April 3, 2025 • 37 mins
In the wake of 9/11, anthrax-laced letters unleashed a new wave of terror across the nation. But who was behind the attacks — and why has America nearly forgotten this story?
As government buildings shut down and law enforcement scrambled to track the perpetrator, the FBI launched one of the largest and most complex investigations in its history. Untangling a web of scientific evidence and false leads, the case took unexpected turns with lasting consequences.
From Wolf Entertainment, USG Audio, Dig Studios and CBC, this eight-part series grants unprecedented access to declassified materials and firsthand accounts, revealing how the anthrax attacks reshaped America—and the hidden impact that still lingers today.
More episodes of Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer are available at: https://link.mgln.ai/9yMJoD
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
In the fall of two thousand and one. While Americans
were still grappling with the horror of nine to eleven,
another terror was quietly brewing. Soon, envelopes filled with white
powder started showing up at media outlets and government buildings.
The letters dominated the news cycle, created mass panic, and
killed innocent people just opening their mail. But what's strange
is if you ask people now what happened with the
(00:23):
anthrax case, almost no one knows. It's like the whole
story just disappeared. Who mailed those letters? Do you know?
I'm Jeremiah Crowell. I'm a documentary filmmaker and host of
Aftermath Hunt for the Anthrax Killer. In this series, all
take you inside one of the largest, twistiest investigations in
FBI history, with the agent, scientists and experts who were there,
(00:46):
from the science that cracked it to the mistakes that
almost derailed it to the lives nearly ruined by it.
This eight part series reveals how the attacks and this
sometimes controversial investigation reshaped America and the surprising hidden consequences
that still linger today. You're about to hear episode one.
If you like it, you'll find more by searching Aftermath
(01:06):
Hunt for the anthrax killer wherever you get your podcasts. Okay,
here we go.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
I mean this was a huge crime scene. Most people
don't think about it as a crime scene, but it
was a crime scene of seven blocks.
Speaker 3 (01:26):
The unthinkable happened today.
Speaker 4 (01:28):
The world trades that are both towers.
Speaker 5 (01:31):
Gone thousand, smart, dead and injured. The skyline of New
York and the psyche of the American population has been
forever changed. Now it's obvious.
Speaker 4 (01:41):
I think we have a terrorist act of proportions that
we cannot begin to imagine at this juncture.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
It was the evening of September eleventh, about twelve hours
after the terrorist attacks, and Scott Decker, a special agent
with the FBI, was already.
Speaker 5 (01:59):
On the move.
Speaker 1 (02:01):
He packed his bags and said goodbye to his family
in Virginia.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
I was told to grab four of the guys, load
up our suburbans with evidence collection equipment as matt gear,
tyvek suits, masks, gloves. We loaded up the trucks that evening,
oh dark thirty September twelve. We started heading up to
New York. I think five black suburbans in a row.
Speaker 1 (02:26):
While everyone else was trying like hell to get out
of New York.
Speaker 5 (02:29):
City.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
Decker drove all night to get in.
Speaker 2 (02:33):
As we went through Maryland, we went through Delaware on
Route ninety five, the main corridor. We got to the
Delaware Memorial Bridge and the big alert sign above the
traffic and usually the letters are in yellow, but in
my memory it was orange. I don't know why, but
I remember orange, and it just said in bold letters,
New York City closed.
Speaker 1 (02:55):
They arrived outside Manhattan near dawn, but those orange letters
were right. New York City was closed even to the FBI.
Bridges were shut down, landlines were out, and cell phones
weren't working well. So Decker went to an FBI field
office in New Jersey just across the river.
Speaker 2 (03:12):
I saw a black Hawk helicopter sitting in the grass
between the office and the Passaic River, and I said, yeah,
I need to lift over to New York. So he
said jump in, and we flew over Manhattan and we
flew over Ground zero. Doors opened on the black Hawk,
and as we flew over through the smoke, we just
looked down and was just ashes. Buildings were in ashes.
(03:38):
They were just big piles on the ground.
Speaker 1 (03:42):
He landed near Ground zero, and like everyone there, struggled
to make sense of what had just happened.
Speaker 2 (03:49):
The morning of the twelfth September, things were a little
up in the air. I don't think any of us
knew what to really expect.
Speaker 1 (03:57):
But Decker isn't looking at the scene the same way
as most first responders. In fact, he's there for something else.
What the public didn't know at the time is that
there was another looming threat.
Speaker 2 (04:09):
We expected a secondary attack. There was rumors of a
biological attack. The country took steps to get ready for it.
Unbeknownst to the public.
Speaker 1 (04:19):
There was reliable intelligence from the week's right before nine
to eleven that al Qaida was planning a different kind
of attack in addition to September eleventh one, involving the
release of biotoxins into the air.
Speaker 2 (04:32):
The second attack was going to be coming at any moment.
Speaker 1 (04:35):
Decker was part of the FBI's new Hazardous Response Team,
so while everyone else was looking at the wreckage, he
was on high alert, searching for signs like unusual illnesses
that this second attack, this time biological, was already underway.
What no one knew at the time is that they
were looking in the wrong city.
Speaker 6 (05:01):
The Florida man has contracted a very rare and potentially
deadly form of anthrax.
Speaker 2 (05:06):
As all Americans know, recent weeks have brought a second
wave of terrorist attacks upon our country.
Speaker 7 (05:11):
The deadly bacteria have now turned up in the American.
Speaker 1 (05:14):
Copin deadly anthrax sports sent through the US mail. One
of the most lethal weapons of all time comes from
an almost indestructible bacteria called anthrax, and in the fall
of two thousand and one, envelopes laced with powdered anthrax
started showing up in the mail.
Speaker 7 (05:32):
The latest letter have been discovered is thoughts contain literally
billions of.
Speaker 8 (05:36):
Sports letters sent to NBC and the New York Post
were the same.
Speaker 9 (05:40):
As a warning.
Speaker 4 (05:41):
Take a kind of sillin.
Speaker 2 (05:42):
Now you cannot stop us.
Speaker 1 (05:44):
We have this anthrax guy, now antrac Are you afraid?
The anthrax attacks created chaos. The US Capital and the
Supreme Court were contaminated and shut down. Thousands of buildings
(06:04):
across the country were evacuated, and innocent people died just
from opening their mail.
Speaker 10 (06:10):
The US House of Representatives is closing offices today until
two What.
Speaker 7 (06:15):
Is perhaps wiring Americans the most is that they still
have no idea who is behind these attacks.
Speaker 1 (06:22):
What's weird is that almost twenty five years later, most
Americans still have no idea who was behind these attacks.
Anthrax was on the nightly news for months, and then
it's like the story just disappeared. I've talked to hundreds
of people about it, and no one, it seems, remembers
what happened with this case. Who mailed those letters? Do
(06:45):
you know? My name is Jeremiah Croll. I'm a documentary filmmaker,
and I was living and working in New York when
all this happened. In those weeks right after nine to eleven.
I remember the stillness of the streets and the collective
sense of raw outrage and sadness in the city, and
then anthrax. I felt the fear of those letters created
(07:08):
the terrifying way they just kept coming, one after.
Speaker 6 (07:11):
Another, another day of jerom warfare, and still no sign.
The worst case of bioterrorism in this country is close
to being solved.
Speaker 1 (07:20):
Almost two decades later, when the pandemic hit, I felt
that same sense of unpredictable terror in the air. It
reminded me of the Anthrax story, and I wondered whatever
happened with that, So my team and I started digging
into it. We tracked down people who were involved, either
affected by the attacks or part of the investigation, FBI agents, victims,
(07:42):
wrongly accused suspects, and the stories they shared, many for
the first time, surprised me. They painted a picture of
these events and their aftermath that revealed how at its
core this was all so personal, like stories about investigative
mistakes right from the start, about civil liberties trampled, and
(08:02):
about lives destroyed.
Speaker 11 (08:05):
They've broke the front door, and there are agents with
uzzis and lunsuits.
Speaker 10 (08:10):
It's one of the most devastating things that's ever happened
to me.
Speaker 11 (08:13):
It'll follow me forever.
Speaker 2 (08:15):
I want to look my fellow Americans directly in the
eye and declare to them I am not the anthrax killer.
Speaker 1 (08:25):
And even after all of that, after the seven year odyssey,
the FBI went on to try to solve this case.
Some people still wonder if the FBI got it right.
Speaker 4 (08:35):
I would not consider the case to be closed.
Speaker 1 (08:38):
In my mind, it certainly is not solved.
Speaker 2 (08:40):
I believe there are others who can be charged with murder.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
This is a story about people who have to look
at chaos and try to make sense of it while
it's still happening, and how hard it is to get
that right.
Speaker 2 (08:54):
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.
