“By the mid-1970s, Bruce Ivins had earned his doctorate and was a promising researcher at the University of North Carolina. By outward appearances, he was a charming eccentric, odd but disarming. Inside, he still smoldered with resentment, and he saw a new outlet for it.
“Several years earlier, a [University of] Cincinnati student had turned him down for a date. He had projected his anger onto the young woman’s sorority, Kappa Kappa Gamma. There was a Kappa house in Chapel Hill, and Ivins cased the building. One night when it was empty, he slipped in through a bathroom window and roamed the darkened floors with a penlight.
“Upstairs, he found something that fascinated him: a glass-enclosed sheaf of documents, called a cipher, necessary for decoding the sorority’s secrets. The cipher would help him wage a personal war against Kappa Kappa Gamma into the sixth decade of his life….
“Investigators believed the poisoned envelopes [in the 2001 anthrax attacks] were deposited in a curbside mailbox in downtown Princeton, N.J. Only years later would the significance of that location become clear.
“The mailbox stood beneath the fourth-floor office of a college sorority, Kappa Kappa Gamma.”
— From the Los Angeles Times, May 29, 2011
Despite a wealth of circumstantial evidence pointing at Ivins as the anthrax terrorist, new questions have arisen.