The main suspect behind the US anthrax attacks is back in the news again. Bruce Ivins killed himself last year as authorities were building a case against him over the 2001 attacks that left five dead.

The New York Times has taken an extended look at Ivins:

That examination found that unless new evidence were to surface, the enormous public investment in the case would appear to have yielded nothing more persuasive than a strong hunch, based on a pattern of damning circumstances, that Dr. Ivins was the perpetrator.

Focused for years on the wrong man, the [FBI] missed ample clues that Dr. Ivins deserved a closer look. Only after a change of leadership nearly five years after the attacks did the bureau more fully look into Dr. Ivins’s activities. That delay, and his death, may have put a more definitive outcome out of reach.

AP has, like the Times, been poring over documents from the case. It says records from the Frederick Police Department show Ivins “tormented his wife with rudeness and behaved erratically in the weeks before the Army scientist took his own life by overdosing on Tylenol”.

Previously from Nature

Did anthrax mailer act alone? – US senator Patrick Leahy says he does not believe the FBI theory that researcher Bruce Ivins acted alone in carrying out the 2001 anthrax attacks in the US, 19 September 2008.

Too close for comfort – Nancy Haigwood, director of the Oregon National Primate Research Center, describes her encounters with anthrax suspect Bruce Ivins, 21 August 2008.

FBI to reveal anthrax data – Science of case will be submitted to peer-reviewed journals, 19 August 2008.

Anthrax: the FBI’s case – The US Department of Justice today released a set of documents describing how its investigators linked Bruce Ivins, who died last week (Los Angeles Times), to the 2001 anthrax mailings, 06 August 2008.