NYT : In Death of Suspect, a Dark End for a Family Man and Community Volunteer

In Death of Suspect, a Dark End for a Family Man and Community Volunteer

By SARAH ABRUZZESE and ERIC LIPTON | August 2, 2008

FREDERICK, Md. — Bruce E. Ivins arrived last month for a group counseling session at a psychiatric center here in his hometown with a startling announcement: Facing the prospect of murder charges, he had bought a bulletproof vest and a gun as he contemplated killing his co-workers at the nearby Army research laboratory.

“He was going to go out in a blaze of glory, that he was going to take everybody out with him,” said a social worker in a transcript of a hearing at which she sought a restraining order against Dr. Ivins after his threats.

The ranting represented the final stages of psychological decline by Dr. Ivins that ended when he took his life this week, as it became clear that he was a suspect in the 2001 anthrax attacks.

For more than three decades, Dr. Ivins, 62, had worked with some of the world’s most dangerous pathogens and viruses, trying to find cures in case they might be used as a weapon. Now he was a suspect in the nation’s worst biological attack.

To some of his longtime colleagues and neighbors, it was a startling and inexplicable turn of events for a churchgoing, family-oriented germ researcher known for his jolly disposition — the guy who did a juggling act at community events and composed satiric ballads he played on guitar or piano to departing co-workers.

“He did not seem to have any particular grudges or idiosyncrasies,” said Kenneth W. Hedlund, a retired physician who once worked alongside Dr. Ivins at the Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in Frederick. “He was the last person you would have suspected to be involved in something like this.”

But to some anthrax experts, while reserving judgment on Dr. Ivins’s case, his identification as a suspect fit a pattern they had suspected might explain the crime: an insider wanting to draw attention to biodefense.

Dr. Ivins, the son of a pharmacist from Lebanon, Ohio, who held a doctorate in microbiology from University of Cincinnati, spent his entire career at the elite, Army-run laboratory that conducted high-security experiments into lethal substances like anthrax and Ebola.

He turned his attention to anthrax — putting aside research on Legionnaire’s disease and cholera — after the 1979 anthrax outbreak in the Soviet city of Sverdlovsk, which killed at least 64 after an accidental release at a military facility, said Dr. Hedlund, who worked with Dr. Ivins at the time.

The work became even more intense in the aftermath of the 2001 anthrax attack, as the field grew tremendously, with billions of dollars in new federal support for research on anthrax and other potential biological weapons and to buy new drugs or vaccines to handle a possible future attack.

Dr. Ivins was among the scientists who benefited from this surge, as 14 of the 15 academic papers he published since late 2001 were focused on possible anthrax treatments or vaccines, comparing the effectiveness of different formulations. He even worked on the investigation of the anthrax attacks, although this meant that he, like other scientists at the Army’s defensive biological laboratory at Fort Detrick, Md., was scrutinized as a possible suspect.

Dr. Ivins and his wife, Diane Ivins, raised two children in a modest Cape Cod home in a post-World War II neighborhood right outside Fort Detrick, and he could walk to work.

He was active in the community, volunteering with the Red Cross and serving as the musician at his Roman Catholic church. His showed off his music skills at work, too, playing songs he had written about friends who were moving to new jobs.

But as investigators intensified their focus on Dr. Ivins, his life began to come apart.

Local police records show unusual calls this past spring, including the report of an “unconscious male” in March. For at least six months of this year, he had attended group counseling sessions at a psychiatric center and had apparently been seeing a psychiatrist.

W. Russell Byrne, a former colleague of Dr. Ivins at the biodefense laboratory, criticized federal agents as harassing the germ scientist and his family.

“They searched his house twice and his computer once,” he said in an interview. “We all felt powerless to stop it.”

He said Dr. Ivins was recently escorted away from the laboratory by the authorities and “disgraced in a place he spent his whole career.”

“That was so humiliating,” he said. “It’s hard to believe.”

In court records, filed after Dr. Ivins discussed his plans to kill his co-workers, a social worker who led the sessions, Jean Duley, said that Dr. Ivins’s psychiatrist had “called him homicidal, sociopathic with clear intentions.” She went on to say that the Federal Bureau of Investigation was looking at Dr. Ivins and that he would soon be charged with five murders — the same number of fatalities in the anthrax attacks.

“He is a revenge killer,” Ms. Duley told a Maryland District Court judge in Frederick as she sought a restraining order against Dr. Ivins. “When he feels that he has been slighted, and especially towards women, he plots and actually tries to carry out revenge killings.”

After Dr. Ivins made the threats on July 9 about killing his co-workers, he was detained while at work and taken to a hospital before being transferred to a nearby psychiatric hospital. He was later released, but forbidden from going to Fort Detrick.

Ms. Duley said that Dr. Ivins had a history of making homicidal threats that dated to his college days. But several of Dr. Ivins’s co-workers said that while he clearly was devastated after he was singled out for possible prosecution, that does not mean he was involved in the attack.

The police had come to Dr. Ivins’s home in response to a call early on July 27 from the fire department for assistance; they found him unconscious on the bathroom floor. He was transported to the hospital, and died two days later.

His family has made no public statement about the investigation or about Dr. Ivins’s suicide. But his children both placed messages on their Facebook pages, saying goodbye to their father, hinting at the torment he went through in his final months.

“I will miss you Dad. I love you and I can’t wait to see you in Heaven,” his son, Andy Ivins, wrote. “Rest in peace. It’s finally over.”

Sarah Abruzzese reported from Frederick, and Eric Lipton from Washington. William J. Broad contributed reporting from New York.