( NYPost )
Ted Kaczynski, the infamous Unabomber who was found dead in his jail cell Saturday, is believed to have committed suicide, according to a report.
Kaczynski, 81, was serving four life terms in federal prison for a decades-long spree in which three people were killed and nearly two dozen others hurt by 16 of his homemade bombs.
While officials at the federal medical prison in Butner, N.C. did not say how he died, multiple sources told The New York Times that he committed suicide. The report did not say how he may have done it, but officials said he was found unresponsive in his cell.
The Chicago native, who was educated at Harvard and UC-Berkeley before becoming a hermit and living in a cabin in Montana, had been in a maximum security prison in Colorado but was moved to a medical facility in North Carolina in December 2021 due to ill health.
He left his first explosive in 1978 at a Chicago university, putting the name of Northwestern University engineering professor Buckley Crist Jr. as the sender.
“I never knew the guy, I never met him and I have no idea why he involved me,” Crist told The Post Saturday of Kaczynski.
After his arrest, he confessed to committing 16 bombings between 1978 and 1995, permanently injuring several of his victims.
To some, he was a folk hero for his pro-Luddite views and ability to elude authorities for years.
Kaczynski wrote a 35,000-word, anti-technology and anti-leftist manifesto, “Industrial Society and Its Future,” better known as the “Unabomber Manifesto,” which warned the world about how rapidly expanding technology would threaten and possibly ruin humans.
The publication of the manifesto was Kaczynski’s undoing. His brother, David Kaczynski, now, 73, and his wife, Linda Patrik, recognized his writing style and called the FBI.
After a massive manhunt, Kaczynski was captured by police in his small plywood and tarpaper cabin in the woods outside Lincoln, Montana.
The tiny home, smaller than the jail cell where he lived his final years, contained explosives, two finished bombs and a coded diary.
But in the decades since Kaczynski’s 1996 capture, a new generation began to revere him for his anti-technology manifesto, dubbing him “Uncle Ted.”
The phrase “Uncle Ted” briefly trended on Twitter as word spread of Kaczynski’s death.
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