Here's a Gosch-related story that I don't think has been shared on this forum so far.
The ludicrous fantasy that Jeff Guckert/Gannon might be Johnny Gosch was concocted by members of the Democratic Underground forums, including election reform advocate Andy Stephenson (who died of cancer a few years ago) and Jeff Wells (who runs the Rigorous Intuition site).
Jeff Wells recently said:
"Over the past year or so I've felt myself needing to pull back from everything Gosch for my own psychic health. (Its becoming enmeshed in the Duncan/Blake story was the last straw.) There's a darkness about it that doesn't end, and extends well beyond the particulars of the case, and I don't trust anyone who offers to guide me through it.
I used to think of the case as something of a Rosetta Stone, and now it seems more like a gateway, that allows passage only one way."
The Duncan/Blake story that Wells is referring to there is the suicides of a young couple named THeresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake. These multi-talented artists had moved from New York to Los Angeles in the hope of becoming involved in the movie business, but things didn't go well for them there.
Their Hollywood dreams eventually fell apart. During this period, they became addicted to conspiracy theory research and grew increasingly paranoid. Soon they were accusing nearly everyone in their lives of being part of a conspiracy against them.
They moved back to New York and Theresa spent a lot of her time working on a blog titled: The Wit of the Staircase, which often involved dark themes and conspiracy theories. Toward the end of her life, Theresa began turning people in her own life into characters in the broader Gosch/Franklin conspiracy theory. Both Duncan and Blake continued to alienate people close to them with wild accusations about conspiring against them, destroying not only their social lives but much of their career potentials as well.
One day, Jeremy came home to their apartment to find Theresa dead of an overdose - an apparent suicide. A week later, he in turn walked into the ocean and drowned himself.
You can read details of this tragedy here:
http://www.laweekly.com/news/news/the-theresa-duncan-tragedy/16942/
and for some amazing insights, this very thoughtful piece by Ron Rosenbaum:
http://tinyurl.com/2klwos
who says:
"Anyway now that the creeping vines of conspiracy theory have begun to overgrow the graves and obscure the legacies of Duncan and Blake maybe there’s a message—or messages—to be found beneath the tangled snakelike tendrils, perhaps too late as well. I’ve learned that once conspiracy theory starts growing, particularly in the blogosphere it can’t be stopped. It’s an incurable virus. It’s super rewarding! It gives people the feeling they’re really In the Know, and the invincibly smug sense of superiority over any one who doesn’t Get It that comes with it. It’s also, I should say, for some in a more understandable and forgivable way, a means of sublimated grieving.
Indeed it’s particularly ironic because from what I’ve seen and read (I’ve decided for various reasons not to quote from the angry e-mails I have that Theresa and Jeremy sent to friends accusing them of being part of a conspiracy against them), the immediate cause of death may have been sleeping pills [Tylenol PM] (in Theresa’s case) or drowning (in Jeremy’s) but the larger force behind the tragedy less likely to be a conspiracy, but conspiracy theory."
"That’s my humble theory: They were strangled, driven mad by their own google abetted conspiracy madness. (all links are equal). And now their legacy is even more conspiracy theory about conspiracy theory.
Don’t get me wrong I believe conspiracies do exist, I don’t dismiss them in their entirety. What differentiates conspiracy theory from evidentiary theory, is, well, actual evidence. One proceeds from evidence to provisional conclusion. The other decides on a conclusion and declares everything it finds evidence of it."
"The Duncan/Blake phenomenon illustrates both sides of the blogsophere: there’s a value to a blogswarm ferreting out facts and details that the mainstream media ignores. But there’s a down side, a darkside to it; building conspiracy-haunted castles the air with no basis in fact, just an indiscriminate concatenation of google links interpreted in a uniformly sinister way."
"A guy I used to know named Danny Casolaro an ambitious likable free lance reporter who thought he ‘d come upon the greatest all-purpose conspiracy theory ever; he was taken in by some con men who kept offering but withholding the proof. He never found it and he was found dead in a bathtub in a motel room in Martinsburg West Virginia with his wrists slit. I came to believe he killed himself in a way to make it seem like murder so at last—at very last—people would take the conspiracy theory he couldn’t prove more seriously.
In any case he’d called me a week or so before he left for Martinsburg. He was on the verge of nailing everything down he was telling everyone. If anything happens to me don’t believe it’s suicide. But I combed through his papers with a number of other reporters after his death. All he had were secondhand ex spy tall tales and conspiracy theory retread crapola.. You can read the story in The Secret Parts of Fortune on the left.) Which is maybe why I react the way I do to conspiracy theories these days. I knew someone killed not by a conspiracy, but by conspiracy theory.
I think it’s claimed two more victims"
