The Anthrax Letters: The Attacks That Shocked America (19 page)

“I used to help her with filling out applications and money orders,” Anna said. Kathy was scrupulous about meeting her obligations, and her rent was always paid on time. Her heavily accented English could be difficult to understand until you got used to it, Anna said. But she conveyed a kindness that made people feel comfortable.

Anna and Kathy would come across each other on the elevator or in the triangular courtyard outside the building’s entrance. “Every time I saw her she would ask how I was, how my family was.” She and Kathy had been to each other’s apartments over the years. “Kathy once made wonton soup and fried rice for me,” said Anna. And Kathy often gave little gifts to the neighbors—fruit, a handkerchief. But even after all those years Anna wasn’t sure how well she really knew Kathy. “Everyone liked Kathy,” Anna said, “but you never saw her with anyone else. She was always alone.” Kathy seemed to be entirely on her own, “no relatives that I knew, though I heard she had a cousin in Seattle.”

Anna Rodgriguez lives in 5R, two floors above Kathy’s apartment. Her modest-sized living room is lively with color, family pictures, and cabinet shelves lined with decorative dishes and vases. “The room layout in Kathy’s apartment is the same as mine.”

Three weeks after Kathy’s death, across the corridor from the third-floor elevator entrance, the heavy black door to Kathy’s apartment remained bolted. Her picture and a brief article about her, clipped from a Spanish-language newspaper, were taped to the door. A separate notice said: “These Premises Have Been Sealed by the New York City Police Department.” Beneath the notice a peephole allowed for a partial view of the interior. The livingroom rug was gone, and the floor’s wooden slats were bare. Furniture had been moved from the center area. Against the wall on the left side, a 3-foot-tall shelf supported a plant whose leaves were withered beyond recovery. Farther along the shelf were a coffee mug, a small basket, and a few books. Toward the far wall a low wooden stool was visible.

Investigators who visited Kathy’s apartment after she was diagnosed with anthrax were impressed by how much was in it. Joel Ackelsberg was part of the team looking for clues. Months later he recalled his impressions: “There was a lot there. She saved mail and old receipts.” Trinkets were plentiful, also lots of clothes and shoes. “I saw two dozen shoeboxes,” he said. The CDC’s Stephen Ostroff described Kathy as a “conscientious saver.” Ostroff saw neat piles of “junk mail, some from 10 years ago, that were asking for donations.” Since she kept the apartment extremely clean, Ostroff wondered if she might have wiped out any anthrax that might have been there.

The fact that Kathy’s anthrax at first seemed unconnected to the mail was, to some, strangely encouraging. By tracing where she had been in recent weeks—shops, parks, subway lines—investigators thought the trail might lead to the perpetrator. They believed that “along those routes she might have intersected with the person or people behind the anthrax attacks,” according to a
New York Times
report. No less intriguing was her place of work. The basement stockroom at the hospital was next to the mailroom. But a few weeks after her death, none of the hundreds of tests for anthrax there or elsewhere showed any indication of anthrax. Nor were the interviews with friends and co-workers any more helpful.

Law enforcement officials had even tracked down a former husband. Kathy had been married briefly some years earlier, though she had not seen her ex-husband or other relatives for decades. Eager for leads, FBI agents managed to locate him. He told them that Kathy used to like to smell things. “We certainly were intrigued by that,” said Ackelsberg. The team considered flowers and anything else she might have smelled as a possible source of the anthrax. “But, again, nothing came up.”

Kathy’s decade at the Eye and Ear Hospital had left an impression similar to the one held by her neighbor, Anna Rodriguez. Esperanza Vassello, the hospital’s head dietician, had been at the hospital since emigrating from the Philippines 30 years earlier. A few weeks after Kathy’s death, “Espie” sat in her office, next to the large kitchen she supervises. She had a strong face and spoke with conviction. “See that?” she asked me, pointing to a brown-framed desk clock on a shelf to her right. “Kathy gave it to me for my birthday.” She recalled the conversation she had with Kathy less than 2 months earlier.

“Espie, here is your birthday present,” Kathy said.

“But it’s only October 8 and my birthday is November 7.”

Kathy smiled. “I want you to use it longer. Happy birthday.”

Kathy gave presents, and not just for birthdays, to everyone at work—earrings, cologne, food. Espie noted that Kathy “had a problem with language and understanding forms.” So, as she did with Anna Rodriguez, Kathy would ask Espie for help in filling out money order requests and other forms. Espie felt that they had become closer during the previous year or so. But she was surprised to learn from a newspaper article after Kathy’s death that she had a cousin in Seattle. “She had told me that all her family members were killed in the Vietnam War and that she had no relatives here.”

Ackelsberg summarizes the view of the investigative teams:

Was Kathy Nguyen’s end foreordained when she swung open the little brass door on her mailbox and retrieved a letter dotted with particles of death? Or did she inhale a lethal dose from some other source?

