“Fallen Angel”

In the waning days of 2003, a mysterious entity calling itself “Fallen Angel” sent two letters - one without a destination and the other addressed to the White House - which demanded a change to trucking regulations. Included in the two envelopes were vials containing ricin…

Georgi Markov was a Bulgarian dissident that worked for the BBC and lived in London, where - using his considerable writing talents - he used his platform to critique the People's Republic of Bulgaria, a socialist republic that was closely allied with the Soviet Union.

In September of 1978, Markov was crossing the River Thames with his wife, when he felt a brief, sharp pain in his leg, near the back of his right thigh. A man walking behind him had seemed to fumble with his umbrella at around the same time and then hurried away. Hours later, Markov - thinking little of the incident at the time - began to notice that the small red mark at the scene of the wound was not lessening in pain. That evening, he began to develop flu-like symptoms and was admitted to the hospital.

Within a week, Georgi Markov had died of these bizarre symptoms at the age of 49.

A postmortem examination of Markov, an otherwise healthy man, revealed that he had been poisoned. At first, investigators didn't know with what; but eventually, they figured that he'd likely been poisoned with ricin. Using the witness account of his wife, authorities theorized that the man on the bridge - who had "dropped" his umbrella and then scampered away - had likely been involved with the Bulgarian Secret Service, and had possibly used a prototype umbrella projectile to shoot a toxic pellet containing ricin into Markov's leg.

While this seems like a scene out of a silly James Bond knockoff, any hope of this being just an outlandish theory was thrown out when Oleg Kalugin, a high-level defector from the Soviet Union, later claimed that the KGB had arranged for the murder to take place in the streets of London.

Sadly, no one was ever held responsible for Georgi Markov's death, and it remains technically unsolved to this today.

While treatments for ricin poisoning exist, these treatments weren't really tested back in 1978, when this incident occurred. Even now, these treatments aren't really a sure thing, and can only be used to mitigate existing symptoms; no proven vaccine or antidote for ricin exposure has been developed, making ricin a well-known poison to this day.

Ricin was even used as a vital plot point in the hit TV series "Breaking Bad," which mentions the story of Georgi Markov in passing.

Ricin is a toxin produced in the seeds of the castor oil plant, which is incredibly toxic if ingested, inhaled, or injected. Ricin isn't a naturally occurring toxin but is often produced in the waste left over after processing castor beans; with as little as 500 micrograms of ricin being enough to kill a healthy adult.

Ricin kills by (essentially) infecting the person's cells and preventing the cells from assembling various amino acids into proteins (basic cell metabolism), which can result in a severe allergic reaction. This builds up into pain, inflammation, and hemorrhages in the gastrointestinal system, which may lead to nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea. From there, it's a short process to organ failure in the pancreas, kidney, liver, and GI tract, and then death. These were the symptoms noted in Bulgarian journalist Georgi Markov, whose story was hinted at in the "Breaking Bad" clip from a moment ago.

Today, ricin remains a well-known poison, which is 30 times more potent than nerve gas and approximately 200 times as potent as cyanide, but not quite as deadly as anthrax. Unlike the others, ricin is also much harder to produce in mass quantities, with its lethality proving hard to maintain during production and distribution. However, in smaller quantities - where its purity can be maintained - ricin remains extremely deadly, especially when injected. As was the case in the assassination of Georgi Markov, the amount needed to kill someone when injected is smaller than the tip of a pen.

While ricin hasn't been used in many successful high-profile poisoning attempts, it is still used by terrorists and criminals all over the globe, who have attempted to perfect ricin in their plots to kill or maim people. For a time, right-wing extremists attempted to process the castor beans into ricin, and terrorist group al-Qaida reportedly developed plans to use ricin in a widespread poisoning effort in the early 2000s, according to instructions found in a Kabul safe-house shortly after the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in 2001.

If you search for ricin on the internet, you'll find dozens of stories dating back decades; barely a year goes by in which there isn't a noteworthy case of ricin being developed by someone with ill intentions... perhaps someone attempting to send it through the post to a politician or journalist. Usually, these people are caught due to their own ineptitude, but in at least one case, a person(s) responsible for mailing ricin to several high-profile U.S. government targets was never caught, let alone identified.

This is the story of "Fallen Angel."

In 2003, it was announced that the world of U.S. truck drivers was changing, onset by a report from the Department of Transportation's Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, which estimated that anywhere "between 196 and 585 fatalities" occurred each year "because of drowsy, tired, or fatigued CMV (commercial motor vehicle) drivers transporting property."

