America's Most Shocking Cases - Conspiracy Theory

[bunniefuu]

[eerie music]

Now, I'm going to take you outside my morgue

for an inside look at America's most shocking cases.

NARRATOR An army scientist falls to his death

from a hotel window.

The only thing I understood was he was dead.

NARRATOR But years later, the revelation

of secret CIA experiments gone bad

sheds new light on the case.

And I'm immediately transfixed by what I see.

NARRATOR And now his son is determined to get to the truth.

The whole thing stinks.

This was homicide.

Sometimes the circumstances surrounding a death

can be so complicated that it takes

years to get to the truth.

Like in this next case, it took over four decades and a team

of forensic investigators to unravel

a web of CIA intrigue, experimental dr*gs,

and shocking allegations of foul play.

It's AM.

The night manager of the Statler Hotel

is making his evening rounds when he comes

across a horrifying scene.

A man barely alive lies bleeding on the ground.

Within just a few minutes, he stops breathing and dies.

The man's name was Frank Olson.

miles away in the suburb of Washington DC,

Frank Olson's son, -year-old Eric Olson,

is sound asleep in his bed.

I'm suddenly awakened before dawn,

and I come out to the living room

where my mother is, at that point,

sitting in a chair with two men.

He was working with some of our operatives.

NARRATOR One of them is the family doctor,

and the other is his dad's boss, Vincent Ruwet.

They told me that there had been an accident.

MAN They take him to a hospital.

It's not expected--

ERIC OLSON My father had fallen out of a window.

He fell through--

ERIC OLSON --out of a hotel window.

And I sort of went blank, went numb.

--right now is to be surrounded by [inaudible]

people who love you.

ERIC OLSON Now, the only thing I understood was one thing.

He was dead.

NARRATOR Frank Olson was a scientist

who worked for the US army.

He was also a devoted husband and father

who was well-liked by just about everyone in the community.

He was known as a kind of a joker

and a party goer who liked practical jokes.

And he really enjoyed people and had quite a few close friends.

NARRATOR The sudden loss is devastating to Frank's

wife and three young children.

ERIC OLSON He just disappeared and was never seen again.

So the break between his presence

and his absence from the family was so enormous so catastrophic

and so absolute that it made a gulf in the family's life

that was just unbridgeable.

NARRATOR On December , , Frank Olson's family

would say their final goodbyes with a small, closed casket

ceremony.

ERIC OLSON I was very identified

with my father at that time.

So if the person you're identified with suddenly

vanishes, who is it that disappears?

In some way, it's yourself.

You no longer have a reference for who you are.

NARRATOR But for Eric, with the pain comes a nagging curiosity

about his father's death.

ERIC OLSON I mean, he was there one day.

And after that, not only he wasn't there

and didn't die in any kind of normal way or comprehensible

way, but it was also a question that you

couldn't speak about it.

I mean, it was immediately acquired a kind of taboo sense.

NARRATOR Over the years, Eric grows more curious

about his father's death.

And when he reaches his mid-teens,

he's driven to find out more.

But what he discovers instead is a secret about the man's life.

Really, all we know about his work

was that he was a scientist, a government scientist.

NARRATOR But he soon learns that his father

wasn't just any army scientist.

In fact, his job had a dark side.

He worked at Fort Detrick, Maryland, an army laboratory

notorious for its involvement in the development and manufacture

of biological weapons.

And Frank Olson was an anthr*x specialist.

And his work involve aerosolizing anthr*x

and turning it into a fine powder that could be dispersed

in an offensive manner.

NARRATOR It's a stunning revelation.

Eric's father was helping to produce biological weapons

that the m*llitary could use against an untold number

of perceived enemies.
[ … ]

And his work was classified top secret.

So basically, you had these two lives

going on at the same time.

NARRATOR But Eric also discovers something else,

something even more troubling.

It appears that in the year before his death,

Frank Olson was in the throes of a major moral crisis.

In the fall of , Frank Olson

began to have serious doubts about the work

that he was involved in, began questioning his involvement

in human experiments that had to do with testing chemical

and germ warfare.

ERIC OLSON He was very afraid that he and his colleagues

would appear to have been w*r criminals for some

of the things they had done.

His germ warfare is basically taking the life sciences

and turning them into the death sciences.

Instead of finding cures for diseases,

how do we make diseases even more deadlier K*llers?

