Chapter Eight

© Richard L. Thornton, Architect & City Planner

The Shenandoah Valley of Virginia

July 2021 Revision

In late spring of 1991, a friend of mine was shot in the head, while he was sitting on the commode in his bathroom. He was a former recipient of the Pulitzer Prize and was investigating the flow of cocaine and counterfeit airplane parts from southern Florida to Basaye Airport in the Shenandoah Valley. Subsequently, I was asked to be a courier in an “underground railroad” that was ferrying confidential intelligence from informants in the Shenandoah Valley to a team of FBI counterinsurgency agents in Washington, DC, who could be trusted. There were several cliques within the FBI, who were actually worked for the “bad guys.” Soon I would be asked to fake an affair with a covert FBI agent in northern Virginia.

Apocalypse” (ἀποκάλυψις) is a Greek word meaning “revelation”, “an unveiling or unfolding of things not previously known and which could not be known apart from the unveiling”.

It was in 1991 that I realized that the Washington, DC area known by tourists and perhaps even Congressmen, was a mirage.  Behind that pleasant image of a beautifully planned national capital, was a witch’s broth of competing loyalties, ideologies, cliques and cults, whose battles at times became deadly. There was an on-going war within the Federal bureaucracy, which was being fanned by vast sums of money.  A secret investigation that began in late 1991 and continued to the spring of 1993,  discovered that vast sums of drug profits were pouring in the Washington, DC area to buy the souls and political loyalties of many thousands of people.

The year 1991 was a time of gargantuan change in the world.  The Allies won a spectacular victory in the Gulf War during February 1991.  There were miniscule casualties among allied combatants, yet hundreds of thousands of men and women were coming home with strange, chronic diseases, which the Bush Administration tried to cover up by labeling their maladies,  “Desert Storm Syndrome” . . . as if these brave citizens were imagining their symptoms.

The unsuccessful August 1991 coup against President Mikhail Gorbachev sealed the fate of the Soviet Union. Planned by hardline Communists, the coup diminished Gorbachev’s power and propelled Boris Yeltsin and the democratic forces to the forefront of Soviet and Russian politics. Soon most of the captive “socialist soviet republics” seceded from the Soviet Union, leaving only Russia, which formed a republic and threw out the remaining communist leaders.

Religious upheaval

Popular that year were several books and published sermons that dealt with the occult.  The theme of them all was that covert Satanic forces were taking over the nation.  The Rev. Billy Graham had a series of dreams or revelations in 1991 about the rise of secret invisible, satanic government in the United States, which would suddenly collapse at an unknown time in the future.  Those visions were synthesized into the book, Storm Warnings.  Graham was known as a religious conservative, but he was also very much a social progressive and a livelong member of the Democratic Party. 

After Billy’s son, Franklin, took control of the Graham Foundation, Storm Warnings was not promoted until Franklin had thoroughly revised it after Billy’s death in 2018.  In the new version,  Billy had visions of liberals forming a secret government, whose goal was to destroy Christianity and capitalism. The original version described a fascist police state in the United States, similar to NAZI Germany.   Unlike his father, Franklin Graham is a rightwing Republican and until recently was strongly associated with President Donald Trump.

In 1991, author Frank Peretti (b. 1951) was becoming wealthy off a series of “Christian novels,” which all dealt with the battles between Satanists and Pentecostal Christians in small towns and rural areas.  Mainline denomination members were typically portrayed as being blind to the evil taking over their community.  Peretti equated New Agers, Earth Mother pagans (Gaia, Ianna, Istar or Easter) , political liberals and Roman Catholic priests with the Satanists.   When we actually began investigating the cults in the Shenandoah Valley, we found that this perception was not accurate.  Female witches and New Agers tended to be Liberal Democrats. Black Arts witches and Satanists were generally Conservative Republicans and  . . .  by far the most effective warriors against the Satanists were the Earth Mother worshipers.  Satanists and Black Witches often joined and were highly visible members of either Pentecostal or conservative Christian denominations . . . even middle-of-the-road denominations like the Methodists, Presbyterians and Lutherans.

