In the week after the first search of his residence in connection with the anthrax investigation, he threw out in the trash a book about secret codes that included a passage about using a series of bolded letters to disguise a message, which was strikingly similar to the technique used in the attack letters. The night he threw out the book, he went out into the street in the middle of the night in his long underwear, immediately after the garbage truck came at about 1:00 a.m., and confirmed that his trash had been picked up.
As the investigation began to focus on him, Dr. Ivins made threatening statements related to the anthrax investigation to another scientist. Later, shortly before his suicide, he revealed in a group therapy session his anger at those who were investigating him and his plans to kill co-workers and others who had wronged him. Also shortly before his suicide, when an acquaintance gently confronted him with the possibility that he might be the anthrax mailer, he equivocated in his response. In the course of that conversation, while rejecting the idea of undergoing hypnosis, he worried aloud about what would happen “[i]f I found out I was involved in some way.”
Dr. Ivins also sent a provocative e-mail about the anthrax case to himself from an account he established in such a way that it would appear as though the e-mail was being sent by him to a friend, in an effort to see whether investigators were reading his e-mail.
Throughout the investigation, he repeatedly made efforts to shift the blame for the mailings to both dear friends and professional colleagues through fanciful, far-reaching theories of responsibility. At one point, he sent an e-mail to himself documenting 12 reasons why two of his former colleagues, who were also his two best friends, likely committed the anthrax attacks.
7. History of disguising identity. Dr. Ivins had a number of habits and strange proclivities consistent with the modus operandi of the anthrax mailer. He had a penchant for going on long drives to mail letters and packages from distant post offices, often using a pseudonym when doing so, thereby disguising his identity as the mailer. Similarly, the attack letters were mailed under a fictitious name in Princeton, New Jersey. Dr. Ivins used over a dozen pseudonyms over the years to mask his identity when communicating with others, often for illegitimate purposes.
8. Obsessive behavior. The anthrax letters were mailed from a collection box outside of an office building that housed a particular sorority with which Dr. Ivins was admittedly obsessed. Dating back 40 years to his college days, Dr. Ivins had been obsessed with the sorority Kappa Kappa Gamma (“KKG”). By his own account, many times over the years, he would drive three hours or more to visit various KKG sorority chapter houses. Once he arrived, he would look at the house for approximately ten minutes and then turn around and drive home for another three hours or more. On two occasions, he actually burglarized the chapter houses and stole secret ritual material, including a cipher used by the KKG sorority to decode the secret rituals. The anthrax letters were mailed from a mailbox outside the Princeton University chapter of this sorority, located approximately three hours from his house in Frederick, Maryland.
10