During that whole spring, he'd been

sleeping badly, in some kind of state of agitation.

NARRATOR Eric's mother remembers

that his personality seemed to change almost overnight.

He became quiet and withdrawn, morose.

Then, one ordinary Sunday evening in the fall of ,

Frank makes a sudden resolution.

He does tell his wife that he's made a mistake

and that he wants to resign and apparently goes over to Fort

Detrick and says, I want out.

NARRATOR But it's not that easy to get out.

And Frank's superiors refuse to accept his resignation.

And basically he's told that he's feeling depressed,

and he should think about it.

Then he's told, basically, that they've

got a good doctor in New York that he should come and see,

basically, that he was somewhat pressured to take

a trip to New York City to visit a specialist.

NARRATOR A colleague, Robert Lashbrook

is assigned to keep Frank safe on his trip to New York, even

going so far as to share the same room with him

at the Statler hotel.

At the urging of his colleagues, Frank

meets with a doctor, who suggests

he needs around the clock psychiatric care.

But on the fourth night of the trip, at AM,

Lashbrook is jarred awake by the sound of breaking glass.

Frank Olson appears to have jumped

straight through the window.

The story raises an unsettling question for Eric,

could his father have committed su1c1de?

Of all the manners of death, suicides

are always the hardest for family members

to comprehend and accept.

A lot of times it's because of guilt or a feeling

of abandonment that this is a person that they

loved and, maybe, depended on that

voluntarily left this world.

NARRATOR Unfortunately, the Olson family

has no choice but to move on with their lives

and do their best to accept the fact that Frank Olson

most likely committed su1c1de.

But years later in , Eric stumbles onto something

that will completely change the perception

of his father's death.

In June of , I was a graduate student at Harvard.

And I got a phone call late one afternoon

from my brother-in-law who says, you know,

there's a story on the front page of the Washington Post

that you might want to take a look at.

NARRATOR Eric picks up a copy of the paper

and sees an article about an army biochemist who

jumped to his death in .

The headline for which was, "su1c1de Revealed".

su1c1de Revealed.

I am immediately transfixed by what I see.

NARRATOR In the summer of , years after Frank Olson's

death, an article in the Washington Post

suggests an incredible explanation.

There's a big story on the front page, "su1c1de Revealed".

I am immediately transfixed by what I see.

NARRATOR The article details the findings of the Rockefeller

commission, a group of congressmen

responsible for investigating CIA conduct.

And in the course of that, ti was discovered

that this unnamed army scientist had

been given LSD as part of a CIA experiment

or program gone wrong.

NARRATOR According to this story,

f the unnamed scientist made a trip to New York in

and jumped to his death from a hotel window.

You have this moment, this must be my father.

But why isn't his name there?

And is this my father?

Maybe it isn't my father.

But it must be.

How many scientists were jumping out of windows in the autumn

of in New York?

It must be my father.

NARRATOR Eric immediately calls the one person who he thinks

must know the truth, his father's old boss, Vincent
[ … ]

Ruwet, the same man who broke the news of Frank Olson's death

to the family back in .

And he, at first, was reluctant to say anything.

And he later did admit, yes, this army

scientist that is being referred to is, indeed, Frank Olson.

NARRATOR The details are astounding.

Just one week before Frank Olson's death, government

documents reveal that a group of scientists from Fort Detrick,

along with a number of CIA analysts,

gathered at the Deep Creek lodge in Western Maryland

to share sensitive information.

It was sort of an informal meeting, relaxed sort of mood.

They were drinking brandy, cointreau and brandy.

NARRATOR But then, out of the blue,

one of the men from the CIA makes a shocking announcement.

That cointreau had actually been spiked with LSD.

LSD is a very potent chemical that acts on the serotonin

system in the brain.

When your brain is on dr*gs, really what's happening

is it's taking over these chemicals

in the brain that then causes these hallucinations.

They had simply drugged members of the Detrick group

without their knowledge, unwittingly drugged them,

just to see what kind of a discussion

would ensue among scientists who had been drugged.

Incredibly, the drugging of unwitting colleagues

wasn't unusual in the CIA of the s.

It was all part of a top secret program called MKUltra.

And during its year lifespan, hundreds of subjects

were given LSD to test the mind altering effects of the drug.

