The mystery of who poisoned 16 churchgoers here with arsenic-tainted coffee seemed to be solved the other day when a congregant shot himself to death, leaving a note that the police said tied him to the poisonings.

But Sara Anderson, who hears all the town's important news from behind her register at the Northstar Variety store here, is not buying it. And the police are trying to figure out whether someone else may have been involved.

''None of us believe that Danny did this -- or at least not him by himself,'' Ms. Anderson said of the man who killed himself, Daniel Bondeson. ''Even the people still in the hospital, unless the police find the proof and put it in their faces, they're still not going to believe he would have done this.''

People in this northern Maine town of about 650 say Mr. Bondeson, a 53-year-old potato farmer, was just too nice to have put the arsenic in the coffee that killed an elderly churchgoer, Walter Reid Morrill. In fact, they recall, Mr. Bondeson was the person who climbed atop Mr. Morrill's roof and shoveled two feet of snow from it this winter.

At the town offices this week, the police took DNA samples and fingerprints from the surviving members of Gustaf Adolph Lutheran Church, and two F.B.I. profilers were expected to arrive in town by Friday.

In a town with families that settled here together more than a century ago and so few homicides that people strain to remember the last one, all of the doubts have left people wondering whether someone else could be right here, right among them.

''Most people would like to hear of some arrest in this case,'' Ms. Anderson said. ''Not knowing and waiting for an answer is almost as hard to take as what happened in the first place.''

On that Sunday, April 27, some of the church elders and congregants gathered after services to sip coffee and eat treats left behind from a bake sale the day before. Though people here, many of them of Swedish descent, pride themselves on making strong ''rugged'' coffee, this brew, percolated in a big old urn, seemed downright bitter. Within minutes, people were vomiting.

Five days later, as Mr. Morrill's family mourned his death and other families waited by bedsides in two hospitals, Mr. Bondeson shot himself at his farm a few miles from the church, police said. Nearby, they found a suicide note. Although they have refused to reveal its contents, one thing is clear: it raised as many questions as it answered.

Something about the wording of the note led police to wonder whether someone else might also be involved, and so, the investigation rolled on. The police will not say whether they know if the poisoning was, in their words, a ''conspiracy-type act,'' nor will they say that they know it was not.

''The overall investigation gives us a feeling that that possibility exists,'' said Lt. Dennis Appleton, the lead state police investigator, who added that officials were looking at some ''real intriguing points'' that they hoped to clear up within a few days.

''We just really are reluctant to just close the case and go away -- we won't sleep well,'' Lieutenant Appleton said. ''Based on our theories, we can't put it to bed.''

Police would not say what physical evidence was found, but by today, 35 church members had driven to the town offices to give blood samples and fingerprints, and 15 others were expected to do the same in the coming days. They also were asked to answer a questionnaire, the contents of which the police would not reveal.

Edmund Margeson, a farmer and member of the 12-person council that leads the church, was one of those who spent about 30 minutes with the police, as his fingertips and thumb sides were inked. Mr. Margeson, 63, said the questionnaire he filled out was five pages long and posed some peculiarly direct questions like: Did you do it? Why should police believe you? How do you think the arsenic got into the coffee?

Mr. Margeson, whose own son was released from the hospital on Wednesday after days of treatment for poisoning, said he found the investigation into church members troubling. ''This is upsetting like the whole thing has been,'' he said. ''There is something in the back of your mind that says, well, you know you are not involved, but it feels odd to be suspected somehow.''

Of the Bondeson family, Mr. Margeson said: ''We happen to have been good friends.'' And his son, Erich, 30, who will now be given EKG tests every day to guard against other, unnoticed damage from the poison, concurred: ''I knew Danny well, and I have nothing bad to say about him.''

The elder Mr. Margeson said he was waiting, nervously, to learn whether other church members will be implicated. ''That'd be like a double whammy, if that turns out to be,'' he said. ''Who knows where this ends?''

Police have said they are looking at disagreements within the church as they search for a motive. There have been conflicts, to be sure. Certainly, the matter of finding a new pastor -- their last one left two years ago -- had been tense. Lutheran leaders had told the church elders they were having trouble finding a pastor who would want to move to such a cold, faraway spot, Mr. Margeson said.

''That's the biggest debate,'' he said, ''but I cannot imagine anybody being that upset over trivial, normal happenings.''

Mr. Bondeson certainly would not have been, his family said. Yes, he went to the church, just as his father had before him, his nephew, Sven Bondeson, said. But he was not wrapped up in church politics. ''Not a whole lot bothered Danny,'' his nephew said. ''He went along with the flow of things. He wouldn't have cared.''

Mr. Bondeson was not serving on the church council at the time of his death, Sven Bondeson said, although his sister, Norma Bondeson, was.

The family had recently bought a communion table to give to the church, he said. They collected donations among themselves to buy it, then assembled it and took it over. The table was inside the church last Sunday, Sven Bondeson said. He said the church council had not officially accepted the table, but that that was merely a formality. They had not met recently to take a vote, he said. ''This was just a table, nothing out of the ordinary,'' Sven Bondeson said.

