An Arkansas tree cutter who made jars of the lethal poison ricin on his rural property was sentenced to eight years in prison for possessing a biological agent infamously known for being one of the most potent toxins in the world, federal prosecutors announced Friday.
Jason Kale Clampit, 44, made his own ricin, a poison extracted from castor beans that grow in the wild. While castor beans themselves are harmless, ricin, when extracted correctly in a complex process, is lethal and has been the stuff of Cold War assassinations and the plot of a popular episode on the Breaking Bad television series.
“This case involved an incredibly dangerous biological weapon,” said Clay Fowlkes, the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Arkansas. “The ricin in this case could have resulted in a mass casualty event involving innocent bystanders including law enforcement officers, first responders, sanitation workers, and others. The defendant’s conduct caused a needless and senseless threat to the community.”
Clampit is not the typical ricin chemist. He aimed to use the ricin to keep away a “group of thieves” staying in the woods by his home, according to court filings.
The resident of Winslow, Arkansas, population 365 and a former stagecoach stop in years gone by, worked as a tree cutter prior to his arrest and enjoyed working with plants, according to court filings. He had also previously run his own landscaping business and worked at a nursery, the documents show.
His sister told investigators that Clampit talked about knowing how to do plant extractions, according to court records. His girlfriend said he would listen to podcasts on toxins and read about them online.
However, text messages mentioned in prosecutors’ filings show that he didn’t trust everything he read about the compound.
“A lot of the recipes try to mislead people. So then we have to figure it out, which makes it dangerous,” he wrote. “But I’ve figured out the code now.”
In the end he accidentally poisoned himself with the compound, becoming extremely ill, court papers said. He had put the ricin in spots around his property to dissuade a group of local thieves he labeled as “owlers,” prosecutors said.
Clampit was charged after an anonymous tipper warned the local sheriff’s office that Clampit may have poisoned his mother, who was in the hospital at the time. The case was then referred to an FBI agent who investigates national security matters related to domestic, international terrorism, and weapons of mass destruction.
Judge Timothy L. Brooks sentenced Clampit in Fayetteville on Thursday, according to court filings. Clampit was originally indicted in March 2024 and plead guilty in October 2024. An attorney for Clampit did not respond to requests for comment.
Ricin explained: Just how deadly is it, how does it kill?
‘Take people to the grave or make them into either angels or demons’
Clampit was aware of the danger and power of the ricin he was producing at home, according to messages contained in an arrest affidavit.
“I have and know things that would baggle the mind,” he told his sister in a text message at around the same time he was recovering from poisoning himself in late 2023. “I know how to either take people to the grave or make them into either angels or demons . . . I am not the brother you once knew, I am more.”
“Bubba, Why would you be around a bottle of that in the first place though,” his sister asked. “I’m glad you’re okay. That’s good.”
Clampit told her: “I made it to get people to stay out of our woods,” Clampit wrote. “There’s a group of thieves out here called the owlers. They snoop around watching people at night. They dress in gilly suits and hide in the bushes. So i made this stuff and set up traps in the woods.”
Clampit said he accidentally got poisoned when handling a leaky bottle of the substance. His mother, who also became sick from ricin exposure, alerted the sister to the poisonings.
The Bentonville Bomb Squad searched Clampit’s six-acre property and found a “significant amount” of castor beans, the natural product ricin is extracted from. Ricin has no known antidote, the CDC says.
Authorities also found at least one jar of suspected liquid ricin, a coffee grinder containing suspected ricin powder and a revolver, court documents say. At least some of the beans were in plain sight on a shelf in the trailer bedroom.
Clampit was arrested a few days later, according to court filings.
Assassins, terrorists and more
Ricin has garnered a reputation over the past half-century as the poison of choice for not just Walter White, the diabolical chemist in Breaking Bad, but also assassins and terrorists.
Exposure to as much as a pinhead of the substance will lead to death in 36 to 72 hours. Symptoms depend on how the poison is delivered but they include flu-like symptoms within the first few hours that can worsen into blue skin, respiratory failure, seizures, organ failure and death, the CDC says.
Ricin made international headlines when a communist agent killed a defector to the West using a poison-tipped umbrella on a bridge in London in 1978.
Georgi Markov, a novelist and playwright, defected in 1969 from his native Bulgaria which was then ruled by communists. Markov became a broadcast journalist in England and was known for his criticisms of the Bulgarian-Soviet regime.
He was assassinated at age 49 in London when a Bulgarian agent closely affiliated with the KGB stabbed Markov with an umbrella that had a ricin pellet attached to its tip.
Ricin is still used by secret police agencies around the world. German police arrested a 32-year-old Iranian citizen in 2023 for procuring ricin in order to commit an “Islamist-motivated” attack, according to reporting by Reuters.
Would-be assassins have also tried using ricin to kill American political leaders.
Federal authorities arrested a U.S. Navy veteran in Utah in 2018 after suspicious envelopes were sent to President Donald Trump and top military leaders, some of which contained the natural ingredients used to make the deadly poison.