The New Nation - Internet Edition

AP, Washington

One of the biggest mysteries surrounding the anthrax scare of 2001 - why the anthrax-laced letters were dropped off at a mailbox in New Jersey - may be connected to a sorority chapter at Princeton University. Bruce Ivins' decades-long obsession with the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority could link the former Army biowarfare scientist to the four anthrax-laced letters, authorities said Monday.

Still, authorities acknowledge they cannot place Ivins in Princeton the day the anthrax was mailed. And the curious explanation connecting the scientist and a sorority is unlikely to satisfy his friends and former co-workers who question what motive the married father of two might have had for unleashing the attack.

Ivins, 62, killed himself last week as the Justice Department prepared to indict him on capital murder charges for the deaths of five people who were poisoned by the anthrax in the weeks following 9/11. His attorney maintains he would have been proven innocent were he still alive.

The mailbox just off the campus of Princeton University where the letters were mailed sits about 100 yards away from where the college's Kappa Kappa Gamma chapter stores its rush materials, initiation robes and other property.

Sorority members do not live there, and the Kappa chapter at Princeton does not provide a house for the women. Multiple U.S. officials told The Associated Press that Ivins was obsessed with Kappa Kappa Gamma, going back as far as his own college days at the University of Cincinnati when he apparently was rebuffed by a woman in the sorority. The officials all spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the case publicly.