California Doctor's Suicide Leaves Many Troubling Mysteries Unsolved

IRVINE, Calif. — On the morning of Feb. 28, 2000, a man in a black hood ran up to Patrick Riley in front of his office, shot him flush in the face and fled.

The bullet missed his brain, and Mr. Riley, a biotechnology entrepreneur, survived. But two days later, his business partner, a doctor named Larry C. Ford, killed himself with a shotgun after learning he was suspected of being the mastermind behind the shooting.

That is where the story probably would have ended — a lurid but ultimately local piece of intrigue played out in the sun-splashed Orange County sprawl — had it not been for the phone calls that within hours began coming in to the police. Dr. Ford, the callers said, had left something behind: a cache of weapons and anthrax.

The local elementary school was closed. Forty-two families were evacuated from their homes in Dr. Ford's affluent neighborhood. Then police and federal investigators began to unearth evidence that Larry Ford had another life — that he was not just a brilliant, if somewhat geeky, gynecologist who hoped to develop a device to protect women from AIDS.

Buried next to his swimming pool they found canisters containing machine guns and C-4 plastic explosives. In refrigerators at his home and office, next to the salad dressing and employee lunches, were 266 bottles and vials of pathogens — among them salmonella, cholera, botulism and typhoid. The deadly poison ricin was stored, with a blowgun and darts, in a plastic bag in the family room. A compartment under the floorboards held medical files on 83 women.

What the searchers did not find was anthrax, and the fear of what remained unfound, along with dozens of other questions, set off investigations that ranged from Beverly Hills to South Africa and back to the Nevada desert.

Since then, pieces of Dr. Ford's other life have begun to emerge. Taken together, they form a troubling and confusing picture — of a man with ties to racist, antigovernment groups in the United States who also developed a relationship with apartheid South Africa's secret biological and chemical weapons program, Project Coast.

For the most part, though, investigators say they are stymied, a long way from understanding what Dr. Ford was doing with his guns and his germs. In South Africa, documents from Project Coast were either destroyed or classified and put on CD-ROM's in a military vault. The fragments of Larry Ford's other life remain just that — frightening, tantalizing fragments.

Still, while no one is suggesting any link to the anthrax attacks of last fall, the questions Dr. Ford left behind nag deeper now, in the ambient anxiety of the post-Sept. 11 world.

Around Irvine, most people knew the 49-year-old Dr. Ford as a committed Mormon and a family man of harmless eccentricities, like wearing tennis shoes no matter what the occasion.

Trained as a gynecologist and microbiologist, he taught at the University of California at Los Angeles in the 1980's and later at the university's campus here. He wrote dozens of scholarly articles on infectious diseases and, with Mr. Riley, ran a biotechnology company, Biofem Inc.

After his suicide, officials began to wonder if Dr. Ford might have deliberately infected some patients. There were the hidden medical records, and a number of women had come forward to say they feared Dr. Ford was responsible for their mysterious illnesses. But in interviews, several former patients praised Dr. Ford and said they felt fine.

Epidemiologists examined the records and interviewed eight women, six of them ill. But they quickly closed the inquiry, saying they had found no public health threat and no pattern of symptoms suggesting deliberate infection.

One of the women, Shane Gregory, says she was a 27-year-old U.C.L.A. undergraduate when Dr. Ford became infatuated with her in 1981, buying her a car and renting her an apartment. She says she broke off the relationship in 1984 — and believes that was the same year Dr. Ford deliberately infected her, possibly in Los Angeles and possibly in London.

Dr. Larry C. Ford, co-owner of Biofem Pharmaceuticals

Irvine company, Biofem Inc., could capture annual sales worth some $400 million. Riley told investors. The profits, in turn, would fund Ford's true passion of the past 12 years, a secret Biofem project to develop a superantibiotic derived from what he called "Unidentified Amniotic Fluid Substance." He believed it was nature's way of protecting embryos from disease, the reason HIV-negative babies can be born to HIV-positive mothers. Ford hoped to synthesize the substance, saving countless lives, and earning him a Nobel Prize along the way.

But Ford had come to resent his decade-long partnership with Riley, who had final say in every Biofem decision and who had the physician bound to a contract so sweeping--giving him a 50 percent share of any idea or product Ford might conceive--that one lawyer likened it to indentured servitude. The agreement snuffed out Ford's attempts to make lucrative outside deals, and so, police and prosecutors have alleged, he decided Riley had to die.

Riley had just emerged from his blue Audi and was walking to Biofem's offices on a Monday morning when the gunman approached and fired. A chance turn of the businessman's head sent the bullet through his left cheek instead of his brain. "I have no doubt I would be dead if not for that," Riley said recently, a faint, nickel-sized scar marking the bullet's point of entry. After crumpling to the hot asphalt, he staggered back to his feet, blood gushing, pulled out his cell phone, and called the one person he knew could help--his friend and partner, Dr. Larry Ford. The doctor ran outside and applied pressure to the gaping hole in the side of the CEO's face as they awaited an ambulance.

Within three days, however, Riley's savior had become a prime suspect. After the first of several searches of his house--which turned up only documents--the 49-year-old gynecologist met for five hours with his lawyer, scribbling notes throughout the discussion. Then he returned home and retreated to his bedroom, where he carefully laid out a selection of firearms from his collection. He put a double-barreled shotgun in his mouth and pulled both triggers. His wife, Diane, heard the blast and the thump of his body on the floor and knew; she called the lawyer and the police without going up to see her husband. The authorities found beside him a rambling, nearly illegible five-page note--what he had been writing in the lawyer's office--protesting his innocence. He had six different antidepressants in his system.

The Biofem case might have made the back burner then and there had Irvine police detective Victor Ray quit when his department and the FBI warned him to. But Ray, a former sonar technician on navy submarines, a job that requires patience and persistence, would not give up. He steered the investigation to Ford's backyard, where men in Andromeda Strain suits would evacuate a neighborhood and haul away an arsenal of toxins, germs, plastic explosives, and guns. In the process they unearthed a trail that stretched all the way from the CIA to apartheid-era South Africa and Dr. Wouter Basson, the man who ran the country's clandestine bioweapons program.

The question still plaguing federal, state, and local investigators is a simple but urgent one: What was Ford planning to do with his germs and bioweapons expertise? The discovery of militia-movement and racist literature among Ford's papers has raised the possibility that he offered biological or chemical weapons to terrorist groups. Concerns have also mounted over a patented feature of his Inner Confidence suppository: the microencapsulation of beneficial bacteria. It turns out this architecture could double as an ideal delivery system for bioweapons, allowing otherwise fragile disease organisms to be seeded virtually anywhere. Ford, in essence, had patented the prescription for a perfect microscopic time bomb.

"That," says Ray, "scares the hell out of everyone."

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