Theodore John Kaczynski built and sent the 16 bombs that the FBI investigated under the case name UNABOM, short for university and airline bombing. Between May 1978 and April 1995 they killed three men and injured more than 20 other people, by the counts of the Associated Press, and for years they changed how airports and post offices handled packages. He was a mathematician who had entered Harvard at 16 and taught at the University of California, Berkeley, before moving in 1971 to a plywood cabin near Lincoln, Montana, without electricity or running water.
The FBI-led task force formed in 1979 grew to more than 150 investigators and analysts, and it had no name to work with until 1996. In 1995 the bomber offered to stop killing if a major newspaper printed his long essay against industrial society. The Washington Post published it on September 19, 1995. Kaczynski's brother, David, and David's wife, Linda Patrik, read it, compared it with letters he had written to the family, and brought their suspicion to the FBI through a lawyer. Agents arrested him at his cabin on April 3, 1996. On January 22, 1998, he pleaded guilty in federal court in Sacramento to charges covering all three deaths and two of the injuries, and he admitted the rest. He spent the rest of his life in federal prison and died in custody in June 2023.
Kaczynski was born in Chicago on May 22, 1942, to parents the Associated Press described as Polish Catholic. He grew up in the city and then in the south suburb of Evergreen Park, where he graduated from Evergreen Park High School at 16, CBS Chicago reported. He had skipped two grades. His younger brother, David, speaking to students in Salt Lake City in 2005, described a gentle older brother and recalled a day, soon after the family had moved to a suburban house, when he was too small to reach the back door handle and Ted made him a handle from a spool of thread so he could let himself in. "Ted loved me," David said. "He cared for me."
Kaczynski entered Harvard in the fall of 1958, aged 16, in the Class of 1962. The Harvard Crimson reported in 2012 that he first lived at 8 Prescott Street, a building used for promising freshmen whose low rent also kept them apart from the Yard, and later took one of the cheapest rooms in Eliot House, a converted maids' quarters. Classmates remembered him as brilliant and solitary. "He was a loner. He didn't talk to anyone," one told the Crimson. Another said he had been quiet but personable, and a third said, "He wasn't a domestic terrorist when I knew him."
In the fall of 1962 he began graduate work in mathematics at the University of Michigan. He later wrote that the five years he spent in Ann Arbor were "the most miserable years of my life," The Michigan Daily reported in 2006, drawing on his university records. He taught undergraduates on a small grant, lived in East Quad, and did strong work: apart from a failed physics course, his lowest grade was a B minus. One professor called him the "best man I have seen," with the reservation that he seemed a little too sure of himself. The mathematician George Piranian recalled describing a problem he believed was unsolved, and finding Kaczynski's solution on his desk weeks later. Kaczynski's dissertation, "Boundary Functions," written under Allen Shields, earned him a Ph.D. in 1967 and won the Sumner Myers prize for the best thesis of the year.
Berkeley hired him from July 1, 1967, first as an acting assistant professor and then as an assistant professor. Records showed he published six papers between 1965 and 1969. Colleagues later had little to say about him because he had let few of them know him. The department chairman, John Addison, wrote in 1970 that he had seemed "almost pathologically shy" and had made no close friends. The department invited him to lead its weekly faculty seminar to help him fit in, but when colleagues asked him to the customary gathering afterward he declined and walked away, the vice chairman, Calvin Moore, recalled. A student evaluation from the winter of 1969 complained that he refused to answer questions.
He resigned in 1969, "quite out of the blue," Addison wrote, telling the department he was leaving mathematics and did not know what he would do next. In a March 1969 letter to the dean, Addison recorded that he and Moore had tried and failed to change his mind. Addison and Moore said after his arrest that he had never shown them any hostility to industrial society. By a coincidence that the university's own newspaper noted in 1996, Hugh Scrutton, who would later be killed by one of his bombs, had been a visiting mathematics student at Berkeley in the summer of 1967.
In 1971, with his brother's help, Kaczynski bought a parcel of about 1.4 acres outside Lincoln, a small town in the mountains of Lewis and Clark County, Montana, and built a small plywood cabin with no running water or electricity. The FBI describes it as 10 feet by 12; other reports give slightly different measurements. He lived there for about 25 years, keeping a garden, hunting and taking occasional rides into town with neighbors. Residents later described him variously as an odd recluse who ate rabbits and as a funny, personable man. The town librarian said he had a good sense of humor and befriended her son.
