WASHINGTON - A late Army microbiologist engaged in a decades-long pattern of "concealment and deceit," pretending to be a comical juggler who played the organ in church on Sundays, while his dark side drove him to mail anthrax-laced letters that killed five people, according to an analysis of his psychiatric records.
The conclusion was made by a nine-member panel of psychiatric and forensic experts in an unusual 285-report released Wednesday. It lent support to the FBI's controversial finding, made after Bruce Ivins' 2008 suicide, that Ivins was the culprit in the infamous 2001 anthrax attacks.
"Dr. Ivins was psychologically disposed to undertake the mailings; his behavioral history demonstrated his potential for carrying them out, and he had the motivation and the means," the panel wrote.
They noted that Ivins confessed to mental-health professionals that he'd committed "criminal break-ins" in years past, describing him as calculatingly careful in the way he "compartmentalized" information, even among his mental-health therapists.
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Information in Ivins' psychiatric records should have kept him from ever being hired by the U.S. Army's Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Md., where he performed research for years on deadly anthrax spores, the behavioral-analysis panel found. But managers who hired him didn't ask for the information.
In addition to the deaths, the anthrax powder in letters sent to two U.S. senators and media outlets in New York and Washington, D.C., sickened 17 people, disrupted the U.S. Postal Service, tainted the mail in agencies across Washington and shuttered Congress.
The 62-year-old scientist killed himself in July 2008 by taking an overdose of Tylenol and other drugs after federal prosecutors notified him that he'd face criminal prosecution, ending a long investigation.
While titillating, the latest analysis fails to fully close the books on the case, because no one has produced clear forensic evidence showing that Ivins dropped the letters into a mailbox in Princeton, N.J., in September and October 2001.
The panel traced Ivins' need for constant mental-health care over the years to a traumatic childhood in which his mother stabbed and beat his father, threatening to kill him with a loaded gun.
"It also appears that she physically abused Dr. Ivins as a boy and that his father mocked him publicly," the panel said.
Psychiatric records are highly confidential, except in unusual circumstances such as a criminal defendant's innocent plea by reason of insanity. But months after Ivins died, the Justice Department got a court order to obtain his sealed records. The FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit asked a longtime consultant, Dr. Gregory Saathoff, an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Virginia, to review the records.
Saathoff, who apparently initiated the idea to delve into Ivins' records, told a news conference Wednesday that after receiving them, he thought the case was so significant that he sought and obtained authority from the Justice Department to perform a comprehensive analysis.
