Magic Beans

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media. On the morning of February two, twenty seventeen,
William Christopher Gibbs had just finished his overnight shift as
a forklift operator to poultry processing plant and a small
town in North Georgia. It was technically eight am on
a Thursday morning, but he'd just gotten off work and

(00:24):
he wanted to relax and have a few beers with
a friend. Around noon, he got a phone call from
another friend who wanted to join them, but he needed
a ride. Gibbs agreed to drive down to the gas
station to pick him up, but he'd need to rearrange
some things in his car first. As he was cleaning
out the front seat of his car, he touched something wet.

(00:49):
A bottle he'd left on the floor of the passenger
side was leaking. He panicked. He spent four hours considering
his options before finally driving himself to the emergency room.
He had to tell the truth he was sick, and
if he wanted help, he'd have to tell them he'd

(01:10):
been making ricin. It looked like a slam dunk case,
But less than two weeks before his trial was set
to begin, a judge dismissed the indictment not for lack
of evidence. The case was solid, but at the eleventh hour,
his public defender made an incredible discovery. A clerical error

(01:33):
had accidentally legalized the possession of ricin, and no one
noticed for over a decade. I'm Molly Conger, and this
is weird Little Guys. The story of William Christopher Gibbs

(02:06):
and his bottle full of liquid risin isn't actually very long.
That was most of it, to be honest. But by
the time I realized how little meat there was to
the case, I'd already committed to a couple of interesting tangents.
I mean, I wasted a whole day learning about ricin.
I can't just throw that away. And it does introduce

(02:28):
some new elements into the Weird Little Guy's extended universe.
We will eventually have to talk about the Church of
the Creator. That was part of what made this story
so sensational. Back in twenty seventeen, when this twenty seven
year old confessed to a nurse in rural Georgia that
he'd accidentally exposed himself to homemade ricin, he was wearing

(02:52):
a motorcycle jacket with a big patch on the chest
that marked him as a member of a group called
the Creativity Alliance. I doubt the nurse knew what it meant,
but I imagine she described it to the cop that she
immediately called about the bioweapon in the parking lot. The
Church of the Creator doesn't actually exist anymore, not under

(03:14):
that name. The group William Christopher Gibbs had joined in
the months before his arrest is called the Creativity Alliance.
Depending on who you ask, it's either a successor to
or a schism from the original church. There are a
lot of almost identical sounding names in this story, so

(03:36):
I apologize in advance. In nineteen seventy three, Ben Clausen,
an aspiring politician in Florida and the inventor of the
wall mounted electric can opener, self published a book called
Nature's Eternal Religion. It would become the foundational text of
the weird new religion he'd just invented. He called it

(03:59):
the Church of the Creator, or just creativity, and religion
isn't the word I would use, but it's the one
they use. Just ask the Bureau of Prisons. They're constantly
fielding lawsuits from incarcerated neo Nazis who argue that their
religious liberties are being violated by prison policies that ban

(04:21):
their religious texts. Clausen would go on to write a
book called The White Man's Bible. They call the head
of the church haunt effects Maximus. They have commandments and
religious holidays. We've talked about racist religions before. There are

(04:41):
a couple of episodes that have touched on Christian identity,
a wildly racist and anti semitic spin on regular Christianity
that preaches that white Europeans are God's chosen people. But
this is something else, This is not like that at all.
They're both anti Semitic, obviously, and they revolve around the

(05:04):
superiority of white people, of course, but in creativity there
is no God, there are no deities at all, there's
no afterlife. It is, at its core, just an elaborate
way to be racist, and in a unique twist, in
addition to being anti Semitic, it's also quite explicitly anti Christian.

(05:30):
Their race is their religion, Their highest belief is the
superiority of the white man, and there is nothing above him.
I promise we'll explore this more another day. There's a
lot of weird lore here. Clausen wrote a number of books,
and they're all very boring. But Gibbs is far from

(05:50):
the first member of the Church of the Creator who
found himself under indictment, so we'll come back to it.
But that brings us to rahoa. It's a shortened form
of the phrase racial holy war. I've used the term
a few times on the show. It's a pretty common
refrain among guys who yearn for a white ethno state.

(06:11):
Years ago, before I rotted out my brain reading the
foundational texts of various Nazi groups, I just assumed that
rahoah was a modern term. It feels very online, very
mid twenty tens to me, and I see it all
the time in their online spaces, where it's mixed in
with nim speak that I recognize as twenty first century inventions.