Speaker 1 (09:02):
It's about the stories we tell ourselves and the price
we pay when we tell the wrong ones. We're going
to go inside one of the largest FBI investigations in
history to figure out why we all lost track of
this case and to explore the aftershocks we still feel today.
From Wolf Entertainment, this is Aftermath the Hunt for the
(09:23):
Anthrax Killer, Episode one, isolated incident. I want to go
back to the beginning of this story, through a time
when most Americans never gave much thought to face masks
or deadly particles in the air. It's October two, two
thousand and one, three weeks after the attacks of nine
(09:45):
to eleven, and we're in suburban Florida. It's the middle
of the night, and a man named Robert Stevens wakes
up feeling sick. He has chills and a fever. Robert
Stevens is sixty three. He's a newspaper photo editor who
lives in Lantana, Florida. That's a coastal town about an
hour north of Miami. He's raised a few kids and
(10:06):
is getting close to retirement. But when he wakes up
that night, he feels disoriented, dizzy, and things seem to
be getting worse. His wife, Maureene, is worried.
Speaker 9 (10:17):
She found him awake in the bathroom vomiting over to
toilet bowl. Confused.
Speaker 1 (10:22):
Doctor Larry Bush was Chairman of Infectious Diseases and chief
of staff at the JFK Medical Center in West Palm Beach,
the hospital closest to Robert and Marine Stephen's house.
Speaker 9 (10:32):
She drove him to the hospital. He walked into JFK
emergency room at around two in the morning, and after
they put him on a vent later and got a
chest radiograph, they sent him for a final fluid examination
looking for bacteria.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
Robert's condition gets worse. He goes into a coma. Larry
and his team suspect that he is meningitis, an infection
that makes the brain swell, so he looks at Robert's
spinal fluid.
Speaker 9 (10:59):
When I look at microscope, I'm lucky to see if
I could see what type of bacteria this is, because
that's important for how I'm going to treat him.
Speaker 1 (11:07):
In a healthy patient. Larry shouldn't see much of anything.
Speaker 9 (11:10):
You're lucky if you can see one or two bacteria
that help you determine what type of bacterial processes may be.
His was overwhelming. I saw an overwhelming amount of pus cells.
That's a bad sign. That means there's havoc going on
in your nervous system.
Speaker 1 (11:28):
These bacteria suggests a cause of infection that shocks Larry.
Speaker 9 (11:32):
They almost never ever cause spinal fluid infection meningitis, but
one does anthrax.
Speaker 1 (11:42):
Larry can't get his head around this. Most of us
are now familiar with anthrax, largely because of this case,
but back then, in two thousand and one, this was nuts.
Most people didn't think about anthrax at all, and for doctors,
it was something you read about in textbooks, not something
expected to see in a patient.
Speaker 9 (12:01):
There were a lot of things going through my mind.
There's nothing else that explains it.
Speaker 1 (12:05):
But it just doesn't make sense. Anthrax is a natural
bacteria that usually only infects livestock. Cattle tend to catch
it in dry rural areas. They eat or breathe in
antrax cells it's called spores while they're grazing, so it's
not like a guy in suburban Florida is going to
just accidentally breathe this stuff in while going about his life,
(12:27):
And if he did, somehow, he'd be the first person
in the entire US in almost twenty five years. And
that person had gotten it from inhaling anthrax spores off
of wool chipped over from Pakistan. Larry runs more tests.
Speaker 9 (12:40):
He had an overwhelming amount of bacteria. But what struck
me was the shape and the color of these bacteria.
Speaker 1 (12:47):
He sees tiny blue stained bacterial rectangles, all in a line.
Imagine looking down on a train from high in the air.
Speaker 9 (12:55):
I'm an infectious disease person. I lecture, I write on
infectious diseases. I look atia under a microscope every day.
I knew what I was looking.
Speaker 1 (13:03):
At in retrospect now, knowing how everything would play out,
This is the moment that it all began. Right here,
for the first time in twenty five years, it seems
that someone in America has anthrax in their lungs.
Speaker 9 (13:19):
I'm convinced this is anthract I don't have one hundred
percent proof.
Speaker 1 (13:23):
Imagine you're him right now. You're the chief of staff
for the whole hospital, and you're very sure that what
you see is one thing, but that one thing is
so rare and so deadly that when you tell people
about it, they'll either not believe you or panic.
Speaker 9 (13:41):
My fear was creating chaos in the hospital.
Speaker 1 (13:45):
Chaos not just in his hospital, but also likely all
of Florida and probably the nation. After nine to eleven,
the whole country was bracing for another attack. Larry's afraid
that this could be it.
Speaker 9 (14:00):
He can't be to anyone exposed. That's my concern. My
fear was missing bioterrorism and being the person who could
blow to whistle.
Speaker 1 (14:09):
He has to risk creating that chaos, so he does.
Larry calls doctor Gene Malecki, a friend and colleague who's
the health director for all of Palm Beach County, but
she was busy at that moment.
Speaker 11 (14:23):
I was giving an actual seminar on bioterrorism at the
time the phone call came in, and so we were
in the middle of that when my secretary rushed over
to hand me a note from doctor Bush. So I
left the seminar and went to my office, and I
got the call from Larry, and he said, oh g
and I need to talk to you. So make sure
(14:44):
your door's closed.
Speaker 1 (14:46):
Larry tells Gene he thinks Robert Stevens has anthrax. They
both know more testiny to be done to prove it,
so Gene calls up the Centers for Disease Control, but
the CDC pushes back. They refuse to anyone could catch
anthrax in suburban Florida.
Speaker 11 (15:03):
I was told by the State of Florida, the Public
Health Laboratory and the CDC, you don't have enough information.
And I said, wait a minute. I have a potential
anthrax event occurring in my backyard here. I am the
chief health officer here, and you're telling me not to
act on this. And that's exactly what they were telling me.
And I said, well, too bad. You're getting specimens in
(15:26):
the mail. You will have them within twelve hours.
Speaker 1 (15:30):
Despite the CDC's hesitancy and the testing that still needs
to be done, Larry and Jean have little doubt that
is anthrax. The real worry on their minds is that
this could be the beginning of another attack by al Qaeda.
And what they don't know is that the FBI is
worried about another attack too.
Speaker 2 (15:50):
The underlying current among government and scientists was a second
wave of attack is coming and can very well likely
be a biologic or chemical bomb anthrax. At the top
of the list is a biological thread.
Speaker 1 (16:04):
Agent number one, FBI Special Agent Scott Decker is one
of only a few agents to have investigated nearly the
entire case, and he's got skills. Few other FBI agents
have a PhD in genetics for the postdoc from Harvard,
So that's why he's on the FBI's new hazmat team
that was deployed at Ground Zero.
Speaker 2 (16:25):
We would be there ready to help in case there
was a biological attack, a chemical attack, or even a
radiological release.
Speaker 1 (16:34):
And one reason they even had Decker and his team
on site is because of something odd that had happened
earlier that summer. In August of two thousand and one,
weeks before the Twin Towers fell or anyone got sick
in Florida, the FBI uncovered something in Minnesota, and that
discovery would ultimately set the stage for the entire anthrax investigation.
(16:56):
One of Decker's FBI colleagues was right in the middle
of it.
Speaker 12 (17:00):
The two flight instructor whistleblowers from a suburban flight school
had called our office to tell the duty agent that
they were very concerned that there was the most suspicious
flight student they had ever come across.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
Colleen Rowley was an FBI agent in Minnesota at the time.
Speaker 12 (17:21):
He was in first of all, asking questions that would
never be asked by a normal flight student who was
trying to actually learn how to fly. There were things about,
you know, communications with the ground, things like that that
had nothing to do with what he said was an
ego boosting trip in order to learn how to fly.
At seven forty seven.
Speaker 1 (17:42):
The flight student's name was Zacharias Mussawi. He was a
Muslim French national. When FBI agents interviewed him, they learned
his visa had lapsed, so they had him detained on
an immigration violation. Agents suspected he was up to something,
but they couldn't prove it. And remember this is all
before four nine eleven, so he's just one strange guy
(18:03):
asking strange questions at a flight school. They couldn't even
get a search warrant for his computer. Then September eleventh happened.
Speaker 12 (18:12):
The day of nine to eleven, we got word from
the jail that he was kind of jumping up gleefully
when the towers were coming down looking at a television
or something.
Speaker 1 (18:23):
Now they get the search warrant and searches computer.
Speaker 8 (18:26):
The only thing.
Speaker 12 (18:27):
That was eventually found on his laptop was a lot
of information about wind and wind directions and how to
fly like a crop duster, things like that.
Speaker 1 (18:38):
A crop duster a crop dust is a small plane
used in agriculture to spray pesticides.
Speaker 12 (18:44):
He initially says, well, I was involved in other plots,
but not the nine to eleven one. So if he's
not involved in the nine to eleven one and he's
in a second wave, he actually kind of admitted I
was going to be a second wave.
