Has ‘Unabomber’ Ted Kaczynski died in US prison?

Kaczynski was dubbed the Unabomber or “University and Airline Bomber” by the FBI owing to him targeting university professors and airline companies.

Theodore John Kaczynski was born on May 22, 1942, to Polish-American parents. Kaczynski was a bright kid from the start with an IQ of 167 and completed high school at the age of 15. He later received a scholarship to study mathematics at Harvard University. 

Kaczynski received his PhD in mathematics from the University of Michigan in 1967  and later took up a job as an assistant professor in mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley. He quit his job in 1971 and bought a land in Montana in 1971. He built a tar-paper cabin near Lincoln that served as the base of his operations during the bombing campaign.

Kaczynski killed 3 people and injured at least 12 more during his 17-year reign of terror. He mainly targeted academics, scientists and random civilians using hand-delivered or mailed bombs. 

He published a 35,000-word manifesto called “Industrial Society and Its Future” in the Washington Post on the promise that he would stop his spree of killings if the media house printed it. This manifesto led to the decline of Kaczynski when his estranged brother David recognized his ideas and tipped the FBI about his suspicions. 

Kaczynski was arrested from his cabin in 1996 and sentenced to four life terms plus 30 years in prison in 1998 after pleading to all charges related to the bombing and rejecting his lawyer’s suggestion to plead insanity. 

He was sentenced to ADX Florence prison in Florence, Colorado and was later shifted to the Federal prison medical center in 2021.

Updated: 11 Jun 2023, 08:50 AM IST