Speaker 1: Cool Zone Media. On the morning of February two, twenty seventeen,
Speaker 1: William Christopher Gibbs had just finished his overnight shift as
Speaker 1: a forklift operator to poultry processing plant and a small
Speaker 1: town in North Georgia. It was technically eight am on
Speaker 1: a Thursday morning, but he'd just gotten off work and
Speaker 1: he wanted to relax and have a few beers with
Speaker 1: a friend. Around noon, he got a phone call from
Speaker 1: another friend who wanted to join them, but he needed
Speaker 1: a ride. Gibbs agreed to drive down to the gas
Speaker 1: station to pick him up, but he'd need to rearrange
Speaker 1: some things in his car first. As he was cleaning
Speaker 1: out the front seat of his car, he touched something wet.
Speaker 1: A bottle he'd left on the floor of the passenger
Speaker 1: side was leaking. He panicked. He spent four hours considering
Speaker 1: his options before finally driving himself to the emergency room.
Speaker 1: He had to tell the truth he was sick, and
Speaker 1: if he wanted help, he'd have to tell them he'd
Speaker 1: been making ricin. It looked like a slam dunk case,
Speaker 1: But less than two weeks before his trial was set
Speaker 1: to begin, a judge dismissed the indictment not for lack
Speaker 1: of evidence. The case was solid, but at the eleventh hour,
Speaker 1: his public defender made an incredible discovery. A clerical error
Speaker 1: had accidentally legalized the possession of ricin, and no one
Speaker 1: noticed for over a decade. I'm Molly Conger, and this
Speaker 1: is weird Little Guys. The story of William Christopher Gibbs
Speaker 1: and his bottle full of liquid risin isn't actually very long.
Speaker 1: That was most of it, to be honest. But by
Speaker 1: the time I realized how little meat there was to
Speaker 1: the case, I'd already committed to a couple of interesting tangents.
Speaker 1: I mean, I wasted a whole day learning about ricin.
Speaker 1: I can't just throw that away. And it does introduce
Speaker 1: some new elements into the Weird Little Guy's extended universe.
Speaker 1: We will eventually have to talk about the Church of
Speaker 1: the Creator. That was part of what made this story
Speaker 1: so sensational. Back in twenty seventeen, when this twenty seven
Speaker 1: year old confessed to a nurse in rural Georgia that
Speaker 1: he'd accidentally exposed himself to homemade ricin, he was wearing
Speaker 1: a motorcycle jacket with a big patch on the chest
Speaker 1: that marked him as a member of a group called
Speaker 1: the Creativity Alliance. I doubt the nurse knew what it meant,
Speaker 1: but I imagine she described it to the cop that she
Speaker 1: immediately called about the bioweapon in the parking lot. The
Speaker 1: Church of the Creator doesn't actually exist anymore, not under
Speaker 1: that name. The group William Christopher Gibbs had joined in
Speaker 1: the months before his arrest is called the Creativity Alliance.
Speaker 1: Depending on who you ask, it's either a successor to
Speaker 1: or a schism from the original church. There are a
Speaker 1: lot of almost identical sounding names in this story, so
Speaker 1: I apologize in advance. In nineteen seventy three, Ben Clausen,
Speaker 1: an aspiring politician in Florida and the inventor of the
Speaker 1: wall mounted electric can opener, self published a book called
Speaker 1: Nature's Eternal Religion. It would become the foundational text of
Speaker 1: the weird new religion he'd just invented. He called it
Speaker 1: the Church of the Creator, or just creativity, and religion
Speaker 1: isn't the word I would use, but it's the one
Speaker 1: they use. Just ask the Bureau of Prisons. They're constantly
Speaker 1: fielding lawsuits from incarcerated neo Nazis who argue that their
Speaker 1: religious liberties are being violated by prison policies that ban
Speaker 1: their religious texts. Clausen would go on to write a
Speaker 1: book called The White Man's Bible. They call the head
Speaker 1: of the church haunt effects Maximus. They have commandments and
Speaker 1: religious holidays. We've talked about racist religions before. There are
Speaker 1: a couple of episodes that have touched on Christian identity,
Speaker 1: a wildly racist and anti semitic spin on regular Christianity
Speaker 1: that preaches that white Europeans are God's chosen people. But
Speaker 1: this is something else, This is not like that at all.
Speaker 1: They're both anti Semitic, obviously, and they revolve around the
Speaker 1: superiority of white people, of course, but in creativity there
Speaker 1: is no God, there are no deities at all, there's
Speaker 1: no afterlife. It is, at its core, just an elaborate
Speaker 1: way to be racist, and in a unique twist, in
Speaker 1: addition to being anti Semitic, it's also quite explicitly anti Christian.
Speaker 1: Their race is their religion, Their highest belief is the
Speaker 1: superiority of the white man, and there is nothing above him.
Speaker 1: I promise we'll explore this more another day. There's a
Speaker 1: lot of weird lore here. Clausen wrote a number of books,
Speaker 1: and they're all very boring. But Gibbs is far from
Speaker 1: the first member of the Church of the Creator who
Speaker 1: found himself under indictment, so we'll come back to it.
Speaker 1: But that brings us to rahoa. It's a shortened form
Speaker 1: of the phrase racial holy war. I've used the term
Speaker 1: a few times on the show. It's a pretty common
Speaker 1: refrain among guys who yearn for a white ethno state.
Speaker 1: Years ago, before I rotted out my brain reading the
Speaker 1: foundational texts of various Nazi groups, I just assumed that
Speaker 1: rahoah was a modern term. It feels very online, very
Speaker 1: mid twenty tens to me, and I see it all
Speaker 1: the time in their online spaces, where it's mixed in
Speaker 1: with nim speak that I recognize as twenty first century inventions.
Speaker 1: But the word rahoah is actually older than I am.
