Agent Scott Decker
Appearances
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 7: Pot of Gold
I thought there was maybe more we could do with the forensics of these envelopes, because I knew nothing about them, but we had crazy ideas about what we could do.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 7: Pot of Gold
Pretty much the only source of DNA would have been from licking the stamp or licking the envelope. And in this case, the people that had made the envelopes had inked a stamp onto it. So you didn't have to put your own stamp on it. No licking. And the envelopes were taped shut, not licked. So we didn't have a licked envelope. We didn't have licked stamps.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 7: Pot of Gold
There was no reason to think there was any place we were going to get human DNA.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 7: Pot of Gold
It was like looking for a needle in a haystack, but we weren't even sure there was a needle to look for. We weren't sure we were going to get an answer. We couldn't say for sure it was going to work.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 7: Pot of Gold
To me, that was interesting because I grew up in the paper mills. I shouldn't say grew up. I spent my 18, 19, 20 years working at the paper mills in Jersey. So I kind of understood what they were doing.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 7: Pot of Gold
They actually made vinyl printing plates, and they'd spin around and they would roll over the envelopes and ink on the stamps. So each piece of this vinyl lasts for about a million envelopes. Then we have to start with a new one because it wears down.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 7: Pot of Gold
During the wearing process, these small defects in printing would arise. So the first hundred would not be the same as the last hundred in the run of a million. So now we had a way, a forensic way, to differentiate between these little envelopes. Technically, each one would be different if you put it under a microscope and looked at the printing defects.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 7: Pot of Gold
So we went to Secret Service and said, can you look at these things and can you tell, is there a difference between the ink or the stamp or the USPS copyright mark at all? If I give you a box of envelopes from month number one, month number two, do you think you can distinguish them by looking... at the printing on the envelopes under a microscope?
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 7: Pot of Gold
I mean, here's another huge hurdle, but at the end of the day, there might be a pot of gold, you know, at the end of the rainbow.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 7: Pot of Gold
They used a dissecting microscope just like they would counterfeit money. It's tedious work. It is. And I give them a lot of credit that they stuck with it and did it for us because it wasn't their investigation. It was ours. But they were the experts in the country to do something like this.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 7: Pot of Gold
They actually found a box that had nearly identical marks on it. They find a run of envelopes with almost the identical marks.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 7: Pot of Gold
One of the fellow grad students he was with in grad school had been a sister in this sorority as an undergrad, and he tied to talk to her about it during grad school to the point where she felt he was a creep. Why do you keep bringing this subject up over and over again? It became an obsession. He asked one of the girls from that sorority out on a date, and she told him no.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 7: Pot of Gold
And he took that to heart. This guy, Ivins, did not let go. At that point, he developed a big grudge against this particular sorority.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 7: Pot of Gold
The mailbox was outside an administration office for Kempikepikema. It was outside the sorority.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 7: Pot of Gold
I know what happened. but I'm not going to say. Let's just say within two months we've changed directions.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 7: Pot of Gold
This is Bruce Ivins. I just wanted to tell you how disappointed and betrayed I feel.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 7: Pot of Gold
I got arrested by the police. I had the guys with the guns got roughed up. It was a terrible experience.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 7: Pot of Gold
You develop experiments where you will just continually prove your hypothesis without self-critiquing. The same thing with being a detective. You've got to keep an open mind. You've got to look at every piece of evidence. And if you find something that disproves the guilt of the guy you're looking at, you can't discount it. You've got to include it.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 7: Pot of Gold
When I looked at it from a scientific standpoint, Scientifically, Hatfield did not have the training or the experience in bacillus anthracis or in bacteriology at all.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 7: Pot of Gold
There was one part of the task force that was pro-Hatfield, and there was another part of the task force that was pro-Hatfield. We got to get moving on the forensics here and develop something else because we don't think it is Hatfield.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 7: Pot of Gold
There was some frustration at that period about where are we going to put our resources. So I was treading a little carefully.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 7: Pot of Gold
The worst thing is to put the blinders on, you may miss something.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 7: Pot of Gold
He leaned forward, real proactive, on trying to get the FBI to look at coworkers to the point where that was suspicious. Why is he trying so hard to help us? This is not his job. He's too old to be a wannabe detective. Why is he doing this?
