Eight-year disgusting-mail mystery leads to arrest - USPS

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ST. LOUIS • It started with a simple white business-size envelope.

Addressed to a Jennings woman in a ghostly scribble, it contained a simple message: "(expletive) you."

That envelope, and its puzzling note, began a nearly eight-year cascade of harassing mail to the woman, her friends, her neighbors, the FBI and television stations.

Almost all were yellow "bubble mailers" with Purple Heart postage stamps, often festooned with strange writing and pasted-on pornographic pictures. They contained feces, used condoms, used feminine hygiene products and even a white powder that investigators thought was meant to simulate anthrax.

All the while, the original recipient — who said she prayed for the day when her tormenter would be caught — was also being blamed. She was listed in the return addresses on many of the letters as the sender.

"I just couldn't figure it out. Why is the person doing it?" she wondered.

The mystery unraveled last month with the arrest of a former neighbor — whom she did not know — on three federal misdemeanor charges of mailing injurious articles.

The indictment, filed March 24, says that Vanessa V. Bell, 48, mailed one package of disgusting contents Feb. 17 and two more Feb. 23. The recipients were not identified in court records.

But other court documents and interviews with some of Bell's alleged victims suggest she was lashing out because she felt the neighbor had been somehow invading her thoughts.

No Halloween prank

The story revolves around a four-plex of apartments on a Jennings street lined with modest brick and wood-frame homes.

The original target of the hate mail agreed to speak to a reporter but asked that her name not be used out of fear that someone else might be involved, and of a reluctance to inflame a situation that makes little sense.

She said she thought the first envelope was a Halloween prank, as it arrived in October 2003.

But the next envelope brought the first in a series of the objectionable personal materials. Some included notes, 'saying my name but nothing that makes sense to me," the woman explained.

The sending of envelopes containing white powder, with her return address, ramped up the interest of law enforcement.

"The police come like they were going to kick my door in," she said. They demanded to know: "Why are you sending these letters?"

Her denials, she said, were met with skepticism.

But at that point, police had little reason to suspect anyone else.

Over time, the finish of her new white Jeep Liberty was keyed. Someone tried to break in to it. Someone took the hubcap emblems, worth "$23 a pop."

And worse.

"I'd wake up in the morning, and there was paint all over the hood — red paint," she complained. "And the letters kept coming — they would come almost every two weeks, maybe every week sometimes."

Fear permeated her life. "I couldn't sleep any more," she said. "I was up at 4 or 5 in the morning, peeping through the blinds."

Mostly, the notes the woman received contained "jibber jabber," she said, but there would also be the names of friends and her boyfriend, and snippets of her apparently overheard phone conversations.

Although she moved twice, the letters always found her.

In University City, they arrived covered with graphic pornography.

She told postal workers, "I can't believe you would deliver this stuff." She said they told her they had no choice.

At least the envelopes were distinctive, so she could throw them away unopened.

Dozens upon dozens of other yellow "bubble mailers" arrived through mail slots all over the St. Louis area over the next few years, almost all with Purple Heart stamps and the same handwriting,

The police, she said, showed little sympathy until a sympathetic Breckenridge Hills police officer tried to help her get it stopped.

She even took a polygraph test for authorities and gave a DNA sample to help prove her innocence.

Finally, an arrest

The letters gradually tapered off but began again this year.

Postal Inspector John Jackman narrowed the drop-off points to just three mailboxes, one downtown and two on Natural Bridge Road.

Jackman identified a suspect by talking to Bell's former landlord, Sylvester Williams, who had previously complained about tenants receiving the bubble mailers. Williams immediately offered Bell's name. He said Bell thought that one of her neighbors had been listening to her conversations through the walls.

The neighbor he mentioned was the woman who got the first mailer and the initial blame.

Postal Inspector Todd Loos was watching mailboxes and discovered one of the packages on Feb. 17, shortly after Bell had been in the area. The envelope was labeled with several strange messages, including "jealous of V," court documents show.

Inspectors then tailed Bell until they spotted her appearing to drop off two envelopes on Feb. 23, court documents show. Then they confronted her at a check cashing business where she works.

"There's a reason why I did it," she told them, before saying she was "glad this happened" and then stopping the questioning by asking to talk to her lawyer.

A 'cuckoo' motive

News of Bell's arrest didn't make things much clearer to her alleged target. The woman said she has never seen Bell, nor heard her name before hearing it from postal inspectors.

She has been told that Bell thought that she was "picking on her" and "listening to her with a special device. It really sounded real cuckoo," she said.

Officials also told her that Bell believed she had placed Bell's name on some type of medical donor list.

Bell, who now lives in the 5900 block of Saloma Avenue in St. Louis, pleaded not guilty March 30.

Reached by phone, her lawyer, Kristy Ridings said, "The judge has ordered she undergo a psychiatric evaluation and treatment, and we're exploring that aspect of the case now." Ridings declined to make Bell available for an interview.

Assistant U.S. Attorney John Sauer, who is handling the case, declined to comment.

Dan Taylor, spokesman for the Postal Inspection Service, said that although investigators believe Bell was responsible for the white powder scares, she is unlikely to be prosecuted for that because of statutes of limitations.

Taylor said that he thinks there were at least six victims of the mailings, although there may be others.

Two people filed for court orders of protection against Bell just days before she was indicted. One, a 62-year-old former neighbor, complained that she had received four envelopes this year, including one with waste material and one containing a threatening letter.

That woman's daughter said that her own car was splashed with paint and that she received a waste-filled envelope in her post office box. In an interview, the daughter said that she has never met Bell.

Another current resident of the apartments told a reporter she also received several such envelopes.

Taylor said the packages were "not just disgusting" but "a potential biohazard for postal employees." He asked, "Who knows how many postal employees could have been sickened if that leaked through?"