Speaker 1 (18:58):
What he's saying is that he is a member of
al Qaida and that they were planning a second attack.
The FBI already know the nine to eleven hijackers were
studying at flight schools around the US, so now agents
worry that Musawi was part of a bigger plot still
to come. But he was studying wind direction and crop
dusters because he and maybe the others were planning to
spray some kind of poison from the air. With all
(19:21):
of this info in mind, President Bush and the Department
of Justice take action, hoping to prevent whatever that second
wave might be.
Speaker 10 (19:29):
Yesterday, the FBI issued a nationwide alert based on information
they received indicating the possibility of attacks using crop dusting aircraft.
Speaker 1 (19:39):
They ground all crop dusters across the country. That solves
the immediate problem, but they still have a larger issue.
Are there other extremist pilots out there waiting to launch
an attack?
Speaker 2 (19:52):
Director Mueller and Attorney General Ashcroft gave press conferences announcing
the names of all nineteen hijackers.
Speaker 10 (20:00):
The director of the FB I and I just returned
from a memorial service at the National Cathedral and wanted
to take this time to give you a report.
Speaker 1 (20:09):
Announcing the names was a call for help to the public.
If you'd seen something, say something.
Speaker 10 (20:14):
The FBI requests that anyone who may have information about
these individuals immediately contact an FBI field office or call
the toll free hotline.
Speaker 1 (20:28):
And someone did. They didn't want to learn how to land,
They just want to learn.
Speaker 4 (20:37):
How to fly.
Speaker 1 (20:39):
Willie Lee is a crop dusting pilot who had an
eerly similar story to the one in Minnesota. Suspicious acting
men from the Middle East asking unusual questions about planes.
Speaker 2 (20:50):
You know that would kick me off right off the bat.
Speaker 1 (20:54):
But Willy isn't in Minnesota. He's halfway across the country
at a different crop dusting business. He'd been flying crop
dusting planes for decades. On any given day during his
regular job, he'd pack as much as five hundred gallons
of pesticides into his air Tractor five h two crop plane.
He'd fly incredibly low to the ground to avoid sprang
homes and people. He flapped two or three feet off
(21:16):
the ground whenever it was spraying.
Speaker 2 (21:18):
It takes some experience to do.
Speaker 1 (21:20):
It, but these men didn't sound like they wanted that experience.
They were asking about tank capacity and flight distances. It
sounded off. So six weeks before September eleventh, Willie called
the police.
Speaker 4 (21:34):
I tell them, I said, these people, something's up there.
Speaker 1 (21:36):
I said, these people ask some questions if people don't ask.
But the police didn't do anything about it. They couldn't. Really,
no one had done anything illegal. After nine to eleven,
when Willi saw the names and pictures of the hijackers
on television, he knew he'd been right to be suspicious
because some of the men who'd visited him were the
(21:58):
same men who flew the plane into the twin towers.
In fact, one of them was Mohammed Atta, the chief
US operative who directed the attack. Willing his team called
the FBI. This time they took action. So now the
FBI has a question to answer. Why were al Qaeda
(22:19):
members in at least two different places around the country
trying to learn how to fly crop dusters? And meanwhile
there's another team with a question the FBI hasn't heard
about yet, doctor Bush and his colleagues, who are trying
to figure out how a man in suburban Florida has anthrax.
And now those two mysteries are about to collide because
(22:41):
the airfield of the nine to eleven terrorists visited Willie's Airfield,
it's less than an hour away from the home of
anthrax's patient, Robert Stevens. Back in that hospital, Robert Stephens'
health is deteriorating, and doctor Bush still doesn't know for
certain what he's dealing with.
Speaker 9 (22:59):
Eight o'clock to the next one morning, I call Jacksonville
Reference Lab and I say, what was the result? And
he said to me, I shouldn't tell you that. I said,
I said, wow, that's a bold answer. I said, well,
there's two things with that answer. I said, first of all,
I'm the treating doctor. I'm taking care of this patient.
I'm responsible for him. I sent the lab to you,
(23:19):
I said, and by you telling me, you shouldn't tell
me that, you just told me that. He said, I
got to go. I said, where are you going? He says,
I have to call the people I work for. You
hung up.
Speaker 1 (23:32):
The people he works for are high up on the chain.
In an instant, the CDC calls the National Department of Health,
who calls the White House, who calls the Department of Justice.
And now, finally, the FBI learns anthrax is in Florida.
Because of his background in science, agent Scott Decker knows
an anthrax infection shouldn't have happened in Florida. So for
(23:55):
the FBI, who'd been worried for weeks about some kind
of biological attack, likely from the air, maybe involving crop dusters,
if this isn't the work of the same nine to
eleven terrorists who they now know took flight lessons in
an airfield only an hour away, it's an awful lot
of coincidences.
Speaker 2 (24:12):
We didn't know if it was an active terrorism So
that was the first thing we had to do, is
prove one way or another.
Speaker 1 (24:19):
And in order to do this prove its terrorism, Decker
and the FBI need to know what kind of anthrax
this is because anthrax comes in strains like the flu,
and if they can figure out the strain, that might
tell agents where or how Stevens got infected.
Speaker 2 (24:35):
He had been up in North Carolina when he got sick,
visiting in his order and they had gone to a
state park. There was a thought that he had got
infected up there one of the plants, or the bad
water or something.
Speaker 1 (24:49):
FBI agents head to the state park to look for
any signs that Stevens could have been infected in nature.
But the scarier scenario is that the anthrax came from
a laboratory, because if it's from a lab, there's a
good chance somebody spread it on purpose. To figure this out,
the FBI knows exactly who to turn to.
Speaker 2 (25:07):
We agreed to call up doctor Paul Kime in Arizona,
Northern Arizona University. He was the unquestioned expert in the country.
Speaker 4 (25:16):
Yeah, so I was doing my normal college professor's stuff
at the beginning of a false semester here in Flagstaff, Arizona,
and out of the blue acquaintance of mind from the
FBI called me up and said said, hey, we have
an unusual case of anthracts down in Florida.
Speaker 1 (25:35):
Doctor Paul Kime hoped to find the source of the
anthracts in a biological database he'd been creating for decades.
Speaker 4 (25:43):
For the last thirty years, I've been involved in trying
to develop DNA methods for precisely identifying strains of dangerous pathogens,
so that we can identify where they came from, linked
them together with outbreaks, and in particular they're related to
biological weapons.
Speaker 1 (26:02):
So, as Robert Stevens is lying in a coma, investigators
put a sample of his spinal fluid on a private
jet and flat halfway across the country directly to Paul.
Speaker 4 (26:13):
And so it was like, wow, it felt like all
the blood was leaving my body at that point, because
it's like this isn't an academic exercise anymore. This is
the real thing. So after I hung up, I quickly
went around and found all the anthrax DNA fingerprinting people.
Speaker 2 (26:30):
I told him I expected.
Speaker 4 (26:32):
To have the anthrax back in the lab by about
eight o'clock in the evening, So I said, you know,
take care of whatever you need, but be back here
around eight o'clock and be prepared to start doing the analysis.
Speaker 1 (26:42):
A few hours later, Paul gets in his truck and
heads to the small local airport and flagstack. He doesn't
know quite what to expect.
Speaker 4 (26:51):
The general aviation guy just went and opened up the
gate and let me drive out on the tarmac, you know,
and the Gulf Stream is a pretty impressive plane, and
so it landed right around sunset. Then this woman, this
blonde woman, came walking down the stairs with a box,
and as she stepped onto the tarmac, you know, all
I could think about was the movie Casa Blanca where
(27:13):
Humphrey Bogart is on the tarmac with Ingrid Bergmann, and
I thought, that make me Humphrey Bogart. Then I kind
of slapped my face and said, get your head back
in the game.
Speaker 1 (27:24):
You know, Paul may not be in a Hollywood movie
right now, but in a way, he is a detective,
and in this very moment, the fate of American biosecurity
is quite literally in his hands. So he takes that
package and drives it back to his lab, and there
he goes into the bio safety suite and opens the box,
(27:44):
and there's a box, you.
Speaker 4 (27:45):
Know, like I know, eighteen inches by eighteen inches by
eighteen inches, a cardboard box, and inside of it was
a styrofoam pack and then a crush proof pack.
Speaker 1 (27:54):
And inside that is a vial with the spores found
in Robert Stevens's spinal fluid.
Speaker 4 (28:00):
When you're looking at it by eye on a culture,
it's kind of this white, creamy stuff, not kind of
like Manny's speared on top of jello. We knew for
sure it was anthrax because it had a DNA fingerprint
pattern that was very consistent with basil sents races.
Speaker 1 (28:14):
It's anthrax. Once Paul knows that, he needs to figure
out what strain it is, and.