(06:35):
But the word rahoah is actually older than I am.
It first appeared in a February nineteen eighty six issue
of Racial Loyalty, the Church of the Creator newsletter, and
you can tell Clausen wasn't sure the term was going
to catch on right away. The first announcement that he'd
invented a new word is brief, and it's sort of

(06:58):
buried on page five, and in this first announcement, Clausen says,
we need a word for our struggle against the other races,
something like jihad, but just for white people. And underneath
his announcement that he's come up with this fantastic new word,
he includes a pronunciation guide which he writes out as

(07:19):
ra haa. He wrote out r ah h h dash
aa that to me says rah and members of his
church must have read that the same way I did,
because a few months later he's revised this pronunciation guide
to read ra ho wah r a h h o wah,

(07:45):
which is clearer to me. That reads as rahah to me.
But later publications of those essays omit both of those
and they just say it rhymes with aloha. And Clausen
was so committed to his new word that a year
later he published an entire book called rahoa This planet

(08:06):
is all Ours. He later wrote another book called On
the Brink of a Bloody Racial War. Racial holy war
was central to the Church of the Creator, and over
the years some members of the church followed through on
that commandment. They racked up a couple of murders, some bombings,

(08:27):
assorted weapons charges, assault cases. By nineteen ninety three, the
church was facing mounting legal and financial problems. Clawson's wife
had died and now he had cancer. In August of
nineteen ninety three, Ben Clausen died by suicide, leaving the
church in the hands of an unworthy successor, a man

(08:49):
who failed to even show up to court when a
lawsuit was filed by the family of a man murdered
by a member of the church. Leaderless and broke, the
church fell into disarray. In nineteen ninety six, a former member,
a law student named Matt Hale, revived the group, forming
a successor organization that he called the World Church of

(09:11):
the Creator. This is a chapter that deserves its own episodes,
but the short version of this arc is. In two
thousand and two, under Matt Hale's leadership, the organization lost
a trademark infringement lawsuit whiled by a religious organization that
had already trademarked the phrase Church of the Creator in
the eighties. A judge ordered Matt Hale and his World

(09:33):
Church of the Creator to stop using the name. He
wasn't allowed to call it that anymore. He did not
take it well, and he heavily implied to his security
chief that he'd really like it if that man would
murder the judge who'd ruled against them. The man he
tried to solicit for the murder of a federal judge

(09:56):
was an FBI informant, and Matthew Hale will be in
prison and twenty thirty six. It was after Hale went
to prison that the church split into the two factions
we have today, the Creativity Alliance and the Creativity Movement.
The two groups hate each other, obviously, and the differences
between them aren't the point right now. But all that

(10:18):
to say Creativity is a Nazi religion. You don't necessarily
have to be a member of any of those organizations
to be an adherent of the religion, but if you
are a member of a group, it's probably one of
those two splinter groups that formed after matt Hale went
to prison. And that is where we find William Christopher Gibbs,

(10:41):
the man who made Risin and Georgia in twenty seventeen.
By all accounts, he discovered Creativity online sometime in the
summer of twenty sixteen, and he got really into it,
really fast. He created an account on the forums run
by the Creativity Alliance in June of twenty sixteen, and

(11:03):
their July newsletter published a letter from him. By September,
he was considering getting rahoa tattooed across his back, and
he was stopped by a cop after people complained about
him hanging around a public park trying to hand out
racist flyers. After Gibbs was arrested, the Creativity Movement, the

(11:24):
other faction of the church, issued a public statement clarifying
that he was not one of theirs. They claimed that
he had actually reached out to them when he was
trying to join, but the messages he sent were very weird.
Quote he struck us as one of the most dysfunctional, incoherent,

(11:46):
and mentally ill people we have come across. The statement read. Now,
that might sound unfair, but I read four frivolous lawsuits
that he wrote, and hundreds of posts that he's made
on Facebook across multiple different accounts over the course of
the last decade, and I'm willing to bet dysfunctional and

(12:08):
incoherent was an understatement. It can be pretty hard to
understand what he's trying to communicate. Sometimes the thoughts just
don't always quite connect. I should say at this point
that Gibbs's mother would later tell the police that her
son was diagnosed with schizophrenia. This doesn't appear anywhere in

(12:31):
the court records. It was never raised as a defense,
There was no request for a competency evaluation. All we
have is his mother's claim at the time of his arrest.
And obviously, mental illness doesn't cause racism. Racism isn't a
mental illness. The two are generally unrelated, and normally I
wouldn't even bring it up, especially considering the lack of
cooperation here. You can't diagnose a man based on his posts,

(12:56):
but there's definitely something going on there. I think anyone
who read any significant amount of his writing would be
able to tell that this is someone who's struggling with something,
and at least one of these Nazi groups could tell.
Colin Campbell, the Pontifex Maximus of the Creativity Alliance, on

(13:17):
the other hand, didn't see any red flags in this
potential new member. After Gibbs was arrested, Campbell acknowledged that
Gibbs had recently successfully completed his six month probationary period
and joined the group as a member, but he claimed
that Gibbs had quote hardly any contact with us, just

(13:38):
enough to pass as rational and dedicated to one hundred
percent legal white civil rights. And I doubt that Gibbs
had any sort of background knowledge or understanding of the
schisms within the movement. This is just something he found online.
He may not have even realized that these were two
very different groups run by people who hate at each other.

