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Notes -
I think it was a process of elimination thing. As I say below, Anthrax is so deadly that it would be very, very difficult to put it in an envelope and mail it to someone without killing yourself. If you or I were to get our hands on some anthrax and start to mess around with it, it is extremely likely that we would die a horrible death within the next few weeks. The number of people who have the technical expertise to use anthrax as a murder weapon is very limited, and anthrax itself is extremely difficult to obtain. Only a very limited number of people have any access to it. Since there are only a limited number of people in the US who have the technical expertise to carry out this kind of attack, and it was trivial for investigators to compile a list of 60 or 70 names, the FBI started out, so to speak, in field goal range, if not exactly in the red zone. The problem was that when they looked into the lives of these people individually they couldn't find anything approaching solid evidence that any one of them committed the crimes. Ivins was the one they liked the best, and as such, the brunt of the investigation fell on him. I remember there was some suggestion that he was behind false information that was leaked suggesting that Iraq was behind the attacks, and the guy definitely seemed to have a widget loose. Either way, even if the case against Ivins contains a lot of eyewash, the FBI was confident enough with it to proceed with prosecution, and after his suicide it was easy to pin it on a dead man and say "case closed". I don't know that there are any other good candidates.
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