Annals Of Unsolved Crimes

The Abduction of JonBenet Ramsey

2010-10-15T13:29:00.000-07:00

JonBenet Ramsey, a six year old celebrity in the world of child beauty pageants, was reported missing from her home in Boulder, Colorado on the morning of December 26, 1996. A hand-written ransom note claimed that the child had been abducted by a “group” representing a “foreign faction”and demanded $118,000– the exact size of her father’s bonus– be delivered to the kidnappers. But at 1:05pm that day, before the ransom money could be paid, John Ramsey found his daughter’s body covered in a white blanket in the "wine cellar" room in the basement . Her wrists had been tied above her head, her mouth covered by duct tape, and her neck had been garroted by a nylon cord. The advanced state of rigor mortis fixed the time of death between 10:00 p.m. on December 25, when her father had carried her to her bedroom, and 6:00 a.m. on December 26. The autopsy further determined that she was killed by strangulation and skull-fracturing blow to the head.  There were also indications that she had been sexually assaulted.
The three sheets of paper used in the ransom note, as well as the pen with which it was written, came from a table near the kitchen in the Ramsey home. So someone had taken the time to write a lengthily letter. What could not be determined by the forensic evidence was whether the perpetrator wrote it before or after strangling JonBenet. If the latter was the case, the note was likely meant to divert and confuse the police.
In many ways, the crime was reminiscent of the 1932 Lindbergh kidnapping which, like this tragedy, provoked a media frenzy. In both case, a high-profile child disappeared from its bed while the parents were at home. And in both cases there was no unambiguous signs of a forced entry, no identifiable fingerprints, and no creditable witnesses. The only evidence of a kidnapping in both cases was a hand-written ransom note. And in both cases the child was later found dead. But Lindbergh was a national hero (at least in 1932), and the local police accepted at face value what he had reported.
Unlike the Lindbergh case, however, the local police in of the JonBenet case fixed their attention on the possibility that the child's death had resulted from domestic violence that been  disguised as a kidnapping. One reason was that they found scant evidence of an intruder. To be sure, there was a footprint in the dust made by a hiking boot, a palm print on the door of the wine cellar, and a pubic hair in the blanket in which JonBenet was wrapped that could not be matched to any family member. But these possible clues also could have been left in the house and blanket at an earlier time or even resulted from the accidental contamination of the crime scene (which was not initially sealed off).
The investigators were also unable to find an escape route. There was an opened basement window but there were no footprints in the snow outside the window. So the investigation focused on the activities of the three family members who were at home– JonBenet’s father John, her mother Patsy, and her brother Burke. Despite an intensive effort, however, the police were unable to match the handwriting samples of any family member to the ransom note, or find any other evidence implicating them. Meanwhile, the family hired lawyers to protect their interests and sue the media that was reporting police "leaks." So the investigation ground to a halt.
In took nearly 12 years, for the district attorney’s office to officially exonerate the family members on the basis of “new scientific evidence.” The district attorney explained: “The match of Male DNA on two separate items of clothing worn by the victim at the time of the murder makes it clear to us that an unknown male handled these items.”   Even though the investigation officially resumed, the Boulder police chief observed, “Some cases never get solved.”

The theories of case can be found here,

The Lindbergh Kidnapping

2010-10-06T08:06:00.000-07:00

The kidnapping of aviator Charles A. Lindbergh’s toddler namesake on March 1, 1932 swept international headlines. Lindbergh had become world famous at the age of 25 by flying solo, from New York to Paris on May 21, 1927. The feat inspired such a frenzy that when he landed, a French crowd estimated at 150,000 spectators at Le Bourget Airport hoisted him above their heads for nearly half an hour, followed by ticket-tape parades in America, presidential commendations, and almost continuous press acclaim. He then married in fairy-tale fashion Ann Morrow, a stunning fellow aviator and daughter of a powerful banker at J.P Morgan, and became a spokesman for the aviation industry. So when his only child was kidnapped from his New Jersey home, it became, as H.L. Mencken famously put it, "the biggest story since the Resurrection.”
Because of his apotheosis into a celebrity hero, Lindbergh acted as if he was above the law when local police attempted to investigate the reported kidnapping. When they arrived at his home that rainy night, he prohibiting them from interviewing the household staff. Instead, carrying a Springfield rifle, he led them to three sections of a makeshift ladder near the house, which he said was used by the kidnapper to gain entrance to the second floor nursery room in which 20-month-old Charles Lindbergh, Jr. was in his crib. In the nursery, he had found a poorly scribbled ransom note demanding “25000$ in 20$ bills 15000$ in 10$ bills and 10000$ in 5$ bills. Police fingerprint experts arrived at midnight and found no fingerprints whatsoever in the nursery or on the note, but about 400 partial prints on the ladder. That was the only evidence as to what happened to the child.
As speculation grew in law enforcement circles that some powerful criminal organization or a foreign government had stolen “the Eaglet,” as the baby was called in the press, President Herbert Hoover, who vowed to "move Heaven and Earth" to recover the child, ordered the new Bureau of Investigation (which would become the FBI) to enter the case. Enter J. Edgar Hoover, the bureau’s publicity-savvy chief, who instantly recognized the case’s potential for expanding his bureau into a national police agency (even though Lindbergh did not cooperate with his Bureau agents).
Instead, Lindbergh, after consulting William “Wild Bill” Donovan (who would go on to head the Office of Strategic Services), decided to take matters into his own hands by seeking out intermediaries with underworld connections, and providing them with the only real secret information in the case, the precise contents of the ransom note. These intermediaries gave it to the New York Daily News, which further damaged the police and FBI investigation, since con men who were not the kidnappers now had the necessary information to write their own make bogus requests for money, especially after Lindbergh placed newspaper ads offering to pay the ransom. On April 1, a purported kidnapper answered the ad, claiming that he would return the Eaglet for $100,000. Lindbergh packaged $50,000 in gold certificates and, following instructions, went to St. Raymond's Cemetery where he gave the money to a man called “John.” “John” then handed Lindbergh a note saying his son was in good health, cared for by two women, on a boat called "The Nelly" docked at Martha’s Vineyard. Lindbergh again did not wait for the police. He overflew to the docks in his private plane but found no sign of his son– nor the boat (which, it turned out, did not exist.)
Events took an even more tragic turn the next month when the corpse of a decomposed child was found in the woods about four and a half miles from the Lindbergh home. Even though both hands and left leg were missing, Lindbergh identified the remains from the toes on the right foot. In response to the public outrage, Congress rushed through what became known as the Lindbergh Law, making kidnapping a federal offense.
Meanwhile, unable to find any credible evidence of a kidnapping gang, police began focusing on the possibility of an inside job. For one thing, Lindbergh had told them that the nursery had been searched by the nurse, his wife, and himself after the kidnapping but before the arrival of the police, yet none of their fingerprints– or any fingerprints-- had been found in the room. This absence suggested that the room had been wiped clean by someone on the inside. Investigator also had the theory–at least at this point– that the kidnapper might have escaped through the house since their tests showed it would be extremely difficult to descend the ladder, which had irregularly spaced rungs, carrying a 30 pound child . And the fact that the kidnapper not only knew the child’s whereabouts but placed his ladder under an unlocked window raise the possibility he had inside information. One employee of interest was Violet Sharp, a pretty 28 serving maid who told contradictory stories about here where she was on the night of the kidnapping. After the police announced their intentions to take her to police headquarters for questioning in June 1932, she was found dead in the Lindbergh home. The cause was cyanide poisoning and it was deemed an apparent suicide.
More than two years passed without a break in the case then in September 1934, police found about one-third of the gold certificates that Lindbergh had paid in ransom in the graveyard in the Bronx home of Bruno Richard Hauptmann, a thirty-four-year-old carpenter with a criminal record in his native Germany. Hauptmann denied any knowledge of the kidnapping, claimed that the gold certificates had been left with him by his former business partner, Isidor Fisch, who had died after returning to German. Hauptmann was arrested and charged with kidnapping and murder.
At the trial, the prosecutor, New Jersey’s powerful Attorney General David Wilentz, presented an impressive chain of evidence tying Hauptmann to the plot in which Lindbergh had been duped into paying $50,000 for bogus information. In addition, Hauptmann had no ironclad alibi for the night of the kidnapping. But there was scant evidence placing him anywhere near the scene of the crime. One witness who said he saw someone looking like Hauptmann driving in the area turned out to be legally blind. The only physical evidence was the ladder used in the kidnapping itself. The state’s expert witness rendered an opinion based on his examination of a floor board taken from Hauptmann’s former attic (and found at a late date after earlier searches had missed it) was that it was consistent with one strut of wood in the ladder. But “consistent” merely means it could have been that a piece of wood could have come from the attic. Such evidence would have been more cogent if any of the 400 prints on the ladder matched those of Hauptmann, but none did, Nor did the 4 prints on the ransom note match Hauptmann’s. Nevertheless, Hauptmann was convicted and sentenced to death. New Jersey Governor Harold Hoffman offered to commute his death sentence if Hauptmann would confessed. But instead he maintained he was innocent and he was electrocuted on April 3, 1936.
The four year media circus was over, but, as in the case of the Kennedy assassination, independent researchers and buffs continue to search for new evidence. For example, they have attempted to show the wood used to make the ladder was thicker than Hauptmann’s attic floor, and thereby controverts the crucial expert testimony, and that the original ransom note was written on table that Hauptmann could not have used (which would indicate that more than one person was involved.)
To be sure, ironclad evidence was presented in court that Hauptmann had received part of Lindbergh’s ransom money. But most of the $50,000 was never found. Aside from the $15,000 found in Hauptmann’s home, another $3,000 was later traced to a notorious forger named Jacob Novitsky. Novitsky, who was arrested for another crime, reportedly told cell mates he had been involved in the extortion plot but not the kidnapping. According to contemporary handwriting analysts, the handwriting in note in this ransom plot did not necessarily match that of the original note, it is possible that Hauptmann (and others) in the extortion plot were mere capitalizing on Lindbergh’s well-publicized misfortune. So, seven decades, the Lindbergh case remains unresolved.

The theories of this case can be found here.

Madoff's Missing Money

2010-09-28T18:51:00.000-07:00

The black hole into which Bernie Madoff pumped $7.9 billion of other people’s grew even darker with the death of Jeffry Picower and Stanley Chais, the only two available witnesses to the laundering of these mystery funds. Both men had been charged in separate fraud suits by the SEC aimed at uncovering the myriad offshore and onshore accounts into which this $7.9 had been ultimately channeled into what the bankruptcy trustee describes as “ a labyrinth of interrelated international funds, institutions, and entities of almost unparalleled complexity and breadth.” It was one of the greatest disappearance act in financial history but neither case will ever come to trial. Picower died in presumed swimming pool accident on October 25, 2009 in Florida and Chais died of a rare blood disease on September 26, 2010.

Both men had been involved with Madoff since well before he began his Ponzi scheme. And they both enjoyed special access to Madoff’s operation. According to the SEC complaint, Picower was advised in advance of Madoff’s monthly profit “targets,” or the amounts with which Madoff planned to pad Picower’s accounts, and, through this knowledge, he or his assistant could request higher or lower “profits” for various accounts. Moreover, to amplify Picower’s fictional profits to accommodate this siphoning off, Madoff extended him so much fictional credit that his accounts had , according to the bankruptcy trustee’s analysis, a “negative net cash balance of approximately $6 billion at the time of Madoff’s arrest.” Picower collaborated in his spectacular, if fictitious, profits by faxing Madoff back-dated letters to support fabricated trades. In some of the faked trades, Picower’s reported profits ran as high as 550% . As a result, the Picower was able to withdraw over $2.4 billion just between 2002 and 2008.
Like Picower, Chais had a close working relation with Madoff (so close that his name came up first on Madoff’s office speed dial.) According to the SEC complaint, Chais withdrew $1.15 billion from 60 accounts for himself, family members, corporations in which he held interests, funds into which he consolidated his clients, and other entities. Madoff enabled him to make such massive withdrawals by giving him inexplicably high phantom profits, with rates of returns in some accounts in excess of 300% a year.
According to the reckoning of the bankruptcy trustee, Picower and Chais together withdrew a total of $7.9 billion between 1995 and 2008 from the phantom profits that Madoff allocated to them. Why were such staggering notional profits systematically credited to the Picower and Chais accounts and then systematically and purposefully siphoned out of these accounts? Were Picower and Chais following instructions in re-depositing the billions that they withdrew? All Ponzi schemes need an exit strategy. Unfortunately, with the death of Picower and Chais, we may never unravel the secret of where that money ended up.
The theories of the crime can be found here.

Assassination in Beirut

2010-09-21T07:17:00.000-07:00

On 12:56 p.m on Valentine's Day 2005, Rafik Hariri, the former Prime Minister of Lebanon, was blown up, along with most of his armored convoy, in front of the Hotel St. Georges in Beirut. The bomb had been packed into a white Mitsubishi van that had been moved into position by a suicide driver just one minute and fifty seconds before Hariri's six-car convoy arrived. The powerful explosion tore a 7 foot deep crater into the street and killed twenty-three people.
The bombing caused an international uproar that has yet to be resolved--and the aftermath of the murders and the five-year quest to discover the culprits and bring them to justice is a sobering tale of the difficulty, if not impossibility, of dealing with state-sponsored terrorism when the concerned states, in this case Syria and Iran (via the military wing of Hezbollah it sponsors) who have the means to manipulate the evidence. A un organized special tribunal on Lebanon has announced it will indictments in 2010, even though Hezbollah has warned that they could set off a civil war. So the legal process is hostage of the political realities of Lebanon.
The sophisticated technology used in the bomb and surveillance of his convoy suggested that it might involve the intelligence services of one or more states. Because Syria had extensive military and intelligence presence in Lebanon,, the Lebanese government turned to the UN for help. The UN Security Council appointed Detlev Mehlis, a German judge renowned for his pursuit of terrorist bombings, to head its investigation.
On the surface, a number of clues pointed to a Jihadist suicide bomber. Similar Mitsubishi vans had been used in a spate of other Beirut bombings blamed on Islam terrorists. Elements in the bomb traced back military explosives used by Al-Qaeda of Iraq. And a conveniently video tape sent to Al Jazeera television showed a lone suicide bomber named Abu Addas claiming that he acted on behalf of unknown Jihadist group.
But the crack UN investigative team, which included forensic experts in explosives, DNA, and telecommunications from 10 countries, found convincing evidence that the assassination was a state-sponsored operation cleverly disguised with decoys, planted evidence and false flag recruitments as the work of Islam Jihadists. The Mitsubishi van had been stolen in Japan, shipped via the port of Dubai to the Syrian- controlled Bekka Valley where it was modified to carry the bomb, and then, only days before the assassination, was driven over a military-controlled highway to Beirut.
One participant in the planning if the attack, who subsequently confessed to his role, told investigators that the putative suicidist, Abu Addas, was a mere decoy who had been induced to go to Syria, make the bogus video, and then was killed. He further alleged that the actual van driver had been recruited under a false flag in Iraq, so presumably if he defected or capture he would wrong identify his recruiters as Jihadists. He also said the "special explosives" in the TNT had been intentionally planted there to mislead investigators in the direction of Iraq.
Meanwhile, the UN team uncovered evidence that the actual conspirators had resources and capabilities, including wire-tapping Hariri's phones, that pointed to an intelligence services. Its telecommunications analysts determined that eight new telephone numbers and 10 mobile telephones had been used, as well as the wire-tapping, to follow Hariri's movements with split-second precision and move the van into place. In addition, a former Syrian intelligence agent told them that he had driven a Syrian military officer on a reconnaissance mission past the St. George Hotel on the day before the bombing and had been told that four Lebanese generals, in collaboration with General Rustam Ghazali, the head of Syrian intelligence in Lebanon, had provided "money, telephones, cars, walkie-talkies, pagers, weapons, and ID cards" for the operation. Judge Mehlis, concluded "there is probable cause to believe that the decision to assassinate former Prime Minister, Rafik Hariri, could not have been taken without the approval of top-ranked Syrian security official and could not have been further organized without the collusion of their counterparts in the Lebanese security services." And he had the four Lebanese generals arrested.
When he moved to question Syrian officials, including intelligence chief,Assef Shawkat (who is the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's brother-in law), the Syrians "stonewalled" the investigation, and protested the direction of Judge Mehlis' inquest. In January 2006, the Security Council replaced Judge Mehlis with Serge Brammertz, a 43 year old Belgian lawyer who had served as deputy prosecutor at the International Criminal Court in The Hague.
Mr. Brammertz focused the investigation on the political context of the murder but made so little progress in advancing the criminal case that when he was replaced in 2008 by Daniel Bellemare, Canada's assistant deputy attorney general, the charges against the four imprisoned Lebanese generals was dropped because of the "complete absence of reliable proof against them."
The UN investigation, under pressure from Syria and its allies, also turned in a new direction: Hezbollah, the Shiite party backed by Iran. By this time, Lebanese investigators, re-examining 2005 cell phone records, had uncovered a network of about 20 mobile phones that had been all activated just a few weeks before the attack and then silenced just after the attack. This so-called second ring of phone had been calling the same phone numbers as the eight phones that actually coordinated the attack.
According to a report in Der Spiegel, the investigators then traced the second ring of phones back to a command post of Hezbollah's military wing under the notorious Imad Mughniyeh (who had been responsible for other spectacular bombing attacks, including the US Embassy. Unfortunately, before the cell phone evidence could be further unraveled, the Lebanese chief investigator working on this complex network was killed in Beirut in 2009 and Mughniyeh, who might otherwise might have been called as a witness, was himself was assassinated. But finally, this April UN investigators summoned 12 Hezbollah members and close supporters for questioning, spurring rumors that the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL), which the UN set up in March 2008, was on the verge of finally issuing indictments.
In Lebanon, a country with a frozen but not ended civil war, judicial facts gave way to political interests.. Hezbollah's powerful chief Hassan Nasrallah said ominously that Hezbollah would not stand by idly if its members are accused of involvement in the assassination, denouncing what he called attempts to "politicize" the Tribunal, as if political consideration could be omitted from political crime. He then moved to discredit the UN tribunal by saying that its investigators come from “intelligence services closely linked to the Israeli Mossad,” and demanded the establishment of a Lebanese committee to investigate “false witnesses.” In September 2010, he went further, claiming that Hezbollah had “evidence” that Israel was behind the assassination. Meanwhile, Syria, which retained the military means to dominate Lebanon, also claimed to be the victim of planted evidence. Hariri's son, Saad Hariri, who became Lebanon’s premier in 2008, had accused Syria’s leaders of assassinating his father on the basis of the massive evidence uncovered in the UN investigation. But now, after a meeting Syrian President Bashar Assad, suddenly reversed his position, in September 2010, saying that he had been wrong to blame Syria for the assassination.
The half-decade "wait" may turn out to be just the prelude, if the agents of Syria and/or Iran are named in this act of terrorism. Since Hezbollah and Syria possess the power to destroy Lebanon, any such Tribunal, no matter how impressive the evidence, will most likely be impeached and, as Hezbollah has already proposed, the blame will be shifted to their convenient Bete Noire: Israel.

