How We Sold Our Souls–The Octopus Murders

photorandy2023

2 years ago

The Articles in the Category cover a vast range of history not only in our country but in the world as well. The category is entitled “How We Sold Our Soul”. In many cases our history has hinged on compromises being made by the powers at be. They say hind-sight is 20/20, which is why I am discussing these land mark decisions in this manner. The people that made these decisions in many cases thought they were doing the right thing. However in some instances they were made for expediency and little thought was given to the moral ramifications and the fallout that would result from them. I hope you enjoy these articles. The initial plan is to discuss 10 compromises, but as time progresses I am sure that number will increase.

Joseph Daniel Casolaro (June 16, 1947 – August 10, 1991) was an American freelance writer who came to public attention in 1991 when he was found dead in a bathtub in room 517 of the Sheraton Hotel in Martinsburg, West Virginia, his wrists slashed 10–12 times. The medical examiner ruled the death a suicide.

His death became controversial because his notes suggested he was in Martinsburg to meet a source about a story he called “the Octopus”. This centered on a sprawling collaboration involving an international cabal, and primarily featuring a number of stories familiar to journalists who worked in and around Washington, D.C. in the 1980s—the Inslaw case about a software manufacturer whose owner accused the Justice Department of stealing its work product, the October Surprise theory that during the Iran hostage crisis Iran deliberately held back American hostages to help Ronald Reagan win the 1980 presidential election, the collapse of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, and Iran–Contra.

Casolaro’s family argued that he had been murdered; that before he left for Martinsburg, he had apparently told his brother that he had been frequently receiving harassing phone calls late at night; that some of them were threatening; and that if something were to happen to him while in Martinsburg, it would not be an accident. They also cited his well-known squeamishness and fear of blood tests, and stated they found it incomprehensible that if he were going to kill himself, he would do so by cutting his wrists a dozen times. A number of law-enforcement officials also argued that his death deserved further scrutiny, and his notes were passed by his family to ABC News and Time magazine, both of which investigated the case, but no evidence of murder was ever found.

A Netflix docuseries titled American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders is centered around the Casolaro case.

Early life and career

Casolaro was born into a Catholic family in McLean, Virginia, the son of an obstetrician, and the second of six children. One of his siblings fell ill and died shortly after birth. A younger sister, Lisa, died of a drug overdose in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury in 1971. Casolaro attended Providence College until 1968. He married Terrill Pace, a former Miss Virginia. The couple had a son, Trey, and divorced after ten years, with Casolaro granted legal custody of his son.

Casolaro’s interests included amateur boxing, writing poems and short stories, and raising purebred Arabian horses. He also dabbled in journalism, looking into issues such as the Soviet naval presence in Cuba, the Castro intelligence network, and Chinese communist smuggling of opium into the U.S. according to his own curriculum vitae (though it remains unclear how much he had published). At the time of his death, he had written and published one novel, The Ice King, with Whitmore Publishing Co.

Towards the end of the 1970s, he dropped his interest in journalism and acquired a series of computer-industry trade publications, which he began selling towards the end of the 1980s. In early 1990, he decided to take up journalism again and, soon after, took an interest in the Inslaw case, of which his IT contacts had made him aware.

Research

Shortly before his death, Casolaro told people that he was nearly ready to reveal a wide-ranging conspiracy involving the Inslaw case, Iran-Contra, the alleged October Surprise conspiracy, and the closure of BCCI. David Corn writes in The Nation that the papers Casolaro left behind reveal few clues, except that he was in over his head, but was tenacious.

His papers included old clippings, handwritten notes that were hard to read, and the names of former CIA officers and arms dealers. Corn writes that the notes show Casolaro was influenced by the Christic Institute and that he had pursued material fed to him by a reporter who worked for Lyndon LaRouche. Richard Fricker writes in Wired that Casolaro had been led into a “Bermuda Triangle of spooks, guns, drugs and organized crime.”

Inslaw case

Ron Rosenbaum writes that the Inslaw story alone is enough to drive a sane man to madness. “If they ever make a movie of the Inslaw suit,” he writes, “it could be called Mr. and Mrs. Smith Go to Washington and Meet Franz Kafka.”^[6] Inslaw’s founder, William A. Hamilton, in a previous position with the U.S. Justice Department, had helped develop a program called PROMIS, short for Prosecutor’s Management Information System. PROMIS was designed to organize the paperwork generated by law enforcement and the courts. After he left the Justice Department, Hamilton alleged that the government had stolen PROMIS and had distributed it illegally, robbing him of millions of dollars. The department denied this, insisting that they owned it because Hamilton had developed it while working for them. As a result of this dispute, Hamilton and the department had been in litigation since 1983. A federal bankruptcy judge ruled in 1988 that the department had indeed taken the software by “trickery, fraud, and deceit”, a decision upheld by a federal district court in 1988, but overturned on appeal in 1991.

A theory was developed around the case, with allegations that “back doors” had been inserted into the software so that whoever bought a copy of it from the Justice Department could be spied upon. The major source on the theory, both for Hamilton and, later, for Casolaro, was Michael Riconosciuto, described by Rosenbaum as a “rogue scientist/weapons designer/platinum miner/alleged crystal-meth manufacturer”. Riconosciuto had been introduced to a friend of Casolaro’s by Jeff Steinberg, a longtime top aide in the LaRouche organization.

Riconosciuto told Bill Hamilton that he and Earl Brian, a director of Hadron, Inc., a government consulting firm, had paid $40 million to Iranian officials in 1980 to persuade them not to release the American hostages before the conclusion of the presidential election that saw Ronald Reagan elected president of the United States; this is the claim now known as the “October Surprise”. In exchange for his helping the Reagan administration, Brian was allegedly allowed to profit from the illegal distribution of the PROMIS system, according to Riconosciuto. Brian, a close friend of then-Attorney General Ed Meese, has denied any involvement in either October Surprise or the Inslaw case.

In addition to this allegation, Riconosciuto also claimed — in a March 21, 1991, affidavit submitted to the court in the Inslaw case^[11] — that he had modified Inslaw’s software at the Justice Department’s behest so that it could be sold to dozens of foreign governments with a secret “back door”, which allowed outsiders to access computer systems using PROMIS. These modifications allegedly took place at the Cabazon Indian Reservation near Indio, California. Because the reservation was sovereign territory where enforcement of U.S. law was sometimes problematic, Riconosciuto further claimed that he had worked on weapons programs there for the Wackenhut Corporation, such as a powerful “fuel air explosive“. On March 29, 1991, eight days after submitting the affidavit, Riconosciuto was arrested for, and later convicted of, distributing methamphetamine and methadone, charges that he said were a set-up to keep him from telling his story.