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 7: Pot of Gold
And I naively said, well, that's exactly the same as using it as a weapon. That's biological warfare. You've just described it to me. And he immediately changed and went irate. His eyes widened. He said something like, no, it's not. And he stared at me. He was pretty pissed off. And we were about three or four feet apart. So I actually shifted my balance a little bit in case things got rough.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 7: Pot of Gold
I apologized. I said, that's really stupid of me. I can see now where the two things are different. You know, please accept my apology, et cetera, et cetera.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 7: Pot of Gold
I needed a little more hard evidence before we actually turned Ivan's life upside down.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 7: Pot of Gold
The White House really thought Iraq was behind the anthrax letters. We repeatedly told the boss, the director, there is absolutely no connection that we can see to Iraq. We have no evidence at all to point in that direction.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 6: Adult Male Loner
He invented a scientist who went to a prairie dog colony and actually got Yersinia pestis from the fleas in the prairie dog burrows and then had planned to disseminate it. That was the storyline.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 6: Adult Male Loner
The search of his apartment didn't get much, if anything.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 6: Adult Male Loner
All of a sudden, there was a great deal of excitement in the squad room because we were going to use three bloodhounds to track the envelopes and see if it led to Hadfield.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 6: Adult Male Loner
It is kind of a foolish term. I mean, it's used everywhere now. And nobody knows what it means.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 6: Adult Male Loner
We go to the mailbox. We look for traffic parking tickets that may have been issued. We look for surveillance cameras on the stores around the mailbox.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 6: Adult Male Loner
All that traditional detective work looked good, but ended up not giving us anything, unfortunately.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 6: Adult Male Loner
Each time we turned around and did a little more homework and investigation on this guy, it looked less and less likely that he was responsible.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 6: Adult Male Loner
You know, this investigation was trying everything under the sun.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 6: Adult Male Loner
So she wasn't happy. I was traveling a lot with the hazmat unit. We were probably 50% travel on the road at that time, and we just drifted apart.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 6: Adult Male Loner
That's the way this investigation went. No stone left unturned.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 6: Adult Male Loner
When we searched Hatfield's Camaro, the task force found maps of the Catoctin Mountain area, north of Frederick, Maryland. So the task force got together and felt, well, maybe...
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 6: Adult Male Loner
Hatfield had made these letters, maybe he made the powders in his apartment, and then took the powder up to the Katonkton Mountains, camped up there, filled the envelopes up in a semi-wilderness, and drove to Princeton and mailed them. Not a likely scenario, but a possible scenario.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 6: Adult Male Loner
I found that I had prostate cancer.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 6: Adult Male Loner
It's pretty brutal. And I was on sick leave for six weeks at home recuperating, but I had had enough.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 6: Adult Male Loner
He said, we'll put you on security duty because we're getting ready to dive in at the ponds right now. And we need people on security at each road going into the pond area in the mountains. So I sat in the car for two weeks and peed in my pants in December. But at least I was back working. And I slowly recuperated.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 6: Adult Male Loner
It was a large plastic box made by the Sterilite Company. And this one was maybe two feet by two feet by two and a half foot, something like that. But the cover had two holes punched in it. And it looks suspiciously like a homemade glove box.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 6: Adult Male Loner
Somebody could have used it to assemble the anthrax letters in it and then tossed it into the ponds.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 6: Adult Male Loner
It would require too much engineering and duct tape and stuff to make that thing into a glove box, to make it airtight. I mean, it just, it would have been easier to buy one over the internet. But, you know, it was that type of investigation where we were grasping at whatever lead we could find, really.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 6: Adult Male Loner
They hadn't really worked these dogs out and validated what they were doing. Most of us became disillusioned little by little. Our faith in the bloodhounds began to disintegrate. So now if we can't believe the bloodhounds, what can we believe as far as Hatfield's concerned?
