Amerithrax (57 page)

agents screamed at her that I had killed five people and that her life would never be the same again,” he said. Rough treatment during the serving of a search warrant had been another of Hoover’s ploys.

“Now I recall his girlfriend said we pushed her around,” said retired FBI profiler Candice DeLong. “Let me explain what probably happened because I’ve been on many searches with FBI agents. We don’t push people around. The only way she would have been restrained or touched in any way is if she tried to attack any of the agents, then they would have restrained her physically. Probably would have arrested her. That didn’t happen. She probably opened the door and there were ten FBI agents there and they said, ‘We have a warrant for a search.’ They handed it to her, let her read it, and then they went past her. I wouldn’t be surprised if one of them merely bumped her and that turned into being manhandled. She was free to leave. She could stay as long as she didn’t get in the way or touch anything. FBI agents are polite. We’re not jackbooted thugs. It’s just more hype to make them look like they’re being victimized by the big bad FBI.”

On Thursday, August 8, agents arrived at Hatfill’s Mary- land complex with three leashed police bloodhounds in tow. The handlers of the purebred bloodhounds—Lucy, a South- ern California hound on loan, Tinker Bell, and Knight— padded toward his apartment. The closer they got, the more agitated they became. The dogs were sniffing, straining at their leashes, and barking—the telltale sign that they had sensed something. At one point they broke free and bounded up to Hatfill, who was outside the apartment sitting in his car. “They went crazy,” one law enforcement source later told
Newsweek.

When they entered his apartment, the dogs also report- edly got excited. “When you see how the dogs got to every- thing that connected him, you say ‘Damn!’” a law enforcement official told
Newsweek.
Could dogs really pick up any scent from a ten-month-old envelope that a terrorist likely had handled with gloves? The FBI claims that usable scent has been collected from evidence three years old.

“I’m a big believer in bloodhounds,” said DeLong. “I

know what they can do. I’ve seen them do it. As I recall, the dogs alerted on a restaurant and the girlfriend’s place. And the bloodhound is the only dog whose sniffing abilities can be admitted in court or put in an affidavit for a warrant. There’s a famous case. A little girl was abducted from an apartment parking lot where she lived. Weeks later—this was in the Boulder area during the dry season—they brought in a bloodhound that sniffed around. It went out to the street and it stopped. The handler decided to see if the girl had been put into a car and driven somewhere. They went a few blocks and let the bloodhound out to sniff around. Every time they did, it would alert they were on the right path.

“They went down the highway miles and miles and miles with this dog and at every exit they’d stop and let the dog out. If the dog didn’t go down the exit, they put the dog back into the car and continued on a straight path. The dog finally took them to a highway leading out of town. Finally, the dog alerted and went down the exit and took off on the desert, collapsing in exhaustion. It was not going to stop. You see, the cells exfoliate off your body and go out the exhaust and out the window and then eventually, those skin cells and hair cells fall to the street and that’s what the bloodhounds get by with. They bring in a second bloodhound. That hound within minutes found the body of the girl.

“Weeks later, miles and miles out. The grandparents of the victim girl were so impressed they began breeding and raising bloodhounds for law enforcement. It’s a wonderful story. The offender was caught and guess what—it was a neighbor. With that said about bloodhounds you can see why I put a lot of faith in them and their reaction in the anthrax case.”

Despite the hounds’ enthusiasm, the feds left Hatfill’s apartment several hours later with nothing concrete linking him to the crime. Drew La France of the National Police Bloodhound Association told reporters that a jury wouldn’t convict on dogs alone. “Have bloodhounds made mistakes? Sure.” The search took place one day after Hatfill had agreed to meet with agents. Hatfill’s attorney, Victor M. Glasberg, criticized investigators for obtaining a search warrant, which

he said was unnecessary. He said the agents carried out the search even though the day before the raid he had left a message on the voice mail of one of the FBI’s lead inves- tigators, Bob Roth, asserting Dr. Hatfill’s continued willing- ness to cooperate.