Speaker 1: It first appeared in a February nineteen eighty six issue
Speaker 1: of Racial Loyalty, the Church of the Creator newsletter, and
Speaker 1: you can tell Clausen wasn't sure the term was going
Speaker 1: to catch on right away. The first announcement that he'd
Speaker 1: invented a new word is brief, and it's sort of
Speaker 1: buried on page five, and in this first announcement, Clausen says,
Speaker 1: we need a word for our struggle against the other races,
Speaker 1: something like jihad, but just for white people. And underneath
Speaker 1: his announcement that he's come up with this fantastic new word,
Speaker 1: he includes a pronunciation guide which he writes out as
Speaker 1: ra haa. He wrote out r ah h h dash
Speaker 1: aa that to me says rah and members of his
Speaker 1: church must have read that the same way I did,
Speaker 1: because a few months later he's revised this pronunciation guide
Speaker 1: to read ra ho wah r a h h o wah,
Speaker 1: which is clearer to me. That reads as rahah to me.
Speaker 1: But later publications of those essays omit both of those
Speaker 1: and they just say it rhymes with aloha. And Clausen
Speaker 1: was so committed to his new word that a year
Speaker 1: later he published an entire book called rahoa This planet
Speaker 1: is all Ours. He later wrote another book called On
Speaker 1: the Brink of a Bloody Racial War. Racial holy war
Speaker 1: was central to the Church of the Creator, and over
Speaker 1: the years some members of the church followed through on
Speaker 1: that commandment. They racked up a couple of murders, some bombings,
Speaker 1: assorted weapons charges, assault cases. By nineteen ninety three, the
Speaker 1: church was facing mounting legal and financial problems. Clawson's wife
Speaker 1: had died and now he had cancer. In August of
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety three, Ben Clausen died by suicide, leaving the
Speaker 1: church in the hands of an unworthy successor, a man
Speaker 1: who failed to even show up to court when a
Speaker 1: lawsuit was filed by the family of a man murdered
Speaker 1: by a member of the church. Leaderless and broke, the
Speaker 1: church fell into disarray. In nineteen ninety six, a former member,
Speaker 1: a law student named Matt Hale, revived the group, forming
Speaker 1: a successor organization that he called the World Church of
Speaker 1: the Creator. This is a chapter that deserves its own episodes,
Speaker 1: but the short version of this arc is. In two
Speaker 1: thousand and two, under Matt Hale's leadership, the organization lost
Speaker 1: a trademark infringement lawsuit whiled by a religious organization that
Speaker 1: had already trademarked the phrase Church of the Creator in
Speaker 1: the eighties. A judge ordered Matt Hale and his World
Speaker 1: Church of the Creator to stop using the name. He
Speaker 1: wasn't allowed to call it that anymore. He did not
Speaker 1: take it well, and he heavily implied to his security
Speaker 1: chief that he'd really like it if that man would
Speaker 1: murder the judge who'd ruled against them. The man he
Speaker 1: tried to solicit for the murder of a federal judge
Speaker 1: was an FBI informant, and Matthew Hale will be in
Speaker 1: prison and twenty thirty six. It was after Hale went
Speaker 1: to prison that the church split into the two factions
Speaker 1: we have today, the Creativity Alliance and the Creativity Movement.
Speaker 1: The two groups hate each other, obviously, and the differences
Speaker 1: between them aren't the point right now. But all that
Speaker 1: to say Creativity is a Nazi religion. You don't necessarily
Speaker 1: have to be a member of any of those organizations
Speaker 1: to be an adherent of the religion, but if you
Speaker 1: are a member of a group, it's probably one of
Speaker 1: those two splinter groups that formed after matt Hale went
Speaker 1: to prison. And that is where we find William Christopher Gibbs,
Speaker 1: the man who made Risin and Georgia in twenty seventeen.
Speaker 1: By all accounts, he discovered Creativity online sometime in the
Speaker 1: summer of twenty sixteen, and he got really into it,
Speaker 1: really fast. He created an account on the forums run
Speaker 1: by the Creativity Alliance in June of twenty sixteen, and
Speaker 1: their July newsletter published a letter from him. By September,
Speaker 1: he was considering getting rahoa tattooed across his back, and
Speaker 1: he was stopped by a cop after people complained about
Speaker 1: him hanging around a public park trying to hand out
Speaker 1: racist flyers. After Gibbs was arrested, the Creativity Movement, the
Speaker 1: other faction of the church, issued a public statement clarifying
Speaker 1: that he was not one of theirs. They claimed that
Speaker 1: he had actually reached out to them when he was
Speaker 1: trying to join, but the messages he sent were very weird.
Speaker 1: Quote he struck us as one of the most dysfunctional, incoherent,
Speaker 1: and mentally ill people we have come across. The statement read. Now,
Speaker 1: that might sound unfair, but I read four frivolous lawsuits
Speaker 1: that he wrote, and hundreds of posts that he's made
Speaker 1: on Facebook across multiple different accounts over the course of
Speaker 1: the last decade, and I'm willing to bet dysfunctional and
Speaker 1: incoherent was an understatement. It can be pretty hard to
Speaker 1: understand what he's trying to communicate. Sometimes the thoughts just
Speaker 1: don't always quite connect. I should say at this point
Speaker 1: that Gibbs's mother would later tell the police that her
Speaker 1: son was diagnosed with schizophrenia. This doesn't appear anywhere in
Speaker 1: the court records. It was never raised as a defense,
Speaker 1: There was no request for a competency evaluation. All we
Speaker 1: have is his mother's claim at the time of his arrest.
Speaker 1: And obviously, mental illness doesn't cause racism. Racism isn't a
Speaker 1: mental illness. The two are generally unrelated, and normally I
Speaker 1: wouldn't even bring it up, especially considering the lack of
Speaker 1: cooperation here. You can't diagnose a man based on his posts,
Speaker 1: but there's definitely something going on there. I think anyone
Speaker 1: who read any significant amount of his writing would be
Speaker 1: able to tell that this is someone who's struggling with something,
Speaker 1: and at least one of these Nazi groups could tell.
Speaker 1: Colin Campbell, the Pontifex Maximus of the Creativity Alliance, on
Speaker 1: the other hand, didn't see any red flags in this
Speaker 1: potential new member. After Gibbs was arrested, Campbell acknowledged that
Speaker 1: Gibbs had recently successfully completed his six month probationary period
Speaker 1: and joined the group as a member, but he claimed
Speaker 1: that Gibbs had quote hardly any contact with us, just
Speaker 1: enough to pass as rational and dedicated to one hundred
Speaker 1: percent legal white civil rights. And I doubt that Gibbs
Speaker 1: had any sort of background knowledge or understanding of the
Speaker 1: schisms within the movement. This is just something he found online.
