The 2001 anthrax case is on the verge of being solved. The Justice Department is getting ready to make its case public on Wednesday. The FBI is basing a central part of the the investigation on the 2001 anthrax mailings against Bruce Ivins. Apparently anthrax spores were found on a laboratory flask to which the scientist had access.

Ivins worked at the Army's biodefense lab in Fort Detrick, Maryland. He commited suicide on July 29 by taking a Tylenol overdose

The families of victims of the 2001 anthrax attacks are also expected to meet with FBI investigators on Wednesday. They are definitely expecting some answers about the five people killed (including two D.C. area postal workers) and the 17 injured by a series of anthrax-laced letters sent in September 2001. At least seven anthrax-laced letters were sent at that time to lawmakers and the media from a mailbox near Princeton University in New Jersey.

Ivins borrowed freeze-drying equipment that allows scientists to quickly convert wet germ cultures into dry spores and this is how he might have been able to send letters containing deadly anthrax spores. Nevertheless the lyopholizer Ivins used can also be used by pharmaceutical companies and laboratories, as well as food processors, to freeze a liquid broth of bacteria and quickly transform it into a dry solid.

U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases was scientifically proven to be the source of the powder.

Dr. Ivins’s lawyer has asserted his innocence, and a number of colleagues at Fort Detrick have defended him, saying that his recent mental state and his suicide were the result of many months of questions and suspicion which came from the FBI, not a reflection of his guilt.