A Texas woman accused of mailing potentially deadly homemade bombs to President Barack Obama and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott in 2016 was caught due to cat hair, a cigarette package and a shipping label.
Julia Poff was indicted by a grand jury this month for mailing injurious articles and transporting explosives with the intent to kill and injure, according to the filing. She was known to dislike the former President, a federal agent testified.
She mailed the explosive devices to both Obama and Abbott, as well as the federal Social Security Administration building in October 2016. Luckily, only Abbott opened his package. It did not detonate, however, because he did not open it “as designed,” court documents said.
The polic tracked Poff down via evidence left on the devices. The bomb sent to Abbott came in a package still bearing an almost-destroyed shipping label addressed to Poff. Also, the cigarette box used to build the device was traced to the Texas store where she bought them.
As for the device sent to Obama, investigators traced it back to Poff from cat hair found under the address label. The hairs were “microscopically consistent” with those one of her cats, according to the court filing.
A pretrial conference in the case is scheduled for early next year.