FREE AT LAST
When I imagine Richard and his conspiracy thoughts, I visualize him standing in the streets of a post-apocalyptic New World Order America in his Phantom Patriot costume. In the distance is a massive black storm cloud, lightning flashing within it, rolling across the horizon, consuming everything in its path. Flying out of this behemoth cloud are rows of black helicopters, swooping over the war-torn streets below. Security cameras are mounted everywhere, hundreds of miles of wire, agents of disinformation in trenchcoats and sunglasses peek around corners. Above, chemtrails crisscross the sky.
The storm is always on the horizon, and there is no escaping it, but it never arrives.
As Richard’s conspiracies began to network, they formed a “super-conspiracy” which ran to all corners of his life. He began to see intricate weavings of theories and symbolism everywhere.
I sometimes found Richard’s ideas interesting or amusing, in their theatrical creativity, but also sad. His messages to me were almost always tense, depressed, frustrated, angry. The conspiracy web had led to him concluding that Stan Lee was a “Reptilian hybrid” and that Chely Wright was part of a government brainwashing program. Conspiracy crept up on him everywhere, to the point that existence itself was a Matrix-like lie.
“There is no God/gods outside ourselves. We and everything else in the multiverse are part of an infinite, eternal consciousness. Everything is energy, and we are sentient energy. The ‘physical’ universe, our bodies, and even our deaths are mind-programmed illusions,” Richard wrote to me, sharing things he had learned from David Icke.
I HAD ANOTHER ARGUMENT with Richard after I returned home from my visit to him in Pahrump in 2015. I e-mailed him to tell him I was working on this book and planned on wrapping it up. He responded with a list of demands. Some were reasonable—he wanted a dozen copies of the book and a percentage of sales, which I would have worked out with him. Some items on his list—complete editorial control of the manuscript, reprinting his “My Memories of Chely Wright” document in its entirety—weren’t going to fly, I told him. He blew up at me in an angry tirade, and we exchanged heated messages back and forth. He accused me of being a deceptive journalist, and I responded that I thought I was being more than fair to him. He came up with a plot where I was going to ask him to bankroll publishing this book, but I told him I was never going to ask him for money. After a few messages, still angry, he finally relented. “I’m OK with you doing the book yourself, as long as you don’t slander me… I probably brought this grief on myself, because I broke my own rule: NEVER TRUST THE PRESS!!!”
We didn’t communicate for a month, but things got back on track, and we talked more about the book in a positive light. We began to exchange e-mails regularly again—Richard would message me to update me on the video projects he was working on, and when he saw something suspicious on the news. He rarely took time to say hello to me before diving right into some evil plot, and I imagined this impending cloud of doom was taking a toll on Richard.
This time, my idea about him was right.
ON MARCH 27, 2019, I saw that I had a message from Richard’s friend Lon Gowan. I hadn’t spoken to him since interviewing him about four years earlier. The message from him was asking me to call as soon as I could. As soon as I saw it, I knew that something terrible had happened to Richard and I guessed he was either dead or had gone off the deep end for some reason and ended up back in prison. But then I remembered the interview I had done where we talked about prison and he said “they’d have to shoot me before I go back there.”
I called Lon as soon as I could, and my first instinct was right. Lon told me that sometime in October 2018, Richard had loaded up his truck in Pahrump. His neighbor had seen him leave and assumed he was taking a trip to Las Vegas. But instead, Richard had driven to Washington, D.C., where he had taken his own life. Months later, the neighbor called in a missing persons report.
Even though Richard had left a will addressed to Lon, police determined that one of Richard’s cousins was his next of kin. This cousin wasn’t close to Richard, hadn’t spoken to him in years and didn’t know much about him. That was the reason five months had passed without anyone knowing he was dead. That was all the info Lon had at the moment, but he told me he would update me as more came in.
Somewhat at a loss for words, I thanked him and hung up. I was caught off-guard but not entirely surprised. Alone in the desert, he had not been able to find any employment, money was dwindling, and his attempts at creating a viral hit Phantom Patriot show hadn’t been a success. I looked at my e-mail and found my last correspondence with Richard was in July 2018. He had e-mailed me, asking what I knew about an upcoming HOPE Real-Life Superhero meet-up in San Diego and we exchanged a couple of messages.
I felt guilt. Could I have kept Richard more engaged in life? Even though I didn’t agree with him, could I have tried to help more with his projects? Maybe talked to him more or helped him build a support group of RLSH?
