Roger Von Bergendorff, the guy who lapsed into a coma after handling deadly ricin in a Las Vegas hotel room, has been arrested and charged with possession of a biological toxin, as well as possessing unregistered firearms and firearms not identified by serial number. According to this article, he also had a couple of homemade silencers and drawings of a device for injecting the ricin into victims. He has supposedly admitted to making the ricin in Utah, “possibly in the basement of his cousin’s Riverton home” — which, if you’ll recall, is only a short distance from my own home.

All in all, Von Bergendorff comes across as something of a poseur, a guy with a big mouth and a vivid imagination rather than a genuine killer, something like the character in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil who is always threatening to pour poison into the city’s water supply just to make himself seem more important. But still… it does give me a bit of a chill to think that somewhere right in my hometown, there was a guy who nursed private grudges and cooked up vengeance plans that sound like something out of a John le Carre novel. It’s all too easy to imagine this guy roaming the aisles of Peterson’s, the local grocery store, poking people with his little poison-spitter, and then laughing a few days later when the TV news is doing around-the-clock coverage while authorities try to figure out what the hell is going on with all the sick and dying people in an otherwise unremarkable bedroom community on the south end of the valley…