Dr. Bruce Ivins is dead. Dr. Ivins probably killed himself by an overdose of Tylenol. What makes this newsworthy is that Dr. Ivins was repotedly about to be indicted for the murders iof 5 people by Anthrax poisoning. Yep, he is the one.

The anthrax attacks started 2 weeks after 9/11. Someone sent letters containing powdered anthrax, from a New Jersey post office to various media outfits. Five letters are believed to have been mailed although only 2 were actually found. The other three were assumed because of anthrax infections elsewhere.

Three weeks later, two more letters were sent, also from NJ, addressed to Sen. Tom Daschle (D- SD) and Sen. Patrick Leahy (D - VT). The letter to Daschle made it to his office and was opened by an aide. Leahy's letter was discovered in a mailbag before it could be delivered.

At least 22 people developed anthrax infections and five died.

The anthrax was determined to be a specific strain - called the Ames strain, and it was first researched in Fort Detrick, in Frederick MD. Ft. Detrick is home to the "United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases" (USAMRIID). According to reports the Ames strain anthrax was distributed to as many as fifteen bio-research labs within the U.S. and six locations overseas.

In 2002, one of Fort Detrick's employees, Steven Hatfill, was publicly called a "person of interest" in the case. Hatfill vehemently denied the charges, and refused to cave in to the intense pressure of FBI harassment. He later sued everyone and their brother, and recently was awarded a reported $5.8 million settlement. I doubt if what he went through was worth even that chunk of money. Regardless, after years of horror, he was finally cleared.

Fast forward to last week. Another scientist at the Ft. Detrick lab passed away in a local hospital. The cause of death was listed as suicide, by ingestion of Tylenol (possibly with codeine). This scientist was Dr. Bruce Ivins. Once the FBI had finished running Hatfill through the wringer, they apparently decided that THIS TIME they knew it was Ivins. For sure. Absolutely. No questions. So they started the same harassment techniques on him that hadn't worked on Hatfill. They staked out his home to the point that all of the neighbors were aware of it. (Not who or why someone was watching, but they knew that someone was being watched.) The FBI questioned and re-questioned Ivins. They searched everything. And they got some super-cool new equipment that supposedly was able to test the DNA of the mailed anthrax, and match it to a flask that Ivins "had" in the lab.

Mind you, dozens of people had access to this stuff. That was one of the problems that was discovered during the beginning of the investigation - security was pretty lax back then.

Since Ivins suicide, he has been villified by the media. The finger is very strongly pointing in his direction, and the FBI is talking about closing the file. Blaming the dead guy who can't defend himself. He killed himself from a guilty conscience, right? Or maybe not.

As soon as the story of Dr. Ivins' suicide hit, there was this very strange comment, that Dr. Ivins therapist had filed court documents stating that Dr. Ivins was a homicidal sociopath, that he was a revenge killer who had tried to poison many people since the year 2000. This story has been bandied around ever since. Here is the REAL story:

The "therapist" is a woman by the name of Jean Duley. She is apparently an addiction counselor in Frederick Maryland. She is NOT a doctor or even a Licensed Social Worker, from what it appears. It seems that she runs group therapy sessions, and Dr. Ivins, for some reason, was a client.

It seems that about a month ago, Ms. Duley made some accusations against Dr. Ivins. She claimed that he had gone ballistic in a group therapy session, had claimed that he had a gun, was going to go take out his coworkers, and go out in a "blaze of glory". Ms. Duley notified the local police, who came and escorted him out of the lab, and right to a psychiatric hospital. This was "his therapist" after all. A few days later, Dr. Ivins was released from the hospital and apparently contacted Ms. Duley several times - leaving messages on her machine. He was extremely upset, and apparently told her that she had ruined him. There was no reports of threats against her on the tapes, just angry, frustrated messages.

What happened next was unbelievable. Ms. Duley swore out a peace warrant on Dr. Ivins. Thats not the incredible part. The incredible part is what she SAID in the documentation. The Smoking Gun has a copy of the document here: http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2008/0801081anthrax1.html?link=rssfeed

"Duley referred to Ivins as a "client" who "has a history dating to his graduate days of homicidal threats, actions, plans, threats & actions towards therapist." Duley added that Ivins's psychiatrist called him "homicidal, sociopathic with clear intentions," and that "FBI involved, currently under investigation & will be charged w/ 5 capital murders. I have been subpoena to testify before a federal grand jury August 1, 2008 in Washington, D.C."

Please take a look at this document. It is shocking both in the written content and by the glaring misspellings, grammatical errors and lack of structure. (I believe this matters, I am not just being a language snob.)

Most of the media reported the content of this document as straight-up fact, and let the readers believe that she was reporting information that she knew firsthand. This could almost certainly not have been the case.

This is one of the weirdest cases I have ever seen. Not only is there this whole business of Duley, which has been explored pretty thoroughly here, but get a whiff of THIS: apparently, unnamed officials say that the motive for the anthrax attacks is (I am not making this up)obsession with a sorority from 30 years ago. (which fits nice and neat with Duley's odd "going back to his graduate days" statement.)

Here's the deal - the anthrax was supposedly mailed from a mailbox on campus in Princeton NJ. This mailbox sits about 100 yards away from a Kappa Kappa Gamma storage facility. (There is no actual sorority house on campus.) So, Ivins was reportedly spurned by a sorority girl at HIS college, 30 years ago, prompting him to send the poison from that location. I know - WUT?

There is no mention of why the anthrax was mailed to media sources and politicians rather than hot college girls (incidentally - Hood College is right down the street from both his house and Ft. Detrick, and full of them), but that's not important. (The *officials* did not mention it, but Ivins' DAD was actually a Princeton guy! That is proof, for sure.) Ivins' has no apparant personal history with Princeton.

Now get this: The *officials* say that there is no proof that Ivins was in NJ, but that he "could have gone after work". Put this in context. The first mailing was postmarked a week after 9/11. Yes, THE nine-eleven. NJ is about a 3-4 hour drive from Frederick MD, at best. What do you suppose the possibility is that Ivins could show up 6-8 hours late from work, and that his wife would not have already called the FBI? Remember it was a WEEK after 9/11. This guy worked in a bio-weapons lab. hello? At the very least, if something so weird had happened, so soon after that, she would have REMEMBERED it. It was a Tuesday. There is obviously no indication that he missed work that day or the next.

Does anyone else think that the FBI is grabbing at straws here? The BS about tracking the DNA is just that - BS. But even if it weren't BS - the fact remains that many people had access to the anthrax. Security was lax back then.

And one of the most important aspects of this case is that Ivins lacked the skills and ability to turn HIS anthrax into the powder form. That is apparently a very specific technical ability, and one which no one believes he had.

Over the past week the media was gripped by the news that the FBI was about to charge Bruce Ivins, a leading anthrax expert, as the man responsible for the anthrax letter attacks in September/October 2001.

But despite the seemingly powerful narrative that Ivins committed suicide because investigators were closing in, this is still far from a shut case. The FBI needs to explain why it zeroed in on Ivins, how he could have made the anthrax mailed to lawmakers and the media, and how he (or anyone else) could have pulled off the attacks, acting alone.

I believe this is another mistake in the investigation.

Let's start with the anthrax in the letters to Sens. Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy. The spores could not have been produced at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, where Ivins worked, without many other people being aware of it. Furthermore, the equipment to make such a product does not exist at the institute.

Information released by the FBI over the past seven years indicates a product of exceptional quality. The product contained essentially pure spores. The particle size was 1.5 to 3 microns in diameter. There are several methods used to produce anthrax that small. But most of them require milling the spores to a size small enough that it can be inhaled into the lower reaches of the lungs. In this case, however, the anthrax spores were not milled.

What's more, they were also tailored to make them potentially more dangerous. According to a FBI news release from November 2001, the particles were coated by a "product not seen previously to be used in this fashion before." Apparently, the spores were coated with a polyglass which tightly bound hydrophilic silica to each particle. That's what was briefed (according to one of my former weapons inspectors at the United Nations Special Commission) by the FBI to the German Foreign Ministry at the time.

Another FBI leak indicated that each particle was given a weak electric charge, thereby causing the particles to repel each other at the molecular level. This made it easier for the spores to float in the air, and increased their retention in the lungs.

In short, the potential lethality of anthrax in this case far exceeds that of any powdered product found in the now extinct U.S. Biological Warfare Program. In meetings held on the cleanup of the anthrax spores in Washington, the product was described by an official at the Department of Homeland Security as "according to the Russian recipes" -- apparently referring to the use of the weak electric charge.

The latest line of speculation asserts that the anthrax's DNA, obtained from some of the victims, initially led investigators to the laboratory where Ivins worked. But the FBI stated a few years ago that a complete DNA analysis was not helpful in identifying what laboratory might have made the product.

Furthermore, the anthrax in this case, the "Ames strain," is one of the most common strains in the world. Early in the investigations, the FBI said it was similar to strains found in Haiti and Sri Lanka. The strain at the institute was isolated originally from an animal in west Texas and can be found from Texas to Montana following the old cattle trails. Samples of the strain were also supplied to at least eight laboratories including three foreign laboratories. Four French government laboratories reported on studies with the Ames strain, citing the Pasteur Institute in Paris as the source of the strain they used. Organism DNA is not a very reliable way to make a case against a scientist.

The FBI has not officially released information on why it focused on Ivins, and whether he was about to be charged or arrested. And when the FBI does release this information, we should all remember that the case needs to be firmly based on solid information that would conclusively prove that a lone scientist could make such a sophisticated product.

From what we know so far, Bruce Ivins, although potentially a brilliant scientist, was not that man. The multiple disciplines and technologies required to make the anthrax in this case do not exist at Army's Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. Inhalation studies are conducted at the institute, but they are done using liquid preparations, not powdered products.

The FBI spent between 12 and 18 months trying "to reverse engineer" (make a replica of) the anthrax in the letters sent to Messrs. Daschle and Leahy without success, according to FBI news releases. So why should federal investigators or the news media or the American public believe that a lone scientist would be able to do so?

Mr. Spertzel, head of the biological-weapons section of Unscom from 1994-99, was a member of the Iraq Survey Group.

Bruce E. Ivins, the government's leading suspect in the 2001 anthrax killings, borrowed from a bioweapons lab that fall freeze-drying equipment that allows scientists to quickly convert wet germ cultures into dry spores, according to sources briefed on the case.

Ivins's possession of the drying device, known as a lyopholizer, could help investigators explain how he might have been able to send letters containing deadly anthrax spores to U.S. senators and news organizations.

The device was not commonly used by researchers at the Army's sprawling biodefense complex at Fort Detrick, Md., where Ivins worked as a scientist, employees at the base said. Instead, sources said, Ivins had to go through a formal process to check out the lyopholizer, creating a record on which authorities are now relying. He did at least one project for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency that would have given him reason to use the drying equipment, according to a former colleague in his lab.

Ivins committed suicide last week. As authorities in Washington debated yesterday how to close the long investigation of him -- a step that would signal they think no one else is culpable in the anthrax attacks -- more details began to emerge about the nature of the case they developed against him.

