AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
London sun edwin meese gun12/30/2023 ![]() She describes Danny as flirting with her in a lighthearted way on the Thursday afternoon before his body was found. One of the last people to report seeing him alive was a waitress at a Pizza Hut, the one that shares a parking lot with the Sheraton Martinsburg. In fact, it turns out Danny did have a kind of Gatsby fixation, one that apparently persisted until the final hours of his life. I was left with a hazy impression of a Gatsbyesque horsey-set dabbler in the arcana of right-wing conspiracy theories. Good-looking, good-natured, golden-haired Danny looked less the ink-stained wretch most investigative reporters are than a Fitzgerald golden boy. Not many investigative reporters I knew raised thoroughbred Arabians in the heart of Virginia horse country. ![]() What I remember most about that evening was not so much the mysteries of Watergate as the mystery of Danny. I was doing a story about revisionist Watergate theories for The New Republic and someone had referred me to Danny as a guy who was pursuing the “Democratic trap” theory-the idea that shadowy figures in the intelligence community hostile to Richard Nixon actually set up the Nixon White House for the Watergate bust. Met him about a dozen years ago down in D.C. It’s traumatic, it’s a disease, it’s like going into the depths of insanity …. “Danny, this story isn’t fun, it’s no adventure. To see if I could find out, to my own satisfaction, the answer to the murder-or suicide question: Did Danny Casolaro die because he was, in some sense, too ruthless with himself? Or because someone got too ruthless with him? I’ve spent the past ten days immersing myself in Danny’s world, retracing his steps from the fragments and pieces of the puzzle he left behind in his notes, trying to reconstruct the vision of the Octopus that led him to meet his death here. Staring up at the cheap cottage-cheese-textured ceiling of the bathroom, perhaps the last sight Danny Casolaro saw. Which is why I’m sitting fully clothed in an empty bathtub in the motel room just across the hall from the one in which Danny died, here at the Sheraton Martinsburg (“where meetings and fitness are our business”). Which is why I had to go down to West Virginia. Still, when someone you’ve yelled at to be ruthless with himself is found dead with his wrists slashed, it makes you wonder if he took your words too much to heart. That’s what I’d meant when I raised my voice and enjoined him to be “ruthless” with himself: slash away the underbrush, so that whatever he had that was news would emerge. I’d had several phone conversations with Danny about his Octopus idea in the weeks before he died, and I’d been pretty skeptical: a lot of it sounded like a rehash of familiar conspiracy-theory connections. ![]() attorney general, Elliot Richardson, the ordinarily circumspect Brahmin, was calling for a federal investigation, and suggesting Danny “was deliberately murdered because he was so close to uncovering sinister elements in what he called ‘The Octopus.’” Was this another Silkwood case? Was Danny murdered because he was “The Man Who Knew Too Much,” as Time put it?īut at that point I wasn’t thinking murder. The friends were saying that Danny was hot on the trail of the long-sought Missing Link between the scandals that had been convulsing Washington-B.C.C.I., the October Surprise, and Iran-contra-and that he was killed to keep him quiet.Īnd it wasn’t just friends saying this: a former U.S. About the death threats and warnings he’d been getting in the final weeks before he was found, his wrists sliced open with an X-Acto-type blade in a bloody motel room bathtub. Friends and family were disputing the local coroner’s hasty preliminary verdict of suicide, a verdict issued before the locals learned about who Danny was and what kind of story he’d been looking into. I’d been feeling that way ever since the morning of August 13, when I was idly flipping through The Washington Post and froze at the headline: “WRITER PROBING INSLAW CASE FOUND DEAD- Freelancer Was in West Virginia to Meet Source, Friends Say.”įriends were saying more than that. Maybe I shouldn’t have been so harsh, shouldn’t have told him, “Danny, you’ve got to get ruthless with yourself.” I’d been thinking, Maybe I shouldn’t have yelled at him the last time we spoke. I was feeling pretty bad about Danny myself, for my own reasons. Five stunners ranging in age from twenty to forty, all dressed in black, all weeping copiously. One of the first stories I heard about Danny Casolaro’s funeral was the five blondes at the grave site.
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |