Episode 2: Martha’s Not Crazy

Summary

Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer
Episode 2: Martha’s Not Crazy
Release Date: April 2, 2025
Hosts: Wolf Entertainment + CBC

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Introduction: A Fateful Sample

“He couldn't have known then what would happen decades later, the murder and mayhem and national panic that sample will cause when it falls into the wrong hands.”
— Jeremiah Kroll [02:08]

The episode opens by tracing the origins of the anthrax attacks to a seemingly innocuous event in May 1981. Veterinarian Mike Vickers responds to a troubling call from a large ranch in South Texas, where two heifers have died under mysterious and gruesome circumstances. Unbeknownst to Mike, the biological sample he sends to a veterinary lab will later become central to one of the FBI's most perplexing investigations.

The 2001 Anthrax Outbreak: Panic Post-9/11

On October 3, 2001, just a day after the September 11 attacks, a new terror grips the nation as Dr. Larry Bush, chief of staff at a Florida hospital, diagnoses a patient with anthrax. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) confirms the diagnosis, igniting widespread fear.

"There's more media in the area because things are leaking out than you can imagine. The parking lot's full of every type of media there is."
— Larry Bush [03:51]

The nation, still reeling from the Twin Towers' destruction, finds itself vulnerable to the fear of biological attacks. Hospitals become inundated with patients exhibiting symptoms that could potentially be linked to anthrax, heightening paranoia and uncertainty.

FBI's Initial Investigation: Al Qaeda as the Prime Suspect

In the immediate aftermath, the FBI zeroes in on Al Qaeda as the likely perpetrator behind the anthrax attacks. Agent Scott Decker reveals that the FBI recognizes the anthrax strain as a laboratory type, complicating the investigation.

"The worst case scenario would be somebody had produced a pound of dried anthrax powder, very fine, that could take out hundreds and thousands of people. If done properly."
— Gene Malecki [08:20]

Dr. Paul Keim, a trusted scientist, identifies the anthrax strain as the Ames strain—a robust and highly concentrated variant originally sourced from Texas in 1981. This revelation expands the pool of suspects to numerous laboratories possessing the coveted strain, making the investigation labyrinthine.

Connecting the Dots: AMI Building and Potential Links to Hijackers

As the investigation unfolds, a breakthrough emerges linking the anthrax infections to the American Media Incorporated (AMI) building in Boca Raton, Florida. Two victims, Robert Stevens and Ernesto Blanco, both AMI employees, succumb to inhalation anthrax, suggesting a localized source of exposure.

"She said, do you read all the stuff we're writing about the people who did 9/11, all the stuff we write about them? I said, no."
— Larry Bush [06:20]

An alarming lead surfaces when a letter addressed to pop star Jennifer Lopez contains a Star of David and white powder. This envelope, examined by Robert Stevens, becomes a critical piece of evidence tying the anthrax to potential mail-based dissemination.

Furthermore, initial suspicions that Al Qaeda might be behind the attacks are reinforced when FBI agents trace connections between the anthrax victims and the 9/11 hijackers, some of whom resided near the AMI building. However, these connections soon prove misleading.

Disproven Links and Shifting Focus

Despite the early focus on Al Qaeda, extensive environmental sampling and DNA testing reveal no evidence of anthrax in the hijackers’ residences or vehicles.

"We subjected all of those samples to vigorous testing, and none of the samples that we tested in our laboratory resulted in a positive result."
— Scott Decker [34:42]

This dead end forces the FBI to reconsider their initial theories, recognizing that the anthrax attack may not be connected to the broader terrorist network in the way they had presumed. Gene Malecki reflects on the investigation's trajectory:

"My theory is that when Mueller and Ashkoff made public the fact that the hijackers lived in South Florida around Boca Raton, that our mailer, anthrax mailer, purposely sent letters to Boca Raton to make us think it was Al Qaeda."
— Gene Malecki [35:48]

Expanding the Crisis: Anthrax Anxiety Spreads

As the investigation intensifies, the presence of anthrax at the AMI building suggests a possible mail-based attack, which raises concerns about widespread contamination across the United States. Firefighters and emergency responders are inundated with reports of suspicious substances, leading to mass quarantines and public hysteria.

"The building shut down and the company's 300 employees told not to come to work after traces of anthrax were found in the nasal passages of a second employee."
— Jeremiah Kroll [30:15]

Public Health Lab Director Segrin Pillai faces the daunting task of screening thousands for exposure, all while managing the ongoing contamination within AMI.

Conclusion: A Misguided Chase and Unresolved Mysteries

By October 11, 2001, the FBI acknowledges the lack of evidence connecting the anthrax attacks to Al Qaeda. The investigation reveals that the anthrax letters were likely the work of an individual outside the terrorist organization, leaving many questions unanswered.

