AP – Theodore “Ted” Kaczynski, known as the Unabomber, has died in federal prison, according to a Bureau of Prisons spokesman. Kaczynski was found dead around 8 a.m. Saturday in a federal prison in North Carolina. He was found unresponsive in his cell. The cause of death was not immediately known. He was 81 years old.
Kaczynski was arrested in 1996 after building and shipping bombs for 17 years. He first came to the attention of law enforcement in 1978 when his first bomb exploded in Chicago at a university. Their bombs were impossible to trace, according to the FBI, and were delivered to random targets. The bombs he created killed three Americans and injured nearly two dozen others, according to the FBI.
He lived in the mountains of Montana in a remote cabin. When he was arrested, authorities found bomb components, 40,000 pages of newspapers discussing the bombs and a live bomb, which was ready to be mailed.
duckynski pleaded guilty in January 1998. He spent two decades in a federal prison in Colorado and was then transferred to the North Carolina Federal Prison Medical Facility.
He was sentenced to four life sentences plus 30 years for a campaign of terror that put universities across the country on edge. He admitted committing 16 bombings between 1978 and 1995.
Years before the 9/11 attacks and anthrax shipments, the Unabomber’s deadly homemade bombs changed the way Americans shipped packages and boarded airplanes.
It forced The Washington Post and The New York Times to make the agonizing decision in September 1995 to publish their 35,000-word manifesto, “Industrial Society and Its Future,” which claimed that modern society and technology were leading to a feeling of helplessness and alienation.
But it led to his undoing. Kaczynski’s brother, David, recognized the tone of the treaty and alerted the FBI, which had been searching for the Unabomber for years in the nation’s longest and most expensive manhunt.
In April 1996, authorities found Kaczynski in a 10-by-14-foot plywood and tarpaulin cabin outside Lincoln, Montana, which was filled with newspapers, a coded diary, explosive ingredients and two finished bombs.