In recent months, investigators have collected circumstantial building blocks in an effort to establish Ivins's alleged role in the attacks, which traumatized the nation and prompted stringent mail-handling policies. Letters containing the anthrax spores killed five people, including two D.C. area postal workers, and sickened 17 others.

Scientific analysis helped researchers pinpoint the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases as the likely source of the powder, which was the Ames strain of anthrax bacteria used in various projects at Fort Detrick. Further testing allowed them to narrow down the age of the substance, concluding that it had been cultivated no more than two years before the attacks

Eventually, through more elaborate DNA testing of the power and tissue cultures from the victims, they determined that the powder probably came from supplies made by Ivins, to which about 10 other people had access. Authorities last week cited "new and sophisticated scientific tools" that helped advance the investigation.

Ivins was not charged before his death July 29. Paul F. Kemp, his attorney, has repeatedly asserted Ivins's innocence, and colleagues and friends say government officials fixed on the wrong man in a race to close a seven-year investigation rife with dead ends and missteps. They also note that other U.S. scientists had access to some of the same material and equipment that authorities apparently used to focus on Ivins.

The lyopholizer Ivins used in the fall of 2001 is commonly employed by pharmaceutical companies and laboratories, as well as food processors, to freeze a liquid broth of bacteria and quickly transform it into a dry solid without a thawing stage.

Scientists and biodefense experts familiar with USAMRIID's procedures say that Ivins's department rarely used such freeze-dryers, because the researchers there worked with anthrax bacteria in a liquid form.

"Dry anthrax is much harder to work with," said one scientist familiar with Ivins's lab. A lyopholizer would fit inside the ventilated "biosafety cabinet" at the lab and could have been used without drawing notice, the scientist said. The machine could have processed a few small batches of anthrax liquid in less than a day, he said.

Other biodefense experts noted that the drying step could have been carried out with equipment no more complicated than a kitchen oven. "It is the simplest . . . but it is the least reproducible," said Sergei Popov, a former Soviet bioweapons scientist who now specializes in biodefense at George Mason University. "If you go too fast you get 'sand,' " he said, referring to the coarser anthrax powder used in the first attacks, in September 2001

The second batch of letters contained a much finer powder. "To me, it all indicates that the person experimented with the ways to dry the spores and produced small batches -- some of them not so successfully -- he later used to fill up different envelopes," Popov said. "The spores are naturally clumpy. As I understand, he just overbaked the first batches."

Many of the key documents that would have supported the prosecution of Ivins could be unveiled this week after Justice Department and FBI officials meet with families of the anthrax victims. Authorities were contacting relatives yesterday and seeking a time to meet.

Investigators have been wrong before about who may have perpetrated the attacks. In June, the Justice Department agreed to pay Steven J. Hatfill, a former Fort Detrick researcher once labeled a "person of interest" in the case, a $5.8 million settlement to forgo a privacy lawsuit.

Significant mysteries remain, including whether the attacks that involved letters mailed from Florida and Princeton, N.J., could have been carried out by one person. And many questions remain about Ivins.

Safety officials and lawmakers have wondered how the scientist was able to maintain his security clearance despite emotional problems that led Jean C. Duley, a therapist, to seek a protective order against him last month.

The Army issued final rules last week that would cover workers who act in an aggressive or threatening manner. Those employees would be denied access to toxic or lethal biological agents under the revised regulations. Other potentially disqualifying personality traits include "arrogance, inflexibility, suspiciousness, hostility . . . and extreme moods or mood swings," according to the document.

A spokeswoman for USAMRIID said Fort Detrick had been operating under interim rules covering the same behavior for some time.

Response: August 05, 2008 @ 08:20 AM: frederick.county http://www.fredericknewspost.com/sections/news/display_comments.htm?StoryID=78406#postComments

The freeze-drying equipment that Ivins signed out, whereby one could conceivably make dry anthrax spores, was part of his job, wherein he was working on a project for DARPA. He was told to do so, so that item still does not make the indiviidual suspicious. One huge danger in any investigation is stating that "this is the suspect so now find anything that ties the suspect to the crime," is that anything circumstantialis brought in. For example, regarding the New Jersey sorority tie, the investigators originally brought a picture of Hatfill to the sorority and asked individuals therein if they ever saw Hatfill by the mailbox where the letters were allegedly mailed. And the FBI still cannot tie Ivns to being at that mailbox.

A USA Today article in October 2004, opens with a description of Bruce Ivins' mindset during the anthrax leaks at USAMRIID:

"Bruce Ivins was troubled by the dust, dirt and clutter on his officemate's desk, and not just because it looked messy. He suspected the dust was laced with anthrax."

Given years of sloppy practices, highlighted in a 361-page Army report, some experts questioned the ability of prosecutors to ultimately make a case against the anthrax killer.

"Any defense lawyer should read this report carefully and keep it in mind when DNA results are being quoted against his (or) her client," says Martin Hugh-Jones of Louisiana State University, a leading expert on anthrax.

Fast forward four years. The FBI is satisfied. Case closed. The deadly missives were apparently sent by none other than a researcher who'd assisted in the investigation.

So the perpetrator was in the FBI's own backyard from the start, just not the one it investigated for years. Not until some breakthrough science technique was developed did the FBI go back to square one.

Never mind the mile-wide holes concerning motive, opportunity and the lack of direct evidence in the case. (Nothing turned up in the search of Ivins' home or car that ties him to the mailings. The new science that nailed him has yet to be vetted by outside experts. He cannot be placed in Trenton, N.J., when the letters were mailed, and his extracurricular lab work began in August 2001, making it possible Ivins was working on his anthrax vaccine that had just lost FDA approval.)

Forget that Ivins was convicted without contributing to his defense. And as Hugh-Jones said, a defense attorney could have a field day with the case.

That's only part of the problem.

The FBI zeroed in on another kooky scientist, pouring millions into sniffing after him for any connection to the crime. This is the same agency that waited nine months to canvass New Jersey drop boxes, the same agency that believed the anthrax came from Detrick, but entrusted a large part of its investigation to Detrick scientists.

When doubts surfaced about Ivins, why was he allowed anywhere near the labs? From FBI accounts, Ivins was a dangerous man who became increasingly crazed when he came under the FBI microscope, yet he was allowed to continue his work at Detrick. Talk about insanity.

Whether you believe the FBI got its man or there's more to the story, a review of the investigation is in order. If in fact Ivins was the country's own Dr. Evil, what does that say about our ability to be victorious in the "war against terror?"

The killer targeted government and the media and the FBI embarked on its most costly and exhaustive investigation in history. Fear helped catapult us into the Patriot Act and a war that's cost the lives of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of civilians. This deserves more than pinning it on a dead man and walking away

House Republican and chairman of the Intelligence Oversight Panel Rush Holt is skeptical and he should be. 

In an e-mail statement, Holt wants to know "why investigators remained focused on Dr. Hatfill long after they had begun to suspect Dr. Ivins of the crime and why investigators are so certain that Ivins acted alone. In addition, there are important policy questions for handling any future incidents of bioterrorism. I will continue to conduct additional oversight on this issue over the course of the next several months." 

We'll be watching.

kheerbrandt@yahoo.com

POSTED BY ADMIN AT 11:55 AM   

A microbiologist claims she was stalked for decades by Bruce Ivins, the suspect in the deadly anthrax mailings of 2001 who, according to court documents, was obsessed with the sorority she joined in college.

Nancy L. Haigwood and her former husband, Carl J. Scandella, also think Ivins may have wanted to get close to her when he moved in down the street from the couple in the suburbs of Washington in the early 1980s.

Ivins, an Army scientist, committed suicide last week as federal authorities prepared to charge him with killing five people by sending anthrax spores in the mail. The letters were dropped in a mailbox near a Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority office in Princeton, N.J., and prosecutors have suggested Ivins chose that location because of its proximity to the office.

In another development, the Justice Department sent a letter to the lawyer for Steven Hatfill, another military scientist who was a colleague of Ivins, formally exonerating Hatfill after saying earlier this week that Ivins was the only suspect. In 2002, law enforcement officials called Hatfill a "person of interest" in the investigation, a claim that brought a lawsuit from Hatfill the following year.

The federal government awarded Hatfill $5.8 million to settle his violation of privacy lawsuit against the Justice Department earlier this year. Hatfill claimed the Justice Department violated his privacy rights by speaking with reporters about the case

In the case of Haigwood, now the director of the Oregon National Primate Research Center, she said she suspected Ivins in the anthrax mailings as early as November 2001, when he e-mailed her, his immediate family and other scientists a photo of himself working with what he called "the now infamous 'Ames' strain" of anthrax, which was used in the attacks. She reported her suspicions to the FBI in 2002 and, at the behest of investigators, kept in touch with Ivins by e-mail and shared their correspondence with investigators.

Haigwood, 56, met Ivins in the late 1970s when he was doing a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of North Carolina, where she earned her doctorate. She was cordial to him, but she noticed that he took an unusual interest in her Kappa membership.

In the summer of 1982, Haigwood moved in with Scandella, then her fiancee, in a townhouse in the Washington, D.C., suburb of Montgomery Village. On Nov. 30 that year, Scandella awoke to find the Greek letters "KKG" spray-painted on the rear window of his car and on the sidewalk and fence in front of the home. Although a police report filed by Scandella does not mention any possible suspects, Haigwood quickly concluded that Ivins was responsible.

"My address wasn't published, and I only lived there a short while before Carl and I got married and moved out of state," Haigwood said Friday. "No one knew my address or my phone number. You had to stalk me to figure this stuff out."

Records show that Ivins was living on the same street, about a block away, shortly after the incident. It was not clear when he moved in. Scandella did not know that Ivins had been their neighbor until he was told Friday by a reporter.

"I was blown away by that," Scandella said. "I had no idea he lived anywhere in the vicinity ... I wonder if it's possible that Ivins moved to that location to be close to Nancy."

Soon after the vandalism, Haigwood bumped into Ivins — she doesn't remember where — and accused him.

"I said, 'This happened and I'm sure you're the one who did it,' and he denied it," Haigwood said. "And I said, 'Well, I'm still sure you did.' What can you do at that point?

Ivins kept in touch with Haigwood via phone calls, letters and e-mails, and while some of the correspondence made her uncomfortable, she never cut off contact with him, a decision she later regretted. She said she sent him polite but curt replies.

"He seemed to know a lot about myself, my children, things I never remembered telling him, which always disturbed me," she said. "I kept him at arm's length as best I could."

She also suspected Ivins of writing a letter in her name to The Frederick News-Post that defended hazing by Kappa members.

Haigwood passed on her suspicions about Ivins to the FBI after the American Society for Microbiology noted that a microbiologist was probably responsible for the anthrax mailings and asked its members to think of possible suspects.

Their e-mail correspondence from 2002 on was brief and cordial, although Ivins did reveal that he was under a lot of stress.