Throughout the year, politicians and members of the DOT would kick around a series of changes to driving regulations, which would change how many hours a day a truck driver could spend on the road. This included how long they could spend receiving or depositing property at their various stops, and the hope was that productive changes to trucking regulations would save at least 75 lives each year by preventing upwards of 1000 fatigue-related accidents on American roads.

The agreed-upon changes, which were published in June of 2003 (but not expected to take effect until January of 2004), included the following daily provisions, as reported by TruckNews.com:

- 11 hours maximum daily driving (up from 10 hours)

- 14 hours maximum daily working (down from 15 hours)

- 10 hours minimum daily off-duty time (up from 8 hours)

Also included were a number of other provisions meant to ensure that truck drivers were not driving while exhausted, and could no longer (legally) drive for days without rest. This was the most meaningful overhaul to trucking regulations in more than sixty years, but many truck drivers - especially non-salaried drivers - were less than pleased with some of the changes, especially since the new regulations didn't include various factors.

One of the major parts of the law change that drivers took umbrage with was the belief that time spent behind the wheel was time spent driving. As part of their daily calculations, the drivers had to log time spent waiting for their loads to be taken in and out of the truck as part of their daily maximum. For many drivers, this amounted to several hours a day, and severely cut back on the time they could spend on the road... thus, putting their livelihood in treacherous territory.

So, if a driver had to wait 4 hours for someone to fill up their truck with goods, that would give them less than 12 hours on the road; less, if they planned on stopping for gas or food. These changes also didn't factor in stops - such as those made for food or fuel - which could presumably take a nice cut off the top, as well.

While these might seem like rather slight changes in an overlooked facet of our lives (after all, who gives a thought to the countless semi-trucks in our lives, or the people behind the wheel?), we know at least one person took particular exception to them...

On October 15th, 2003, a piece of mail raised eyebrows at a mail processing and distribution facility in Greenville, South Carolina, near the Greenville-Spartanburg International Airport, off of Pelham Road. One of the facility's 68 employees had set this piece of mail to the side the previous weekend, having first been seen on Friday (10th) between 2:00 and 3:00 AM. It wasn't until the following Wednesday (15th) that the letter was re-discovered "unopened but separated from other mail" (according to the New York Times), and handed over to federal authorities.

The letter, which did not contain a delivery address or postmark, contained one small, typed message on the outside which read:

"caution RICIN POISON

Enclosed in sealed container

Do not open without proper protection"

Inside the envelope, authorities would find a letter and a small, metal vial. The sealed, waterproof metal container did contain an isolated batch of ricin, and the typewritten letter read:

"to the department of transportation: I'm a fleet owner of a tanker company. I have easy access to castor pulp. If my demand is dismissed I'm capable of making ricin. My demand is simple, January 4, 2004 starts the new hours of service for trucks which include a ridiculous ten hours in the sleeper berth. Keep at eight or I will start dumping. You have been warned this is the only letter that will be sent by me."

The author of the letter then signed off with a self-given nickname:

"Fallen Angel"

It was hard not to make note of this individuals' chosen nickname, which many believed to be a euphemism for Satan. However, because of the inference to trucking regulations, others believed that it might have been referring to "road angels," an expression used years prior for truckers that came to the aid of hitchhikers or stranded motorists.

Federal investigators began contact-tracing elements of the letter, trying to determine who had come into contact with it and who might have worked around it over the preceding days. Thankfully, none of the mail employees developed symptoms of ricin poisoning, meaning that the ricin in the sealed metal vial had not broken through to contaminate the mailroom itself.

In fact, authorities would find no evidence that any one person had come into contact with the ricin sample inside of the metal vial, theorizing that the sample might have been sent as a mere threat, meant to intimidate... not to actually do any harm. According to New York Times reporter Judith Miller, authorities investigated this as a case of "criminal extortion" and not terrorism.

Regardless, a week later, on October 22nd, the mail facility was closed for what the CDC described as a "detailed epidemiologic and environmental investigation." After all, there is no known vaccine or antidote for ricin poisoning, and if anyone had ingested any of the ricin inside, identification and treatment needed to start immediately.

The decision to close the facility and disclose this potential ricin exposure a week after the contaminated letter had been given to federal authorities was criticized by many, who believed that the delayed public response might have put lives in danger. However, authorities insisted that there was no known threat to the public nor anyone involved, and would embark on new safety protocols the following week, after having it confirmed that the substance in the metal vial was a purified batch of ricin.