Speaker 1: He may not have even realized that these were two
Speaker 1: very different groups run by people who hate at each other.
Speaker 1: But when one group turned him away because he seemed unstable,
Speaker 1: the other welcomed him. So on February two, twenty seventeen,
Speaker 1: Gibbs was wearing his Creativity Alliance patch when he got
Speaker 1: to the hospital, complaining of rice and exposure, and shortly
Speaker 1: after he arrived, someone at the hospital called the police.
Speaker 1: What about HIPPA, you're probably asking, or maybe you're not,
Speaker 1: But his lawyers did, and the judge denied a motion
Speaker 1: to suppress evidence stemming from disclosures made by the hospital.
Speaker 1: HIPPA does allow medical providers to disclose what would otherwise
Speaker 1: be protected information if it's necessary to prevent a serious
Speaker 1: and imminent threat to the health and safety of others,
Speaker 1: like if, for example, if a patient comes into the
Speaker 1: hospital and says he was trying to make a biological weapon,
Speaker 1: and it's outside in his car. Within the hour, investigators
Speaker 1: from the Fannin County Sheriff's Office were in his hospital room.
Speaker 1: He wasn't under arrest. They just wanted to get a
Speaker 1: better idea what was going on here and how alarmed
Speaker 1: they should be. Gibbs explained that he'd ground up the
Speaker 1: castor beans and put them in a bottle of nail
Speaker 1: polish remover, and that all of those implements and materials
Speaker 1: were in his car outside. Gibbs assured the officer that
Speaker 1: it's quote, nothing to worry about, and when the officer
Speaker 1: pressed him, asking if the substance in the car was poisonous,
Speaker 1: Gibbs replied, quote, he said, it's not unless it's inhaled
Speaker 1: or injected. This singular line in one filing written by
Speaker 1: the judge has a citation in the footnotes to a
Speaker 1: sealed document, and it never comes up again. There's never
Speaker 1: any other mention of Gibbs having communicated with anyone about
Speaker 1: making the rice, and so I guess it'll be a
Speaker 1: mystery forever. But he's assuring the officer that there's no
Speaker 1: danger to the public. It's fine, don't worry about it.
Speaker 1: It's not a big deal. But at the same time,
Speaker 1: he's gone to the emergency room because he thinks he's
Speaker 1: been poisoned. And as this conversation is happening, he's pretty
Speaker 1: agitated that he isn't receiving adequate treatment for this exposure.
Speaker 1: He's upset that they haven't given him an IV for example,
Speaker 1: And in an interview later that evening, he's hacking and
Speaker 1: coughing and nervously asking an FBI agent what are the
Speaker 1: symptoms of rice and poisoning? So he clearly thinks he's
Speaker 1: been exposed to something very dangerous. The officer called him
Speaker 1: back up, and by around eight o'clock that evening, deputies
Speaker 1: had moved all of the other cars in the parking
Speaker 1: lot out of what they were now calling the hot zone.
Speaker 1: A hazmat team from another county arrived to search the car.
Speaker 1: FBI agents rolled up in black suv, and the Army
Speaker 1: National Guard's Weapons of Mass Destructions Civil Support team was
Speaker 1: on site to provide assistance if needed. The bottle recovered
Speaker 1: by the hasmat team tested positive for risin, but it
Speaker 1: was a small amount and it was all contained within
Speaker 1: the vehicle. There was no danger to the public. Gibbs
Speaker 1: was released from the hospital. He was fine after being
Speaker 1: interrogated that night by the FBI. Gibbs was initially held
Speaker 1: at the county jail on just a misdemeanor charge of
Speaker 1: reckless conduct. A few weeks later, though, a federal grand
Speaker 1: jury indicted him on a single count of possession of
Speaker 1: a biological agent or toxin by a person who didn't
Speaker 1: have the proper registration. That section one's seventy five B
Speaker 1: of Title eighteen of the US Code one seventy five B.
Speaker 1: The B is so critical here because one seventy five
Speaker 1: B isn't a subcategory of section one seventy five, it's
Speaker 1: its own section Section one seventy five Prohibitions with respect
Speaker 1: to biological weapons that carries a ten year sentence, and
Speaker 1: one seventy five B is a paltry five years. The
Speaker 1: difference between the two is intent. You have to prove
Speaker 1: that the defendant intended to use the toxin as a
Speaker 1: weapon if you want to charge them under one seventy five.
Speaker 1: One seventy five B just means you had something you
Speaker 1: weren't supposed to have. That section was newly written in
Speaker 1: two thousand and one. Certainly, as some sort of frantic
Speaker 1: post nine to eleven crackdown on scientists without update paperwork.
Speaker 1: Maybe they just wanted to know who had what, where,
Speaker 1: when and why, even if it wasn't something they were
Speaker 1: planning to use as a weapon. Or maybe they just
Speaker 1: wanted to be sure they could charge cases where the
Speaker 1: facts were fuzzy, bit of both. I think so. When
Speaker 1: I read news coverage of this case and the reports
Speaker 1: all say the case against Gibbs was dismissed because Congress
Speaker 1: forgot to make risin illegal, I thought that can't be right.
Speaker 1: I've read cases from this time period that ended in
Speaker 1: a conviction related to ricin. There was one in Georgia
Speaker 1: just a few years before this, some militia guys with
Speaker 1: a hair brain scheme to disperse the toxin over large
Speaker 1: areas in major cities. It never would have worked. It
Speaker 1: wasn't a workable plan. They didn't even have risin, and
Speaker 1: there was no indication that they had any idea how
Speaker 1: to make it or had sought that knowledge. It's a
Speaker 1: scary sounding plot, but even the judge doubted that a
Speaker 1: seventy year old man was going to figure out how
Speaker 1: to do anything with those beans he bought. The hiccup
Speaker 1: is right here, though, those elderly militia men with a
Speaker 1: bag of raw castor beans were charged with section one
Speaker 1: seventy five. They were only conspiring to make the ricin.
