By David Chesanow, JTNews Correspondent
The Bainbridge Island Police Dept. is confident that the person responsible for three anti-Semitic mailings to local residents last summer has already been apprehended.
Police Chief Bill Cooper confirmed last Friday that his department has closed its investigation of the incidents after concluding that the material, addressed to the island’s two Jewish congregations and to a private household, was sent by a Sammamish man arrested last month for allegedly perpetrating an anthrax hoax.
Donald Bruce McAninch, 45, was taken into federal custody in December after his fingerprint was found on an envelope containing baker’s yeast sent to the home of a Seattle realtor in early October. The realtor is a Caucasian whose husband is originally from China.
Following the publicized desecration of two Jewish headstones in Bainbridge Island’s Port Blakely Cemetery in July, packets containing assorted items, including partial printouts of neo-Nazi Web pages, were received by both of the island’s Jewish congregations and a non-Jewish family with a Jewish-sounding name. Among the items received by the congregations were a fragment of granite and two photographic negatives. Detective Scott Anderson, in charge of the police investigation, said that one showed an image of three little boys celebrating Halloween, while the second was of the same children being read a bedtime story by a man who was presumably their father.
He said it was initially feared that the images were of Jewish residents of the island but that congregants examined the developed photos and could not identify the subjects. Nonetheless, he said, “The immediate reaction when we developed those pictures…was that what this meant is that children were going to be harmed, and that children were going to be targeted.”
Anderson said that the piece of granite, which had one polished surface, may have been intended to suggest that it came from a broken headstone, but that monument makers who examined the fragment did not believe that it was an actual headstone. In any event, he said, it was not from one of the Jewish headstones on Bainbridge Island, and that there was “no indication that [the sender] was ambitious enough to actually get out and go places.”
In recent years, hundreds of similar mailings have been received by Jews and members of other minority groups in Western Washington, according to Brian David Goldberg, director of the Anti-Defamation League’s Pacific Northwest office. The packets, addressed in a distinctive handwriting, have typically contained such disparate items as white supremacist literature, wire service dispatches, pornographic photos and the business cards of legitimate local businesses. The envelopes were postmarked in Seattle but often had fictitious return addresses from outside the city and as far away as Walla Walla, sometimes with a Jewish-sounding last name or that of a legitimate business.
“The ADL has been tracking and monitoring this for seven years, and we started to see a step-up in activity in September 2000,” said Goldberg, who provided the FBI with writing samples from the mailings as well as information on the hate groups whose literature was included in the packets. He also suggested that in many cases the sender of the packets was motivated by media attention to local hate incidents, and that the way some of the mailings were addressed indicates that the sender found the addresses in published sources like telephone directories and The Guide to Jewish Washington, an annual supplement to The Jewish Transcript.
With no subsequent packets received on Bainbridge Island after the summer, the case there seemed to have reached a dead end. However, when TV news reports in December showed the envelope used in the Seattle anthrax hoax, Detective Anderson remarked on the handwriting: “I instantly recognized that as being extremely similar to the three mailings we got here.” He notified the FBI’s Seattle office and forwarded the original evidence.
FBI Special Agent Leland Yates, who is working on the McAninch case, said last week that further investigation was necessary to determine whether the accused sent the Bainbridge Island mailings, although he said they were consistent with others that McAninch is alleged to have sent.
While pointing out that other hate crimes cases on Bainbridge Island remain open, Anderson considers the case of the mailings to be resolved. “Our criteria in law enforcement is that a crime has occurred and it’s more likely than not that this is the person that committed the crime,” he explained. “And we believe that we’re significantly above that bar, so to speak — that it’s significantly more probable than not that McAninch is the person that has done this, and that there’s no question that we have a crime here.”
Asked if McAninch could be charged with malicious harassment — the legal term for a hate crime — for the Bainbridge Island mailings, Anderson said that he was asked the same question by the FBI and that “I said that I can provide victims over here that were put in real fear: The law requires that somebody be in reasonable fear.” However, he pointed out that, rather than charge McAninch locally, it made more sense for the FBI to handle the investigation: “Typically, if somebody falls under a federal statute and the FBI is willing to take the case, the suspect is looking at significantly severer penalties than they are in our arena.”
In 1991, McAninch was convicted of sending threatening letters to then president George Bush and harassing civil rights advocates and minority-group members, for which he was sentenced to 30 months in prison. According to the current federal indictment, he faces four charges:
(1) Mail fraud, including the allegation that McAninch harassed Jews and other minority-group members, interracial couples and outspoken opponents of racism by secretly signing them up for magazine subscriptions or ordering merchandise in their names without intending to pay for it. It is also alleged that McAninch “mailed threatening letters containing racist material to certain people having found their names on the Jewish Federation contact list.”
(2) Threatened use of weapons of mass destruction.
(3) Theft or receipt of stolen mail, for allegedly stealing from a mail depository outside the Issaquah Post Office.
(4) Mailing a threatening communication to a Seattle resident who had attended an anti-racism conference; the mailing, the indictment reads, “contained pornographic photographs, material apparently downloaded from white-supremacist Internet websites, and what the recipient described as “˜right-wing religious material,’…”
According to Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen González, a conviction for threatened use of weapons of mass destruction carries a maximum penalty of life imprisonment; convictions on each of the other charges carry maximum penalties of five years’ imprisonment.
Media spokespersons for both the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the FBI refused to comment on physical evidence linking McAninch to hate mailings or on whether he had Jewish Federation material in his possession. The case goes to trial on Feb. 25.
On Bainbridge Island, however, there is already a sense of closure. A Jewish resident of the island observed, “You simply couldn’t ignore the striking similarities between the mailings. And although I think we all wish that the nation didn’t have to deal with the threat of bio-terrorism, in a way it turned out to be the key to finding the most viable suspect in the [Bainbridge Island] case, and for that reason our congregation feels greatly relieved that there’s been an arrest.”
“In this case, our efforts are concluded,” stated Police Chief Cooper. “Detective Anderson deserves a pat on the back because he has continued to work these cases in an attempt to develop leads. The fact that we got a successful conclusion is in part related to that effort.”