Public health officials, in collaboration with the CDC, would initiate a statewide surveillance effort to find any illnesses consistent with ricin exposure, including daily reviews at seven hospitals in the Greenville, Spartanburg, and Anderson areas. This surveillance would carry on from October 15th to the 29th, and only found two cases of "multisystem organ failure and several nonspecific illnesses" in South Carolina during that span, which - according to the CDC - were proven to not be linked to the ricin from the mail facility in Greenville.

No one had been hurt with the sending of this letter, but authorities were still alarmed: not only had this individual figured out how to create ricin, but they had also successfully sent it through the mail with a letter of demands. What happened if their demands went ignored?

Authorities struggled to get a handle on the letter found at the mail processing facility in Greenville, South Carolina, simply because there was little evidence to work with.

Because the letter hadn't been postmarked, authorities were unable to determine where it had come from. As far as anyone could tell, the letter had simply materialized inside of the mail processing facility, and authorities have given no indication of the letter's origins over the years. Federal investigators would question and polygraph the employees of the mail facility but were unable to come up with a link between these men and women and the letter itself.

Investigators would attempt to dig into the content of the letter itself, which contained the only known information about the potential culprit. This individual - who claimed to own a fleet of tanker trucks - seemed to be threatening to dump ricin in the public's water supply if their demands to roll back changes to the trucking sector weren't met. Authorities surmised that this was most likely an empty threat since the amount of ricin needed to poison any water supply would have to be in the thousands of pounds... an unattainable sum to all but a small number of people. The amount sent in the letter itself was not more than an ounce or two, which would have been dangerously effective if inhaled or injected, but was less deadly in his ingested form. Nonetheless, chemicals regularly used to treat drinking water would likely kill the ricin, should it be dumped, eliminating the threat at the source.

However, because this was the first use of a chemical or biological agent to be sent through the mail since the 2001 anthrax letters (which I covered in a previous episode, Amerithrax), this incident would be investigated thoroughly by the applicable federal agencies. The ricin was analyzed and confirmed to be just that, ricin, and the envelope was examined for any DNA or forensic evidence... of which, there was none. Also absent were any clues pointing to the potential suspect's identity.

The following month - November 2003 - the CDC would issue an alert for health workers to be on the lookout for possible cases of ricin poisoning, fearing that the first letter might have just been a warning shot. Unbeknownst to the public at the time, however, another letter had already been sent... this time, addressed to the most high-profile target imaginable.

More than two weeks later - on November 6th, 2003 - another letter, "nearly identical" to the original, was discovered at a mail processing facility in Washington D.C.

This time, the letter did contain a recipient... the White House. This letter was intercepted before it got there, however, having been directed towards an off-site facility monitored by the military. Like the first letter found in Greenville, South Carolina, this envelope also contained a small vial filled with a white, powdery substance. While initial tests would come back negative for any known substances, later testing would confirm that this powder was "probable for ricin."

Also included was a letter, which was slightly different from the original. This typewritten letter read:

"Department of transportation

If you change the hours of service on

January 4, 2004 I will turn D.C. into a ghost town

The powder on the letter is RICIN

have a nice day

Fallen Angel"

The letter had been postmarked on October 17th, 2003 in Chattanooga, Tennessee, having been put in the mail just days after the original letter was first noticed back in South Carolina. Authorities could not explain why so much time had passed before this letter arrived in D.C. and was itself noticed, but it is worth noting that the recipient's address on the front of the envelope had been handwritten - presumably, by the letter's author - and they had incorrectly written down the ZIP code. They attempted to scratch out the ZIP and replace it with the proper code (20500), but the result was a chicken-scratched mess.

Even though the envelope was addressed to the White House, its contents were incredibly similar to those of the original letter; and the letter itself seemed to be directed towards the Department of Transportation's new trucking regulations. And their threat seemed to be more straightforward this time, threatening to "turn D.C. into a ghost town."

Despite this second letter being brought to the attention of the Secret Service almost immediately on November 6th, the Secret Service would investigate its origins... well, secretly, for the better part of an entire week. Other offices and agencies - such as the FBI, CDC, and even the intended target, the White House - were not alerted to the threat until November 12th, when a conference call was held with all of these branches to discuss a path forward.

