August 27, 2021 • 66 mins
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of My Heart Radio. Hello, welcome back to the show.
(00:25):
My name is Max, my name is Noel. They call
me Ben. We're joined as always with our super producer Paul,
mission controlled decads. Most importantly, you are you. You are here,
and that makes this the stuff they don't want you
to know. I have returned, fortunately here to our fair
metropolis of Atlanta. It's at least for the time beaten.
(00:49):
It's very good to see you, guys, and I can't
wait to dive into your mysterious adventures in the Pacific.
The mysterious adventures of a guy who was uh in
the in the Pacific area when he died. That's it's
(01:11):
like the pawn shop meme Matt that that was my
best I can do as answer. Uh. So, here we
are looking at a story we I think we all
learned about in an earlier Listener Male segment, The Strange
Bizarre Tale of a fellow named Thomas Merton H M
E R T O N. For a lot of folks
(01:33):
today this may be an unfamiliar case. This guy was
a monk, an author, a peace activist. Uh. He could
rightly be called a mystic. He was perhaps most well
known for his inter faith studies. He was also known
for his work in social justice. And there's there's a
(01:56):
huge genre you could call it, of holy figures working
in the realm of social justice. And when we say
social justice, we don't mean the internet meme of an
s JW or social justice warrior. What we mean is
people who are fighting against far right governments, they're fighting
(02:18):
against big corporations. They're trying to do what they feel
is the most holy or in Marten's case, the most
Christian thing to do, which is to stick up for
people who cannot stick up for themselves. And he did
this through pacifism, through writing. He wasn't a warrior monk
in the physical sense, is what we're saying. Uh. He
(02:41):
also spoke a lot too, in front of many people.
And he wrote a lot too. And he had like
dozens of books that he wrote in a pretty short
amount of time relatively speaking. Yeah, yep, he was a
prolific author. He originally wanted to be a poet. Uh.
In just the space of twenty seven years, less than
thirty years, he wrote more than fifty books, and in
(03:01):
December of nineteen he was found dead. This created a
mystery that, according to multiple sources, remains unsolved in the
present day. And before we begin, uh, I wanted to
ask you all, prior to that piece of listener mail
we received from fellow conspiracy realists, had any of us
(03:23):
ever heard of Thomas Merton. The name was immediately familiar
to me when I read it when I just saw
it on an email, but I could not place it anywhere.
But after or after literally searching it on Google for
a second, you see his face and I know I
have encountered him before, but I was you know, it
(03:43):
wasn't like I had a bunch of things stored from
him in my mind. No, I felt the same way
he does. He does have a look to him done,
and he's got a certain twinkle in his eye that
like has some recognition for me as well. But you know,
it was until I was digging in for this episode specifically,
that I really realized how he was such a huge
influence on so many folks who maybe go down that
(04:04):
path of pure devout Christianity. Or decided to become a monk,
or you know, perhaps join in particular sect or devote
their lives to God in that way. Um So, if
you were someone who was maybe from the church or
did those kinds of studies, I'm sure he would be very,
very familiar to you. I am not that person. Um
So he was not but fascinating guy, really looking forward
(04:27):
to digging into this unsolved mystery and this man's life.
And it should be mentioned that his books sold hundreds
of thousands of copies, and so it wasn't just the church, right,
it was, it was there was a wide audience. Glad. Yeah,
I'm glad you point that out, because, Uh, as you
can tell by the date of death December late nineteen sixties,
(04:50):
we're talking about a peace activist at a time when
peace was considered by some authorities to itself be dangerous proposition. Uh.
This is a time when operations like co and TELL
pro actively monitored, stocked, or harassed various civic leaders, including,
(05:12):
of course, most famously Martin Luther King Jr. And Dr King.
I was just thinking a way to compare this. So
Dr King is if we consider him sort of a
Shakespeare on the level of Shakespeare in the fight for
civil rights in the US. Then you could, uh, you
could conceivably consider Thomas Merton to be a Christopher Marlowe
(05:36):
or Ben Johnson, someone who was also tremendously influential, but
perhaps not as well known today as they were in
their time. So make no mistake whether or not you
have heard of Thomas Murton, and you're gonna hear a
lot about him today. Uh. He he was up there
in the pantheon of anti war active him and his approach,
(06:01):
his strategy was different. But like Dr King, he was
a very well known orator. He was quite a prolific writer.
People came to him for a spiritual and a practical perspective.
So here are the facts. He was born on January
(06:22):
thirty one, nineteen fifty, in France and the Pyrenees, to
two artists, Owen Merton and Ruth Jenkins. Ruth Jenkins was
from the us Ohen Merton was a Kiwi. He was
from New Zealand. They were good parents and Thomas Burton
was a bad kid, that's right. Um. In his time
(06:46):
at Cambridge University during the thirties, he was hard partier.
He essentially dropped out, um, in favor of just kind
of like, you know, hitchhiking, I guess around Europe. He
was in and out of jail, and he eventually he
had a child out of wedlock, which is a big
no no in the in the Christian faith. Um. A
(07:06):
dude named Tom Bennett, who was an old friend of
Thomas's father, Uh, kind of took him under his wing,
but that got old pretty quickly. So he decided he
was done bailing this kid at a jail. Uh, and
you know, floating him money that he was just gonna
blow on booze and you know cheap rent or you know,
(07:27):
hotels and things like that. Um. Not to mention that
he was still having to pay for classes at Cambridge.
I think he didn't drop out officially, He just kind of,
you know, went a wall right then. Yeah, he was.
He was lush, which means disreputable basically. And he was
one of those kids who's kind of traveling on a
(07:47):
benefactor's dime. If you have if you have traveled in
your younger years to various parts of the world, you
have met these people and they can be at times insufferable. Uh.
This is just a growing phase. Yeah, and it is
something important, right, It's it's important for his life that
he went through that. I think that he explored in
(08:10):
that way. It gave him of a perspective on life
that he wouldn't have had if you know, he just
was buttoned up and had whatever you would consider a
standard quiet upbringing. That's a really good point. He saw,
you know, how the other half lived. I guess because
he was the other half. And when I say that,
I don't mean like the privilege necessarily, I kind of
(08:31):
just mean like sinners. He was very much aware of
what it meant to live the life of a of
a quote unquote sinner. So this guy Tom Bennett to
spend a little time on him, I guess, very very
old friend of Owen Merton, and took on the took
on the responsibility of carrying for Thomas, sort of like
(08:51):
Ward Thomas was while and out. Cambridge and several other
universities in the UK have been known for these clubs
that dedicate themselves two decadence revelry. There's even one club
I can't remember the name or the specific institution, uh
(09:11):
that is known for being composed entirely of cartoonishly rich
college students who intentionally wreck restaurants when they go to them,
like just so you know, that's the world in which
this guy is living. Eventually, Tom Bennett has just had
enough and he said, look, dude, you have to get
(09:32):
it together. You have to shape off or ship out
like you are. You are almost twenty years old. You
have a kid. Merton, by the way, never meets this
kid during his lifetime, and you have the rest of
your life and you need to start taking it seriously.
So Merton obviously knows he's never going to graduate Cambridge.
(09:53):
He's burned a lot of bridges candidly in Europe. So
he ships off to New York City q the Salcy
Commercial Lie in January. He's just turned twenty. He applies
to study at Columbia University, and this is where his
life changes. This is a moment he writes about pretty
(10:14):
frequently in uh in his later autobiography. This is where
Catholicism really comes into Thomas Martin's story and into his life.
And while he's at Columbia and not well, I mean
it's a while after what is it six years maybe
after he arrives there, he ends up at the Abbey
(10:35):
of Ghasemine in ninety one, and this is where he
decides to become this thing called a Trappist monk. And
as we said before in the Listener Male episode, you
may have heard that term before just with regards to
a beverage that you enjoy drinking, a bureau perhaps, um,
(10:56):
But this is a this is a lifestyle, a type
of monastic existence. He joined the Order of Cistercians of
the Strict Observance. Huh. Yeah, but you know again, you
can you can see why maybe he would You can
see why maybe he would want to if he got
really touched in his initial journeys into the Catholicism and
(11:20):
thought back on his life, you can maybe imagine like
why he would want to take this route, right. Yeah,
he's sown some wild oats. He feels like his life
experiences have informed his choice, because you know, to join
a monastic order is no small enterprise and it requires
(11:44):
some careful considerations. So he he thought about this closely,
but he didn't ever quite fit in to the idea
of of the Trappist existence, which is pretty communal. I mean,
he wanted to be a poet. Uh. He was out
going to left wing protests and demonstrations. Early on, he
(12:08):
was also fascinated by Eastern religion and studied it extensively,
looking toward commonalities towards us spiritual points of intersection and agreement.
Not too long ago, just a few centuries ago or so.
This is the kind of stuff that would get you
(12:29):
in big trouble with the Catholic Church. Uh. In another
you know, about seven years he has published an autobiography
that propels him to international fame. It is called The
Seven Story Mountain. It's a good read. Candidly if it
is a bit um I don't want to say sensationalistic
(12:54):
or necessarily embellished, like I don't want to say his lying,
but he's styling on it. And later in life, in fact,
Merton would himself kind of kind of distance his present
identity from the the version of him that is the
protagonist of this autobiography. At this point, he's he's into
(13:17):
Buddhism as well, right, yeah, yeah, with the Eastern religions
in general. He's he will go on to correspond with
various religious officials from Eastern religions, uh and and have
these really productive, deep philosophical conversations with them, Like don't
(13:38):
get us wrong, you know. I know there's a little
bit of a stereotype that comes about when we talk
about people who have dedicated their lives to one form
of religion or the next. But this guy seems like
he's really chill and fun to hang out with, Like
he'll talk to you like he is not He hasn't
grown up in a monastery or anything. He was wilding
(13:58):
out not too long ago, you know, and he became
like he lived more life by the time it was
twenty and many people have lived into their thirties or forties.
And I love Ben. They're talking about melding philosophical schools
there in a way, because that's really kind of what
he's doing, is he's letting one inform the other a bit.
(14:20):
But it's it's it's his writing. And specifically that book
was very, very influential on young men returning from World
War Two, right That's and it's because I think and
I'm not a scholar on on this, but I do
think that it's because it felt open, maybe because it
(14:42):
was bringing in concepts from far flowing parts of the world,
uh and melding that philosophy into something that maybe an
individual can see as helpful to them, right, yeah, And
this is also being written in a larger cultural context.
It is the end of World War two. People are
returning from parts of the world they never thought they
(15:03):
would visit, and with them they're bringing cultural artifacts, both
tangible and intangible, so not just physical souvenirs, but belief systems.
And this this is um an ecosystem in which merchant thrives.
He chafes a little bit. It's interesting when you read
about his life. He chafes a little bit under the
(15:25):
authority of the church and the monastery because the Trappist
existence is pretty communal, and as anyone who enjoys, or
maybe a better word is uh is compelled to, right,
it can be kind of a solitary existence. So when
(15:46):
he's writing extensively about concepts like justice, peace, inter faith,
what do we what are we all searching for when
we think of the concept of God? Uh? He eventually
he asked the leaders of the monastery, can I just
be a hermit? Can I just like just give me
a shock. It doesn't have to be in a good
(16:07):
part of the ground. It's just like, let me hang
out and write. And they're like, hey, you know, we
talked about this when you were becoming a monk. We're
we're kind of communal here, but he does he does
get them to kind of, I want to say, make exceptions,
but customize his existence there. So he's always always writing. Uh,
(16:28):
He's got tons of journals. He makes poems, some of
which you can easily read online about political, social concerns
of the day. He's corresponding with a lot of UM.
I guess you could call him liberation theologists in Mexico
and South America, and he they the monastery makes a
(16:49):
deal with them where they say, okay, well, why don't
you become a lecturer and you can lecture um, you
can lecture students, you can lecture younger monks, and then
this beca comes away for him to sit around and write.