(14:01):
But when one group turned him away because he seemed unstable,
the other welcomed him. So on February two, twenty seventeen,
Gibbs was wearing his Creativity Alliance patch when he got
to the hospital, complaining of rice and exposure, and shortly
after he arrived, someone at the hospital called the police.

(14:24):
What about HIPPA, you're probably asking, or maybe you're not,
But his lawyers did, and the judge denied a motion
to suppress evidence stemming from disclosures made by the hospital.
HIPPA does allow medical providers to disclose what would otherwise
be protected information if it's necessary to prevent a serious

(14:45):
and imminent threat to the health and safety of others,
like if, for example, if a patient comes into the
hospital and says he was trying to make a biological weapon,
and it's outside in his car. Within the hour, investigators
from the Fannin County Sheriff's Office were in his hospital room.

(15:05):
He wasn't under arrest. They just wanted to get a
better idea what was going on here and how alarmed
they should be. Gibbs explained that he'd ground up the
castor beans and put them in a bottle of nail
polish remover, and that all of those implements and materials
were in his car outside. Gibbs assured the officer that

(15:26):
it's quote, nothing to worry about, and when the officer
pressed him, asking if the substance in the car was poisonous,
Gibbs replied, quote, he said, it's not unless it's inhaled
or injected. This singular line in one filing written by

(15:46):
the judge has a citation in the footnotes to a
sealed document, and it never comes up again. There's never
any other mention of Gibbs having communicated with anyone about
making the rice, and so I guess it'll be a
mystery forever. But he's assuring the officer that there's no
danger to the public. It's fine, don't worry about it.

(16:08):
It's not a big deal. But at the same time,
he's gone to the emergency room because he thinks he's
been poisoned. And as this conversation is happening, he's pretty
agitated that he isn't receiving adequate treatment for this exposure.
He's upset that they haven't given him an IV for example,
And in an interview later that evening, he's hacking and

(16:30):
coughing and nervously asking an FBI agent what are the
symptoms of rice and poisoning? So he clearly thinks he's
been exposed to something very dangerous. The officer called him
back up, and by around eight o'clock that evening, deputies
had moved all of the other cars in the parking
lot out of what they were now calling the hot zone.

(16:53):
A hazmat team from another county arrived to search the car.
FBI agents rolled up in black suv, and the Army
National Guard's Weapons of Mass Destructions Civil Support team was
on site to provide assistance if needed. The bottle recovered
by the hasmat team tested positive for risin, but it
was a small amount and it was all contained within

(17:15):
the vehicle. There was no danger to the public. Gibbs
was released from the hospital. He was fine after being
interrogated that night by the FBI. Gibbs was initially held
at the county jail on just a misdemeanor charge of
reckless conduct. A few weeks later, though, a federal grand

(17:36):
jury indicted him on a single count of possession of
a biological agent or toxin by a person who didn't
have the proper registration. That section one's seventy five B
of Title eighteen of the US Code one seventy five B.
The B is so critical here because one seventy five

(17:59):
B isn't a subcategory of section one seventy five, it's
its own section Section one seventy five Prohibitions with respect
to biological weapons that carries a ten year sentence, and
one seventy five B is a paltry five years. The
difference between the two is intent. You have to prove

(18:20):
that the defendant intended to use the toxin as a
weapon if you want to charge them under one seventy five.
One seventy five B just means you had something you
weren't supposed to have. That section was newly written in
two thousand and one. Certainly, as some sort of frantic
post nine to eleven crackdown on scientists without update paperwork.

(18:43):
Maybe they just wanted to know who had what, where,
when and why, even if it wasn't something they were
planning to use as a weapon. Or maybe they just
wanted to be sure they could charge cases where the
facts were fuzzy, bit of both. I think so. When
I read news coverage of this case and the reports

(19:04):
all say the case against Gibbs was dismissed because Congress
forgot to make risin illegal, I thought that can't be right.
I've read cases from this time period that ended in
a conviction related to ricin. There was one in Georgia
just a few years before this, some militia guys with

(19:24):
a hair brain scheme to disperse the toxin over large
areas in major cities. It never would have worked. It
wasn't a workable plan. They didn't even have risin, and
there was no indication that they had any idea how
to make it or had sought that knowledge. It's a
scary sounding plot, but even the judge doubted that a

(19:46):
seventy year old man was going to figure out how
to do anything with those beans he bought. The hiccup
is right here, though, those elderly militia men with a
bag of raw castor beans were charged with section one
seventy five. They were only conspiring to make the ricin.

