Amerithrax (34 page)

“He shot the baby in the bassinet and took the baby with him. He also attempted to drink blood by eviscerating the female of that family—the mother, an eight-year-old boy, the grandpa, and the infant. Only the female was mutilated, mutilation of course postmortem. He was compelled by his delusions to do what he did. Enough people put him with the profile to point the police in the right area. They did some background. They watched him carefully, then they made an anonymous phone call one night. ‘Hey, Richard, the police have surrounded you and they’re coming to get you,’ and just hung up the phone. He had no idea who was calling. What do you think he did? He hung up the phone. His door opens and they watch him run out with a box. He trips and out of the box is tons of evidence from both crimes. This is the best example of profiling doing what it should do.”

DeLong was anxious to see what the Amerithrax profile would look like.

Between July 1976 and August 1977, a serial killer stalked New York lovers’ lanes and byways. He shot thir- teen young men and women. In a letter to the police he christened himself the Son of Sam. David Berkowitz, who worked as a mailman, was the killer. He sent letters to New York columnist Jimmie Breslin that included clues to his whereabouts and identity, even his motive. Son of Sam called himself “the Wicked King Wicker.” Berkowitz lived on Wicker Street and his neighbor Sam’s dog supposedly told him to kill.

In the Bay Area Zodiac case, the hooded killer’s long series of letters eventually became his motive in a cat-and- mouse game with the police, a game of outdoor chess.

Not a few of history’s mail-writing monsters were men

of science. One such was Jack the Ripper, who penned at least two taunting letters to the press (many were copycat letters written by the press themselves). Jack was thought to be a doctor because of the anatomical knife work he did on his victims. His eviscerations showed at least a rudimentary knowledge of medicine. Dr. James Gull, the Queen’s phy- sician, was a leading suspect in the Ripper case. Dr. Neil Creme, another Ripper suspect, enjoyed sending his victims poison and imagining their death throes.

Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, was a doctor of science, a brilliant mathematician who mailed bombs to his compet- itors in the computer field. He used stamps with a symbolic meaning known only to himself and bought in bulk years before his crimes began. He manufactured his own bomb components, made his own chemicals, and stripped the store-bought batteries of their metal coverings so they could not be traced back to him.

In the annals of the U.S. Postal Inspectors, those stalwart eyes and ears of the post office, is a case in which batteries tripped up a mail bomber who was also a doctor. One of the great successful hunts for a murderer by mail and one of the postal inspectors’ triumphs, the story went like this:

In 1957 rules for handling unexploded bombs in transit called for immersing them in oil, not water. In some explo- sives, calcium phosphide is present and phosphine gas is formed when water strikes it. As soon as this gas reaches air it bursts into flames and sets off the bomb. Oil eliminates this hazard, as well as a short circuit touching off electrical detonators or igniting fulminate of mercury caps.

Curry Thomas, a socially prominent Cape Charles planter, stopped at the post office to pick up a package, a belated wedding gift. Before he and his wife reached home, he untied the parcel, removed the paper wrapping, and raised the lid of a strong corrugated carton. His wife glimpsed a small mousetrap inside. She heard a snap, then a crackling noise. “Throw the package out the car window!” she screamed. When dynamite in sections of pipe sealed with iron end caps detonated, the force turned the steel to shrap- nel, which exploded in every direction. Neighbors a mile

away heard the blast. Curry died instantly, and his wife was rushed to the hospital.

Postal inspectors B. B. Webb, J. E. Sentman, and C. H. Burrows of the Washington, D.C., division caught the case. They fine-combed the wreckage of the death car and rooted out a tiny coil of wire from a mousetrap, small fragments of steel pipe, iron caps resembling shrapnel, tiny pieces of corrugated pasteboard that had housed the mousetrap-type bomb, a loop of twine, a two-inch piece of wire, and a torn fragment from the label of a dry-cell battery. It was marked “—dio ‘C’ battery” and “—atteries, Inc.” Decades later, the Unabomber would go as far as manufacturing his own tools and parts from scrap so they would be untraceable.