If you have ever lived in or known someone who's
lived in a intentional community or a communal lifestyle, what
(17:10):
one of the big things about those communities is distribution
of work. So a lot of them fall apart when
it comes to the nuts and bolts stuff of like, Okay,
we're growing our own food. That's awesome, who's going to
actually grow it? Okay, we're we're self sufficient Uh, you know,
we use fertilizer, who collects the poop? Who drops the
(17:33):
night night soil? And why does the leader of this
group inevitably not have to do any real work. So
this gets controversial, and that's something they have to navigate together.
It reminds me distinctly of a trip that we all
took years ago where we stayed in a communal house
where the boss who was staying with us in the
house inevitably got the largest bedroom. I don't think Matt, Matt,
(17:57):
were you on that trip. I don't think it was.
I don't know what we're referring to. Well, I'm not
going to name names, obviously, but I think Ben, you
know what I'm referring to. I thought you went, but
maybe you stayed in a different house, but maybe you didn't. Okay,
I thought that you guys were there. But anyway, it's
a it's a it's a flex let's just say um.
But Ben, I think it's interesting the idea of a hermitage. Obviously,
(18:21):
that's the name of Thomas Jefferson's home. Um. And you know,
they can refer to a secluded retreat where one can live,
you know, kind of away from society. But it also
literally refers to the dwelling of a hermit, and that
is exactly what he had built for him, or they
accommodated him because of I think probably they saw the
(18:41):
worth of him, the work that he was doing, and
they're like, okay, buddy, we'll make some compromises here for you.
Well yeah, um, guy, royalties. He was bringing money into
that abbey. That's true, especially after seven story Mountain. That
is absolutely true. Yeah, that's a very good point that
and that doesn't necessarily mean the monastery was somehow crooked
(19:04):
or sinister. This was a transparent agreement they had. That's
his contribution, right, I don't have to touch the fertilizer
because royalty checks or or probably phrase something like I
would love to help out, but the elders have instructed
me this is the way I should do it. It's
it's funny because, if anything, this aspect of his life
(19:27):
should be inspiring to a lot of us listening today,
because it just it shows how much you can create.
You listening now, you specifically, it shows how much you
are capable of when you get the time and space
to focus solely on the things you want to create.
That's something that doesn't happen to a lot of people nowadays,
(19:49):
and it is an immense privilege. Uh, this isn't a
perfect life. He does get shut down on some ideas.
He wants to go to Mexico and work with a
first a student and then later a priest that's been
corresponding with, and he's told he he cannot do this,
but he's still pushing to travel. He's got this correspondence
(20:11):
going on with what you could describe as his counterparts
in Asia, monks from other religious orders. And in nineteen
sixty eight, remember that's the first date we dropped in
today's episode ninety eight, he travels to Asia. He's hanging
out at the Red Cross, and he wants to meet
(20:31):
and speak with monks from other religious traditions. If you
look at his writings from this time and leading up
to this time, he often seems to feel that he
and his colleagues are at the cusp of some great
spiritual awakening. Ben, do you think of the leadership in
the order that he was a part of had any
(20:52):
kind of editorial oversight over his work or had to
sign off since it definitely represented them. Yeah, I think
there could be something where they would voice their approval
or disapproval, but maybe not necessarily censorship because he was
very much you know, he was very much sincere in
his spiritual belief so you could argue that he was
(21:14):
kind of self selecting already, but also very outspoken and uh,
potentially very controversial. So I wonder if they maybe you know,
gave him a past knowing that he was bringing at
least attention, whether it good or bad, to their order
and like Matt was saying, those royalty checks, but there
were certainly people that did not care for his uh,
(21:35):
his attitudes and ideas and which we could maybe have
been considered very radical. Um. And on that date that
you mentioned, ben Um in December of nineteen sixty eight,
he was found dead in a suburb of Bangkok in Thailand. Yeah,
about fifteen miles away from Bangkok. He was at a
place called Swan Kanye Wat Red Cross Retreats Center. So
(21:58):
the story goes like this, he's ound dead in his
cottage he has he's sharing rooms with some other folks
will meet in a moment. He was only wearing shorts.
He was officially lying on his back with a short
circuited Hatachi fan across his body. Hatachi fan here is
(22:18):
a brand name of electric floor fan, meaning it stands
like a floor lamp, you know, and it's it's a
few feet high. So there's a lot of controversy. According
to the official report, the original official report from the
Thai government UH the autopsy indicates the following general explanation
(22:43):
for his death. He took a shower after a morning
lecture and he was planning, you know, to have lunch.
He walked out of the shower, slipped, had a basically
a banana peal moment with no banana, and then while
he was falling back words, he grabbed that fan nearby
instinctively to try to steady himself. The fan had a
(23:06):
short circuit and electrocuted him. He had a wound on
the back of his head. It's implied this is from
his skull hitting the floor and then because of the
faulty wiring of the fan he was he received an
enormous electric shock that possibly caused a massive heart attack,
(23:26):
but either way led to his death. It sure seems
like a bit of bet hedging going on in this report,
where it's like, well, if he didn't get killed by
the head wound. Then the fan definitely took him out.
So certainly no foul play here because there were two
absolutely final destination style causes of death that could have
been at play here. So let's just move right along,
shall we. Um, No, let's not. Let's make the episode
(23:53):
because this is weird. Yes it is. Yeah, this is
very weird. They think about if you've read many uh
topsy reports, which is a weird thing to say in
a sentence, but if you've read many of these, than
what you notice is there are things that can be
contributing factors to a cause of death, but there's ultimately
supposed to be one cause of death. It's not a
(24:15):
it's ideally not a multiple choice question, you know. So
this is already sus and that's why. That's why we well,
that's why. Yeah, that's why if you say you do them,
you actually do them. So in a way, this is
the beginning of the story, this moment around three pm,
December tenth. And for the people who don't accept the
(24:41):
various official explanations for Thomas Marton's death, there are a
lot of questions that remain, and we believe these are
troubling questions even decades decades later. What are we talking about.
We'll tell you after a word from our sponsors. Here's
(25:04):
where it gets crazy. Okay, this is this is a
tough one because we're doing this one episode. There can
be much more to this story. We encourage you to
ride along with us for for the rest of this
show and also come back to us with your own
thoughts because we're condensing a lot of information here, and
(25:29):
some of the information is still unavailable to the public,
uh to this day, and we're we're laboring under that constraint.
So we've established some pretty pretty solid stuff about Merton's life,
and so with that, with what we know now, it
might seem first kind of odd to question this guy's death.
You know, who would want to murder a monk? What
(25:50):
danger could a pacifist dedicated to spiritual awakenings posed to anyone?
I mean, it's at first blush it seems weird, right,
it seems like there's so many other people who should
be murdered, you know what I mean. They're serial killers,
there are war criminals. The list goes on, and you
(26:12):
just answered your own question. It's war criminals who fear pacifists. Hey,
they're only criminals if they're caught. Though. Oh, it's true.
I'm just saying, like, to someone who thrives on war
and makes money on war, the pacifists who truly can
reach people's hearts and minds, it's possibly the most dangerous
thing in existence. Yeah, I was thinking that later. It's
(26:35):
it's funny you mentioned that because I had that leader
notes too. I was thinking, you know, the pursuit of
peace can itself to seem to some demographics to be
incredibly dangerous and threatening. I want to continue on this,
and I want to just give two other names and dates,
uh to the conversation here, add them to the mix.
As we're thinking about this and why people may have
(26:56):
fought there was something else to the story. Consider that
we're discussing December tenth, ninety eight, the death of a
path pacifist monk. Consider that in April of that same year,
nineteen sixty eight, Martin Luther King Jr. A pacifist civil
rights leader and church leader, was killed assassinated. And consider
(27:20):
in June of that year, Robert F. Kennedy, a somewhat
pacifist at least pacifist leaning politician, was assassinated. Yeah, and
we know that, you know, the man who killed John
Lennon was likely inspired by obsession and and personal you know,
perceived vendetta. But we also know that John Lennon was
(27:43):
tracked extensively by the FBI, and that dossier's and you know,
files were kept on him for his outspokenness on on
pacifism and uh, you know anti Vietnam views well, and yeah,
and who knows what you believe about how those men
were killed or why they were killed, or you know,
(28:04):
the very stories and theories behind their deaths. It's just
pacifists were dying right right at a time when there
was comparatively little oversight of the actions and capacities of
many factions of governments, not just the US, but the
world's governments. And this is this is exacerbated by the
(28:28):
the the sheer fact that the US is immensely powerful
post World War Two. So if the watchman isn't going
to watch itself, who will? Which sounds cryptic but not
unnecessarily so. And we're raising we're raising good points here.
So it's even possible that Merton may have alluded to
(28:52):
the dangerous nature of his advocacy for peace in his
own work. During his lifetime. You can read some articles
in the Irish Times. They're pretty short, but they they
are dense with information and it one the reporter quotes
his work, a signed confession of Crimes against the State,
in which he writes, in which Merton writes, quote, the
(29:14):
very thoughts of a person like me are crimes against
the state. All I have to do is think, and
immediately I become guilty. Well yeah, right, I thought crime.
But also I think that's something a lot of us
listening in today can identify with in one capacity or another.
And in the years following Merton's death, multiple people came
(29:36):
forward objecting to the story. One guy, Jim Douglas, a
friend of Merton's, raised the issue publicly multiple times. But
he's not the only one. Uh. The people have a
problem with this also include some of the folks who
were there that day that December tenth in this is
(30:00):
something you should remember for the end of this episode.
In twenty sixteen, there's this theologian named Matthew Fox no relation,
I think to the actor from Lost, who had maintained
that Merton was assassinated by CIA agents active in Thailand
at the time. In the late nineteen sixties, and further,
(30:22):
Fox claimed a member of the CIA actually told him
that's what happened. Wait, you might be saying, is this
the end of the episode. No, no, just hold that,
just keep it, keep in the front of your head
or you know, in a little pocket chest. Yeah. Yeah,
put it in your shoe. But put it somewhere where
you can find it, because we're coming back to that.
(30:44):
What we need to point out now, we need to
introduce is for the people who believe that Thomas Murton
was murdered, there is one book that stands above all others.
It is called The Martyrdom of Thomas Murton and Investing Asian.
It's published in so it's it's relatively recent. It's by
(31:05):
two authors, David Martin and Hugh Turley, and they I think,
I said, you know, they walk through circumstances surrounding Marten's demise,
but that's not true. They dive in. This book is
obsessively researched and they poke serious, serious holes in the
official story. And it's a it's a story that they
(31:25):
say they find preposterous. And I'll be honest, if you
read the book, they back it up a hundred percent
you can also see right now. I know there's for
sure one long interview with Hugh Turley. There are several
places where he's spoken about it. I didn't see much
about Martin speaking on it, but I just didn't find
it maybe in my in my search. But you can
(31:47):
hear them discuss it if you're more into the video
format or you want to listen, just if you're if
you're not going to read the book. Yeah, that's somewhere
between like a primary secondary source because it is the
author talking about the book that they wrote. And I
think there's are you talking about the interview on YouTube?
It's about forty five minutes or so. There are several
(32:08):
on there. When Yeah, there's one that you can find.
Just search for Hugh Tarley and Thomas Merton. You'll find it. Yeah.
So here's what here's what the authors are talking about.
In the book. They say there are numerous issues with
both how the story was initially reported, one, how it
(32:29):
was investigated to and how the cause of death became
official three and uh, it gets so in depth so quickly.
They focus on the accounts of several people Merton's colleagues
in the church and at this Red Cross retreat. One
(32:51):
of the folks they focus on is Friar Francois de Groun.
It was the last person known to have been with
Merton when Merton returned to his room after those lectures.
