Dr. Bruce Edwards Ivins: America's Unsolved Anthrax Mystery

it's the deadliest bioterror attack in american history on october the 2nd 2001 photo editor robert stevens was rushed to hospital suffering breathing difficulties three days later he was dead the first person to die of anthrax on u.s soil in 25 years but rather than being a freak accident stevens death was the beginning of a nightmare over the next seven weeks envelopes laced with the deadly bacteria were sent to politicians and media figures by the time the attack ended five people were dead and another 17 had been sickened but while the deaths had stopped the attacker was still at large it would be another seven years before the fbi found its prime suspect dr bruce ivins an anthrax researcher at fort dietrich ivins was an expert on the bacteria according to the feds he had the means to carry out the mailings yet his case never went to trial ending instead when ivans committed suicide was he guilty or was he an innocent man hounded to death by the fbi well today we're going to take a look at the attack that terrified a nation and the peculiar life of its prime [Music] [Music] suspect the author leo tolstoy once wrote happy families are all alike every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way for the unhappy family of bruce edwards ivins their misery could be traced back to a single source when ivans was born on april 22 1964 in lebanon ohio it would be fair to say that his mother was not thrilled the third of three boys ivan's was what some parents term a happy accident but there was nothing happy about this accident for mary ivins during her pregnancy mary repeatedly tried to induce a miscarriage by bouncing down the staircase on her butt hoping the third of the impact might kill her unborn child as ivins grew up and became old enough to understand things mary would tell him this story making it clear how unwanted he was sadly this casual bit of cruelty wasn't the worst thing to happen in the ivan's household outwardly the family was happy ivan's father randall owned a pharmacy mary volunteered with a pta but behind closed doors randall was a pushover mary subjected to brutal violence ivans witnessed his mother do things like stab his father with a fork and beat him with a broom once she hit him so hard over the head with a skillet that the family thought she'd killed him in such circumstances it's perhaps no surprise that bruce ivins was a bit of an odd child ferociously intelligent ivan's locked himself away from his parents devouring books on science aged only 14 he was inviting local girls back to see his homemade gunpowder but it would be a stretch to say that ivans had any girlfriends or even friends later in life he'd claim he was unwanted by everyone that he still harbored feelings of hatred towards the teenage girls who'd rejected him latching onto pretty girls and then becoming consumed with rage when they didn't return his feelings was a pattern that would repeat throughout ivins's life still no one living in their small town could have known about the resentment smoldering away inside the boy as a teenager he was outwardly normal gunpowder aside taking part in science and running clubs when he graduated in 1964 he easily got a place at the university of cincinnati pursuing a degree in microbiology yet even here away from the mother who belittled him and brutalized his father ivans was still acting strange at some point he was turned down by a girl from the kappa kappa gamma sorority it was the start of what ivans would later describe as an obsession spurned ivins began to fixate on the kappas he followed news about them obsessively began staking out their campus home eventually he came to believe that the sorority were his enemies one night ivans broke into the capper's home inside he found the cipher for decoding their secret rituals when ivans left he took the cipher with him it was the start of a theme in the young man's life punishing women through weird acts of theft from here on out these acts were only going to get weirder the story of ivans's time at college is really the story of two people one let's call dr ivins was a successful microbiologist who published multiple papers earned his doctorate and fell in love with and married diane betch in 1975. the other one let's call it bruce was a student haunted by deep depression and a growing feeling of anger on campus bruce would carry a loaded gun whenever someone slighted him he would take the gun out and shoot at objects imagining the faces of his enemies he threatened in private that it inherited a demon at birth that whatever darkness looked within his mother had somehow passed on to him it was the mid-1970s when bruce met nancy hagwood a married capper studying microbiology at first he tried to befriend her but hagwood considered him clawingly nice and rebuffed him so bruce decided to teach her a lesson in 1979 haywood was working on a doctoral dissertation she recorded all of her results and hypotheses in a single notebook and kept it locked in the lab the notebook was the key to hagwood's research the cipher to decoding her work one day it vanished haywood was distraught for days she lived in a state of panic until finally an anonymous note arrived telling her the notebook could be recovered from a public mailbox for the rest of her life hagwood would swear bruce had been the one who stole her notes as some sort of revenge it wouldn't be until 25 years had passed that bruce ivins sat in an interrogation room and confirmed her suspicions to the fbi in the 1970s though these were only suspicions suspicions that grew every time her car was vandalized every time letters appeared in the local