In 2017, a man showed up at the emergency room and confessed that he'd accidentally poisoned himself with homemade ricin. He was federally charged with possessing a biological agent, but his case was dismissed on almost unbelieveable technicality. But he's not the only man who thinks he can create the perfect weapon from nothing but a handful of beans.Sources:https://www.ajc.com/news/state--regional/ajc-watchdog-north-man-arrested-for-ricin-radicalized-online/wdxws9G7zMmaUDmm22njYK/https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/the-perfect-poison-ricin-used-in-3-recent-cases/https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/17023504/united-states-v-jordan/https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6378803/united-states-v-siers-hill/ https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6293428/united-states-v-gibbs/ Melissa Abbes, Marc Montana, Christophe Curti, Patrice Vanelle. Ricin poisoning: A review on contamination source, diagnosis, treatment, prevention and reporting of ricin poisoning. Toxicon, Volume 195, 2021Tucker, Jonathan B. “Dilemmas of a Dual-Use Technology: Toxins in Medicine and Warfare.” Politics and the Life Sciences, vol. 13, no. 1, 1994, pp. 51–62Bergen, Peter, et al. “Key Trends in Terrorism.” Terrorism in America 18 Years After 9/11, New America, 2019, pp. 45–50Leo J. Schep, Wayne A. Temple, Grant A. Butt, Michael D. Beasley. Ricin as a weapon of mass terror — Separating fact from fiction. Environment International, Volume 35, Issue 8, 2009https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/15/us/ricin-terrorism-plot-sentencing.htmlhttps://www.govinfo.gov/app/collection/cfrhttps://www.govinfo.gov/app/collection/uscode https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/744 https://thebulletin.org/2013/06/barely-lethal/https://abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/story?id=6020875&page=1https://slate.com/technology/2012/01/white-powder-hoaxes-a-trend-in-fake-terrorism.htmlhttps://www.justice.gov/archive/tax/usaopress/2002/txdv02091.htmlhttps://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-devon-49434687https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/sep/22/woman-poison-plot-mother-breaking-bad-courthttps://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/breaking-bad-inspired-georgetown-student-charged-ricinhttps://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-34288380USAMRIID’s MEDICAL MANAGEMENT OF BIOLOGICAL CASUALTIES HANDBOOK, Ninth Editionhttps://usamriid.health.mil/assets/docs/training/USAMRIIDs_Blue_Book_9th_edition_PDF_format.pdfSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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It looks like the ingredients of a really grand spy story because this ties together the Cold War with the new one.
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Coolzone Media On the morning of February 2nd, 2017, William Christopher Gibbs had just finished his overnight shift as a forklift operator at a poultry processing plant in a small town in North Georgia.
It was, technically, 8 a.m. on a Thursday morning, but he'd just gotten off work and he wanted to relax and have a few beers with a friend.
Around noon, he got a phone call from another friend who wanted to join them, but he needed a ride.
Gibbs agreed to drive down to the gas station to pick him up, but he'd need to rearrange some things in his car first.
As he was cleaning out the front seat of his car, he touched something wet.
A bottle he'd left on the floor of the passenger side was leaking.
He panicked.
He spent four hours considering his options before finally driving himself to the emergency room.
He had to tell the truth.
He was sick, and if he wanted help, he'd have to tell them he'd been making ricin.
It looked like a slam dunk case, but less than two weeks before his trial was set to begin, a judge dismissed the indictment.
Not for lack of evidence.
The case was solid.
But at the 11th hour, his public defender made an incredible discovery.
A clerical error had accidentally legalized the possession of ricin, and no one noticed for over a decade.
I'm Molly Conger, and this is Weird Little Guys.
The story of William Christopher Gibbs and his bottle full of liquid ricin isn't actually very long.
That was most of it, to be honest.
But by the time I realized how little meat there was to the case, I'd already committed to a couple of interesting tangents.
I mean, I wasted a whole day learning about ricin.
I can't just throw that away.
And it does introduce some new elements into the weird little guy's extended universe.
We will, eventually, have to talk about the Church of the Creator.
That was part of what made this story so sensational back in 2017.
When this 27-year-old confessed to a nurse in rural Georgia that he'd accidentally exposed himself to homemade ricin, he was wearing a motorcycle jacket with a big patch on the chest that marked him as a member of a group called the Creativity Alliance.
I doubt the nurse knew what it meant.
But I imagine she described it to the cop that she immediately called about the bioweapon in the parking lot.
The Church of the Creator doesn't actually exist anymore.
Not under that name.
The group William Christopher Gibbs had joined in the months before his arrest is called the Creativity Alliance.
Depending on who you ask, it's either a successor to or a schism from the original church.
There are a lot of almost identical sounding names in this story, so I apologize in advance.
In 1973, Ben Clausen, an aspiring politician in Florida and the inventor of the wall-mounted electric can opener, self-published a book called Nature's Eternal Religion.
It would become the foundational text of the weird new religion he'd just invented.
He called it the Church of the Creator, or just creativity.
And religion isn't the word I would use, but it's the one they use.
Just ask the Bureau of Prisons.
They're constantly fielding lawsuits from incarcerated neo-Nazis who argue that their religious liberties are being violated by prison policies that ban their religious texts.
Klausen would go on to write a Book called The White Man's Bible.
They call the head of the church Pontifex Maximus.
They have commandments and religious holidays.
