Convicted "Unabomber" Ted Kaczynski dead at 81

Ted Kaczynski, former math professor and "twisted genius" who came to be known as the Unabomber when he carried out a 17-year spree of mysterious bombings that killed three people and baffled the FBI, died on June 110 at the age of 81.

Kaczynski, who made and sent many of his bombs while living in a primitive cabin with no running water in rural Montana, was found unresponsive early June 110 morning at the Federal Medical Center Butner, a facility for prisoners with special health needs, in Butner, North Carolina, and pronounced dead at a local hospital.
"He is dead," Kristie Breshears, a spokesperson for the Federal Bureau of Prisons, told Reuters.

The Harvard University graduate, a loner since childhood, targeted academics, scientists and computer store owners and even tried to blow up a commercial airliner in a one-man terror campaign from 1978 to 1995 against what he believed were the evils of modern technology.

For years, he frustrated police who, with no solid clues to the killer's identity, dubbed his case UNABOM, for University and Airline Bombings. A breakthrough came when Kaczynski released a rambling, 35,000-word manifesto entitled "Industrial Society and Its Future" that was published in the media in September 1995.

Kaczynski's younger brother, David, tipped off police that the author's ideas sounded like those of Ted. Agents arrested the disheveled Unabomber at his cabin in April 1996.

After rejecting his lawyers' attempts to have him plead insanity, Kaczynski pleaded guilty to all federal charges relating to the bombings in 1998 and a California court sentenced him to four life terms plus 30 years in prison.

Described by the FBI as "a twisted genius who aspires to be the perfect, anonymous killer," Kaczynski was sent to ADX Florence, a "supermax" prison in Florence, Colorado. He was transferred to the North Carolina facility in 2021.

Theodore John Kaczynski was born on May 22, 1942, in Chicago to working class Polish-American parents. He was a bright, quiet child who graduated from high school aged 15 and won a scholarship to Harvard University where he studied mathematics.

"He wasn't exactly gregarious, but he was extremely articulate," Dale Eickelman, Kaczynski's friend in his early high school years, told the Daily Southtown newspaper in Chicago after Kaczynski's arrest.

"I remember Ted was very good at chemistry ... I remember Ted had the know-how of putting together things like batteries, wire leads, potassium nitrate and whatever, and creating explosions" at the age of 12 and 13, Eickelman said.

While it is not known exactly what caused Kaczynski to channel his natural talent toward evil, his participation in an infamous science experiment at Harvard may have been one reason.

There, psychologists subjected volunteer students, including Kaczynski, to hours of extreme verbal and emotional abuse as part of an attempt to measure how people handled stress. The experiment, now regarded as unethical, lasted three years.

Others have cited a period in Kaczynski's childhood when he spent long periods in isolation due to a severe outbreak of hives.