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 6: Adult Male Loner
The danger is that the investigation will be misled. You could work and work to investigate the person who was really innocent at the expense of ignoring the person that really is guilty. Because we haven't, as detectives, kept an open mind. You know, we've convinced ourselves we know who it is and we try to find evidence to prove that. I knew we were just going to have to dig deeper.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 6: Adult Male Loner
And we were in for the long haul. It wasn't going to be an easy solution. We were going to have to solve this case. We were going to have to do something as quick as we can so it didn't happen again.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 6: Adult Male Loner
It was really frustrating. We needed a good, solid lead to break the investigation open because it just wasn't going anywhere at that time.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 6: Adult Male Loner
A report came from an agent that they had an anthrax expert helping out in the Red Cross tent. He's handing out food and coffee in the tents.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 6: Adult Male Loner
The command coast answered, do you have a name for this individual? The radio came back. They said it's Bruce Ivins. He's an expert on anthrax. And the agent also said, I think he's on the person of interest list back at the office.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 6: Adult Male Loner
We felt that there was somebody else out there who had done it.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 6: Adult Male Loner
The FBI made the profile of the mailer public.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 6: Adult Male Loner
It was done with the hope that somebody would call and tell us who had done this.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 6: Adult Male Loner
We sent it to the American Society of Microbiology.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 6: Adult Male Loner
It was really the first place to go looking for somebody. You wouldn't go to a physics lab, you know, or a nuclear station. You'd go to a microbiology lab where they did this for a living.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 6: Adult Male Loner
Just hoping that it would trigger somebody to pick up the phone and call with information that may have not seemed important at the time, but maybe it was important.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 6: Adult Male Loner
He tells them about a scientist at USAMRID. He was an expert in anthrax. He knows how to make anthrax spores. And by the way, he now works at a company in central New Jersey near Princeton.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 6: Adult Male Loner
The biggest risk is getting a tip about somebody, and it's... It has no credibility. I mean, you always get the poison pen phone calls. You know, the guy across the street barks, his dog barks too much, and I'm going to get him in trouble.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 6: Adult Male Loner
He made her feel a little bit uncomfortable. He was just trying to be too close, too friendly, without a real good reason, really.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 6: Adult Male Loner
That means he can't work on the contract. That means he's unemployable as far as the CIA is concerned. So it devastated him career-wise. So we're looking for a motive. That was a pretty good motive. He's just plain pissed off.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 6: Adult Male Loner
He was domestic. He was born in the U.S. and he wasn't foreign. And the profile said it would be a domestic scientist. And he wasn't part of any right-wing, left-wing group that we knew of. So he fit the lone wolf profile also.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 6: Adult Male Loner
It had been believed that that was an intentional biological attack by the Selva Scouts. Long story short, Hatfield claimed to be part of that group.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 6: Adult Male Loner
Hatfield was not nervous, calm. He denied doing it. He said to do whatever he could to help with the investigation.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 6: Adult Male Loner
If he was guilty, he was not going to break. He stuck to his story.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 6: Adult Male Loner
All those things came together as a perfect picture of who we were looking for.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 6: Adult Male Loner
So when agents show up... There were helicopters hovering over news helicopters, and news trucks showed up.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 4: Machine 17
You know, what is everybody? A dead man walking? You know, it was a human experiment in progress. Nobody knew how it would come out.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 4: Machine 17
Our national capital region was just chaotic. It was a buzz. There was people everywhere. There was absolute fear, hysteria.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 4: Machine 17
There was just a tremendous surge capacity that came into the Capitol from the military, from the Coast Guard. We had strike teams. We had decon teams. We had people going in, nasally swabbing thousands of patients. And this was all at the Capitol at the United States. Everybody who was responding at the time had been dealing with for 20 plus hours a day. Nobody was getting any sleep.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 4: Machine 17
Everybody was working themselves to the bone. This is the worst biological attack in this country's history.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 4: Machine 17
This is an unbelievably complicated threat. How do we respond to this? And it can kill tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands. So at that point in time, you are on an absolute war footing. You are trying to do everything within your power to stop, that next incident and to mitigate and respond to the crisis that you have in your own backyard.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 4: Machine 17
We have a white powder letter. We have somebody who's been exposed. And everybody in that suite has been exposed.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 4: Machine 17
The individual who opened that letter was still sitting in a chair. We did not enter the suite. She was still sitting in a chair holding the envelope with the powder on her lap. I think fortuitously, this individual had just been trained on what to do if you open up a white powder letter. And she remained very calm, held it upright so nothing else spilled out of it.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 4: Machine 17
How do you protect them? You know, what do you do? What do you tell them? And the fact of the matter is that if you ultimately want to protect them, you got to go do your job, right?