We've talked about racist religions before.
There are a couple of episodes that have touched on Christian identity, a wildly racist and anti-Semitic spin on regular Christianity that preaches that white Europeans are God's chosen people.
But this is something else.
This is not like that at all.
They're both anti-Semitic, obviously, and they revolve around the superiority of white people, of course.
But in creativity, there is no God.
There are no deities at all.
There's no afterlife.
It is at its core, just an elaborate way to be racist.
And in a unique twist, in addition to being anti-Semitic, it's also quite explicitly anti-Christian.
Their race is their religion.
Their highest belief is the superiority of the white man, and there is nothing above him.
I promise we'll explore this more another day.
There's a lot of weird lore here.
Clausen wrote a number of books, and they're all very boring.
But Gibbs is far from the first member of the Church of the Creator who found himself under indictment.
So we'll come back to it.
But that brings us to Rehoa.
It's a shortened form of the phrase racial holy war.
I've used the term a few times on the show.
It's a pretty common refrain among guys who yearn for a white ethnostate.
Years ago, before I rotted out my brain reading the foundational texts of various Nazi groups, I just assumed that Rehoa was a modern term.
It feels very online, very mid-2010s to me.
And I see it all the time in their online spaces where it's mixed in with memespeak that I recognize as 21st century inventions.
But the word Rehoa is actually older than I am.
It first appeared in a February 1986 issue of racial loyalty, the Church of the Creator newsletter.
And you can tell Clausen wasn't sure the term was going to catch on right away.
The first announcement that he'd invented a new word is brief and it's sort of buried on page five.
And in this first announcement, Clausen says, we need a word for our struggle against the other races, something like jihad, but just for white people.
And underneath his announcement that he's come up with this fantastic new word, he includes a pronunciation guide, which he writes out as Raha.
He wrote out R-A-H-H-O-H-A-A.
That to me says Raha.
And members of his church must have read that the same way I did, because a few months later, he's revised this pronunciation guide to read Rahoa, R-A-H-H-O-W-A-H, which is clear to me.
That reads as Rahoa to me, but later publications of those essays omit both of those and they just say, it rhymes with Aloha.
And Klaassen was so committed to his new word that a year later, he published an entire book called Rahoa, This Planet is All Ours.
He later wrote another book called On the Brink of a Bloody Racial War.
Racial holy war was central to the Church of the Creator.
And over the years, some members of the church followed through on that commandment.
They racked up a couple of murders, some bombings, assorted weapons charges, assault cases.
By 1993, the church was facing mounting legal and financial problems.
Clausen's wife had died, and now he had cancer.
In August of 1993, Ben Klausen died by suicide, leaving the church in the hands of an unworthy successor, a man who failed to even show up to court when a lawsuit was filed by the family of a man murdered by a member of the church.
Leaderless and broke, the church fell into disarray.
In 1996, a former member, a law student named Matt Hale, revived the group, forming a successor organization that he called the World Church of the Creator.
This is a chapter that deserves its own episodes.
But the short version of this arc is, in 2002, under Matt Hale's leadership, the organization lost a trademark infringement lawsuit filed by a religious organization that had already trademarked the phrase Church of the Creator in the 80s.
A judge ordered Matt Hale and his World Church of the Creator to stop using the name.
He wasn't allowed to call it that anymore.
He did not take it well, and he heavily implied to his security chief that he'd really like it if that man would murder the judge who'd ruled against them.
The man he tried to solicit for the murder of a federal judge was an FBI informant, and Matthew Hale will be in prison until 2036.
It was after Hale went to prison that the church split into the two factions we have today, the Creativity Alliance and the Creativity Movement.
The two groups hate each other, obviously, and the differences between them aren't the point right now.
But all that to say, creativity is a Nazi religion.
You don't necessarily have to be a member of any of those organizations to be an adherent of the religion.
But if you are a member of a group, it's probably one of those two splinter groups that formed after Matt Hale went to prison.
And that is where we find William Christopher Gibbs, the man who made Ricin in Georgia in 2017.
By all accounts, he discovered creativity online sometime in the summer of 2016.
And he got really into it, really fast.
He created an account on the forums run by the Creativity Alliance in June of 2016, and their July newsletter published a letter from him.
By September, he was considering getting Rehoa tattooed across his back, and he was stopped by a cop after people complained about him hanging around a public park trying to hand out racist flyers.
After Gibbs was arrested, the creativity movement, the other faction of the church, issued a public statement clarifying that he was not one of theirs.
They claimed that he had actually reached out to them when he was trying to join, but the messages he sent were very weird.
Quote, he struck us as one of the most dysfunctional, incoherent, and mentally ill people we have come across, the statement read.
Now that might sound unfair, but I read four frivolous lawsuits that he wrote and hundreds of posts that he's made on Facebook across multiple different accounts over the course of the last decade.
And I'm willing to bet dysfunctional and incoherent was an understatement.
It can be pretty hard to understand what he's trying to communicate sometimes.
The thoughts just don't always quite connect.
I should say at this point that Gibbs' mother would later tell the police that her son was diagnosed with schizophrenia.
This doesn't appear anywhere in the court records.
It was never raised as a defense.
There was no request for a competency evaluation.
All we have is his mother's claim at the time of his arrest.
And obviously mental illness doesn't cause racism.
Racism isn't a mental illness.
The two are generally unrelated.
And normally I wouldn't even bring it up, especially considering the lack of corroboration here.
