The Three Faces of Evil, Part II

"Now I know why your tears fell like raindrops and why that melancholy air after the fun stopped." - from Casey's letter to Death Row inmate Mikki McDermott

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This essay stands alone. You can also read The Three Faces of Evil, Part I HERE.

I met a murderer once. Or at least, someone who had been convicted of murder. Because truth is never easy to discern and whoever tells the best story usually wins, regardless of whether it’s true or not.

Maureen “Mikki” McDermott

It was over ten years ago that I sat across the table from California death row inmate Maureen “Mikki” McDermott. I did this on two occasions, traveling up from Los Angeles to Chowchilla Women’s Prison, spending a total of approximately 5 hours each time with her.

Back in June of 1990, Mikki, a registered nurse, had been sentenced to death for a particularly heinous and callous crime.

Five years earlier, Mikki had hired a hospital orderly, Jimmy Luna, to murder her roommate, Stephen Eldridge, so she could collect a $100,000 mortgage insurance policy. Stephen, co-owner of the house where they lived together, was stabbed 44 times and his penis cut off by Luna. Mikki and Stephen were both gay and this was made much of in the trial, which took place in t1985 at the height of the AIDS scare. Luna claimed Mikki had ordered him to cut off the penis so the police would think it was a crime committed by a crazed lover or a homophobe.

So why had I gone to visit a monster like Mikki?

It was 1997 that I met private investigator Casey Cohen. At that time, I was president of InsideOUT Writers, a creative writing program for incarcerated youth that I had founded with then Catholic Chaplain of Central Juvenile Hall, Sister Janet Harris. The youth I worked with were kids who were facing life sentences thanks to Biden’s draconian laws. Many of those youths I remained friends with until this day. Some, instead of spending their lives in prison, went on to be lawyers and run businesses, most just went on to live ordinary lives. Others spent the rest of their lives in prison. One fourteen-year-old girl, Erika, finally had a chance to get out a couple of years ago after having spent over 20 years behind bars. She was so afraid of being free that she committed suicide shortly before her release. Everyone’s story is different.

It was Janet who had introduced me to Casey. I used to joke when I walked through the grounds of CJH, the Catholic nun on one side of me and the atheist Jew on the other side, that I was perfectly balanced. Those were great days, but they didn’t last. Nuns can be do-gooders and have a darker side, too. But that’s a story for another day.

Casey on the far left with the beard, interviewing a witness.

Casey’s real name was Kaddish, meaning in Hebrew “a prayer for the dying.” He often spoke of his name ruefully, as if it was a kind of curse given to him by his father who hadn’t been religious but had bowed to the power of tradition. With Casey’s thick beard and soulful brown eyes, he was like a father confessor and witnesses and criminals alike found themselves confessing their deepest and darkest secrets.

At the time I met him, Casey had the reputation as one of the foremost authorities on the death penalty phase. He was usually hired by the defense during the habeas appeal to help uncover stories from the murder’s past in order to humanize them so that they could escape the death penalty for life in prison.

Casey had worked on some of the most notorious murder trials in the country, all the way back to the tragic murder involving Marlon Brando’s son, Christian Brando. He was a favorite of famed criminal attorney Leslie Abramson, and his last job involved her client, 18-year-old Jeremy Stromeyer. On May 25, 1997, at 3:47 am, Jeremy followed 7-year-old Sherrice Iverson into the bathroom of a Nevada casino and molested and killed her, twisting her neck to make sure she was dead, just like he’d seen on TV.

You’re probably thinking as you read this, what a morbid world, how did you end up there? That’s a longer story than I have room to tell here, but suffice it to say, it was a world that interested me. After all, I was working with incarcerated youth who were facing life sentences for serious crimes. From Casey, I learned how better to talk to the girls who were in my first writing group and how to help them share their stories.

Teaching High Risk Offender boys at Barry J. Nidorf JH

“Everybody reads about Jeremy, but no one comes to know Jeremy the way I do,” Casey told me during those days before the trial. “No one else hears him speak those barely audible words. And then I have the responsibility of interpreting it all so the attorney can go into the courtroom like into the lion’s den, and fight for their client’s life. People may think they don’t deserve saving, but when it comes to the courtroom, it isn’t a moral issue. It’s about honesty and fairness. Well it should be. But most often it’s about power and political careers. If you can beat them at their own game, now that’s a victory.”

Over the course of his career, Casey had traveled the world in search of those stories. He’d gone anywhere, down some dark alley in Chinatown, or across the world to some mountainous village, interviewing the friends and families of convicted murders. He complained that the stories came to fill him like poison.

Hearing Casey talk about the stories as poison caused me great sadness. From the first time I met him, at a little Mexican restaurant not far from the downtown courthouse, frequented by lawyers, detectives and judges, I’d found out he was dying of cancer. I would know him for only three years.

When Casey wasn’t working on murder trials, he worked with Charlie English, known at that time as “attorney to the stars,” handling damage control with the likes of Tommy Lee when he got in trouble for allegedly abusing Pamela Andersen; or Robert Downey Jr. when he was picked up for drug or alcohol related charges, in the days before he turned his life around. Casey’s job was fascinating and dangerous, inhabited by a host of characters more colorful than any movie, with him the most colorful of all.

But it was Mikki’s case that troubled Casey until the very end. He was sure she had been innocent. He talked about it to me often and I came to know the case very well. I never questioned Casey’s assessment. After all, he was the expert, not me, and highly regarded in the field by his peers. Even the BBC had taken notice, doing a segment on his life for their Everyman series.

Casey had worked on Mikki’s habeas appeal with attorney Verna Wefald. They had done their best, but her appeal had been denied. He couldn’t bear the thought of Mikki sitting in a sterile room on death row, day after day, year after year, never being free again. Never traveling to far off lands, as she had hoped to do.

So, he started writing her letters. Only they weren’t ordinary letters. They were the most fantastical letters you could ever imagine. Within the pages of the letters, Casey created an imaginary world, inhabited by wild and wonderful characters. Casey wrote as if he were one of those characters, calling himself C. and her M. Each letter talked as if he was in some exotic location, Paris, Rome, San Franscisco during the 60s, a tropical island, running into old flames and dangerous acquaintances, attending wild parties.

None of it was true. But it was true within the world of the letters and when I read them, I was transported into that world and saw it all. I thought of Mikki receiving the letters, taking them out of the envelope, settling on her bunk, and sailing away on a ship of imagination. Away, away, from the purgatory of waiting, waiting for death.

Here is a little taste of one of the letters:

Dear M.

       Do you remember the endless days and nights of heat and the painful summer we spent in Brazil (before you ran off with Bobbi Havana)? I can still see the room we rented, the large window overlooking the river. I dreamed about that time last night and it was like we were there again. I felt the tropical air. I saw the restaurant we would walk to down the dark, tree-lined path that led from our back yard. I heard the music and saw the lights of the town and the colorful, slow moving boats dancing on the water. In all my previous letters, in all my recriminations and complaints about your friends, I never mentioned, nor did I think, about that time or of Bobbi. What brought this up?

       I can't say where I've been recently, but for five days I was trapped (depressed and lonely without you) in a cabin in a very remote park. Night after night I sat up, propped against the pillows, listening to the hissing rain on the trees just outside my open window. One night I must have been drifting off to sleep when I was startled by a sudden flash of strobe-like lightening and a loud reverberating thunder that seemed to go on forever. When I was fully awake I saw a living black stripe on the wall opposite the bed. When I walked closer it turned out to be a column of ants seemingly stirred by the heat and humidity, crossing horizontally from the window to a crack in the wall on the other side of the room. The column was fully four inches wide and at least 12 feet long. Eventually, the weather let up and in that brief time I walked outside just as a full moon came into view through an opening in the clouds, which were moving quickly across the sky. Then more lightening, rolling volleys of thunder and rain even more relentless than before.

       I came inside and picked up a book of poetry which had been unread since I stuffed it into a compartment of my suitcase weeks earlier before I left Malaysia. Here was what it said on the page that fell open:

Do not think

after the clouds have vanished away,

“How bright it has become!”

For in the sky, all the while,

The moon of dawn.

       At that moment I realized what a fool I had been not to see my M., the M. I had known, the M. I had traveled with in Europe (during that golden age). I realized I didn't know you then and that just possibly it was why you ran off with the likes of that aged, disgusting Artur, who I later learned was a unit leader in the Hitler Youth. And it explains why the Bobbi Havana episode.

       Now I know why your tears fell like raindrops and why that melancholy air after the fun stopped. I understand why you needed people and why you threw yourself into planning parties with such intensity. That night the clouds parted, I understood the brightness that was hidden all that time. I know I was miserable to be with much of the time. And there were many occasions you had to take care of me.

       Madrid, for example. New Year's Eve. A closet-sized room, confined to a squalid little bed, shivering and coughing. A small light bulb hanging overhead from a wire. And despite the fatigue, the apprehension and depression, lacking the will to stand and turn off that light, listening to the Christmas music on the street below, hungry, shabby, unshaven. And eventually a deep sleep in which I dreamed of “our” beach in Mexico. Bright, hot sunshine. Dos Equis on ice. Tanned bodies. No longer racked by coughing spasms. Young again. Healthy. Do you remember my white suit? Do you remember the night you took my hand and led me on to the open dance floor? My dream didn't last long.

       When the door burst open, you were there with Mario, (our bartender friend from Barcelona). You had run into him on the street and somehow located me. I can still see the shock on your face. But what a joy it was. My misery instantly turned to hope. My self-pity erased. My survival assured. And because of you, M. The way you washed my face and dressed me. And then you and Mario helping me down the stairs and into a waiting taxi. And before I knew it we were at Fatumbi's villa. Fatumbi (“reborn”), how appropriate. Is it any wonder I can't abandon you no matter what?

       Now, some sad news. Fatumbi is dead. Yes, he was in his 90's. No one knows for sure. He was so vibrant, alive, interested in the world until the end. He was the only European to penetrate the Yoruba society and learn their language. I heard he was even a “priest” in Africa where he learned voodoo. They said he was a babalao, a father of secrets. What secrets he must have taken with him. We were so lucky to have known him and learned from him.

       Enough for now, M. I will no longer have a sarcastic tone when I refer to you as the Jewel of Paris. I will no longer refer to your wardrobe as “tres tackeee.” I will send you postcards from my destinations. And who knows. There is still our Paris, our Barcelona, our songs, our true friends. And, as always, you are in my thoughts.

       M., if you know how to get in touch with Danielle, the one whose mother let us use her house when we flew to the Cote d'Azure, please let me know. Raphael Limon (sourpuss) asked me to locate her.

Forever, C.

Perhaps you can see now why I considered Casey’s gift to me of the letters as beyond any price. I began to research the letters. I found that reality was mixed with fiction. When he spoke of illness or special places, of M being abandoned, they were subtle hints of things that had really happened. When I discovered that Fatumbi, “Reborn,” was a real person named Pierre Verger, I started writing about all of it. That writing has ended up being almost 400 pages. Will it ever find its way into the world beyond my imagination? I don’t know.

All thanks to Casey, who took the lives of monsters and found who they were beyond the one moment of their terrible crimes, absorbed their tragedies and turned it all over the lawyers and prosecutors, judges and courts to then decide their fate.

What sort of a person would think up such letters let alone write them, to a woman on death row, so despised and feared, convicted of such a gruesome murder? Only one person, Kaddish “Casey” Cohen.

Casey asked me to draw a picture, inspired by the last letter he sent to her, and I did. Here it is:

Shortly before his death, he asked me to please visit Mikki. Who knows, he said, perhaps one day you’ll write about us all.

I promised I would. It took me 10 years to fulfill my promise, but I finally did.

You can imagine after all those years, all the letters and the stories he had told me about Mikki, I was filled with a nervous excitement to see her at last.

And so, I found myself sitting there in that tiny room, a big glass window on one side with a burly guard outside, wondering what to say to this tiny woman that I towered over. She looked so ordinary, it was hard to imagine her thinking up such a devious, horrific murder and then carrying it out. I’d written to her first, of course, explaining who I was, and she’d agreed for me to visit. A friend of Casey’s was always welcome she told me.

Sitting there with Mikki, we talked about her life on death row, she told me about the other women, many of whom were there for killing abusive partners or their own children. She told me how she only got out once a day for a short period, to walk around and around a tiny yard with walls so high all you could see was a square of sky far above. Once, a bird had fallen from the sky and she and the other women with her gathered around it. Mikki picked it up. It was the first time in years she had felt another living being, feeling it’s small heart fluttering inside. Those murderers prayed and pleaded for the bird not to die and then, suddenly it ruffled its feathers and flew off again and disappeared.

That was the best story I heard. Otherwise, she talked about other friends who wrote to her, the television shows she watched. When I mentioned the letters, I expected a light to shine in her eyes, a far-off expression of nostalgia to overtake her. But nothing of the sort happened. She had forgotten about them. They hadn’t held any magic for her. It didn’t occur to her how brilliant and how unique the letters were. Her TV shows were much more interesting.

That moment reinforced what Casey had said, that most murderers are boring people.

I began to doubt Casey’s version. Could he have been wrong? Why had he been so insistent that she was innocent. I ended up meeting with Verna Wefald and reading through the 1,000 pages of the habeas trial. I saw how the original trial and Mikki’s conviction had certainly been unfair.

The prosecutor Katherine Mader had formerly defended Angelo Buono, one of the Hillside Stranglers. In that case, she had fawned over Buono and treated him like a misguided little boy, a tactic used to humanize him for the jury. With Mikki, she did the opposite, likening her to ‘a Nazi working in the crematorium by day and listening to Mozart by night,’ a ‘mutation of a human being,’ a ‘wolf in sheep’s clothing,’ a person who ‘stalked people like animals,’ and someone who had “resigned from the human race.” Casey had explained all this to me and that a trial like that can make or break a District Attorney’s career. Mader won the case. And she became a Superior Court Judge.

Angelo Buono and Katherine Mader

Casey had known what I came later to understand very well myself, that whoever tells the best story, or perhaps even more important, whoever tells the story with the most money and press behind it, is the one that wins.

Perhaps Casey had wanted desperately for this one story that he had told of Mikki to be true. And in that, he was no different from anyone else. We all create the stories of our lives, and we tell them over and over and we want them to be true.

Was Mikki innocent, or had she told herself that story so often over the years that now she actually believed it? I just didn’t know. But if she was truly innocent, how horrible to be put in that cage.

How about Biden, Fauci and Gates. I knew they weren’t innocent. There was no doubt in my mind. But had they told themselves the story of their benevolence so often that they, too, believed it?

Mikki was a nurse. She had made a vow to save her patients. When she had first been put in jail, awaiting her trial, she’d saved another woman’s life who’d been choking on an apple.

“Is that the action of a murderer?” she demanded of me, her eyes, always wide as if confronting some confounding surprise, grew wider, her voice taking on a slightly belligerent tone.

I could only shake my head, no, of course not.

Biden, Fauci and Gates were all public servants of different sorts. Each one could point to countless lives they had saved. Surely, they would never knowingly, willingly kill anyone.

Mikki refused to talk about the crime. She had reason to be distrustful. The press had eaten her alive during the trial and a terrible TV movie had been made about the crime. She refused to support me in writing about her life and her case.

And that made me wonder. She had nothing more to lose. She’d already been condemned to death. Why wouldn’t she want a better version to be left behind, not just the sordid tale that was out there?

After the second visit she cut me off and I never went back. In fact, even without her cutting me off I doubt I would have returned. It seemed after the initial spark of interest on both sides, we had nothing more to say to one another.

To this day, the doubts remain. Is she innocent or not?

Of one thing, I am sure. I would never want to share a house with her.

In a series of tweets right before Christmas, a concerned Bill Gates said he planned to cancel most of his holiday plans and warned that the United States "could be entering the worst part of the pandemic."

At the same time, he assured us that we would likely see the pandemic wind down. In Bill Gates’ “2021 Year in Review” he wrote: “In a couple years, my hope is that the only time you will really have to think about the virus is when you get your joint COVID and flu vaccine every fall.”

“My hope.” Did he truly hope? Could someone cause mass murder and actually think he had never done it, only wanted the best for everyone?

Those words of his sound all the more sinister because they are said with such conviction.

Biden will be gone and easily replaced.

But for Fauci and Gates, they are setting the stage so that, even when they depart this earth their legacy will never die.

"It's possible that new variants could evade our countermeasures and become fully resistant to current vaccines or past infection, necessitating vaccine adaptations," WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said. He chided leaders of wealthier nations, saying that “reactionary political movements fostered vaccine inequity and created the ideal conditions for the emergence of new variants."

Great. More proof that despite the good news of Covid becoming a regular illness like the common cold, we are only dipping our feet into the new reality of deadly plagues, But not the plagues of the past. Genetically engineered ones that target certain populations.

By the time everyone is happily getting their yearly Covid/flu jab, these highest servants of our overlords could well be in control of the entire pharmaceutical empire, administering their concoctions to a world population so addled by addictions they are no longer capable of doing anything except holding out their arms or swallowing their pills or being infused with drug cocktails directly into their skin.

Imagine the day when everyone has technology implanted into their bodies at birth, that monitors everything they do, sending that information to government agents.

I remember when traveling behind the Iron Curtain as a child. In all the hotels, on every floor, sat an old lady at the end of the corridor, a babushka, who watched and reported on all the comings and goings. We were warned of listening devices inside our rooms. Before entering each country, we had to buy gas vouchers, having calculated exactly how much gas we would need. We were only allowed to travel on certain roads and on the rare occasions when we deviated, even when it was out in the middle of nowhere, a car magically appeared to direct us back en route.

Imagine having someone like that inside your skin, reminding you to take your mediation, telling you if you’d eaten too much sugar that day, knowing where you had been and no doubt listening to all your conversations.

By the time we get to the pandemic that Gates warned us about in 2008, people will be begging for this level of control. Covid was just a test run. It did what it was supposed to do. It killed the elderly and those with comorbidities such as diabetes and heart disease. Of course, neither Gates nor the others wanted it to kill themselves or their own children.

Remember Italy, the first Western nation hit so hard by Covid in the beginning? We all watched in horror as the country was brought to its knees by this terrifying virus that no one seemed to know anything about.

An article in Bloomberg says that 99% of people who died from coronavirus in Italy were elderly with preexisting conditions. The average age was around 80. And 60% suffered from at least 3 preexisting illnesses while a fifth had two.

In the United States the CDC tells us that “more than 81% of COVID-19 deaths occur in people over age 65. The number of deaths among people over age 65 is 80 times higher than the number of deaths among people aged 18-29.”

This has been a disease of the elderly. For most of those elderly, they died alone, in cold, clinical rooms, not surrounded by loved ones but by masked strangers. They were not even allowed funerals.

And now, for those elderly who remained healthy, Anderson Cooper made jokes to a gleeful Bill Gates about taking away their social security if they do not bow to take a vaccine that, if they haven’t taken it by now, they probably don’t want to. These people should be congratulated as being strong and healthy to have made it through, not treated like pieces of garbage.

Any pandemic in the future will also need to target a certain portion of the population, as Covid did. If you suspected Covid was biologically engineered just wait for the next one.

Prophet Gates has something to say about that: “Also, related to pandemics is something people don't like to talk about much, which is bioterrorism, that somebody who wants to cause damage could engineer a virus. So that means the chance of running into this is more than just the naturally caused epidemics like the current one.”

Gates has mentioned smallpox a number of times. Uncannily, the dreaded disease began cropping up in the news. “Vials labeled 'smallpox' found at vaccine research facility in Pennsylvania, CDC says,” read a November 2021, CNN Headline.

In my last essay, Wa’R, I talk about biowarfare and quote from Guo Jiwei (郭继卫), a professor with the Third Military Medical University, 2010’s War for Biological Dominance (制生权战争), where he emphasizes the impact of biology on future warfare. "biotech will be positioned in the battlefield of the human body itself, targeted at people, limited to people, where it can attack parts or fractions of the human body, accurate to specific biological characteristics ..."

Further, “Biology is among seven "new domains of warfare" discussed in a 2017 book by Zhang Shibo (张仕波), a retired general and former president of the National Defense University, who concludes: “Modern biotechnology development is gradually showing strong signs characteristic of an offensive capability,” including the possibility that “specific ethnic genetic attacks” (特定种族基因攻击) could be employed.” 

And as I have shown in other essays, such as The Chinafication of the Western World, we in the West love to self-righteously lay the blame on China for their lack of moral integrity. However, the truth is that when it got too hot in the West, our “experts” simply sent their questionable research over to China and funded it there. Gain of function research and organ harvesting didn’t stop. Nor did the hunt for rare earth minerals that I talk about in my essay, The Magic of Rare Earth Elements & the Hypocrisy of Clean Energy.

It’s a lot to absorb, I know. But once we see the bigger picture, we realize how it all fits together and very little over the past two years has happened by chance. Much of it appeared chaotic, the information was constantly changing, but that was to create fear and uncertainty and to prep people to accept whatever they were told. The information provided has been on such a massive scale, people grew weary of trying to disseminate it all. It was easier to simply believe in our prophets and sorcerers.

There is a new film out called A Good Death which documents the stories from people who “lost loved ones to fatal doses of morphine and Midazolam. Each year, tens of thousands of elderlies and terminally ill patients are quietly euthanized in NHS facilities. In hospitals, care homes and hospices, behind closed doors, their deaths are hastened in what appears to be a caring and humane way. But how has this practice of euthanasia – illegal in the UK and carrying a life prison sentence - become so widespread and acceptable? And why are people who are nowhere near the end of their lives being given killer ‘cocktails’ of drugs that are used in many US states for executions?”

That is how Mikki will die, with a lethal cocktail of drugs, unless she dies a natural death while she is waiting, which is more likely. How ironic that she lives, waiting for her drugs of death, while countless of the innocent have died.

Have they succeeded in normalizing fascism to such an extent? And if so, how much longer will it be before those identified with other “flaws” will be put out of their misery?

In 1905 when the yellow fever and malaria plague was threatening lives across the border in America, Dr. Alexander Lambert, personal physician to President Theodore Roosevelt, made this statement:

“I am sorry for you tonight, Mr. President. You are facing one of the greatest decisions of your career. If you fall back on the old methods…you will fail…. If you back up Dr. Gorgas and his ideas, and you let him make his campaign against the mosquitoes, then you get your canal. I can only give my advice: you must decide for yourself. There is only one way of controlling yellow fever and malaria, and that is the eradication of the mosquito.” From William Crawford Gorgas, His Life and Work. Gorgas and Hendrick, 1924.

Walter Reed went on to find funding apart from the government and proved that yellow fever was spread not by poor sanitation but by the Aedes Aegypti mosquitoes. Because it was America and they wanted the Panama Canal to succeed, the mosquitoes that caused the diseases were eradicated—not simply controlled. The idea that “fomites” spread the disease, causing obsessive sanitizing of products and surfaces was debunked, and millions of dollars were saved, not to mention millions of lives.

Interestingly, Fauci used the old scare tactic of “fomites” at the beginning when everyone was told to obsessively sanitize every surface. Then, like so many other theories that he already knew were bogus, we were told to stop, and everyone blindly obeyed.

In Scott Atlas’s book, A Plague Upon Our House, he tells how the press vilified President Trump for shutting down Fauci and putting a “kook in charge.” That “kook” of course was Atlas. He went on to describe how he “watched the nation’s ‘top scientists’ lie about covid and get away with it.”

Atlas tried his best as he wrote:

Clarifying the facts about the pandemic and countering the unending barrage of misinformation and pseudoscience about it, in this case coming from within the administration itself, was one of my most important roles in this national crisis.

It is impossible for us on the outside to imagine the severe pressure, the frustration, the battles that must have raged as Trump and Atlas tried to combat the true misinformation: Fauci, Gates and the mainstream media.

And then, incredibly, while Joe Biden, who hid in his basement as he “campaigned” for the presidency, Donald Trump went out amongst the people and contracted Covid, whereupon he was sent to be treated at Walter Reed Hospital, named after the very man who had helped eradicate the mosquito that had infected so many with Yellow Fever.

I will never forget that moment when Trump returned to the White House and triumphantly tore off his mask on the balcony for the world to see. I thought surely, whether you love him or you hate him, whether it’s true or whether it’s theater, it’s inspiring.

But no. Of course, the press vilified him. Joy Reid saying she was “disgusted.” Biden making fun of that “macho thing.” When I tried to tell this to my friends, they became angrier than ever. Trump was a reckless killer of grandmothers. Biden was the one who would save us all. When I tried to say his fearless attitude was inspiring, I was derided as an idiot and a killer of grandmas too. We should be afraid. Not being afraid was irresponsible.

