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 with held from the public. this is how forensic science unearthed the biological trail. this small town in oregon is called the dales and penched high above the columbia river 80 miles due east of portland. >> it seems like it's from back in the 50s and seems in a

physical appearance, seems frozen in time in that way. >> dave and sandy are among the 11,000 residents who find the dales the perfect place to raise a fall mily. >> skiing, water sports, hiking, has descent schools. we have pretty low crime. >> on september 25th, 1984 david and sandy both became violently ill with cramps, diarrhea and vomiting. >> i never felt that bad in my life. the room was spinning, and you just didn't care about anything. >> 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. >> suddenly there were so many people, there were people leaning on the floor and against the wall.

>> it was found, salmonella. it's found in animal feces, especially that of reptiles. it's 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 time dave emerged from four days of sickness, he encountered a disaster. he owned a small restaurant 13 of his employees were sick along with hundreds of customers. >> we had virtually no business. it just disappeared. >> what was the source of the outbreak?

food handlers who don't properly wash 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? my name is daniel i have diabetic nerve pain. the pain felt like my feet were on fire. i had these very burning, ... needle-like sensations. i knew i needed to see a doctor.

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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 commune 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. [announcer:] what if one stalk of broccoli could protect you from cancer? what if one push up could prevent heart disease? [man grunts] one wishful thinking, right? but there is one step you can take to help prevent another serious disease- pneumococcal pneumonia. one dose of the prevnar 13® vaccine can help protect you ... from pneumococcal pneumonia, an illness that can cause coughing, chest pain, difficulty breathing, and may even put you in the hospital. prevnar 13 ® is used in adults 50 and older to help prevent infections from 13 strains of the bacteria that cause pneumococcal pneumonia. you should not receive prevnar 13 ® if you've had a severe allergic reaction to the vaccine or its ingredients if you have a weakened immune system, you may have a lower response to the vaccine. common side effects were pain, redness, or swelling

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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, being 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 zaitz, 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. i thought they were just purely evil folks by that time, was really quite 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. and i remember at the time thinking, well, 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 from the rajneeshis' clinic had a plasmid profile similar to the organisms from the dalles. and it could be killed by all antibiotics just like the strain used in the epidemic. >> that really was a smoking gun. that showed us that the isolate that i found in the clinic and the isolates that i had from the people, the tests we were getting from the outbreak were the same bacterial strain. >> the question remained -- why would they poison the residents of this small town?

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>> you forgot your lunch. inside the rajneeshi 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 were illegal interceptions. thousands of them. they had banks of tape recorders running all the time. it's indescribable. >> most rajneeshis didn't know they were being monitored. it was kept quiet by sheela and 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. or 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. you understood right. >> why the -- >> when the rajneeshis 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 other nearby places that they would all vote. 100% turnout. among the rajneeshis. enough they would install their own candidates on the county commission. >> but why had the outbreak happened in september? informants say it was a rehearsal. and it wasn't their first. at sheela's direction, the rajneeshis 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, the rajneeshis made plans to contaminate the city's water supply. apparently, they were unsuccessful. >> there was evidence that someone had gotten to the reservoir for the city of dalles. and had gotten into it. but no evidence that anybody was

contaminated. >> all of the rajneeshi candidates lost in the november elections. armed with the forensic biological evidence, sheela and puja were extradited from europe and charged with tampering with consumer products. they both pled guilty, served less than three years in federal prison, were released and fled to switzerland before state charges could be filed. >> last we knew, sheela was in europe running the equivalent of a nursing home. which is sort of chilling to think about. turning grandma over to sheela in her final days. >> there was no proof rajneesh himself 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 lutgens' restaurant. >> we never regained the position we had in the community afterwards. i had people that would tell me that, you know, i know it wasn't your fault, but i just can't eat there anymore. >> he now runs a catering service. the scientists who investigated the outbreak wrote a paper about it. but the centers 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 in the rajneeshis' health clinic revealed they had even more

potent biological weapons in their possession. had they been used, the results would have been catastrophic. >> neither the epidemiology alone nor a criminal investigation alone would have cracked this. cracked this. it took both to put it together. -- captions by vitac -- www.vitac.com of a single gunshot wound. the gun was by her side. after examining the forensic evidence, her death was ruled a homicide. but could that same evidence be interpreted differently? one man's life hung in the balance. in 1979, martin