Etowah Mounds came very close to becoming the centerpiece for a planned gated community with million-dollar houses, exclusive “village” shopping center, country club for the elite, golf course and gambling casino. We celebrate the arrival of a New Year with a longer than usual saga, about how that abomination within one of the nation’s largest National Historic Districts, was stopped. You will be astonished how much goes on in the United States . . . indeed . . . how many people are harmed or even murdered for political reasons . . . without the news media saying a word.
Part Two: The Secret Native American History of the Southeast
by Richard L. Thornton, Architect & City Planner
About 22 years ago, it seemed to be a done deal. With the approval of several federal and state agencies, the largest individual doner to the George Bush Presidential campaign was to be leased the Etowah Mounds National Historical Landmark for a dollar a year. Not one word about this project had been mentioned by the local and Atlanta regional news media.
A gated community of large McMansions and a private golf course would be constructed in the Etowah River’s flood plain immediately adjacent to the former state historic site . . . and within one of the nation’s largest National Historic Districts. Susan and I quickly figured out that the actual real estate developer was a national criminal organization.
The Etowah Mounds Museum, designed by Architect Julian Harris (with guidance by the famous Archaeologist, Arthur Kelly) would be demolished and replaced by a Cherokee-themed museum, named after the lessee . . . and run by a private foundation, headed by a key speaker (10 years in the future) of “Maya Myth-Busting in the Mountains.” Other archaeologists, who later were involved with “Maya Myth-Busting,” had written reports, which supported the construction of a Cherokee gambling casino nearby.
Dozens of honest, conscientious employees at the City of Cartersville, Bartow County, Georgia Environmental Protection Division, GA Parks and Historic Sites Division, U. S. Department of Interior and U. S. Army of Engineers had been illegally fired for trying to enforce the laws of the land, which would have prohibited this project.
Meet one of the heroines of this battle
I don’t’ know how long this project was in the making, the names of the invisible people behind this project or even exactly how it was stopped, when it seemed to be a fait accompli. I was, however, a witness to the intrigues that occurred midstream, the many careers ruined and the successful effort to cover up what had almost happened.
I remember the day I found out about the project vividly. It was in June 1998 and the seventh anniversary of Susan and I meeting at the Wendy’s Restaurant in Front Royal, Virginia. Susan was then a naïve 25-year-old Swedish law school graduate (with honors) and a newly minted FBI agent. She was fluent in Swedish, English, Finnish and Russian, but no field office wanted her, because as you see from this photo that I took of her at Wendys, she initially looked no older than 21.
Instead, the FBI set her up covertly as a real estate lawyer in Winchester, VA. During the first five months of 1991, four investigative reporters had been assassinated in Shenandoah County, VA . . . where I lived in 1991. One of them was a close friend of mine. Nationwide, over a hundred TV and newspaper reporters had been murdered by professional hit men during the same period.
Traveling to construction sites around NW Virginia was a great cover. My volunteer assignment was to ferry intelligence from honest cops in the Shenandoah Valley to Susan, who then would take the intel and photos to her sister in Manassas, VA, whose husband would then take the packages to the FBI headquarters in Washington, DC.
We were to pretend like we were having an affair . . . since my wife’s activities was quite well known in Shenandoah County. The few acquaintances, who saw us together at our rendezvous point . . . the Wayside Inn at Middletown, VA, laughed, and said, “It’s about time, Richard.” I must confess, though, that by the end of the transmittals in September, 1991, we were faking not have sincere feelings for each other.
Assuming that we were “a couple,” the last paragraph of Susan’s commendation letter, specifically mentioned the dramatic improvement in National Security and outdoor survival skills that she had learned from me and urged her to continue the relationship. We had discovered a massive drug pipeline, being run by law enforcement officers in northern Virginia, northern Georgia and southern Florida. The State of Virginia abolished the Virginia Bureau of Investigation as a result of my testimony and Susan’s classified report.
In December 1991, Susan was transferred southward to set up a real estate law office in the Roswell, GA area, where she helped bust a ring of Russian spies that had been spying on the Lockheed Aircraft Plant and Dobbin AFB since 1942. The unraveling of the Soviet Union caused them to have no support from the KGB in Moscow. We did not begin a conventional relationship until June 1993, after I had become stuck in Metro Atlanta and officially single.
During the 15-year relationship, it was like that – on again and off again – with Susan going long periods when I didn’t know where she was or what she was doing . . . but both of us secretly caring deeply for each other in between. From December 1991 onward, I didn’t even know which federal agency, she worked for, or specifically where her home was. June 1998 started the longest periods of frequent contact.