In the summer of 1990, Casolaro arranged to meet Bill Hamilton, expressing an interest in pursuing the Inslaw story. Hamilton gave Casolaro a 12-page memo Riconosciuto had written detailing his allegations. Rosenbaum writes that, “The moment he got his hands on that maddening memo, with its maze of illusion and reality, was the moment Danny’s life changed and he began his descent into the obsession that would lead to his death. He was slowly, then rapidly, sucked into a kind of covert-ops version of Dungeons & Dragons, with that memo as his guide and Michael Riconosciuto as his Dungeon Master.”

Final days

On August 8, 1991, Casolaro arrived in Martinsburg, West Virginia to meet a source who, he said, had promised to provide an important missing piece of his story.

On August 5, 1991, Casolaro phoned Bill McCoy, a retired CID officer to tell him that Time magazine had assigned him an article about the Octopus. He further claimed to be working with reporter Jack Anderson, and that publishers Little, Brown and Time Warner had offered to finance the effort. All of these claims were later shown to be false: Little and Brown, for example, had rejected his Octopus manuscript over a month earlier.

On the same day, Casolaro’s friend Ben Mason agreed to talk to Casolaro about his finances. A few days later, Casolaro showed Mason a 22-point outline for his book and expressed frustration at having been tied up with a literary agent who was unable to sell it for the last eighteen months. He also allegedly complained about his sleep being disturbed for the previous three months by calls during the night.

The following day, a neighbor of Casolaro’s and long-time housekeeper, Olga, helped Casolaro pack a black leather tote. She remembers his packing a thick sheaf of papers into a dark brown or black briefcase. Casolaro said he was leaving for several days to visit Martinsburg, West Virginia, to meet a source who promised to provide an important missing piece to his story. This was the last time Olga saw him. Olga told The Village Voice that she answered several threatening telephone calls at Casolaro’s home that day. She said that one man called at about 9:00 a.m. and said, “I will cut his body and throw it to the sharks”. Less than an hour later, a different man said: “Drop dead.” There was a third call, but Olga remembered only that no one spoke and that she heard music as though a radio were playing. A fourth call was the same as the third, and a fifth call, this one silent, came later that night.

Last known sightings

According to The Village Voice, Casolaro’s whereabouts between late in the day of August 8 and the afternoon of August 9 are unknown. The day before he died, according to The Martinsburg Morning Journal, he ate at a Pizza Hut, where he told the waitress he liked her eyes and quoted The Great Gatsby to her. He met Honeywell engineer William Richard Turner at the Sheraton at about 2:30 p.m. on August 9. Turner says he gave Casolaro some documents, and that they spoke for a few minutes. Witnesses reported that Casolaro spent the next few hours at a Martinsburg restaurant. A bartender there told police that he had seemed lonely and depressed. The police further learned that Casolaro was seen at Heatherfields, the cocktail lounge at the Sheraton, at around 5 p.m. with a man described by a waitress as “maybe Arab or Iranian.”

At about 5:30 p.m. that night, Casolaro happened to meet Mike Looney who rented the room next to Casolaro’s room 517. They chatted on two occasions—first at about 5:30 p.m. and then again at about 8:00 p.m. Looney later explained, “[Casolaro] said he was there to meet an important source who was going to give him what he needed to solve the case.” According to Looney, Casolaro claimed that his source was scheduled to arrive by 9:00 p.m. Around that time, Casolaro left Looney, explaining that he had to make a telephone call. He returned a few minutes later and said that his source might have “blown him off.” Casolaro and Looney talked until about 9:30 p.m. At about 10:00 p.m., Casolaro bought coffee at a nearby convenience store. That was the last time anyone reported seeing him alive.

Death

At about noon on August 10, 1991, housekeeping staff discovered Casolaro naked in the bathtub of room 517. His wrists had been slashed deeply. There were three or four wounds on his right wrist and seven or eight on his left. Blood was splattered on the bathroom wall and floor; and according to Ridgeway and Vaughn, “the scene was so gruesome that one of the housekeepers fainted when she saw it.”

Under Casolaro’s body, paramedics found an empty Milwaukee beer can, two white plastic liner-trash bags, and a single edge razor blade. There was also a half-empty wine bottle nearby. Ridgeway and Vaughan write that nothing was placed in the bathtub drain to prevent debris from draining away, and none of the bathwater was saved. Other than the gruesome scene, the hotel room was clean and orderly. There was a legal pad and a pen present on the desk; a single page had been torn from the pad, and a message written on it: “To those who I love the most: Please forgive me for the worst possible thing I could have done. Most of all I’m sorry to my son. I know deep down inside that God will let me in.”

Based on the note, the absence of a struggle, no sign of a forced entry, and the presence of alcohol, police judged the case a straightforward suicide. After inspecting the scene, they found four more razor blades in their envelopes in a small package. Police interviews further revealed that no one had seen or heard anything suspicious. This statement has later been proved to have been falsified. The Martinsburg police contacted authorities in Fairfax, Virginia, who said they would notify Casolaro’s family.

Police investigation

The first autopsy was performed on Casolaro’s body at West Virginia University on August 14, 1991. The coroner determined that blood loss was the cause of death, and that death had occurred from one to four hours before the body was discovered, or roughly between 8:00 a.m. and 11:00 a.m. on August 10.

The day after Casolaro’s body was found, Village Voice editor Dan Bischoff received an anonymous telephone call alerting him to Casolaro’s death. By Tuesday, August 13, Ridgeway and Vaughan write, the “rumors were flying, … and by the next day, the crazies started coming out of the woodwork. There were vague unsubstantiated rumors that the Mafia was somehow involved, and the wildest story even suggested that the undertaker was an employee of the CIA, hired to clean up after an agency assassination.” Even at the funeral, they write, the family felt “engulfed by mysteries”. As the ceremony drew to a close, a highly decorated military officer in U.S. Army dress reportedly arrived in a limousine. Accompanied by another man in plain clothes, the military man approached the coffin just before it was lowered into the ground, laid a medal on the lid, and saluted. No one recognized either man and, to this day, they have never been identified. Further, Casolaro was known to have complained numerous times about threatening or unsettling phone calls directed at him, often occurring late at night, including those received by his housekeeper during his absences from his home.

After Casolaro’s death was reported by several mainstream news organizations, police re-examined room 517. The adjacent rooms had been rented the evening of Casolaro’s death — one by Mike Looney, the other by an unnamed family. No one reported hearing anything unusual either on the night of August 9 or the morning of August 10. In January 1992, about five months after Casolaro’s death, Dr. Frost of the West Virginia state medical examiner’s office performed another autopsy; he returned a second suicide verdict, citing blood loss as the cause of death. Frost said there was evidence of the early stages of multiple sclerosis, but the degree of severity was probably minor. Toxicology analysis uncovered traces of several drugs: antidepressants, acetaminophen, and alcohol. He wrote: “There was nothing present in any way that could have incapacitated Casolaro so he would have been incapable of struggling against an assailant, let alone been sufficient to kill him.”

Ron Rosenbaum, a journalist acquaintance of Casolaro’s, speculated in Vanity Fair that Casolaro may have intended his suicide to appear to be murder triggered by his research, in order to have others look into the story after his death.

Later investigations showed that the FBI misled Congress about investigating Casolaro’s death. Members of an FBI task force looking into Casolaro’s death “questioned the conclusion of suicide” and recommended further investigation. This level of doubt “was especially significant, because even at that time (December 1992), it was understood that to express those views risked one’s career.” FBI documents show that some files on Casolaro are being withheld from public release, which is contradicted by the FBI saying the files are missing entirely.

Martinsburg police released case details to Zachary Treitz and Christian Hansen due to a Freedom of Information Act requested on the closed case. After initially being denied the information as the Department of Justice claimed to have taken over the case, the results found contradicted the statement released by the police department back in 1991. The results revealed there was another person who visited Danny’s hotel room that night. The eye-witness provided their statement in a written note and a sketch was performed. This sketch and statement eerily matches the description of a man named Joseph Cuellar. According to Cuellar’s son, “Part of what his specialty was to be able to infiltrate, retract information, to find out what someone potentially knows and what they don’t know.” Cuellar was known well for his “psychological warfare.” Based off of witness interviews, a friend of Danny’s stated he had a brief interaction with Joseph at a bar local to his hometown weeks before Danny’s “suicide.” In these interactions, Danny shared his knowledge of the “Octopus,” revealing information about international intelligence agencies, organized crime, and government corruption. This introduces a new theory – that Danny Casolaro was murdered due to his knowledge of dark crime being committed with taxpayer dollars. This information put whoever was in charge of these operations and their allies at risk for being exposed for their heinous acts.

In popular culture

Suspicions of homicide were presented on the US television show Unsolved Mysteries in 1993 during season 5. Journalists, family members, William Hamilton (owner of Inslaw who co-developed PROMIS), Michael Riconosciuto, and an attorney general in the Nixon administration, Elliot Richardson, were interviewed. Richardson said the affair “at its outer reaches entails a far more sinister kind of conspiracy than anything revealed in Watergate”. A full autopsy showed signs of struggle, disputing earlier findings, and various information suggesting foul play that contradicted official findings of suicide was presented.

Dominic Orlando, Casolaro’s cousin, wrote a play based on Casolaro’s story in 2008 called Danny Casolaro Died For You.

In January 2013, Aviation Cinemas Productions and Caliber Media optioned the film rights to the story of Danny Casolaro based on Orlando’s play. Adam Donaghey, Eric Steele, Dallas Sonnier and Jack Heller were set to produce with Eric Steele directing. Production was set to begin in 2015.

On February 28, 2024, Netflix released the four-part docu-series American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders exploring the complex case of Casolaro’s death.

Michael James Riconosciuto (born 1947 or 1948) is an American electronics and computer expert who was arrested in early 1991, shortly after providing Inslaw, Inc. with an affidavit in support of their lawsuit against the United States Department of Justice. Riconosciuto professed a defense centered on the Inslaw Affair (a legal case in which the U.S. government was charged with illegal use of computer software). Riconosciuto claimed to have reprogrammed Inslaw’s case-management program (PROMIS) with a secret “back-door” to allow clandestine tracking of individuals. Riconosciuto stated that he had been threatened with prosecution by a justice department official. Riconosciuto provided an affidavit detailing threats to a House Select Committee investigating the Inslaw Affair.

Early life

Riconosciuto was born to Marshall and Twylla Riconosciuto and raised in Tacoma, Washington. He had a brother named Joseph who was approximately four years younger than him.

Riconosciuto was recognized for some technical and scientific talents early in his life. When he was only twelve years old, The Tacoma News Tribune and Ledger called him a “modern Da Vinci” in a 1960 article describing a phone network he established for himself and thirteen friends in Tacoma, experiments he conducted with underwater microphones and plant cognition, an intercom system he developed in his home and a radio class he helped teach at a local YMCA. By the summer of 1964, before his junior year of high school, Riconosciuto built and lived in an underwater house complete with television, radio, “and other common necessities.” He also set up the stereo sound system in Bellarmine Preparatory School‘s auditorium. As a teenager, he constructed a working argon laser, a feat that earned him an invitation to Stanford University as a research assistant. His work on underwater acoustics and his laser drew the attention of the United States Department of the Navy which offered him several college scholarships before he had even successfully demonstrated his laser.

Riconosciuto was employed as an engineer at a mine in Maricopa, California. Hercules Properties, Ltd. had raised financing and purchased a 167-acre (0.68 km²) contaminated waste-disposal site which had once been a portion of a 1,300-acre (5.3 km²) TNT and fertilizer manufacturer known as Hercules Powder Works.

Allegations

Cabazon murders

Nathan Baca’s Emmy winning series “The Octopus Murders” featured documents from the archives of Michael Riconosciuto. These documents have been the subject of interest for recently reopened cold case homicide investigations.

Inslaw Affair

In early 1991, Riconosciuto filed an affidavit^[3] before a House judiciary committee investigating the bankruptcy case of Inslaw Inc. v. United States Government. Riconosciuto was called to testify before Congress regarding the modification of PROMIS, a case-management software program that had been developed for the Department of Justice by Washington, D.C.-based Inslaw Inc. Riconosciuto declared that he had been under the direction of Earl Brian, who was then a controlling shareholder and director of Hadron, Inc.^[18] He claimed that Brian, an associate of Ronald Reagan, was involved in a secret agreement with the Iranian government to delay the release of Americans held hostage in Iran until after the 1980 United States presidential election, and that the software was stolen in order to raise funds for Brian’s payment.

