Glacial Errata, No. 90

One

When you enter Highgate Cemetery, you’re given a map with the most notable graves identified, including Karl Marx, George Eliot, Douglas Adams, and, of course Georgios Panayiotou. There’s also an index that lists each of these graves and whatever was notable about the person.

One in particular grabbed my attention: Jeremiah Duggan, who was listed in the index simply as “Mysterious death.” Being me, I immediately wanted to know more, so I looked up his story.

Two

What I then realized is that many, many years ago, I had already written about Jeremiah Duggan, for a piece on the history of conspiracy theories regarding musical tuning. However, I had to cut the paragraph on Duggan out of the piece because my editor told me, in her words, “we can’t afford to be sued by the Lyndon LaRouche people.” So you won’t actually find mention of him in the piece.

Three

I also cannot afford to be sued by the Lyndon LaRouche people (then or now), and so here we will be sticking to the facts. Jeremiah Duggan was 22 years old in 2003 when he first learned about Nouvelle Solidarité, a youth movement in France run by longtime presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche. LaRouche had spent some time in prison sharing a cell with televangelist Jim Bakker, who would later say of him, “To say that LaRouche was a little paranoid would be like saying the Titanic had a little leak.”

Duggan soon got involved with the Schiller Institute, another organization run by LaRouche and his wife Helga Zepp-LaRouche, which (among other things) focused on, as I detailed in my Believer piece, in pushing to lower the standard for musical tuning from 440 Hz to 432 Hz.

In March, Duggan traveled to Wiesbaden for a Schiller Institute conference. His family believed that this was mostly related to the protests against the Iraq War. During that conference, according to April Witt’s reporting in the Washington Post, LaRouche gave a speech denouncing Bush as an “unreformed drunk,” claiming that Woodrow Wilson founded the KKK, and that JFK was killed by something within the US government called the Special Warfare Section. He blamed the Iraq War, along with Hitler’s rise to power, on the “independent central-banking-system crowd, the slime-mold. The financial interests.” Specifically, the people hoping to launch a new world war were, like Hitler, admirers of Nietzsche, but, “being Jewish, they couldn’t qualify for party leadership, even though their fascism was absolutely pure! As extreme as Hitler!”

Duggan was Jewish.

“Don’t trust your own independent thinking,” LaRouche told the audience. “You probably don’t have any independent thinking. But you delude yourself that you do.”

(There’s much more in Witt’s WaPo piece, which you can read here.)

Four

On March 27, at 5:24 am, Duggan called his mother. According to an interview she gave later:

And he said, "Mum, I'm in ... big trouble ... You know this Nouvelle Solidarité?" ... He said, "I can't do this ... I want out." And at that point the phone was cut. And then it rang back again almost immediately. And the first thing that he said that time was, "Mum, I'm frightened." I realised he was in such danger that I said to him, "I love you." And then he said, "I want to see you now." ... I said, "Well, where are you, Jerry?" He said, "Wiesbaden." And I said, "How do you spell it?" And he said, "W-I-E-S." And then the phone was cut.

About 50 minutes later, a driver on a nearby four-lane highway saw a man running towards him; he attempted to swerve to avoid him, but according to the driver, the man leapt in front of his car, arms raised. The driver hit him, throwing him back into the road where a subsequent driver almost immediately afterwards ran over him.

Jeremiah Duggan was pronounced dead at the scene at 6:35 am.

Five

The first German investigation concluded that Jeremiah Duggan had committed suicide. A second inquest, conducted in Britain, discussed the number of suspicious events around Duggan’s death, and concluded “I really must add that he had earlier been in a state of terror. It is a word not commonly used in a Coroner’s court but no other word would reflect his state of mind at the time.”

A second British inquest, done at the behest of Duggan’s mother and her campaign Justice for Jeremiah, added, “There are a number of unexplained injuries that suggest Mr. Duggan may have been involved in an altercation at some stage before his death.”

A second German investigation was eventually opened, and according to Wikipedia, as of 2015 there was still a discussion of potentially charging some unnamed individuals in connection with Duggan’s death, but nothing appears to have come of that.

The inscription on his headstone in Highgate Cemetery reads:

May your dreams for a better world live on
Missed by all who knew and loved you