The man accused of mailing Anthrax in 2001 committed suicide last week as investigators discussed a plea bargain.

From the Washington Post:

Investigators were so certain about the connection that they had scheduled a meeting for last Tuesday with Ivins’s attorneys to discuss a plea bargain that would have sent the scientist to prison for life but spared him a death sentence, according to sources briefed on the government’s case. But barely two hours before the meeting was to occur, Ivins died of an overdose of Tylenol that he had ingested over the weekend, the sources added. The death was ruled a suicide.

Ivins, 62, a prominent researcher of inhaled anthrax bacteria who had personally tested the lethal powder as part of the anthrax investigation, emerged in a news report yesterday as the latest focus of the seven-year search for a culprit. Five people were killed in the attacks and 17 others became ill.

But no sooner had the news broken than Paul F. Kemp, a Bethesda attorney who has represented Ivins for more than a year, declared that the FBI had the wrong man — again. The bureau had spent years attempting to prove that Steven J. Hatfill, a researcher at the same laboratory, had committed the anthrax attacks before agreeing last month to a $5.8 million out-of-court settlement of his privacy lawsuit.

“We assert his innocence in these killings, and would have established that at trial,” Kemp said in a statement yesterday.