Within eight days of this declaration, Riconosciuto was arrested for conspiracy to manufacture, conspiracy to distribute, possession with intent to distribute, and with distribution—a total of ten counts related to methamphetamine and methadone.

During his trial, Riconosciuto accused the Drug Enforcement Administration of stealing two copies of his tape. Riconosciuto also stated that he himself had disposed of a third tape.

In addition to his claims of a government “frame up” related to Inslaw, Riconosciuto maintained that the chemical laboratory on his property was in use for the extraction of precious metals such as platinum in a highly specialized mining operation.

No drug-lab contamination was found at the laboratory site and a member of the DOE’s Hazardous Spill Response Team asserted that high barium levels on the property were unlikely to be the result of Riconosciuto’s work. Barium does have specialized usage for metallurgy with regards to the processing of platinum group metals.

In his investigation of the allegations surrounding the Inslaw case, Special Counsel Nicholas J. Bua was particularly critical of several of Inslaw’s witnesses. He found that Riconosciuto had given inconsistent accounts in statements to the Hamiltons, his affidavit, and in testimony at his 1992 trial for manufacturing methamphetamine. Bua compared Riconosciuto’s story about Promis to “a historical novel; a tale of total fiction woven against the background of accurate historical facts.”

In 1991, journalist Danny Casolaro believed he was on the brink of uncovering a wide-reaching government conspiracy he dubbed “The Octopus” — and those closest to him are convinced it cost him his life.

Casolaro’s investigation began innocently enough: In the summer of 1990, Casolaro — a writer with more than two decades of experience — began digging into the INSLAW case at the suggestion of a colleague. The INSLAW case involved a small, St. Louis-based software company that had accused the U.S. Justice Department of stealing a breakthrough computer program they developed — and then driving the company into bankruptcy. The owners of INSLAW and their attorney had spent the majority of the 1980s battling the DOJ in court over the matter.

But when Casolaro began to investigate INSLAW in 1990, he believed he was on to a much bigger story — one he eventually dubbed “The Octopus” and planned to write a book about with the same title. Casolaro suspected that multiple well-known political scandals — including the Iran-Contra affair, the October Surprise allegations, the fraudulent Bank of Credit and Commerce International (B.C.C.I.) and INSLAW, among others — were all interconnected and engineered by an undercover global network he labeled “The Octopus.”

Casolaro spent more than 12 months digging into “The Octopus” case and, in July 1991, he revealed to several family members and friends that he was on the verge of a major breakthrough. According to their accounts, Casolaro traveled to West Virginia in August 1991 to meet a key source in his Octopus investigation.

“He had been researching this thing for a long time and was very excited about the information he was finally getting,” Benjamin Mason, a close friend of Casolaro’s and the last person to see him alive, told The Washington Post. “He was in good spirits and very excited about the source he was going to see in West Virginia.”

But then, on Aug. 10, 1991, Casolaro’s body was discovered in the bathroom of his Martinsburg, W. V. hotel room. His wrists had been slashed multiple times and an apparent suicide note had been left behind, leaving local authorities and the medical examiner to declare his death a suicide. But those closest to Casolaro were adamant that he had not killed himself — and believed he was the victim of foul play.

“There is no way in the world that he would have killed himself,” Mason told The Washington Post in 1991.

More than three decades later, Netflix is taking a closer look into Casolaro and “The Octopus” with its latest crime docuseries, American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders. The four-part series, which began streaming on Feb. 28, “pushes to uncover the secrets behind Casolaro’s death, and the story that killed him,” according to Deadline.

Here’s everything to know about Danny Casolaro, “The Octopus” conspiracy and the journalists continuing Casolaro’s crusade in American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders.

What was Danny Casolaro investigating?

In early 1990, Casolaro sold his stake in Computer Age Publications and was looking to get back into investigative reporting, according to multiple accounts. That summer, a friend of Casolaro’s (who also worked in computer trade newsletters) suggested that he look into the INSLAW case.

INSLAW was a software company founded by former National Security Agency employee Bill Hamilton and his wife Nancy. In the early 1980s, the Justice Department tapped INSLAW to develop a computer program that would allow U.S. attorneys to track criminal cases from office to office, according to American Conspiracy. The Hamiltons delivered and created the breakthrough software, called the Prosecutor’s Management Information System — or PROMIS, for short.

But then, the Hamiltons alleged that the Justice Department reneged on the contract, stole their software and plotted to drive their company into bankruptcy. By the time Casolaro connected with the Hamiltons, they had spent nearly a decade fighting the Justice Department in court over their claims.

As Casolaro began digging into INSLAW, however, he believed that it was much more than just a software piracy and bankruptcy case. Casolaro suspected that INSLAW was part of a much larger, global conspiracy that connected events including the Iranian hostage crisis, Iran-Contra affair and the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, according to The Washington Post and TIME.

What was The Octopus Conspiracy?

‘American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders’. COURTESY OF NETFLIX

The Octopus Conspiracy was the theory Casolaro was investigating that suggested the INSLAW case, the Iran-Contra arms deal, the October Surprise, the closure of the B.C.C.I. and other global scandals — including Watergate and the Bay of Pigs Invasion — were all connected and orchestrated by a ring of rogue intelligence officers. Casolaro planned to uncover this supposed worldwide conspiracy and all of its various “tentacles” in a book he wanted to call The Octopus.

According to Casolaro’s book proposal — which was rejected by Little, Brown publishers in July 1991 — The Octopus promised to deliver “the most explosive investigative story of the 20th Century,” the Columbia Journalism Review reported.

“This story is about a handful of people who have been able to successfully exploit the secret empires of espionage networks, big oil, and organized crime. This octopus spans the globe … to control governmental institutions in the United States and abroad,” the proposal continued.

What happened to Danny Casolaro?

In August 1991, Casolaro traveled from his home in Fairfax, Va. to Martinsburg, W. V. where he planned to meet an unnamed source that promised a big breakthrough in his yearlong investigation of The Octopus Conspiracy. According to Vanity Fair, Casolaro told several friends and family members that he had finally “cracked the case” — and even indicated to one friend that he was going to “meet the head of Octopus” in West Virginia.

However, on the morning of Aug. 10, 1991, the housekeeping staff at the Sheraton Martinsburg discovered Casolaro naked in the bathtub with his wrists slashed multiple times. Authorities ruled his death a suicide, based on the nature of his injuries, no sign of forced entry or a struggle and an unsigned note found in the hotel room.

