Ooit al van Laurel Canyon gehoord? Laurel Canyon is een bergachtige wijk in Los Angeles waar heel wat Hollywood-, muziek- , en andere beroemdheden wonen. Het is ook een plaats waar heel vreemde dingen gebeuren, die zo uit een SF-films kunnen komen. Maar het niet science-fiction, het is werkelijkheid....

• We beginnen bij Frank Zappa, die nogal eigenaardige banden lijkt te hebben met het militair-industrieel complex waar hij publiekelijk tegen is:
  Zappa’s manager is a shadowy character by the name of Herb Cohen, who had come out to LA from the Bronx with his brother Mutt just before the music and club scene began heating up. Cohen, a former US Marine, had spent a few years traveling the world before his arrival on the Laurel Canyon scene. Those travels, curiously, had taken him to the Congo in 1961, at the very time that leftist Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba was being tortured and killed by our very own CIA. Not to worry though; according to one of Zappa’s biographers, Cohen wasn’t in the Congo on some kind of nefarious intelligence mission. No, he was there, on the contrary, to supply arms to Lumumba “in defiance of the CIA.” Because, you know, that is the kind of thing that globetrotting ex-Marines did in those days (as we’ll see soon enough when we take a look at another Laurel Canyon luminary). Making up the other half of Laurel Canyon’s First Family is Frank’s wife, Gail Zappa, known formerly as Adelaide Sloatman. Gail hails from a long line of career Naval officers, including her father, who spent his life working on classified nuclear weapons research for the US Navy. Gail herself once worked as a secretary for the Office of Naval Research and Development (she also once told an interviewer that she had “heard voices all [her] life”). Many years before their nearly simultaneous arrival in Laurel Canyon, Gail had attended a Naval kindergarten class with “Mr. Mojo Risin’” himself, Jim Morrison (it is claimed that, as children, Gail once hit Jim over the head with a hammer). The very same Jim Morrison had later attended the same Alexandria, Virginia, high school as two other future Laurel Canyon luminaries—John Phillips and Cass Elliot.
• Dan hebben we Stephen Stills, van Crosby, Stills & Nash (& Young), een autoritair mannetje met alweer connecties met het Amerikaanse leger:
  (Stills’ follow-up single will be entitled Bluebird, which, coincidentally or not, happens to be the original codename assigned to the CIA’s MK-ULTRA program). Before his arrival in Laurel Canyon, Stephen Stills was the product of yet another career military family. Raised partly in Texas, young Stephen spent large swaths of his childhood in El Salvador, Costa Rica, the Panama Canal Zone, and various other parts of Central America—alongside his father, who was, we can be fairly certain, helping to spread ‘democracy’ to the unwashed masses in that endearingly American way. As with the rest of our cast of characters, Stills was educated primarily at schools on military bases and at elite military academies. Among his contemporaries in Laurel Canyon, he was widely viewed as having an abrasive, authoritarian personality. Nothing unusual about any of that, of course, as we have already seen.
  There is, however, an even more curious aspect to the Stephen Stills story: Stephen will later tell anyone who will sit and listen that he had served time for Uncle Sam in the jungles of Vietnam. These tales will be universally dismissed by chroniclers of the era as nothing more than drug-induced delusions. Such a thing couldn’t possibly be true, it will be claimed, since Stills arrived on the Laurel Canyon scene at the very time that the first uniformed troops began shipping out and he remained in the public eye thereafter. And it will of course be quite true that Stephen Stills could not have served with uniformed ground troops in Vietnam, but what will be ignored is the undeniable fact that the US had thousands of ‘advisers’—which is to say, CIA/Special Forces operatives—active in the country for a good many years before the arrival of the first official ground troops. What will also be ignored is that, given his background, his age, and the timeline of events, Stephen Stills not only could indeed have seen action in Vietnam, he would seem to have been a prime candidate for such an assignment. After which, of course, he could rather quickly become—stop me if you’ve heard this one before—an icon of the peace generation.
• En zijn bandgenoot Crosby? Ja hoor:
  But David Crosby is much more than just the son of Major Floyd Delafield Crosby. David Van Cortlandt Crosby, as it turns out, is a scion of the closely intertwined van Cortlandt, van Schuyler and van Rensselaer families. And while you’re probably thinking, “the Van Who families?,” I can assure you that if you plug those names in over at Wikipedia, you can spend a pretty fair amount of time reading up on the power wielded by this clan for the last, oh, two-and-a-quarter centuries or so. (Noot: "founding father" Alexander Hamilton was getrouwd met een van Schuyler, wiens zus op haar beurt getrouwd was met een van Rensselaer, zie Ron Chernow). Suffice it to say that the Crosby family tree includes a truly dizzying array of US senators and congressmen, state senators and assemblymen, governors, mayors, judges, Supreme Court justices, Revolutionary and Civil War generals, signers of the Declaration of Independence, and members of the Continental Congress. It also includes, I should hasten to add—for those of you with a taste for such things—more than a few high-ranking Masons. Stephen van Rensselaer III, for example, reportedly served as Grand Master of Masons for New York. And if all that isn’t impressive enough, according to the New England Genealogical Society, David Van Cortlandt Crosby is also a direct descendant of Founding Fathers and Federalist Papers authors Alexander Hamilton and John Jay.
• En zo gaat het door. Warren Zevon is zelfs de zoon van een luitenant van Los Angeles maffiabaas Mickey Cohen:
  And so it goes as one scrolls through the roster of Laurel Canyon superstars. What one finds, far more often than not, are the sons and daughters of the military/intelligence complex and the sons and daughters of extreme wealth and privilege—oftentimes, you’ll find both rolled into one convenient package. Every once in a while, you will also stumble across a former child actor, like Brandon DeWilde, or Monkee Mickey Dolenz, or eccentric prodigy Van Dyke Parks. You might also encounter some former mental patients, such as James Taylor, who spent time in two different mental institutions in Massachusetts before hitting the Laurel Canyon scene, or Larry “Wild Man” Fischer, who was institutionalized repeatedly during his teen years, once for attacking his mother with a knife (an act that was gleefully mocked by Zappa on the cover of Fischer’s first album). Finally, you might find the offspring of an organized crime figure, like Warren Zevon, the son of William “Stumpy” Zevon, a lieutenant for infamous LA crimelord Mickey Cohen.
