By Jonathan Mason-June 11th, 2023.
Ted Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber, has been found dead in his prison cell, federal officials confirmed to the BBC.
Kaczynski, 81, killed three people and injured 23 more during a mass mail-bombing spree between 1978 and 1995. He later pleaded guilty to his crimes.
He was sentenced to life without parole in 1996 after evading capture for almost 20 years.
The Harvard-trained mathematician was eventually caught in a Montana cabin.
He was a man who fascinated America for decades, and he became the focus of numerous TV documentaries.
Kaczynski spent the past three decades held at prisons across the US – most recently at the Federal Medical Center in Butner, North Carolina.
His cause of death was not immediately clear.
“Responding staff immediately initiated life-saving measures,” the spokesperson said. Kaczynski was then “transported by EMS to a local hospital and subsequently pronounced deceased by hospital personnel”.
Before suffering from declining health which prompted his transfer to the facility in December 2021, he had been held at the federal Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, since May 1998.
He was a mathematics prodigy but abandoned his academic career in 1969 to pursue a primitive lifestyle. Between 1978 and 1995, Kaczynski murdered three individuals and injured 23 others in a nationwide mail bombing campaign against people he believed to be advancing modern technology and the destruction of the environment.
In 1971, Kaczynski moved to a remote cabin without electricity or running water near Lincoln, Montana, where he lived as a recluse while learning survival skills to become self sufficient After witnessing the destruction of the wilderness surrounding his cabin, he concluded that living in nature was becoming impossible and resolved to fight industrialization and its destruction of nature through terrorism. In 1979, Kaczynski became the subject of what was, by the time of his arrest, the longest and most expensive investigation in the history of the FBI.
The FBI used the case identifier UNABOM (University and Airline Bomber) before his identity was known, resulting in the media naming him the “Unabomber.”