The theories of the case can be found here.

The Zodiac Murders

2010-08-10T11:11:00.001-07:00

Ever since Jack The Ripper stalked London, serial killer have held almost irresistible attraction for the media. The advantage of a serial murderer for circulation is that each new victim compounds public fear that they themselves may be in danger. The more bizarre the killings the greater the fear– and interest. The relationship between the media and the serial murderer can be symbiotic: The relentless coverage of such crimes renders the killer a public persona he might not otherwise have– the name "Jack The Ripper," after all, was a coinage of the British press– while providing the media with circulation it might not other have. Consider, the case of "The Zodiac," which engendered thousands of news stories, television investigation, and two movies.
The confirmed attacks took place in Northern California between 1968 and 1969 . The first victims were two teenage high school students, Betty Lou Jensen and David Faraday on a secluded lover’s lane in the town of Benicia. At about 11pm on December 20, 1968 they were found shot to death. There was no apparent motive for the killing, no clues. About a half-year later, on July 4th 1969, two other youths, Michael Renault Mageau, 19, and Darlene Elizabeth Ferrin, 22 were attacked in the parking lot of a park in Vallejo, California. Ferrin was shot to death but Mageau was only wounded,
Both seemed to be isolated cases until August 1, 1969.. Then the killer himself linked the two attacks in letters sent to the Vallejo Times-Herald, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the San Francisco Examiner. Each letter contained one-third of a 408-symbol cryptogram, which, the writer tauntingly (and falsely) claimed, revealed his identity. He not only invited these newspapers to investigate his murders but warned that unless each paper printed his letter on their front page he would shoot "a dozen people over the weekend." The Chronicle immediately published its third of the cryptogram, and there were no murders that weekend.
The next letter received by the San Francisco Examiner provided non-public details about the two attacks. It was signed "The Zodiac," which gave the media a vivid name for their headlines.
In his next attack on September 27, 1969, the killer wore a Zodiac costume, consisting of a black hood, clip-on sunglasses, and a bib with the cross-hair Zodiac symbol in the letters. With a gun in one hand and pieces of a clothesline in the other, he attacked Bryan Hartnell and Cecelia Shepard near Lake Berryessa in Napa County. After ordering Shepard to tie up Hartnell, he stabbed them both repeatedly. Leaving them in a pool of blood, he then drew his Zodiac symbol on Hartnell's car door. Although Shepard died , Hartnell survived to tell the story,
The final confirmed murder was in San Francisco on October 11th, The victim was taxi driver Paul Lee Stine. According to three teen witnesses, the passenger shot Stine and then calmly cut off part of his victim's bloodstained shirt, and escaped .
Apparently he committed this murder to get incriminating evidence. He added bloody swatches from Stine's shirt to his next round of letters to newspapers. He then demanded that a renowned defense lawyer, either F. Lee Bailey or Melvin Belli, await his call on the Jim Dunbar television show. Belli came on the show and in front of a television audience arranged to meet the call-in claiming to be the Zodiac in Daly City. The caller did not show up but Belli received in the mail another swatch from Stine's shirt with a letter asking for his professional help. That was the last Belli heard from him.
Even after the murders stopped in 1970, the journalistic fascination with the case lingered on. Letters of unknown provenance continued to be received by newspaper. Some contained ciphers, that though they could not be deciphered, made good news stories. And since the Zodiac had taken credit for no less than 37 murders. reporters mined the police cold case files for similar killings. This search yielded many reports about other intriguing murders and disappearances that could have been done by the Zodiac, but no forensic evidence was found actually linking them. Even when DNA analysis became readily available in the 1990s, investigators were unable to match the DNA found in the saliva on the stamps of any of the letters to any crime scene or suspect. Nor was any murder weapon ever found. So the Zodiac murders remain unsolved.

Theories of the case can be found here.

Did Sam Sheppard Murder His Wife?

2010-07-15T13:12:00.000-07:00

In an investigation of the murder wife, suspicion commonly falls on the husband. If he has no verifiable alibi, and there are no witnesses, it often deemed a domestic homicide. Since a husband living at home has both opportunity and a presumed motive in terminating the marriage, it is not difficult to build a convincing case against him . Consider the celebrated case of Dr. Samuel Holmes Sheppard, a husband who was both convicted and then exonerated for the murder his wife.
At 6 am on July 4th in 1965, police in the Cleveland suburb of Bayview, Ohio, were summoned to home of Dr. Sheppard, one of Cleveland most prominent orthopedic doctors. When they arrived, they Sheppard’s wife Marilyn was dead in the upstairs bedroom. Her half-naked body had been badly beaten savagely and her face slashed so many times she was barely recognizable. The entire room, including the walls, floor and closet doors had been splattered with blood. No murder weapon was found at the scene but downstairs there were signs of an apparent robbery. Dr. Shepard's medical bag had been overturned and its contents was strewn on the floor, sports trophies were smashed, and the drawers of Sheppard's desk had been pulled opened as if someone was searching them. Yet, according to Dr. Shepard, nothing was missing. The time of Marilyn’s death was established as approximately 4:30 am. Asked to account for his movements, Shepard said that after a dinner party that night he fell asleep on a day bed in the den downstairs. He was awoken by her scream, and rushing upstairs, saw some unknown person. When he got to her bedroom, he was then knocked out from behind. When he regained consciousness, still woozy, he determined Marilyn was dead by testing her pulse, then heard someone leaving by the back door. He ran after him, pursing him along the Lake Erie shore which fronted their house. . He caught up with and grappled with a "bushy-haired" person, but he was again knocked out. Police almost immediately doubted his story because there were no signs of forced entry. Instead, as was standard operating procedure, they assumed it was a domestic homicide and made little more than a perfunctory effort to recover fingerprints, blood samples, hairs, and fiber evidence. There was not need to collect such evidence if their domestic homicide theory was correct, since it would serve no purpose other than to prove that that Sam and Marilyn Sheppard shared the home. Indeed, police at the scene were so convinced that this was a domestic homicide that detectives dispatched to the hospital to question Shepard to get a full confession. One detective, playing the "bad cop," told him:"I don’t know about my partner, but I think you killed your wife." Despite such tactics, Shepard steadfastly insisted he was innocent and was himself a victim of the same assailant who murdered his wife.
Nevertheless, on July 29, 1954, he was arrested for the murder of his wife.
The trial, which began in October 1954, became a media circus. Few trials in American history, . At least up until the O.J Simpson case in 1994, generated as much lurid coverage. The prosecution spent weeks bringing out the erotic details of Sheppard’s three year sexual tryst with Susan Hayes, a nurse at his hospital, to establish him as a man who would betray his wife. His defense lawyers focused on gory crime scene evidence. They produced expert witnesses who testified that Marilyn’s broken teeth indicated that she had bitten her attacker in the struggle and that since Sheppard had no open wounds. . They produced a report by one of America’s most eminent neurosurgeons, Dr. Charles Elkin, who examined Sheppard after the murder, and found that he had suffered a cervical concussion, nerve injury, and weak nerve reflexes that were impossible for him to "fake" and that Sheppard’s injuries could not have been self-inflicted. two witnesses found by his private investigators testified that they had seen a bushy-haired man near the Sheppard home on the day of the crime. Shepard then took the stand in his own defense and described his fight with a "bushy-haired intruder."
But The jury did not believe Sheppard’s story and, on December 21, 1954, brought in a verdict of second-degree murder. and he was sentenced to life imprisonment. Then, after spending 10 years in prison, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned his conviction on the grounds he was denied due process. When he was retried in 1966, he was quickly acquitted.
After he was released from prison, he wrote a book, wrestled professionally in arenas as "The Killer," and, after becaming an alcoholic, died at the age of 46 of liver disease in 1970 .
The case was re-opened by his son with new DNA evidence. In 1998, these DNA tests showed that the there was blood on Sheppard's clothes that was neither his nor his wife’s. In addition, the same unidentified DNA was found on a crucial stain on a closet door only a few feet away from where Marilyn was murdered. If it had not been left there before the attack, it meant that some unidentified person had been in the bedroom and also left his blood on Sheppard’s clothes. The DNA testing undercut the police’s theory that it was a domestic homicide, but it did not identify the killer. The case, after more than a half century, still remains opened.
***

Theories of the case can be found here. The Archive of Unsolved Crimes Here

Vanished: Jimmy Hoffa Is Still Missing

2010-07-04T07:58:00.000-07:00

Can one of the most-closely watched men in America vanish without a trace? The disappearance in 1975 of James Riddle Hoffa, who had been one of the most powerful labor leaders in American history, demonstrates how difficult it is for authorities to resolve a case if they cannot find the body– or crime scene.Jimmy Hoffa, the son of a coal miner, had built the International Brotherhood of Teamsters into the largest, richest, and most politically powerful union in the United States, and had used its vast pension funds to finance the building of much of the casino economy of Las Vegas. Even before Hoffa assumed the presidency of the Teamsters in 1957, his putative connection to organized crime were relentlessly investigated by the FBI and a Congressional Committee on which Robert F. Kennedy was a lead council. When John F. Kennedy became President in 1961, Robert Kennedy, as the new Attorney General, created an unprecedented task force at the Justice Department to bring down a single man: Jimmy Hoffa. His "Get Hoffa" crusade, including no-holds-barred surveillance and wiretaps, resulted in convicting the labor leader of jury tampering and fraud. Even though he was jailed in 1967, Hoffa was re-elected l President of the Teamsters. Finally, in 1971,his sentence was commuted by President Richard M. Nixon after he agreed to officially resign his position, though, according to FBI informants, he was involved in behind=the-scenes to regain his power over the Teamsters in 1975. He was also scheduled to appear before the Congressional Committee investigation the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
On July 30th, 1975, Hoffa went to a limousine service offices in Pontiac, Michigan where he told a friend he was meeting with Tony Giacalone, who reputedly was a leader of organized crime in Detroit and Tony Provenzano, a New Jersey Teamster official. His calender had the notation "TG—2 p.m.—Red Fox", which apparently referred to his meeting with Tony Giacalone at the Red Fox restaurant in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. He arrived at the Red Fox shortly before 2pm, but no one met him, according to witnesses. At 2:15 p.m, Hoffa telephoned his wife from a call box and said "I wonder where the hell Tony is." He said he was still waiting. He never returned home.when police investigators, called by his wife, went to the restaurant, they found Hoffa's car but not Hoffa. . They found no signs of a struggle, and no witnesses to his departure. Both Tonys, when questioned, categorically denied they had any plan to meet Hoffa. They both also had airtight alibis, Giacalone spent the afternoon in a steam room at the Southfield Athletic Club on the outskirts of Detroit; Provenzano spent the afternoon at a local Teamster meeting in Hoboken, New Jersey.The FBI then launched one of the largest investigation in its history to find out what had happened to Jimmy Hoffa. It lasted over quarter of a century and is summed up in 1,879 pages of FBI files recently released on a CD-ROM. At one point, they checked out every meat packing plant in the Detroit area looking for frozen body parts, but found none connected to Hoffa. After someone on the TV show "Current Affair" claimed to be a mafia hit man who witnessed Hoffa’s killing, the FBI spent months investigating and polygraphing him before determining that his story was a fabrication. Through DNA analysis in the 1990s, they matched a match between Hoffa and a hair found in a Mercury that had been driven by Hoffa’s foster son, Charles O'Brien. O'Brien said that he used the car that day to deliver a frozen salmon to the home of a Teamster official, and a long investigation of O’Brien’s activities proved fruitless. On various tips, the FBI excavated graves, building sites, and garbage dumps without ever finding his Hoffa’s body– or proof he was dead. , his body was never found. Nor was anyone ever charged in the crime.In this unsolvable case, the government achieved its closure by blaming the Mafia. A FBI briefing memo was released noting that in 1976 the consensus in law enforcement circles was that Hoffa was murdered at the behest of the Mafia leaders out of concern he would regain control of the Teamsters and interfere with their funding from its pension funds. The problem with this consensual explanation is that law enforcement agencies, after 30 years of investigation, are unable to substantiate it– or find Jimmy Hoffa.
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Theories of the case can be found here.
Archives of Unsolved Crimes is here
Disappearance file is here

The Elimination of Lin Biao

2010-06-26T05:37:00.000-07:00

On September 13 1971, Marshal Lin Biao died in the crash of his Trident jet in Mongolia. Lin Biao had been Mao Zedong’s designated successor to rule China, as well as one of China's greatest generals. His elimination inexorably altered the history of China.
Even four decades later, facts surrounding this critical crash remain even scarce. The British-made Trident airliner, powered by three jet engines, with a range of over 2000 miles, took off from Shanhaiguan Airbase in Eastern China. The pilot, Pan Jungyin, who was deputy commander of the Chinese air force, headed north towards the Soviet-satellite of Mongolia. Aboard the aircraft, along with General Lin Biao, was his family and top aides. Soon after crossing into Mongolian air space, the plane plunged to earth. Everyone aboard died in the crash.
Even though the crash itself was kept a state secret, the ruling Communist party was shaken to its core by the aftermath. All the top leaders of China disappear from view for five days. The entire military command was purged. So many of China’s top generals were arrested that for the first time in the history of Communist China, the annual National Day celebrations on October 1st had to be cancelled. Meanwhile, its supreme leader, Mao Zedong told top party leaders that General Lin Biao had been planning to assassinate him and stage a coup d’etat. And when his plot was discovered, he planned to defect but his plane crashed en route to the Soviet Union. The purge that followed his elimination was thus a countercoup. The "Lin Biao Incident", as it was called, was then sealed shut. But what remains unanswered is the role that the plane crash played in the secret power struggle. Was it merely a convenient coincidence that his plane fell out of the sky over Mongolia? Or was it Mao;s opening move in the purge? The almost total suppression of this issue is a sobering demonstrates of the power of a closed society to write its own history. The Communist party kept the news of Lin Biao's death secret from the general public for nearly a year. Then, after completing its massive purge, it announced that Lin Biao, up until then was considered one of China’s greatest heroes, was a traitor, who died in an airplane accident while attempting to escape to the Soviet Union. The cause of the accident in the official version of events was that his plane ran out of fuel over Mongolia.
This problem with this explanation is that the crash investigation in Mongolia established that the plane had ample fuel aboard it when it crashed. There was indeed so much excess fuel in the pods that the fire incinerated much of the wreckage. As result of this inferno, none of the flight instruments were recovered. The badly charred bodies were buried in a shallow grave near the crash site without the benefit of autopsies. Since there was no evidence that the aircraft had been attacked by any other plane, and, as its location in Mongolia was well beyond the range of China’s primitive surface to air missiles, the Mongolian investigation concluded that the probable cause of plane crash was pilot error. As most of the plane had been destroyed, it was also possible that the plane had been sabotaged. So the KGB did its own secret investigation, which reportedly included exhuming some of the bodies. The results, given the extreme sensitivity of Sino-Soviet relations in 1971, were never released.
US intelligence also provided some insight into the incident. Because of the Vietnam War as well as the preparations for President Richard Nixon's trip to China, the NSA was closely monitoring Chinese communication activities. On September 13, 1971, it learned that China had suddenly grounded all military plane flights. The timing of this extraordinary event coincided with Lin Biao’s flight. This action indicated that no effort was made to intercept General Lin Biao's flight. According to one later account, Mao. after being told by Premier Zhou Enlai about Lin Biao’s impending flight, ordered no military action to counter it. Instead, he recited to Zhou Enlai an ancient Chinese proverb that began "Rain must fall."
Another intriguing clue comes from Mao’s personal physician, Dr. Li Zhisui, who, after he emigrated to the United States, wrote in his memoir that Mao was fully aware of Biao Lin’s plotting (which had been accidentally exposed by Lin Biao’s own daughter). According to Dr. Li, after the crash, Mao was greatly relieved to hear that there were no survivors. But if Mao considered it necessary for Biao Lin to die, why would he leave this outcome to random chance unless he knew that Lin Biao’s plane was doomed to crash? By now, virtually all the participants in the incident are silenced, making it unlikely that the mystery will ever be solved.
***
The theories of the case can be found here.

