Poisonings at Church Are Termed Retaliation

The man who committed one of Maine’s most notorious crimes, poisoning parishioners at a church with arsenic three years ago, was trying to retaliate against his fellow church members because he believed they had once put chemicals in his coffee, the man’s lawyer said yesterday.

The lawyer, Peter Kelley, revealed authoritatively for the first time the motive for the poisonings at Gustaf Adolph Lutheran Church in New Sweden, which killed a 78-year-old man and injured 15 other people, bringing international attention to the tiny, insular town in far-northern Maine.

Mr. Kelley said in an interview that Daniel Bondeson, a parishioner at the church who the police had previously said had not acted alone in the poisoning, came to see him several days after the poisonings and explained how and why he had poured an arsenic-laced chemical in the coffee at Sunday services on April 27, 2003. Mr. Bondeson killed himself the day after he met with Mr. Kelley.

At some point in the past, Mr. Kelley said, Mr. Bondeson “felt someone had made bad coffee for him, although he could not prove it, and he had a tummy ache and he was going to get back at them.”

“He just obviously overreacted,” he added. “He decided to do something to the parishioners.”

Mr. Kelley said he decided to disclose the information yesterday because the Maine State Police and the attorney general’s office announced in the afternoon that they were closing the case, having concluded that Mr. Bondeson was the only culprit.

Mr. Bondeson, a 53-year-old potato farmer who also worked at a nursing home, left a suicide note taking responsibility for the crime. The police had long said that details in the note persuaded them that Mr. Bondeson was assisted by at least one other person.

But yesterday, Stephen H. McCausland, a spokesman for the Maine Department of Public Safety, said Mr. Bondeson “acted alone. There is no one else involved.”

Mr. McCausland confirmed Mr. Kelley’s description of the motive. He said the police closed the case because of “new information.”

Mr. Kelley said he was the source of the new information. He said that until a few months ago he believed that he was unable to tell investigators about his conversation with Mr. Bondeson because of attorney-client privilege. But the matter went before a judge, who ruled that Mr. Bondeson’s suicide note had essentially waived the privilege.

Mr. Kelley said Mr. Bondeson had gone to the church that Sunday and poured liquid from an old spray can on his farm into the percolating coffee.

“He did not know it contained arsenic and he had no intent of seriously harming anyone,” Mr. Kelley said.

He said Mr. Bondeson, whom he barely knew, sought legal advice, and “I told him that there’s no trail at all to him, that he’d be the last person in the world people would think would do this, that he should go about his work and be busy and let it roll over, so to speak.”

Mr. Kelley said Mr. Bondeson met with him twice that day. He mentioned suicide and “I strongly urged him to get counseling,” Mr. Kelley said. “He’s stoic, physically tough, quiet, never been married. He was, as best he could show emotions, very upset about it.”

Reaction yesterday in New Sweden, whose 621 people are largely of Swedish descent, seemed stoic as well. Some were not too surprised because a book came out last year asserting that Mr. Bondeson had acted alone out of revenge.

“I’m kind of glad it’s closed,” Ralph Ostlund, 82, who suffered damage to nerves in his feet from the arsenic, said by telephone. “I don’t have the feeling in my feet that I should have, but life’s got to go on.”

Peter Drever, a pastor at the church in 2004 and 2005, said in a telephone interview that people would probably be relieved the case was over.

“Scandinavian folk by nature don’t like to be in the limelight,” Mr. Drever said.

Ariel Sabar contributed reporting from Bangor, Me., for this article, and Katie Zezima from Boston.

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