After her housekeeper left, she slipped into some functional clothes and headed for the secret lab. Maybe tonight she would finally be able to neutralize the infinitesimal culprit that killed both children and adults so slowly and so painfully. Maybe this would be the step that made the dream of a cancer vaccine possible. This new machine had great potential. And it had been put in her hands. Her week of training in Boston would pay off now. Finally she stood on the leading edge of science. She went to the lab with high hopes.
That night something terrible happened in the lab. Something went wrong. There was a brilliant flash of light. Without warning an electrical arc of unbelievable magnitude leapt from the machine. A fireball of overcharged particles ran up Mary’s arm and lunged through her body. The massive electrical current and intense heat literally blew her arm off. A flashbulb of violence. Her body was destroyed almost beyond recognition in a fraction of a second. She never knew what hit her. Maimed and unconscious, she was still alive, since the path of the electricity had not crossed her heart.
Beyond their horror, the others in the lab with her now had an enormous crisis on their hands. One of America’s most prominent doctors lay on the floor at their feet, maimed and mutilated by a machine most Americans did not even know existed. Maybe they could have saved her, it is hard to say. Maybe they tried. But would she have wanted that? A blind surgeon missing an arm and part of her body? And what would it do to their covert medical operation? Their secret experiments? It would be difficult to keep this one quiet.
Serious decisions had to be made fast. By dawn the die would be cast one way or another. It was time for action. Confronted with a near-dead scientist and perhaps the possibility of exposing a covert research project, the decision was made to cover up the tragedy.
Dr. Sherman would need to be terminated, her body returned to her apartment, a murder scene staged, and the investigation directed to a dead end. The plan had to be implemented immediately. There was no time to waste. Mary Sherman was terminated quickly and unceremoniously by stabbing her directly in the heart. They knew she could not recover from this. Then her body had to be returned to her apartment under the cover of darkness and in total stealth. No one could ever know.
One or two team members put on white gloves to prevent fingerprints from being left on any object. Mary’s body was put into a body bag and placed in the trunk of her car. Around 3:00 A.M. they drove her car back to her apartment. Using the keys from her purse, they unlocked the gate and the door to her apartment, and turned off the burglar alarm. Once inside they quietly set her keys on the kitchen counter and dropped her purse on the sofa. Then they went back downstairs, got the body, and gently carried it up the concrete-and-steel stairs into her apartment.
When they placed Mary’s body on her bed, they did not realize that the body was backwards, with the feet pointing toward the headboard. Once the body bag was removed, it did not seem to matter. A stack of neatly folded clothes was pulled from a dresser drawer and piled on top of her charred torso. Then came the hard part. They stabbed her corpse with a knife in a helter-skelter manner to create the impression of a psychopathic slashing. This left cuts in the folded clothes they had placed on her torso.
The fire was then started. The work done, they dropped the blood-stained gloves into the laundry hamper, quickly washed-up their hands, and hurriedly left the apartment, using Mary’s car to fee the scene.
When the smoke from the smoldering mattress found its way through the ventilation ducts into a neighbor’s apartment, he called the police. It was 4:13 A.M.
What happened in the lab that night? Secret medical experiments “under the cover of darkness” were underway. These experiments used a linear particle accelerator to mutate monkey viruses. Her euthanasic termination and the subsequent sham murder-scene were intended to preserve the secrecy of the operation, which is also the reason that the investigation into her death was sent on a wild goose chase, looking for a psychopathic lesbian butcher who never existed.
CHAPTER 11
The Machine
BY THE SUMMER OF 1995, I had spent three years investigating the death of Mary Sherman, the history of monkey virus research, and the uncharted epidemic of soft tissue cancers. I was exhausted. It was a watershed point for me. Much had been done, yet much was undone. I had to make a decision about publishing. Should I publish what I had found to date, even if it was incomplete? Or should I continue researching, hoping to find more information?
On one hand, one of my major goals had been accomplished. Much of the nonsense surrounding Mary Sherman’s death had been exposed. On the other, my list of unanswered questions stretched to the horizon. It was as if all my years of work were little more than clearing the brush before the real work could begin. The ultimate problem was that I had no way of knowing if additional effort would produce additional answers. Or whether a major discovery lay just around the corner.
For better or worse, I decided to publish, just to get the story out, even if there was more work to be done. Perhaps it would trigger an investigation. Perhaps someone would come forward with more information. Perhaps our Orwellian monster would stir on its own. Anyway, I needed a break and felt I had done as much as I could for the moment, and in 1995 I published the first edition of Mary, Ferrie & the Monkey Virus.
Ironically, it wasn’t until I stopped writing and started publishing that I began to think about the set of unanswered questions from a broader perspective. My initial goal had been very general — to gather all the information into one place and look for an obvious pattern. What I found was a series of events that were both individually and collectively suspicious, but the overall pattern had not yet produced a coherent explanation.
