My Mahoney-Murder Threat

As I wrote in my previous article, “Mary Caitrin Mahoney and the Starbucks Massacre,” about the 1997 murder of a former Clinton White House intern and two co-workers in a Georgetown neighborhood in Washington, DC, the first thing that comes up when you Google the intern’s name is a 2013 article, “The Mysterious Murder of Mary Mahoney,” on a web site called Little Dixie Dynamite. As I indicated in my article, that web site is less forthcoming than it might be, because it seems to be holding back my revealing posting about the article in perpetuity. I attempted to weigh in there more than a month ago, on January 9, but as of today my computer still tells me, “Your comment is awaiting moderation.” Here is that comment, which is apparently too explosive for the supposed Southern dynamite girl:

I wrote the article that Daniel DeLuca posted. It was the first in a series. The last in the series was titled “Starbucks Surveillance.” http://www.dcdave.com/article3/000214.html

I posted it on a Saturday. On Sunday morning I received an email that said simply, “For the sake of your family, forget you ever heard of Caity Mahoney.” The email address of the sender was “razor@dis.member.” (Mahoney went by “Caity,” not by her first name.)

I sent it to the local police, but they blew me off. I also sent it to the reporters at The Washington Post and The Washington Times who had been covering the story, but neither responded.

It is logical to conclude that whoever ordered the murders was also responsible for the threatening email, is it not? I don’t think there is much better evidence that Carl Derek Cooper is serving a life sentence for someone else’s heinous, high-level crime.

It is also reasonable to conclude that I hit a particularly sensitive nerve with my “Surveillance” article, because this is the only time that I have ever been threatened as a result of something I have written, and I had already written what I considered to be some hard-hitting pieces on the Starbucks murders. If, in fact, store security cameras recorded what took place on that tragic night all the speculation about the number of gunmen and what precipitated the shooting is out the window, not to mention the question of whether or not Cooper was the actual shooter. Now one might conclude that if such cameras had any role to play in the case that the police and the news media would have reported it to us. However, the very first thing that one can conclude from the previous articles that I have written on the case is that they are not to be trusted to tell us salient facts and, when they do, they can’t be trusted to interpret them properly.

We have also seen the importance of surveillance cameras in other important cases. In the Boston Marathon bombing they show us that the backpack worn by Dzokhar Tsarnaev does not match the “black nylon” backpack that contained the explosives, but we haven’t heard anything like that from the mainstream media. In the Oklahoma City bombing and the Pentagon attack on 9/11 they would likely also be very revealing, which is doubtless why the FBI quickly gathered up all such evidence and withheld it from the public. One can easily imagine, as well, that there is a surveillance video in existence that confirms what witnesses have consistently stated with regard to the recent mass shooting in San Bernadino, California, that is, that there were three male shooters, not a man and a woman.

Upon re-reading my February 14, 2000, article reprinted below, I think the key passage is probably the following: “Upon entering the Wisconsin Avenue Starbucks, one notices right away two security cameras behind the counter up over the heads of the employees, aimed at the customers. The most important question one could ask is if they were installed at the time of the 1997 murders and, if so, what they might have recorded.”

Such security cameras have been standard in retail establishments for quite a long time, and there is every reason to believe that the Wisconsin Avenue Starbucks was no exception to the rule. The fact that the media never raised the question of such cameras speaks volumes. In fact, nothing quite reveals so much that this was a high level killing and not just a garden variety violent “botched robbery” than the behavior of the news media in the case. That alone is enough for one to conclude that Caity Mahoney’s name truly belongs on the list of suspicious deaths related to Bill and Hillary Clinton.

In his Clinton Body-Count list, my fellow skeptic in the Vince Foster death case, Michael Rivero, has the following passage concerning Mahoney, “In the pre-trial publicity surrounding Paula Jones lawsuit Mike Isikoff had dropped hints that a "former White House staffer" with the initial "M" was about to go public with her story of sexual harassment at 1600 Pennsylvania. Just days later, gunmen entered the Starbuck's while the crew was cleaning up after closing.” He also describes Mahoney as “attractive.”

These facts would lead one to believe that she might have been another one of Bill’s girls. Rivero neglects to mention that Mahoney was a lesbian, which suggests that she was more likely to have been in Hillary’s orbit than in Bill’s.

As a final note, one can’t help but notice the great similarities between this murder case and that of Mary Pinchot Meyer in Georgetown in 1964. In that case, as well, the police tried to pin the murder on an unfortunate black man. But from Dovey Roundtree, Ray Crump, Jr., had the sort of effective legal defense that Carl Derek Cooper did not have, and he was acquitted in a trial. (It is a case in which, by his own admission, Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee obstructed justice by making off with and allowing his wife to burn Meyer’s diary.) The case remains unsolved.

Reformatted below is my earlier offending article (The Inter Star Company referred to therein seems no longer to be in business. I could find no trace of it on the Net.).

David Martin

February 11, 2016

Starbucks Surveillance

Maybe the man answering the telephone at Inter Star Systems, Inc., was perfectly candid with his ready explanation that their security signs on the three back doors of Washington, D. C.'s Wisconsin Avenue Starbucks store are of fairly recent vintage. No, he responded to a question, their cameras had not captured what went on at the store in the fashionable Georgetown section on the night of Sunday, July 6, 1997, because the installation of their equipment was in response to the three murders of that evening. Whether any security cameras at all might have filmed the killers he could not say because he did not know if any security company had preceded them.

