Panic grips Florida as two more newspaper workers fall ill with anthrax. The FBI uncovers chilling connections—a 9/11 hijacker with possible anthrax exposure, a disturbing motive, and a direct link to the targeted newsroom. Is this the next wave of terror?Want more episodes now? Binge all 8 early and ad-free by subscribing to Apple True Crime Premium on Apple Podcasts.
Chapter 1: How did the anthrax investigation begin?
This is a CBC Podcast. I want to go back for a moment to an early spring morning more than 40 years ago, because that morning, in a way, is how this whole story begins. It's 1981. It's a breezy May morning in South Texas. A veterinarian is driving his truck through the green shrubbery and straight farm roads that he's grown up around. His name is Mike Vickers.
And Mike has a mystery to solve this morning. He's treated a lot of sick animals in his day, but this call is different.
One of my clients called me. This is a big ranch. They had about 900 cows. And he had two heifers die pretty close together, you know. And he was real concerned about that.
As Mike drives toward those dead cows, he doesn't know exactly what to expect. He arrives at the ranch, meets up with a farmer, and they head out about five miles into scrubland.
I followed him out to where both of these heifers had died. And both of them, of course, down here in the hot sun, they were already bloated, but they had the blood coming from the nose and the mouth and the eyes.
It's a gruesome scene. Mike crouches down right up close to the dead cows and takes a careful look at them. He knows then what he has to do, and he slowly cuts into one of the cows.
I opened that cow up and all of a sudden there's this blackberry jam spleen and I just kind of wilted because I recognized it as very lethal and, you know, very dangerous.
He could tell that both cows are affected by this strange infection. So Mike reaches inside one of them and takes out a biological sample. He carefully packages up the sample to take with him. Before he leaves, he tells the rancher to build a big, very hot fire and to burn the carcasses. Mike Vickers drives home and mails that sample to a veterinary lab.
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Chapter 2: What was the first confirmed case of anthrax in Florida?
He couldn't have known then what would happen decades later, the murder and mayhem and national panic that sample will cause when it falls into the wrong hands. I'm Jeremiah Kroll, and from Wolf Entertainment, this is Aftermath, the hunt for the anthrax killer. Episode 2, Martha's Not Crazy. It's October 3rd, 2001. One day now since Dr. Larry Bush diagnosed his patient with anthrax.
The Centers for Disease Control has just confirmed the diagnosis of of anthrax in a patient in a Florida hospital.
Bob Stevens is in the ICU. He's not doing well. The hospital's aware. The local health department's on the scene. The state health department's coming down. The CDC's on their way.
Dr. Larry Bush is feeling immense pressure. He's the chief of staff of the hospital in West Palm Beach, Florida. And he can't seem to stop his patient's health from deteriorating. Stevens is now in a coma. And the nation is in a panic.
A deadly disease putting a Lantana man in the hospital and creating a scare in South Florida.
There's more media in the area because things are leaking out than you can imagine. The parking lot's full of every type of media there is. The hospital is going crazy. People are calling the hospital and want their loved ones transferred because we have anthrax. Everybody who has a cough or fever is showing up in the ER now, right? With anthrax, so to speak.
It's easy to forget now what was happening in the American psyche at this moment. Just weeks before this, thousands of people had died in an attack that had previously seemed unimaginable. Before then, Americans had felt like terrorist attacks happened somewhere over there, not at home. The feeling after 9-11 was if that attack was possible here, literally anything was possible.
So the panic or even paranoia that set in around this new attack felt reasonable. And Larry, just like everyone else, doesn't know if this one case of anthrax is a random one-off or if there are going to be hundreds or even thousands of other people getting sick. So he has to take everyone who shows up seriously, no matter what their symptoms are, which means he's seeing a lot of patients.
I get a call to come down and see this woman. And I said to the emergency room doctor, you know, this is getting a little overwhelming. You're calling me for every cough that's walking in there. I said, why this one? They said, this woman's got an interesting story. So I go down to the ER, and I meet Martha. And I said, OK, Martha, I look at her history. I examine her.
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Chapter 3: How did the FBI connect the anthrax strain to a lab?
But these differences are so tiny, Paul would need a microscopic map of the anthrax's DNA, a kind of genetic fingerprint, to tell any of the variants apart. And in the fall of 2001, that technology simply doesn't exist.
Yet. Nobody had done this before because it was just prohibitively expensive.
prohibitively expensive, and technologically impossible. This has got to be frustrating. You know there's a specific thing you can do to figure out who the killer is. You just don't know how to do that thing yet. So Paul and the FBI get to work inventing this technology. It'll take years.
