By Smartencyclopedia Newsroom*

The ‘Unabomber,’ Theodore ‘Ted’ Kaczynski, has died in prison aged 81.

The mathematician holed up in a dingy shack in the Montana wilderness and ran a 17-year bombing campaign that killed three people and injured 23 others.

He died at a US federal prison in Butner, North Carolina, on Saturday, authorities confirmed.

He was found unresponsive in his cell early Saturday morning and was pronounced dead around 8 am, she said. The cause of death was not immediately known.

on his share of sympathisers and comparisons to Daniel Boone, Edward Abbey and Henry David Thoreau.

But once revealed as a wild-eyed hermit with long hair and beard who weathered Montana winters in a one-room shack, Kaczynski struck many as more of a pathetic loner than a romantic anti-hero.

Even in his own journals, Kaczynski came across as not a committed revolutionary, but a vengeful hermit driven by petty grievances.

“I certainly don’t claim to be an altruist or to be acting for the ‘good’ (whatever that is) of the human race,” he wrote on April 6, 1971. “I act merely from a desire for revenge.”

A psychiatrist who interviewed Kaczynski in prison diagnosed him as a paranoid schizophrenic.

“Mr. Kaczynski’s delusions are mostly persecutory in nature,” Sally Johnson wrote in a report. “The central themes involve his belief that he is being maligned and harassed by family members and modern society.”

Kaczynski hated the idea of being viewed as mentally ill and when his lawyers attempted to present an insanity defense, he tried to fire them. When that failed, he tried to hang himself.

Kaczynski eventually pleaded guilty rather than let his defense team proceed with an insanity defense.

“I’m confident that I’m sane,” Kaczynski told Time magazine in 1999. “I don’t get delusions and so forth.”

‘Becoming the Unabomber’

Kaczynski skipped two grades to attend Harvard at age 16 and had published papers in prestigious mathematics journals.

His explosives were carefully tested and came in meticulously handcrafted wooden boxes sanded to remove possible fingerprints. Later bombs bore the signature “FC” for “Freedom Club.”

The FBI called him the ‘Unabomber’ because his early targets seemed to be universities and airlines. An altitude-triggered bomb he mailed in 1979 went off as planned aboard an American Airlines flight, causing a dozen people aboard to suffer from smoke inhalation.

Kaczynski killed computer rental store owner Hugh Scrutton, advertising executive Thomas Mosser and timber industry lobbyist Gilbert Murray.

California geneticist Charles Epstein and Yale University computer expert David Gelernter were maimed by bombs two days apart in June 1993.

Mosser was killed in his North Caldwell, New Jersey, home on December 10, 1994, a day he was supposed to be picking out a Christmas tree with his family. His wife, Susan, found him grievously wounded by a barrage of razor blades, pipes and nails.

“He was moaning very softly,” she said at Kaczynski’s 1998 sentencing. “The fingers on his right hand were dangling. I held his left hand. I told him help was coming. I told him I loved him.”

When Kaczynski stepped up his bombs and letters to newspapers and scientists in 1995, experts speculated the ‘Unabomber’ was jealous of the attention being paid to Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.

A threat to blow up a plane out of Los Angeles before the end of the July Fourth weekend threw air travel and mail delivery into chaos. The ‘Unabomber’ later claimed it was a “prank.”

The Washington Post printed the ‘Unabomber’s’ manifesto at the urging of federal authorities, after the bomber said he would desist from terrorism if a national publication published his treatise.

‘My brother’s a serial killer’

Patrik had had a disturbing feeling about her brother-in-law even before seeing the manifesto and eventually persuaded her husband to read a copy at the library.

After two months of arguments, they took some of Kaczynski’s letters to Patrik’s childhood friend Susan Swanson, a private investigator in Chicago.

Swanson in turn passed them along to former FBI behavior science expert Clint Van Zandt, whose analysts said whoever wrote them had also probably written the ‘Unabomber’s’ manifesto.

“It was a nightmare,” David Kaczynski, who as a child had idolised his older brother, said in a 2005 speech at Bennington College. “I was literally thinking, ‘My brother’s a serial killer, the most wanted man in America.’”

Swanson turned to a corporate lawyer friend, Anthony Bisceglie, who contacted the FBI.

Source: With Agencies