And at this point it is crucial to note the
stories already don't match. From the moment de Gron leaves
(33:15):
Burton and his last person to see him alive, these
stories start to spread and propagate and mutate, and they
contradict each other at almost every imaginable point other than
the fact that there is a man who is dead.
Like take the versions of how to Grund found Burton's
body in the first place, because he's also important to
(33:37):
note he's the last person who saw him alive and
the first person who saw him dead, that's right. And
there are three versions of how the body was found,
how to ground found Merton's body, which kind of again
ties into the whole like sus nature of what was
it the fan and electrocuted him? Did he hit his head?
What's the deal? And there are varying kind of account
(34:00):
so this some of which come directly from the monastery itself,
Like there's a you know, version of the story that
they have then there's the official report. It's all very strange,
but these are the versions of how to Grun potentially
found Merton's body. So one, the police reported that de
Grin heard a suspicious noise around three o'clock in the
afternoon and ran downstairs. Um. They also went on to
(34:22):
report that de Groun went to Merton's room to grab
a key. And then we have a report from father
Celestine Say, who was on site at this Red Cross
you know, what do you call it? Like, I guess compound?
Um he says that Say says that de Grun went
to ask Merton if he wanted to go for a
(34:43):
little swim. And then the authors point out that all
of these stories can't possibly all be true, and in
fact may all be untrue. Um. They conclude that what's
most likely is de Groun didn't go down to see
Morton at all, but instead knocked on father says door, um,
prompting Say to discover Martin's body on the floor. So
(35:06):
this is all we're getting into, some kind of semantic
ee kind of splitting hairs thing that doesn't feel particularly
conspiratorial yet even this point, like, what did these folks
have to gain? In covering this up. It just almost
feels like a case of miscommunication or bad reporting at
this point to me. Um, but we'll we'll go on
to see that it also appears to be something much
(35:28):
more than that. Well, we're gonna get into it. But
a lot of what we know are from official thaie reports,
Thaie sources, right, And these men are English speakers in
Thailand and in dealing with authorities, and those authorities are
then you know there's translation occurring, reports are being made.
(35:48):
I'm I'm wondering if there's anything small there that was
lost in translation. Uh. Right, Well, there's an important issue here,
which is that, Yeah, as the authors pointed out, these
stories cannot all be true, but these folks are interviewed
about what happens the day after the murders, so there's
(36:10):
not enough time for memory to play the treacherous game
of retrieval and reinterpretation, and already witnesses are disagreeing about something.
When you are a witness to a murder, changing your
story just even once is incredible is an incredibly bad
(36:32):
move and avoided if you can, because it makes people
think that you are not telling the truth or you
are unreliable. And both of those things are not a
good look. They're not a they're not a catbird seed exactly.
But we do know there are three men, let me
say they discovered Merton's body. Later we'll find that. Apparently
(36:55):
the grun didn't disage, however, anything wrong with Merton it all.
He just knocked on Say's door and then went off
to tell other people. So these three guys who do
actually go to Merton's room, Otto Hass, Egbert Donovan, who
is in our chapit, and the previously mentioned officials saved
(37:16):
from the Philippines. They walk in and according the reports,
they immediately know this guy is dead and the fan
is still running. Uh. This book, the Martyrdom spends a
lot of time on the fan. And the next few minutes,
so according to this has Soto, Hass reaches out to
move that fan and he gets a shock. Little zippityes
(37:38):
app and say unplugs the fan. This shock, it's important
to note, does not incapacitate Hass. It's it's just enough
to be unpleasant. Uh. And so Hass apparently the guys
recognized something untoward has occurred, and so has says, hey,
(37:58):
you know, say go get your camera. Let's take some
photos so police can see this and probably does that
moment we hear about in film so often don't touch anything, right,
which is also what you should do. You shouldn't touch
anything in a crime scene unless you're trying to cover
up or alter a part of the crime scene. That's
the only reason to touch stuff, you know. It's it's
(38:20):
interesting hearing about this secondary interaction with the fan, because
much a lot has made, you know, much to do
is made about this fan. But I mean to me,
you think you hear about you know, that's almost like
cliche trophy way of committing suicide. The idea of being
in a bath and dropping like a toaster or like,
you know, some sort of electrical appliance like a hair
(38:40):
hair dry or something in it would require some huge
conductive force for that to probably be, you know, enough
to kill you, unless you just absolutely gripped the transformer,
you know, while you were soaking wet. Um. It seems
like an awful lot to to ask for that to
have been the thing that actually killed Merton Um. But
(39:01):
yet a lot of his made of this fan. Yeah, yeah,
especially in the various versions. Again, the various versions of
the official reports, So there is a doctor at the center.
There are a couple of doctors, obviously it is the
Red Cross. One of them is Dr Weist. Dr Weiss
(39:23):
gets word of what that something screwy is happening, and
she is at the scene moments later, as the news
spreads through the retreat and the doctor initially observes a
third degree burn in the upper right abdominal area where
the fans switchbox which where you would turn the fan
(39:43):
on and off, had a mad contact with Merton's skin. Later,
some of those other witnesses, including say will pardon me
for this, say that they did not see any burns. Uh.
The doctor also observes a series of strip like burns
on Merton's right arm, and perhaps most importantly, a quote
(40:06):
bleeding wound on the back of his head. She concludes
that Merton has been electrocuted, and when she does make
that conclusion, she replaces the fan on Merton's body so
that things will quote look as they have been found
for the police. Don't touch anything right to it and
put it right back right exactly. I'm just gonna do.
(40:28):
You can touch it a little bit as a treat,
but this is this is what is happening at this time.
And even though she concludes that electrocution has caused this
guy's death, she's puzzled, and rightly so, because she can't
figure out why had fallen? Had he fainted? Did he
have a dizzy spell? Do you have a heart attack?
(40:49):
Why would she wonder that? Why wouldn't she say that
he like slipped because his feet were wet from coming
out of the shower. Well, it's because the shower itself
that that whole part of the narrative is also seriously
called into question. Yes, at least according to the authors
who wrote the book about the investigation that we've been
(41:11):
talking about here, According to them, that story was invented
Thomas Murton. At least, according to them, there's no evidence
at least that he took a shower, that he was wet,
when when any of this occurred. That story was allegedly
written in nineteen seventy three, several years five years after
(41:33):
his death, and it was written by someone named brother
Patrick Hart, who who was Again I'm only going off
what I learned from that book's contents, But according to
those authors, this person, brother Hart, was a fairly new
secretary to Thomas Murton, or at least fairly newly functioning
(41:55):
secretary to Thomas Merton Um. And for some reason or
an other he wrote in the Asian Journal of Thomas Murton. Uh,
this thing, the story about the shower. Yeah, Patrick Hart
is an interesting character, and the people who believe that
Thomas Murton was murdered do spend a lot of time
(42:18):
on how he propagated what is the dominant narrative of
the death today. And this is one aspect of a
larger problem, which is again the diffusion of story right
and the way in which these stories contradict each other.
So the authors of The Martyrdom don't just allege that
(42:42):
authorities may have bungled this investigation. They say they straight
up manufactured witness statements. And again, you know, you can
find this book online. You can order it from your
bookstore for Amazon. It's freely available. It's not classified or
you know, suppressed her and he thing. But it when
I read it, I thought they made some powerful arguments.
(43:05):
One in particular is that the only statement providing evidence
that bad fan wiring might have immediately killed someone, the
only primary statement is super suspect. It looks fake, It
looks so fake because it doesn't just contain hallmarks of
a falsified police report. It contains the kind of hallmarks
(43:28):
that indicate preferred methods of existing organizations that have falsified
reports in the past. So it's kind of like it's
kind of like if you know someone who takes credit
for something to do, or you're a college professor and
you've had the same ne'er do well student multiple times
(43:48):
in your classes, you can tell, like you know their tricks.
And that's what his authors are saying. They have like
little tells almost there are little signatures almost of you know,
some kind of um nefarious activity. Yeah. So this statement
is supposedly from Otto hass he's the guy who survived
the fan and the name of the surviving the fans
(44:12):
could be the subtitle of this autobiography. And this witness
account has some pretty egregious errors. It doesn't match the
stories of the other witnesses. Uh. In this Otto has
misspells the name of his like the place where he
lives his own religious community in Korea. Uh. The strength
(44:38):
of the shock that he received from the fan is
totally is described totally differently from the way that other
witnesses describe it. Perhaps most importantly, even though this is
a witness statement, it is not signed, it bears no date.
Nobody's exactly sure when it was written, it seems, and
(44:59):
this is the belief of the authors of the Martyrdom.
It seems that this was written as a way to
provide some evidence or some support for the idea that
this guy died by a fan. And there are a
couple of things that we should mention here. They're really important.
So in East Asia and the diaspora there there is
a there's an interesting series of urban legends or common
(45:22):
beliefs about electric fans, and one of those is that
you cannot leave a fan on a night because it
may electrocute you due to wiring, or that it may
was the other one, Matt, I, I remember hearing this,
and I don't know if this is correct, the concept
that you don't leave a fan on because of something
with the air circulation and you may suffocate. I see, Yeah,
(45:47):
so they're already like this. This idea of death by
fan is something that kind of exists in nearby parts
of the world. But also another deal with the fan
that more people pointed out this guy. First off, Merton
if a shower occurred, he had a shared shower, I
(46:08):
think like private bath, shared shower kind of situation. Uh,
and other people would have been walking around this fan.
Also Merton himself, this isn't the first day he got there.
He had touched the fan earlier. So what happened between
the earlier encounters with the fan and the encounter on
December ten. It's a good question. We don't have an
(46:29):
answer there are you know, there are implications in the
book and uh and some other sources that say the
fan may have been tampered with. But even that's tough
because again we have two potential causes of death. Why
were we so snarky about the autopsy, We'll tell you
because the medical investigation that did take place was also
(46:53):
just so bizarrely suspect. That's right. UM. We have an
account from Dr Lusanna Knock Vachara, who was the doctor
that was assisting in the investigation. UM. And and he's
he's mentioned in the book, and according to official sources,
he arrived there on site with the police and he
(47:15):
completed his report on the same day as the death.
I don't know what standard operating procedure is like in Thailand,
But here you don't usually mean you have a coroner
or somebody to you know, declare somebody dead and make
an official record, but typically you wouldn't have that information
(47:37):
available so quickly. The idea of this report came out
the same exact day as the death with no autopsy, um,
before the investigation of the fan itself and you know,
the actual mechanics of the fan um before the interviews
with the witnesses even were taken. UM, no autopsy so
(47:58):
very strange. I mean, that's a big no atop. It's
it's big. But even if even with all of those
other factors, you still do it autopsy. There's not a
situation where you just say, oh, we can skip the autopsy.
That's sort of standard operating procedure, right, Yeah, standard, this
is standard. This is the standard case. No, it's been
in general. Yeah, originally there isn't There is a report
(48:22):
that there is an autopsy, but that turns out not
to uh not not to be the case. And yeah,
this is where we really get into looking at the
official documents that were generated through this hole ordeal and
this the death of Thomas Merton. There are several and
the authors of this investigative book were able to get
these official documents, and they noted that in several places
(48:46):
it says that there was an autopsy, but then there
will be a handwritten note on the back by a
responding officer or by someone a police officer handling the investigation,
saying no, there was no autopsy. Uh. Just very very strange,
right right. It's smacks of people trying to get their
story straight, to be absolutely candid here. So this doctor
(49:10):
uh Nacara concludes again the same day as the death concludes,
cardiac failure has caused accidental falling into the fan, which
is weird because it means that this doctor made those
conclusions before the investigation concluded or before it really began.
(49:34):
They sort of set out with an idea where they say, Okay,
this is what happened. Let's make it look this way again.
