[Vision2020] Bouma Postcard Hoax Remains Unsolved

[Tom Hansen]

"Moscow Cares" continues to offer a reward of $7,000 for information leading to the arrest of the perpetrater of the Bouma postcard hoax.

http://www.moscowcares.com/Hero/Postcard_Hoax.htm
 
Courtesy of today's (March 14, 2012) Moscow-Pullman Daily News.

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Latah County Sheriff's Office closes case on Bouma postcard hoax
A similar race is developing for Idaho's District 5 Senate with Dan Schmidt once again pitted against Gresham Bouma - this time to represent both Latah and Benewah counties. Replacing Gary Schroeder in competition against Bouma in the Republican primary is his son, Barrett.
A repeat of the 2010 mailing of more than 100 political postcards attributing inflammatory messages to Bouma's campaign, however, is not expected to occur this year. The real culprits were never found.
The Latah County Sheriff's Office opened an investigation into the fraudulent postcard mailings when people around the county first reported receiving them in the mail Oct. 16, 2010. Reports came from Harvard, Deary, Genesee and Moscow, and within a week the sheriff's office had collected 113 postcards.
The return address for the postcards had been to a nonexistent group, Friends of Bouma, and claimed Catholics and Mormons belonged among a group of "false churches as minions of Satan no different from Obama and his unholy mosques."
It went on to attack Paul Agidius and both Schroeders, with Gary running for re-election to District 6 Idaho Senate and Barrett as chairman for the Latah County Republicans at the time. Agidius had been running for county commissioner.
The case was closed in May when attempts to trace the postcards to their original points of origin were unsuccessful, even while utilizing search methods available through the U.S. Post Office and the Idaho State Forensics Lab. Following the fraudulent campaign mailings, Bouma, Moscow Cares and other donors put up a more than $3,000 reward under the Postcard Hoax Information Reward Fund.
According to an investigative report by Sheriff's Detective Josh Anderson, multiple people were interviewed who had either received the postcard or posted it online with no success in pinpointing a source, usually with one interviewee pointing the finger at another individual they felt worthy of investigation.
The postcards were determined to have been supplied by Office Depot, however, the largest purchases of that stock were in Spokane. The postcards were supplied to the store by Gartner Studios. Without a credit card number, purchases could not be cross referenced and the purchase could not be determined if it was made in cash, the report states.
A U.S. postal inspector from Spokane was also unable to determine from where the postcards had been sent, but provided 62 more postcards on top of the 113 collected by the sheriff's office that had been returned to the post office as undeliverable.
In December 2010, postcards were sent to the Idaho State Forensics Lab for latent print analysis and "four latent images of comparison value found on different postcards" could not be matched to one person, the report states. Sheriff's Lt. Brannon Jordan said the partial prints did not match any in the criminal database.
"There were no prints on file ... that hit on any particular suspect," he said. "That does happen where you have an identifiable fingerprint but no match on file."
Chances are the prints could have come from either the postal carrier who delivered the postcards or the residents who turned them over to law enforcement, said Jordan.
Without any new leads, Jordan said the investigation was closed after many man hours spent on the case.
"Just because it's closed we could possibly reopen it if more information came forward," said Jordan of the case.
"I wouldn't anticipate seeing this kind of thing again."

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Seeya round town, Moscow.

Tom Hansen
Moscow, Idaho

"If not us, who?
If not now, when?"

- Unknown


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