"We beat that dog to death."
— Gene Malecki [35:26]

The episode concludes by highlighting the complexities and challenges faced by the FBI, emphasizing the difficulties in distinguishing coincidences from genuine leads in high-stakes investigations.

"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."
— Gene Malecki [36:56]

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Notable Quotes:

• “He couldn’t have known then what would happen decades later…”
  — Jeremiah Kroll [02:08]

• “There’s more media in the area because things are leaking out than you can imagine.”
  — Larry Bush [03:51]

• “The worst case scenario would be somebody had produced a pound of dried anthrax powder…”
  — Gene Malecki [08:20]

• “We subjected all of those samples to vigorous testing, and none of the samples that we tested in our laboratory resulted in a positive result.”
  — Scott Decker [34:42]

• “We beat that dog to death.”
  — Gene Malecki [35:26]

This episode of Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer masterfully weaves together declassified materials, firsthand accounts, and expert analysis to unravel the intricate and often frustrating investigation into the anthrax attacks. It underscores the profound impact such events have on national psyche and security protocols, while also highlighting the persistent gaps in intelligence and forensic technology of the time.

Transcript

[Kathleen Goldhar]

While there are plenty of toxic social media personalities, few are as vicious and influential as Andrew Tate online. He brags about being a misogynist, and his videos have been viewed billions of times. Now Tate and his brother are under investigation for human trafficking. I'm Kathleen Goldhar, and this week on Crime Story, I speak with two journalists who spent four years inside Andrew Tate's manosphere. Find Crime Story wherever you get your podcasts.

[Jeremiah Kroll]

This is a CBC podcast. I want to go back for a moment to an early spring morning more than 40 years ago, because that morning, in a way, is how this whole story begins. It's 1981. It's a breezy May morning in South Texas. A veterinarian is driving his truck through the green shrubbery and straight farm roads that he's grown up around. His name is Mike Vickers, and Mike has a mystery to solve this morning. He's treated a lot of sick animals in his day, but this call is different.

[Mike Vickers]

One of my clients called me. This is a big ranch. They had about 900 cows, and he had two heifers die pretty close together, you know, and he was real concerned about that.

[Jeremiah Kroll]

As Mike drives toward those dead cows, he doesn't know exactly what to expect. He arrives at the ranch, meets up with a farmer, and they head out about five miles into scrubland.

[Mike Vickers]

I followed him out to where this. Both of these heifers died, and both of them, of course, down here in the hot sun, they were already bloated, but they had the blood coming from the nose and the mouth and the eyes.

[Jeremiah Kroll]

It's a gruesome scene. Mike crouches down right up close to the dead cows and takes a careful look at them. He knows then what he has to do, and he slowly cuts into one of the cows.

[Mike Vickers]

I opened that cow up, and all of a sudden there's this BlackBerry jam spleen, and I just kind of wilt it because I recognized it as very lethal and, you know, very dangerous.

[Jeremiah Kroll]

He could tell that both cows are affected by this strange infection. So Mike reaches inside one of them and takes out a biological sample. He carefully packages up the sample to take with him before he leaves. He tells the rancher to build a big, very hot fire and to burn the carcasses. Mike Vickers drives home and mails that sample to a veterinary lab. He couldn't have known then what would happen decades later, the murder and mayhem and national panic that sample will cause when it falls into the wrong hands. I'm Jeremiah Kroll, and from Wolf Entertainment, this is the hunt for the anthem anthrax killer episode 2 Martha's not crazy it's October 3rd, 2001. One day now since Dr. Larry Bush diagnosed his patient with anthrax. The Centers for Disease Control has just confirmed the diagnosis of anthrax in a patient in a Florida hospital.

[Larry Bush]

Bob Stevens is in the icu. He's not doing well. The hospital's aware. The local health department's on the scene. The state health department's coming down. The CDC is on their way.

[Jeremiah Kroll]

Dr. Larry Bush is feeling immense pressure. He's the chief of staff of the hospital in West Palm Beach, Florida, and he can't seem to stop his patients health from deteriorating. Stevens is now in a coma and the nation is in a panic.

[Kathleen Goldhar]

A deadly disease putting a lantana man in the hospital and creating a scare. In South Florida.

[Larry Bush]

There's more media in the area because things are leaking out than you can imagine. The parking lot's full of every type of media there is. The hospital is going crazy. People are calling the hospital and want their loved ones transferred because we have anthrax. Everybody who has a cough or fever is showing up in the ER now, right with anthrax, so to speak.

[Jeremiah Kroll]

It's easy to forget now what was happening in the American psyche at this moment. Just weeks before this, thousands of people had died in an attack that had previously seemed unimaginable. Before then, Americans had felt like terrorist attacks happened somewhere over there, not at home. The feeling after 911 was if that attack was possible here, literally anything was possible. So the panic or even paranoia that set in around this new attack felt reasonable. And Larry, just like everyone else, doesn't know if this one case of anthrax is a random one off or if there are going to be hundreds or even thousands of other people getting sick. So he has to take everyone who shows up seriously, no matter what their symptoms are, which means he's seeing a lot of patients.