He did not cut every tie. In the late 1970s he worked for a time at a foam rubber products company near Chicago where his father and brother also worked, the Associated Press reported; after a supervisor turned him down, he posted insulting limericks about her and was fired by his brother. He wrote long letters to his family. Some were hostile; one letter to his parents, quoted by Knight-Ridder Newspapers in 1997, said he could not wait for them to die. His private writing, read by investigators after his arrest, showed anger building long before the first bomb. "I act merely from a desire for revenge," he wrote in a journal entry dated April 6, 1971.
On May 25, 1978, a package was found in a parking lot at the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle campus. It bore the return address of Buckley Crist Jr., an engineering professor at Northwestern University, and was sent back to him. Crist had not mailed it. When it was opened at Northwestern it exploded and injured a campus security officer, the FBI says.
On May 9, 1979, John Harris, a Northwestern graduate student, picked up a cigar box that had been left on a table outside his office in the university's technological institute, meaning to keep pens in it. The detonator went off without setting off the main charge. "I saw a bright flash. I don't remember hearing anything," he recalled in 1996, by then a professor at the University of Illinois. He was treated for superficial burns.
On November 15, 1979, a parcel bomb mailed from Elgin, Illinois, went off in the cargo hold of American Airlines Flight 444 from Chicago to Washington. The bomb did not work as intended; the cabin filled with smoke, the plane landed safely, and twelve passengers were treated for smoke inhalation. The FBI formed a task force with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service that year. The FBI's name for the case came from the early targets, universities and airlines.
On June 10, 1980, Percy Wood, the president of United Airlines, was injured at his home in Lake Forest, Illinois, when he opened a hollowed out copy of the novel Ice Brothers by Sloan Wilson. A letter signed "Enoch W. Fisher" had told him a book of social significance was on its way.
On October 8, 1981, a package containing a pipe bomb was found in a University of Utah building in Salt Lake City and safely detonated. In May 1982 a bomb addressed to Patrick Fischer, the head of the computer science department at Vanderbilt University, was forwarded to Vanderbilt from his old address at Penn State. His secretary opened it and was injured. On July 2, 1982, Diogenes Angelakos, an engineering professor at Berkeley, was injured by a device left in a break room in Cory Hall. The early bombs were made with wooden parts, and some were marked with the letters FC.
On May 15, 1985, a second bomb exploded in Cory Hall at Berkeley. It injured John Hauser, a graduate student and an Air Force officer, who lost part of his right hand and with it his career as a fighter pilot, the Associated Press reported. A device mailed to the Boeing Company's fabrication plant in Washington state that spring sat for weeks without exploding and was safely destroyed by a bomb squad, though most of its forensic value was lost.
In November 1985 a package arrived for James McConnell, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan known for his work on behavior. It contained a bomb in a three-ring binder and a letter asking him to review a thesis. His assistant, Nicklaus Suino, opened it and suffered wounds to his arms and abdomen; McConnell was not seriously hurt. A colleague later suggested the bomber might have objected to McConnell's view that human behavior could largely be controlled.
Hugh Scrutton ran RenTech, a computer rental store on Howe Avenue in Sacramento. On December 11, 1985, he saw an object near the back of his store that looked like a block of wood and bent to pick it up. It exploded and killed him. He was the first person to die in the UNABOM case. The Justice Department later charged that the bomb had been carried from Montana to Sacramento and placed behind the store. A retired ATF agent who worked the case recalled in 2023 that the death had changed how investigators saw the bombings, because now someone had died.
On February 20, 1987, Gary Wright pulled into the parking lot behind CAAMS, his computer repair company on 900 South in Salt Lake City. He saw what looked like a piece of lumber with nails sticking out of it lying in the lot and picked it up to throw it away so no one would run over it. It exploded and threw him about 22 feet. He spent three years in and out of casts and had about 200 pieces of shrapnel removed.
A store employee had watched a man set the object down, and her account produced a composite sketch of the suspect; the FBI later described the man as wearing a hooded sweatshirt and aviator glasses. After Salt Lake City the bomber went quiet for six years.
Wright later said it took him about six years to decide that he had to forgive whoever had done it, and that forgiveness did not mean accepting what had happened but refusing to let it define him. He went on to become a close friend of David Kaczynski. David found him through a private investigator, called to apologize, and the two met after the sentencing in 1998. For years they spoke together to schools and other groups. "I lost my innocence to this man," Wright told the court at sentencing, "and I fight daily to find the carefree happiness that was taken from me."
