Last Updated

26 Aug 2008

Source: Palm Beach Post, October 6, 2007.

Widow Wants Answers

By Emily J. Minor, Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

When she looks back - and how can you not? - it all makes so much sense.

The tubes and the masks and the FBI agents.

The worried doctors and the sneaky reporters and the room where they told her the ending.

"I should have known," Maureen Stevens says now.

But back then, things like masks and tubes and a box of tissues on a meeting room table just didn't click.

Now, of course, it all makes sense.

It was six years ago Friday that Robert Stevens (case 5), the lovable, affable, kind man that Maureen Stevens adored, died from breathing in anthrax. And while anniversary dates like these come and go in our lives, Stevens, 65, pretty, soft-spoken and still brokenhearted, doesn't need a date on a wall calendar to remember that her husband was murdered the first week of October 2001.

It's the week that started out so beautifully in the leafy green nooks and crannies of Charlotte, N.C. - visiting their son - and ended in that room, the room with the chairs and the table and the water and the tissues, for the grief that would come.

"Water and tissues," she says again. "I should have known."

Those were just a few of the clues that passed by Maureen Stevens during that short week, the one that seemed to last forever.

But time is a funny thing and - along with healing her heart, just a little - it tends to make some things more clear.

Some things about Robert.

The way he was talking nonsense. The way he practically collapsed into the hospital wheelchair. The way she did not want to leave him.

Victim list expands

The fall and early winter of 2001 was one of those surreal times in American history that the country just kind of muddled through. The attacks of Sept. 11 had left us shocked and anxious, and in the weeks that followed we hung nervously - and in most cases, foolishly - to every airplane mishap, every stray package, every olive-skinned man who looked like he wasn't from Nebraska.

Then the anthrax scare ratcheted up the nation's nerves by about 2,000 percent.

Before his death, Stevens was a photo editor at American Media Inc. in Boca Raton. The company published such supermarket favorites as The National Enquirer - Stevens actually worked for The Sun - at its sprawling office complex. Investigators combed the AMI building, protected by white suits, headgear with breathing tubes and green latex gloves that looked as if they could have been bought at a hardware store in outer space.

Eventually, AMI left the building for good.

In South Florida, though, there was another surreal twist. Federal investigators began to realize that several of the Sept. 11 terrorists had lived here, even learning to fly at area airports. The government's "spot map" of key terrorist locations overlapped with our homes and our offices and our schools. For weeks, investigators thought the two - Sept. 11 and the anthrax - were connected.

Meanwhile, Stevens would not be the last to die.

Two postal workers at the Brentwood facility outside Washington - Joseph P. Curseen (case 16) and Thomas L. Morris Jr. (case 15) - died Oct. 22 after apparently becoming contaminated at work. Curseen was 47; Morris, 55.

And while more than two weeks passed between Stevens' death and the death of those two postal workers, the 17 days in between were one bizarre scare after another.

A look back:

Oct. 15, they found anthrax in a letter sent to Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D. The Capitol was shut down. No important government work. No tours. No visits to the nation's capital by the safety patrol kids of Palm Beach County, the first time the trip - a rite of passage for fifth-graders here - had ever been canceled.

Then letters began to appear at major news agencies in New York City. Among those affected: Tom Brokaw's assistant at NBC News. The baby boy of an ABC news producer. Dan Rather's assistant at CBS. An editorial page clerk at The New York Post.

All of them took medication and survived.

The fourth death was in New York. Kathy T. Nguyen (case 22), 61, a stockroom worker at Manhattan Eye, Ear and Throat Hospital, died from anthrax Oct. 31.

And then there was Ottilie Lundgren (case 23), 94, of Oxford, Conn.

Lundgren died after she opened a letter inside her home that apparently had been contaminated somewhere along the way. She died Nov. 21, the day before Thanksgiving.

By this time, there had been 30 anthrax cases nationwide, five of them fatal.

And no matter where these stories appeared - People magazine, The New York Times, Washington Post, The Columbus Dispatch - Bob Stevens' name was always at the end of the list.

Six years later, it's still there.

Bob Stevens, 63, photo editor at American Media's Sun tabloid. Died Oct. 5.

A lifetime of joy

They met on a blind date, and Maureen Stevens was so unenthusiastic about the prospect, she didn't even dress up.

"Neither of us wanted to go," she says.

She was 30, working in an antique store in a little town outside London. He was doing freelance photography. Back then, he handled the high-end cosmetic photos for big-name advertising clients. They went to a pub called the Shepherd's Hut and, at night's end, when they both knew they'd found something nice - even without fancy clothes - he asked to see her again.

Of course, she said.

She tore a small slip of paper from her address book and wrote down her telephone number for him.

They were both private and unassuming, each once divorced, and they liked to read and travel and laugh. They got married Oct. 18, 1974, and the next day he left for America, where he had a new job with The National Enquirer in Lantana. Maureen Stevens followed soon after.

At his job for the supermarket tabloid, it was Stevens who would take a picture of, say, Cher or Prince or even O.J. and doctor it up a bit, make the star look just a touch better. Bob Stevens was great at this tabloid technique, and he loved his job and the people who made that nutty newsroom go round.

But he also loved his family. He liked to go fishing. He liked to work with wood. He was a sci-fi fan, even taking what little spare time he had to write a novel of his own.

He was both a perfectionist and the life of the party.

A lovely twist, really.