This was the period of Cold w*r.

This was the period of the Iron Curtain.

NARRATOR In the CIA, there was a general climate of paranoia.

One of their concerns was the loyalty of their spies

around the world.

They wanted to make sure they were not fabricating stories.

And they were looking for ways to guarantee that people

were not lying to them.

And this led to experimentation with things such as dr*gs.

So I think there was tremendous interest in mind control.

The CIA was very interested in LSD

as being this wonderful truth serum,

that you could administer LSD to prisoners,

to, perhaps, subjects.

And basically, they'd spill the beans

and tell you everything they knew.

The effects of the drug can vary.

But there can be cases where people

feel very happy, euphoric.

They're seeing visual hallucinations,

changes in color.

They're seeing things that may or may not be there.

NARRATOR But for some people like Frank Olson,

the effects can be more severe.

Anxiety, panic, fear, fear of death, fear of loss

of control, paranoid delusions.

NARRATOR Frank soon slips into a paranoid tailspin,

and his colleagues begin to worry that the LSD may have

triggered a psychotic episode.

There's been documented cases that, after taking LSD,

people have these psychotic symptoms for several months.

And in that case, there can be cases

of mania, depression, aggression,

and su1c1de attempts

NARRATOR According to CIA documents,

Frank's psychotic reaction to LSD

is the real reason he was sent to New York and the reason he

jumped to his death.

LSD, in and of itself, hardly ever causes death.

It can cause hypothermia and death,

and I've seen a case of that.

But usually it would cause death by, what we say,

toxic behavior, by what it causes you to do.

And one of those behaviors could be jumping out of a window.

NARRATOR For the nation, the revelations about MKUltra

and the CIA's LSD experiments are shocking.

But for Eric and the rest of the Olsen family,

the news is personal.

And it isn't long before they decide

to bring a wrongful death suit against the US government.

Within a very short time, the Olson's were actually

invited to an unprecedented White House meeting

with President Gerald Ford, where they were

actually offered an apology.

And the government basically said, yes, the CIA

did slip LSD to Frank Olson.

He was given LSD without his knowledge.

And this is why he jumped out the window.

NARRATOR The government offers the Olsen's a deal.

If they drop the lawsuit, they will

get a monetary settlement and access to all CIA

documents relating to the case.

The Olson's accept the offer and, ultimately,

received $,.

Now, with the questions surrounding Frank's death

finally put to rest, Eric and his family

look forward to moving on with their lives.

He was under the influence of LSD.

He was drugged out.

He didn't know what he was doing,
[ … ]

and he jumped out of the window.

Somehow, LSD explained it all.

NARRATOR But shortly after the settlement,

Eric's mother reveals a new detail

that doesn't make much sense.

On the night of his death, when he was supposedly

in the middle of a psychotic episode,

Frank Olson actually placed a phone call to his wife.

He had called my mother and said

that he was feeling fine and looking forward

to seeing her the next day.

NARRATOR Eric can't help wondering why if his father was

in the throes of an LSD induced psychosis,

he would make such a level headed call.

So here's a man who calls his wife

in the evening of the night that he then commits

su1c1de a few hours later.

It just-- it doesn't really make sense.

NARRATOR The US government has admitted that Frank Olsen

k*lled himself in during a psychotic episode brought on

by LSD.

The hallucinogenic drug was administered to him

without his knowledge by agents of the CIA.

But when Eric learns that Frank had a casual phone conversation

with his wife just hours before his death,

he begins to question the government's story.

I just wanted to be able to finally,

at this point in my life, put this thing to rest and say,

well, whatever it is, this is the story,

and this is what you have to live with.

NARRATOR More than years after his father's death,

Eric Olson decides to take matters into his own hands

and begin an investigation.

The first step will be an interview

with the last man who saw Frank Olson alive, Armond Pastore.

Armond Pastore was a guy who was

the night manager of the hotel, the Statler Hotel, in .

NARRATOR Pastore agrees to tell Eric everything he remembers.

He begins with the moment he found Frank Olson on the f,

barely alive and trying to speak.

His story holds my father in his arms

and nestles down to try to hear what he's saying.

Frank then d*ed.

And, at that point, Pastore looks up at the window

to see if he can identify exactly which room

this person has come out of.

NARRATOR Pastore soon realizes it's room A

and immediately notifies the police.

