Ted Kaczynski evaded the federal authorities for nearly 20 years before his arrest in 1996

NEED TO KNOW

• Ted Kaczynski, a.k.a. the Unabomber, was caught in 1996 after evading arrest for nearly two decades
• He pleaded guilty in 1998 to avoid the death penalty and was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole
• Kaczynski spent over 20 years in a supermax prison before his 2021 transfer to a medical facility, where he died in 2023

Ted Kaczynski, also known as the Unabomber, evaded the federal authorities for nearly 20 years in what is now remembered as one of the most exhaustive manhunts in FBI history.

Before the reclusive mathematician and college professor began his reign of terror, he lived a quiet life in a remote cabin in Montana. A child prodigy, Kaczynski graduated high school at 15 and enrolled at Harvard University at 16. He went on to earn a Ph.D in mathematics from the University of Michigan and became an assistant professor at the University of California at Berkeley when he was just 25 years old.

Kaczynski left Berkley after just two years and moved to his isolated cabin, which had neither electricity nor running water. He spent his days reading about sociology and philosophy, growing increasingly more frustrated with the world around him — eventually formulating a plan to enact his revenge against technological advances and their impact on the environment.

In 1978, he began crafting homemade bombs in his cabin and mailed one to the University of Illinois. The return address was at Northwestern University, and when it was returned there, it exploded and injured a campus security officer. Over the next two decades, Kaczynski targeted scholars and businesspeople, some with ties to modern technology, with increasingly more complex explosives. By the time he was captured, he had killed three people and injured 23 with 16 bombs detonated over a 17-year period.

Kaczynski’s life and crimes have been the subject of several films and documentaries in the years since his arrest. Most recently, Jacob Tremblay starred as Kaczynski in the biopic Unabomber, which premiered on Sept. 25 on Netflix.

Here’s what happened to Ted Kaczynski, a.k.a. the Unabomber, after he was finally caught in 1996.

How was Ted Kaczynski caught?

After evading the FBI for nearly two decades, Kaczynski was captured in part thanks to his brother, David, and his sister-in-law, Linda.

The break in the case came shortly after Kaczynski demanded that his manuscript be published in newspapers across the United States, threatening that the bombings would continue if it was not publicized. In September 1995, The New York Times and The Washington Post both published “Industrial Society and Its Future,” Kaczynski’s 35,000-word anti-technology manifesto, at the recommendation of Attorney General Janet Reno and FBI Director Louis Freeh.

Upon reading the manifesto, Linda recognized Kaczynski’s handwriting and shared her suspicions with her husband, David.

“When she said, ‘Well, I think maybe your brother’s the Unabomber,’ I thought, ‘Well, this is not anything to worry about. Ted’s never been violent. I’ve never seen him violent,’ ” David later said on 20/20, per ABC News. “I couldn’t imagine that he would do what the Unabomber had done.”

David later realized the similarities between the writings of his brother and the manifesto, including “the way he argued, the way he talked, [and] the way he expressed an idea.” Eventually, he and Linda made the decision to contact the FBI.

On April 3, 1996, a SWAT team raided Kaczynski’s Montana cabin and arrested him. According to the FBI, they uncovered bomb components, 40,000 pages of handwritten diary entries and one live bomb.

What happened leading up to Ted Kaczynski’s trial?

Kaczynski was initially arrested on charges of possession of bomb components and held in Montana, per the Department of Justice.

In June 1996, he was officially indicted on 10 counts concerning four separate bombings, per The Washington Post. He was then transported to Sacramento, Calif., where the UNABOM Task Force was based, and held until his case went to trial.

Just days before the trial was set to begin in January 1998, Kaczynski attempted to publicly dismiss his lawyers because they “would not abandon assertions that he is suffering from mental illness,” per The New York Times. Kaczynski requested to work with civil rights attorney Tony Serra, who agreed “not to present a mental defense” and would create his defense based on Kaczynski’s anti-technology views, per Wired.

Kaczynski’s request to dismiss his attorneys was rejected, as was his subsequent petition to represent himself. The judge ultimately ruled that Kaczynski would continue with his initial legal team, who had the right to argue that he suffered from mental health issues.

On Jan. 9, in the wake of the judge’s decision, Kaczynski attempted to die by suicide, per BBC News. He was not seriously injured and appeared in court the following day.

