Mystery Unsolved Inc True Crime

Bruce Fredricks

"It's the deadliest bioterror attack in American history, on October the 2nd 2001, a photo editor was rushed to hospital suffering breathing difficulties. Three days later, he was dead. The first person to die of anthrax on U.S soil in twenty-five years."

"But rather than being a freak accident the photo editor's death was the beginning of a nightmare. Over the next seven weeks envelopes laced with the deadly bacteria were sent to politicians and media figures, by the time the attack ended, five people were dead and another seventeen had been sickened. But while the deaths had stopped, the attacker was still at large it would be another seven years before the FBI found its prime suspect Dr. Bruce Fredericks, a wolf anthrax researcher at Fort Detrick. Fredericks was an expert on the bacteria, according to the feds he had the means to carry out the mailings, yet his case never went to trial ending instead when Fredericks committed suicide. Was he guilty or was he an innocent man hounded to death by the FBI? Well today we're going to take a look at the attack that terrified a nation and the peculiar life of its prime suspect."

"When Fredricks was born on April 22th, 1964 in Lebanon, Ohio it would be fair to say that his mother was not thrilled. The third of three boys Fredricks' was what some parents term a happy accident but there was nothing happy about this accident for Mary Fredricks. During her pregnancy, Mary repeatedly tried to induce a miscarriage by bouncing down the staircase on her butt hoping the third of the impact might kill her unborn child. As Fredricks grew up and became old enough to understand things, Mary would tell him this story making it clear how unwanted he was. Sadly this casual bit of cruelty wasn't the worst thing to happen in the Fredricks' household. Outwardly the family was happy Fredricks' father Randall owned a pharmacy. Mary volunteered with a PTA. But behind closed doors Randall was a pushover Mary subjected to brutal violence. Fredricks witnessed his mother do things like stab his father with a fork and beat him with a broom. Once she hit him so hard over the head with a skillet that the family thought she'd killed him. In such circumstances it's perhaps no surprise that Bruce Fredricks was a bit of an odd child. Ferociously intelligent Fredricks' locked himself away from his parents, devouring books on science. Aged only fourteen he was inviting local girls back to see his homemade gunpowder. But it would be a stretch to say that Fredricks had any girlfriends or even friends. Later in life he'd claim he was unwanted by everyone that he still harbored feelings of hatred towards the teenage girls who'd rejected him. Latching onto pretty girls and then becoming consumed with rage when they didn't return his feelings was a pattern that would repeat throughout Fredricks' life. Still, no one living in their small town could have known about the resentment smoldering away inside the boy. As a teenager he was outwardly normal, gunpowder aside, taking part in science and running clubs. When he graduated in 1964, he easily got a place at the University of Cincinnati pursuing a degree in microbiology. Yet even here, away from the mother who belittled him and brutalized his father, Fredricks was still acting strange. At some point he was turned down by a girl from the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority. It was the start of what Fredricks would later describe as an obsession. Spurned, Fredricks began to fixate on the Kappas, he followed news about them obsessively, began staking out their campus home. Eventually he came to believe that the sorority were his enemies. One night Fredricks broke into the Kappa's home. Inside he found the cipher for decoding their secret rituals. When Fredricks left, he took the cipher with him. It was the start of a theme in the young man's life, punishing women through weird acts of theft. From here on out, these acts were only going to get weirder."

"The story of Fredricks' time at college is really the story of two people. One, let's call Dr. Fredricks was a successful microbiologist who published multiple papers, earned his doctorate and fell in love with and married Diane Boron in 1975. The other one, let's call it Bruce, was a student haunted by deep depression and a growing feeling of anger. On campus, Bruce would carry a loaded gun, whenever someone slighted him he would take the gun out and shoot at objects imagining the faces of his enemies. He threatened in private that it inherited a demon at birth that whatever darkness lurked within his mother had somehow passed on to him. It was the mid-1970s when Bruce met Nancy Greenwood, a married Kappa studying microbiology. At first he tried to befriend her but Greenwood considered him clawingly nice and rebuffed him. So Bruce decided to teach her a lesson. In 1979, Greenwood was working on a doctoral dissertation, she recorded all of her results and hypotheses in a single notebook and kept it locked in the lab. The notebook was the key to Greenwood's research, the cipher to decoding her work. One day it vanished. Greenwood was distraught for days, she lived in a state of panic until finally an anonymous note arrived telling her the notebook could be recovered from a public mailbox. For the rest of her life, Greenwood would swear Bruce had been the one who stole her notes as some sort of revenge. It wouldn't be until twenty-five years had passed that Bruce Fredricks sat in an interrogation room and confirmed her suspicions to the FBI. In the 1970s though, these were only suspicions, suspicions that grew every time her car was vandalized, every time letters appeared in the local press signed in her name saying something outrageous. Many years later Bruce would tell a psychiatrist that Greenwood reminded him of his mother. He'd even made detailed plans, he would confess about murdering her. But while Bruce was becoming creepier as time crept by, his Dr. Fredricks personality was becoming successful. In 1979, Fredricks began working on anthrax, a deadly bacteria known for its great bioweapon potential. Naturally found in soil, anthrax can enter the body in multiple ways, the worst of which is inhalation. Breathing anthrax spores and your chance of dying is around eighty percent. Because of this, it was suspected the USSR might try to weaponize it. When a deadly Soviet anthrax leak in 1979 confirmed these suspicions, the U.S became desperate to hire experts on the disease. One of those experts was Dr. Fredricks, in December of 1980, Fredricks now live in Maryland was hired to work at the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. There at Fort Detrick, he would grow purify, and test anthrax for a possible vaccine. It was the perfect placement for a young ambitious doctor. Given a secret security clearance, Fredricks went on to co-patent a new vaccine becoming one of the world's leading anthrax experts. He also settled in at work, sticking out only as an office geek who would practice unicycling in the corridors and write silly songs for his colleagues. His co-workers, just thought he was harmless. But this was just one side of the dual personality. Behind the affable dorky Fredricks, Bruce still lurked still harbored his obsessions and grudges. Over the next decade those obsessions would grow into something terrifying."