August 4-5, 2008: Anthrax Attacks Suspect Ivins’s Sorority Obsession Appears Exaggerated by FBI

The Kappa Kappa Gamma storage facility is located in this brick building. [Source: Mike Derer / Associated Press]On August 4, 2008, the Associated Press reports that the FBI has an explanation for why deceased anthrax attacks suspect Bruce Ivins allegedly mailed the anthrax letters from a particular mailbox in Princeton, New Jersey: it is located across the street from a college sorority that he has had a grudge and obsession with for many years. “Multiple US officials” tell the Associated Press that Ivins was obsessed with Kappa Kappa Gamma, which has “a sorority that [sits] less than 100 yards away from” the mailbox from which he is said to have sent the letters. Ivins was said to have been fixated about the sorority since he apparently was romantically rebuffed by one of its members while attending college in Ohio decades earlier. Katherine Breckinridge Graham, an adviser to the sorority’s Princeton University chapter, says she has been interviewed by FBI agents “over the last couple of years” about the case. She says Ivins had no known connection to the Princeton chapter of the sorority or any of its members. [Associated Press, 8/4/2008; Associated Press, 8/5/2008] But the next day, the Associated Press publishes an updated version of the same article which reveals that Kappa Kappa Gamma does not have a Princeton University house for its members at all. The mailbox is near where the sorority has a storage unit for its initiation robes, rush materials, and other property. The article notes, “Even the government officials [who leaked the story] acknowledged that the sorority connection is a strange one, and it’s not likely to ease concerns among Ivins’ friends and former co-workers who are skeptical about the case against him.” [Associated Press, 8/5/2008] The New York Times notes that Ivins had visited “Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority houses at universities in Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia,” but the last such visit was in 1981. [New York Times, 8/5/2008] Salon columnist Glenn Greenwald, a skeptic of the FBI’s case against Ivins, calls the sorority theory a “pitifully thin reed.” [Salon, 8/6/2008]