Who killed Danny Casolaro?
Who killed Danny Casolaro? To this day, Casolaro’s death has been ruled a suicide. Five months after the initial coroner’s report in 1991, Dr. Frost of the Virginia State Medical Examiner’s Office performed another autopsy and returned a second suicide verdict.
But those who knew Casolaro as well as medics who were at the scene of his death are doubtful that’s actually the case. Casolaro was on the verge of uncovering a huge government conspiracy involving many high-stakes individuals and because of this, friends were convinced he’d been killed to stay quiet. After all, Casolaro told his brother Anthony repeatedly, “If an accident happens [to me], don’t believe it.”
Don Shirley, who was a medic at the scene of Casolaro’s death, was asked by another reporter if he thought there was anything suspicious at the crime scene. “In my six years as a medic, I’ve never seen somebody cut their wrists that many times. The left arm appeared to have 8 cuts and the right arm appeared to have 4 cuts,” he said at the time, as depicted in the Netflix series.
“It just did not appear that he could have physically done this. These were deep enough that the tendon had been severed. You cut your tendon, you can’t hold something and I had the gut feeling at that time that this could be a homicide.”
However, months after Casolaro died, fellow reporter Ron Rosenbaum reflected on his relationship with Casolaro; the two had discussed the Octopus theory not long before Casolaro’s death.
“I was so skeptical about the Octopus murder theory that I even harbored a suspicion that Danny might have staged his own death. That, while his friends were saying it was murder disguised to look like suicide, maybe it was really a suicide staged to provoke suspicion of murder,” he wrote for Vanity Fair in December 1991.
“That by killing himself and leaving enough ambiguities to raise the possibility of murder Danny would make his own death the sensational final chapter of the book he never wrote—the one thing that would validate the seriousness of the quest he was on.”