When they go up, he goes with them to the room.

They pull their g*ns before they open

the door because they didn't know

what they were going to find.

He opens the door, goes in, and sees a guy sitting on the john.

NARRATOR The man is Robert Lashbrook,

the CIA operative assigned to keep watch over Frank Olson.

His version of events was that he was asleep and was only

awakened by crashing glass.

NARRATOR Police have no reason to doubt Lashbrook's story,

and they quickly closed the case.

But Pastore finds Lashbrook's behavior suspicious.

Now, this guy had been there, obviously, for some time,

was sharing the room with my father

and had not called the police or even called the front desk

to say what had happened.

NARRATOR Curious, Pastore decides to look

into the matter himself.

Pastore story goes back down to the lobby

and poses a question to the night

operator of the switchboard.

Have any calls been made?

NARRATOR It turns out there was a call placed from room A

but not to the police.

The guy in the room says only the following,

"Well, he's gone."

The other side says, "That's too bad."

Then they both hung up.

That's the entire call-- well, he's gone.

That's too bad-- which is a devastating phone call.

NARRATOR This phone call convinces Eric

that there may be more to the story than he

and his family have been told.

If somebody that you're responsible for crashes

through the window, how could you possibly pick up the phone

and say to somebody else, well, he's gone?

Who's gone?

What do you mean gone?

No.

The response was none of that.

It was, that's too bad.

NARRATOR Suddenly the CIA story is raising new questions,

and Eric must resort to extreme measures to get some answers.

That means one thing--

an exhumation and full exhumation

of his father's body.

When I first got the idea of doing

an exhumation of the body, I didn't know

what I was really looking for.

It was really kind of, you know, a last ditch effort.

But Eric knows that he can't find these clues on his own.

He needs a forensic expert.
[ … ]

And it isn't long before he turns to Dr. James Starrs,

a forensic investigator renowned for his historical casework

on the Lizzie Borden murders and the Boston Strangler.

Unannounced, Eric Olson came to my office

here in the law school, knocked on the door,

and literally said to me, we're now

ready for an exhumation to find out more, if we can,

about the death of my father.

And I said, what do you mean?

NARRATOR Eric outlines all the suspicious circumstances

surrounding his father's death, and Starrs

finds his story compelling.

And he was really kind of stunned by the suspiciousness

of this whole story and agreed with me

that, perhaps, something should be done to try to resolve this.

I had to bring on to my team members

of various scientific disciplines who were totally

divorced from this case in any way, didn't know the family,

didn't know anything about the circumstances of Frank Olson's

death, looking at this in a new and first light

so that they could then investigate

it without any predisposition, any preconceptions of any kind.

NARRATOR The exhumation is scheduled for June nd, ,

years after Frank Olson was buried.

Eric's hopes are high.

But Dr. Starrs knows that there's no guarantee

of finding any new evidence.

Every step of the way is a challenge

in the case of an exhumation because nothing

is ever known for sure.

I've seen an exhumation of a person

who's been underground less than a year,

was almost skeletonized.

And I've done an exhumation where

the person's been underground for years,

and they looked great.

There are a lot of variables.

Was the casket exposed to water?

Was the body exposed to water?

What type of fungus growth is on the body?

So it's a roll of the dice whether they're

even going to find anything useful with an exhumation.

Well, the day of the exhumation

was actually one of the good days

in this whole long, long, long saga.

It was a beautiful day in early June .

NARRATOR The coffin comes out of the ground intact.

It's a good first sign.

I mean, for me, it was a great moment of kind of coming back

to an old childhood fantasy of, let's open this thing up

and see what's in that box.

NARRATOR Gently, team members pry open the lid of the casket.

You don't know the condition of the remains

because we're talking here about years later.

Would they be intact?

Who knew.

NARRATOR The top slides off.

And for the first time in years,

Eric comes face to face with his father.

When I opened the coffin lid, I think

the word I used was Eureka.

I mean, I was stunned by what we found.

NARRATOR Eric Olson thinks the CIA may be

lying about his father's death.

Now, all his hopes are riding on what

he finds in this box, Frank Olson's

coffin, which has just been unearthed

after years underground.

When we opened the coffin and we

took the linen wrapping off him, there

was a man atrophied, mummified.

NARRATOR Dr. Starrs and his team

can hardly believe their eyes.

