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.
Kaczynski, labeled the “Unabomber” by the FBI, died at the federal prison medical center in Butner, NC, 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. local time, she said.
A 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, Colo., 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. put .
He admitted to committing 16 bombings between 1978 and 1995, permanently disfiguring some 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.
Manifesto gave a clue to identity
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 is seen outside a California federal courthouse in a January 22, 1998 archive photo. (Bob Galbraith/AFP/Getty Images)
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 three-by-four-foot plywood and tar paper cabin outside Lincoln, Mont., which was filled with diaries, 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.