"Robert was just an all-around nice person," his wife says.

Eventually, as their lives here became more and more grounded with the house and friends and the four children and then the grandchildren, he liked to make the little ones laugh.

Humor was his forte.

Even today, the grandkids tell the story about the time Granddad took the bucket of earthworms, spread out the newspaper on Grandmother's good dining room table and dumped the whole caboodle all over the place.

What fun to have him in trouble instead of them!

"I love talking about him," Maureen Stevens said this week during her first one-on-one interview with The Palm Beach Post. "I love looking at photographs of Robert."

She added: "This will not be forgotten. I will not forget what happened to him. I just won't."

And, of course, she will not forget that first date. Who would?

The small pub. Their instant connection.

The little slip of paper she tore from her address book that night so she could write down her telephone number.

After his death - after Robert Stevens' horrible, wretched death - she found that slip of paper in her dead husband's wallet.

He'd tucked it away and saved it.

"Robert was a bit of a romantic," she says in her lovely British accent. "He really was."

They thought it was flu

This is not the way it's supposed to be, not by a long shot.

He's supposed to be here, with her.

He's supposed to make the trips back to England to visit family.

He's supposed to be in his wood shop, the one with all the new tools they were going to buy him, making something lovely for inside the house.

Instead, here she is, sitting in her lawyer's office, very much alone, talking about her husband's murder - the box of tissues within easy reach.

"It's never easy," she says about doing the interview. "I have a lot of anger in me because I'd like a few answers.

"Answers would be nice."

Investigators now think Robert Stevens was contaminated before the couple left for North Carolina that fall. He'd felt punky during their visit, but they thought it was the flu. On the way home, the Monday of the week he died, Stevens felt so ill that he got behind the wheel and drove with exceptional fortitude, apparently pulling himself together just long enough to make it home.

Back in South Florida, they turned in early the night they got back because they both felt like they were coming down with something.

Maureen Stevens awoke in the middle of the night and found him wandering the house.

It was odd. She knew that right off.

He was stumbling, speaking in gibberish, barely lucid. When they got to JFK Medical Center in Atlantis, she found a wheelchair and sat him in it.

It was really the last interaction between them.

The next 48 hours elapsed in that kind of slow-motion surreal blur that happens when personal disaster strikes. She began to gather the kids, one of whom was overseas at the time. First the doctors thought it was pneumonia. Then meningitis, because of the cloudy spinal fluid.

On Thursday, Dr. Jean Malecki - the county health department director, who would become a dependable source of truth for her - called her at the house in suburban Lantana. Maureen Stevens had gone home for a short rest.

We think it's anthrax, Malecki told her.

"That floored me," Maureen Stevens said. "I didn't know a lot about it, but I knew it wasn't good."

Newspaper photographers took pictures - click, click, click - of the handwritten note she'd taped to the front door telling the kids where she was. There were top-level officials everywhere: deputies, FBI, officials from the Atlanta headquarters of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

At their home, reporters scared away her daughter, who on Friday afternoon took refuge at a friend's house about 20 minutes away.

"We couldn't go home," Maureen Stevens said.

It was then, of course, that the family got the hospital page.

Hurry, they said.

When they got to JFK, she and the kids were ushered to the private room - the room with the table and the water and the boxes of tissues.

He was dead, they said.

He'd inhaled the anthrax too deeply into his lungs.

In the days and weeks that followed, others at the AMI building, including mailroom worker Ernesto Blanco, who almost died from anthrax, were put on Cipro, the strong antibiotic used to treat anthrax.

Maureen Stevens never took it.

"I didn't see the use," she said.

If she had been exposed, she figured, she'd already be dead. Just like him.

Maureen Stevens still lives in the same house near Lantana that they bought all those years ago.

The anthrax, they know now, was on a letter that Stevens had apparently brought to his desk at the AMI building. He had trouble reading small print, so they imagine he'd held the letter close to his face.

As the months went on, Maureen Stevens hired an attorney, a good one, and together they're plodding through her case, which was filed in federal court.

It boils down to this.

Attorney Richard Schuler is alleging that the strain of anthrax that killed Stevens was the Ames strain, which can be traced to Fort Dietrich, the Army's biowarfare defense lab outside Washington.

Government lawyers have nickel-and-dimed Schuler's legal team, he says, stalling with motion after motion. But he thinks it will eventually get to court, and a fairly important piece of the case should be heard before the Florida Supreme Court early next year. That ruling will help set the pace for Maureen Stevens' lawsuit.

And then, maybe, she will get her chance.

Schuler claims the security at Fort Dietrich was so poor - it was vastly and noticeably improved after the 2001 anthrax scare, he says - that anyone could have walked out with anthrax.

You don't need a lot to commit murder.

Schuler says he's deposed a man who worked there who said that when he quit, he could have put anthrax in the box with his personal belongings. No problem.

Top guys in the field, from a noted handwriting expert to a key anthrax guy, have been told not to discuss the government's investigation. In court, Schuler will do this questioning using subpoenas.

That's what Maureen Stevens wants.

Some answers to her questions.

The kids are grown and scattered. She has still has her quiet pastimes. She likes to read. She gardens. She enjoys movies and crosswords and she goes to church. Her friends are the same source of strength they've always been.

"My husband was killed in a horrible way," Maureen Stevens said this week. "He was murdered. And nobody's that interested.

"Well, I am."

Every day of every year, six years running. No calendar needed.