Ted Kaczynski, the anti-technology domestic terrorist known as the Unabomber who conducted a series of mailbombing from 1978 until his capture in 1996, was found dead in a federal prison Saturday morning in North Carolina, the Associated Press reports. He was 81. The cause of death was not immediately known.
A Harvard alum with a Ph.D. from Michigan, Kaczynski was serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole for at least sixteen bombings that killed three people and injured more than 20. Working from a cabin in the woods of Montana, Kaczynski sent a 35,000-word manifesto, titled “Industrial Society and Its Future” to the Washington Post in 1995, which the newspaper published as a special supplement after consulting with the Department of Justice and then-Attorney General Janet Reno. Investigators believed distributing the manifesto would help identify the bomber, and it worked: Kaczynski’s brother recognized key phrases and themes in the work and contacted authorities.