[Larry Bush]

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.

[Gene Malecki]

You're.

[Larry Bush]

You're calling me for every cough that's walking in there. I said, why this one? They said, this woman's got an interesting story. So I go down to the ER and I meet Martha and I said, okay, Martha. I look at her history, I examine her, I look at her X ray and her lab work and I say, martha, I think you have a cold. I said, I don't think you have anthrax. I don't even think you're really sick. But I said, but why are you really here, Martha? Why are you really here? She said, I'm very concerned about where I work. I said, where do you work? She says, I work at ami.

[Jeremiah Kroll]

Ami? That's American Media Incorporated. It's a newspaper publisher. They print tabloids, most famously the National Enquirer. You know, the one in the checkout aisle at the supermarket that's got alien visitation stories and celebrity gossip? Yeah, that one and a few others like it. AMI is also the place where anthrax patient Robert Stevens works.

[Larry Bush]

She says, do you read all the stuff we're writing about the people who did 9 11, all the stuff we write about them? I said, no. She says, I think they're upset with us. I said, you think they read the National Enquirer?

[Jeremiah Kroll]

It sounded a bit ridiculous. Terrorists attacked her company just because it published bad stories about them. To Larry, it doesn't make much sense. At least not yet. As panic rises in Florida and now around the country, the White House is forced to call a press conference. Good afternoon. Before I begin the briefing, I just want to, for a few brief moments, introduce you to Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson. Remember, the last person in America who got critically sick from breathing in anthrax was a weaver who'd been working with contaminated wool from Pakistan who then died. So the press had questions. We don't know that at this point in time, that's entirely possible.

[Kathleen Goldhar]

Did you find out about it?

[Gene Malecki]

Did he go into the hospital?

[Jeremiah Kroll]

He went to the hospital. Was this inhalation anthrax? Was this fellow a hunter? It appears at this point in time, it's inhalation. Do we know if he was a hunter? We don't know that. We know he was an outdoorsman. The fear behind these questions is if there's no natural cause to pin this on, then it seems likely the country is under attack again by Al Qaeda. And the FBI has the same fear.

[Gene Malecki]

The FBI and others thought that Al Qaeda was behind this. We had no proof. We had a high suspicion, but no proof that it was an intentional act. That is terrorism.

[Jeremiah Kroll]

Agent Scott Decker and the FBI know something the White House isn't prepared to talk about yet. That this anthrax is a lab strain. But where that lab strain came from and who would have had access to it is still unknown. And the FBI knows that every second that ticks by, things could get a lot worse.

[Gene Malecki]

The worst case scenario would be somebody had produced a pound of dried anthrax powder, very fine, that could take out hundreds and thousands of people. If Done properly.

[Jeremiah Kroll]

Agent Decker had now been moved from New York back to FBI headquarters at the J. Edgar Hoover Building in downtown D.C. he soon began to work the anthrax case full time, trying to figure out how a photo editor for a tabloid newspaper in Florida came into contact with anthrax.

[Gene Malecki]

We didn't know why he was targeted. I mean, he could have pissed somebody off. We didn't know. We have to keep an open mind.

[Jeremiah Kroll]

Part of keeping an open mind in this case means thinking about all the ways Stevens could have been infected. So the FBI has to find out all it can about that lab strain. Like could an Al Qaeda lab make it? Agents go to their trusted scientist in Arizona, Paul Keim, to find out. He's the one who figured out it was a lab strain to begin with.

[Paul Keim]

This was not a natural strain that occurred just randomly around the United States or in Florida in particular. This was a laboratory strain. And that was sobering.

[Jeremiah Kroll]

Paul thinks that the way the anthrax infected Stevens might help reveal where it came from. It infected his lungs, so he didn't drink it or touch it. Somehow Robert Stevens breathed it.

[Paul Keim]

And that's unusual. Most cases of anthrax are what we call cutaneous. You get it from handling material like hides or wool, and then you get a skin type of infection.

[Jeremiah Kroll]

For Stevens to have breathed it in, the anthrax must have been made to be as light and dry as possible so that it could just float in the air. And that tells Paul a lot.

[Paul Keim]

Inhalation is the way that biological weapons are developed and deployed.

[Jeremiah Kroll]

It makes sense. Biological weapons are designed for maximum reach. The more particles you can get to stay in the air, the more people you'll infect. That process is called aerosolization. So if Paul can figure out which labs have the ability to do that, to aerosolize anthrax, it'll help the FBI eliminate some of them from their list. But before he does that, Paul needs to pinpoint the particular strain of this anthrax to see which labs even use it. And when he does, his heart sinks.

[Paul Keim]

This was a particular type of Bacillus anthracis. And that particular type was the Ames strain.