The bombs started again in June 1993. On June 22, Dr. Charles Epstein, a geneticist at the University of California, San Francisco, opened a package at his home in Tiburon. He lost several fingers and was severely hurt. Epstein had helped establish medical genetics as a recognized specialty and was best known for his research on Down syndrome. He went back to that work and taught at UCSF for more than 40 years in all. He died in 2011. His son Jonathan said in 2023 that his father did not want to be remembered as a victim of the Unabomber, but for his science.
Two days later, on June 24, David Gelernter, a computer scientist at Yale, opened a package in his fifth floor office in Arthur K. Watson Hall in New Haven, thinking it was a dissertation. He was wounded in the abdomen, chest, face and hand. Instead of waiting for help, he walked down five flights of stairs to the university health service, where his blood pressure registered zero; doctors told him he would probably have bled to death if he had waited, the Yale Daily News reported. He lost the use of his right hand and learned to paint with his left.
The Justice Department later charged that both bombs had been mailed on or about June 18, 1993. In 1993 the bomber also wrote to The New York Times, claiming to speak for an anarchist group called FC.
Thomas J. Mosser was 50 and lived in North Caldwell, New Jersey. He had spent about 25 years at the public relations firm Burson-Marsteller, where he rose to vice chairman, and earlier in 1994 had become executive vice president and general manager of its parent, the advertising agency Young & Rubicam. He liked touch football and golf, made his own spaghetti sauce, and loved Christmas; at his funeral Mass, attended by about 500 people, his children led the singing of his favorite carol.
On Saturday, December 10, 1994, he opened a package about the size of a videotape in his kitchen. It had arrived at the house on Friday, mailed from San Francisco. The explosion killed him. His wife, Susan, and their 15 month old daughter were a few feet away, shielded by a fireplace; their 13 year old daughter was upstairs. On December 12 the FBI said that the bomb was the work of the bomber it had been hunting since 1978. Mosser was the first victim with no tie to a university, computers or airlines. In letters to newspapers the bomber later said he had targeted Mosser because Burson-Marsteller had helped Exxon repair its image after the Exxon Valdez spill. The firm said it had not worked on the spill.
On April 24, 1995, a heavy, neatly wrapped package arrived at the Sacramento office of the California Forestry Association, the timber industry's trade group, about four blocks from the State Capitol. It was addressed to William Dennison, the association's former president. Gilbert Murray, its president, opened it and was killed. Coworkers had joked that it looked like a bomb. "If we knew then what we know now, Gil Murray would still be alive," the association's vice president said a year later.
His sister Barbara Murray remembered him as a practical joker who once hollowed out a Twinkie to hide a note inside, and as a man who loved trees all his life. Their mother learned of his death, she said, because he did not call to tell her the news reports were not about him. She said it took her 15 years and trauma therapy to come to terms with it.
Murray was the third person killed and the last. The Justice Department later charged that the bomb had been carried from Montana to Oakland and mailed from there.
In June 1995 The New York Times and The Washington Post each received a typed essay of about 35,000 words titled Industrial Society and Its Future. The author, again claiming to speak for FC, said he would stop killing if it was published. The essay argued that modern technology left people powerless and alienated, and it called for revolution against industrial and technological society. That summer, a threat to blow up a plane out of Los Angeles disrupted air travel and mail on the West Coast; the bomber later called it a prank.
The task force recommended publication in the hope that a reader would recognize the author, and the FBI Director, Louis Freeh, and Attorney General Janet Reno approved. The Washington Post printed it on September 19, 1995. In the months that followed more than 50,000 people called the FBI's tip line, according to Terry Turchie, who had taken over the task force in 1994. Turchie had reorganized the investigation, reinvestigating each bombing, pairing agents and putting everything into one database. A forensic linguist on the task force, James R. Fitzgerald, noticed old fashioned terms in the essay that helped him estimate the writer's age, and a linguistics professor judged from its vocabulary that the writer had roots in Chicago, where the first bombs had been placed or mailed.