Speaker 1: They did have the beans, and they were intending to
Speaker 1: use them as a weapon. Most cases, where someone is
Speaker 1: arrested because they had some kind of biological agent or toxin,
Speaker 1: they go ahead and charge them with intent to use
Speaker 1: it as a weapon. Why else would the cops be
Speaker 1: at your house and a hazmat suit? Right, And that
Speaker 1: law is pretty broad. It is enough to just attempt, threaten,
Speaker 1: or conspire to use it as a weapon. You don't
Speaker 1: even have to have a plan that would actually work.
Speaker 1: I mean, in that militia case, they just had the beans.
Speaker 1: They hadn't even made the poison yet. So in the
Speaker 1: Gibbs case, they must not have felt that they could
Speaker 1: meet even that burden. I guess they really thought that
Speaker 1: they wouldn't be able to convince a jury that he
Speaker 1: was ever going to do anything other than spill it
Speaker 1: in his car, so they charged him with the lesser
Speaker 1: offense one seventy five B. And again that's just having
Speaker 1: one of these biological agents or toxins without properly registering
Speaker 1: that possession with the government. And those two laws they're
Speaker 1: in the same chapter. They use most of the same words.
Speaker 1: How could it be that one of them applies to
Speaker 1: risin and one of them doesn't. The answer took me
Speaker 1: too long to figure out. It's very complicated and it's
Speaker 1: very silly. So just to get a little schoolhouse rock
Speaker 1: on you here. We have laws, right. The United States
Speaker 1: Code is the codification of all of the permanent federal statutes,
Speaker 1: those things that become law after Congress passes a bill.
Speaker 1: But we also have something called the Code of Federal Regulations.
Speaker 1: After passing a law, Congress can delegate the authority to
Speaker 1: a government agency to write the regulations that help that
Speaker 1: agency interpret and implement those laws. It's more complicated than that,
Speaker 1: but I know nobody wants to hear me struggle to
Speaker 1: explain regulatory law, so I'm not gonna so. In this case,
Speaker 1: Congress passed a bill that said it's illegal to have
Speaker 1: biological agents or toxins. Okay, solid law, But they're not
Speaker 1: experts on microbiology, so they leave it to the Department
Speaker 1: of Health and Human Services to list what sorts of
Speaker 1: things need to be criminalized by this law specifically, and
Speaker 1: Risin was on that list. In the first Code section
Speaker 1: there actually is no list. It just says biological agent
Speaker 1: or toxin and that's defined very broadly. But in this
Speaker 1: specific section in one seventy five B, the Code section
Speaker 1: that requies requires you to register with the Secretary of
Speaker 1: Health and Human Services if you possess certain what are
Speaker 1: called select agents. Got a list them. They're select agents.
Speaker 1: You have to select them. So instead of listing those
Speaker 1: select agents by name in the law, it specified that
Speaker 1: it applied to biological agents and toxins that are quote
Speaker 1: listed as non overlap or overlap select biological agent or
Speaker 1: toxin in sections seventy three point four and seventy three
Speaker 1: point five of Title forty two, Code of Federal Regulations. Okay,
Speaker 1: so I assume Risin must be missing from that list, right,
Speaker 1: That's why the case got dropped. So I found a
Speaker 1: copy of the twenty seventeen version of the Code of
Speaker 1: Federal Regulations and I flipped a Title forty two, section
Speaker 1: seventy three, and Risin's on the list. I control eft
Speaker 1: it I found Risin in section seventy three. I can
Speaker 1: see it what happened, and here's it gets so silly.
Speaker 1: So the law was passed in two thousand and one.
Speaker 1: In two thousand and one, the statute made specific reference
Speaker 1: to the list of toxins found in the Code of
Speaker 1: Federal Regulations, Title forty two, Section seventy two point six.
Speaker 1: Then in two thousand and two, the Department of Health
Speaker 1: and Human Services made some formatting updates to their rules
Speaker 1: and regulations, so Congress amended the law in two thousand
Speaker 1: and two to match the updated reference. So now the
Speaker 1: law says that the list is in appendix A of
Speaker 1: section seventy two. Perfect, everything's matching up. In two thousand
Speaker 1: and four, Congress amended the law again, updating that reference
Speaker 1: again because Health and Human Services had made some more
Speaker 1: formatting changes, And now the list of toxins is in
Speaker 1: section seventy three point four in seventy three point five perfect.
Speaker 1: The law and the regulation still match until three months later,
Speaker 1: Health and Human Services did a little bit of reformatting
Speaker 1: of their rules and regulations. They eliminated an unnecessary section,
Speaker 1: so everything got shifted by point one. So now the
Speaker 1: list of toxins with risin on it is section seventy
Speaker 1: three point three and the law wasn't amended to match.
Speaker 1: It's like a dead link, right, the law requires the list.
Speaker 1: The law says that the things on the list are illegal,
Speaker 1: but it points you to a really specific place, and
Speaker 1: that's not where the list is anymore. And if it
Speaker 1: only criminalizes the things on the list and there is
Speaker 1: no list, then it's not illegal. Obviously this was a mistake.
Speaker 1: They'd made updates in tandem twice before. Twice the regulations
Speaker 1: changed and they updated the law to match so that
Speaker 1: the numbers still matched. They just didn't do it the
Speaker 1: third time. And in the law it lists the name
Speaker 1: of the regulation they're talking about. It just has the
Speaker 1: wrong number. Surely that doesn't make it legal to make risin.
Speaker 1: But I found two judges who said that's exactly what
Speaker 1: it did in this case. In twenty eighteen, a judge
Speaker 1: in the Northern Destruct of Georgia dismissed the indictment against
Speaker 1: William Christopher Gibbs. Judge Richard's Story wrote, it falls to
Speaker 1: Congress to write the laws or to amend them if
Speaker 1: they yield unfair or unwanted results. The role of the courts,
Speaker 1: on the other hand, is limited to fairly reading and
Speaker 1: applying the law's Congress rights, not to change them. In
Speaker 1: other words, Congress fucked up, But a judge can't change
Speaker 1: the law. He can't apply the law that he thinks
Speaker 1: should have been passed. Citing that decision in the Gibbs case,
Speaker 1: judge James Moody and Arkansas missed a similar case against
Speaker 1: Alexander Jordan in twenty twenty. Jordan was twenty one when
Speaker 1: he called nine one one in a panic, believing he'd
Speaker 1: poisoned himself. He claimed that he'd created the risin because
Speaker 1: he was thinking of ending his own life, and when
Speaker 1: first responders arrived, he did warn them to be careful
Speaker 1: around the substance. He didn't want people to get hurt.
Speaker 1: After his arrest, he was sent to a psychiatric facility
Speaker 1: to await trial, but the trial ever came. Congress amended
Speaker 1: the law to correct the mistake after what happened in
Speaker 1: the Gibbs case, so in twenty nineteen the law has
Speaker 1: been fixed. But Alexander Jordan was charged in twenty eighteen
Speaker 1: before the law changed. And while the correction to the
Speaker 1: law made it clear that they'd always intended to criminalize risin,
Speaker 1: it wasn't illegal when Jordan did it. Judge Moody wrote,
Speaker 1: there is no ambiguity. The government should not be allowed
Speaker 1: to prosecute the defendant for conduct that was not made
Speaker 1: illegal until after he committed the challenged acts. Congress had
Speaker 1: fifteen years to amend the statute. Now it's possible there
Speaker 1: are other cases, but I only found one other case
Speaker 1: with a pretty similar set of circumstances, so someone who
Speaker 1: was charged only under the Possession Statute for conduct that
Speaker 1: occurred after two thousand and five, but before twenty nineteen.
Speaker 1: And in this third case, the judge was presented with
Speaker 1: the decisions that had already been made in the Alexander
Speaker 1: Jordan and William Gibbs cases. He read those opinions and
Speaker 1: he said, judges can disagree. Everybody can tell what Congress meant. Honestly,
Speaker 1: I think it's kind of a reasonable opinion in this case.
Speaker 1: I think everybody can tell what Congress meant. Statutory interpretation
Speaker 1: is not interesting to me. So maybe that judge and
Speaker 1: I are wrong. And this case was a little different
Speaker 1: because Debbie Sears Hill had already pled guilty, so it's
Speaker 1: not the same. It's just dismissing an indictment. She would
Speaker 1: have to revoke her guilty plea and vacate her sentence.
Speaker 1: But it is interesting that a third judge looked at
Speaker 1: the same facts and had an entirely opposite read on
Speaker 1: the situation. After the federal case against Gibbs was dropped,
Speaker 1: he spent one more week in jail. The Fens had
Speaker 1: released him, but he'd only been in federal custody since
Speaker 1: his arrest. Bannon County, Georgia wanted a couple of days
Speaker 1: time for a probation violation. His arrest for reckless conduct
Speaker 1: on the day he showed up at the hospital violated
Speaker 1: the terms of a twenty twelve plea deal for an
Speaker 1: old burglary conviction, But that was it because the case
Speaker 1: never went to trial. Though we don't know what happened,
Speaker 1: there's nothing on the record about what Gibbs planned to
Speaker 1: do with the risin. Most of the recording on the
Speaker 1: case focuses on the two details we do know. He
Speaker 1: made risin, and he was a self professed adherent of Creativity,
Speaker 1: a white supremacist religious movement. There is a heavy implication
Speaker 1: that he must have been plotting some kind of racially
Speaker 1: motivated terror attack, and I'll admit that's where my mind
Speaker 1: went too, But that's because I didn't know very much
Speaker 1: about risin. It's a toxin found in the seeds of
Speaker 1: the castor oil plant, and don't get me wrong, it
Speaker 1: is extremely toxic. Do not make risin, Do not chew
Speaker 1: on castor beans, which is incidentally one of the most
Speaker 1: common causes of toxicity. It is thousands of times more
Speaker 1: poisonous than cyanide or rattlesnake venom. And it's really easy
Speaker 1: to make. I'm not going to tell you how to
Speaker 1: make rice, and I just want to put on the
Speaker 1: record that all those Google searches I made last night
Speaker 1: for how to make risin, how to extract risin from
Speaker 1: castor bean, castor bean acetone, castor bean solvent extraction, that
Speaker 1: was for work. Okay, if the FBI is listening, that
Speaker 1: was for work. I don't even have any beans. I
Speaker 1: hated chemistry in high school. I just like to have
Speaker 1: a robust understanding of the case. Okay, But several articles
Speaker 1: I read by doctors and toxicologists and chemists all seem
Speaker 1: to agree any idiot can figure it out. It's easier
Speaker 1: than cooking meth, and plenty of people do that every day.
Speaker 1: Just fine. The instructions are pretty easy to find online,
Speaker 1: and it's something you can do at home with normal
Speaker 1: household solvents. We don't need any special equipment or scientific knowledge.
Speaker 1: The results achieved by your average home chemist are going
Speaker 1: to vary pretty widely depending on a variety of factors,
Speaker 1: but in most cases you're going to end up with
Speaker 1: something you definitely shouldn't eat. So it's highly toxic, there's
Speaker 1: no known cure, and it's very easy to make it
Speaker 1: home with things that are cheap and legal to buy.
Speaker 1: This must be a terrorist weapon of choice, right, This
Speaker 1: must be happening all the time, Not exactly. Risin has
Speaker 1: existed for as long as the castor oil plant has.
Speaker 1: You can get rice and toxicity from just eating the
Speaker 1: seeds of the plant. It was first isolated in a
Speaker 1: lab by a German microbiologist in eighteen eighty eight, and
Speaker 1: within a few years people were trying to figure out
Speaker 1: how to use it as a weapon. During World War One,
Speaker 1: the US military experimented with trying to create toxic dust
Speaker 1: clouds that could be unleashed on the battlefield. Inhalation of
Speaker 1: powdered risin would be extremely toxic, but it's hard to
Speaker 1: get the particle size right so that it aerosolizes. It's
Speaker 1: hard to control a cloud of poisonous dust, and with
Speaker 1: no antidote, you risk your own troops if the wind shifts.
Speaker 1: Experimentation with risin coated bullets and shrapnel was pretty quickly abandoned,
Speaker 1: in part because it would be a violation of the
Speaker 1: Hague Conventions, but in a more practical sense, bullets get
Speaker 1: very hot and high heat denatures the toxin, so it
Speaker 1: just wouldn't work anyway. During World War Two, several countries
Speaker 1: experimented with bombs that would release risin without superheating it,
Speaker 1: but ultimately they were cheaper, easier, more controllable ways to
Speaker 1: get the exact same horrible results, so risin was never
Speaker 1: really used on the battlefield. It's just not that useful
Speaker 1: for large scale attacks. It's possible, sure people have tried.
