He Uncovered a Rogue CIA Conspiracy. Then He Was Found Dead.

Conspiracy theories are dangerous in more ways than one, and American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders is—among many, many things—an exposé about the irrevocable damage that can come from falling down the rabbit hole. Produced by Mark and Jay Duplass (Wild Wild Country), Netflix’s four-part true-crime docuseries is an investigation into what its primary subject believed was “the political conspiracy of the century.” Yet the further it proceeds down its hopelessly winding path, the more it becomes a portrait of the hazards posed by such sleuthing and thinking. Enticing viewers with the promise of world-shattering secrets and then miring them in a thicket of debatable facts, dubious conjecture, and manic fantasy, it’s an expert case of true-crime form echoing its content.

Designed to make one’s head spin until it hurts, American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders (Feb. 28) is the tale of Danny Casolaro, a writer who was found dead in a Sheraton hotel bathtub on Aug. 10, 1991, in Martinsburg, West Virginia. Police swiftly dubbed this a suicide, since Casolaro had been alone, his wrists had been cut, and he’d left a farewell note. Those closest to the outgoing and loving man, however, thought otherwise. For one, Casolaro’s wrists had 12 separate slash wounds that were so deep, they’d severed the tendons. Moreover, there was blood all over the room, in places that made no sense if he’d simply been ending his life. Most suspicious of all, though, was the fact that just a few short weeks before his demise, Casolaro had told his brother Tony that if something happened to him, it wouldn’t be an accident.

Casolaro’s death, and the theory that he’d been murdered, soon became local news, since he hadn’t been any old scribe. By 1991, Casolaro was knee-deep into reporting on a supposedly bombshell story about a multi-tentacled conspiracy that he referred to as “the Octopus” which involved software engineers, businessmen, drug dealers, gunrunners, organized crime, the CIA, FBI, NSA, and various individuals related to the Ronald Reagan White House. Casolaro had stumbled upon this while employed by Computer Age, a newsletter about the computer business, and it all began with INSLAW, a firm founded by Bill Hamilton that had created a revolutionary nationwide criminal-case tracking system for law enforcement agencies known as PROMIS. In the second year of a three-year contract, the Department of Justice abruptly stopped paying INSLAW for PROMIS, forcing the firm into bankruptcy. Heated lawsuits and telephone threats to Hamilton ensued, all of which were so over-the-top that it made Hamilton and those aligned with him (including former Attorney General Elliot Richardson) suspect that the DOJ was up to something “much dirtier than Watergate.”

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