Coma Dude 
Tholen
Posted on 04/18/2008 11:34:46 PM PDT by Deo volente
LAS VEGAS - A loner who long had struggled financially, Roger Bergendorff told investigators that he found making ricin an "exotic idea."
So he researched the deadly toxin online. He bought "The Anarchists Cookbook." He ordered castor bean seeds -- ricin comes from the processed beans' waste -- apparently posing as a fictitious customer: "Roger's Patio and Garden."
He donned a mask and gloves, mashed the beans with acetone, dried out the oil and stored the light-colored powder in a polypropylene container.
According to a six-page federal complaint released Wednesday, Bergendorff fell ill while keeping a "crude" form of the poison at the Extended Stay America hotel in Las Vegas, where he lived with his cats and German shepherd.
(Excerpt) Read more at baltimoresun.com ...
He claims he was just having fun.
SURE he was!
He IS an idiot, though, who put others in harm’s way. Brilliant of them to publish the recipe.
This guy was one sick mother. An accident just waiting to happen. This could have turned out a lot worse than just him getting poisoned, a lot worse.
His cousin Mr. Tholen now believes this guy was making ricin in Tholen’s basement....Mr. Tholen is one lucky fella.
This guy needs to be put away for a really, really long time.
from another article:
Nearly two weeks after he was admitted to the hospital, Extended Stay employees entered Bergendorff’s room and discovered two .25-caliber semi-automatic pistols, a .22-caliber Ruger rifle and a .22-caliber Browning pistol. Each had a homemade silencer attached.
Las Vegas police summoned to the motel room found an “Anarchist’s Cookbook” with recipes for deadly poisons. A page describing how to make ricin had been marked.
A total of 4 grams of the deadly substance later were discovered in a vial and a beaker stored in a bag in Bergendorff’s room.
http://www.lvrj.com/news/17842429.html
Roger Bergendorff in court telling the judge he was just having some “fun” cooking up ricin.
The judge wasn’t impressed.
I’m still trying to find a photo of the guy.
For some reason...I’m not buying into this story that the guy says at all. Why show up in Vegas? Why mess with ricin anyway? If you know the consequences...what is the enticement to make the stuff? This guy had alot on his plate and probably was going to market or sell the stuff to someone.
WHY would a normal human being find it necessary to “experiment” with a substance that could kill LOTS of people very quickly and very stealthily? I think the short answer is: A NORMAL person wouldn’t.
I don’t care what this idiots motives may have been. They should lock him up and lose the key. Anyone with a mindset that irresponsible should not be mingling with the general public!
http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/europe/01/07/terror.poison.bulgarian/
And Bergendorff had a drawing of some kind of injection device disguised as a pen...makes you wonder what he was planning.
Is it my imagination, or did that article just tell me how to make ricin?
Amazing that they can go into such detail with that, but they still can’t explain how Hillary Clinton made $100,000 in the cattle futures market, or how Saddam Hussein was corrupting the United Nations with the Oil For Food program.
EXCERPT:
The man arrested Wednesday for possession of ricin, a poison considered to be a weapon of mass destruction, had enough of the illegal toxin tucked inside his Las Vegas motel room to kill about 522 people, federal authorities said.
http://www.lvrj.com/news/17842429.html
it takes a little more than vague hints to make ricin (although if you eat the beans, it makes you sick)...the bad news is that I’ve seen the cookbook on p2p and torrant sites.
Perhaps a curious question...but just how many folks die in Vegas in a normal week...and does that compare to cities of the same size?
It’d be a mighty simple act for a guy to bring his wife out to Vegas...to sit at the slots....and then have a guy come by and jab her. The gal dies at the machine and the medical folks proclaim this a simple heart attack. The guy goes home and collects on her insurance policy...buries the wife...and buys a new pontoon boat.
This is a more mundane question, but how did he afford the $1200/month for the Extended Stay hotel room if he was unemployed and broke? Not to mention his other living expenses.
And he was on the move for several years. Utah, then Southern California, then Las Vegas. Who was supporting him?
From the article it seems he made Ricin before. It seems he never used it. What may have started out an inquisitive man’s hobby, could very easily have turned at some point to something much more sinister. Once you have something, there’s a tendency to want to use it.
The silencers on the guns is worrysome. It seems to me that he may have been thinking blackmail of a casino.
On the other hand, he may have been an excentric.
The problem is, the authorites will never know, and this guy isn’t going to see the light of day for a while IMO.
I don’t know where to go to check those kind of stats.
But your hypothetical sounds like a great plot for a CSI episode.
The “injection device disguised as a pen” worries me, too.
Although it looks like he was only at the drawing board stage on that one.
I agree. This guy was playing with fire. I don’t know what his plans were. Perhaps it gave him a sense of importance to have something that potent in his posession. It sure isn’t something I would want around. No way.
Its too bad we can’t write our own version of CSI episodes and have the show do them. I would have had the cop show up at the husband’s room...telling him the woeful news of the wife dying of a apparent heart attack on the blackjack floor...and there on the table in front of the cop...were several brochures of pontoon boats...making the cop very suspicious. Later...the husband indicates that he never....ever....took the wife on Vegas trips and this was the first one. Then the cop follows the husband to some strip-joint in town where he pays off some farmer from Iowa who comes down to Vegas each year to whack off five or six wives for guys....to help make the mortgage payment on the farm that he operates in Iowa, which is a failure but he won’t admit it. Then at the very end of the episode...the farmer-killer dies mysteriously as his dear wife arrives in Vegas to discover that these trips to the Farmer’s convention were all fake.
Thanks for the ping. There was a pic of both Bergendorf and Tholen side by side in one of the threads. Let me get a cup of coffee in me and will see if I can find it.
Been so busy, I haven’t even pinged the list yet.
Be back in a bit.
Ricin take take days to kill, and it's a nasty way to go.
Coma Dude Tholen
Sounds like the guns with silencers were intended to be used on a security guard or maintenance worker or both so he could get access to the air conditioning system.
Most likely a blackmail plot and the ricin was to be dispersed over people on a casino floor.
His plot against the casino was airborne dispersal of the poison.
Ping to thread for those still interested in this bizarre story:
Deo volente has been following the story and posted this NEW INFO!!
Don’t remember any news about the ‘injection device drawings’ found....do you?
(hope I did not leave anyone out of the ping list. had to make it from scratch again, so forgive me if you were not on the list)
Hey there penelope!!! Thx for the ping...and yes I am still very, very interested in this. I had never seen (in the previous threads) the photos side by side...eery resemblance wouldn’t you say?
Sounds reasonable to me as well. I agree.
Thanks for the ping.
No, hadn’t heard anything about injection pen. Weird.
So we finally know the amount of ricin they found—4 grams. And he’d been at it for almost 10 years. Wonder if they found it all? Or if maybe he’d even used it? I doubt many hospitals would think to look for ricin poisoning.
And the subject in question illustates how well that recipe works. Think about it.
“....eery resemblance wouldn’t you say?”
YES!! They look more like brothers, not cousins. Don’t you just love his ‘defense’:...”I am not a criminal, I am not a robber, I am not a thief, I am not a rapist, I am not a child molester,” Bergendorff mumbled in a soft but scratchy voice. “It’s not in my blood.”
LOL..he left out ‘murderer and terrorist’..(eye roll)
Good point. I also didn’t read anywhere before now that the guns had no serial numbers. I knew he had made silencers for them from another article. He sounds like an assassin ready to do ‘contract work’ for someone else.
Thanks for the ping and yes, I am still interested.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.