“It’s all bogus! It’s bogus!” Glasberg said. He ridiculed the idea that bloodhounds would be used that way and asked the media to check the story themselves instead of just reporting what someone else reported. “It’s not fair,” he said. “If the United States wants to charge anybody with a crime, they should damn well go ahead and do it in a fair manner... But that’s different from the kids’ game of tele- phone, bandying about allegations that get more expansive every time they’re repeated, so you can’t tell fact from fic- tion.” Dr. Patrick, the holder of multiple anthrax patents, was given a polygraph and asked about Hatfill. The blood- hounds, with his permission, sniffed around Patrick’s ga- rage with no result.

IN
Trenton, the Anthrax Task Force—made up of the FBI, CDC, and U.S. Postal Inspectors—continued interviewing residents and swabbing mailboxes for clues to the source of the anthrax-laden letters. They didn’t want to frighten the neighborhood, so they tested at night. Nighttime tests had been under way for three weeks, from July 23 to August 13. More than seven hundred samples collected from Trenton mailboxes during June, July, and August were currently un- dergoing exhaustive testing at the New Jersey Health De- partment lab.

The postal inspectors weren’t worn out. They were used to finding a needle in a haystack. They had had their suc- cesses over the years. A Boston division inspector once left for Galveston armed only with a picture of the girlfriend of a fugitive. Calling in all the city letter carriers, he showed the photo around and asked if anyone had ever seen her. A carrier identified her as the wife of a new storekeeper on his route. The fugitive, who had set the store up as a blind to avoid detection, was arrested.

The Task Force continued analyzing the four Amerithrax

letters that had survived. The Postal Service had its own labs—five identification laboratories, each serving postal in- spectors in a specified geographical area. One was in the Bureau itself; the others were at Chicago, Cincinnati, St. Louis, and San Francisco. Skilled specialists made the ex- aminations, mostly analysis of handwriting in cases involv- ing anonymous and threatening letters, forged money orders, and checks stolen from the mails. The Bureau had compiled a book illustrating every conceivable form of handwriting, including ransom and extortion notes received through the mails. To identify two writings as the product of the same individual, document examiners must depend upon the char- acteristic significance of a habit based upon departures from the normal copybook patterns.

Back in 1958, the Bureau lab had collaborated with the eminent Dr. William Souder, for thirty-nine years an expert in the Bureau of Standards. He was instrumental in the de- velopment of chromatographic analysis. It is possible to de- termine whether two inks in liquid form are identical and often determine the brand of ink. This technology meant they would be able to match the toner used in the Xerox copier Amerithrax had used.

In the Document Section of the FBI lab, any foreign trait in the handprinting could be detected and compared with a ready reference of foreign handwriting systems to distin- guish accurately between national and individual character- istics in coping with the problem of identification.

At 3:00 a.m. on August 8, the same day the bloodhounds went “crazy” in Frederick, anthrax-bacteria field tests con- ducted on a single curbside mailbox on the corner of Nassau and Bank Streets in the business district of Princeton reg- istered positive for pathogens.

It was the only positive sample taken from nearly 650 boxes tested in towns whose Zip codes began with “085” and “086.” State and federal officials still didn’t know if the spores had gotten into the mailbox from the plastic bin used to catch mail or from an actual anthrax letter. If it had been the reusable bin, other mail carriers would have gotten sick. Further tests would reveal if the spores matched the strain of anthrax in the letters.

By 9:00 a.m. the contaminated mailbox had been re- moved under cover of darkness and replaced with another box of a slightly lighter shade of blue. Only the sharpest eye could have detected the switch. The hot box was air- lifted to a lab for further forensic testing. Thirty-nine boxes remained to be tested. Now the inspectors concentrated on local photocopiers. Those were checked for identifying marks. They also reviewed prescription records at local pharmacies to see if large quantities of Cipro had been pre- scribed.

Agents headed to nearby Borough Hall to search munic- ipal files for tickets issued for traffic violations around the Nassau Street drop box. Son of Sam in New York had fi- nally been caught through a parking ticket he got the night of one of his shootings. The agents specifically asked about Dr. Hatfill. A court clerk told them he hadn’t received any tickets in the borough.