ARCHIVE OF CRIMES PLANE CRASHES

Heart of Darkness: The Death of Dag Hammarskjöld

2010-06-17T12:16:00.001-07:00

On September 17, 1961, a UN chartered DC-6 airliner took off from Leopoldville, the capital of the newly independent Republic of the Congo, on a 1000 mile flight to Ndola in Rhodesia. On board it was UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld and his small staff. He was en route to a secret meeting with Moise Tshombe, the self-proclaimed President of the Congo’s break away province of Katanga. Because of the dangers involved in his mission, a decoy plane was sent ahead and no flight plan was filed. The captain maintained radio silence until reaching the Rhodesian border . At 11:35 pm, he finally notified the control tower at the Ndola airport that the UN plane would land there shortly after Midnight. This was the last communication with the aircraft which never arrived at the airport.
Shortly after midnight, a large flash of light was seen in the sky near the airport. The next afternoon the plane's wreckage was found some nine miles from the airport. So were the 15 badly-burned bodies of the members of Hammarskjold’s party and the crew.. The only survivor was Hammarskjold’s security chief, who died five days later in the hospital.
Even though a 180 man search party scoured a six-square-kilometer area, they found few clues to the cause of the Midnight crash. The plane was not equipped with either a black box or cockpit recorder. In the initial inquiry, the Rhodesian Board of Investigation, assisted by Swedish technical experts, found no signs of technical or structural defects in the plane itself. The altimeters, which were sent to a US lab, had been working order at the time of the crash. And there was no evidence or fire in flight on the sections of the plane that had not been destoyed by the fire. The possibility of sabotage could not be excluded because major parts of the plane were not recovered and witnesses testified it had been left unguarded at the Leopoldville Airport prior to the flight.
Nearly a year later, the United Nations’ own Commission of Investigation, which relied heavily on the Rhodesian inquiry, was also inconclusive. Two of Hammarskjold’s Swedish bodyguards had suffered multiple bullet wounds but the Rhodesian medical examiners assumed they had been the result of ammunition aboard it exploding in the fire. The arms it carried could also account for traces of explosives found in the plane. But ballistics expert Major C. F. Westell, who attempted to replicate these bullet wounds, strongly disagreed. He stated, "I can certainly describe as sheer nonsense the statement that cartridges of machine guns or pistols detonated in a fire can penetrate a human body." In addition, there may have been a bullet wound in Hammarskjold himself. General Bjorn Egge, who was the first UN official to see Hammarskjold’s body, said in a newspaper interview in 2005, that he had seen a large hole in Hammarskjold’s forehead that had been airbrushed out of the photographs. Although General Egge did not speculate on the cause of the head wound, it raised the question of whether Rhodesian authorities had covered up some pertinent facts about the wounds.
The inquiry’s failure to rule out foul play was compounded by intrigues in the high-stakes shadow war for control of the Congo in 1960 and 1961. Western intelligence services, mercenary groups supported by the White Supramicist governments of Rhodesia, and the Union Miniere mining company, had been working to undermine the regime of Patrice Lumumba, the first elected leader of the Congo, by supporting the secession of the mineral-rich province of Katanga (which had supplied the US with the Uranium for its first atom bombs.) After Lumumba sought Soviet military assistance, the CIA planned at least two assassination attempts-- one involving poison tooth paste-- which, as national security documents declassified in 2000 revealed, followed a suggestion from President Dwight Eisenhower in 1960 that Lumumba be eliminated. (Lumumba was killed by Katanga troops early in 1961) The exposure of these machinations led Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the head of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, to implicate both the CIA and Britain’s MI-5 in Hammarskjold’s crash in 1998. He cited documents found in South Africa’s intelligence files indicating a bomb had been planted in the plane's landing gear. Even though the documents were unverifiable, they added to the political tension surrounding the crash. The British Foreign Office even suggested that they might have been fabricated disinformation. In any case, without any forensic means of establishing the true facts surrounding Hammarskjold’s death, it remains an unresolved mystery.

The theories of the case can be found here.

The Mayerling Mystery

2010-06-08T08:01:00.000-07:00

On January 30 1889, Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria and the Baroness Mary Vetsera were discovered fatally shot at the royal hunting lodge at Mayerling. The 30 year old Prince was the only son of Emperor Franz Josef I and heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His wife, Princess Stephanie, was the daughter of King Leopold of Belgium. As the Baroness Mary Vetsera, the 17 year old daughter of a diplomat, was his mistress, the political implications of the double deaths were staggering. Aside from a royal scandal, it could lead to a succession crises since Prince Rudolf himself had no male heir. With the stakes so high, the government wasted little time in organizing a cover-up. The Baroness’ body was smuggled out of Mayerling in the middle of the night and later secretly buried on the grounds of a nearby monastery. . This made possible the Imperial Court’s initial story that Prince Rudolf had died from heart failure. But since all the doctors, police, and other witnesses who had seen the bullet wound could not be completely silenced, court officials soon modified the story, claiming that Prince Rudolf had shot himself. Since suicide was considered a sin by the Vatican, the Emperor had to petition the Pope to bury Rudolf in the family crypt.
Even so, there remained the vexing issue of who killed his lover. Mary Vetsera’s body had been found in the same locked bedroom. From the rigor mortis, doctors determined that she likely died several hours before he died, leaving a gap in the dual suicide scenario. Had he killed her? Had she killed herself? Or had something else happened that night?
Whatever evidence the police found, including the weapon, was never released, and the imperial court expunged all police records bearing on the crime, It was not until 1945, long after the Hapsburg empire had ended, that Mary Vertsera’s remains were actually examined. That Spring the invading Russian army had accidentally unearthed her grave. When a young physician named Gerd Holler was called in to witness the re-interring of her remains, as was required by law, he inspected her skull and bones. Since he found no penetration hole or other signs indicating that she had been shot. Dr, Holler researched the case further. As the Pope had sent his Nuncio to Mayerling to investigate the request for a special burial dispensation for Prince Rudolf. Dr. Holler requested permission from the Vatican to read the Nuncio’s 1889 report. In it, he discovered that the investigation found that only a single shot had been fired in the hunting lodge. This bullet presumably killed Prince Rudolf. If so, the Baroness died by some other means. Further beclouding the issue, her remains were stolen in 1988, and they, or what purported to be them, were not recovered for four years.

Consequently, despite the legend of a Romeo-and-Juliet type suicide pact that has been burnished in the public mind through movies, romantic operas, ballets, and even a Japanese Manga comic book, we do not know how the Crown Prince and Baroness actually died that snowy night in an isolated hunting lodge. And thanks to the efficiency of the state-sponsored cover-up, it will likely continue to remain an unresolved mystery.

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The theories of the case can be found here.

The Curious Death Of Enrico Mattei

2010-06-05T12:34:00.001-07:00

Enrico Mattei, the ambitious head of the Italian energy company ENI, died on October 27, 1962 when his small jet, a Morane-Saulnier MS-760, crashed in stormy weather near the village of Bascape on a flight from Sicily to Milan. His pilot Irnerio Bertuzzi, and William McHale. an American reporter who was interviewing him, were also killed in crash, At the time of his death, Mattei had been challenging the near monopoly of the so called seven sister oil cartel, led by Exxon and Royal Dutch Shell. To get oil for Italy, he first had offered the Shah of Iran an unprecedented deal: a 50-50 partnership in which ENI would entirely finance the drilling for oil in areas of Iran not controlled by the cartel. By 1961, however, ENI failed to find oil in Iran, and Mattei turned to the onlu other major source of oil not controlled by the cartel, Soviet Union. It was the height of the Cold War. The Soviet Union desperately needed the hard currencythat oil sales to Europe could provide, bit it had no way of delivering the oil. So Mattei negotiated a deal to build a pipeline through Eastern Europe. But the Kennedy administration attempted to cut off the steel exports needed for the pipeline. Meanwhile, Exxon secretly financed a number of politicians in Italy’s ruling Christian Democratic Party to put pressure on Mattei (since ENI was owned by the Italian government.) Exxon also offered Mattei a deal he could not easily refuse: it would supply ENI with Libyan oil if Mattei would cancel his deal with the Soviets. At this point, Mattei asked for personal meeting with President John F. Kennedy. It was scheduled for November 1962. But just weeks before he was to fly to Washington DC to seal the deal, he died in the plane crash.
The officially inquiry, headed by Defense Minister Gulio Andreotti, ruled that the plane crash was a probable accident caused by bad weather. But that finding was called into question in 1995 after the remains of Mattei and his pilot were exhumed. Even though 33 years had elapsed, forensic pathologists were able to determine that bits of metal found in the crash victims’ bones had been deformed by a powerful explosion from within the aircraft. If so, an explosive device had been planted aboard the plane. and Mattei had been the victim of an assassination.
The circumstances surrounding this lethal incident are unlikely to be unraveled because much of the avionics had been inexplicably destroyed at the crime scene during the initial investigation in 1962, The flight instruments, for example, had been dissolved in acid. Consequently, it remains unknown if the plane was brought down by a bomb or bad weather. All that is known is at a critical point in Mattei's negotiations with Russia and the US, whether by accident or design, his plane fell from the sky.

The theories of the case can be found here.

The Assassination of Bhutto

2010-05-13T12:47:00.000-07:00

On 27 December 2007, Benazir Bhutto was killed by a suicide bomber in the Pakistani city of Rawalpindi. 24 other people were also killed in the explosion. Bhutto had just returned from a nine year exile as part of a deal arranged by the United States through which she would run in a nationwide elected to replace the faltering military dictatorship of General Pervez Musharraf. After speaking at a rally at Liaquat Bagh park, Bhutto departed at 5 pm in a white armored Land Cruiser. As the convoy made a right turn on the main highway, Bhutto was waving to her supporters through the roof hatch in her car. Then gunman standing a few feet behind her car fired three shots and detonated a bomb. The video footage shows that only 1.6 seconds elapsed between the time of the first shot to the detonation of the explosives. Bhutto, with a gaping head wound, died in the hospital less than an hour later. Her doctors, finding no bullet wounds, postulated that she died from a head injury in the explosion, Since authorities did not permit an autopsy to be conducted, even though it is required by law, the cause of her death was never conclusively determined.
The crime scene investigation was also inexplicably limited by authorities. Only one bullet casing was recovered which was traced by DNA on it to the partial skull of the body of the presumed suicide bomber. The skull fragment, which was found on the roof of a building, was determined to have come from a boy no more than sixteen years old. Since the crime scene itself was hosed down within an hour of the shooting, other potential clues, including DNA evidence, were washed away. (The lone bullet casing was found lodged in a sewerage drain.) Similarly, Bhutto’s Land Rover had been scrubbed clean hours after the blast. The extraordinary cleansing of the crime scene before all the evidence could be recovered had been ordered by police authorities According to the UN Commission that investigated the assassination, "Hosing down the crime scene so soon after the blast goes beyond mere incompetence," and raises the issue of "whether this amounts to criminal responsibility." In any case, it made it all but impossible to determine if the bomber had any accomplices.
Despite the lack of forensic evidence, General Musharraf ordered a press conference the very next day to announce that Bhutto’s assassination had been organized by Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Taliban insurgency in Pakistan, and by Al-Qaida. The government spokesman said that Pakistan ISI intelligence service had intercepted a message in which Mehsud congratulated a subordinate on the Bhutto assassination. Fugitive warrants were then issued for Mehsud (who was killed in 2009 by a CIA drone attack) and his subordinates. Meanwhile, the UN investigators obtained a transcript of the intercepted message, but it contained nu mention of either Mehsud or the Bhutto assassination. Instead, it contained a conversation in which someone called "Emir Sahib," asked another unknown person merely "who were they?" After he was told 3 names, he said "The three did it?" When UN investigators attempted to pursue the matter, the ISI claimed it had been able to identify "Emir Sahib" as Mehsud through a " voice signature," and that from the context of the conversation, its analysts assumed that the "it" likely referred to the Bhutto assassination. the ISI refused to divulge either the date of the interception, the means by which it was obtained, or how it was verified. So the UN Commission was unable to authenticate it. Soon after the December 28th press conference, the authorities in Pakistan closed down their investigation. According to the UN Commission report, they " essentially ceased investigating the possibility of other perpetrators, particularly those who may have been involved in planning or directing the assassination by funding or otherwise enabling the assassination" and "even ended its efforts to identify the suicide bomber." So the question of who killed Bhutto remains unresolved.
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The theories of the case can be found here.

The Strange Death Of Marilyn Monroe

2010-04-13T14:24:00.000-07:00

The Los Angeles police received an urgent phone call At 4:25 am on Sunday August 5th 1962 informing them that Marilyn Monroe had committed suicide. When they arrived at her Brentwood home a few minutes later, they found two of her doctors, Ralph Greenson and Hyman Engelberg, were already at the scene, along with her live-in house keeper, Eunice Murray. In the movie star’s bedroom, they observed her nude body lying face down on her bed. Next to her body were several nearly empty bottles of the barbiturate Nembutal. They also noted that they were unable to find any glass in the room which she might have used to take the capsules (though one would turn up later.) From the advanced state of rigor mortis, it was estimated by the mortuary that Monroe had died between 9:30 and 11:30 pm on Saturday night. According to the subsequent toxicology report, her blood contained not only Nembutal but also chloral Hydrate, a hypnotic sedative used as a "knock-out" drug. To achieve this level of Nembutal in her blood, she would have had to take the equivalent of at least 38 capsules. There is no doubt that she died of poisoning.. What is less clear is how she ingested this fatal dose. If she had swallowed yellow Nembutal capsules, they would have left crystals, yellow dye and other residue in her digestive system but Coroner Dr. Thomas Noguchi found no traces of them in her stomach or her intestines. Could she have injected the drugs? Dr. Noguchi also ruled out that they had been intravenously delivered, since the examination of her body showed no injection punctures or tell-tale bruises. The other possibility is that the drugs had been administered rectally. But this seemed even less likely since no enema or other was found in her home. When Dr. Noguchi attempted to obtain a further toxicological analysis of her liver, kidneys and other organs, he was told that they had been destroyed. Even so, as there was no evidence that anyone else was involved in her death, he concluded that her death was a "probable suicide."
But there still remains the vexing issue of the contradictory accounts of how and when her death was discovered.
Eunice Murray, her housekeeper, provided the scenario that would be accepted by the police. She claimed that Monroe retired to her bedroom at about 8pm on Saturday and she did not see her again, or notice anything was amiss, that night. Then, about 3 am on Sunday morning, she saw a light was in her locked bedroom. Monroe didn’t respond to her repeated calls, so she summoned Dr. Engelberg, who then discovered her body.
The problem with this scenario is that several of Monroe’s associates claimed to have been informed on Saturday night about her death and both her doctors initially gave different times when they found the body. In addition, Norman Jeffries, Murray’s son-in-law, who was working as a handyman in the house, claims that between 9:30 and 10 pm, there was a panicked commotion in the house. Three men arrived at the house and ordered him and Murray to leave the house. He identified one of those men as Robert Kennedy, who was then the Attorney-General of the United States. (Jeffries was not the only person to claim to have seen Attorney-General Kennedy visiting Monroe’s home that night. Elizabeth Pollard, a neighbor, told police that she saw Kennedy approaching the house with two other men ,one of whom was carrying a small black bag. She placed this visit several hours earlier than did Jeffries.) According to his version, he and Murray went to a nearby neighbor's home until these men left. Then, about an hour later they returned to Monroe’s house, Soon afterwards, other people began arriving, including a doctor. Around this time, he also saw Monroe’s lifeless body on her bed.
As it turns out, Robert Kennedy had been at the nearby Beverly Hills Hotel that Saturday , according to a FBI report (released 44 years later). But he checked out that afternoon and flew to San Francisco, where he registered at the St. Francis Hotel . If so. Kennedy could not have been one of the three men who Jeffries (or Pollard) saw that night– at least not at 9:30pm in the evening. His claim that other people went to her home that evening is not so easily dismissed. Other neighbors also saw individuals arriving and leaving. If he was indeed ordered out of the house 6 hours or so before the police were called in, there is a likelihood that the crime scene was compromised. Indeed, when police arrived around 4:30am, they found that Murray was running the washing machine, suggesting that there might have been a cleansing of the crime scene. Of course, a cover-up does not necessarily require an underlying crime. It can be done simply to protect the reputation of the deceased person or other involved parties. In the case of Marilyn Monroe, whether by accident or design, these pre-dawn activities may have so clouded the sequence of events that it may no longed be possible to resolve the mystery surrounding her strange death..

