The day before he tried to kill himself, Mark Whitacre told his groundkeeper to come late to work. Fortunately for Whitacre, Rusty Williams takes pride in being punctual. Arriving at the four-acre Whitacre estate in Moweaqua, Illinois, shortly after 7 a.m. on Aug. 9, Williams found his employer unconscious in his car in a garage filled with auto-exhaust fumes. Williams drove the car out of the garage and shook Whitacre awake. "I just thanked God when he coughed and started speaking," he recalls.
But the mystery remained last week even after Whitacre, 38, recovered in a Chicago hospital. Why would a corporate whistle blower, who for the past 2 1/2 years had carried hidden tape recorders and cooperated with the fbi in an investigation into price fixing at the giant Archer Daniels Midland Co., decide to take his own life? Whitacre was certainly under pressure. ADM lashed out at him after the executive surfaced as an fbi mole in June, accusing him of stealing at least $2.5 million from the company. Was the suicide attempt a sign that he was guilty? Or was it the despairing act of a fast-track executive who had been branded a traitor by colleagues, hounded by reporters, faced with anonymous threats and fired from his job two weeks earlier?
Whitacre says he was never a thief. In a letter to the Wall Street Journal just before his attempted suicide, Whitacre indicated that the $2.5 million the company said he took was, in fact, under-the-table payments ADM made routinely to favored employees. Whitacre is reported to have informed the Justice Department about the arrangement when he signed on as an informer. "Dig deep," he wrote the Journal. "It's there! They give it; then use it against you when you are their enemy."
Whitacre had also been dogged lately by suspicions that he may have lied about his education. When Millikin University in Decatur, Illinois, elected Whitacre a trustee in May, the school said he held a master's degree in business from Northwestern University's prestigious Kellogg School. In fact, Whitacre earned his M.B.A. last year through mail-order courses from Kensington University in Glendale, California. A Millikin spokesman said the information about Kellogg came from "Whitacre's office" at ADM headquarters in Decatur; that left open the possibility that the company, rather than Whitacre, had pumped up his resume.
But no one has ever challenged the extent of Whitacre's determination to succeed, which makes his casting as a whistle blower so unusual. Whitacre, say those who have worked with him, seemed happy and in a hurry. "He'd just swarm over a problem until it was solved," says Professor Gerald Combs of Cornell University, where Whitacre earned a Ph.D. in nutritional biochemistry in 1983. "He was like a saw running on 220 volts instead of 110. We used to tease him about how wired he was."