‘Unabomber’ Ted Kaczynski found dead in US prison cell at age of 81
- Kaczynski ran a violent 17-year bombing campaign that killed 3 and injured 23. He admitted committing 16 bombings between 1978 and 1995
- Kaczynski was found unresponsive in his North Carolina prison cell early on Saturday morning and was pronounced dead at around 8am
Theodore “Ted” Kaczynski, the Harvard-educated mathematician who retreated to a shack in the Montana wilderness and ran a 17-year bombing campaign that killed three people and injured 23 others, died on Saturday. He was 81.
Years before the September 11 attacks and the anthrax mailing, the Unabomber’s deadly home-made bombs changed the way Americans posted packages and boarded planes, even virtually shutting down air travel on the US west coast in July 1995.
He forced The Washington Post newspaper, in conjunction with The New York Times, to make the agonising decision in September 1995 to publish his 35,000-word manifesto, “Industrial Society and Its Future”, which claimed modern society and technology was leading to a sense of powerlessness and alienation.
But it led to his undoing. Kaczynski’s brother David and David’s wife, Linda Patrik, recognised the treatise’s tone and tipped off the FBI, which had been searching for the “Unabomber” for years in the nation’s longest, costliest manhunt.
Authorities in April 1996 found him in a 10-by-14-ft (3-by-4-metre) plywood and tarpaper cabin outside Lincoln, Montana, that was filled with journals, a coded diary, explosive ingredients and two completed bombs.
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As an elusive criminal mastermind, the Unabomber won his share of sympathisers and comparisons to Daniel Boone, Edward Abbey and Henry David Thoreau.
But once revealed as a wild-eyed hermit with long hair and beard who weathered Montana winters in a one-room shack, Kaczynski struck many as more of a pathetic loner than romantic anti-hero.
Even in his own journals, Kaczynski came across as not a committed revolutionary, but a vengeful hermit driven by petty grievances.
“I certainly don’t claim to be an altruist or to be acting for the ‘good’ (whatever that is) of the human race,” he wrote on April 6, 1971. “I act merely from a desire for revenge.”
A psychiatrist who interviewed Kaczynski in prison diagnosed him as a paranoid schizophrenic.
“Mr Kaczynski’s delusions are mostly persecutory in nature,” Sally Johnson wrote in a 47-page report. “The central themes involve his belief that he is being maligned and harassed by family members and modern society.”
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Kaczynski hated the idea of being viewed as mentally ill and when his lawyers attempted to present an insanity defence, he tried to fire them. When that failed, he tried to hang himself with his underwear.
Kaczynski eventually pleaded guilty rather than let his defence team proceed with an insanity defence.
“I’m confident that I’m sane,” Kaczynski told Time magazine in 1999. “I don’t get delusions and so forth.”
He was certainly brilliant.
Kaczynski skipped two grades to attend Harvard University at age 16 and had published papers in prestigious mathematics journals. His explosives were carefully tested and came in meticulously handcrafted wooden boxes sanded to remove possible fingerprints. Later bombs bore the signature “FC” for “Freedom Club.”
The FBI called him the “Unabomber” because his early targets seemed to be universities and airlines. An altitude-triggered bomb he mailed in 1979 went off as planned aboard an American Airlines flight; a dozen people aboard suffered from smoke inhalation.
Kaczynski killed computer rental store 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 killed in his North Caldwell, New Jersey, home on December 10, 1994, a day before he was supposed to be picking out a Christmas tree with his family. His wife, Susan, found him grievously wounded by a barrage of razor blades, pipes and nails.
“He was moaning very softly,” she said at Kaczynski’s 1998 sentencing. “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 stepped up his bombs and letters to newspapers and scientists in 1995, experts speculated the “Unabomber” was jealous of the attention being paid to Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.
A threat to blow up a plane out of Los Angeles before the end of the Fourth of July weekend threw air travel and mail delivery into chaos. The “Unabomber” later claimed it was a “prank.”
The Washington Post printed the “Unabomber’s” manifesto at the urging of federal authorities, after the bomber said he would desist from terrorism if a national publication published his treatise.
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Patrik had had a disturbing feeling about her brother-in-law even before seeing the manifesto and eventually persuaded her husband to read a copy at the library. After two months of arguments, they took some of Ted Kaczynski’s letters to Patrik’s childhood friend Susan Swanson, a private investigator in Chicago.
Swanson in turn passed them along to former FBI behavioural science expert Clint Van Zandt, whose analysts said whoever wrote them had also probably written the Unabomber’s manifesto.
“It was a nightmare,” David Kaczynski, who as a child had idolised his older brother, said in a 2005 speech at Bennington College. “I was literally thinking, ‘My brother’s a serial killer, the most wanted man in America.’”
Swanson turned to a corporate lawyer friend, Anthony Bisceglie, who contacted the FBI.
David Kaczynski wanted his role kept 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 at court hearings and described David Kaczynski in a 1999 book draft as a “Judas Iscariot (who) … doesn’t even have enough courage to go hang himself.”
Ted Kaczynski was born on May 22, 1942, in Chicago, the son of second-generation Polish Catholics – a sausage-maker and a homemaker. He played the trombone in the school band, collected coins and skipped the sixth and 11th grades.
His classmates thought him odd, particularly after he showed a school wrestler how to make a mini-bomb that detonated during a chemistry class.
Harvard University classmates recalled Kaczynski as a lonely, thin boy with poor personal hygiene and a room that smelled of spoiled milk, rotting food and foot powder.
After graduate studies at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, he started a job teaching mathematics at the University of California at Berkeley but found the work difficult and resigned abruptly. In 1971, he bought a parcel of land about 4 miles (6km) outside Lincoln, Montana and built a cabin there without heating, plumbing or electricity.
He learned 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 products manufacturer outside Chicago with his father and brother. But when a female supervisor dumped him after two dates, he began posting insulting limericks about her and would not stop.
His brother fired him and Ted Kaczynski soon returned to the wilderness to continue plotting his vengeful killing spree.
