Will suicide close case on anthrax?

WASHINGTON — After four years pursuing one former Army scientist on a false trail, FBI agents investigating the deadly anthrax letters of 2001 zeroed in last year on a different suspect: another Army scientist from the same biodefense research center at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Md.

As the government battled a lawsuit filed by the first scientist, Steven Hatfill, investigators built a case against the second one, Bruce Ivins, a respected microbiologist who had worked for years to design a better anthrax vaccine.

Last weekend, after learning federal prosecutors were preparing to indict him on murder charges, Ivins, 62, a father of two, took an overdose of Tylenol with codeine. He died in a Frederick hospital Tuesday, leaving uncertainty about whether the anthrax mystery had been solved.

Investigators had scheduled a meeting this week with Ivins' attorneys to discuss a plea bargain that would have sent the scientist to prison for life but spared him a death sentence, according to sources briefed on the government's case.

The apparent suicide of Ivins, who had won the Defense Department's highest civilian award in 2003, was a dramatic turn in one of the largest criminal investigations in the nation's history. The attack, the only major act of bioterrorism on U.S. soil, came in the jittery aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. It killed five people, sickened 17 and set off a wave of panic.

In the early days after the letter attacks, in September and October 2001, Ivins joined about 90 colleagues at the Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in a round-the-clock laboratory push to test thousands of samples of suspect powder to see if they were anthrax.

In April 2002, he came under scrutiny in an Army investigation of a leak of potentially deadly anthrax spores outside a sealed-off lab at Fort Detrick. He later admitted he had discovered the leak but not reported it.

Whether the focus on Ivins had resolved the case of the anthrax letters was unclear. A federal law-enforcement official said that Ivins had been regarded as a strong suspect and that agents had been nearing an arrest; a lawyer familiar with the investigation said he believed prosecutors had planned to charge only Ivins.

The link between Ivins' suicide and the federal investigation was first reported Friday in The Los Angeles Times.

But the FBI declined Friday to make public its case against Ivins, noting that evidence is under court seal as part of a grand-jury investigation. Officials said they were briefing the victims of the anthrax letters — those who recovered and relatives of those who died — and would need to go to court to have evidence unsealed before it could be summarized for the public.

"Relentless pressure"

A lawyer who had represented Ivins since May 2007, Paul Kemp, said Ivins was innocent and had been driven to suicide by false suspicions.

"For six years, Dr. Ivins fully cooperated with that investigation, assisting the government in every way that was asked of him," Kemp said in a written statement, calling the microbiologist "a world-renowned and highly decorated scientist who served his country for over 33 years with the Department of the Army."

"We assert his innocence in these killings and would have established that at trial," Kemp said. "The relentless pressure of accusation and innuendo takes its toll in different ways on different people, as has already been seen in this investigation."

Kemp was referring to the case of Hatfill, who was the focus of intensive FBI and news-media attention in the case beginning in mid-2002 and received a $5.8 million settlement from the government in June to settle a lawsuit accusing the FBI and the Justice Department of destroying his career and personal life with leaks.

The Justice Department, which has not publicly exonerated Hatfill, 54, would not comment about the case Friday.

Thomas Connolly, a lawyer for Hatfill, said he had "nothing at this point" to say about the case. Hatfill, he added, is not interested in speaking directly with reporters about the case.

Whatever the cause of his suicide, Ivins had been behaving bizarrely in the weeks before his death. He was hospitalized briefly for depression and, according to a complaint filed with the police, threatened to kill a social worker who had treated him in group therapy.

A spokesman for the Frederick police, Lt. Clark Pennington, said he could not say whether Ivins had left a suicide note.

Investigators in the inquiry traveled to many countries and by late 2006 had conducted 9,100 interviews, sent out 6,000 grand-jury subpoenas and conducted 67 searches, the FBI said. But the prime focus steadily narrowed: first to the Army infectious-diseases laboratories, apparently linked to the letters by genetic analysis, then to Hatfill, a medical doctor who had become a bioterrorism consultant, and finally to Ivins, who worked in the same building as Hatfill.

Two puzzles haunted investigators from the beginning: the motive of the perpetrator and his skills. Because the notes in some of the letters mailed to news organizations and two U.S. senators included radical Islamist rhetoric, investigators initially believed they might have been sent by al-Qaida.

FBI narrows focus

But the FBI quickly narrowed its main focus on a different profile: a disgruntled U.S. scientist or technician, perhaps one specializing in biodefense, who wanted to raise an alarm about bioterrorism.

That theory accounted for the letters' taped seams and the notes' use of the word "anthrax," a warning that allowed antibiotic treatment, not to be expected from an al-Qaida attack aimed mainly at killing.

That theory of a biodefense insider placed many scientists at the infectious-diseases institute and other laboratories under scrutiny, even as they helped the FBI analyze the anthrax powder in the letters.

"The FBI would be remiss not to look at us, especially those of us who worked with anthrax," said John Ezzell, an anthrax researcher who hired Ivins at the institute and knew him well. "We were all subjected to lie-detector tests. We were all interviewed."

Ezzell called Ivins "intense about his work, but a popular guy." Asked whether he was aware Ivins had become a more serious suspect, Ezzell declined to comment.

The other puzzle involved the skills necessary to produce the high-quality aerosol powder contained in the letters addressed to the senators, Tom Daschle, D-S.D., and Patrick Leahy, D-Vt.

Scientists familiar with germ warfare said there was no evidence that Ivins, though a vaccine expert with easy access to the most dangerous forms of anthrax, had the skills to turn the pathogen into an inhalable powder.

By their own admission, the FBI and the Postal Inspection Service had little expertise in biological weapons in 2001, when they began the investigation. Since then, at least 19 government and university laboratories have worked on the investigation, using clues such as the genetic fingerprints of the anthrax and radioactive isotopes in the water used to grow it to try to trace it to a source.

The source, several officials said, was the infectious-diseases institute, where the trail led to a handful of vials in a single lab.

Ivins' brother, Tom Ivins, said federal agents questioned the scientist 18 months ago. A colleague, Henry Heine, said that over the past year, he and others on their team had testified before a federal grand jury investigating the anthrax mailings.

The victims of the attacks had little in common.

Robert Stevens, 63, a photo editor at the Sun, a supermarket tabloid published in Boca Raton, Fla., was the first to die.

Thomas Morris Jr., 55, and Joseph Curseen, 47, worked at a Washington-area postal facility that was a hub for sorting the capital's mail.

Kathy Nguyen, 61, who had emigrated from Vietnam and lived in the Bronx, worked in a stockroom at Manhattan Eye Ear & Throat Hospital. Ottilie Lundgren, 94, who lived in Oxford, Conn., was the last to die.

Material from The Washington Post and The Associated Press

is included in this report.