If you believe that there's conspiracy of foot this is
troubling for a ton of reasons. Later, Catholic officials on
the scene, multiple Catholic officials on the scene would say
heart failure was a choice of convenience, It was a
(49:55):
less complicated conclusion than electrocution, and even Curtin's official biographer
believes the electrocution angle was downplayed to avoid embarrassing the
Red Cross or the Thai government and Thai officials hosting them,
So that could be one cover up. But how did
(50:16):
Thomas Murton actually die if there is a cover up,
and why do people believe he was murdered? Will tell
you after a word from our sponsor. So let's get
into the theories first. Those authors, Truly and Martin, they
think that Merton was struck in the back of the head,
(50:38):
either by a pointed object or a bullet fired from
a gun fitted with a silencer. People did report hearing
a noise. It's again just like the shower. It's controversially
don't know if it actually happened. And they also believe
his body was later moved or repositioned as the before
the investigation commenced. Uh. They say that Merton was lying
(50:59):
on the floor and originally his legs and arms were
straight and his palms were facing down like you would
put him in a coffin. And you'll remember that the
Benedictine father, Celestine Say who was Filipino, took those photographs
at the crime scene. And they're basing their conclusions on
those photographs with Martin's body laying on the floor, the
(51:20):
fans still on top of his thigh um and reaching
to the opposite side of his lower waist um. Yeah. Yeah,
And this is so things get dicey because these guys
decide to take photographs with says camera because they don't
they want to get the evidence is accurately as possible
(51:42):
before an investigation ensues. They don't know what's going to happen.
They're being on the safe side with this. However, photographs
of the scene have been withheld and the authors of
this book weren't able to get They were able to
view the photographs, but they weren't able to publish them
in their work. It's something really weird happens. So the
(52:04):
abbey in Kentucky, right is Merton's home, and they say,
you know what, we want to have an autopsy done,
and they asked the U. S Embassy for help. In
the U. S Embassy says something really weird. They say, okay, well,
according to the laws of Thailand, if there is an autopsy,
(52:26):
Merton has to be buried in Thailand. And according to
the authors, this is hogwash. This is like an invented
law that someone in the embassy said for some reason.
So instead of having an actual autopsy, which is said
to have occurred in some of the paperwork but never
actually happened, the abbey just flies Merton's body back to
(52:48):
the US along with corpses of American soldiers, and the
police report further doesn't make room to investigate homicide. I
believe there are a total of two lines in the report.
Let's say there were no witnesses who might be suspected
of causing the death. There's no reason to suspect criminal causes.
And that's it. That's it. That's Oh he really persuaded us.
(53:12):
They just said, I don't think about it. Don't think
about that part. So there are a couple of possibilities.
One theory distressingly simple. The local police just messed up,
just bungled the investigation several times. That's absolutely possible, And
that happens even with the best of intentions and even
with competent professionals, working people can make mistakes totally and
(53:33):
doesn't necessarily imply nefarious you know, manipulation of evidence. I mean,
there can just be honest mistakes. Well, but within that theory,
you also have all the other theories that because if
they bungled the investigation, it could have been he did
actually die accidentally, he uh was killed by someone that
they never found and never even searched for. You know,
(53:55):
there's it encompasses all of the things within that one concept. Yeah, exactly.
And then there's another theory. What if the police and
the US government actively covered up a murder, why would
they do that? Well, at the time, the US government
and the Thai government were deep, deep, deep into some
(54:15):
very shady things. Think about it. Thailand's allowing the US
to run bases for bombing raids in Vietnam and Laos
and officially right, unofficial, well, there's in China war. Yeah.
So between nineteen fifty and nineteen seventy five, a lot
of money is changing hands, a ton of money, more
(54:37):
than you might think. Thailand gets around six or fifty
million dollars in economic aid, another nine d fifty million
earmarked just for defense and security. For comparison, nine hundred
fifty million is over fifty percent of Bangkok's own spending
on its armed forces every year during that period. This
doesn't count another seven hundred and sixty million for the
(54:57):
vaguely phrased operating costs, the purchase or subsidized purchase of
military equipment, payment for Thai troops in Vietnam. The list
goes on and on, all at all over a period
of just ten years nineteen sixty five to nineteen seventy five.
That's over two billion dollars in assistance, making Thailand the
second largest recipient of American aid and the entirety of
(55:19):
Southeast Asia, second only, of course to Vietnam. So what
does this all I have to do with this monk
from Kentucky who is just like, hey, maybe let's not
wage war on each other. Uh? Well, he was staunchly
opposed to the Indo China War, and that's the war
that Thailand was actively pursuing with the US. So the
authors here also point out that Thai officials are provably
(55:42):
in bed with the c i A on illegal stuff.
So they're working with Uncle Sam overall for Indo China War.
But along with that, they're doing things like running drugs.
They're doing things like the Phoenix program. Ah, that is
a whole episode on its own, guys, I have we
not done that? We gotta do that. The Phoenix program
(56:05):
is this widely I would say unknown thing that existed
during the Vietnam War. It's also widely misunderstood, and my goodness,
if you read official CIA documentation or people writing for
the CIA about it, you're going to get a very
different picture than what you'll read from people writing about
(56:25):
it outside of the CIA. And as is per usual,
I suppose, but it was it was either an assassination program,
if you want to call it that, but I think
that's oversimplifying it. It was it was a system of
infiltrating UH, Vietcong networks as well as attempting to identify
(56:45):
those networks and individuals who are who are either on
the military side or just the civilian side. Uh. And
they operated not just in Vietnam, right exactly. Yeah, you
know what, let's do a Phoenix Program episode. It will
be worth it, and it has ramifications they continue in
the modern day. Yeah, I agreed. And you know what
(57:06):
they did in the Phoenix Program when they caught someone,
they tortured them. Fun. But you know what I'm thinking about, guys,
the marks on his arm, the burns on his arm,
as well as the burn on his chest, as though
maybe possibly Thomas Marton was tortured with elextrocution, the ones
(57:26):
that were blamed on this, uh, this fan that was
so important in the case, no evidence, no evidence for that,
just putting it out there. Good torture though, I effective torture,
I would say it takes time. So if they were
doing that kind of torture, that would just be purely
sadism on the part of the assailants. But uh, but
you know it, it's a point that needs to be made.
(57:48):
The CIA has manuals on assassination, and if you read them,
if you read them or leaked a while back, then
you will see that, by far, the most preferred method
for quietly removing someone from the chessboard is to make
it look like an accident. That's why Frank Wilson fell.
(58:10):
That's why this guy calling people who believe he's murdered.
That's why he suddenly ran into a dangerous fan that
was totally fine for days before. You wanted to look
like an accident. So this this stuff with the CIA,
aside from Phoenix Program, you know there was an illicit
drug business. Well we'll talk about that in Phoenix Program
(58:31):
as well. This led the authors um Turley and Martin
to say that helping dispose of a nettlesome monk who
was interfering with the war effort would have been little
more than routine business for the CIA, because they were
actually closer with Thai police forces than they were with
(58:53):
the overall Thai government. That was more of an Uncle
Sam kind of thing. But the CIA was down in
the trenches. The issue is that this isn't hard evidence.
They have a pretty good point. When they knew that
the CIA had easily targeted Martin, and if it had
targeted him for assassination, it could have reasonably assumed allies
(59:15):
in the Thai police force would help facilitate that and
they would help cover up any loose ends in the aftermath.
Later investigations do verify. They confirmed that Merton, like many
other peace activists, as you have mentioned earlier, he was
on a CIA watch list. His mail was monitored and
at times illegally intercepted. The FBI was watching as well.
(59:36):
A group calling itself the Catholic Concerned Citizens had written
to Kentucky state legislatures asking them to declare Merton a
dangerous radical. They forwarded it to the CIA, and the
CIA was like, oh yeah, no, we're on it. We're
watching this guy already. Have you read his book The
Seven Story Mountain. It's actually pretty good anyway. That's how
(59:58):
they were talking. Uh so, and the ends there's a dilemma.
That's why we said this is unsolved. The authors lay
out a convincing case that multiple parts of this investigation
were either bungled or purposefully misleading, and they don't provide
hard proof that the CIA killed Merton to eliminate his
(01:00:18):
anti war activities, but they do point to numerous examples
of CIA assassinations, assassination attempts, and stalking. Perhaps it's best
for for you to look into the front of your mind,
check your shoe, check that pocket we mentioned where you
remembered the statements of Matthew Fox, who straight up says
(01:00:41):
the CIA confirmed Merton was murdered. In his opinion, they
confirmed it. It's important to note that because if you
look at the Thomas Murton Society again this is available
online as well, you'll see that Matthew Fox actually spoke
to three CIA agents, not one the two the first
(01:01:01):
two we spoke with were in Southeast Asia at the
time of Merton's death, not at the Red Cross Center
at least as far as we know. Uh. Fox had
asked them straight up, he said, did you guys kill
Thomas Murton? And the first replied, I will neither affirm
nor deny it, which is a standard it's a standard
spy answer. Uh. The second said, you know, man, we
(01:01:25):
had so much money at the time, we had no
accountability whatsoever. If any CIA agent felt Merton was a
threat to the country, they could have just had him killed,
no questions asked. It would like it wouldn't have been
a big deal, which is somehow even more terrified than
saying yeah, we did it. We carefully planned it because
(01:01:46):
you don't want to get caught. It's more like it
makes it sound like a four thirty on a Friday decision,
like you know what, while we're here, I know, while
we're here, let's just get it knocked out. You ask, hey, yeah,
could you have killed him? Sure? I don't know, I
mean maybe you know it was a wild time, that's crazy. Yeah, yeah,
(01:02:08):
And and and it should be frightening to people because
that is an answer reflecting the reality of that of
that era. So then later Fox meets a third CIA
agent ask him again just point link, did you guys
kill Thomas Merton, and the agent said the following. Yes,
(01:02:28):
The agent replied, adding the last forty years of my
life I have been cleansing my soul from the actions
I was involved in in the name of the CIA
in Southeast Asia as a young man. I'm sorry, I
didn't mean to laugh. I just have a hard time
believing that a CI agent would ever say anything like this. Well, yeah,
you you have to believe, Matthew Fox, that this actually occurred.
(01:02:52):
It's there's no signed affid David from that quote CIA
officer who said those things, right, But if it's true
somebody feels bad about doing something terrible, it's tough that
that's what this whole story is, right, there's and I
think that's what the what the authors of the book
would say. There's not enough information to conclusively say. We
(01:03:16):
just have a lot of questions still right, and we
know there's opportunity and capability, but that doesn't necessarily mean
that these events happened. And that's that's where we leave
it today. Honestly, for Fox, that emission was proof that
the CIA killed Thomas Murton, and it prompted him to
say Merton died a martyr for peace, as did his
(01:03:38):
friend Dr Martin Luther King Jr. At the hands of
the US government. It hasn't been proven yet, but just
looking at the investigation, it is riddled with problems. And
at this point we want to hear from you. We
want to hear what you think happened to Thomas Murton
was just just well intentioned bung leaning of a case.
(01:04:01):
Was there something more insidious at play? And if so,
do you agree with the author's idea of the culprit.
On a personal note, uh with his travel stuff. I
think I'm gonna be I think I'm gonna view on
the East Coast for a while. I've had some I've
had some weird personal times. But I wanted to thank
(01:04:23):
everybody who took the time to support the show and
took the time to drop a little note my way
or a exciting lead to a future episode. So thank
you all so much. Also, if you know about a
another assassination or assassination conspiracy that deserves more attention investigation,
(01:04:44):
and we'd love to hear from you. We try to
make it easy to find us online and we are
absolutely easy to find and all the usual Internet places
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(01:05:08):
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Is that right, guys? Yes? Okay, cool. Let's see the
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(01:05:31):
a bridge too far? Yes, give yourself one of those.
