Ted Kaczynski, the infamous “Unabomber” whose package bomb attacks terrorized the United States between 1978 and 1995, was found dead in his cell at the age of 81, US media reported Saturday, citing the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

Since 1978 and for 18 years, this graduate of the prestigious Harvard University had shipped sixteen hidden bombs in parcels to different individuals and companies, making a total of three killed and 23 injured. After a lengthy police manhunt, he was arrested in 1996 and sentenced to life in prison in 1998.

According to information released by The New York Times, based on prison authorities, the inmate was found unconscious in his cell early Saturday morning and the cause of his death is still unknown.

He spent a long time in the maximum security prison of Florence, Colorado – known for housing famous inmates such as Mexican drug lord “El Chapo” Guzmán – and was transferred to a North Carolina prison health center in 2021.

Brilliant mathematician turned recluse

Born on May 22, 1942, Ted Kaczynski was the son of second-generation Polish Catholics. His father was a sausage maker and his mother a housewife, and he grew up in Chicago with his younger brother David.

From a very young age, it quickly became apparent that Kaczynski was a genius mathematician, skipping grades six and eleven on his way to Harvard at just 16 years old. However, the virtuoso is remembered as an outcast by high school classmates, with an ominous incident where he showed a fellow student how to make a mini-bomb which he detonated during chemistry class.

Harvard classmates remembered him as a lonely, thin boy with poor personal hygiene and a room that smelled of spoiled milk, spoiled food, and foot powder.

He continued his studies at the University of Michigan before landing a job teaching mathematics at the University of California at Berkeley.

Already unemployed in 1971, Theodore Kaczynski had embarked on a crusade against progress and technology, having bought a four-mile parcel of land in the desert outside Lincoln, Montana, where he made his bombs in a shack with no running water or electricity.

His first targets were academics and airline personnel, earning the assassin the nickname “Unabomber” (for “University and Airline Bomber”).

Manifesto

In September 1995, promising to stop sending bombs, he had The New York Times and The Washington Post publish an extensive manifesto expressing his hatred of technology and the modern world.

But when he read it, a resident of the East Coast of the United States, David Kaczynski, saw a resemblance to the ancient writings of his brother Theodore, who had been isolated from his family for years. So he alerted the FBI and in April 1996 his arrest was announced.

A diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia did not stop him from being tried in 1998 and later sentenced to life in prison after pleading guilty to the offences.