Speaker 4 (28:24):
My laboratory had been developing DNA fingerprinting methods to identify
the different strains from around the world. And if it
was a laboratory strain, this wasn't an accident. In the
wake of nine to eleven.
Speaker 1 (28:37):
Paul and his team worked through the night. By morning,
they have an answer.
Speaker 4 (28:41):
It was a laboratory strain, you know, And so how
does a laboratory strain end up infecting a gentleman in Florida?
Speaker 1 (28:50):
Think about this here's a college science professor, an expert
in theoretical bioterrorism, and now he's seeing right up close
anthrax from what a pear used to be an actual bioterrorist.
Speaker 4 (29:03):
Instantly we knew that this was a biological weapons event
because it had to be an intentional act, and in
the wake of nine to eleven, Al Qaeda was the
number one suspect.
Speaker 1 (29:14):
Paul's lab is the only place in the world that
now knows the very threat weighing on Agent Scott Decker
and the FBI is the real deal.
Speaker 4 (29:23):
At that point. If there were any doubts that this
was a bioterrorism event, they.
Speaker 2 (29:27):
Were gone.
Speaker 1 (29:33):
For the moment. The story hasn't spread to the media,
Paul Kim and the FBI have only a short window
to try to get answers before the bad news spreads,
and they're all wondering the same thing. Was it the
nine to eleven hijackers who deployed this anthrax? Gene Malecki,
the health director in Florida, worries about that too.
Speaker 11 (29:53):
In Pobbage County, we use crop dusters all the time.
They go up and down all the time spring our
ves and our fruits.
Speaker 1 (30:02):
If there was an aerial attack. Is it possible the
nine eleven hijackers or people working with them had dropped
anthrax in an area that included Robert Stevens's backyard? Is
that how it ended up in his system? Stephen's home
was less than a mile from an airstrip, so his
house could have easily been in the path of travel.
Speaker 11 (30:20):
My focus was to go to the home, to speak
to everybody there, to take samples, to investigate the entire
outside of the home, inside the home, to look at
potential sources for anthrax.
Speaker 1 (30:34):
Gene takes a biohazard crew to scour the property from
top to bottom.
Speaker 11 (30:39):
The home itself was a three bedrooms, probably two baths, liso,
little kitchen, and a living room.
Speaker 1 (30:45):
The powder is so fine that if it was spread
from the sky, it could be anywhere.
Speaker 11 (30:50):
In the backyard. They had lots of plants and lots
of trees. We looked for any type of white powder
substances that could have been in the trees or on
the ground. I remember distinctly bending down and taking examples
off of various bushes that were in the backyard.
Speaker 1 (31:08):
On the surface, nothing looks suspicious. There's no obvious white
powder anywhere, but Jean sends samples she's taken to her lab.
She then heads back to the hospital to check on
Robert Stevens and discovers a deadly disease, putting a Lantana
man in the hospital.
Speaker 13 (31:24):
The story was out Mohammed Atta, who was the lead
terrorist on board one of the flights that crashed into
the World Train Center, apparently took flight lessons in Palm
Beach County out of flight school.
Speaker 10 (31:35):
Anthrax can enter the body in three ways.
Speaker 13 (31:38):
It could be swallowed, to seep through cuts in his skin,
and the most deadly way inhaled.
Speaker 1 (31:44):
State and federal health officials hurry to put together press
conferences to address everyone's concerns.
Speaker 8 (31:49):
This individual is being cared for by a very well
trained and expert team of physicians from within the hospital
in Palm Beach.
Speaker 1 (31:58):
As one of those well trained physics doctor Larry Bush,
is called upon to answer some tough questions.
Speaker 9 (32:04):
The difficult part for me in that press conference was
Marine Stephens was sitting in the front and they said
to me, is Bob Stevens going to die?
Speaker 1 (32:12):
Larry knows that historically inhalaesian anthrax is likely fatal, but
he's conflicted about sharing the worst case scenario.
Speaker 9 (32:20):
But I'm looking at Marine Stephens and I said, well,
you know, he's seriously ill. He's on the right medication,
and we have hoped that he could survive.
Speaker 1 (32:28):
Meanwhile, the press keep on with their questions, and the
CDC seems entirely focused on hitting the same reassuring note
over and over again.
Speaker 3 (32:37):
I want to stress two things. First of all, that
this is an isolated case, and second that this is
not contagious.
Speaker 8 (32:46):
This is a very serious illness. But once again, it's
an isolated case.
Speaker 3 (32:50):
But I do want to stress again.
Speaker 8 (32:52):
I want to reiterate this is an isolated case.
Speaker 3 (32:55):
This is an isolated case.
Speaker 1 (32:56):
The disease is not contagious. If the hope was to
keep people calm, to reassure the media that this situation
was nothing to worry about, it didn't work.
Speaker 2 (33:06):
The Centers for Disease Control has just confirmed the diagnosis
of ANTHRACS and a patient in a Florida hospital.
Speaker 9 (33:15):
There's more media in the area because things are leaking
out than you can imagine. The parking lot is full
of every type of media.
Speaker 4 (33:22):
There is.
Speaker 1 (33:23):
The chaos doctor Larry Bush was afraid of is here.
Speaker 7 (33:28):
All this coming just a day after the FBI warned
Americans but another terrorist attack could be imminent.
Speaker 9 (33:36):
The hospital is going crazy. People are calling the hospital
and when their loved ones transferred because we have antracs
in the hospital.
Speaker 6 (33:43):
The Florida man has contracted a very rare and potentially
deadly form of anthrost.
Speaker 9 (33:48):
The outside of the hospital was one of those things
like you see when somebody's coming out of a courthouse
and everybody's rushing them with a microphone to get some
type of sound bite. She was, you know, really chaotic.
Speaker 1 (34:00):
Everyone is now watching Larry's team closely to understand what
this one case of anthrax might mean for the rest
of the world, and the news he has is not
looking good.
Speaker 9 (34:11):
Bob Stevens is in the ICU, He's not doing well.
Speaker 1 (34:14):
Robert Stevens' health is failing quickly, and Larry fears the worst.
With the story out in the world, panic is going
to grow and the public wouldn't be wrong to worry.
It seems Robert Stevens may be patient zero of a
colossal new attack. Agent Decker and the FBI now face
(34:35):
what could be the largest bioterror threat in American history.
So the question on their minds is if al Qaeda
does have anthrax, what will they do with it next?
Speaker 2 (34:46):
The worst case is if somebody had succeeded in making
a pound of powder that would float into the air
and drift over a population. Hundreds thousands of people would
breathe this in and probably die.
Speaker 1 (35:00):
But it seems that agents are closing in on their
suspects fast. The confirmation of a plan for a second
wave attack, the pilots learning about crop dusters, the airstrip
near Stephen's house. It's all adding up. The FBI just
needs a little hard evidence, a link that proves who
did this so they can stop more deaths.
Speaker 9 (35:20):
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.
Speaker 1 (35:34):
But of course it's not going to be that easy.
The information they're about to get will send the FBI
down a rabbit hole of false suspects, shocking twists, and
damning revelations, including a liar in their midst. This season
on Aftermath, the Hunt for the Anthrax Killer.
Speaker 9 (35:54):
No witnesses, no fingerprints of personal DNA.
Speaker 4 (35:58):
And then there's another case and another.
Speaker 7 (36:01):
There was such enthusiasm over a conspiracy theory that had
no basis.
Speaker 10 (36:07):
I felt betrayed me for the rest of my life.
Speaker 6 (36:10):
American and coalition forces are in the early stages of
military operations to disarmour Rack.
Speaker 1 (36:15):
As Sodom Hussein could have produced twenty five thousand leaders
of this deadly material.
Speaker 9 (36:21):
Do you think they're going to submit evidence that implicates them?
Speaker 1 (36:24):
And this is the United States half of the FBF
Field office from Washington and at dear Home.
Speaker 13 (36:30):
This is not a joke.
Speaker 2 (36:31):
What is everybody at? Dead Man Walking?
Speaker 1 (36:41):
Aftermath? The Hunt for the Anthrax Killer is a production
of Wolf Entertainment, USG Audio and Dig Studios in collaboration
with CBC Podcasts. The series is hosted by me Jeremiah Croll.
It's created, written, and executive produced by Scott Tiffany and
Me at DIG Studios. Aftermath is executive produced by Dick Wolfe,
Elliott Wolf and Stephen Michael at Wolf Entertainment, Josh Block
(37:03):
at USG Audio, and Janielle Kassner at Spoke Media. The
series is produced by Kelly Kulf. Story editing by Jeanielle Kastner,
Sound design and mix by Evan Arnett. Original composition by
John O'Hara. Production by Spoke Media. Production support for USG
audio by Josh L. Longi. Tanya Springer is the Senior
manager of CBC Podcasts. Rif Nirani is the director of
(37:27):
CBC Podcasts. Thank you for listening. Tune in next week
for an all new episode of Aftermath The Hunt for
the Anthrax Killer, or you can binge the whole series
ad free by subscribing to CBC True Crime Premium on
Apple Podcasts. That was the first episode of Aftermath, Hunt
(37:50):
for the Anthrax Killer. If you like what you heard,
episode two is waiting for you right now. Find and
follow Aftermath wherever you get your podcasts.
