Bombshell: The explosive backstory in the Robert Ortloff murder trial may be more fascinating than the case itself

Instead, the government hid the existence of the postal clerk — who could have helped Ortloff's quest for a "reasonable doubt" verdict in his favor — until well after the conviction.

Ortloff also received redacted government paperwork that hinted how FBI explosives expert Tom Thurman might have wrongfully concluded that Ortloff's prints had come from the bomb package.

The paperwork included previously undisclosed statements of medical personnel at the Fort Hood bombing who had noted yellow tissue paper strewn about Specialist Gulczynski's room.

The import was, the government maintained that Anna Carpenter had filled her harmless package — the one that authorities blew up in the latrine — with yellow paper, and that the exploded bomb box in Gulczynski's room was stuffed with brown paper.

The FBI crime lab apparently hadn't analyzed the yellow paper for fingerprints or anything else before destroying it.

By 1992, Ortloff's evolving "theory" in his legal pleadings was that materials from the bomb package had been mixed in with Carpenter's benign package (where his fingerprints definitely could have been, since she'd put it together at his flower shop).

His more malevolent hypothesis was that the government had deliberately engaged in a bait-and-switch of the two sets of packing materials to fabricate evidence against him.

In May 1993, Ortloff submitted a "2255 habeas corpus" petition with trial judge Walter Smith (the number refers to the federal statute), asking for reconsideration of his case based on newly discovered evidence and on other grounds.

Federal prisoners frequently file such petitions, but their success rate is exceedingly low.

Judge Smith quickly dismissed the petition, citing the "overwhelming evidence" against Ortloff, and an appellate court upheld the judge in December 1994.

At the time, the notion of a convicted mail-bomber winning a legal battle against the FBI crime lab and its highly respected and agent Tom Thurman seemed absurd.

Back in June 1991, ABC News had selected Thurman its Person of the Week for his work on the Pan Am 103 crash in Lockerbie, Scotland.

By 1996, Thurman's reputation had grown to almost mythic proportions, and he had been promoted to chief of the FBI's Explosives Unit and Bomb Data Center.

That July, a story in the New York Daily News about Thurman began, "He is the feds' secret weapon in the battle for answers to the crash of TWA Flight 800."

An assistant FBI director said of Thurman in that story, "I want the best guy we have and he is the best guy we have."

But all the accolades ended the following January, when national headlines broke news of a long-brewing scandal inside the FBI crime lab.

Senior explosives expert turned whistleblower Dr. Frederic Whitehurst claimed that lab examiners, including Thurman, had doctored reports, fabricated testimony, and handled evidence sloppily in cases that included the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building.

One FBI agent wrote of Thurman in an internal memo, "It is clear that [he] does not understand the scientific issues involved with the interpretation and significance of explosives and explosives residue composition . . . Thurman committed errors which were clearly intentional. He acted irresponsibly. He should be held accountable."

The Justice Department's inspector general later issued a 517-page report that confirmed Whitehurst's allegations of substandard analyses, testimonial "errors" and generally poor practices at the lab.

Thurman soon retired from the agency, became a college professor and, in a second act that may be described as ironic, authored a well-received book in 2006 titled Practical Bomb Scene Investigation.

As for Thurman's work in the Fort Hood mail-bombing case, a 1997 FBI task force later concluded that all evidence had been destroyed. That seemingly made any real investigation into Thurman's pivotal work in that decade-old case impossible.

Ortloff continued to file his Freedom of Information requests and his lawsuits against the government.

He worked endlessly at the prison library on his so-called "chronology of facts" of the myriad events (the uncharged Kathleen Smith case, the FBI crime lab, and so on) that he alleged had wrongfully landed him behind bars.

As 1999 began, Ortloff continued to prepare hard for a parole hearing slated for sometime that year.

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On April 10, 1994, a detailed story in the New York Times reported that "a prominent Atlanta lawyer has been convicted of arranging the murder of his wife, who was shot to death in front of the couple's two young sons as part of a cocaine and money-laundering conspiracy.