• Dus wat als alles opgezet spel is? Dat de zogenaamde "counterculture" deel was van een grotere operatie om de echte anti-oorlogsoppositie in een slecht daglicht te stellen?
  What if, in other words, the entire youth culture of the 1960s was created not as a grass-roots challenge to the status quo, but as a cynical exercise in discrediting and marginalizing the budding anti-war movement and creating a fake opposition that could be easily controlled and led astray? And what if the harassment these folks were subjected to was largely a stage-managed show designed to give the leaders of the counterculture some much-needed ‘street cred’? What if, in reality, they were pretty much all playing on the same team?
• Doden, doden, doden:
  Jimi Hendrix, who reportedly briefly occupied the sprawling mansion just north of the Log Cabin after he moved to LA in 1968, died in London under seriously questionable circumstances on September 18, 1970. Though he rarely spoke of it, Jimi had served a stint in the US Army with the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell. His official records indicate that he was forced into the service by the courts and then released after just one year when he purportedly proved to be a poor soldier. One wonders though why he was assigned to such an elite division if he was indeed such a failure. One also wonders why he wasn’t subjected to disciplinary measures rather than being handed a free pass out of his ostensibly court-ordered service. In any event, Jimi himself once told reporters that he was given a medical discharge after breaking an ankle during a parachute jump. One biographer has claimed that Jimi faked being gay to earn an early release. The truth, alas, remains rather elusive. At the time of Jimi’s death, the first person called by his girlfriend— Monika Danneman, last to see Hendrix alive—was Eric Burden of the Animals. Two years earlier, Burden had relocated to LA and taken over ringmaster duties from Frank Zappa after Zappa had vacated the Log Cabin and moved into a less high-profile Laurel Canyon home. Within a year of Jimi’s death, a reported prostitute-turned-groupie named Devon Wilson, who had been with Jimi the day before his death, plunged from an eighth-floor window of New York’s Chelsea Hotel. On March 5, 1973, a shadowy character named Michael Jeffery, who had managed both Hendrix and Burden, was killed in a midair plane collision. Jeffery was known to openly boast of having organized crime connections and of working for the CIA. After Jimi’s death, it was discovered that Jeffery had been funneling most of Hendrix’s gross earnings into offshore accounts in the Bahamas linked to international drug trafficking. Years later, on April 5, 1996, Danneman, the daughter of a wealthy German industrialist, was found dead near her home in a fume-filled Mercedes. Jim Morrison, who for a time lived in a home on Rothdell Trail, behind the Laurel Canyon Country Store, may or may not have died in Paris on July 3, 1971. The events of that day remain shrouded in mystery and rumor, and the details of the story, such as they are, have changed over the years. What is known is that, on that very same day, Admiral George Stephen Morrison delivered the keynote speech at a decommissioning ceremony for the aircraft carrier USS Bon Homme Richard, from where, seven years earlier, he had helped choreograph the Tonkin Gulf Incident. A few years after Jim’s death, his common-law wife, Pamela Courson, dropped dead as well, officially of a heroin overdose. Like Hendrix, Morrison had been an avid student of the occult, with a particular fondness for the work of Aleister Crowley. According to super-groupie
  Pamela Des Barres, he had also “read all he could about incest and sadism.” Also like Hendrix (and Wilson), Morrison was just twenty-seven at the time of his (possible) death.
• Nog een "staged event"?
  Bruce Berry, a roadie for Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, died of a heroin overdose in June 1973. Berry had just flown out to Maui to deliver a shipment of cocaine to Stephen Stills, and was promptly sent back to LA by Crosby and Nash. Berry was a brother of Jan Berry, of Jan and Dean. (Dean Torrence, the “Dean” of Jan and Dean, had played a part in the fake kidnapping of Frank Sinatra, Jr., just a couple weeks after the JFK assassination. The staged event was a particularly transparent effort to divert attention away from the questions that were cropping up, after the initial shock had passed, about the events in Dealey Plaza.)
• Wie Crowley zegt, zegt natuurlijk ook The Beatles. Ook hier gebeuren heel wat vreemde dingen en vallen de doden bij bosjes (en waarom sterven al die rockers op de leeftijd van 27 jaar?):
  Pete Ham, a singer/songwriter/guitarist and the leader of the British band Badfinger, another outfit with close ties to those lads from Liverpool, was found swinging from the end of a rope on April 23, 1975. Ham’s band was first signed by the Beatles’ own Apple label, and their first single, Come And Get It, was penned by Paul McCartney. According to rock lore, McCartney recorded the song himself and then insisted that Ham’s band play and record it exactly the same way. Sir Paul also personally auditioned all four members of Badfinger to decide who would provide the lead vocal on the single. Ham’s greatest claim to fame though was being the co-writer of the oft-recorded Without You, a song that became a monster hit around the world when it was committed to vinyl in 1972 by John Lennon’s Sunset Strip/Laurel Canyon sidekick, Harry Nilsson—the very same Harry Nilsson whose London flat served as the death scene for both Mama Cass and Keith Moon. The song received numerous awards and Ham and his band moved over to Warner Bros. Records with the expectation that Badfinger was soon to become quite a sensation. It wasn’t meant to be. Within a few years, Pete Ham was unemployed and turned up dead in his garage. Ham is yet another member of the Twenty-Seven Club, though not by much; his death came just three days before his twenty-eighth birthday. His passing was barely reported on, due in part to the fact that neither Warner Bros. nor the Beatles organization bothered to make an announcement or issue any public comment. Just one month later, his girlfriend gave birth to a daughter that Ham was never to know. Eight-and-a-half years later, on November 18, 1983, Tom Evans, Ham’s former bandmate and the co-writer of Without You, was also found swinging from the end of a rope. Shit happens, it appears.