In American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders, however, many questioned the cause of death ruling, including Casolaro’s friends and family members and a paramedic who was on the scene.

What did Danny Casolaro’s family say about his death?

Those closest to Casolaro did not believe that he died by suicide.

“He was always upbeat and positive,” Casolaro’s brother, Dr. Anthony Casolaro, told The Washington Post days after his death. “He was not depressive. He was just not the type of guy to kill himself.”

But that wasn’t the only factor that led Casolaro’s family and friends to suspect foul play, his brother revealed. According to American Conspiracy, none of Casalaro’s papers were found in his hotel room or his car, which appeared suspicious (because he reportedly always traveled with his files). Additionally, Dr. Casolaro told The Washington Post that his brother would have never left such a brief note — claiming that a “four-page letter” was more his style. Casolaro’s body was also embalmed by the funeral home and his hotel room was cleaned by an industrial cleaner before the family was notified about his death.

“It adds to the sense of conspiracy about this death,” Dr. Casolaro told The Washington Post in 1991.

But perhaps the most alarming piece of information was that, in the weeks before his death, Casolaro had told his brother “not to believe it” if he died in what was reported to be an “accident,” Dr. Casolaro recounted to numerous media outlets. Casolaro had also reportedly been receiving threatening phone calls at his home.

Casolaro’s close friends also found his reported suicide to be highly implausible.

“Danny hated the sight of blood,” Wendy Weaver, who dated Casolaro for seven years, told The Washington Post in 1991. “Additionally, he didn’t like to be seen naked. To be found in a tub, naked — that’s not Danny.”

“I can say that the Danny Casolaro who was my best, beloved friend, who I grieve for very much, was not a person that would have committed suicide,” added Arthur Weinfeld, a friend of the Casolaro family for nearly three decades.

Who else was involved in The Octopus Conspiracy and murders?

In addition to the Hamiltons and Casolaro, another key figure in The Octopus Conspiracy was Michael Riconosciuto.

Riconosciuto was an electronics and computer expert who, in 1980, was working as the research director on a weapons-design project at the Cabazon Indian Reservation in California, according to American Conspiracy. In May 1990, he claimed to the Hamiltons that, back in October of 1980, he and Earl Brian (a confidant of former President Ronald Reagan) were hired by Bill Casey (then Reagan’s campaign director) to undertake a secret mission to Iran. The mission involved transferring $40 million to “prevent a deal with the Carter Administration to release the American hostages prior to the election” — otherwise known as the October Surprise, Vanity Fair reported.

Riconosciuto told the Hamiltons that Brian’s alleged reward for participating in the supposed Iranian mission was their stolen PROMIS software — which Brian then allegedly sold to police forces around the world for profit, according to multiple outlets. (Brian, who died in November 2020, denied any connection to the INSLAW case.)

After Casolaro connected with the Hamiltons about their INSLAW case, the Hamiltons put Casolaro in touch with Riconosciuto in the summer of 1990. It was Riconosciuto — and his numerous stories of supposed government cover-ups and lies — who ultimately set Casolaro on the path of investigating the so-called Octopus Conspiracy, according to Vanity Fair.

However, in March 1991 (while Riconosciuto and Casolaro were working together) Riconosciuto ended up in jail on federal drug charges — one week after he provided a sworn affidavit to the House Judiciary Committee that was investigating the INSLAW case, per American Conspiracy. Riconosciuto later claimed in court that the drug charges were government retribution for the testimony he provided in the INSLAW case; nonetheless, he was found guilty and sentenced to 30 years in prison, according to the Justice Department. (He was later released in 2017.)

While Riconosciuto wound up in prison, several people with links to the scientist died under suspicious circumstances — including Casolaro. In 1982, Paul Morasca, an associate of Riconosciuto’s, was found murdered in San Francisco, according to the 1996 book The Octopus: Secret Government and the Death of Danny Casolaro. Another individual with ties to Riconosciuto, Alan Standorf, was found dead in his car from a blow to the head in January 1991. Standorf worked at a secret military listening post in Virginia and was allegedly providing Casolaro with classified information at the time of his death, according to The Octopus.

And Casolaro was also not the only journalist to die while investigating the so-called “Octopus.” On March 31, 1991 — five months before Casolaro was found dead — a British journalist named Jonathan Moyle was discovered hanging in his hotel room closet in Santiago, Chile, The Washington Post reported.

Though Moyle and Casolaro’s work had different focuses, they did involve some of the same individuals — specifically, an arms dealer in Chile, according to The Washington Post. Casolaro believed that INSLAW software was being sold to Iraqi intelligence officers through an arms broker in Chile; while Moyle was looking into the same arms broker for alleged weapons sales to Iraq. Additionally, Moyle’s family was emphatic that he did not die by suicide and was the victim of foul play.

What new information about The Octopus and Danny Casolaro’s death has been discovered?

Christian Hansen in ‘American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders’. COURTESY OF NETFLIX

In September 1992, a year after Casolaro was found dead, the House Judiciary Committee asked the Justice Department to form an independent counsel to further investigate Casolaro’s death, per The Washington Post. The committee, which had also been looking into the INSLAW case at the time, wrote in their report that “as long as the possibility exists that Danny Casolaro died as a result of his investigation in the INSLAW matter, it is imperative that further investigation be conducted.”

Two years later, in September 1994, the INSLAW case — the matter at the center of Casolaro’s Octopus investigation — was also put to rest. The DOJ released a report at that time concluding that there was “no credible evidence” that members of the Justice Department conspired to steal software developed by INSLAW. Additionally, the report affirmed police findings that Casolaro’s death was a suicide — and that there was no need for an independent counsel to look into the matter.

The Octopus Conspiracy: One Woman’s Search for Her Father’s Killer

Rachel Begley’s hunt for her father’s killer began with a simple Google search and blossomed into a four-year-and-counting journey into the dark heart of an elaborate conspiracy theory.

ON THE MORNING of July 1, 1981, three bodies were discovered behind a shabby, concrete ranch house on Bob Hope Drive, a main drag in a sand-swept stretch of California’s scorching Coachella Valley. The corpses were sprawled in a semicircle, on chairs and beds that had been dragged into the backyard. Each of the victims—the house’s owner, Fred Alvarez, his girlfriend, Patricia Castro, and a guest named Ralph Boger—had been killed by a single .38-caliber gunshot to the head. Police surmised that Alvarez and his friends had been planning to sleep outdoors to escape the heat of the house, which had no air-conditioning, and were surprised in the dark by one or more assailants. There were few clues and no witnesses left at the scene; the crime had all the hallmarks of a professional hit.