(20:07):
They did have the beans, and they were intending to
use them as a weapon. Most cases, where someone is
arrested because they had some kind of biological agent or toxin,
they go ahead and charge them with intent to use
it as a weapon. Why else would the cops be
at your house and a hazmat suit? Right, And that

(20:28):
law is pretty broad. It is enough to just attempt, threaten,
or conspire to use it as a weapon. You don't
even have to have a plan that would actually work.
I mean, in that militia case, they just had the beans.
They hadn't even made the poison yet. So in the
Gibbs case, they must not have felt that they could

(20:50):
meet even that burden. I guess they really thought that
they wouldn't be able to convince a jury that he
was ever going to do anything other than spill it
in his car, so they charged him with the lesser
offense one seventy five B. And again that's just having
one of these biological agents or toxins without properly registering

(21:12):
that possession with the government. And those two laws they're
in the same chapter. They use most of the same words.
How could it be that one of them applies to
risin and one of them doesn't. The answer took me
too long to figure out. It's very complicated and it's

(21:34):
very silly. So just to get a little schoolhouse rock
on you here. We have laws, right. The United States
Code is the codification of all of the permanent federal statutes,
those things that become law after Congress passes a bill.
But we also have something called the Code of Federal Regulations.

(21:57):
After passing a law, Congress can delegate the authority to
a government agency to write the regulations that help that
agency interpret and implement those laws. It's more complicated than that,
but I know nobody wants to hear me struggle to
explain regulatory law, so I'm not gonna so. In this case,

(22:19):
Congress passed a bill that said it's illegal to have
biological agents or toxins. Okay, solid law, But they're not
experts on microbiology, so they leave it to the Department
of Health and Human Services to list what sorts of
things need to be criminalized by this law specifically, and

(22:40):
Risin was on that list. In the first Code section
there actually is no list. It just says biological agent
or toxin and that's defined very broadly. But in this
specific section in one seventy five B, the Code section
that requies requires you to register with the Secretary of

(23:02):
Health and Human Services if you possess certain what are
called select agents. Got a list them. They're select agents.
You have to select them. So instead of listing those
select agents by name in the law, it specified that
it applied to biological agents and toxins that are quote

(23:23):
listed as non overlap or overlap select biological agent or
toxin in sections seventy three point four and seventy three
point five of Title forty two, Code of Federal Regulations. Okay,
so I assume Risin must be missing from that list, right,
That's why the case got dropped. So I found a

(23:43):
copy of the twenty seventeen version of the Code of
Federal Regulations and I flipped a Title forty two, section
seventy three, and Risin's on the list. I control eft
it I found Risin in section seventy three. I can
see it what happened, and here's it gets so silly.
So the law was passed in two thousand and one.

(24:04):
In two thousand and one, the statute made specific reference
to the list of toxins found in the Code of
Federal Regulations, Title forty two, Section seventy two point six.
Then in two thousand and two, the Department of Health
and Human Services made some formatting updates to their rules
and regulations, so Congress amended the law in two thousand
and two to match the updated reference. So now the

(24:25):
law says that the list is in appendix A of
section seventy two. Perfect, everything's matching up. In two thousand
and four, Congress amended the law again, updating that reference
again because Health and Human Services had made some more
formatting changes, And now the list of toxins is in
section seventy three point four in seventy three point five perfect.

(24:45):
The law and the regulation still match until three months later,
Health and Human Services did a little bit of reformatting
of their rules and regulations. They eliminated an unnecessary section,
so everything got shifted by point one. So now the
list of toxins with risin on it is section seventy

(25:07):
three point three and the law wasn't amended to match.
It's like a dead link, right, the law requires the list.
The law says that the things on the list are illegal,
but it points you to a really specific place, and
that's not where the list is anymore. And if it

(25:27):
only criminalizes the things on the list and there is
no list, then it's not illegal. Obviously this was a mistake.

(25:50):
They'd made updates in tandem twice before. Twice the regulations
changed and they updated the law to match so that
the numbers still matched. They just didn't do it the
third time. And in the law it lists the name
of the regulation they're talking about. It just has the
wrong number. Surely that doesn't make it legal to make risin.

(26:15):
But I found two judges who said that's exactly what
it did in this case. In twenty eighteen, a judge
in the Northern Destruct of Georgia dismissed the indictment against
William Christopher Gibbs. Judge Richard's Story wrote, it falls to
Congress to write the laws or to amend them if
they yield unfair or unwanted results. The role of the courts,

(26:37):
on the other hand, is limited to fairly reading and
applying the law's Congress rights, not to change them. In
other words, Congress fucked up, But a judge can't change
the law. He can't apply the law that he thinks
should have been passed. Citing that decision in the Gibbs case,

(26:58):
judge James Moody and Arkansas missed a similar case against
Alexander Jordan in twenty twenty. Jordan was twenty one when
he called nine one one in a panic, believing he'd
poisoned himself. He claimed that he'd created the risin because
he was thinking of ending his own life, and when
first responders arrived, he did warn them to be careful