When recent reports in the
Sun
and other publications revealed that Dr. Hatfill had claimed a Ph.D. certificate he had not received, he offered an explanation. He had com- pleted the work for the degree at Rhodes University in South Africa and assumed it had been granted. Later, when he learned the degree had not been awarded, he stopped listing it on his resume. But when applying for an NIH research job in 1995, he provided the Rhodes University Ph.D. cer- tificate in molecular cell biology with his name on it, signed by the university vice chancellor and other officials.

According to Angela Stuurman, assistant to the registrar at Rhodes University, “Our parchment doesn’t even look like that. It’s most definitely a forgery.” The university seal was positioned wrong, the vice chancellor’s signature had the incorrect middle initial, and other names were made up. Victor Glasberg declined to comment on the degree, telling the press via e-mail: “We are not feeding the media frenzy on collateral issues. If you ask me whether Dr. Hatfill was standing on the grassy knoll when JFK was shot, I will give you the same answer.” At least one of his resumes said he was a member of the Royal Society of Medicine, but a spokeswoman for the society said it had no records of his ever being a member.

Hatfill’s embroidered claims about his accomplishments, his long residency in Rhodesia and South Africa, his bio- weapons training, the loss of his security clearance twenty- six days before the first anthrax letters were mailed—no wonder the FBI, the media, and his fellow scientists were so intrigued.
Newsweek
, in debunking Hatfill’s claims of Army heroics, obtained military records that showed he had joined the Marines in 1971, but was discharged a year later. He did a three-year stint in the Army, stationed in the U.S., but did not rise above the rank of private. He was never trained as a pilot. His resume said he served with Army Special Forces, but the Army had no record of that. U.S. records showed he was in America for at least two of the years he claimed to have been fighting in Rhodesia.

“We are very angry at the way they have treated this man, who has done nothing but cooperate fully with the federal authorities,” said Jonathan Shapiro. “We’re ex- tremely angry at the course of this investigation and the way the United States has seen fit to trash Dr. Hatfill. We’ve made it clear.” Shapiro conceded that the government had no obligation to keep Hatfill’s name secret, but said his cli- ent was severely damaged. “Through innuendo in the public eye they have begun to destroy this man’s life,” he said, “his standing in the scientific community, his ability to make a living. This is absolutely wrong. This is outrageous.” He accused the government, under pressure to make progress before the anniversary of 9-11, of leaking details from the affidavit submitted with the application for the search war- rant, details that were supposed to be kept secret.

Glasberg rebutted some of the various claims in advance. It was rumored that Dr. Hatfill had unfettered access to the Army bioresearch lab at the Institute after his grant ended in 1999. He did not, Glasberg said. “After he stopped work- ing there, he had to be escorted, like everybody,” Glasberg said.

The FBI at first theorized that Amerithrax would have contracted anthrax and needed Cipro. Like many of the sci- entists at the Institute, Hatfill had been inoculated against anthrax. Hatfill claimed he had a limited number of anthrax vaccinations, including an annual booster to maintain im-

munity. His records said his last inoculation had been in “early” 1999. Since December 2000, he had been suscepti- ble to anthrax. Yearly boosters are required for the anthrax vaccine to remain effective and the FBI speculated that Hat- fill had taken booster shots to prevent getting anthrax at the time of the anthrax mailings.

He had not, Glasberg said. Dr. Hatfill waived doctor- patient privilege so agents could ask his doctor about his prescriptions for Cipro. Glasberg explained that Hatfill had had an infection. But if Hatfill had been exposed to anthrax, he might still have been protected. A study done in the 1990s at Fort Detrick said seven out of eight monkeys that were given two doses of anthrax vaccine two weeks apart were protected from exposure to large amounts of the aero- solized Ames strain spores for almost two years after the last dose had been given.

Glasberg answered the charge that Dr. Hatfill had taken 350-pound cabinets from the Institute that could be used to culture anthrax. The obsolete biological cabinets were moved by truck to a training site for military exercises and then blown up, Glasberg said. Fort Detrick spokesman Chuck Dasey corroborated that the biosafety cabinets were “old and nonfunctional.” They had gone to the Army’s Spe- cial Forces Command to help train soldiers to identify ap- paratus that might be found in a bioweapons facility.