Approximately one week later, the CDC would alert the public to the possible public threat of ricin poisoning, in a vague statement that did not indicate this second letter's existence. In fact, the public wouldn't know about this second letter for several months (for reasons that will become clear soon).

Many took exception with the Secret Service's handling of this initial investigation, which was shrouded in secrecy. This included the U.S. Postal Service, who believed that their employees were in direct threat; after all, they were the ones that had been unknowingly handling the packages containing the deadly toxin, and seemed to be the ones closest to the "line of duty" in this particular instance (it's also worth noting that three postal employees had died in the 2001 Anthrax letter campaign, the closest comparison to this scare). Postal Service officials did not appreciate being kept in the dark and weren't afraid to voice their displeasure with the Secret Service when this information became public knowledge.

It is worth noting that the Secret Service investigates threats to the president daily, and typically doesn't release results from their investigation unless an arrest is made or public safety is endangered. In this case, no arrest had been made, and investigators in charge of overseeing the case believed it to be criminal extortion, not terrorism... a distinction that seems to be centered around the motivations of this mysterious "Fallen Angel," which authorities believed to be a bluff, primarily because of the low-grade quality of the ricin discovered.

White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan would later address this, stating:

"Unfortunately, there are some people in this world that are seeking to either carry out pranks or make some serious threats. And we appreciate the work of the Secret Service that they do to address each and every one of these matters."

As I mentioned previously, the public was not told about this second letter - which had been initially deemed a hoax - until February of 2004. That was when a third possible case of ricin was reported... inside an office building reserved for U.S. Senators.

On the afternoon of Monday, February 2nd, 2004, white powder in a mailroom of the Dirksen Senate Office Building. The large building was used by dozens of senators to conduct their daily business, and the discovery of this powder on the tray of a sorting machine in the mailroom used by Senator Bill Frist was a major cause for concern.

Even though all congressional mail had been irradiated since the 2001 anthrax attacks, radiation would not have affected ricin because it was neither a virus nor a bacterium. "Fallen Angel" might have known that, hence their choice to include ricin in their previous letters. Testing carried out the following day - February 3rd - would confirm that the powder contained elements of ricin mixed in with paper.

Senator Frist was not only the senior Republican Senator from Tennessee, but the Senate Majority Leader at the time, and the discovery of this powder - at first, theorized to be anthrax - caused a mass evacuation of the Dirksen, Hart, and Russell Senate Office Buildings, as well as anyone in the surrounding area. The U.S. Senate was essentially shuttered for the rest of the day, as were all committee hearings scheduled that Monday. While the Senate would reconvene the next day, the office buildings would remain closed until later that week.

Approximately sixteen staffers believed to have potentially come into contact with the ricin would undergo decontamination to ensure that they had not been exposed to the deadly toxin. They were each forced to strip down and put into decontamination showers conducted by a hazardous materials (HAZMAT) team called out to D.C. Thankfully, no suspicious illnesses were reported by anyone working at the building, indicating that while ricin was present, no one had been exposed to anything beyond a brief, cursory exposure.

Other than the minute amount of powder found in Senate Majority Leader Frist's mailroom, no other samples of ricin could be found anywhere inside of the building; not on door handles, floors, air filters, etc. Similar screenings carried out at other government facilities were unable to discover any ricin samples, including at mail facilities throughout the D.C. region.

As reported by TIME, because the powder was mostly paper dust with incredibly trace amounts of ricin, authorities were unable to evaluate the ricin for purity or particle size.

Air sampling carried out by a specialized Marine unit that dealt with chemical and biological agents, the CBIRF (Chemical Biological Incident Response Force), was unable to find any additional traces of ricin outside of the office of Bill Frist. This indicated that wherever the sample had come from, the ricin had likely only been on mail sent to Frist's office since ricin particles weren't detected in any other rooms or in the ventilation system of the building itself. Speaking to CNN, Senate Majority Leader Frist would state:

"We believe it was contained to the [mailroom] area itself."

The aforementioned "Fallen Angel" may have mailed other letters to the senate or Senator Frist himself, and the trace amounts of ricin had been on his or her fingerprints, which then carried over into other letters. Of course, this implies that the individual involved was "Fallen Angel" and also implied a sense of sloppiness, neither of which were certainties. It was similarly possible that the ricin had come from an additional letter, which wasn't recognized by those in the mailroom.