By the time of her death, 4 weeks had elapsed since Bob Stevens had become the first fatality of the anthrax terrorism. During those weeks, eight more people became infected with inhalation anthrax and 11 with the less dangerous cutaneous form. Thousands of people were hoarding Cipro and other antibiotics deemed effective against anthrax. Gas masks were selling briskly, even chemical protective suits. People were opening mail in their garages and scrubbing their mailboxes with bleach. Contaminated postal facilities, business offices, and the Hart Building, which housed the offices of half the U.S. Senate, were closed. Postal authorities reported a sharp decline in the volume of mail.

CDC protocols state that health care workers caring for anthrax patients are not at risk and that they need not take antibiotics. Nevertheless, after Kathy Nguyen was diagnosed with anthrax, both Dr. Mayer Grosser and Dr. Bushra Mina, who had seen her at the hospital, started on Cipro. After a few days, Grosser was inclined to stop, but his wife would not let him. “She insisted on watching me take the Cipro, one pill in the morning and one at night.”

On Wednesday, October 31, Kathy Nguyen went into cardiac arrest and at 1 p.m. she died. Blood cultures and autopsy findings confirmed that anthrax had colonized all her organs. On the day of her death, the
New York Times
ran stories about Kathy Nguyen under a three-column headline: “Hospital Worker’s Illness Suggests Widening Threat; Security Tightens Over U.S.”

A week after Kathy’s death, no new cases had been reported. “I’m hopeful, like the rest of America, that the anthrax has stopped permanently,” said Tom Ridge, President Bush’s director of homeland security. But by mid-November, hopes that the outbreak had ended were abruptly set back.

Ten miles south of Waterbury, Connecticut, Route 67 leads to a small wooden bridge and a sign that says “Welcome to Oxford.” Oxford was established in 1789, the year George Washington was inaugurated president of the United States. Two centuries later the number of inhabitants had grown from 1,400 to 9,800, a comparatively modest increase. During the same period in New York City, then as now the nation’s largest city, the population rose from 33,000 to 8 million. Located 75 miles north of New York, Oxford is a rustic community where agriculture and farming continue to flourish.

Along Great Hill Road, just past Immanuel Lutheran Church, a road to the right opens to a patch of single-family homes. One such home, on Edgewood Drive, stands behind neatly trimmed hedges and a tall flagpole. A black mailbox bearing the number 16 is perched on a white post near the curb. Toward the rear of the house, the backyard slopes into a valley of maple and oak, naked in the January cold. The house is empty. Six weeks earlier, on November 21, 2001, its owner, Ottilie Lundgren, succumbed to anthrax. At 94 she was the oldest of the 11 inhalation anthrax cases. Although the source of her infection, like that of Kathy Nguyen’s, remains uncertain, Ottilie’s seems even more puzzling. Her activities were limited, easily traced, and seemingly unrelated to any source of anthrax.

Whereas Kathy Nguyen had been part of the hubbub of New York City—the crowds, the subway, the shops in Chinatown—Ottilie largely remained at home in a rural, quiet community. “We were left with major gaps in the time line of Kathy’s activities,” Joel Ackelsberg said. This was not the case with Ottilie. She was childless and since her husband’s death 24 years earlier, she lived alone. Neighbors would stop by, as did her niece, Shirley Davis, who lived 30 minutes away in Waterbury, Connecticut. Ottilie had given up driving a year earlier and had become dependent on them to help her with shopping. They would drive her to the church down the road, to the beauty parlor, and to lunch at Fritz’s Snack Bar on Highway 67 where she would order minestrone soup and lobster rolls.

Although slowed by age, Ottilie remained remarkably alert. At one time a manager of her husband’s legal office, she was still a quick thinker and a reader of travel and mystery stories. Robin Shaw, a half century younger, had for the past 10 years been Ottilie’s hair dresser at the Nu Look Hair Salon. “She was a sweet woman, intelligent, and very frank,” said Robin, who looked forward to seeing her every Saturday morning at 11. Ottilie could effortlessly shift from reciting poetry to gentle chiding. A fastidious, conservative dresser herself, she may have seen in Robin’s fluffy dark hair and colorful clothes some opportunity for improvement: “Robin, your outfit. Couldn’t you choose a better color match?” “Now don’t hold back, Ottilie,” Robin replied. And both broke into laughter.

Weeks after Ottilie died, Shirley Davis talked with me about her aunt over lunch. Dressed in a black suede jacket and maroon sweater, a thin gold necklace below her turtleneck collar, Shirley’s meticulous appearance is reminiscent of her aunt’s. At 72, Shirley, who had reared her own children, was young enough to have been Ottilie’s daughter. “We became especially close in recent years,” Shirley says. Born and raised in Waterbury, like Ottilie, Shirley still lives there. She visited Ottilie several times a week to check on her and help around the house. Only after her death did a ritual of Ottilie’s take on significance:

“I nearly fainted when the doctors told me they suspected anthrax,” Shirley said, her eyes beginning to water. How could her aunt ever have been exposed? Her life was distant from mailing facilities and population centers. Her infrequent outings never took her more than a few miles from home. Shirley recalled that Ottilie had been feeling out of sorts for a few days—mild cough, weakness—and that she rejected Shirley’s pleas to call her doctor. But with Shirley in her home on Friday morning, November 16, she relented. Ottilie’s doctor suggested that she stop by the emergency room at Griffin Hospital in nearby Derby.