 1978 and 1995, leaving some of his victims permanently disabled.
Years before the September 11 attacks and anthrax mailings, the “Unabomber”‘s deadly homemade bombs changed the way Americans sent packages and boarded planes, even nearly closing doors. air travel on the West Coast in July 1995.
He forced The Washington Post, along 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 claimed. that modern society and technology are leading to feelings of helplessness and alienation.
But it led to his undo. Kaczynski’s brother David and David’s wife, Linda Patrik, recognized the tone of the treatise and expose the FBIsearched for “Unabomber” for years in the nation’s longest, most expensive manhunt.
In April 1996, authorities found him in a 10-by-14-foot (3-by-4-meter) plywood and oil-paper house outside Lincoln, Montana, filled with magazines, a encrypted signature, explosive components and two completed bombs.
An elusive criminal mastermind, the Unabomber is widely shared and compared to Daniel Boone, Edward Abbey and Henry David Thoreau.
But after it was revealed that a wild-eyed hermit with long hair and a beard spent the winter in Montana in a one-room tent, Kaczynski made many people look like a pitiful loner. rather than a romantic anti-hero.
Even in his own journals, Kaczynski is seen not as a devoted revolutionary, but as a vengeful hermit fueled by petty grievances.
“I certainly do not consider myself a selfless person or act for the ‘good’ (whatever it may be) of mankind,” he wrote on April 6, 1971. “I act solely out of hope. want revenge.”
A psychiatrist who interviewed Kaczynski in prison diagnosed him with paranoid schizophrenia.
Sally Johnson wrote in a 47-page report: “Mr. Kaczynski’s delusions are essentially persecuted in nature. “The main themes concern his belief that he is being maliciously harassed and harassed by members of his family and modern society.”
Kaczynski hated the idea of being considered mentally ill, and when his lawyers tried to defend the mental illness, he tried to fire them. When that failed, he attempted to hang himself with his underwear.
Kaczynski ultimately pleaded guilty instead of letting his defense team conduct a crazy defense.
Kaczynski told Time magazine in 1999: “I am confident that I am healthy. I am not delusional, etc.”
He is definitely excellent.
Kaczynski failed two classes to attend Harvard at the age of 16 and had articles published in prestigious mathematical journals. His explosives have been carefully tested and are housed in meticulously handcrafted wooden boxes that are polished to eliminate possible fingerprints. Later bombs bore the signature “FC” for the “Freedom Club”.
The FBI called him “The Bomber” because his initial targets appeared to be universities and airlines. An altitude-activated bomb he sent in 1979 exploded as planned on an American Airlines flight; Dozens of people on board were suffocated by smoke.
Kaczynski 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 bombed two days apart in June 1993.
Mosser was killed at his home in North Caldwell, New Jersey on December 10, 1994, a day when he should have been picking a Christmas tree with his family. His wife, Susan, found him badly wounded by a barrage of razor blades, pipes and nails.
“He groaned very softly,” she said at Kaczynski’s sentencing hearing in 1998. “The fingers of his right hand were swinging. I held his left hand. I told him that the help is coming. I told him I loved him.”
When Kaczynski ramped up his bombing and sent letters to the press and scientists in 1995, experts speculated the “Unabomber” was jealous of the attention of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.
A threat to blow up a plane leaving Los Angeles before the fourth weekend of July has thrown air travel and mail delivery into chaos. “Unabomber” later claimed it was a “joke”.
The Washington Post printed the “Unabomber’s” manifesto at the urging of federal authorities, after the bomber said he would renounce terrorism if a national publication published his treatise.
Patrik had felt worried about her brother-in-law even before seeing the manifesto and eventually convinced her husband to read one at the library. After two months of arguments, they sent some letters from Ted Kaczynski to Patrik’s childhood friend, Susan Swanson, a private investigator in Chicago.
Swanson in turn turned them over to former FBI behavioral science expert Clint Van Zandt, who analysts say whoever wrote them probably also wrote the “Unabomber’s” manifesto.
“It was a nightmare,” David Kaczynski, who as a child idolized his brother, said in a 2005 speech at Bennington University. “I literally thought, ‘My brother is a serial killer, the most wanted man in America.'”
Swanson reached out to a friend who was a company attorney, Anthony Bisceglie, who contacted the FBI.
David Kaczynski wanted his role to be kept secret, but his identity was quickly revealed and Ted Kaczynski vowed never to forgive his brother. He ignored his letters, turned his backs on him at the trials, and described David Kaczynski in the 1999 book manuscript as “Judas Iscariot (who) … didn’t even have the courage to have enough courage.” to hang himself.”
Ted Kaczynski was born on May 22, 1942 in Chicago, the son of a second generation Polish Catholic – a sausage maker and a homemaker. He played the trombone in the school band, collected coins, and dropped out of sixth and eleventh grade.
His high school classmates thought he was weird, especially after he showed a school wrestler how to make a small bomb that would explode during chemistry class.
His classmates at Harvard remember him as a lonely, skinny boy with poor personal hygiene and a room that reeked of spoiled milk, rotting food, and foot powder.
After graduate school at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, he took a job teaching math at the University of California at Berkeley but found the job difficult, so he abruptly quit. In 1971, he purchased a 1½-acre piece of land about 6 kilometers from Lincoln and built a cabin there without heating, plumbing, or electricity.
He learned how to garden, hunt, make tools, and sew, living on a few hundred dollars a year.
He left his cabin in Montana in the late 1970s to work at a foam rubber product manufacturer outside of Chicago with his father and brother. But when a female supervisor dumped him after two dates, he started posting offensive comments about her and wouldn’t stop.
His brother fired him and Ted Kaczynski soon returned to the wilderness to continue his vengeful murder plot.
