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Ted Kaczynski, known as “The Unabomber,” who conducted a 17-year bombing campaign that killed three people and wounded 23, committed suicide, four people familiar with the matter told The Associated Press.
Kaczynski, 81, with terminal cancer, was found unresponsive in his cell at Federal Medical Center in Butner, North Carolina, around 12:30 a.m. Saturday. Emergency crews performed CPR and revived him before being taken to the hospital, where he was pronounced dead late Saturday morning, people told The Associated Press. They were not authorized to discuss Kaczynski’s death publicly and spoke to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity.
Kaczynski’s death comes as the BOP has faced increased scrutiny over the past few years following the suicide of wealthy financier Jeffrey Epstein in federal prison in 2019.
Kaczynski has been incarcerated at the federal Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, since May 1998, when he was sentenced to four life sentences plus 30 years in prison for a terrorist campaign that edged universities across the country. He admitted to committing 16 bombings from 1978 to 1995 that left several victims permanently disabled.
In 2021, he was transferred to Commonwealth Medical Center in North Carolina, a facility that treats prisoners with serious health problems. Bernie Madoff, the notorious mastermind of the largest Ponzi scheme of all time, died of natural causes that same year.
A Harvard-trained mathematician, Kaczynski retreated to a dingy cabin in rural Montana, where he conducted a single bomb that changed the way Americans mailed packages and boarded airplanes.
His targets included academics and airlines, the owner of a computer rental store, an advertising executive and a lumber industry lobbyist. In 1993, a California geneticist and a Yale computer scientist were killed by bombs within two days.
Two years later, he persuaded the New York Times and the Washington Post to publish his manifesto, a 35,000-word tirade against modern life and technology and the destruction of the environment, with constant threats of violence.
Recognizing the tone of the paper, his brother David and David’s wife Linda Patrik tipped off to the FBI, which has been searching for years for the most recent U.S. time investigation. The bomber in the longest and most expensive manhunt.
Authorities found him in April 1996 in a plywood and tarpaper log cabin outside Lincoln, Montana, filled with diaries, coded diaries, dynamite components and two completed bombs.
In 1998, while awaiting trial, Kaczynski attempted to hang himself with a pair of underwear. Although he was diagnosed by a psychiatrist as a paranoid schizophrenic, he insisted that he was not psychotic. He ended up pleading guilty instead of letting his lawyers enter an insanity plea.
Kaczynski grew up in Chicago and skipped two grades before entering Harvard University at 16, where he published in prestigious mathematics journals.
His explosives are carefully tested and packed in carefully handcrafted wooden boxes that are sanded to remove possible fingerprints. Later bombs bear the signature “FC” of the “Freedom Club”.
The FBI dubbed him “Unabomber” because his early targets appeared to be universities and airlines. An altitude-triggered bomb he mailed in 1979 went off as planned on an American Airlines flight; a dozen people on board inhaled smoke.
During his decades in prison, Kaczynski maintained regular correspondence and became an object of fascination, even adoration, by opponents of modern civilization.
“He has become an iconic figure on the far right and the far left,” said Darryl Johnson, a domestic terrorism expert at the New Line Institute, a nonprofit think tank. “In terms of his level of education, the meticulous nature with which he designed the bomb, he definitely stood out.”
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This story corrected the expert’s last name to Johnson in the last paragraph.
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Balsamo reported from Miami.
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