Boger’s daughter, Rachel Begley, who was 13 at the time, says she learned of her father’s death from a television news bulletin. Her parents were divorced, and though she spent occasional days with her dad, riding in his motorcycle’s sidecar, she didn’t know enough about his life to make sense of what had happened. The police would eventually conclude that Boger and Alvarez were killed in connection with shady doings at the nearby Cabazon Indian reservation. But Begley’s mother shielded her from all the murky details of the investigation.

After the murders, Begley went through a rebellious phase and fell in with a bad crowd. By the time she was 15, she was pregnant and had dropped out of high school. Eventually she got her GED and moved to Iowa. She says she would periodically wonder about the case and check in with the police, who never seemed to have any new information. Beyond that, she didn’t have time or tools to delve too deeply.

Then one night in 2007, she idly typed her father’s name into Google. She didn’t find much, but as she clicked through the few results that came up, she found a book entitled The Octopus: Secret Government and the Death of Danny Casolaro. Based on the work of a fringe freelance journalist, the book argued that the 1981 triple slaying was wrapped up in an enormous plot involving arms dealing, private-security firms, and the upper echelons of the Reagan administration. Skeptical but intrigued, Begley dug deeper and discovered that over the years the murder case had taken on a curious life of its own, preserved on obscure websites and nurtured by a grassroots community of obsessives. To these conspiracy theorists, Boger’s killing was the work of a secret syndicate that they called the Octopus, because its tangled tentacles supposedly reached into some of the most powerful organizations in the world.

Begley’s simple Google search launched a four-year-and-counting odyssey, during which she has devoted herself to tracking down forgotten documents, corresponding with federal prisoners, putting questions to Oliver North, and even confronting the man who may have shot her dad. Her work, she says, has placed her own life in danger and made her a target of the same forces that killed her father. And yet she cannot stop. She keeps following the siren song of the conspiracy theory, the same beguiling cognitive path that lures others to the JFK assassination and Area 51. What was once a family tragedy has blossomed into something else entirely, a vast puzzle whose solution promises to illuminate not only her father’s death but the dark forces behind the world’s apparent chaos.

On a sweltering afternoon last June, Begley was sitting in front of a wheezing Dell Dimension 8300 desktop, beneath a photocopy of a prayer for protection from “evil spirits who prowl about the world,” trying to sum up the dimensions of the Octopus conspiracy. “You’ve got the drug people, mixing with the mafia, mixing with the Hells Angels, mixing with the government—various governments, actually,” she says as she clicks around on the computer. “This is where I piece it all together.”

Begley lives and works in a rickety house at the end of a gravel road, next to a small pond and a rotting wood barn in a rural town outside Louisville, Kentucky, that she doesn’t want named for security reasons. Out front, her “guard dog,” an aging flat-coated retriever named Lucky, lazes beneath her porch. Begley is 43 and heavyset, with piercing blue eyes. On this day, her air conditioner is broken, and her round face glistens with sweat. She has four children, and for the moment she is collecting unemployment and selling a line of weight-loss shakes to make money on the side.

Before she heard about the Octopus, she never gave much thought to politics or read the newspaper, and she certainly didn’t size up her dad—a bearded mechanic who liked to drink, smoke pot, and ride motorcycles—as the type to be tied up in byzantine plots. “I thought it was a normal thing,” Begley says of the killings. “Well, murder is never normal, but I thought somebody went to try and rob them or something.”

In fact, within days of the crime, investigators had fixed their suspicion on John Philip Nichols, who was serving as financial manager for the Cabazon Band of Mission Indians, a group of fewer than 30 descendants of a desert people that had long inhabited the Coachella Valley. Nichols was encouraging the Cabazons to open a casino, a radical idea at the time that caused clashes with the police and attracted some alleged mob associates to the reservation. Boger’s friend Fred Alvarez, a dissident tribe member, opposed the plan. Before his death, Alvarez had approached a local reporter to talk about blowing the whistle. “There are people out there who want to kill me,” he warned. No one knew what Alvarez was preparing to disclose, but initial speculation involved embezzlement.

When Begley stumbled upon The Octopus, though, she found a more nefarious explanation: Nichols proposed to use the tribe’s sovereign status to build an arms factory on the reservation and ship weapons to Central American rebel groups like the Contras. Drawing heavily on a San Francisco Chronicle investigation, the book reported that he had struck a partnership arrangement with Wackenhut, a private-security firm with alleged ties to the CIA and Republican Party.

That strange story was widely reported in the early 1990s. But since then, others had embroidered those findings with more bizarre information, speculation, and extrapolations. Before long, Begley was tearing through websites and bulletin boards, finding herself drawn into the conspiracy. Much of what she found traced back to Danny Casolaro, the freelance journalist who had been the first to write about a shadowy “international cabal” of covert operatives he dubbed the Octopus. Casolaro tied the Cabazon tribe’s arms company to a Reagan crony, who figured in the so-called October Surprise of 1980 and was connected to a computer program called Promis, which was supposedly used for spying. In 1991, the writer was found dead in the bathtub at a West Virginia hotel, his wrists slashed. Authorities deemed the death a suicide, but others presumed Casolaro was killed because he knew too much.

“Most of the stuff, I didn’t believe,” Begley says. “I thought all these people were making money off my dad’s murder, writing these books.” She was angry enough, in fact, that she was determined to prove the speculators wrong. At the time, Begley was working in customer service for an Internet service provider, which was moving its back-office operations to another state, and she was spending her days sitting idly at her computer, waiting to get laid off. Begley had once worked for a collections agency, and she knew how to track people down. “I went into it with a mindset, I guess, almost like a police officer would,” she says.

No one had ever been charged in the killings. Nichols was long gone—he had died of a heart attack in 2001. But Begley talked to Alvarez’s sister, who recounted her family’s thwarted efforts to get the police to pursue the case. She then found William Hamilton, the developer of the Promis software, who had collaborated with Casolaro on his investigation. Hamilton called her back on her cell phone as she was leaving work one day, and he talked and talked until his battery died. “It was like—boom,” she later said. “He dumped it all in my lap.” Begley may have started out trying to resist the Octopus, but she gradually gave in to the theory’s implications: Her father had been caught up in a vast conspiracy, and it had killed him.