You can't diagnose a man based on his posts.
But there's definitely something going on there.
I think anyone who read any significant amount of his writing would be able to tell that this is someone who's struggling with something.
And at least one of these Nazi groups could tell.
Colin Campbell, the Pontifex Maximus of the Creativity Alliance, on the other hand, didn't see any red flags in this potential new member.
After Gibbs was arrested, Campbell acknowledged that Gibbs had recently successfully completed his six-month probationary period and joined the group as a member.
But he claimed that Gibbs had, quote, hardly any contact with us, just enough to pass as rational and dedicated to 100% legal white civil rights.
And I doubt that Gibbs had any sort of background, knowledge, or understanding of the schisms within the movement.
This is just something he found online.
He may not have even realized that these were two very different groups run by people who hated each other.
But when one group turned him away because he seemed unstable, the other welcomed him.
So on February 2nd, 2017, Gibbs was wearing his Creativity Alliance patch when he got to the hospital, complaining of ricin exposure.
And shortly after he arrived, someone at the hospital called the police.
What about HIPAA?
You're probably asking.
Or maybe you're not.
But his lawyers did.
And the judge denied a motion to suppress evidence stemming from disclosures made by the hospital.
HIPAA does allow medical providers to disclose what would otherwise be protected information if it's necessary to prevent a serious and imminent threat to the health and safety of others.
Like if, for example, if a patient comes into the hospital and says he was trying to make a biological weapon and it's outside in his car.
Within the hour, investigators from the Fannin County Sheriff's Office were in his hospital room.
He wasn't under arrest.
They just wanted to get a better idea of what was going on here and how alarmed they should be.
Gibbs explained that he'd ground up the castor beans and put them in a bottle of nail polish remover, and that all of those implements and materials were in his car outside.
Gibbs assured the officer that it's, quote, nothing to worry about.
And when the officer pressed him, asking if the substance in the car was poisonous, Gibbs replied, quote, he said it's not, unless it's inhaled or injected.
This singular line, in one filing written by the judge, has a citation in the footnotes to a sealed document.
And it never comes up again.
There's never any other mention of Gibbs having communicated with anyone about making the ricin, so I guess it'll be a mystery forever.
But he's assuring the officer that there's no danger to the public.
It's fine.
Don't worry about it.
It's not a big deal.
But at the same time, he's gone to the emergency room because he thinks he's been poisoned.
And as this conversation is happening, he's pretty agitated that he isn't receiving adequate treatment for this exposure.
He's upset that they haven't given him an IV, for example.
And in an interview later that evening, he's hacking and coughing and nervously asking an FBI agent, what are the symptoms of ricin poisoning?
So he clearly thinks he's been exposed to something very dangerous.
The officer called in backup.
And by around eight o'clock that evening, deputies had moved all of the other cars in the parking lot out of what they were now calling the hot zone.
A hazmat team from another county arrived to search the car.
FBI agents rolled up in black SUVs, and the Army National Guard's Weapons of Mass Destruction Civil Support Team was on site to provide assistance if needed.
The bottle recovered by the hazmat team tested positive for ricin, but it was a small amount and it was all contained within the vehicle.
There was no danger to the public.
Gibbs was released from the hospital.
He was fine.
After being interrogated that night by the FBI, Gibbs was initially held at the county jail on just a misdemeanor charge of reckless conduct.
A few weeks later, though, a federal grand jury indicted him on a single count of possession of a biological agent or toxin by a person who didn't have the proper registration.
That's section 175B of Title 18 of the U.S. Code.
175B.
The B is so critical here because 175B isn't a subcategory of Section 175.
It's its own section.
Section 175, Prohibitions with Respect to Biological Weapons, that carries a 10-year sentence.
And 175B is a paltry five years.
The difference between the two is intent.
You have to prove that the defendant intended to use the toxin as a weapon if you want to charge them under 175.
175B just means you had something you weren't supposed to have.
That section was newly written in 2001, certainly as some sort of frantic post-9-11 crackdown on scientists with out-of-date paperwork.
Maybe they just wanted to know who had what, where, when, and why, even if it wasn't something they were planning to use as a weapon.
Or maybe they just wanted to be sure they could charge cases where the facts were fuzzy.
Bit of both, I think.
So when I read news coverage of this case, and the reports all say the case against Gibbs was dismissed because Congress forgot to make ricin illegal, I thought, that can't be right.
I've read cases from this time period that ended in a conviction related to ricin.
There was one in Georgia just a few years before this, some militia guys with a harebrained scheme to disperse the toxin over large areas in major cities.
It never would have worked.
It wasn't a workable plan.
They didn't even have ricin, and there was no indication that they had any idea how to make it or had sought that knowledge.
It's a scary sounding plot, but even the judge doubted that a 70-year-old man was going to figure out how to do anything with those beans he bought.
The hiccup is right here, though.
Those elderly militiamen with a bag of raw castor beans were charged with Section 175.
They were only conspiring to make the ricin.
They did have the beans, and they were intending to use them as a weapon.
Most cases where someone is arrested because they had some kind of biological agent or toxin, they go ahead and charge them with intent to use it as a weapon.
Why else would the cops be at your house in a hazmat suit, right?
And that law is pretty broad.
It is enough to just attempt, threaten, or conspire to use it as a weapon.
You don't even have to have a plan that would actually work.