The postal inspector’s job was to find out the source of the materials and who had purchased them. They fabricated an exact replica of the unexploded package and showed it around post offices. They hoped an alert clerk might rec- ognize the kind of wrapping paper and string used on the parcel or recall whether a gummed sticker was used or the exact position of stamps affixed to the parcel. Anything they could learn would be a help.

The clerk at the Cape Charles post office did recall the package had been postmarked Richmond, Virginia, and of course the name of the sender. He’d thought it odd that sender and addressee had identical names. So did the in- spectors. There was no “C. F. Thomas” living in Richmond. Since Mrs. Thomas still could not talk, Webb began a search for a motive.

Webb learned that Dr. Hege, a prominent (and married) dentist in Mount Airy, North Carolina, had been smitten with Mrs. Thomas before her marriage. When she met Curry Thomas at a party, Dr. Hege refused to accept that he had lost her. He broke down and cried when her proposed mar- riage was discussed. Hege deluged her with special-delivery letters saying, “If I can’t have you, no one else can.”

Hege and his wife attended the wedding, but he didn’t kiss the bride. The postal inspectors interviewed the bespec- tacled dentist with a reputation for “quiet respectability.” During their second talk with Hege, he denied his jealousy, but admitted sending special-delivery letters. However, he

had an alibi for the day the bomb was mailed from Rich- mond, 250 miles from Mount Airy. Dr. Hege claimed he and a friend, Ed, left Mount Airy at 6:00 a.m. on the day of the mailing for a two-day fishing trip. They traveled through the mountains by way of Hillsville, Galax, and Fries Road Junction in Virginia. They reached a fishing camp on the New River on the North Carolina side of the state line between 3:00 and 4:00 p.m. Ed insisted to Webb that he and Dr. Hege did not visit Richmond. The fishing camp owner corroborated his story. Webb, Burrows, and Sentman were still not satisfied. The friend’s version too closely followed Dr. Hege’s. No one had seen them from the time they left Mount Airy until they reached the fishing camp.

Finally the inspectors traced the torn battery label to a Cleveland firm. It had come from a dry-cell radio battery of a type sold only to hardware stores. Five sales of such bat- teries had been made in North Carolina, one to a Mount Airy hardware store located on the ground floor of the build- ing that housed Dr. Hege’s office. The hardware proprietor didn’t recall selling such a battery to Dr. Hege, but one clerk remembered selling him two sticks of dynamite. Dr. Hege had told him he was buying it for his brother, a farmer. At a plumbing firm, Dr. Hege had purchased two steel nipples, two pieces of iron pipe five inches in length, and four iron caps for the pipe. He had paid in cash and no record of the transaction existed.

A rope firm in Auburn, New York, recognized the loop of twine used to secure the parcel as their product. A ship- ment had gone to a dental supply house at Winston-Salem which had included some of the twine in a mailing of dental supplies to Dr. Hege less than a week before the bomb mur- der. Dr. Hege was their only customer in Mount Airy.

Mrs. Thomas, now speaking from her hospital bed, re- fused to speculate on who mailed the bomb, but did describe the parcel and its measurements. Postal inspector G. T. Bleakley, an expert in reconstructing dummy packages, set to work. He tied his replica at both ends with a loop of twine similar to that recovered at the scene of the bombing. Bleakley pasted white typewritten address stickers on the face of the parcel so it looked just like the original. He

exhibited the dummy to all receiving clerks employed at the main post office in Richmond and at six classified stations. None recalled accepting a similar package at any time.

Next Bleakley showed the replica at the various contract stations throughout Richmond, stations set up in stores for the convenience of the public in outlying districts. Many years later the Unabomber would use such stations to avoid detection when he mailed his bombs. At Station No. 22, located in a city dry-goods store, the clerk recollected ac- cepting a package like Bleakley’s. It weighed nine pounds, carried the name “Thomas” in its return address, and was addressed to a “Thomas” at Cape Charles. His description of the sender matched that of Dr. Hege. Later Bleakley lo- cated other witnesses who had seen the dentist in the area. When Dr. Hege was arrested, he berated the postal inspec- tors for being fools. “Do you really think you have anything against me?” he said. When Webb briefly outlined their case, Hege lapsed into sullen silence.