Investigators have said that between 2000 and 2006, Ivins was prescribed antidepressants, antipsychotics and anti-anxiety drugs. The Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Md., where Ivins worked, has offered no explanation for why he was allowed to work with some of the world's most dangerous toxins while suffering from serious mental health problems

It wasn't until November 2007, after the FBI raided his Frederick home, that Fort Detrick revoked his laboratory access, effectively putting him on desk duty. In the meantime, Haigwood said she worried about what Ivins was up to in the lab

"After a while, after I decided that he was probably the perpetrator, I was afraid of him," Haigwood said. "I thought that if he found out I had turned him in, he would go after me. And he knew how to do that. This is something his colleagues don't seem to recognize in him."

Haigwood said she was not aware of Ivins stalking any other Kappa sisters.

In an interview Friday, Kappa Kappa Gamma executive director Lauren Sullivan Paitson said the FBI asked in August 2007 for help documenting decades' worth of Ivins' contacts with the sorority, including breaking into the now-closed chapter house at the University of Maryland. The sorority disbanded at Maryland in 1992.

But before being contacted by the FBI, Paitson had been engaged in an editing war on Wikipedia.com with a writer by the name of "jimmyflathead" who threatened to post secret rituals and bad publicity about the sorority on the Web site. Court affidavits listed "jimmyflathead@yahoo.com" among Ivins personal e-mail addresses.

Only after the government asked for the sorority's help did Paitson realize that the online Kappa nemesis was the top suspect in the anthrax investigation.

"We already had firsthand experience with him, going back and forth," she said.

The sorority did not threaten Ivins with legal action as a result of the Wikipedia editing dispute, and Paitson said she was assured by the FBI that none of the Kappa chapters or members nationwide would be targeted with anthrax letters.

She declined to give more details, citing the privacy of the members of the sorority.

POSTED BY ADMIN AT 12:19 PM   

This is really starting to piss me off! The latest story about the microbiologist who claims she was stalked by Dr. Bruce Ivins for 20 years, seems to support the FBI/DOJ claims against him. But, what no one else seems to understand is THIS IS WHERE THEY GOT THEIR INFORMATION initially!

In other words, everything that has been published so far has been information by people who were working together for a common goal.

It sounds so damning. Ivins was a STALKER for 20 years!! Well, first off, read the story. He was not exactly a "stalker". He was a guy who kept writing to a woman who didn't really like him, but kept writing back anyway. That's STALKING? I don't think so.

He moved into her neighborhood? OMG!! That's stalking, right? Not necessarily - the article says that he lived there after she moved out. I know that area. Montgomery Village. It was THE place to live for techies in the 80's. All of the tech and bio jobs were moving out to this part of the county - along Route I-270. Montgomery Village was a new "planned" development with affordable safe housing that appealed to the up-and-coming educated people who were working in those jobs. That he lived a block away "after she moved out" is nothing. Nada. Zip. i would bet that 20 people from wherever they were working lived within a 1/4 mile area at the same time. We are talking probably 600 people living on the same street. That is NOT a significant statistical improbability.

Now heres the part that starts to sound like a conspiracy.

-Duley (the questionably-licensed therapist) accuses Ivins of (among other things) harrassing women - going back to his graduate days.

- This woman says that she told the FBI about his stalking her, going back to that timeframe

- The FBI uses the "therapists" accusations to facillitate the approval of a search warrant.

Why? The FBI would never get approval for a search warrant based on a former colleague/friend/whatever, saying that he bugs her. BUT - put the stamp of approval from a THERAPIST on this allegation, and it takes on a whole different aura.

Now, lather, rinse, repeat. Do this over and over and over. Look at all the accusations that are being made in this case. And apply that circular process to every item. It seems that in most cases, it FITS. That means that it is TAINTED. It is not clean evidence. It has been chopped up and fed to others, then regurgitated back to become the basis for more allegations.

There is SOMETHING wrong here!

OMG! I feel like a naive fool!

One thing that kept tugging at me was what Jean C. Duley's motivation was. Something that someone else wrote just gave me that "CLICK". She had 2 and a half million reasons!

Remember how Ivins' son says that the FBI harassed him to rat out his dad - offering him $2.5 million and the car of his choice? The REWARD money! Duuuuuh!

So, Ms. Jean C. Duley - self-professed biker babe/junkie/druggie/alcoholic/DUI arrestee is a hero? According to the interview of her reported husband (later reported "fiancee"). Well, guess what? He is in a whole heap o' crap himself! Michael Duncan McFadden.

I am not an investigator, but a quick search of records finds that 4/2006 he was guilty for driving an unregistered vehicle on a suspended license. In 1996, he was charged (and given a PBJ) for contract fraud! In 2007 it looks like he was sued by a possible family member for a contractual issue. A couple of foreclosures in 2006. In 2004 - another guilty verdict for a contract dispute.

So, it looks like the hero's lover boy is a bit skitchy himself, eh? He doesn't pay his bills, or keep his promises. He lost the right to drive and said "screw you" and drove anyway. He refused to pay for his car, and lost at least one home. Does that make HIM a bad guy? Not necessarily. But it sure is nice to know what kind of people were influencing our "hero" when we are trying to figure out if she destroyed a man unfairly.

This is getting stinlier and stinkier by the minute. And it all comes back to why? And, I think it goes further back, to $2.5 million.

I was trying to grasp what the deal was with Dr. Ivins email addresses and so-called fake names. I am still trying to absorb it all but it is crazy that this is considered any sort of evidence against him. And frankly, it had NOTHING to do with anthrax, or terrorism, or anything. It is simply an invasion of his privacy by authorities who were on a witch hunt!

OK - on TSG - start at page 6. Ivins created an email address of Jimmyflathead, and listed his name as Ed Irving. That would be suspicious except he didn't do anything bad with it! Not only that, but the emails he sent out from that address actually listed his name as Bruce Ivins. So WHAT? I have several email accounts. I don't know that I have ever used a FALSE name, but I have shortened my name, used the wrong DOB and such before. It's not sinister. I don't want a lot of spam on my main email account, so I created a new one to put on cookie sites and such.

Ivins used the Jimmyflathead account to play on Wikipedia. He said derogatory things about that sorority Kappa Kappa Gamma (KKG) on Wiki. He got into edit wars about KKG on Wiki. So What? He knew alot about KKG. So what? I know a lot about many things. And, if I don't know, I sometimes spend a lot of time learning. (Like about this whole anthrax case). he apparently knew some stuff that was "secret". SO WHAT? My God - it's a freaking sorority, not some top-secret military strategy! And, as additional proof of Ivin's diabolical mind - he actually encouraged people on Wiki to email him. That is just NOT DONE! If you ever edit on Wiki, you must never discuss anything in private with other posters. Sheesh.

I swear, it sounds like middle-school dramatics! I CANNOT believe our GOVERNMENT is involved in this kind of crap.

OK.. the next email address evidence has been heavily redacted, but it seems like it is referring to the fact that he once lived on the same street as the woman from KKG who now says that he was stalking her. There was an incident of VANDALISM!!! Ivins might have done it, but denied it. Since when is the FBI investigating 20 year old graffiti cases? Hello???

The next information is even crazier! Ivins rented a PO box to hide his identity as he traded in illicit porn. No? Not porn? OMG! He was selling that TOP SECRET KKG information! And he claimed that he had STOLEN IT from the sorority house in college! No wonder the FBI is involved! The CIA and Interpol should be notified too.

The document goes on to show how deeply entrenched Ivins was in the secret ways of the KKG. I'm sorry. Maybe I don't get it. But a sorority is just a bunch of snobby girls right? Is there some reason that he was not entitled to either 1) love or 2) hate the KKG?

I'm kidding. I really know why the FBI spent so much time on this KKG "obsession" that Ivins so clearly had. The anthrax was mailed from a blue mailbox. In NJ. In Princeton NJ. That's a college town, you know? And this actual mailbox was 100 yards from the KKG storage house on campus. Not a sorority house. Just a place they stored all their sorority snob shit. So clearly, Ivin's obsession with KKG was the impetus for driving up there to drop off the poison.

By the way FBI guys, I actually thought of a BETTER link for Ivins and Princeton, but it seems to have slipped right by you guys. Did you know that his DAD was a graduate of Princeton? But I guess no one in their right mind would ever give that connection an iota of credit, so you came up with the sorority chick thing. Holy cow.

This is an embarassment. seriously. But not only that, it is a tragedy. Ivins is dead - almost certainly a legally, and most likely a factually, innocent man. And the FBI is trying to sell us this propaganda as evidence. They are just letting the apparent suicide speak for itself. because at least half the viewing audience will think "he must be guilty if he killed himself". The rest of us are not so dense and can envision the torment the guy was living when the walls came crushing down on him - in the form of a greedy, lying therapist.

Thinking about the Pence thing - something makes sense. The envelopes that the anthrax was maile in were purchased from a vending machine in a post office. The envelopes had certain subtle defects. Other envelopes with the same defects were sent to two post offices in VA, and one in Elkton, MD.

Elkton MD, incidentally is about 2 hours drive from Frederick. It is very near the border of MD/DE. It is NOT on the path from Frederick to Newark, although it is on the path from DC and points south (I-95). It is ALSO on the path from Florida to New York. Florida being the state where the terrorists were supposedly based in the US.

Anyway.. back to the envelopes - they are sold in packages of 5. Although only 2 envelopes were recovered from the initial mailing, which went out on 9/18/01, by following the trail of anthrax infections there is pretty compelling evidence that 5 letters were sent out.

The known letters in the first batch letters were sent to NBC (Tom Brokaw) and the NY Post newspaper. The other three are thought to have been mailed to ABC, CBS and American Media.

The second batch has only ever been mentioned as two envelopes. One to Leahy and one to Daschle. That leaves three extra (unknown) envelopes. And three additional politicians with trace amounts of anthrax found in their office.

So, what does this mean? I have no clue. But I do wonder why the other 3 were sort of swept under the rug?

One thing that I thought of while writing this, is the proximity of Elkton to Ft. Detrick and Trenton NJ. As I said above, it is not on the "normal" path. I do not believe that the killer would have stopped and picked up envelopes on the way to drop off the anthrax. The envelopes had to have been acquired before that. If nothing else, so the mailer could address them in that block printing. Plus, anyone with any familiarity with anthrax would not be carrying it around in their pocket till they got an envelope for it. PLUS it would be risky to do just before the drop time.

So the big question is - why Elkton? And why Princeton? What was the draw?

Here's another thing. Newark is enroute to NY. This guy made at least 2 trips from "wherever" to Newark. Maybe he travels from "wherever" to NY? Maybe he travels it often enough that no one would be suspicious of his travel? That is assuming of course, that the mailer is a legitimately employed person. The other possibility is that the person was a terrorist driving up whenever he felt like, from Florida to NY

Could it be someone who drives from say DC to NY rather frequently, who just hopped off the interstate in Elkton and found a post office and grabbed 2 stacks of envelopes. Then later (days? weeks?) he travelled again and jumped off the interstate again, found a nice mailbox box (In Princeton NJ) and dropped the letters? That would make more sense than someone from Frederick just randomly driving to Elkton to grab envelopes, then heading home. Then later driving up to Princeton on a totally different road, to drop the letters off.