During much of 1992, I was required to attend secret hearings above a cafe in Georgetown by the Department of Justice Task Force on State and Local Government Corruption. Then we learned that profits from the police-run drug cartel were being used fund a planned coup d’etat in which, a deadly biotoxin being stored in the Shenandoah Valley, would be injected into the water system serving government buildings on Capitol Hill. Then, rightwing insurgents, being trained in rural areas of Virginia and West Virginia, would capture the Capitol. I was slapped with a National Security 30-year non-disclosure agreement that didn’t expire till Spring 2023.
All the witnesses were moved southward to eastern Tennessee and the Atlanta Area. My handler was an Assistant US District Attorney in Knoxville, TN.
The battle begins
The girlfriend from Alpharetta had dumped me for a second time, because she said that I didn’t make enough money. Then someone left a plastic bag of video tapes and audio tapes of her in very compromising situations at my front door. I called Susan to ask her what to do. She immediately picked up the tapes . . . saying that my ex-girlfriend was in grave danger and that the Georgia cops were trying to frame me. Since I was on the Federal Witness Protection Program, she could legally bypass local and state cops to protect me.
Susan saved the woman’s life then announced that it was time for us to be a scandalous public item. She told me to introduce her in Cartersville as Kathy Spurlock . . . a childhood friend in Waycross, GA. Susan began speaking in a syrupy Southern drawl, when we were in public. How did she know that one of our neighbors in Waycross, was the Spurlock family?
After picnicking at Delinger Park in Cartersville to celebrate our anniversary, we drove to the nearby Etowah Mounds State Historic Site, where I planned to tell her more about my Native American heritage. That was something that I didn’t discuss much in Virginia.
We entered the museum. While waiting at the counter to pay for tickets, we observed a women talking to the Site Manager, with some tears in her eyes. The Site Manager was from SW Georgia and had substantial Creek ancestry. I had chatted with her before about out Creek heritage.
We overheard that the weeping woman’s brother had been fired by the City of Cartersville for refusing to sign off on a site plan for a development around Etowah Mounds. The woman had sent a letter to editor to the local newspaper about the planned development. The letter had been rejected then after teaching for 16 years in the Cartersville School System, she had just been informed that her contract was not going to be renewed . . . because of her “controversial” political activities outside the classroom.
I butted in, “Ma’am I am on the county planning commission and city Board of Zoning Appeals. I am working with the City Manager on the restoration of the Old Courthouse into a museum and with the County Manager in the restoration of the Roselawn Estate for a museum. No one has mentioned anything about a big project next to Etowah Mounds.”
The Etowah Mounds Site Manager then told me everything that I described at the beginning of the article. It seemed impossible . . . a fairytale . . . but she also seemed very honest and was a Creek Sister. I decided to check out her story.
As we were going out the museum to look at the mounds, Susan saw a young couple holding hands and then she grabbed mine. It was the first time that she had ever shown me physical affection in public I was shocked. At the Wayside Inn in Virginia, we always made out inside her unmarked FBI car, so its cameras would catch anybody spying on us.
She then said, “I have missed you terribly. You will be my first and only lover, because you are the only man in the world, who I don’t have to lie to. Besides, that gal in Alpharetta, who just dumped you again . . . she and her brother have relatives and friends, who are spies for Red China. You don’t want to be caught up in that mess.”
I asked a couple nearby to photograph us holding hands. The rest is history.
The Aftermath
The Cartersville Planning Director and City Manager turned their eyes away from direct contact, while claiming to know nothing. The County Manager did the same thing. However, in a meeting with a Cartersville Building Inspector at Roselawn, he confirmed everything. Everybody was job scared now. I promised not to mention his name to anyone.
I called several historic preservationists around the Cartersville Area. A few had heard rumors, but all wanted to spread the details of the scheme to the community, what was secretly going on.
I lived in an older neighborhood, near Downtown Cartersville, which was a mixture of old-time elderly residents, blue collar families and educated folks restoring old houses. Almost immediately, someone at the Cartersville Police Dept. called the elderly to tell that I was a peeping tom. They told the redneck families that I was an FBI agent spying on their KKK activities. They told the blue-collar families, the leaders of Tabernacle Baptist Church and my clients at the Etowah Valley Museum that I was a child molester.