The body is shockingly well-preserved

and will be ideal for performing an autopsy.

When bodies decompose, they usually go through a sequence

of [inaudible] where the cells are breaking up and the enzymes

are destroying the body.

And of course, the bacteria are helping break down the body.

But there is another way the bodies

can go through this process, and that's if it's very dry.

Your body almost desiccates.

And the bacteria don't have a chance to act on the body

as much because the tissues have dried out,

and that will k*ll the bacteria.

So the body, in a way, is preserved

with mummification because the body becomes so dried out.

What we found couldn't have been better.

NARRATOR This discovery is both encouraging

for the investigation and emotionally powerful for Eric.

I mean, I could recognize his face years later.

I could see the intact skin.

All his body was intact, and it was really a remarkable moment

of kind of rejoining this person from whom

you had been really traumatically

separated years earlier.

NARRATOR Dr. Starrs will now rely on pathologist,

Dr. Jack Frost, a deputy chief ME from West Virginia,

to perform the autopsy on Frank Olson's remains.

Incredibly, this will be a first because, when Frank Olson
[ … ]

d*ed in , the medical examiner

never performed a full autopsy.

Frank Olson did not have a complete autopsy

because they thought, at that time,

he was an out and out jumper from a hotel room.

NARRATOR The team now hopes that a complete autopsy

will reveal clues that went unnoticed in .

Dr. Frost begins with a thorough external exam.

I started at the top of the head

and went to the bottom of the feet, front side, back side,

looking at the genitalia, spreading

legs, rolling the body over, and just described what I saw.

NARRATOR What he sees is a series of lacerations

on Olson's legs and arms that seem to be the result

of compound fractures.

These are finding that you'd expect to find

from hitting the ground.

NARRATOR All of these lacerations

are also listed in the original report.

But that report also cites lacerations

across the front of Olson's face and neck,

and Dr. Frost is unable to find a single laceration

anywhere on Frank's upper body.

There was nothing.

NARRATOR It's an unsettling discovery.

If his face had no lacerations,

how did he go through the glass window?

NARRATOR Dr. Starrs wastes no time investigating

the discrepancy further.

Well, I called a medical examiner who had

been on the scene in New York.

And his reply to me, I remember it well, we all make mistakes.

Well, we all do make mistakes, but you don't

make that kind of mistake.

He didn't challenge the fact that he

didn't find any lacerations.

He simply said, well, sometimes this is what happens.

It was a glaring mistake on the part of the medical examiner's

office in New York.

NARRATOR But even if it was just a mistake,

the finding raises questions about Lashbrook's story.

It contradicts which Dr. Lashbrook said.

Dr. Lashbrook said he was awakened out of sound sleep

by a crash of glass.

NARRATOR It now appears to the investigative team

that Lashbrook was not telling the whole truth.

You don't go through a broken window and have no cuts.

NARRATOR And now that they know what didn't happen,

they need to find out what did.

What is the window scenario?

What are we actually talking about here?

There were just too many sinister features

for me to say, this is an out and out su1c1de.

NARRATOR And as the contradictory evidence

continues to pile up, Eric Olson begins

to draw a darker conclusion.

I thought the most logical scenario is some kind

of a homicide here, but I'm not out to prove that because, I

mean, it's a hideous thought.

It's a really unbearable thought.

NARRATOR Based on the initial findings

of Frank Olson's external exam, Eric Olson has one question.

Could the government be covering up the real reasons

behind his father's death?

And I was very suspicious that there might have been much more

malicious intent in this story than we had,

you know, really been told and that a homicide

might be involved here.

But I wasn't convinced of it.

And I still didn't feel like I understood

the motive well enough to argue that that was the case.

NARRATOR But it's not long before Eric and Dr. Starrs do

find a possible motive, and it's tied

to Frank Olson's top secret work on biological weapons.

He was involved in some of the most lurid and ethically

questionable operations that the United States

government has ever performed.

And he was doing this with great ethical misgiving for a number

of years and grave doubts about whether this was

the right thing for the United States to be doing

and for him to be doing.

NARRATOR In , Frank Olson made

it clear that he wanted to quit his post,

but his superiors rejected his resignation.

If he had simply resigned and walked off,

how do they know whether he would compromise what they

were doing up in Fort Detrick.

