Episode 2: Martha’s Not Crazy
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How did the anthrax investigation begin?
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. 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. 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.
I followed him out to where both of these heifers had 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. 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. I opened that cow up and all of a sudden there's this blackberry jam spleen and I just kind of wilted because I recognized it as very lethal and, you know, very dangerous. 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.
What was the first confirmed case of anthrax in Florida?
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 Aftermath, the hunt for the 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 of anthrax in a patient in a Florida hospital.
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's on their way. 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 patient's health from deteriorating. Stevens is now in a coma. And the nation is in a panic. A deadly disease putting a Lantana man in the hospital and creating a scare in South Florida. 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.
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 9-11 was if that attack was possible here, literally anything was possible.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
How did the anthrax investigation begin?
0:36–2:39
2
What was the first confirmed case of anthrax in Florida?
2:39–12:32
3
How did the FBI connect the anthrax strain to a lab?
12:32–19:23
4
Did al-Qaeda have access to anthrax?
19:23–27:36
5
What role did a 9/11 hijacker play in the anthrax case?
27:36–34:54
6
How did the media and public react to the anthrax scare?
34:54–40:01