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LUBBOCK, Texas - The FBI swept into this quiet college town the day after professor Thomas Butler reported 30 vials of plague - the Black Death - missing from his lab and possibly stolen. President Bush was briefed out of concern terrorists may have been involved.
"My only reason for reporting the missing vials was public safety," Butler, a Texas Tech University researcher, would later say. "I consider safety to be the most important thing."
But the FBI and federal prosecutors believe otherwise. The 62-year-old microbiologist has been in federal court most of this month, on trial for allegedly lying to investigators, smuggling plague samples into the country, defrauding Texas Tech out of hundreds of thousands of dollars and cheating on his taxes.
If convicted of just a few of the 69 counts, Butler could face years in prison.
Yet even with the case against him wrapped up and in the hand of a jury that resumes deliberations Monday, it remains unclear what exactly happened to the vials of plague.
Investigators ruled out terrorist involvement shortly after Butler reported the samples missing in January. Butler claims he doesn't know. He says the FBI coerced him into signing a statement in which he said he accidentally destroyed the samples.
One thing is certain: Even if he is acquitted, Butler's distinguished career battling the plague is in tatters. He's no longer allowed into his own lab, and Texas Tech is trying to fire him. He is currently on paid leave from his post as chief of the infectious diseases division at the school's department of internal medicine.
The reversal of fortune is stunning for a man whose reputation in the small field of plague research had been impeccable.
Butler's supporters in the scientific community think he's guilty of nothing more than bureaucratic misdeeds in mishandling plague samples and the complicated paperwork required post-Sept. 11. They say he's being made a scapegoat and that the case presages a new era in research constraints.
A year ago, national security officials were relying on Butler to help develop defenses against terrorists attacks with plague, which is still endemic in Africa and Asia.
He likely had no idea on the January morning when he told his boss of the missing vials that it would trigger a federal investigation into all aspects of his life.
Butler was initially indicted in April on 15 charges, nearly all of them related to his handling of the plague samples and his statements to the FBI. After he refused a plea bargain that included jail time in early August, Butler was charged with 54 more crimes related to drug industry grants.
Butler's supporters think the additional charges represent a "piling on" by the prosecutors.
Yet Butler's apparently cavalier handling of the deadly plague has startled some. Testimony showed he hauled samples taken from infected Tanzanians in petri dishes stored in his luggage on airplanes and in cardboard boxes in the trunk of his car.
Scientists such as Peter Agre, this year's Nobel Prize winner for chemistry, said Butler handled his potentially deadly germs no differently than many other researchers of his generation, who joked that they transported their samples "VIP" - vials in pocket.
Agre joined three other Nobel laureates - Sidney Altman, Robert Curl, and Torsten Wiesel - in expressing in an open letter what they called the worry of "a growing number of leading scientists" about the Justice Department's decision to prosecute Butler.
The judge presiding over Butler's trial has barred both sides from publicly discussing the case. But during testimony, it became clear that the FBI and federal prosecutors believe Butler is much more devious than the brilliant but absent-minded researcher his supporters portray.
Information that has surfaced since the April indictment, some of it obtained through open-records requests with the university, indicates that Butler's career had suffered setbacks shortly before the missing-vials incident.
In 2001, university administrators temporarily suspended his work with terminally ill human subjects because they said he was slow to answer questions about an experiment testing a drug that fights the bacteria-spreading ailment sepsis. Testimony showed that nine of 13 patients died in Butler's portion of the study; half had been expected to die.
In late 2002, the university suspended Butler's right to do any research with human subjects after he failed to respond to administrators' inquiries.
Scrutiny of Butler also led school administrators to demand an accounting of some $350,000 in grants that he received from two drug companies since 1998.
Finally, on Jan. 9, university officials notified Butler they were moving forward with an inquiry about his work. Four days later, Butler told campus police that the 30 vials of plague samples were missing.