DENVER –
The man known as the Unabomber was transferred to a federal medical facility in North Carolina after spending the past two decades in a Supermax federal prison in Colorado to hit a series of bombings against scientists.
Theodore “Ted” Kaczynski, 79, was transferred to Butner Federal Medical Center in eastern North Carolina on December 14, US prison spokesman Donald Murphy announced. Murphy declined to reveal details of Kaczynski’s health or the reason for his transfer.
After his arrest in 1996, Kaczynski is serving his life without parole in the primitive hut he lived in in western Montana. He pleaded guilty to causing 16 explosions between 1978 and 1995, killing three people and injuring 23 others.
FMC Butner in Granville County, North Carolina, northeast of Durham, provides medical services to prisoners, including oncology, surgery, neurodiagnostics, and dialysis, according to the Bureau of Prisons. It opened an intensive care unit and a hospice ward in 2010.
Butner has 771 inmates, according to the bureau, and was home to notable offenders such as John Hinckley Jr., who was investigated there after President Reagan was shot, and Bernie Madoff, the notorious architect of a massive Ponzi scheme who worked on the facility in North Carolina earlier this year.
In November, former Oklahoma zookeeper known as “Tiger King” Joe Exotic was moved to the facility after being diagnosed with cancer, his attorney said. Joe Exotic, whose real name is Joseph Maldonado-Passage, had been convicted of trying to hire someone to kill an animal rights activist and breaking federal wildlife law.
The deadly homemade bombs the vengeful Kaczynski mailed – including an altitude-triggered explosion that went off as planned on an American Airlines flight – changed the way Americans sent packages and boarded planes.
A 1995 threat to blow up a plane from Los Angeles before the July 4th weekend ended, wreaked havoc on air traffic and mail delivery. The Unabomber later claimed it was a “prank”.
The Harvard-trained mathematician had railed against the effects of advanced technology and led the authorities in the longest and most expensive manhunt in the country. The FBI called him the Unabomber because his early targets appeared to be universities and airlines.
In September 1995, the Washington Post and the New York Times published its anti-technology manifesto, “Industrial Society and Its Future.” The manifesto was printed at the urging of federal authorities after the assassin announced that he would stop terrorism if a national publication published his treatise.
The treatise led his brother David and David’s wife, Linda Patrik, to recognize his writings and turn him over to the FBI.
In April 1996, authorities found Kaczynski outside Lincoln, Mont., In a three-by-four-meter plywood-and-tarpaulin shack where he had lived since the 1970s. It was filled with diaries, an encrypted diary, explosive ingredients, and two finished bombs.
Kaczynski hated the idea of being viewed as mentally ill and during his trial tried to fire his lawyers as they tried to build a defense against insanity. He eventually pleaded guilty instead of letting his lawyers go ahead.
In his personal diaries, which the government published at the request of the victims’ families, Kaczynski described his motive as “simply personal revenge”.
“I often had fantasies about killing the kind of people I hated – government officials, cops, computer scientists, the rowdy college students who left their beer cans in the arboretum, etc., etc. wrote.
Kaczynski killed computer rental company Hugh Scrutton, advertising manager Thomas Mosser, and lumber industry lobbyist Gilbert Murray. California geneticist Charles Epstein and Yale University computer expert David Gelernter were bombed two days apart in June 1993.
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