One other thing (again) It just occurred to me that there was a three week gap between the mailings. Something is wrong with that. Why would the mailer have gone back to the same mailbox? He must have been worried that the authorities had figured it out and were keeping quiet about it - maybe watching the mailbox. (Certainly a paranoid person like Ivins would be thinking that.) I sure as heck would not have gone anywhere NEAR that box after the first letters were mailed. So - did the second letters go in that box? Or was it a different box? Or did the mailer have some way to know that it was safe to drop those envelopes in that box

As with all the questions - who knows?

((disclaimer: I don't know why this case has suddenly caught my interest. I love a good mystery, but I barely paid any attention to it when it happened. Anyway, if the FBI or NSA or anyone else happens to stumble across this - I am not obsessive, I am not homicidal or psychotic. I am just a person who finds this interesting. Oh, and I really don't have anything against what ya'll do. Even though I think you messed this investigation up pretty bad - I don't think it was done with malice.))

Although the current sentiment is that the anthrax had to have come from Ft. Detrick, I think that it's worth looking at info from way back. I think that the FBI may have kept working on that assumption, and trying to find a suspect to fit with what they think they know. This article from [2002] lends some insight into other possible scenerios.

One other thing. When did info about the 9/11 terrorists start coming out? What I am getting at is the letter that was mailed to American Media in Fl. Everyone wonders why the mailer would have chosen that media outlet. The "common" thought is that it was to "frame" the terrorists. But the letters went out a week to the day after 9/11. So the mailer, in order to frame them, would have had to know where they were from, and then researched what media source was closest. Did he have 6 days to do it? Or 2 days? Or was the info not even public a week after 9/11? Was it sheer coincidence that the anthrax mailer chose to send letters to the BIG news outlets, and the company that spits out tabloid rags? If the mailer wanted to hit the tabloid audience, why didn't he send the letter directly to the National Enquirer?

Note: I started to highlight the relevant parts, and it is ALL relevant!

__________________________

Does Al Qaeda Have Anthrax? Better Assume So

National Journal, June 1, 2002

By Jonathan Rauch

The operatives and allies of Al Qaeda have something in mind for the United States, of that there can be little doubt. Something nasty. Vice President Dick Cheney said in May it is "almost certain" that the terrorists will strike again. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld warned that terrorists "inevitably" will get their hands on weapons of mass destruction, "and they would not hesitate one minute to use them." Question: What if they already did use them and are preparing to do so again? Were last year's anthrax attacks, which caused five fatalities, a preview?

No one knows, of course. That said, there are dots worth connecting.

The perpetrator(s). In November, the FBI issued a suspect profile identifying the likely anthrax attacker as a single adult male, probably an American with a scientific background, lab experience, poor social skills, and a grudge. Some people -- I was one of them -- viewed this interpretation with skepticism. What would be the motive? Why the timing so close to September 11? A number of analysts, including David Tell in a useful article in The Weekly Standard on April 29, have subsequently cast doubt on the disgruntled- scientist hypothesis, and an FBI spokesman said in May that the bureau, far from being "convinced" that the attacks were carried out by an American loner, had "not precluded any category of suspect, motive, or theory."

If anything, hints that anthrax and Al Qaeda may be linked have grown harder to dismiss. Dot one: Several of the hijackers, including their suspected ringleader, Mohamed Atta, are reported to have looked at crop dusters in Belle Glade, Fla. Dot two: Among five targeted media organizations, only one was not nationally prominent -- American Media, of Boca Raton, Fla., which happens to be a few miles from where Atta and other terrorists lived and attended flight school. (Atta rented an apartment from a real estate agent whose husband worked for American Media.) Dot three: In March a doctor in Fort Lauderdale announced that he had treated one of the terrorists for what, in retrospect, he believes was cutaneous anthrax. Doctors at Johns Hopkins University examined the case and concurred that anthrax was "the most probable and coherent interpretation of the data available."

Other recent reports cite captured documents and an unfinished lab in Afghanistan that suggest Al Qaeda was interested -- as presumably it would be -- in producing biological weapons, including anthrax. In 1999, an Arabic-language newspaper in London reported that "elements loyal to [Osama] bin Laden" had, for a few thousand dollars, "managed to obtain an offer for the supply of samples of anthrax and other poisons" from a former Soviet bloc country.

None of that proves anything. The FBI checked the 9/11 terrorists' homes, cars, and personal effects for anthrax. "Exhaustive testing did not support that anthrax was present anywhere the hijackers had been," an FBI spokesman told The New York Times in March.

A point worth noting: The anthrax-laced letters were all mailed after the deaths of Atta and his fellow hijackers. If Al Qaeda did have something to do with the anthrax attacks, whoever did the mailings is still out there.

The material. In April, news reports said that the material used in the attacks was not only "weaponized" but also more sophisticated than anything that U.S. military labs had managed to produce. In May, other news reports said that the material was (in The Times' words) "far less than weapons grade." Good grief. What's the story?

Everyone agrees that all of the anthrax was of the same type, known as the Ames strain. Most sources also agree that the first mailing, to the media organizations, contained a cruder formulation than the second, to Sens. Thomas A. Daschle, D-S.D., and Patrick Leahy, D-Vt. They also concur that the second batch was of impressive purity and concentration. "Very, very pure" is how Matthew Meselson, a Harvard University biologist who has looked at images of the material, described it in an interview. "If you look at it under the electron microscope, you don't see anything but anthrax spores." A cruder preparation, by contrast, would contain so-called vegetative cells and other debris.

One source of ultra-pure anthrax might be a foreign bio-weapons program. An obvious suspect: the former Soviet Union. The Soviets had as many as 2,000 scientists working on anthrax, Tell writes. In 1979, dozens, or hundreds, of Russians died when anthrax leaked from a bio-weapons facility in Sverdlovsk. Subsequent analyses found four or more different anthrax strains in tissue samples taken from the victims

So does the material used in America last year look Soviet? No, says Ken Alibek, a former Soviet bio-weapons official who is now executive director of the George Mason University Center for Biodefense. He has reviewed images of the material and says it looks like nothing he saw in the Soviet Union. The material, in fact, is of mediocre quality, he told me, and was not produced industrially. It definitely had not been milled, nor did it appear to have any sort of coating to reduce static or otherwise enhance its deadliness. Silica supposedly found in the material, Alibek thinks, may simply be a residue from an unsophisticated drying process. Meselson concurs that the anthrax evinces no sign of special coating or processing. "There is no evidence that I know of," he told me, "that it was treated in any special way."

What about Iraq? It is known to have produced several thousand gallons of anthrax, but that was in liquid form. Stephen D. Bryen, who headed the Pentagon's Defense Technology Security Administration during the Reagan administration and who now is the managing partner of Aurora Defense, says that United Nations inspectors in Iraq found no "dusty" anthrax (the dry, wafting variety used in the U.S. attacks) -- which of course could mean either that the Iraqis didn't (yet) have it or that they hid it well. Bryen also notes that the Iraqis, like the Soviets, tend to mix together various germs (or strains) and chemicals in their weapons, presumably to defeat countermeasures. The U.S. anthrax was all of a single strain.

If the U.S. anthrax was very pure but not specially weaponized, could it have been made by amateurs? In small quantities, yes, according to both Alibek and Meselson. It could be done, Alibek says, with "a very simple, nonindustrial process -- a very primitive process -- that could let you get a trillion spores in one gram. You can't make hundreds of kilos, but you could make hundreds of grams at this concentration."

Meselson concurs. "It's something that could be done by a fair number of people." The necessary glassware, culturing media, centrifuges, and so on "would exist in a large number of places, both hospitals and laboratories -- widespread.

The U.S. attacks, Meselson notes, confirmed what a Canadian simulation had already shown: Even uncoated, nonindustrial-grade anthrax easily suspends itself in the air, floating around and penetrating lungs. No special coating or treatment is necessary. Whoever produced the few grams used last year could presumably produce more. Not enough to fill a crop duster, perhaps, but enough to kill a lot of people

The outlook. So what to assume? Bryen notes that dropping anthrax in the mail was a very primitive way to distribute it. "It's not how regimes think about dispersing a biological or chemical weapon," he said. "Which should say that the guy distributing it was a total amateur." That, in turn, argues for what Bryen calls the "sample" theory. "The sample theory being that somebody gave these guys a small amount. It has all the characteristics that it was given to people who didn't have any idea how to use it."

Or maybe, on the other hand, not. Paul Ewald, a biologist at Amherst College and the author of Plague Time: The New Germ Theory of Disease, suggests that inefficient distribution might have been exactly the point. "If this attack was caused by the Al Qaeda group -- and I think that's the best explanation, given the evidence available -- this small release would be most useful as a demonstration that they have anthrax on U.S. soil."

If the terrorists are dumb, Ewald says, they made or obtained a few grams of anthrax and mailed off their whole supply. "We'd be wiser if we planned for the smart-terrorist possibility," he says. Smart terrorists would have made or obtained larger quantities of the stuff and stashed it, probably (if they're smart) before setting off alarms by sending out a few grams. Later, with the potency of their weapon proved, they could mount, or threaten to mount, a much larger attack.

Ewald argues for a policy that assumes this is what's going on and that urgently enlists the public's eyes and ears and memories. "We should be alerting people to let authorities know of any suspicious activity they may have seen that would relate to people hiding canisters or objects or doing something that didn't look right," Ewald says. The question is not whether Ewald is right, but whether we want to bet he is wrong.

WASHINGTON — An acclaimed government scientist who assisted the federal investigation of the 2001 anthrax mailings said Tuesday that he erred seven years ago when he told top Bush administration officials that material he examined probably had been altered to make it more deadly.

The scientist, [Dr. Peter B. Jahrling (born 1946)], had observed anthrax spores with the aid of an electron microscope at the government’s biological warfare research facility at Ft. Detrick, Md.

On Oct. 24, 2001, Jahrling was summoned to the White House after reporting to his superiors what he believed to be signs that silicon had been added to anthrax recovered from a letter addressed to then-Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.).

The presence of silicon was viewed with alarm because the material, if artificially added to the anthrax, would make it more buoyant in air and more capable of penetrating deeply into the lungs.

“I believe I made an honest mistake,” Jahrling said in response to questions e-mailed to him for this article, adding that he had been “overly impressed” by what he thought he saw under the microscope.

“I should never have ventured into this area,” said Jahrling, who is a virologist, referring to his analysis of the anthrax, which is a bacterium. Jahrling’s initial analysis -- and his briefing of officials at the White House -- was first detailed in a 2002 book by bestselling author [Richard McCann Preston (born 1954)].

Although Jahrling was careful in 2001 not to implicate Iraq or any other regime in the mailings, others used his analysis to allege that the silicon perhaps linked the letters to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

Inhaled anthrax can kill at a rate of 80% to 90% unless patients are treated quickly with an antibiotic.

Jahrling’s comments Tuesday came soon after a congressional hearing at which FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III announced that he was arranging for an outside review of scientific findings that helped the bureau conclude that another scientist at Ft. Detrick, Bruce E. Ivins, perpetrated the deadly mailings. The review is to be overseen by the National Academy of Sciences, Mueller said.