Linda Patrik, a philosophy professor at a college in upstate New York, was the first in the family to wonder whether her husband's brother might be the bomber. To David Kaczynski, a social worker, it seemed impossible at first that his gentle brother could be violent. The couple studied the essay for weeks and compared it with letters Ted had written. A friend of Linda's, the Chicago private investigator Susan Swanson, passed the letters to Clint Van Zandt, a former FBI behavioral expert, whose analysts concluded that the same person had probably written both. A lawyer, Anthony Bisceglie, then contacted the FBI's Washington Field Office for the family.
The family gave the FBI an essay Ted had written. Fitzgerald later said it read like "a well-crafted outline of the manifesto," and he concluded it pointed to the real author rather than an imitator. The Bureau's own summary is that its linguistic analysis found the author of David's documents and the author of the essay were almost certainly the same person, and that this, combined with what investigators knew of the bombings and of Ted Kaczynski's life, supported a search warrant. Kaczynski became suspect number 2,416.
David said later that the choice had come down to being responsible or turning away, and that "whatever choice we made could cause someone to die." He also came to understand, he said, that the family name would be tied to violence forever.
Agents watched the cabin for about a month. On April 3, 1996, two FBI agents and Jerry Burns, a U.S. Forest Service law enforcement officer, went to the door with a search warrant. They posed as surveyors who might need to cut a tree on his land, according to a postal inspector on the team. "Ted, are you home?" Burns called. When Kaczynski came out and then tried to go back inside, they took him into custody without further trouble. He was 53.
The search was slow because agents feared the cabin was booby trapped. Inside they found what the task force had never had. There were labeled containers of chemicals that could be mixed into explosives, bomb components stored in cans, a typewriter, and a live bomb under the bed, wrapped and ready to mail but not yet addressed. There was what investigators believed was the original typed copy of the essay, and about 40,000 handwritten journal pages describing bomb experiments and the crimes, some in a code of his own. A manila envelope held detailed admissions to all 16 bombings, Turchie said. Kaczynski was first held in Helena on a federal complaint for possessing bomb components, a charge meant to keep him in custody while the larger case was built.
The arrest brought thousands of reporters and onlookers to Lincoln. A neighbor whose sawmill was used as the FBI's staging area recalled going out with a shotgun to stop a news helicopter landing in her driveway. On June 23, 1996, he left Montana for California.
On June 18, 1996, a federal grand jury in Sacramento returned a ten count indictment charging him with four bombings: the killings of Hugh Scrutton and Gilbert Murray and the injuries to Charles Epstein and David Gelernter. The charges were transporting an explosive with intent to kill or injure, mailing an explosive device with intent to kill or injure, and using a destructive device in relation to a crime of violence. The counts for the two deaths carried a possible death sentence. It was the first time he had been charged with any of the bombings. The Associated Press reported that DNA tests on saliva from two letters had shown a genetic link to him.
The prosecution team was led by Robert J. Cleary of New Jersey, and the Sacramento case was supervised by the United States Attorney, Charles J. Stevens, and Merrick B. Garland of the Justice Department. The Mosser killing could not be charged in Sacramento, and on October 1, 1996, a federal grand jury in New Jersey indicted him for it, with one count under each of the same three statutes. On May 15, 1997, the government gave notice that it would seek the death penalty.
Kaczynski's appointed lawyers were Quin Denvir and Judy Clarke of the federal defender's office, later joined by Gary Sowards. They believed that evidence of mental illness was his best defense against a death sentence. He saw it as a lie about him and his ideas. The prosecution's theory, as summarized before trial, was that he was a methodical killer; at a hearing in September 1997 a prosecutor read excerpts from his diaries that the government called an admission to all 16 attacks.
In June 1997 the defense filed notice that it might present expert evidence on his mental condition. In October his lawyers refused to let government experts examine him. Jury selection began on November 12, 1997. Later that month, the Ninth Circuit's account says, Kaczynski learned that his lawyers planned to present evidence that he was mentally ill. In December he complained about them in letters, and Judge Garland E. Burrell Jr. met privately with him and his lawyers. On December 22 the defense agreed to withdraw its notice and present no expert mental health testimony during the guilt phase, while Kaczynski accepted his lawyers' control over mitigation evidence at any penalty phase. In mid December he had offered to plead guilty if the death penalty were withdrawn; a Justice Department review panel turned him down.
On January 5, 1998, as the trial was about to open, he raised new objections to his lawyers. On January 7 the judge ruled that the defense could present mental state evidence over his objection. That night he tried to hang himself in his cell. The next day Judy Clarke told the court he wanted to represent himself. The judge ordered a competency examination. Dr. Sally C. Johnson, a Bureau of Prisons psychiatrist, began examining him on January 12. She found him competent to stand trial while diagnosing paranoid schizophrenia, a diagnosis he always rejected; he insisted he was not mentally ill. On January 20 the parties agreed that the report settled the competency question.
On January 21 Kaczynski renewed his request to represent himself. On the morning of January 22, Judge Burrell denied it as untimely and as a tactic for delay. Immediately afterward Denvir offered an unconditional guilty plea to both indictments if the government withdrew its notices of intent to seek death. A written plea agreement was signed the same day.
Under it, Kaczynski pleaded guilty in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California, in Sacramento, to all ten counts of the Sacramento indictment and to the counts of the New Jersey indictment, which was transferred to Sacramento for the purpose under Rule 20 of the federal rules of criminal procedure. The pleas covered the killings of Hugh Scrutton, Thomas Mosser and Gilbert Murray and the bombings that injured Charles Epstein and David Gelernter. He admitted that he was pleading guilty "because he is in fact guilty," waived his trial and appeal rights, and signed a statement that he understood the agreement, agreed to it voluntarily and acknowledged he was guilty of the crimes charged. He also acknowledged responsibility for all 16 UNABOM bombings. The government withdrew its notices of intent to seek the death penalty, and the agreement meant he would spend the rest of his life in prison with no possibility of parole.
Attorney General Reno said in a statement that justice had been done and that he would never threaten anyone again. Not everyone agreed. California's governor, Pete Wilson, called the deal a miscarriage of justice and said a jury should have heard the evidence. David Gelernter said that if the death penalty could not be obtained in a case like this, it was a moral catastrophe. Susan Mosser had wanted a death sentence and accepted the plea reluctantly after prosecutors told her that a single juror could block a conviction or a death verdict.
Within days the Sacramento County district attorney, Jan Scully, said she would not bring state murder charges for the two Sacramento killings, because California law barred a state prosecution after a federal conviction for the same acts; she said she would have sought the death penalty if she could.
Sentencing was held in Sacramento on May 4, 1998. Victims and families spoke first. Charles Epstein called Kaczynski a coward: "In the end you showed you would rather save your life than risk your neck for the cause you say you believe in." Susan Mosser described the morning her husband died; she had told him help was coming, she said, and that she loved him. She asked the judge to "lock him so far down that when he dies he'll be closer to hell." Gary Wright spoke of the happiness he was still trying to recover. David Gelernter, in a written statement, said Kaczynski should have been executed. Nicklaus Suino told the others, "Revenge is an illusion." Several of them praised David Kaczynski, who was in court; his brother never looked at him.
The government's sentencing memorandum quoted his journal as calling his motive "simply personal revenge." Kaczynski complained that the memorandum contained false and misleading statements and asked only that people reserve judgment on him. Judge Burrell said he had committed "unspeakable and monstrous crimes for which he shows utterly no remorse," and called them vicious acts of terrorism. He imposed four consecutive life sentences plus 30 years and ordered $15,026,000 in restitution to four victims. Outside the courthouse David Kaczynski said, "We are very, very sorry." That month Kaczynski was sent to the federal Supermax prison at Florence, Colorado.
In August 1998 the Justice Department awarded David Kaczynski the one million dollar reward that had been offered for the bomber's capture. David, then 47 and working at a youth shelter in Albany, said his mother and he wished to do whatever they could to ease the families' grief, and that money could not make up for a lost life. "I hope that Ted will someday forgive me," he said. A law firm offered to help set up a fund for the survivors. David and his mother also wrote to victims and families to apologize.
Kaczynski came to say that his plea had been forced on him. On April 23, 1999, he filed a motion under 28 U.S.C. 2255 to vacate his conviction, arguing that he had pleaded guilty only to escape a trial at which his lawyers would portray him as mentally ill, and that the judge had wrongly denied his request to represent himself. In handwritten papers he wrote that his pleas "were induced by the threat of a mental-state defense." The district court denied the motion without a hearing.
