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Dark side of anthrax suspect emerges

Bruce Ivins is pictured at Fort Detrick, Maryland, in 2003. PHOTO: AP

Bruce Ivins was a juggler, a gardener, a church musician, a Red Cross volunteer — and a suspected multiple murderer, federal authorities said.

Some who knew him scoffed at the government’s assertion that Ivins sent the anthrax letters that killed five people and sickened 17 in the fall of 2001. But court documents indicate the outwardly mild-mannered Ivins had a menacing side.

Documents show that Ivins recently received psychiatric treatment and that he was ordered last week to stay away from Jean Duley, a social worker who counseled him. In her handwritten application for a protective order, Duley wrote that Ivins had stalked and threatened to kill her and had a long history of homicidal threats.

Ivins, 62, committed suicide last week as federal prosecutors zeroed in on him as a suspect in the 2001 attacks. They were planning to indict him and seek the death penalty.

Ivins’ brother, Tom Ivins, who stressed that had not spoken to Bruce since 1985, was not shocked to hear that his brother was accused of making death threats and he conceded the possibility that Bruce may have been the anthrax mailer.

“It makes sense, what the social worker said,” Tom Ivins said. “He considered himself like a god.”

Some who knew Ivins said the scrutiny of the investigation was too much for him to bear.

“The relentless pressure of accusation and innuendo takes its toll in different ways,” his attorney, Paul Kemp, said in a statement.

“In Dr Ivins’ case, it led to his untimely death,” he said.

Ivins had worked for the past 35 years at the government’s biodefense labs at Fort Detrick, Maryland. For more than a decade, he worked to develop an anthrax vaccine that worked even when different strains of anthrax were mixed, which made vaccines ineffective.

W. Russell Byrne, a colleague who worked in the bacteriology division of the Fort Detrick research facility, said Ivins was “hounded” by FBI agents and was hospitalized for depression last month.

Byrne and local police said Ivins was removed from his workplace out of fears that he might harm himself or others.

“I think he was just psychologically exhausted by the whole process,” Byrne said.

Still, Byrne did not think the probe would result in charges.

“If he was about to be charged, no one who knew him well was aware of that and I don’t believe it,” he said.
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