According to a March 6, 2024, article in Forbes magazine, the new Netflix series “American Conspiracies: The Octopus Murders” was watched 3.9 million times the previous week “to become one of the streamer’s most-watched shows.” Released on February 28, it was “viewed for 14.5 million hours to become the fourth-most popular show on Netflix from Feb. 26-March 3.”
Count me as one of this show’s viewers. I have now watched 3 episodes of the four-part series.
The documentary is based on a 2010 book entitled The Last Circle by an investigative reporter named Cheri Seymour. The book was published by Trine Day. Seymour’s book and the Netflix series revolve around the death of a man named Danny Casolaro, who was investigating what he was convinced was a vast governmental conspiracy, which included the CIA and that involved such things as BCCI, Iran-Contra, Inslaw, arms dealers, money launderers, thieves, murderers, and drug-runners. He was planning on writing a book entitled The Octopus.
In 1991, Casolaro was found dead in a hotel room in West Virginia, where he had gone to meet a source. His body was found in a bathtub. The walls of the bathroom were splattered with blood. His death was declared a suicide and his body was quickly embalmed before his family was contacted.
But all that is not why I’m writing this article. As I was watching Episode 3 last night, I was quite surprised to hear the subject of the Zapruder film pop up — and specifically the concept of an altered copy of the film. The CIA’s production of a fraudulent copy of the Zapruder film is the subject of my most recent book, An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story.
At around 37:10 of Episode 3, Cheri Seymour is recounting a meeting she had with a shadowy figure named Robert Booth Nichols, who is described as a “government facilitator.” The meeting took place at what she felt was a “safe house.” Nichols had met with Casolaro as a background source for the book that Casolaro was writing. He agreed to meet with Seymour, who was investigating Casolaro’s death.
According to Seymour, during Seymour’s meeting with Nichols, he shows her what he says is the original Zapruder film, which is the film that Dallas businessman Abraham Zapruder took of the Kennedy assassination. Seymour recounts how the film that Nichols showed her clearly showed the driver of JFK’s limousine, Secret Service agent William Greer, turning around and shooting Kennedy at point-blank range with a pistol.
When I was writing An Encounter with Evil, I was familiar with the notion that Greer had done that. If you Google “Greer” “revolver” and “Kennedy,” you’ll find that notion raised on the Internet. However, I concluded that there simply was not sufficient persuasive evidence to arrive at that conclusion and so I decided to omit that subject from my book.
For example, in my research I could not find any eyewitnesses in Dealey Plaza who attested to that notion. Moreover, it would obviously have been a very high-risk move on the part of Greer to do that, given the fact that there were many eyewitnesses in the area, including ones with cameras. (On the other hand, if Greer did do the shooting, that would explain why Jackie Kennedy was headed toward the back of the vehicle rather than trying to retrieve a skull fragment on the back of the trunk.)
Nonetheless, there is no reasonable doubt that Greer and the other Secret Service agent in the presidential limousine, William Kellerman, were dirty. As I pointed out in my book, there were dozens of eyewitnesses in Dealey Plaza who attested to the fact that the presidential limousine, which Greer was driving, made a complete stop or a near-stop after the first shot rang out.
The extant film shows no such stop or near stop, which indicates, as I detail in my book, that the extant film is an altered copy, one in which those frames have been deleted. Obviously, it would not have looked very good to have a film showing that the car stopped or nearly stopped, which would have enabled shooters to more easily deliver a fatal gunshot to the head.
As I also detail in my book, the original film was secretly delivered to the CIA’s National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC) in Washington, D.C., on Saturday evening, November 23, the day after the assassination. The CIA succeeded in keeping this secret for some 50 years, until former world-renowned CIA photo analyst Dino Brugioni disclosed it to former Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) staffer Douglas Horne and to author Peter Janney. (Note: I highly recommend Horne’s 5-volume book Inside the Assassination Records Review Board and Janney’s book Mary’s Mosaic: The CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary Pinchot Meyer, and Their Vision for World Peace.)
When Horne and Janney showed Brugioni the extant Zapruder film, he stated that it was not the film he viewed. The film he viewed, he stated, had multiple frames depicting the fatal head shot, with blood and brain tissue shooting upward. The extant film has only one frame depicting the head shot, with no blood and brain tissue shooting upward.
Moreover, as I further detail in my book, Kellerman was in charge of the Secret Service team that forced its way out of Parkland Hospital by brandishing guns, over the vehement objections of Dr. Earl Rose, the Dallas County medical examiner, who steadfastly and correctly maintained that Texas law required him to perform an autopsy on Kennedy’s body.
Later that day, after new President Lyndon Johnson had dutifully delivered JKF’s body into the hands of the military for what turned out to be a fraudulent autopsy, it was Kellerman and Greer who were at the center of a secret casket-switching scheme, as I detail in my book The Kennedy Autopsy.
I remain skeptical of the notion that Greer was a shooter, but then again, Seymour comes across as a very serious and credible reporter. My hunch is that it was Nichols and his cohorts who came up with another fraudulent copy of the Zapruder film to discredit her. In fact, she herself alludes to this possibility in the documentary.
There are lots of interesting commentaries on the Netflix documentary online. Here is one: “American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders Revisits the Death of Danny Casolaro.” Here is one on the Zapruder film aspect of the documentary: “American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders”: Why a Chilling Scene About JFK’s Assassination Is Key to Docuseries.”
Buy An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story.
Buy The Kennedy Autopsy.