The Ninth Circuit agreed to hear three questions: whether the plea was voluntary, whether self-representation had been wrongly denied, and whether a capital defendant can stop his lawyers from presenting a mental state defense. On February 12, 2001, a divided panel affirmed in United States v. Kaczynski, 239 F.3d 1108. Judge Pamela Ann Rymer, joined by Judge Melvin Brunetti, held that the request to represent himself had been made for delay and in bad faith, that its denial was therefore proper, and that the plea was voluntary. She noted that Kaczynski had, in December 1997, clearly permitted his lawyers to present mental state evidence at a penalty phase. Judge Stephen Reinhardt dissented. He would have found that the request was sincere, that the record did not support the finding of delay, and that the wrongful denial made the plea involuntary.
A defense lawyer who had offered to represent him, J. Tony Serra, told the Associated Press that a new trial would have needed a political defense, because Kaczynski wanted to put his ideology on trial. No later court decision reopening the conviction was reported.
At Florence he kept up a large correspondence, and the Associated Press reported that he became an object of fascination and even reverence among people opposed to modern civilization. In 1999 he told Time magazine that he was confident he was sane and that he would rather have been sentenced to death than to life in prison. In 2003 he asked a federal judge to send the papers and other belongings seized from his cabin, including a pipe bomb, to a University of Michigan archive that already held more than 15,000 of his papers. In 2012, asked by Harvard for an entry in his class's 50th reunion report, he listed his occupation as "prisoner" and his awards as eight life sentences. Harvard printed it.
His property became the subject of a long fight over the restitution he owed. The district court ruled that the government's restitution lien gave it a superior claim to what had been seized, and in 2005 the Ninth Circuit held that the government could sell what was needed to pay the victims but must use a commercially reasonable plan. The government proposed an internet auction, with his writings redacted to remove the names of actual and intended victims and their families at the victims' request. Kaczynski argued that the plan violated the First Amendment. On January 9, 2009, the Ninth Circuit rejected his challenge in United States v. Kaczynski, 551 F.3d 1120, noting that he kept complete copies of his writings and that the redactions protected the victims' privacy. It also upheld the disposal of bomb-making materials rather than their return to him.
The U.S. Marshals Service and the General Services Administration ran the online sale from May 18 to June 2, 2011. Collectors paid 232,246 dollars for 58 items, the Associated Press reported. His journals sold for 40,676 dollars, the highest price for a single item; a Smith Corona typewriter brought 22,003 dollars, the manifesto 20,053 dollars, and the hooded sweatshirt and sunglasses 20,025 dollars. The money went to the victims. Some survivors opposed the sale. David Gelernter, who filed a letter objecting to the plan in 2005, told the Yale Daily News he found the idea "revolting," though he said the victims deserved whatever restitution they could get. Susan Mosser said the auction at least denied Kaczynski the belongings he wanted back, and noted that he had paid no restitution himself.
In March 2021 Kaczynski was diagnosed with rectal cancer. On December 14, 2021, the Bureau of Prisons moved him from Florence to the Federal Medical Center at Butner, North Carolina, which treats prisoners with serious illnesses. He had chemotherapy every two weeks until March 2023, when he refused further treatment because of its side effects and his poor prognosis. The autopsy report described the cancer as stage 4, spread to his liver and both lungs. About a month before his death he was noted to be depressed and referred for psychiatric evaluation.
He was found unresponsive in his cell shortly after midnight on June 10, 2023. Staff began life saving measures, and responders restored his circulation. He was taken to Duke University Hospital and pronounced dead at 8:07 a.m. He was 81. The Associated Press reported the next day, citing four people familiar with the matter, that he had died by suicide. The autopsy report of the North Carolina Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, obtained by NBC News, gave the cause of death as hanging and the manner as suicide, and said federal law enforcement had no concern about foul play.
"Finally we can close that chapter," Jonathan Epstein said after the death. Barbara Murray, Gilbert Murray's sister, said she had set out to outlive him. "The best revenge is a good life," she said.
Proven by final judgment, on his guilty pleas: the killings of Hugh Scrutton, Thomas Mosser and Gilbert Murray, and the bombings that injured Charles Epstein and David Gelernter. His motion to withdraw the pleas failed in the district court and in the Ninth Circuit in 2001.
Admitted but never charged: the remaining UNABOM bombings, from the 1978 Chicago package to the 1987 Salt Lake City bomb. He acknowledged responsibility for all 16 as part of the plea, and the government said his journals described them, but they were never tried.