• Houdini, die ook alweer op een rare manier om het leven kwam, was een geheim agent, zijn act als ontsnappingskoning een cover:
  Far more compelling than the revelations about Houdini’s death, however, was something else about the illusionist that the book revealed for the first time: Harry Houdini was engaged in doing intelligence work for both the US Secret Service and Scotland Yard. And his traveling escape act, as it turns out, was pretty much a cover for those activities—in very much the same way that an actor by the name of John Wilkes Booth appears to have used his career as a traveling stage performer as a cover for intelligence operations. It is a time-honored tradition that seems to remain largely unchanged to this day.
• Blanken sterven in Laurel Canyon aan een hogere ratio dan zwarten elders:
  It appears then, that, of the eight celebrity residents of Laurel Canyon listed on the Laurel Canyon Association website, at least two (Novarro and Houdini), and quite possibly as many as four, were murdered. That seems like a rather high homicide rate given that, statistically speaking, a white person in this country has about a one-in-345 chance of being murdered. Non-white persons, of course, have a far greater chance of becoming the victims of a homicide, but nowhere near the one-in-four to one-in-two odds that a white celebrity living in Laurel Canyon faced.
• Lookout Mountain Air Force Station:
  The existence of the facility remained unknown to the general public until the early 1990s, though it had long been rumored that the CIA operated a secret movie studio somewhere in or near Hollywood. Filmmaker Peter Kuran was the first to learn of its existence, through classified documents he obtained while researching his 1995 documentary Trinity and Beyond. And yet even today, nearly twenty years after its limited public disclosure, one would have trouble finding even a single mention of this secret military/intelligence facility anywhere in the ‘conspiracy’ literature.
• Laurel Canyon: de gevaarlijkste plaats ter wereld?
  Of the four actors stricken with what has been dubbed the “Rebel Without a Cause Curse,” two were former residents of Laurel Canyon, another lived at—and was killed at—the mouth of the canyon, and the fourth lived just a mile away, as the crow flies, in neighboring Coldwater Canyon. As I may have mentioned previously, Laurel Canyon seems to be a rather dangerous place to live.
• SF-schrijver Robert Heinlein, die een grote invloed had op L.Ron Hubbard, en onrechtstreeks op de Manson-familie (al staat dat niet vast), was er ook:
  Another famous resident of Laurel Canyon was science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein, who resided at 8775 Lookout Mountain Avenue. Like so many other characters in this story, Heinlein was a graduate of the US Naval Academy at Annapolis and he had served as a naval officer. After that, he embarked on a successful writing career. And despite the fact that he was, by any objective measure, a rabid right-winger, his work was warmly embraced by the flower-power generation. If that capsule biography sounds vaguely familiar, by the way, it is probably because it is virtually identical to the biography of a guy named L. Ron Hubbard, whom you may have heard of. Heinlein’s best-known work is the novel Stranger in a Strange Land, which many in the Laurel Canyon scene found to be hugely influential. Ed Sanders has written, in The Family, that the book “helped provide a theoretical basis for Manson’s Family.” Charlie frequently used Strange Land terminology when addressing his flock, and he named his first Family-born son Valentine Michael Manson in honor of the book’s lead character.
• Bruce Dern, nu wordt het indrukwekkend:
  It is probably safe to say that Dern’s parents had rather impressive political connections, given that baby Bruce’s godparents were sitting First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and future two-time Democratic presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson (he lost both times, in 1952 and 1956, to Eisenhower). Bruce’s paternal grandfather was a guy by the name of George Dern, who served as Secretary of War under President Franklin Roosevelt (for the youngsters in the crowd, Secretary of War is what we used to call the Secretary of Defense in a slightly less Orwellian era). George had also served as Governor of Utah and Chairman of the National Governors’ Association. Bruce’s mother was born Jean MacLeish, and she happened to be the sister of Archibald MacLeish, who also served under Franklin Roosevelt, as the Director of the War Department’s Office of Facts and Figures and as the Assistant Director of the Office of War Information. In other words, Archibald MacLeish was essentially America’s Minister of War Propaganda. He also served at various times as an Assistant Secretary of State and as the Librarian of Congress. Perhaps the most impressive item on his résumé, however, was his membership in everyone’s favorite secret society, Skull and Bones (class of 1915, one year before Prescott Bush was tapped in 1916).
• En Henry ("Hank") Fonda:
  Fonda rebounded quickly from Seymour’s unusual death (alweer!) and within eight months he was married once again, to Susan Blanchard, to whom he remained married until 1956. In 1957, Hank married yet again, this time to Italian Countess Afdera Franchetti (who followed up her four-year marriage to Fonda with a rumored affair with newly-sworn-in President John Kennedy). Franchetti, as it turns out, is the daughter of Baron Raimondo Franchetti, who was a consultant to fascist dictator Benito Mussolini. The countess is also the great-granddaughter of Louise Sarah Rothschild, of the Rothschild banking family (perhaps you’ve heard of them?).
• Albert Wohlstetter (van de Rand Corporation) was er ook:
  In the latter half of the 1950s and into the early 1960s, while Wohlstetter was with the RAND Corporation and also serving as a professor at UCLA (and while his wife Roberta also worked as an analyst for RAND), Albert and his followers—the men who would serve as the architects of US foreign policy during the George W. Bush administration—regularly met in a heavily wooded neighborhood in Los Angeles known as Laurel Canyon. As Gregg Herken wrote in his review of Abella’s book, “those bright, eager and ambitious young men… had sat cross-legged on the floor with their mentor at his stylish house in Laurel Canyon.” Just as, not far away, Vito’s eager young followers sat cross-legged with their mentor. And just as, also not far away, Charles Manson’s eager young followers would sit cross-legged on the floor with their mentor.
