I had found this story before and didn't post it, but I think it's a worthwhile read. Could this all be co-incidence? Although SOME may be random "bad luck", a few others smell of MURDER.

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September 2002

When the Miami Police first found Benito Que, he was slumped on a desolate side
street, near the empty spot where he had habitually parked his Ford Explorer.
At about the same time, Don C. Wiley mysteriously disappeared. His car, a white
rented Mitsubishi Galant, was abandoned on a bridge outside of Memphis, where
he had just had a jovial dinner with friends. The following week, Vladimir
Pasechnik collapsed in London, apparently of a stroke.

The list would grow to nearly a dozen in the space of four nerve-jangling
months. Stabbed in Leesburg, Va. Suffocated in an air-locked lab in Geelong,
Australia. Found wedged under a chair, naked from the waist down, in a blood-
splattered apartment in Norwich, England. Hit by a car while jogging. Killed in
a private plane crash. Shot dead while a pizza delivery man served as a decoy.

What joined these men was their proximity to the world of bioterror and germ
warfare. Que, the one who was car-jacked, was a researcher at the University of
Miami School of Medicine. Wiley, the most famous, knew as much as anyone about
how the immune system responds to attacks from viruses like Ebola. Pasechnik
was Russian, and before he defected, he helped the Soviets transform cruise
missiles into biological weapons. The chain of deaths -- these three men and
eight others like them -- began last fall...

.And what of the deaths of nearly a dozen scientists? Is it really possible
that they all just happened to die, most in such peculiar, jarring ways, within
so short a time? ''We can never say for a fact that something isn't a
conspiracy,'' says Bradley Efron, a professor of statistics at Stanford. ''We
can just point out the odds that it isn't.''

..I read a small news item out of the Finnish town of Raahe...On the morning
of March 5, two elderly twin brothers were riding their bicycles, as was their
habit, completing their separate errands. At 9:30, one brother was struck by a
truck along coastal Highway 8 and killed instantly. About two hours later and
one mile down the same highway, the other brother was struck by a second truck
and killed. It was hard to believe this could happen just by chance,'' says
Marko Salo, the senior constable who investigated both deaths for the Raahe
Police Department. Instead, the department looked for a cause, thinking
initially that the second death was really a suicide. ''Almost all Raahe
thought he did it knowing that his brother was dead,'' Salo says of the second
brother's death. ''They thought he tried on purpose. That would have explained
things.'' But the investigation showed that the older brother was off
cheerfully getting his hair cut just before his own death.

..Which brings us to the death of Benito Que...Que had the habit of parking
his car on Northwest 10th Avenue, a side street that Ardalan describes as
being ''beyond the area considered to be safe.'' His spot that day was in front
of a house where a young boy was playing outside. Four youths approached Que as
he neared his car, the boy later told the police, and there might have been
some baseball bats involved. When the police arrived, they found Que
unconscious. His briefcase was at his side, but his wallet was gone. His car
was eventually found abandoned several miles from the scene...

The mystery, limited to small items in local Florida papers at first,
was ''What killed Benito Que?'' Could it have been the mugging? A CAT scan
showed no signs of bony fracture. In fact, there were no scrapes or bruises or
other physical signs of assault. Perhaps he died of a stroke? His brain scan
did show a ''huge intracranial bleed,'' Ardalan says, which would have
explained his earlier headache, and his high blood pressure would have made a
stroke likely. In other words, this man just happened to be mugged when he was
a stroke waiting to be triggered. That is a jarring coincidence, to be sure.
But it is not one that the world was likely to have noticed if Don Wiley had
not up and disappeared.

Don C. Wiley was a microbiologist. He did some work with anthrax...and he was
also quite familiar with Ebola, smallpox, ...and influenza. At 57, he was the
father of four children and a professor of biochemistry and biophysics in the
department of molecular and cellular biology at Harvard.

On Nov. 15, four days before the attack on Benito Que, Wiley was in Memphis to
visit his father and to attend the annual meeting of the scientific advisory
board of St. Jude's Research Hospital, of which he was a member. At midnight,
he was seen leaving a banquet at the Peabody Hotel in downtown Memphis. Friends
and colleagues say he had a little to drink but did not appear impaired, and
they remember him as being in a fine mood, looking forward to seeing his wife
and children, who were about to join him for a short vacation.

