Timeline of the Unabomber Attacks
May 25, 1978: The first package traced to Kaczynski was found in a parking lot at the University of Illinois in Chicago. The person listed on the return address was Northwestern University Professor Buckley Crist, Jr. When it was returned to him, Crist didn’t recognize the package and called campus security. The package exploded when it was opened and injured security officer Terry Marker. He sustained minor injuries to his left hand.
May 9, 1979: John Harris, a graduate student at Northwestern University found a box inside a room used by graduate students. The box, which Harris opened because it looked like a present, exploded.
“There was a cigar box on the table outside my office," Harris told the Deseret News in 1996. "I picked it up, intending to put some pens and pencils inside … It had a detonator that went off. I saw a bright flash. I don't remember hearing anything.”
Harris was treated for superficial burns. He later became a mathematics instructor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
November 15, 1979: A bomb detonated in the luggage compartment on American Airlines Flight 444 flying from Chicago to Washington, D.C., and filled the aircraft with smoke. The plane landed safely. Several passengers suffered from smoke inhalation. Kaczynski managed to get the bomb on the plane by mailing it in a box through the Post Office.
June 10, 1980: United Airlines President Percy Wood, of Chicago, was seriously injured when he opened a package holding a bomb encased in a book called Ice Brothers by Sloan Wilson. The bomb went off and Woods suffered burns and cuts all over his body. Days earlier, he received a letter in the mail telling him he would soon receive a book of social significance. The letter was signed "Enoch W. Fisher."
"I've thought about it a lot but I still don't know why it happened," he told the Chicago Tribune. "I've never heard the guy's name. I never saw him before."
October 8, 1981: A bomb wrapped in brown paper and tied with string was found in the hallway of a building at the University of Utah. The bomb was safely detonated without injury.
May 5, 1982: A bomb was sent to Patrick C. Fischer, the head of the computer science department at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. The return address was to a professor at the University of Utah, and it had been mailed from Brigham Young University. Fischer’s secretary, Janet Smith, opened the package and was hospitalized for three weeks after it exploded. She never spoke publicly of the attack.
July 2, 1982: A package bomb left in the break room of Cory Hall at the University of California, Berkeley, exploded and left engineering professor Diogenes J. Angelakos with minor injuries to his face and hand.
During his 20 years at Berkeley, he grew the university’s Electronics Research Laboratory from a small departmental research group to a large research center with yearly funding of $15 million.
May 15, 1985: A second bomb in Cory Hall injured engineering graduate student John Hauser. He lost four fingers and severed a major artery in his right arm, and he was left blind in one eye, ending his dreams to become an astronaut.
Instead, he became a researcher and professor of electrical engineering at the University of Colorado.
“Do I feel cheated? Sure, sometimes,” Hauser told the Los Angeles Times in 1997. “But you know, what I’m doing now is OK, too.”
June 13, 1985: A suspicious package sent to the Boeing Fabrication Division in Washington was safely detonated. Most of the forensic evidence was lost.
November 15, 1985: University of Michigan psychology professor James V. McConnell and assistant Nicklaus Suino were injured, suffering from temporary hearing loss and minor shrapnel wounds, when they opened a package containing a three-ring binder that had a bomb.
December 11, 1985: Computer store owner Hugh Scrutton, 38, died after he handled a bomb that was placed at the back door of his business, Rentech. It was designed to look like a road hazard.
In his own writings, Kaczynski said he thought the bomb was “excellent” and a “humane way to eliminate somebody.” “He probably never felt a thing,” the killer wrote.
February 20, 1987: Another bomb was left in the parking lot of a Salt Lake City computer store. The owner, Gary Wright, drove up to the device and kicked it. It exploded and hundreds of pieces of shrapnel hit Wright’s body. It severed a nerve in his arm.
Wright has spent his life speaking about his experience and his unlikely friendship with David Kaczynski, the Unabomber’s brother.
June 22, 1993: Geneticist and Down syndrome researcher Charles Epstein at the University of California lost the tips of three fingers and part of his hearing after he opened a package that exploded in his kitchen. The device had been mailed to his home in Tiburon, Calif.
He died on February 15, 2011, at age 77 of pancreatic cancer.
June 24, 1993: David Gelernter, a computer scientist from Yale University lost several fingers and sustained major damage to his right eye to a mailed bomb. Gelernter was removed from teaching classes in 2026 after newly released documents showed he sent sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein an email in 2011 describing an undergraduate as a very “small goodlooking blonde” while recommending her for a job.
December 10, 1994: Advertising executive Thomas J. Mosser was killed by a package bomb sent to his New Jersey home. The package had been mailed from San Francisco a week earlier.
In an April 1995 letter he sent to The New York Times, Kaczynski said he “blew up Thomas Mosser because ... Burson-Marsteller helped Exxon clean up its public image after the Exxon Valdez incident [in 1989].”
St. Bonaventure University in New York dedicated a wing of its communications building to Mosser. “Tom was an outstanding global corporate leader in the strategic areas of advertising and public relations,” the university stated.
April 24, 1995: A mailed bomb killed Gilbert Brent Murray, 47, in his Sacramento office. In a June 1995 letter, Kaczynski took credit for the bomb. Murray spent more than 16 years with Collins Pine Company in Chester, California. Then he and his wife decided to move to Sacramento, where he became the California Forestry Association vice president of private land resources, and eventually became president of the organization.
