Curtis also had every reason to resent Sadie Holland. She had once sentenced Curtis to six months in jail for assaulting the rhythm-guitar player for a Double Trouble gig, a man who Curtis claims pulled a loaded pistol on him in a fit of drunken anger.(3) It would take little more than a Google search for the FBI to finger Curtis as the sender.

Though the feds were convinced they had their man, Holland herself had doubts about his guilt. “I never really once thought that Curtis sent it. If he had sent it, why would he have signed off on it like that?” Dutschke, however, had once fetched up in her court over a billing dispute with the parents of a tae kwon do student. He struck Holland as “a very arrogant person, and to be honest with you, it would not surprise me, anything that he might do.”

Four days after Kevin Curtis was released from jail, the feds arrested Everett Dutschke. Unfolding in the far graver shadow of the Boston Marathon bombing, the ricin story hit the news cycle almost as comic relief—Elvis impersonators! Half-assed espionage! Domestic-terrorism-as-wacky-screwball-romp!

But with Dutschke’s arrest, it did look like the feds at last had collared the guilty party. The evidence spelled out in the FBI’s affidavit in support of the charges leaves little room for optimism on the part of the defense. Damning details include an interview with an unnamed witness who claimed to have heard Dutschke touting his poison-manufacturing know-how and his “secret knowledge” of a method for “getting rid of people in office.” There is also the report of an FBI surveillance team who claimed that they watched Dutschke cart from his dojo to a Dumpster down the street “the box for a Black and Decker Smart Grind coffee grinder,”(4) “a box containing latex gloves,” and a dust mask and drain-trap cullings that tested positive for ricin. There is also the document, recovered from Dutschke’s laptop, ”Standard Operating Procedure for Ricin, which describes safe handling and storage methods for ricin.” There are also the eBay and PayPal records indicating that “Dutschke paid for fifty red castor bean seeds on or about November 17, 2012. He made a second purchase of fifty red castor bean seeds on or about December 1, 2012.” And there are the text messages, sent from Dutschke’s wife’s phone days before his arrest, with instructions to “get a fire going” because someone was “coming over to burn some things.”

4.Laura Curtis: “I forgot to tell the FBI even that [Dutschke] doesn’t drink coffee, why would he have a coffee grinder? I just remember how I would ask him if he wanted a cup of coffee and he would go, ‘That stuff’s poison,’ and he would always look funny when he said it.”

Dutschke, who has pleaded not guilty, dismisses the preponderance of evidence mentioned in the FBI affidavit as “absurd.” “I’ve read the FBI affidavit a thousand times, and there’s nothing illegal in it.” When I mention the castor beans, he corrected me: “Castor seeds. Flower seeds. Completely legal flower seeds. Stuff that we’ve planted every single year.”

Citing his pending trial, Dutschke declined to comment on the matter of the ricin-laced garbage. But evidence is forthcoming, he says, that will “totally exonerate me.”

So, then: Does Dutschke believe Kevin Curtis actually sent the letters? “The simplest answer,” he says, “is usually the correct one, and I think the simple answer has already been out there, but they weren’t able to make it stick.”

Tupelo peanut gallerists have a different opinion. They’re quick to point out that for all Dutschke’s local renown as a “genius,” the ricin plot is not a masterwork of diabolical cunning. The ricin itself was so impotent that 80-year-old Sadie Holland huffed it with no ill effects. And there are probably junior high schoolers who would have covered their tracks more shrewdly than the ricin letters’ sender did. So, one wonders: If Everett Dutschke loathed Kevin Curtis passionately enough to risk life imprisonment, can we really believe that he would have framed Curtis so bunglingly as to leave such a flagrant trail to his own front door? The perpetrator’s plot was so maladroit, so easily unraveled, that it’s hard not to wonder: If Dutschke did it, did he want to get caught?

So goes one local theory: Some speculate that, facing the possibility of forty-five years for child molestation in Mississippi’s Parchman state farm, an especially unhappy home for pedophiles, Dutschke may have hit upon the ricin scheme as a route to a gentler bid in a federal pen.

While the courts have not yet pronounced upon his guilt or innocence, most everyone agrees that if Dutschke does any time, they will not be easy years. “I believe he’s gonna go in a tight end and come out a wide receiver,” mused Rep. Steve Holland, Dutschke’s former political rival. “But that’s pure conjecture. I couldn’t say for sure.”

If you were to diagram the political dream-lives of Everett Dutschke and Kevin Curtis—the forces they believe they’ve been striving against, the enemies they’ve cultivated—the circles would Venn at the man who offered that last piece of insight, Rep. Steve Holland. Until the ricin thing happened, Holland was the guy Everett Dutschke seemed to loathe more than anyone in the world. But curiously, Kevin Curtis does not count Holland, the enemy of his enemy, as one of his friends. Because Holland runs a funeral home with his mother, Judge Sadie Holland, Curtis suspects that Holland has an important if unspecified role in the body-parts conspiracy. (I called the hospital for comment on the issue. A bunch of times. Nobody ever called back.) I wanted to understand this man Holland more—in the hope that by so doing, I might better understand the rivalry at the center of our tale. And in a show of true hospitality and professional transparency, Rep. Holland invited me down to the funeral home one morning in early summer to help him put a nightgown on a corpse.