"I'm always looking out for white powder," said Dave Lannon-Gunn of Riverside, then 11. "Better safe than sorry."
There were hoaxes. Hundreds of Planned Parenthood clinics received threatening letters with a white powder inside. On Dec. 5, federal marshals arrested a suspect at a Kinko's photocopy store in a suburb of Cincinnati.
"The most wanted man in America is behind bars," crowed U.S. Marshals Service Director Benigno Reyna.
But the suspect was only a hoax artist. The most wanted man in America was still at large.
Over time, the FBI concluded that the anthrax poisoner was probably a U.S. government scientist, not a foreign terrorist as Bush had guessed.
The last known victim, Ottilie W. Lundgren, 94, of Oxford, Conn., died on Nov. 21, 2001. The attacks had stopped. No one knew why, any more than anyone -- except the perpetrator -- knew why they had started.
And in time -- not much time, in fact -- Americans stopped looking at their mail with suspicion.
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doyle.mcmanus@latimes.com
