Anthrax Letter Writer Profile

FBI Home Page ^ | FBI, Critical Incident Response Group

[El Gato]

isn't it customary for Europeans (or computers?!) to list the day first, as in 11-09-01

It's the way the military, civil servants working for the military, and to a lessor extent some military contracters, write dates. Although it would be more common to spell or abreviate the month, (9 November 2001 or 9 Nov 01, etc) but I've seen the all numbers version more often the last few years. I've got to the point where I always spell out or abreviate the month just to avoid confusion. I.E. is 11-09-01, the 9th of November or the 11th of September....ooh hadn't noticed that about today's date. :)

[OrioleFan]

has exhibited an organized, rational thought process in furtherance of his criminal behavior.

I guess voters in Miami-Dade and Broward are off the hook.

[FReethesheeples]

The implications noted re:

the "box lettering" and

the peculiar slant of the lettering (Arabic is a left-to-right written language, of course),

the use of the European-Middle Eastern for m of the number "1" and

the idiomatic awkwardness of his language ("can not" vs. "cannot"),

all suggest a possible to likely Middle East/ Arabic-language, non-US raised citizen tie.

[Nataku X]

sounds like a computer programmer...

slashes of both kinds are used in directory and regexps... hypenating dates makes life a little easier for the programmer...

also it is easier for the programmer to put a 0 in front of the month or the day that is less than 10... presumably many programmers have worked with applications using dates and find it easier to do a 6 or 8 digit string... like today would be 11092001... a 1192001 would be unreadable by the computer

programmers also probably have had a lot of grief working with the lowercase l and the number 1... it wouldn't surprise me if the guy puts a slash inside the number zero, either for readability. I do that myself sometimes.

as for the block handwriting... he may just have been covering up his regular handwriting by writing in all caps.

[Nataku X]

Wow, that is really interesting re fortran programming needed to be done by hand. Maybe you should pass that information onto the FBI.

Of course, if he was a Fortran programmer he probably would have used the anthrax against himself to end his misery. LOL!

[FITZ]

I just figured out a fouth grader did the anthrax....everyone missed one important clue.

[FITZ]

That's pretty good! Personally, I don't see why the FBI published a psychological profile.

Maybe they did it as a trick, sometimes a criminal actually doesn't want someone else to get "the credit" for doing what he did. Chances are the guy behind this thinks he's brilliant (a brilliant Arab) and will put out a few hints to make sure the wrong people aren't given the credit.

[schmelvin]

The "of the" being smaller doesn't mean he has to be an American. He could have seen it in print--on stationary letterhead if he'd corresponded with his target before and received a response. Or maybe he's seen the street sign itself. Maybe he saw that the "of the" was not capitalized when he looked the address up, possibly getting it off a website.

The third letter is different from the first two in content and the handwriting looks smaller. Were the first two letters published prior to the third being sent out? Could the person who sent the third letter have seen a photo of the others in a newspaper and imitated style and handwriting, then added his 2 cents?

[The Bolt]

First off, not all freepers are freepers, but akin to what Rush Limbaugh affectionately calls seminar callers. The FBI is simply trying to appear to do its job, while serrupticiously gathering a huge database on whoever happens to be suggested to them on this issue. My guess is they already nabbed the perp in their roundup, otherwise the mailings would have continued. Maybe the perp died of exposure already or simply ran out of spores. Blew his whole wad already, so to speak.

[Huggy]

Please pardon me if this has been mentioned, but I've read this thread twice, it's 3 in the morning here and I am cross-eyed. However, has the fact that "penacilin" is spelled incorrectly been discussed? It should be "penicillin."

[Kermit the Frog Does theWatusi]

WANTED

[spunkets]

The penicillin misspelling isn't commented on in the FBI posting, just in the media preview to it.

Good reasoning of his id as a native. The rest of your profile strayed when you extrapolated w/o considering some facts. There's the fact the guy produced the slime. You need to consider what it would take in knowledge and equipment. He's a chemist/chem engineer, or related. It takes that kind of knowledge and most importantly, understanding that knowledge, to make a good slime. He also picked the nastiest standard bug. It's somewhat resistant to penicillin. He's definitly got a degree and a long time in industry. He's not a technician. This guy's got a high enough position that he is free to operate in the facilities w/o folks questioning what he's up to. If he only has a BS degree he's an old guy, about to retire. Else he's a little younger and has a higher degree.

Somehow he obtained the Ames bug. So he's got clout, or works/has access to antibiotic testing, or R&D. Else someone going over the PO's would ask, "what the hell's the anthrax for?" He bypassed supervision.