Amerithrax (38 page)

SEVERAL
weeks before Mrs. Lundgren became ill, FBI agents and EPA Criminal Investigative Division personnel gathered to consider the monumental and dangerous task of combing 280 barrels of unopened mail addressed to and col- lected from Capitol Hill. The letters had been sequestered after the anthrax letter was opened in Senator Daschle’s of- fice. Agents hoped a second letter—which the infection of Hose, at the State Department mail facility, suggested must exist—might be inside the quarantined congressional mail. That letter, which would later prove to have been mailed the same day as the Daschle letter, October 9, 2001, from Trenton, New Jersey, might contain an even finer and more highly volatile powder. Its spores were uniformly small and more deadly.

It took more than a week to find a spot to open the quar- antined mail. Few building owners were willing to allow anthrax operations to be performed on their property. It took FBI and EPA personnel two more weeks to transform a Springfield, Virginia, warehouse into a “hot zone.” Hazard- ous materials (Hazmat) experts built a special interior con- tainment unit and associated structures. Once inspectors approved the unit’s structural integrity, the EPA set about designing the work space and developing sampling proce- dures to minimize risk of exposure to any heavily contam- inated mail.

Negative air pressure ensured that spores would not es- cape. Intake and exhaust air was screened with HEPA filters, exhausting air faster than it was let in. Dust control trapped

all particles down to the microscopic size of anthrax spores. Four air samplers monitoring the air inside and outside the containment area also helped measure the number of air- borne spores. The hot zone also had a “cold zone,” or de- contamination area—an outer work space with outer air exhausts. The system worked so well that, during the entire operation, no spores were ever detected from air samples collected there.

Before commencing, scientific and forensic experts had to create an entirely new protocol to analyze the sequestered congressional bags for anthrax contamination. This clever strategy for finding a single “hot” letter inside 635 plastic trash bags eliminated the need for hazardous materials teams to sift and paw through each piece of mail.

They based the method used to search through the moun- tain of mail on classic microbiology techniques. Time- consuming sorting by hand unnecessarily exposed workers to high concentrations of spores. And they might be fooled visually. There was no reason that another anthrax envelope would look the same as an earlier one. During a manual search the real letter might be overlooked. Under the EPA’s scheme, workers only had to sample 635 plastic bags, not tens of thousands of individual letters.

What they knew about the Daschle letter suggested that they should be looking for spores rather than letters. Clearly, the Daschle letter made numerous people sick. It had con- taminated large areas wherever it went. Therefore, they rea- soned that a trash bag containing a similar anthrax-loaded letter had to contain a gigantic number of spores. Those could be sampled to find the anthrax letter.

On Saturday afternoon, November 10, 2001, Hazmat workers from the FBI and EPA began sampling bags of congressional mail. Inside the hot zone, contamination was quite high. People were fearful and sweating though every- one wore personal protective equipment and respirators as they sorted and sampled. People would not become contam- inated unless they handled a hot bag. Any worker’s exposure was further monitored by taking samples directly off their clothing. Spores were automatically detected from all the hot zone samplers when a particularly “hot” bag was handled.

They moved slowly. Spores become airborne with ease.

Each bag, sampled in turn, was jostled around to mix up any spores present. Then a simple, easily mastered swabbing technique was used by the workers. A swab was inserted into a small hole in each of the plastic bags and wiped around the inside. Sampling through small holes minimized the release of any spores present into the work space. After the swab was withdrawn, the hole was sealed with duct tape, and the swab was used to inoculate a petri dish containing a particular solid growth medium.

The inoculation of petri dishes with swabs was a very sensitive technique. Theoretically it could detect a single spore, as it had in the Farkas household. In this case the technique was actually too sensitive for the Hazmat search. The maximum number of spores that could be identified with this method was about three hundred. If more were present, the resulting colonies would become too crowded to count. This left little leeway to distinguish samples that produced one hundred colonies on petri dishes from those that may have contained many, many more than three hun- dred. The searchers decided to use a second sampling tech- nique to determine whether or not there were large differences in contamination levels between bags.

Normally, swabs are packaged and transported to the lab- oratory where they are then used to inoculate the culture medium. The brilliance of the EPA plan lay in inoculating the medium at the scene. This step greatly reduced the work- load on the laboratory and diminished the time needed to obtain results. The bacteria started growing as soon as they touched the petri dish. By the time the cautery reached the Naval Medical Research Center for analysis early the next morning, any with spores had already produced visible col- onies resulting from the growth of the anthrax bacterium on the culture medium. Now the spores could be quickly iden- tified by the experienced laboratory workers at NMRC.

Bag sampling by FBI personnel continued all day Sunday and into Monday, November 12. So far they had detected contamination in only about sixty bags. The swabs from about fifty bags revealed only trace contamination. Seven produced greater than one hundred bacterial colonies from

a swab and were considered “hot.” By Tuesday, all sampling results were back from the NMRC lab.

