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The troubled life of an anthrax suspect

— Photo: AP

IN THE LAB: Prosecutors believed they had the evidence against Bruce Edwards Ivins, but their assertions met with scepticism among some scientists, lawmakers and co-workers.

Inside the Army laboratory at Fort Detrick, Maryland, the government’s brain for biological defence, Bruce Edwards Ivins paused to memorialise his moment in the spotlight as the anthrax panic of 2001 reached its peak.

Ivins titled his e-mail message “In the lab” and attached photographs: the gaunt microbiologist bending over Petri dishes of anthrax, and colonies of the deadly bacteria, white commas against blood-red nutrient.

Outside, on that morning of November 14, 2001, five people were dead or dying, a dozen more were sick and fearful thousands were flooding emergency rooms. The postal system was crippled; senators and Supreme Court justices had fled contaminated offices. And the Federal Bureau of Investigation was struggling with a microbe for a murder weapon and a crime scene that stretched from New York to Florida.

But Ivins was chipper — the anonymous scientist finally at the centre of great events. “Hi, all,” he began the e-mail message. “We were taking some photos today of blood agar cultures of the now infamous ‘Ames’ strain of Bacillus anthracis. Here are a few.” He sent the message to those who ordinarily received his corny jokes and dour news commentaries: his wife and two teenage children, former colleagues and high school classmates. He even included an FBI agent working on the case.

Ivins, who had helped develop an anthrax vaccine to protect U.S. troops, had spent his career waiting for a biological attack. Suddenly, at 55, he was advising the FBI and regaling friends with scary descriptions of the deadly powder, his expertise in demand.

One recipient of his e-mail message, however, a graduate-school colleague, looked at the photograph of Ivins and leapt to a shocking conclusion.

“I read that e-mail, and I thought, He did it,” the fellow scientist, Nancy Haigwood, said in a recent interview.

Nearly seven years and many millions of dollars later, after an investigation that included both path-breaking science and costly bungling, the FBI concluded that Haigwood had been right: the anthrax killer had been at the investigators’ side all along. Prosecutors said they believed they had the evidence to prove that Ivins alone carried out the attacks, but their assertions immediately met with scepticism among some scientists, lawmakers and co-workers of Ivins’.

With the FBI preparing to close the case, The New York Times has taken the deepest look so far at the investigation, speaking to dozens of Ivins’ colleagues and friends, reading hundreds of his e-mail messages, interviewing former bureau investigators and anthrax experts, reviewing court records, and obtaining, for the first time, police reports on his suicide in July, including a lengthy recorded interview with his wife.

That examination found that unless new evidence were to surface, the enormous public investment in the case would appear to have yielded nothing more persuasive than a strong hunch, based on a pattern of damning circumstances, that Ivins was the perpetrator.

Focussed for years on the wrong man, the bureau missed ample clues that Ivins deserved a closer look. Only after a change of leadership nearly five years after the attacks did the bureau more fully look into Ivins’ activities. That delay, and his death, may have put a more definitive outcome out of reach.

Brad Garrett, a respected FBI veteran who helped early in the case before his retirement, said logic and evidence point to Ivins as the most likely perpetrator.

“Does that absolutely prove he did it? No,” Garrett said. With no confession and no trial, he said, “you’re going to be left not getting over the top of the mountain.”

The Times review found that the FBI had disproved the assertion, widespread among scientists who believe Ivins was innocent, that the anthrax might have come from military and intelligence research programmes in Utah or Ohio. By 2004, secret scientific testing established that the mailed anthrax had been grown somewhere near Fort Detrick. And anthrax specialists who have not spoken out previously said that, contrary to some sceptics’ claims, Ivins had the equipment and expertise to make the powder in his laboratory.

FBI agents, moreover, have shown that Ivins, a church musician and amateur juggler whom colleagues cherished, hid from them a shadow side of mental illness, alcoholism, secret obsessions and hints of violence.

Still, doubts persist. The case will be reviewed this year by the National Academy of Sciences and by Congress. If the FBI is wrong, then a troubled man was hounded to death and the anthrax perpetrator is still at large, as many of Ivins’ colleagues at Fort Detrick believe.

In the emotional days after September 11, friends were not surprised when Ivins signed up as a Red Cross volunteer. He liked the atmosphere, he told friends, and three months later, as the crushing workload created by the anthrax letters began to ease, he applied for more training. Noting that he worked at the Army institute, he wrote in his December 2001 application, “Perhaps I could help in case of a disaster related to biological agents.”

There was more to Bruce Ivins than his Army colleagues imagined, and Nancy Haigwood — one of Ivins’ former colleagues — knew it.

In November 2001, when Haigwood received the e-mailed photograph of Ivins working with anthrax in the laboratory, she noticed that he was not wearing gloves — a safety breach she thought showed an unnerving “hubris.” That fed her hunch that he had sent the deadly letters.

Knowing her suspicion was an extraordinary leap, she kept it to herself. But three months later, the American Society for Microbiology sent an appeal from the FBI to its 40,000 members.