Had Trump really been ill? Was all of it just theater? I didn’t know. But what I did know in that moment was that America was lost. If people truly now believed that cowering in our homes when we were healthy was the right thing to do and our only hope was fear, then we had no hope.

I lost many friends at that time, as I know so many of us did.

In the end, Trump jumped on the vaccine train, and he is there to this day. If you can’t beat them, join them. I like to believe that Trump tried, really tried. Fauci was a weed whose roots ran too deep. Everything Trump tried to get people to accept was destroyed by the media. Rather than admit Trump was right and preventive remedies such as Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin should be tried, no prevention was allowed. This crime must be paid for.

Image Biden saying today what Trump dared to say then: “People are tired of hearing Fauci and these idiots, all these idiots who got it wrong.”

We all know that will never happen.

Sir Ronald Ross, winner of the Nobel Prize in 1902 for his discovery of the malaria parasite in mosquitoes, railed against “academics” in the place of practical research when he said,

“It implies the sacrifice of life and health on a large scale while researches which may have little real value and may be continued indefinitely are being attempted…In practical life we observe that the best practical discoveries are obtained during the execution of practical work and that long academic discussions are apt to lead to nothing but academic profit.”

This train isn’t stopping anytime soon.

The Biden administration announced on Wednesday a $137 million contract for Millipore Sigma, a unit of Germany's Merck KGaA, to boost production capacity of a highly constrained component of rapid coronavirus tests.

The money will allow the company over three years to build a new facility to produce nitrocellulose membranes, the paper that displays test results, in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. That, in turn, will allow for 85 million more tests to be produced per month, the official said.

What, I wonder, could these tests possibly be for?

I wish Casey was alive now. I would love to hear his take on all of this. I know he wouldn’t be fooled. Casey lived his life. He would never have endured a lock down. When he found out he was dying, he destroyed most of his case files and took off to Thailand, thinking he’d live a life of meditation and stay there until he died.

“But I didn’t die,” he told me. “And eventually I realized that there were the same McDonalds on street corners in Thailand that there were in Los Angeles. So, I came back.”

We were both glad he did. If he hadn’t, we never would have met. He married a Thai woman, the sister of one of the men whose case he had worked on, the only person on death row who was executed, shortly before Casey’s own death. He told me that with Jay’s execution, his life had come full circle. Too many stories to include that one here.

As Casey grew weaker and weaker, he talked to me on the phone as if he’d been transported out of his pain and into the past. I would close my eyes and listen to his soft, struggling voice.

Remembering how his Santa Monica condo had contained only a mattress on the floor and a large table against the wall on which sat a computer and a printer. A closet with six pairs of jeans, four pairs of K-Swiss shoes, and 35 or so Gap T-shirts. Walking on the beach, listening to birds, feeling the cold wind. Upscale restaurants on Montana Ave. and his hangout on Ocean Avenue—the mail drop place and the magazine stand.

A weak laugh and a painful cough. “That was my office, where Debbie kept a director’s chair for me so I could sit out on the sidewalk and read the newspapers. I never had a real office. People knew where to find me.”

Meeting one or the other of his sons on Main Street at night in Russel’s Bar.

Memories stretched out in a long line. “Like 1956, the year you were born, Karen, when I was on the destroyer, the McKean, off the coast, near the pier and we fired 5” Starshells high into the air. Chief Skorzak, Bud Davis, later to become a well-respected stuntman, Pete Gray, who owned every shit-kicking record ever made. The time I was stationed in the Pacific three miles down-wind from an Atomic Test and how years later the Veterans Administration said my slow-growing, but unstoppable, cancer was service connected from radiation at that test. I got discharged from the navy and went crazy (literally) and ran away to Australia. I got a sales job at Hicks Atkinson in Sidney all because of a young lady, but she ended up stealing all my money.”

“Just imagine, Karen, at 16, you were lamenting that you’d never been kissed, while at that age I was losing my virginity to a lady of the night in some dark dive in Asia.”

