The Associated Press reported on Sunday that Ted Kaczynski, known to the FBI as the ‘Unabomber,’ committed suicide. Kaczynski, 81, was discovered dead in his North Carolina prison cell the day before, suffering from late-stage cancer.
According to four persons characterized by the Associated Press as “familiar with the matter,” Kacynski committed suicide. The sources did not specify how the 81-year-old cancer patient did this, and they also stated that they were not authorized to discuss his death publicly.
According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, Kaczynski was discovered unresponsive in his cell early Saturday morning and was brought to the hospital, where he was pronounced dead. He had been incarcerated in the federal Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, since 1998, but in 2021 he was transferred to a medical clinic in North Carolina to receive cancer treatment.
An autopsy on Kaczynski’s body has yet to be performed.
After pleading guilty to 16 bombings between 1978 and 1995, Kaczynski received four life sentences in 1998. The recluse killed three individuals and maimed 23 others by mailing explosives to academics, businesspeople, and other persons he regarded leaders of industrial society.
He was a skilled mathematician and child prodigy who was admitted to Harvard University at the age of 16 and became the University of California, Berkeley’s youngest professor at the age of 25. He took part in a CIA-linked psychological experiment at Harvard and stayed at Berkeley for less than two years before dropping out and moving to a remote cabin in Montana. His hatred for the modern society grew there, culminating in his bombing campaign and the publication of his manifesto titled ‘Industrial Society and its Future’ by the Washington Post and New York Times in 1995.
He was apprehended after his brother recognized his writing style and alerted the FBI, bringing an end to one of the longest and most expensive manhunts in US history.
In 1998, Kaczynski attempted suicide while awaiting trial, but asserted that he was not mentally sick. Despite being diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, he pleaded guilty to three counts of first-degree murder and thirteen counts of transporting explosive devices rather than pleading insanity.