[Jeremiah Kroll]

The Ames strain. If you're in the infectious disease business, you know this strain, the Ames strain, got its name from a lab in Ames, Iowa. It was sent there after infecting thousands of livestock in the Southwest.

[Paul Keim]

As it turns out, the Ames strain came from Texas.

[Jeremiah Kroll]

It had come from a biological sample taken from a dead cow. Remember that veterinarian back in Texas, Mike Vickers?

[Mike Vickers]

The organism that showed up after 911 was from a cow that I autopsied in 1981.

[Jeremiah Kroll]

And 30 years later, that organism, now called Ames, was known to be robust and highly concentrated. That made it ideal for testing vaccines and figuring out its military potential.

[Paul Keim]

Every laboratory in the world wanted to have access to the Ames strain. And so that strain had been distributed to multiple laboratories in the United States, foreign laboratories.

[Jeremiah Kroll]

So now all of those laboratories around the world are suspects. And on top of that, there was.

[Paul Keim]

No inventory of the laboratories that had the AIM strain. We didn't know how many laboratories in the country or in the world had it.

[Jeremiah Kroll]

We, the FBI now has to create that inventory from scratch, asking each lab to submit the anthrax they've got. But Paul considers another approach. He thinks he might be able to figure out what lab this anthrax came from by reverse engineering. Because making anthrax is a bit like making sourdough from a starter. You make the mother batch, and then other batches get made from that batch. All of those subsequent batches are largely made of the same stuff, but as they develop, there are subtle mutations between them. So in theory, if Paul could find the genetic differences that set this anthrax apart from the mother batch of AIM strain, the FBI could trace its origins back to a unique and specific batch somewhere in a specific lab. But these differences are so tiny, Paul would need a microscopic map of the anthrax's DNA, a kind of genetic fingerprint to tell any of the variants apart. And in the fall of 2001, that technology simply doesn't exist yet.

[Paul Keim]

Nobody had done this before because it was just prohibitively expensive.

[Jeremiah Kroll]

Prohibitively expensive and technologically impossible. This has got to be frustrating. You know, there's a specific thing you can do to figure out who the killer is. You just don't know how to do that thing yet. So Paul and the FBI get to work inventing this technology. It'll take years. So for now, the FBI is stuck with old school on the ground investigative techniques, Chasing down leads and paper trails to figure out which labs could have put anthrax in nefarious hands. And there's one suspect on the top of their list.

[Paul Keim]

And in the wake of 9 11, al Qaeda was the number one suspect. And so all of us were thinking that this was a biological attack carried out by Al Qaeda.

[Jeremiah Kroll]

The idea that anthrax found its way out of a lab by accident in the weeks after 9 11, it just doesn't feel likely. But did Al Qaeda even have Ames? There's only one clue about that, and it's helpful and perplexing.

[Paul Keim]

There was no linkage of that strain to the Middle east or to Al Qaeda. But we also knew the controls over the laboratories were, were light. In other words, it would have been possible for a scientist to walk into a laboratory and walk out with one of these strains.

[Jeremiah Kroll]

If someone did walk out with Ames, did they give it to Al Qaeda? At this point, no one knows. But there's one thing Paul does know for sure.

[Paul Keim]

When you get those spores deep into your lungs, it progresses to systemic or body wide disease very rapidly and very catastrophically. The vast majority of people who get inhalational anthrax will die. And so that was chilling to know that we were handling a sample of an individual likely to die of anthrax.

[Jeremiah Kroll]

That individual, Robert Stevens back in Florida, wasn't doing well. He was still in a coma and now having an increasingly difficult time breathing. And the health officials trying to understand what had happened to him were operating in the dark.

[Segrin Pillai]

All we knew was that we had a man who couldn't speak to us, who was dying in a hospital. That's all we knew.

[Jeremiah Kroll]

Gene Malecki, the health director of Palm beach county who'd first reported this case to the cdc, is now on high alert for more cases of anthrax.

[Segrin Pillai]

I had physicians who called to notify hospitals, emergency rooms, private doctors, et cetera, to get as much information as possible about people who could potentially touch the system.

[Jeremiah Kroll]

Jean's doctors are asking for leads on patients with anomalies, strange health incidents, anything that might suggest more cases of anthrax or some clues about how Robert Stevens got infected. And she gets a hit.

[Segrin Pillai]

An emergency room doctor contacted one of the physicians that was working with me in the emergency operating room center.

[Jeremiah Kroll]

And this doctor says that he thinks it's possible he'd seen a case of anthrax a little before 9 11. No one had heard this yet. And if it's true, it's major news. Gene immediately brings in the FBI.

[Gene Malecki]

The doctor in South Florida recalled that he treated this guy for an ulcer on his leg, an open sore.