• Lowell George was een andere muzikant, met connecties met Frank Zappa, die Laurel Canyon niet heeft overleefd. Hij overleed op 34-jarige leeftijd (nee, dus niet op 27-jarige leeftijd) aan een hartaanval. Zijn lichaam werd gevonden in de buurt van het Pentagon:
  Another new name on the Laurel Canyon Death List is Lowell George, the founder and creative force behind the critically acclaimed but largely obscure band known as Little Feat. George was the son of Willard H. George, a famous furrier to the Hollywood movie studios. Lowell’s first foray into the music world was with a band known as the Factory, which cut some demos with a guy by the name of Frank Zappa. The Factory evolved into the Fraternity of Man, though without George, who had left to serve as lead vocalist for the Standells. George returned, however, to join the band in the studio for the recording of their second album. By that time, as we have already learned, the Fraternity of Man had taken up residence in the Log Cabin, alongside Carl Franzoni and his fellow freaks. George next joined up with Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention, though his tenure there was destined to be a short one; like so many others, Lowell left embittered by Zappa’s dictatorial approach to making music and his condescending treatment of his bandmates. After parting company with Zappa, George formed Little Feat, a band composed mostly of musicians from the Fraternity of Man sessions. Lowell, who is credited with being a pioneer of the use of slide guitar in rock music, served as singer, songwriter and lead guitarist for the band, which released its debut album in 1970. Though well regarded within the industry and by critics, the band’s albums failed to sell and George ultimately announced the demise of the band and recorded a solo album. After playing a show on June 29, 1979, at George Washington University in support of that album, George was found dead in an Arlington, Virginia, hotel room, very near the Pentagon. Cause of death was said to be a massive heart attack, though George was just thirty-four years old at the time.
• Laurel Canyon: gevaarlijke dissidenten, sex, drugs, rock n' roll, heel veel doden, maar de LAPD is niet geïnteresseerd:
  Time and time again, ‘the man’ was handed golden opportunities to crack down on Laurel Canyon’s most prominent voices, and time and time again those ‘dangerous dissidents’ were handled with kid gloves. Indeed, the LAPD appears to have adopted a hands-off policy towards the Laurel Canyon crowd. As musician-turned-photographer Henry Diltz acknowledged to writer Harvey Kubernik, “There was not a presence of the heat in Laurel Canyon.” Radio personality Elliot Mintz agreed, noting that he couldn’t “recall a law enforcement presence in Laurel Canyon.” Given the unique geography of the canyon community, it would have been very easy for the police to cut off access and conduct regular sweeps, but nothing like that ever happened. Instead, police seem to have stayed out of the canyon entirely.
• Hoe is het mogelijk dat de overheid, het Establishement, de "counterculture" heeft laten gebeuren?
  How is it possible that not one of the musical icons of the Woodstock generation, almost all of them draft age males, was shipped off to slog through the rice paddies of Vietnam? Should we just consider that to be another one of those great serendipities? Was it mere luck that kept all the Laurel Canyon stars out of jail and out of the military during the turbulent decade that was the 1960s? Not likely. The reality is that ‘The Establishment,’ as it was known in those days, had the power to prevent the musical icons of the 1960s from ever becoming the megastars that they became. The state, working hand-in-hand with corporate America, could quite easily have prevented the entire countercultural movement from ever getting off the ground—because then, as now, the state controlled the channels of communication.
• The Maysles Brothers, George Lucas en Steven Spielberg hebben meer geluk in Laurel Canyon:
  One of the young cameramen working for the Maysles brothers that day, as it turns out, was a guy by the name of George Lucas. (It is unclear whether it was Lucas who captured the conveniently unobstructed footage of the murder.) Not long after, Lucas would begin a meteoric rise to the very top of the Hollywood food chain. He would be joined there by another film director by the name of Steven Spielberg; the two of them would emerge as arguably the most critically acclaimed and influential filmmakers of their generation. Just as the second wave of Laurel Canyon bands, with names like the Eagles and CSN, would transform the music industry from a community of artists into a vast money-making machine—ushering in the era of stadium concerts, multi-million selling albums and unprecedented profits—Spielberg and Lucas would perform a similar trick with the film business, producing blockbusters like ET, Raiders of the Lost Arc, Jaws and Star Wars. It seems perfectly natural then that in the mid- to late-1960s, USC film student Spielberg was living on Lookout Mountain in Laurel Canyon.