The theories in this case can be found here.

Assassination In Dubai

2010-03-26T13:13:00.000-07:00

"There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact."--Sherlock Holmes

James Jesus Angleton, the legendary CIA counterintelligence chief, once discussed a series of suspicious deaths in Germany with me. "Any gang of thugs could murder someone," he said, "but it took an intelligence services to make a murder appear to be a suicide or natural death."
According to this precept, the assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai on the evening of Jan. 19, 2010 was almost certainly the work of an intelligence service. When Mabhouh's body was discovered the next day in his room in the five-star Al Bustan Rotana hotel, it appeared he'd died in bed of natural causes. There were no wounds, bruises or other signs of foul play.
Room 230 had no balcony or windows that could be opened, and the electronic door latch appeared to have been locked from the inside. If an ordinary tourist died under such non-suspicious circumstances, investigators would routinely assume he had died in his sleep from natural causes.
But Mabhouh was no ordinary tourist. He was a senior commander and a co-founder of Hamas's military wing, Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades. His activities including the abduction of Israeli soldiers, and he was wanted in three countries: Israel, Egypt, where he had been imprisoned for almost a year, and Jordan.
Based in Damascus, Syria, Mabhouh was also a key intermediary in the covert arms traffic between Iran's Revolutionary Guard, the Syrian intelligence service, the Hamas government in Gaza, and other militants. He was ordinarily protected by a team of armed bodyguards. But they had not been allowed to accompany him to Dubai on Jan. 19 because there was no room on the flight, according to a Hamas spokesman in Damascus, Talal Nasser. So whether by design or accident, he was stripped of his protection, making his assassination easier to accomplish.
When the Dubai police, under pressure from Hamas, looked more closely into the crime scene, they found that the electronic lock on the door of his room had been reprogrammed to allow others entry. The electronic lock can be accessed directly at the hotel room door by a sophisticated hacker.
Then a Dubai forensic lab retesting his body fluids discovered traces of succinylcholine. This is a quick-acting, depolarizing, paralytic drug that, by rendering Mabhouh incapable of resisting, could account for the lack of bruise marks on the body.
In February, Dubai's chief coroner, Fawzi Benomran, reversed his verdict of a natural death. Instead, describing the death as "one of the most challenging cases" in the history of the emirate, he concluded it was a disguised homicide "meant to look like death from natural causes during sleep."
Meanwhile, Dubai investigators examined 645 hours of videos from surveillance cameras at the hotel and elsewhere. They saw that, after Mabhouh left his hotel room, four suspicious-looking individuals got out of the elevator on the second floor near his room. Several hours later, at 8:25 p.m., Mabhouh returned to his room (according to the electronic lock). Shortly afterwards, the four men were seen via the cameras leaving the floor.
The police theorized that these men had surreptitiously entered Mabhouh's room while he was out, incapacitated him with the paralytic drug on his return, induced a heart attack by suffocating him with a pillow, and reprogrammed the electric lock to make it appear it had been locked from the inside.
With the aid of facial recognition software, Dubai police then identified 26 suspects. All had been in Dubai at the time of Mabhouh's brief visit. All had entered Dubai using fake or fraudulently obtained passports from countries not requiring a Dubai visa, including Britain, Ireland, France, Germany and Australia.
All the passports turned out to be stolen identities with faked passport photos. The charge cards, airline tickets, and pre-paid phone cards these suspects used were also in the name of their stolen identities. The only real clue to their real identities was that eight of the identities had been stolen from people with dual Israeli citizenship. As Mossad, Israel's national intelligence agency, had previously used dual citizens' passports to fake identities, Dubai authorities concluded the suspects were from Mossad.
Dahi Khalfan Tamim, the head of the Dubai police force, stated on a government-owned Web site, that he "is 99 percent, if not 100 percent, that Mossad is standing behind the murder." While this authoritative finger-pointing was largely accepted as am "aha" moment by the media, Dubai is not exactly an uninterested party in the Mabhouh affair. It is, after all, the principal transshipment points for the lethal arms trade between Iran and Hamas-and Mabhouh had been one of the major players in this trade.
The much-publicized hotel surveillance videos, while highly diverting on YouTube, do not show any of the 26 suspects engaging in any illegal activities other than using false identities, a practice which is not unknown in Dubai (Mabhouh himself reportedly had five different passports). Even if all 26 identity thieves were intelligence operatives, as seems the case, it does not necessarily follow that they were all in Dubai on the same business, or even working for the same side.
Since Iran maintains its largest offshore financing facility in Dubai-which is used by the Revolutionary Guard, among others, to support its traffic in covert weapons- more than one intelligence service might be interested in Mabhouh's trip. Consider, for example, the peculiar fact that two of the 26 Dubai suspects exited by boat to Iran, according to Dubai authorities; this is not a likely escape route for Mossad agents.
Two other individuals whom the Dubai police had named as suspects worked for the Palestinian Authority, an arch enemy of Hamas. (They were arrested in Jordan and turned over to Dubai). Another person wanted by Dubai for questioning returned to Damascus just prior to the killing. And then there is the question of who in Syria played a role in stripping Mabhouh of his protection just hours before his flight to Dubai.
The key missing piece in the jigsaw remains Mabhouh's mission to Dubai-apparently important enough for him to travel there without his normal contingent of bodyguards.
Mabhouh arrived from the airport at his hotel shortly before 3 pm, and after changing his clothes left for an unknown destination. He was gone for several hours. But even with its state-of-the-art surveillance cameras in Dubai, and extensive interviews with all the taxi drivers at the hotel, authorities claim they cannot determine either his whereabouts during these hours or the identity of whom he met.
The world-wide focus on the spooks-whose false identities allowed many of them to vanish in the intelligence netherworld-has diverted attention from the potentially embarrassing mission that brought Mabhouh to the Dubai. The real intrigue here is not who killed a wanted terrorist, but what he was up to. Without this missing piece, any rush to judgment about who his killers were may be premature.

The theories of the case can be found here.

The Assassination Of Olof Palme

2010-03-21T12:58:00.000-07:00

On 28 February 1986 at 11:21 pm, Olof Palme, the young charismatic Prime Minister of Sweden, while walking home with his wife from the Grand Cinema on Sveavagen street in central Stockholm, was fatally shot from behind at close range. His wife, Lisbet Palme, was hit by a second bullet, but survived. The lone shooter, wearing a heavy overcoat then jogged away. He disappeared from Lisbet’s view through a tunnel at the end of the street.
Since Palme had no bodyguards , there were not any witnesses to the actual assassination, other than Palme’s wounded wife. Nor was a murder weapon, or any other physical evidence, found at the crime scene.
In December 1988, almost 22 months later,Christer Pettersson, a brain-damaged drug user, who had previously been convicted of manslaughter, was picked out of a police lineup by Lisbet Palme. He was arrested, tried and convicted of Palme’s murder , entirely on the basis of her testimony. On appeal, however, that verdict was thrown out because no motive had been established, no murder weapon had not been found, and the court found inconsistencies in of Mrs Palme's testimony. Pettersson was then acquitted on all charges.
Nearly a decade later,Eugene de Kock, a former South African police officer, gave evidence to South Africa's Supreme Court , alleging that Palme had been assassinated by a South African hit squad. According to de Kock, Palme was killed to prevent him from arranging further Swedish financing for the African National Congress (ANC)-- an organization dedicated to overthrowing the South African government and its system of Apartheid. He alleged that Craig Williamson, a South African intelligence officer, organized the hit, and Williamson's superior, identified the shooter as Anthony White, a former Rhodesian Selous Scout. A third person, a Swedish mercenary living in Cyprus, was also implicated in the operation code-named "Longreach." Swedish investigators went to South Africa but they were unable to uncover any evidence to corroborate these claims.
In late 2006, police recovered a Smith & Wesson .357 revolver from a lake that was traced by its serial number to a Swedish post office robbery in 1983, and, as it was consistent with the type of gun used to kill Palme, the Swedish National Laboratory of Forensic Science tested it. But after 20 years of exposure and rusting, it could not be matched through ballistics to the bullets found at the crime scene. Even a $7 million reward failed to produce any further evidence or credible witnesses.
Consequently, after a two-decade long investigation that generated 700,00 pages of documents and cost over $45 million, the case remains unresolved.

The theories of the case can be found here.

Jack The Ripper

2010-03-12T08:14:00.000-08:00

The "Jack The Ripper" murders contain an intriguing mystery within an unsolvable mystery. Did the character "Jack The Ripper" actually exist? Or was he no more than a convenient composite used to link together a number of unrelated murders? The case, which provided a template in journalism for reporting serial killers, dates back to 1888. There had been a large number of attacks on prostitutes, and violence, and other crimes in London slums that had been swollen by waves of impoverished Irish and Jewish immigrants. The murders became the focus of a take-no-prisoner circulation war between "penny" newspapers which proliferated after they were freed from heavy British taxes. Then, on September 28th, a taunting letter signed "Jack The Ripper" found its way to the Central News Agency, which was supplying stories to subscribing newspapers. Its clients, including "The Star," whose circulation was badly faltering, used the letter to give a diabolical name, if not a face, to whoever was the perpetrator of a number of ghastly murders in the Whitechapel area. Within weeks, as the Central News Agency syndicated the story to newspapers around the world "Jack The Ripper" became one of the most feared villains in history.
The problem was that this letter, and a postcard that followed it a few days later with the signature "Jack The Ripper" in a similar handwriting, constitute the only evidence as to the murderer’s identity. But when the letter was forwarded to Scotland Yard, the Criminal Investigation Department, which had received dozens of other letters claiming credit for the killings, concluded that it was a hoax, forged by someone inside the Central News Agency, which, on previous occasions, had famously fabricated stories to increase their appeal to its clients. In his memoirs, Sir Robert Anderson, the head of the Criminal Investigation Department, stated "the 'Jack-the-Ripper' letter which is preserved in the Police Museum at Scotland Yard, is the creation of an enterprising London journalist." Another top Scotland Yard official, Sir Melville Macnaghten went even further about the "Jack the Ripper" letter, writing in his autobiography, "I have always thought I could discern the stained forefinger of the journalist - indeed, a year later, I had shrewd suspicions as to the actual author." (One suspect was Thomas J. Bulling, a deputy editor at the Central News Agency.)
If the letter was indeed a journalistic invention, all that linked the murders to a single killer was a similar modus operandi. To be sure, eleven of the murders had clear similarities. The victims were all women prostitutes whose throats were cut prior to abdominal mutilations. But in these eleven murders included in a London Metropolitan Police Service investigation of, Sir Melville Macnaghten, who ran the Criminal Investigation Department found only five victims actually fit the same pattern. They were Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly. He noted in his official report "the Whitechapel murderer had 5 victims—and 5 victims only." Even that number may have been too high, according to Dr Percy Clark, the assistant to the examining pathologist. He found that only three of the victims conformed to the pattern, and he suggested the other murders were perpetrated by copy cat killers.(As the gory details of each murder had been published in the press, it was impossible to exclude copycat killers.)
Since all the murders occurred in deserted streets at night, no passerby actually saw the killer attack a victim. One victim, Emma Elizabeth Smith, actually lived long enough to describe the attack. She said she was stabbed by two to three men, including a teenager. But while this fit the pattern of gang assaults, it didn't fit the image of a solitary "Jack The Ripper" .
At the time, fingerprints, hair and fiber analysis, and DNA identification did not yet exist. And the killer left no weapons, clothing, or other tell-tale clues at the crime scene. The absolute dearth of creditable evidence did not prevent the burnishing of Jack The Ripper in the popular imagination, but it leaves unresolved the mystery of whether there actually was a solitary serial killer.
***
The theories of the case can be found here

The Assassination Of Lincoln

2010-03-05T08:32:00.000-08:00

Was the plot to assassinate President Abraham Lincoln, and those in line to succeed him, a state-sponsored act? That was the view of the Military Commission that investigated the crime in 1865 and President Andrew Johnson, who after he succeeded Lincoln, signed a proclamation citing "evidence in the Bureau of Military Justice that the atrocious murder of the late President, and the attempted assassination of the Hon. William H. Seward, Secretary of State, were incited, concerted and procured," by, among others, Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederate States. He even placed a $100,000 bounty on Davis’s head.
Here is what happened. At about 10:15 pm on Friday April 14, 1865 in Washington DC, two assassins launched nearly simultaneous attacks against the President and the Secretary of State (who was in the line of succession.) At Ford’s Theater, John Wilkes Booth fatally shot President Abraham Lincoln in the head; at the Washington home of Secretary of State William Seward, Lewis Powell, an associate of Booth, stabbed Seward in his bed (who survived the attack). The assassins, as well as Powell’s accomplice David Herold, escaped to Surrattville, and, splitting up, Booth and Herold headed southward on horseback..
Powell was captured the next day at the home of Mary Surratt, where Booth had been a frequent visitor. Mary Surratt and 5 other associates of Booth were arrested. Meanwhile, on April 26th, Federal troops trapped Booth and Herold in a barn in Virginia, Booth was killed and Herold captured.
On May 1, 1865, President Johnson ordered that the 8 alleged conspirators, all of whom were kept chained and hooded in military prisons, be tried before a military commission. Over the course of seven weeks, the Commission heard 371 witnesses. According to prosecution witnesses, the Confederate Congress had appropriated five million dollars in 1864 for covert operations run out of Canada by former Secretary of Interior Jacob Thompson, and former Senator Clement Clay. One failed operation allegedly involved delivering clothing that had been "carefully infected in Bermuda with yellow fever" to the White House. According to other testimony, Thompson’s goal was not only to kill Lincoln but to "leave the government entirely without a head" by killing those in the line of succession. To this end, Thompson allegedly met in Montreal with John Wilkes Booth and John Surratt, Jr. (A son of Mary Surratt who escaped to Canada), and approved plans to attack Lincoln on April 6, 1865, the date which, according to a Canadian banker’s testimony, Thompson withdrew $184,000 from the over $600,000 in his private Montreal account. The prosecution also introduced a ciphered letter found in Booth’s possession, which, according to its forensic experts, traced to a cipher machine recovered from the code room in the Confederate headquarters in Richmond.
One defendant, George Atzerodt, admitted his role in an earlier plot to abduct Lincoln in March 17th 1865. The conspirators, including Booth, planned to intercept the President’s carriage as Lincoln was returning from a matinees performance at the Campbell Hospital on the outskirts of Washington, and seize Lincoln. The scheme failed when the President cancelled his trip. However, according to Atzerodt, Booth then went New York City tp meet his Confederate contacts, and told Atzerodt that they now planned to blow up Lincoln in the White House, saying "They were going to mine the end of the president's House. They knew an entrance to accomplish it through." But this plot fizzled on April 10th because Union troops captured the Confederate explosives expert allegedly assigned the task of planting the explosives. The prosecutor said in his summation that the evidence showed "that John Wilkes Booth was in this conspiracy; that John Surratt was in this conspiracy; and that Jefferson Davis and his several agents named, in Canada, were in this conspiracy."
The Military Commission concurred, finding Powell, Herold, Surratt, and Atzerodt guilty of participating in the conspiracy and sentenced them to death by hanging. On July 7, 1865, the four condemned prisoners were hung (making Mary Surratt the first woman ever executed in the United States.) The other four defendants were found guilty of helping the assassins escape and sentenced to long prison terms.
The verdict, however, suffered from the flawed procedures of the Military Commission. Its hastily drawn up rules did not allow the defense lawyers, who were appointed just days before the trial began, to examine potentially exculpatory evidence or time to prepare through cross-examination. Nor did they allow the 8 prisoner to testify on their own behalf. In addition, much of the testimony was flimsy.
Yet, substantial evidence has since emerged that the Confederate government backed the plot by Booth and others to kidnap Lincoln in March 1865, including Confederate military records that Confederate troops had been posted on the planned route of the abductors in Northern Virginia. Nor is there any doubt that Booth, Powell, Herold had been involved in that plot (one defendant who received a life prison late made a full confession about his role in that conspiracy.) The issue that still baffles historians is: was the March and April conspiracies connected? Booth’s diary, which was captured after he was killed, contains an entry written after the assassination saying, "For six months we had worked to capture, but our cause being almost lost, something decisive and great must be done," suggesting that they did not have authorization, the April continuation of the plot against Lincoln. Unfortunately, eighteen pages are missing from the diary, so it unknown what he (or others) might have deleted, leaving unresolved the question of whether or not Booth and his fellow conspirators had authorization for the assassination.

The theories of the case can be found here.

The Godfather Case: Did The Mafia Frame Andreotti?

