John Youngbear/AP

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Ted Kaczynski, known widely as the Unabomber, was found dead in his prison cell Saturday morning, according to the Associated Press, which cited a spokesperson for the Bureau of Prisons. The 81-year-old, who was serving a life sentence in Colorado, had been moved to a North Carolina medical facility due to poor health. The cause of death was not immediately known.

Across nearly two decades of terror starting in 1978, Kaczynski fashioned 16 “increasingly sophisticated” bombs, which he then mailed or hand-delivered, killing three people and injuring scores more. The name, “Unabomber” derived from a six-letter acronym used by the FBI’s taskforce investigating the cases, UNABOM, the “UNA” being a reference to some of his targets, university campuses and airliners.

Kaczynski was finally captured in 1996, a year after he sent the FBI a 35,000-word manifesto that was published by the Washington Post and the New York Times, causing family members to tip off authorities. He pleaded guilty in 1998, and was sentenced to a Supermax facility in Colorado.

Kaczynski’s deadly spree, and the accompanying manhunt, reverberated for decades through American politics and culture. The current Attorney General, Merrick Garland, oversaw the case against Kaczynski—a high-stakes investigation that made a lasting impression on the then-prosecutor. He described the raid on Kaczynski’s Montana cabin to students at the University of Chicago Law School in 2017: “You can read about criminal law as much as you want,” he said. “But sitting around a table trying to figure out whether you have enough probable cause to search the cabin—that was a really complicated problem.”

Kaczynski’s stated desire to attack industrialized society was seized upon by some in an attempt to link his crimes to the environmental movement at large. In 2012, the ultra-conservative Heartland Institute (described by environmentalist Bill McKibben as the “nerve center of climate change denial”) put up a billboard near Chicago that compared anyone who thought climate change was real to Kaczynski, in an attempt to show that “the most prominent advocates of global warming aren’t scientists. They are murderers, tyrants, and madmen.” The billboard screamed, “I still believe in Global Warming. Do you?” in giant, crimson letters. (Heartland eventually removed the billboard.) The group also wanted to feature the faces of Charles Manson, Fidel Castro, and Osama bin Laden.

This is a breaking news post and will be updated.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate