Family of woman 'most responsible' for bringing down the Unabomber pay tribute after her death

The woman who helped bring down the infamous Unabomber Ted Kaczynski has been praised for her ‘insight, courage and skill’ following her death earlier this year.

Linda Patrik was married to Ted’s brother David Kaczynski and was the first person to suspect that her brother-in-law could be the domestic terrorist.

Kaczynski, whose crimes have recently been retold in Netflix's Unabomber, was a maths prodigy who abandoned a successful academic career in the late 1960s to live a reclusive life.

But his decision to become a self-sufficient recluse came alongside an horrific terrorism campaign that ran for almost two decades and resulted in the deaths of three people as well as the injuries of dozens more.

Kaczynski was eventually captured in 1995 after he wrote a letter to The New York Times and his brother David recognised the writing style and reported his suspicions to the FBI.

Ted Kaczynski was unmasked as the Unabomber in 1996 (Bureau of Prisons/Getty Images)

However, in a new interview with The US Sun, David has said it was his late wife Linda who was ‘the person most responsible for ending the Unabomber’s reign of violence and for saving lives in the process’.

David, 76, paid a sweet tribute to his ‘deeply spiritual’ and ‘empathetic’ wife, who passed away in February this year.

He told the publication that while Linda only received ‘small credit’ for her role in catching the Unabomber, it was her ‘insight’ and ‘persistence’ that helped him when he was faced with turning in his own brother.

“People say, ‘David, you made this very painful, ethical decision,” he said.

“Typically the decision has been attributed to me, but it was actually founded in a process of us.”

David said it was his wife who had initially shown him the 35,000-word Unabomber manifesto and urged him to compare it to his brother’s writings.

In an interview with ABC News in 2016, Linda said she felt compelled to raise her suspicions with her husband after learning more about the victims.

"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.

Linda and David helped bring down the infamous Unabomber (Investigation Discovery)

"And there were others. And so I spent those days thinking about those people."

Initially, David had hoped that he’d be able to read the manifesto and reassure his wife that it was not his brother’s work, but after taking it soon became clear and he admitted to Linda that he thought there was a ‘50-50 chance’ his brother was the Unabomber.

David said had it not been for Linda he likely would have remained in denial, but that as a couple they were able to face the decision to shop his brother to the FBI, which eventually led to him being arrested in 1996.

At his trial in 1998, Kaczynski pleaded guilty to a slew of charges including murder and the mailing of bombs and was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Kaczynski died by suicide in 2023 aged 81.