press signed in her name saying something outrageous many years later bruce would tell a psychiatrist that hagwood reminded him of his mother he'd even made detailed plans he would confess about murdering her but while bruce was becoming creepier as time crept by his dr ivan's personality was becoming successful in 1979 ivans began working on anthrax a deadly bacteria known for its great bioweapon potential naturally found in soil anthrax can enter the body in multiple ways the worst of which is inhalation breathing anthrax spores and your chance of dying is around 80 percent because of this it was suspected the ussr might try to weaponize it when a deadly soviet anthrax leak in 1979 confirmed these suspicions the u.s became desperate to hire experts on the disease one of those experts was dr ivins in december of 1980 ivins now live in maryland was hired to work at the united states army medical research institute of infectious diseases there at fort detrick he would grow purify and test anthrax for a possible vaccine it was the perfect placement for a young ambitious doctor given a secret security clearance ivans went on to co-patent a new vaccine becoming one of the world's leading anthrax experts he also settled in at work sticking out only as an office geek who would practice unicycling in the corridors and write silly songs for his colleagues his co-workers just thought he was harmless but this was just one side of the dual personality behind the affable dorky ivans bruce still lurked still harbored his obsessions and grudges over the next decade those obsessions would grow into something terrifying as the 1980s progressed bruce's inner life began to revolve around kappa kappa gamma late at night he'd leave his home and drive all over the country staking out kappa houses he later told the fbi that he'd driven to north carolina and tennessee just so he could lurk outside sororities and watch the kappa girls on one trip to west virginia he again broke into the house stealing the chapter's book of ritual bruce was still posing as nancy hagwood too writing letters to newspapers in her name defending the practice of hazing in one particularly unpleasant incident he sent a copy of hagwood's pro-hazing letter to the mother of a boy who died in a hazing ritual alongside he included a letter in his real name commenting on how disgusting heywood was but this story isn't just as simple as that of a man failing to control his demons as the 1990s began ivans seems to have become increasingly aware that he had problems he began seeing counsellors taking antidepressants and antipsychotic drugs in his sessions he would cut loose confessing to one counselor that had procured ammonium nitrate and planned to make a bomb telling another that he was an avenging angel of death but word of this side never got back to his colleagues to them he was still dr ivan's red cross volunteer churchgoer and renowned anthrax expert as the millennium dawned ivans began emailing female lab technicians telling them he was having disturbing and violent thoughts in one email to his former assistant mara linscott he wrote occasionally i get this tingling that goes down both arms at the same time i get a bit dizzy and get this unidentifiable metallic taste in my mouth other times it's like i'm not only sitting at my desk doing work i'm also a few feet away watching me do it there's nothing like living in both the first person singular and the third person singular what he failed to mention was that he was also the person sending linscott crude sexual emails from an anonymous account come july 2000 bruce iben seems to have been in the grip of a full-fledged breakdown he worried that he would not be able to resist the urge to do harm that he had a split personality and he couldn't stop thinking of revenge on july the 18th he even informed a mental health worker that he'd reformulated a plan to murder mara linscott offering her wine laced with cyanide he'd already mixed it he said when the counselor called the police they claimed that no crime had been committed a year later in the summer of 2001 colleagues started noticing that bruce islands was staying behind in the lab for long hours after work he told friends it was peaceful down there like being on the surface of mars shortly after on september the 11th 2001 hijacked planes slammed into the twin towers in new york the pentagon and a field in rural pennsylvania killing almost 3 000 people the following week an anonymous batch of letters was quietly dropped into a new jersey mailbox and with that the anthrax attacks had begun by the time they were over the us would have suffered its worst bioterror incident in history [Music] the first sign that something was wrong came when robert stevens began to suffer chills a british-born naturalized u.s citizen stevens was a photo editor currently in the middle of a hiking vacation in north carolina at first he and his wife thought nothing of his illness it was september 29 2001 and all anyone could think about was the smoldering rubble in new york the idea that terrorism might involve a plain envelope like the one stevens had come into contact with didn't even cross their minds by october the second though stevens was in bad shape he was sweating red in the face and incoherent when he was rushed to hospital in florida doctors assumed that it contracted meningitis but then an infectious disease specialist took a sample of his spinal fluid and realized it was something much more terrifying stevens death on october 5th was the first anthrax death in the u.s in 25 years doctors declared it a freak accident saying that it likely picked it up while hiking although two of stevens's colleagues