Soon thereafter the neighbor from Tabernacle Baptist across the street, began videotaping me when I was mowing the lawn. She yelled out, “There are cops all over this county! If they don’t get you, we will!” I yelled back that Kathy Spurlock had already gotten me. The crazy neighbor didn’t understand.
Then, I noticed a plump man in his fifties, following me around. He looked like Porky Pig, wearing a straw hat. Porky made the mistake of going into a printing and office supply shop, just after I left the business. You see, the owners were covert FBI agents like Susan had been. This deacon at Tabernacle Baptist announced that he was an FBI agent, who was investigating me and following me around town. The two ladies were my only local contacts with the Federal Witness Protection Program. Impersonating a federal law enforcement officer is a felony. Oops! Never saw Porky the Pig again.
Then a few weeks later, a stranger pulled up beside me in his pickup on a narrow side street off of Tennessee Street. He yelled, “Richard, we are going to kick your butt!” I wrote down his auto tag number and went straight to the police station. The man making terroristic threats was the police chief! The District Attorney refused to have him arrested for said crime.
I was scheduled to lead a Single Outdoor Adventures hike at the Allatoona Pass Battlefield the following Saturday. Early that morning, we were greeted by the body of the Cartersville Police Chief’s blond mistress, floating nearby in Lake Allatoona. It was time to me to get the heck out of Cartersville!
The married police chief was soon fired for having an affair with one of his female officers, not for murdering his other mistress after she tipped off the DA about his affair with the officer. Rather than going to prison, he was offered a job with the GBI, paying a larger salary than before.
Rome, GA and Jasper, GA
I moved to Rome, GA temporarily to do planning for Downtown Revitalization Projects along North and South Broad Streets. Three years later, I would work on buildings near the intersection of North Broad and Second Ave. Susan urged me to go online and join some dating websites, so we could safely continue our Biblical relationship, while she maintained her cover in whatever investigation that she was assigned to. She began registering on these sites with alias identities, but also wanted me to date other women, so that no one would suspect that we were an item.
Out of the blue, the very pretty Secretary of the Department of Cultural Affairs for the government of the Netherland Antilles began courting me online, hot and heavy. She sent me expensive gifts and invited me to come live with her for two months to see how we got along.
I couldn’t tell her about Susan, but could honestly say that unless I worked, I could not pay my bills. She eventually flew up to Georgia, visited Rome and realized that I was not the rich heir to a family fortune that the Department of Defense has said I was. Yes, that’s right, the US Department of Defense gave her government agency a huge grant in return for her trying to get me out of the United States. Now, I told you there was a secret history of the United States!
Bad and odd news from Etowah Mounds
As ordered, the Site Manager had never gone to the media about the planned leasing of Etowah Mounds, but she still couldn’t be trusted to be the worm that organized crime demands. The State of Georgia forcibly retired her at age 38, because Carpal Tunnel syndrome in her right hand might prevent her from firing a pistol accurately . . . in case terrorists attacked Etowah Mounds – yes, really! Her real crime was finding out that the proposed lessee of Etowah Mounds National Historical Landmark was the largest individual donor to the George W. Bush Presidential campaign funds.
Employees of the US Army Corps of Engineers had been fired because they refused to allow a large planned community to be built entirely in a flood hazard area (flood plain). Department of Interior employees were fired because they refused to remove Etowah Mounds as being a National Historical Landmark. Employees were found in both agencies, who would do as ordered.
In the meantime, I was being increasingly harassed by Rome, GA police. They twice pointed loaded guns me, when I was merely walking down a sidewalk downtown, shopping or getting money from an ATM.
I moved 52 miles away to Jasper, GA (Pickens County) in June 2000. A few days later, Susan and I flew to Mexico City for a one-week vacation and to celebrate her birthday. She got pregnant again – probably intentionally. It was her idea and she picked up the tab via the lavish expense account assigned to a female James Bond.
In September 2000, the chief investigator for the Pickens County District Attorney’s Office, a county deputy and several GBI agents began contacting women I was about to date via dating websites. They told them that I had a long criminal record, including two prison terms and was the prime suspect in a long series of murders in the North Carolina and Georgia Mountains. Those North Jawja cops do love to lie. Several of those women that they contacted were aliases for Susan. LOL The Pickens Deputy would nine years later be the judge, who issued me an eviction notice for Christmas Eve. He is in a state prison now.
Later that fall, while working on the restoration of a large 1888 building on West Church Street in Cartersville, I stopped by the FBI printing shop. The ladies told me that the leasing of Etowah Mounds was a done deal. There was nothing the FBI could do about it, because it was state property. They were not as certain about the gated community in the Etowah River Flood Plain. Some environmental group might tie the project up in court for years.
