Unabomber Ted Kaczynski found dead in prison aged 81

KaczynskiThe body was found in his cell on Saturday morning, officials said. He was 81 years old.

He was in maximum security facility in Colorado, but was transferred to a medical facility in North Carolina in December 2021 due to poor health.

Kaczynski, who gave up a promising career to live as a hermit in a Montana cabin, lived for nearly 20 years before finally being captured in April 1996 and considered the most prolific bomber in American history.

The explosives he made, which he mailed or personally delivered, also wounded two dozen victims. After his arrest, he confessed to committing 16 bombings between 1978 and 1995, which permanently injured several of his victims.

For some, he was a folk hero for his pro-Luddite views and his ability to elude the authorities for years.

Kaczynski wrote the 35,000-word anti-tech and anti-leftist manifesto Industrial Society and Its Future, better known as the Unabomber Manifesto, which warned the world about how rapidly advancing technology would threaten and possibly kill people.

Ray Kurzweil, Google’s chief engineer and one of the world’s leading experts in AI or artificial intelligence, included a lengthy excerpt from the manifesto in his 2000 book: The age of spiritual machines: when computers will surpass human intelligencebut he did not tell readers until the next page who the author of the passage was.

“People will agree with what he wrote until they turn the page and see who wrote it,” Kurzweil told reporters. New York Post Happy Saturday “He raised issues we need to be concerned about, but of course he did it completely wrong. He attacked people who were real explorers, and for that he should be condemned forever.”

The coupler was written under the pseudonym FC, or Freedom Club, and published in Washington Post And The newspaper “New York Times in 1995, by virtual force after his promise to stop the bombing if a major publication printed it in full.

The publication of the manifesto ruined Kaczynski. His brother David Kaczynski, now 73, and his wife Linda Patrick recognized his writing style and called the FBI.

After a massive manhunt, Kaczynski was captured by police from his small plywood and tar paper cabin in the woods near Lincoln, Montana.

The tiny house, smaller than the prison cell where he spent his final years, contained explosives, two ready-made bombs, and an encrypted diary.

Prior to being transferred to a medical facility, Kaczynski was held at the Supermax federal prison in Florence, Colorado, from 1998, where he served four life sentences plus 30 years.

On Saturday, it was not possible to contact David Kaczynski.

Despite his inclusion in Kurzweil’s book and his reputation among some as a perspicacious truth-seeker, Kaczynski was honest about who he was.

“I certainly do not pretend to be an altruist or act for the good (whatever that is) of humanity,” he wrote in April 1971. “I’m just acting out of a desire for revenge.”

This article originally appeared in New York Post and reproduced here with permission

Originally published as Unabomber Ted Kaczynski found dead in prison aged 81