So Begley dove deeper, into the submerged ecosystem of interconnected message boards where initiates continued to discuss and dissect the Octopus. “I was one of those thinking that the conspiracy people were weird,” she posted on one of these boards in 2008. “Then I had my eyes opened, REALLY FAST.”

As she set out on her search, one of the first things Begley did was fashion a new identity. She came up with a screen name, Desertfae, and introduced her character in a series of YouTube videos. The first ones, set to pounding music, consisted of montages of images—an Indian chief, a close-up of her eyes—and cryptic messages: “I am lost … I need your help and guidance to bring closure … I will be silent no longer … Soon the clues and proof will be found.”

As Begley plunged into the world of the conspiracy theorists, she found more than facts and assertions—she found a community with its own rules, ethics, and currency. And it was a difficult one to penetrate; the cluster of people devoted to studying the Octopus tended not to throw their arms open to newcomers. Over the years, they had built a kind of gnostic society, a belief system that was both all-encompassing—a grand unified theory of everything sinister—and exclusionary, open only to the select few who could accept the devastating truth. They were suspicious of outsiders and divided into factions that warred over arcane points, often accusing one another of being double agents.

With persistence and a convert’s zeal, Begley managed to win the trust of some of the leading theorists. She formed a particularly tight bond with Cheri Seymour, a matronly San Diego woman who had been working for nearly 20 years on a book called The Last Circle. The two sealed their friendship with a transaction of weathered documents, the Octopus community’s customary medium of exchange. Copying Seymour’s files, which the author had gathered from archives, courts, and a confidential source’s hidden trailer, Begley glimpsed the far reaches of the speculation: bioweapons, Lebanese heroin shipments, Howard Hughes, the yakuza.

There were many competing interpretations of the Octopus—Seymour was particularly interested in the alleged role of entertainment company MCA—and they were infinitely adaptable, able to accommodate the Patriot Act or the financial crisis. Devotees found and fought one another on sites like Above Top Secret, conspiracy clearinghouses that host every conceivable thread of discussion. Begley forged an alliance with a retired FBI agent who was exploring a link between the Octopus and Satanic cults. She did battle with a prominent UFO enthusiast who thought the Octopus was hiding the government’s collaboration with a colonizing alien force. (In January, online sleuths discovered that alleged Arizona assassin Jared Lee Loughner was a regular poster on Above Top Secret, but his bizarre ramblings about currency and space travel, widely disdained by other contributors, never touched on the Octopus threads.) Begley also developed a venomous rivalry with Virginia McCullough, a California writer who accused her of being an enemy impostor, not really Ralph Boger’s daughter. When Begley posted a copy of her birth certificate online, McCullough called it “a cut-and-paste job.”

“I do not believe that Desertfae is a ‘victim,’ and she has not posted any information that she is who she claims to be,” McCullough wrote on one message board. “She is a low-stage puppet reporting to the puppet master and two or three of his minions.”

The man McCullough called the puppet master is a federal narcotics prisoner named Michael Riconosciuto, Casolaro’s principal source, who had worked for the Cabazon arms company in the 1980s. The convict, who claimed he’d been framed, continued to play a leading role in the factional wars, penning letters in loopy cursive to numerous correspondents. Shortly after Begley began communicating with Riconosciuto, she posted a new video, entitled “OMG Michael Called!!!!!” Looking rattled, she reported that Riconosciuto had warned that the Octopus was watching. Then she cut to shaky handheld footage of a black helicopter that had appeared over her house.

Begley wasn’t scared off the trail. She interviewed retired cops and unearthed new witnesses. She amassed thousands of documents: news clippings, police reports, Casolaro’s notes, leaked memos, reams of legal filings and depositions. (For a secret cabal, the Octopus was remarkably litigious.) Informants found her website or friended her on Facebook and promised they could tell her about the Octopus from the inside. “If you’re involved with some kind of high-level weird thing,” she explains, “and you’ve held it in for 20 or 30 years, and you can’t talk about it, eventually you’re going to be, like, ‘I want to tell somebody before I die.'”

Begley continued to post YouTube videos documenting her investigations, and before long they started winning a small but avid viewership—and not just fellow conspiracy theorists. It seemed the police were paying attention as well. Back when she had first begun investigating, Begley called the police department in Riverside County, where Coachella is located, telling them the case was bigger than Watergate. She got a dismissive response. But after she started posting her videos, she received a phone call telling her that the cold-case squad was reopening the inquiry into her father’s murder.

Soon, Begley focused her attention on one player in the killing: Jimmy Hughes, a former Cabazon reservation employee who worked for John Philip Nichols. In 1984, in the midst of a business dispute, Hughes implicated Nichols to the police, claiming he had ferried a cash payment from Nichols to some unidentified contract killers for the Alvarez hit, which he said his boss had called a “US government covert action.” The police had looked into Hughes’ claims but gradually shifted their suspicion to the informant himself. At that point, Hughes fled town, and the grand jury investigation into the murders fizzled.

Begley discovered that Hughes had become an evangelical minister based in Honduras. In December 2007, she began trying to contact him, but he ignored her. She had an idea why: On the website of a religious group, she discovered an autobiographic essay Hughes had posted that sounded eerily familiar. In it, he called himself “a hit man with a new mission” and told a story of elite military training and a career as a contract killer, a life that was transformed when he was born again. She also found a list of upcoming speaking engagements, which indicated that Hughes was scheduled to address an evangelical banquet in Fresno, California. Begley booked a flight.

On a rainy evening in February 2008, Begley sat in the gilded ballroom of a historic Fresno bank building as Hughes took the floor to preach. Inside her handbag, she carried a hidden camera that peeked out through a discreet hole she’d cut just beneath the zipper. Next to it sat a loaded pistol—just in case.

Hughes, a stocky 51-year-old with a graying buzz cut and raspy voice, bounded around, bellowing tales of his past brutality. Begley, nervous and bleary-eyed from a sleepless cross-country flight, exchanged incredulous text messages with an accomplice who had come along as backup: Mikel Alvarez, Fred’s son. When Hughes finished his performance, Begley and Alvarez came forward with a rush of adrenaline, introducing themselves to the sweat-soaked evangelist as the children of the murder victims.

“Can’t say nothing about that,” Hughes stammered. “It’s a long time ago—it’s in the past.”