For example, could coincidence adequately explain how the soon-to-be-accused assassin of the President of the United States crossed paths with the former President of the American Cancer Society, who was working on an assignment for the U.S. Government which was so “sensitive” that it required clearance from the Director of the FBI? Could social acquaintance explain why the Chairman of the Pathology Committee of the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons had been associated with a contraband pilot who few covert operations for the CIA? Could corruption adequately explain the extreme manner in which the New Orleans Police Department shut down the investigation into Mary Sherman’s murder and sanitized the reports?
All three seemed highly unlikely to me. I began to suspect that the individual pieces had been distorted to confuse the larger pattern. For example, if one saw Sherman’s murder as sexual, it would be hard to see her death as a part of events which were medical, or as part of a larger pattern that was political.
But once you knew that Sherman’s death was not sexual, it changed both the appearance of that individual event and the appearance of the overall pattern. And what to make of Oswald, Banister, and Ferrie? Were they colorful, albeit irrelevant, ornaments that decorated the streets of New Orleans? Or were they somehow woven into the fabric of events that ultimately produced Mary Sherman’s death?
Further, the pattern of distortions begged the obvious question: What were they trying to hide? Why did people want us to think that Sherman’s death was sexual? Why did they want us to think that viruses could not cause cancer? Was this in any way related to the reason that they wanted us to think that Oswald was a Communist? In short: What was the larger pattern to the events around Mary Sherman’s death?
I began to see our scattered fragments like the tiles of a mosaic which would only reveal their larger pattern when arranged in exactly the right order. Perhaps there was a pivotal question, a central piece of information around which all other answers would orbit. A single question whose answer would define the pattern. The more I thought about it, the more one question came into focus. Eventually, it glared at me like a full moon on a cloudless night.
If Mary Sherman was killed by a linear particle accelerator, then the central question was clear: Where was the linear particle accelerator loc
ated? And then a series of related questions: Upon whose property did Mary Sherman die? Whose reputation was her masquerade-murder intended to protect? Upon whose authority was the investigation into her murder shut down? I thought about these questions every time I looked at the book, and I wondered if I would ever find the answers.
Of course, linear particle accelerators themselves were not secret. As early as July 27, 1959, the cover article in Time magazine bragged about the one at M.D. Anderson Hospital in Texas. However, linear particle accelerators were highly regulated. Under normal circumstances, the sale of a single accelerator would have generated a paper trail a mile long, particularly in the files of the Atomic Energy Commission. But was this a normal circumstance? My instincts said, “No.”
Times being what they were, I was not about to FOIA1 the records of the Atomic Energy Commission by myself. Their ability to sandbag, avoid, and delay was far beyond my ability to persist. So I decided to stick to my strategy of patience, and to wait for something to happen.
Six months passed with little change. Then the phone rang. It was a cold winter night in January 1996. The voice was warm and familiar. It was a medical doctor who had quietly fed me information over the past several years. His kiss-and-tell stories about radioactive medicine and medical politics had encouraged me at a time when little else did. I will call him Dr. X, for reasons that will become obvious shortly. We had spoken often, but not in recent months. During those earlier phone calls, he frequently talked about his long career and detailed many of the people and places he knew along the way. Of particular interest to me was his experience with linear particle accelerators.
As a young surgeon in the early 1960s, Dr. X had worked at a well-known cancer clinic on the East Coast. Operating on cancer patients was his business. Day after day he removed tumors and repaired organs with varying degrees of success. The daily grind was an excruciating battle between life and death. As times changed, new technology brought new hope. Chemotherapy and radiation therapy offered alternatives to radical surgery, and brought new promises to both doctors and cancer patients.
Radioactive substances, such as Cobalt-60, were injected into patients in hope of destroying their tumors. It was a desperate hope. The side effects were often terrible. None of the medical staff liked the idea of injecting patients with radioactive substances strong enough to destroy living tissue. Nor did they like the idea of standing by watching countless patients die. They all hoped that things would get better.
Considering these circumstances, it was not surprising that Dr. X and his colleagues welcomed the introduction of the linear particle accelerator as a new, improved means of destroying cancer tumors. The accelerator’s main advantage was that the direction of the radioactive beam could be controlled, aimed precisely at the tumor, rather than emitting radiation in all directions and into the surrounding tissue as Cobalt had done. Fewer healthy cells would be destroyed, and less radiation would penetrate the bloodstream. It was an improvement at least, and it offered new hope. The hospital spent millions of dollars on this new technology and renovated a building to house the huge machine, which Dr. X came to use on a regular basis.
In this setting Dr. X came to know the people who designed and built his linear particle accelerator. One was Mr. Y, the manufacturer’s Director of Sales, who had sold the machine and who serviced the account. Mr. Y spent so much time at Dr. X’s hospital that he rented an apartment nearby. Dr. X and Mr. Y became friends, as well as professional colleagues. At one point Dr. X sublet a room in Mr. Y’s apartment, so for a time they were roommates.
