anything. >> nothing you put on a computer is going to disappear unless it's at the bottom of the lake or somehow destroyed in the fire. it's going to follow you even if you think you have destroyed it. in a small town in oregon in 1984 the first biological attack was launched against the united states. for over a decade the details of this nearly catastrophic event were withheld from the public. this is how forensic science unearthed the biological trail. this small town in oregon is called the dalles and is perched

high above the columbia river, about 80 miles due east of portland. >> it seems like you've driven back in the '50s. and it seems in the physical appearance it seems frozen in time in that way. >> dave and sandy lutgens are among the 11,000 residents who find the dalles the perfect place to raise a family. >> a half an hour or an hour from skiing. a lot of water sports. a lot of hiking. it has pretty decent schools. we have pretty low crime. >> on september 25th, 1984, david and sandy both became violently ill with cramps, diarrhea, and vomiting. their dehydration caused delirium. >> i never felt that bad in my life. the room was spinning. and you just didn't care about anything. >> well, let's put it this way. i would never want to be that sick again. >> when david and his wife went to the hospital, they weren't the only ones seriously ill. >> and then suddenly there were so many people we had people laying on the floor, we had

people laying up against the wall. there are people in the lobby. >> they all had the same symptoms. microbiologists identified the cause. salmonella. salmonella is a bacteria commonly found in eggs, meat, poultry, unpasteurized milk, water, and in animal feces, especially that of reptiles. it is rarely fatal. but sometimes death occurs in infants and the elderly. ten days after the first outbreak a second wave hit. the number of patients exploded from dozens to hundreds, every hospital bed was filled. by the name dale lutgens emerged from four days of delirium he encountered a disaster. lutgens owned a small restaurant. 13 of his employees were sick, along with hundreds of his customers. >> we had virtually no business.

i mean, it just disappeared. >> but what was the source of the outbreak? food handlers who don't properly wash their hands after using the bathroom sometimes transmit salmonella. but hundreds of people were sick and they hadn't eaten in the same restaurant or even the same restaurant chain. tests of the water supply revealed nothing. the centers for disease control in atlanta, georgia was asked to investigate whether it was some type of accidental outbreak or was it intentional. erica. in fact, there's a new victim of identity theft every...three...seconds. so you have to ask yourself, am i next? one weak password could be all it takes. or trusting someone you shouldn't. over 100 million consumers had their personal information stolen in recent retail store and online security breaches.

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solving the riddle of the salmonella outbreak in oregon is the job of epidemiologists, scientists who study how disease moves through large populations. >> they seemed to be unrelated events. it complicated things greatly. it was almost like doing multiple simultaneous investigations. >> there seemed to be no common link among the hundreds of

residents who had gotten sick. dave and sandy lutgens both remembered eating a salad in their restaurant before getting ill. hundreds of their customers and most of their employees became ill too. at the county health department nurse diane kerr contacted everyone who fell ill and discovered they had all eaten a salad from one of ten local restaurants. >> most of the people seemed to have eaten potato salad. at another restaurant most of the people seemed to have eaten a green salad. and so what was going on? >> they looked at common suppliers of food. they looked, you know, where did everybody get their lettuce? where did everybody get this? where did everybody get that? >> we couldn't find one source of cucumbers or lettuce or of meat or of anything that would explain all those restaurants being contaminated at once. >> dr. michael skeels runs the laboratory that processed samples from the dalles salmonella outbreak.

microbiologists discovered that all of the victims had the same strain of salmonella, one that was exceptionally rare. >> it was dulcitol negative, which means it didn't biochemically break down a sugar called dulcitol. and that's only the case for 2% of salmonellas of this type. >> this salmonella had another odd characteristic. unlike most bacteria, this one was not resistant to antibiotics. when all the cases were tallied, there had been 751 cases of salmonella poisoning. two months after the outbreak the state of oregon reported that poor hygiene of restaurant workers and cross-contamination were the most likely causes of the outbreak. in other words, they didn't know. >> if you've worked in public health long enough you'll figure out that lots of times you really can't pinpoint where