“Not for us,” Begley said, insistently. “We’re trying to get resolution.”

“I don’t care who got killed,” Hughes shouted, attracting the bewildered attention of others at the banquet. “I was trainedin the military. I killed people all over the world, right or wrong, because the government ordered me to.”

Hughes stalked off, fuming, and Begley began to cry. That seemed to bother the minister, because he came back, speaking in a tone that was softer but full of veiled menace. Apparently, he had seen her web videos. “Are you aware that that goes all over the world? Are you a crazy lady?” Hughes said. “Think about your children. They need a mother.” He told Begley and Alvarez that the murder was a “mafia hit,” and though he didn’t explicitly admit to carrying it out, he intimated that he knew much more.

“Your parents were involved in some very dangerous things,” Hughes said. “It’s a lot bigger than just the murder of this guy or the murder of that guy. You’re talking political people. You’ve got babies to take care of, mama. Go home tonight and be at peace.”

Suddenly, the murky crime had come into focus, and the conspiracy theorist confronted an unaccustomed feeling: vindication. Hughes’ outburst seemed to confirm Begley’s deepest fears and also her most far-fetched fantasies. After so many decades of false starts and mysterious ends, Begley had finally hit upon something undeniably tangible—an actual lead in the case. Within two days, Begley posted excerpts of the confrontation to YouTube, ending her video with a postscript in stark black and white: “This ‘crazy lady’ wants the murders solved. The Octopus will be exposed.”

Shortly before Begley confronted Hughes, she began cooperating with John Powers, a Riverside County homicide detective who was investigating the reopened 1981 murder case. When Powers saw the video of her run-in with Hughes, he was impressed. “The statements she got from him,” Powers says, “no police officer would ever have been able to get.” He and Begley went on to form an unusually tight partnership. She shared everything she learned with the man she called “my detective” and helped to persuade a pair of reluctant witnesses to offer damning testimony against Hughes.

Still, the case had to overcome some curious obstacles. Powers was surprised to find that the records of the 1980s grand jury investigation had somehow disappeared. And it turned out that the district attorney of Riverside County, a long-serving prosecutor, was actually related to Hughes. Because of the conflict of interest, the case was transferred to the California attorney general’s office. After much procedural wrangling, a warrant was finally issued. In September 2009, Hughes was arrested at Miami’s international airport. Begley posted a celebratory video, scored to Coldplay’s “Viva la Vida.” It flashed up an image of Hughes’ mug shot, across which she had scrawled: “Gotcha.”

As fond as he was of Begley, Powers’ arrest complaint completely ignored the Octopus conspiracy. The detective doubted that a jury would believe—or even be able to follow—the abstruse connections that purportedly linked Hughes to the CIA, the Contras, and all the rest. Instead, he wanted to focus on the old dispute over building a casino on the Cabazon reservation. “Nichols thought he was going to be making millions, and Fred Alvarez was a threat to that,” Powers says. “That was motive enough for murder.”

On the afternoon of July 1, the 29th anniversary of the murders, a grim-faced Begley walked into a courtroom in Indio, California, for an important hearing. The chamber was packed with an expectant crowd of reporters, members of Hughes’ family, and a few supporters from the Octopus community, including Cheri Seymour. Hughes was ushered in, wearing chains and an orange jumpsuit.

Then Michael Murphy, a dapper prosecutor from the attorney general’s office, rose and delivered a shocking blow. “We have lost confidence in our ability to proceed with the prosecution,” he said. Begley closed her eyes tightly as the prosecutor gave a vague reason for his sudden about-face, something about “new information” and a reassessment of the evidence. Begley was allowed to address the court. “How many people must die or suffer at the hands of Jimmy Hughes,” she asked, “before he is brought to justice?” But the judge dismissed the charges anyway. It was enough to make you wonder, if you were of a certain mindset, whether the fix was in.

Afterward, Powers stood next to Begley outside the courtroom as she addressed the television cameras, sobbing. The detective was disgusted by the outcome. The attorney general’s office gave no further public explanation for its decision, but Powers sensed that the prosecutors were eager to “dump” the case. Murphy, he said, started to question the credibility of the witnesses Begley had uncovered. Throughout, Begley had used Twitter and Facebook to mobilize the Octopus believers to pressure Murphy, and at least a few called the prosecutor to urge him to look beyond Hughes and dig into the myriad connections they had spent decades documenting. Begley’s devotion and inventive use of the Internet had helped to ensnare Hughes, but the obsessions of her fellow travelers may have helped to undermine the prosecutor’s confidence. (Murphy declined to comment.)

Powers, for his part, doubts there ever was an Octopus. The detective blames Nichols, the self-aggrandizing adviser who convinced the Cabazons to build a casino, for conjuring the intrigue that continued to befog the case long after his death. “Nichols had a lot of people fooled,” Powers says, “believing that he was some secret spook working for the government.” Even Nichols’ own underlings bought into his mystique; Powers thought it entirely plausible that Hughes truly believed his boss gave orders on behalf of shadowy overlords. In that sense, the Octopus may have existed, if only as a deceived and malignant state of mind.

On the night of his release, Hughes emerged from jail into a furnace blast of desert darkness. “Only God can justify and vindicate those who are really innocent,” he triumphantly told reporters outside the Indio jailhouse. Fearing retribution, Begley had already split, driving over the mountains to San Diego, where she holed up at Seymour’s house. “It’s not over by a long shot,” she told me on the phone. Her cell phone kept ringing: the Los Angeles Times, Dateline NBC, her newly materialized pro bono lawyer, a victims’ rights advocate who often appeared on Nancy Grace’s talk show.

Finally, the world seemed to be listening. “Actually, this might be better,” Begley says, sounding curiously invigorated. Though this experience has been draining, it has given her a sense of purpose, of a momentous cause. Hughes might be free, heading back to Honduras, but in a way, defeat offered a perverse validation. The Octopus wouldn’t be the enemy she thought it was if it gave up its secrets so easily. “You’re going to find out real soon,” Begley says, “that the world isn’t what you think it is.”

Resources

en.wikipedia.org, “Danny Casolaro.” By Wikipedia Editors; en.wikipedia.org, “Michael Riconosciuto.” By Wikipedia Editors; people.com, “What Happened to Danny Casolaro? The True Story of American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders.” By Lynsey Eidell; wired.com, “The Octopus Conspiracy: One Woman’s Search for Her Father’s Killer.” By Andrew Rice;