So for now, the FBI is stuck with old-school, on-the-ground investigative techniques, chasing down leads and paper trails to figure out which labs could have put anthrax in nefarious hands. And there's one suspect on the top of their list.
And in the wake of 9-11, al-Qaeda was the number one suspect. And so all of us were thinking that this was a biological attack carried out by al-Qaeda.
The idea that anthrax found its way out of a lab by accident in the weeks after 9-11, it just doesn't feel likely. But did al-Qaeda even have aims? There's only one clue about that, and it's helpful and perplexing.
There was no linkage of that strain to the Middle East or to al-Qaeda. But we also knew the controls over the laboratories were light. In other words, it would have been possible for a scientist to walk into a laboratory and walk out with one of these strains.
If someone did walk out with Ames, did they give it to al-Qaeda? At this point, no one knows. But there's one thing Paul does know for sure.
When you get those spores deep into your lungs, it progresses to systemic or body-wide disease very rapidly and very catastrophically. The vast majority of people who get inhalational anthrax will die. And so that was chilling to know that we were handling a sample of an individual who's likely to die of anthrax.
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Chapter 4: Did al-Qaeda have access to anthrax?
The family was trying to keep the news media out, but the blankets didn't stop the panic rising outside.
No one knows where he got it. This is a serious illness. Because it can exist in an almost indestructible form called spore, has died as a result of what they're describing as the first bioterrorist attack in the United States.
We don't have any real hot leads at this time, but we are going to continue pursuing this.
It has long been considered a possible bioterrorism agent.
Now there's a fatality and a media frenzy. The FBI is in a jam. They'd already discovered the hijackers' potential anthrax skin infection, and that Al-Qaeda members have been training to fly crop dusters near Robert Stevens. But they still don't have proof that Al-Qaeda is behind this.
We didn't know who it was, and we certainly hadn't neutralized them in any way.
But maybe the FBI was further along than they thought because they'd already found a lead that could link anthrax to Al-Qaeda. They just hadn't realized it yet.
At 24, I lost my narrative, or rather it was stolen from me. And the Monica Lewinsky that my friends and family knew was usurped by false narratives, callous jokes, and politics. I would define reclaiming as to take back what was yours. Something you possess is lost or stolen, and ultimately you triumph in finding it again.
Follow Reclaiming with Monica Lewinsky on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to Reclaiming early and ad free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts.
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Chapter 5: What role did a 9/11 hijacker play in the anthrax case?
The thought that came to my mind was, oh boy, we are under attack.
He puts that thought aside as they go further into the building.
I just jumped into action immediately, started swabbing areas. You focus on the area where the index patient worked. So that's basically his table, his computers, his workbench, and his cubicles, et cetera.
While all that's going on, Jean and her team interview Robert Stevens and Ernesto Blanco's colleagues. Stevens was a photo editor, and Ernesto Blanco worked in the mailroom. Keep in mind this is 2001. Email's in its infancy. So most readers of the tabloids are using snail mail for letters to the editor and to send comments. And because these are juicy tabloids, there's a lot of mail.
And it's someone's job to read all of it. Which must have been fun, by the way. Of all the avenues they go down, plus the side streets and alleyways, this is how the FBI gets its first major break. In the form of a letter about the pop sensation of the new millennium, Jennifer Lopez.
An envelope had been delivered to the AMI building, and it was addressed to J-Lo, Jennifer Lopez, J-Lo. The envelope was eventually opened, and in the envelope was a Star of David and white powder. And the person who had this envelope brought the envelope to another person and Mr. Stevens to look at because they were amazed by it.
White powder in an envelope. If you know anything about the anthrax attacks, you probably know that powder was sent through the mail. But at this point, only three days after Robert Stevens has died, no one knows anything like that. This is the first time that a point of contact starts to come into view.
They now suspect it's an anthrax-laced letter sent through the mail that infected both of the victims.
Mr. Stevens was nearsighted, and he brought the envelope close to him, as per somebody who gave an interview, and he had sneezed into it, fell all over his computer, and that's most likely where he inhaled the anthrax spores.
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Chapter 6: How did the media and public react to the anthrax scare?
We subjected all of those samples to vigorous testing. And none of the samples that we tested in our laboratory resulted in a positive result.
That's zero evidence of anthrax anywhere near the 9-11 hijackers.
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.
As much time and energy as they'd sunk into the al-Qaeda angle, they'd found nothing.
Trust me, we beat that dog to death, trust me. It's all classified. It caused a lot of heart pain and resources.
But how was that possible? What about the Florida connection and all those credible leads?
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.
So, no evidence linking the death of Robert Stevens to Al-Qaeda. Those crop dusters? Nothing to do with anthrax. That hijacker really did just have a leg bruise. And the apartment rentals and the connection to AMI?
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.
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