Kaczynski then underwent a court-ordered evaluation with psychiatrist Dr. Sally Johnson, who diagnosed him with paranoid schizophrenia. During their interviews, Kaczynski claimed that he had experienced “extreme psychological verbal abuse by his parents,” per the Chicago Tribune.

Kaczynski also spoke with Johnson about his struggles with his gender identity. Following the evaluation, she deemed him mentally competent to stand trial on Jan. 20, per the Los Angeles Times.

In the years since Kaczynski’s conviction, his diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia has been contested, including by renowned forensic psychiatrist Dr. Park Dietz. Dietz told The New Yorker in March 1998 that the results of Kaczynski’s evaluation “scream geek, not schizophrenic.”

“They’re full of strong emotions, considerable anger, and an elaborate, closely reasoned system of belief about the adverse impact of technology on society,” he said. “The question always is: Is that belief system philosophy or is it delusion? The answer has more to do with the ideology of the psychiatrist than with anything else.”

What sentence did Ted Kaczynski receive?

On Jan. 22, 1998, the day that opening statements were set to begin, Kaczynski entered a last-minute guilty plea, per the Associated Press. In order to avoid the possibility of the death penalty, he pleaded guilty to all charges. He also admitted to placing or mailing an additional 11 bombs for which he had not been charged.

Kaczynski was subsequently sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. His surviving victims, as well as the families of those who died, were awarded $15 million, which was later paid for in part by auctioning Kaczynski’s belongings, according to NBC News.

What happened when Ted Kaczynski appealed his sentence?

In 2001, Kaczynski attempted to withdraw his guilty plea, claiming that the trial judge had coerced him into pleading guilty, per the Los Angeles Times. Kaczynski’s appeal focused on his desire to represent himself in court so that he would not be portrayed as “a grotesque and repellent lunatic.”

“Kaczynski hypothesizes that [his lawyers] may have used mental state evidence as a threat to pressure him into an unconditional plea bargain as a means of saving him from the risk of a death sentence, but admits that this is speculative and that no proof for it is possible,”Judge Pamela Ann Rymer of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco wrote, per the outlet.

Meanwhile, Judge Stephen Reinhardt said that Judge Burrell, who presided over the case in 1998, had violated a 1975 Supreme Court precedent that gives a competent defendant the constitutional right to represent himself.

Ultimately, the federal appeals court panel rejected Kaczynski’s bid for a retrial.

Where was Ted Kaczynski imprisoned?

For more than 20 years, Kaczynski was incarcerated at ADX Florence, a supermax prison in Florence, Colo. He spent 23 hours a day in a 12-by-7 foot jail cell, only slightly smaller than his remote cabin in Montana, per Yahoo! News. Kaczynski spent much of his time in prison writing letters.

“I consider myself to be in a (relatively) fortunate situation here,” he wrote in a February 2000 letter, per the outlet. “As correctional institutions go, this place is well-administered. It’s clean, the food is good, and it’s quiet, so that I can sleep, think and write (usually) without being distracted by a lot of banging and shouting.”

He remained at the facility until December 2021, when he was moved to a medical facility in North Carolina due to health issues.

Who did Ted Kaczynski communicate with in prison?

While behind bars, Kaczynski befriended several other prisoners, including Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and Ramzi Yousef, who bombed the World Trade Center in 1993. In letters, he described other prisoners on his cell block as “easy to get along with,” per Yahoo! News.

“Actually, the people I am acquainted with in this range of cells … are nicer than the majority of people I’ve known on the outside,” Kaczynski wrote in another letter.

Aside from his allocated outdoor time, Kaczynski spent the rest of time in his cell reading, studying other languages, listening to the radio, exercising and writing letters to thousands of people around the world.

Kaczynski also published two books while in prison: 2010’s Technological Slavery and 2016’s Anti-Tech Revolution: Why and How.

His archive, which includes hundreds of letters as well as legal documents, is currently housed at the University of Michigan’s Special Collections Library in the Joseph A. Labadie Collection. The names of his correspondents have been deleted and the original, unaltered documents are sealed until Jan. 1, 2050, per the library’s website.

How did Ted Kaczynski die?

In March 2021, Kaczynski was diagnosed with rectal cancer and was transferred that fall to the Federal Medical Center in Butner, N.C., per NBC News. He received biweekly chemotherapy until March 2023, “when he refused any further treatments due to negative side effects and his poor prognosis.” An autopsy later revealed that the cancer had spread to his liver and both lungs.

On June 10, 2023, Kaczynski died by suicide in his prison cell. He was 81.

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