Letters from Frist's office, along with the mail-sorting machines themselves, were sent off to the Naval Medical Research Center in Maryland for more in-depth testing, but the experts there were unable to identify where the ricin had come from. It had likely come from a letter, but the exact letter remains a mystery to this day.

Following the closure of the U.S. Senate that Monday, business would resume the next day. Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, a Democrat from South Dakota whose office had been targeted by the anthrax letters approximately two years earlier, stated:

"As we speak, the Senate is in session. We're debating the highway bill, and that work will go on. Terrorist attacks, criminal acts of this kind, will not stop the work of the Senate or the Congress, as we have important work to be done."

Ultimately, authorities would prove unable to determine the origin of the ricin discovered in the office of Senator Bill Frist, nor prove that it was in any way related to the "Fallen Angel" letters from a few months prior. However, that didn't stop many in the press from theorizing that there was some kind of connection, with many pundits and reporters believing that this was too much of a coincidence.

U.S. Capitol Police Chief Terrance Gainer would tell reporters days later:

"There's been no smoking letter information that helps tie this thing together."

The investigation into the "Fallen Angel" letters, as well as the ricin exposure in the Dirksen Senate Office Building months later, was overseen by the FBI, who offered up a $100,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of the person(s) responsible in January of 2004. This was two months after the "Fallen Angel" letters had been received, and weeks before ricin was discovered in the mailroom of Senator Bill Frist.

As I mentioned previously, authorities were unable to link the ricin exposure from that February to the letters received months prior, but believed that there might be some connection. To raise awareness for their investigation, they would publish the only handwriting sample from the letters - the envelope of the second letter, which had been addressed to the White House - as well as the contents of the letters themselves (which had been typewritten).

Days after the incident at the Dirksen Senate Building, it was reported that a letter discovered in Wallingford, Connecticut, addressed to the Republican National Committee, had also tested positive for ricin. Ironically, the facility this letter was found in had also been the site of an anthrax letter in 2001. Thankfully, this powder found inside this envelope was determined to not be ricin or any other dangerous substance, but many believed early on that it might be related to the others.

A lot of the early reporting seemed to think that this might have been the tip of the spear for a new wave of terror attacks, while federal officials insisted that it was far from that... most likely just an empty threat by someone hoping to scare public officials away from the proposed changes to trucking regulations. However, because of the toxin used - ricin - many believed this to be an empty threat.

As recounted by Dr. Tareg Bey, an associate clinical professor at the University of California Irvine and one of approximately 200 board-certified medical toxicologists in the U.S. at the time (as reported by HealthDay):

"[Ricin's] not contagious, it's not a bacteria, it's not a fungus and it does not multiply or get transmitted like a flu from person-to-person... It's more a psychological attack than a real threat."

The FBI and the Transporation Department inspector general's office would work closely with the trucking industry throughout their investigation, with the American Trucking Association sending "bulletins to its members urging them to be aware of people 'displaying aggressive behavior' or engaging in suspicious activity," as reported by Redorbit. One of these bulletins, in particular, asked that members "be alert for either a potential disgruntled trucking company, trucking company employee or person purporting to be from the trucking industry" that had made threatening comments towards government agencies or persons. They would even ask that popular trucker radio programs publicized information about the case and the $100,000 reward.

Many criticized the Bush administration's early handling of the investigation, with the Secret Service having investigated the origins of the second "Fallen Angel" letter for a week before informing or alerting any other agency of its existence; then, refusing to divulge information about the letter to the public for nearly three months, until ricin was discovered in the mailroom of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist. Speaking to this in February of 2004, Democratic Representative Henry Waxman stated:

"It took the administration a week to inform the Postal Service about the ricin letter, nearly three months to tell the public, and another three weeks to disclose detailed information about the letter. These delays arouse suspicion rather than reassure the public."

While many were quick to label these letters an act of terrorism, federal authorities refused to do the same. Officials insisted that the person(s) responsible for the "Fallen Angel" letters were just bluffing and never intended to do any harm. While it's hard not to think of this train-of-thought as a bit naive - considering that this mysterious entity had actually gone through the effort of sending ricin through the mail - at the end of the day, no real harm was done.

Some in the media were quick to point out that terrorist groups such as al-Qaida had been toying with the idea of using ricin for several years at this point - as had Saddam Hussein, the despotic leader of Iraq, who had developed ricin on a massive scale in the 1980s - both of which were entities that the U.S. was actively at war against. However, no link to any terrorist group or foreign government would ever be uncovered. As far as anyone knew, "Fallen Angel" was a domestic group or individual whose sole focus was attempting to overturn trucking regulations.