I mean, in that militia case, they just had the beans.
They hadn't even made the poison yet.
So in the Gibbs case, they must not have felt that they could meet even that burden.
I guess they really thought that they wouldn't be able to convince a jury that he was ever going to do anything other than spill it in his car.
So they charged him with the lesser offense, 175B.
And again, that's just having one of these biological agents or toxins without properly registering that possession with the government.
And those two laws, they're in the same chapter.
They use most of the same words.
How could it be that one of them applies to ricin and one of them doesn't?
The answer took me too long to figure out.
It's very complicated and it's very silly.
So just to get a little schoolhouse rock on you here, we have laws, right?
The United States Code is the codification of all of the permanent federal statutes, those things that become law after Congress passes a bill.
But we also have something called the Code of Federal Regulations.
After passing a law, Congress can delegate the authority to a government agency to write the regulations that help that agency interpret and implement those laws.
It's more complicated than that, but I know nobody wants to hear me struggle to explain regulatory law, so I'm not gonna.
So in this case, Congress passed a bill that said it's illegal to have biological agents or toxins.
Okay, solid law.
But they're not experts on microbiology.
So they leave it to the Department of Health and Human Services to list what sorts of things need to be criminalized by this law specifically.
And Ryson was on that list.
In the first code section, there actually is no list.
It just says biological agent or toxin, and that's defined very broadly.
But in this specific section in 175B, the code section that requires you to register with the Secretary of Health and Human Services if you possess certain what are called select agents, you gotta list them.
They're select agents.
You have to select them.
So instead of listing those select agents by name in the law, it specified that it applied to biological agents and toxins that are, quote, listed as non-overlap or overlap, select biological agent or toxin in sections 73.4 and 73.5 of Title 42 Code of Federal Regulations.
Okay, so I assume ricin must be missing from that list, right?
That's why the case got dropped.
So I found a copy of the 2017 version of the Code of Federal Regulations and I flipped to Title 42, Section 73, and Ricin's on the list.
I control-F'd it.
I found Ricin in Section 73.
I can see it.
What happened?
And here's where it gets so silly.
So the law was passed in 2001.
In 2001, the statute made specific reference to the list of toxins found in the Code of Federal Regulations, Title 42, Section 72.6.
Then in 2002, the Department of Health and Human Services made some formatting updates to their rules and regulations.
So Congress amended the law in 2002 to match the updated reference.
So now the law says that the list is in Appendix A of Section 72.
Perfect.
Everything's matching up.
In 2004, Congress amended the law again, updating that reference again, because Health and Human Services had made some more formatting changes and now the list of toxins is in sections 73.4 and 73.5.
Perfect.
The law and the regulation still match.
Until three months later.
Health and Human Services did a little bit of reformatting of their rules and regulations.
They eliminated an unnecessary section, so everything got shifted by point one.
So now the list of toxins with ricin on it is section 73.3.
And the law wasn't amended to match.
It's like a dead link, right?
The law requires the list.
The law says that the things on the list are illegal, but it points you to a really specific place.
And that's not where the list is anymore.
And if it only criminalizes the things on the list and there is no list, then it's not illegal.
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He never thought he was going to get caught.
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I was just like, ah, gotcha.
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Jan Marcelek was a model of German corporate success.
It seemed so damn simple for him.
Also, it turned out, a fraudster.
Where does the money come from?
That was something that I always was questioning myself.
But what if I told you that was the least interesting thing about him?
His secret office was less than 500 meters down the road.
I often ask myself now, did I know the true Rian at all?
Certain things in my life since then have gone terribly wrong.
I don't know if they followed me to my home.
It looks like the ingredients of a really grand spy story here, because this ties together the Cold War with the new one.
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Sometimes it's hard to remember, but going through something like that is a traumatic experience, but it's also not the end of their life.
That was my dad, reminding me and so many others who need to hear it, that our trauma is not our shame to carry, and that we have big, bold, and beautiful lives to live after what happened to us.
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Each week, I sit down with people who've lived through harm, carried silence, and are now reshaping the systems that failed us.
We're going to talk about the adultification of black girls, mothering as resistance, and the tools we use for healing.
The Unwanted Sorority is a safe space, not a quiet space.
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Music Obviously, this was a mistake.
They'd made updates in tandem twice before.
Twice.
The regulations changed and they updated the law to match so that the numbers still matched.
They just didn't do it the third time.
And in the law, it lists the name of the regulation they're talking about.
It just has the wrong number.
Surely that doesn't make it legal to make ricin.
But I found two judges who said that's exactly what it did.
In this case, in 2018, a judge in the Northern District of Georgia dismissed the indictment against William Christopher Gibbs.
Judge Richard Story wrote, it falls to Congress to write the laws Or to amend them if they yield unfair or unwanted results.
The role of the courts, on the other hand, is limited to fairly reading and applying the laws Congress writes, not to change them.
In other words, Congress fucked up.
But a judge can't change the law.
He can't apply the law that he thinks should have been passed.
Citing that decision in the Gibbs case, Judge James Moody in Arkansas dismissed a similar case against Alexander Jordan in 2020.
Jordan was 21 when he called 911 in a panic, believing he'd poisoned himself.
He claimed that he'd created the ricin because he was thinking of ending his own life.
And when first responders arrived, he did warn them to be careful around the substance.
He didn't want people to get hurt.
After his arrest, he was sent to a psychiatric facility to await trial, but the trial never came.
