The Killer Book of Cold Cases (12 page)
Read The Killer Book of Cold Cases Online
Authors: Tom Philbin
On September 6 and October 6, 2001, one of the scariest assaults on the United States occurred. Five envelopes—some with false return addresses and some containing semiliterate notes praising Allah—were completely or partially filled with
Bacillus anthracis
and mailed to various individuals and places. Two envelopes went to Senators Patrick Leahy and Tom Daschle in Washington, D.C. One went to the
New York Post
, one to newsman Tom Brokaw of NBC, and the fifth to the Boca Raton, Florida, office of American Media, Inc., or AMI, publisher of the
National Enquirer
,
TV Guide
, and other magazines.
Some people contracted anthrax through the skin by handling the envelopes, and others contracted it through the most deadly transmission method by inhaling it. Five people were killed as a result. Seventeen more were made ill, and thirtyone others tested positive for the anthrax spores. Since the envelopes had passed through postal facilities, the FBI was on the case from the start. Agents calculated that 10,000 additional people were at risk of getting sick or dying.
The FBI immediately formed a task force with the Department of Justice and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service to handle the investigation, code-named Amerithrax.
The first step was identifying the type of anthrax used in the attack, which was found to be the Ames strain. Only experts can work with anthrax without it making them sick (or worse), and different experts work with different strains. The task force also discovered that anthrax from the Ames strain had been housed and maintained by scientists at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, or USAMRIID, which works on biological warfare defense. These facts helped investigators narrow down the number of suspects.
Despite that quick winnowing, the investigation would hardly be a slam dunk. Overall, the task force took seven years and expended more than 600,000 investigative hours before identifying someone to bring to justice.
Meanwhile, the investigation had a Damocles sword hanging over it. The sender of the anthrax was technically a mass murderer (defined as someone who murders a lot of people all at once) and exposing as many people as he did within the postal system showed him to be a psychopath. Investigators knew that if he (or she) sent more anthrax, thousands of additional people would be at risk.
One of the main tasks in the early days of the investigation was to determine where the anthrax came from. Had it all been sent by one individual? Stolen by a terrorist group or state government? Or perhaps been sent by a business that would somehow profit?
The FBI isolated a number of people that they characterized as “persons of interest,” one step below being suspects. In August 2002, they regarded their prime person of interest as Steven J. Hatfill, a scientist who had worked at USAMRIID from 1997 to 1999. While he was there, he had easy access to the Ames strain of anthrax, and he had told coworkers that he knew how to “weaponize” anthrax.
When the FBI searched Hatfill’s apartment in Frederick, Maryland, in June 2002, agents discovered what the FBI characterized as detailed “anthrax production protocols,” some of which matched techniques used by the U.S. Army. Investigators also discovered that Hatfill was quite familiar with how to conduct an anthrax letter attack on the United States. He had, in fact, commissioned a “risk assessment study.”
The circumstantial evidence continued to pile up against Hatfill, including his use of the drug ciprofloxacin, or Cipro, the only antibiotic approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for the treatment of inhalational anthrax. The doses he received had been prescribed by a doctor friend in January, July, September, October, and November 2001 and included refills that he filled two days before each of the letter assaults.
The Feds seemed to have not one but two smoking guns to use against Hatfill, but that turned out not to be the case. As the investigation continued, the task force reluctantly concluded that Hatfill’s use of Cipro was not to fight inhalational anthrax but for chronic sinus and bronchial infections.
The most important facts that helped completely clear Hatfill, were later scientific breakthroughs. Originally, the task force had assumed that any scientist who worked in the USAMRIID Building and had access to the biocontainment side of Building 1412 also had access to the anthrax powder used in the attacks. But that was not correct. Investigators discovered that a powder called RMR-1029 had actually been used in the attacks. Hatfill had left USAMRIID two years before RMR-1029 was available. In other words, he wasn’t around when the anthrax was weaponized.
After that, investigators simply had to figure out who had access to RMR-1029. They quickly eliminated everyone who was a suspect except one person, Bruce Ivins, PhD.
Ivins was a microbiologist, a renowned expert in all aspects of anthrax who had worked at USAMRIID for twenty-seven years. The task force also learned that Ivins had been able to transfer small quantities of the main ingredient of the anthrax (RMR-1029) used in the letters to two other domestic labs before the attacks in 2001.
Investigators closely examined Ivins’ emails and online searches, and the deeper they dug, the more concerned they became. They received authorization to wiretap his phones, “tossed his trash,” (as cops say, so they could examine what was in it), and put a GPS on his car so they could follow him. Of course, investigators also wanted to know what made Ivins tick and took a close look at his personal and professional life.
Ivins exhibited truly bizarre behavior in his personal life. For example, he had a history of disguising his identity and mailing things under fictitious names, even when there was no logical reason to do so. Investigators discovered a dozen pseudonyms that he had used. They also learned that he exhibited a variety of obsessive behaviors. For example, he had a penchant for going on long drives to mail letters. And he didn’t hesitate to name friends and colleagues as being behind the anthrax attacks.
At first, investigators kept their focus on Ivins secret, but when they felt they had exhausted all investigative avenues, they confronted him and his lawyers. Ivins was given every reasonable opportunity to answer questions related to the anthrax attack, but he was not able to answer anything adequately.
Ivins’ main reaction was rage, and his behavior in the following days and weeks clearly indicated that he had a homicidal side and was capable of sending envelopes full of deadly anthrax.