I think those things could have been done, but Richard had been descending this path for a long time, over 20 years.
That night, I slept fitfully. I had a dream about Richard still being alive. He knocked on my door, and I went out on my front porch to talk to him. I was surprised to see him alive. He had faked his death, he told me, then opened up a jacket he was wearing to reveal his chest was strapped with plastic explosives. He smiled and then laughed heartily and told me he was going to sneak into the Bohemian Grove and finally blow up the Great Owl of Bohemia.
I WOKE UP EARLY the next morning, brewed coffee, and flipped open my computer. The first thing I saw on Facebook was an article titled “Ranting, Raving Alex Jones Laughed Out Of A Texas Chicken Restaurant.”
Alex Jones and his new wife were getting food at Lucy’s Fried Chicken when a group of people began heckling him. An angry Jones turned on his camera and huffed and puffed his most tiresome lines, calling the group “libtards,” telling one heckler “you’re not an American, you’re a slob,” and saying they had “extra chromosomes.”
“America is awake to anti-free speech like you and bullies like you!” he screamed. But here was the beautiful part—the group just jeered and laughed at him, and Jones looked like a crazy, ranting, disheveled clown.
Eventually Jones, after persistent but polite prompting by an employee, walked off in a cloud of anger to find fried chicken somewhere else.
“Bye! Bye, Alex, have a good night!” someone laughed and called after him.
I was never happier to see Alex Jones fail.
LATER THAT DAY, IMPATIENT to learn more, I tried to see if I could shake down any paperwork on Richard’s death. I contacted the coroner’s office, who couldn’t give me much info as I wasn’t a family member, but they gave me a police report number, and after contacting the D.C. Metro police department, I got a Public Incident Report. The report notes that Richard died on October 15, 2018. Richard was found in his truck, parked in an alleyway off of 15th Street. I did a virtual tour of the block where he was found on Google Street View. It seemed like an average neighborhood, with some brick apartment buildings covered in ivy.
But then I noticed it, looming across the street and taking up most of the block: the House of the Temple. Built in 1915, the House of the Temple is headquarters for the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, and Richard had protested in front of it during his 2011 Thoughtcrime tour. Freemason Brigadier General Albert Pike, author of Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (1871), is buried in the Temple. It stands just about a mile north of the White House.
Was Richard’s final act of protest to kill himself next to a Freemason headquarters? I tried to imagine what Richard’s death would look like through his own eyes. Richard’s last days are a mystery, and he was found shot in a truck across the street from the Freemason headquarters. Did Richard want it to look like a conspiracy? Would conspiracists say he was a victim of the Clinton Body Count or a CIA assassination? What if it was a conspiracy?
The Scottish Rite of Freemasonry’s House of the Temple in Washington, D.C. CREDIT: WIKIMEDIA COMMONS/AGNOSTICPREACHERSKID.
LON, MUCH LIKE HE DID after Richard’s arrest in 2002, slowly began to unravel what had happened to Richard and began processing what he had left behind. In between his time spent on movie and TV show sets, he filed paperwork to get Richard’s cremated remains from the D.C. morgue, saving them from a fate of being dumped in a numbered mass grave of the unclaimed. He dealt with the IRS and made sure insurance and taxes were paid on his property in Pahrump, and reviewed Richard’s living will.
It took Lon a while to talk about the details of Richard’s death. They were, as he noted, “horrific and gruesome,” and I think he needed some time to process it.
Richard, as a felon, was not allowed to purchase firearms. He always considered himself “principled,” as Lon noted, so he was unlikely to pursue finding a gun on the black market. As such, he purchased a captive bolt pistol, commonly called a “cattle gun,” as his suicide weapon. A captive bolt gun fires a metal cylinder using compressed air in a forceful but shallow shot before the cylinder retracts. It was made famous as the weapon of choice for hitman Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men.
It isn’t an effective way to commit suicide. In an incident report, a witness says they saw Richard’s truck “at 10:30 a.m., and again 11:15 a.m.” the morning of October 14 and police were called, so Richard must have shot himself sometime that morning. Police found he was “suffering from head trauma,” and he was transported to a hospital. He was pronounced dead at 4:35 p.m. the next day, October 15, 2018, at least 30 hours after he was called in.