In the fall of two thousand and one. While Americans
were still grappling with the horror of nine to eleven,
another terror was quietly brewing. Soon, envelopes filled with white
powder started showing up at media outlets and government buildings.
The letters dominated the news cycle, created mass panic, and
killed innocent people just opening their mail. But what's strange
is if you ask people now what happened with the
(00:23):
anthrax case, almost no one knows. It's like the whole
story just disappeared. Who mailed those letters? Do you know?
I'm Jeremiah Crowell. I'm a documentary filmmaker and host of
Aftermath Hunt for the Anthrax Killer. In this series, all
take you inside one of the largest, twistiest investigations in
FBI history, with the agent, scientists and experts who were there,
(00:46):
from the science that cracked it to the mistakes that
almost derailed it to the lives nearly ruined by it.
This eight part series reveals how the attacks and this
sometimes controversial investigation reshaped America and the surprising hidden consequences
that still linger today. You're about to hear episode one.
If you like it, you'll find more by searching Aftermath
(01:06):
Hunt for the anthrax killer wherever you get your podcasts. Okay,
here we go.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
I mean this was a huge crime scene. Most people
don't think about it as a crime scene, but it
was a crime scene of seven blocks.
Speaker 3 (01:26):
The unthinkable happened today.
Speaker 4 (01:28):
The world trades that are both towers.
Speaker 5 (01:31):
Gone thousand, smart, dead and injured. The skyline of New
York and the psyche of the American population has been
forever changed. Now it's obvious.
Speaker 4 (01:41):
I think we have a terrorist act of proportions that
we cannot begin to imagine at this juncture.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
It was the evening of September eleventh, about twelve hours
after the terrorist attacks, and Scott Decker, a special agent
with the FBI, was already.
Speaker 5 (01:59):
On the move.
Speaker 1 (02:01):
He packed his bags and said goodbye to his family
in Virginia.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
I was told to grab four of the guys, load
up our suburbans with evidence collection equipment as matt gear,
tyvek suits, masks, gloves. We loaded up the trucks that evening,
oh dark thirty September twelve. We started heading up to
New York. I think five black suburbans in a row.
Speaker 1 (02:26):
While everyone else was trying like hell to get out
of New York.
Speaker 5 (02:29):
City.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
Decker drove all night to get in.
Speaker 2 (02:33):
As we went through Maryland, we went through Delaware on
Route ninety five, the main corridor. We got to the
Delaware Memorial Bridge and the big alert sign above the
traffic and usually the letters are in yellow, but in
my memory it was orange. I don't know why, but
I remember orange, and it just said in bold letters,
New York City closed.
Speaker 1 (02:55):
They arrived outside Manhattan near dawn, but those orange letters
were right. New York City was closed even to the FBI.
Bridges were shut down, landlines were out, and cell phones
weren't working well. So Decker went to an FBI field
office in New Jersey just across the river.
Speaker 2 (03:12):
I saw a black Hawk helicopter sitting in the grass
between the office and the Passaic River, and I said, yeah,
I need to lift over to New York. So he
said jump in, and we flew over Manhattan and we
flew over Ground zero. Doors opened on the black Hawk,
and as we flew over through the smoke, we just
looked down and was just ashes. Buildings were in ashes.
(03:38):
They were just big piles on the ground.
Speaker 1 (03:42):
He landed near Ground zero, and like everyone there, struggled
to make sense of what had just happened.
Speaker 2 (03:49):
The morning of the twelfth September, things were a little
up in the air. I don't think any of us
knew what to really expect.
Speaker 1 (03:57):
But Decker isn't looking at the scene the same way
as most first responders. In fact, he's there for something else.
What the public didn't know at the time is that
there was another looming threat.
Speaker 2 (04:09):
We expected a secondary attack. There was rumors of a
biological attack. The country took steps to get ready for it.
Unbeknownst to the public.
Speaker 1 (04:19):
There was reliable intelligence from the week's right before nine
to eleven that al Qaida was planning a different kind
of attack in addition to September eleventh one, involving the
release of biotoxins into the air.
Speaker 2 (04:32):
The second attack was going to be coming at any moment.
Speaker 1 (04:35):
Decker was part of the FBI's new Hazardous Response Team,
so while everyone else was looking at the wreckage, he
was on high alert, searching for signs like unusual illnesses
that this second attack, this time biological, was already underway.
What no one knew at the time is that they
were looking in the wrong city.
Speaker 6 (05:01):
The Florida man has contracted a very rare and potentially
deadly form of anthrax.
Speaker 2 (05:06):
As all Americans know, recent weeks have brought a second
wave of terrorist attacks upon our country.
Speaker 7 (05:11):
The deadly bacteria have now turned up in the American.
Speaker 1 (05:14):
Copin deadly anthrax sports sent through the US mail. One
of the most lethal weapons of all time comes from
an almost indestructible bacteria called anthrax, and in the fall
of two thousand and one, envelopes laced with powdered anthrax
started showing up in the mail.
Speaker 7 (05:32):
The latest letter have been discovered is thoughts contain literally
billions of.
Speaker 8 (05:36):
Sports letters sent to NBC and the New York Post
were the same.
Speaker 9 (05:40):
As a warning.
Speaker 4 (05:41):
Take a kind of sillin.
Speaker 2 (05:42):
Now you cannot stop us.
Speaker 1 (05:44):
We have this anthrax guy, now antrac Are you afraid?
The anthrax attacks created chaos. The US Capital and the
Supreme Court were contaminated and shut down. Thousands of buildings
(06:04):
across the country were evacuated, and innocent people died just
from opening their mail.
Speaker 10 (06:10):
The US House of Representatives is closing offices today until
two What.
Speaker 7 (06:15):
Is perhaps wiring Americans the most is that they still
have no idea who is behind these attacks.
Speaker 1 (06:22):
What's weird is that almost twenty five years later, most
Americans still have no idea who was behind these attacks.
Anthrax was on the nightly news for months, and then
it's like the story just disappeared. I've talked to hundreds
of people about it, and no one, it seems, remembers
what happened with this case. Who mailed those letters? Do
(06:45):
you know? My name is Jeremiah Croll. I'm a documentary filmmaker,
and I was living and working in New York when
all this happened. In those weeks right after nine to eleven.
I remember the stillness of the streets and the collective
sense of raw outrage and sadness in the city, and
then anthrax. I felt the fear of those letters created
(07:08):
the terrifying way they just kept coming, one after.
Speaker 6 (07:11):
Another, another day of jerom warfare, and still no sign.
The worst case of bioterrorism in this country is close
to being solved.
Speaker 1 (07:20):
Almost two decades later, when the pandemic hit, I felt
that same sense of unpredictable terror in the air. It
reminded me of the Anthrax story, and I wondered whatever
happened with that, So my team and I started digging
into it. We tracked down people who were involved, either
affected by the attacks or part of the investigation, FBI agents, victims,
(07:42):
wrongly accused suspects, and the stories they shared, many for
the first time, surprised me. They painted a picture of
these events and their aftermath that revealed how at its
core this was all so personal, like stories about investigative
mistakes right from the start, about civil liberties trampled, and
(08:02):
about lives destroyed.
Speaker 11 (08:05):
They've broke the front door, and there are agents with
uzzis and lunsuits.
Speaker 10 (08:10):
It's one of the most devastating things that's ever happened
to me.
Speaker 11 (08:13):
It'll follow me forever.
Speaker 2 (08:15):
I want to look my fellow Americans directly in the
eye and declare to them I am not the anthrax killer.
Speaker 1 (08:25):
And even after all of that, after the seven year odyssey,
the FBI went on to try to solve this case.
Some people still wonder if the FBI got it right.
Speaker 4 (08:35):
I would not consider the case to be closed.
Speaker 1 (08:38):
In my mind, it certainly is not solved.
Speaker 2 (08:40):
I believe there are others who can be charged with murder.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
This is a story about people who have to look
at chaos and try to make sense of it while
it's still happening, and how hard it is to get
that right.
Speaker 2 (08:54):
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.
Speaker 1 (09:02):
It's about the stories we tell ourselves and the price
we pay when we tell the wrong ones. We're going
to go inside one of the largest FBI investigations in
history to figure out why we all lost track of
this case and to explore the aftershocks we still feel today.
