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in a small town in oregon in 1984 the first biological attack was launched against the united states
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for over a decade the details of this nearly catastrophic event were withheld from the public
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this is how forensic science unearthed the biological trail [Music] this small town in oregon is called the
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dales and is perched high above the columbia river about 80 miles due east of portland
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it seems like you've driven back in the 50s and it seems in the physical appearance
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it seems frozen frozen in time in that way dave and sandy lutkins are among the 11
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000 residents who find the dales the perfect place to raise a family a half an hour or an hour from skiing a
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lot of water sports a lot of hiking it has pretty decent schools we have pretty low crime
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on september 25 1984 david and sandy both became violently ill with cramps diarrhea and vomiting
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their dehydration caused delirium but i've never felt that bad in my life the room was spinning and you just
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didn't care about anything well let's put it this way i would never want to be
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that sick again when david and his wife went to the hospital they weren't the only ones
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seriously ill and then suddenly there were so many people we had people laying on the floor
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we had people leaning up against the wall there were people in the lobby they all had the same symptoms
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microbiologists identified the cause salmonella salmonella is a bacteria commonly found
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in eggs meat poultry unpasteurized milk water and an animal feces especially that of reptiles
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it is rarely fatal but sometimes death occurs in infants and the elderly ten days after the first outbreak a
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second wave hit the number of patients exploded from dozens to hundreds every hospital bed
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was filled by the time dave lutkins emerged from four days of delirium he encountered a disaster
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lutkins owned a small restaurant 13 of his employees were sick along with hundreds of his customers
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we had virtually no business i mean it just disappeared it was tough i mean that was
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i was in the process of building another facility in hood river and i was going to have it all paid for and
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opening up debt-free and it didn't work out that way but what was the source of the outbreak
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food handlers who don't properly wash their hands after using the bathroom sometimes transmits salmonella
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but hundreds of people were sick and they hadn't eaten in the same restaurant or even the same restaurant
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chain tests of the water supply revealed nothing the centers for disease control in
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atlanta georgia was asked to investigate whether it was some type of accidental outbreak
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or was it intentional [Music] solving the riddle of the salmonella outbreak in oregon is the job of
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epidemiologists scientists who study how disease moves through large populations
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they seem to be unrelated events complicated things greatly it was almost like doing multiple simultaneous
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investigations there seemed to be no common link among the hundreds of residents who had gotten
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sick dave and sandy ludkins both remembered eating a salad in their restaurant before getting ill
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i think we were too sick to worry that much about it at that time it was later that we started you know
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wondering if it was gonna close us down hundreds of their customers and most of their employees became ill too
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at the county health department nurse diane kerr contacted everyone who fell ill and discovered they had all eaten a
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salad from one of ten local restaurants most of the people seem to have eaten potato salad
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at another restaurant most of the people seem to have eaten a green salad and so what was going on they looked at
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common suppliers of food they looked you know where did everybody get their lettuce where did everybody get this
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where'd everybody get that we couldn't find one source of cucumbers or lettuce or
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meat or of anything that that would explain all those restaurants being contaminated at once
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dr michael skeels runs the laboratory that processed samples from the dale salmonella outbreak
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microbiologists discovered that all of the victims had the same strain of salmonella one that was exceptionally
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rare it was dulcitol negative which means it didn't biochemically break down a sugar
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called dulcetal and that's only the case for two percent of salmonellas of this
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type this salmonella had another odd characteristic unlike most bacteria this one was not
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resistant to antibiotics when all the cases were tallied there had been 751 cases of salmonella poisoning
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10 were restaurant workers and these people became ill before outbreaks among the outbreak was noticed among customers
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nevertheless two months after the outbreak the state of oregon reported that poor hygiene of
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restaurant workers and cross-contamination were the most likely causes of the outbreak
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in other words they didn't know the oregon health department basically hung us out and said well it
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was dirty employees it was you know it was unsafe practices unsafe handling the food officials found no salmonella in
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dave lutkin's restaurant but they did find traces of it in some of the other
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restaurants if you've worked in public health long enough you'll figure out that lots of
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times you really can't pinpoint where things front come from the health officials said this is the best we can
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tell you it wasn't a very satisfying explanation for them or for the public or for the press
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but at that time there was no other explanation local officials now began to suspect a
