The Mirage Man by David Willman

Author:David Willman [Willman, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-345-53021-9
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-06-06T16:00:00+00:00

Montooth expected that he, too, would eventually face criticism. Second-guessing went with the territory of high-profile work—and Montooth had enough real-world experience to resist being distracted by those forces beyond his control.

His rise could be traced to preparation and perseverance, befitting his upbringing in a small Illinois farming community, where his mother stayed at home to raise four children, his father was a high school teacher, and Ed was the lanky teenager neighboring farmers could rely on for a solid day’s work. There was no shortage of it. He picked soybeans and corn, baled hay, slaughtered pigs, cows, and sheep, mended fences, and cleaned the manure from cramped chicken houses in summer.

Montooth played the major sports in high school and then paid his own way through Western Illinois State University. Like Lisi, he’d known that he wanted a career in law enforcement since he was a boy, and so he majored in criminal justice. When he learned he would likely need more diverse preparation if he were ever to be hired by the FBI, he took a paid internship with a local company, work that trained him how to untangle complicated financial crimes. He earned his degree at Western Illinois while working days at the company, a Fortune 500 retailer, and taking classes four nights a week. After graduating, Montooth managed the firm’s credit card fraud investigations for seven years. The experience showed him the type of evidence needed to get search warrants, along with how to collaborate with local, state, and federal authorities to build successful white-collar cases. In May of 1980, he left to join the FBI.

Whether he was working on drug trade murders in Washington, ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, or the cold-blooded killings of the two Americans in Indonesia, Montooth felt an obligation to the victims and their survivors. It was no different with the anthrax attacks. He wanted to assure the families of Robert Stevens, Thomas Morris, Joseph Curseen, Kathy Nguyen, and Ottilie Lundgren—along with the victims who had survived exposure to the attacks—that their losses, their suffering, would not be forgotten. Everything possible, he wanted them to know, would be done to bring to justice whoever was responsible.

On Friday, October 27, 2006, Montooth, Lisi, and Lawrence Alexander met for the first time with a group of those victims and survivors. Postal inspector Dellafera was on hand, along with other senior investigators. As the meeting unfolded at bureau headquarters, it was obvious that after five years of waiting for a breakthrough, some were eager for any shred of promising news and others were angry or frustrated. Montooth said that his team would always remain open to them. He encouraged questions. The investigators circulated their cards. Still, the people who had come to Washington with hopes of seeing concrete signs of progress were disappointed. The secrecy required to avoid compromising the investigation prevented Montooth from providing any but the barest details.

One man asked whether the FBI was investigating a certain scientist at USAMRIID—a fellow named Bruce Ivins.

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