They also told me something strange. There were Creek, Chickasaw, Choctaw and Seminole law enforcement officers in Cartersville, pretending to be Mexican laborers. She didn’t know who they worked for or what exactly they were doing.
Surprise, surprise, surprise
Shortly after President George W. Bush was inaugurated 2001, there were two events that made a bad situation grim. The Bush Whitehouse fired the Asst. US District Attorney in Knoxville, who was looking after the Shenandoah Valley witnesses. He was not replaced. Some time after his firing, he sent me a letter with a photograph of a pudgy, non-descript couple from Sao Paulo, Brazil. They had murdered two key witnesses in the murder of 17 year-old lad, who contacted the VBI Drug Hotline to tell them that some deputies in Shenandoah County were selling drugs to teenagers.
The attorney warned me that the two Brazilians might be coming for me, since the teen’s body was found in our side yard the first night that I was in Virginia. He had been shot two weeks earlier, but his body had been stored in a deer cooler.
Within a year, all of the key witnesses, including federal law enforcement officers, were dead. All of those public officials, who were sent to federal prison for murdering civilians or being involved with drug trafficking in Virginia were pardoned by Bush. Two first class Delta tickets to Atlanta were purchased with my Visa card in Brazil. After the rest of my VISA card balance was cleaned out at a bank in Sao Paolo, the two pudgy professional assassins from Sao Paulo, Brazil showed up in Georgia and were following. However, things did not turn out well for them.
Then, there were articles in the local Cartersville newspapers about the planned project around Etowah Mounds – presenting it as a done deal. Everything that the Etowah Site Manager had told me was true. What was worse, the articles quoted several prominent Georgia archaeologists as being in favor of the project. The articles stated that the project had bipartisan support in both Georgia and Congress. Gov. Roy Barnes, a Democrat, was going to announce the project to the nation.
Then a while later, there was a brief mention in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution of a delegation from the Muscogee-Creek Nation were in Georgia to visit Etowah Mounds in Cartersville. The Creek leaders stated that they had some concerns about its future. Some TV stations also had brief mentions of the visit. The AJC stated that the delegation was next planning to visit Washington, DC to discuss their concerns with federal officials.
There was NEVER again a mention of the project anywhere. Certain haughty business leaders in Cartersville refused to discuss the project and pretended that it had never happened. However, no fired employees were hired back.
No one, outside of those who were there, knows for certain what the leaders of the Muscogee Creek Nation did or said to stop the project, but there is some evidence that they carried to Washington information that would be very embarrassing to both President Bush and Governor Barnes.
Members of the MCN Justice Dept. at Etowah Mounds – 12/14/2005
In December 2005, three members of the MCN Justice Department were to be given tours of Etowah Mounds and the site of Kusa at Carters Lake. There was a criminal ring, which was digging up burial mounds at Kusa then selling the skulls and grave goods at flea markets. Susan was then to come and spend two weeks with me.
Susan arrived three days early. I was going to show her off as Kathy Spurlock to the Creek dignitaries, but she freaked out and stayed in my bedroom with the doors locked during all three visits to my home.
Their first visit was a little awkward. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation had as usual, been tapping my phone. They contacted the Creek Lighthorse and Judge Patrick Moore in Oklahoma and told them that I was a homosexual with AIDS, so they should not have any dealings with me. LOL
So . . . Judge Moore brought me a woman’s kitchen apron as a gift and the Assistant Director of the Creek Lighthorse Police wouldn’t shake hands with me, out of fear of catching AIDS. LOL
Susan became the first Swedish flycka in history to own a Creek apron. After the delegation departed, she confessed that she had gone to Ocmulgee, OK to tell Creek officials about the planned desecration of Etowah Mounds . . . using a false name and false professional identity. This was done without knowledge of her superiors.
She wouldn’t tell me why the Native American law enforcement officers were sent to Cartersville, who they worked for or what they were doing. She did say that the nationwide criminal organization was neo-satanic . . . a mixture of old fashion Mafia-type crime, Satanism and Fascism . . . perhaps the same one that was operating in the Shenandoah Valley back in those passionate days, when we worked together. The members of the cult believed that they could draw “power” from living next to the ancient Native American town.
