Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, who eluded authorities for 18 years, dies at 81
At first the bombs were crude affairs, amateur efforts packed with thousands of match heads. But over time, Ted Kaczynski became a craftsman, building sophisticated killing devices from easily obtained chemicals, lamp cords, roofing nails — materials that were commonplace, highly damaging and virtually untraceable.
When he needed switches, he hand-carved them from hickory. He glued components together with epoxy that he made from the boiled hooves of deer he shot. In his primitive, 10-by-12-foot cabin near the Continental Divide in Montana, he sanded and filed and polished parts to erase his fingerprints. He even peeled the skin off batteries to eliminate the lot numbers that could identify where they were sold.
He fed investigators false clues, taunting them like a comic-book villain. He sent the New York Times a letter with a return address of 9th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue N.W. in Washington, D.C. — the location of the J. Edgar Hoover Building, headquarters of the FBI. At one point, he lodged hairs he found in a bus station restroom between the layers of electrical tape on a bomb’s wire connections, hoping to initiate a genetic wild-goose chase.
But in 1996, after 18 years of a frightening, slow-motion rampage that killed three people and injured 23 more, Kaczynski was finally arrested — betrayed not by his bombs but by his own words.
Known as the Unabomber, Kaczynski