[Jeremiah Kroll]

The doctor says in June he'd had two men from the Middle east visit his ER in Fort Lauderdale. One of them had a dark lesion on his left calf about an inch wide with raised edges that were red. The man claimed he'd bumped his leg. The doctor thought the wound was unusual, maybe some kind of infected bruise, but he didn't think much of it. He treated it and gave the man a prescription for antibiotics. Yet now with anthrax in the news, he's thinking the man's leg injury looked a lot like an anthrax infection, the kind you get from touching it.

[Gene Malecki]

Anthrax. The disease is caused by the bacteria Bacillus anthracis. Anthracis is a Greek word for black or coal. Because if you get cutaneous anthrax, your skin in that area turns black. And I guess the doctor looked at some pictures of cutaneous anthrax and said, boy, that sure looks the same to me.

[Jeremiah Kroll]

There's something else concerning. The men in the emergency room had identified themselves as pilots.

[Gene Malecki]

The doctor who had looked at him went back to his notes and said, I think I just looked at one of the hijackers of 9 11.

[Jeremiah Kroll]

The FBI recognizes the patient's name, Ahmed Al Hasnawi. The same man who hijacked one of the planes on 911 and crashed it into a Pennsylvania field.

[Gene Malecki]

That started off an investigation unto itself determine whether this hijacker had an anthrax sore on his leg.

[Jeremiah Kroll]

This lead could unlock the case for the FBI. The 911 hijackers were living and taking flight lessons about an hour away from Robert Stevens. And the FBI has a credible witness who says those hijackers were trying to learn about crop dusters. So now if this doctor's suspicions are correct, it means that at least one hijacker came into contact with anthrax in Florida before the attack on 9 11. If this was Al Qaeda and their goal was to use anthrax to kill Americans, their plan works. 63 year old photo editor Bob Stevens died from a form of anthrax, the.

[Kathleen Goldhar]

First state and federal disease. Detectives are now busy retracing the steps of Robert Stevens one day after the avid outdoorsman died.

[Jeremiah Kroll]

He was just about the gentlest person you could imagine. His family's devastated.

[Segrin Pillai]

That's all that matters.

[Jeremiah Kroll]

It's been just three days since Robert Stevens checked into the hospital. Health director Jean Malecki gets in her car and drives back to the Stevens home to be with Robert's wife and her family.

[Segrin Pillai]

I want your family to be safe and I want you to know that I care because she wasn't getting that. And as I turned down her street, you know, I thought I was going into a war zone. Literally on every home there was a member of the press, you know, sitting in a beach chair with their cameras and with their notepads and pens. And I drove into her parking area and went in with my staff and I just gave her a hug and we sat down and we talked and I just looked around it looked like a cell. Every opening was covered by thick blankets. You couldn't see any light.

[Jeremiah Kroll]

The family was trying to keep the news media out, but the blankets didn't stop the panic rising outside. No one knows where he got it. This is a serious illness because it can exist in an almost indestructible form called spore has died as a result.

[Segrin Pillai]

Of what they're describing as the first.

[Jeremiah Kroll]

Bioterrorist attack in the United States.

[Larry Bush]

We don't have any real hot leaves at this. We are going to continue pursuing this.

[Jeremiah Kroll]

It has long been considered a possible bioterrorism agent. Now there's a fatality and a media frenzy. The FBI is in a jam. They'd already discovered the hijacker's potential anthrax skin infection and that Al Qaeda members have been training to fly crop dusters near Robert Stevens. But they still don't have proof that Al Qaeda is behind this.

[Gene Malecki]

We didn't know who it was, and we certainly hadn't neutralize them in any way.

[Jeremiah Kroll]

But maybe the FBI was further along than they thought because they'd already found a lead that could link anthrax to Al Qaeda. They just hadn't realized it yet.

[Kathleen Goldhar]

At 24, I lost my narrative, or rather it was stolen from me. And the Monica Lewinsky that my friends and family knew was usurped by false narratives, callous jokes and politics. I would define reclaiming as to take back what was yours. Something you possess is lost or stolen, and ultimately you triumph in finding it again. Follow reclaiming with Monica Lewinsky on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to reclaiming early and ad free right now by joining Wondery plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts.

[Jeremiah Kroll]

Weeks earlier, in the hours right after the attacks of September 11, the FBI had discovered that some of the hijackers lived in southern Florida.

[Gene Malecki]

You know, had the manifest of passengers on the airline, and just doing basic investigation, it was quickly determined where each of those hijackers lived. Before they got on the plane.

[Jeremiah Kroll]

Two of them lived in an apartment about 25 minutes from the home of Robert Stevens. The FBI raided their apartment the night of 9 11.

[Gene Malecki]

And when they looked at the residences where these guys had lived, they found that two of them were living in an apartment that had been rented to them by Gloria Irish.

[Jeremiah Kroll]

Gloria Irish agents had found her business card in the apartment, but her name didn't mean anything to them on the night of 9 11. But now the last name Irish takes on a whole new meaning because of.