On Wednesday, November 14, personnel met and iden- tified the bags that would have their air sampled and mail sorted. To be cautious, all bags that produced greater than twenty spores from the swabbing method were sorted by hand. These bags were handled in biological safety cabinets because of the increased risk associated with opening the bags and handling contaminated mail. Safety cabinets use directed airflow to prevent contamination from escaping while work is being done inside of them.

Air sampling began, as did the sorting of some bags that had tested “cold” for anthrax. For the second sampling method, air was drawn out of selected bags for two minutes each and bubbled through water. The water would accu- mulate spores over time, which could then be counted, no matter how many there were. This method proved to be much less sensitive than direct plating onto petri dishes, but it turned out to be more discriminating. Spores were detected in the air of only three bags. Finding the letter that had sickened David Hose at the State Department annex was crucial. An unopened piece of Amerithrax’s anthrax-tainted mail might be their only hope to catch the murderer of five people by inhalational anthrax and attempted murderer of uncounted others, including an infant. One bag produced about one hundred spores; another, three hundred; and a third bag, between nineteen and twenty-three thousand. The difference between this last bag and all the others made it clear that, if there was just a single anthrax-loaded letter, it had to be in that bag.

At 5:00 p.m. on Friday, FBI and EPA Hazmat personnel searched the last bag in one barrel of unopened congres- sional mail. It was leaking anthrax spores “like a sieve,” said one Army scientist. Approximately three-quarters of the way into the bag, they unearthed an anthrax-contaminated letter. It was in pristine condition, wrapped in tape, and ad- dressed to Senator Leahy. It had been trapped by the Capitol evacuation and subsequent, though delayed, quarantine of mail.

“As you know,” Van Harp commented from the FBI’s

Washington field office, “on Friday, November 16, 2001, we recovered a letter addressed to Senator Leahy in the Rus- sell Senate Office Building from a large quantity of mail that was quarantined from the Capitol Hill complex. We believed at the time that because of the lettering and the initial test results there may have been anthrax in it similar to the Senator Daschle letter. We sealed it, secured it, had it delivered to Fort Detrick, and since that time we have been very deliberate and methodical in developing a meth- odology to examine—to open and examine—the letter.”

Thus began a painstaking analysis by a number of lab- oratories. The deadly envelope presented a number of prob- lems for the FBI and Army scientists. How could they open it without destroying the invaluable microbial contents or infecting the technicians? On November 20, they took a sample of the plastic evidence bag that contained the still- unopened letter. That sample alone contained enough for more than two lethal doses. Only after the envelope was decontaminated could the Leahy letter be removed and ex- amined for its message. Then the paper could be studied for fibers, fingerprints, watermarks, photocopier gripper marks, and human DNA and the spores subjected to physical and chemical analysis.

For more than two weeks, government and private sci- entists consulted to decide how to open the letter. Experts from the scientific, public health, and law enforcement com- munities worked closely together to develop protocols and procedures to preserve the evidence. The U.S. Army Med- ical Research and Materiel Command Center was to oversee the analysis. Their goal was to save as many spores as pos- sible in order to identify the strain and source of the toxin. They were determined to give experts as much to work with as possible. Most of the spores within the Daschle letter were spilled and lost when opened by an aide. The rest had been used up during testing. “The Leahy letter is the most intact piece of evidence we have,” said FBI spokeswoman Tracy Silberling. “It may be the only complete opportunity we have to study this stuff in detail.”

FBI forensic experts intended to open the letter according to a carefully orchestrated protocol. First they brought in

high-tech lab equipment to redirect the air currents and re- duce the tendency of the anthrax to waft about in the air like a gas. Over two days, they conducted dry runs in BL-3 on a “body-double.” This was a replica of the envelope wrapped in tape like the Leahy letter. Never had any murder investigation put so much planning into the simple process of opening a piece of mail. “The U.S. Army and the FBI... know the sample is precious,” said Maj. Gen. John Parker, command- ing general of the center overseeing the analysis. “They want to make every study count toward the end of linking the sam- ple to the perpetrator.”

The Army’s consummate anthrax scientist, John Ezzell, had been vaccinated against anthrax multiple times. So on December 5, the day set to open the letter, he would not be wearing a protective suit, only a surgical mask and gloves. Support technicians Dr. Jeff Teska and Candi Jones wore double gloves and moon suits with oxygen respirators. An FBI forensic expert would be there. As in the past, other FBI personnel had to be content to remain outside and pho- tograph the proceedings through the thick glass window. Photographing the lightweight anthrax wouldn’t be easy. The evidence was too fragile, immaterial, and “floaty.”