A Department of Homeland Security official, speaking under the veil of anonymity, told reporters that this did "not bear the mark of an international terrorist attack," and then clarified further, adding, "This is a criminal issue. It is not a weapon of mass destruction."

It's possible that federal authorities downplayed this threat as part of an intentional tactic to deny "Fallen Angel" the platform that they were attempting to find... essentially neutering them. And looking back at this tactic, if indeed intentional, it must have been effective; no follow-up letters were reported in the months or years to come, with the trace amount of ricin found in Senator Frist's office unconfirmed to have come from the same source.

Using the scant amount of evidence made available to the public, it's hard to formulate any real cohesive theories or suspects. However, among the theories are two potential links.

The first is a link to the state of Tennessee. This one is the least cohesive of the two theories but does seem to have some basis in fact. The second letter, which was mailed to the White House and discovered in November of 2003, had been postmarked in Chattanooga, Tennessee weeks prior on October 17th. This implies that the letter's sender had been in Chattanooga on the date in question.

Then, we have the discovery of ricin in the office of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, who - at the time - was the acting leader of the senate. He chose what came up for a vote or not, and also happened to be a Republican senator from Tennessee. It's hard to determine whether the ricin had been intentionally sent to Frist or not - after all, such a small amount of ricin had been found in his mailroom - and if it had been sent to him because of his roots to Tennessee or his powerful position in Congress. However, this potential link to Tennessee can't be overlooked, in my opinion.

The second major theory is perhaps the more obvious of the two: an apparent link to the trucking industry, due to the stated motivations of the offender(s) in their two letters, which specifically addressed upcoming changes to the industry. It's almost unnecessary to go into depth about this theory since I've spoken about it so frequently throughout the episode, but I'll dive into some of the leads this line of inquiry led to in the weeks after the "Fallen Angel" letters were discovered.

In the weeks following the discovery of the second letter, investigators would insist that they had "no live suspect," but were continuing to hone in their investigation on truckers. They also told reporters that they were receiving tips from several individuals, including the wives and girlfriends of potential persons of interest, who believed their loved one might know the "Fallen Angel" letters.

FBI agents would continue to focus in their investigation on suspects in the trucking field, filing subpoenas for eight active truck drivers employed by Mail Contractors of America, a company that transported mail for the US Postal Service. These were all drivers that made deliveries to the USPS facility near the Greenville-Spartanburg International Airport, where the first letter was found in October of 2003. Media reports mentioned that authorities were interested in a dearth of information about each individual, including driver logs and timesheets.

It was also reported at this time that investigators were narrowing in around a ninth individual that had previously worked for the company...

Daniel Somerson was a suspect that lived in Jacksonville, Florida at the time, and had previously worked as a truck driver for Mail Contractors of America. At the time of the "Fallen Angel" letters, however, he no longer worked as a trucker, having become a political activist that railed against the trucking industry - which he openly described as "corrupt" on his website, TruckingSolutions.com, whose banner read, "Time for a regime change."

While Somerson was known to criticize the trucking industry as a whole - primarily, the companies that flaunted existing regulations without any pushback from the government entities meant to regulate them - he also railed against the forthcoming regulations, which he believed didn't fix the problem at all.

In October of 2003, Daniel Somerson was questioned by members of the FBI's terrorism task force and was asked whether or not he had any involvement in the creation of the letters containing ricin. In his previous job for MCA, he had delivered mail to the facility where the first letter had been found, near the Greenville-Spartanburg International Airport, and investigators noted that Somerson had filed several complaints against MCA, which were dismissed out-of-hand by the Department of Transportation. This is what led to him leaving the trucking industry, and then launching his website, which acted as a professional and personal crusade against his former employer and their business model.

In September of 2003, Somerson had been hit with a contempt of court charge related to his website, and investigators noted that the first "Fallen Angel" letter was sent out just weeks later. To them, this was more than a simple coincidence.

Months later, Daniel Somerson spoke to reporters with the Florida Times-Union (at the behest of his then-wife), and - citing his ignorance of ricin and lack of ability to produce it - refuted the notion that he had anything to do with "Fallen Angel," stating:

"This was something that was made by an expert. That tells me a driver had nothing to do with it. My belief is that there is no 'Fallen Angel,' that it is a ruse."