things come from. >> local officials now began to suspect a religious cult outside of town. the rajneeshis. as the rajneeshis expanded their compound there had been growing tension between cult leaders and local politicians. just a year earlier one of the cult's leaders, ma-anan sheela, hinted at potential violence. she said, "we are here in oregon to stay at whatever the cost. if that means some blood is spilled, then this is the price we are prepared to pay." a guru from india, bhagwan sri rajneesh started the farming compound in 1981. after two years and $30 million

the 64,000-acre organic farming and meditation compound had its own post office, school, hospital, and shopping mall with housing for over 1,000 followers. >> there were doctors and lawyers and accountants who've given up everything to drive tractors and plant potatoes and have, you know, daily chants. >> in 1982 the rajneeshis took over the nearby town of antelope and with it the majority of seats on the city council and school board, which horrified long-time residents of the small town. before the outbreak the rajneeshis had set their sights on control of the larger town of the dalles and had put up their own slate of candidates running in the november election. in the absence of a scientific explanation some thought the rajneeshis might have intentionally poisoned the community in some way.

>> so there was suspicion, but there was no evidence. >> why would they do this? and the other thought was maybe it was somebody, some hothead trying to incriminate the rajneeshis. >> one year later the rajneeshis' behavior grew even more bizarre, revealing evidence that would eventually solve the mystery. skater kid: whoa narrator: that got torture tested by teenagers and cried out for help. from the surprised designers. who came to the rescue with a brilliant fix male designer: i love it narrator: which created thousands of new customers for the tennis shoes that got torture tested by teenagers. the internet of everything is changing manufacturing. is your network ready? if it doesn't work fast... you're on to the next thing. neutrogena® rapid wrinkle repair has the fastest retinol formula

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since health officials could not find the source of the salmonella outbreak in the dalles, oregon, suspicion among local officials continued to be the rajneeshis, a religious cult living on a farm outside of town. >> like criminals accused of poisoning someone who we had nothing to do with. >> leaders of the cult and town officials were often at odds. the cult was founded by bhagwan sri rajneesh, but the day-to-day operations were run by his associate, ma anand sheela. >> they met each other's needs. sheela provided for him whatever he wanted. you want 60 rolls-royces? we'll get you 60 rolls-royces. you want a new disciple tonight? we'll get you a new disciple. you want to fly on a jet, we'll get you a jet. whatever can make you happy.

and the trade-off was the bhagwan would say okay, you're number one, you're in control, you take care of all the details. i don't care how you do it. >> the rajneeshis were becoming paranoid for many reasons. they were being investigated for possible immigration fraud. and there was growing internal conflict between sheela and other commune leaders. >> nonsense, you'd better believe me, i'm a tigress. >> she and her group were in a power struggle with another group which we always kind of called the hollywood faction. they were rich members of the cult, headed up by a lady who was the ex-wife of a hollywood producer. >> the struggle was for control of the guru, the cult, and its finances. former cult members told of plans to assassinate several local politicians, rival cult members, a united states

attorney, and journalist les zaits in retaliation for some investigative pieces he had written about the group in the local newspaper. >> to be told that you're on a hit list for a group that i believed at the time they were capable of it, that they were just purely evil folks by that time, is really kind of a chilling way to start the day. >> one year after the salmonella outbreak, without warning, sheela and the head of the rajneesh medical clinic, a nurse named puja, fled to europe. rajneesh disowned them. >> they had turned it into a fascist concentration camp. >> prosecutors heard that puja had been experimenting with biological poisons at the clinic, including salmonella. but there was no hard evidence.

with the increasing scrutiny the bhagwan stepped up the level of personal security. >> there were times when he would move from one end of the town to the other where he would be in a bulletproof limousine, he would have a lead suv with armed guards in it, he would have a trailing suv with armed guards in it, and he'd have a jet ranger helicopter in the air. we felt we could be confronted by a 45-person private army with fully automatic weapons. >> in october of 1985 a federal grand jury issued a 35-page indictment charging the bhagwan with lying on his visa application and arranging sham marriages so his followers could remain in the united states. when officials planned to search the compound, they asked epidemiologist dr. mike skeels to come along because of fears of biological retaliation.