For example, he threatened another scientist, and in a group therapy session, investigators say he revealed his anger at those who were investigating him, as well as his plans to kill his coworkers and others who had wronged him. As the investigation heated up, Ivins seemed to fall apart emotionally, although he likely had been very depressed for a long time. Indeed, on July 29, 2008, he took his own life.
On October 2, 2002, one of the most baffling terrorism cases in American history started when ten people in the Washington, D.C. area were randomly murdered by a sniper in less than a month and three more people were critically injured, all having been shot with a single bullet. When they were shot, these people were going about their everyday lives—mowing the lawn, pumping gas, shopping, reading a book, and so on.
The first shooting occurred on October 2, when a man was killed while crossing a parking lot in Wheaton, Maryland. The next day, October 3, four people were shot within two hours in Aspen Hill and another in nearby in Montgomery County. That evening, a fifth person was killed in the District of Columbia.
Following this, investigators determined that all of the shootings were linked. They knew that each had been done from some distance away by a sniper and that the same rifle had been used. Fear in the Washington area became pervasive, and parents began taking their children to school early and not allowing them to ride a school bus. From the variety of people shot (and killed), anyone seemed to be fair game.
Fear spread after a 13-year-old boy was shot in Bowie, Maryland, on October 7 and then a man was murdered on the same day near Manassas, Virginia, while pumping gas. On October 11, another man was shot dead near Fredericksburg, Virginia, also while pumping gas, and on October 14, Linda Franklin, an FBI intelligence analyst, was shot dead near Falls Church, Virginia, while coming out of a Home Depot with her husband.
The shootings continued. Someone gave a tip on the shooting of the FBI agent, but this was ultimately determined to be fake; indeed, the tipster was arrested for interfering with the investigation.
After five days without shootings, 37-year-old Jeffrey Hopper was shot dead on October 21. At the time, a white van was thought to be involved in the shootings and two immigrants were arrested, but this trial led nowhere.
Meanwhile the shooter had been sending taunting notes and other communications to Chief Charles Moose, Sheriff of Montgomery County. For example, the tenth victim was a bus driver in Aspen Hill, and after that killing, the sheriff received a note that said, in part: “Your children are not safe anywhere, at any time.”
An investigation that included federal agents had been going full tilt, but eyewitness accounts were spotty, although they included people spotting the white van and a gray car speeding away from the four shootings that had occurred in Aspen Hill.
Besides the notes, which were handwritten and inside plastic bags, Moose received Tarot cards with the Death sign, upon which was written “Call me God.”
A telephone call made by the killer and traced to a pay phone in Henrico County, Virginia, almost resulted in an arrest but that effort missed by minutes. But what the killer said was highly significant, particularly when he boasted about having committed a murder in a liquor store in Montgomery, Alabama.
On October 17, investigators matched that information to John Allen Muhammad, who was known to authorities. Muhammad’s exwife lived near the Capital Beltway in Clinton, a community in suburban Prince George’s County, Maryland, and had taken out an order of protection against him.
Further investigation found that Muhammad had bought a 1990 dark blue Caprice, but horribly, the cops screwed up. The Caprice had been stopped a couple of times by radio cars because it was in the area, but neither Muhammad nor his young friend, Lee Boyd Malvo, were suspected of being involved in the shootings. Also, cops had stopped Muhammad for a minor traffic infraction on October 3, two hours prior to the shooting of Pascal Charlot. Perhaps they had been focused on finding a “white van.”
Finally, with Muhammad a suspect because of the Montgomery killing, an alert for the blue Caprice was put out. On October 24, a truck driver discovered Muhammad and Malvo sleeping in the car at a rest stop off Interstate 70 near Myersville, Maryland. The driver used his truck to block the exit and then called police, who made the arrest uneventfully.
The motive for the killings might have been Muhammad’s desire to kill his wife, Mildred, because she had won custody of his children as well as a court order keeping him away from them. Perhaps the plan was to cover up her murder by making her seem like another victim of the sniper, rather than the main target.
But Muhammad seemed crazy, wanting to do just about anything for Allah, while the boy, Malvo, said the motive was to kidnap children to extort money from the government and to “set up a camp to train children to terrorize cities.”
Both men were convicted. Malvo was given five life terms in prison, while Muhammad was executed by lethal injection on November 10, 2009.
October 2:
Man killed while crossing a parking lot in Wheaton, Maryland.
October 3:
Five more murders, four in Maryland and one in D.C.
October 4:
Woman wounded while loading her van at Spotsylvania Mall.
October 7:
13-year-old-boy wounded at a school in Bowie, Maryland.
October 9:
Man murdered near Manassas, Virginia, while pumping gas.
October 11:
Man shot dead near Fredericksburg, Virginia, while pumping gas.
October 14:
FBI analyst Linda Franklin killed near Falls Church, Virginia.
October 19:
Man wounded outside a steakhouse in Ashland, Virginia.
October 22:
A bus driver, the final victim, killed in Aspen Hill, Maryland.
Malvo and Muhammed had equipped the Chevrolet Caprice so well that it was, in effect, a rolling tank. These are some of the items found in it:
- The Bushmaster .223-caliber rifle used in each attack.
- A rifle scope for taking aim and a tripod to steady the shot.
- A backseat that had the sheet metal removed between the passenger compartment and the trunk, enabling the shooter to get into the trunk from inside the car.
- The Chevy Caprice owner’s manual with—the FBI Laboratory later detected—written impressions of the one of the demand notes.
- The digital voice recorder used to make extortion demands.
- A laptop stolen from one of the victims containing maps of the shooting sites and getaway routes from some of the crime scenes.
- Maps, walkie-talkies, and many more items.