By far, the most dangerous cults in Northern Virginia were the paramilitary Neo-Satanist organizations, which included the Brotherhood of Patriots, KKK and Aryan Brotherhood. They labeled NAZI ideology and white supremacist beliefs as being Christian then had bizarre satanic rituals, which kept the initiates terrified and loyal for life.  They offered job security, often in the form of being granted “three wishes” upon joining.  Young men and women were intentionally sent into the military to gain combat skills. 

Most members were from blue collar backgrounds, but those from more affluent families, who were also good students, were placed into US Army Intelligence and the NSA.  For example, the son of a state senator in our county, repeatedly stated that his goal in life was to conquer the world.  He graduated from Virginia Military Institute and then obtained a commission as a Lieutenant in US Army Intelligence.  This practice continues.

During the Iraqi-Afghanistan wars,  an entire KKK klavern in Jasper, GA, where I formerly lived,  joined the Army National Guard, knowing that they would be sent to Afghanistan.  Most of the members returned home a year later, disillusioned, when they found out that war was not fun.

The occult in Southeastern law enforcement agencies

A federal counter-insurgency agent, who was part Cherokee . . . the same age and height as me . . . had moved up to Shenandoah County, VA from McMinn County, TN the same October 1987 that I moved up there from nearby Buncombe County, NC.   He was somehow able to infiltrate the Shenandoah County Sheriff’s Department to identify honest deputies.  My role in the Shenandoah County investigation was as a volunteer courier . . . aka an asset.  That was my response to the Shenandoah Commonwealth’s Attorney and crooked deputies setting up an intentional auto accident and then a few months later murdering a friend and architecture client.

The secret agent from Tennessee became one of the many martyrs of that era.  His body was found on a frozen pasture on the Back Road near my farm on December 12, 1992.  He had a police-type 9mm bullet in his head.  This chapter is dedicated to his honor and memory.

What we learned from the informants was that the Shenandoah Sheriff’s Department had for many years been operating as a Neo-Satanic cult.  Pre-adolescent boys and girls were invited to join the Sheriff’s Department Youth Auxiliary.   For many members, the group was merely benign activities like picnics, getting to ride in patrol cars, special badges, etc.   However, individual youth were identified to being useful for the future. 

Brain-washing activities of these “special” members would climax with 13-year-old boys being manipulated to have sex with other boys . . . being photographed in the process.  The 13-year-old girls were manipulated into stripping off their clothes and providing several sexual favors to young men and women in their late teens . . . also being photographed in the process.   From then on, as long as they lived in Virginia the threat of exposing those photos was used to extort the men and women to do the will of the cult. 

Cult activities for the deputies often occurred at a “club house” about two miles from my farm.  There they sacrificed animals, had sex with underage females or had sex with teenage boys . . . depending on their preference.  The teenage victims typically were those, who had been arrested for shoplifting or drug possession.  They were offered the provision of sexual favors as a means of avoiding trials and time in a detention center.

Extra-marital relationships

For the younger generations in the Washington, DC area, my age and lower, extra-marital sex was endemic during the 1980s and 1990s.  There was the usual bored husband or wife thing, but in the Washington Area, promiscuity was institutionalized. An extremely high percentage of female college interns and recent female college graduates regularly used sex to accelerate their advancement up the career ladder of the federal bureaucracy or large institutions or in the case of interns, be invited to parties, attended by the rich and powerful. 

If the readers recall Chapter One,  all the single women at the Christmas Party except Vivi the French Courtesan were so accustomed to meaningless one-nighters, there was no passion in their invitations to me to become yet another one-nighter. I stole Vivi’s heart by just being kind to her. She was accustomed to rich businessmen and powerful politicians treating her like a commodity.

When I was 24, single and working at the Richard P. Browne Associates office in Columbia, MD,  I found it difficult to meet women with my equivalent educational background, because so many of them were involved with their married bosses.  I ended up dating a senior at Bloomsburg State University in Pennsylvania, who had not been tainted by affairs with married men . . . yet.

Later in that decade, when Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich was going around the nation, vociferously demanding the impeachment of President Bill Clinton because of his trysts with Monica Lewinsky,  the 53-year-old married congressman was having a torrid affair with a 20-year-old intern, who later became his third wife!  However,  such was the frequency of such things in Washington, Gingrich’s affair seemed to have no effect on his career.

