By Anne Hull
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 10, 2008
On the morning of July 10, Jean C. Duley decided she had a phone call to make. She had agonized all night. Her counseling client, Bruce E. Ivins, had announced in a group therapy session the evening before that he was a suspect in the 2001 anthrax investigation and had a plan to kill his co-workers.
From her desk at Comprehensive Counseling Associates in Frederick, Duley called the Frederick Police Department to report Ivins's threats. The scientist was taken into custody that afternoon and placed in a psychiatric hospital. A day later, the FBI showed up at Duley's office for the first time.
"Everyone thinks I was complicit with the FBI," Duley said in an interview Friday. "The FBI didn't tell me anything."
After Ivins was released from the hospital two weeks later, Duley said, she was so frightened that she asked the FBI for protection. She said an agent basically told her that she was on her own.
"The agent said, 'We are going to be watching him, we can't be watching you,' " according to Duley. With no other alternative, she filed a petition for a restraining order on July 24, providing one of the first public documents that cited worries about Ivins's potential for violence. The scientist died July 29 in what was ruled a suicide.
Duley, 45, appeared exhausted and tearful Friday as she sat in the Towson, Md., office of her attorney, Kathleen Cahill, drinking 7-Eleven coffee, clutching tissue and telling her story for the first time. She would not discuss any aspect of her professional relationship with Ivins, citing patient confidentiality. Documents released by the FBI last week, in support of its case against Ivins in the deadly anthrax mailings of 2001, provide a timeline of his movements and the specific threats he made in Duley's therapy session.
Duley would discuss only the wrenching decision to override patient confidentiality and report Ivins to law enforcement, a move that brought her into a sprawling FBI investigation cloaked in secrecy and surveillance.
"I care about every single one of my clients," Duley said. "They are humans, no matter what they do. All I was trying to do was the right thing. I was just trying to do my job."
Duley is not a psychiatrist, a psychologist or even a social worker; in the highly stratified world of mental health, she is an addictions counselor who earns $20 an hour. She said she believed "100 percent" that Ivins was serious about his threats. Two days after she reported him to police, the FBI searched Ivins's house and seized, among other items, hundreds of rounds of ammunition, homemade body armor and a bulletproof vest, according to Justice Department documents.
Blond and slightly disheveled, a pack of Marlboro Golds in her purse, Duley said her job was the most important thing in her life and she lived for her clients. She described the cascading events that preceded and followed her court petition for a restraining order against the scientist.
After police took Ivins into custody, records show, he was brought to Frederick Memorial Hospital for evaluation and then to Sheppard Pratt, a psychiatric hospital in Baltimore. Duley said Ivins called from the hospital and left two voice mails on her work phone, at 4:25 a.m. and 4:28 a.m.
On July 23, Duley said, the FBI notified her that Ivins was being released from the hospital the next day. In a panic, she asked the FBI for protection, but the agent she spoke to suggested she petition for a restraining order. The next morning, on July 24, Duley and a lawyer went to the county courthouse in Fredrick to fill out a peace order petition.
Duley said she was trembling as she sat on a bench outside the clerk's office completing the form. In hastily scribbled handwriting, Duley wrote, "Client has a history dating to his graduate days of homicidal threats, actions, plans, threats & actions towards therapist." Duley cited another psychiatrist who called Ivins "homicidal, sociopathic, with clear intentions."
She said she asked her attorney if the hearing could be held in closed chambers. "Believe it or not, even with all this, I was still trying to protect Bruce's anonymity," Duley said.
Instead, it was held in open court amid mundane hearings involving landlord-tenant disputes and other civil matters. Duley recounted Ivins's threatening behavior for the Maryland District Court judge.
"He was going to go out in a blaze of glory that he was going to take everybody out with him," Duley testified. "He is a revenge killer. When he feels he has been slighted, and especially towards women, he plots and actually tries to carry out revenge killings."
