Harvard genius who terrorized US with mystery bombs for 17 years dies
text_fieldsNorth Carolina, US: A mystery man who sent bombs to unsuspecting victims terrorizing Americans from 1978 to 1995 died on Saturday at the age of 81, Reuters reported.
Ted Kaczynski, former math professor, died as he was serving four life terms plus 30 years, first at ‘supermax’ prison in Florence, Colorado, and then at a North Carolina facility since 2021.
Kaczynski came to be called ‘Twisted genius’ alongside another nickname 'Unabomber' which is a combination of the initial letter of University and Airline Bombings, his main targets.
Born on May 22, 1942 in Chicago to working class American-Polish parents, Theodore John Kaczynski was a brilliant, quiet child who got a scholarship to Harvard University and came out graduating, according to the report.
John Kaczynski had always been a loner, and little is known about what made him to target people with whom he had no personal grudge.
His friend from school years, Dale Eickelman, reportedly said that Kaczynski made explosions by putting together batteries, wire leads, potassium nitrate at the age of 12 and 13.
After earning doctoral degree in mathematics in 1967, Kacznynski became an assistant mathematics professor at the University of California at Berkeley.
He did not hold down the job for long, resigning before moving to Montana in 1971 where he bought land and built himself a tar-paper cabin.
A largely deserted town with 1000 people during winter back then, Montana became the ideal place for his destructive activities.
He was reportedly upset by destruction of surrounding forest by development and he began a bombing campaign in 1978 by sending a package for an engineering professor at Chicago Northwestern University, the report said.
His first victim to have burns was a police officer who opened this package and another was a graduate student after a small bomb went off in his hands causing burn injuries.
In 1979 he placed a bomb in the cargo hold of an American Airlines that spewed smoked during flight, requiring emergency landing.
FBI agents found no clue, despite spending years to catch the bomber as there was little forensic evidence.
A package he sent in 1980 exploded and injured American Airlines President Percy Wood.
But a 38-year-old computer store owner Hugh Scrutton was his first fatal victim from a bomb explosion after nails and splinters went off in 1985 in his store’s parking lot.
In 1994 he killed with a mail bomb advertising executive Thomas Mosser who was working for oil major Exxon.
Following which he killed Gilbert Brent Murray, the head of a lobbying group for California timber industry in 1995.
His 17 bomb attacks injured as many as 25 people with some losing vision, hearing or fingers.
His downfall came after he sent out to publications a 35,000-word essay titled ‘Industrial Society and Its Future’, which was published by Washington Post as per The FBI’s direction
The investigative agency was hoping to get some leads and the trick worked when Kaczynski’s brother tipped off the police that it sounded like his brother.
Kaczynski refused his lawyers’ advice to plead insanity but accepted the charges receiving a verdict for life-time in prison.
Many linked his destructive traits to an infamous psychological experiment he volunteered in with others students in Harvard.
The experiment reportedly included hours of ‘extreme verbal and emotional abuses’ to gauge how much stress people could take.
Another reason others cited is Kaczynski’s isolation during outbreak of hive as a child.