Uncle John’s Heavy Duty Bathroom Reader@ (82 page)

TEXTED-EM

In October 2009, police in Miramar, Florida, were investigating the case of a missing 35-year-old woman. In the first days after she disappeared, the woman sent her family text messages saying she’d moved, but the family didn’t believe it, telling police they had never received text messages from her before. They also said that she had been trying to leave her abusive boyfriend, Paul Edwards, 44, for some time. After the woman had been missing for almost a month, police decided to see how Edwards would react to a message…from his missing girlfriend. They received court permission to transfer her old cell phone number to a new phone, and then sent Edwards a text message: “Just wait ’til I get better.” It worked. Edwards left his house and drove to several different locations—and eventually led police to the woman’s body. Thanks to her “ghostly” text message, Edwards is now in jail, facing a charge of first-degree murder.

In Japan, builders use bubble wrap as insulation and soundproofing in houses.

RECYCLED-EM

Gene Wilford Hathorn was convicted of capital murder in Huntsville, Texas, in 1985, and has been on death row ever since. In 2008 he was contacted by Danish-based artist Marco Evaristti, who asked Hathorn if he could have Hathorn’s body after the execution, when and if it ever happens. If that wasn’t weird enough, he told Hathorn what he wanted to do with it. “My aim is to first deep freeze Gene’s body,” Evaristti said, “and then make fish food out of it.” Hathorn agreed. Evaristti plans to stage an “art” exhibit—where visitors will have the opportunity to feed fish with the food made from Hathorn’s body. “It’s the last thing he can do for society and he views it as positive,” says Evaristti. Texas officials permit prisoners to choose whoever they want to care for their remains, and Hathorn has made the artist the legal heir to his body, so this may actually happen some day. (We’ll be sure to let you know if it does.)

SMOKED-EM

A mummified human body was found in the chimney of a Finnish industrial building as it was being demolished in 2010. The corpse still had clothes on, and had a wallet with identification in one of the pockets. It identified the body as that of a man born in 1953 who had gone missing in 1991. Exactly how and why the man ended up in a chimney is still under investigation.

TOWED-EM

In March 2010, police in New York City towed a mini-van that was illegally parked in front of a funeral home. Funeral director Paul DeNigris had illegally parked the van in front of the building for a few minutes while he picked up some paperwork and took a call. When he came out and found it gone, he was aghast: There was a corpse in the van. He raced to the police impound yard and spent the next hour-and-a-half trying to get it back. He finally did, and raced to the airport: The corpse was bound for Miami, Florida, where it was scheduled to be cremated. The impound lot waived its usual $185 towing fee because of the “special circumstances” involved in the incident. (But he still had to pay $115 for the parking violation.)

What do Steve Jobs, Faith Hill, and Rev. Jesse Jackson have in common? All were adopted.

THE ANTHRAX ATTACKS,
PART IV

Here’s the final installment of our story on the 2001 anthrax scare. (Part III is on
page 424
.)

I
GNORE THE EVIDENCE

The first suspect in the anthrax attacks of 2001 was Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. It seemed plausible: The letters at least
seemed
to come from a Muslim source (they all said “Allah is great”). Hussein once had large stores of anthrax-based weaponry and he’d had a beef with the United States since the Persian Gulf War. But the evidence being presented in the media didn’t add up.

The first stories linking Iraq to the anthrax attacks appeared in October 2001 in several newspapers, including the
New York Times
and the London
Times
. They reported that an Iraqi intelligence agent had met with al-Qaeda member and 9-11 ringleader Mohammad Atta in Prague in April 2001. There, according to the reports, they discussed the attacks of 9-11—and the Iraqi gave Atta a vial of anthrax spores. The story had the effect of linking Iraq to both the anthrax attacks
and
the 9-11 attacks, and it increased the panic already felt by Americans. The only problem: Both the FBI and the CIA said there was no evidence such a meeting ever took place.