2010-02-15T09:47:00.000-08:00

Up until 1992, Giulio Andreotti was the political Godfather of Italy. He served as Prime Minister three times between 1972 and 1992, Minister of the Interior (1954 and 1978), Defense Minister (1959-1966 and 1974) and Foreign Minister (1983-1989). Then in 1992 the infamous Tangentopoli ("bribe city") revelations discredited his Christian Democratic party. Although he was not himself implicated in the scandal, soon afterwards he was investigated on the charge of being in league with the Mafia in Sicily. By then, the Mafia was in a virtual state of war with the government, blowing up officials with car bombs. The charges against Andreotti, which were tantamount to treason, originated in revelations made by Tommy Buscetta, a Mafioso who had been implicated in two murders in America, and, after being arrested in Brazil (where he was a major heroin trafficker), was eventually extradited to the US. In 1984, he began providing information to US authorities about Mafia activities, and, as a reward, he was put in the US Witness Protection Program. Eight years passed, then in September 1992, he named Andreotti as the Mafia’s "man in Rome." According to his belated story, Andreotti was able to keep his Mafia role secret by using Senator Salvo Lima, the Christian Democrat leader in Sicily, as his go-between with Mafia dons. The putative arrangement was that Andreotti would use his immense influence in Rome "to adjust." or reduce, Mafia sentences in return for the Mafia carrying out the murders and other crimes that benefitted him. Since Senator Lima had been murdered earlier that year by the Mafia, the allegation could not be refuted. Buscetta himself did not claim to have ever met Lima or Andreotti, nor had he directly witnessedthe liaison he described. He testified that he had "surmised" the relationship from what other Mafia members told him.Two separate magistrates, one in Rome, the other in Palermo, investigating these allegations. were unable to find any evidence that either Andreotti or Lima had adjusted, or even attempted to adjust, any Mafia sentences. Nevertheless, the inquests continued, with Buscetta and other Mafia "pentiti" (or repenters) alleging that Andreotti had mandated some of Italy’s most sensational murders and even that Andreotti had been responsible for the Red Brigade’s 1978 execution of former Aldo Moro.The direct evidence that Andreotti had any association with Mafia bosses came down to the accounts of two imprisoned pentiti. Both had been convicted of murder, and, by both, by testifying, literally got away with murder.Baldassare Di Maggio, a Mafioso who had admitted murdering no fewer than 15 people before he was arrested in 1993, alleged that in September 1987 he had witnessed Andreotti receive a "kiss of honor" from the top Mafia leader in Sicily, Toto Riina. He said he had seen this embrace in the Palermo apartment of Sicilian politician Ignazio Salvo. On the face of it, his story seemed implausible for several reasons. For one thing, the entrance to Salvo’s apartment was guarded by police because Salvo was under house arrest in September 1987. Why would Riina, who was then the most wanted fugitive in Sicily, choose a venue under police surveillance for a Mafia gathering?. In addition, Andreotti would have had to elude his security detail to get to Palermo and attend this meeting. Then, as the inquiry proceeded, Di Maggio’s credibility was badly damaged when investigators discovered that he had committed a murder after he had been admitted to the Italian witness protection program and he had falsely claimed he had been given permission for the homicide by Italian authorities. Finally, the investigating judges concluded that Di Maggio’s "kiss of honor" story was a total fiction.The other pentito, Marino Mannoia, is also a multiple murderer, who bargained his way into the US witness protection program in the late 1980s by informing on other Mafioso. After years of testifying about the Mafia without ever mentioning Andreotti’s name, he told Italian investigators in April 1993 that in 1980 he had personally witnessed Andreotti arrive in a bulletproof Alfa Romeo sedan at a villa in Sicily in the company of several Mafia leaders, who were no longer alive. So Mannoia is the only witness to the putative meeting. In those years, after the Red Brigade kidnaping of Moro, Andreotti was literally surrounded by security men, who kept detailed logs of his movements, . Yet, since Mannoia was unable to recall the exact place or date of this alleged meetings, his story could neither be corroborated or refuted by these records.Aside from these two witnesses, the other evidence gathered against Andreotti is hearsay. Most of it is second- hand stories recounted in prison about one Mafia member said to another. While such hearsay testimony is ordinarily not admissible in court since it denies the accused the ability to confront his accuser, prosecutors argued that an exception should be made for this hearsay evidence on the grounds that "one of the inflexible rules of the Mafia is that men of honor must tell the truth when speaking of facts relating to other men of honor." If so, even a Mafioso sociopath who murders 14 people and perjures himself repeatedly when questioned by authorities, can be relied on to be truthful in relating stories to other Men of Honor. For example, Buscetta uncorroborated story that another Mafioso heroin trafficker told him in the early 1980s in Brazil that Andreotti said to him "Men like you are needed in every street in every Italian town," could be admissible evidence in building the case against Andreotti.Even if one believed that such a Mafia ethic exists, it would not necessarily apply when Mafioso informants are ultimately relaying provocative stories to government authorities through channels they know to be compromised. So, via pentiti, prison gossip could be used as a form of disinformation. The Mafia was not by any means an uninterested party in the effort to discredit Andreotti and his party in the 1990s. Andreotti had been personally responsible for many initiatives against the Mafia, including the international bilateral agreements that allowed the US to extradite Mafioso (including Buscetta), the Decree-laws that prevented the release of Mafia suspects before trial, the dissolution of 29 Mafia-penetrated municipal councils in Sicily that had protected Mafia interests, the internal exile of Mafia suspects without trial, and the crackdown on banks laundering Mafia funds. After top leaders of the Mafia, including Toto Riina, were imprisoned, the Mafia engaged in full-scale attack on civil authorities in the early 1990s, including blowing up anti-Mafia investigators Judge Giovanni Falcone, so it difficult to discount the possibility that it also used false allegations to discredit Andreotti.Yet the case proceeded to trial. In 1996, Andreotti was charged with complicity in Mafia murders . Initially, he was acquitted of all charges in 1999, then, when prosecutors appealed the verdict, he was convicted in 2002. That verdict, however, was overturned in 2003 by the appeals court which acquitted him on all charges. Meanwhile, another court in Palermo, while acquitting him on charges of ties to the Mafia becauseof statutory limitations, the judges rendered a finding that Andreotti had received electoral help from the Mafia in Sicily prior to 1980. So after 7 years of trials that produced more heat than light, the Godfather case is still unsolved.

The theories of the case can be found here.

The Anthrax Attack

2010-01-25T05:46:00.001-08:00

The investigation of the 2001 anthrax attacks ended as far as the public knew on July 29, 2008, with the death of Bruce Ivins, a senior biodefense researcher at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) in Fort Detrick, Md. The cause of death was an overdose of the painkiller Tylenol. No autopsy was deemed necessary by the medical examiner, and there was no suicide note.
Less than a week after his apparent suicide, the FBI declared Ivins to have been the sole perpetrator of the 2001 Anthrax attacks, and the person who mailed deadly anthrax spores to NBC, the New York Post, and Sens. Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy. These attacks killed five people, closed down a Senate office building, caused a national panic, and nearly paralyzed the postal system.
The FBI's six-year investigation was the largest inquest in its history, involving 9,000 interviews, 6,000 subpoenas, and the examination of tens of thousands of photocopiers, typewriters, computers and mailboxes. Yet it failed to find a shred of evidence that identified the anthrax killer—or even a witness to the mailings. With the help of a task force of scientists, it found a flask of anthrax that closely matched—through its genetic markers—the anthrax used in the attack.
This flask had been in the custody of Ivins, who had published no fewer than 44 scientific papers over three decades as a microbiologist and who was working on developing vaccines against anthrax. As custodian, he provided samples of it to other scientists at Fort Detrick, the Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus, Ohio, and other facilities involved in anthrax research.
According to the FBI's reckoning, over 100 scientists had been given access to it. Any of these scientists (or their co-workers) could have stolen a minute quantity of this anthrax and, by mixing it into a media of water and nutrients, used it to grow enough spores to launch the anthrax attacks.
Consequently, Ivins, who was assisting the FBI with its investigation, as well as all the scientists who had access to the anthrax, became suspects in the investigation. They were intensely questioned, given polygraph examinations, and played off against one another in variations of the prisoner's dilemma game. Their labs, computers, phones, homes and personal effects were scrutinized for possible clues.
As the so-called Amerithrax investigation proceeded, the FBI ran into frustrating dead ends, such as its relentless five-year pursuit of Steven Hatfill, which ended with an apology in 2007 and Mr. Hatfill receiving a $5.8 million settlement from the U.S. government as compensation. Another scientist, Perry Mikesell, became so stressed by the FBI's games that he began to drink heavily and died of a heart attack in October 2002.
Eventually, the FBI zeroed in on Ivins. Not only did he have access to the anthrax, but FBI agents suspected he had subtly misled them into their Hatfill fiasco. A search of his email turned up pornography and bizarre emails which, though unrelated to anthrax, suggested that he was a deeply disturbed individual.
The FBI turned the pressure up on him, isolating him at work and forcing him to spend what little money he had on lawyers to defend himself. He became increasingly stressed. His therapist reported that Ivins seemed obsessed with the notion of revenge and even homicide. Then came his suicide (which, as Eric Nadler and Bob Coen show in their documentary "Anthrax War," was one of four suicides among American and British biowarfare researchers in past years). Since Ivins's odd behavior closely fit the FBI's profile of the mad scientist it had been hunting, his suicide provided an opportunity to close the case. So it held a congressional briefing in which it all but pronounced Ivins the anthrax killer.
But there was still a vexing problem—silicon.
Silicon was used in the 1960s to weaponize anthrax. Through an elaborate process, anthrax spores were coated with the substance to prevent them from clinging together so as to create a lethal aerosol. But since weaponization was banned by international treaties, research anthrax no longer contains silicon, and the flask at Fort Detrick contained none.
***
Yet the anthrax grown from it had silicon, according to the U.S. Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. This silicon explained why, when the letters to Sens. Leahy and Daschle were opened, the anthrax vaporized into an aerosol. If so, then somehow silicon was added to the anthrax. But Ivins, no matter how weird he may have been, had neither the set of skills nor the means to attach silicon to anthrax spores.
At a minimum, such a process would require highly specialized equipment that did not exist in Ivins's lab—or, for that matter, anywhere at the Fort Detrick facility. As Richard Spertzel, a former biodefense scientist who worked with Ivins, explained in a private briefing on Jan. 7, 2009, the lab didn't even deal with anthrax in powdered form, adding, "I don't think there's anyone there who would have the foggiest idea how to do it." So while Ivins's death provided a convenient fall guy, the silicon content still needed to be explained.
The FBI's answer was that the anthrax contained only traces of silicon, and those, it theorized, could have been accidently absorbed by the spores from the water and nutrient in which they were grown. No such nutrients were ever found in Ivins's lab, nor, for that matter, did anyone ever see Ivins attempt to produce any unauthorized anthrax (a process which would have involved him using scores of flasks.) But since no one knew what nutrients had been used to grow the attack anthrax, it was at least possible that they had traces of silicon in them that accidently contaminated the anthrax.
Natural contamination was an elegant theory that ran into problems after Congressman Jerry Nadler pressed FBI Director Robert Mueller in September 2008 to provide the House Judiciary Committee with a missing piece of data: the precise percentage of silicon contained in the anthrax used in the attacks.
The answer came seven months later on April 17, 2009. According to the FBI lab, 1.4% of the powder in the Leahy letter was silicon. "This is a shockingly high proportion," explained Stuart Jacobson, an expert in small particle chemistry. "It is a number one would expect from the deliberate weaponization of anthrax, but not from any conceivable accidental contamination."
Nevertheless, in an attempt to back up its theory, the FBI contracted scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Labs in California to conduct experiments in which anthrax is accidently absorbed from a media heavily laced with silicon. When the results were revealed to the National Academy Of Science in September 2009, they effectively blew the FBI's theory out of the water.
The Livermore scientists had tried 56 times to replicate the high silicon content without any success. Even though they added increasingly high amounts of silicon to the media, they never even came close to the 1.4% in the attack anthrax. Most results were an order of magnitude lower, with some as low as .001%.
What these tests inadvertently demonstrated is that the anthrax spores could not have been accidently contaminated by the nutrients in the media. "If there is that much silicon, it had to have been added," Jeffrey Adamovicz, who supervised Ivins's work at Fort Detrick, wrote to me last month. He added that the silicon in the attack anthrax could have been added via a large fermentor—which Battelle and other labs use" but "we did not use a fermentor to grow anthrax at USAMRIID . . . [and] We did not have the capability to add silicon compounds to anthrax spores."
***
If Ivins had neither the equipment or skills to weaponize anthrax with silicon, then some other party with access to the anthrax must have done it. Even before these startling results, Sen. Leahy had told Director Mueller, "I do not believe in any way, shape, or manner that [Ivins] is the only person involved in this attack on Congress."
When I asked a FBI spokesman this month about the Livermore findings, he said the FBI was not commenting on any specifics of the case, other than those discussed in the 2008 briefing (which was about a year before Livermore disclosed its results). He stated: "The Justice Department and the FBI continue working to conclude the investigation into the 2001 anthrax attacks. We anticipate closing the case in the near future."
So, even though the public may be under the impression that the anthrax case had been closed in 2008, the FBI investigation is still open—and, unless it can refute the Livermore findings on the silicon, it is back to square one.

The theories of the case can be found here.

Who Assassinated Anna Politkovskaya?

2010-01-07T14:49:00.000-08:00

The brutal murder of Anna Politkovskaya in Moscow on Vladimir Putin’s birthday in 2006, sent shock waves through the media community in Russia and the world. The award- winning Russian journalist was gunned down at close range at about 4 p.m on October 7, 2006 in the stairwell of her apartment block. Three bullets hit her body, and a fourth bullet, execution-style, was fired into her head. Next to her body, there was a Makarov PM pistol, a silencer, and the four shell casings from the bullets. As the Makarov PM ordinarily ejects its shells about 10-15 feet behind the shooter, the killer had collected the casings and neatly placed them next to his victim, which police interpreted as the signature of a contract killer. The killer, whose features were obscured by a baseball cap, using the correct door code, had entered the building just minutes before Politkovskaya had returned from shopping.

The plot grew more complex after police investigators examined the video tapes from surveillance cameras. At the Ramstor shopping center, her last stop before returning home, they discovered that she has been under surveillance. Two people– a man in jeans and women in black– methodically followed her as she shopped. Video tapes from other locations showed she had also been tailed by these and other trackers earlier in the week. Such surveillance suggested that her assassination was the work of a conspiracy.

Identifying Politkovskaya’s trackers turned out to be relatively-easy for the police. The problem confronting them was where these identifications led. Some of those identified were current or former agents of the Federal Security Service, or FSB, the successor agency to the KGB. Since alumni of this agency included many of the people running the Russian state including President Putin, connecting the FSB to the assassination of an internationally-renowned journalist on Putin’s birthday was no minor matter. Indeed, it was such a sensitive issue that it took nearly ten months before Russia’s Prosecutor General Yuri Chaika ordered the suspects arrested. In a press conference on August 27, 2007, after announcing that ten suspects in the Politkovskaya's murder had been arrested. Chaika ominously warned, "Unfortunately, this group included retired and acting interior ministry and FSB officers." The official version was that Politkovskaya had been killed for money by a Chechen criminal gang in Moscow that controlled a Lieutenant-Colonel in the FSB. According to the chief investigator in the case, all ten suspects had been linked to other plotters by their cell phone records, saying"they called back and forth by phone: before the murder, on the day of the murder, and after it."
The shooter was subsequently identified by authorities as Rustam Makhmudov, a Chechen allegedly employed as a contract killer. He was apparently warned about his imminent arrest and provided with a forged passport, allowing him to flee Russia. The best that the police could do was to arrest two of his brothers, Ibragim and Dzhabrail Makhmudov, as accomplices. They also arrested FSB Lieutenant Colonel Pavel Ryaguzov, who was charged with abuse of office and extortion in connection with the assassination.
On February 19th 2009, after a three month trial, a jury unanimously acquitted all three men (as well as a former police officer who had also been charged as an accomplice.) Since Russia does not proscribe double jeopardy, prosecutors currently plan to retry the case with another jury in the future. But even if these men are eventually found guilty of being accomplices of the vanished killer– and, in Colonel Ryagozov’s case, of abusing his authority– it will not resolve the real mystery: Who gave the orders and paid to have Politkovskaya assassinated on Putin’s birthday?

The theories of the case can be found here.

