“He was the most careful serial bomber anyone had ever seen,” said Special Agent Kathleen Puckett, who worked on the UNABOM task force. — On April 3, 1996, federal agents arrested a man who had been terrorizing the country for nearly two decades.
Theodore “Ted” Kaczynski, better known as “The Unabomber” first got on the federal agents’ radar in 1978 when his first known “primitive homemade bomb” exploded at a Chicago university, the FBI said.
“He would go on to place a bomb on an aircraft and leave others in university buildings and by computer stores. He would also mail powerful bombs to a number of university professors and to businesses and executives,” the FBI recapped.
The FBI says Kaczynski’s 16 bombs killed three people and injured 23 others in the span of 17 years.
He hit areas like Chicago, Salt Lake City, Nashville, Sacramento, Berkeley (California), and Ann Arbor, Michigan, among other areas.
Kaczynski also targeted the Puget Sound area. On June 13, 1985, a suspicious package was sent to the Boeing Fabrication Division in Washington, which was located in south King County.
The package was safely detonated and no one was injured, but foresnic evidence was lost.
“He was the most careful serial bomber anyone had ever seen,” said Special Agent Kathleen Puckett, who worked on the UNABOM task force and led efforts to profile the bomber. (Both Puckett and Turchie are now retired from the FBI.)
After deadly bombings in 1994 and 1995, he wrote to several publications asking them to publish an essay that he believed would memorialize his achievements and his ideology.
Although he promised to cease his bombings if his writings were published, FBI leaders pushed for publication with a different goal in mind: using the Unabomber’s own words to identify him, the FBI said.
The big break in the case came in 1995. The Unabomber sent us a 35,000-word essay claiming to explain his motives and views of the ills of modern society.
After the manifesto appeared in the Washington Post, thousands of tips came in to the FBI.
One of those tips was from David Kaczynski, Ted’s brother. He told investigators that his brother was troubled and had connections to at least three of the locations that had been targeted. David also provided letters and documents written by his brother, and an FBI linguistic analysis determined that the author of those papers and the manifesto published in newspapers were almost certainly the same.
When they raided Ted’s remote cabin in Montana in 1996, the FBI found “a wealth of bomb components; 40,000 handwritten journal pages that included bomb-making experiments and descriptions of Unabomber crimes; and one live bomb, ready for mailing,” the FBI said.
Ted was arrested April 3, 1996. He pleaded guilty in January 1998 and was initially sent to a supermax prison in Colorado.
Kaczynski died by suicide in a North Carolina federal prison in June 2023 at the age of 81.
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