(and the reason his visit to carlsbad became public knowledge is one of my all time favorite stories, involving a local guy with a penchant for night golf using night-vision goggles & glo-in-the-dark balls who picked a really bad night to sneak onto the four seasons golf course.)

I believe that Ivins deeply supported many reactionary views (he himself doubtless would have thought of them as “conservative”) regarding what the Right calls “family values,” an ideology fixed in large part on the notion of supposed parents’ rights — among them the right to spank their kids or to restrict their kids’ access to public education about sex, contraception, sexual diversity, or anything else inimical to the conservative agenda. It’s hard to imagine anyone other than the subscribers of the newsletter of the American Family Association (which Ivins was for many years), or of the Family Rights Association, or readers of bloggers promoting these organizations’ issues putting that exact politically significant address on an envelope. The Greendale Baptist Academy case was on no one’s radar screen but theirs (with the possible exception of those groups whose business it is to know what’s on the radar screen of wingnut “family-values” groups).

It has the same level of cagy, hermetic, secretly socio-political self-reference that you see in one of his favorite pseudonyms, Jimmyflathead, an allusion to the Flathead Indian tribe, correctly known as the Salish, one of the few (if there even were any others) Native American tribes whole-heartedly and enthusiastically to welcome and convert to Catholicism, a distinction that earned them an entry in the Catholic Encyclopedia.

Ivins has a history of compulsively driving hundreds of miles to mail stalkerish “gifts” to women, so that they wouldn’t associate the gifts with him. He claimed on the web to have thought of himself as the single most knowledgeable person regarding KKG paraphernalia and rituals outside the sorority itself. He hid himself behind addresses with covertly sociopolitical references to his Catholicism. Now, the deadly anthrax mailings were mailed at a letterbox sixty yards from a KKG office filled with KKG paraphernalia, and the sender uses a return address that covertly references a story of interest primarily to those of Ivins’s religious and political sensibility. So I conclude that either he had a direct (though not necessarily unaccompanied) hand in the mailings, or someone very clever person who knew him extremely well hoped to frame him, or a coincidence of astonishing proportions occurred.

* Regardless of the office’s actual use, it is nevertheless the listed business office of KKG in Princeton, where mail to the Princeton chapter is delivered — KKG’s official address there, in short, an address doubtless frequented by its officials. Ivins might not know how it was used, only how it was listed. Or, if he knew, he might not care; the fact that it’s KKG’s listed business office might have served his purposes (assuming he had any).

* Ivins had a documented history of obsessive fascination with KKG paraphernalia, especially paraphernalia associated with its blindfolding rituals. On the KKG Talk Page on Wikipedia, he admitted to having burgled a KKG house to acquire their secret handbook. The fact that objects and papers, rather than living girls, occupied the Nassau St. address full time would arguably make it more, not less, attractive to him.

Regardless, I’m convinced that Ivins could not and therefore did NOT deposit (at least) the first envelopes in the 10 Nassau St. letterbox. But I’m surprised that no one so far has floated the possibility (which, I grant is EXTREMELY improbable, but surely possible [and, thus, according to Sherlock Holmes’s famous maxim, worth considering]) that Ivins passed the envelopes off somehow to a KKG member with business at or access to the 20 Nassau St. office, who then mailed them from the 10 Nassau St. letterbox, either because it was simply convenient for her after her business there or because he directed her to do so.

The existence of a co-conspirator might also explain the weirdness of his taking an unexplained “administrative leave” on the morning of Monday, the 17th. Perhaps he drove the package of letters part of the way to Princeton, handed it to his conspirator (she might have been in Washington on business, for instance) and returned in plenty of time to attend his afternoon meeting.

Were he to be entirely vindicated posthumously, his suicide would nevertheless be understandable. The kind of public humiliation attendant on the detailed and specific courtroom revelations of his desire to collect representations of blindfolded women — which caused him to rent his P.O. Box in the first place — would drive many people, i dare say, to desperation.

81 – thanks for the train info – does it give more time even, or are there lots of stops?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/…..8;pos=list

It should just stay away from the hard stuff, and direct its attention to the dark doings of mafia hit-men.

Huh. Maybe some FBI folks with intact integrity managed to intentionally let some of the non-conforming data get into the document dump, hoping that folks who are paying attention (including but not limited to us) would find it, and loudly call bullshit on this mess…? Since they themselves weren’t powerful enough to stop it…?

Kill Game: The Path Of Destruction In The Amerithrax Investigation