The LA Bloodbath and Trials of O.J. Simpson

2009-12-31T17:07:00.000-08:00

Evidence is, by its very nature, controvertible. Nowhere is this proposition better illustrated than in the murder trial of O.J. Simpson. Late in the evening of June 12, 1994, Nicole Simpson Brown, Simpson’s ex-wife, and Ronald Goldman, a friend of Nicole’s, were brutally stabbed to death outside of Nicole’s condominium on Bundy Drive in Los Angeles.
Since O.J. Simpson, one of America’s all-time great football heroes, had threatened her with violence on previous occasions, and had left LA immediately after the bloodbath, he became a suspect in the double homicide, and agreed to voluntarily surrender the to the LA police on June 17th.
Even though O.J., as he was universally known to fans, had retired from professional football, he had remained in the public eye as a movie actor, television show host, and product endorser, and more than one thousand reporters had gathered at police headquarters to witness his agreed-upon surrender. When "O.J" failed to arrive, they became fixated on the pursuit of his Ford Bronco in which a passenger had warned on his cell phone that O.J. was suicidal and holding a loaded gun to his head. As a convoy of police cars slowly trailed the Bronco on the throughways, one network after another canceled its schedule to carry the strange chase from helicopters live on television,. By the time Simpson returned home, surrendered to waiting police, and was handcuffed, USA Today reported it was already "the most publicized crime in history."
Although no murder weapon was found or any eye witnesses to the double homicide, the police quickly amassed a wealth of incriminating evidence, including a bloody foot print, hairs, and fibers, and, on July 7th, proceeded to indict O.J. Simpson.
He pleaded "absolutely not guilty," retaining what the media termed a "dream team" of 9 top lawyers, including 2 world-renowned experts in DNA evidence, to defend him. The televised trial, which began on January 25 1995, turned on the prosecution’s DNA evidence. To compare samples from those taken at the crime scene with those specimens furnished by O.J, the prosecution used a technique called "restriction fragment length polymorphism." It requires breaking each DNA sample into pieces via restriction enzymes, then separating them according to their lengths, and comparing these results with the DNA furnished by O.J. According to the prosecution’s expert witness, police criminologist Dennis Fung, this DNA evidence, including samples taken from the bloody footprints leading away from the bodies, perfectly matched that of O.J. Simpson. If so, he could be placed at Nicole Brown's townhouse at the time of the murders. But in eight days of cross-examination, defense lawyer Barry Scheck elicited testimony that showed deep flaws in the process. For example, the police scientist who collected blood samples from Simpson to compare with those from the crime scene carried them around in his lab coat pocket for nearly a day before handing it over as evidence, raising the possibility of cross-contamination between the samples. Scheck argued that this and other mishandling of the blood samples. made it impossible to determine to whose DNA was found at the crime scene.
The prosecution had also heavily relied on seemingly-cogent glove evidence. It presented a left leather glove found at the crime scene with blood that matched that of murder victim Goldman and a similar right glove that was found in the police search of Simpson’s compound. . However, when the prosecutor asked O.J to try on the left glove in front of the jury, it was much too small to fit on his hand. This mismatch led defense lawyers to argue to the jury, " If it [the glove] doesn't fit, you must acquit."
The dream team of lawyers so effectively impeached the police investigation that had produced the evidence that. on October 3, 1995, after only three hours of deliberation the jury returned a unanimous verdict of not guilty. The one-hundred-and-thirty-five-day trial was over, and O.J. walked out of the court room a free man.
But the O.J. saga did not end with his acquittal. The parents of Goldman sued Simpson for wrongful death, as did the family of Nicole Brown, In February 1997, after a four-month civil trial, which requires a lower standard of proof than a criminal trial, the jury awarded the plaintiffs $33.5 million.
The judgment literally bankrupted O.J. Simpson. By 2006, he was so desperate for money that he accepted a $1.1 million advance from Judith Regan, the editor of Regan Books, a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, to sign his name to a work of fiction that would be called "If I Did It: Here’s How It Happened." The plan was to make the book into a TV drama for Fox, Murdoch’s television arm. And, as Regan explained it, to bring "closure" to the case. A ghost-writer, Pablo Fenjves, was hired to write the fictional account of how a character based on O.J did the murders. Before it could be published, word of it leaked to the National Enquirer, causing such a firestorm of charges that O.J Simpson, Regan and Fox TV, were exploiting the crime for profit, that Murdoch fired Judith Regan, canceled the television show, and withdrew the book from publication.
Soon afterwards, the Goldman family won the rights to the novel from a Florida bankruptcy court. It changed the title of the ghost-written book to "If I Did It: Confessions of the Killer," printing the key word "If" in such tiny letters that it actually fitted in the dot over the "I" in the title. To the casual reader, the title appeared to be: "I Did It: Confessions of the Killer." In addition to this legerdemain, it added an introduction by Dominick Dunne implying falsely that Simpson had actually confessed to the crime. The ghost-written fiction, passed off to the public as a truthful confession by O.J. Simpson, like the fake trial staged in London to resolve the issue of who burned down the Reichstag, was highly effective in the court of public opinion. It was an immense best seller, and reaped a sizable profit. But it did not succeed in closing the case in the realm of fact. On the books of the LA police, the double murders still remain an unsolved crime.

The theories of the case can be found here.

Who Burned Down The Reichstag-- And Brought Hitler To Powet?

2009-12-26T07:43:00.001-08:00

On the night of February 27, 1933 in Berlin, the Reichstag, the home of the German Parliament and the symbol of the German state, was ablaze. While it was still smouldering, German police arrested Marinus Van der Lubbe, a Dutch communist with a history of setting buildings on fire. Also at the crime scene was Adolph Hitler, the newly appointed leader of a shaky coalition government. Only hours later he proclaimed that the crime was not the work of a lone arsonist but part of a wider Communist plot to overthrow the German government calling the it a warning"sign from heaven" of the impending Communist Putsch. With such rhetoric, he persuaded President Paul von Hindenburg to sign the Reichstag Fire decree, which temporarily suspended civil liberties in Germany and allowed the mass arrest of Communists, including its members in parliament. After a snap election, Hitler’s Nazi party had the majority necessary to pass the laws that would make Hitler dictator.
To provide evidence of a Communist plot, German authorities arrested Georgi Dimitrov, a Bulgarian Communist, and Stalin’s chief of covert operations in central Europe. They also arrested two his Communist associates, Vasil Tanev and Blagoi Popov. Together with Van Der Lubbe, they were charged with a conspiracy to overthrow the government. The Show trial ran from September to December 1933, and by almost any measure qualified as the trial of the century. It was presided over by judges fromGermany's highest court. It had Hermann Goring, the creator of Hitler’s Gestapo, and other senior Nazi leaders, as star witnesses, and it was one of the first trials to be broadcast live via radio to the entire world. It began on the morning of September 21, 1933 with the rambling testimony of Van der Lubbe. He admitted setting the fire but claimed he had acted entirely on his own. The prosecution then produced evidence found by firemen, including twenty bundles of inflammable material strategically located in different parts of the Reichstag, that cast doubt on the idea that Van der Lubbe, who was half blind, could himself have placed and rigged all these incendiary devices without help. Next Dimitrov, the operative accused of masterminding the conspiracy, was called to the stand. Though not a lawyer, he acted as his own defense lawyer. He agreed with the prosecutors that the fire had been set by a conspiracy, but, turning the tables on them, he argued that it was a Nazi not a Communist conspiracy, With great dramatic flair, he cross-examined Goring about his role in the investigation and the sequence in which evidence was uncovered. Allowing a worldwide radio audience to hear Stalin’s principal agent brutally interrogate Hitler’s alter ego in a German court room about inconsistencies in the investigation. At one point, he provoked a heated exchanges between himself and Goring on the nature of Communism. Dimitrov’s defense proved so effective that he, as well as his two Communist associates, were acquitted. Hitler and Goring were outraged at the verdict, but the chief judge explained that whereas the court was convinced that the fire resulted from a Communist conspiracy, the prosecutors had failed to prove Dimitrov and his associates was part of it. The only person convicted was the hapless Van der Lubbe, who was beheaded in 1934.
While the Leipzig trial was still under way, a counter-trial was staged in London by Willi Münzenberg, the brilliant propaganda chief for the Stalin-controlled Communist International. The evidence it produced took the form of dramatic revelations from masked men who claimed to be Nazi defectors, including one who identified himself as a former storm trooper and testified that his unit in Berlin had set the fire on direct orders from Goring. Another witness identified Van der Lubbe as the homosexual lover of a top Nazi commander and was used as a fall guy. At the end of the one week counter-trial, Goring was convicted of burning down the Reichstag fire to bring Hitler to power. But though the counter-trial provided much grist for the media mill, it turned out that all its evidence had been faked by Münzenberg’s staff. The masked witnesses were not Nazi defectors but Communist loyalists acting out scripted parts. The "Nazi storm trooper," for example, was played by Albert Norden, the editor of the leading Communist newspaper in Germany. By blending together a cocktail of fact and fiction, the counter-trial served to further pollute the evidentiary waters.
When the Red Army captured Berlin in 1945, it also captured the Gestapo archive. Stalin ordered this trove of documents, including some 50,000 pages of legal proceedings and Gestapo investigations bearing on the Reichstag fire, transported under seal to Moscow. For over three decades, they remained a state secret. Then, after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990, part of this archive was opened to researchers. The documents , which presumably had been vetted (and possibly added to) by the KGB, showed no evidence that Stalin or Communist party officials had burnt the Reichstag. They did, however, contain evidence showing that the Nazis had been preparing to arrest Communists before the fire. In addition, there was one intriguing report suggesting that the fire had been set by the Nazis themselves. It described a Berlin prison guard telling police investigators that Adolf Rall, a prisoner arrested for theft, had been overheard bragging to other prisoners that he had been part of a Nazi squad that entered the Reichstag through a tunnel and sprinkled flammable liquid inside the building. German investigators were unable to confirm this story. No record of Rall’s interrogation by the Gestapo was ever found and Rall himself had been murdered on the outskirts of Berlin in November 1933 (while the trial was still in progress). So the lead was a literal dead end. In any case, since both the Gestapo and KGB had custody of an archive, and neither agency was above with tampering with documents, the evidentiary value of the documents is at least questionable.
As a result, little more is known seven decades later about one of the most political explosive crimes of the twentieth century. Indeed, all that is known for certain that the Reichstag was deliberately destroyed. Whether a lone arsonist or a conspiracy, the resulting conflagration forever changed history.
***

The theories of the case can be found here.