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 4: Machine 17
Anthrax particles will act as a gaseous material. They will just circulate through the air and move as a gas, right? If you have heating, ventilation, and air conditioning on, you can move that through the whole building very quickly.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 4: Machine 17
There's a lot of national business that needs to take place. And if you shut down the nation at that point in time, does that business proceed or not?
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 8: This is What I Do
Well, he would contradict himself between interviews. And the hallmark of a person that lies to law enforcement is they forget to lie after a couple months. And so when you ask them the same questions again, they give you different answers because they're not telling the truth. They're making it up and they don't remember what they said before. And that's what he was doing.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 8: This is What I Do
At first he said he went in there to get away. from the security guard. Because if he was in his office, the security guard would bug him in the evenings asking for a newspaper or something and say, well, Bruce, we checked and there was no security guard working in that area of the building on those nights you were in the laboratory. Eventually, he just shut down and wouldn't answer.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 8: This is What I Do
They took Bruce to a hotel while the house was being searched, because Bruce wasn't going back to his house that night.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 8: This is What I Do
They recovered guns and ammunition from his basement, and he had in his basement a homemade shooting range, probably for .22 caliber. People do that. It's not that unusual. They took his computers and they towed his car to a garage where they searched his vehicles, two or three vehicles, him and his wives.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 8: This is What I Do
It was a list of defenses he may be using or planned to use about why it wouldn't have been him to do the mailings.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 8: This is What I Do
I wanted to charge him with obstruction of justice, and I was overruled by the U.S. Attorney's Office.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 8: This is What I Do
That's unusual. I've never seen one of those before. The ones I've recovered during armor car robberies have usually been stolen from the trunks of police cars. But this one was homemade. That's unusual. And that shows evidence of planning something big. What possible reason could you have it unless you were going to commit a crime and thought you might be in lethal danger?
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 8: This is What I Do
Well, he got the odd idea to take a syringe and inject poison into the bottle of the wine through the cork. And that's what he was going to give to her. Now, why is that important? It all shows a twisted mind, a potential killer. But he was willing to drive long distances to commit murder. So there's a pattern now, and there's also a disturbed mind.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 8: This is What I Do
He shows up with his lawyer and talks. He contradicted himself with his earlier interviews from January and February, and it didn't go well at all. He eventually, as I recall, just shut down, wouldn't talk anymore. He eventually just stopped talking.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 8: This is What I Do
And then on the way home, his attorney told him that it looks like they're going to indict you, Bruce, and you can expect them to ask for the death penalty.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 8: This is What I Do
Hey, this is Bruce Ivins. I just wanted to tell you how just disappointed and betrayed I feel about what happened. I got arrested by the police. I had the guys with the guns got roughed up. It was a terrible experience.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 8: This is What I Do
The scientist, Brucie Ivins, died Tuesday at a suburban Washington hospital.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 8: This is What I Do
I'm thinking immediately, what does this mean for us? What does this mean for solving this case? We're not going to have an indictment. We're going to have a trial. And we're not really going to prove this knucklehead did this to the public's satisfaction. And oh shit, what about the last six years of work?
