Researcher Awaits Fate in ‘Mad Scientist’ Case : Crime: He was poisoned but does not know whether he received a cancer-causing dose. The director of the research center is charged with attempted murder.
His nose stuffed up by a sinus problem, Barry van Winkle reached into his oak desk drawer for a bottle of nasal spray, placed it in one nostril, and inhaled.
Instantly, he knew something was terribly wrong.
Pain shot through his face. It felt as if battery acid had been injected into his head. Van Winkle ran across the biotechnology office’s blue carpet and flushed his nose out with emergency eyewash as best he could.
He may have saved his life. Or maybe not.
The nose-spray bottle had been filled with a hazardous chemical called beta-propiolactone. Minuscule doses of beta-propiolactone are known to cause cancer in animals. Van Winkle, a biologist, got a full-strength shot of the colorless killer right into his nose. He later noticed the sweet-smelling substance had been placed on his telephone and doorknob.
It may be years before Van Winkle, 46, knows if he will live to a ripe old age or die from cancer caused by beta-propiolactone. He calls his outlook “undetermined.”
But one thing seems certain.
Someone had tried to kill him.
The Cryobiology Research Center was exactly the kind of institution this planned community 25 miles north of Houston had hoped to attract. The Woodlands, acres and acres of $200,000 homes nestled among select corporate developments, wanted to foster a biotechnology neighborhood to capitalize on offshoots from Houston’s famed Medical Center.
The research center was a laboratory established by the University of Texas Health Science Center for one of its prominent researchers, John Gunnar Linner, the creator of a revolutionary method of conducting research with biological tissues through cryobiology--biology at very low temperatures.
Working in 1982 in the basement of an electrical shop at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, Linner, then an obscure cell biologist, scavenged machine parts and came up with a way to rapidly freeze tissues without damaging ice crystals. The technique allowed researchers to use the tissues for extended periods of time and, for the first time, to see and analyze complete cellular structures with electron microscopes.
It became known as the Linner Process, and it was Linner’s ticket out of the basement and into the corner office of the research center, in a stylish steel-and-glass suburban office building with immaculate landscaping.
Linner, the center’s director, creator and star, looks more like a retired professional football tackle than a successful biologist. At 47, he stands 6-foot-4 and weighs 300 pounds or more.
Neighbors in The Woodlands know him as a friendly sort who frequently walks his sheep dog. Friends say he likes to whip up tasty batches of chili. Another passion is building miniature race cars and airplanes.
Co-workers call him a gentle giant, though some think him a bit eccentric. A few had heard a bizarre claim he made in the lab a time or two that he had poisoned a roommate at Iowa State University by putting a radioactive substance in his underwear.
Macho talk, they thought. Too bizarre to be true.
Not many knew about Linner’s extensive gun collection. But some had seen the books he kept on his desk--books on poisoning titled “Silent Death” and “The Poisoner’s Handbook.”
One woman quit working for Linner when he became enraged after being told he had to draft a memo requesting repairs on a microscope. He pulled a gun from his desk, waved it around and said “This is the only memo I need,” according to police reports.
Linner once told the Houston Chronicle that he had alienated other University of Texas researchers with his unorthodox methods.
The gentle giant, it seems, had a temper. And his office was right next to Van Winkle’s.
After the April 8 nasal spray incident, Van Winkle took the Afrin bottle to a friend at the county medical examiner’s office in Houston. Analysis revealed that it was beta-propiolactone, a dangerous carcinogen used in the making of some plastics or as a sterilizer or disinfectant.
Van Winkle reported what had happened to the University of Texas police because the incident had occurred in a UT laboratory. He also reported who he thought had tried to kill him.
Frustrated at the slow pace of the college police investigation, he called Peter Speers, the Montgomery County district attorney, on April 22.
“When he called me, I thought the same thing everyone else thinks when they hear about this, ‘Man, this is strange,’ ” Speers said.
Speers passed the tip along to David Moore, a sheriff’s department detective.
