The Demon in the Freezer- Post 1 -Beginnings

The first ten pages talks about the life and unfortunate death of a british photo retoucher named Richard Stevens. In the early 1970s he arrived in south Florida to take a job at the National Inquirer. He worked there as a photo retoucher in the days long before they used computers to retouch photos. In his free time he loved to fish in the near by lakes and swamps, but he was a kind hearted soul and he always threw the fish back. Not long before he died he took up a job at the Sun a tabloid owned by the same company as the National Inquirer. On Thursday, September 27, 2001 he and his wife to a drive to Charlotte to visit their daughter and by Sunday he began to feel quite ill. By monday he was incoherent and his wife rushed him to the hospital.

At the hospital he received a spinal tap and the fluid came out cloudy. Upon further examination of the spinal fluid the doctors discovered it was full of rod shaped bacteria with flat ends an unmistakable characteristic of anthrax. After a lab confirmed the doctors suspicion every one was shocked. There had only been 18 cases of inhaled anthrax in the past hundred years and non within the last twenty-five. After realizing the rarity of this bacteria they doctor made a call to the head of infectious disease control at the CDC who immediately sent out two teams, one to swab everything Stevens had come in contact with in the last several days and a second team to preform a carful autopsy on Stevens who had died the night before.