Yes, here I was a theoretically married man in a secret relationship with a twice-divorced woman. There are mitigating circumstances in my case. Eventually, Diana began secretly seeing a psychologist in preparation for getting “everything” in her long-planned divorce.  Her favorite book, A Woman’s Five Year Guide to Winning at Divorce had recommended that prospective divorcee’s do this in order to appear “abused.’   The psychologist quickly saw through her lies and then was able to get my wife divulge a 16-year-long history of infidelity and several abortions.  Her patient was ultimately diagnosed with Multiple Personality Disorder.

Several months into the therapy sessions, the psychologist telephoned me.  She said that my wife had been keep many secrets from me throughout our marriage, but she could not divulge most of them.  However, Virginia law did require her to tell me all facts that were related to reproduction and earlier children.  That was enough to blow my mind, however.

The female psychologist told me virtually the same things in 1993 that Sara had told me in December 1990 . . . to stay away from my wife, because she was dangerous and would require years of therapy.   She urged me to immediately start seeking a woman, who could provide me the nurturing I deserved.  It would be very therapeutic for me to live with that new woman.  The psychologist even put this recommendation in a letter addressed generically to a judge, in case it was needed in a future divorce hearing!  So now I could tell Vivi that a mental health professional had prescribed “lots of good loving” as a cure for all that ailed me!  LOL  The message from the shrink also told me that my wife knew nothing about Vivi.

The psychologist did NOT include in the letter to a judge our further conversation.   She told me that as soon as she passed my wife on to a psychiatrist, who specialized in Multiple Personality Disorder, she would love to go out with me.  She could think of no other man, who would make a more ideal husband or the father of her children.  She added that over and over again during therapy sessions, she would have to say, “Diana, how could you treat your husband that way?

The battle begins . . . Who are they?

Chapter Eight ended as Vivi and I were beginning amorous adventures in the shower, when she noticed some blood seeping out of wounds on my leg and then flowing into the drain.  She freaked out and then began screaming, even though it was not anything near being a gory or life-threatening situation. Within a minute, Bob and Sara were knocking on the Guest Quarters door.   Still “not decent” I explained through the door that some scabs on my legs had come off in the shower then seeped some blood.   I asked Sara if I could borrow a painter’s drop cloth, so my cuts would not stain her bed linens. In a couple of minutes, she returned with the drop cloth. 

The blood trauma shut off Vivi’s passion, but she slept the night with her head on my shoulder and her arms wrapped around me.  No woman has loved so much before or since.

I strongly suspect that Vivi had been an eyewitness to a sister, platonic girlfriend or boyfriend committing suicide by slitting their wrists in a shower or tub.  She never would talk about it with me, but apparently in their daily early morning quality time of “coffee and cigarettes” Vivi did divulge some of the details to Sara.  

While Sara was making breakfast, Bob called us to the living room for a meeting.  He first informed Vivi that her French security clearance has been extended to an Interpol clearance, so she could legally be in on the conversation.  “Vivi, you need to know what Richard is involved in, so you will understand him, when things seem strange.”

Vivi chuckled and said that Interpol must not know the terrible things she did when in early twenties . . . then stared at me and sternly said, “Now Ree-shard don’t you tell anybody.  I had too much wine the night of the party.”

Bob continued, “Richard, you know about the three journalists being killed this year in Shenandoah County, but it’s happening all over the country.  At least a hundred journalists – mostly investigative reporters – have been murdered in the United States in 1991.  The most recent three were murdered after they mentioned the previous murders on TV news reports.  Someone in the White House and at the top of the FBI is blocking us from investigating these murders.   They are obviously political assassinations, but we can’t make out any pattern.  Just be careful out there.”  

Sara often peeked into the living room as I began my report, which Bob was recording.  

Dr. Pierre Lassard necropsidied most of our dead goats after the middle of April 1991.  The goats are first being paralyzed by a dart containing curare, fired from a pneumatic rifle. An human or animal administered curare will be unable to move any voluntary muscles, including the diaphragm. A large enough dose will therefore result in death from respiratory failure unless artificial ventilation is initiated. Perhaps 5% of the dosage of listeria toxin that killed these goats, would kill an human.

