The deeper anthrax mystery goes unsolved

Last Friday's apparent suicide nearly seven years after the bio-terrorism that followed 9/11 came and passed only explains a little.

Editor's note: Federal authorities announced Friday that a suspect in the 2001 anthrax attacks had killed himself after learning that federal prosecutors were preparing to indict him. Trip Jennings covered the anthrax attacks as a reporter in Connecticut.

Ottilie Lundgren died at the age of 94 the day before Thanksgiving 2001.

Maybe you remember her name. Maybe not. Six years on, Ottilie Lundgren is a historical footnote for most of the world.

Had she died of natural causes, chances are Ottilie Lundgren's passing would not have attracted much notice beyond an obituary in the local paper in Connecticut and tearful remembrances by friends and family of a life well lived.

But Ottilie Lundgren met a particularly grim demise as one of five Americans to die of inhalational anthrax in the 75 days following the 9/11 attacks.

The news of her death made international headlines and shocked Connecticut, where I lived and worked as a newspaper reporter at the time. It also attracted a media horde that included journalists from as far away as Japan and that produced a spectacularly impressive cavalcade of TV trucks in a small community with few stoplights.

But most of all I remember her death traumatizing an already frayed population still struggling to make sense of the 9/11 attacks and unsure of how many of the victims from that day's horrible carnage were from the small towns in that part of Connecticut. 

I'm sure the 9/11 terrorist attacks shook the people of New Mexico. And it's likely that there were people here who lost loved ones or friends in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania on that day.

But it is hard to overstate how traumatized -- even terrorized -- people in the Tri-State area (New York, New Jersey and Connecticut) felt in the days after 9/11. It was not only about proximity but about common bonds. We -- my wife, then 2 year old son and I -- lived 80 miles from New York and, as I was to find out soon enough, about 10 miles from Ottilie Lundgren.

In the days following 9/11, people felt unhinged, vulnerable, knocked sideways. Most towns in that part of Connecticut are home to people who commute daily into "the city." And then there are the relatives of those who worked in or around the Twin Towers who for weeks after 9/11 were still trying to determine the status of their loved ones.

So when news hit that Ottilie Lundgren was the fifth victim of what appeared to be an act of biological terrorism, it shook something loose in a population already bewildered and struggling to regain its collective sanity.

I am not sure what mass hysteria looks like, but I think it may resemble those days in Connecticut.

In the weeks afterward local firefighters told me of responding to hundreds of homes and businesses where people were fearful that a white substance they had encountered was anthrax spores. It wasn't. One call even involved someone frightened by the white paste on a cinnamon bun, an official told me. It was sugar.

As embarrassing as it is to admit,  I wasn't immune to the histrionics. One day as I pulled some clothes out of the washer, I found a white paste in the pocket of my jeans. I froze. Is it anthrax, I wondered. I held the wet pants in my hands, debating whether to call the fire department. Finally after what seemed to be an eternity, I worked up the nerve to dismiss the notion that the white paste was something that could make me deathly ill. It's paper, I told myself, disintegrated in the water from the washer. After taking a deep breath, I resumed the laundry.

Now, some six years and nine months after Ottilie Lundgren's name momentarily burst beyond the small community where she lived and died, we hear that federal authorities may have identified the person responsible for the attacks.

Several media outlets reported Friday that Dr. Bruce Ivins, a highly respected microbiologist and Army scientist in Maryland, had committed suicide after learning that federal prosecutors were preparing to indict him on murder charges.

The news of Dr. Ivins' death appears to answer, even if tentatively, one of the biggest mysteries surrounding the anthrax deaths: who sent out anthrax-laced letters to U.S. senators and several media outlets that ultimately took the lives of a Floridian, two postal workers in Washington, a hospital worker in the Bronx and Ottilie Lundgren.

Ivins took to his grave the knowledge of whether he was indeed the culprit and, if so, whether he acted alone.

Doubts persist in some corners that the government has got the right guy, or can ever find the culprit, especially after so much time and the botched federal investigation of Steven Hatfill, another Army scientist and early suspect. Hatfill settled a lawsuit last month with the federal government after it agreed to pay him $2.8 million plus a 20-year annual annuity of $150,000.

All I know is that when I heard the news Friday, the memories of those harrowing days in Connecticut flooded back, reminding me of how I lived and breathed the Ottilie Lundgren case, how I went to her funeral, talked to her family and friends and to doctors and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officials on the hunt for the exact moment she came into contact with anthrax.

The news also forced me to revisit the sadness, fear and those moments of abject bewilderment as I tried but failed to comprehend the deaths of so many people killed on 9/11 and in the anthrax attacks -- and that one of them had lived so close.

I hope last week's news closes the chapter on the anthrax attacks. But I suspect it won't. Some people will always question the government's competence. Beyond that, though, people will ask but never learn to their satisfaction what makes a human being lace letters with anthrax and send them out to total strangers. It's something we probably will never know.

And that sums up the sad reality of life in the 21st century America: we have learned to live with the knowledge that we are vulnerable to attack at the same time that we have learned to soldier on.

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