Speaker 1: You could aerosolize it over a large area. You could
Speaker 1: put massive quantities of it in a water supply and
Speaker 1: people would get sick and they might die. But it's
Speaker 1: not the best tool for that job. You have to
Speaker 1: use a lot of it, and it would be hard
Speaker 1: to make it at that kind of scale. It's very
Speaker 1: difficult to control for particle size. If you're trying to
Speaker 1: aerosolize it, some chemicals used in water treatment would render
Speaker 1: it useless. A few countries kept trying to figure out
Speaker 1: how to use it at scale, but it never took off,
Speaker 1: So maybe that just means it's better suited for use
Speaker 1: up close. A paper published in a twenty twenty one
Speaker 1: issue of Toxicon, the official scientific journal of the International
Speaker 1: Society on Toxinology, found fifty cases of rice and intoxication
Speaker 1: in the scientific literature during a forty year period from
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty to And in that forty year period, they
Speaker 1: found fifty cases described in the scientific literature. Seventy four
Speaker 1: percent were accidental exposures, and only six people died. And
Speaker 1: those were only the cases that ended up in a
Speaker 1: medical journal. So minor incidents where everyone was fine don't
Speaker 1: warrant a case study. So I assume in the real
Speaker 1: world that fatality rate is even lower. Okay, but surely,
Speaker 1: surely all six of those deaths were some kind of
Speaker 1: sinister plot. Right. The paper didn't say it was written
Speaker 1: by scientists. They're more focused on things like hydrolyzing ribosomes
Speaker 1: and polypeptide chains with disulfide bonds. I don't know. That's
Speaker 1: not my business. So I poked around the medical literature
Speaker 1: a little bit on my own, and I found half
Speaker 1: a dozen case studies discussing deaths by suicide, almost all
Speaker 1: of which involves injecting themselves with a rice in solution.
Speaker 1: There was one paper about a man who died after
Speaker 1: ingesting an herbal remedy that he didn't know contained powdered
Speaker 1: castor beans. And I found another dozen or soap papers
Speaker 1: about non lethal ricin poisonings, and all of those were
Speaker 1: either suicide attempts or accidents. You know, a child chewing
Speaker 1: up some seeds, a woman eating castor beans because an
Speaker 1: herbal has told her it would make her hair grow thicker,
Speaker 1: things like that. I looked everywhere for proof that risin
Speaker 1: has ever actually been used to kill someone on purpose,
Speaker 1: someone other than oneself. I looked in media coverage, medical journals,
Speaker 1: court records, government reports on bioterrorism, the Army's Handbook on
Speaker 1: Management of Biological Casualties. Looked everywhere it has happened one time,
Speaker 1: people have tried, people have come close, people have gotten
Speaker 1: very sick. But at least as far as any publication
Speaker 1: I can find by any government entity. The only time
Speaker 1: rice has ever been used to successfully murder someone, it
Speaker 1: was in nineteen seventy eight. The victim was Georgi Markov,
Speaker 1: a political dissident from Bulgaria. He was standing at a
Speaker 1: bus stop in London when he felt a sharp prick
Speaker 1: on the back of his leg. He didn't realize it
Speaker 1: at the time, but an assassin had shot him with
Speaker 1: a tiny pellet containing risin, fired out of a device
Speaker 1: concealed inside of an umbrella. Markov died in the hospital
Speaker 1: four days later. This was a highly sophisticated operation, allegedly
Speaker 1: carried out by the Bulgarian Secret Police with assistance from
Speaker 1: the KGB. The pellet was finely machined, less than two
Speaker 1: millimeters in diameter, with tiny holes drilled in it to
Speaker 1: form a reservoir for the poison. The device used compressed
Speaker 1: air to fire the pellet at short range, circumventing the
Speaker 1: problem posed by the heat of a traditional gun barrew.
Speaker 1: Investigators believe the pellet was also coated in a sticky
Speaker 1: substance designed to melt at the temperature of the human body,
Speaker 1: which would then release the poison. That's not something your
Speaker 1: average home chemist could pull off. There are cases of
Speaker 1: attempted murder using risin, and aside from a few very
Speaker 1: high profile assassination attempts, mostly involving the KGB, they seem
Speaker 1: to be predominantly crimes of intimacy. They happen in the home. Injection, inhalation,
Speaker 1: and ingestion. These are the three routes to rice in poisoning.
Speaker 1: Injection is favored by assassins and those taking their own lives.
Speaker 1: Inhalation is unpredictable and hard to weaponize. So most of
Speaker 1: the stories I could find of someone who is non
Speaker 1: lethally but intentionally poisoned with ricin, it was because someone
Speaker 1: put it in their food, a husband, a wife, a neighbor,
Speaker 1: a mother. I couldn't find any instances where a victim
Speaker 1: died from this, but it's possible that they're out there,
Speaker 1: and it's just not the kind of thing that shows
Speaker 1: up in a DHS report or a bioterrorism medical manual.
Speaker 1: So people are giving their husbands kidney failure and diarrhea.
Speaker 1: But why did I think this was some kind of superweapon?
Speaker 1: I feel like it lives in the same place in
Speaker 1: my brain as anthrax, and I know I'm not the
Speaker 1: only one, because in twenty thirteen alone, three separate people
Speaker 1: and a bunch of letters full of risin trying to
Speaker 1: recreate the hysteria of the two thousand and one anthrax letters.