[Gene Malecki]

Her husband, Mike Irish, was an editor at the ami, and I guess the boss of Robert Stevens. He was married to Gloria Irish, who was a real estate agent in Boca Raton.

[Jeremiah Kroll]

The FBI finally has a link, however tenuous, between Al Qaeda, Florida anthrax and Robert Stevens. But agents can't figure out what that link means. Al Qaeda just took down the Twin Towers. Would they really target a tabloid next? Then again, if you step back, it seems too weird to be a coincidence.

[Gene Malecki]

These hijackers, operatives, whatever you want to call them, they weren't stupid. And we could see that they were very good at planning long term.

[Jeremiah Kroll]

But the FBI has no idea what that long term plan could be like. In one world, Al Qaeda members were planning a second wave attack, but then accidentally exposed their real estate agent to some powder. And then she tracked it back to her husband, who must have accidentally infected his co worker in the AMI building. Or maybe the AMI building really does matter to Al Qaeda and Gloria Irish was just somehow their way in. Now one person is dead, but wouldn't Al Qaeda be going for mass casualties? So is there a link between the hijackers, anthrax and ami? Or is the FBI forcing these puzzle pieces together? There's at least one obvious next step. Agents go back to the 911 hijackers apartments.

[Gene Malecki]

We sampled their apartments and their cars, what we call environmental sampling. Taking samples with a damp little piece of swab of gauze. And then you run DNA analysis on that and look for anthrax DNA. So that was done in all the hijackers, cars, their apartments down in Boca.

[Jeremiah Kroll]

Then the FBI waits for results, hoping they will finally find proof that Al Qaeda has anthrax. A few miles away, Dr. Larry Bush is completely unaware of what the FBI is up to. He's just trying to manage the mayhem that anthrax has unleashed on South Florida. He and his hospital are now at the center of the chaos.

[Larry Bush]

The parking lot's full of every type of media there is. We're meeting in the boardroom with the local health department, the state health department, the CDC and the FBI. We're on the phone with the governor's office.

[Jeremiah Kroll]

Stephen's death was a gut punch to Larry. He was his patient and now he's dealing with a ton of new patients who think they might have anthrax too. He hasn't thought much about his patient Martha and her theory that the AMI building was a target for Al Qaeda. It had sounded ridiculous to him until.

[Larry Bush]

I get a call about 7:00 that night from the ER that we have a man here who has a hemorrhagic bleeding process in his lungs. He's on a ventilator. And oh, by the way, he works at the AMI building. I'm thinking, oh my God, Martha's not crazy. Wow. Patient two.

[Jeremiah Kroll]

Patient two's name is Ernesto Blanco. He's a worker in the mail room at AMI. He's almost 74. He's a devoted dad, a nice, often funny guy by all accounts. And now he's got inhalation anthrax too. Now to the disturbing news from Boca Raton, Florida. Another person has been exposed to anthrax.

[Gene Malecki]

A co worker of the 63 year.

[Jeremiah Kroll]

Old man who died Friday of an extremely rare form of inhaled anthrax. It's suddenly clear to the FBI that the source of the infection is very likely inside the AMI building. And as ridiculous as it may sound to some, Gene Malecki gets why the tabloid could be a target.

[Segrin Pillai]

It's the sun, the National Enquirer, Mira, all the rag sheets in the supermarket. They say nasty things about everybody and no matter who you are, you know, reputation is not that good. So it certainly made a lot of sense.

[Jeremiah Kroll]

And for Jean, alarm bells are ringing. There are hundreds, maybe thousands of people who've moved in and out of the AMI building in the last week. And a ton of people are still hard at work inside. She's got to test the building for anthrax, but she doesn't want to create any more panic than there already is. Gene knows who to turn to.

[Scott Decker]

I'm actually a molecular geneticist, a biochemist, and a board certified clinical microbiologist.

[Jeremiah Kroll]

Dr. Segrin Pillai is the public Health laboratory director for Miami Dade County. Segrin and his team are tasked to go inside the AMI building to run tests. That means breathing the same air as two people who've been infected. So they clearly should wear hazmat suits.

[Scott Decker]

But we did not want to get people worried. We did not want the workers to get worried and cause any alarm.

[Jeremiah Kroll]

So they make a call.

[Scott Decker]

You know, we were not able to put on our PPEs and walk into the building simply because that will scare everybody.

[Jeremiah Kroll]

As soon as he's inside, Seguin sees a large framed photo that makes him cringe.

[Scott Decker]

There was an image of Osama bin Laden on the front cover.

[Jeremiah Kroll]

Right there in the lobby. A photo shows bin Laden's face above the headline Wanted Dead or alive with or alive crossed out. The article claims bin Laden had underdeveloped sex organs and that his hatred of the US Began when an American girl laughed at his problem, the thought that.

[Scott Decker]

Came to my mind was, oh boy, we are under attack.

