Theodore “Ted” Kaczynski died on Saturday. The Harvard-educated mathematician, who retired to a dilapidated shack and launched a 17-year campaign of bombings that resulted in the deaths of three people and the injuries of 23 others, ran the campaign from a Montana wilderness shack.

Theodore “Ted” Kaczynski died on Saturday. He was 81. He was 81.

The Associated Press reported that Kaczynski, who was dubbed the “Unabomber”, died in the medical center of the federal prison in Butner, North Carolina. Kristie Brshears is a spokesperson of the federal Bureau of Prisons. She said that he was found unconscious in his cell at 8 am on Saturday. The cause of death wasn’t immediately known.

He had been in the federal Supermax Prison in Florence, Colorado since May 1998. In that month, he received four life sentences and 30 years in prison for a terror campaign that shook universities across the country. He confessed to 16 bombings between 1978 and 1995. Several of his victims were permanently injured.

The Unabomber’s deadly homemade bombs changed how Americans sent packages and boarded planes years before Sept. 11, 2001, and the anthrax mail. They even nearly shut down air travel along the West Coast of the United States in July 1995.

In September 1995, he forced The Washington Post and The New York Times to make an agonizing decision to publish his 35,000 word manifesto “Industrial Society and Its Future”, which claimed that modern technology and society was leading to alienation and a feeling of powerlessness.

It led to his downfall. David Kaczynski and Linda Patrik (David’s wife) recognized the tone of the book and alerted the FBI. The FBI had been looking for the Unabomber in the nation’s most expensive and longest manhunt for years.

In April 1996, authorities found him inside a cabin made of plywood and tarpaper measuring 10 by 14 feet (3 by 4 meters) outside Lincoln, Montana. The cabin was full of explosives, journals, a diary in code, and two bombs.

The Unabomber, a notorious criminal, has gained his fair share of admirers and been compared to Daniel Boone and Henry David Thoreau.

Kaczynski was initially portrayed as a hermit with wild eyes, long hair and a beard who lived in a one room shack during the Montana winters. However, this portrayal led many to believe that he was a romantic anti-hero rather than a lonely loner.

Kaczynski’s own journals show him not to be a revolutionary, but rather a hermit who is driven by small grievances.

He wrote, “I don’t pretend to be altruistic or to act for the ‘good of the human species’ (whatever it is),” on April 6, 1970. “I only act out of a desire to retaliate.”

Kaczynski was diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenia by a psychiatrist who interviewed him in prison.

“Mr. Sally Johnson, in a 47 page report, wrote that Kaczynski’s delusions were primarily persecutor in nature. The central themes are his belief that family members and the modern world harass and malign him.

Kaczynski was against the idea that he would be viewed as a mentally ill person. When his lawyers tried to use an insanity defence, he fired them. After that failed, Kaczynski tried to hang himself using his underwear.

Kaczynski pleaded guilty instead of letting his defense team continue with an insanity defence.

Kaczynski said to Time magazine, “I am confident that I am sane.” “I don’t have delusions or anything like that.”

He was brilliant.

Kaczynski had already published papers in mathematics journals of repute and skipped two grade levels to attend Harvard when he was 16 years old. His explosives had been carefully tested, and they were packaged in handcrafted wooden boxes that were sanded down to remove any fingerprints. Later bombs carried the “FC” signature for “Freedom Club.”

The FBI called him “Unabomber”, because his first targets were universities and airlines. The altitude-triggered explosive he sent in 1979 exploded as planned on an American Airlines flight. Twelve people suffered smoke inhalation.

Kaczynski murdered Hugh Scrutton the owner of a computer rental shop, Thomas Mosser an advertising executive and Gilbert Murray, a timber lobbyist. Two days apart, in June 1993, bombs injured California geneticist Charles Epstein as well as Yale University computer expert David Gelernter.

Mosser died in his North Caldwell home, New Jersey on December 10, 1994. He was supposed to go pick out a tree for Christmas with his family. Susan, his wife, found him severely wounded from a barrage consisting of pipes, razor blades and nails.

She said, “He was moaning softly,” at Kaczynski’s 1998 sentencing. “The fingers of his right hand were hanging.” I held his right hand. I told him that help was on the way. “I told him that I loved him.”

Experts speculated that Kaczynski was jealous of the attention given to Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh when he increased his bombings and letters sent to newspapers and scientists.

The threat to blow up an airplane out of Los Angeles by the Fourth of July weekend caused chaos in air travel and postal delivery. Later, the Unabomber claimed that it was “a prank.”

The Washington Post published the Unabomber’s manifesto on the advice of federal authorities after the bomber stated that he would cease terrorism if his work was published in a national magazine.

Patrik’s husband was persuaded to read the manifesto by her after she had a bad feeling about him even before reading it. After two months’ worth of arguments, Patrik and her husband took some of Ted Kaczynski’s letters to Susan Swanson, Patrik’s childhood friend, a Chicago-based private investigator.

Swanson then passed the documents on to Clint Van Zandt. His analysts concluded that whoever had written them was also likely responsible for writing the Unabomber manifesto.

David Kaczynski said, “It was like a nightmare,” in 2005, when he spoke at Bennington college. As a child, he idolized his brother. “I literally thought, ‘My older brother is a serial murderer, the most sought man in America’.”

Swanson contacted Anthony Bisceglie a friend of hers who was a corporate attorney and he notified the FBI. In his previous position at the Justice Department, Merrick Garland (now Attorney General) was responsible for overseeing both the investigation and prosecution.

Ted Kaczynski promised to never forgive his younger brother David Kaczynski for leaking his identity. David Kaczynski had wanted his role to be kept secret, but it was revealed. He turned his back at court hearings, ignored his letters and described David Kaczynski as “Judas” in a 1999 draft of a book.

Ted Kaczynski, a second-generation Polish Catholic, was born in Chicago on May 22, 1942. His parents were a sausage maker and a housewife. He collected coins, played trombone in his school band and skipped grades 6 and 11.

He was considered odd by his high school classmates, especially after he taught a wrestler in the school how to make a miniature bomb that exploded during chemistry class.

Harvard classmates remembered him as a thin, lonely boy who had poor hygiene. His room reeked of spoiled food, milk and foot powder.

He quit his job abruptly after finding the work to be difficult. In 1971 he purchased a 1-1/2-acre plot of land about 6 kilometers (4 miles) outside Lincoln, and built a small cabin without any heating, electricity or plumbing.

Living on just a few hundred bucks a year, he learned how to hunt, garden, and make tools.

In the late 1970s, he left his Montana cabin to work with his father and his brother at a manufacturer of foam rubber products outside Chicago. When a female boss dumped him after just two dates, he posted insulting limericks and didn’t stop.

Ted Kaczynski was fired by his brother and returned to the wilderness soon after to plot his revengeful killing spree.