The number injured is given differently: 23 in most Associated Press reports, 24 in some 2021 and 2023 reports, 28 in The Christian Science Monitor in 1998, 29 in Associated Press reports of the 1998 sentencing and the reward, and "nearly two dozen" by the FBI. The Ninth Circuit's opinions refer to nine people injured. Accounts of the cabin's size vary between 10 by 12, 10 by 14 and 13 by 13 feet, and accounts of what was found range from one live bomb (the FBI) to two finished bombs (the Associated Press).
His motive is a matter of record only in his own words. The essay presents the bombings as part of a fight against technology; his journal, as quoted by the government, called his motive personal revenge. Theories about his choice of targets, including a private investigator's 1996 claim that he picked two of them from a list circulated by radical environmentalists, were never proven. Whether mental illness shaped what he did remained in dispute: Dr. Johnson's diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia was never tested at trial, and he rejected it to the end.
Several later reports repeat errors. He was sentenced to four life terms plus 30 years, not eight life terms, although he himself listed "eight life sentences" for Harvard. He was arrested on April 3, 1996, not April 6. His brother and sister-in-law recognized his ideas and style of writing in a typed essay, not his handwriting. The medical examiner's report recorded no prior suicide attempts, although his 1998 attempt in jail is part of the court record.
May 22, 1942: Theodore John Kaczynski is born in Chicago.
1958: enters Harvard at 16, after graduating from Evergreen Park High School.
1962: graduates from Harvard and begins graduate study at the University of Michigan.
1967: earns a Ph.D. in mathematics with the dissertation "Boundary Functions"; joins the Berkeley mathematics faculty on July 1.
1969: resigns from Berkeley.
1971: buys land near Lincoln, Montana, and builds a cabin.
May 25, 1978: a package bomb returned to Northwestern University injures a campus security officer.
May 9, 1979: a bomb injures graduate student John Harris at Northwestern.
November 15, 1979: a bomb fills the cabin of American Airlines Flight 444 with smoke; the FBI task force is formed.
June 10, 1980: United Airlines president Percy Wood is injured at his home.
October 8, 1981: a bomb at the University of Utah is safely detonated.
May 1982: a bomb sent to Vanderbilt injures a department secretary.
July 2, 1982: Professor Diogenes Angelakos is injured at Berkeley.
May 15, 1985: graduate student John Hauser is injured at Berkeley.
1985: a bomb mailed to Boeing in Washington state fails and is destroyed.
November 1985: Nicklaus Suino is injured opening a bomb sent to Professor James McConnell in Ann Arbor.
December 11, 1985: Hugh Scrutton is killed in Sacramento.
February 20, 1987: Gary Wright is injured in Salt Lake City; a witness's description produces the composite sketch.
June 22, 1993: Dr. Charles Epstein is injured at his home in Tiburon.
June 24, 1993: Dr. David Gelernter is injured at Yale.
December 10, 1994: Thomas Mosser is killed at his home in North Caldwell, New Jersey.
April 24, 1995: Gilbert Murray is killed in Sacramento.
June 1995: The New York Times and The Washington Post receive the essay.
September 19, 1995: The Washington Post publishes it.
Early 1996: through a lawyer, David Kaczynski and Linda Patrik bring their suspicion to the FBI.
April 3, 1996: Kaczynski is arrested at his cabin.
June 18, 1996: indicted in Sacramento on ten counts covering four bombings.
June 23, 1996: leaves Montana for California.
October 1, 1996: indicted in New Jersey for the Mosser killing.
May 15, 1997: the government gives notice that it will seek death.
November 12, 1997: jury selection begins.
January 7 to 8, 1998: the judge allows mental state evidence over his objection; he attempts suicide; he asks to represent himself.
January 22, 1998: the request is denied; he pleads guilty to both indictments and the death penalty is withdrawn.
May 4, 1998: sentenced to four consecutive life terms plus 30 years and $15,026,000 in restitution; sent to Florence.
August 1998: David Kaczynski receives the reward.
April 23, 1999: files a motion to vacate his plea.
February 12, 2001: the Ninth Circuit affirms the denial, 2 to 1.
January 9, 2009: the Ninth Circuit upholds the plan to sell his seized property.
May 18 to June 2, 2011: the online auction raises 232,246 dollars for the victims.
March 2021: diagnosed with rectal cancer.
December 14, 2021: moved to FMC Butner.
March 2023: refuses further chemotherapy.
June 10, 2023: dies at Duke University Hospital after being found unresponsive in his cell; the medical examiner rules the death a suicide.