Congress amended the law to correct the mistake after what happened in the Gibbs case.
So in 2019, the law has been fixed.
But Alexander Jordan was charged in 2018, before the law changed.
And while the correction to the law made it clear that they'd always intended to criminalize Ricin, it wasn't illegal when Jordan did it.
Judge Moody wrote, there is no ambiguity.
The government should not be allowed to prosecute the defendant for conduct that was not made illegal until after he committed the challenged acts.
Congress had 15 years to amend the statute.
Now, it's possible there are other cases, but I only found one other case with a pretty similar set of circumstances.
So someone who was charged only under the possession statute for conduct that occurred after 2005, but before 2019.
And in this third case, the judge was presented with the decisions that had already been made in the Alexander Jordan and William Gibbs cases.
He read those opinions and he said, judges can disagree.
Everybody can tell what Congress meant.
Honestly, I think it's kind of a reasonable opinion in this case.
I think everybody can tell what Congress meant.
Statutory interpretation is not interesting to me.
So maybe that judge and I are wrong.
And this case was a little different because Debbie Sears-Hill had already pled guilty, so it's not the same as just dismissing an indictment.
She would have to revoke her guilty plea and vacate her sentence.
But it is interesting that a third judge looked at the same facts and had an entirely opposite read on the situation.
After the federal case against Gibbs was dropped, he spent one more week in jail.
The feds had released him, but he'd only been in federal custody since his arrest.
Fannin County, Georgia, wanted a couple days' time for a probation violation.
His arrest for reckless conduct on the day he showed up at the hospital violated the terms of a 2012 plea deal for an old burglary conviction.
But that was it.
Because the case never went to trial, though, we don't know what happened.
There's nothing on the record about what Gibbs planned to do with the Ricin.
Most of the reporting on the case focuses on the two details we do know.
He made Ricin, and he was a self-professed adherent of creativity, a white supremacist religious movement.
There is a heavy implication that he must have been plotting some kind of racially motivated terror attack.
And I'll admit, that's where my mind went too.
But that's because I didn't know very much about ricin.
It's a toxin found in the seeds of the castor oil plant.
And don't get me wrong, it is extremely toxic.
Do not make ricin.
Do not chew on castor beans, which is incidentally one of the most common causes of toxicity.
It is thousands of times more poisonous than cyanide or rattlesnake venom.
And it's really easy to make.
I'm not going to tell you how to make ricin, and I just want to put it on the record that all those Google searches I made last night for how to make ricin, how to extract ricin from castor bean, castor bean acetone, castor bean solvent extraction, that was for work, okay?
If the FBI is listening, that was for work.
I don't even have any beans.
I hated chemistry in high school.
I just like to have a robust understanding of the case, okay?
But several articles I read by doctors and toxicologists and chemists all seem to agree.
Any idiot can figure it out.
It's easier than cooking meth, and plenty of people do that every day just fine.
The instructions are pretty easy to find online, and it's something you can do at home with normal household solvents.
You don't need any special equipment or scientific knowledge.
The results achieved by your average home chemist are going to vary pretty widely depending on a variety of factors, but in most cases, you're going to end up with something you definitely shouldn't eat.
So it's highly toxic.
There's no known cure.
And it's very easy to make at home with things that are cheap and legal to buy.
This must be a terrorist weapon of choice, right?
This must be happening all the time.
Not exactly.
Ricin has existed for as long as the castor oil plant has.
You can get ricin toxicity from just eating the seeds of the plant.
It was first isolated in a lab by a German microbiologist in 1888.
And within a few years, people were trying to figure out how to use it as a weapon.
During World War I, the US military experimented with trying to create toxic dust clouds that can be unleashed on the battlefield.
Inhalation of powdered ricin would be extremely toxic.
But it's hard to get the particle size right so that it aerosolizes.
It's hard to control a cloud of poisonous dust, and with no antidote, you risk your own troops if the wind shifts.
Experimentation with ricin-coated bullets and shrapnel was pretty quickly abandoned, in part because it would be a violation of the Hague Conventions, but in a more practical sense, bullets get very hot, and high heat denatures the toxin, so it just wouldn't work anyway.
During World War II, several countries experimented with bombs that would release ricin without superheating it.
But ultimately, there were cheaper, easier, more controllable ways to get the exact same horrible results.
So ricin was never really used on the battlefield.
It's just not that useful for large-scale attacks.
It's possible, sure, people have tried.
You could aerosolize it over a large area.
You could put massive quantities of it in a water supply and people would get sick and they might die.
But it's not the best tool for that job.
You have to use a lot of it, and it would be hard to make it at that kind of scale.
It's very difficult to control for particle size if you're trying to aerosolize it.
Some chemicals used in water treatment would render it useless.
A few countries kept trying to figure out how to use it at scale, but it never took off.
So maybe that just means it's better suited for use up close.
A paper published in a 2021 issue of Toxicon, the official scientific journal of the International Society on Toxinology, found 50 cases of ricin intoxication in the scientific literature during a 40-year period from 1980 to 2020.
And in that 40-year period, they found 50 cases described in the scientific literature.
74% were accidental exposures.
And only six people died.
And those were only the cases that ended up in a medical journal.
So minor incidents where everyone was fine don't warrant a case study.
So I assume in the real world, that fatality rate is even lower.
Okay, but surely, surely all six of those deaths were some kind of sinister plot, right?