FBI scientists and outside experts hired by the bureau to analyze the anthrax recovered from the mailings announced Aug. 18 that although they had found silicon, it occurred within the spores naturally and was not added.

In challenging those experts, one journalist reminded them that Jahrling, among other scientists, had concluded otherwise.

Some critics of the FBI investigation have asserted that Ivins lacked the skills to have “weaponized” the anthrax with any additive that enhanced its virulence.

At Tuesday’s hearing, a member of the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), pressed Mueller anew about how the silicon got into the spores.

After being informed of the events at the hearing, Jahrling renounced his earlier analysis.

“In retrospect,” Jahrling said, “I believe I was mistaken and defer to the experts.”

[Dr. Bruce Edward Ivins (born 1946)], 62, a civilian bacteriologist for the Army, died July 29 after ingesting a massive dose of prescription Tylenol 3.

Attorneys Ivins had hired to defend him against criminal charges being prepared by the Justice Department have said that they would have won his acquittal if the case had gone to trial.

In 2001, [Dr. Peter B. Jahrling (born 1946)] briefed a roomful of officials at the White House, including Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft, Mueller and Tom Ridge, President Bush’s secretary of Homeland Security.

The next day, the Washington Post published a front-page article headlined “Additive Made Spores Deadlier” that reported:

“The presence of the high-grade additive was confirmed for the first time yesterday by a government source familiar with the ongoing studies, which are being conducted by scientists” at Ft. Detrick.

The article said that the United States, the former Soviet Union and Iraq were “the only three nations known to have developed the kind of additives that enable anthrax spores to remain suspended in the air, making them more easily inhaled” and more deadly.

At the time, Jahrling was employed as the senior civilian scientist at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, within Ft. Detrick.

Jahrling is a past winner of the Secretary of Defense Meritorious Civilian Service Award.

Michael P. Kortan, a spokesman for Mueller, said after the congressional hearing that the FBI was seeking the outside review while maintaining “full confidence in our scientific approach.”

“Consideration of an outside review began before any public disclosure of the scientific aspects of the investigation,” Kortan said.

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

Dr. 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 Nov. 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 Dr. Ivins was chipper — the anonymous scientist finally at the center 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 F.B.I. agent working on the case.

Dr. Ivins, who had helped develop an anthrax vaccine to protect American troops, had spent his career waiting for a biological attack. Suddenly, at 55, he was advising the F.B.I. 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 Dr. 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 F.B.I. concluded that Dr. 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 Dr. Ivins alone carried out the attacks, but their assertions immediately met with skepticism among some scientists, lawmakers and co-workers of Dr. Ivins.

With the F.B.I. preparing to close the case, The New York Times has taken the deepest look so far at the investigation, speaking to dozens of Dr. Ivins’s 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 Dr. Ivins was the perpetrator.

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

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

“Does that absolutely prove he did it? No,” Mr. 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 F.B.I. had disproved the assertion, widespread among scientists who believe Dr. Ivins was innocent, that the anthrax might have come from military and intelligence research programs 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 skeptics’ claims, Dr. Ivins had the equipment and expertise to make the powder in his laboratory.

F.B.I. agents, moreover, have shown that Dr. 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 F.B.I. is wrong, then a troubled man was hounded to death and the anthrax perpetrator is still at large, as many of Dr. Ivins’s colleagues at Fort Detrick believe. When institute scientists began their own review of the evidence, nervous Army officials ordered the inquiry dropped.

In November, four of Dr. Ivins’s closest co-workers wrote a glowing obituary of their “valued collaborator” for Microbe, the leading microbiology journal. It did not mention the anthrax accusations and was a singular protest by the four scientists against the F.B.I.’s conclusion.

“His colleagues and friends will remember him not only for his dedication to his work,” the obituary said, “but also for his humor, curiosity and great generosity.”

Fearing an Attack

The Sunday night after the Sept. 11 attacks, Dr. D. A. Henderson, who led the global campaign to eradicate smallpox and had long been a lonely Cassandra warning of the bioterrorism threat, was summoned to an emergency meeting with the secretary of health and human services, Tommy Thompson.

Fearing a germ attack, officials had grounded crop dusters. Apocalyptic warnings were all over the news media: one study said 100 kilograms of anthrax released over Washington could kill 1 million to 3 million people. 

Now, Dr. Henderson was told, intelligence reports indicated that there might be a second attack by Al Qaeda, most likely biological. Dr. Henderson gave Mr. Thompson and his aides a disturbing tutorial on anthrax and smallpox. As the meeting ended, an aide thanked him.

“I just hope we’re not too late,” Dr. Henderson replied.

Days later came word of the anthrax letters. First, the death of a tabloid photo editor in Florida, Robert Stevens. Then the poison letters mailed to NBC News and The New York Post with notes declaring “Death to America! Death to Israel!”

And finally the letters to Senators Tom Daschle, Democrat of South Dakota, and Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, spewing deadly spores through the postal system and across official Washington.

Whoever had ignited panic with a tablespoon of anthrax powder, officials assumed, would not stop there. Dr. Henderson wondered if the powder came from the tons of anthrax weaponized by the Soviet Union. Some assumed Al Qaeda was behind the letters; others suspected Iraq. 

“My fear was that this first mailing was the tip of the iceberg,” said Bill Raub, a senior official at the Health and Human Services Department. “We feared we would be at their mercy.”

Then — nothing. Within days, investigators were piecing together clues pointing to a domestic source. 

First, there were the notes. One warned, “We have this anthrax,” and advised the recipients to take penicillin. Al Qaeda, F.B.I. agents reasoned, would hardly reduce the death toll with an alert that might have saved lives.

Then there was the strain of anthrax. Dr. Paul S. Keim, an anthrax geneticist at Northern Arizona University, identified the spores as Ames, a lethal strain most common in United States research. “It was chilling,” Dr. Keim recalled, but also puzzling. “How in the world did Stevens get a lab strain?” 

An alternative theory of a possible perpetrator took shape: the bioevangelist. An American obsessed by the bioterrorism threat — maybe a biodefense insider who might gain in pay or prestige from an attack — had decided to alert the nation.

That meant the potential suspects included the very Army scientists now working so closely with the F.B.I. And at the core of that group was Bruce Ivins.

In 21 years at the Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, Dr. Ivins supplied Hershey’s Kisses to office visitors and always showed concern when a colleague was ill. He toasted departing colleagues with humorous poems. He livened up parties with his juggling act and led songs from a portable keyboard at his Catholic church.

Colleagues knew Dr. Ivins, whose e-mail Christmas card one year spelled out “Happy Holidays” in anthrax spores, was an oddball, wearing outmoded bellbottoms and lunching on concoctions of tuna, peas and yogurt. But in a place where red tape and petty rivalry often darkened spirits, he was a bright spot. 

“He actually thought of other people,” said Melanie Ulrich, who worked with him on an anthrax project and invited him to the house she shared with her husband, Ricky Ulrich, also an Army scientist. “He was fun.”

Arthur O. Anderson, the top ethicist at the institute, bonded with Dr. Ivins in the 1980s over their shared experience of adopting children. After that, every corridor encounter led to a long, probing talk on adoption or the ethical conundrums of biodefense.

Dr. Anderson said Dr. Ivins had relished provocative conversation. “If you didn’t bite at one of his emotionally laden questions, he’d find another way to shock you,” he said.

They often discussed what they considered groundless criticism of the anthrax vaccine Dr. Ivins had helped produce, which some soldiers blamed for their illnesses. “Bruce was thin-skinned,” Dr. Anderson said. 

In the emotional days after Sept. 11, friends were not surprised when Dr. Ivins signed up as a Red Cross volunteer. On Sept. 22, 2001 — a date, it would turn out, between the two anthrax mailings — he attended a Red Cross class, Introduction to Disaster Services. 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.”

Odd and Pressing

There was more to Bruce Ivins than his Army colleagues imagined, and Nancy Haigwood knew it.

She met him in 1976 in the biology department at the University of North Carolina, where he was a post-doctoral fellow and she was a graduate student. She found him odd and tried gently to disengage, but he kept in touch, pressing her with questions about her sorority, Kappa Kappa Gamma. 

Dr. Ivins’s boss at U.N.C., Dr. Priscilla B. Wyrick, received similar queries about her sorority, Chi Omega. “He’d say, ‘What’s your secret password? What’s your secret handshake?’ ” she recalled. “I thought he was intellectually interested in secret things.”

Dr. Wyrick said she thought of him then as “a goody-two-shoes, aggressive about his science but very sensitive about how he was portrayed by other people.” She kept up a correspondence with him, and after the letter attack, arranged for him to give a talk at her current university, East Tennessee State.

Dr. Haigwood’s experience with Dr. Ivins was not so benign. Outside her home in Maryland in 1982, a vandal spray-painted her sorority’s Greek initials, “KKG,” on her fence, sidewalk and fiancé’s car window. A year later a letter she had not written appeared under her name in The Frederick News-Post, defending Kappa Kappa Gamma and the hazing of recruits. She was certain Dr. Ivins was responsible.

She said she had found Dr. Ivins’s attentions creepy. She never told him her Maryland address, but he found it anyway. Later, in e-mail messages, he mentioned details about her sons that she had not shared with him. 

“He damaged my property, he impersonated me and he stalked me,” said Dr. Haigwood, now director of the Oregon National Primate Research Center.

In November 2001, when she got the e-mailed photograph of Dr. 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 F.B.I. to its 40,000 members.

“It is very likely that one or more of you know this individual,” the message said. F.B.I. profilers thought the killer might have made the anthrax during “off-hours in a laboratory.” 

Dr. Haigwood called the bureau, and two agents visited her. After that, they called periodically but gave no hint that they had tried to confirm the vandalism and stalking.

Soon after Dr. Haigwood’s call, there was another reason for investigators to scrutinize Dr. Ivins. The Army found that in December 2001 he had secretly swabbed for anthrax spores outside his secure laboratory space. 

Suspecting a technician’s desk was contaminated, he later told an Army investigator, he had tested and found a bacillus, the class of bacteria that includes anthrax. He scrubbed the desk with bleach but did not report the spill, though he mentioned it several weeks later to Dr. Anderson, his ethicist friend.

“I had no desire to cry ‘Wolf!’ ” Dr. Ivins wrote to Army investigators in April 2002. “I would have been agitating many people for no real reason.” Yet Dr. Ivins wrote that he could not recall whether he had retested the desk for anthrax after his cleanup, as regulations required.

His conduct was a flagrant violation of biosafety standards. Anthrax spores outside containment areas could endanger anyone who was not vaccinated. When the spill was properly investigated, three strains of anthrax were found outside the laboratory, including the Ames strain on Dr. Ivins’s desk.

By then, too, the bureau had detailed records showing when scientists entered and left the secure laboratories. The documents showed that Dr. Ivins had worked unusually late hours in his laboratory for several nights before each of the anthrax mailings, a pattern that stood out even at an institute where night hours were common.

Yet neither the spill nor the night hours sparked the suspicions of the anthrax investigators. They were intently focused on another suspect.

Focus on Hatfill

Dr. Ivins’s modest bungalow was across the street from Fort Detrick, and he often walked to work. If he did so on June 25, 2002, a sunny Tuesday, he would have noticed the hubbub as he passed by the Detrick Plaza apartments. 

