Unabomber Ted Kaczynski was diagnosed with rectal cancer and had been struggling with bouts of depression before he died by suicide behind bars, according to a new report.
Kaczynski — a reclusive Harvard-educated terrorist who waged a decades-long mail-bombing spree that killed three people and injured 23 others— was discovered unresponsive on June 10, 2023, inside his solitary cell at the Federal Medical Center in Butner, North Carolina, northeast of Durham.
“At around midnight on June 10, 2023, he was found to have hung himself from a handicap rail in his room with shoelaces,” according to an autopsy report obtained by NBC News through a Freedom of Information Act request. “He was initially pulseless, and resuscitation was initiated.”
There was then a “return of spontaneous circulation” before he was transferred to nearby Duke University Hospital, where his blood pressure remained low, according to the report. He was pronounced dead at 8:07 a.m.
“The decedent was not on any prescription medications and had no prior suicidal ideations or attempts,” the report added. “Federal Law Enforcement had no concern for foul play.”
The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in North Carolina listed the cause of death as hanging, with a shoelace used as a ligature.
In May 1998, Kaczynski was sentenced to four consecutive life sentences plus 30 years for carrying out a series of deadly bombings between 1978 and 1995. Considered one of the most prolific bombers in the world at the time, he spent nearly 20 years evading law enforcement before he was eventually found living alone in a one-room shack in a remote corner of Montana. He was taken into custody by a SWAT team in April 1996, roughly six months after he forced The Washington Post, in conjunction with The New York Times, to publish his 35,000-word manifesto, “Industrial Society and Its Future.”
His younger brother, David Kaczynski, tipped off investigators to the Unabomber’s possible identity when he and his wife read the anti-industrial screed and recognized the tone.
Kaczynski spent the bulk of his sentence at a maximum-security facility in Colorado before he was moved to the prison medical facility in Butner in December 2021. Prison officials previously confirmed the Unabomber had cancer, but it had been unclear what kind. He’d been diagnosed with rectal cancer in March 2021. Medical examiners said it had reached stage 4 and that it had spread to his liver and lungs prior to his death.
He underwent biweekly chemotherapy until March 2023, “when he refused any further treatments due to negative side effects and his poor prognosis,” medical examiners said.
An oncologist also noted that he “appeared depressed” about a month before his death. Kaczynski was also previously diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, though he repeatedly denied suffering from any sort of mental illness.