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 8: This is What I Do
We all saw it as the easy way out, the coward's way out. Rather than stand up and fight a trial and make us prove you're guilty, he had taken the easy way out.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 8: This is What I Do
Gulf War syndrome, they called it. And it was theorized that it was the result of being vaccinated for anthrax. and that the anthrax vaccine was not very clean, and it was a political hot potato. It really was.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 8: This is What I Do
At the Pentagon, There was a lot of talk about where the research money should go. They thought, we're putting all this money into anthrax research. We're taking all this political heat because of Gulf War syndrome. Let's just shut it down and move on.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 8: This is What I Do
They went to Bruce and they said, we want you to stop working on anthrax. We think you ought to work on Glanders, which is animal disease. And he didn't like that. That was not for him.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 8: This is What I Do
I had a prior relationship, professional relationship, with at least one or two people on the committee. And we had been on friendly terms. And it had turned into a hostile environment when we went into that meeting. So I felt betrayed.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 8: This is What I Do
It was like they thought we were saying the genetics proved Ivins did it, and they wouldn't get off the boat. It's not true. We all know it doesn't prove that he did it, but it sure as heck tells us which door to knock on.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 8: This is What I Do
We had eight matches to the mailed anthrax in the over 1,000 samples that I had collected with the help of other agents on the squad.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 8: This is What I Do
But where did they get it? They got it from Bruce Ivins. He had sent it to him. So all eight originated from Bruce's hands.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 8: This is What I Do
We sent a couple agents out to Ohio. We did go to the trouble to alibi all the employees at this laboratory to show that they had never been to Princeton, had never been away for a full weekend in order to do the mailing.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 8: This is What I Do
So he and another agent asked Bruce if they could look around in his freezer and refrigerator. And Bruce said, OK. They put him on the spot, essentially. He said, OK, without asking for a search warrant. And they went in and they found samples of Ames bacteria in different tubes with different dates that Ivins never turned over to us, which he should have under Cepeda.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 8: This is What I Do
I understood science because I was a scientist, but now I was a detective, and the two things don't always go together.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 8: This is What I Do
I felt we had proved he did it, regardless of whether we went to trial or not, or he pled guilty. In my mind, we had proven it. When you look at all the evidence together, it's the preponderance of evidence is what we call it. It's pretty damning against him.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 8: This is What I Do
I'm confident that we got the right person. I'm not happy with how it turned out. It would have been much more satisfying to go to trial... I probably would have testified at some point and let the jury or the judge find out if we really had proved it beyond a reasonable doubt. That part I'm not happy about. Nobody on the investigation is happy about that. We all felt cheated.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 8: This is What I Do
We all felt that Ivins had cheated the public and the U.S. government.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 8: This is What I Do
We saw on those records the spikes where he started staying long nights in the laboratory in August of 2001.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 8: This is What I Do
If you look at the nights right before the mailing of each two different mailings, he was in there for long periods of time at night, right before each of the letters were mailed.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 8: This is What I Do
That was an aha moment. It was at that point, they said, wait a minute. And then we all began to realize that this guy had done it, but how were we going to prove it?