>> and as we were going up that road, i was thinking, for a microbiologist this is going to be a pretty interesting day. >> no shots were fired. in the commune's licensed medical center, skeels found samples of various bacteria, standard testing material for a small clinic. >> one of these vials contained salmonella typhimurium. i remember at the time they told me to look for salmonella, if i found any i'm supposed to seize it as evidence. there it is. so i'll seize it. but i wasn't thinking at all that this was related to the outbreak. >> shortly after the raid rajneesh left on one of his private jets. he was arrested in north carolina on the immigration charges. meanwhile, the cdc tested the salmonella found in the commune's lab using a technique called plasmid profiling. plasmids are sections of free-floating genetic material outside the bacterial chromosome.

bacteria can exchange plasmids, allowing a colony to genetically adapt. >> and you would then use the size of the plasmid and some other characteristics of it to see whether it matched the plasmids from other bacteria. mostly the size. so if you found that you had the same plasmid type, you could assume that these were related or similar strains. the salmonella had a plasmic profile similar to the organism from the family. and it could be killed by all antibiotics just like the strain used in the epidemic. >> that really was a smoking gun. it showed that what i found in the clinic and the tests we were getting from the outbreak were the same bacterial strain. >> the question remained -- why would they poison the

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inside the commune, investigators found evidence connecting the group to the mass salmonella poisonings and they discovered other bizarre activities.

sheela had installed surveillance devices everywhere in the commune. every pay phone in the town was tapped and almost every building. >> this is the largest incident of wiretapping in the history of the united states. they wired this whole town. they this banks of tape recorders running all the time. indescribable. >> most of them didn't know they were being monitored. i was kept quiet by the inner circle which held their meetings on her round bed. >> a bookcase concealed a metal door opening into a tunnel. >> or in secret rooms, complete with escape tunnels. >> the fbi also found a number of manuals for making bombs and doing dirty tricks and they

found a number of articles about bioterrorism and biowarfare. >> the salmonella was the weapon chosen for a power struggle but not an internal one. >> did i understand you correctly yesterday when you said that you were, in fact, now going to attempt to take over the county? >> that's correct, yes. >> whether they put up their own candidates to run for election for the local county commission, they wanted to make sure their candidates won. to do that, they wanted to make the local voters sick enough so they couldn't get to the polling places to vote. >> they would have enough people in antelope and in other nearby places they would all vote, 100% turnout, enough they would install their own candidates on

the county commission. >> but why have the outbreak happened in september? informants say it was a rehearsal and it wasn't their first. at her direction, they took off their red robes and put on regular clothing and went through the town with spray containers filled with salmonella. in august, their first experiment was spraying the door handles in the county courthouse and produce in the local supermarkets. but no one got sick. their second experiment in september was to spray salmonella on salad bars in ten local restaurants. which worked, contaminating over 700 residents. just before election day, they made plans to contaminate the city's water supply. apparently they were unsuccessful. >> there was evidence that someone had gotten to the reservoir.

but no people were contaminated. >> they lost in the november elections. armed with the forensic biological evidence, sheila and puja were extradited from europe and charged with tampering with consumer products. they both plead guilty, served less than three years in federal prison, were released and fled to switzerland before state charges could be filed. >> last we knew, she was in europe running a nursing home which is sort of chilling to think about. turning grandma over to sheila in her final days. >> there was in proof he ever knew anything about the salmonella plot. he pleaded guilty to immigration violations, was deported and died in india in 1990. most of the restaurants targeted

in the attack never recovered from the economic blow and went out of business. that's what happened to dave's restaurant. >> we never regained the position we had in the community afterwards. i had people that would tell me that i know i wasn't your fault but i just can't eat there anymore. he now runs a catering service. scientists who investigating the outbreak wrote a paper about it. at the center for disease control asked that it not be published fearing copycat crimes. in 1997, 13 years after the outbreak when bioterrorism had become a growing concern, the paper was finally published in the journal of the american medical association. evidence discovered health clinic revealed they had even

more potent biological weapons in their possession. had they been used, the results would have been catastrophic. >> the epidemiology alone or a criminal investigation alone would have cracked this. it took both to put it together. just after opening a vintage car restoration business, phil rousch became seriously ill. doctors found difficulty finding the cause. but to forensic scientistses, it looked like foul play. from the day he found an abandoned model a ford in an old cotton warehouse, phil rouse knew that vintage automobiles would be his life.