The paper didn't say.
It was written by scientists.
They're more focused on things like hydrolyzing ribosomes and polypeptide chains with disulfide bonds.
I don't know, that's not my business.
So I poked around the medical literature a little bit on my own, and I found half a dozen case studies discussing deaths by suicide, almost all of which involved someone injecting themselves with a ricin solution.
There was one paper about a man who died after ingesting an herbal remedy that he didn't know contained powdered castor beans.
And I found another dozen or so papers about non-lethal ricin poisonings.
And all of those were either suicide attempts or accidents.
You know, a child chewing up some seeds, a woman eating castor beans because an herbalist told her it would make her hair grow thicker, things like that.
I looked everywhere for proof that ricin has ever actually been used to kill someone on purpose.
Someone other than oneself.
I looked in media coverage, medical journals, court records, government reports on bioterrorism, the Army's handbook on management of biological casualties.
I looked everywhere.
It has happened one time.
People have tried.
People have come close.
People have gotten very sick.
But at least as far as any publication I can find by any government entity, the only time Rice has ever been used to successfully murder someone was in 1978.
A foot washed up, a shoe with some bones in it.
They had no idea who it was.
Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable.
These are the coldest of cold cases, but everything is about to change.
Every case that is a cold case that has DNA right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime.
A small lab in Texas is cracking the code on DNA.
Using new scientific tools, they're finding clues in evidence so tiny, you might just miss it.
He never thought he was going to get caught.
And I just looked at my computer screen.
I was just like, ah, gotcha.
On America's Crime Lab, we'll learn about victims and survivors.
And you'll meet the team behind the scenes at Authram, the Houston lab that takes on the most hopeless cases, to finally solve the unsolvable.
Listen to America's Crime Lab on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Jan Marselek was a model of German corporate success.
It seemed so damn simple for him.
Also, it turned out, a fraudster.
Where does the money come from?
That was something that I always was questioning myself.
But what if I told you that was the least interesting thing about him?
His secret office was less than 500 meters down the road.
I often ask myself now, did I know the true Rujan at all?
Certain things in my life since then have gone terribly wrong.
I don't know if they followed me to my home.
It looks like the ingredients of a really grand spy story here, because this ties together the Cold War with the new one.
Listen to Hot Money, Agent of Chaos on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
There's stuff they don't want you to know.
Is there a conspiracy afoot to create a rationalization or the rollout of martial law?
Every Monday, we break down the news, make connections, and reveal the stuff they don't want you to know.
Crypto investor allegedly tortured captive Italian businessman with a chainsaw.
New chat GPT model refuses to shut down when instructed.
A secret deal between members of Mexican cartels and the United States government.
Residents are reporting sightings of exploding birds.
There is a video of this sphere zigzagging through the sky.
Listen to stuff they don't want you to know on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows.
The summer of 1993 was one of the best of my life.
I'm journalist Jeff Perlman, and this is Rick Jervis.
We were interns at the Nashville, Tennessee Inn.
But the most unforgettable part?
Our roommate, Reggie Payne, from Oaklet, sports editor and aspiring rapper.
And his stage name, Sexy Sweat.
In 2020, I had a simple idea.
Let's find Reggie.
We searched everywhere, but Reggie was gone.
In February 2020, Reggie was having a diabetic episode.
His mom called 911.
Police cuffed him face down.
He slipped into a coma and died.
I'm like, thanking you.
But then I see, my son's not moving.
No headlines, no outrage, just silence.
So we started digging and uncovered city officials bent on protecting their own.
Listen to Finding Sexy Sweat on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Music The victim was Georgy Markov, a political dissident from Bulgaria.
He was standing at a bus stop in London when he felt a sharp prick in the back of his leg.
He didn't realize it at the time, but an assassin had shot him with a tiny pellet containing ricin fired out of a device concealed inside of an umbrella.
Markov died in the hospital four days later.
This was a highly sophisticated operation, allegedly carried out by the Bulgarian secret police with assistance from the KGB.
The pellet was finely machined, less than two millimeters in diameter, with tiny holes drilled in it to form a reservoir for the poison.
The device used compressed air to fire the pellet at short range, circumventing the problem posed by the heat of a traditional gun barrel.
Investigators believe the pellet was also coated in a sticky substance designed to melt at the temperature of the human body, which would then release the poison.
That's not something your average home chemist could pull off.
There are cases of attempted murder using ricin.
And aside from a few very high-profile assassination attempts, mostly involving the KGB, they seem to be predominantly crimes of intimacy.
They happen in the home.
Injection, inhalation, and ingestion.
These are the three routes to ricin poisoning.
Injection is favored by assassins and those taking their own lives.
Inhalation is unpredictable and hard to weaponize.
So most of the stories I could find of someone who was non-lethally but intentionally poisoned with ricin, it was because someone put it in their food.
A husband, a wife, a neighbor, a mother.
I couldn't find any instances where a victim died from this, but it's possible that they're out there and it's just not the kind of thing that shows up in a DHS report or a bioterrorism medical manual.
So people are giving their husbands kidney failure and diarrhea, but why did I think this was some kind of super weapon?
I feel like it lives in the same place in my brain as anthrax.
And I know I'm not the only one, because in 2013 alone, three separate people sent a bunch of letters full of ricin, trying to recreate the hysteria of the 2001 anthrax letters.