• The curare is from the South American jungles, yet is abundant here in the Shenandoah Valley.  There have been quite a few murders in which the coroner, not being a professionally educated pathologist, could find NO cause of death, other than the lungs stopped moving.  My guess is that the curare is being shipped with the cocaine.

Dr. Lessard could find no bacterial infections in the goats and only a few listeria bacteria.  The goats were killed by high concentrations of listeria biotoxin, which could only be made in a sophisticated industrial facility, like once existed at Fort Detrick.  However, it has been illegal to make biological weapons for almost 20 years, so my guess is that the biowarfare equipment was moved from Fort Detrick to a secret underground facility, that is unknown to generals at the Pentagon.

Twenty-four of our best goats were killed in April and early May.  Then the leaders of the herd realized that they could sleep in a circle near an area light in front of my house and no one would harm them.  Since then,  we have only lost animals, when it is raining so the goats are sleeping in the barn.  No animal is hurt if I stay in the barn with them, but I can’t go on indefinitely without sleep.

For a while the attackers tried to reach the goats in this circle. That was when I could see the attackers clearly with binoculars or my infrared goggles.  Most wore black ninja type outfits that covered all of their bodies.  Some wore US Army combat fatigues.  Most of the ninja outfits seemed home-made since they didn’t seem to fit as tightly as the ninja costumes, you see on television.  All attackers are wearing US Army starlight lens night vision goggles.  I can see them far away, but they can’t see my Israeli night vision googles.   I just can’t figure out how so many people, would be motivated to kill livestock, cut fences, and vandalize buildings of a hard-working farmer.

I tracked one ninja, who was on our farm too late, because the sun was about to rise.  He initially was on the abandoned section of the Old Middle Road, which runs through our woods.  He then continued walking to a house on the paved section of the Middle Road.  I photographed him taking off his ninja outfit before going inside.  He was a Sheriff’s Deputy and a member of the Virginia National Guard. 

I don’t think that just one group is involved with these attacks.  On some occasions, I see what appears to be teenagers or even kids as young as 11.   We may be looking at groups from the National Guard, Virginia Defense Force* and Shenandoah Sheriff’s Department Youth Auxiliary. 

*A State Defense Forces are a little-known division of the military that was created by the Reagan Administration.  They are a direct descendant of the militia units, which date back to the earliest days of North America’s colonization.  State Defense Force members are volunteers, who normally receive no wages, but get to wear US Army style uniforms.  It is illegal for any of these units to have in their possession biological weapons or dart guns. 

Note: Biological weapons were outlawed internationally in 1972! Soon there would be a fourth journalist murdered in Shenandoah County.  A few weeks after my visit to Bob and Sara,  a senior investigative reporter for the Washington Post was murdered in broad daylight on a sidewalk in Maurertown, 2.25 miles from my house.  He had been asking around, concerning the rumors that an illegal biotoxin, recently manufactured at Fort Detrick, MD, was being stored in large tanks on a farm near Maurertown. 

Faking an affair

We adjourned to the dining room for breakfast then went back into the living room.  In May, Bob and Sara had set up a system whereby any information or photographs from informants could be mailed to me in manilla envelopes, with the return address of the US Department of Agriculture printed on them.  No one would get suspicious about a USDA envelope being mailed to a professional farmer. I then took the envelopes by the Winchester FBI field office, while driving to project sites in the Winchester area. Later, I also set up a waterproof plastic box, where the now-abandoned Middle Road entered my property. With that alternative “mailbox” system, informants and I could send messages back and forth. It was Sara’s turn to explain what had gone wrong.

Richard, after the second time that you took a package to the Winchester FBI office, our satellite cameras picked up unmarked Virginia Bureau of Investigation cars following your pickup much of the time.  Look for 1990 white Chevy Luminas. They will have a state police tag on the back . . . not very smart!  You can’t go back to the Winchester office for quite a while. We have solution. You are going to have to have an affair!  Vivi clapped her hands and exclaimed, “Bon, now I have an excuse to be with Ree-shard all the time!”

Sara laughed, “Sorry Vivi, we need to keep you invisible for the sake of your safety and Richard’s sanity!”