“It is very likely that one or more of you know this individual,” the message said. FBI profilers thought the killer might have made the anthrax during “off-hours in a laboratory.” Haigwood called the bureau, and two agents visited her.

Anthrax was the core of Ivins’ working life.

But even if Ivins could have made the anthrax, did he?

The agents were building what they thought was a prosecutable case against Ivins, but gaping holes remained. No evidence placed him in Princeton, N.J., where the letters were mailed. No receipt showed that he had bought the same type of envelopes. No security camera had caught him photocopying the notes.

Nor, in his e-mail messages and conversations with confidants, could agents find any hint of a confession. One colleague who knew Ivins well told them, “If Bruce had done this, he never would have been able to keep quiet about it.”

In May 2007, Ivins — assured by prosecutors that he was not a target of the investigation — testified under oath to a grand jury on two consecutive days. He answered all the questions about anthrax.

Starting with the search of his house on Nov. 1, 2007, Bruce Ivins’ life began to come irrevocably apart. While some agents carted files, computers and guns from the house, others questioned his wife and children, intimating that they knew he was the killer. Fort Detrick officials banned him from working with anthrax. His career was over.

Last March, after drinking the fruit juice and vodka mix that he had come to rely on and adding a big dose of Valium, he passed out and was discovered by his wife, Diane. Despite his denials, she was convinced it was a suicide attempt.

``You know, he’s been incredibly, incredibly stressed, because of the way he’s been hounded by the FBI,” Diane Ivins would later tell Frederick police officers in a recorded interview. ``They’ve always treated him as if he was guilty, and I just felt that he couldn’t take it anymore.”

Ivins spent much of the spring in residential alcohol treatment outside Washington and in western Maryland. But when he returned, the FBI agents were still there, watching his house and trailing him around Frederick.

On July 10, Ivins reached a breaking point. He told his therapy group that he expected to be charged with five murders and talked about killing himself and killing others with him, using his .22-caliber rifle, Glock handgun and bulletproof vest.

Tipped off by the therapist, Frederick police officers removed Ivins from the Army laboratory that day. He voluntarily checked himself in at the Sheppard Pratt psychiatric hospital in Baltimore.

After a two-week stay, Ivins was brought home by his wife. She had left a heartfelt note in his bedroom, saying she hoped that he could turn his life around and that they could enjoy life together.

``He didn’t understand that so many people in the treatment program with him had lost their families because of their alcoholism,” Diane Ivins later told the police. “So I wanted to write down how I felt because I loved him — you know, I wanted him to come back and get healthy again so we could continue. He was retiring in September, and we were going to travel and enjoy our adult children finally.” Her note was blunt. “I’m hurt, concerned, confused and angry about your actions the last few weeks,” she wrote. “You tell me you love me but you have been rude and sarcastic and nasty many times when you talk to me. You tell me you aren’t going to get any more guns, then you fill out an online application for a gun license.”

Diane Ivins wrote to her husband that he was paying his lawyers a lot of money but ignoring their advice by contacting two former female laboratory assistants he was preoccupied with. He was keeping odd hours, walking the neighborhood late at night and drinking so much caffeine that he was “jumpy and agitated,” she wrote. But Diane Ivins’ note also expressed support. “I had written on the bottom of the paper that I knew he had not been involved in the anthrax letters in any way and I never doubted his innocence,” said the woman who thought she knew him best.

Even as Diane Ivins picked up her husband at the Baltimore hospital last July 24, his group therapist, Jean C. Duley, was in a Frederick courtroom, testifying about threats he had left on her answering machine. A judge signed an order at 10:37 a.m. directing Ivins to stay away from her. The order would not be necessary. At 12:31 p.m., according to records checked by the Frederick police, Ivins stopped in at the Giant Eagle grocery store near his house and bought Tylenol PM, acetaminophen and an antihistamine. Then, at 1:21 p.m., evidently concerned that he did not have enough medication for the purpose he was contemplating, he bought a second container of Tylenol PM.

Bruce Ivins, the connoisseur of secrets, took with him any knowledge he had of the anthrax attacks. But he left one more surprise for his family: a clause in his will intended to enforce his wish to be cremated and have his ashes scattered. If his demands were not met, $50,000 from his estate would go not to the family but to Planned Parenthood of Maryland, whose abortion services Diane Ivins abhorred. It was one last, devious step for a man whose oddities, for many people, made the FBI’s anthrax accusation more plausible.

But like so much about Ivins, it cut the other way, too. The FBI theorised that Ivins had sent anthrax letters to Sens. Patrick Leahy and Tom Daschle because they were pro-choice Catholics, offending his anti-abortion views. Would an anti-abortion absolutist have flirted with a donation to a cause he despised?

On Oct. 6, a lawyer for the Ivins family filed with the Orphans’ Court of Frederick County certification that Planned Parenthood would not receive the money. His ashes, the document said, “were scattered or spread on the ground, as he directed.”

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