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religious cult outside of town the rajnishi's as the rajnishi's expanded their
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compound there had been growing tension between cult leaders and local politicians
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just a year earlier one of the cult's leaders sheila hinted at potential violence
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she said quote we are here in oregon to stay at whatever the cost if that means some blood is spilled
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then this is the price we are prepared to pay a guru from india bhagwan shri rashnesh
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started the farming commune in 1981. after two years and 30 million dollars the 64 000 acre organic farming and
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meditation compound had its own post office school hospital and shopping mall with housing for over a thousand
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followers they're doctors and lawyers and accountants who've given up everything
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to drive tractors and plant potatoes and and have you know daily chance as he drove through the compound each
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day in one of his 80 rolls-royce automobiles the guru preached the benefits of meditation and free love
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published reports say that the bhagwan claimed to have had more sex partners than anyone in history
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in 1982 the rajnishis took over the nearby town of antelope and with it the majority of seats on the
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city council and school board which horrified long-time residents of the small town
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before the outbreak the rajnishi's had set their sights on control of the larger town of the dales and had put up
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their own slate of candidates running in the november election in the absence of a scientific
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explanation some thought the rashnesses might have intentionally poisoned the community in some way
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so there was suspicion but there was no evidence why would they do this and the other thought was was maybe there
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was somebody some hot head trying to incriminate the raj niche one year later the rajnishi's behavior grew even more
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bizarre revealing evidence that would eventually solve the mystery since health officials could not find
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the source of the salmonella outbreak in the dales oregon suspicion among local officials
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continued to be the rosh nishis a religious cult living on a farm outside of town
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leaders of the cult and town officials were often at odds the cult was founded by bhagwan sri
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rajneesh but today today operations were run by his associate ma anand sheila they met each other's needs sheila
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provided for him whatever he wanted you want 60 rules for isis we'll get you 60
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rolls royces you want a new disciple tonight we'll get you new disciples you
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want to fly in a jet we'll get you to what you know whatever to make you happy
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and and the trade-off was that the black one would say okay you're number one you're in control you
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take care of all the details i don't care how you do it the raj nishis were becoming paranoid
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for many reasons they were being investigated for possible immigration fraud and there was growing internal conflict
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between sheila and other commune leaders nonsense you better believe me i'm a tigress
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she and her group were in a power struggle with another group which we always kind of
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called the hollywood faction they were rich members of the cult headed up by a lady who was the ex-wife of a hollywood
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producer they had money they had access to rajneesh and sheila and her group were very paranoid
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about these people the struggle was for control of the guru the cult and its finances
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former cult members told of plans to assassinate several local politicians rival cult members a united states
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attorney and journalist les zeits in retaliation for some investigative pieces he had written about the group in
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the local newspaper to be told that you're on a hit list and for a group that
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i believe is the time they were capable of that they're just purely evil folks
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by that time uh it was really quite a chilling chilling way to start the day one year after the salmonella outbreak
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without warning sheila and the head of the rashnesh medical clinic a nurse named puja fled
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to europe rajneesh disowned them they had turned it into a passive concentration camp
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prosecutors heard that puja had been experimenting with biological poisons at the clinic including
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salmonella but there was no hard evidence with the increasing scrutiny the bhagwan
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stepped up the level of personal security [Music] there were times when he would move from
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one end of the town to the other where he would be in a bulletproof limousine he would have a lead suv with armed
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guards in it he would have a trailing suv with arm guards and then he'd have a
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jet ranger helicopter in the air [Applause] we felt we could be confronted by a 45
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person private army with fully automatic weapons in october of 1985 a federal grand jury issued a 35-page
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indictment charging the bhagwan with lying on his visa application and arranging sham marriages so his
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followers could remain in the united states when officials planned to search the
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compound they asked epidemiologist dr mike skeels to come along because of fears of biological retaliation and as
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we were going up that road i was thinking you know for a microbiologist this is going to be a pretty interesting
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day no shots were fired in the commune's licensed medical center skills found samples of various bacteria
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standard testing material for a small clinic one of these vials contains salmonella
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typhy muriel and i remember at the time thinking well they told me to look for salmonella if i
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find any i'm supposed to seize it as evidence well there it is so i'll seize
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it but i wasn't thinking at all that this was related to the outbreak shortly after the raid
