June 10, 2023
Unabomber Ted Kaczynski Dies by Suicide in Prison at 81
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UPDATE: Sources tell The New York Times that Kaczynski died by suicide. The paper states that emergency workers were called to his cell at a federal prison in Butner, North Carolina, just after midnight Saturday. Attempts to revive him were unsuccessful. He was rushed to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
Theodore J. Kaczynski, the infamous Unabomber who was convicted of attacking a variety of people — and modernity itself — via homemade bombs sent between 1978 and 1995, died in a prison hospital in Butner, North Carolina, Saturday, The New York Times reports.
He was 81.
Kaczynski had been a math wunderkind at Harvard in his youth, as well as an associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley before devolving into a life of seclusion and resentment in a Montana shack.
All told, Kaczynski killed three people and injured 23 others with his mail bombs, which were known to cause victims to lose their fingers upon opening.
Why did he do it? His defense claimed he was mentally ill, but Kaczynski had offered a 35,000-word manifesto to justify his bloodthirsty rampage, asserting his opposition to leftist policies, industrialization, and the destruction of nature. The publication of his ravings by The Washington Post directly led to his capture when his brother David Kaczynski recognized the writing style.
Kaczynski was arrested on April 3, 1996, after having been the target of the FBI's priciest manhunt ever. In 1998, having pleaded guilty to all charges against him, Kaczynski went to prison in Florence, Colorado, where the unrepentant domestic terrorist befriended World Trade Center (1993) bomber Ramzi Yousef and Oklahoma City (1995) bomber Timothy McVeigh while serving multiple life sentences.
Kaczynski's notoriety led to suspicions he was the Zodiac Killer of the '60s (he was not) and/or involved in the 1982 Chicago Tylenol murders (he was not). His manifesto was partly copied by Anders Behring Breivik, the far-right terrorist who killed over 70 people in Norway in July 2011.
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