Ten Official Stories That Still Don't Add Up

In the weeks after September 11, 2001, letters carrying anthrax spores reached newsrooms and the U.S. Senate. The first batch, postmarked in Trenton, New Jersey, on September 18, went to media outlets including NBC News and the New York Post. Two more, dated October 9, were addressed to Senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy. Five people died and at least 17 others were sickened. The FBI investigation, called Amerithrax, spent years on a different scientist, who was publicly labeled a person of interest and later exonerated; in June 2008 the Justice Department settled his lawsuit for $5.8 million.

The FBI's final answer was Bruce Ivins, an anthrax researcher at the Army's Fort Detrick laboratory in Maryland. Ivins died by suicide on July 29, 2008, as prosecutors were drafting charges, and the case was formally closed on February 19, 2010. The core evidence was genetic: four mutations linked the letter spores to a flask in Ivins's lab labeled RMR-1029. The FBI later counted 419 people who had access to that lab or had received samples from the flask.

Outside reviews were cooler. In 2011 a National Research Council committee, which the FBI had requested, said science alone could not settle where the spores came from and that alternatives were not fully tested. In 2014 the Government Accountability Office found the FBI's genetic testing lacked consistent standards. The FBI says science was not the sole basis for its conclusion. No court ever weighed the case.

Karen Silkwood was 28, a laboratory technician at Kerr-McGee's Cimarron River nuclear fuel plant in Oklahoma, and she was trying to expose safety violations there. In the week before she died, she was contaminated with plutonium at work on three straight days, and traces turned up in her apartment. On the night of November 13, 1974, she set out to meet New York Times reporter David Burnham and a union investigator in Oklahoma City.

She never arrived. Her car crashed into a concrete abutment on State Highway 74, about seven miles south of Crescent. State and federal investigators called it a single-vehicle accident, at first attributed to her falling asleep after taking a sedative. The Justice Department, which ended its inquiry in 1978, later said there was not enough evidence that she had been asleep. The documents she reportedly carried, said to show the plant was unsafe, were never found.

A. O. Pipkin Jr., an accident investigator hired by the union, reported dents in the rear fender and bumper that he said the abutment could not have made, and steering wheel damage suggesting she was conscious. Those findings were never tested in a criminal case. Her estate sued over the contamination and won $10.5 million in 1979; the award was cut on appeal, reinstated in 1984, and settled in 1986 for $1.38 million.

Dorothy Kilgallen was one of the best-known journalists in America, a newspaper columnist and a regular panelist on the TV game show What's My Line? She covered the 1964 trial of Jack Ruby, the man who shot Lee Harvey Oswald, and is reported to be the only reporter who ever interviewed him. She also published Ruby's closed-door testimony to the Warren Commission before its official release, and, by author Mark Shaw's account, spent about 18 months on her own inquiry into the Kennedy assassination.

On November 8, 1965, the morning after a What's My Line? broadcast, she was found dead in her Manhattan townhouse. She was 52. The medical examiner attributed her death to a mix of alcohol and barbiturates and ruled it accidental. Shaw, who has written two books on the case, says the death drew no real investigation at the time.

Shaw cites National Archives records showing two additional barbiturates in her system, residue on a glass by her bed, and FBI files, obtained through Freedom of Information requests, showing the bureau kept her under surveillance. Her assassination research files have never been found. In 2017 the Manhattan district attorney's office opened a review at Shaw's urging and dropped it about eight months later, citing no evidence of murder; witnesses were reportedly not interviewed. In 2024, the NYPD and the district attorney declined a city councilman's request to reopen the case.

Jeffrey Epstein, the financier awaiting trial on federal sex trafficking charges, was found dead in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan on August 10, 2019, a little over a month after he arrived there. He was 66. New York City's chief medical examiner, Dr. Barbara Sampson, ruled the death a suicide, and federal officials have backed it since.

The failures surrounding that night are well documented. Because of an earlier incident, Epstein was supposed to share a cell, but no cellmate was assigned. At least two officers assigned to check on him overnight did not do so, and they were criminally charged with falsifying records; their prosecutions were later deferred. Security cameras did not work properly. In June 2023 the Justice Department's inspector general blamed negligence, misconduct and long-running staffing problems, and found no evidence that he was murdered.

The doubts come from two places. Dr. Michael Baden, a former New York City chief medical examiner hired by Epstein's family, attended the autopsy and said certain neck injuries were more typical of homicide than suicide, while calling his view not conclusive. Sampson stood firmly by her ruling, and other experts note such injuries do occur in suicides, more often in older people. Then, in July 2025, the government released jail video it described as raw. Wired's analysis of the file's metadata found that nearly three minutes appeared to have been cut, and Attorney General Pam Bondi attributed a missing minute near midnight to a nightly system reset. What the gap would show is unknown.