The Unabomber, aka Ted Kaczynski, was captured on April 3, 1996, by a nine-man SWAT team in Montana. As per FBI, Kaczynski was in his cabin, which was near Lincoln, Montana, when he was apprehended. However, it took officials nearly 20 years to capture this domestic terrorist.
Cops reportedly managed to arrest the Unabomber because of his brother and sister-in-law’s suspicions. After reading the terrorist’s writings, his sister-in-law, Linda Patrick, was able to identify that Kaczynski was the Unabomber.
According to ABC News, during a 20/20 on ID Presents: Homicide interview in 2016, she said, “I’d thought about the families that were bombed. There was one in which the package arrived to the man’s home and his little 2-year-old daughter was there. She was almost in the room when he opened the package. Luckily she left, and his wife left. And then he died.”
She continued, “And there were others. And so I spent those days thinking about those people.” Linda also explained that Ted sent letters to her husband, David Kaczynski. The ideas in the letters were shockingly similar to the Unabomber’s writings.
In the same interview, David Kaczynski said, “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. I couldn’t imagine that he would do what the Unabomber had done.”
Who was the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski?
Between 1978 and 1995, Ted Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber, conducted a bombing campaign. According to Britannica, his activities led to the death of three and injured 23 people.
The reason he did this was to bring about “a revolution against the industrial system.” He was named the Unabomber after ATF and U.S. Postal Inspection Service joined hands to investigate the “UNABOM” case. It was a code-name for the UNiversity and Airline BOMbing.
However, the big break in the case arrived in 1995 when Kaczynski sent a 35,000-word essay to the FBI. Here, he explained his motives. The essay was published by FBI to identify the author, after which the list of suspects was reduced when David Kaczynski described about his brother and also provided letters written by Ted. The documents proved to be crucial, which ultimately led to Ted Kaczynski’s arrest in April 1996.
According to AP News, he died by suicide at the age of 81 on June 10, 2023, in his cell at the Federal Medical Center in Butner, North Carolina.
