Genius who became a terrorist: Unabomber committed suicide in an American prison

81-year-old American Ted Kaczynski, known as the Unabomber, committed suicide in a prison cell. with the BBC tells the story of one of the most notorious terrorists in the world.

Photo: IStock

U.S. Federal Bureau of Prisons spokeswoman Christy Breachers told The Associated Press that the Unabomber was found unconscious in his cell at a North Carolina prison in the early hours of June 10 and pronounced dead around 8:00 a.m. Later it turned out that the terrorist had committed suicide. AP. He was 81 years old and had cancer.

The FBI used the nickname "Unabom" (Unabom - University and airline bomber) for Kaczynski. Later, thanks to the press, the nickname became the word “Unabomber.” The nickname "Junkyard Bomber" was also used due to the materials used to create the bombs.

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

Theodore 'Ted' Kaczynski, known as the 'Unabomber' has died in federal prison. He was 81. They found him unresponsive in his cell around 8am this morning. pic.twitter.com/WzPLa6gacQ

— Rose (@901Lulu) June 10, 2023

Kaczynski was sentenced to life in prison without parole in 1996 after being a fugitive for nearly 20 years.

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

Wunderkink

Theodore (Ted) Kaczynski was a rather outstanding personality, to whom the attention of Americans was riveted for a long time. He is the subject of many television documentaries, his story has become the basis of Hollywood detective films.

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As a child, he was called a child prodigy. At 16, Kaczynski entered Harvard and later received a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Michigan.

He was in such an amazing area of ​​mathematics that, as his colleagues said, only a dozen people in the country understood what he was studying. His specialty was the branch of complex analysis - the geometric theory of functions. Kaczynski received his doctorate with a thesis on "Boundary Functions". He received a grant from the National Science Foundation and taught students for three years, published two papers related to his dissertation, and four more after he left Michigan.

At 25, he began teaching calculus and geometry at the prestigious University of California, Berkeley, but quit two years later. Kaczynski settled in a secluded cabin without electricity or running water in Montana and began to learn survival skills by eating rabbits and other hunting trophies.

He soon came to the conclusion that it was impossible to lead such a lonely primitive life, and he blamed the industry and developments that destroy wildlife for this.

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

Terrorist activity

He began his protest against the destruction of wildlife with small acts of sabotage, and mailed his first bomb in 1978, reports Фокус. It was intended for materials engineering professor Buckley Christ at Northwestern University. As a result, a university police officer who picked up the package was injured.

After the Unabomber sent bombs to all the famous US universities. One of the bombs that landed on an American Airlines flight from Chicago to Washington did not explode, but began to smoke, so that 12 passengers were poisoned by combustion products. The bomb was so powerful that if it exploded, the plane would have been destroyed, authorities said.

The first seriously injured as a result of the activities of the Unabomber was a graduate student and US Air Force Captain John Hoser - in 1985 he lost four fingers and an eye.

Hugh Scrutton, a 38-year-old computer store owner in California, was killed by a nail from a fragmentation bomb placed in the parking lot of his car in 1985. Two years later, on February 20, 1987, there was an explosion at another computer store in Salt Lake City, Utah. Then Harry Wright was wounded, who was later supported by Ted's brother.

Kachinsky committed the next terrorist attack after a six-year break - in 1993. He mailed the bomb to David Gelernter, a computer science professor at Yale University. Despite being severely injured, Gelernter eventually recovered.

Another bomb, mailed the same weekend, was sent to the home of geneticist Charles Epstein in San Francisco. Epstein lost several fingers in the explosion. Kaczynski then called Charles's brother Joel, a behavioral geneticist, and threatened "you're next." Geneticist Phillip Sharp at MIT also received a threatening letter two years later. Kaczynski wrote a letter to the New York Times claiming that there was an FC group that was responsible for the bombings.

In 1994, Burson-Marsteller executive Thomas Mosser was killed by a mail bomb sent to his home in North Caldwell, New Jersey. In another letter to the New York Times, Kaczynski claimed that FC “blew up Thomas Mosser because Burston-Marsteller helped Exxon clean up after the Exxon Valdez incident” and, more importantly, because “its business is the development of to manage people's relationships. This letter was accompanied by the 1995 assassination of Gilbert Murray, head of the skidding industry that lobbied for the California Forestry Association. In fact, this bomb was intended for the previous president, William Dennison, who retired.

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One feature of Kaczynski's tactics was to leave false clues in each bomb. He made them hard to find to make investigators believe they had a clue.

In total, Ted's bombs killed three people and injured 23 others. He also sent threatening letters to professors and graduate students.

"The Unabomber Manifesto"

His crimes were discovered after Kaczynski, threatening new murders, forced the Washington Post and New York Times (with the consent of the FBI director and the US Attorney General) to publish his insane anarcho-primitivist manifesto entitled “Industrial Society and Its Future.”

The 35-word anonymous document argued, in part, that the latest technology was causing Americans to feel alienated and powerless.

In the Manifesto, Kaczynski stated that through his actions he was trying to draw attention to the process of decreasing human freedom in society due to modern technologies that require large-scale organization. He was convinced that the Industrial Revolution and its consequences were a disaster for the human race.

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After reading the manifesto in the newspapers, Kaczynski's brother and daughter-in-law recognized his highly original way of presenting his thoughts 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” ideas, Kaczynski himself did not consider himself crazy and resisted the lawyers’ attempts to have him declared insane in order to avoid the death penalty.

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

In 2017, the series “Hunting the Unabomber” was filmed about Ted. He was played by Paul Bettany.

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