Van Winkle, the lab’s director of research and administration, told Moore that he did not think he had any problems with Linner and that they had always gotten along. But he also was adamant that it was Linner who had spiked the bottle.
Linner, Moore learned, was the only one at the lab authorized to order beta-propiolactone. The detective obtained search warrants for Linner’s office and home.
“I told my supervisor, ‘This one is pretty bizarre,’ ” he said.
Tight funding had reduced the Cryobiology Research Lab staff to three--Linner, Van Winkle and a secretary. Last August, Linner and Van Winkle, who had come to the University of Texas in 1989 from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, received a letter saying that their funding grants had dried up and that their contracts would not be renewed after Aug. 31. The lab would close on that date.
The day the termination letters arrived, Linner ordered a supply of beta-propiolactone, according to the order form detectives found.
Detectives also found two sealed canisters of toxic substances for which there did not seem to be a need in a cryobiology lab. They called some of the larger fire departments in the area, but no one had heard of the two substances--tetrodotoxin and DFP, both nerve agents.
So Moore called the local FBI agent, who checked with his main office. Word came back from Washington: The FBI was immediately dispatching a germ warfare task force that had prepared for terrorism and the Persian Gulf War.
“The FBI said one of the two was essentially the same nerve agent Saddam Hussein had used against the Kurds,” Speers said.
In searching Linner’s lab and home, detectives said they found in his briefcase a homemade botulism recipe, with ingredients that included dirt and greasy beef.
They also said they found the order form for beta-propiolactone, which had been filled by a Kansas City firm, but none of the substance. And they said they found paperwork on a filled order for another toxic substance, fluoroacetate, in a quantity large enough to kill about 75 people.
“It’s nowhere to be found. We don’t know where it went,” Speers said.
All the poisons would be difficult if not impossible to detect in an autopsy, Speers said. “It would look like natural causes,” he said.
“Assassins’ poisons--that’s what they call these things,” Moore said.
On April 30, John Gunnar Linner was arrested and charged with attempted murder. He was released May 6 on $25,000 bond.
His attorney, Robert C. Bennett of Houston, said Linner is “not guilty of any offense.” At a bond hearing, Bennett argued that beta-propiolactone is known to cause cancer in animals, but has not been proven to cause cancer in humans. Therefore, he said, there could be no attempted murder.
Linner has declined to comment.
Authorities have speculated that Linner was enraged that the lab was closing and that Van Winkle’s application for a job elsewhere within the University of Texas system had been accepted.
But Linner’s common-law wife, Linda Linner, testified during a bond hearing that jealousy was not an issue because a new research position was to be opened for Linner at Montana State University--a claim that Montana State spokeswoman Marilyn Wessel disputes.
“I don’t know what the motive was quite frankly,” Speers said.
Detectives have been investigating Linner’s background since his arrest and finding what they believe are a trail of clandestine poisoning plots.
“He is not your ordinary fellow. He’s eccentric to say the least,” Speers said. “He had a fascination with poisons generally. A lot of people refer to this case as the mad scientist case.”
“He seems like a vindictive person,” said Moore, the detective who interviewed Linner the night of his arrest. “He said there were legitimate scientific reasons why he had these things, but he couldn’t give me the reasons.”
Since the arrest, the sheriff’s department has received several dozen calls from former colleagues and classmates, sheriff’s spokesman Bob Morrison said.
“Most of them are from people saying they didn’t really trust the guy, or things just didn’t seem right,” Morrison said.
Investigators have the name of the roommate Linner reportedly bragged about poisoning, but have not yet been able to locate him. They also are trying to find another former colleague whose lab coat was reportedly contaminated with a cancer-causing substance.
On a hot, muggy spring day, Barry van Winkle was back at the research center, directing the packers waiting to fill three moving vans. The lab was closing early because of the incident.
Medical tests have not found any immediate damage from the carcinogen, but Van Winkle knows close monitoring will be required.
“I really can’t talk about it,” he said. “It will all come out at the trial.”