Mr. Y was a colorful character, a Peter Paul and Mary vintage nonconformist with a Ph.D. in physics from Harvard. During the time Dr. X knew him, Mr. Y dated a beautiful French woman who danced with the Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall. According to Dr. X, Mr. Y’s success was based both upon his brilliant mind and his father’s close association with Harvard University’s Board of Directors.2 Dr. X gave me all the relevant details which I have stored safely.
Tat January night, Dr. X’s voice was more excited than usual. He began by telling me about his recent trip to Europe, and then he updated me on a research project that he had been working on. Finally, he turned the conversation to Mr. Y.
By this time, Mr. Y and his linear particle accelerators were a familiar subject to me. He had built about 10 accelerators around the world. Each one was uniquely designed for a special application. From Israel to South Africa to New Orleans, Mr. Y shepherded the design, sales and installation of some of the world’s most mysterious machines. Dr. X had reminded me on several occasions that Mr. Y had known Dr. Ochsner.
This had been dangerous ground for me, and I had no intention of being manipulated into any accusations about Dr. Ochsner or Ochsner Clinic. Recall that my physics teacher at Jesuit had told our class in 1968 that the linear particle accelerator in New Orleans was not at Ochsner Clinic.3 So I treated all these comments with caution.
Meanwhile, I had listened carefully for details which I might be able to confirm from another source. The problem was that there weren’t many. Dr. X, however, kept encouraging me to look for evidence myself, evidence like a paper trail on the accelerator. At first he talked about licenses and permits. Since I considered this to be a covert operation, looking for an overt paper trail sounded like a giant waste of time.
Then Dr. X had reminded me that it would be difficult to hide a huge machine which required a three-story building and 5,000,000 volts of electricity. Perhaps there were records left in the files of the electric company. While this may have seemed like a reasonable route for a team of professional investigators, it sounded like a wild-goose chase down an obscured paper trail for an independent researcher like myself. And no one would leave a linear particle accelerator lying around.
But he had persisted. There must have been some kind of evidence left, even if the accelerator itself had been removed. Perhaps there was physical evidence, like special wiring needed for the massive amounts of electricity. I told him I needed more information about the site itself. Perhaps then, I could figure out where the machine had been located. The problem had been that Dr. X had not talked to Mr. Y in years. The last he had heard, Mr. Y had burned out on the stress and secrecy of exporting nuclear machinery and had got out of the business altogether. Dr. X hadn’t even been sure that he could find Mr. Y anymore.
Now, that had changed.
Dr. X said that he had stopped on the East Coast to attend a medical meeting on his return from Europe. On the spur of the moment, he decided to try and locate Mr. Y After several phone calls from his hotel room, he located his old roommate and invited him out for a drink. They met at a local restaurant and reminisced about old times. Eventually Dr. X got his friend to talk about the accelerators he had built. Finally Mr. Y talked about New Orleans.
Here is a summary of what Dr. X said he had been told about the linear particle accelerator project Mr. Y supervised in New Orleans:
The project was extremely secret. Mr. Y had to sign a secrecy contract with the government before taking on the project, and he could not disclose the exact location of the accelerator.
The design of the accelerator was unusual. Normally an accelerator intended for medical use had clinical access features, like ramps for wheel chairs or beds for patients to lie down on. Here there were none. In fact, the intended use was in some form of laboratory experiments which required that the radioactive beam be split into equal portions for identical doses of radiation.
The overall design resembled an octopus. The accelerator’s particle gun was located on the top floor of the building. The beam pointed down, toward the ground, and struck a pyramid-shaped metal structure on the bottom floor. The pyramid divided the main beam into several smaller beams of equal intensity, and deflected them into series of containment chambers which encircled the pyramid. The targets were placed in the containment chambers, which were specially designed to hold heat and radiation. The metal pyramid was made out of plat
inum.
The financing was unusual. Since linear particle accelerators cost millions of dollars, the machines were usually purchased on long-term contracts which were paid off over many years. But this case was different, the entire amount (approximately $10,000,000) was paid in advance.
The method of payment was unusual. Mr. Y received five or six checks in varying amounts within one week. Each check came from a different company and was drawn from a different bank. (So much for the paper trail.)
Mr. Y went to New Orleans frequently during the construction of the machine, but once it was completed, he did not go back to the site for a long time. Suddenly there was a problem. He was sent to New Orleans to survey the situation. When he got there, something was obviously wrong. The accelerator building was guarded by soldiers with machine guns.
Inside the building there were thousands of mice in cages. They were doing some kind of vaccine experiments. Dr. Ochsner was in charge. Mr. Y described him as tense and extremely suspicious.
Mr. Y was particularly annoyed to discover, upon his return home, that military intelligence had been investigating his girlfriend while he was away tending to the accelerator.
What a bombshell! This was the worst-case scenario. At first, I hardly knew how to react. Needless to say, I had serious questions about the reliability of the information. Was this true? Or disinformation? Was I being handed the most important information of my investigation? Or was I being set up? Had I been given easily-verifiable information for over a year, only to be handed a red herring at the last minute? Or was I being lied to by someone with a hidden agenda?
Dr. Mary’s Monkey Page 23