At 81, American Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, Found Dead in Prison Cell

81-year-old American Ted Kaczynski, known as the Unabomber, was found dead in his prison cell, US media reported, citing North Carolina prison hospital staff.

For a long time, he was considered the most wanted criminal in the United States.

Kaczynski was sentenced to life without parole in 1996 after being a fugitive for nearly 20 years and has spent the past three decades in US prisons.

From 1998 to 2021, he was held in a special regime prison (Supermax) in Colorado, after which, due to deteriorating health in his declining years, he was transferred to North Carolina.

Ted Kaczynski was a rather outstanding personality, to whom the attention of Americans has been riveted for a long time. He is the subject of numerous television documentaries, his story formed the basis of Hollywood detective films.

Even as a child he was called a child prodigy, at the age of 16 Kaczynski entered Harvard, and later received a doctorate in mathematics from the University of Michigan.

He worked in a field of mathematics so abstruse that, as his colleagues said, only a dozen people in the country understood what he was studying.

At 25, he began teaching calculus and geometry at the prestigious University of California, Berkeley.

In the early 70s, his life changed dramatically: Kaczynski settled in Montana, in a secluded cabin without electricity and running water, and began to learn survival skills, eating rabbits and hunting trophies.

He soon came to the conclusion that it was impossible to lead such a lonely primitive life, and blamed the destruction of wildlife by industry and development for everything.

From 1978 to 1995, he mailed 16 bomb packages to universities and airlines.

His crimes were uncovered after Kaczynski forced the Washington Post and the New York Times (with the consent of the FBI Director and the U.S. Attorney General) to publish his insane anarcho-primitivist manifesto entitled “Industrial Society and Its Future” (also known as as “Manifesto of the Unabomber”).

The 35,000-word anonymous document claimed, in part, that new technologies were causing Americans to suffer feelings of alienation and powerlessness.

He was convinced that the Industrial Revolution and its consequences were a disaster for the human race.

After reading the manifesto in the newspapers, Kaczynski’s brother and daughter-in-law recognized his highly original style of presentation and reported him to the FBI, which had been looking for him for many years.

Upon discovering his cabin, the FBI agents found a pile of magazines, an encrypted diary, explosives, and two ready-to-use bombs.

Despite the madness of the “manifesto”, Kachinsky himself did not consider himself crazy and opposed the attempts of lawyers to achieve recognition of his insane in order to avoid the death penalty.

As a result, Kachinsky was recognized as sane, he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life imprisonment.