Here's a man in possession of top secret information

that they wanted to make certain doesn't

get into the general public.

NARRATOR And the resignation of a person like Frank Olson,

known to be questioning the morality of his work,

is the last thing the CIA would want.

The one thing they never did in these situations,

traditionally, was to release a person of that type,

to send them out of the building, to force them out,

to fire him, or to move him in another direction.

They want to keep that person where he can be watched.

NARRATOR Now that they have a possible motive for m*rder,

the team will search for concrete evidence of foul play.
[ … ]

And they begin with Frank Olson's head.

The scalp was reflected forward

and backward, so see you see beneath the scalp.

NARRATOR Once the skull is exposed,

Dr. Frost sees the full extent of the damage.

It is badly fractured.

The skull fractures were on the right side,

and they extended across the entire base of the skull.

And they extended up into the calvarium, the cap,

the top off half of the skull.

NARRATOR Doctor Frost believes these injuries are what

directly k*lled Frank Olson.

Taking those into account, there's no way Frank

Olson would have survived.

NARRATOR But as they inspect the front of Olson's skull,

they make an unexpected discovery,

a dark patch of blood just over Olson's left eye socket.

We could see the blood, brownish red but darkened.

But it was no question that it was a big hematoma.

In the sense, it was, yes, a big, big, big bruise.

A hematoma is a collection of blood underneath the skin.

This collection of blood is usually due to blunt trauma.

We often see those in the head area, where the hematoma are

the collection of blood forms of between the scalp

and the skull.

NARRATOR First, Dr. Starrs and Dr. Frost

consider whether Frank could have sustained the trauma

when he landed on the sidewalk.

It couldn't have happened when he hit the pavement

because the amount of force in striking

the pavement would have caused fracturing of the bone.

NARRATOR And the bone under the hematoma

isn't fractured at all.

They also rule out the possibility of his head

hitting the building during the fall.

I would have expected there to be

some sort of laceration of the skin at that site,

and there wasn't.

NARRATOR But if the hematoma didn't

come from hitting the sidewalk or from striking

the building during the fall, the team

wonders, how did it happen?

The obvious implication when we saw that was

that he had been struck.

This was a punch in the head in my view.

NARRATOR If this theory is true,

the implications could be devastating.

Somebody knocked him out, and then he

was thrown out of the window.

NARRATOR And as Eric Olson sees it,

this is proof that his father was m*rder*d.

To Dr. Starrs and Eric Olson, there are now simply

too many holes in the story.

su1c1de is no longer a possibility.

But Dr. Frost isn't so sure.

He thought that it was either the window or the structure

around the window that caused it, the wood around the window.

NARRATOR The thing to remember with a hematoma,

if there is no specific laceration or abrasion,

I'd say, it means it must have been probably

on a fairly broad surface that the head struck,

such as the window sill.

All the evidence that he saw was indicative of a su1c1de.

My view in responding to that was, Jack, Dr. Frost, that

meant that this individual had to have his head up,

fully up, inf hitting the window,

looking where he was going.

That does not seem to me likely.

If he hits something like that as he flies through,

you'd expect to see an abrasion.

Dr. Stars and I didn't reach an agreement

as to how that hematoma was produced over the left eye.

NARRATOR However, the two doctors do agree on one thing.

Your choices, in this case, boil down

to being homicide or a su1c1de.

NARRATOR Eric now believes there is sufficient evidence

to petition for an official investigation

into the death of his father.

He takes his evidence to the New York

District Attorney's Office, and they agree to reopen the case.

I mean, I had the sense we've now driven a wedge in the door.

We open this space.

Something's going to happen.

But I have no idea what it's going to be.

NARRATOR Based on new autopsy findings,

Eric Olson has convinced the New York DA's office to reopen

the case of Frank Olson.

But shortly after the investigation begins,

the only people with firsthand knowledge of his father's death

begin to disappear.

One of the very, you know, immensely frustrating things

that happened during this process

was that several people d*ed quite

suspiciously during the course of this investigation.

NARRATOR William Colby, former director of the CIA,

dies in a mysterious canoe accident.

Both Vincent Ruwet, Frank Olson's boss,

and Sidney Gottlieb, architect of MKUltra,

suffer a fatal heart att*cks.

David Belin, executive director of the Rockefeller commission,
[ … ]

falls and hits his head in a hotel room and dies.