(27:19):
around the substance. He didn't want people to get hurt.
After his arrest, he was sent to a psychiatric facility
to await trial, but the trial ever came. Congress amended
the law to correct the mistake after what happened in
the Gibbs case, so in twenty nineteen the law has
been fixed. But Alexander Jordan was charged in twenty eighteen

(27:43):
before the law changed. And while the correction to the
law made it clear that they'd always intended to criminalize risin,
it wasn't illegal when Jordan did it. Judge Moody wrote,
there is no ambiguity. The government should not be allowed
to prosecute the defendant for conduct that was not made

(28:04):
illegal until after he committed the challenged acts. Congress had
fifteen years to amend the statute. Now it's possible there
are other cases, but I only found one other case
with a pretty similar set of circumstances, so someone who
was charged only under the Possession Statute for conduct that

(28:25):
occurred after two thousand and five, but before twenty nineteen.
And in this third case, the judge was presented with
the decisions that had already been made in the Alexander
Jordan and William Gibbs cases. He read those opinions and
he said, judges can disagree. Everybody can tell what Congress meant. Honestly,

(28:47):
I think it's kind of a reasonable opinion in this case.
I think everybody can tell what Congress meant. Statutory interpretation
is not interesting to me. So maybe that judge and
I are wrong. And this case was a little different
because Debbie Sears Hill had already pled guilty, so it's
not the same. It's just dismissing an indictment. She would

(29:07):
have to revoke her guilty plea and vacate her sentence.
But it is interesting that a third judge looked at
the same facts and had an entirely opposite read on
the situation. After the federal case against Gibbs was dropped,
he spent one more week in jail. The Fens had
released him, but he'd only been in federal custody since

(29:29):
his arrest. Bannon County, Georgia wanted a couple of days
time for a probation violation. His arrest for reckless conduct
on the day he showed up at the hospital violated
the terms of a twenty twelve plea deal for an
old burglary conviction, But that was it because the case
never went to trial. Though we don't know what happened,

(29:54):
there's nothing on the record about what Gibbs planned to
do with the risin. Most of the recording on the
case focuses on the two details we do know. He
made risin, and he was a self professed adherent of Creativity,
a white supremacist religious movement. There is a heavy implication

(30:15):
that he must have been plotting some kind of racially
motivated terror attack, and I'll admit that's where my mind
went too, But that's because I didn't know very much
about risin. It's a toxin found in the seeds of
the castor oil plant, and don't get me wrong, it
is extremely toxic. Do not make risin, Do not chew

(30:41):
on castor beans, which is incidentally one of the most
common causes of toxicity. It is thousands of times more
poisonous than cyanide or rattlesnake venom. And it's really easy
to make. I'm not going to tell you how to
make rice, and I just want to put on the

(31:01):
record that all those Google searches I made last night
for how to make risin, how to extract risin from
castor bean, castor bean acetone, castor bean solvent extraction, that
was for work. Okay, if the FBI is listening, that
was for work. I don't even have any beans. I
hated chemistry in high school. I just like to have

(31:23):
a robust understanding of the case. Okay, But several articles
I read by doctors and toxicologists and chemists all seem
to agree any idiot can figure it out. It's easier
than cooking meth, and plenty of people do that every day.
Just fine. The instructions are pretty easy to find online,

(31:46):
and it's something you can do at home with normal
household solvents. We don't need any special equipment or scientific knowledge.
The results achieved by your average home chemist are going
to vary pretty widely depending on a variety of factors,
but in most cases you're going to end up with
something you definitely shouldn't eat. So it's highly toxic, there's

(32:13):
no known cure, and it's very easy to make it
home with things that are cheap and legal to buy.
This must be a terrorist weapon of choice, right, This
must be happening all the time, Not exactly. Risin has
existed for as long as the castor oil plant has.

(32:37):
You can get rice and toxicity from just eating the
seeds of the plant. It was first isolated in a
lab by a German microbiologist in eighteen eighty eight, and
within a few years people were trying to figure out
how to use it as a weapon. During World War One,
the US military experimented with trying to create toxic dust
clouds that could be unleashed on the battlefield. Inhalation of

(33:01):
powdered risin would be extremely toxic, but it's hard to
get the particle size right so that it aerosolizes. It's
hard to control a cloud of poisonous dust, and with
no antidote, you risk your own troops if the wind shifts.
Experimentation with risin coated bullets and shrapnel was pretty quickly abandoned,

(33:24):
in part because it would be a violation of the
Hague Conventions, but in a more practical sense, bullets get
very hot and high heat denatures the toxin, so it
just wouldn't work anyway. During World War Two, several countries
experimented with bombs that would release risin without superheating it,

(33:45):
but ultimately they were cheaper, easier, more controllable ways to
get the exact same horrible results, so risin was never
really used on the battlefield. It's just not that useful
for large scale attacks. It's possible, sure people have tried.