A confession wasn’t needed. Hege’s friend, Ed, and the fishing camp owner confessed to false statements as to the time of Dr. Hege’s arrival at the camp. They had reached the camp early in the evening, not late in the afternoon. Ed admitted that Dr. Hege
did
stop several times en route to open the trunk and check tools he thought were rattling. After parking in the Richmond business district, he stopped at the dry-goods store. Before entering, Dr. Hege looked into the trunk once again, but Ed didn’t think he took anything into the store, though he wasn’t watching him closely. When he returned twenty minutes later, Hege gave him no reason for going into the store. Leaving Richmond, they headed for the fishing camp at high speed to make up for lost time.

The case never came to trial. Dr. Hege committed suicide in his cell by cutting an artery in his wrist, slashing his arms, and severing his jugular vein with a broken lens from his eyeglasses. Mrs. Thomas, crippled for life as a result of the explosion, left Cape Charles to take up residence elsewhere.

Return to Sender

ON
November 8, 2001, a senior official confided that though a few to a half-dozen individuals had been aggres- sively investigated, federal investigators had so far ferreted out no one who could remotely be deemed a serious suspect in the anthrax mailings. “Still, the more you are out there, the more things bubble up,” the official said. But when re- porters asked if recent news reports of a possible Amerithrax suspect were true, the official replied, “I only wish that was true. We run out every lead and we give these people a real hard look and real hard shake before we take them off the screen. There have been people who we have placed a little higher priority on than others. But then they fall off.”

In the weeks after the attacks, agents tried to cobble to- gether a psychological profile of Amerithrax. Foreign ter- rorist? Disgruntled scientist? A member of Al Qaeda? Had some lunatic used a vial of anthrax developed in the former Soviet Union or Iraq? When several promising leads came up short the FBI turned to profiling, at best “a rough sci- ence.”

The Amerithrax profile, called a “behavioral assessment” by the FBI, was released in a briefing on November 9. “I was back East when the Bureau profile of the Anthrax Killer came out,” said former FBI profiler Candice DeLong, “and so MSNBC had me all day. I was sitting in the chair com- menting. I thought that particular profile was weak. I was embarrassed when this profile came out. I was embarrassed to say I was an FBI profiler. Anybody who had been paying attention to the case could have come up with that. There

really haven’t been a lot of really good profiles come out of Quantico since John Douglas and Hazel Wood left. Sorry to say it but it’s true.

“[This profile] is taking what we know about Kaczynski after he was caught and applying those behaviors to the Anthrax Killer. Kaczynski, as we know, was nonconfron- tational one-on-one. He would be passive-aggressive in his criminal behavior and send his bomb through the mail. This profile is applying that concept to the Anthrax Killer and I don’t necessarily agree with it. I can’t see that at all. I went over the profile again and once again I found myself laugh- ing. It’s probably the weakest profile ever put out by the FBI and they should be embarrassed. They should be em- barrassed.”

The attacks were carried out by someone with access to a well-equipped lab—a scientist—someone who might work for the government. The anthrax was finely produced to spread quickly through the air, not the sort of thing an am- ateur could create. Experts suggested how Amerithrax might have gotten around this. He could have hired on at a lab, as a student or technician, and gotten a starter culture.

“We all use student workers who are eighteen or nine- teen,” says Martin Hugh-Jones of Louisiana State Univer- sity. “Most of them don’t even have any background you can check.” For decades the government had imposed greater security restrictions on nuclear scientists than on sci- entists in the biodefense field. More vetting was required to operate a school bus than to work with dangerous pathogens like anthrax. But if Amerithrax was a
psychopath
, that could create difficulties: for psychopaths are skillful at concealing their true personality.