BAD PRESS

The next bit of “evidence” that Iraq was involved was reported by ABC News’ Brian Ross on October 26, 2001. Citing “three well-placed but separate sources,” Ross said that government tests on the anthrax powder used in the attacks showed that it contained a chemical called
bentonite,
and that the only country in the world known to use bentonite in its biological weapons…was Iraq. The problem with this story: There was no bentonite in the anthrax. Both the White House and Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge immediately said it wasn’t true. (And Ross never revealed who had given him the bogus information.)

While stories like these were making headlines, the FBI had a
real investigation to carry out. That turned into about as much of a fiasco as the sketchy news stories.

Iraq war fact: Water-soaked (unused) disposable diapers are good for sponge baths.

THE WRONG SUSPECTS

The investigation of the FBI’s “Amerithrax” case was the biggest (and the most expensive) in the agency’s history. According to the FBI:

Efforts involved more than 10,000 witness interviews on six different continents, the execution of 80 searches, and the recovery of more than 6,000 items of potential evidence during the course of the investigation. The case involved the issuance of more than 5,750 grand jury subpoenas and the collection of 5,730 environmental samples from 60 site locations.

Over the course of the investigation more than 1,000 people were viewed as possible suspects. Here are the most significant:

Dr. Ayaad Assaad.
The Egyptian-born microbiologist worked at USAMRIID at Fort Detrick from 1989 to 1997. On October 2, 2001—two days before the first confirmed case of inhalation anthrax—the FBI received an anonymous letter saying Assaad was planning a bioterror attack. “The letter-writer clearly knew my entire background, my training in both chemical and biological agents, my security clearance, what floor where I work now, that I have two sons, what train I take to work, and where I live,” said Assaad. The FBI later cleared him of any connection to the attacks. The letter writer was never identified. Assaad believes it was a coworker, and quite possibly the attacker.

Dr. Philip M. Zack.
In December 2001, Connecticut’s
Hartford Courant
newspaper reported that although Zack, a retired army lieutenant colonel and a microbiologist, had been fired from the Fort Detrick lab in 1991, video surveillance tapes showed him being let in by a coworker, Dr. Marian Rippy, months later—when he should not have had access to the site. (Zack had been fired for harassing Dr. Assaad, the story said.) This was right around the time that anthrax bacteria samples were reported missing from the lab. The FBI said little publicly about Zack, and despite the fact that the
Courant
ran this story just a few months after the attacks, he was almost completely ignored by the press over the entire course of the investigation.

It takes about 6 hours to play a perfect game of
Pac-Man
.

Dr. Steven J. Hatfill.
The one person who was not ignored by the press was Hatfill, a medical doctor, virologist, and bioterror expert who worked at Fort Detrick from 1997 until 1999. He was first implicated in early 2002 by Don Foster, a linguistics professor hired by the FBI to study the letters and other classified documents connected to the case. According to Foster, there were too many odd clues pointing to Hatfill to ignore.

• Hatfill had studied medicine in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in the 1970s, when one of the largest anthrax outbreaks among humans in modern history occurred.

• The Rhodesian medical school Hatfill attended was near a suburb named “Greendale”—the name of the fictitious school listed as the return address on the letters sent to the Senate.

• Hatfill had authored an unpublished novel years earlier. The subject: a bioterror attack on Washington, D.C.

• He’d taken Cipro in the days before the attacks.

The FBI initially told Foster he was wrong—no matter what the evidence said, Hatfill had a solid alibi. But under intense pressure to solve the case, in August 2002, the agency named him as a “person of interest” anyway. And for the next three years, Hatfill’s life unraveled as the FBI trailed him 24 hours a day, questioned his friends, family, and co-workers, and repeatedly searched his home, all the while leaking seemingly incriminating information about him to the press. Hatfill was in the news constantly, sometimes being named outright as the attacker. He ended up losing his job, many of his friends, and nearly his mind. “You might as well have hooked me up to a battery,” he told
The Atlantic
magazine in May 2010. “It was sanctioned torture.” During the investigation Hatfill sued the Justice Department for ruining his reputation. In 2008 they quietly settled for $5.82 million, and soon afterwards the department fully exonerated him of any wrongdoing.

