Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hey, everyone. It's still behind the bastards. Part two of our episodes on how the FBI and the media created a monster by repeatedly accusing the wrong people of terrorism. And we're talking. We talked the last episode with our guest, Courtney Kosak. about Richard Jewell and the Olympic Park bombing.
And in these next two episodes, we're going to be talking about the 2001 anthrax attacks in the United States that killed like five people and freaked the whole country the fuck out. You know, these happened right in the wake of 9-11. If you're on the younger side of things, I don't think this is as famous.
But basically, right after 9-11, a bunch of people, including guys like Tom Daschle, some people in government, started receiving letters that had white powder in them. Several people got sick and died, mostly folks who were just... happened to be in and around the mail rooms and stuff where the letters were being opened, and they never found who did it.
But they had a suspect for several years, and that suspect is a guy who is a bastard, I think, by my standards, but is also, again, not the bad guy of this story. And we're gonna spend this episode talking about his life and times, because again, he's a fascinating person.
um and i think there's a lot like on his own we probably could do a bastards episode but the thing he's best known for is being wrongly accused of being the anthrax male guy and it just felt like i don't know it seems weird to do an episode about how much this guy sucks but also he's fine here like this wasn't his fault he was done dirty um so we're just talking about like
how both of these, in both of these terrorist attacks, the same fucked up thing happened, thanks to the FBI and the media being the kinds of organs that they are. Is Steve our protagonist this time?
Steve is ā and this is going to be more of a traditional bastards episode, this one, and then in part three, whenever we record that, we'll get to the actual anthrax attack and what happened to him. But we have to talk about Steve Hatfield because who he is and the kind of life he leads are what makes him into the suspect for this terrorist attack, right?
And like is why people are ā is why people in the FBI and the media become so convinced that it was him. And he is a he's a perfect candidate for bastards like his backstory is insane. He's told a bunch of different versions of his life, many of which can't be true.
Independent reporting has repeatedly shown that like different things he said about his resume and his CV could not have happened that way. So there's a lot of really fun untangling and record correcting to do. So anyway, let's let's talk about Steve J. Hatfield. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human. A new true crime podcast from Tenderfoot TV in the city of Mons in Belgium.
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Chapter 2: What was the context of the 2001 anthrax attacks in the U.S.?
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Order your copy of the New York Times bestseller Shot Ready today at stephencurrybook.com. So he was born on October 24th, 1953, in St. Louis, Missouri, like me. He was raised in Mattoon, Illinois. He was the oldest of two kids and the only boy in his family. His mother was a homemaker and part-time interior decorator, and his father was an electrical engineer and salesman.
Now, the details I've come across don't make it look like his childhood was particularly noteworthy. There's no major trauma or at least anecdotes that we have that foreshadow the man he would become. He describes himself as a bad student and told one reporter, I never took a book home from school. He did better when it came to electives. Yeah. And he's another one of these like autodidacts.
Right. Like he reads obsessively, at least according to him. He just can't study anything he's not interested in. Right. Maybe it's ADHD brain, you know, but he's primarily interested in like medical science and military history and he can't make himself care about anything else. Yeah. He does better when it comes to electives. He wrestles for the varsity team in high school.
He flies glider planes and is allowed to solo pilot a glider at age 14, which seems early, but go off, kid. He graduates Mattoon Senior High and is admitted to Southwestern College in Kansas, where he majors in biology and joins an ROTC-like summer leadership program hosted by the Marine Corps.
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Chapter 3: Who is Steven Hatfill and what is his background?
He wants to fly jet fighters, you know? It's the coolest job you can do in the military. That's what he wants. And so he goes in, and the Marine Corps tests his vision, and it's not perfect. And you know what you can't do if you don't have naturally perfect vision? Is fly a fucking jet, you know? Like, sorry, kid, you're screwed. Yeah. Um, anyway, so this, this fucks his life.
Uh, it seems to have broken something inside of him because the Marines are like, well, you could be a navigator. And he's like, I don't want to be a fucking navigator. I want to be a fucking top gun jet pilot. Like nobody wants to be a navigator. Come on. That's just such a bummer job. Navigators are the bike cops of the piloting world where it's like, this isn't what you signed up to do.