For the last two weeks the original letter had been im- pounded in a locked, low-humidity refrigerator. The long- missing envelope was opened in a negative pressure glass containment box in the BL-3 facility. Dr. Ezzell stuck his arms through metal-cuffed gloves and unscrewed the sealed metal canister. The unopened envelope was inside. Ezzell carefully slit open a seam in the Leahy letter with a sur- geon’s scalpel, then began scooping out particles bunched at one edge of the envelope. The grains of highly refined anthrax were enough to kill one hundred thousand people. The scientists would not comment on any characteristics of the material until a battery of tests was completed.

It would be another three months before the FBI col- lected anthrax strains from suspect labs for comparison. Then a number of sophisticated scientific and forensic ex- aminations could begin. Ezzell would dole out tiny single amounts upon request, but the material was as valuable as radium and crucial to any future criminal prosecution against

Amerithrax. However, the envelope and letter could imme- diately be decontaminated and rushed to the FBI labs for further forensic analysis.

As suspected, the letter to Leahy was a photocopy of the letter sent to Daschle, hinting at escalating danger. He no longer warned the openers to take penicillin, but said flatly, “You die now.” Amerithrax, whoever he was, had to be filled with hate. It showed in his letters.

“I have to tell you that after the Leahy letter was dis- covered,” former FBI profiler Candice DeLong said, “that I decided unequivocally that the offender was a homegrown American. Up to that point I was willing to consider the possibility of state-sponsored terrorism, although I thought if this were state sponsored there would be a whole lot more dead people than there were. After the Leahy letter, that pushed me over the border. I’m pretty up on politics, and I vaguely knew who Daschle was. He wasn’t a household word. I didn’t know who Leahy was. He was definitely ob- scure. So how did the offender pick them? An Iraqi agent wouldn’t have picked these two. They would have picked Kennedy. They would have picked the highest profile poli- ticians we have not living in the White House at the mo- ment.

“Amerithrax picked two obscure and liberal targets. This guy picked Leahy for a reason. Patrick Leahy for me is the key as to why this is a homegrown American who has really got a bone to pick with Leahy and Daschle. He knows of these people and of their politics. There’s something about Leahy’s politics he doesn’t like. Possibly the motivation of the anthrax killer was to shake up our senators and make us more secure, then that makes sense.”

Poison Letters

“WHILE
the text of [the Amerithrax letters] is limited,” the FBI reported, “there are certain distinctive characteristics in the author’s writing style. These same characteristics may be evident in other letters, greeting cards, or envelopes this person has written. We hope someone has received corre- spondence from this person and will recognize some of these characteristics. All of the letters were photocopies and none appeared to contain any fingerprints.” No fingerprints meant that Amerithrax had worn gloves. The plastic tape on the envelopes, a mass-marketed variety, was the type of surface that usually offered good clues—carpet fibers, hairs, dust, and prints. Amerithrax left none. However, all the tape had been cut from the same roll. The paper on which the letters were written was an average size. The envelopes were pre- stamped and widely available. A human breath can leave DNA on a sheet of paper that could be detected through PCR. The FBI believed that Amerithrax had worn a breathing mask because there was not a trace. The marks left by the photocopier were carefully studied, but revealed no clues.

Postal inspectors took anonymous letters as a matter of course. Their history was a rich one and contained many successful hunts for poison pen writers and poison by mail. The letters themselves had been their best clue. Years ago, New York City police discovered the body of a bride who had committed suicide just after her wedding. An anony- mous letter crumpled in her hand alleged her husband was a bigamist. The accusation was untrue. Five other brides

received similar letters. The trail led back to a young woman in a New York suburb who confessed to writing the letters. She targeted her victims after reading the marriage notices in the newspapers. She defended her actions, saying they had found the happiness to which she was entitled.

In College Park, Georgia, an Atlanta suburb, letters ac- cusing daughters and wives of sordid sexual behavior started arriving. Inspector J. A. Callahan, who’d handled the Charleston, South Carolina, poisoned candy case, examined the letters. They were all typewritten in uppercase letters and mailed from Atlanta and suburban East Point. The let- ters brought domestic havoc to the two fashionable com- munities. Callahan studied the letters and listed all errors in sentence structure and misspelled words.

He wrote down all references to places, happenings, in- dividuals, or incidents known only to a few people. Grouped together and properly considered, his list was invaluable. In the Amerithrax case, the killer had misspelled penicillin. The San Francisco Zodiac had spelled words correctly and in- correctly in the same letter. Misspellings also gave a fright- ening tone to any letter, as did the uppercase lettering.

Callahan made photostated copies of several poison pen envelopes and distributed them to all mail carriers serving the College Park and East Point areas. “Keep a sharp watch for similar typewritten envelopes during your collections,” he ordered. After several weeks, a carrier named Brown of the East Point post office turned in a letter that appeared to be written on a typewriter like that used by the poison pen writer.