As he struggled and gasped for air, about a mile away the nation’s most powerful conspiracy theorist was sitting in the White House, perhaps sipping a Diet Coke and watching FOX News.
And right around the same time Richard’s truck was surrounded by police cars, a fire truck, and an ambulance, down in Austin, Texas, The Alex Jones Show was preparing to go on air. The show opened with a baritone narrator saying, “crashing through the lies and disinformation… it’s Alex Jones!” Jones launched into the airwaves with his story of the day—the October 2 murder of Saudi Arabian journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Turkey. Within the first three minutes of the show, Jones had pinned the death as a “false flag” with ties to the “Deep State,” including Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
“A very very clear picture has emerged that this is a false flag to basically draw Saudi Arabia in and then to basically destabilize Saudi Arabia and have a coup in the Saudi kingdom and put something far worse in, so this has Iran and Obama and of course Hillary written all over it, trying to kill the peace plans that Trump has been trying to develop,” Jones rasped breathlessly into the mic.
Later in the show, he ranted about his de-platforming, including recently being kicked off PayPal, and compared himself to a “Jew in Nazi Germany, in a ghetto that can’t buy or sell anything.” He talked about George Soros and revisited a favorite topic—how bad Hillary Clinton must smell, saying he’d been told she has an odor like “like a rotting pile of corpses.” He plugged a 50% off holiday sale on InfoWars supplements and at the end of the show Roger Stone dropped by to talk about Congressman Ted Deutch, who Stone says “pressured” Facebook into de-platforming InfoWars and was plotting to overthrow Nancy Pelosi.
October 14, according to InfoWars, was just another day in Conspiracy World America.
LON TOLD ME THAT in addition to his remains, he had filed paperwork to get Richard’s other possessions he had with him when he died. Among them was a black three-ring binder that had been found next to Richard on the passenger seat of his truck. After Lon acquired it, he mailed it to me.
Richard’s death hit me for a second time when I opened the package Lon sent me. I remembered the first manila envelope filled with letters and comics I had received from Richard in 2010. Here was Richard’s determined handwriting again, capturing his last words in a document titled “Final Thoughts of an Extreme Altruist.” There had been an effort in the RLSH community by some to separate themselves from the “superhero” label by referring to themselves as “Extreme Altruists” or “X-Alts.” Richard’s three-ring binder contained the document, followed by a variety of printouts of articles related to conspiracies, and a collection of photos from protests he had staged over the years.
Richard’s final writing features 21 thoughts over five pages talking about his decision to kill himself and his legacy. His first point describes deteriorating health: “tinnitus/early-onset Alzheimer’s, arthritis/joint erosion, restless leg syndrome, sciatica.” He notes, “I don’t want to spend my remaining years degenerating into a broken-down, bitter old hermit, living on pills.” He also notes “toxic 5G Wi-Fi radiation” and states, “I don’t want to live to see World War III and the completion of UN agendas 21 and 2030.” Agenda 21 is a conspiracy favorite. It calls for voluntary efforts for governments to work on ways to combat poverty and pollution and other actions to make the world sustainable. But theorists say the agenda is a Trojan horse for globalism and a New World Order. Agenda 2030 is a similar list of goals toward sustainability to reach by the year 2030.
Point five of Richard’s document reads: “Everyone leaves this life, eventually. I am simply choosing the time, place, and circumstances. My passing, during this divisive time in history, will be meaningful.”
He addresses the location of his suicide briefly: “I want the last thing I do, in this life, to be an act of defiance against the corrupt, Masonic Establishment.” His truck was decked out with protest signs, designed to be an eye-catching last stand. A large sign in the bed of his vehicle read: “Warning! Albert Pike’s 1871 Illuminati plan called for… Terrorism, 3 World Wars, Luciferian Religion, Global Dictatorship.” A sign in the driver’s window read: “When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross—Sinclair Lewis. IT CAN HAPPEN HERE!”
Other points in his document ponder religion: “I realize that we are all unique aspects of the Infinite Consciousness… the true Supreme Being. We are all eternal spirits, having a temporary, human experience,” Richard wrote.
Statements 10 through 14 “condemn” or “call out” several people, including the “equally corrupt Democrat and Republican parties,” and states “America is now a failing democracy; well on its way to becoming a globalist/socialist police state.”