It'll be fun for everybody. You've got three minutes say
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(01:06:00):
M M M. Stuff they Don't want you to know
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From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
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(00:25):
My name is Max, my name is Noel. They call
me Ben. We're joined as always with our super producer Paul,
mission controlled decads. Most importantly, you are you. You are here,
and that makes this the stuff they don't want you
to know. I have returned, fortunately here to our fair
metropolis of Atlanta. It's at least for the time beaten.
(00:49):
It's very good to see you, guys, and I can't
wait to dive into your mysterious adventures in the Pacific.
The mysterious adventures of a guy who was uh in
the in the Pacific area when he died. That's it's
(01:11):
like the pawn shop meme Matt that that was my
best I can do as answer. Uh. So, here we
are looking at a story we I think we all
learned about in an earlier Listener Male segment, The Strange
Bizarre Tale of a fellow named Thomas Merton H M
E R T O N. For a lot of folks
(01:33):
today this may be an unfamiliar case. This guy was
a monk, an author, a peace activist. Uh. He could
rightly be called a mystic. He was perhaps most well
known for his inter faith studies. He was also known
for his work in social justice. And there's there's a
(01:56):
huge genre you could call it, of holy figures working
in the realm of social justice. And when we say
social justice, we don't mean the internet meme of an
s JW or social justice warrior. What we mean is
people who are fighting against far right governments, they're fighting
(02:18):
against big corporations. They're trying to do what they feel
is the most holy or in Marten's case, the most
Christian thing to do, which is to stick up for
people who cannot stick up for themselves. And he did
this through pacifism, through writing. He wasn't a warrior monk
in the physical sense, is what we're saying. Uh. He
(02:41):
also spoke a lot too, in front of many people.
And he wrote a lot too. And he had like
dozens of books that he wrote in a pretty short
amount of time relatively speaking. Yeah, yep, he was a
prolific author. He originally wanted to be a poet. Uh.
In just the space of twenty seven years, less than
thirty years, he wrote more than fifty books, and in
(03:01):
December of nineteen he was found dead. This created a
mystery that, according to multiple sources, remains unsolved in the
present day. And before we begin, uh, I wanted to
ask you all, prior to that piece of listener mail
we received from fellow conspiracy realists, had any of us
(03:23):
ever heard of Thomas Merton. The name was immediately familiar
to me when I read it when I just saw
it on an email, but I could not place it anywhere.
But after or after literally searching it on Google for
a second, you see his face and I know I
have encountered him before, but I was you know, it
(03:43):
wasn't like I had a bunch of things stored from
him in my mind. No, I felt the same way
he does. He does have a look to him done,
and he's got a certain twinkle in his eye that
like has some recognition for me as well. But you know,
it was until I was digging in for this episode specifically,
that I really realized how he was such a huge
influence on so many folks who maybe go down that
(04:04):
path of pure devout Christianity. Or decided to become a monk,
or you know, perhaps join in particular sect or devote
their lives to God in that way. Um So, if
you were someone who was maybe from the church or
did those kinds of studies, I'm sure he would be very,
very familiar to you. I am not that person. Um
So he was not but fascinating guy, really looking forward
(04:27):
to digging into this unsolved mystery and this man's life.
And it should be mentioned that his books sold hundreds
of thousands of copies, and so it wasn't just the church, right,
it was, it was there was a wide audience. Glad. Yeah,
I'm glad you point that out, because, Uh, as you
can tell by the date of death December late nineteen sixties,
(04:50):
we're talking about a peace activist at a time when
peace was considered by some authorities to itself be dangerous proposition. Uh.
This is a time when operations like co and TELL
pro actively monitored, stocked, or harassed various civic leaders, including,
(05:12):
of course, most famously Martin Luther King Jr. And Dr King.
I was just thinking a way to compare this. So
Dr King is if we consider him sort of a
Shakespeare on the level of Shakespeare in the fight for
civil rights in the US. Then you could, uh, you
could conceivably consider Thomas Merton to be a Christopher Marlowe
(05:36):
or Ben Johnson, someone who was also tremendously influential, but
perhaps not as well known today as they were in
their time. So make no mistake whether or not you
have heard of Thomas Murton, and you're gonna hear a
lot about him today. Uh. He he was up there
in the pantheon of anti war active him and his approach,
(06:01):
his strategy was different. But like Dr King, he was
a very well known orator. He was quite a prolific writer.
People came to him for a spiritual and a practical perspective.
So here are the facts. He was born on January
(06:22):
thirty one, nineteen fifty, in France and the Pyrenees, to
two artists, Owen Merton and Ruth Jenkins. Ruth Jenkins was
from the us Ohen Merton was a Kiwi. He was
from New Zealand. They were good parents and Thomas Burton
was a bad kid, that's right. Um. In his time
(06:46):
at Cambridge University during the thirties, he was hard partier.
He essentially dropped out, um, in favor of just kind
of like, you know, hitchhiking, I guess around Europe. He
was in and out of jail, and he eventually he
had a child out of wedlock, which is a big
no no in the in the Christian faith. Um. A
(07:06):
dude named Tom Bennett, who was an old friend of
Thomas's father, Uh, kind of took him under his wing,
but that got old pretty quickly. So he decided he
was done bailing this kid at a jail. Uh, and
you know, floating him money that he was just gonna
blow on booze and you know cheap rent or you know,
(07:27):
hotels and things like that. Um. Not to mention that
he was still having to pay for classes at Cambridge.
I think he didn't drop out officially, He just kind of,
you know, went a wall right then. Yeah, he was.
He was lush, which means disreputable basically. And he was
one of those kids who's kind of traveling on a
(07:47):
benefactor's dime. If you have if you have traveled in
your younger years to various parts of the world, you
have met these people and they can be at times insufferable. Uh.
This is just a growing phase. Yeah, and it is
something important, right, It's it's important for his life that
he went through that. I think that he explored in
(08:10):
that way. It gave him of a perspective on life
that he wouldn't have had if you know, he just
was buttoned up and had whatever you would consider a
standard quiet upbringing. That's a really good point. He saw,
you know, how the other half lived. I guess because
he was the other half. And when I say that,
I don't mean like the privilege necessarily, I kind of
(08:31):
just mean like sinners. He was very much aware of
what it meant to live the life of a of
a quote unquote sinner. So this guy Tom Bennett to
spend a little time on him, I guess, very very
old friend of Owen Merton, and took on the took
on the responsibility of carrying for Thomas, sort of like
(08:51):
Ward Thomas was while and out. Cambridge and several other
universities in the UK have been known for these clubs
that dedicate themselves two decadence revelry. There's even one club
I can't remember the name or the specific institution, uh
(09:11):
that is known for being composed entirely of cartoonishly rich
college students who intentionally wreck restaurants when they go to them,
like just so you know, that's the world in which
this guy is living. Eventually, Tom Bennett has just had
enough and he said, look, dude, you have to get
(09:32):
it together. You have to shape off or ship out
like you are. You are almost twenty years old. You
have a kid. Merton, by the way, never meets this
kid during his lifetime, and you have the rest of
your life and you need to start taking it seriously.
So Merton obviously knows he's never going to graduate Cambridge.
(09:53):
He's burned a lot of bridges candidly in Europe. So
he ships off to New York City q the Salcy
Commercial Lie in January. He's just turned twenty. He applies
to study at Columbia University, and this is where his
life changes. This is a moment he writes about pretty
(10:14):
frequently in uh in his later autobiography. This is where
Catholicism really comes into Thomas Martin's story and into his life.
And while he's at Columbia and not well, I mean
it's a while after what is it six years maybe
after he arrives there, he ends up at the Abbey
(10:35):
of Ghasemine in ninety one, and this is where he
decides to become this thing called a Trappist monk. And
as we said before in the Listener Male episode, you
may have heard that term before just with regards to
a beverage that you enjoy drinking, a bureau perhaps, um,
(10:56):
But this is a this is a lifestyle, a type
of monastic existence. He joined the Order of Cistercians of
the Strict Observance. Huh. Yeah, but you know again, you
can you can see why maybe he would You can
see why maybe he would want to if he got
really touched in his initial journeys into the Catholicism and
(11:20):
thought back on his life, you can maybe imagine like
why he would want to take this route, right. Yeah,
he's sown some wild oats. He feels like his life
experiences have informed his choice, because you know, to join
a monastic order is no small enterprise and it requires
(11:44):
some careful considerations. So he he thought about this closely,
but he didn't ever quite fit in to the idea
of of the Trappist existence, which is pretty communal. I mean,
he wanted to be a poet. Uh. He was out
going to left wing protests and demonstrations. Early on, he
(12:08):
was also fascinated by Eastern religion and studied it extensively,
looking toward commonalities towards us spiritual points of intersection and agreement.
Not too long ago, just a few centuries ago or so.
This is the kind of stuff that would get you
(12:29):
in big trouble with the Catholic Church. Uh. In another
you know, about seven years he has published an autobiography
that propels him to international fame. It is called The
Seven Story Mountain. It's a good read. Candidly if it
is a bit um I don't want to say sensationalistic
(12:54):
or necessarily embellished, like I don't want to say his lying,
but he's styling on it. And later in life, in fact,
Merton would himself kind of kind of distance his present
identity from the the version of him that is the
protagonist of this autobiography. At this point, he's he's into
(13:17):
Buddhism as well, right, yeah, yeah, with the Eastern religions
in general. He's he will go on to correspond with
various religious officials from Eastern religions, uh and and have
these really productive, deep philosophical conversations with them, Like don't
(13:38):
get us wrong, you know. I know there's a little
bit of a stereotype that comes about when we talk
about people who have dedicated their lives to one form
of religion or the next. But this guy seems like
he's really chill and fun to hang out with, Like
he'll talk to you like he is not He hasn't
grown up in a monastery or anything. He was wilding
(13:58):
out not too long ago, you know, and he became
like he lived more life by the time it was
twenty and many people have lived into their thirties or forties.
And I love Ben. They're talking about melding philosophical schools
there in a way, because that's really kind of what
he's doing, is he's letting one inform the other a bit.
(14:20):
But it's it's it's his writing. And specifically that book
was very, very influential on young men returning from World
War Two, right That's and it's because I think and
I'm not a scholar on on this, but I do
think that it's because it felt open, maybe because it
(14:42):
was bringing in concepts from far flowing parts of the world,
uh and melding that philosophy into something that maybe an
individual can see as helpful to them, right, yeah, And
this is also being written in a larger cultural context.
It is the end of World War two. People are
returning from parts of the world they never thought they
(15:03):
would visit, and with them they're bringing cultural artifacts, both
tangible and intangible, so not just physical souvenirs, but belief systems.
And this this is um an ecosystem in which merchant thrives.
He chafes a little bit. It's interesting when you read
about his life. He chafes a little bit under the
(15:25):
authority of the church and the monastery because the Trappist
existence is pretty communal, and as anyone who enjoys, or
maybe a better word is uh is compelled to, right,
it can be kind of a solitary existence. So when
(15:46):
he's writing extensively about concepts like justice, peace, inter faith,
what do we what are we all searching for when
we think of the concept of God? Uh? He eventually
he asked the leaders of the monastery, can I just
be a hermit? Can I just like just give me
a shock. It doesn't have to be in a good
(16:07):
part of the ground. It's just like, let me hang
out and write. And they're like, hey, you know, we
talked about this when you were becoming a monk. We're
we're kind of communal here, but he does he does
get them to kind of, I want to say, make exceptions,
but customize his existence there. So he's always always writing. Uh,
(16:28):
He's got tons of journals. He makes poems, some of
which you can easily read online about political, social concerns
of the day. He's corresponding with a lot of UM.
I guess you could call him liberation theologists in Mexico
and South America, and he they the monastery makes a
(16:49):
deal with them where they say, okay, well, why don't
you become a lecturer and you can lecture um, you
can lecture students, you can lecture younger monks, and then
this beca comes away for him to sit around and write.
