Scales on a Dragon

Dead intern, Lori Klausutis; she died in July 2001. Image Source: Northwest Florida Daily News.

I knew someone who was a victim in a major Canadian abuse scandal and who recently prematurely died. I mentioned this survivor's death to a person who investigates these cases and asked him if he thought the scandal had wider dimensions. He said, "Such cases always do, like one scale on a dragon."

So now that Matt Lauer is gone when will the Fake News practitioners at NBC be terminating the contract of Phil Griffin? And will they terminate low ratings Joe Scarborough based on the “unsolved mystery” that took place in Florida years ago? Investigate!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 29, 2017

Conspiracy theorists see the scales of the dragon in crimes which supposedly connect the establishment to a cultist underground. Donald Trump fueled this speculation in November 2017, when he tweeted about dead intern Lori Klausutis. You can see his tweet refuted here, here, here, here, here, here and here. His allegation is easily dismissed, perhaps. But who knows what Trump saw in his days presiding over his hotels and casinos? Strange things happen in parks and tax havens, on yachts and private islands. What do we make of reports of dead billionaires and porn stars, or murdered teens, interns and tourists? They are part of a terrible reality that promises to red pill us all.

The fiction: a fake news article in Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut (1999) © Warner Bros. Reproduced non-commercially under Fair Use. Images Sources: Movie Heds and Vigilant Citizen.

The reality: Police Video of Epstein House (19 May 2018). Video Source: Youtube.

A Millennial phenomenon sees a victim become a celebrity through his or her death. There is a sub-genre of Youtube videos devoted to giving silenced victims a voice by channeling them from the spiritual realm or remote viewing them. Even if the only way to find out the truth is to talk to the dead, the public wants to know what happened, especially if it connects to us to some greater meaning, beyond individuals' tragic fates.

The question remains: if each crime is one scale on the dragon, what is the dragon? Is it a larger truth about our whole society, or is it an imagined myth? I have begun to develop a chapbook of poetry about the dragon.

The chapbook is tentatively entitled, Sparrows Still Sing in the Morning. The line was written by serial killer Son of Sam, aka David Berkowitz, who is still in prison for his crimes. This choice was not meant to give Berkowitz any credit, but rather to invert his likely-intended meaning of the phrase and to revisit his insistence that he did not work alone. He claimed he was part of a network of Satanists who catered to establishment figures. A bizarre account at the Website, It's Sin, Stupid explores this possibility:

"In Dead Names, a book authored by the person who prepared the Necronomicon for publication, the anonymous yet unabashedly occult author confirms [Michael A.] Hoffmans' claim:

'When the Son of Sam murders began to take place, those of us in the occult milieu in New York knew very well that more than one person was responsible for them. We also knew that there was a Brooklyn Heights connection, even after the shop moved from the Heights to Manhatta[n]'s Nineteenth Street since so many occultists lived in Brooklyn Heights by that [time] Wiccans, Satanists, and magicians of every variety. There was a small cult operating out of a brownstone on Hicks Street, and another on Henry Street, north of Montague. Classes were still being held on Clark Street, and coven meetings were taking place in various locations in the Heights. So, when the murders began, we knew they were not the actions of one killer; we understood the occult calend[a]r being used, and we were aware of the activities of just such a cult that was operating out of Brooklyn.' (Dead Names, p. 120)

What occult calend[a]r was being used, the author doesn't say, but later the author tells us that the cult's first known murder, arguably that of Arlis Perry's ritual annihilation on October 12, 1974, occur[r]ed at midnight on Aleister Crowley's birthday. Crowley was the infamous and extraordinarily wicked occult crank, Freemason, and guru of the O.T.O. (Ordo Templar Orientis). The author of Dead Names also informs us that the cult, though seemingly small, didn't act independently, but was involved with larger organizations."

The story goes that the Son of Sam killings and the Manson murders were connected to the Process Church, which sought to merge the Lamb of Christ with the Goat of Satan. It emerged in the 1960s and 1970s and was an offshoot of Scientology. Beyond these basic details, speculation about the church becomes weird and terrifying:

"[I]nvestigator Ed Sanders, who wrote a book on the Manson family, said, 'There were so many investigations going on out there after the murders that I began to wonder if the Process was a front for some intelligence operation.' [Jim] Keith, Mind Control, World Control, page 176."

Note that there is a thread of anti-Semitism in this theory, which I do not believe or endorse. Because none of this information is respectable or mainstream, it remains in the shadows and is never seriously researched and rarely understood.

This is why confusion and cognitive dissonance dominate the public discussion when perpetrators - like ex-Colonel Russell Williams - hail from successful, respectable backgrounds; or when they - like Sir Jimmy Savile - had the highest possible social connections. Victims who become celebrities after their deaths are mirrored by their social climber murderers. Sometimes the killers are friends, like Williams and another Canadian killer, Paul Bernardo, who partied together in college. These links mean that serial killers are not just psychopathic anomalies and outliers. They are part of the way power is constructed in our social environments. Somehow, they relate to the functions of the establishment.

My intention in exploring this material is to honour the victims by revealing the possible larger context of their sufferings and how that larger context shapes our own private worlds.

Part of my inspiration for this work originated in the summer of 1991, when I personally witnessed some things along these lines. The essay in which I describe those experiences will be included in my non-fiction collection currently in progress, Inside the Potemkin Village.

Dead intern, Chandra Levy; she died in late April or on 1 May 2001. Image Source: NStarZone.