• Zelfs de fameuze Black Dhalia zaak zou connectie hebben met Laurel Canyon:
  Much of what has been written about the brief life of Ms. Short is contradictory. Among the facts that seem to be agreed upon are that she had recently worked at a military facility that is now known as Vandenberg Air Force Base, and that she had some kind of close connection to a US Naval hospital in San Diego, where she may have also worked. That is, in any event, what she had indicated in a letter to her mother. Unlike the Manson and Wonderland murders, the mutilation of the Black Dahlia occurred some twenty years before Laurel Canyon’s glory days. There is, nevertheless, a possible connection. This story begins on August 30, 1935, with the birth of John Edmund Andrew Phillips to parents Claude and Edna Phillips. Claude was a retired Marine Corps officer and engineer. His father, John Andrew Phillips, who had been a prominent and influential architect, one day “mysteriously fell to his death” on a construction site, according to John Phillips’ autobiography. John’s mother, Edna, had what most people would consider a decidedly unconventional upbringing. Her mother was a psychic and faith healer, and many of her eleven siblings were well known locally as gun-fighters and bandits. When Edna was just a year old, she was purportedly kidnapped by Gypsies! Not to worry though—her father allegedly found her a year later down in Mexico, though how he would have done so will doubtless forever remain a mystery. Edna was just fifteen when she met and began a relationship with Claude Phillips, who according to legend had supposedly won an Oklahoma bar from a fellow serviceman in a poker game on the way home from France at the close of WWI—which seems, in retrospect, about as credible as various other aspects of Phillips family history as told by John. By eighteen, Edna had given birth to the couple’s first child, Rosie Phillips, born on New Year’s Eve, 1922. Rosie would later become a career employee of the Pentagon, where John’s first wife would also find work. Years later, according to John, Rosie’s daughter Patty would be “found dead of an overdose in a girlfriend’s apartment in North Hollywood… There were mysterious questions surrounding her death.” This kind of thing tends to happen to families in Laurel Canyon. In the late 1920s, Claude Phillips was commissioned to Haiti, where he remained for four years. He was then sent back to Quantico, then shipped off to Managua, Nicaragua, before finally returning to Alexandria, Virginia, where John Phillips, who would become arguably the most important music figure in the canyon, grew up and went to school. John attended a series of strict Catholic and military schools. He also served as an altar boy, though according to his own account, he also had a darker side which included forays into vandalism, auto theft, breaking and entering, fighting, and other assorted mischief. His mother, meanwhile, routinely cruised for men, when not spending time with a US Army Colonel named George Lacy. John would later be told that his real father was a US Marine Corps doctor named Roland Meeks, who died in a Japanese POW camp during WWII. Phillips played basketball at George Washington High School, graduating in 1953. He then scored an appointment to Annapolis Naval Academy, but soon dropped out. One of his first paying jobs was working on a fishing charter boat. As John later recalled it, the crew consisted of him, a retired Navy officer, and four retired Army generals. Seems like a perfect fit for one of the future guiding lights of the hippie movement. Phillips also, for a brief time, tried his hand at selling cemetery plots. As noted at the beginning of this odyssey, John’s first wife was the aristocratic Susie Adams, a direct descendent of President John Adams and an occasional practitioner of voodoo. The couple’s first son, Jeffrey, was born on Friday the 13th in December of 1957. Shortly after that, John found himself in, of all places, Havana, Cuba, just as the Batista regime was about to fall to the revolutionary forces of Fidel Castro. According to Phillips, he and his traveling companions “were once whisked off the street by a director, straight into a TV studio to appear on a live Havana variety show.” Many of you, I’m sure, have had a similar experience. Some months later, in 1958, Phillips flew to Los Angeles and began performing on amateur nights at Pandora’s Box on the legendary Sunset Strip. His first band, the Journeymen, featured Phillips, Scott Mc-Kenzie and Dick Weismann. It was while touring with this formation that John Phillips met a very young Holly Michelle Gilliam. Michelle was born November 10, 1944, in Long Beach, California, to a father variously described as a merchant marine, a movie production assistant, and a self-taught intellectual. When Michelle’s mother, a Baptist minister’s daughter, reportedly died of a brain aneurysm when Michelle was just five, Gardner “Gil” Gilliam took his daughters and promptly relocated to Mexico, ostensibly to attend college on the GI Bill. They remained there for several years. Upon their return to Southern California, Gil found work as an LA County probation officer. According to John, Gil’s work “often required him to go out of town,” though one would think that that would make it rather difficult for him to keep tabs on his charges. In 1958, while future husband John was vacationing in war-torn Cuba, Michelle found a new mother figure in twenty-three-year-old Tamar Hodel. Tamar’s father, Dr. George Hodel, was described by Vanity Fair in December 2007 as “the most pathologically decadent man in Los Angeles” and “the city’s venereal-disease czar and a fixture in its A-list demimonde.” Also noted in the article was that “George Hodel shared with Man Ray a love for the work of the Marquis de Sade and the belief that the pursuit of personal liberty was worth everything.” In other words, Hodel embraced that all-purpose Luciferian creed, “Do what thou wilt.” According to the same article, Tamar and her siblings had “grown up in her father’s Hollywood house, which resembled a Mayan temple, was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright’s son, and was the site of wild parties, in which Hodel was sometimes joined by director John Huston and photographer Man Ray.” The luxurious home reportedly features, among other amenities, a subterranean walk-in vault, which is always a nice thing to have around. Within the walls of that singularly odd Hollywood Hills home, which lies about three miles due east of the mouth of Laurel Canyon, Tamar has talked of how she “often ‘uncomfortably’ posed nude… for ‘dirty-old-man’ Man Ray and had once wriggled free from a predatory John Huston.” Her own father, not so shockingly, “had committed incest with her. ‘When I was eleven, my father taught me to perform oral sex on him.’” Her father also “plied her with erotic books, grooming her for what he touted as their transcendent union,” and freely shared her with his wealthy and influential friends. “To the girl’s horror, she became pregnant” at the tender age of fourteen—with her father’s child. “To her greater horror, she says, ‘my father wanted me to have his baby.’ “A friend, nevertheless, took her to get an abortion. Dr. George was so incensed that, according to Tamar, he “struck her on the head with his pistol,” prompting her stepmother (who also happened to be John Huston’s ex-wife) to assist her in going into hiding. Dr. George Hodel was arrested and charged with, among other things, offering his young daughter to several friends at an orgy. The sensational 1949 incest trial featured a witness who took the stand to describe being hypnotized by Hodel at a party. Allegations that the rich and powerful were dabbling in incest, hypnotism, pedophilic orgies and Luciferian philosophies must surely have been shocking to Angelenos in the 1940s, as they would still be to most Americans today. Perhaps that is why the jury chose not to believe Tamar and instead acquitted Dr. Hodel. Of course, it should probably be factored in that Tamar was roundly vilified by both the Jerry Giesler-led defense team and the local press. Far more shocking than the allegations aired at trial was the then-unknown fact that, even while Hodel was standing trial on the sensational charges, he was, and still is today, a prime suspect in the Black Dahlia murder case! There have been, to be sure, numerous suspects identified in the case, including actor/director Orson Welles. But George Hodel does seem to be a much more likely suspect than most of those who have been identified. And his possible guilt, it should be noted, does not exclude others from likely complicity as well. The mistake that virtually all investigators of this case have made is assuming that there was only one culprit. It is entirely possible that Hodel committed the crime in conjunction with various others in his Luciferian social circle. Photographer Man Ray, for example, is a compelling suspect given that the posing of Ms. Short’s body appeared to mimic the Minotaur, one of his better-known photographs.