“I condemn the ruling blue blood ‘elite’ of this world whether their names are Rothschild, Rockefeller, Soros, Netanyahu, Bush, Cheney, Gore, Obama, Biden, Trump, Pence, May, Blair, Cameron, Putin, or Pope Francis… among others.” Richard also calls out mainstream media and then zeroes in on conspiracy theory:
(13) I call out Bill Hicks a.k.a. “Alex Jones” (who I met in 2001) as a false patriot and controlled opposition. Despite reporting a distorted version of the truth, his divisive act has led many, genuine truthseekers astray.
(14) Federal psy-op YouTube channels, like QAnon, Project Veritas, etc., function in a similar way to Bill Hicks/Alex Jones. They also trick people into trusting some mythical “white hat patriots” and Trump (a sociopathic Illuminati billionaire, who is bloodline cousins with Hillary and has committed incest with Ivanka) to “drain the swamp.” Here’s some advice, America… liberate yourselves!
Richard added points noting his appreciation for David Icke for “his efforts to reveal the true nature of reality” and “his few friends that remain,” listing 11 people, including Lon, the guys from Las Vegas Motion Pictures who produced his videos, a couple of his neighbors, the guys who worked at the comic shop he got his weekly comic books from, and Denny Mozena (his former teenage sidekick, Iron Claw). I was on the list, too.
Points 17 to 19 express his regrets and disappointment. He mentions the Chely Wright country music Project Monarch theory and that despite his protest attempts, “the Las Vegas media and authorities continue to lie about the October 1, 2017, false flag attack,” Richard wrote, referring to the deadliest mass shooting in our history. Stephen Paddock shot concertgoers from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Hotel, killing 58 and wounding over four hundred more. Richard had ridden his Phantom-Cycle around the hotel several times, protesting. Richard also reflects on his failed attempt at the Bohemian Grove:
“Perhaps things would have turned out differently if the idiots in my jury had taken me seriously and Judge Elliott Lee Daum and prosecutor Charles Arden hadn’t been tools of the Bohemian Club.” His last point reads:
“(21) I truly hope that my struggle against the New World Order will inspire people to take back their freedom from the political, religious, and corporate ‘snakes,’ who stole it from them.”
LON REPORTED THAT RICHARD, in death, did a last act of helping others. Being an organ donor was not the type of superheroics Richard had envisioned, but it helped save the lives of five people.
“Each of his lungs, his kidneys, and his liver were all viable and a match for five recipients. At last update, all recipients were doing great and had a wonderful Christmas with their families,” Lon informed an e-mail group of people Richard had listed as friends.
On November 12, 2019, I voyaged back to Pahrump to say goodbye to Richard. I flew into Las Vegas late the night before. As I walked sleepily through the terminal, the flashing slot machines reminded me of my 2015 trip to Nevada, where I was met by Richard leaning against the airport wall in his “Where the Heck is Pahrump?” shirt.
THE NEXT MORNING, Walter Marin and Mitch Teich of Las Vegas Motion Pictures, the company Richard hired to do his video production work, picked me up from my hotel. While I waited for them, I watched CNN, or as Trump might call the outlet, “fake news” and “the enemy of the people.” Trump’s impeachment inquiry hearings were about to get underway, and as I traveled, I spent my downtime watching it unfold.
After I got picked up by Walter and Mitch, we made the trip to Richard’s house through the desolate terrain of Nevada. It was a strange feeling driving this route, a path I never thought I’d be revisiting. We passed the “Welcome to Pahrump” sign (now forever linked in my mind with the “Welcome to Dark Side Hee Haw” vandalism). We cruised by the fireworks stores, casinos, and fast food joints until we arrived at Richard’s home. The yard was littered with dried-out tumbleweeds and other wilted plants, but his property looked to be in good shape despite being abandoned for a little over a year. Lon was already there, looking through a file of paperwork he had found in Richard’s closet. Two of Richard’s neighbors were there, too. They had been keeping an eye on his property as best they could. Someone had recently broken into the house through the back door, stealing Richard’s TVs and a couple shelves of his prized comic book collection.
There was not much else of value to steal. Richard’s bedroom had just his bed, neatly made, and an AM/FM alarm clock next to it. His closet had a pair of pants and two shirts hanging in it. There were no other clothes; he had perhaps donated those along with other household items before leaving for D.C.
His living room had his couch, a TV stand with a dust outline of where his stolen TV once stood. On his coffee table was a small photo album full of pictures of himself posing in his various superhero costumes, and next to it was a note he had handwritten:
“I could have committed suicide in the comfort and privacy of my own home. Instead, I chose to drive to Washington DC, warn the American people one last time, and die with honor.”
