Sleuth fuels row over anthrax case

By ROGER FRANKLIN

Back in 1986, doctoral student Don Foster pulled off quite a coup. Working late in the library, the specialist in Elizabethan literature decided to look at one last roll of microfilm. He was tired, his eyes sore, and while he didn't hold much hope of finding anything of real interest among the photographic images of documents recently unearthed in an English archive, he had nothing better to do. The last bus didn't leave for 40 minutes and the library was safer than waiting on the dark street outside.

Then one of those frames caught his eye. It was a facsimile of what even Foster admits is a mediocre poem, A Funeral Elegy For William Peter. As he read, observing not so much the words but the placement of punctuation and other stylistic tics, his heart pounded. By the time he reached the last line and found the initials "W.S.", there was no doubt: He had found a long lost work by William Shakespeare. The bus left without him.

Today, the "academic detective" is a professor at prestigious Vassar College, and he is just as certain that he has made another irrefutable catch: the identity of the man who two years ago terrorised America with anthrax-dusted letters that killed five people and made 22 others sick. For legal reasons, he doesn't deliver that verdict in quite so many words, but Foster's account of his latest sleuthing in October's Vanity Fair leaves the casual reader in little doubt.

His prime suspect is former US Army bio-warfare specialist Steven Hatfill, the man whom the FBI has been keeping under surveillance since another academic, microbiologist Barbara Rosenberg, conducted an unofficial investigation. Like Foster, but for entirely different reasons, she concluded that the letters were a wake-up call from a misguided patriot.

As Ground Zero still smoked, she theorised that the culprit wanted to prod authorities into preparing for the next, inevitable terrorist offensive - biological warfare.

Hatfill angrily denied the allegations before deciding to let his lawyers do the talking. Even his supporters admit, however, that he makes a compelling suspect. He had access to the weapons-grade Ames strain used in the attacks. He was studying in Rhodesia when an unexplained anthrax outbreak killed or made 11,000 people sick. And later, after Ian Smith's white government fell, he moved to South Africa, where he knew, and may have worked with, the apartheid regime's germ-warfare specialists.

There were other circumstantial clues, too, including the anthrax letter's fictitious return address, "the Greendale School". Foster combed the internet to see if those words occurred anywhere in Hatfill's past. In the former Rhodesia, he found a suburb by that name a mile from his suspect's old address.

"A person writing, say, a ransom note or death threat will always try to conceal his identity, but it's really not possible," Foster told the Weekend Herald in an earlier interview.

"Certain traits - punctuation, idiosyncrasies of expression, hints of personal history - as markers, they're as good as fingerprints." And like a fingerprint analyst, Foster runs the loops and whorls of literary style through a computer that looks for similarities with a suspect's known works.

The FBI, which had been ridiculed in the press for its inability to find the anthrax killer, was keen to tap Foster's mind, and while others had doubts about Foster's methods, the bureau's agents were true believers.

Apart from the Shakespeare scoop, he had identified the New Yorker's Joe Klein as the anonymous author of the Clinton roman-a-clef Primary Colors, and helped nail Unabomber Ted Kaczynski by analysing the mad hermit's rants against technology and modern life. He helped Kenneth Starr's inquisitors to extract Monica Lewinsky's admission of enjoying sex and cigars in the Oval Office, and he applied the skills of a forensic linguist to the bizarre ransom note left in the Boulder home of murdered 6-year-old beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey.

That last case was problematical at first, because Foster initially believed the letter couldn't possibly have been the work of any member of JonBenet's family. But eventually, after writing to assure John and Patsy Ramsey that "I would stake my reputation on your innocence", his thinking fell into step with the authorities, who still see the couple as the only suspects worth considering.

The misspelled anthrax notes are full of clues, Foster explains. Why, for example, would a colleague of the September 11 terrorists warn recipients to seek immediate medical help, as all the letters did? And what of the misspellings and reversed characters? Elementary, proclaims Foster - clumsy attempts to conceal that English is the writer's native language.

Hatfill's lawyer, Tom Connolly, is unimpressed, likening the official investigation to the FBI's leaks and smears against Richard Jewell, the security guard initially suspected of bombing the Atlanta Olympics. Months later, investigators admitted that the blast was the work of anti-abortion fanatic Eric Rudolph. Like Hatfill, Jewell passed a voluntary FBI lie detector test, only to see the results dismissed.

The Vanity Fair article "is ripe with so many errors," Connolly says. "The real story," he adds, "is what a fraud Foster actually is."

They're fighting words, especially given Foster's reputation as the father of forensic linguists and, indeed, its only practitioner. But Connolly isn't impressed, promising defamation lawsuits that he says will make Hatfill even richer than Jewell, who collected millions for his pain and suffering.

But would a jury go against an expert of Foster's standing, the only person in 400 years to add an extra entry to the list of Shakespeare's known works?

Quite possibly. Last year, Foster conceded what scores of his less media-savvy colleagues had been saying almost from the moment A Funeral Elegy was trumpeted on the front page of the New York Times. As Foster now admits, the find that transformed him from obscure academic to media darling wasn't Shakespeare's work, but the words of some unknown Elizabethan hack. That admission was a long time coming. Connolly hopes his client doesn't have to wait as long for a retraction.