The Last Circle

[Jan Klimkowski]

I hesitate to post this for reasons I think will be obvious, but I have also e-mailed a copy of the link to Cheri Seymour and Ed Encho.

Wired has weighed in on the Octopus: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/02/ff...racy/all/1

Ed -thanks for posting. Shame on Wired.

I have taken the liberty of cross-posting Cheri Seymour's response to the hatchet job published by Wired:

Posted by: CheriSeymour | 02/5/11 | 12:51 pm |
From my point of view, this article written by Andrew Rice lacks compassion for the ordeal that Rachel Begley experienced while trying to bring her father's suspected killer (Jimmy Hughes) to justice.

Mr. Rice has attempted to make a laughing stock of everyone he mentions in the story, except of course, Mike Murphy, "the dapper prosecutor from the attorney general's office," who dropped the case against the suspected killer because (according to Rice's sources) "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." Mr. Rice insinuates that the case was dropped because "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." Rice then adds that the prosecutor, Murphy, "declined to comment."

I don't know the names of the so-called obsessive "fellow travelers" who called the prosecutor's office and allegedly caused him to drop the case, but I do know that anyone who would have made those calls would have been working against Detective John Powers and Rachel Begley's efforts to see the case prosecuted. I personally never made contact with the prosecutor, Mike Murphy, at any time because they were clearly trying not to confuse the prosecutor with the "myriad connections."

Nevertheless, Mr. Rice's story tries to make a joke of the triple-homicide investigation, i.e., everyone who tried to help is a conspiracy theorist and they're all "obsessives." I agree with Rice that some conspiracy theorists' radical view of the world is damaging to any legitimate investigation.

Beginning in 1991, I spent years trying to sort through the smoke and mirrors of the so-called Octopus conspiracies, and I understand why most legitimate writers won't touch the story these days because their work becomes compromised by some radical theorists who attach themselves to such writings and begin circulating them at conspiracy sites across the Internet.

Such was the case with my book, "The Last Circle," and I can't defend the truth, validity and relevance of this 600-page book which contains over 100 pages of documents obtained from the FBI, U.S. Customs, RCMP, Police files, and court documents nationwide because it must be read to be believed. Anyone who has read it, including Andrew Rice, would be disingenuous to imply that it lacks truth, or that it is based on "speculation."

The one thing that Rice failed to express in his article, was the real-life fact that three people were really executed in June 1981 and someone really did kill them and that triple-homicide never got resolved and the victims never got justice. That aspect was apparently not important to Rice because he was too busy mocking and sneering at everyone involved to include compassion in his story.

Maybe someday Mr. Rice will understand that this could have been a great story about a brave woman whose father was executed, and they deserve justice, regardless whether her father was a "bearded mechanic who liked to drink, smoke pot, and ride motorcycles," and most compassionate people who read the article will not think it's funny or cute, but that it's really unnecessarily demeaning.

Cheri Seymour