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 8: This is What I Do
So we now had a genetic fingerprint for what was mailed in the envelope versus the original wild type of 1980. So we had a specific genetic fingerprint that we could identify what had been mailed. That was a big moment for us.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 8: This is What I Do
We got eight matches out of a thousand plus. And when we took out our records and looked at where each eight came from, they all came from the same place.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 8: This is What I Do
Other people had access to this laboratory. So was it Bruce? Was it his technician? Was it another scientist that could access his laboratory? We've got to figure out which of these individuals, if not all of them, was involved.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 8: This is What I Do
He couldn't account for his time. He was in that laboratory three nights in a row before each mailing. We called out a clue.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 8: This is What I Do
Until... We did what we call mirrored his computer, his hard drive in his laboratory. So we didn't take the computer, but we had a trained agent mirror the computer.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 2: Martha’s Not Crazy
Anthrax, the disease, is caused by the bacteria Bacillus anthracis. Anthracis is a Greek word for black or coal, because if you get cutaneous anthrax, your skin in that area turns black. And I guess the doctor looked at some pictures of cutaneous anthrax and said, boy, that sure looks the same to me.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 2: Martha’s Not Crazy
The doctor who had looked at him went back to his notes and said, I think I just looked at one of the hijackers of 9-11.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 2: Martha’s Not Crazy
It started off an investigation unto itself to determine whether this hijacker had an anthrax sore on his leg.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 2: Martha’s Not Crazy
We didn't know who it was, and we certainly hadn't neutralized them in any way.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 2: Martha’s Not Crazy
You know, I had the manifest of passengers on the airline, and just doing basic investigation, it was quickly determined where each of those hijackers lived before they got on the plane.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 2: Martha’s Not Crazy
And when they looked at the residences where these guys had lived, they found that two of them were living in an apartment that had been rented to them by Gloria Irish.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 2: Martha’s Not Crazy
Mike Irish was an editor at the AMI, and I guess a boss of Robert Stevens. He was married to Gloria Irish, who was a real estate agent in Boca Raton.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 2: Martha’s Not Crazy
These hijackers, operatives, whatever you want to call them, they weren't stupid. And we could see that they were very good at planning long term.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 2: Martha’s Not Crazy
We sampled their apartments and their cars, what we call environmental sampling, taking samples with a damp little piece of swab of gauze. And then you run a DNA analysis on that and look for anthrax DNA. So that was done in all the hijackers' cars, their apartments down in Boca.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 2: Martha’s Not Crazy
He's the guy that took the mail and walked around the building and gave you your mail.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 2: Martha’s Not Crazy
American media evidently destroyed their mail every night or every week. I mean, they got a lot of mail, and there's no reason for them to save it. They just destroyed most of it.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 2: Martha’s Not Crazy
The FBI and others thought that Al Qaeda was behind this. And it turned out not to be true. When I grew up, I was taught to take the easy shot first. Al Qaeda was the easy shot. It would have been nice to just say it was them and to be able to prove it.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 2: Martha’s Not Crazy
Trust me, we beat that dog to death, trust me. It's all classified. It caused a lot of heart pain and resources.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 2: Martha’s Not Crazy
My theory is that when Mueller and Ashkoff made public the fact that the hijackers lived in South Florida around Boca Raton, that our mailer, anthrax mailer, purposely sent letters to Boca Raton to make us think it was al-Qaeda.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 2: Martha’s Not Crazy
It was a coincidence. A very strange coincidence, but a coincidence. And that's kind of a trick. When you do these investigations, you've got to quickly recognize it's a coincidence and not chase it down. Because a real lead could be going unaddressed. I guess that's what makes a good investigator versus a not-so-good investigator.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 2: Martha’s Not Crazy
The worst thing that can happen to an FBI agent working a criminal investigation is to solve it in your mind before you really have the evidence.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 2: Martha’s Not Crazy
The FBI and others thought that al-Qaeda was behind this. We had no proof. We had a high suspicion, but no proof that it was an intentional act, i.e. terrorism.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 2: Martha’s Not Crazy
The worst case scenario would be somebody had produced a pound of dried anthrax powder very fine that could take out hundreds and thousands of people if done properly.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 2: Martha’s Not Crazy
We didn't know why he was targeted. I mean, he could have pissed somebody off. We didn't know. We have to keep an open mind.
Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 2: Martha’s Not Crazy
The doctor in South Florida recalled that he treated this guy for an ulcer on his leg. an open sore.