Old-school detective work and a scientific moonshot finally uncover the truth. But the case exposes failures in national biosecurity, cracks in the mental health system, and a tragic ending that changes America forever.
Chapter 1: What is the background of the anthrax case?
My name is Maureen Stephens and my husband Robert Stephens was murdered six years ago on Friday and we're still trying to find out what happened to him.
This is Maureen speaking to the Palm Beach Post in the fall of 2007. By this time, she is so desperate for answers about who killed her husband that she feels her only recourse is to turn to the media to raise awareness. Robert Stevens had been the first victim in 2001, the photo editor who died in Florida.
And by this point, his story and the story of anthrax in general had long faded from the headlines. It seemed no one was talking about it anymore. But as Maureen said in her interview, she was still thinking about it. And she was going to make sure the public remembered, even if she had to do it herself.
This is not going to be forgotten. I'm not packing it away. I keep it sometimes in the front because I will not forget this, you know, what happened to my husband. I just won't.
By now, six years in, it seemed Maureen might never really know who took her husband from her. Anthrax had become one of the largest cases the FBI had ever taken on. It'd gone down many rabbit holes, but if you asked anyone still following the case, it seemed like all the FBI had done was publicly accuse the wrong suspect more than once.
America had even gone to war in Iraq, citing the search for anthrax as a key motive. But despite all that energy and military action, no one in the American government could point to the person who'd mailed those letters. Most Americans took it as fact that the anthrax attacks had to have been linked to 9-11. The president and his administration certainly had.
But after those six long years, Maureen has a different theory. She thinks that this anthrax wasn't at all related to terrorists overseas, but came from someone inside the United States' own bioweapons lab, USAMRID.
I think it was taken out of there, and I think somebody, for whatever reason, whatever agenda they had, just decided to try this and try it after September the 11th, because I would think that most people would associate the two.
Maureen is convinced she's correct, and she's not afraid to publicly criticize the FBI and the media for not pursuing her line of thinking.
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Chapter 2: Who was Maureen Stephens and what happened to her husband?
In the course of 2007, I reviewed hundreds and hundreds of emails.
Decker's team turns Bruce Ivan's computer and emails over to Greg Sathoff, a forensic psychiatrist and consultant for the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit.
Through the emails, I learned more about Dr. Ivins, some of the anxieties that he expressed, some of the concerns.
Greg learns that back in 2000, Ivins was experiencing significant stress in his home and work life, enough that he sought professional help from a psychiatrist. He was diagnosed with depression and paranoid personality disorder and was prescribed medication. Greg also reads emails from that time in which Ivins describes how he's seeing the world.
In one, he writes, it's like I'm not only sitting at my desk doing work, I'm also a few feet away watching me do it. In another, he writes, what is really scary is the paranoia. I get these paranoid episodes. Of course, I regret them thoroughly when they're over, but when I'm going through them, it's as if I'm a passenger on a ride.
It's clear to the FBI that, at the very least, Bruce Ivins has a troubled relationship to himself, his work, and his reality. They need to learn more about who this scientist really is and where his story started. So they head to his hometown, Lebanon, Ohio.
Bruce came into my life as a friend, just gradually, the way friends do.
Ellen Hefner grew up in Lebanon and knew Bruce from childhood.
We all walked to school together, and we would walk down off Mulberry, and Bruce would come from Broadway, and he would meet us all, because you would develop a tribe of people by the time you got to school.
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Chapter 3: What theory does Maureen have about the anthrax attacks?
Just before 9-11, Ivins emailed a colleague outside USAMRID, revealing that the government's stockpile of anthrax vaccines was now down to its very last lot, so soldiers wouldn't be able to be vaccinated in the field anymore. And critically, Bruce Ivins would himself soon not be allowed to enter the hot suite to do his anthrax research because his own vaccinations wouldn't be up to date.
So management had proposed a solution.
They went to Bruce and they said, we want you to stop working on anthrax. We think you ought to work on Glanders, which is animal disease. And he didn't like that. That was not for him.
Ivins got upset, telling his manager, I am an anthrax researcher. This is what I do. Consider what this moment would be like for the man who'd walked the streets of his hometown, proud of the person he'd become, a researcher at the top of his field.
After everything the FBI had learned about Bruce, his paranoia, his instability, not to mention his obsessive commitment to even minor vendettas, it's not hard to imagine the lengths he might go to to keep the entirety of his work afloat.
If Ivan's motivation behind the anthrax attacks was to make anthrax seem more necessary in order to keep working in the field he loved, it worked, probably better than anyone could have imagined. Within a few months of the anthrax attacks, the FDA fast-tracked the approval of his vaccine funding, even though it hadn't yet met the FDA's new standards.
His research became so important that 18 months after the first attack, the government awarded him the decoration for exceptional civilian service, equivalent to the Distinguished Service Medal if he was a soldier. All of that wasn't enough for the FBI to convince the government of his guilt. In September 2008, Robert Mueller gets called before a Senate Judiciary Committee.
He tells Congress that to make sure that the science that pointed to Ivins was trustworthy, the FBI would seek an independent review of the case by the National Academy of Sciences. This process puts Agent Scott Decker in a weird spot. He finds that he's suddenly in an adversarial relationship with the scientists he knew, who are now scrutinizing every detail of his work.
And from the very first meeting, the energy felt off to Decker. I felt betrayed.
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