(34:05):
You could aerosolize it over a large area. You could
put massive quantities of it in a water supply and
people would get sick and they might die. But it's
not the best tool for that job. You have to
use a lot of it, and it would be hard
to make it at that kind of scale. It's very
difficult to control for particle size. If you're trying to

(34:27):
aerosolize it, some chemicals used in water treatment would render
it useless. A few countries kept trying to figure out
how to use it at scale, but it never took off,
So maybe that just means it's better suited for use
up close. A paper published in a twenty twenty one

(34:47):
issue of Toxicon, the official scientific journal of the International
Society on Toxinology, found fifty cases of rice and intoxication
in the scientific literature during a forty year period from
nineteen eighty to And in that forty year period, they
found fifty cases described in the scientific literature. Seventy four

(35:08):
percent were accidental exposures, and only six people died. And
those were only the cases that ended up in a
medical journal. So minor incidents where everyone was fine don't
warrant a case study. So I assume in the real
world that fatality rate is even lower. Okay, but surely,

(35:31):
surely all six of those deaths were some kind of
sinister plot. Right. The paper didn't say it was written
by scientists. They're more focused on things like hydrolyzing ribosomes
and polypeptide chains with disulfide bonds. I don't know. That's
not my business. So I poked around the medical literature

(35:52):
a little bit on my own, and I found half
a dozen case studies discussing deaths by suicide, almost all
of which involves injecting themselves with a rice in solution.
There was one paper about a man who died after
ingesting an herbal remedy that he didn't know contained powdered
castor beans. And I found another dozen or soap papers

(36:13):
about non lethal ricin poisonings, and all of those were
either suicide attempts or accidents. You know, a child chewing
up some seeds, a woman eating castor beans because an
herbal has told her it would make her hair grow thicker,
things like that. I looked everywhere for proof that risin

(36:35):
has ever actually been used to kill someone on purpose,
someone other than oneself. I looked in media coverage, medical journals,
court records, government reports on bioterrorism, the Army's Handbook on
Management of Biological Casualties. Looked everywhere it has happened one time,

(36:56):
people have tried, people have come close, people have gotten
very sick. But at least as far as any publication
I can find by any government entity. The only time
rice has ever been used to successfully murder someone, it
was in nineteen seventy eight. The victim was Georgi Markov,

(37:31):
a political dissident from Bulgaria. He was standing at a
bus stop in London when he felt a sharp prick
on the back of his leg. He didn't realize it
at the time, but an assassin had shot him with
a tiny pellet containing risin, fired out of a device
concealed inside of an umbrella. Markov died in the hospital
four days later. This was a highly sophisticated operation, allegedly

(37:57):
carried out by the Bulgarian Secret Police with assistance from
the KGB. The pellet was finely machined, less than two
millimeters in diameter, with tiny holes drilled in it to
form a reservoir for the poison. The device used compressed
air to fire the pellet at short range, circumventing the
problem posed by the heat of a traditional gun barrew.

(38:20):
Investigators believe the pellet was also coated in a sticky
substance designed to melt at the temperature of the human body,
which would then release the poison. That's not something your
average home chemist could pull off. There are cases of
attempted murder using risin, and aside from a few very

(38:41):
high profile assassination attempts, mostly involving the KGB, they seem
to be predominantly crimes of intimacy. They happen in the home. Injection, inhalation,
and ingestion. These are the three routes to rice in poisoning.
Injection is favored by assassins and those taking their own lives.

(39:06):
Inhalation is unpredictable and hard to weaponize. So most of
the stories I could find of someone who is non
lethally but intentionally poisoned with ricin, it was because someone
put it in their food, a husband, a wife, a neighbor,
a mother. I couldn't find any instances where a victim

(39:28):
died from this, but it's possible that they're out there,
and it's just not the kind of thing that shows
up in a DHS report or a bioterrorism medical manual.
So people are giving their husbands kidney failure and diarrhea.
But why did I think this was some kind of superweapon?

(39:49):
I feel like it lives in the same place in
my brain as anthrax, and I know I'm not the
only one, because in twenty thirteen alone, three separate people
and a bunch of letters full of risin trying to
recreate the hysteria of the two thousand and one anthrax letters.
If you're too young to have watched nine to eleven

(40:10):
happen on the TV at school, back in two thousand
and one, letters containing spores of the bacterium basillisanthrasis were
mailed to the offices of several news outlets and to
Senators Tom Dashall and Patrick Lahey. At least twenty two
people developed anthrax infections, and five of them died. Even

(40:32):
if you are too young to remember the amerthrax case
unfolding in real time, the image of mysterious white powder
in an envelope is sort of ubiquitous now. Every police
procedural drama has an episode with poisoned mail, because again,
this was happening just a few weeks after nine to eleven,

