Global Courant
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 Saturday. He turned 81.
Marked the “Unabomber” According to the FBI, Kaczynski 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 early Saturday morning and was pronounced dead around 8 a.m., she said. The cause of death was not immediately known.
Prior to his transfer to the prison’s medical facility, 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 edge . He admitted to committing 16 bombings between 1978 and 1995, permanently disfiguring several of his victims.
Years before the September 11 attacks and the anthrax mailing, the deadly homemade bombs of the Unabomber 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,” in which he argued that modern society and technology led to a feeling 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 country’s longest and most expensive manhunt.
Authorities found him in April 1996 in a 10-by-14-foot 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 recluse who endured the Montana winters in a one-room cabin, Kaczynski seemed to many more like a pathetic loner than a romantic anti-hero.
Even in his own diaries, Kaczynski came across not as a committed revolutionary, but as a vengeful recluse driven by petty grievances.
“I certainly do not claim to be an altruist or to act for the ‘good’ (whatever that may be) of the human race,” he wrote on April 6, 1971. “I act only out of a desire for vengeance.”
A psychiatrist who interviewed Kaczynski in prison diagnosed him as a paranoid schizophrenic.
“Mr. Kaczynski’s delusions are usually haunting in nature,” Sally Johnson wrote in a 47-page report. “The central themes are his belief that he is being vilified and harassed by family members and modern society.”
Kaczynski hated the idea of being considered mentally ill and when his lawyers tried to defend an insanity, he tried to fire them. When that failed, he tried to hang himself with his underwear.
Kaczynski eventually pleaded guilty rather than let his defense team proceed with an insanity defense.
“I am convinced that I am healthy,” Kaczynski told Time magazine in 1999. “I don’t get delusional and so on.”
He sure was brilliant.
Kaczynski skipped two grades to attend Harvard at age 16 and had articles published in prestigious math journals. His explosives were carefully tested and came in carefully handcrafted wooden boxes that were sanded to remove any possible fingerprints. Later bombs bore the signature “FC” for “Freedom Club”.
The FBI dubbed him the “Unabomber” because his early targets seemed to be universities and airlines. An altitude-triggered bomb he sent in 1979 exploded as planned aboard an American Airlines flight; a dozen people on board suffered from smoke inhalation.
Kaczynski killed computer rental company owner Hugh Scrutton, advertising executive Thomas Mosser, and timber 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.
Mosser was murdered at his home in North Caldwell, New Jersey, on December 10, 1994, a day when he was supposed to pick out a Christmas tree with his family. His wife, Susan, found him badly injured by a barrage of razor blades, pipes, and nails.
“He moaned very softly,” she said at Kaczynski’s sentencing in 1998. “The fingers on his right hand were dangling. I held his left hand. I told him help was coming. I told him I loved him.”
When Kaczynski staged his bombing and letters to newspapers and scientists in 1995, experts speculated that the Unabomber was jealous of the attention paid to Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.
A threat to blow up a plane from Los Angeles before the end of the 4th of July weekend caused chaos in air traffic and mail delivery. The Unabomber later claimed it was a “joke”.
The Washington Post printed the Unabomber Manifesto at the urging of federal authorities, after the bomber said he would quit terrorism if a national publication published his treatise.
Patrik had a disturbing feeling about her brother-in-law even before seeing the manifesto and eventually persuaded her husband to read a copy in the library. After two months of arguing, they took some letters from Ted Kaczynski to Patrik’s childhood friend Susan Swanson, a Chicago private investigator.
Swanson in turn passed them on to former FBI behavioral scientist Clint Van Zandt, whose analysts said whoever wrote them probably also wrote the Unabomber’s manifesto.
“It was a nightmare,” David Kaczynski, who had idolized his older brother as a child, said in a 2005 speech at Bennington College. “I literally thought, ‘My brother is a serial killer, the most wanted man in America.'”
Swanson turned to a corporate lawyer friend, Anthony Bisceglie, who contacted the FBI. The investigation and prosecution were overseen by current Attorney General Merrick Garland, during a previous stint at the Justice Department.
David Kaczynski wanted his role to remain confidential, but his identity quickly leaked out and Ted Kaczynski vowed never to forgive his younger sibling. He ignored his letters, turned his back on him during court hearings, and described David Kaczynski in a 1999 book version as a “Judas Iscariot (who) … doesn’t even have the courage to hang himself”.
Ted Kaczynski was born on May 22, 1942 in Chicago, the son of second-generation Polish Catholics – a sausage maker and a housewife. He played trombone in the school band, collected coins, and skipped sixth and eleventh grades.
His high school classmates thought he was strange, especially after he showed a school wrestler how to make a mini-bomb that detonated during chemistry class.
Harvard classmates remembered him as a lonely, thin boy with poor personal hygiene and a room that smelled of spoiled milk, rotting food, and foot powder.
After graduating from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, he got a job teaching mathematics at the University of California at Berkeley, but found the work difficult and abruptly quit. In 1971, he bought a 1 1/2 acre lot about 4 miles (6 kilometers) outside of Lincoln and built a cabin there with no heating, plumbing, or electricity.
He learned to garden, hunt, make tools, and sew, and lived on a few hundred dollars a year.
In the late 1970s, he left his cabin in Montana to work with his father and brother at a manufacturer of foam rubber products outside of Chicago. But when a female supervisor dumped him after two dates, he started posting offensive limericks about her and didn’t stop.
His brother fired him and Ted Kaczynski soon returned to the wilderness to continue his vengeful killing spree.