Callahan sent it on its way, then tracked down the ad- dressee, Nellie Jo Barfield, a divorced woman. Callahan filled her in. “I received that letter,” she said, “but I didn’t know there were others. I thought I was the only one.” She explained that her former husband, Fred O. Barfield, who lived with his seventy-six-year-old mother in College Park, had started sending her “filthy, obscene, and highly objec- tionable letters” after their divorce. “There were others, Mr. Callahan, but I destroyed them,” she said. “If the letters weren’t bad enough, he would call me on the telephone and use the same kind of language. It’s been like a nightmare.

I’ve been sick—sick of wondering how to get away from him.” “What motive would your husband have for writing such letters?” Callahan asked. “He is mean and spiteful, that’s why,” she said. “He likes to make people squirm and suffer.”

Barfield denied writing the letters. He denied he had a typewriter even though Callahan fished one from under Bar- field’s bed. In the end he agreed to a typewriter test. The document examiners in the bureau of the chief inspector identified Barfield’s typewriter as the one used. When Cal- lahan dictated the letters to Barfield, the suspect “repeated every misspelling with deadly accuracy.” Faced with such evidence, he admitted writing the letters, but refused to clar- ify his motive. Though Barfield complained to the president of the United States and two Georgia senators—by type- written letters—he was found guilty.

Some poison pen writers pieced their letters together with type snipped from magazines and pasted down. In 1956, a series of such collage postcards were mailed to the medical director of a Boston hospital and to the mayor. A surveil- lance photo taken by Boston division postal inspectors as- signed to the case caught a Boston physician as he mailed some of the postcards to his immediate superior. The doctor wanted to defame the character of his superior because he felt better qualified for the position.

What the postal inspectors began to look for in their search for Amerithrax was some event prior to the mailings that would have been a catalyst to him. Perhaps he had been passed over for a promotion or fired. They knew Amerithrax did not select victims randomly. He deliberately chose NBC News, the
New York Post
, and Senators Daschle and Leahy as targets.

The FBI noted that “these targets are probably very im- portant to the offender. They may have been the focus of previous expressions of contempt which may have been communicated to others, or observed by others.” The FBI had done considerable work on the characteristics of the letters: Amerithrax made an effort to identify the correct address, including zip code, of each victim, just as the Un- abomber had with the series of homemade bombs he had

mailed. But the Unabomber got some titles and addresses wrong because he had worked from an out-of-date reference in a small-town library in remote Montana. That eventually was a clue in his capture.

Letter 1

One page, handprinted letter

Transmittal envelope, also similarly handprinted Addressed to “NBC TV—Tom Brokaw”—No return address

Postmarked Trenton, NJ 09/18/2001 (Tues.)

Letter 2

One page, handprinted letter

Transmittal envelope, also similarly handprinted Addressed to “NY Post”—No return address Postmarked Trenton, NJ 09/18/2001 (Tues.)

Letter 3

One page, handprinted letter

Transmittal envelope, also similarly handprinted Addressed to “Senator Daschle—509 Hart Senate Of- fice Building”

Return address—“4th Grade, Greendale School, Franklin Park, NJ”

Return address zip code—“08852” Postmarked Trenton, NJ 10/09/2001 (Tues.)

Letter 4

One page, handprinted letter

Transmittal envelope, also similarly handprinted Addressed to “Senator Leahy—433 Russell Senate Office Building”

Return address—“4th Grade, Greendale School, Franklin Park, NJ”

Return address zip code—“08852” Postmarked Trenton, NJ 10/09/2001 (Tues.)

1. The author uses dashes (“-”) in writing of the date “09-11-01.” Many people use the slash (“/”) to separate the day/month/year.
   

2. In writing the number one, the author chooses to use a formalized, more detailed version. He writes it as “1” instead of the simple vertical line.
   

3. The author uses the words “can not,” when many peo- ple prefer to spell it as one word, “cannot.”
   

4. The author writes in all upper case block-style letters. However, the first letter of the first word of each sentence is written in slightly larger upper case lettering. Also, the first letter of all proper nouns (like names) is slightly larger. This is apparently the author’s way of indicating a word should be capitalized in upper case lettering. For whatever reason, he might not be comfortable or prac- ticed in writing lower case lettering.
   

5. The names and addresses on each envelope are no- ticeably tilted on a downward slant from left to right. This may be a characteristic seen on other envelopes he has sent.
   

6. The envelopes are of the prestamped variety, the stamps denoting thirty-four cents, which are normally available directly from the post office. The stamps were preprinted suggesting that the mailer feared saliva on a licked stamp could be used to confirm his identity. They are not the traditional business size envelopes, but the smaller size measuring approximately six and one-quarter inches by three and one-half inches.