A Life Wasted

The Ultimate Deception

I was sitting in a motel room just north of Atlanta when the news story hit about the reporter with American Media in Florida being killed from exposure to anthrax that had been mailed to him. Hearing about this brought to mind what I had read about past attacks against abortion clinics. Several years earlier there had been a few white powder anthrax threat letters sent to clinics. Those letters lacked creditability, yet they were enough to close the clinics for a day. With the first real death from mailed anthrax in the news I could see how a powder laced threat sent now would cause a stir.

I went to staples and purchased a CD-ROM business directory, a printer, a box of plastic gloves, and several boxes of #10 envelopes. At a post office I bought 1,000 first class stamps, and from a grocery store a pound of white flower and a supply of brown bags. Using this directory, I created a list of every abortion clinic on the eastern seaboard and printed these addresses on the envelopes. For a return address I used the United States Marshals Service on some of them because they provide federal level security to abortion clinics and US Secret Service on others just to mix it up. I printed "Open Immediately, Time Sensitive Security Information," on the bottom of the envelope.

I had also written a long threat letter, too long a letter but I am known to be long winded. I printed this letter several times before realizing it would take too long to print, so I found a Kinko's to make copies. A thousand copies is a lot to make so a friendly clerk offered to help. Before I could stop him he picked up one of the copies and read the bold letters, "Why you are going to die." He said, "Wooo," and put it back. Seeing that he was alarmed I laughed and said, "You think that will get their attention?" I briefly explained that I sold life insurance, so the idea was to go for a shock effect. He seemed to buy it because he didn't call the police.

I used a hair net and gloves the entire time. I was careful to not leave any forensic evidence down to using bottled water on a sponge to seal the envelopes. Bottled water so they couldn't figure out where the tap water originated. I worked hard through the night, watching the news the whole time to keep up with events related to the anthrax investigation. I separated the letters by geographic location, putting all the southern addressed ones in separate paper bags to be mailed from Atlanta, and ones from Tennessee, and the middle states in another bag, then divided up the northern states the same way. My plan was to wait until the last pickup on Friday night then drop the southern addressed envelopes in an Atlanta area mail box, then drive north and repeat the process matching the area sent to the destination area as close as I could.

To keep this straight and to prevent putting my finger prints or DNA on any of the envelopes I put the envelopes in brown paper bags and wrote the area they were to be mailed from on the outside of the bag. This way I could upend the paper bag into the mail box and keep the paper bag. I would start in Atlanta and work my way north to Ohio, mailing my powder laced threats along the way.

While doing this and watching the news a postal investigator was asked if anthrax was a threat to postal workers. He said no, that powdered anthrax in a sealed envelope would not come out. Shortly after he said this I picked up one of my paper bags filled with powder laced envelopes. Inadvertently I squeezed the bag and white flower flew into the air. I knew then that the postal inspector was wrong about the anthrax.

That Friday night as I started my mail run I remember hoping that the anthrax thing would survive the weekend news cycle so that it would still be on everyone's mind when my mail hit. By Monday real anthrax had been found mailed to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschal and numerous members of congress as well as several news organizations. So Wednesday when my letters arrived at their destinations, the real mailed anthrax was the largest news story of the month. I sent 580 letters, but only 280 reached the intended address. That weekend thousands of letters were destroyed by the postal service because of positive anthrax readings from the batch. Some of my letters containing harmless flour were cross contaminated with the real anthrax letters which caused positive readings for anthrax when they were opened by the clinics so 300 of my letters were in that group.