also fell ill with anthrax the public were told not to panic on october 9 president george w bush declared it looks like it's a very isolated incident that same day another set of letters were mailed four days later all hell broke loose on october 12th an anthrax letter was opened by an nbc staffer inside was a note declaring 9-1101 this is next take penicillin now death to america death to israel allah is great three days later an aide for senate majority leader tom daschle was poisoned by another letter this one reading 9 1101 you cannot stop us we have this anthrax you die now are you afraid death to america death to israel allah is great this last letter paralyzed congress and the government mail service as panic swept to the media three postal workers who'd handled the letter fell ill by october the 21st two of them thomas morris and joseph casine would be dead but the letter also led to something else on october 15th the fbi deposited it at fort dietrich for analysis one day later it was handed to dr bruce ivins in front of his colleagues ivans examined the letter a wet spore specialist ivans noted the attack spores were dried and ionized capable of spreading through the air like gas he also noted the terrifying purity of the sample one trillion spores a gram more than anyone at fort dietrich had ever seen away from the lab the attacks continued coming so soon after 9 11 the letters left america reeling rumors swirled that al-qaeda were involved or saddam hussein but then just as the panic was reaching a crescendo they stopped no more anthrax letters were deposited after october the 9th although fake anthrax letters would continue to be posted way into 2002 the crisis was already over on november 21st 94 year old ottoli lundgren became the last person to die of the anthrax attacks in total the letters claimed five lives and sickened 17 more including a seven month old baby not long after bruce simons sent his old flame nancy hagwood a terrifying photo in it he casually held a petri dish full of anthracis bacteria while not wearing any protective gear at that moment hagwood later said that awful moment i knew it was him [Music] as the federal investigation named emerathrax gained steam the fbi found itself in a worrying position this wasn't murder committed with a regular weapon agents needed to learn about anthrax and fast so fbi director robert mueller yep that robert mueller decided to call in the experts among them was dr bruce ivins although hagwood later told the fbi of her suspicions the feds had ignored her now they were getting ivans to explain to them the bacteria he worked with unlike most of the other researchers ivins was eager to help unusually so when everyone else the fbi asked about potential suspects swore that no one at fort dietrich could have done such a thing ivins happily threw out names accusing colleagues and friends it was odd but it tallied with what the threads were already thinking genetic testing had traced the anthrax strain back to a deadly stock known as ames since the aim strain came from a single cow in texas it looks like the attack had originated in the u.s but thousands of researchers had access to aim stock so the fbi had also drawn up a profile one which suggested a perpetrator working in the biodefense community and they were pretty sure that perpetrator was bioterra expert stephen hatfield as the fbi was pursuing hatfill anthrax expert pat warsham was examining the attack spores she noticed that the strain grew four distinctive morphs if left a culture long enough mutations unique to that particular batch warsham was ecstatic finding an aim sample that grew the same four morphs would mean the attack anthrax had come from the same batch all the fbi needed to do was build a database of anthrax from every ames flask and then test all of them to see which carried the same mutations whichever had matching spores would belong to the killer bruce ivins thought this is a great idea he helped draw up the selection criteria including a stipulation that a wide sample be used from each flask not just the purest spores he then handed over his own sample a strain of anthrax named rmr1029 the fbi tested it and it came back negative for morphs shortly after they raided stephen hatfield's house on live tv it was around this time that bruce ivins did something very strange against protocol bruce started secretly testing his offers for anthrax spores decontaminating any potential patch that he found when his colleagues learned of this all hell broke loose while none believed bruce was the mailer his actions looked very much like those of a man trying to destroy evidence there were other weird moments too on august the 8th the mailbox was located in princetown new jersey with anthrax spores inside the place where the first letters were dropped no one realized it at the time but that mailbox was opposite kappa kappa gamma's local chapter house it wasn't until fall 2003 that investigators began to look more seriously at bruce ivins around that same time pat warsham tested a sub-sample of ivan's rmr-1029 batch one he'd long ago sent to another researcher to her shock the sub-sample grew identical mutants to the anthrax attack shocking because rmr1029 had already been tested clear yet the sub-sample was so similar they should have produced the same results there was only one answer ivans hadn't handed a sample of his anthrax to the fbi at all for bruce ivins this realization would be the beginning of the end in late 2003 federal agents sent ivins's flask for retesting this time all four morphs grew from it but it wasn't until the fbi replaced its lead investigator in 2006 that it dropped its weak case against stephen