From Wolf Entertainment, this is Aftermath the Hunt for the
(09:23):
Anthrax Killer, Episode one, isolated incident. I want to go
back to the beginning of this story, through a time
when most Americans never gave much thought to face masks
or deadly particles in the air. It's October two, two
thousand and one, three weeks after the attacks of nine
(09:45):
to eleven, and we're in suburban Florida. It's the middle
of the night, and a man named Robert Stevens wakes
up feeling sick. He has chills and a fever. Robert
Stevens is sixty three. He's a newspaper photo editor who
lives in Lantana, Florida. That's a coastal town about an
hour north of Miami. He's raised a few kids and
(10:06):
is getting close to retirement. But when he wakes up
that night, he feels disoriented, dizzy, and things seem to
be getting worse. His wife, Maureene, is worried.
Speaker 9 (10:17):
She found him awake in the bathroom vomiting over to
toilet bowl. Confused.
Speaker 1 (10:22):
Doctor Larry Bush was Chairman of Infectious Diseases and chief
of staff at the JFK Medical Center in West Palm Beach,
the hospital closest to Robert and Marine Stephen's house.
Speaker 9 (10:32):
She drove him to the hospital. He walked into JFK
emergency room at around two in the morning, and after
they put him on a vent later and got a
chest radiograph, they sent him for a final fluid examination
looking for bacteria.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
Robert's condition gets worse. He goes into a coma. Larry
and his team suspect that he is meningitis, an infection
that makes the brain swell, so he looks at Robert's
spinal fluid.
Speaker 9 (10:59):
When I look at microscope, I'm lucky to see if
I could see what type of bacteria this is, because
that's important for how I'm going to treat him.
Speaker 1 (11:07):
In a healthy patient. Larry shouldn't see much of anything.
Speaker 9 (11:10):
You're lucky if you can see one or two bacteria
that help you determine what type of bacterial processes may be.
His was overwhelming. I saw an overwhelming amount of pus cells.
That's a bad sign. That means there's havoc going on
in your nervous system.
Speaker 1 (11:28):
These bacteria suggests a cause of infection that shocks Larry.
Speaker 9 (11:32):
They almost never ever cause spinal fluid infection meningitis, but
one does anthrax.
Speaker 1 (11:42):
Larry can't get his head around this. Most of us
are now familiar with anthrax, largely because of this case,
but back then, in two thousand and one, this was nuts.
Most people didn't think about anthrax at all, and for doctors,
it was something you read about in textbooks, not something
expected to see in a patient.
Speaker 9 (12:01):
There were a lot of things going through my mind.
There's nothing else that explains it.
Speaker 1 (12:05):
But it just doesn't make sense. Anthrax is a natural
bacteria that usually only infects livestock. Cattle tend to catch
it in dry rural areas. They eat or breathe in
antrax cells it's called spores while they're grazing, so it's
not like a guy in suburban Florida is going to
just accidentally breathe this stuff in while going about his life,
(12:27):
And if he did, somehow, he'd be the first person
in the entire US in almost twenty five years. And
that person had gotten it from inhaling anthrax spores off
of wool chipped over from Pakistan. Larry runs more tests.
Speaker 9 (12:40):
He had an overwhelming amount of bacteria. But what struck
me was the shape and the color of these bacteria.
Speaker 1 (12:47):
He sees tiny blue stained bacterial rectangles, all in a line.
Imagine looking down on a train from high in the air.
Speaker 9 (12:55):
I'm an infectious disease person. I lecture, I write on
infectious diseases. I look atia under a microscope every day.
I knew what I was looking.
Speaker 1 (13:03):
At in retrospect now, knowing how everything would play out,
This is the moment that it all began. Right here,
for the first time in twenty five years, it seems
that someone in America has anthrax in their lungs.
Speaker 9 (13:19):
I'm convinced this is anthract I don't have one hundred
percent proof.
Speaker 1 (13:23):
Imagine you're him right now. You're the chief of staff
for the whole hospital, and you're very sure that what
you see is one thing, but that one thing is
so rare and so deadly that when you tell people
about it, they'll either not believe you or panic.
Speaker 9 (13:41):
My fear was creating chaos in the hospital.
Speaker 1 (13:45):
Chaos not just in his hospital, but also likely all
of Florida and probably the nation. After nine to eleven,
the whole country was bracing for another attack. Larry's afraid
that this could be it.
Speaker 9 (14:00):
He can't be to anyone exposed. That's my concern. My
fear was missing bioterrorism and being the person who could
blow to whistle.
Speaker 1 (14:09):
He has to risk creating that chaos, so he does.
Larry calls doctor Gene Malecki, a friend and colleague who's
the health director for all of Palm Beach County, but
she was busy at that moment.
Speaker 11 (14:23):
I was giving an actual seminar on bioterrorism at the
time the phone call came in, and so we were
in the middle of that when my secretary rushed over
to hand me a note from doctor Bush. So I
left the seminar and went to my office, and I
got the call from Larry, and he said, oh g
and I need to talk to you. So make sure
(14:44):
your door's closed.
Speaker 1 (14:46):
Larry tells Gene he thinks Robert Stevens has anthrax. They
both know more testiny to be done to prove it,
so Gene calls up the Centers for Disease Control, but
the CDC pushes back. They refuse to anyone could catch
anthrax in suburban Florida.
Speaker 11 (15:03):
I was told by the State of Florida, the Public
Health Laboratory and the CDC, you don't have enough information.
And I said, wait a minute. I have a potential
anthrax event occurring in my backyard here. I am the
chief health officer here, and you're telling me not to
act on this. And that's exactly what they were telling me.
And I said, well, too bad. You're getting specimens in
(15:26):
the mail. You will have them within twelve hours.
Speaker 1 (15:30):
Despite the CDC's hesitancy and the testing that still needs
to be done, Larry and Jean have little doubt that
is anthrax. The real worry on their minds is that
this could be the beginning of another attack by al Qaeda.
And what they don't know is that the FBI is
worried about another attack too.
Speaker 2 (15:50):
The underlying current among government and scientists was a second
wave of attack is coming and can very well likely
be a biologic or chemical bomb anthrax. At the top
of the list is a biological thread.
Speaker 1 (16:04):
Agent number one, FBI Special Agent Scott Decker is one
of only a few agents to have investigated nearly the
entire case, and he's got skills. Few other FBI agents
have a PhD in genetics for the postdoc from Harvard,
So that's why he's on the FBI's new hazmat team
that was deployed at Ground Zero.
Speaker 2 (16:25):
We would be there ready to help in case there
was a biological attack, a chemical attack, or even a
radiological release.
Speaker 1 (16:34):
And one reason they even had Decker and his team
on site is because of something odd that had happened
earlier that summer. In August of two thousand and one,
weeks before the Twin Towers fell or anyone got sick
in Florida, the FBI uncovered something in Minnesota, and that
discovery would ultimately set the stage for the entire anthrax investigation.
(16:56):
One of Decker's FBI colleagues was right in the middle
of it.
Speaker 12 (17:00):
The two flight instructor whistleblowers from a suburban flight school
had called our office to tell the duty agent that
they were very concerned that there was the most suspicious
flight student they had ever come across.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
Colleen Rowley was an FBI agent in Minnesota at the time.
Speaker 12 (17:21):
He was in first of all, asking questions that would
never be asked by a normal flight student who was
trying to actually learn how to fly. There were things about,
you know, communications with the ground, things like that that
had nothing to do with what he said was an
ego boosting trip in order to learn how to fly.
At seven forty seven.
Speaker 1 (17:42):
The flight student's name was Zacharias Mussawi. He was a
Muslim French national. When FBI agents interviewed him, they learned
his visa had lapsed, so they had him detained on
an immigration violation. Agents suspected he was up to something,
but they couldn't prove it. And remember this is all
before four nine eleven, so he's just one strange guy
(18:03):
asking strange questions at a flight school. They couldn't even
get a search warrant for his computer. Then September eleventh happened.
Speaker 12 (18:12):
The day of nine to eleven, we got word from
the jail that he was kind of jumping up gleefully
when the towers were coming down looking at a television
or something.
Speaker 1 (18:23):
Now they get the search warrant and searches computer.
Speaker 8 (18:26):
The only thing.
Speaker 12 (18:27):
That was eventually found on his laptop was a lot
of information about wind and wind directions and how to
fly like a crop duster, things like that.
Speaker 1 (18:38):
A crop duster a crop dust is a small plane
used in agriculture to spray pesticides.
Speaker 12 (18:44):
He initially says, well, I was involved in other plots,
but not the nine to eleven one. So if he's
not involved in the nine to eleven one and he's
in a second wave, he actually kind of admitted I
was going to be a second wave.
Speaker 1 (18:58):
What he's saying is that he is a member of
al Qaida and that they were planning a second attack.
The FBI already know the nine to eleven hijackers were
studying at flight schools around the US, so now agents
worry that Musawi was part of a bigger plot still
to come. But he was studying wind direction and crop
dusters because he and maybe the others were planning to
spray some kind of poison from the air. With all
(19:21):
of this info in mind, President Bush and the Department
of Justice take action, hoping to prevent whatever that second
wave might be.