"I know that I had nothing to do with this and I know that in the end I will be vindicated. As for the damage done to my good name, there's nothing you can do about that."

In the years to come, Somerson would continue to deny any link to "Fallen Angel," not only in interviews with various publications (such as the Washington Post) but on his website, where he wrote that the FBI "is convinced that I am Fallen Angel or that I inspired Fallen Angel." He went on to compare himself to Richard Jewell, the security guard falsely accused of involvement in the 1996 Atlanta Olympic bombing.

Unfortunately, Daniel Somerson was unable to prevent his life from deteriorating after this. He eventually separated from his wife, and after years of not working, became a recluse. He moved to a home in Fruit Cove, where he lived alone and rarely stepped outside. His name would make headlines again in 2011 when he was found murdered, having been stabbed dozens of times and rolled up in carpet, with the crime scene having been meticulously cleaned up.

Authorities would later learn that the killer was a young woman named Latoya Jordan, who Daniel had met online through Craigslist. Jordan was homeless at the time, and had agreed to meet Daniel at his home, but rebuffed his romantic advances. Afraid of being told to leave - and again face her homelessness - Jordan decided to murder Daniel in his sleep. She cleaned up the crime scene and continued to live in his home for several days, before moving on to the home of another man, but not before using Daniel's credit cards to make thousands of dollars in purchases. She was eventually convicted and sentenced to life in prison, but Daniel Somerson's story ended there.

Personally, I'm not sure whether or not Daniel might have had any involvement in the "Fallen Angel" letters. I think he might have been dedicated enough to his cause to see a scheme like that through, but I find it hard to believe that he might have been able to produce the ricin on his own without any technical experience; I also believe that there would have been a paper trail of him having gone to Tennessee and/or South Carolina to mail off the two letters, which would have taken him several hours outside of Jacksonville.

Either way, the likelihood of determining Daniel Somerson's potential involvement in this story ended with his murder in 2011.

Another possible suspect emerged in the latter half of 2004 when federal authorities began to look into the potential involvement of a man named Steven Aubrey.

Aubrey was a truck driver from Illinois who worked for a private trucking company that had been subcontracting by the U.S. Postal Service to deliver mail for them. In the first half of 2004, Aubrey moved with his wife and son to Aurora, Illinois, having previously lived about 40 miles southwest in Marseilles. Their home there had been destroyed in a fire that Spring, which was described by the investigating fire chief as "suspicious."

Aubrey made headlines throughout the region in August of 2004, when he killed himself during a police standoff after murdering his wife. His wife, Erica Marie Aubrey, was reported missing in August of 2004, and her strangled body was discovered the following day in a shallow grave, hours after Steven's body had been found. The couple had been facing a host of domestic issues in the months prior, including a call to police the prior December, when Erica had called police to the home, alarmed about Steven's deteriorating mental state. However, when police arrived, they claimed to find Steven in a proper state of mind and believed him to be fine (he apparently wasn't).

After this murder-suicide, police would search the family's home in Aurora and discovered an overwhelming cache of firearms, explosives, and chemicals. There were reportedly so many explosives and firearms that police called in the bomb squad to remove and detonate them in an adjacent field, after evacuating approximately twenty homes in the area.

Inside Aubrey's home, police also discovered the chemicals and tools needed to create ricin, which was extremely odd, because Aubrey had no prior criminal record and nothing that would indicate his involvement in something as bizarre as this: no ties to extremist organizations, no stated motivations for manufacturing poisons, etc. Whatever reason Aubrey might have had for accumulating these weapons, explosives, and poisons seemed to die with him.

While Steven Aubrey's links to "Fallen Angel" remain tentative at best, I think he remains a very valid suspect nearly two decades later. Not only did he work as a truck driver for a company subcontracted by the USPS, but his wife, Erica, had noted his deteriorated mental state in December of 2003, mere weeks after the "Fallen Angel" letters were sent. Erica also happened to work as a clerk for the postal service, which remains an interesting link to me, as well. Steven also lived approximately ten hours away from both Tennessee and South Carolina, where the two "Fallen Angel" letters were found, and his work likely led him outside of the Illinois region with regularity. As a truck driver, he was likely facing a cutback in work with the new laws governing the industry and might have felt inspired to act.

Sadly, as is the case with Daniel Somerson, we'll likely never get to learn the truth about Steven Aubrey's intentions for creating his stockpile of dangerous material.

