Man Suspected in Anthrax Attacks Said to Commit Suicide

By DAVID STOUT and MITCHELL L. BLUMENTHAL, New York Times

Published: August 2, 2008

WASHINGTON — The seven-year investigation into the anthrax attacks that traumatized and baffled the nation just weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks has taken a stunning new turn with the apparent suicide of a scientist who was the prime suspect in the case.

With investigators close to filing charges against him, the scientist — Bruce E. Ivins, 62 — apparently took his own life with a prescription painkiller, Tylenol mixed with codeine. He died Tuesday at a hospital in Frederick, Md., about an hour’s drive north of Washington.

Dr. Ivins, who was a biodefense researcher at Fort Detrick, had been told of the investigation into the anthrax incidents, said his lawyer, Paul F. Kemp of Rockville, Md., who issued a statement insisting that his client was innocent.

“For six years, Dr. Ivins fully cooperated with that investigation, assisting the government in every way that was asked of him,” Mr. 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. In Dr. Ivins’ case, it led to his untimely death.”

Dr. Ivins, who the Associated Press said had received three degrees, including a doctorate from the University of Cincinnati, appeared to have been a brilliant but deeply troubled man, according to a portrait emerging from legal documents and the recollections of friends and acquaintances.

He was a church-going family man, and a dozen of his fellow parishioners gathered Friday morning to pray for him at St. John the Evangelist Roman Catholic Church in Frederick, where the Rev. Richard Murphy recalled him as “a quiet man ... always very helpful and pleasant,” the A.P. said.

But he was clearly in great mental anguish in recent weeks. Maryland court documents show he had been under psychiatric treatment and had been served with a restraining order directing him to stay away from a woman he was accused of stalking and threatening. And a lab colleague told the A.P. he was recently removed from his workplace by the police because of fears that he had become a danger to himself or others.

One of his scientific specialties was working on a vaccine that would be effective against anthrax infection, even in difficult cases in which different strains of anthrax were mixed. In a scientific journal last month, Dr. Ivins wrote of the limited supply of monkeys available for testing the vaccine, and how, in any event, testing on animals would not necessarily indicate how humans would react.

The death of Dr. Ivins, who grew up in Ohio, is the most dramatic development in the case of the anthrax attacks, which killed five people and made 17 others ill in the fall of 2001 when they were exposed to anthrax spores sent through the mails. Letters containing anthrax powder was also sent to lawmakers’ offices on Capitol Hill, causing great alarm in the capital when it was still jittery from the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Letters were also found containing a similar-looking powder but no anthrax.

Little more than a month ago, the Justice Department agreed to pay $4.6 million to settle a lawsuit by another bio-defence researcher at the same facility, Steven J. Hatfill. The settlement ended a five-year legal battle over Dr. Hatfill’s allegations that investigators violated his privacy by leaking information on the investigation to journalists.

At the time, the Department of Justice emphatically denied any liability in connection with Dr. Hatfill’s claims, despite agreeing to settle with him, and it was far from clear whether the suicide of Dr. Ivins might bring an end to the anthrax case — or point the way to further developments.

Justice Department officials have not decided whether to close the investigation.

Federal officials were caught off guard by Dr. Ivins’s death, and were limited in what they could say by grand jury secrecy rules. “All of that stuff is sealed — we have nothing we can talk about,” an official said, adding that federal officials also needed to brief the victims’ families before making any public statements.

Dr. Ivins, who was married and the father of two, died Tuesday at Frederick Memorial Hospital, according to an obituary published Friday in The Frederick News-Post, which said that he is survived by his wife of 33 years, Diane, and by a son and a daughter.

The obituary said Dr. Ivins had worked at Fort Detrick for 36 years, was a member of the American Red Cross, and was a parishioner at St. John the Evangelist Roman Catholic Church in Frederick, “where he was as a musician for many years for church services.”

The Los Angeles Times first reported the investigation of Dr. Ivins and the apparent connection to his death on Friday. But it was clear from the comments of Dr. Ivins’s lawyer and officials close to the case that the researcher had been under suspicion for many months.

The White House said President Bush had been informed that a major new chapter in the case was about to unfold. Thomas R. Ivins Jr., Bruce Ivins’ brother, said that another brother, Charles Ivins, called him earlier this week and said that Bruce had died of the overdose, and that the death was believed to be a suicide.

Thomas Ivins, who at 73 is the eldest of the three brothers, said in an interview Friday morning from his home in Middletown, Ohio, that F.B.I. agents had contacted him about 18 months ago to ask about Bruce. He said he had been estranged from his youngest brother and had not spoken to him in 20 years, so he could tell the agents little about him or his work. “I gave them family background and history,” he said.

He said his father, T. Randall Ivins, ran a pharmacy in Lebanon, Ohio, where the brothers grew up.

A relative who answered the phone at Charles Ivins’ house said he was unable to talk because he was recovering from open-heart surgery following a recent heart attack. “It’s a very difficult time,” said the relative, who declined to give her name.

The laboratory at Fort Detrick, officially known as the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, has been at the centre of the F.B.I. and in fact Dr. Ivins had assisted in analyzing samples from the 2001 anthrax attacks.

“We are not at this time making any official statements or comments regarding this situation,” Debbie Weierman, a spokeswoman for the F.B.I’s Washington field office, which is investigating the anthrax attacks, told The Associated Press on Friday. The A.P. reported that prosecutors were planning to seek the death penalty in the case.

The 2001 anthrax mailings were baffling in several ways, not least because the victims — whetherthey were chosen or were struck at random — seemed to have nothing in common. The dead included an editor at a tabloid newspaper based in Florida, a woman in New York City, another woman in Connecticut, and two postal workers at a huge mail-sorting building in Washington, D.C.

Targets of the mailings included Tom Brokaw of NBC and two Democratic senators: Tom Daschle of South Dakota, then his party’s Senate leader, and Patrick J. Leahy, a leading member of the Senate Judiciary Committee but arguably not an instantly recognizable figure outside Washington and his home state.

The letters were traced to a post office near Trenton, N.J., and had return addresses that, while fictional, suggested some knowledge of local geography.

Scott Shane and Eric Lichtblau contributed reporting from Washington.

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