Nicole duFresne
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New York radio station 1010 WINS reports that two teens,
19-year-old Rudy Fleming and 18-year-old Ashley Evans, have
been arrested and charged with the murder of Nicole
DuFresne. Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly says they were
able to find and arrest them thanks so tips from a telephone
hot line. The accused don't seem to have known DuFresne
personally. Instead, her murder may have been part of a
"crime spree" they went on with friends, in which several
other people were attacked.
Peter Levenda wrote: A few days ago, on the Lower East Side
in New York City, a gang of four or five men accosted writer
and actress Nicole duFresne and three of her friends. Her
fiance, Jeffrey Sparks, was pistol-whipped. Nicole herself
was shot in the chest, and died. The men fled. No arrests
have been made.
It appeared to be a robbery gone wrong, but, as you will
see, it was much more than that. One of the men tried to
take the purse of another woman in the company and Nicole
stepped in, shoving the man aside, saying "What are you
going to do? Shoot us?" Which he promptly did.
Armed robbery by a gang of another group of people on the
sidewalks of New York City may not seem strange to
out-of-towners, but it is a little strange to a New Yorker.
Normally, thieves and muggers do not accost in groups.
Normally they do not attack other groups. Too much trouble.
They wait for the lone walker, the solitary male or female,
before they strike. Also, this was on Wednesday night,
Thursday morning on the Lower East Side, an area that was a
virtual slum twenty years ago but which has since become
gentrified and trendy, full of busy night life at all hours.
It was a very strange place to choose for a robbery, and a
very strange target for murder.
Nicole duFresne was only 28 at the time of her death, but
she covered a lot of ground in those 28 years. A co-founder
of the Present Tense Theater Project in New York and a
resident of Greenpoint, Brooklyn (another trendy area), she
had written and performed in a play entitled Burning Cage.
Based on the book about the CIA?s mind control projects ? In
The Sleep Room, by Anne Collins ? it explores the
relationship between two women patients in a clinic who are
subjected to electroshock and LSD treatments as part of a
government-sponsored mind control program run amok.
Ms. duFresne is only the latest in a string of tragic and
premature deaths involving those who study the mysterious
world where government secrecy and the paranormal meet. We
are reminded of the death of John Mack, the valiant Harvard
professor who took alien abduction seriously, by a drunk
driver on an English city street late last year. But there
have been many others.
Let us take for example the sad end of James Webb, a young,
brilliant student of the occult and its relationship to
politics, the author of such masterpieces as The Occult
Establishment, The Occult Underground, and The Harmonious
Circle (the latter about G.I. Gurdjieff and his followers),
on May 8, 1980, of suicide. The thirty-four year-old Scots
academic blew his brains out with a shotgun.
Or the case of Professor Ioan Culianu, of the University of
Chicago and heir to the legacy of his countryman, Mircea
Eliade (the famous expert on mythology and shamanism).
Culianu, the author of such stimulating and insightful works
as Eros and Magic in the Renaissance (a study of occult
theories and systems and their relation to politics and
psychological warfare, among other things), was murdered on
May 21, 1991, execution style, on the campus of the
university where he taught. He was only forty years old.
The crime has never been solved, but it is rumored that he
was killed by members of the Romanian secret police.
Then, of course, there was the murder of Danny Casolaro, an
investigative journalist on the trail of what he called the
Octopus, a vast conspiracy of intelligence agencies, wealthy
families, and multinational corporations going back at least
a generation. Casolaro went to a meeting with a potential
informant and was found dead in his West Virginia motel room
the next day, August 10, 1991 ? a little over three months
after the murder of Professor Culianu ? an apparent suicide
victim until further investigation revealed that the
shoelace around his neck and the deep gashes in his wrists
could not have been the result of a suicide attempt but
evidence of foul play. His manuscript ? tentatively
entitled The Octopus and which would reveal a web of
conspiracy involving everything from the PROMIS scandal to
BCCI to Iran-Contra to the JFK assassination ? was missing
from his room and has never been found. He was in his early
forties. According to one commentator, Casolaro was less an
investigative reporter and more a ?poet?. Hence the title
of this short essay.
And then there were the UFO investigators.
We remember the brave scientist, Dr James McDonald, who
insisted before a Congressional committee in 1968 that the
government dismissals of UFOs as ?swamp gas? or
meteorlogical anomalies were grossly in error. He was
ridiculed for his testimony ? which was based on scientific
data and not on prejudiced belief ? and after relentless
attacks by Phillip Klass among others, including the
planting of false stories in political journalist Jack
Anderson?s column ? he took his life on June 13, 1971. He
was fifty-one years old.
And the suicide of Morris Jessup, another UFO investigator,
who took his own life in a Miami-Dade parking lot on April
20, 1959. He claimed he had descended into a nightmare
world of unreality, swept along in a stream of
?coincidences?, and that he could only appear insane to the
rest of the world even as he battled with forces beyond his
understanding. He was fifty-nine.
These were all serious people, in most cases professionals
with academic backgrounds, who probed a little too deeply
behind the curtain of consensus reality and saw a web of
conspiracy and coincidence involving government agencies,
criminal elements, arrogant scientists and politicians and
their flacks, and some of the most important events of our
generation, from assassination to mind control to the UFO
phenomenon.
To study the Qabala, according to Jewish tradition, one
must be male, at least thirty-five years old, and married.
The idea seems to be that one must be securely in the world
in order to gaze outside it, or beneath it. One needs to be
grounded emotionally, and surrounded by the mundane concerns
of everyday life in order to successfully resist the
glamours of the Other World. This, at least, should
preserve one from the temptations of suicide when confronted
by a set of laws and concepts that seem insane or nightmarish.
But what can save the doomed poet from murder and
assassination? There are events and ? relationships ? that
some of our public servants wish to keep, well, private.
Mostly, these seem to concern the involvement of government
agencies with studies of the paranormal and the unconscious
mind. In this day and age of ubiquitous electronic
eavesdropping and the Patriot Act, it is possible that the
very next frontier for government and science will be the
recesses of our own minds, and the strange powers that lie
concealed therein. Those of us who study the technologies
of the mind with a view towards expanding its powers and
abilities may come under increasing scrutiny in the months
and years to come. Those who dare to expose these
technologies ? and especially the abuse of these
technologies ? will be in increasing danger of having their
lives disrupted, perhaps permanently.
I do not know if Ms duFresne was one of these. Quite
probably, her death was just one more cruel factor of life
in the big city; but after years of studying this
phenomenon I have come to the conclusion that these
seemingly random events ? like the ?coincidences? that drove
Morris Jessup insane ? may be evidence of darker forces at
work in the world. In any event, I have a feeling that she
was greeted on the Other Side by John Mack, Danny Casolaro,
James McDonald, James Webb, Morris Jessup, Ioan Culianu and
many, many other dead poets who dared to peek behind the
curtain.
And rend the Veil of the Temple.
Peter Levenda is the author of Unholy Alliance, and the
upcoming Sinister Forces.
For more information, click here.
