TBO.com - TBO is Tampa Bay Online

Counselor Says Ivins Told Her Of Plot To Kill Woman

ADVERTISEMENT

The Washington Post

Published: August 7, 2008

WASHINGTON - More than a year before the anthrax attacks that killed five people in 2001, Bruce Ivins told a counselor he was interested in a young woman who lived out of town and had "mixed poison" and taken it with him when he went to watch her play in a soccer match.

"If she lost, he was going to poison her," said the counselor, who had treated Ivins at a Frederick, Md., clinic four or five times during the summer of 2000.

She said Ivins emphasized that he was a skillful scientist who "knew how to do things without people finding out."

The counselor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Wednesday that she was so alarmed by her client's emotionless description of a specific, homicidal plan she immediately alerted the head of her clinic, a psychiatrist who had treated Ivins, and Frederick police. She said the police told her nothing could be done because she did not have the woman's address or last name.

The counselor's account is part of a dark portrait of Ivins that emerges from documents made public Wednesday by the Justice Department, as well as e-mail, chat room postings, and an interview with a former graduate student at the University of North Carolina, who said Ivins was obsessed with her sorority when he was at the university three decades ago.

These glimpses of Ivins conflict with a depiction of him by friends and colleagues. They described him as a church-going family man whose mental health eroded because of pressure from federal investigators who saw him as a prime suspect in the anthrax attacks.

The former graduate student, Nancy Haigwood, was studying microbiology at Chapel Hill in the mid-1970s, when Ivins, who was doing post-doctoral work there, took an obsessive interest in her sorority, Kappa Kappa Gamma.

According to Haigwood, now director of the Oregon National Primate Research Center in Portland, Ivins' "intrusive" questions made her uncomfortable, but his curiosity did not end when they both left North Carolina. In 1982, Ivins took a job at Fort Detrick in Maryland, and Haigwood coincidentally moved to Gaithersburg, Md.

One morning, she walked out of her apartment and found someone had spray-painted "KKG" in red letters on her boyfriend's car and a fence behind the house. Haigwood told police she suspected Ivins.

"It was very upsetting," she said. But when she confronted Ivins, he denied doing it.

Share this:

Loading Comments...

Email Print

ADVERTISEMENT