F.B.I. agents and postal inspectors trudged in and out of one unit, toting away items for inspection. A horde of reporters milled around nearby; television helicopters circled overhead. It was one of the most heavily publicized searches in the history of criminal investigations.

Dr. [Steven Jay Hatfill (born 1953)], who had given permission for the search, never imagined this media circus. It was just the beginning of an intrusion into his life by the F.B.I. and the news media that would show just how tantalizing a case could be built against a man the government would, six years later, officially clear.

[NOTE - Steven Hatfill did not actually receive his medical doctorate. He lied. Still, the New York Times refers to him as "Dr."].

For months, agents had been growing more focused on Dr. Hatfill, a physician and virologist who had worked from 1997 to 1999 at the Fort Detrick institute.

He had earned a medical degree but had forged his Ph.D. diploma, written an unpublished novel about a covert bioattack on Washington and bragged on his résumé of a “working knowledge” of biowarfare pathogens. In his apartment, agents found a harmless bacteria commonly used as an anthrax simulant and a notebook on anthrax dissemination. 

Then there was the timing. One month before the anthrax attacks, the government suspended Dr. [Steven Jay Hatfill (born 1953)]’s security clearance after questionable results on a polygraph test, and he told friends he expected to be fired from his job as a bioterrorism consultant. Two days before each of the two anthrax mailings, Dr. Hatfill filled a prescription for Cipro, an antibiotic that protected against anthrax.

Could it all be a coincidence? F.B.I. officials did not think so.

Desperate to find something more definitive against Dr. Hatfill, lead investigators — who had to brief the F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III, on their progress every week — ordered round-the-clock surveillance. Meticulous study of tiny brown fibers found stuck to the envelopes led nowhere. Handwriting comparisons proved useless because the perpetrator had printed in block letters. DNA found on the outside of the Leahy anthrax envelope turned out to be inadvertent contamination by a laboratory worker.

Ignoring the grave doubts of some F.B.I. scientists, agents used bloodhounds to try to link the letters by scent to Dr. [Steven Jay Hatfill (born 1953)]. They sent divers into a pond outside Frederick, and when that did not turn up anything, they drained two ponds hunting for discarded anthrax-making equipment.

Agents were excited when they dredged from the mud a plastic box that they thought might have been a homemade biological “glove box,” built to work safely on dangerous germs. The excitement lasted only until a Fort Detrick scientist with a rural Southern upbringing took one look and recognized what the $20,000-a-day pond-draining had turned up: a turtle trap.

Soon after the pond debacle, Dr. Hatfill began fighting back, filing lawsuits and dragging F.B.I. officials to all-day depositions. But investigators did not want to give up on him as a suspect — in part because overwhelming scientific evidence was tying the mailed anthrax to Fort Detrick.

By early 2004, F.B.I. scientists had discovered that out of 60 domestic and foreign water samples, only water from Frederick, Md., had the same chemical signature as the water used to grow the mailed anthrax.

By late 2005, genetic analysis by top outside experts had matched the spores to a flask of anthrax at the Army institute. Dr. Ivins had custody of the flask, but some agents were still convinced Dr. Hatfill was the culprit. 

The science alone could not close the case. “We could get to a lab, to a refrigerator, to a flask,” said Dwight E. Adams, the F.B.I. laboratory director until 2006. “But that didn’t put the letters in anyone’s hand.” 

Sudden Interest

Early in 2006, with the investigation largely stalled, Nancy Haigwood heard from two different F.B.I. agents. Four years after she had reported her suspicions of Dr. Ivins, the bureau suddenly seemed interested.

“They said, ‘We need your help,’ ” Dr. Haigwood recalled. She was frustrated by the delay, but when the agents asked her to strike up a new correspondence with Dr. Ivins, she reluctantly complied. “I was afraid of this man,” she said. “I was convinced he had done it, and I was afraid he’d send me an anthrax letter.”

Some agents believed that their bosses were stuck on Dr. [Steven Jay Hatfill (born 1953)], and an internal F.B.I. investigation confirmed their complaint. In mid-2006, Mr. Mueller, the F.B.I. director, quietly moved Richard Lambert Jr., who had led the anthrax investigation since 2002, to a new job running the bureau’s office in Knoxville, Tenn. His replacement, Edward Montooth, a veteran of security and intelligence cases who had worked overseas in places from the Balkans to Indonesia, ordered a fresh look at the evidence. 

For four years, Dr. Ivins, like others at Fort Detrick, had simultaneously been a trusted F.B.I. technical consultant and a possible suspect. Now the balance was tipping.

As the bureau’s undercover informant, Dr. Haigwood struck up a breezy e-mail correspondence about scientific grants, pets and travel. Dr. Ivins complained about psychological screening and other “rather obnoxious and invasive measures” imposed at Fort Detrick since the anthrax attacks. 

“I got so tired of the endless questions that I finally got a lawyer, after almost three dozen interviews,” he wrote in late 2006, referring to interviews by the F.B.I. agents. One session, he said, was “virtually an interrogation.”

In another message, Dr. Ivins complained about feeling “thoroughly beaten down” but said his volunteer work with the Red Cross had provided welcome relief. “The Red Cross is my fraternity/sorority,” he said.

For Dr. Haigwood, the reference carried disturbing overtones, reflecting the old obsession with sororities, and with certain women, that Dr. Ivins had hidden from family and colleagues.

Dr. Ivins still carried resentment from four decades earlier at Lebanon High School in Ohio, where he had been a nerdy, awkward teenager devoted to photography and, even then, to the study of bacteria.

In recent years, said Rick Sams, a pharmacologist who had been among Bruce Ivins’s few school friends, Dr. Ivins “shared with me feelings about how he’d been treated in high school. He was bitter about being excluded.”

When Dr. Sams urged him to attend their 40th class reunion, Dr. Ivins refused. “He said, ‘Why should I go? Look how they treated me,’ ” Dr. Sams said.

The agents learned, in part from Dr. Ivins himself, that he had in his post-college years made uninvited visits to Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority houses at U.N.C., the University of Maryland and West Virginia University, once making off with a sorority’s ritual book and cipher device.

That was more than 20 years ago. But more recently, agents discovered, Dr. Ivins had left a long trail of online postings about Kappa Kappa Gamma. There were inquiries about arcane details of sorority rituals and a bitter editing battle over the KKG entry on Wikipedia.

Dr. Ivins hid behind the online handles he used for his proliferating e-mail addresses — KingBadger, Jimmyflathead, goldenphoenix. Once, on GreekChat.com, he described what he said was a family history of mental illness, calling his mother “an undiagnosed paranoid schizophrenic.”

The agents learned that Dr. Ivins had long maintained a post office box to receive mail without his family’s knowledge and took long walks or drives on sleepless nights. Once, he admitted, he drove all night to Ithaca, N.Y., and back to leave gifts for a young woman who had left her job in his laboratory to attend Cornell University.

The agents also found e-mail messages in which Dr. Ivins confessed to alarming psychiatric problems. During paranoid episodes, he wrote, he felt like “a passenger on a ride.” Even as he worked at his desk, he wrote, “I’m also a few feet away watching me do it.”

Of his group therapy program, he wrote on Sept. 26, 2001, between the two anthrax mailings, “I’m really the only scary one in the group.”

On the face of it, Dr. Ivins’s strange secret life seemed less relevant to the case than Dr. [Steven Jay Hatfill (born 1953)]’s boasts about his bioweapons expertise. But anthrax was the core of Dr. Ivins’s working life. 

“He was in charge of producing large quantities of wet spores for research,” said John W. Ezzell, a Fort Detrick colleague whose anthrax expertise rivaled that of Dr. Ivins. “So if anybody could have produced a lot of spores without arousing suspicion, it was him.”

Though a public debate had raged for years over whether the mailed anthrax had been “weaponized” with sophisticated chemical additives, the F.B.I. had concluded early on that it was not. Dr. Ezzell agreed, as did Jeff Mohr, an expert on anthrax and other pathogens at the Army’s Dugway Proving Ground in Utah.

Without giving an opinion of Dr. Ivins’s guilt or innocence, both Dr. Ezzell and Dr. Mohr said they believed that any experienced microbiologist could have grown and dried the anthrax using equipment Dr. Ivins had in his laboratory. The trickiest step, they said, was producing anthrax with the letters’ high concentration of spores per gram, a skill Dr. Ivins had mastered.

Evidence Problems

But even if Dr. Ivins could have made the anthrax, did he? “It’s been difficult for a lot of us to accept this,” Dr. Ezzell said. “He was a loyal friend. He was a diligent worker.”

The agents were building what they thought was a prosecutable case against Dr. 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 Dr. Ivins well told them, “If Bruce had done this, he never would have been able to keep quiet about it.”

Yet the agents knew he led a compartmentalized life. He went on vacation with his brother, Charles, each year, but Charles had no idea Bruce had a drinking problem for which he had been in residential treatment and Alcoholics Anonymous. Dr. Ivins spent hours in online exchanges about sororities, but his family knew nothing about it.

Some F.B.I. agents were haunted by the [Steven Jay Hatfill (born 1953)] precedent. Dr. Hatfill, too, was eccentric. He, too, had begun drinking heavily as he came under scrutiny. He, too, had grown depressed and erratic under the F.B.I.’s relentless gaze.

What if Dr. Hatfill had committed suicide in 2002, as friends feared he might? Would the investigators have released their evidence and announced that the perpetrator was dead?

In May 2007, Dr. 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. Only once did he plead his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, when he was asked about his secret interest in sororities.

A Life Coming Apart

Starting with the search of his house on Nov. 1, 2007, Bruce Ivins’s 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 F.B.I.,” Mrs. 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.” 

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

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

Tipped off by the therapist, Frederick police officers removed Dr. 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, Dr. 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,” Mrs. 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.”

Mrs. 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 Mrs. Ivins’s 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 Mrs. 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 Dr. 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, Dr. Ivins stopped in at the Giant Eagle grocery store near his house and bought Tylenol PM, acetaminophen and an antihistamine. He bought a few groceries and filled three prescriptions for his psychiatric illness, possibly a sign that he was thinking about the future.

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.

Over the next two days, Mrs. Ivins worked her lunchtime shift at a nearby cafe, went for a swim at Fort Detrick and ran her regular Friday bingo game. In and out of the house, she saw that her husband was sleeping but had risen at least a few times, bringing in the mail and eating breakfast.

She did not worry much; depressed, banned from his laboratory, he had been spending many days in bed. And on the back of her note, he had scribbled that he had a terrible headache and was going to rest.y

“Please let me sleep,” he wrote. “Please.” 

When she found him on the bathroom floor in the middle of a Saturday night, her voice on the 911 tape was calm and methodical: “He’s unconscious. He’s breathing rapidly. He’s clammy.”

She had been through this before. The dispatcher offered to stay on the line until the ambulance arrived. “I’m O.K.,” Mrs. Ivins said.

One Last Message

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 Mrs. Ivins abhorred.