Maybe so; maybe not. If this private surveillance company were to be providing cover for some nefarious goings on involving shadowy elements of the federal government, it would not be the first time such a thing has happened. Consider the case of the major defense contractor, North American Rockwell, and the huge spy apparatus, the National Reconnaissance Office, whose very name was declassified only recently. When the latter's big building complex was going up in Chantilly, Virginia, everyone was led to believe, including Fairfax County authorities (if they can be believed), that the complex was Rockwell's. That cover story remained in place even after the buildings had been completed, office equipment had been installed, including computers, and one of the security guards was murdered, for no apparent reason other than the theft of her gun and her radio. Only some months later when the true ownership of the buildings was revealed did anyone begin to see any reason for this still-unsolved, greatly under-publicized homicide (see “The Tina Ricca Murder”).

Maybe it is true, as well, that surveillance records are completely immaterial to finding out who really killed the three young Starbucks workers, one of whom, Mary Caitrin Mahoney, was a political activist who had been a White House intern during Bill Clinton's first year on the job. Perhaps that is why the question has never been addressed in any public report on the crime. But, then, the question of White House surveillance records has never been addressed by any of our news media, either, not even the "critic," Christopher Ruddy, in relation to the mysterious death of Deputy White House Counsel, Vincent W. Foster, Jr. Ruddy went so far as to tell this writer that his White House "source" told him that the cameras had been removed to facilitate Clinton's notorious tom-catting. That bit of intelligence was passed along in response to information given to me, which I relayed to Ruddy, from a former employee of a company that installed the equipment that the cameras were so good that they could tell how closely Foster had shaved when he arrived in the morning. The mainstream media's neglect, and Ruddy's dismissal, of the surveillance question would ring particularly hollow to anyone who has seen the recent Will Smith movie, Enemy of the State. (With movies like this one, Bulworth, Wag the Dog, Conspiracy Theory, and JFK, the supposed fantasy-spinners in Hollywood will keep you in a lot closer touch with political reality these days than will the would-be fact-brokers of the press.)

One would also be a lot readier to accept Inter Star's simple explanation if we had not been subjected to so many changing and implausible stories from the very beginning about the case (see also Starbucks Fallback Fallguy, Starbucks Suspect Recanted before Confession Announced, and Starbucks Railroad Job on Track.), and if it matched a little more neatly with the physical evidence.

Let us look at photographs of two of the three signs on the back (The third sign is identical, but it is behind a fenced-in area to the left rear that houses a dumpster.).

The first photo is of the door nearest to 34th Street, the north-south street by the rear of the store, which faces on Wisconsin Avenue. It is the first one that a person is likely to notice, especially someone casing the store, planning a robbery. The sign's badly weathered condition, evident in the second photograph, suggests that it has either been there much longer than two and a half years or it is of very poor quality. Also noteworthy is the fact that the 800 number is written in a convention that is well out of date. For at least a decade 800 numbers virtually always come with a "1" in front of them. pic.2

pic.3 Around the back right side we find another door with the same Inter Star sign displayed prominently at eye level. But the most interesting things in this photograph are the dangling cables. To the left of the one on the right we see a small, rectangular plate on the wall that could well have been a mounting plate for whatever the cable was meant to be connected to.

pic.4 To the left of the cable on the left, we can see in the fourth photograph an identical plate for the device to which this cable was apparently once connected. Had the devices been security cameras peering down on the signs warning of surveillance, the signs would have carried a great deal more weight than they do currently.

pic.5 Finally, in the close-up in the last photograph, we notice that this second sign is in even worse condition than the first. If this sign is only two and a half years old, it truly has a very short legibility life span and Inter Star Systems, Inc., is quite negligent in maintaining the signs at the facilities it is contracted to protect.

Positioned as they are, on the back doors and not the front, the purpose of these signs is apparently to protect primarily against burglary and pilferage. Once again, though, the absence of visible cameras covering the doors on which the signs appear undermines the message, as does the decrepit condition of the signs. If the purpose is to prevent a repeat of an armed robbery in which the perpetrators enter from the front, as we are told now was the case with the 1997 incident, the absence of any security sign in the front window is curious. The M Street Starbucks on the main commercial drag of Georgetown, by contrast, has a sign in the window that says "Protected by SecurityLink from Ameritech. Interestingly, it has no security message on its back door.

Upon entering the Wisconsin Avenue Starbucks, one notices right away two security cameras behind the counter up over the heads of the employees, aimed at the customers. The most important question one could ask is if they were installed at the time of the 1997 murders and, if so, what they might have recorded.

It is also important for the official story that the crime resulted from a botched robbery by Carl Derek Cooper not only that there be no surveillance but there not even be signs about surveillance. The Washington Times told us in its March 18, 1999, that Cooper had chosen this Starbucks to rob after checking it out several times. One would think that signs such as we see here on the back of the store would have been a very big discouragement.

But there is one more actual surveillance camera that might be important to the case. It is on the back of Fillmore School across 34th Street several hundred feet behind the Wisconsin Avenue Starbucks. Its purpose is to protect the parking area behind the school, but it stares right at the back of Starbucks in the distance. Was it installed and working at the time of the killings? If so, did anyone from the police or the press ask what it might have shown?

One would like to think that, although our lapdog press has never raised such questions publicly, that the attorneys for the accused murderer, Carl Derek Cooper, are raising them. But, as was the case with Timothy McVeigh, they are appointed and paid for by the government. In the McVeigh trial, the old adage, "He who pays the piper calls the tune," seemed to rear its head. Is there any reason why we should not expect the same this time?

David Martin

February 14, 2000

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