Between mixing batches of anthrax and obsessing over sorority girls, maniacal microbiologist Bruce Ivins worshiped the pioneering female astronauts of NASA.
Ivins, the deceased No. 1 suspect in the 2001 anthrax-letter attacks, gushed online like a schoolboy about his devotion to Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, and wondered whether she had ever been a sorority member.
“A few years ago, I made a comment about Sally Ride not being in a sorority, and I was told in the firmest of terms that I was completely wrong. I’ve been trying to find out ever since what she was in,” the Army biodefense scientist posted on an electronic bulletin board for college students in September 2006.
“Dr. Ride is a personal hero of mine whom I heard speak at Goucher College many years ago,” Ivins wrote using the pseudonym “Prunetacos.” “She was funny, down-to-earth, bright and a thoroughly delightful speaker.”
The doc then lamented that he didn’t have the nerve to write to Ride directly. He closed his message with the tribute “Reach for the Stars” to two female astronauts killed in the 1986 Challenger explosion, Christa McAuliffe and Judith Resnick, whom he noted was a sorority member.
Ivins, who died from a fatal painkiller overdose on July 29 just before feds could indict him on five murder charges, had an obsession with the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority, according to federal prosecutors.
As with Ride, Ivins, a career lab rat, was likely a shy secret admirer of a Kappa Kappa Gamma sister at the University of Cincinnati when he was an undergrad in the 1960s.
“He may have never told the woman he had a crush,” said a KKG sister and Cincinnati Class of 1968 alumna. Last summer, FBI agents interviewed her about recollections of Ivins.
“They said that he remembered me, but I don’t remember him,” she said. “I don’t think I was the one rebuffing him, because [Ivins] had told [the FBI] that I was nice to him.”
Meanwhile, a microbiologist who belonged to Kappa Kappa Gamma claimed Ivins stalked her for decades.
Nancy Haigwood and her former husband, Carl Scandella, also think Ivins may have wanted to get close to her when he moved in down the street from the couple in the Washington suburbs in the early 1980s.
Additional reporting by Chuck Bennett, Shari Logan and AP