Without these firsthand accounts or more substantial evidence,

the DA is unable to bring formal charges against the CIA.

But then, in , yet another bizarre piece of information

emerges from a very unexpected source.

There was an article in "The New York Times"

that drew my attention about the declassification

of CIA documents.

NARRATOR The earliest documents were

drafted in , just one year before Frank Olson's death.

The timing of it made you think this

might somehow be connected.

NARRATOR And these documents include a shocking disclosure,

a detailed set of instructions for carrying out

assassinations.

Eric wonders if these methods might match the circumstances

of his father's death.

So I got a copy of this thing by going to the National

Security Archives.

It was a type of document, maybe pages long, not very long.

And I began reading it.

NARRATOR What he finds is, essentially,

a manual for assassination.

And the preferred method is, ideally, you have a physician

who is in a position to prescribe dr*gs,

so the subject will have very diminished consciousness.

You then hit them over the head on one

of the temples above the eyes with a blunt instrument.

And then you maneuver them to the window or to a ledge,

and you simply push them off.

This is what they consider to be the ideal method

for accomplishing what they call a contrived accident.

Contrived accident.

NARRATOR Eric now believes he has

discovered the very blueprint for his father's death.

Suddenly, it all made sense.

Eric Olson brought to me the internal memorandum

from the CIA, indicating the preferred method

of getting rid of someone.

Everything in that preferred method

was exactly what they did to Frank Olson.

Hitting him on the head, throwing him out the window,

all of that was stipulated in that internal memorandum.

As far as I was concerned, that was the information

that closed the door on the fact that there was involvement

on the part of the CIA.

Of course, when you find the assassination manual written

by the CIA themselves in this exact moment, which describes

exactly the scenario which you've just discovered

through the forensic investigation

and through your own research into, this, I mean,

it's not like you leap to conclusions.

It's like you become cornered actually,

and there's no escape but to come to this conclusion,

that they k*lled him.

They did it intentionally, and they

covered it up with great skill.

NARRATOR Eric Olson now hopes that the documents will

be the linchpin the DA needs to press

formal charges against the CIA.

But at some point, they began to become squeamish,

and I don't know what happened.

NARRATOR The DA's office informs

Eric that they still don't have enough evidence

to solve the case.

There is simply no smoking g*n.

I think there are definitely is a smoking g*n here.

I think it is the hematoma.

I mean, if he was hit on the head, then there is intent.

If there is intent, then this is not a su1c1de, period.

Everything about this is a smoking g*n.

The whole thing smokes.

The whole thing stinks.

This is not negligence.

This was not an accident.

This was not even a su1c1de.

This was homicide.

NARRATOR Nevertheless, in , the DA drops

the Frank Olson case for good.

And then after half a century of seeking the truth,

Eric Olson says his final goodbyes

and reburies his father.

Today, Frank Olson's death remains

officially listed as it did on his death certificate--

jump or fall from the th floor of hotel.

For the rest of his life, Robert Lashbrook

maintained that Olson jumped.

And the CIA has refused to comment on the case.

And some former CIA analysts are still

hesitant to point the finger.

I don't believe the CIA k*lled Frank Olson.

I think the CIA was responsible for the death of Frank Olson

and the CIA did not handle this matter

in a forthright or ethical fashion.

And they did their best to cover it up

as they do today with today's crimes, even w*r crimes.

But I don't think, in a legal sense, they k*lled Frank Olson.

NARRATOR Eric Olson's investigation

has come to an end.

But to him, the truth is abundantly clear.
[ … ]

I've now faced the hard fact that a government assassination

is not a crime for which you can ever get political resolution

or any kind of judicial resolution.

It's not in the cards.

You're not going to get it.

It's been tough for Eric Olson.

His father d*ed when he was nine,

and he's been searching much of his life

to find the answers why.

And the more he dug, the more sinister it seemed.

All I can do is turn away from it.

You know, I have this information.

It's unbearable.

But you go on living.

Sometimes a forensic investigation involves a lot

more than just an autopsy.

But in some cases, like in this one,

we can still end up without a smoking g*n.

In the end, we may never know if Frank Olson was m*rder*d,

and that's difficult to accept.

But as a forensic pathologist, all we

can do a search for the answers and hope

that our work, at the very least,

provides the family with some sort of peace

about their loved one's death.