Danny Casolaro - Final Days

Final Days

On August 5, 1991, Casolaro phoned Bill McCoy, a retired CID officer to tell him that Time magazine had assigned him an article about the Octopus. He further claimed to be working with the reporter Jack Anderson, and that publishers Little, Brown and Time Warner had offered to finance the effort. All of these claims were later shown to be false: Little, Brown, for example, had rejected his Octopus manuscript over a month earlier.

On the same day, Casolaro's friend Ben Mason agreed to talk to Casolaro about his finances. A few days later, Casolaro showed Mason a 22-point outline for his book and expressed frustration at having been tied up with a literary agent who was unable to sell it for the last eighteen months. He also allegedly complained about his sleep being disturbed for the previous three months by calls during the night.

The following day, a neighbor of Casolaro's neighbor and long-time housekeeper, Olga, helped Casolaro pack a black leather tote. She remembers him packing a thick sheaf of papers into a dark brown or black briefcase. Casolaro said he was leaving for several days to visit Martinsburg, West Virginia, to meet a source who promised to provide an important missing piece of his story. This was the last time Olga saw him. Olga told The Village Voice that she answered several threatening telephone calls at Casolaro's home that day. She said that one man called at about 9:00 a.m. and said, "I will cut his body and throw it to the sharks". Less than an hour later, a different man said: "Drop dead." There was a third call, but Olga remembered only that no one spoke and that she heard music as though a radio were playing. A fourth call was the same as the third, and a fifth call, this one silent, came later that night.