Circling Around The Mailbox

For folks who don't like the government case against anthrax suspect Bruce Ivins, this latest WaPo story provides more grist for the laugh track (that is a hoarse, grainy laugh there).

The mystery - is there evidence that actually places Bruce Ivins at the mailbox in Princeton, NJ from which the anthrax letters were mailed?  Today's lead - the FBI recovered hair samples from the mailbox, but they don't match Ivins.  Well, fine, any ordinary passerby could have left that hair, so getting a match was always a longshot.  But the Comedy Gold is buried at the bottom of their story.  Let's compare and contrast this passage with earlier WaPo coverage.  Timing is everything (my emphasis):

Meanwhile, government sources offered more detail about Ivins's movements on a critical day in the case: when letters were dropped into the postal box on Princeton's Nassau Street, across the street from the university campus.

Investigators now believe that Ivins waited until evening to make the drive to Princeton on Sept. 17, 2001. He showed up at work that day and stayed briefly, then took several hours of administrative leave from the lab, according to partial work logs. Based on information from receipts and interviews, authorities say Ivins filled up his car's gas tank, attended a meeting outside of the office in the late afternoon, and returned to the lab for a few minutes that evening before moving off the radar screen and presumably driving overnight to Princeton. The letters were postmarked Sept. 18.

Nearly seven years after the incidents, however, investigators have come up dry in their efforts to find direct evidence to place Ivins at the Nassau Street mailbox in September and October 2001.

Either the WaPo has found better experts or the current crop is reading their critics on the lefty blogs, because here is a WaPo headline from Aug 8:

New Details Show Anthrax Suspect Away On Key Day

By Carrie Johnson and Joby Warrick
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, August 8, 2008; A14

Anthrax attack suspect Bruce E. Ivins took several hours of administrative leave from his Fort Detrick, Md., laboratory on a critical day in September 2001 when the first batch of deadly letters was dropped in a New Jersey mailbox, government sources briefed on the case said yesterday.

The gap recorded on his time sheet offered investigators a key clue into how he could have pulled off an elaborate crime that involved carrying letters packed with lethal powder to a distant location for mailing, the sources said.

...

Meanwhile, bits of fresh information continued to come out. A partial log of Ivins's work hours shows that he worked late in the lab on the evening of Sunday, Sept. 16, signing out at 9:52 p.m. after two hours and 15 minutes. The next morning, the sources said, he showed up as usual but stayed only briefly before taking leave hours. Authorities assume that he drove to Princeton immediately after that, dropping the letters in a mailbox on a well-traveled street across from the university campus. Ivins would have had to have left quickly to return for an appointment in the early evening, about 4 or 5 p.m.

Ivins also had ample time to return to the same Nassau Street mailbox the following month, over the Columbus Day weekend, when a second group of letters was sent to Senate offices and media organizations, the sources said, offering new information that they said underscored Ivins's opportunity to commit the crime.

As explained by the EmptyWheel, an separate FBI affidavit explained that, based on the postmarking timetable, the letter must have been mailed after 5 PM on the 17th in order to have received the postmark on the 18th, so a mid-day mail run by Ivins made no sense.  But the WaPo has sure cleared that up and set my mind to ease.

Some thoughts:

(a) in their first story the WaPo cited "government sources briefed on the case", not the lead investigators.  One might presume that the briefees got muddled on one detail of a sprawling case and the obvious correction is now being printed, so in itself this is troubling but hardly fatal to the government case.

(b)  FULL DISCLOSURE - I have had roughly zero blog coverage of the Ivins story and do not foresee having the time to dive in or add anything original, but if enough people care maybe something can be worked out.  However, in a bit of eerie prescience I will claim without proof that the detail that struck me from about the only Times story I have bothered to read is that the Feds can't place Ivins at the fateful mailbox.  Consequently, I read with interest the denunciations of the WaPo effort last week, again sans blogging.

 

Comments

[kim]

Did Eckenrode work on this case?
=====================

[Topsecretk9]

Kim

He did on the Connecticut part, and I think there were some hinkys involved on his part.