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rashnesh left on one of his private jets he was arrested in north carolina on the
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immigration charges meanwhile the cdc tested the salmonella found in the commune's lab using a
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technique called plasmid profiling plasmids are sections of free-floating genetic material outside the bacterial
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chromosome bacteria can exchange plasmids allowing a colony to genetically adapt
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and you would then use the size of the plasmid and some other characteristics of it to see
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whether it matched the plasmids from other bacteria mostly the size and so if you found that you had the same plasmid
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type you could assume that these were related or similar strains the salmonella from the rashnesses
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clinic had a plasmid profile similar to the organism from the dales and it could be killed by all
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antibiotics just like the strain used in the epidemic that really was a smoking gun that
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showed us that the isolate that i found in their clinic and the isolates that we were getting from the people in
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this outbreak really were the same bacterial strain the question remained why would the rashnesses poison the
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residents of this small town inside the rashnishi commune investigators found evidence connecting
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the group to the mass salmonella poisonings and they discovered other bizarre activities
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sheila had installed surveillance devices everywhere in the commune every pay phone in the town was tapped
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and almost every building this is the largest incident of wiretapping in the history of the united states
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they wired this whole town they were illegal interceptions there were thousands of them they had banks of
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tape recorders running all the time it's indescribable [Music] most rashinishi's didn't know they were
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being monitored it was kept quiet by sheila and her inner circle which held their meetings
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on her round bed a bookcase concealed a metal door opening onto a tunnel or in secret rooms
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complete with escape tunnels the fbi also found a number of manuals for making bombs and
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doing dirty tricks and they found a number of articles about bioterrorism or biowarfare
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the salmonella was the weapon chosen for a power struggle but not an internal one
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did i understand you correctly yesterday when you said that you were in fact now
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going to attempt to take over wasco county that's correct you understood right
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when the rajinishis put up their own candidates to run for election for the local county commission they wanted to
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make sure their candidates won to do that they wanted to make the local voters sick enough so they couldn't get
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to the polling places to vote the russian issues would have enough people in antelope and other nearby
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places that they would all vote 100 turnout among the russian issues enough that they would
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install their own candidates on the county commission but why had the outbreak happened in
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september informants say it was a rehearsal and it wasn't their first at sheila's direction
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the rajnishi's took off their red robes and put on regular clothing and went
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through the town with spray containers filled with salmonella in august their first experiment was
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spraying the door handles in the county courthouse and produce in the local supermarkets
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[Music] but no one got sick their second experiment in september was to spray salmonella on salad bars in 10
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local restaurants which worked contaminating over 700 residents just before election day the rajnishi's
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made plans to contaminate the city's water supply apparently they were unsuccessful
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there was evidence that someone had gotten to the reservoir for the city of the dallas and gotten into it but no
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evidence that they actually ever contaminated all of the rajonishi candidates lost in
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the november elections armed with the forensic biological evidence sheila and puja were extradited
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from europe and charged with tampering with consumer products they both pled guilty served less than
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three years in federal prison were released and fled to switzerland before state charges could be filed
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last we knew sheila was in europe running at the equivalent of a nursing home which
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is sort of chilling to think about turning grandma over to sheila in her final days
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there was no proof rashnesh himself ever knew anything about the salmonella plot
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he pleaded guilty to immigration violations was deported and died in india in 1990
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most of the restaurants targeted in the attack never recovered from the economic
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blow and went out of business that's what happened to dave lutkin's restaurant
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we never regained the position we had in the community afterwards i had people that would tell
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me that you know i know it wasn't your fault but i just can't eat there anymore
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he now runs a catering service [Music] the scientists who investigated the outbreak wrote a paper about it
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but the centers for disease control asked that it not be published fearing copycat crimes
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in 1997 13 years after the outbreak when bioterrorism had become a growing concern
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the paper was finally published in the journal of the american medical association
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evidence discovered in the rashneshi's health clinic revealed they had even more potent biological
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weapons in their possession had they been used the results would have been catastrophic
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neither the epidemiology alone nor a criminal investigation alone would have would have cracked this it took
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both to put it together [Music] so [Music] [Music] you