Speaker 10 (19:29):
Yesterday, the FBI issued a nationwide alert based on information
they received indicating the possibility of attacks using crop dusting aircraft.
Speaker 1 (19:39):
They ground all crop dusters across the country. That solves
the immediate problem, but they still have a larger issue.
Are there other extremist pilots out there waiting to launch
an attack?
Speaker 2 (19:52):
Director Mueller and Attorney General Ashcroft gave press conferences announcing
the names of all nineteen hijackers.
Speaker 10 (20:00):
The director of the FB I and I just returned
from a memorial service at the National Cathedral and wanted
to take this time to give you a report.
Speaker 1 (20:09):
Announcing the names was a call for help to the public.
If you'd seen something, say something.
Speaker 10 (20:14):
The FBI requests that anyone who may have information about
these individuals immediately contact an FBI field office or call
the toll free hotline.
Speaker 1 (20:28):
And someone did. They didn't want to learn how to land,
They just want to learn.
Speaker 4 (20:37):
How to fly.
Speaker 1 (20:39):
Willie Lee is a crop dusting pilot who had an
eerly similar story to the one in Minnesota. Suspicious acting
men from the Middle East asking unusual questions about planes.
Speaker 2 (20:50):
You know that would kick me off right off the bat.
Speaker 1 (20:54):
But Willy isn't in Minnesota. He's halfway across the country
at a different crop dusting business. He'd been flying crop
dusting planes for decades. On any given day during his
regular job, he'd pack as much as five hundred gallons
of pesticides into his air Tractor five h two crop plane.
He'd fly incredibly low to the ground to avoid sprang
homes and people. He flapped two or three feet off
(21:16):
the ground whenever it was spraying.
Speaker 2 (21:18):
It takes some experience to do.
Speaker 1 (21:20):
It, but these men didn't sound like they wanted that experience.
They were asking about tank capacity and flight distances. It
sounded off. So six weeks before September eleventh, Willie called
the police.
Speaker 4 (21:34):
I tell them, I said, these people, something's up there.
Speaker 1 (21:36):
I said, these people ask some questions if people don't ask.
But the police didn't do anything about it. They couldn't. Really,
no one had done anything illegal. After nine to eleven,
when Willi saw the names and pictures of the hijackers
on television, he knew he'd been right to be suspicious
because some of the men who'd visited him were the
(21:58):
same men who flew the plane into the twin towers.
In fact, one of them was Mohammed Atta, the chief
US operative who directed the attack. Willing his team called
the FBI. This time they took action. So now the
FBI has a question to answer. Why were al Qaeda
(22:19):
members in at least two different places around the country
trying to learn how to fly crop dusters? And meanwhile
there's another team with a question the FBI hasn't heard
about yet, doctor Bush and his colleagues, who are trying
to figure out how a man in suburban Florida has anthrax.
And now those two mysteries are about to collide because
(22:41):
the airfield of the nine to eleven terrorists visited Willie's Airfield,
it's less than an hour away from the home of
anthrax's patient, Robert Stevens. Back in that hospital, Robert Stephens'
health is deteriorating, and doctor Bush still doesn't know for
certain what he's dealing with.
Speaker 9 (22:59):
Eight o'clock to the next one morning, I call Jacksonville
Reference Lab and I say, what was the result? And
he said to me, I shouldn't tell you that. I said,
I said, wow, that's a bold answer. I said, well,
there's two things with that answer. I said, first of all,
I'm the treating doctor. I'm taking care of this patient.
I'm responsible for him. I sent the lab to you,
(23:19):
I said, and by you telling me, you shouldn't tell
me that, you just told me that. He said, I
got to go. I said, where are you going? He says,
I have to call the people I work for. You
hung up.
Speaker 1 (23:32):
The people he works for are high up on the chain.
In an instant, the CDC calls the National Department of Health,
who calls the White House, who calls the Department of Justice.
And now, finally, the FBI learns anthrax is in Florida.
Because of his background in science, agent Scott Decker knows
an anthrax infection shouldn't have happened in Florida. So for
(23:55):
the FBI, who'd been worried for weeks about some kind
of biological attack, likely from the air, maybe involving crop dusters,
if this isn't the work of the same nine to
eleven terrorists who they now know took flight lessons in
an airfield only an hour away, it's an awful lot
of coincidences.
Speaker 2 (24:12):
We didn't know if it was an active terrorism So
that was the first thing we had to do, is
prove one way or another.
Speaker 1 (24:19):
And in order to do this prove its terrorism, Decker
and the FBI need to know what kind of anthrax
this is because anthrax comes in strains like the flu,
and if they can figure out the strain, that might
tell agents where or how Stevens got infected.
Speaker 2 (24:35):
He had been up in North Carolina when he got sick,
visiting in his order and they had gone to a
state park. There was a thought that he had got
infected up there one of the plants, or the bad
water or something.
Speaker 1 (24:49):
FBI agents head to the state park to look for
any signs that Stevens could have been infected in nature.
But the scarier scenario is that the anthrax came from
a laboratory, because if it's from a lab, there's a
good chance somebody spread it on purpose. To figure this out,
the FBI knows exactly who to turn to.
Speaker 2 (25:07):
We agreed to call up doctor Paul Kime in Arizona,
Northern Arizona University. He was the unquestioned expert in the country.
Speaker 4 (25:16):
Yeah, so I was doing my normal college professor's stuff
at the beginning of a false semester here in Flagstaff, Arizona,
and out of the blue acquaintance of mind from the
FBI called me up and said said, hey, we have
an unusual case of anthracts down in Florida.
Speaker 1 (25:35):
Doctor Paul Kime hoped to find the source of the
anthracts in a biological database he'd been creating for decades.
Speaker 4 (25:43):
For the last thirty years, I've been involved in trying
to develop DNA methods for precisely identifying strains of dangerous pathogens,
so that we can identify where they came from, linked
them together with outbreaks, and in particular they're related to
biological weapons.
Speaker 1 (26:02):
So, as Robert Stevens is lying in a coma, investigators
put a sample of his spinal fluid on a private
jet and flat halfway across the country directly to Paul.
Speaker 4 (26:13):
And so it was like, wow, it felt like all
the blood was leaving my body at that point, because
it's like this isn't an academic exercise anymore. This is
the real thing. So after I hung up, I quickly
went around and found all the anthrax DNA fingerprinting people.
Speaker 2 (26:30):
I told him I expected.
Speaker 4 (26:32):
To have the anthrax back in the lab by about
eight o'clock in the evening, So I said, you know,
take care of whatever you need, but be back here
around eight o'clock and be prepared to start doing the analysis.
Speaker 1 (26:42):
A few hours later, Paul gets in his truck and
heads to the small local airport and flagstack. He doesn't
know quite what to expect.
Speaker 4 (26:51):
The general aviation guy just went and opened up the
gate and let me drive out on the tarmac, you know,
and the Gulf Stream is a pretty impressive plane, and
so it landed right around sunset. Then this woman, this
blonde woman, came walking down the stairs with a box,
and as she stepped onto the tarmac, you know, all
I could think about was the movie Casa Blanca where
(27:13):
Humphrey Bogart is on the tarmac with Ingrid Bergmann, and
I thought, that make me Humphrey Bogart. Then I kind
of slapped my face and said, get your head back
in the game.
Speaker 1 (27:24):
You know, Paul may not be in a Hollywood movie
right now, but in a way, he is a detective,
and in this very moment, the fate of American biosecurity
is quite literally in his hands. So he takes that
package and drives it back to his lab, and there
he goes into the bio safety suite and opens the box,
(27:44):
and there's a box, you.
Speaker 4 (27:45):
Know, like I know, eighteen inches by eighteen inches by
eighteen inches, a cardboard box, and inside of it was
a styrofoam pack and then a crush proof pack.
Speaker 1 (27:54):
And inside that is a vial with the spores found
in Robert Stevens's spinal fluid.
Speaker 4 (28:00):
When you're looking at it by eye on a culture,
it's kind of this white, creamy stuff, not kind of
like Manny's speared on top of jello. We knew for
sure it was anthrax because it had a DNA fingerprint
pattern that was very consistent with basil sents races.
Speaker 1 (28:14):
It's anthrax. Once Paul knows that, he needs to figure
out what strain it is, and.
Speaker 4 (28:24):
My laboratory had been developing DNA fingerprinting methods to identify
the different strains from around the world. And if it
was a laboratory strain, this wasn't an accident. In the
wake of nine to eleven.
Speaker 1 (28:37):
Paul and his team worked through the night. By morning,
they have an answer.
Speaker 4 (28:41):
It was a laboratory strain, you know, And so how
does a laboratory strain end up infecting a gentleman in Florida?