"The lawyer, Fredric Tokars, a former prosecutor and part-time judge, was convicted on Friday of eight federal charges, including racketeering, kidnapping, money laundering and using the phone to set up a murder."

Tokars, then 40, still faced a state murder charge, where prosecutors would seek the death penalty.

In Atlanta, Sara Tokars' murder had been a huge story ever since it occurred just after Thanksgiving 1992.

Mrs. Tokars and her sons, 4 and 6, were kidnapped from their suburban home. An intruder forced them into the mother's car and ordered her to drive down the street. There, he shot her in the head from close range and fled into the night.

The 6-year-old reached around his mother's bloody body to stop the vehicle and ran with his little brother to a neighbor's home for help.

Suspicions about Tokars soon arose. Police learned that Sara was about to seek a divorce and had asked a private detective to turn over his findings of her husband's various criminal enterprises and adulterous activities to authorities if anything happened to her.

Also, Tokars had taken out $1.7 million in insurance on Sara's life, with himself as sole beneficiary.

Within weeks, police arrested a Tokars business associate and another man on charges of murdering Sara and announced that Tokars also was a murder suspect.

The feds arrested Tokars in August 1993.

"Wife Dead, Husband Indicted, Atlanta Is Transfixed," a headline in the New York Times read.

In his closing argument at Tokars' federal trial the following year, a prosecutor told the jury, "You know what a hypocrite is? A hypocrite is a wolf in sheep's clothing. A hypocrite is a human being who portrays to be something good when they are really bad . . . And that is the case for Fred Tokars."

After the jury convicted Tokars, a judge sentenced him to four life sentences in a federal prison.

In March 1997, another jury in the state of Georgia's case against Tokars decided to spare his life after convicting him of murdering Sara.

During the sentencing phase, one of Tokars' oldest friends, Alan Bell, made an impassioned plea for mercy. Bell was a former prosecutor who split his time between Tucson and Capistrano Beach, California.

Bell would become a central figure in the new legal machinations that later would envelop Robert Ortloff.

By the late 1990s, records show that federal inmate Tokars already had offered his services to the government as what prosecutors like to term "a cooperating witness."

Others call them snitches, and they are everywhere inside penal institutions. In exchange for "information" about other inmates, government informants often are transferred into nicer prisons or receive other benefits.

In 1998, Tokars came forward with information on fellow inmate Dustin Honken, serving a 27-year sentence in a Colorado Supermax prison on a drug-distribution conviction.

Tokars and another inmate separately told authorities that Honken had confessed to the unsolved 1993 murders in Iowa of three adults and two children.

Prosecutors later secured Tokars' placement in the federal witness-protection program. Tokars and many other inmates testified against Honken at the 2004 trial, which ended in convictions and a death sentence.

But not everyone was enamored of Fred Tokars.

"Regarding his personality structure," a prison psychiatrist wrote of him in 1998, "it seems apparent that he has been dealt many narcissistic blows. He has a long history of manipulating and coercing people. He did not talk about his crimes at all, and he does not seem to have any remorse for his crimes."

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On January 5, 1999, the feds transferred Fred Tokars from Colorado to the medium-security Oxford, Wisconsin, prison where Robert Ortloff had been housed for a few years.

It was a busy time for Ortloff, legally speaking.

He was putting the finishing touches on yet another attempt at a habeas petition ("newly discovered evidence"), though he says he was aware it would be an uphill struggle to win the day.

Ortloff also was working on his parole hearing set for that April.

That July 2, Fred Tokars would tell a Tempe police detective by phone that Ortloff had confessed to him about murdering Kathleen Smith back in 1984.

He said he'd first met Ortloff in mid- to late January, with the confession coming a few months after that.

"Over a period of, like, three months," he told Tom Magazzini, "[Ortloff] asked me to help him work on his habeas corpus case and a couple of other legal matters. As he failed more on his court petitions, and as he became more desperate, he opened up to me and started to confide in me."