The Cold Case Of The Hot Corpse

2009-12-14T11:24:00.000-08:00

November 23rd 2009 was the third anniversary of the radiation death in London of the former KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko. By now, most, if not all, the crucial evidence in the case has either vanished or been suppressed. The radioactive isotope to which he was exposed was an extremely exotic isotope that has only a brief half- life of 138.4 days. After nine half-lives, over 99 percent of it is gone. Traces of other isotopes made with the Polonium 210, and which could have possibly identified the nuclear reactor that produce it, and which have even briefer half-lives, no longer exist in identifiable quantities. So there is no longer a radioactive trail, if indeed there ever was one.
Even before the disappearance of the Polonium 210, the crime scenes in London had been too badly compromised to determine any clear chronology of the contamination. Police did not initially seal off the places where Litvinenko and his associates visited because they did not know that they were dealing with a radioactive poison. It took the hospital over two weeks to correctly identify the Polonium 210 and, during this time, the sites were scrubbed clean and walked through. So, several weeks later, different radiation levels at these sites could be due to nothing more than cleaning or traffic. Nor was the container ever found in which the Polonium 210 was transported or were there any witnesses to its existence. Consequently, the only evidence as to where, when and how Litvinenko was exposed to Polonium 210 comes from the autopsy performed on his radioactive body which was done on December 1, 2006 at the Royal London Hospital. But the pathologists’ findings– as well as the autopsy slides, autoradiography films, and toxicology report– have been kept secret from not only the public and Litvinenko’s family members, but from Britain’s partner in the joint-investigation, Russia.
When I asked a former top official of Scotland Yard about the autopsy, he told me authoritatively that “there is good reason for its secrecy.” He then added that there was one leak that “caused a near panic at the Crown Prosecutors office” because it was “accurate.”
The leak he referred came from Scotland Yard and was published on January 7, 2007 in the London Telegraph. It revealed that Litvinenko’s “post-mortem examination revealed two ’spikes’ of radiation poisoning,” meaning that Litvinenko was exposed to Polonium 210 on at least two different occasions. This finding alone, if accurate, undermines the initial hypothesis of investigators that Litvinenko had been poisoned only once: in the Pine Bar of the Millennium Hotel on November 1st, 2006. If Litvinenko had multiple encounters with the same Polonium 210, it would require a different explanation. Had Litvinenko wittingly or unwittingly been in possession of a vial of the Polonium 210 that leaked on him twice? Did a poisoner administered Polonium 210 to him on two different occasions? Or was there some other way to account for his multiple exposures? But even though this finding made the case much murkier, Scotland Yard already had a prime suspect, Andrei Lugovoi, a former Russian intelligence officer, who had been with Litvinenko in the Pine Bar just hours before he fell ill.
The Suspect
Lugovoi, a 42 year old Russian businessman, had tested positive for Polonium 210, as did his hotel rooms. He also admitted that he had met with Litvinenko both on November 1st and in mid October. So he had opportunity. Even though he denied any part in Litvinenko’s death, or any knowledge about the Polonium 210, to British detectives in Moscow, Britain’s crown prosecutors decided he should stand trial in London and they requested his extradition. Since Britain had no extradition treaty with Russia, and the Russian Constitution prohibits the extradition of its citizens, Russia rejected the request. Britain then retaliated by expelling Russian diplomats and effectively ending the Russian involvement in the joint investigation.
When I went to Moscow that December to interview the Russian investigators, and examine the evidence the British had furnished for its extradition request, the Russian inquiry was at a complete standstill. The special prosecutor said that without access to the pathology reports, or being allowed to talk to Litvinenko’s doctors, it was not possible even to establish "the cause of death of Litvinenko” or that culpability of anyone, including Lugovoi.
I next went to see Lugovoi, who just had been elected to the Russian Dumas. Since as a member of the Dumas he was invulnerable to prosecution, I found him eager to discuss his relationship with Litvinenko. They both had been intelligence officers in the 1990s, but then Lugovoi had become a supporter of Putin while Litvinenko had done everything he could to discredit him, So how did they come together? Lugovoi answered in a single word: “Berezovsky.”
Boris Abramovich Berezovsky, a billionaire now living in London, had been the single most powerful oligarch in Russia in the 1990s. He not only controlled whole sectors of the Russian economy, and the country's largest television channel, but he was part of the Kremlin apparatus, serving as the deputy secretary of its National Security Council. Both Litvinenko and Lugovoi acted a his protectors in the FSB, which was the successor agency to the KGB. Litvinenko was deputy head of its organized crime unit, while Lugovoi was in the 9th Directorate, which was responsible for guarding top Kremlin officials, including Berezovsky, before becoming head of security at Berezovsky’s television channel. They both also performed extraordinary services for Berezovsky. Litvinenko saved Berezovsky when, with a gun in one hand and his FSB credentials in the other, he prevented Moscow police from arresting him on a murder charge. He then ended his own career in the FSB by exposing a FSB faction’s alleged plan to assassinate Berezovsky. As a consequence, Litvinenko was imprisoned. Lugovoi meanwhile helped Berezovsky’s partner break out of a Moscow prison–an act for which he served prison time. During this tumult, Berezovsky moved to London and became Putin’s arch foe. He repaid Litvinenko by helping him to escape to England in November 2000, where he financially supported him and his investigations for the next six years. How did he repay Lugovoi?, I asked. Lugovoi answered with a wry smile, by “bringing me to Litvinenko.”
The reunion came in January 2006 in London. Berezovsky had rented Blenheim Palace– the birthplace of Winston Churchill– to give himself a lavish 60th birthday party. There were some 300 guests in formal attire and, in the center of the room, a giant ice sculpture representing St. Basil's Cathedral on Red Square covered with Caspian caviar. Berezovsky’s seating plan placed Lugovoi at a small table with three men: On his right was Litvinenko, who now engaged in conducting investigations into Russian atrocities in Chechnya. Across from him was Akhmed Zakayev, the exiled leader of the Chechen resistence who headed the Committee on Russian War Crimes in Chechnya. On his left was Alexander Goldfarb, who ran Berezovsky’s foundation which help support both Litvinenko’s and Zakayev’s activities. These men at the table would be among the last to see Litvineko before his death ten months later. Lugovoi would meet with him in the Pine Bar at 5 pm on November 1st. Zakayev then would drive Litvinenko from the Pine Bar to Berezovsky’s office (and the next day to the hospital). At the hospital, Goldfarb would write Litvinenko’s dramatic death bed statement accusing Putin of assassinating him.
But that evening, as Lugovoi recalls it, there was nothing but good cheer and celebration toasts. There also emerged a joint venture between him and Litvinenko. The idea, according to Lugovoi, was to use his connections in Moscow to gather “business data” that Litvinenko could sell to London clients, including Berezovsky.
As this project developed, much of the “business data” concerned individuals connected in one way or another with the Russian energy giant Yukos Oil. Yukos was no ordinary oil company: With tens of billions of dollars stashed away in accounts in Cyprus, Gibraltar and other offshore havens, it had become by the early 2000s a virtual counter-state to the government. In the battle that ensued between it and the government, it was charged with tax fraud and, through enormous fines, its assets in Russia were effectively expropriated. The two principal owners of its holding company were Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was imprisoned in Siberia. And Leonid Nevzlin, who fled to Israel. In Tel Aviv, Nevzlin set up a private intelligence company, ISC Global, with divisions in London and Tel Aviv, to gather information that would help him fight Russian efforts to get Yukos’ offshore accounts. After a re-organization in 2005, the London branch, changed its name to RISC Management, Ltd. Shortly thereafter it called in Lugovoi and Litvinenko, and according to Lugovoi, retained them on behalf of its anonymous client to gather information in Moscow. Initially, it asked for relatively innocuous reports, such as one entitled, “Main characteristics of Russian Organized Crime in 2003-2005." But soon it was asking for more sensitive data, including government files on corrupt Russian tax officials. When Lugovoi resisted these requests, Litvinenko suggested that he might have a “problem” renewing his British visa, and then his visa was indeed held up. When he agreed to cooperate, his visa was instantly renewed. Lugovoi also got $8,000 wired into his bank account.
Then, in September 2006, Litvineko made a trip to Tel Aviv to meet personally with Nevzlin and to personally hand=deliver “The Yukos file.” Nevzlin admits receiving the dossier from Litvinenko, but said it was unsolicited. After Litvinenko returned from Israel. Lugovoi says he found him increasingly on edge. On October 27th, after Lugovoi was summoned to London by Berezovsky, Litvinenko retrieved the cell phone he had been using for RISC business, and removed the SIM card, which contained a digital trail of his contacts. When he next saw Litvinenko on November 1st at the Pine Bar to discuss their planned meeting the next day at RISC, he seemed even edgier. Then the next day Litvinenko called to say he was sick and cancelled the meeting. Lugovoi returned to Moscow, and 2 weeks later, learned that Litvinenko was dying and that he was contaminated with the radioactive isotope.
When I asked Lugovoi who was providing the expenses for his trips to London, he said Litvinenko gave it to him in cash but it obvious to him that Litvinenko himself did not have the resources to finance him, Clearly there was a missing element. Was the elephant in the room Berezovsky?
After all, Berezovsky not only had been financing Litvinenko even since he had defected to London, he owned the house in which he lived and the office which he used (both of which had been contaminated by Polonium 210). Lugovoi had also seen him at the RISC office on one occasion. Berezovsky also shared a common interest with the former owners of Yukos in opposing Putin’s efforts to seize offshore accounts and in blocking Russian extradition requests for both him and Nevzlin. Berezovsky was the only person, other than Litvinenko, to call Lugovoi on the cell phone reserved for RISC activities . So he could hardly have been unaware of Litvinenko’s and Lugovoi’s information-gathering business.
The Compramat game
For a further insight into this business, I went to the person who accompanied Lugovoi to London for two meeting, Dmitry Kovtun, a compact man in his mid forties who had served in a Soviet Army intelligence unit in Germany. After leaving the military, he became a consultant first in Germany and then in Russia attempting to broker energy deals. I him at the Porto Atrium, a restaurant on the Leninsky Prospect know for its extensive wine cellar. He explained that Lugovoi, who had been his close friend since childhood, had proposed he go to London with him on October 16th 2006 to find new consulting work. Lugovoi’s contact there turned out to be Litvinenko, who spent most of his next two days with them. He recalled that Litvinenko first took them to a building owned by Berezovsky in Mayfair for a meeting with a security company before going to another one at RISC. That evening Litvineko invited them to a trendy Moroccan restaurant for dinner and then escorted them to various night spots, including a lap dancing club called Hey Jo His next encounter with Litvinenko came 2 weeks later. He had gone to Hamburg to renew his German residency permit when Lugovoi invited him to come to London for a major soccer match (for which Berezovsky was providing tickets.) When he arrived on November 1st, he went to the Millennium hotel, where Lugovoi was staying with his family, and met him at hotel’s Pine Bar. Then they were joined by Litvinenko for a pre-game drink. That was his last contact with Litvinenko.
After he returned to Moscow, he tested positive for Polonium 210. So did the visa form he had signed in Hamburg on October 29th, the London nightclubs they visited on October 16th and 17th, and his room at the Great Western Hotel where he stayed on October 16th. But the Transaero plane on which he arrived in London on the morning of October 16th had no traces of Polonium 210. So he deduced he must have been exposed on the 16th and then left a radioactive trail in London and Hamburg. (German prosecutors concluded in November 2009 that the Polonium 210 traces in Hamburg did not constitute enough evidence to continue their investigation of Kovtun.)
When I pressed him about what had happened at the meetings, he said they seemed like just “courtesy meetings” through which Litvinenko could show that he had contacts in Moscow. After leaving RISC, however, Litvinenko made an extraordinary proposal to Kovtun. He said that a number of Russian billionaires had established residence in Spain. He suggested that he and Lugovoi should work with him in Spain to “solve problems” for these Russian expatriates. When Kovtun asked,“What kind of problems?”, Litvinenko laughed “Don’t worry. We’ll provide their problems and then fix them.” It became clear to him that the “game” that Litvinenko was proposing was dealing in “compramat,” or compromising information.
The Italian Job
Litvinenko’s game may have involved more than merely unearthing existing Compramat. Consider, for example, his collaboration with Mario Scaramella, who was the third of Litvinenko’s associates contaminated with Polonium 210, Scaramella, a lawyer and self-styled nuclear waste investigator, had met Litvinenko while working for a highly-controversial Italian Parliamentary Committee attempting (without success) to uncover putative KGB penetrations in Italy. Scaramella also believed that their was a “Red Mafia” of ex-KGB men who smuggled arms, including nuclear components, from eastern Europe. So Litvinenko, who had himself monitored organized crime in the KGB, helped Scaramella organize operation to entrap them. One of their targets was an ex-KGB agent living in Naples. To compromise him, they arranged for a box of contraband Russian rocket grenades to be delivered to him, and then tipped-off the Naples police that he was planning to use them to assassinate someone. He was duly arrested but then the scheme backfired because Scaramella and Litvinenko’s plotting was overhead by SISMI, the Italian intelligence agency, which was tapping Scaramella’s phone. So the ex-KGB man was released from custody and other information Scaramella had provided police came under scrutiny, including his tip that led police to a suitcase containing enriched uranium rods that supposedly belonged to other “Red Mafia”agents trafficking. in nuclear component. By the time, Scaramella flew to London on November 1st 2006 to meet Litvinenko at the Itsu Sushi restaurant, Italian authorities were preparing to criminally charge Scaramella with planting false evidence as part of a compramat plot. And when Scaramella was released from the London hospital where he tested positive for Polonium 210, he was imprisoned in Naples on charges of calumny and arms smuggling. (He is currently under house arrest awaiting trial scheduled for May 2010.)
Whatever their merit or legality, Litvinenko was involved in covert activities that went beyond those ordinarily engaged in by a political dissident. But were they related to the Polonium 210 that caused his death?
The Importance Of Polonium
Polonium 210 is tightly controlled by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) for a singular reason: it can be used trigger an early-stage nuclear bomb. The United States and Russia both used Polonium 210 in their early weapons before moving on to more sophisticated (and stable) triggers. Almost every country secretly attempting to build nuclear weapons, including Israel, South Africa, Iraq and North Korea, have also experimented with Polonium 210. Consequently, its detection anywhere outside a known nuclear facility is considered, as noted in a US intelligence report, "a key indication of a nuclear weapons program in its early stages."
The small quantity of Polonium 210 found in London could have been made in any country that has an uninspected nuclear reactor– a list in 2006 that included Russia. Britain, China, France, India, Israel, Pakistan and North Korea (which manufactured a substantial quantity for its October 2006 nuclear tests. It also could have been stolen from stockpiles in the former Soviet Union or America, where, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Illicit Trafficking Data Base, there had been 14 incidents of missing industrial Polonium-210 since 2004.
Wherever it originated, we know that it was smuggled into London and that it contaminated at least four men– Litvineko, Lugovoi, Kovtun and Scaramella– as well as offices, restaurants, and automobiles. The possible time it arrived could be narrowed down by the autopsy report, which remains, even 3 years after Litvinenko’s death, a state secret. Beyond that evidence, there is only conjecture. What remains unanswered is the crucial question: why was a component for an early stage nuclear bomb was brought to London in 2006.
***

The theories of the case can be found here

Who Killed Zia

2009-12-14T11:20:00.000-08:00

On August 17, 1988, at 3:58 PM, Pak One, an American built Hercules C-130b transport plane, carrying its VIP capsule the President of Pakistan, General Zia-ul-Haq, most of his top generals, as well as two American guests– US Ambassador, Arnold L. Raphel and US military mission head General Herbert Wassom– crashed to earth only 18 miles from the airport in central Pakistan from where it took off. It had been a. bright clear day, and dozens of eye witnesses could see the giant aircraft lurch up and down three times in the sky, as if were on an invisible roller coaster, and then plunge straight into the desert and explode in a fire ball. All 30 persons on board, including four crew members, were dead. Within hours, army tanks sealed off public building and television stations, signifying the change in power. Zia’s reign, which had begun with his own military coup on July 5, 1977, now had ended with his death. But even though the crash altered the face of politics in Pakistan in a way in which no simple Presidential assassination or coup d'etat could have done, its cause remains a mystery.
Former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, whose father he had allowed to be executed (and who herself was assassinated in 2007,) said in the epilogue to her book, Daughter of Destiny "Zia's death must have been an act of god". But divine intervention is not what brought the plane down. According to the 365-page report of the forensic investigation done by six American Air Force experts, headed by Colonel Daniel E. Sowada, no evidence of a accidental mechanical failure or pilot error had been found. A conclusion of assassination was all but inescapable. The aviation investigators, following the precepts of Sherlock Holmes, used on a process of elimination. First, they ruled out the possibility that the plane had blown up in mid air. If it had exploded in this manner the pieces of the plane, which had different shapes and therefore resistance to the wind, would have been strewn over a wide area-- but that had not happened. By re-assembling the plane in a giant jigsaw puzzle, and scrutinizing with magnifying glasses the edges of each broken piece, they could established that the plane was in one piece when it had hit the ground. They thus concluded structural failure--ie. The breaking up of the plane-- was not the cause. Next, they eliminated the possibility of a missile attack. If the plane had been hit by a missile, it would have generated intense heat which in turn would have melted the aluminum panels and, as the plane dived, the wind would have left tell-tale streaks in the molten metal. But there were no streaks on the panels. And no missile part or other ordinance had been found in the area.
They further rule out the possibility that there was an inboard fire while the plane was in the air since, if there had been one, the passengers would have breathed in soot before they died. Yet, the single autopsy performed, which was on the American general seated in the VIP capsule, showed there was no soot in his trachea, indicating that he had died before, not after, the fire ignited by the crash.
If it was not a missile or fire, the power might have somehow failed in flight. If this had happened, the propellers would not have been turning at their full torque when the plane crashed, which would have affected the way their blades had broken off and curled on impact. But by examining the degree of curling on each broken propeller blades, they determined that in fact the engines were running at full speed when the propellers hit the ground.
Had the fuel been sabotaged? They ruled out the possibility of contaminated fuel by taking samples of the diesel fuel from the refueling truck, and, by analyzing the residues still left in the fuel pumps in the plane, they could also tell that they had been operating normally at the time of the crash. They then ruled out any problem with the electric power on the plane because both electric clocks on board had stopped at the exact moment of impact, which they determined independently other evidence.
The final possibility of mechanical failure was that the controls did not work. But the Hercules C-130 had not one but three redundant control system. The two sets of hydraulic controls were backed up, in case of a leak of fluid in both of them, by a mechanical system of cables. If any one of them worked, the pilots would have been able to fly the plane. By comparing the position of the controls with the mechanisms in the hydraulic valves and the stabilizers in the tail of the plane (which are moved through this system when the pilot moves the steering wheel), they established that the control system was working when the plane crashed. This was confirmed by a computer simulation of the flight done by Lockheed, the builder of the C-130. They also ruled out the possibility that the controls had temporarily jammed by a microscopic examination of the mechanical parts to see if there were any signs of jamming or binding.
That left the possibility of pilot error. But the crash had occurred after a routine and safe take off in perfectly clear daytime weather and the hand-picked pilots were fully experienced with the C-130 and had medical check-ups before the flight. Since the plane was not in any critical phase of flight, such as take off or landing, where poor judgment on the part of the pilots could have resulted in the mishap, the investigators ruled out pilot error as a possible cause. Based on this investigation, Pakistan’s Board of Inquiry concluded that the only other possible cause of the crash of Pak-One was a criminal act “leading to the loss of control of the aircraft." It suggested the pilots must have been incapacitated but this was as far as it could go since there was no black box or cockpit recorder on Pak One and no autopsies had been done on the remains of the pilots.
What had happened to the pilots during the final minutes of the flight? When I went to Pakistan in February 1989, I attempted to answer that question. There were three other planes in the area tuned to the same frequency for communications– the turbojet carrying General Aslam Beg, the Army’s vice chief of staff, which was waiting on the runway at Bahawalpur airport to take off next; Pak 379, which was the backup C-130 in case anything went wrong to delay Pak One; and a Cessna security plane that took off before Pak One to scout for terrorists. With the assistance of the families of the military leaders killed in the crash, I managed to locate pilots of these planes-- all of whom were well acquainted with the flight crew of Pak One and its procedures-- who could listen to the conversation between Pak One and the control tower in Bahawalpur. They independently described the same sequence of events. First Pak One reported its estimated time of arrival in the capital. Then, when the control tower asked its position, it failed to respond. At the Same Time Pak 379 was trying unsuccessfully to get in touch with Pak One to verify its arrival time. All they heard from Pak One was "stand by" but no message followed. When this silence persisted, the control tower got progressively more frantic in its efforts to contact Zia's pilot, Wing Commander Mash'hood. Three or four minutes passed. Then, a faint voice in Pak One called out "Mash'hood, Mash'hood". One of the pilots overhearing this conversation recognized the voice. It was Zia's military secretary, Brigadier Najib Ahmed who apparently, from the weakness of his voice, was in the back of the flight deck (where a door connected to the VIP capsule.) If the radio was switched on and was picking up background sounds, it was the next best thing to a cockpit flight recorder. Under these circumstances, the long silence between "stand bye" and the faint calls to Mash'hood, like the dog that didn't bark, was the relevant fact. Why wouldn't Mash'hood or the three other members of the flight crew spoken if they were in trouble? The pilots aboard the other planes, who were fully familiar Mash'hood, and the procedures he was trained in, explained that if Pak One's crew was conscious and in trouble they would not in any circumstances have remained silent for this period of time. If there had been difficulties with controls, Mash'hood instantly would have given the emergency "may day" signal so help would be dispatched to the scene. Even if he had for some reason chosen not to communicate with the control tower, he would have been heard shouting orders to his crew to prepare for an emergency landing. And if there had been an attempt at a hijacking in the cockpit or scuffle between the pilots, it would also be overheard. In retrospect, the pilots of the other aircraft had only one explanation for the prolonged silence: Mash'hood and the other pilots were unconscious while the thumb switch that operated the microphone had been kept opened by the clenched hand of a pilot..
The account of the eyewitnesses at the crash site dove-tailed with the radio silence. They had seen the plane slowly pitching up and down. According to a C-130 expert I spoke to at Lockheed, C-130's characteristically go into a pattern known as a "phugoid" when no pilot is flying it. First, the unattended plane dives towards the ground, then the mechanism in the tail automatically over-corrects for this downward motion, causing it to head momentarily upwards. Then, with no one at the controls, it would veer downward. Each swing would become more pronounced until the plane crashed. Analyzing the weight on the plane, and how it had been loaded on, this expert calculated the plane would have made three roller-coaster turns before crashing, which is exactly what the witnesses had been reported. He concluded from this pattern that the pilots had been conscious, they would have corrected the "phugoid"-- at least would have made an effort, which would have been reflected in the settings of the controls. Since this had not happened, he concluded, that they were paralyzed or unconscious
One hypothesis he advanced was that the flight crew might have been incapacitated by an extremely rapid acting chemical agent, such as "VX" nerve gas. It is odorless, easily transportable in liquid form, and a soda-sized can full would be enough to causes paralysis and loss of speech within 30 seconds. Nerve gas would leave behind traces of phosphorous, and, as it turned out, the chemical analyzes of debris from the cockpit showed such traces of phosphorous.
So why were autopsies not performed on the bodies of the flight crew to determine whether a nerve gas or other toxic agent had paralyzed them? The explanation given in the report was that Islamic law requires burial within 24 hours. But this could not been the real reason since the bodies were not returned to their families for burial until two days after the crash, as relatives confirmed to me. Nor were they ever asked permission for autopsy examinations. And, as I learned from a doctor for the Pakistan Air Force, Islamic law not withstanding, autopsies are routinely done on pilots in cases of air crashes. I was further told by doctors at the military hospital in Bahawalpur that parts of the victims' bodies had been brought there in plastic body bags from the crash site on the night of August 17, and stored there, so that autopsies could be performed by team of American and Pakistani pathologists. But before the pathologists had arrived, the hospital received orders to return these plastic bags to the coffins for burial.
These orders to literally bury the evidence came directly from the Army which was now under the authority of General Beg, who, after having his turbojet pilot circle over the burning wreckage of Pak One, few immediately back to the capital, Islamabad, to assume command.
For its part, Pakistani military authorities concentrated their investigation on the possibility that Shi'ite fanatics were responsible for the crash. The co-pilot of Pak One, Wing Commander Sajid, was a Shi'ite (as are more than ten per cent of Pakistan's Moslems), as was one of the pilots of the back-up C-130. This pilot, though he protested his innocence, was kept in custody for more than two months and roughly interrogated about whether Wing Commander Sajid had discussed a suicide mission. Finally, the army abandoned this effort after the Air Force demonstrated that it would have been physically impossible for the co-pilot alone to have caused a C-130 to crash in the way it did.
The government then appointed a commission headed by Justice Shafiur Rehman, a well-respected judge on the Supreme Court, to establish the cause of the crash. Five years later, in 1993, it issued a secret report concluding that the Army's had so effectively obstructed the investigation that the perpetrators behind the crash could not be brought to justice. The one uncounted casualty of Pak One was thus the truth.
The theories of the case can be found here.

