The Afrin Affair
Was Dr. John Linner a mad scientist bent on murder or a victim of academic skullduggery?
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The case, based entirely on circumstantial evidence, didn’t look promising. It was going to be difficult for a prosecutor to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Linner had taken any steps at all to carry out a crime. The fact that Linner had ordered beta propiolactone, the chemical that found its way into Van Winkle’s nasal spray, did not make him a criminal.
Nor was the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Department cut out for major scientific investigations. At the time Moore was assigned to the Linner case, he was trying to hunt down a local crime ring that was said to be stealing diesel fuel from trucks. Because the two detectives could barely spell the names of the chemicals in Linner’s lab, let alone pronounce them, they took to calling them Chemical Number One, Chemical Number Two, and so on.
On a whim, Peterson called the local FBI agent, Jerry Price, to see what he might know about the chemicals Van Winkle had found. Price said he would do some checking. That afternoon he called back, his voice tense. He said the FBI was sending down two special agents, both Ph.D.’s, from its Scientific Analysis Unit in Washington, D.C. Price asked Peterson to get a search warrant for the cryobiology center and for Linner’s home.
The FBI’s response made Peterson and Moore wonder whether John Linner could be one of those mad scientists they had seen in the movies. “The FBI done scared me bad about those toxins, real bad,” recalled Peterson in his booming, auctioneerlike voice. “The FBI told us those chemicals Linner had were the poisons that assassins use, like the damn KGB. I thought, ‘Holy shit, I don’t want to go into his lab.’”
In the small hours of April 30, FBI agents, Montgomery County sheriff’s officers, and Barry Van Winkle descended upon Research Forest and entered the offices of the cryobiology center. The officers found the chemicals Van Winkle had told them about. They also found The Handbook of Toxinology, which Linner had checked out of the UT Health Science Center library.
When the agents and deputies arrived at Linner’s home at two-thirty in the morning, the lights were still on. Linner, a night owl, was in a white T-shirt and white shorts, watching television. As they trooped inside—Linner had a tastefully designed home with Salvador Dali prints on the wall—they saw a machine gun lying on the kitchen floor. Linner told them to remain calm; it was only a squirt gun that he used to shoot at his cats when they jumped on the kitchen counter.
The raid took a darker turn when the officers found two U.S. Marine manuals on chemical warfare hidden in a back closet. The manuals described such things as chocking agents, hydrogen cyanide, and mustard gas. Then, in Linner’s downstairs office, the investigators found a photocopied chapter from a book describing some of the country’s most infamous murderers; this particular chapter concerned Herman Webster Mudgett, a mass murderer from the nineteenth century who had lured women to his home, used chloroform to knock them out, carried them down to his basement, and dismembered them.
As the search continued, one FBI agent, looking through Linner’s briefcase, pulled out a sheet of paper. On it, in Linner’s scrawly handwriting, was some kind of strange recipe that included such items as narrow-mouth quart-size jars, greasy beef, and five heaping tablespoons of soil. It was, the flabbergasted agent realized, a crude formula for botulinum, the bacteria that produces the toxin that causes botulism. If Linner had needed botulinum for some kind of research project, he could have ordered it from a chemical company. Why did he need to grow his own?
Linner was arrested and taken to the Montgomery County jail, where Detective Moore tried to interview him. “It was the worst feeling I ever had,” says Moore. “I’d ask Linner a question about why he needed tetrodotoxin and he’d talk for thirty minutes and I’d just sit there. I couldn’t come back and tell him he was a liar because I couldn’t even spell the name of the damn chemical.”
When the newspaper stories emerged that week (DEADLY NASAL SPRAY USED IN LABORATORY DEATH PLOT, read a Houston Post headline), Linner’s neighbors were indignant. Just because he was eccentric, they argued, that didn’t make him crazy. Linner’s lawyer, Robert Bennett, said Linner had “fallen prey to a hysteria that he is dangerous, simply because he knows more than other people about chemistry.”
