2020-08-29 - Bring Out the Tinfoil Hats

email to Leon Gyre from Ravn Abildgaard

Leon,

Here's the short version of what I've dug up so far. Can you use your police contacts to make sure this file ends up on the desk of someone on the Force who shares our unique perspective, and who may actually give it due consideration before writing me off as yet another psycho? I hope to God to be wrong, but if I'm not, it's going to get a lot messier.

Give my regards to Maggi, and thank you for the other night! Must repeat soon.

--Ravn

Attached: tinfoil.doc

To whoever this may concern, may it hurt their brains less to read than it did mine to compile.

1: The Library Patrons

An employee at GHL noticed the deceased, Henry Fitzgerald, about a week previous to his body being found on the beach, researching the progression of Sumer to the Babylonian and Assyrian civilisations. This being an unusual subject of interest, the same employee noticed a man -- described as thirty-ish, wearing glasses -- looking into similar materials about a month ago. Police may not be aware of this earlier patron's existence. This patron should be identified; if the serial killer theory (see below) holds, he may be a victim whose body is as of yet undiscovered. Further questions to be directed to Miss Harper Price, Head Librarian, who is obviously not at liberty to discuss patrons with other patrons, i.e. me. I note that neither she nor her staff identified the other man which leads me to believe that he was in fact not a local, or at least not a recurring library visitor.

2: The Other Angle

Police authorities can be assumed to pursue the traditional angles of criminal psychology, forensics, etc.. What I can contribute as a folklorist is that other take, the crazy one -- that of a serial killer who attempts to communicate his message in symbolism ingrained to our culture, whatever that message may be; someone who attempts to convey a message or invoke a desired outcome by means of the myths that permeate our cultural heritage. I may be entirely off track, and after a fashion I do hope that I am -- but if I am not, then I hope that some of the information in this document may help the authorities identify the killer, and perhaps predict where he will strike next.

I am working on the assumption that we are dealing with someone who firmly believes in occult ritual. Please bear with me. It's going to be a wild ride.

3: Alien Astronauts

A prominent conspiracy theory which rears its head in academic circles every now and then -- largely to be laughed at with scorn -- is that of most ancient, pantheistic religions being, unknown to most, alien astronauts making contact with early human civilisations. The Nazca lines, the Pyramids, the megalithic sites -- all of them built by aliens. However, while no academic will consider this so-called theory for even a moment, I am working from the presumption that our killer does, and in fact believes firmly.

One of the famous incarnations of these alien astronauts are the Annunaki, demons of the Sumerian underworld. Judges in service of the goddess Ereshkigal, ruler of Kur, they are sometimes beheld as elder gods banished by a younger generations of deities -- while in older text they are the most powerful of deities; some of the very prominent Babylonian deities are also beheld as being Annunaki. The important thing to take away here is that they figure prominently on the list of ancient mythological entities who are beheld to be alien astronauts -- our tinfoil hat wearing killer is not likely a specialist on Sumerian myth, either, so there is no need to go in depth detail.

Henry Fitzgerald's body was found on the beach, his body having taken considerable water damage, and his head replaced with that of a squid. The oceanic symbolism is obvious.

Still assuming that our killer has scraped most of his actual information from search engines and online resources he will have an at least superficial familiarity with the epic of Gilgamesh in which the Annunaki are described as weeping as the Flood wipes out most of humanity. A prominent pseudoarcheologist (and that's really a very generous term for a complete hack and snake oil salesman) published numerous books on this subject in the 1960s. Long story short, humanity was created and domesticated by these astronauts to serve as slave labour. The Annunaki, in this interpretation, wept because their work was being undone and their labourers dying. This is not a theory confined to one society of tinfoil hat wearers -- the Church of Scientology follows a similar belief pattern.

If our serial killer is indeed following this pattern of thought, he is either trying to stave off an alien invasion by means of human sacrifice -- or to summon his space slash ocean god in a similar fashion. Either way, he wil kill again, until he achieves the desired result.

4: Roleplaying Games

From the moment I saw Henry Fitzgerald's body on the beach I had a hunch that there would be a connection to H. P. Lovecraft. The squid head, obviously -- Cthulhu, the squid-headed elder god who sleeps under the sea. Lovecraft's universe is fiction but it is a fiction old enough and famous enough that like Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, it permeates popular culture to a point where, by now, it is not unreasonable to apply the term folklore to it in spite of its origins.

Lovecraft's books had a resurgence in popular culture in the 1980s when the game company Chaosium published their roleplaying game, Call of Cthulhu. Taking that pattern of thought a little further, the first and oldest roleplaying game was Dungeons & Dragons -- which, in its original incarnation, sported a pantheon of deities that includes Tiamat, an evil dragon goddess.

That's the same Tiamat who in Sumerian myth is the goddess of the sea, or the sea personified, as described on Wikipedia:

"When above the heavens (e-nu-ma e-liš) did not yet exist nor the earth below, Apsu the freshwater ocean was there, the first, the begetter, and Tiamat, the saltwater sea, she who bore them all; they were still mixing their waters, and no pasture land had yet been formed, nor even a reed marsh." This resulted in the birth of the younger gods, who later murder Apsu in order to usurp his lordship of the universe. Enraged, Tiamat gives birth to the first dragons, filling their bodies with "venom instead of blood", and made war upon her treacherous children, only to be slain by Marduk, the god of Storms, who then forms the heavens and earth from her corpse.

I deliberately quote Wikipedia rather than a proper academic resource because, once again, I am of the firm conviction that our killer is not an academic. He gets his background information from easily available online sources and Cliff's Notes. To think like him, we must do the same.

5: Conclusion

If my theory holds, we are looking for a person who is at least forty years of age, probably closer to fifty; old enough to remember the first editions of the roleplaying games in question -- he may not have played them, but the notion of angry sea gods with Babylonian names and Lovecraftian modus operandi has steeped in his mind. He is not an academic -- the combination of cuneiform and popular culture symbolism indicates someone who is self-taught and perhaps lacking of a critical filter. He has a message; the body was meant to be found. He will kill again, because his goal has not been achieved. He wants to be heard and understood; Miss Price suggests that he likely will have left hints and comments on social media, but an in-depth investigation of these I shall leave to people better qualified. Look for Lovecraftian quotes.

I genuinely hope to be entirely in the wrong. The notion of a conspiracy theorist madman killing to appease his space slash ocean god in Gray Harbor is terrifying. But on the off chance that I am not, I am submitting this file in the hope that it may be of use to the investigation of the case. If the investigation infers that I am in fact on the right track, heaven forbid, I offer my full cooperation in my capacity as a folklorist.

Ravn Abildgaard, August 29, 2020.

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