[Topsecretk9]

CO-INVESTIGATORS Connecticut Anthrax Investigation Team

FBI - Jack Eckenrode

ftp.cdc.gov/pub/infectious_diseases/iceid/2002/pdf/hadler.pdf

[narciso]

Did he destroy his notes on this case, too.
All right, 'we're through the looking gas
here, people'. Why would he go so far as Princeton, instead of another Delta Kappa Kappa chapter in the Maryland/Delaware area. Who else could be at fault here.

[MayBee]

If I were going to mail a poisonous substance to people, I would mail it from a place that made no sense.
I would get in my car and drive until I hit someplace far away, and then I'd throw the letter in a not-busy mailbox. Then I'd come back home as if nothing happened.

Kind of like what Gary Gondit did with his watch (he just didn't go far ennough).

Similarly, if I wanted to murder someone, I would murder someone I had no relation to, in a place I rarely went, just so it would be harder to find me.

What I wouldn't do is make it easy for people trying to put pieces together to figure out who did it. I'd be wily like that.

[cathyf]

Note to self: Don't get on MayBee's bad side!

[Sue]

Can you avoid tolls, etc. in your route from where he was to where he went? Could he make it on a tank of gas? Roundtrip? I don't know, I've always thought it was domestic terrorism, like the Beltway sniper, so I'm not surprised that it was. Maybe.

I'd be wily like that.

Ruhroh...

[cathyf]

Well, if he paid cash at the tollbooth then there would be no record.

(In the (in)famous CIA rendition in Milan, one of the stupid errors that they made was to use the electronic transponders to save time on the toll roads, and of course left a to-the-second timestamp of every toll between Milan and the US base that they flew their prisoner out of. Somehow it was inevitable that they would -- since they did things like charge their hotel rooms to personal credit cards rather than their cover names so that they could get the frequent flier miles...)

[Sue]

Well, if he paid cash at the tollbooth then there would be no record.

Really? I've watched too much CSI I guess. I thought they could tell if you went through a toll booth whether you paid cash or not.

[MayBee]

Well, if he paid cash at the tollbooth then there would be no record.

Ditto if he paid cash at a gas station.
I suppose the FBI could go through every gas station's surveillance tapes for the day, but I don't know....

[anduril]

Trying to reconstruct any event after this amount of time, in the absence of documentary evidence of some sort, is bound to be highly problematic. One of those articles that I linked previously said that the FBI made no attempt to locate witnesses who might have seen Ivins, since any ID after all these years would be worthless. Very true. And in a highly transient area like a major university...

[cathyf]

The only reason that they know if you went through a tollbooth is, a) if you use a transponder, or b) if you don't pay and they take a photograph of your license plate and send you a ticket. Remember also that this was nearly 7 years ago, and there was even less technology than today...

OT -- well, almost 9pm, and we still haven't seen a bat. Last night's bat is still MIA -- we could hear considerable pouncing activity through the closed door but no sign of a body this morning. The cats I'm sure have forgotten the whole thing -- they lose interest pretty quickly when their little "toy" stops moving.

Mark my words, though, Autumn is here. Kim is right, global cooling is upon us. It's going to be a brutal winter!

[Der Hahn]

I don't necessarily buy that the time a postmark switches from one day to the next proves much.

When, exactly, was that post box emptied on that day? No chance the pickup was delayed, skipped, or done early? When would the mail actually arrive at the processing center to be postmarked? (I don't think mail is postmarked as it is taken out of letter boxes but maybe I'm wrong) No chance the contents might have been shuffled to the back of load dock and post marked out of order?

Maybee - a higher traffic mailbox is probably better. You might have a lower chance of being observed in an out of the way place but it's more likely that, if you are noticed, people will remember.

[MayBee]

Oh Der Hahn- thanks for the tip!

And yes, you are right about the date stamp. Why just the other day I went to my local mailbox (from that you can tell I was not mailing anything dangerous) and the 2:30pm pickup was taking place at just slightly before 2:00pm. Which means any poor soul that go there at 2:15 was SOL for that day's pickup.

[sophy]

I do not know how to use the Cheap metin2 yang ; my friend tells me how to use.