With the feds closing in on him for killing five people with anthrax letters, Bruce Ivins got increasingly frantic – plotting to gun down everybody who ever “wronged” him, authorities said yesterday.
I’m Convinced This Was Lab Rat Who Bit Me
Department Of Justice’s Anthrax Website
Drinking heavily and displaying the instability that would lead him to kill himself, Dr. Doom boasted during group therapy that he had a bulletproof vest and access to his son’s Glock handgun.
“I have a list of witnesses that I am going to kill,” Ivins said, according to Assistant US Attorney Rachel Lieber.
Yesterday, the feds for the first time identified Ivins as the sole anthrax murderer – and called the case closed.
They revealed that Ivins told fellow substance abusers during a July 9 session that he was the prime suspect in the seven-year-old anthrax investigation.
“He said he was not going to face the death penalty, but instead had a plan to kill co-workers and other individuals who had wronged him,” a postal inspector wrote in an affidavit about the incident.
“His therapist was convinced he was going to go out in a blaze of glory,” said federal prosecutor Ken Cole at a Washington briefing for victims of the anthrax attacks.
The therapist, social worker Jean Duley, notified local cops. The scientist was taken to Frederick Memorial Hospital for evaluation, then sent to a high-security psychiatric center in Baltimore.
From the facility, he left Duley two threatening messages on July 11, blaming the therapist for his commitment. A similar message followed the next day.
With Ivins safe in the asylum, feds raided his modest Cape Cod-style home in Frederick, Md., just blocks from the Army bio lab where he worked, and confiscated a bulletproof vest and ammo.
But Ivins was inexplicably released on July 24.
The feds said they put Ivins under 24-hour surveillance as soon as he was discharged.
On July 27, Ivins’ wife, Diane, found him unconscious at home. He had downed handfuls of Tylenol with Codeine. He died two days later at age 62.
“We regret that we will not have the opportunity to present evidence to the jury,” US Attorney Jeffrey Taylor said yesterday.
Long before Ivins’ suicide, there were numerous warning signs that Ivins had deep emotional problems compounded by a long history of popping pills and alcohol abuse and an unwavering drive to create a perfect anthrax vaccine.
Perhaps most bizarre was decades-long obsession with the girls of Kappa Kappa Gamma, a prominent national sorority.
Prosecutors believed Ivins had a failed romance with a Kappa girl at the University of Cincinnati.
“Kappas are noted for being lovely, highly intelligent campus leaders, unfortunately they labeled me an enemy decades ago and I can only abide by their Fatwah on me,” Ivins wrote in a Feb. 20, 2007, e-mail.
Prosecutors say this is significant because the seven recovered anthrax letters were sent from a mailbox in Princeton, NJ, on the same street as the Ivy League school’s KKG chapter office. Ivins father was also a Princeton grad.
Even before the 9/11 attacks rattled him – and the rest of the country – Ivins was breaking under the stress of producing an anthrax vaccine for the Army.
“I think the s— is about to hit the fan . . . bigtime,” he wrote in am e-mail.
“The control vaccine isn’t working. It’s just a fine mess.”
He was further stressed that an anthrax vaccine he helped develop was being blamed for Gulf War Syndrome.
Ivins also told of taking medications for his mental ills.
“Even with the [antidepressant] Celexa and the counseling, the depression episodes still come and go. That’s unpleasant enough. What is REALLY scary is the paranoia,” Ivins wrote a friend on June 27, 2000.
“Remember when I told you about the ‘metallic’ taste in my mouth that I got periodically? It’s when I get these ‘paranoid’ episodes. Of course I regret them thoroughly when they are over, but when I’m going through them, it’s as if I’m a passenger on a ride.”
A week later, he self-diagnosed himself as having a “paranoid personality disorder.”
Then came 9/11.
“Of the people in my ‘group,’ everyone but me is in the depression/sadness/flight mode for stress. I’m really the only scary one in the group,” he wrote. “Of course, I don’t talk about how I really feel with them – it would just make them worse . . . I just heard tonight that bin Laden terrorists for sure have anthrax.”
In that same Sept. 26, 2001, e-mail, Ivins wrote “Osama bin Laden has just decreed death to all Jews and all Americans,” paralleling anthrax letters postmarked two weeks later warning “DEATH TO AMERICA, DEATH TO ISRAEL.”
Additional reporting by Erin Calabrese