The Real Oswald Mystery

2009-12-14T11:15:00.000-08:00

The endless tangle of questions about bullets, trajectories, wounds, time sequences and inconsistent testimony that has surrounded the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 and has obsessively fascinated, if not entirely blinded, two generations of self-styled assassination investigators, probably never will be satisfactorily resolved. Each new release of documents from the various bureaucracies involved in the nearly half century old investigation may only deepen the apparent contradictions.
Within this morass of facts. however, there is a central actor, Lee Harvey Oswald. His rifle, which fired the fatal bullet into the president, was found in the sniper's nest at the Texas Book Depository. So was his palm print. He had also bought the ammunition. His cartridge cases were found near the body of a murdered policeman on the route of his flight.
In light of such evidence, the issue that ought to have concerned Americans was not Oswald's technical guilt but whether he was involved with others in the assassination. Oswald was not a "loner- in the conventional sense. Ever since he was handed a pamphlet about the Rosenberg prosecution at the age of 15, he was a joiner, seeking affiliations with groups at home and abroad. When he was only 16. he wrote the Socialist Party "I am a Marxist and have been studying Socialist Principles for well over five years" and he requested information about joining their "Youth League. He subsequently made membership inquiries to such organizations as the Socialist Workers Party, the Socialist Labor Party, The Gus Hall-Benjamin Davis Defense Committee, The Fair Play for Cuba Committee and the Communist Party, USA— correspondence that brought him under surveillance by the FBI.
0swald also joined the Marine Corps. And after a two-year stint as a radar operator, Oswald sought still another affiliation: in October 1959 he became the first Marine to defect to the Soviet Union. In Moscow, he delivered a letter stating. "I affirm that my allegiance is to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics." Not only did he publically renounce his American citizenship but he told the U.S. consul that he intended to turn over to the Soviet Union military secrets that he had acquired while serving in the Marines, adding that he had data of "special interest" to the Russians. Since he indeed had exposure to military secrets such as the U-2 spy plane, his defection had serious espionage implications. Oswald thus had not only compromised the secret data he had come in contact with in the Marines, but put himself firmly in the hands of another country. He was now completely dependent on Russia for financial support, legal status and protection.
Before disappearing into the Soviet hinterland for a year, Oswald spelled out his operational creed in a long letter to his brother. From Moscow, he wrote presciently of his willingness to commit murder for a political cause: "I want you to understand what I say now, I do not say lightly, or unknowingly, since I've been in the military .... In the event of war I would kill any American who put a uniform on in defense of the American Government --", and then ominously added for emphasis, "Any American." His willingness to act as an assassin was now known to anyone who read this letter, which included not only his Russian hosts but American intelligence, since his letter was intercepted by the CIA and microfilmed.
Oswald returned from the Soviet Union in June 1962, joined by his Russian wife Marina, and settled in Dallas. He then acquired the means for killing. He purchased a rifle with telescopic sights and a revolver from a mail-order house under a false name. He also lectured a small circle of friends on the need for violent action rather than mere words. His particular focus was General Edwin A. Walker, an extreme conservative, who had been active in Dallas organizing anti-Castro guerrillas. For example, he suggested to a German geologist, Volkmar Schmidt that General Walker should be treated like a "murderer at large". He did not stop at fierce words. For weeks, he methodically stalked Walker's movements, photographing his residence from several angles. He then had his wife photograph him, dressed entirely in black, with his revolver strapped on a holster on his hip, his sniper's rifle in his right hand, and two newspapers, The Worker and The Militant, in his left hand. He made three copies of the photograph-- one of which he inscribed, dated "5--IV-63" and sent to a Dallas acquaintance, George De Mohrenschildt (who had also seen his rifle). He then left with his rifle wrapped in a raincoat, telling his wife he was off to "target practice", but his target, General Walker, was out of town that night. Five nights later, Oswald returned to Walker's house, and fired a shot at him that missed his head by inches, demonstrating to those that saw the photograph that he had the willingness to kill.
After the failed assassination, another friend, Ruth Paine, drove Oswald and his family to New Orleans, where he became the organizer for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, which opposed the efforts of the Kennedy administration to overthrow Castro. . Aside from printing leaflets, staging demonstrations, getting arrested and appearing on local radio talk shows in support of Castro that summer, Oswald attempted to befriend leaders of and infiltrate anti-Castro groups that were organizing sabotage raids against Cuba. By this time, he apparently considered himself a sleeper operative, writing in August 1963 to the central committee of the Communist Party USA, and asking "Whether in your opinion, I can compete with anti-progressive forces above ground, or whether I should always remain in the background, i.e. underground." During this hot summer, while practicing sighting his rifle in his backyard, according to his wife, he told her about his plan to hijack an airliner to Cuba, saying he might earn a position in Castro's government. Then, on September 9th, in a report that appeared on the front page of the New Orleans Times-Picayune, Castro, who had been the target of a number of assassination attempts by the CIA, warned that if American leaders continued "aiding plans to eliminate Cuban leaders ... they themselves will not be safe".
The implication of this warning was not lost on Oswald. Telling his wife that they might never meet again, he left New Orleans two weeks later headed for the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City. To convince the Cubans of his bona fides-- and seriousness-- he had prepared a dossier on himself, which included a 10 page resume, outlining his revolutionary activities, newspaper clippings about his defection to the Soviet Union, documents he had stolen from a printing company engaged in classified map reproduction for the US Army, his correspondence with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee executives, and, as if to demonstrate his lethal capability , the photographs linking him to the Walker shooting.
Oswald applied for a visa at the Cuban Embassy on the morning of September 27th 1963. He said that he wanted to stop in Havana en route to the Soviet Union. On the application the consular office who interviewed him, noted: "The applicant states that he is a member of the American Communist Party and Secretary in New Orleans of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee." Despite such recommendations, Oswald was told that he needed a Soviet visa before the Cuban visa could be issued. He argued over this requisite with the Cuban counsel, Eusebio Azque, in front of witnesses, and reportedly made wild claims about services he might perform for the Cuban cause. During the next five days, he traveled back and forth between the Soviet and Cuban embassies attempting to straighten out the difficulty. When he telephoned from the Cuban embassy to arrange an appointment at the Soviet Embassy with an officer called Valery Vladimirovich Kostikov, he set off alarm bells at the CIA, which had been surreptitiously monitoring the phone line. Kostikov was a KGB officer who had been under close surveillance in Mexico by the FBI. By the time the CIA had identified Oswald, and notified the FBI, he had left Mexico.
When he returned to Dallas, Oswald assumed a different identity--"O.H.Lee-- and, separating himself from his family, he moved to a rooming house. He also forbade his wife from divulging his whereabouts.
On October 18th, Oswald's visa was approved by the Cuban Foreign Ministry despite the fact that he had not officially received a Soviet visa, as required. Apparently unaware of this development, he wrote another letter to the Soviet Embassy, referring to his meeting with Kostikov in Mexico, and adding cryptically: "Had I been able to reach the Soviet Embassy in Havana as planned, the embassy there would have had time to complete our business." When FBI counterintelligence intercepted this letter in Washington. it urgently requested its field agent in Dallas to question him.
The FBI agent, James Hosty, unable to locate Oswald, warned his wife she could be sent back to Russia. When his wife told him about the FBI warning he threatened to bomb its Dallas office. By this time, Oswald had a menial $1.50 hour job at the Texas Book Depository, which overlooked the convergence of the three main streets into central Dallas.
On November 22nd, at 12:30 PM, as the President’s car passed the book depository, a burst of rifle fire fatally wounded him. Less than two hours later, a Dallas policeman had been shot and killed, and, near the shooting, Oswald was arrested with the murder weapon in his hand. He was charged with killing the policeman and, shortly afterwards, assassinating the President. Then, on November 24th, Oswald was shot to death in Dallas police headquarters by night club owner Jack Ruby.
The Warren Commission concluded– rightly I now believe– that Oswald fired all the shots that killed the President. But conspiracies do not necessarily require multiple rifleman to accomplish their purpose. And what the Warren Commission could not absolutely rule out, as two of its members pointed out to me, was the possibility that Oswald had acted at the behest of others. After all, he had advertised his willingness to undertake a high-profile assassination by circulating photographs connecting himself to the shooting of General Walker. Any party who was monitoring his activities in Dallas, New Orleans or Mexico City could have discerned from them that he was a potential assassin awaiting a mission. With his mind set on such violent actions as hijacking a plane, blowing up the FBI office, or killing “any American,” not much would be required to prod him to violence. He had sought liaisons in dangerous quarters and someone could have provided him with an inducement. But with Oswald forever silenced by Ruby, and intelligence services capable of expunging embarrassing data about their contacts with a Presidential assassins from their files, it is doubtful that we will ever know who, if anyone, influenced Oswald to act on November 22nd 1963.

The theories of this case can be found here.

Who Killed God's Banker

2009-12-12T16:02:00.001-08:00

On June 11, 1982, Roberto Calvi, the chairman of the Banco Ambrosiano, who had become know as "God’s Banker" because of the investments he made for the Vatican, vanished from Italy with a black briefcase full of documents. One week later, his body was found hanging from an orange noose under Blackfriar's Bridge in London; his feet submerged in the swirling waters of the Thames. His black bag was gone. Also missing was $1.2 billion from bank's subsidiaries in the Bahamas, Nicaragua, Peru, and Luxembourg. And the Vatican was missing one-half billion dollars in loans. How did God’s banker come to be dangling at the end of a rope over the Thames?
When the London river police cut down his body from scaffolding under the bridge on the morning of June 19,1982, they found seven large bricks stuffed in his pockets and grey suit. He did not appear to be the victim of a robbery since he had an expensive Patek Phillippe watch on his wrist and about $14,000 in Swiss francs, British pounds and Italian Lire in his wallet. He also had in his pockets a bogus Italian passport in the name of "Gian Roberto Calvino" (which he had used to get into Britain.)
The autopsy, conducted by Professor Frederick Keith Simpson, one of England's most experienced pathologist, only intensified the mystery. There was no river water in his lungs, so he had not drowned. Instead, the cause of death was asphyxia by hanging. Since his neck had not suffered the kind of injury that would have occurred in a free-fall, Professor Simpson determined that Calvi could not have dropped more than 2 feet before his fall was broken by the water. There was a "V" shaped wound on his neck, consistent with suicide, and there was no marks on the arms to indicate he had been restrained, puncture marks on to indicated he had been injected with a drug and no traces of suspicious chemicals in his stomach of drugs (other than the residue of a sleeping pill he had taken the previous night). So there was no
medical evidence of foul play.

The time of the death added further to the mystery. His Patek Phillippe watch, which was not water-proof, stopped at 1:52. While the watch could have stopped for reasons other than water damage, the water marks on the face of it, when taken together with the dropping level of the tide that night at Blackfriar's Bridge, established the latest time at which his body could have been suspended from the scaffolding. After 2:30 am, the level of the water in the Thames at Blackfriar's bridge would not have been high enough to have reached Calvi's wrist (as was calculated from the length of the rope he was hanging by when he was found), so he must have been hanging before then. But he could not have hung himself before 1 a.m. because the river level then would have been above his mouth and left river water in his body. So, if he committed suicide, it he could only have been between 1:00 and 2:30 a.m.
The coroner's jury in 1982, finding no evidence of murder, concluded that Calvi had hung himself.
But suicide during these hours, if possible at all, would require extraordinary activities from a sixty-two year old man, who was over-weight and suffered from vertigo. Despite the darkness, he would have had to find the scaffolding from the walkway along the river, which, since it was nearly submerged, could be seen only by leaning over the parapet wall at a strategic point. He would also have to have found in the dark the bricks (which were identified as coming from a construction site about a block away) and the rope to hang himself. Next, he would have to had hoisted himself over the parapet on the bridge and climbed twelve feet down a nearly vertical iron ladder to the level of the temporary scaffolding. He then would have to step across the two and one-half feet gap onto the scaffolding's rusty poles, which were arranged like monkey-bars in a children's playground, and edge his way about 8 feet along them to tie the rope to the eyelet. After that, he would to shimmy down to the next level of the scaffolding (otherwise the drop from the higher level would have resulted in far more neck damage than there had been.) Finally, after having put the bricks in his pockets and pants fly, and his head in the noose, he would have had to ease himself into the swirling water three feet below by clutching onto the poles (again, avoiding a free fall).
While such an acrobatic maneuver is possible, it would presumably leave some traces such as rust under his fingernails, splinters or abrasions on his hands, tears in his suit. "The long and short of it is we do not know how Calvi's body got onto the end of that rope," Deputy Superintendent John White explained to me. "We don't even know how he got from his hotel, four and one half miles away, to Blackfriar's Bridge."
Since he was "God’s Banker," and in the headlines of every major newspaper, the British authorities, aided by MI-6, continued to investigate even after the suicide verdict. They established that Calvi had arrived in London on June 15 in a chartered plane under a false name (Calvino) and checked into an inexpensive suite in the Chelsea Cloisters, a second-rate residential hotel. When the police searched it after his death, they found his personal belongings-- including his toilet kit-- neatly packed inside two locked suitcases, as if they were waiting to be picked up by someone, but no other trace of his stay there. No hotel employee recalled seeing Calvi leave. the London police spent months canvassing taxi drivers and other potential witnesses, but they could not find anyone in London who had seen him that night. Nor could they find in London any witness to his activities during the three days he had been in London prior to his death. During these London days, he was, as Superintendent White put it, "the invisible man."
Italian authorities ran into a similar stone wall. His flight from Italy was clearly aided by an elaborate conspiracy. He used three false identities, eight separate private plane flight around Europe, a speed boat, four different cars, and 14 temporary residences in getting to the Chelsea Cloisters, in a convoluted itinerary that took him from Rome to Venice by plane, then to Trieste by car, Yugoslavia by a smuggler’s motor boat, Austria by car. He flew to London in a leased jet, and disguised as a Fiat executive. His facilitators included Flavio Carboni, a Sardinian businessman ( who had received $11 million from Calvi for organizing the escape,) Silvano Vittor, a cigarette smuggler, who served as his bodyguard in London, and two strikingly beautiful Austrian sisters, Manuela and Micheala Klienszig. . When they were later arrested, they all denied seeing Calvi the night he disappeared. So there were no witnesses at all.
Seven years later, Carlo Calvi, Calvi's only son, hired Kroll Associates to re-investigate the case. After locating, authenticating and re-assembling the original scaffolding Calvi had hung from, forensic experts retained by Kroll conducted a simple experiment. They had a stand-in for Calvi— same size and weight— walk the possible routes along the scaffolding poles that Calvi would have to walk if he tied the rope and hung himself. The stand-in wore pairs of Calvi's hand-made loafers that were similar to the one he had on when he was found, After each trial, these shoes were then put in water for the same time Calvi's shoes had been submerged, and then microscopically examined by a forensic chemist, who had worked in the London police laboratory for 18 years. In each case, he found that the soles of the stand-in's shoes had picked up yellow paint smears that matched those on the scaffolding poles. Given the pressure of the shoe on the narrow pole, he concluded such tell-tale traces were "unavoidable." Yet, when he examined the soles of the shoes Calvi had actually worn that day with a microscope, he found no traces of yellow pain on the soles. Since there was no way he could have hung himself except to have walked on the scaffolding, Kroll concluded "Someone else had to have tied him to the scaffolding and killed him."
After the Kroll investigation, The coroner's jury quashed its verdict of suicide and declared it was unable to decide between murder and suicide. So like God’s banker, the question of how he met his end was left dangling.
But how could Calvi have been murdered. He couldn't have been forced, alive, onto the scaffolding, without leaving signs of struggle on his body. Nor could he have been drugged unconscious without the drugs showing up in the autopsy examination. But he could have been strangled somewhere else with a rope– death was by asphyxia not drowning and then transported to the scaffolding. Kroll’s investigators came up with the theory that his dead body was taken to the bridge in a small boat sometime around midnight when the high tide would make it possible to moor the boat to Blackfriar’s Bridge, tie the rope to the scaffold, and unload Calvi’s body. The problem with this murder scenario is that it would be visible to anyone passing by the bridge on either bank– hardly a recipe for a perfect crime– and there were many potential potentials. Yet, neither the police nor Kroll could ever find any witness to such a bizarre scene.
As a result, the case remains unsolved.

The theories of the case are here.