WASHINGTON – 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.
Prison guards at the facility discovered Kaczynski’s body on Saturday morning, a spokesperson for the US Bureau of Prisons told the BBC.
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.
Kaczynski’s violent campaign – which shook the US – left a number of his victims permanently maimed and changed the way Americans posted letters.
His crimes were uncovered after he forced the Washington Post and the New York Times to publish his unhinged and angry manifesto, called Industrial Society and Its Future, in September 1995.
They agreed to print the manifesto on the recommendation of the FBI and the US attorney general after Kaczynski said he would end his campaign if a national paper published his treatise.
The 35,000-word anonymised document railed against modern life and claimed that technology was leading to Americans suffering from a sense of alienation and powerlessness. (BBC)