Speaker 1: If you're too young to have watched nine to eleven
Speaker 1: happen on the TV at school, back in two thousand
Speaker 1: and one, letters containing spores of the bacterium basillisanthrasis were
Speaker 1: mailed to the offices of several news outlets and to
Speaker 1: Senators Tom Dashall and Patrick Lahey. At least twenty two
Speaker 1: people developed anthrax infections, and five of them died. Even
Speaker 1: if you are too young to remember the amerthrax case
Speaker 1: unfolding in real time, the image of mysterious white powder
Speaker 1: in an envelope is sort of ubiquitous now. Every police
Speaker 1: procedural drama has an episode with poisoned mail, because again,
Speaker 1: this was happening just a few weeks after nine to eleven,
Speaker 1: and everyone had kind of lost their minds. This incident
Speaker 1: rewired our brains to believe that any one of us
Speaker 1: could be the victim of a bioterrorism attack, and it
Speaker 1: spawned a lot of real world copycat hoaxes. In two
Speaker 1: thousand and eight alone, the US Postal Inspection Service responded
Speaker 1: to nearly three thousand incidents of suspicious substances sent through
Speaker 1: the mail, and a majority of those cases were quote
Speaker 1: unknown white powders. From two thousand and seven to two
Speaker 1: thousand and eight, the FBI investigated nearly one thousand potential
Speaker 1: crimes involving possible biological agents found in conjunction with a
Speaker 1: threatening note, and most of those cases, too, were white
Speaker 1: powder letters. But they're never real. They're never real. A
Speaker 1: guy mailed making powder to the IRS with a letter
Speaker 1: that says, here's anthrax, and he spelled anthrax wrong. A
Speaker 1: man in the UK mailed protein powder to an MP.
Speaker 1: It's sugar or salt or flour. In one case, nine
Speaker 1: cops in Florida were hospitalized and held in quarantine because
Speaker 1: they found a box of white powder and they assumed
Speaker 1: it was a bioweapon. It was cocaine. But the fear
Speaker 1: that these incidents cause is real, and that's enough for
Speaker 1: most hoaxers. But what if you didn't just want to
Speaker 1: do a hoax? What if you wanted to do it
Speaker 1: for real? But you don't know how to make anthrax?
Speaker 1: A lot of the literature emphasized that it's not hard
Speaker 1: to make anthrax. They just mean it's possible for a
Speaker 1: non state actor to do. They don't necessarily mean it's
Speaker 1: possible for you to do. You need some actual lab
Speaker 1: equipment and some specialized skills, at least the kind of
Speaker 1: lab skills you would learn in a college level microbiology class.
Speaker 1: But ricin rice's easy to make. And if in the
Speaker 1: wake of the anthrax letters, white powder is what's scary,
Speaker 1: ricin can be a white powder too. It's perfect for
Speaker 1: an aspiring terrorist without a lot of skills. So these
Speaker 1: are people who are taking an extra step. If they
Speaker 1: just wanted to scare people, they could mail powdered sugar
Speaker 1: like everybody else. But they went out of their way
Speaker 1: to make risin. So they must want something to happen.
Speaker 1: They must want someone to get sick. But they don't
Speaker 1: seem to realize that ricin doesn't work that way. There's
Speaker 1: no evidence that anyone has ever gotten sick from a
Speaker 1: ris in letter. And I don't just mean they haven't died.
Speaker 1: We've covered that nobody's dying from this. No one's gotten sick.
Speaker 1: Unlike anthrax, you can't absorb rising through your skin. It
Speaker 1: doesn't work that way. It can cause illness if inhaled,
Speaker 1: similar to anthrax, but the home chemist is unlikely to
Speaker 1: create a rice in power are fine enough to aerosolize.
Speaker 1: To get sick from one of these ris in letters,
Speaker 1: you would have to eat it. Surely that people doing
Speaker 1: this have some idea how risin works, I mean they
Speaker 1: did the research to figure out how to make it.
Speaker 1: Surely information about how it works is accessible in a
Speaker 1: similar place. It's impossible to say why most of these
Speaker 1: people believed something that was just provably scientifically impossible to
Speaker 1: result in the intended outcome. But there are some cases,
Speaker 1: starting about fifteen years ago, where we do know the
Speaker 1: answer to that question, and it's so embarrassing for them.
Speaker 1: They saw it on Breaking Bad. Risin was a recurring
Speaker 1: plot device for four of the five seasons of the
Speaker 1: television show Breaking Bad. If you haven't seen the show,
Speaker 1: it's pretty good check it out. Brian Cranston plays Walter White,
Speaker 1: a high school chemistry teacher who turns to cooking meth
Speaker 1: to pay for his medical bills. Hi Jenson sue, he
Speaker 1: gets pretty good at crime. I don't really remember. It's
Speaker 1: been a few years. In a season two episode that
Speaker 1: aired in March of two thousand and nine, Walter White
Speaker 1: is teaching his young assistant Jesse Pinkman, how to make
Speaker 1: risin so they can use it to poison a Mexican
Speaker 1: drug kingpin. In that episode, the first time Rison appears
Speaker 1: in the show. They're really overplaying it. As Walter is
Speaker 1: explaining the plan, they're leaning over the table looking at
Speaker 1: the beans. Walter slaps Jesse's hand away as he reaches
Speaker 1: out to touch them, and Jesse's incredulous and he says, seriously,
Speaker 1: you can get poisoned from beans, and Walter tells him
Speaker 1: yes again, even the finished product, even once you have
Speaker 1: extracted the toxin from the bean, you can probably touch.
Speaker 1: You can definitely touch the beans, just don't chew them
Speaker 1: up and swallow them. The risin is teased throughout the show,
Speaker 1: and there's always this implication that it is the perfect
Speaker 1: murder weapon that sprinkling it on someone's food or giving
Speaker 1: them a rice and laced cigarette to smoke spells certain death.
Speaker 1: In the series finale in twenty thirteen, Walter White kills
Speaker 1: a drug smuggler by switching out the sweetener packet that
Speaker 1: she puts in her tea for when filled with risin,
Speaker 1: and since that episode aired, there have been at least
Speaker 1: five cases in which the defendant outright admitted that they
Speaker 1: got the idea to purchase, manufacture, or use risin because
Speaker 1: they saw it on that show. The make believe meth
Speaker 1: dealer on TV told him it was easy, deadly, and
Speaker 1: often overlooked as a cause of death because the symptoms
Speaker 1: are more easily explained by some ordinary illness. In the
Speaker 1: most egregious instance, a thirty seven year old woman in
Speaker 1: London went online to purchase ris in just days after
Speaker 1: seeing the series finale, and in that episode, Walter White
Speaker 1: put risin in a woman's tea. But when Kuntal Patel
Speaker 1: logged onto the dark web to try to buy risin,
Speaker 1: she was ultimately sold a similar poison called abrin, and
Speaker 1: when she received it, she dumped it into her mother's
Speaker 1: diet coke. Her mother survived, and Patel got a three
Speaker 1: year sentence in the span of just a couple of years.