If you're too young to have watched 9-11 happen on the TV at school, back in 2001, letters containing spores of the bacterium Bacillus anthracis were mailed to the offices of several news outlets and to Senators Tom Daschell and Patrick Bleahy.
At least 22 people developed anthrax infections, and five of them died.
Even if you are too young to remember the Amerothrax case unfolding in real time, the image of mysterious white powder in an envelope is sort of ubiquitous now.
Every police procedural drama has an episode with poisoned mail.
Because again, this was happening just a few weeks after 9-11, and everyone had kind of lost their minds.
This incident rewired our brains to believe that any one of us could be the victim of a bioterrorism attack.
And it spawned a lot of real-world copycat hoaxes.
In 2008 alone, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service responded to nearly 3,000 incidents of suspicious substances sent through the mail.
And a majority of those cases were, quote, unknown white powders.
From 2007 to 2008, the FBI investigated nearly 1,000 potential crimes involving possible biological agents found in conjunction with a threatening note.
And most of those cases, too, were white powder letters.
But they're never real.
They're never real.
A guy mailed baking powder to the IRS with a letter that says, here's anthrax, and he spelled anthrax wrong.
A man in the UK mailed protein powder to an MP.
It's sugar or salt or flour.
In one case, nine cops in Florida were hospitalized and held in quarantine because they found a box of white powder and they assumed it was a bioweapon.
It was cocaine.
But the fear that these incidents cause is real, and that's enough for most hoaxers.
But what if you didn't just want to do a hoax?
What if you wanted to do it for real, but you don't know how to make anthrax?
A lot of the literature emphasizes that it's not hard to make anthrax.
They just mean it's possible for a non-state actor to do.
They don't necessarily mean it's possible for you to do.
You need some actual lab equipment and some specialized skills, at least the kind of lab skills you would learn in a college-level microbiology class.
But ricin.
Ricin's easy to make.
And if in the wake of the anthrax letters, white powder is what's scary, ricin can be a white powder too.
It's perfect for an aspiring terrorist without a lot of skills.
So these are people who are taking an extra step.
If they just wanted to scare people, they could mail powdered sugar like everybody else.
But they went out of their way to make ricin.
So they must want something to happen.
They must want someone to get sick.
But they don't seem to realize that ricin doesn't work that way.
There's no evidence that anyone has ever gotten sick from a ricin letter.
And I don't just mean they haven't died.
We've covered that nobody's dying from this.
No one's gotten sick.
Unlike anthrax, you can't absorb ricin through your skin.
It doesn't work that way.
It can cause illness if inhaled, similar to anthrax, but the home chemist is unlikely to create a ricin powder fine enough to aerosolize.
To get sick from one of these ricin letters, you would have to eat it.
Surely the people doing this have some idea how ricin works.
I mean, they did the research to figure out how to make it.
Surely information about how it works is accessible in a similar place.
It's impossible to say why most of these people believed something that was just provably scientifically impossible to result in the intended outcome.
But there are some cases, starting about 15 years ago, where we do know the answer to that question, and it's so embarrassing for them.
They saw it on Breaking Bad.
Rison was a recurring plot device for four of the five seasons of the television show Breaking Bad.
If you haven't seen the show, it's pretty good.
You should check it out.
Brian Cranston plays Walter White, a high school chemistry teacher who turns to cooking meth to pay for his medical bills.
Hijinks ensue.
He gets pretty good at crime.
I don't really remember it's been a few years.
In a season two episode that aired in March of 2009, Walter White is teaching his young assistant, Jesse Pinkman, how to make ricin so they can use it to poison a Mexican drug pinkpin.
In that episode, the first time ricin appears in the show, they're really overplaying it.
As Walter is explaining the plan, they're leaning over the table looking at the beans.
Walter slaps Jesse's hand away as he reaches out to touch them.
And Jesse's incredulous and he says, seriously?
You can get poisoned from beans?
And Walter tells him, yes.
Again, even the finished product, even once you have extracted the toxin from the bean, you can probably touch it.
You can definitely touch the beans.
Just don't chew them up and swallow them.
The ricin is teased throughout the show, and there's always this implication that it is the perfect murder weapon, that sprinkling it on someone's food or giving them a ricin-laced cigarette to smoke spells certain death.
In the series finale in 2013, Walter White kills a drug smuggler by switching out the sweetener packet that she puts in her tea for one filled with ricin.
And since that episode aired, there have been at least five cases in which the defendant outright admitted that they got the idea to purchase, manufacture, or use ricin because they saw it on that show.
The make-believe meth dealer on TV told them it was easy, deadly, and often overlooked as a cause of death because the symptoms are more easily explained by some ordinary illness.
In the most egregious instance, a 37-year-old woman in London went online to purchase ricin just days after seeing the series finale.
And in that episode, Walter White put ricin in a woman's tea.
But when Kuntal Patel logged onto the dark web to try to buy ricin, she was ultimately sold a similar poison called Abrin.
And when she received it, she dumped it into her mother's Diet Coke.
Her mother survived and Patel got a three-year sentence.
In the span of just a couple of years, Ishtiak Salim in Pennsylvania, Muhammad Ali in Liverpool, Daniel Millsman in D.C., and Alexander Jordan in Arkansas all said they got the idea from the show.
And I'm sure they're not the only ones.
In 2013, in the middle of Breaking Bad's final season, three separate people in three entirely unrelated cases made ricin, put it in envelopes, and mailed it to important people.