Duley then described the two messages that Ivins left from the hospital on her work telephone, the first "ranting, blaming me for having done this to him." The second message was more frightening: "He very calmly thanked me for ruining his life and letting the FBI now be able to prosecute him for the murders, and it was all my fault," she said.
The judge asked Duley if she had anything else to say. "I'm scared to death," she responded. The order was signed. Duley said she stayed burrowed in her house in rural Maryland and slept on the couch, where she could hear any noises. "Every time the dogs barked, I jumped," she said.
Ivins was released from Sheppard Pratt later on July 24, but for reasons that are unclear, the peace order was not served. The FBI documents based on surveillance of Ivins said he visited a public library in Frederick that evening, where he searched a Web site dedicated to the anthrax investigation and checked various e-mail accounts.
Two nights later, he was found unconscious in his home and was declared dead July 29 from an overdose of acetaminophen.
The backlash of grief and anger over Ivins's death was swift among co-workers and former colleagues at the high-security biodefense lab where he worked at Fort Detrick, the Army base in Frederick. In interviews, they said the 62-year-old scientist had been persecuted to the point of disintegration by an overzealous FBI that still had no solid evidence linking him to the anthrax mailings, which killed five people. They described a much-loved, bright, playfully mischievous man who devoted his life to science.
When Duley's restraining order against Ivins surfaced a few days after his death, the counselor left her home and went into hiding. In the breathless rush of media coverage, her life was scoured for details. News reports described her multiple DUI arrests and problems with addiction, including her current probation for her most recent DUI arrest in 2007.
"They made me out to sound like a white-trash biker druggie," Duley said.
Duley spent her early childhood in Southeast Asia, where her father was a diplomat in several countries during the Vietnam War. The family returned to Chevy Chase, and Duley attended Walt Whitman High School before dropping out when she began using drugs. She earned her GED in 1984 and worked as a warranty manager at a car dealership, but a decade of her life was lost to alcohol and drugs, mostly cocaine.
She married, had a son in 1993 and decided to get sober by moving into a halfway house in Montgomery County for 18 months. She would marry and divorce again, and relapse and recover. In 2000, she began classes at Frederick Community College and studied to become an addictions counselor.
Duley said her house was always a crash pad for people trying to get sober or straighten out their lives, "every stray there was," which is why she chose to work with people with addictions.
But she was not free herself. In 2007, the same year she graduated from Hood College with a four-year degree in social work, she was charged with DUI again and sentenced to two years of probation.
In January, Duley was hired by Comprehensive Counseling Associates in Frederick to launch a program that used the drug suboxone to treat people addicted to painkillers. She would not describe her interaction with Ivins, but during the restraining-order hearing she said she saw him once a week for group therapy and every other week on an individual basis.
Ivins was abusing vodka, sleeping pills and anti-anxiety medication, according to a fellow scientist who is in recovery from addiction. The scientist told a Washington Post reporter that he was in contact with Ivins through Ivins's two stints in psychiatric and detox facilities this spring.
Ivins's psychiatric problems and homicidal threats predated Duley, according to a counselor who saw Ivins for four or five sessions in 2000 at the same Frederick clinic. In an interview with The Post last week, the counselor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that the scientist was obsessed with a young woman and had "mixed poison" that he brought when he went to watch her play a soccer game. The counselor contacted the Frederick police but was told that unless Ivins had provided the full name of his intended victim, there was little that could be done.
The psychiatrist who owns Comprehensive Counseling Associates, Allan Levy, refused to comment on the case, according to his attorney, J. Eric Rhoades.
Duley said she no longer works at the clinic; she would not discuss her reasons for leaving.
She has a new counseling job lined up and will start when she is able. She has kept busy spending time with family and going to 12-step meetings.
Duley said she thought about attending Ivins's memorial service last week at Fort Detrick. "It's complicated," she said, her eyes filling with tears. But she stayed away.
Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.
View all comments that have been posted about this article.