hatfield they began pursuing bruce ivins by now dna results from the anthrax mutants had narrowed the list of suspects down to a handful of names one by one those names had been crossed out as suspects provided alibis for september the 8th 2001 on october 9 2001 the days the letters were mailed at last only one name remained bruce ivins couldn't account for his whereabouts on those days additionally weird details about his life were beginning to seep out in interviews with federal agents ivans would volunteer damaging information almost like he was trying to destroy his own character he told the feds about his obsession with kappa kappa gamma about breaking into their homes he told them about his harassing behavior towards nancy hagwood of his secret cross-dressing tendencies of his bondage fetish as 2007 crawled on the interviews got increasingly aggressive until it was clear the mental strain was getting to ivan's that september he came to work with a black eye claiming his wife had hit him he began drinking wildly mixing sleeping drugs with tequila on november 1st the fbi raided his home they recovered hate mail to politicians pistols and a note declaring ivans would draw first blood and last but they never found anthrax spores still the interrogations continued ivins was becoming incoherent unto questioning claiming he wasn't an expert and didn't understand microbiology at one point he admitted to hacking the emails of a female co-worker he was obsessed with named pat not long after some bright spark looked back at the anthrax letters and noticed that many of the a's and t's were bolded as if they might be referring to the nucleotide bases of dna the ones represented by the letters g c a and t lifting out the bolded letters they came up with t-t-t-a-a-t-t-a-t the amino acids these referred to started with the letters p a and t it seemed the anthrax mailer had been sending a hidden message as the investigation closed in bruce's behavior got more unnerving he told a friend he could remember multiple times in his life waking up fully dressed the car keys beside him and thinking he'd driven somewhere the previous night and committed some terrible act online he was leaving anonymous comments under videos of women talking about dismembering them with hatchets on march the 19th he was even hospitalized after mixing a ton of pills with booze possibly in an attempt at suicide finally on june 9 2008 ivans went to his group therapy session and declared that he'd bought a glock and body armor and was going to kill his co-workers the next day he was arrested at fort dietrich and placed into psychiatric care when the fbi searched his home again they found several guns a bulletproof vest and hundreds of rounds of ammunition but they'd never get a chance to build the case against him on july 24th ivans was released from hospital he drove to separate stores and bought huge bottles of tylenol at each two days later on the evening of july the 26th dr bruce edward ivins downed both bottles he left a scrawled note beside his bed for his wife i have a terrible headache i'm going to take some tylenol and sleep in tomorrow please let me sleep please at 1am on the morning of july 27th diane found her husband collapsed in the bathroom at the hospital doctors tried to get her to authorize an emergency liver transplant to save him he doesn't want to be saved she replied bruce ivins died at 10 47 a.m on july 29 2008. despite the fbi since declaring him the sole perpetrator of the anthrax attacks significant doubts remain about his guilt there's the 2011 national academy of sciences report that claimed the fbi overstated the scientific evidence linking the attack anthrax to ivan's sample there's the 2014 government accountability office report which declared the fbi's investigation at times lacked precision consistency and adequate standards even from a layman perspective it's clear the case had potential holes only an anthrax expert could have pulled this attack off and the fbi's anthrax collection relied on those experts submitting their own samples it's not too hard to imagine how someone could have gamed that system a brilliant psychopath who could run rings around the entire fbi that being said the case against ivans remains compelling here was a highly intelligent deeply troubled man with an expertise in anthrax and a history of stalking acts of revenge and darkly homicidal thoughts is it too difficult to believe that such a man one who called himself an avenging angel of death could have quietly snapped could have decided he was an untouchable god able to murder at will because if that's not the case then it means the person who pulled off the deadliest biological attack in american history is still out there still living a normal life perhaps even still working with anthrax the story of the 2001 anthrax attacks may not be fully over but what is over is the tale of bruce edwards ivins a man who may have been a monster or may have just been a strange sad and creepy man we may not know the truth for sure but what we can say is that it's clear ivan's suffered at his mother's hands at the hands of the demons in his mind whether he responded to that pain by inflicting even worse suffering on others is something only he could have told us so i'm not going to ask whether you enjoyed the video but i do hope you found it interesting if you did please do hit that thumbs up button below don't forget to subscribe and as always thank you for watching

Channel: Biographics

Views: 275,199

Keywords: biographics, biography, biographies, people, famous people, simon whistler

Id: _1jjtlgcD1g

Length: 21min 30sec (1290 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 28 2020