The Demon in the Freezer

Introduction: The 2001 Anthrax Attacks

In the early 1970s, a British photo retoucher named Robert Stevens moved to Florida to work for a supermarket tabloid. He was a kindhearted man who embraced American life, spending his free time fishing in local canals and caring for neighborhood cats. His life took a tragic turn in late 2001 when he developed a high fever and became incoherent after a trip to North Carolina. When he was rushed to the hospital, doctors discovered his spinal fluid was filled with rod-shaped bacteria, which infectious-disease specialist Dr. Larry Bush identified as anthrax.

This was a shocking discovery because inhalation anthrax is incredibly rare, with only eighteen cases reported in the United States over the previous century. Stevens quickly fell into a coma and passed away on October 5, 2001. A team of experts from the Centers for Disease Control performed a specialized autopsy and discovered that Stevens’s chest cavity was filled with nearly a gallon of bloody liquid. His lymph nodes were massively swollen, confirming that the anthrax spores had entered his body through the air he breathed. Investigators soon found anthrax spores in the mail bins at his office, proving the bacteria had been delivered through the mail as an intentional act of violence.

Shortly after Stevens's death, an unnamed staffer in Senator Tom Daschle’s office in Washington, D.C., opened a hand-lettered envelope that released a fine, bone-colored powder into the air. The invisible particles were immediately pulled into the building’s high-volume ventilation system, circulating throughout the Hart Senate Office Building for forty minutes. The FBI’s Hazardous Materials Response Unit recovered the letter and transported the samples to the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in Maryland. This facility serves as the nation’s primary laboratory for developing defenses against biological weapons.

At the military laboratory, microbiologist John Ezzell took custody of the evidence and examined it inside a specialized safety cabinet. When he attempted to move a small amount of the silky, light tan powder with a metal spatula, the particles began to fly away on the slightest air currents. The extreme lightness and uniform color of the substance signaled a level of sophistication rarely seen in biological samples. Ezzell realized immediately that this was not a crude imitation, but a professionally prepared biological weapon designed to spread effortlessly through the air.

Senior scientist Peter Jahrling was jolted awake by a pager call alerting him to the highly refined nature of the powder. As an expert in lethal viruses, Jahrling was haunted by the possibility that the anthrax might be a distraction containing something even more dangerous, such as smallpox. Smallpox is a highly contagious disease that has killed more people throughout history than any other pathogen, and Jahrling feared it could be in the hands of extremist groups. He immediately tasked a skilled microscopist with examining the powder at the cellular level to ensure a much larger and uncontrollable viral outbreak was not about to take root.