(40:54):
and everyone had kind of lost their minds. This incident
rewired our brains to believe that any one of us
could be the victim of a bioterrorism attack, and it
spawned a lot of real world copycat hoaxes. In two
thousand and eight alone, the US Postal Inspection Service responded
to nearly three thousand incidents of suspicious substances sent through

(41:19):
the mail, and a majority of those cases were quote
unknown white powders. From two thousand and seven to two
thousand and eight, the FBI investigated nearly one thousand potential
crimes involving possible biological agents found in conjunction with a
threatening note, and most of those cases, too, were white

(41:39):
powder letters. But they're never real. They're never real. A
guy mailed making powder to the IRS with a letter
that says, here's anthrax, and he spelled anthrax wrong. A
man in the UK mailed protein powder to an MP.
It's sugar or salt or flour. In one case, nine

(42:01):
cops in Florida were hospitalized and held in quarantine because
they found a box of white powder and they assumed
it was a bioweapon. It was cocaine. But the fear
that these incidents cause is real, and that's enough for
most hoaxers. But what if you didn't just want to

(42:21):
do a hoax? What if you wanted to do it
for real? But you don't know how to make anthrax?
A lot of the literature emphasized that it's not hard
to make anthrax. They just mean it's possible for a
non state actor to do. They don't necessarily mean it's
possible for you to do. You need some actual lab

(42:43):
equipment and some specialized skills, at least the kind of
lab skills you would learn in a college level microbiology class.
But ricin rice's easy to make. And if in the
wake of the anthrax letters, white powder is what's scary,
ricin can be a white powder too. It's perfect for

(43:05):
an aspiring terrorist without a lot of skills. So these
are people who are taking an extra step. If they
just wanted to scare people, they could mail powdered sugar
like everybody else. But they went out of their way
to make risin. So they must want something to happen.

(43:25):
They must want someone to get sick. But they don't
seem to realize that ricin doesn't work that way. There's
no evidence that anyone has ever gotten sick from a
ris in letter. And I don't just mean they haven't died.
We've covered that nobody's dying from this. No one's gotten sick.
Unlike anthrax, you can't absorb rising through your skin. It

(43:50):
doesn't work that way. It can cause illness if inhaled,
similar to anthrax, but the home chemist is unlikely to
create a rice in power are fine enough to aerosolize.
To get sick from one of these ris in letters,
you would have to eat it. Surely that people doing

(44:11):
this have some idea how risin works, I mean they
did the research to figure out how to make it.
Surely information about how it works is accessible in a
similar place. It's impossible to say why most of these
people believed something that was just provably scientifically impossible to

(44:32):
result in the intended outcome. But there are some cases,
starting about fifteen years ago, where we do know the
answer to that question, and it's so embarrassing for them.
They saw it on Breaking Bad. Risin was a recurring
plot device for four of the five seasons of the

(44:55):
television show Breaking Bad. If you haven't seen the show,
it's pretty good check it out. Brian Cranston plays Walter White,
a high school chemistry teacher who turns to cooking meth
to pay for his medical bills. Hi Jenson sue, he
gets pretty good at crime. I don't really remember. It's
been a few years. In a season two episode that

(45:16):
aired in March of two thousand and nine, Walter White
is teaching his young assistant Jesse Pinkman, how to make
risin so they can use it to poison a Mexican
drug kingpin. In that episode, the first time Rison appears
in the show. They're really overplaying it. As Walter is
explaining the plan, they're leaning over the table looking at

(45:37):
the beans. Walter slaps Jesse's hand away as he reaches
out to touch them, and Jesse's incredulous and he says, seriously,
you can get poisoned from beans, and Walter tells him
yes again, even the finished product, even once you have
extracted the toxin from the bean, you can probably touch.

(46:01):
You can definitely touch the beans, just don't chew them
up and swallow them. The risin is teased throughout the show,
and there's always this implication that it is the perfect
murder weapon that sprinkling it on someone's food or giving
them a rice and laced cigarette to smoke spells certain death.

(46:23):
In the series finale in twenty thirteen, Walter White kills
a drug smuggler by switching out the sweetener packet that
she puts in her tea for when filled with risin,
and since that episode aired, there have been at least
five cases in which the defendant outright admitted that they
got the idea to purchase, manufacture, or use risin because

(46:46):
they saw it on that show. The make believe meth
dealer on TV told him it was easy, deadly, and
often overlooked as a cause of death because the symptoms
are more easily explained by some ordinary illness. In the
most egregious instance, a thirty seven year old woman in
London went online to purchase ris in just days after

(47:07):
seeing the series finale, and in that episode, Walter White
put risin in a woman's tea. But when Kuntal Patel
logged onto the dark web to try to buy risin,
she was ultimately sold a similar poison called abrin, and
when she received it, she dumped it into her mother's
diet coke. Her mother survived, and Patel got a three