THE FINAL SUSPECT

On August 6, 2008, the FBI announced for the first time that they believed that just one person was responsible for the 2001 anthrax attacks, and that they knew who that person was: Dr. Bruce Ivins, one of the leading researchers at Fort Detrick—and someone who had actively helped them in the investigation into the attacks.

Homer Simpson, John Cleese, and Mr. T have each been the voices of GPS systems.

One big problem for anyone looking for true closure in the case: Ivins had committed suicide a month earlier. He would never face the trial that might have answered at least some of the many questions that remained. There was, however, a lot of compelling, if circumstantial, evidence against him:

• Ivins worked in the lab at Fort Detrick from 1990 until his death in 2008, and had easy access to the Ames strain of anthrax bacteria.

• In the weeks before both the September and October attacks, he worked several late nights alone in the lab.

• Ivins had twice—once in December 2001 and again in April 2002—performed unauthorized cleanups of anthrax spills at Fort Detrick. He did not report the events to authorities at the time.

• While working on developing an anthrax vaccine, Ivins not only had access to the RMR-1029 batch of the Ames strain—he had been its sole custodian since it was first cultured in 1979. (Hatfill did not have access to RMR-1029.)

• Just days after being informed by the FBI that he was going to be indicted in the anthrax attacks, Ivins committed suicide.

CASE CLOSED?

In February 2010, a year and a half after first naming Ivins as their sole suspect, the Justice Department and the FBI officially closed the case of the 2001 anthrax attacks. Many people believe there are still far too many mysteries to justify ending the investigation. Among them: The government never showed any evidence that Ivins had been to the New Jersey post office box used to mail the letters—seven hours from his Maryland home; Jeffrey Adamovicz, Ivins’s onetime supervisor at Fort Detrick, said Ivins didn’t have the skill necessary to process anthrax liquid into concentrated powder form; and no traces of anthrax were ever found at Ivins’s home or on any of his belongings.

Questions not involving Bruce Ivins also remain unanswered: How did Kathy Nguyen, 61, the New York City hospital worker, and Ottilie Lundgren, 94, of rural Connecticut, come into contact with anthrax spores? (The only explanation ever given was that their mail must have been cross-contaminated while in the postal system, but no contaminated letters were ever found at their
homes or at Nguyen’s workplace.) Why did the FBI focus on Hatfill for so long when evidence pointed to Ivins at least as early as 2002? And, going back to the start of this story—who was the “high government official” who warned columnist Richard Cohen to take Cipro before the attacks even occurred?

Those questions will likely remain unanswered for years to come.

Two of the 14 actors who played the “Marlboro Man” died of lung cancer.

A FEW SPORE FACTS

• The anthrax spores in the letter sent to Chile were not from the Ames strain. Whether it was related to the attacks in the U.S. is still unknown.

• The name “Ames strain” was based on an error: The strain was grown from a bacteria sample taken from a cow that died of anthrax in Texas in 1980. The Army lab at Fort Detrick acquired the strain in 1981, and a researcher there dubbed it “Ames” because he thought it came from the National Veterinary Services Laboratories, a government lab where cattle diseases are studied, in Ames, Iowa. He was wrong—but the name stuck.

• According to the American Medical Association, at least 2,500 anthrax spores have to be inhaled to cause an infection.

• Cats, dogs, pigs, and birds can contract anthrax, but rarely do. Cold-blooded creatures such as frogs and snakes cannot contract the disease.

• Seven people in Scotland and one in Germany died of anthrax after injecting contaminated heroin in late 2009 and early 2010.

• It’s believed that only the United States and Russia have developed the technology to convert anthrax spores to powder form.

• The bacteria used in the anthrax-based weapons that Iraq developed in the late 1980s were created from strains Iraq bought from the American Type Culture Collection, a private, not-for-profit company based in Manassas, Virginia, that sells cell cultures.