The FBI hopes the latest disclosure will convince people they fingered the right guy. Of course, there are some who still believe that the elements found in the anthrax could not have come from the Maryland lab where suspect Bruce Ivins worked.
WASHINGTON — More than eight years after anthrax-laced letters killed five people and terrorized the country, the F.B.I. finally closed its investigation of the matter on Friday. The bureau released a 92-page report adding eerie new details to its case that the attacks were carried out by Bruce E. Ivins, an Army biodefense expert who killed himself in 2008.
The report describes the evidence against Dr. Ivins in far greater detail than before, revealing his equivocal answers when a friend asked him in a recorded conversation whether he was the anthrax mailer.
“If I found out I was involved in some way.” Dr. Ivins said. “I do not have any recollection of ever doing anything like that,” he said, adding: “I can tell you, I am not a killer at heart.”
The report also describes the F.B.I.’s theory that Dr. Ivins, who was fascinated by codes, embedded a complex coded message in the notes that he mailed with the anthrax. The coded message, based on D.N.A. biochemistry, alluded to two female colleagues with whom he was obsessed, the bureau said.
The report describes how a hidden F.B.I. surveillance agent watched in 2007 as Dr. Ivins threw out a book and an article that might reveal his interest in codes, then came out of his house at 1 a.m. in long underwear to make certain that the garbage truck had in fact taken his trash.
“I can hurt, kill, and terrorize,” Dr. Ivins wrote in a 2008 e-mail message to a friend. “Go down low, low, low as you can go, then dig forever, and you’ll find me, my psyche.”
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