  It seems unlikely that the fourteen-year-old daughter of a lowly probation officer would fall into the orbit of the daughter of the very wealthy and well-connected George Hodel, but not any more unlikely, I suppose, than numerous other aspects of the Laurel Canyon saga. Tamar, who has been described by Michelle as “the epitome of glamour,” quickly took the youngster under her wing, buying her clothes, enrolling her in modeling school, teaching her to drive, and providing her with a fake ID and a steady stream of prescription drugs—obtained, one would presume, from her father. According to Michelle, “Tamar put on perfect airs around my dad and when it became necessary she would sleep with him.” That perhaps explains why, in early 1961, Gil didn’t have a problem with allowing his underage daughter to move to San Francisco with her surrogate mom.
• The Beach Boys, the Bushe's en de Manson's:
  The summer before, Dennis had released the first solo album by a Beach Boy, the critically acclaimed but now largely forgotten Pacific Ocean Blue. The album was co-written and co-produced by fellow Manson fan Gregg Jakobson. By the end of the year, Dennis was living in Coldwater Canyon with Christine McVie of Fleetwood Mac, a British band that had been transformed into a Laurel Canyon band following the mid-1970s addition of Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks. Wilson lived with McVie for more than two years, during which time the home’s pool house burned to the ground. As 1980 rolled around, the Beach Boys could be found playing a benefit concert in support of the presidential campaign of former spy-master George H.W. Bush. Early the next year, they played one of the inaugural balls for the incoming administration, putting their stamp of approval on the Reagan/Bush era. It wasn’t the first time the Reagan and Wilson families had crossed paths; Dennis had once had a brief affair with Reagan daughter Patti Davis, who also had a relationship with Eagle Bernie Leadon. The Boys later played a private birthday bash for then-Vice President Bush. Around the time of the Reagan inauguration, Stan Love and Rocky Pamplin invaded the home of Dennis Wilson, who by then was said to have a serious alcohol addiction, and savagely beat him. Wilson was reportedly kicked, stomped, bludgeoned with a telephone receiver and thrown through a plate glass window. The assault, later described by Love as “one of the most brutal beatings ever,” left Wilson in the hospital with broken ribs and a battered face. Love and Pamplin were served with restraining orders and received fines and probation for the attack, which was allegedly motivated by the desire to prevent Dennis from supplying drugs to Brian. It seems likely though that it was actually motivated by Mike Love’s rage over Dennis’ affair with his illegitimate and underage daughter. After having a son together in September 1982, Dennis and Shawn were married on July 28, 1983. The marriage though was a violent and turbulent one, with divorce papers filed just four months later, in November 1983. The divorce case never made it to court though because Dennis allegedly drowned in thirteen feet of water in a Marina Del Rey boat slip the next month, on December 28, 1983. At the time, he reportedly had no home of his own and had taken to crashing at friends’ houses. He was largely estranged from his brothers and cousins, once telling an interviewer that if “there wasn’t the Beach Boys and there wasn’t music, I would not even talk to them.” Dennis was known throughout his adult life for living life in the fast lane, with a fondness for fast cars, faster women and mass quantities of controlled substances. He was married five times in his brief thirty-nine years on this planet, a record bested by cousin Mike Love, who according to Carlin had already been married and divorced six times by 1981. One of Dennis’ paramours, according to a court filing, was one of Love’s wives. Another, as previously stated, was Mike’s daughter. Dennis was also known for having expensive tastes and for being generous to a fault. He was said to be obsessed with sex and to at times refer to himself as ‘The Wood.’ All of which, along with his obvious interest in music, made Dennis an ideal companion for Charlie Manson, who continued to see Dennis from time to time after the summer of 1968, even turning up at his door a day or two after the Cielo Drive murders.