[Jeremiah Kroll]

He puts that thought aside. As they go further into the building.

[Scott Decker]

I just jump into action immediately started swabbing areas. You focus on the, you know, the area where the index patient worked. So that's basically its table, its computers, its workbench and its cubicles, etc.

[Jeremiah Kroll]

While all that's going on, Jean and her team interview Robert Stevens and Ernesto Blanco's colleagues. Stevens was a photo editor and Ernesto Blanco worked in the mailroom. Keep in mind, this is 2001. Email's in its infancy, so most readers of the tabloids are using snail mail for letters to the editor and to send comments. And because these are juicy tabloids, there's a lot of mail and it's someone's job to read all of it, which must have been fun, by the way. Of all the avenues they go down, plus the side streets and alleyways. This is how the FBI gets its first major break in the form of a letter about the pop sensation of the new millennium, Jennifer Lopez.

[Segrin Pillai]

An envelope had been delivered to the AMI building and it was addressed to J. Lo. Jennifer Lopez, JLo. The envelope was eventually opened and in the envelope was a Star of David and white powder. And the person who had this envelope brought the envelope to another person and Mr. Stevens to look at because they were amazed by it.

[Jeremiah Kroll]

White powder in an envelope. If you know anything about the anthrax attacks, you probably know that powder was sent through the mail. But at this point, only three days after Robert Stevens has died, no one knows anything like that. This is the first time that a point of contact starts to come into view. They now suspect it's an anthrax laced letter sent through the mail that infected both of the victims.

[Segrin Pillai]

Mr. Stevens was nearsighted and he brought the envelope close to him as per somebody who gave an interview and he sneezed into it, fell all over his computer. And that's most likely where he inhaled.

[Jeremiah Kroll]

The anthrax spores with the letter as a lead. Gene isn't surprised by the swab results she gets back from Segrin.

[Segrin Pillai]

That whole building was full of spores. All over, all over. It was in almost every room, every floor, just full of anthrax. Just full of it.

[Jeremiah Kroll]

The health department wanted to be discreet only a day before, but now Gene has to take dramatic action.

[Segrin Pillai]

I used the public health laws of the state of Florida to shut down and quarantine that building, which means the.

[Jeremiah Kroll]

Works, police cars, yellow caution tape, crews of emergency workers, and Hazmat suits, the media jumps on it.

[Kathleen Goldhar]

The building shut down and the company's 300 employees told not to come to work after traces of anthrax boy. Were found in the nasal passages of a second employee. And inside the building. People here in South Florida are worried about possible exposure to anthrax now that one person has died and another has tested positive.

[Jeremiah Kroll]

Jean's attention now moves to the many people who've gone in and out of the AMI building in the last week.

[Segrin Pillai]

We spent the rest of that night, all night long, contacting every employee. And we were up and running that very next morning to start screening hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and then thousands of people for the disease. And that all happened within a 36 hour period of time.

[Jeremiah Kroll]

The FBI, meanwhile, are trying to find that JLO letter. Agent Decker sees how it might have infected Ernesto Blanco and contaminated a lot of the building.

[Gene Malecki]

He's the guy that took the mail and walked around the building and gave you your mail.

[Jeremiah Kroll]

Now the FBI's big question is, where is that letter? They look and quickly learn the answer.

[Gene Malecki]

American media evidently destroyed their mail every night or every week. I mean, they got a lot of mail and there's no reason for them to save it. They just destroyed most of it.

[Jeremiah Kroll]

AMI doesn't have it, so the FBI won't get it. There's no way now to definitively prove how anthrax entered the building or know how many people could have been exposed. And then right on cue, everyone's fears come true. Someone else from AMI is sick.

[Segrin Pillai]

More than a thousand individuals have been tested for possible exposure. At 965 of those results are back. We have one exposure of Stephanie Daly.

[Jeremiah Kroll]

Stephanie Daly, a clerk at ami, is case number three. She works alongside Ernesto Blanco in the mailroom with another mailroom related infection. The public is putting the puzzle pieces together as well. The only way that an infected letter could get to the mailroom is by way of the U.S. postal Service. And the U.S. postal Service is everywhere, which means anthrax could be spreading everywhere. Panic soars. You can call it anthrax anxiety. Firefighters in both Miami Dade and Broward counties responding to non stop calls of people encountering mysterious substances, anything with a.

[Kathleen Goldhar]

White residue inside are causing stores, streets and buildings to be shut down and panic to erupt.

[Jeremiah Kroll]

In Deerfield beach, fire crews suiting up at the post office and locking up 40 people inside just in case they came in contact with some boxes that also had powder on them. So there's all that media and public panic and there's still the actual investigation to deal with.

[Scott Decker]

I did not get any sleep at all. So I was working pretty much 24 7.