“I have a long list of conquests—take, for example, that dangerous liaison with the girlfriend of the Israeli Mafioso—Las Vegas branch, I mention no names—now that was insanity, the two of us entering her apartment one night when he was out of town, stumbling over our feet in our eagerness, hands poised to tear each other’s clothes off and then the gasp, the wide-eyed terror as she noticed the picture on the wall, and I turn to see that one and the next, and the next, all of them priceless pieces of art, turned to the wall. And the photos of her on the mantle, lying face down, not smashed in anger, but lined up neatly in a row, face down with finality. The subtlety, the intelligence, the artfulness of the message not lost on me. I can appreciate a creative mind, a grand gesture, and how perfect was his thinking when he did this. My fear all the stronger, caught in a situation more dangerous than any I had ever known in a long list of dangerous situations.  

“Not more than five frozen seconds of standing stupidly and staring before her frantic hiss, ‘Go, go!’ and she was pushing me out the door.

“‘You’ll be okay?’ What a meaningless, cowardly question to ask of the woman I was about to make love to and was instead scurrying away from like a scared rat.

“Her terrified eyes, and yet resigned. ‘Yes.’

“I left just like that, no more contact, no last kiss, rapidly and yet with perfect control, down the hall, the disciplined years of training returning, instincts on high alert, standing to one side as the elevator doors opened, prepared for a bullet to make a third eye in my forehead.

“I never saw her again. The message had done its job, the sender a man of class and distinction. I had helped him out of a sticky situation and so I suppose that is why I wasn’t gutted and thrown into the desert. Man to man, respect. The debt had been paid and I was never tempted to cross that bridge again. I don’t regret a minute of the mad pleasure, made that much realer, as with every ecstatic moan, every burn of flesh on flesh, we flirted with death. I have been lucky. I have lived. Who am I to complain that my time is up?”

So many stories.

“It doesn’t matter what people say, Karen, as long as they believe it. I’ve heard the most outrageous claims made by academics, junkies, gangsters, pastors, sweet old ladies, agonized housewives, shifty politicians and powerful businessmen. In the end their stories unify them. The banal accounting of a sweet old lady can hide a secret just as horrific and insanely perverse as the confession of a serial killer. “

We talked a lot about saving people, how you can’t save everyone—no, not their souls, or getting them off drugs, or anything really. In the end, everyone has to save themselves.

The burden of saving even monsters from death had sat on his shoulders for so long. And the time had come to let it go.

“It’s my name. A father shouldn’t give a son a name like Kaddish. It’s a curse.”

“And a blessing,” I said.

Shortly before his death, Casey called me for the last time. “I had a dream,” he said. “We were sitting on the balcony of my condo in Santa Monica. We were sitting in chairs and I saw that your chair was floating in a pond where there were many beautiful koi fish. They were swimming around you, and I said, ‘Karen, wow, look at all those coy fish, you’re so lucky, those are the luckiest fish, and they’re swimming around you.’ And you know what? You looked, but for the life of you, you couldn’t see those fish. I just want you to know, they’re there, Karen! They’re all around you. The luckiest fish. You’re so lucky. Don’t ever forget it.”

By that point, he was in so much pain he could hardly speak, but he was determined to tell me his dream. I cried as he told it to me. Unbearable pain and unbearable beauty. To the end, he gave so me much and those last words, along with the letters, were his greatest gift. Little did he know how important that dream would become in the difficult days ahead.

A page from Casey’s journal that arrived in the mail for me, along with Mikki’s letters, shortly after his death. Over the years, he’d had his friends write their favorite sayings in this journal

There are monsters who live next door to us, or that we read about in the newspapers. There are monsters who are in prison. There are monsters on death row, and we feel safer because they can no longer hurt us.

And then there are the worst monsters of all, the Biden’s and the Fauci’s and the Gates’, who walk openly above us, never in our midst, so protected that no one can touch them. One moment they may be revered and worshiped. The next moment they may be despised and feared. It doesn’t seem to matter. They have been chosen by the overlords and there they stay until their use is done.

Looking at them after two years of death and destruction, still telling their lies, can fill us with anger and despair. But then I think of Maria and the others, singing outside the prison where their children are being held. The human spirit is amazingly resilient. I think we will surprise ourselves in this coming year with our ability to act courageously and shed light upon the evil.

Casey left this earth on Valentine’s Day, 2000. I was on a plane flying back from Senegal to New York when it happened. I miss him most days.

And so, here I am, writing about Casey and the story of Mikki, just as my dear friend hoped I would. I know he is smiling, with his usual touch of cynicism. He might have been an atheist, but if anyone is in heaven right now, it’s him.

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