• Terug naar Houdini voor een redelijk complex verhaal:
  For the rest of his years, Houdini devoted a considerable amount of time to investigating and debunking the spiritualist movement, which flourished in the post-WWI years as legions of fake ‘mediums’ preyed upon the grief of those who had lost loved ones in the war. By design or otherwise, Houdini’s crusade served primarily to publicize the movement, which included among its members a number of Harry’s friends, most notably and prominently Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of fictional detective Sherlock Holmes and possible perpetrator of the infamous Piltdown Hoax of 1912. Both Doyle and Houdini also had connections to Le Roi and Margery Crandon, and that is where this story takes a decidedly dark turn. Margery, born Mina Stinson in Canada in 1888, had moved with her family to Boston, Massachusetts, at a young age. As a teenager, she is said to have been a musical prodigy and to have played various musical instruments in local orchestras, while later working as an actress, secretary and ambulance driver. In 1917, the then-married Mina was hospitalized and operated on by Dr. Le Roi Goddard Crandon, a man who occupied a prestigious position in Boston society. Crandon was a direct descendent of one of the original twenty-three Mayflower passengers and a member of the Boston Yacht Club. He had graduated from Harvard Medical School and had also obtained a master’s degree in philosophy from Harvard, where he also served as an instructor. Just before meeting Mina, he had served as a Naval officer and as head of the surgical staff at a US Naval hospital during WWI. Shortly after meeting the doctor, Mina divorced her first husband and, in 1918, became the much older Le Roi Crandon’s third wife. The two seemed hopelessly mismatched, she being young, vivacious and, by all accounts, very attractive, while he was said to be rather arrogant, unpleasant and antisocial. Nevertheless, the pair quickly became the talk of Boston’s high society, particularly after the summer of 1923 when they began holding regular séances in their home. One member of the couple’s inner circle was a fellow by the name of Joseph DeWyckoff, a wealthy steel tycoon born in Poland and educated in England and Czarist Russia before settling in America to practice law. He was jailed in Boston on embezzlement charges, later fleeing to Chicago after embezzling yet more money. He soon turned up in, of all places, Havana, Cuba, where, according to Kalush and Sloman, “in 1898 he was recruited by John Wilkie, the Secret Service chief, as a co-optee and was involved in spying for the United States during the Spanish-American War.” That would be, needless to say, the very same John Wilkie who had kick-started Harry Houdini’s career that very same year. As a reward for his service, DeWyckoff, who “had a history of violence,” “was given the contract to salvage the Battleship Maine in the Havana Harbor.”The Maine had been sunk in what appears to have been a false-flag operation carried out by US intelligence operatives to justify launching a bloody colonial war. Although fragmentary, there is clear evidence that Le Roi and Mina Crandon, in conjunction with DeWyckoff and various others, began sometime soon after getting married to ‘adopt’ an untold number of children who subsequently went missing. A number of letters that Dr. Crandon penned on the subject and dispatched to his buddy Doyle appear to have gone missing as well. As Kalush and Sloman note, “Strangely, many of the letters regarding the investigation into the boys have been expunged from Crandon’s files.” In one surviving letter, sent on August 4, 1925, Crandon notes that “about December first I had Mr. DeWyckoff bring over a boy from a London home for possible adoption… In April 1925, our Secret Service Department at Washington received a letter saying that I had first and last sixteen boys in my house for ostensible adoption, and that they had all disappeared.” Four years earlier, a Boston newspaper had reported that two boys had been rescued from a raft; one, eight-year-old John Crandon, was Margery/Mina’s son from her previous marriage; the other, a ten-year old English ‘adoptee,’ was reportedly so unhappy at the Crandon home that he was frantically attempting an escape, with the younger boy in tow. “Two years later, when Margery began her mediumship, there was no trace of that boy in the household.” Perhaps he was the ‘homeless’ boy whose dead body was reportedly found on the outskirts of Joseph DeWyckoff’s large estate in Ramsey, New Jersey, during that time period. By 1924, Dr. Crandon was openly asking his many friends in the British spiritualist movement to “be on the lookout for suitable boys to adopt.” Around that same time, as another associate noted in a letter, Crandon was “being sued for $40,000 for operating on a woman for cancer, when she was simply pregnant, and destroying the foetus… A highly incredible story which persists is that a boy who was in his family some weeks mysteriously disappeared. He claims that the boy is now in his home in England, but still official letters of inquiry and demand are received from that country. This is no mere rumor, for I was shown some of the original letters… The matter has been going on for more than a year. It is very mysterious.”
  In response to questions raised about the disappearance of one particular boy, Margery/Mina complained that “people wrote asking his whereabouts, and the prime minister of England cabled to ask where he was and demanded a cable reply. Why people even said Dr. Crandon committed illegal operations on little children and murdered them.” According to Margery, “the poor little fellow had adenoids and had to be circumcised,” so Crandon opted to perform the surgery at home. It was widely rumored that the good doctor had performed another procedure at home as well—surgically altering his wife’s vaginal opening to allow her to ‘magically’ produce various items at sèances.
• Houdini en Arthur Conan Doyle dus, maar Houdini has ook een relatie met horroschrijver H.P Lovecraft:
  Not long before his death, Houdini, who had an extensive library of literature on the occult, began working with horror writer and occultist H.P. Lovecraft on various magazine articles. In 1926, he hired Lovecraft (who could, like Crandon, trace his lineage to the Massachusetts Bay Colony) and Clifford Eddy, Jr. (another occultist and horror writer and one of Houdini’s covert operatives), to co-write a book debunking superstition. According to Kalush and Sloman, “Shortly after meeting with Eddy and Lovecraft, Bess was stricken with a nonspecific form of poisoning.” Indeed, there is evidence suggesting that both Harry and Bess Houdini suffered from some form of poisoning prior to Harry’s death. In addition, Houdini is said to have exhibited severe mood swings and had some “aggressive confrontations” in the weeks leading up to his death, both of which were out of character for the illusionist (though Bess is widely reported to have suffered from extreme mood swings throughout her life). As the story goes, Houdini, who prided himself on being able to take a punch from pretty much anyone, was sucker-punched in his dressing room by a McGill University student, causing his appendix to burst and ultimately leading to his death on October 31, 1926. Houdini’s physicians dutifully swore out affidavits certifying the cause of death to be “traumatic appendicitis,” though the medical community now acknowledges that such a medical condition has never existed. No autopsy was performed. Joscelyn Gordon Whitehead, the guy credited with sucker-punching Houdini, had some rather provocative connections. His father, for example, was a British diplomat serving in the Orient. After Houdini’s death, Whitehead is said to have become a recluse living something of a hermetic existence. He did have at least one close associate though—Lady Beatrice Isabel Marler, a wealthy heiress and the wife of Sir Herbert Meredith Marler, a prominent Canadian politician and diplomat who once served as Canada’s ambassador to the US.