Wiley's father lives in a Memphis suburb, and that is where Wiley should have
been headed after the banquet. Instead, his car was found facing in the
opposite direction on the Hernando DeSoto Bridge, which spans the Mississippi
River at the border of Tennessee and Arkansas. When the police found the car at
4 a.m., it was unlocked, the keys were in the ignition and the gas tank was
full. There was a scrape of yellow paint on the driver's side, which appeared
to come from a construction sign on the bridge, and a right hubcap was missing
on the passenger side, where the wheel rims were also scraped. There was no
sign, however, of Don Wiley. Detectives searched Wiley's financial records, his
family relationships, his scientific research-- anything for a hint that the
man might have had cause to take his own life. ...The week that Wiley
disappeared coincided with the peak of anthrax fear throughout the
country...Could it be mere chance that this particular scientist, who had
profound knowledge of these microbes, had disappeared at this time?

..Vladimir Pasechnik was 64 when he died. His early career was spent in the
Soviet Union working at Biopreparat, the site of that country's biological
weapons program. He defected in 1989 and spilled what he knew to the British,
revealing for the first time the immense scale of Soviet work with anthrax,
plague, tularemia and smallpox. For the next 10 years, he worked at the Center
for Applied Microbiology and Research, part of Britain's Department of
Health....In the weeks before he died, Pasechnik had reportedly consulted with
authorities about the growing anthrax scare...

Robert Schwartz...was an expert on DNA sequencing and analysis. On Dec. 10 he
was found dead on the kitchen floor of his isolated log-and-fieldstone
farmhouse near Leesburg, Va., where he had lived alone since losing his wife to
cancer four years ago and his children to college. Schwartz had been stabbed to
death with a two-foot-long sword, and his killer had carved an X on the back of
his neck.

..On the same day that Schwartz died, Set Van Nguyen, 44, was found dead in an
air-locked storage chamber at the Australian Commonwealth's Scientific and
Industrial Research Organization's animal diseases facility in Geelong...the
center dealt with microbes like mousepox, which is similar to smallpox...''He
was a valued member of the laboratory's technical support staff...
Nguyen...shared a last name with Kathy Nguyen, the 61-year-old hospital worker
who just happened to be the one New Yorker to die of anthrax.

In addition to the men already discussed, the names that appear most often are
these: Victor Korshunov, a Russian expert in intestinal bacteria, who was
bashed over the head near his home in Moscow; Ian Langford, a British expert in
environmental risk and disease, who was found dead in his home near Norwich,
England, naked from the waist down and wedged under a chair; Tanya Holzmayer,
who worked as a microbiologist near San Jose and was shot seven times...when
she opened the door to a pizza delivery man; David Wynn-Williams, who was hit
by a car near his home in Cambridge, England; and Steven Mostow, who died in a
plane crash near Denver.

Ken Alibek...is one of the country's best-known microbiologists. He was the No.
2 man at the Soviet Union's Biopreparrat (where Victor Pasechnik also
worked)...and now works with the U.S. government seeking antidotes for the very
weapons he developed:''I got an e-mail from Pasechnik before he died...but I'm
not paying much attention.''

Others are not quite as sanguine. Phyllis Della-Latta is the director of
clinical microbiology services at New York's Columbia Presbyterian Medical
Center. She found an article on the deaths circulating in the most erudite
place -- an Internet discussion group of directors of clinical microbiology
labs around the world. These are the people who, when a patient develops
suspicious symptoms, are brought in to rule out things like anthrax...

Don Wiley's body was finally found on Dec. 20, near Vidalia, La., about 300
miles south of where he disappeared. The Memphis medical examiner, O.C. Smith,
concluded that yellow paint marks on Wiley's car suggest that he hit a
construction sign on the Hernando DeSoto Bridge, as does the fact that a hubcap
was missing from the right front tire. Smith's theory is that heavy truck
traffic on the bridge can set off wind gusts and create ''roadway bounce,''
which might have been enough to cause Wiley to lose his balance after getting
out of the car to inspect the scrapes....''If Dr. Wiley were on the curb trying
to assess damage to his car, all of these factors may have played a role in his
going over the rail,'' Smith said when he issued his report. The Memphis Police
consider the case closed..The talk of Memphis at the moment is the bizarre
ambush of the city's coroner last month. He was wrapped in barbed wire and left
lying in a stairwell of the medical examiner's building with a live bomb
strapped to his chest. Coincidentally, that coroner, O.C. Smith, was also the
coroner who did the much-awaited, somewhat controversial autopsy on Don Wiley.

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.Mainstream newspapers started taking up the story, including an alternative
weekly in Memphis, where interest in the Wiley case was particularly strong,
and most recently The Toronto Globe and Mail....