This story is a joint project with ProPublica, PBS Frontline and McClatchy. The story will air on Frontline on Oct. 11. Check local listings.
WASHINGTON ? In March 2007, federal agents convened an elite group of outside experts to evaluate the science that had traced the anthrax in the letters to a single flask at an Army lab in Maryland.
Laboratory work had built the heart of the case against Bruce Ivins, an Army researcher who controlled the flask. Investigators had invented a new form of genetic fingerprinting for the case, testing anthrax collected from U.S. and foreign labs for mutations detected in the attack powder.
Out of more than 1,000 samples, only eight had tested positive for four mutations found in the deadly germs sent to Congress and the news media.
Even so, the outside scientists, known as the "Red Team," urged the FBI to do more basic research into how and when the mutations arose to make sure the tests were "sound" and the results unchallengeable.
Jenifer Smith, a senior manager at the FBI?s laboratory, shared the team?s concerns. Smith recalled that she was worried the FBI didn't have a full understanding of the mutations and might see a trial judge throw out the key evidence.
"The admissibility hearing would have been very difficult," Smith recalled in an interview. "They had some good science, but they also had some holes that would have been very difficult to fill."
The FBI rebuffed the Red Team?s suggestion, describing it as "an academic question with little probative value to the investigation."
Ivins committed suicide in July 2008 as prosecutors were preparing to charge him with capital murder in the cases of the five people killed by the anthrax mailings. Prosecutors announced that Ivins was the sole perpetrator and the parent material for the letters had come from his flask.
Three years later, that assertion remains an open question. A separate panel, from the National Academy of Sciences, found that prosecutors had overstated the certainty of their finding. Committee members said newly available testing methods could prove the FBI?s case much more definitively or lead to other potential suspects. But federal investigators, who closed the case more than a year ago, have expressed no interest in further scientific study of the evidence.
A re-examination of the anthrax case by PBS Frontline, McClatchy and ProPublica has raised new questions about some of the evidence against Ivins. The reporting uncovered previously undisclosed tensions between researchers who were trying to create a new form of forensic science and criminal investigators whose boss was under intense pressure from the president of the United States to crack a case that had few leads and hundreds of plausible suspects.
Paul Keim, an anthrax expert at Northern Arizona University who assisted in the FBI investigation, said he had qualms about whether the bureau?s groundbreaking laboratory method would have survived a rigorous legal review.
"I don?t think that it was ready for the courtroom at the time Bruce committed suicide," Keim said.
If Ivins hadn?t killed himself, he said, the FBI would have launched a "hard push" for additional data that showed the method was reliable. Such research, he said, also could have shown it wasn?t valid.
Keim, a member of the Red Team who attended the March 2007 meeting in Quantico, Va., said he didn't find out that the team's call for further research had been rejected until a year later, after Ivins had committed suicide and prosecutors were hastily organizing a news conference to describe the science.
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