It was one last, devious step for a man whose oddities, for many people, made the F.B.I.’s anthrax accusation more plausible.

But like so much about Dr. Ivins, it cut the other way, too. The F.B.I. theorized that Dr. Ivins had sent anthrax letters to Senators Leahy and 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.”

• Postscript: Feb. 28, 2009

  • • • A front-page article on Jan. 4 about Bruce E. Ivins, the late Army scientist who the Federal Bureau of Investigation says was responsible for the anthrax letter attacks of 2001, reported that F.B.I. scientists had concluded in 2004 that out of 60 domestic and foreign water samples, only water from near Fort Detrick, Md., where Dr. Ivins worked, had the same chemical signature as the water that had been used to grow the mailed anthrax. That information, provided by a former senior law enforcement official who did not want to be named in the article, suggested that the anthrax could not have come from military and intelligence research programs in Utah and Ohio, as some defenders of Dr. Ivins’s innocence had speculated. The F.B.I. declined to answer questions for that article, which said that the evidence against Dr. Ivins was circumstantial and that many of his colleagues believed the F.B.I.’s conclusion was wrong. 

      • On Tuesday at an American Society for Microbiology conference in Baltimore, an F.B.I. scientist, Jason D. Bannan, said the water research ultimately was inconclusive about where the anthrax was grown. An F.B.I. spokeswoman, Ann Todd, said on Wednesday that the bureau “stands by the statements” of Dr. Bannan. The case will be reviewed this year by the National Academy of Sciences.

Some of his former colleagues at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) remember Ivins as a goofball scientist and practical joker, but one former grad school colleague saw what she describes as Ivins’ “dark side.” Here are excerpts from their FRONTLINE interviews.

Col. W. Russell Byrne, M.D., USAMRIID

I would have met him sometime in April 1993. …

My first real encounter with Bruce was kind of indirect, when he [complained] about the first animal protocol with plague that I had run. He described it as a runaway train. …

You risk your life every time you walk into the BSL-3 suites. And it’s not just what you do that can get you into trouble. If somebody else doesn’t run an experiment right, if you walk into a lab or somebody’s vortexing a specimen or something that could be aerosolized, people want to know about that because they can inhale them.

I had this experiment going and I forget what his specific complaint was, but … I remember thinking he was pretty intense.

And then as I got to know him, he had a hair-trigger sense of humor. I could kid him about practically anything, and he’d find a way to keep the joke going. That’s the kind of person that I knew.

Like what kind of joke?

His lunches were kind of bizarre, but I don’t remember exactly what was in it.

I remember him juggling. This was in the division office and the secretary’s desk is there, and she’s behind it. And my office is a little office right next to it, there’s a door right there. And he starts juggling in front of it. Then he gets down and he ends up juggling on this back. …

To me he was much more of a kind of a Dick Van Dyke character. He saw things as being funny a lot of the time. And he also knew that he was funny. He also knew that he was comical. That’s the person I knew.

He cared a lot about his work. … He ran down details. He checked things out. He took things very seriously.

That was his reputation in general?

That was my experience with him. I can’t say that’s what everybody thought. I just don’t know. I never had any complaints about him while I was the chief. …

You describe a guy who has a humor trigger. Did he also have a temper trigger?

No, I never saw him angry. He was very intense at certain times. I never saw him angry. …

How did he show his intensity? 

He would speak faster, and he would just look more intense. It wouldn’t be the smiling kind of joking guy. I think he always spoke pretty rapidly. He would speak more rapidly. And maybe because I was not only his boss, I wouldn’t see a more intense side than that. But that’s what I did see. …

You belong to his church. How involved was he?

… He was the music director for the 9:00 Mass. … He referred to it as the hippie Mass. And other people referred to it as the happy-clappy Mass.

It was very energetic. His wife sang. … I enjoyed it a lot. He would get people clapping and going along with it, and you could see people kind of moving from side to side. This was usually on the last song. He would bring in these old Negro spirituals or something like that. He always kind of fired things up at the end. And I really enjoyed that. …

Was the Bruce Ivins that the FBI described during the press conference[after his death] the same Bruce Ivins you knew?

They seemed to harp on he was a loner. He was not a loner. …. He had a lot of friends. The first-year anniversary and the second year anniversary of his death, 20 or 30 people got together from the division. He was not a loner. He might have been a gregarious introvert maybe, but he was very outgoing. …

Lt. Col. Jeffrey Adamovicz, Ph.D., USAMRIID

I became Bruce’s boss in 2001 when I became the deputy division chief, and I supervised Bruce for a time, for a couple of years. And then I became the chief of the division. Then I no longer supervised him directly.

But he was a pleasure to work with. He’s a somewhat animated, very eccentric person. But he was a very productive scientist. In matters of discussion about science, I listened very closely to what Bruce had to say. He was a key person in the field, and he was well respected by everybody in the lab.

At the same time, of course Bruce had kind of a quirky personality that would put some people off at times. But my interactions with him were always good, whether I was his supervisor or not. Whether in the work setting or in a social setting, I always enjoyed being around Bruce. …

What do you mean by quirky nature?

Bruce is probably antithetical to the typical scientist personality, in a sense that Bruce is playful. He likes to tell jokes. He likes to talk to people. He would keep candy in his office to entice people to come into the office so he could talk.

He enjoyed following weather patterns and weather systems and discussing it in the morning, you know what the weather was going to be that day.

He juggled. He played musical instruments. He played the guitar. He wrote poems for people when they left the institute, or if there was a special occasion, such as a Christmas party, that sort of thing.

But he was a very outgoing sort of guy. He didn’t care about very materialistic things. He didn’t dress well. He didn’t drive a nice car. He didn’t focus or talk about money at all. So he was a different person.

Did the quirkiness go beyond what people would expect, so that some people wondered whether he was emotionally stable or not?

Answering a question about Bruce’s emotional stability is very difficult because I think there were probably changes in Bruce’s personality over time.

When I met Bruce in 1995, he was a person that you wouldn’t think of as having emotional problems. Sometime after 9/11 I think Bruce began to change in certain ways, in the sense that as the pressure at the institute increased to deal with these attacks and to deal with the samples that were coming in, I think that that was a source of stress for Bruce and for all of us.

Clearly though his personality fundamentally changed I would say along about 2006, after he became the quote unquote, prime suspect, and it was clear that the FBI was focusing on him. He did not deal with that stress very well at all. …

In the early days, did he have a temper?

I never saw Bruce exhibit any forms of temper, temperament or anger. … He would speak in a very animated way about certain topics. But I never saw him display anger.

In fact, one of the things that I was proud of Bruce is that we had a problem employee in the institute, and this was an employee who would put his hands on people and was a very aggressive personality. He had shoved Bruce up against a filing cabinet one day. And Bruce came and told me about it, but he didn’t really want to make a big deal out of it. Clearly he wasn’t the type of person to engage any kind of physical altercation. He wasn’t aggressive in his personality. …

Did Bruce show signs of being afraid of the FBI?

Bruce was very afraid of the FBI. … I believe they knew that this was having an adverse effect on him. But it was in their minds the desired effect. …

Bruce and I had several conversations about the stress he was feeling. This was around late 2006, early 2007. I advised him to seek legal help, because it was clear to me that this was something more than routine at this point. And Bruce did retain a lawyer. …

Bruce clearly felt you know a lot of stress and anxiety over the FBI. In fact he had mentioned to me one time that “It doesn’t matter whether I did it nor, they’re going to convict me of it.” That’s the kind of thoughts that were probably going through Bruce’s head at the time. …

Some say that Bruce was just a really good liar. What are your thoughts?

Do we ever really know somebody completely? It’s possible. Bruce could have been the master deceiver. Although knowing him personally I can’t imagine how he could pull that off. Bruce didn’t seem to be capable of deceiving people, because he was too outgoing. In other words, if you wanted a secret to get spread across the institute, you told the secret to Bruce. And you told him specifically to keep it a secret. And sure enough, it would get out, because Bruce couldn’t keep a secret.

So there’s this juxtaposition between how this FBI represents Bruce as this clever mastermind, manipulating liar, and the person that we knew that couldn’t keep a secret. They’re not the same person. And again, I’m still firmly held in my belief that he had nothing to do with this.

Henry Heine, Ph.D. USAMRIID

Bruce was one of the senior scientists in the Division of Bacteriology at USAMRIID when I arrived in December 1998. … Bruce was just wonderful right from day one. 

Bruce, I would consider one of the godfathers in this area. And so here you have somebody, and you’re new, and he comes in and says: “Anything you need, if you need some help from me, ask me. I can help you out in anyway whatsoever.” Just invited me into his world as it were. 

He was a very congenial scientist. Very smart, brilliant. Really knew his science and very dedicated. And at the same time also very dedicated to mentoring and helping out new scientists, young scientists coming in. …

The Bruce Ivins that’s been described by the FBI and so forth, I never met that person. And I would hope I never do. The person that I knew was a good scientist, and then as the years went by developed also into what I would like to believe was a good friendship.

You mentioned that you guys would go up to your cabin. …

We kind of tongue-in-cheek always described those as “bacteriology militia weekends.” We would go up to my place in West Virginia, usually get up there late on a Friday evening. First thing obviously is we’d go out and hit the local bar, then come back to the cabin, sleep it off. 

And then the next morning — after everybody was sober, because I have very, very strict rules about alcohol and firearms — we’d do a lot of shooting. We had a small target range set up there. And everybody could bring up whatever they had and do a little target practicing, something that’s kind of hard to do down in the metropolitan areas. 

I don’t really believe that Bruce had any guns until he started doing that with us. Because the first time he came up he didn’t have any, and he was of course using everybody else’s. Then on subsequent trips he started showing up with his own, and they were brand-new guns. 

He was a terrible shot. We used to joke with him, and again when he wasn’t present, about how he couldn’t hit the side of a barn if he was standing right next to it. He didn’t know how to shoot properly. We tried to work with him on it, but he wasn’t very proficient with firearms at all. …

Did he ever talk about women or his obsession with the sorority?

Never heard them as obsessions the way they were presented. I did hear the story which is the foundation for all this, which was that when he was an undergraduate he had gone to a party with a young lady who was a member of that particular sorority as it turned out. And after a period of time she kind of excused herself to go to the bathroom or something, and then never came back. …

Where did you hear that story?

That was from Bruce.

Why would Bruce bring it up?

I don’t even remember the context for it. I don’t remember the exact date and time, but I remember where it was. It was in what was referred to as the CAC, the Community Activity Center there on Fort Detrick, which was a favorite place for us all to go after work at least once a week.

And I can remember we were all sitting around the table probably telling war stories from college is what I think the context was. And that was his college war story.

Did he seem to talk about the sorority in any way, either in respectful ways or in anger?

No, he just mentioned that she had been in a sorority. Didn’t even mention which sorority it was, just mentioned sorority. Again, I can’t recall all the specifics of it except that I do know we were kind of telling war stories: “I was in a fraternity; my wife was in a sorority.” So I think it probably all kind of centered around those kind of stories, that “Oh yeah, you know, I dated somebody in this sorority,” and so forth.