  After Houdini’s death, it was widely rumored that Bess—who in addition to suffering from wild mood swings was also an alcoholic and a drug addict who was occasionally suicidal—ran an illegal speakeasy/ brothel in conjunction with a woman named Daisy White, said to have been Harry’s mistress. Nothing unusual about that. In mid-1945, Theodore ‘Hardeen’ checked into Doctor’s Hospital for a scheduled operation. On June 12, 1945, Hardeen left that hospital in a body bag. It was reported at the time that Hardeen had been planning to pen a book on his brother and had begun work on the project before checking into the hospital. Nearly two decades later, on October 6, 1962, Leopold Weiss—Harry’s last living sibling and the one who had been brutally attacked in his brother’s home—is said to have jumped off a ledge and fallen six stories to his death. The last of Houdini’s secrets went to the grave with him. It has often been noted that Houdini took far longer to perform many of his stage escapes than was actually necessary and that he was frequently out of view of the audience during such times. This has generally been assumed to have been for dramatic effect. Authors Kalush and Sloman though offer a far more compelling possibility: “One explanation is that such challenges gave Houdini both the opportunity and an alibi to conduct a mission while he was performing.” It was, in other words, the perfect cover, for how could a man be responsible for something that occurred elsewhere when he was performing on stage for a captive audience at the time? There are, it should be noted, clear parallels here to the story told by Chuck Barris, who has claimed that he was similarly slipping off to conduct covert missions while performing his duties as a chaperone for The Dating Game. Of course, no one took Barris seriously because we all know that such things don’t really happen in the real world—or at least not in the world that most of us think we live in.
• De Copeland Broers, oprichters van The Police:
  The youngest and best known of the Copeland brothers, Stewart, also opted to venture into the emerging punk/new wave scene, but he did so by forming his own ‘punk’ band. Before actually recruiting any musicians, he quickly came up with a band name, the Police, and designed the band’s logo and an album cover. The band that he would then assemble, featuring himself on drums, Gordon Thomas Matthew “Sting” Sumner on bass and lead vocals, and Andrew James Summers on guitar, would soon become arguably the most critically acclaimed and commercially successful of the new bands. The initial success of the Police in the US is what largely opened the floodgates for a new British invasion of punk and new wave bands. And that was in spite of the fact that the band was in no way a punk band and didn’t really even qualify as a new wave band. As the British press pointed out, band members were much too professional, and a bit too old, to really fit into the new scene. In 2002, Stewart Copeland played briefly in a reconstituted version of the Doors, alongside founding members Ray Manzarek and Robby Krieger. Copeland’s former bandmate, Andy Summers, who was a decade older than Stewart and Sting, had been on the Laurel Canyon scene back when the original Doors were playing the Sunset Strip. As he wrote in Rolling Stone in July 2007, in 1968 he “was living in Laurel Canyon and going to Sunset Strip every night.” Briefly a member of Eric Burden and the Animals at that time, Summers had been one of the regulars at the Log Cabin. And the beat goes on…
• Ten slotte de zaak Rodney Alcala, seriemoordenaar:
  Upon arrival, the officer knocked on the suspect’s front door and was greeted through the window by a partially naked man who claimed he had just gotten out of the shower and would need a minute to get dressed. Despite the fact that the officer was responding to a report of an abducted child (with the witness on the scene) and had just encountered the presumed suspect, he nevertheless allowed that suspect time to get dressed and escape. According to Sands, “In the short time it had taken to kick in the door, the perpetrator—the monster—had slipped out the back.” The LA Weekly concurred, claiming that Alcala “escaped through a backdoor.” Not many apartment units, it should probably be noted, come equipped with a back door. In any event, the apartment was found to be full of photographic equipment and stacks of photographs of young girls. The suspect, however, was nowhere to be found. The case was assigned to, of all people, LAPD detective Steve Hodel, brother of Michelle Phillips’ surrogate mom, Tamar Hodel, and son of accused Black Dahlia killer George Hodel. According to a January 21, 2010, article in the LA Weekly, Hodel was at the time a “newbie detective working juvenile crimes.” The Shapiro family, meanwhile, abruptly decided to relocate to Mexico, a move that is routinely cited as the reason the crime was never prosecuted.
  In August 1974, a prison psychiatrist recommended that Alcala be released and he was paroled to LA County and required to register with the local police as a sex offender. Within just weeks of gaining his freedom though, Alcala kidnapped a thirteen-year-old girl and was promptly arrested once again. He again caught a lucky break and was found guilty only of violating his parole and of furnishing drugs to a minor, escaping far more serious charges. He served about two-and-a-half years and was paroled on June 16, 1977. Just days after being released, he asked his parole officer for permission to take a trip to New York City, and, since he had behaved himself so well the last time he was on parole, his request was granted. Alcala remained in New York for a little over a month, ostensibly to visit relatives. During his time there, a woman by the name of Ellen Jane Hover went missing. Being the small world that it is, Ellen just happened to be the daughter of Herman Hover, who had been the longtime owner of Ciro’s on the Sunset Strip, the club that famously launched the career of the Byrds. She was also the goddaughter of Sammy Davis, Jr. For reasons that were never explained, the FBI took a keen interest in Hover’s disappearance, which happened to come at a time when New York City was gripped by intense fear. It was, after all, the infamous ‘Summer of Sam’ and Hover’s disappearance on July 15, 1977, was sandwiched between two Son of Sam attacks, one on June 26 and another on July 31. Hover remained missing for almost a full year, until her skeletal remains were discovered in June of 1978, in a shallow grave on, of all places, the Rockefeller estate in Westchester County. It would be over three decades later that Rodney Alcala would be charged with her murder. 
  Six months after that third conviction, the television show 48 Hours Mystery aired The Killing Game, a look at the Rodney Alcala case that had been produced by longtime correspondent Harold Dow. The episode was aired posthumously; Dow had died suddenly and unexpectedly a month earlier, on August 21, 2010, just before completing work on the project. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that Dow had discovered something about the Alcala case that those with vested interests did not want aired on national television.
  So what, at the end of the day, are we to make of Alcala’s curious connections to the Laurel Canyon ‘peace, love and understanding’ scene? If his official bio is to be believed, his first victim, the daughter of a record executive, was snatched from the mouth of the canyon. One of his last victims was left posed at the northern end. And all along the way, such names as Jim Morrison, Roman Polanski, Marlon Brando and Steve Hodel, and such iconic places as Ciros and the Chateau Marmont, unexpectedly pop up in the storyline. Rodney Alcala’s story is a strange one even by serial killer standards. But it is far from being the only serial killer story that the mainstream media got wrong.