[Jeremiah Kroll]

Dr. Segrin Pillai, the public health lab director who went into the AMI building, now has to process lab tests for hundreds of potential anthrax contaminations pouring in from hospitals all over South Florida. He can barely keep up. One night he returns at 4am after working with almost no sleep the night before. Before he can even get into bed, he. He gets an urgent call. Police officers are worried about white powder coming out of a box that's sitting in their office.

[Scott Decker]

So I ended up heading to the lab and they were waiting there for me. So I asked them, what's going on? Where's the sample? And when they showed me a box of powdered donuts, I was shocked in the first place. But at the same time, that literally told me how people were handling this situation, how fearful they are, including even law enforcement officers.

[Jeremiah Kroll]

Meanwhile, FBI agents are waiting for Segrin to finish processing their own swabs.

[Scott Decker]

They had collected samples from the place that the 911 hijackers were residing at. They also collected samples from the vehicles they had rented and used. So all of those samples ended up in my laboratory. I believe it was about 2am on 7 October.

[Jeremiah Kroll]

If these samples show the hijackers had anthrax, the FBI will finally have hard proof connecting this attack to Al Qaeda.

[Scott Decker]

We subjected all of those samples to vigorous testing, and none of the samples that we tested in our laboratory resulted in a positive result.

[Jeremiah Kroll]

That's zero evidence of anthrax anywhere near the 911 hijackers.

[Gene Malecki]

The FBI and others thought that Al Qaeda was behind this, and it turned out not to be true. When I grew up, I was taught to take the easy shot first. Al Qaeda was the easy shot. It would have been nice to just say it was them and to be able to prove it.

[Jeremiah Kroll]

As much time and energy as they'd sunk into the Al Qaeda angle, they'd found nothing.

[Gene Malecki]

Trust me. We beat that dog to death. Trust me. It's all classified. It caused a lot of heart pain and resources.

[Jeremiah Kroll]

But how is that possible? What about the Florida connection and all those credible leads?

[Gene Malecki]

My theory is that when Mueller and Ashkoff made public the fact that the hijackers lived in South Florida around Boca Raton, that our mailer, anthrax mailer, purposely sent letters to Boca Raton to make us think it was Al Qaeda.

[Jeremiah Kroll]

So no evidence linking the death of Robert Stevens to Al Qaeda. Those crop dusters, Nothing to do with anthrax. That hijacker really did just have a leg bruise and the apartment rentals and the connection to ami.

[Gene Malecki]

It was a coincidence. A very strange coincidence, but a coincidence. And that. That's kind of a trick. When you do these investigations, you've got to quickly recognize it's a coincidence and not chase it down because a real lead could be going on unaddressed. I guess that's what makes a good investigator versus a not so good investigator. 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.

[Jeremiah Kroll]

On October 11, 2001, the FBI's Deputy Assistant Director shares their findings with a congressional subcommittee. The FBI has found no connection between the anthrax discovery in Florida and the terrorist attacks on September 11th. No connection to the terrorist attacks on September 11th. It says two things at once. We've got no leads, but there isn't a wider attack. The FBI hopes that that second point will at least help calm some nerves. At this time, the presence of anthrax appears to be limited to the American media building located in Boca Raton, Florida. Other officials had been hitting the same limited scope note all week from the health department.

[Scott Decker]

I want to reiterate something that's very important. This is an isolated case.

[Jeremiah Kroll]

To the White House, it appears that this is just an isolated case. Isolated case, no evidence of terrorism. The public didn't buy it. Turns out the public is right. Good evening. Tonight we find ourselves in the unusual and unhappy position of reporting on one of our beloved colleagues, a member of my personal staff who has contracted a cutaneous anthrax infection. Anthrax hits New York City. Next time on the hunt for the anthrax killer. The letters sent to NBC and the New York Post were the same. A fraction of an ounce could kill thousands of people. Our government is doing everything we possibly can to protect the lives of our citizens. Everything. And eventually, when the FBI finally does find their answer, it's about as far from Al Qaeda as you can get.

[Gene Malecki]

Everything all together painted a very a picture of a very odd, abnormal, possibly psychotic individual.

[Jeremiah Kroll]

All of that coming up on the hunt for the anthrax killer. The Hunt for the Anthrax killer is a production of Wolf Entertainment, USG Audio and Digg Studios in collaboration with CBC Podcasts. The series is hosted by me, Jeremiah Kroll. It's created, written and executive produced by Scott, Tiffany and me at Digg Studios. Aftermath is executive produced by Dick Wolf, Elliot Wolf and Stephen Michael at Wolf Entertainment, Josh Block at USG Audio and Jonielle Kastner at Spoke Media. The series is produced by Kelly Kolf story editing by Janiel 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 Laulonghi Tanya Springer is the Senior Manager of CBC Podcasts. Arif Narrani is the Director of CBC Podcasts. Thank you for listening. Tune in next week for an all new episode of 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. For more CBC Podcasts, go to CBC CA Podcasts.