Speaker 1 (28:50):
Think about this here's a college science professor, an expert
in theoretical bioterrorism, and now he's seeing right up close
anthrax from what a pear used to be an actual bioterrorist.
Speaker 4 (29:03):
Instantly we knew that this was a biological weapons event
because it had to be an intentional act, and in
the wake of nine to eleven, Al Qaeda was the
number one suspect.
Speaker 1 (29:14):
Paul's lab is the only place in the world that
now knows the very threat weighing on Agent Scott Decker
and the FBI is the real deal.
Speaker 4 (29:23):
At that point. If there were any doubts that this
was a bioterrorism event, they.
Speaker 2 (29:27):
Were gone.
Speaker 1 (29:33):
For the moment. The story hasn't spread to the media,
Paul Kim and the FBI have only a short window
to try to get answers before the bad news spreads,
and they're all wondering the same thing. Was it the
nine to eleven hijackers who deployed this anthrax? Gene Malecki,
the health director in Florida, worries about that too.
Speaker 11 (29:53):
In Pobbage County, we use crop dusters all the time.
They go up and down all the time spring our
ves and our fruits.
Speaker 1 (30:02):
If there was an aerial attack. Is it possible the
nine eleven hijackers or people working with them had dropped
anthrax in an area that included Robert Stevens's backyard? Is
that how it ended up in his system? Stephen's home
was less than a mile from an airstrip, so his
house could have easily been in the path of travel.
Speaker 11 (30:20):
My focus was to go to the home, to speak
to everybody there, to take samples, to investigate the entire
outside of the home, inside the home, to look at
potential sources for anthrax.
Speaker 1 (30:34):
Gene takes a biohazard crew to scour the property from
top to bottom.
Speaker 11 (30:39):
The home itself was a three bedrooms, probably two baths, liso,
little kitchen, and a living room.
Speaker 1 (30:45):
The powder is so fine that if it was spread
from the sky, it could be anywhere.
Speaker 11 (30:50):
In the backyard. They had lots of plants and lots
of trees. We looked for any type of white powder
substances that could have been in the trees or on
the ground. I remember distinctly bending down and taking examples
off of various bushes that were in the backyard.
Speaker 1 (31:08):
On the surface, nothing looks suspicious. There's no obvious white
powder anywhere, but Jean sends samples she's taken to her lab.
She then heads back to the hospital to check on
Robert Stevens and discovers a deadly disease, putting a Lantana
man in the hospital.
Speaker 13 (31:24):
The story was out Mohammed Atta, who was the lead
terrorist on board one of the flights that crashed into
the World Train Center, apparently took flight lessons in Palm
Beach County out of flight school.
Speaker 10 (31:35):
Anthrax can enter the body in three ways.
Speaker 13 (31:38):
It could be swallowed, to seep through cuts in his skin,
and the most deadly way inhaled.
Speaker 1 (31:44):
State and federal health officials hurry to put together press
conferences to address everyone's concerns.
Speaker 8 (31:49):
This individual is being cared for by a very well
trained and expert team of physicians from within the hospital
in Palm Beach.
Speaker 1 (31:58):
As one of those well trained physics doctor Larry Bush,
is called upon to answer some tough questions.
Speaker 9 (32:04):
The difficult part for me in that press conference was
Marine Stephens was sitting in the front and they said
to me, is Bob Stevens going to die?
Speaker 1 (32:12):
Larry knows that historically inhalaesian anthrax is likely fatal, but
he's conflicted about sharing the worst case scenario.
Speaker 9 (32:20):
But I'm looking at Marine Stephens and I said, well,
you know, he's seriously ill. He's on the right medication,
and we have hoped that he could survive.
Speaker 1 (32:28):
Meanwhile, the press keep on with their questions, and the
CDC seems entirely focused on hitting the same reassuring note
over and over again.
Speaker 3 (32:37):
I want to stress two things. First of all, that
this is an isolated case, and second that this is
not contagious.
Speaker 8 (32:46):
This is a very serious illness. But once again, it's
an isolated case.
Speaker 3 (32:50):
But I do want to stress again.
Speaker 8 (32:52):
I want to reiterate this is an isolated case.
Speaker 3 (32:55):
This is an isolated case.
Speaker 1 (32:56):
The disease is not contagious. If the hope was to
keep people calm, to reassure the media that this situation
was nothing to worry about, it didn't work.
Speaker 2 (33:06):
The Centers for Disease Control has just confirmed the diagnosis
of ANTHRACS and a patient in a Florida hospital.
Speaker 9 (33:15):
There's more media in the area because things are leaking
out than you can imagine. The parking lot is full
of every type of media.
Speaker 4 (33:22):
There is.
Speaker 1 (33:23):
The chaos doctor Larry Bush was afraid of is here.
Speaker 7 (33:28):
All this coming just a day after the FBI warned
Americans but another terrorist attack could be imminent.
Speaker 9 (33:36):
The hospital is going crazy. People are calling the hospital
and when their loved ones transferred because we have antracs
in the hospital.
Speaker 6 (33:43):
The Florida man has contracted a very rare and potentially
deadly form of anthrost.
Speaker 9 (33:48):
The outside of the hospital was one of those things
like you see when somebody's coming out of a courthouse
and everybody's rushing them with a microphone to get some
type of sound bite. She was, you know, really chaotic.
Speaker 1 (34:00):
Everyone is now watching Larry's team closely to understand what
this one case of anthrax might mean for the rest
of the world, and the news he has is not
looking good.
Speaker 9 (34:11):
Bob Stevens is in the ICU, He's not doing well.
Speaker 1 (34:14):
Robert Stevens' health is failing quickly, and Larry fears the worst.
With the story out in the world, panic is going
to grow and the public wouldn't be wrong to worry.
It seems Robert Stevens may be patient zero of a
colossal new attack. Agent Decker and the FBI now face
(34:35):
what could be the largest bioterror threat in American history.
So the question on their minds is if al Qaeda
does have anthrax, what will they do with it next?
Speaker 2 (34:46):
The worst case is if somebody had succeeded in making
a pound of powder that would float into the air
and drift over a population. Hundreds thousands of people would
breathe this in and probably die.
Speaker 1 (35:00):
But it seems that agents are closing in on their
suspects fast. The confirmation of a plan for a second
wave attack, the pilots learning about crop dusters, the airstrip
near Stephen's house. It's all adding up. The FBI just
needs a little hard evidence, a link that proves who
did this so they can stop more deaths.
Speaker 9 (35:20):
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.
Speaker 1 (35:34):
But of course it's not going to be that easy.
The information they're about to get will send the FBI
down a rabbit hole of false suspects, shocking twists, and
damning revelations, including a liar in their midst. This season
on Aftermath, the Hunt for the Anthrax Killer.
Speaker 9 (35:54):
No witnesses, no fingerprints of personal DNA.
Speaker 4 (35:58):
And then there's another case and another.
Speaker 7 (36:01):
There was such enthusiasm over a conspiracy theory that had
no basis.
Speaker 10 (36:07):
I felt betrayed me for the rest of my life.
Speaker 6 (36:10):
American and coalition forces are in the early stages of
military operations to disarmour Rack.
Speaker 1 (36:15):
As Sodom Hussein could have produced twenty five thousand leaders
of this deadly material.
Speaker 9 (36:21):
Do you think they're going to submit evidence that implicates them?
Speaker 1 (36:24):
And this is the United States half of the FBF
Field office from Washington and at dear Home.
Speaker 13 (36:30):
This is not a joke.
Speaker 2 (36:31):
What is everybody at? Dead Man Walking?
Speaker 1 (36:41):
Aftermath? The Hunt for the Anthrax Killer is a production
of Wolf Entertainment, USG Audio and Dig Studios in collaboration
with CBC Podcasts. The series is hosted by me Jeremiah Croll.
It's created, written, and executive produced by Scott Tiffany and
Me at DIG Studios. Aftermath is executive produced by Dick Wolfe,
Elliott Wolf and Stephen Michael at Wolf Entertainment, Josh Block
(37:03):
at USG Audio, and Janielle Kassner at Spoke Media. The
series is produced by Kelly Kulf. Story editing by Jeanielle Kastner,
Sound design and mix by Evan Arnett. Original composition by
John O'Hara. Production by Spoke Media. Production support for USG
audio by Josh L. Longi. Tanya Springer is the Senior
manager of CBC Podcasts. Rif Nirani is the director of
(37:27):
CBC Podcasts. Thank you for listening. Tune in next week
for an all new episode of Aftermath The Hunt for
the Anthrax Killer, or you can binge the whole series
ad free by subscribing to CBC True Crime Premium on
Apple Podcasts. That was the first episode of Aftermath, Hunt
(37:50):
for the Anthrax Killer. If you like what you heard,
episode two is waiting for you right now. Find and
follow Aftermath wherever you get your podcasts.
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