Unabomber when he was arrested
Unabomber, Theodore Kaczynski, sowed panic in the US with parcel bombs
For 18 years he terrorized the United States with his parcel bombs which he sent to universities, airlines, academics; the FBI could not find elements to frame him and in the end it was his brother who provided the decisive clues. Sentenced to life in prison, terrorist Theodore Kaczynski, better known as the “Unabomber”, was found dead in a cell in a North Carolina prison.
Kaczynski was a gifted student, a mathematical genius, who entered Harvard University at just 16 and who, at 25, was already an assistant professor at the prestigious University of Berkeley. But at one point, he embarked on a crusade against progress and technology: he gave up academic life and, in the early 1970s, moved away from civilization to live in a cabin in Montana, where there was no running water or electricity and was lit by candles that he made himself. And from this hut, feeding on the rabbits he hunted, between 1978 and 1995, this brilliant mathematician who had become a hermit terrorized the country by sending sixteen bombs, hidden in parcel post, to various people and companies.
It was his rejection of the role of technology in civilization, but doing so resulted in three deaths and 23 injuries. His first targets were academics and airlines, which earned him the nickname “Unabomber” (which stands for “University and Airline Bomber”). But in September 1995, by promising to stop sending bombs, Kaczynski managed to get a long manifesto of 35,000 words published by the New York Times and the Washington Post: it was entitled “The industrial society and its future”, in which he expressed his hatred of technology and the modern world and justified his murderous campaign.
And it was at that point that while reading the manifesto, his brother, David Kaczynski, sees in the document a similarity to the old writings of Theodore, who had been cut off from the family for years: he alerted the FBI and, in April 1996, the terrorist was arrested. Despite a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia, psychiatrists believed he could be brought before a jury: he was tried and in 1998 sentenced to life in prison.
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