If you have ever lived in or known someone who's
lived in a intentional community or a communal lifestyle, what
(17:10):
one of the big things about those communities is distribution
of work. So a lot of them fall apart when
it comes to the nuts and bolts stuff of like, Okay,
we're growing our own food. That's awesome, who's going to
actually grow it? Okay, we're we're self sufficient Uh, you know,
we use fertilizer, who collects the poop? Who drops the
(17:33):
night night soil? And why does the leader of this
group inevitably not have to do any real work. So
this gets controversial, and that's something they have to navigate together.
It reminds me distinctly of a trip that we all
took years ago where we stayed in a communal house
where the boss who was staying with us in the
house inevitably got the largest bedroom. I don't think Matt, Matt,
(17:57):
were you on that trip. I don't think it was.
I don't know what we're referring to. Well, I'm not
going to name names, obviously, but I think Ben, you
know what I'm referring to. I thought you went, but
maybe you stayed in a different house, but maybe you didn't. Okay,
I thought that you guys were there. But anyway, it's
a it's a it's a flex let's just say um.
But Ben, I think it's interesting the idea of a hermitage. Obviously,
(18:21):
that's the name of Thomas Jefferson's home. Um. And you know,
they can refer to a secluded retreat where one can live,
you know, kind of away from society. But it also
literally refers to the dwelling of a hermit, and that
is exactly what he had built for him, or they
accommodated him because of I think probably they saw the
(18:41):
worth of him, the work that he was doing, and
they're like, okay, buddy, we'll make some compromises here for you.
Well yeah, um, guy, royalties. He was bringing money into
that abbey. That's true, especially after seven story Mountain. That
is absolutely true. Yeah, that's a very good point that
and that doesn't necessarily mean the monastery was somehow crooked
(19:04):
or sinister. This was a transparent agreement they had. That's
his contribution, right, I don't have to touch the fertilizer
because royalty checks or or probably phrase something like I
would love to help out, but the elders have instructed
me this is the way I should do it. It's
it's funny because, if anything, this aspect of his life
(19:27):
should be inspiring to a lot of us listening today,
because it just it shows how much you can create.
You listening now, you specifically, it shows how much you
are capable of when you get the time and space
to focus solely on the things you want to create.
That's something that doesn't happen to a lot of people nowadays,
(19:49):
and it is an immense privilege. Uh, this isn't a
perfect life. He does get shut down on some ideas.
He wants to go to Mexico and work with a
first a student and then later a priest that's been
corresponding with, and he's told he he cannot do this,
but he's still pushing to travel. He's got this correspondence
(20:11):
going on with what you could describe as his counterparts
in Asia, monks from other religious orders. And in nineteen
sixty eight, remember that's the first date we dropped in
today's episode ninety eight, he travels to Asia. He's hanging
out at the Red Cross, and he wants to meet
(20:31):
and speak with monks from other religious traditions. If you
look at his writings from this time and leading up
to this time, he often seems to feel that he
and his colleagues are at the cusp of some great
spiritual awakening. Ben, do you think of the leadership in
the order that he was a part of had any
(20:52):
kind of editorial oversight over his work or had to
sign off since it definitely represented them. Yeah, I think
there could be something where they would voice their approval
or disapproval, but maybe not necessarily censorship because he was
very much you know, he was very much sincere in
his spiritual belief so you could argue that he was
(21:14):
kind of self selecting already, but also very outspoken and uh,
potentially very controversial. So I wonder if they maybe you know,
gave him a past knowing that he was bringing at
least attention, whether it good or bad, to their order
and like Matt was saying, those royalty checks, but there
were certainly people that did not care for his uh,
(21:35):
his attitudes and ideas and which we could maybe have
been considered very radical. Um. And on that date that
you mentioned, ben Um in December of nineteen sixty eight,
he was found dead in a suburb of Bangkok in Thailand. Yeah,
about fifteen miles away from Bangkok. He was at a
place called Swan Kanye Wat Red Cross Retreats Center. So
(21:58):
the story goes like this, he's ound dead in his
cottage he has he's sharing rooms with some other folks
will meet in a moment. He was only wearing shorts.
He was officially lying on his back with a short
circuited Hatachi fan across his body. Hatachi fan here is
(22:18):
a brand name of electric floor fan, meaning it stands
like a floor lamp, you know, and it's it's a
few feet high. So there's a lot of controversy. According
to the official report, the original official report from the
Thai government UH the autopsy indicates the following general explanation
(22:43):
for his death. He took a shower after a morning
lecture and he was planning, you know, to have lunch.
He walked out of the shower, slipped, had a basically
a banana peal moment with no banana, and then while
he was falling back words, he grabbed that fan nearby
instinctively to try to steady himself. The fan had a
(23:06):
short circuit and electrocuted him. He had a wound on
the back of his head. It's implied this is from
his skull hitting the floor and then because of the
faulty wiring of the fan he was he received an
enormous electric shock that possibly caused a massive heart attack,
(23:26):
but either way led to his death. It sure seems
like a bit of bet hedging going on in this report,
where it's like, well, if he didn't get killed by
the head wound. Then the fan definitely took him out.
So certainly no foul play here because there were two
absolutely final destination style causes of death that could have
been at play here. So let's just move right along,
shall we. Um, No, let's not. Let's make the episode
(23:53):
because this is weird. Yes it is. Yeah, this is
very weird. They think about if you've read many uh
topsy reports, which is a weird thing to say in
a sentence, but if you've read many of these, than
what you notice is there are things that can be
contributing factors to a cause of death, but there's ultimately
supposed to be one cause of death. It's not a
(24:15):
it's ideally not a multiple choice question, you know. So
this is already sus and that's why. That's why we well,
that's why. Yeah, that's why if you say you do them,
you actually do them. So in a way, this is
the beginning of the story, this moment around three pm,
December tenth. And for the people who don't accept the
(24:41):
various official explanations for Thomas Marton's death, there are a
lot of questions that remain, and we believe these are
troubling questions even decades decades later. What are we talking about.
We'll tell you after a word from our sponsors. Here's
(25:04):
where it gets crazy. Okay, this is this is a
tough one because we're doing this one episode. There can
be much more to this story. We encourage you to
ride along with us for for the rest of this
show and also come back to us with your own
thoughts because we're condensing a lot of information here, and
(25:29):
some of the information is still unavailable to the public,
uh to this day, and we're we're laboring under that constraint.
So we've established some pretty pretty solid stuff about Merton's life,
and so with that, with what we know now, it
might seem first kind of odd to question this guy's death.
You know, who would want to murder a monk? What
(25:50):
danger could a pacifist dedicated to spiritual awakenings posed to anyone?
I mean, it's at first blush it seems weird, right,
it seems like there's so many other people who should
be murdered, you know what I mean. They're serial killers,
there are war criminals. The list goes on, and you
(26:12):
just answered your own question. It's war criminals who fear pacifists. Hey,
they're only criminals if they're caught. Though. Oh, it's true.
I'm just saying, like, to someone who thrives on war
and makes money on war, the pacifists who truly can
reach people's hearts and minds, it's possibly the most dangerous
thing in existence. Yeah, I was thinking that later. It's
(26:35):
it's funny you mentioned that because I had that leader
notes too. I was thinking, you know, the pursuit of
peace can itself to seem to some demographics to be
incredibly dangerous and threatening. I want to continue on this,
and I want to just give two other names and dates,
uh to the conversation here, add them to the mix.
As we're thinking about this and why people may have
(26:56):
fought there was something else to the story. Consider that
we're discussing December tenth, ninety eight, the death of a
path pacifist monk. Consider that in April of that same year,
nineteen sixty eight, Martin Luther King Jr. A pacifist civil
rights leader and church leader, was killed assassinated. And consider
(27:20):
in June of that year, Robert F. Kennedy, a somewhat
pacifist at least pacifist leaning politician, was assassinated. Yeah, and
we know that, you know, the man who killed John
Lennon was likely inspired by obsession and and personal you know,
perceived vendetta. But we also know that John Lennon was
(27:43):
tracked extensively by the FBI, and that dossier's and you know,
files were kept on him for his outspokenness on on
pacifism and uh, you know anti Vietnam views well, and yeah,
and who knows what you believe about how those men
were killed or why they were killed, or you know,
(28:04):
the very stories and theories behind their deaths. It's just
pacifists were dying right right at a time when there
was comparatively little oversight of the actions and capacities of
many factions of governments, not just the US, but the
world's governments. And this is this is exacerbated by the
(28:28):
the the sheer fact that the US is immensely powerful
post World War Two. So if the watchman isn't going
to watch itself, who will? Which sounds cryptic but not
unnecessarily so. And we're raising we're raising good points here.
So it's even possible that Merton may have alluded to
(28:52):
the dangerous nature of his advocacy for peace in his
own work. During his lifetime. You can read some articles
in the Irish Times. They're pretty short, but they they
are dense with information and it one the reporter quotes
his work, a signed confession of Crimes against the State,
in which he writes, in which Merton writes, quote, the
(29:14):
very thoughts of a person like me are crimes against
the state. All I have to do is think, and
immediately I become guilty. Well yeah, right, I thought crime.
But also I think that's something a lot of us
listening in today can identify with in one capacity or another.
And in the years following Merton's death, multiple people came
(29:36):
forward objecting to the story. One guy, Jim Douglas, a
friend of Merton's, raised the issue publicly multiple times. But
he's not the only one. Uh. The people have a
problem with this also include some of the folks who
were there that day that December tenth in this is
(30:00):
something you should remember for the end of this episode.
In twenty sixteen, there's this theologian named Matthew Fox no relation,
I think to the actor from Lost, who had maintained
that Merton was assassinated by CIA agents active in Thailand
at the time. In the late nineteen sixties, and further,
(30:22):
Fox claimed a member of the CIA actually told him
that's what happened. Wait, you might be saying, is this
the end of the episode. No, no, just hold that,
just keep it, keep in the front of your head
or you know, in a little pocket chest. Yeah. Yeah,
put it in your shoe. But put it somewhere where
you can find it, because we're coming back to that.
(30:44):
What we need to point out now, we need to
introduce is for the people who believe that Thomas Murton
was murdered, there is one book that stands above all others.
It is called The Martyrdom of Thomas Murton and Investing Asian.
It's published in so it's it's relatively recent. It's by
(31:05):
two authors, David Martin and Hugh Turley, and they I think,
I said, you know, they walk through circumstances surrounding Marten's demise,
but that's not true. They dive in. This book is
obsessively researched and they poke serious, serious holes in the
official story. And it's a it's a story that they
(31:25):
say they find preposterous. And I'll be honest, if you
read the book, they back it up a hundred percent
you can also see right now. I know there's for
sure one long interview with Hugh Turley. There are several
places where he's spoken about it. I didn't see much
about Martin speaking on it, but I just didn't find
it maybe in my in my search. But you can
(31:47):
hear them discuss it if you're more into the video
format or you want to listen, just if you're if
you're not going to read the book. Yeah, that's somewhere
between like a primary secondary source because it is the
author talking about the book that they wrote. And I
think there's are you talking about the interview on YouTube?
It's about forty five minutes or so. There are several
(32:08):
on there. When Yeah, there's one that you can find.
Just search for Hugh Tarley and Thomas Merton. You'll find it. Yeah.
So here's what here's what the authors are talking about.
In the book. They say there are numerous issues with
both how the story was initially reported, one, how it
(32:29):
was investigated to and how the cause of death became
official three and uh, it gets so in depth so quickly.
They focus on the accounts of several people Merton's colleagues
in the church and at this Red Cross retreat. One
(32:51):
of the folks they focus on is Friar Francois de Groun.
It was the last person known to have been with
Merton when Merton returned to his room after those lectures.
And at this point it is crucial to note the
stories already don't match. From the moment de Gron leaves
(33:15):
Burton and his last person to see him alive, these
stories start to spread and propagate and mutate, and they
contradict each other at almost every imaginable point other than
the fact that there is a man who is dead.