Three days before the suicide, the two men had worked together packing potatoes. It was just another day. Daniel Bondeson did not seem troubled or depressed, his nephew said. The Bondeson family had been through more than its share of pain over the last six years: Daniel's father and brother had died of health troubles and another relative had died in a snowmobiling wreck.

But Daniel Bondeson had busied himself with multiple jobs: at a nursing home, substitute teaching and farming. He also skied and liked to jog on the long stretches beside the potato fields and cattle pastures here.

In a house just down the road from the steepled church, more than a century old, and the waiting picnic tables out back, Mr. Morrill's family showed photographs of him to a visitor. He was 78, a retired railroad worker, a veteran of World War II, someone who had twice made a hole in one at the Caribou golf course.

''We're trying to cope with this, and the horrible way that he went,'' his son, Ron Morrill, said.

Still, Mr. Morrill, 51, said that the possibility of another person being involved in his father's death was an open question in his mind. ''It's a big puzzle,'' he said. ''But we believe that Danny would never intentionally want to hurt Dad. He was a friend.''

Mass Poisoning

By Katherine Ramsland

No one at the Gustaf Adolph Lutheran Church in New Sweden, Maine, which had a congregation of some 60 regular worshipers, could quite believe what had happened.  One minute, the two dozen people who had gathered for coffee and doughnuts after the service on April 27, 2003, were greeting one another as usual, and the next, over a dozen members of the congregation had become violently ill.  Samples taken from the victims were tested in the toxicology lab of the Maine Public Safety Department.

On Monday, Walter Reid Morrill, 78, died.   He'd been a longtime member of the church and had often served as a caretaker and usher.  Laboratory tests conducted on the coffee by the Maine Bureau of Health and a private lab in Pennsylvania confirmed that the cause of the sudden illness was arsenic.

The others who were ill were fortunate. After the September 11 terrorism incident, officials had used federal antibioterrorism grants to stockpile arsenic antidotes in Portland, Maine, and these supplies were rushed to New Sweden to treat parishioners who had consumed the coffee and were in a critical condition.  Everyone besides Morrill survived.

The Boston Globe, CNN, ABC News, and many other media outlets covered the case as it was breaking.   Parishioners interviewed recalled that the coffee had had a peculiar taste.

It soon became clear that someone had introduced the deadly substance into the coffee, but it was not yet known whether this had been done by accident.

"We don't know what the motive is," said a police spokesperson.   "We don't know who is responsible for doing this."

The investigation's initial focus was on those who'd had access to the building over the weekend.   Church members insisted that their community was safe and that no one in the membership would do such a thing.  They were a close-knit community.  Nevertheless, investigators interviewed many of them, looking for disputes or disagreements.  Tests on the well water, sugar, and unbrewed coffee in the can confirmed what everyone feared: someone had intentionally introduced a large concentration of the poison into the brewing coffee.  Someone had meant to hurt them, perhaps even kill them.

The police now had a homicide investigation on their hands.   It was the 13^th largest mass arsenic poisoning in the nation's history.  They began to seek fingerprints and DNA samples from members.

Then on Friday, May 2, a substitute teacher, nurse, and member of the same church, Daniel Bondeson, 53, died after being taken into surgery at Cary Medical Center.  He'd apparently shot himself in the chest in his home in the neighboring town of Woodland.  Investigators were not sure if the two violent incidents were linked, or if the shooting was a suicide or accident, but they obtained a search warrant and entered Bondeson's home.

That Sunday, May 4, before the analysis of this second incident was released, Maine's governor and several state troopers attended an after-service reception to ensure that the incident was not repeated.   Bondeson, they knew, had not attended the fatal reception, and he was certainly not at this one.  His autopsy had not yet been done, but he was the chief suspect. Police seemed sure the coffee would now be safe.  It was.

At a news conference the following day, police announced that Bondeson had left behind a suicide note that contained "important information."   While the note itself remained the confidential property of the medical examiner's office (by Maine statute), a lawyer for the estate, Alan F. Harding, later indicated that Bondeson had described how he merely wanted to give the church group a "bellyache."  He had not intended to kill anyone and did not even realize it was arsenic that he had used, which indicated that the "homicide" might have been more along the lines of an accident.  At that time, 12 people were still in the hospital, three in critical condition, four in serious condition, and five in fair condition.  Three others had been released.

Bondeson was the son and grandson of potato farmers and a loner who served on the church's historical committee.   He operated the family farm with one of his brothers, Carl. Another brother, Paul, said that he'd seen Daniel several days after the poisoning and just before his suicide. While Daniel was his usual "reserved" self, Paul said,   he had not acted out of character.

So the situation might have been left at that: a man who had planned the prank had seen it go too far and had killed himself out of shame and remorse.   But that wasn't the end of it.  The police suspected that Bondeson had an accomplice—probably at least two and possibly more, all of whom were in the congregation.  By September, they believed they knew who this person or persons were, but had not yet filed charges.  State Police Col. Michael Sperry told the Blethen Maine Newspapers that information received from FBI profilers and out-of-state laboratories had bolstered the investigation, but he would not say whether the case was nearing its conclusion.  They had searched a home in Amesbury, Mass., where a relative of Bondeson had occasionally lived.  The motive now appeared to have been a long-held grudge about church policies and ideas for change.

As of November 2003, the case remained open and "very active." Police say they will solve it.

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