Global Courant
Ted Kaczynski, the convicted terrorist known as the Unabomber, was found dead in his prison cell early Saturday, a spokesman for the Federal Bureau of Prisons said. He turned 81.
Kaczynski was found unconscious in his cell around 12:30 a.m. ET and transported to a local hospital where he was pronounced dead, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
Kaczynski was previously in a maximum security facility in Colorado, but was moved to a federal medical center in Butner, North Carolina in December 2021 due to ill health.
Kaczynski, who went uncaptured for nearly 20 years until his arrest in 1996, was considered America’s most prolific bomber.
In this April 4, 1996 file photo, Ted Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber, is flanked by federal agents as he is led to a car from the federal courthouse in Helena, Mont.
John Youngbear/AP, DOSSIER
Between 1978 and 1995, Kaczynski planted or dispatched 16 bombs that, according to authorities, killed three people and injured 20 others.
In 1995, before he was identified as the Unabomber, he demanded that newspapers publish a long manuscript he had written, saying otherwise the murders would continue. Later that year, both the New York Times and the Washington Post published the 35,000-word manifesto at the recommendation of the US Attorney General and the Director of the FBI.
Without the suspicions of his brother and sister-in-law, Kaczynski may never have been caught. Kaczynski’s sister-in-law, Linda Patrik, was one of the first to identify Kaczynski as the Unabomber after reading the Unabomber’s writings.
In an interview with “20/20 on ID Presents: Homicide” in 2016, Patrik recalled the first time she suspected Kaczynski was responsible for the serial bombings.
“I thought about the families that were bombed. There was one in which the package arrived at the man’s house and his little 2-year-old daughter was there. She was almost in the room when he opened the package. Luckily she left and his wife left. And then he died,” Patrik said. “And there were others. And so I spent those days thinking about those people.”
Patrik said she recognized familiar-sounding ideas in the manuscript from letters her husband David Kaczynski had received from his brother. The family eventually decided to contact the FBI, and on April 3, 1995, a 9-member SWAT team arrested Kaczynski at his cabin in Montana. A live bomb and a “treasure of bomb components” were found in the cabin, the FBI said, as well as “40,000 handwritten diary pages detailing bomb-making experiments and descriptions of Unabomber crimes.”
“When she said, ‘Well, I think your brother might be the Unabomber,’ I thought, ‘Well, this is nothing to worry about. Ted has never been violent. I’ve never seen him violent’, said David Kaczynski in the “20/20 on ID Presents: Homicide” interview. “I couldn’t imagine him doing what the Unabomber had done.”
Ted Kaczynski, identified as the domestic terrorist known as the Unabomber, is shown in this booking photo, April 1996.
Bureau of Prisons via Getty Image, FILE
Kaczynski was on trial in Sacramento, California, where the issue was not his guilt, but his sanity and whether he would be spared the death penalty. He pleaded guilty to murder in exchange for life in prison without parole in 1998.
Kaczynski, who had attended Harvard at age 16 and received a Ph.D. in math from the University of Michigan, had also threatened to blow up planes, according to the FBI.
Kaczynski’s prosecution was overseen by now Attorney General Merrick Garland when he was a senior Justice Department official. Garland also oversaw the investigation of Oklahoma City bombings before he was attorney general.
He grew up in Chicago, where his first bomb exploded, taught at the University of California, Berkeley, where two devices were left behind, and lived in Salt Lake City, which was also a target, authorities said.
The name Unabomber is inspired by the case name UNABOM, which the FBI says is derived from the UNiversity and Airline BOMBing targets.
