FBI: No ricin found in home of Mississippi suspect

[depotoo]

FBI: No ricin found in home of Mississippi suspect - SFGate

Agent Brandon Grant said that a search of Paul Kevin Curtis' vehicle and house in Corinth, Miss., on Friday did not turn up ricin, ingredients for the poison, or devices used to make it. A search of Curtis' computers has found no evidence so far that he researched making ricin.

so, do they have the right man?

 

[waltky]

Smells like a frame-up...

Harry Reid: Another ricin incident at Bolling Air Force Base
4/23/13 - Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said another ricin-laced letter may have been discovered at Bolling Air Force Base in Washington, D.C.

Reid said he knew no other details of the incident at the base, where the Defense Intelligence Agency Headquarters is located.

The Defense Intelligence Agency said Tuesday that it had detected “the possible presence” of “a potentially harmful substance” at its office in Washington, but that it did not discover any specific “suspicious” letters or packages after investigating. “The FBI took samples and will conduct further testing off-site,” said spokesman Thomas Veale, who added that DIA would not comment again about the “harmful substance” incident.

News of a possible third ricin incident comes on the same day that a man from Mississippi who had been arrested for sending the first two was released from jail.

Last week, letters mailed to President Barack Obama and Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) were found to contain ricin, a deadly poison that has no antidote. Both of those letters contained the same message and were signed “KC.”

Read more: Harry Reid: Another ricin incident at Bolling Air Force Base - Juana Summers and Ginger Gibson - POLITICO.com

 

[waltky]

Granny says mebbe dey could make a B movie `bout it...

Ricin case resembles a Mississippi tall tale
April 28, 2013 : Small-town intrigue shrouds investigation of tainted letters.

What looked at first like classic terrorism — poisoned letters sent to the president and other public officials — now seems more likely to be the product of a local feud between two not-so-good-old boys straight out of a Faulkner story, albeit with Facebook pages. In the past week, the FBI has arrested Kevin Curtis, released him, and then, on Saturday, arrested his online sparring partner, Everett Dutschke. Each has accused the other of trying to frame him as the sender of ricin-tainted letters that, coinciding with the Boston Marathon bombing, reminded a jittery nation of the deadly anthrax attacks that followed 9/11.

Dutschke faces a federal charge of producing and possessing a biological agent for use as a weapon, U.S. Attorney Felicia Adams said Saturday. The charge can result in a life sentence and a $250,000 fine. Dutschke is expected to appear in court Monday. A terrorism motive, at least, might have some logic. But the story spinning out in this city of Elvis Presley's birth is as implausible as an Elvis sighting. Who knows what The King would have made of Curtis and Dutschke? But William Faulkner, the Nobel laureate who lived down the road in Oxford, would have appreciated their Southern Gothic obsessions and secrets, their eccentricities, their capacity for vendetta.

Curtis, 45, is a sometime Elvis impersonator with bipolar disorder who has long warned of a seemingly imaginary underground traffic in stolen body parts at the hospital from which he was fired as a janitor. Dutschke, 41, is a blues band front man, martial arts teacher, failed political candidate and indicted child molester. He's also a former member of Mensa, the society for those with high IQs. If the sender of the ricin letters did come from Tupelo or environs, it would be the biggest crime here since the gangster Machine Gun Kelly robbed a local bank in 1932. Most people don't know what to make of this case, other than they don't like the attention.

Tupelo is known worldwide for Elvis, says local resident Carley Johnston, "and we want to keep it that way.'' Another perspective is offered by Curtis Wilke, a former national correspondent for the Boston Globe who teaches at the University of Mississippi. "I've thought, 'God, I wish I were still a reporter; it'd be fun to cover this story.' " Wilke says. "Neither of them seems very sophisticated. Make a weapon of mass destruction from a bunch of beans?'' Ricin is a potentially lethal poison made from castor beans. Earlier this month, letters with grains of it were mailed from Memphis to President Obama, U.S. Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., who is from Tupelo, and an 80-year-old local judge, Sadie Holland.

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