Like take the versions of how to Grund found Burton's
body in the first place, because he's also important to
(33:37):
note he's the last person who saw him alive and
the first person who saw him dead, that's right. And
there are three versions of how the body was found,
how to ground found Merton's body, which kind of again
ties into the whole like sus nature of what was
it the fan and electrocuted him? Did he hit his head?
What's the deal? And there are varying kind of account
(34:00):
so this some of which come directly from the monastery itself,
Like there's a you know, version of the story that
they have then there's the official report. It's all very strange,
but these are the versions of how to Grun potentially
found Merton's body. So one, the police reported that de
Grin heard a suspicious noise around three o'clock in the
afternoon and ran downstairs. Um. They also went on to
(34:22):
report that de Groun went to Merton's room to grab
a key. And then we have a report from father
Celestine Say, who was on site at this Red Cross
you know, what do you call it? Like, I guess compound?
Um he says that Say says that de Grun went
to ask Merton if he wanted to go for a
(34:43):
little swim. And then the authors point out that all
of these stories can't possibly all be true, and in
fact may all be untrue. Um. They conclude that what's
most likely is de Groun didn't go down to see
Morton at all, but instead knocked on father says door, um,
prompting Say to discover Martin's body on the floor. So
(35:06):
this is all we're getting into, some kind of semantic
ee kind of splitting hairs thing that doesn't feel particularly
conspiratorial yet even this point, like, what did these folks
have to gain? In covering this up. It just almost
feels like a case of miscommunication or bad reporting at
this point to me. Um, but we'll we'll go on
to see that it also appears to be something much
(35:28):
more than that. Well, we're gonna get into it. But
a lot of what we know are from official thaie reports,
Thaie sources, right, And these men are English speakers in
Thailand and in dealing with authorities, and those authorities are
then you know there's translation occurring, reports are being made.
(35:48):
I'm I'm wondering if there's anything small there that was
lost in translation. Uh. Right, Well, there's an important issue here,
which is that, Yeah, as the authors pointed out, these
stories cannot all be true, but these folks are interviewed
about what happens the day after the murders, so there's
(36:10):
not enough time for memory to play the treacherous game
of retrieval and reinterpretation, and already witnesses are disagreeing about something.
When you are a witness to a murder, changing your
story just even once is incredible is an incredibly bad
(36:32):
move and avoided if you can, because it makes people
think that you are not telling the truth or you
are unreliable. And both of those things are not a
good look. They're not a they're not a catbird seed exactly.
But we do know there are three men, let me
say they discovered Merton's body. Later we'll find that. Apparently
(36:55):
the grun didn't disage, however, anything wrong with Merton it all.
He just knocked on Say's door and then went off
to tell other people. So these three guys who do
actually go to Merton's room, Otto Hass, Egbert Donovan, who
is in our chapit, and the previously mentioned officials saved
(37:16):
from the Philippines. They walk in and according the reports,
they immediately know this guy is dead and the fan
is still running. Uh. This book, the Martyrdom spends a
lot of time on the fan. And the next few minutes,
so according to this has Soto, Hass reaches out to
move that fan and he gets a shock. Little zippityes
(37:38):
app and say unplugs the fan. This shock, it's important
to note, does not incapacitate Hass. It's it's just enough
to be unpleasant. Uh. And so Hass apparently the guys
recognized something untoward has occurred, and so has says, hey,
(37:58):
you know, say go get your camera. Let's take some
photos so police can see this and probably does that
moment we hear about in film so often don't touch anything, right,
which is also what you should do. You shouldn't touch
anything in a crime scene unless you're trying to cover
up or alter a part of the crime scene. That's
the only reason to touch stuff, you know. It's it's
(38:20):
interesting hearing about this secondary interaction with the fan, because
much a lot has made, you know, much to do
is made about this fan. But I mean to me,
you think you hear about you know, that's almost like
cliche trophy way of committing suicide. The idea of being
in a bath and dropping like a toaster or like,
you know, some sort of electrical appliance like a hair
(38:40):
hair dry or something in it would require some huge
conductive force for that to probably be, you know, enough
to kill you, unless you just absolutely gripped the transformer,
you know, while you were soaking wet. Um. It seems
like an awful lot to to ask for that to
have been the thing that actually killed Merton Um. But
(39:01):
yet a lot of his made of this fan. Yeah, yeah,
especially in the various versions. Again, the various versions of
the official reports, So there is a doctor at the center.
There are a couple of doctors, obviously it is the
Red Cross. One of them is Dr Weist. Dr Weiss
(39:23):
gets word of what that something screwy is happening, and
she is at the scene moments later, as the news
spreads through the retreat and the doctor initially observes a
third degree burn in the upper right abdominal area where
the fans switchbox which where you would turn the fan
(39:43):
on and off, had a mad contact with Merton's skin. Later,
some of those other witnesses, including say will pardon me
for this, say that they did not see any burns. Uh.
The doctor also observes a series of strip like burns
on Merton's right arm, and perhaps most importantly, a quote
(40:06):
bleeding wound on the back of his head. She concludes
that Merton has been electrocuted, and when she does make
that conclusion, she replaces the fan on Merton's body so
that things will quote look as they have been found
for the police. Don't touch anything right to it and
put it right back right exactly. I'm just gonna do.
(40:28):
You can touch it a little bit as a treat,
but this is this is what is happening at this time.
And even though she concludes that electrocution has caused this
guy's death, she's puzzled, and rightly so, because she can't
figure out why had fallen? Had he fainted? Did he
have a dizzy spell? Do you have a heart attack?
(40:49):
Why would she wonder that? Why wouldn't she say that
he like slipped because his feet were wet from coming
out of the shower. Well, it's because the shower itself
that that whole part of the narrative is also seriously
called into question. Yes, at least according to the authors
who wrote the book about the investigation that we've been
(41:11):
talking about here, According to them, that story was invented
Thomas Murton. At least, according to them, there's no evidence
at least that he took a shower, that he was wet,
when when any of this occurred. That story was allegedly
written in nineteen seventy three, several years five years after
(41:33):
his death, and it was written by someone named brother
Patrick Hart, who who was Again I'm only going off
what I learned from that book's contents, But according to
those authors, this person, brother Hart, was a fairly new
secretary to Thomas Murton, or at least fairly newly functioning
(41:55):
secretary to Thomas Merton Um. And for some reason or
an other he wrote in the Asian Journal of Thomas Murton. Uh,
this thing, the story about the shower. Yeah, Patrick Hart
is an interesting character, and the people who believe that
Thomas Murton was murdered do spend a lot of time
(42:18):
on how he propagated what is the dominant narrative of
the death today. And this is one aspect of a
larger problem, which is again the diffusion of story right
and the way in which these stories contradict each other.
So the authors of The Martyrdom don't just allege that
(42:42):
authorities may have bungled this investigation. They say they straight
up manufactured witness statements. And again, you know, you can
find this book online. You can order it from your
bookstore for Amazon. It's freely available. It's not classified or
you know, suppressed her and he thing. But it when
I read it, I thought they made some powerful arguments.
(43:05):
One in particular is that the only statement providing evidence
that bad fan wiring might have immediately killed someone, the
only primary statement is super suspect. It looks fake, It
looks so fake because it doesn't just contain hallmarks of
a falsified police report. It contains the kind of hallmarks
(43:28):
that indicate preferred methods of existing organizations that have falsified
reports in the past. So it's kind of like it's
kind of like if you know someone who takes credit
for something to do, or you're a college professor and
you've had the same ne'er do well student multiple times
(43:48):
in your classes, you can tell, like you know their tricks.
And that's what his authors are saying. They have like
little tells almost there are little signatures almost of you know,
some kind of um nefarious activity. Yeah. So this statement
is supposedly from Otto hass he's the guy who survived
the fan and the name of the surviving the fans
(44:12):
could be the subtitle of this autobiography. And this witness
account has some pretty egregious errors. It doesn't match the
stories of the other witnesses. Uh. In this Otto has
misspells the name of his like the place where he
lives his own religious community in Korea. Uh. The strength
(44:38):
of the shock that he received from the fan is
totally is described totally differently from the way that other
witnesses describe it. Perhaps most importantly, even though this is
a witness statement, it is not signed, it bears no date.
Nobody's exactly sure when it was written, it seems, and
(44:59):
this is the belief of the authors of the Martyrdom.
It seems that this was written as a way to
provide some evidence or some support for the idea that
this guy died by a fan. And there are a
couple of things that we should mention here. They're really important.
So in East Asia and the diaspora there there is
a there's an interesting series of urban legends or common
(45:22):
beliefs about electric fans, and one of those is that
you cannot leave a fan on a night because it
may electrocute you due to wiring, or that it may
was the other one, Matt, I, I remember hearing this,
and I don't know if this is correct, the concept
that you don't leave a fan on because of something
with the air circulation and you may suffocate. I see, Yeah,
(45:47):
so they're already like this. This idea of death by
fan is something that kind of exists in nearby parts
of the world. But also another deal with the fan
that more people pointed out this guy. First off, Merton
if a shower occurred, he had a shared shower, I
(46:08):
think like private bath, shared shower kind of situation. Uh,
and other people would have been walking around this fan.
Also Merton himself, this isn't the first day he got there.
He had touched the fan earlier. So what happened between
the earlier encounters with the fan and the encounter on
December ten. It's a good question. We don't have an
(46:29):
answer there are you know, there are implications in the
book and uh and some other sources that say the
fan may have been tampered with. But even that's tough
because again we have two potential causes of death. Why
were we so snarky about the autopsy, We'll tell you
because the medical investigation that did take place was also
(46:53):
just so bizarrely suspect. That's right. UM. We have an
account from Dr Lusanna Knock Vachara, who was the doctor
that was assisting in the investigation. UM. And and he's
he's mentioned in the book, and according to official sources,
he arrived there on site with the police and he
(47:15):
completed his report on the same day as the death.
I don't know what standard operating procedure is like in Thailand,
But here you don't usually mean you have a coroner
or somebody to you know, declare somebody dead and make
an official record, but typically you wouldn't have that information
(47:37):
available so quickly. The idea of this report came out
the same exact day as the death with no autopsy, um,
before the investigation of the fan itself and you know,
the actual mechanics of the fan um before the interviews
with the witnesses even were taken. UM, no autopsy so
(47:58):
very strange. I mean, that's a big no atop. It's
it's big. But even if even with all of those
other factors, you still do it autopsy. There's not a
situation where you just say, oh, we can skip the autopsy.
That's sort of standard operating procedure, right, Yeah, standard, this
is standard. This is the standard case. No, it's been
in general. Yeah, originally there isn't There is a report
(48:22):
that there is an autopsy, but that turns out not
to uh not not to be the case. And yeah,
this is where we really get into looking at the
official documents that were generated through this hole ordeal and
this the death of Thomas Merton. There are several and
the authors of this investigative book were able to get
these official documents, and they noted that in several places
(48:46):
it says that there was an autopsy, but then there
will be a handwritten note on the back by a
responding officer or by someone a police officer handling the investigation,
saying no, there was no autopsy. Uh. Just very very strange,
right right. It's smacks of people trying to get their
story straight, to be absolutely candid here. So this doctor
(49:10):
uh Nacara concludes again the same day as the death concludes,
cardiac failure has caused accidental falling into the fan, which
is weird because it means that this doctor made those
conclusions before the investigation concluded or before it really began.
(49:34):
They sort of set out with an idea where they say, Okay,
this is what happened. Let's make it look this way again.