On Christmas Eve Susan proposed to me. She planned to take hazardous duty retirement in July, when she turned 40. She would then present our son and daughter to me and we would then travel around the country together, before buying a historic farm near Winchester, VA or Frederick, MD. Once we were living together as a family, she could legally tell me, who she now was. I assume that she would have also told me her real name. LOL
The years pass on, but the damage continues
In 2008, the Director of the Georgia’s Parks and Historic Sites Division used the recession as an excuse to close all state historic sites, associated with Native American culture. She laid off all staff rangers with post-graduate degrees in history or anthropology. They were never rehired, when Etowah Mounds reopened two years later.
In 2011, shortly after George Tiger was inaugurated as Principal Chief of the Muscogee Creek Nation, he fired eight employees of the MCN Justice Department, who played key roles in stopping the leasing of Etowah Mounds. Included was Judge Patrick Moore, one of the most respected Native American judges in the nation. At the time, I was homeless and living in a chicken house.
Tiger was later impeached by the MCN National Council. He ultimately was convicted of embezzlement of federal funds and given a one year prison sentence. However, the MCN Justice Dept. employees that he fired, were never rehired.
Susan never showed up. For many years, I assumed that she had been killed in action, while overseas. I tried several times to find out where she was buried. Initially, there were still some people in DC, who remembered me. They would not tell me her real name. However, FBI records showed her leaving the agency in December 1991 . . . but if she was shifted into covert counter-intelligence, what some clerk tells you means nothing.
Her diploma from the University of Minnesota with a J. D. in law was a fake. No woman by the name of Susan Karlson was studying law there at that time. Two years ago, I found online photographs of the law students in the late 1980s and early 1990s. No woman looked like her. However, she was a brilliant attorney and investigator, so she had a law degree from somewhere.
I now believe that she grew up somewhere in the Warsaw Pact countries. She said that her parents were from the Swedish-speaking part of Finland, captured by Russia in 1941. Ethnic Swedes were banished to other parts of the Soviet Union. I found an article, which said that many thousands of people in the Soviet Union, who had been intelligence assets for NATO, fled to the west, when the Berlin Wall came down and there was chaos in Russia.
Susan reappeared for two weeks in the autumn of 2022. A woman from Athens, GA set her herself on fire in the northern part of Habersham County, GA – about 21 miles from where I live in the county. Before a official cause of death (suicide) was released by the GBI, the Habersham County Sheriff’s Department went before the national media in a press conference to claim that a “new serial killer” had done the foul deed. Their evidence was a self-described “psychic”, who had appeared once on an obscure internet website.
Secretly, the stupid detectives then contacted lower tier FBI personnel an told them that before burning this woman, I had probably committed many murders over the past 25 years in northern Georgia and western North Carolina. Their reasoning was that since I was one of the 20% sane people in their county, who did not bow down and worship Donald Trump as the Messiah, I must be a librul, Marxist pervert.
Before I moved my furniture into this house in May 2018, they tapped my home phone and set up sting operations to catch me as a homosexual predator of teenagers at the nearby Dollar General, a predator of teenage girls at Fritchie’s Market and a predator of young women over 18 at the Cool Springs convenience store.
After I ate a few meals at the Sautee Cafe, Habersham deputies told the waitresses that I was a predator of waitresses. Next thing I know, their brothers came over to my house to beat me up, because I had give their sisters a 15% tip, expecting sex from the $1.25. I pointed to the 100 lb.+ boulders that I was moving around the yard and asked them what they thought I could do to them. The rednecks were not used to being bullied by Libruls and so backed off and quickly drove away.
However, on the three occasions, when mature, unmarried, educated women have given me their telephone number, Habersham deputies have called them with the offer to stay at their house to protect them from me. How do you spell . . . CLINICALLY INSANE?
Susan’s and my files are classified under National Security, so probably no agent outside of Washington could have access to them. The lower tier FBI then contacted a long list of relatives, Georgia Tech fraternity brothers and girlfriends, I had known since age 18, and told them that I was a bisexual serial killer! Pickens County District Attorney’s office probably gave them the email addresses that Susan used with me with which they tried to contact her. That stunt triggered outrage from upper tier Homeland Security administrators.
Susan came by my house and looked at me. When two people have been so close, there is always a telepathic connection . . . but we did not have conversation. Three times, she passed my car, gave her secret car beep signal and waved . . . just like in the good ole days. She left word with someone else that she and our children had to take another identity in 2006, after it was learned that Georgia law enforcement had blown her cover by passing around videos of us together to watch as porno. I was not told what she was up to, when staying in Northeast Georgia.
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The Truth Is Out There Somewhere
The Americas Revealed 