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‘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

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Unabomber Theodore “Ted” Kaczynski is flanked by federal agents in Helena, Montana, US in 1996. He died in prison on Saturday at the age of 81. Photo: AP
Associated Press

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.

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Branded the “Unabomber” by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Kaczynski died at the federal prison medical centre in Butner, North Carolina, US, said Kristie Breshears, a spokeswoman for the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Kaczynski was found unresponsive in his prison cell early on Saturday morning and was pronounced dead at around 8am, Breshears said.
Before his transfer to the prison medical facility, Kaczynski had been held in the federal Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, since May 1998, when he was sentenced to four life sentences plus 30 years for a campaign of terror that set universities across the United States on edge. He admitted committing 16 bombings between 1978 and 1995, permanently maiming several of his victims.
Ted Kaczynski in 1996. Known as the Unabomber, Kaczynski terrorised Americans for nearly two decades from the 1970s to the 1990s with a bombing campaign. Photo: Handout / FBI / AFP
Ted Kaczynski in 1996. Known as the Unabomber, Kaczynski terrorised Americans for nearly two decades from the 1970s to the 1990s with a bombing campaign. Photo: Handout / FBI / AFP

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.

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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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