Theodore "Ted" Kaczynski, the Harvard-educated mathematician who retreated to a dingy shack in the Montana wilderness and ran a 17-year bombing campaign that killed three people and injured 23 others, has died at the age of 81.
Branded the "Unabomber" by the FBI, Kaczynski died at the federal prison medical centre in Butner, North Carolina, said Kristie Breshears, a spokesperson for the federal Bureau of Prisons.
He was found unresponsive in his cell early on Saturday morning and was pronounced dead around 8am, she said.
A cause of death was not immediately known.
Before his transfer to the prison medical facility, he 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 nationwide on edge.
He admitted having committed 16 bombings between 1978 and 1995, permanently maiming several of his victims.
Years before the September 11 attacks and the anthrax mailing, the "Unabomber's" deadly homemade bombs changed the way Americans mailed packages and boarded airplanes, even virtually shutting down air travel on the West Coast in July 1995.
He forced The Washington Post, 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 were 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 3-by-4-metre plywood and tar paper cabin outside Lincoln, Montana, that was filled with journals, a coded diary, explosive ingredients and two completed bombs.
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."
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.
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.
Story by AP
Original story link https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-06-11/convicted-unabomber-ted-kaczynski-dead-at-81/102466692
Stay tuned for the latest news on our radio stations