Because of the ease with which ricin can be manufactured, it has remained at the forefront of domestic terror plots over the past two decades.

In June of 2004, a right-wing extremist named Michael Crooker was arrested in Boston, Massachusetts, following an investigation into a homemade silencer sent through the mail (which, it turns out, was actually legally made and sold). During a search of Crooker's home, authorities discovered a home lab with castor seeds, which had been previously used to create ricin. A trove of powdered ricin was later discovered on Crooker's property, which was reportedly powerful enough to kill hundreds of people.

While awaiting trial, Crooker reportedly confessed to inmates about his ability to create ricin and later wrote a letter to the federal prosecutor handling his case, in which he threatened to send ricin through the mail (even going as far as quoting Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh). He later pleaded guilty to the charges of illegally possessing ricin and using mail the threaten a federal prosecutor, and in 2011, was sentenced to fifteen years in prison.

Two years later - in April of 2013 - two envelopes were sent to officials in Washington D.C., including Senator Roger Wicker and President Barack Obama. Both letters contained ricin and matched language seen in a third letter, sent weeks prior, to Lee County Judge Sadie Holland in Mississippi.

Some believed this to be the great reprise of "Fallen Angel" nearly ten years after their disappearing act, which just-so-happened to come a few months before a new batch of trucking regulations, which were set to go into effect on July 1st of that year (2013). These letters also came less than a week after a man was arrested in Washington D.C. after threatening to blow up a truck bomb in protest of the same trucking regulations (that man, Kryzysztof Wasik, was later charged with threatening and conveying false info regarding the usage of an explosive and sentenced to time served).

Authorities originally arrested a man named Paul Curtis as the potential culprit of these new letters but would free Curtis a week later and detain another man: 41-year-old James Everett Dutschke. Dutschke later admitted to producing the poison and sending it through the mail in an attempt to frame Curtis, a rival of his. He eventually pleaded guilty to numerous charges and was sentenced to 25 years in prison. Authorities believe he was not linked to the original "Fallen Angel" letters, although Dutschke likely knew about them, using their existence to divert additional suspicion towards his rival.

Ricin continues to be a favorite threat used by extremists attempting to push platforms or positions of their own. While government officials have noted that right-wing extremists seem particularly drawn to ricin - which, as I've mentioned, is incredibly easy to manufacture and deadly if ingested, inhaled, or injected - it is not limited to just them.

Most recently, a Canadian woman gained headlines in 2019 after allegedly sending packages containing ricin to Donald Trump and law enforcement agencies in the state of Texas. She has pleaded not guilty to the charges, and that case is currently working its way through the legal system.

Even though nearly two decades have passed since the letters signed by the mysterious "Fallen Angel" were discovered by federal law enforcement agencies, investigators have been unable to determine their origin.

Because of the relative ease that ricin can be made, especially in small quantities, authorities have been unable to determine any forensic links between the ricin samples sent through the mail and the ricin found in the office of Senator Bill Frist. A forensic fingerprint is absent from the ricin, it seems, and officials have been unable to discover anything that could point to the offender's identity.

The FBI would increase the reward for information in this case from $100,000 to $120,000 in December of 2004, but this did little to raise the profile of their hunt for this unknown individual, who seems to have gotten away with their crime. Since then, updates have been few and far in-between. As you've heard, the most notable persons of interest have since passed away, and the possibility of finding out any additional information about them has likely passed on as well.

To date, it remains unknown who, exactly, "Fallen Angel" was, and whether or not the contamination in the mailroom of the Dirksen Senate Building was related to them.

As of this episode's recording, this story remains unresolved.

Episode Information

Writing, research, hosting, and production by Micheal Whelan

Published on on July 25th, 2021

Producers: Roberta Janson, Travis Scsepko, Ben Krokum, Gabriella Bromley, Bryan Hall, Quil Carter, Steven Wilson, Laura Hannan, Jo Wong, Damion Moore, Scott Meesey, Astrid Kneier, Aimee McGregor, Sara Moscaritolo, Sydney Scotton, Thomas Ahearn, Marion Welsh, Patrick Laakso, Meadow Landry, Tatum Bautista, Denise Grogan, Teunia Elzinga, Sally Ranford, Rebecca O'Sullivan, Ryan Green, Jacinda Class, Stephanie Joyner, James Weis, Kevin McCracken, Brooke Bullek, Lauren Nicole, Shane Robinson, Matthew Traywick, Sara Rosario, and Stacey Houser