Another small room had some costumes he had made for his videos, a box full of The Stardust and Fantomah Show DVDs, art supplies, and a couple of unfinished scripts. One appeared to be a script for a dramatization of part of his life titled “Bohemian Grove Reenactment.” The other incomplete text was a start to a second episode of The Stardust and Fantomah Show. Next to the scripts was another short note, addressed to the people involved in his video productions: “If I were to choose a known actor to portray me in a movie, it would be Sam Worthington (Avatar, Wrath of the Titans).”
Another room contained his remaining comic book collection and a stack of books by David Icke and other conspiracy tomes, but other than that, the house was empty.
We headed into The Outpost next. Things were neat and orderly inside. G’nik sat silently on one side of The Outpost, staring silently at the row of mannequins lined up across from him. The exercise equipment and his crossbow target with the Reptilian mask on it were still there, along with his empty meeting table and his Patriot-Cycle, parked in a corner with a sign on top of it that read: “Politicians Are Really Parasites Who Live On Our Taxes!”
“I thought you might want to see this,” Lon said, pointing out a black plastic case resting on a crate to me. I looked at it, puzzled, then flipped it open. There was a foam insert that had a bottle brush and a small bottle of oil. I squinted in the shadows (the electricity had been shut off, but the bright desert sun poured through the door) and unfolded a yellow copy of a receipt.
“Oh damn,” I said, recoiling slightly. I looked back down at the case. There was a large chunk of space where a bolt pistol used to be.
RICHARD’S NEIGHBORS, LON, WALTER, MITCH, and I gathered in Richard’s backyard. Lon, after a lot of time and paperwork, had acquired Richard’s cremated remains. We took turns spreading them by the roots of a tree in his yard near his bedroom window. His neighbor, with a tear in her eye, told us it was a good place for Richard to rest because a flock of mourning doves liked to congregate in the tree. She had painted some rocks with the American flag on them and placed them on the ground next to it. She recalled what a friendly neighbor Richard was. She laughed and told us that when her female friends would visit, they would peek out the window at Richard doing yardwork shirtless, like schoolgirls, admiring what good shape he was in. She could count on him going for a run every morning, but when she stopped seeing him on his daily routine, she suspected something was wrong with him.
Lon said a few words, and his ashes were spread. We were silent for a moment, then headed back into his house. We talked for a bit, and then I headed back to Las Vegas with Walter and Mitch. As they spoke of video production, I stared out the window at the rocky desert and mesas passing by as we left Pahrump.
To many who encountered him, Richard was just a guy in a wacky costume on the Vegas strip, holding a sign that accused Obama of being a Reptilian. But I saw his life in whole—Richard as a boy trying to escape into a comic book he was reading while his dad screamed at his mom about bills, a puffy-haired evangelist on the TV in the background, proclaiming that Jesus could gift you money if you prayed hard enough. I see Richard, heartbroken and afraid of dying as he joins the Marines. I feel his excitement as he pursues his American dream of being a Hollywood action star and signs up for stunt school. My thoughts cloud as I think of those terrible years where his parents died and his life fell apart with nothing to lean on but the words of Alex Jones.
I thought of Richard’s final costume, a shirt he had made that he wore when he committed suicide. He had placed a photo of it in the binder he left behind, the last photo in the book. It was a striped prison shirt, like his Thought-crime outfit, and in the style of the Phantom Patriot, it had a red Republican R on one shoulder, and a blue Democrat D on the other, both struck out.
On the chest of the shirt, in red, white, and blue letters are the words: FREE AT LAST.
The phrase was also found in one of the last points of Richard’s “Final Thoughts” document:
“(20) The ancients Gnostics believed that the body was a prison for the spirit. With the death of my body, my pronoia (true self) is now FREE AT LAST! I look forward to leaving this Archon-controlled virtual reality and finding a better existence beyond the Ouroboros, in the Upper Aeons.”
Richard is referring to terms from Gnosticism here—the Archons are demons who rule the universe. The Ouroboros is the ancient symbol of a serpent or dragon eating its tail, which symbolizes eternity and the soul of the world. The Upper Aeons are described as a pure and luminous realm, a place full of divine potential and ideals.
I hope that Richard traveled there peacefully.