The Elvis impersonator arrested for the ricin letters

On Wednesday evening, the FBI arrested a Mississippi man, Paul Kevin Curtis, on suspicion of sending letters filled with the poison ricin to Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), President Obama, and a local judge. If guilty, Curtis didn't cover his tracks very well. The arrest was based on information gathered "very early on," an official tells The New York Times. Presumably that information includes Curtis' use of his actual initials, KC, in the letter.

In fact, Curtis left enough breadcrumbs that a conservative website, Lady Liberty 1885, apparently fingered Curtis hours before the FBI announced his arrest, just through internet sleuthing. Curtis' Facebook posts include both the sign-off used in the ricin letters to Wicker and Obama — "This is KC and I approve this message" — and, according to Lady Liberty, the same quote: "To see a wrong and not expose it, is to become a silent partner to its continuance."

So, who is Kevin Curtis? To begin with, he "might be better known to some as a celebrity impersonator," says the Jackson, Miss., Clarion-Ledger. Curtis, 45 and a resident of Corinth, impersonates 70 celebrity singers, including Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jon Bon Jovi, Prince, and Kenny Chesney — using the stage name KC. According to his profile on Reverb Nation, Curtis has been performing in Elvis competitions since age 10. And on the entertainment booking site GigSalad, Curtis says he has an impressive three-octave range and is a seven-time World Finalist at the Memphis-area Elvis impersonation contest "Images of the King."

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Here's Curtis in action:

But Elvis impersonations aren't Curtis' only passion. According to several posts online, and a book he was shopping around, Curtis is convinced that he stumbled upon a massive, secret organ-harvesting network while performing janitorial services at a local Mississippi hospital. Many of the missives in which he details his grisly discovery in the hospital morgue, and the fallout when he tried to report it, end with a variant of the same sign-off, "This is Kevin Curtis and I approve...," says Chris Geidner at BuzzFeed. And less than 20 hours before he was arrested, he revisited the organ-harvesting allegation on Facebook:

Curtis' Facebook page also has several mentions of Wicker and Obama. One of his postings, to a site called Ripoff Report, includes this detail:

It concludes: "This is Kevin Curtis and I approve this report."

In terms of his ideology, he writes this under the "Political Views" section of Facebook: "Is facebook.com REALLY a place to advertise our political views? Really...throw me a frickin bone here someone!" But he also posted a picture of himself with his thumb up in front of a bumper sticker reading "Christian and a Democrat." In a Facebook post mourning the loss of the 8-year-old killed in the Boston Marathon bombing, he seems all over the map:

The easy trail to Curtis is a big shift from the 2001 anthrax letters. After seven years, the feds were about to finally charge somebody for the attacks, scientist Bruce Ivins, when the suspect killed himself. But Curtis, if guilty, is more the norm than the exception, says Michael Crowley at TIME. His Facebook page features a certificate from Mensa, the club for "geniuses" with high IQs, but his writings suggest Curtis "may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer."

In fact, says Crowley, the only person who "has delivered ricin and gotten away with it" is a person who goes by the name Fallen Angel, who sent two ricin-laced letters to the Bush White House and the Transportation Department in 2003. Fallen Angel was angry about trucking regulations, not pilfered body parts, and his ricin was deemed pretty non-lethal. But "say this for Fallen Angel: He was smart enough not to reveal his initials. And in the hapless world of America's would-be ricin killers, that may pass for genius."