And I know it. I know you don't want to be sitting back there. Who needs a navigator anyway? Just bomb wherever. That's what I'm saying. What? I would be too scared. I would be a navigator. I hate to say it. Well. I mean, then I get to be the pilot, I guess. So that's a win for me. I just want you to know, I do not trust you to fly a plane. I think I'd be a great fighter pilot.
I mean, Sophie, look at how many F-35s and F-22s they're crashing these days. F-18s, you know, I could do at least that well. I could crash one of those things. The bar is low, yeah. I could crash that son of a bitch into whatever, you know, a house. I don't care. Sure. You're allowed to do anything in the Marine Corps, I assume.
So he doesn't join the Marine Corps, though, because, again, he doesn't get to be a pilot. And this kind of I get the feeling reading his backstory that this kind of like shatters him. So he he he partially drops out. It's less accurate to say he drops out of college because he will go back. But he like suspends his college education and just flies to Africa.
Now, he's got no formal medical training, but he finds a mission hospital in the Congo called. This is not a safe place. This is not an easy place to get to. So he travels and he doesn't reach out to them beforehand. He travels to the Congo, finds this mission doing like medical work. It's like a missionary hospital type deal. And it's like, hey, can I help?
And the people running this mission are Glenn and Lena Eshtruth. Lena describes the 19-year-old Steve as being something of a mystery when he showed up. Quote, nobody sent him. I don't even know how he knew about us.
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Chapter 4: What led to Steven Hatfill being wrongly accused?
But they're like, well, he's volunteering and we don't have enough people, so let's take him in. I mean, if nothing else, he's just like a lone white kid in the Congo. So we should probably not just let him wander off. So... They take him in and he works there and they taught him. He learns, you know, the basics of hematology and parasitology, right?
Like he's not enough that he could be a practitioner, but enough that he knows that he's interested in getting a real medical education, right? He gets some hands-on experience and he's like, oh, this is almost as good as killing people in a plane. So he, what? I mean, not quite as good. Every doctor would rather be dropping a JDAM, you know? We all know that. Yeah. He does have balls, though.
That part is consistent. That part is consistent, yeah. Yes, yeah. I don't know. Straight to the Congo. I don't think our friend Dr. Hoda would agree. I think he would agree that it takes the balls to just at 19 go straight to the Congo to see if you can find a place to work. Fair enough. It's like an American who grew up in the suburbs. So he returns to the U.S. after this year.
I think it's about a year in the Congo. And he goes back to Southwestern and he finishes and he gets his degree. He gets his undergraduate degree in 1975, at which point he joins the Army.
Now, every version of the story that Hatfield tells and quite a few of the articles about Hatfield that are written by reporters who talk to him will repeat this next part because he claims that as soon as he joins the army, he gets into the Green Berets. Do you know what the Green Berets are, Courtney? They're special. They're special. It's a yeah, they're very special, boys.
Some of the specialist boys in the whole army. That's right, guys. It's a special forces unit.
They're more focused on like the Green Berets are the guys you send in if you've got, if you have a bunch of like local militia types that you want to train up into a fighting force to fuck with whatever country that you're having a great power conflict with, you send in the Green Berets and they spend long periods of time, you know,
in the wilderness basically training people how to be insurgents. That's kind of their gig, right? That's what the Green Berets do. Is it like Navy SEAL adjacent? Yeah, it's at that level of special forces, right? But they come in before, or they're trainers? They just do different things. The Navy SEALs are more the guys carrying out assassinations.
The Green Berets are more the guys who are trying to teach indigenous allies how to set up tripwires in the jungle or whatever, or carry out ambushes on NVA caravans, if we're talking about Vietnam or whatever. So Hatfield claims to have joined the Green Berets, and most of the news articles about him say that he joined the Green Berets.
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Chapter 5: What experiences did Hatfill have in Rhodesia?
Success is not an accident. I'm passing the ball to you. Let's go. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.