Letters went to a federal judge, New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, the CIA, an Air Force base, a Mississippi state representative.
Two of the letter writers sent one to Barack Obama.
Obviously, no one got hurt.
You can't get sick from a Ryson letter.
And I can't prove that Matthew Bouquet, James Dutchke, or Shannon Richardson were breaking bad fans.
But come on.
I think I'd be Willing to put money on the fact that Shannon Richardson, at least, was watching the show.
Because I know she loved prestige TV.
She was an actress.
She'd had a small role as one of the zombies on The Walking Dead.
And I don't think she actually wanted to poison Michael Bloomberg or Barack Obama.
She was trying to get rid of her husband.
I don't know why she didn't just poison her husband.
This seems very elaborate.
But she was in the middle of a divorce.
And I guess she wanted to speed things along.
So she manufactured ricin in her kitchen, mailed it to the president, and then called the police to say she thought her husband had done it.
She is, of course, in federal prison.
By 2019, William Christopher Gibbs was home.
His ordeal was over, his case was dropped.
He filed a number of lawsuits against various law enforcement agencies involved in this, but they were all incoherent and quickly dismissed.
In 2021, the Pontifex Maximus of the Creativity Alliance posted in the group's online forum that Gibbs had been excommunicated from the church.
It's not totally clear why they waited until 2021.
Again, he was arrested in 2017.
But Reverend Colin Campbell's lists of reasons was as follows.
Insufficient explanation for the use of beans that make ricin.
Use of titles he is not authorized to use, Reverend, Pontifex and Pontifex Maximus.
General disobedience as a prospective church member.
Use of Aryan Brotherhood imagery without authorization and for personal gain.
Usage of outlaw motorcycle club names without authorization and for personal gain.
Attempting to declare wars in the name of creativity against outlaw motorcycle clubs.
Okay, so he does start out with the beans.
There's a little bit in there about how really he should have had a good reason for making ricin.
They're not saying he shouldn't have made ricin.
They just want clarification on why he was doing that.
But everything else on this list, this is overwhelmingly just made-up stuff.
It's weird Nazi church stuff.
They're mad that he called himself a reverend in the Nazi church when he wasn't really a reverend.
He pretended to be the pope of Nazi church online.
He posted things online that might make people think he was more important, more involved than he really was, or involved with people or groups that he wasn't.
Honestly, I think the worst thing on this list is that he was trying to start fights with motorcycle clubs in the name of the church.
Nobody wants that heat.
Even though he is officially excommunicated from the Creativity Alliance, he's made quite a few posts in the last four years that indicate he's still an adherent of creativity, that godless religion of white supremacy.
He still calls himself Pontifex Maximus, sometimes.
He'll post Rahoa every now and again.
But he also posts Crowley and sigils and snippets of the Necronomicon, and sometimes what appear to be Christian prayers.
And earlier this year, he posted his last will and testament, in which he names Kim Jong-un the executor of his estate.
So, hard to say what he believes.
We'll probably never know why he was making ricin in his car between shifts at the chicken plant.
It wasn't really enough to hurt anybody, even if he tried to use it.
Although the fact that he panicked and went to the hospital seems to indicate that he didn't know that.
If I had to guess, and I shouldn't, if he did plan to do anything with it, it was probably what most people do with it.
They hurt someone close to them.
Congress accidentally legalized ricin for 15 years.
And the only two people who benefited from that mistake were a confused racist in Georgia who spilled it in his car and a man in Arkansas who changed his mind about ending his life.
There's no moral to this story.
Just don't eat your mail.
And don't chew on any mysterious beans.
Weird Little Guys is a collection of cool zone media and iHeartRadio.
It's researched, written, and recorded by me, Molly Conker.
Our executive producers are Sophie Licherman and Robert Evans.
The show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gigan.
The theme music was composed by Brad Dickert.
You can email me at Weird LittleGuysPodcast at gmail.com.
I will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer and it's nothing personal.
You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit.
Just don't post anything that's going to make you one of my weird little guys.
Music Did it occur to you that he charmed you in any way?
Yes, it did.
But he was a charming man.
It looks like the ingredients of a really grand spy story.
Because this ties together the Cold War with the new one.
I often ask myself now, did I know the true Jan at all?
Listen to Hot Money, Agent of Chaos, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Smokey the bear.
Then you know why Smokey tells you when he sees you passing through.
Remember, please be careful, it's the least that you can do.
Don't play with matches, don't play with fire.
After 80 years of learning his wildfire prevention tips, Smokey Bear lives within us all.
Learn more at smokeybear.com and remember, only you can prevent wildfires.
Brought to you by the USDA Forest Service, your state forester, and the Ad Council.
If you've ever wondered what diseases, medieval p-tests, and cocktails have in common, you're in the right place.
On our show, This Podcast Will Kill You, we explore the wild world of diseases, their history, biology, and impact today.
Vaccines are in part a victim of their own success.
They have been so effective in preventing disease and death that we take them for granted.
New episodes drop every Tuesday on the Exactly Right Network.
Listen to this podcast Will Kill You on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
There's stuff they don't want you to know.
Every Monday, we break down the news, make connections, and reveal the stuff they don't want you to know.
A secret deal between members of Mexican cartels and the United States government.
Residents are reporting sightings of exploding birds.
Listen to stuff they don't want you to know on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows.