That, in fact, may be true. John Linner said he had an explanation for all those how-to-kill books and chemicals and the botulinum formula—and he did. At a gun show, he said, he had traded some gun parts for $75 and a canvas bad of books. He said books like The Poisoner’s Handbook and Silent Death were in there, but he never read them. When I asked about how Van Winkle found the hazard sheets for the toxic chemicals in the bag, he said Van Winkle was lying. “They were never in there,” said Linner.
Linner said the biography of the mass murderer found in his home was photocopied because the man happened to be an ancestor of his wife, Linda, who was curious about him. The chemical warfare manuals belonged to her son from a previous marriage, a Marine who served in Desert Storm with a chemical warfare unit. Both Linda Linner and a Marine spokesperson confirm Linner’s accounts.
The botulinum formula in his briefacase? He says that was part of a scientific project he was doing at home. He wanted to know how plants take in water and other nutrients from the soil, and since botulinum exists in the soil, he wanted to make some to see its effect. He copied the formula, he says, from a book he read at the Health Science Center library.
The two toxins in his lab, tetrodotoxin and DFP? He says he had ordered them for a series of experiments on certain proteins in cells. When the police asked for lab reports involving the chemicals, he told them he hadn’t yet begun the experiments. (A senior scientist from the medical school’s toxicology department said Linner’s explanation “sounds perfectly reasonable.”) And as for the beta propiolactone, Linner says he was just beginning to use it in experiments, a fact he had pointed out earlier to investigators.
Though Linner had plenty to reasons to dislike Van Winkle—he had, after all, benefited from the dismantling of Linner’s Research Forrest kingdom—on closer investigation, much of the case against Linner appears as weak as the UT Health Science Center police pronounced it last spring. Montgomery County officers Peterson and Moore theorized that Linner wanted Van Winkle dead so he would have a chance at that job in the pathology department at the medical school. The truth was that the university never considered offering Linner the job, nor did he apply for it. Linner, after all, called the main campus of the Health Science Center “the swill of nastiness.” He said he was already looking for work on the East or West coasts.
At the same time, Linner and his attorney’s theory that Van Winkle was trying to frame Linner was also full of holes. Not even lawyer Bennett could suggest a motive for why Van Winkle would want to frame Linner. “Maybe Barry was driven by psychoses, if anything,” Linner suggested. In fact, Van Winkle’s seemingly irrational persistence in pressuring the investigation—taking the Afrin bottle to the UT police, enlisting Montgomery County officers when the Health Science Center police refused to press charges—had a rational explanation. Last year, his wife was diagnosed with breast cancer. Watching her suffering through the mastectomy, chemotherapy, and radiation had left profound scars. “To think that someone was coming after me with a carcinogen,” Van Winkle said, “well, that just goes beyond messing around with someone. I wanted to know who was doing that to me.”
In turn, Linner also casts aspersions on a former co-worker. When I asked why that person might possibly want to murder someone, Linner replied, “People, I guess, they amaze you with their resourcefulness when they’re driven by a deep-seated hatred.” That ironically, could be the very description that some might apply to John Linner.
As of mid-July, the Montgomery County district attorney had not taken the case to the grand jury for an indictment against Linner. As a result, there just seemed to be a lot of finger-pointing over who had spiked the Afrin. Linner himself already appeared to be engrossed in other subjects, spending much of his time in Houston at the Health Science Center library, working on his own research projects that might someday again make him famous.
One afternoon I happened to see his massive figure crossing a courtyard next to the UT medical school. He was in his shorts and sandals and looked lost in thought. Given his distracted manner, it had always been difficult for me to tell whether he even regretted the events that had taken place. Now I also wondered if the ultimate question about him would go unanswered. We may never know whether Linner is a killer or a misguided eccentric who lost his way in the unforgiving world of academic science. Whatever the case, he still seemed to want a place in the very world that had so harshly rejected him.
Notebook in hand, his head down, he walked musingly past the med school building where Barry Van Winkle was setting up his new lab. John Linner turned toward the library. And without once looking up, he lumbered up the library steps and disappeared inside, the door closing slowly behind him.
My Library
