http://www.totse.com/en/conspiracy/casolaro/http://www.lukeford.net/profiles/profiles/danny_casolaro.htmAs Casolaro worked on his Octopus story, he came to rely increasingly on Nichols as a source, and as a friend. But in July 1991, after Nichols visited him in Washington, D.C., Danny began to suspect that Nichols was far more sinister than he'd imagined, and began to investigate his activities. Three days before he died, he called Gates, who works in the bureau's L.A. office. As Gates has testified before the House Judiciary Committee, Casolaro told him that Nichols had warned Danny, "If you continue this investigation, you will die." Other publications, notably Vanity Fair, have wondered whether Casolaro committed suicide; none has had the benefit of the evidence we've been able to amass. Spy has discovered that on July 31- ten days before he died, six days before he had a 64-minute phone conversation with Nichols, seven days before he spoke to Agent Gates- Danny Casolaro learned a terrible secret of Robert Booth Nichols's, a secret that, if revealed, could cost Nichols his life, a secret that Casolaro might well have told Nichols he knew.
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http://www.cjr.org/year/91/6/octopus.aspTHE OCTOPUS FILE
by Phil Linsalata
Linsalata is a reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Joseph Daniel Casolaro's family and friends buried him on August 16. Less than a week later, feeling a little like a vulture, I joined a handful of reporters at Nightline's Washington headquarters to pick over the notes and files left behind by the forty-four-year- old Washington free-lancer known to his friends as Danny.
His brother Anthony, a doctor in suburban Washington, had gathered the materials and given them to Nightline after staff members there offered to keep the documents safe. Dr. Casolaro also agreed to allow some of the reporters who had been working the same ground as Danny to go through the files.
As he spoke with each reporter, the doctor encourage continued investigation. he raised the possibility that his brother had been murdered in his hotel room in Martinsburg, West Virginia, challenging the statement by Dr. James Frost, West Virginia deputy chief medical examiner, that the physical evidence held "nothing inconsistent with suicide." Somehow, authorities had failed to notify family members until almost two days after the death. In the meantime, a preliminary ruling of suicide had been issued, clearing the way for a thorough cleanup of the scene and the embalming of the body, which would make a later autopsy more difficult.
One hope was that a review of Casolaro's papers might shed light on the question of murder or suicide. What was Danny doing in Martinsburg? Who was the source living near there who, Danny claimed, would bring him a breakthrough? If he intended to commit suicide, why had he driven hours from his suburban Washington home? Where were the files he carried with him, the ones he'd been seen with on the last afternoon of his life? And where was the research and hard evidence for Casolaro's book-in-progress? If he had gathered such evidence, it wasn't readily apparent in the material.
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