So Bruce’s contribution was, “Well, I went out with this one girl and she left me,” kind of thing. And that was the end of it.

Nancy Haigwood, Ph.D. Graduate school colleague

I went to graduate school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and when I met Bruce and his wife, I was a graduate student and he was a new postdoc who had just arrived to work with Dr. Priscilla Wyrick.

I met him casually, as all new people do, just dropped by the lab, “Hi, how you doing? Welcome,” that kind of thing. I had a casual friendship with him that’s typical of scientists from different laboratories.

What was he like?

He was a high-energy guy, very interested in engaging with other people. Seemed quite interested in his science. And a serious scientist, but with a fun streak to him.

His reputation at that point of the work that he was doing, the kind of intellect he had and such?

Oh, certainly very bright. I didn’t know much about it because I was studying something quite different from what his area was, so I wasn’t that familiar with the specifics. But certainly the caliber of students and fellows at UNC at that time was quite good and still is. And he seemed to fit in scientifically.

He was a little bit of an odd duck, though. That showed up in a few more months, in that he was persistently friendly in a way that scientists typically are not. We tend to be pretty contained within our own little scientific issue and typically within our own laboratories.

But he was different. How? How did it show up?

It’s so hard to describe. I know I’ve talked about this over the years. It wasn’t unpleasant, but it was a little too persistent. It was just a little bit odd. It seemed as though Bruce wanted more attention than he was getting.

…

So what kind of interactions would you have with him? … Did you work together? …

No, we never worked together. Again, this is a very casual, sort of drop-by-the-lab kind of “Hi, how you doing?” type of interaction. Probably it must have been four years. I believe I was in graduate school about five years, and he arrived and left during that time. So the specific dates I don’t remember exactly, but I believe he certainly left Chapel Hill before I did.

… What was the nature of what he wanted out of the relationship with you?

I think he was generally looking for friends at UNC, but he specifically seems to have latched onto me because of my association with Kappa Kappa Gamma, which was my sorority in college. And it’s actually called a fraternity, but it is a sorority. And KKG, or Kappa Kappa Gamma, was a sorority that Bruce had developed a strong interest in.

His whole demeanor kind of lit up when he found out I was a KKG person. I happened to be also the faculty or graduate mentor to the chapter at Chapel Hill at that time, so I was still involved in Kappa Kappa Gamma while I was a graduate student.

He seemed to take an inordinate interest in it, and I remember at one point saying: “Bruce, this is just way beyond the bounds. I don’t want to talk about this anymore.” But later, of course, it came out that he had a longstanding interest in Kappa Kappa Gamma where he had gone to college, and seemed to have retained what appears to have been kind of an obsession with the Kappas.

Why?

I have no idea. There’s been speculation, but I really don’t know.

What kind of things would he want to talk about?

Oh, he wanted to know what’s the secret cipher, and can you talk more about it? What was it like? What was your chapter like? He seemed to just want to drill down and kind of get into the specifics, which are irrelevant, in my view, to any man, let alone any woman who’s not in that particular sorority. It’s a wonderful way to get to know other women, and we had a few secret rituals, and that was a fun thing to do in college. And I certainly value my Kappa sisters and my experience there, but it’s not something I would ever share. And he seemed to just to be wanting to be very intrusive.

So his interest in you in a relationship was not romantic.

Oh, not at all.

It was almost more to find out information about the sorority.

I think so. I mean, I’m a pretty friendly person. People will tell you that I have been my whole life. So I was probably on the friendlier side of a typical scientist. And it came to be that very few other people were friends at all with Bruce, and I continued to be friendly. But that’s it.

Why did he have a problem finding other friends?

I think he had just unusual personality traits. Again, it’s very hard to describe, but Bruce could be very annoying.

Can you tell me how he was annoying?

I think that one word that comes to mind is obsequious. He tended to be just wanting to garner praise and wanting to overdo conversations in a way that just — people just eventually were turned off by that. …

The way it’s been reported is this obsession with you became bigger and bigger and lasted many, many years. What’s your take on it? The psychological report basically says that you became a defining character in his life.

It was always puzzling to me. He seemed to maintain regular contact. By that I mean the yearly sort of Christmas card-level-type of contact over the years. And yet, at the same time, there were some very disturbing incidents that happened to me in graduate school and when I had my first job in Maryland — one in Chapel Hill and one in Maryland.

Both of these events were very disturbing. I’ll describe them to you. But I was suspicious that there was no one else who would have done anything like that to me except for Bruce. Bruce was the only oddball in my life. And I confronted him about these events, and he denied having done them. And later I learned from the FBI that he in fact had been the perpetrator.

One of them is the attack on your fiancé’s home.

Yes. I came home from work one day to discover that the fence outside our home and the car that belonged to my fiancé had been spray-painted with red paint, with “Kappa Kappa Gamma.” And of course, when I saw “Kappa Kappa Gamma,” my first thought was, this has to be Bruce Ivins. …

We reported it to the police right away, and they asked us who might have done this, and I said that I suspected that a former colleague of mine from graduate school might have been the person involved. I don’t think there was ever an investigation about that. There certainly was no conviction of any kind.

What do you think triggered it?

Desire for attention? I think Bruce wanted to let me know he was in the area, which I did know. He was working at Frederick at the time, and this was in Gaithersburg, Md. That certainly brought my attention to the fact that he was close by. And the way that it was done was very meticulous, which is also not the way someone who is simply out on a prank might do it. In other words, the spray paint on the back window of the Honda sedan was done in such a way that there was no extra paint; it was clearly on the glass so that it could be easily repaired, scraped off. So there was no actual long-term damage, just an annoyance.

And that intrusive kind of “I can do this to you” kind of thing is what started to make me uncomfortable.

When had been the last time you had talked to him? How long had it been since you’d had correspondence?

This was many years ago. I don’t remember exactly. But again, this is about a once-a-year type of discussion that I may have had with him, or exchanged family letters and things like that.

There were two other incidents that happened around that time that caused me to be in touch with Bruce. One was someone impersonated me writing a letter to the Frederick newspaper, signing my name to it, and it was about hazing in fraternities, especially in my sorority.

It was written in such a way that — well, of course I didn’t write the letter. Someone brought it to my attention, said, “Oh, I saw your letter.” And I said: “I didn’t write a letter. Show me. Show it to me.”

I called the Frederick Post, I think was the name of the paper, and they apologized. They said, “Well, we don’t check letters to the editor.” So I called Bruce at that point and said: “I think you did this, and I don’t appreciate it. Stop it.” And he denied it.

But at that point, I was very irritated. I don’t actually remember which occurred first, the newspaper event or the fence and car damage.

Did you cut off your relationship with him at that point?

Oh, yes. As far as I know, I never reached out to him. Now, Bruce was the kind of person who reached out to all kinds of people all the time, and he managed to find out where I was and continued to contact me over the years. I kept an absolutely arm’s-length, at least, approach from then on.

Very creepy.

Yes, it was very creepy. And I haven’t described the first incident, which happened while I was there ending graduate school. This is a very intense time for a graduate student, because every single piece of data is critically important to one’s dissertation. I was working night and day.

I came in one day, and my laboratory notebook was gone. This is the only copy of my data. It was completely missing from the lab, and I was in a total panic.

And I went home and received a letter in the mail from I didn’t know who, saying that the notebooks had been taken and that they could be found in the bottom of a post office box in Chapel Hill. It’s a tiny town; there’s only one main post office box.

And I contacted the post office. This was like a Friday, so I had to wait till like a Monday. But at any rate, the authorities helped me out. The Chapel Hill police helped me out. And indeed, the notebook was in the bottom of the post office box.

This was, in my view, in retrospect, Bruce’s first use of the post office.

So you immediately thought again it was Bruce.

Well, this was the first time anything had happened to me, to my knowledge, and I really was quite puzzled. And I remember talking to everyone: Does anybody have any idea who this might have been? And Bruce was not living in North Carolina at that time, so I thought, you know, the one kook I know is Bruce, but he’s not here. Well, again, it turns out later, he has a brother living nearby. He did do it. I didn’t know that till after he died.

It seems like the antics of a lovelorn individual who just maybe thinks it’s almost funny.

It wasn’t the least bit funny. It was intended to be frightening, and it was. And there was no love situation whatsoever.

What do you think it says about him?

I think this is someone — again, this is years of thinking about this — who felt very superior and underappreciated. I’m not a psychologist, but this is the kind of behavior that it looks like to me, who wanted desperately to get attention, especially from people whom he says he admired. He did get my attention, but he did not get my admiration. And that must have frustrated him.

But I also think there was a dark side to this where he saw that he could get away with these things. And then he realized he felt omnipotent and able to do all kinds of things, and I think he moved on from there.

Paul Kemp Bruce Ivins’ attorney

Describe Bruce Ivins. The first time you meet him, what are your impressions?

He’s geeky, professorial, biochemist, quirky guy. Had on running shoes, but khaki pants. He’s sort of the opposite of me. I was a jock when I went through college. And he, I’m sure, was in a science club and did all the kinds of things that people who have Ph.D.s in biochemistry do. 

He obviously was extremely knowledgeable, was proud of his work with the Army, was proud that he’d received an award from the Department of the Army and the Defense Department in 2003. 

Seemed to be helpful. Never refused to answer one of my questions. Never refused to answer one of their questions. Never said, “Hold on, I need to talk to my lawyer” in the presence of them. I, at some point, said, “I’d like to take a break now and go talk to you about a couple of things.” But he never did. And he was always like, “Let’s keep going, let’s get to the end of this. Let’s try and help them.” 

So he was helpful. He was quirky. He had a crew cut. He had gray hair and it was in a crew cut, and glasses. Clearly was not a man of the world kind of thing, sort of the opposite, just a kind of person that falls into a stereotype of a scientist biochemist who never leaves the laboratory.

Over time, as the pressure grows from the FBI and the investigation, as it’s becoming apparent that he is being looked at more and more, how does he deal with the pressure?

I think he begins drinking more, and so much so that he ends up receiving a month of treatment at a Maryland state hospital in Cumberland for drinking too much. 

Then he’s angry that they are focusing on him. This is after the search warrants are executed and they kind of cart him and his wife and children away, out of their homes. They execute search warrants at his house, for his cars, at the daughter’s apartment, everywhere. And freeze-wrap his cars and cart them away, so that all the neighbors see this. They have people in there in white spacesuits, essentially, looking for any hint of anthrax. 

He was angry that his integrity was being challenged, and … felt that he wanted to try and get to a judge, or get to court, or to do something. And I said, “Well, there’s no charges pending. I’m hopeful there’s not going to be any charges pending. We just have to ride this out. This is a difficult thing, I understand that, but try and hang on.”

And he had a hard time, and I think he turned to alcohol. I know he did.

How was his emotional stability?

He was concerned. He contacted me more frequently through the spring of 2008. I was relieved when he went out to the hospital in Cumberland and was there for 28 days. And when he came out, I think things were OK. He had not lost his privileges to go to Fort Detrick. He was still being allowed in. I think that was important to him.

He was set to retire in August 2008, after a long career with the Department of the Army. And he wanted to get to that and retire with honor. Obviously that didn’t happen.