An ideal candidate for Richard’s fake lover is a new covert agent we have set up in small office on the edge of Winchester.  She is a young lawyer, who we also trained intensively in real estate financing.  The public does not know that some FBI agents are trained in other locations than Quantico, VA.  That’s so a spy in the FBI will not recognize her as being one of us.  Her primary job is to identify real estate developments that were financed by laundered drug money.  She is a 25-year-old Swedish-American from Minnesota named Susan Karlson.  Vivi looked at her photo and was not pleased, but pretended to make a joke of it.  “So, my Ree-chard will be able to sleep with a beautiful French girl and a beautiful Swedish girl.”

Sara laughed again, “No, Richard will not be sleeping with Susan, even if he wants to.  She is a graduate of the same Christian university that the Rev. Billy Graham attended and prides herself on being a virgin.  They say she won’t even let guys kiss her. She was known as the Swedish Ice Queen by the other FBI cadets in her class.”

Vivi rolled in the floor laughing . . . “A 25-year-old virgin?   That’s much funnier than Ree-shard, who was afraid to sleep with his neighborhood girlfriend of four years in high school for fear she would hate him afterward. No wonder you Americans are always going to war.  You are all horny!”

Bob added, “Well, actually that is a concern of mine.   Undoubtedly the VBI also followed Richard’s wife around and know about her secret life.  They would think it quite normal for a healthy, young, but lonely architect like you to find a young babe.  However, if Susan continues to be a prude, rather than act like a 25-year-old women full of hormones, they will get suspicious.  We will have to send her to another part of the country.  At least 16 honest citizens from the Valley, who went to the VBI with information on drug dealers, were quickly murdered.”

One could tell that Vivi was trying to be brave, but did not like this turn of events. She then said, “Phsh-h,  I have done this thing many times for the French National Police.  Ree-shard, come back to our room and I will show you how to pass messages and photograph negatives under a women’s bra without a policeman with a camera noticing it.” 

Both Bob and Sara gave me mischievous looks as we walked back to the Guest Room.  We were not ready to go look at real estate for her winery, until another hour and a half had passed.  Bob loaned me his old station wagon so that a VBI surveillance car would not see Vivi and me together in my pickup.

Later that day, we found the perfect spot to grow champaign grapes.  The tract of land faced south and above it was St. Dominic’s Monastery.  The elevation was about 1400 feet, which was much lower than Georgia’s section of the Blue Ridge, but according to Vivi at that latitude the situation would be perfect.

As we stood there, looking across at the beautiful view, Vivi apologized for being jealous.  She said that she forgot that she was the new Vivi.  She had been with so many men in her young life, that she couldn’t remember their names.  I had been starved for 16 years and so deserved to have some fun.  She just wanted me to keep Vivi No. 1.   

I told her that if I did what my heart wanted to do right now without any regard to how if affected any other humans or my animals, I would fly off with her tomorrow and want to spend every night with her for eternity . . . but . . . I had a duty to my God and my country.  These horrific murders must be stopped and the people committing them must be put behind bars.   She gave me the warmest, sweetest kiss most imaginable and said . . . “and oui, that is why I love you.”

Post Script

Susan Karlson spent all of that weekend on her knees, praying to God for guidance.  Not only was she being asked to do things with me that she had never done with any man, but I was a married man at that.  The answer she finally got back was not what she expected.  She hoped God would say, “Absolutely not!”  Instead, she thought he said, “Do you really think that the Creator of the universe cares what you do with your body . . . what your body was always created to do?  Do what ever is necessary to save your fellow humans.” Susan decided that she would sacrifice her honor, perhaps even the virtue of her body, for her God and her country.

Thus, stage was set for me also to continue doing things I never dreamed I would ever do and in the process sell a whole heckuva lot of cheese.

The great country-western singer, Patsy Cline, grew up in the northern end of the Shenandoah Valley. In fact, she spent part of her youth living in the grimy blue collar neighborhood, where the FBI had covert purchased a 1950s brick rancher for Susan Carlson. Patsy died in the crash of a small private airplane at the age of 33. They say that her soul still haunts the Shenandoah Valley. This rendition of the song “Sweet Dreams” is Patsy’s voice, but is being lip-synced by actress Jessica Lange from Charlottesville, VA in the movie, “The Patsy Cline Story” (1985). Part of the movie was filmed in the Shenandoah Valley