NORTH CAROLINA: Theodore “Ted” Kaczynski, a Harvard-educated math professor who launched a murderous bombing campaign from a hut in rural Montana and rose to the moniker “Unabomber,” has passed away. He was 81, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
CNN said that the Federal Medical Centre in Butner, North Carolina, said that Kaczynski was discovered unconscious in his cell at around 12:25 on Saturday morning.
The responding staff started life-saving efforts right away, according to the agency. “Lifesaving efforts continued after staff called for emergency medical services (EMS). EMS took Kaczynski to a nearby hospital, where he was pronounced dead on arrival.
Kaczynski began serving eight life sentences after pleading guilty plea in 1998 for sending mail bombs that resulted in the deaths of three persons and the injuries of 23 others between 1978 and 1995,.
According to the FBI’s website, he made untraceable explosives and delivered them to arbitrary targets, with the first one being sent to a Chicago university in 1978. The FBI spent nearly two decades attempting to find him.
In order to look into the “UNABOM” case, an acronym made up of the phrases university, airline, and bombing, an FBI-led task force was established in 1979. This task force eventually swelled to more than 150 full-time investigators.
In 1996, Kaczynski was taken into custody at a tiny, outlying cabin in western Montana.
According to the agency, Kaczynski was transferred to the federal hospital in North Carolina in 2021. Before being sent to FMC Butner on December 14, 2021, he had been detained at Supermax in Florence, Colorado.
Kaczynski wrote a 30,000 word manifesto known as the Unabomber Manifesto, which was published and portrayed by prosecutors as the work of a spiteful loner.
Kaczynski defended his murderous campaign in the paper by claiming that protecting people and the environment from technology and exploitation gave him moral authority.
“I don’t believe in anything I don’t even subscribe to the religion of wilderness or nature worshippers. I frequently discard cans in logged-over regions, therefore I’m completely willing to litter in the woods where they aren’t useful to me,” he said in his writings.
Kaczynski talked of a strong hate of humans in his notebooks, which were widely mentioned in the sentencing statement.
Since Kaczynski’s arrest in April 1996 as a result of a tip from his brother David, the family has maintained that the writings were the product of a paranoid schizophrenic, not a murderer with a cold, calculated heart. The prosecution was able to abandon its desire for the death penalty and approve a plea deal after a federal prison psychiatrist concurred.
Kaczynski requested permission from the judge to fire his solicitors and handle his own defence following an apparent suicide attempt in his detention cell prior to entering a plea. He claimed that he intended to defend himself using the argument that technology is obliterating mankind.
Kaczynski consented to examinations administered by Dr. Sally Johnson, a federal psychiatrist, to demonstrate his capacity to defend himself.
Johnson came to the conclusion that Kaczynski was mentally sound, but she also gave him a paranoid schizophrenic diagnosis.
Just before his trial was set to start, a last-minute plea agreement was reached. Kaczynski was originally facing the death penalty, but the prosecution later changed their plea to life in prison without the possibility of release.
Kaczynski’s sentence was handed down by US District Judge Garland Burrell Jr, who stated: “The defendant committed unspeakable and monstrous crimes for which he shows utterly no remorse.”
‘He’ll be closer to hell’
Kaczynski was spared a trial and potential execution by lethal injection because to the plea deal.
Theodore Kaczynski “poses a grave danger to society because of these heinous acts of terrorism and because of the callous nature of the crimes,” said Burrell. “He should be sent to a facility where he can be closely monitored.”
Susan Mosser, whose husband was killed by the Unabomber, pleaded with Burrell to “make the sentence bullet-proof, or bomb-proof, lock him so far down that when he does die, he’ll be closer to hell” at the sentencing hearing. That is the proper place for the devil.
In 1994, a parcel bomb killed her husband Thomas, a New Jersey advertising executive.
She mentioned that her 15-month-old daughter Kelly had seen her father bleed after the bomb went off while speaking between brief gasps in the courtroom.
The young child had wailed, “No, no, no, not my Daddy!”
At the time, Attorney General Janet Reno released a statement that said, “Justice has been done, and Theodore Kaczynski will never threaten anyone again.”
Hugh Scrutton, proprietor of a computer rental business, and Gilbert Murray, a lobbyist for the forestry sector, were among Kaczynski’s other victims. Bombings injured computer specialist David Gelernter and geneticist Charles Epstein.
Hugh Scrutton, proprietor of a computer rental business, and Gilbert Murray, a lobbyist for the forestry sector, were among Kaczynski’s other victims.
Bombings also injured computer specialist David Gelernter and geneticist Charles Epstein, who were Kaczynski’s partners.
After Epstein suffered catastrophic injuries in the 1993 explosion, he publicly named Kaczynski for the first time in 1998, referring to him as “the personification of evil,” CNN reported at the time.
According to CNN, Epstein stated in a 1998 press conference that Kaczynski’s guilty plea and imprisonment will never provide victims with a sense of closure.
“There’s never closure,” said Epstein, who was attacked and lost three fingers on his right hand in addition to having a fractured arm, serious stomach injuries, and a permanent hearing loss.
David Kaczynski, who gave the tip that resulted in his brother’s arrest, was referred to by a prosecutor as “a true American hero.”
Following the plea, David Kaczynski issued a statement in which he expressed his profound sorrow and remorse to the victims and his desire to “reiterate our deep sorrow and regret to the victims…(and) to reach out in any way possible to ease their pain and express our love.”
In order to construct a shack close to Lincoln, Montana, Ted Kaczynski resigned from a tenure-track post at the University of California, Berkeley in 1969. For more than 20 years, he lived there without running water or power.
From the 13 by 13 foot hut, Kaczynski ran his “anti-technology” bombing campaign for 17 years.
In addition to the losses and harm he caused, Kaczynski also threatened to blow up aeroplanes. He planted a bomb on one trip in 1979, which led to an emergency landing after the cargo hold caught fire.
By threatening to blow up a jet leaving Los Angeles and declaring that he would put an end to the bombs if The New York Times and Washington Post published his 35,000-word manifesto, Kaczynski was able to at one point coerce publications into printing it.
The manifesto criticised technology and environmental deterioration. His brother was informed that it resembled letters he had sent to his family, and he decided to turn Kaczynski in.
