US: Scientist in anthrax case sorority-obsessed

By GEOFF MULVIHILL Associated Press Writer

MOUNT LAUREL, N.J. (AP) - Among the many details that have emerged about Bruce Ivins, a deeply troubled Army scientist suspected in the anthrax attacks in 2001, few are as strange as his apparent obsession with the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority.

His dealings with the sorority were laid out Wednesday by the Justice Department as part of the evidence investigators say link him to anthrax-laced letters that killed five people. Ivins killed himself last week as authorities were preparing to charge him in the attacks.

Ivins' enmity toward the sorority dated back to the 1960s, according to a Web posting from one of the e-mail addresses Ivins told investigators he used. It could have started when he was an undergraduate at the University of Cincinnati.

"Kappas are noted for being lovely, highly intelligent campus leaders," he wrote. "Unfortunately, they labeled me as an enemy decades ago, and I can only abide by their 'Fatwah' on me." A fatwa is an Islamic religious edict.

In the posting, he asks some detailed questions about Kappa ceremonies and says that at one point in his life he knew more about the sorority "than any non-Kappa that had ever lived."

Ivins once claimed to have broken into a Kappa Kappa Gamma house to steal a secret handbook, according to the documents.

The Justice Department cited the sorority obsession in attempting to link Ivins with a mailbox in Princeton, N.J., where the anthrax-laced letters were mailed. Investigators say this is why he might have driven more than three hours from his home in Maryland.

The anthrax letters were all sent from a mailbox across from Princeton University's campus and down the street from a building where Kappa Kappa Gamma, which has no official affiliation with the university, had offices.

Rep. Chris Smith, a New Jersey Republican, said that during a Justice Department briefing on Capitol Hill, he asked FBI officials whether there were cell phone, highway toll records or any other forensic evidence that placed Ivins in Princeton around Sept. 18 and Oct. 9, 2001 - the dates the letters were postmarked.

The answer, he said, was no.

Still, Smith said, the explanation for Ivins picking Princeton still made sense through the prism of someone with psychological problems. "We're dealing with, according to the FBI, someone who is not stable," Smith said. "It doesn't fit a logical profile at all."

The government documents, however, do not explain why Ivins did not instead send the letters from one of the many other chapters around the U.S. and Canada. Ivins did have some connection to Princeton, though, in that his father graduated from the Ivy League university in 1928 before becoming a pharmacist in Ohio.

The documents do not spell out why Ivins may have been so obsessed with the sorority.

One government witness, who was not identified in the documents, says Ivins wrote a letter in 1982 expressing interest in research in hazing by sororities, especially Kappa Kappa Gamma. Another witness says Ivins confessed to having broken into a Kappa Kappa Gamma house, possibly at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, decades ago and stealing a secret sorority handbook.

A spokeswoman at the sorority's national headquarters in Columbus, Ohio, did not return a call seeking comment.

The police forces for Princeton University, Princeton Borough and nearby Princeton Township have all said they never had contact with Ivins.

The attacks resonated in New Jersey because six people in central New Jersey were sickened by anthrax, although none died. Four were employees at the Hamilton Township mail processing facility, which was closed for 3 1/2 years after handling the letters. The others were an accountant and a letter carrier who handled contaminated mail.

Patrick O'Donnell, a postal sorter at a mail distribution facility near Princeton who was sickened after handling one of the contaminated letters, said he had long thought al-Qaida was behind the anthrax attacks.

After attending an FBI briefing Wednesday he believes Ivins is the man who poisoned him. Still, he said, investigators did not have all the answers.

"I don't know what to think, man," he said.

O'Donnell, 42, was in the hospital for a week and out of work for two years from the anthrax. He has since returned to work at the same distribution center.

"It's so hard going in there every day," he said. "There isn't a day that goes by that I don't think about this thing."