Speaker 1: Ishtiyak Salem in Pennsylvania, Muhammad Ali in Liverpool, Daniel Millsman
Speaker 1: in d c and Alexander Jordan in Arkansas all said
Speaker 1: they got the idea from the show, and I'm sure
Speaker 1: they're not the only ones. In twenty thirteen, in the
Speaker 1: middle of Breaking Bad's final season, three separate people in
Speaker 1: three entirely unrelated cases made Risin, put it in envelopes
Speaker 1: and mailed it to important people. Letters went to a
Speaker 1: federal judge, New York City mayor, Mike Bloomberg, the CIA,
Speaker 1: an Air Force base, a Mississippi state representative. Two of
Speaker 1: the letter writers sent one to Barack Obama. Obviously, no
Speaker 1: one got hurt. You can't get sick from a rice
Speaker 1: In letter. And I can't prove that Matthew Buquette, James Douciki,
Speaker 1: or Shannon Richardson were Breaking Bad fans, But come on,
Speaker 1: I think I'd be willing to put money on the
Speaker 1: fact that Shannon Richardson at least was watching the show,
Speaker 1: because I know she loved Prestige TV. She was an actress,
Speaker 1: she'd had a small role as one of the zombies
Speaker 1: on The Walking Dead. And I don't think she actually
Speaker 1: wanted to poison Michael Bloomberg or Barack Obama. She was
Speaker 1: trying to get rid of her husband. I don't know
Speaker 1: why she didn't just poison her husband. This seems very elaborate,
Speaker 1: but she was in the middle of a divorce and
Speaker 1: I guess she wanted to speed things along, so she
Speaker 1: manufactured rice and in her kitchen, mailed it to the president,
Speaker 1: and then called the police to say she thought her
Speaker 1: husband had done it. She is, of course, in federal prison.
Speaker 1: By twenty nineteen, William Christopher Gibbs was home, his ordeal
Speaker 1: was over, his case was dropped. He filed a number
Speaker 1: of lawsuits against various law enforcement agencies involved in this,
Speaker 1: but they were all incoherent and quickly dismissed. In twenty
Speaker 1: twenty one, the Pontifex Maximus of the Creativity Alliance hosted
Speaker 1: in the group's online forum that Gibbs had been excommunicated
Speaker 1: from the church. It's not totally clear why they waited
Speaker 1: until twenty twenty one. Again, he was arrested in twenty seventeen,
Speaker 1: but Reverend Colin Campbell's list of reasons was as follows,
Speaker 1: insufficient explanation for the use of beans that make risin
Speaker 1: use of titles he is not authorized to use, Reverend
Speaker 1: Pontifex and Pontifex Maximus. General disobedience is a prospective church
Speaker 1: member use of Arian brotherhood imagery without authorization and for
Speaker 1: personal gain, usage of outlaw motorcycle club names without authorization
Speaker 1: and for personal gain, attempting to declare wars in the
Speaker 1: name of Creativity against outlaw motorcycle clubs. Okay, so he
Speaker 1: does start out with the beans. There's a little bit
Speaker 1: in there about how really he should have had a
Speaker 1: good reason for making ricin. They're not saying he shouldn't
Speaker 1: have made ricin, they just want clarification on why he
Speaker 1: was doing that. But everything else on this list, this
Speaker 1: is overwhelmingly just made up stuff. It's weird Nazi church stuff.
Speaker 1: They're mad that he called himself a reverend in the
Speaker 1: Nazi Church when he wasn't really a reverend. He pretended
Speaker 1: to be the pope of Nazi Church online. He posted
Speaker 1: things online that might make people think he was more important,
Speaker 1: more involved than he really was, or involved with people
Speaker 1: or groups that he wasn't. Honestly, I think the worst
Speaker 1: thing on this list is that he was trying to
Speaker 1: start fights with motorcycle clubs in the name of the church.
Speaker 1: Nobody wants that heat. Even though he is officially excommunicated
Speaker 1: from the Creativity Alliance, he's made quite a few posts
Speaker 1: in the last four years that indicate he's still an
Speaker 1: adherent of Creativity, that godless religion of white supremacy. He
Speaker 1: still calls himself Pontefec's Maximus. Sometimes he'll post rahoa every
Speaker 1: now and again, but he also posts Crowley and sigels
Speaker 1: and snippets of the Necronomicon, and sometimes what appeared to
Speaker 1: be Christian prayers, and earlier this year he posted his
Speaker 1: last will and testament, in which he names Kim Jong
Speaker 1: un the executor of his estate. So hard to say
Speaker 1: what he believes. We'll probably never know why he was
Speaker 1: making risin in his car between shifts at the chicken plant.
Speaker 1: It wasn't really enough to hurt anybody, even if he'd
Speaker 1: tried to use it, although the fact that he panicked
Speaker 1: and went to the hospital seems to indicate that he
Speaker 1: didn't know that. If I had to guess, and I shouldn't.
Speaker 1: If he did plan to do anything with it, it
Speaker 1: was probably what most people do with it. They hurt
Speaker 1: someone close to them. Congress accidentally legalized risin for fifteen years,
Speaker 1: and the only two people who benefited from that mistake
Speaker 1: were a confused racist in Georgia who spilled it in
Speaker 1: his car, and a man in Arkansas who changed his
Speaker 1: mind about ending his life. There's no moral to this story.
Speaker 1: Just don't eat your mail and don't chew on any
Speaker 1: mysterious beans. Weird Little Guys is a correction of Coolzo
Speaker 1: Media and iHeartRadio. It's researched, written and recorded by me,
Speaker 1: Molly Conker. Our executive producers are Sovie Looked Mean and
Speaker 1: Narbert Dans. The show is edited by the wildly talented
Speaker 1: Mary Gigan. The females is composed by Brad Dickert. You
Speaker 1: can email me at Weird Little Guys podcast at gmail
Speaker 1: dot com. I will definitely read it, but I probably
Speaker 1: won't answer. It's nothing personal. You can exchange conspiracy theories
Speaker 1: about the show with other listeners on the Weird Little
Speaker 1: Guys sub reddit. Just don't post anything that's going to
Speaker 1: make you one of my Weird Little Guys