(47:30):
year sentence in the span of just a couple of years.
Ishtiyak Salem in Pennsylvania, Muhammad Ali in Liverpool, Daniel Millsman
in d c and Alexander Jordan in Arkansas all said
they got the idea from the show, and I'm sure
they're not the only ones. In twenty thirteen, in the

(47:54):
middle of Breaking Bad's final season, three separate people in
three entirely unrelated cases made Risin, put it in envelopes
and mailed it to important people. Letters went to a
federal judge, New York City mayor, Mike Bloomberg, the CIA,
an Air Force base, a Mississippi state representative. Two of

(48:18):
the letter writers sent one to Barack Obama. Obviously, no
one got hurt. You can't get sick from a rice
In letter. And I can't prove that Matthew Buquette, James Douciki,
or Shannon Richardson were Breaking Bad fans, But come on,

(48:38):
I think I'd be willing to put money on the
fact that Shannon Richardson at least was watching the show,
because I know she loved Prestige TV. She was an actress,
she'd had a small role as one of the zombies
on The Walking Dead. And I don't think she actually
wanted to poison Michael Bloomberg or Barack Obama. She was

(49:01):
trying to get rid of her husband. I don't know
why she didn't just poison her husband. This seems very elaborate,
but she was in the middle of a divorce and
I guess she wanted to speed things along, so she
manufactured rice and in her kitchen, mailed it to the president,
and then called the police to say she thought her
husband had done it. She is, of course, in federal prison.

(49:29):
By twenty nineteen, William Christopher Gibbs was home, his ordeal
was over, his case was dropped. He filed a number
of lawsuits against various law enforcement agencies involved in this,
but they were all incoherent and quickly dismissed. In twenty
twenty one, the Pontifex Maximus of the Creativity Alliance hosted

(49:52):
in the group's online forum that Gibbs had been excommunicated
from the church. It's not totally clear why they waited
until twenty twenty one. Again, he was arrested in twenty seventeen,
but Reverend Colin Campbell's list of reasons was as follows,
insufficient explanation for the use of beans that make risin

(50:16):
use of titles he is not authorized to use, Reverend
Pontifex and Pontifex Maximus. General disobedience is a prospective church
member use of Arian brotherhood imagery without authorization and for
personal gain, usage of outlaw motorcycle club names without authorization
and for personal gain, attempting to declare wars in the

(50:38):
name of Creativity against outlaw motorcycle clubs. Okay, so he
does start out with the beans. There's a little bit
in there about how really he should have had a
good reason for making ricin. They're not saying he shouldn't
have made ricin, they just want clarification on why he

(50:59):
was doing that. But everything else on this list, this
is overwhelmingly just made up stuff. It's weird Nazi church stuff.
They're mad that he called himself a reverend in the
Nazi Church when he wasn't really a reverend. He pretended
to be the pope of Nazi Church online. He posted

(51:20):
things online that might make people think he was more important,
more involved than he really was, or involved with people
or groups that he wasn't. Honestly, I think the worst
thing on this list is that he was trying to
start fights with motorcycle clubs in the name of the church.
Nobody wants that heat. Even though he is officially excommunicated

(51:43):
from the Creativity Alliance, he's made quite a few posts
in the last four years that indicate he's still an
adherent of Creativity, that godless religion of white supremacy. He
still calls himself Pontefec's Maximus. Sometimes he'll post rahoa every
now and again, but he also posts Crowley and sigels

(52:03):
and snippets of the Necronomicon, and sometimes what appeared to
be Christian prayers, and earlier this year he posted his
last will and testament, in which he names Kim Jong
un the executor of his estate. So hard to say
what he believes. We'll probably never know why he was

(52:25):
making risin in his car between shifts at the chicken plant.
It wasn't really enough to hurt anybody, even if he'd
tried to use it, although the fact that he panicked
and went to the hospital seems to indicate that he
didn't know that. If I had to guess, and I shouldn't.

(52:46):
If he did plan to do anything with it, it
was probably what most people do with it. They hurt
someone close to them. Congress accidentally legalized risin for fifteen years,
and the only two people who benefited from that mistake
were a confused racist in Georgia who spilled it in

(53:07):
his car, and a man in Arkansas who changed his
mind about ending his life. There's no moral to this story.
Just don't eat your mail and don't chew on any
mysterious beans. Weird Little Guys is a correction of Coolzo

(53:42):
Media and iHeartRadio. It's researched, written and recorded by me,
Molly Conker. Our executive producers are Sovie Looked Mean and
Narbert Dans. The show is edited by the wildly talented
Mary Gigan. The females is composed by Brad Dickert. You
can email me at Weird Little Guys podcast at gmail
dot com. I will definitely read it, but I probably
won't answer. It's nothing personal. You can exchange conspiracy theories

(54:03):
about the show with other listeners on the Weird Little
Guys sub reddit. Just don't post anything that's going to
make you one of my Weird Little Guys

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