If you believe that there's conspiracy of foot this is
troubling for a ton of reasons. Later, Catholic officials on
the scene, multiple Catholic officials on the scene would say
heart failure was a choice of convenience, It was a
(49:55):
less complicated conclusion than electrocution, and even Curtin's official biographer
believes the electrocution angle was downplayed to avoid embarrassing the
Red Cross or the Thai government and Thai officials hosting them,
So that could be one cover up. But how did
(50:16):
Thomas Murton actually die if there is a cover up,
and why do people believe he was murdered? Will tell
you after a word from our sponsor. So let's get
into the theories first. Those authors, Truly and Martin, they
think that Merton was struck in the back of the head,
(50:38):
either by a pointed object or a bullet fired from
a gun fitted with a silencer. People did report hearing
a noise. It's again just like the shower. It's controversially
don't know if it actually happened. And they also believe
his body was later moved or repositioned as the before
the investigation commenced. Uh. They say that Merton was lying
(50:59):
on the floor and originally his legs and arms were
straight and his palms were facing down like you would
put him in a coffin. And you'll remember that the
Benedictine father, Celestine Say who was Filipino, took those photographs
at the crime scene. And they're basing their conclusions on
those photographs with Martin's body laying on the floor, the
(51:20):
fans still on top of his thigh um and reaching
to the opposite side of his lower waist um. Yeah. Yeah,
And this is so things get dicey because these guys
decide to take photographs with says camera because they don't
they want to get the evidence is accurately as possible
(51:42):
before an investigation ensues. They don't know what's going to happen.
They're being on the safe side with this. However, photographs
of the scene have been withheld and the authors of
this book weren't able to get They were able to
view the photographs, but they weren't able to publish them
in their work. It's something really weird happens. So the
(52:04):
abbey in Kentucky, right is Merton's home, and they say,
you know what, we want to have an autopsy done,
and they asked the U. S Embassy for help. In
the U. S Embassy says something really weird. They say, okay, well,
according to the laws of Thailand, if there is an autopsy,
(52:26):
Merton has to be buried in Thailand. And according to
the authors, this is hogwash. This is like an invented
law that someone in the embassy said for some reason.
So instead of having an actual autopsy, which is said
to have occurred in some of the paperwork but never
actually happened, the abbey just flies Merton's body back to
(52:48):
the US along with corpses of American soldiers, and the
police report further doesn't make room to investigate homicide. I
believe there are a total of two lines in the report.
Let's say there were no witnesses who might be suspected
of causing the death. There's no reason to suspect criminal causes.
And that's it. That's it. That's Oh he really persuaded us.
(53:12):
They just said, I don't think about it. Don't think
about that part. So there are a couple of possibilities.
One theory distressingly simple. The local police just messed up,
just bungled the investigation several times. That's absolutely possible, And
that happens even with the best of intentions and even
with competent professionals, working people can make mistakes totally and
(53:33):
doesn't necessarily imply nefarious you know, manipulation of evidence. I mean,
there can just be honest mistakes. Well, but within that theory,
you also have all the other theories that because if
they bungled the investigation, it could have been he did
actually die accidentally, he uh was killed by someone that
they never found and never even searched for. You know,
(53:55):
there's it encompasses all of the things within that one concept. Yeah, exactly.
And then there's another theory. What if the police and
the US government actively covered up a murder, why would
they do that? Well, at the time, the US government
and the Thai government were deep, deep, deep into some
(54:15):
very shady things. Think about it. Thailand's allowing the US
to run bases for bombing raids in Vietnam and Laos
and officially right, unofficial, well, there's in China war. Yeah.
So between nineteen fifty and nineteen seventy five, a lot
of money is changing hands, a ton of money, more
(54:37):
than you might think. Thailand gets around six or fifty
million dollars in economic aid, another nine d fifty million
earmarked just for defense and security. For comparison, nine hundred
fifty million is over fifty percent of Bangkok's own spending
on its armed forces every year during that period. This
doesn't count another seven hundred and sixty million for the
(54:57):
vaguely phrased operating costs, the purchase or subsidized purchase of
military equipment, payment for Thai troops in Vietnam. The list
goes on and on, all at all over a period
of just ten years nineteen sixty five to nineteen seventy five.
That's over two billion dollars in assistance, making Thailand the
second largest recipient of American aid and the entirety of
(55:19):
Southeast Asia, second only, of course to Vietnam. So what
does this all I have to do with this monk
from Kentucky who is just like, hey, maybe let's not
wage war on each other. Uh? Well, he was staunchly
opposed to the Indo China War, and that's the war
that Thailand was actively pursuing with the US. So the
authors here also point out that Thai officials are provably
(55:42):
in bed with the c i A on illegal stuff.
So they're working with Uncle Sam overall for Indo China War.
But along with that, they're doing things like running drugs.
They're doing things like the Phoenix program. Ah, that is
a whole episode on its own, guys, I have we
not done that? We gotta do that. The Phoenix program
(56:05):
is this widely I would say unknown thing that existed
during the Vietnam War. It's also widely misunderstood, and my goodness,
if you read official CIA documentation or people writing for
the CIA about it, you're going to get a very
different picture than what you'll read from people writing about
(56:25):
it outside of the CIA. And as is per usual,
I suppose, but it was it was either an assassination program,
if you want to call it that, but I think
that's oversimplifying it. It was it was a system of
infiltrating UH, Vietcong networks as well as attempting to identify
(56:45):
those networks and individuals who are who are either on
the military side or just the civilian side. Uh. And
they operated not just in Vietnam, right exactly. Yeah, you
know what, let's do a Phoenix Program episode. It will
be worth it, and it has ramifications they continue in
the modern day. Yeah, I agreed. And you know what
(57:06):
they did in the Phoenix Program when they caught someone,
they tortured them. Fun. But you know what I'm thinking about, guys,
the marks on his arm, the burns on his arm,
as well as the burn on his chest, as though
maybe possibly Thomas Marton was tortured with elextrocution, the ones
(57:26):
that were blamed on this, uh, this fan that was
so important in the case, no evidence, no evidence for that,
just putting it out there. Good torture though, I effective torture,
I would say it takes time. So if they were
doing that kind of torture, that would just be purely
sadism on the part of the assailants. But uh, but
you know it, it's a point that needs to be made.
(57:48):
The CIA has manuals on assassination, and if you read them,
if you read them or leaked a while back, then
you will see that, by far, the most preferred method
for quietly removing someone from the chessboard is to make
it look like an accident. That's why Frank Wilson fell.
(58:10):
That's why this guy calling people who believe he's murdered.
That's why he suddenly ran into a dangerous fan that
was totally fine for days before. You wanted to look
like an accident. So this this stuff with the CIA,
aside from Phoenix Program, you know there was an illicit
drug business. Well we'll talk about that in Phoenix Program
(58:31):
as well. This led the authors um Turley and Martin
to say that helping dispose of a nettlesome monk who
was interfering with the war effort would have been little
more than routine business for the CIA, because they were
actually closer with Thai police forces than they were with
(58:53):
the overall Thai government. That was more of an Uncle
Sam kind of thing. But the CIA was down in
the trenches. The issue is that this isn't hard evidence.
They have a pretty good point. When they knew that
the CIA had easily targeted Martin, and if it had
targeted him for assassination, it could have reasonably assumed allies
(59:15):
in the Thai police force would help facilitate that and
they would help cover up any loose ends in the aftermath.
Later investigations do verify. They confirmed that Merton, like many
other peace activists, as you have mentioned earlier, he was
on a CIA watch list. His mail was monitored and
at times illegally intercepted. The FBI was watching as well.
(59:36):
A group calling itself the Catholic Concerned Citizens had written
to Kentucky state legislatures asking them to declare Merton a
dangerous radical. They forwarded it to the CIA, and the
CIA was like, oh yeah, no, we're on it. We're
watching this guy already. Have you read his book The
Seven Story Mountain. It's actually pretty good anyway. That's how
(59:58):
they were talking. Uh so, and the ends there's a dilemma.
That's why we said this is unsolved. The authors lay
out a convincing case that multiple parts of this investigation
were either bungled or purposefully misleading, and they don't provide
hard proof that the CIA killed Merton to eliminate his
(01:00:18):
anti war activities, but they do point to numerous examples
of CIA assassinations, assassination attempts, and stalking. Perhaps it's best
for for you to look into the front of your mind,
check your shoe, check that pocket we mentioned where you
remembered the statements of Matthew Fox, who straight up says
(01:00:41):
the CIA confirmed Merton was murdered. In his opinion, they
confirmed it. It's important to note that because if you
look at the Thomas Murton Society again this is available
online as well, you'll see that Matthew Fox actually spoke
to three CIA agents, not one the two the first
(01:01:01):
two we spoke with were in Southeast Asia at the
time of Merton's death, not at the Red Cross Center
at least as far as we know. Uh. Fox had
asked them straight up, he said, did you guys kill
Thomas Murton? And the first replied, I will neither affirm
nor deny it, which is a standard it's a standard
spy answer. Uh. The second said, you know, man, we
(01:01:25):
had so much money at the time, we had no
accountability whatsoever. If any CIA agent felt Merton was a
threat to the country, they could have just had him killed,
no questions asked. It would like it wouldn't have been
a big deal, which is somehow even more terrified than
saying yeah, we did it. We carefully planned it because
(01:01:46):
you don't want to get caught. It's more like it
makes it sound like a four thirty on a Friday decision,
like you know what, while we're here, I know, while
we're here, let's just get it knocked out. You ask, hey, yeah,
could you have killed him? Sure? I don't know, I
mean maybe you know it was a wild time, that's crazy. Yeah, yeah,
(01:02:08):
And and and it should be frightening to people because
that is an answer reflecting the reality of that of
that era. So then later Fox meets a third CIA
agent ask him again just point link, did you guys
kill Thomas Merton, and the agent said the following. Yes,
(01:02:28):
The agent replied, adding the last forty years of my
life I have been cleansing my soul from the actions
I was involved in in the name of the CIA
in Southeast Asia as a young man. I'm sorry, I
didn't mean to laugh. I just have a hard time
believing that a CI agent would ever say anything like this. Well, yeah,
you you have to believe, Matthew Fox, that this actually occurred.
(01:02:52):
It's there's no signed affid David from that quote CIA
officer who said those things, right, But if it's true
somebody feels bad about doing something terrible, it's tough that
that's what this whole story is, right, there's and I
think that's what the what the authors of the book
would say. There's not enough information to conclusively say. We
(01:03:16):
just have a lot of questions still right, and we
know there's opportunity and capability, but that doesn't necessarily mean
that these events happened. And that's that's where we leave
it today. Honestly, for Fox, that emission was proof that
the CIA killed Thomas Murton, and it prompted him to
say Merton died a martyr for peace, as did his
(01:03:38):
friend Dr Martin Luther King Jr. At the hands of
the US government. It hasn't been proven yet, but just
looking at the investigation, it is riddled with problems. And
at this point we want to hear from you. We
want to hear what you think happened to Thomas Murton
was just just well intentioned bung leaning of a case.
(01:04:01):
Was there something more insidious at play? And if so,
do you agree with the author's idea of the culprit.
On a personal note, uh with his travel stuff. I
think I'm gonna be I think I'm gonna view on
the East Coast for a while. I've had some I've
had some weird personal times. But I wanted to thank
(01:04:23):
everybody who took the time to support the show and
took the time to drop a little note my way
or a exciting lead to a future episode. So thank
you all so much. Also, if you know about a
another assassination or assassination conspiracy that deserves more attention investigation,
(01:04:44):
and we'd love to hear from you. We try to
make it easy to find us online and we are
absolutely easy to find and all the usual Internet places
of note. You can find us on Facebook, Twitter, and
YouTube at Conspiracy Stuff. You can also find us on
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us a telephone call at st d w y t K. Yes,
(01:05:08):
very easy. Just give yourself a cool nickname. The only
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Is that right, guys? Yes? Okay, cool. Let's see the
smile from Ben yep, don't use that one, or Mission
Control or Doc Holiday codename doc Holiday or I think
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(01:05:31):
a bridge too far? Yes, give yourself one of those.
It'll be fun for everybody. You've got three minutes say
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(01:06:00):
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