More than a week after hikers discovered the bodies of a man and a woman last Tuesday near the Sky Trailhead parking lot, park rangers say they have no new information about the cause of death or the identity of the woman in a case that’s puzzled locals and reminded them of gruesome days when the Trailside Killer stalked Marin’s parks.
“I don’t have any further information about this as it is still under investigation,” David Schifsky, the chief park ranger for the Point Reyes National Seashore, said in an email on Wednesday. He did not respond to further questions about a gun reported at the scene, or whether the body of the gray-haired woman could possibly be the man’s wife.
In the past week, friends and colleagues have speculated in online forums that the bodies were the result Petaluma couple’s murder-suicide: a scholarly man who had grown disillusioned with his country and his attempt to relieve his ailing wife.
Last week Mr. Schifsky identified the male as Thomas Fletcher, a 62-year-old Petaluma resident. According to several colleagues, Mr. Fletcher—or “Tod” as they knew him—spent the last decade of his life studying the events of 9/11 and contributed to journals and online forums that meticulously picked apart the government’s official reports. “Brilliant and intelligent. He was a listener as well as a relentless researcher,” one person posted online. “The truth movement lost a key player in his passing.”
A Bay Area native, Mr. Fletcher attended the University of California, Berkeley, and in 1980 he met his future wife, Susan Peabody, a graduate student who would go on to teach literature. He enrolled in a graduate program in geography at the university, but his studies were derailed when Ms. Fletcher became bedridden with a chronic illness, his colleague David Ray Griffin wrote online.
Mr. Fletcher took responsibility for his wife’s full-time care and taught at several nearby junior colleges. Most of his research focused on ecological crises, and he published a book on the 19th century history of Mono Lake. After the Twin Towers fell, Mr. Fletcher turned his attention to how the attacks had happened. “I never fell for the official explanation,” he wrote on his blog. “I’ve been researching and writing about 9/11 since 9/12.” Twenty-eight years after she began suffering, Ms. Fletcher was afflicted by constant pain from severe chronic fatigue and hypersensitivity, searing in agony at the touch of her own clothes. She had once attempted suicide a decade ago, but Mr. Fletcher found her and rushed her to the emergency room.
On Sept. 28, “with elegant simplicity,” Mr. Fletcher wrote letters to three of his friends and dropped them in the mail, Mr. Griffin said. “Susan has reached the point at which she requires release, and as she can’t effect this herself, I must help her, as I promised her long ago I would do,” Mr. Fletcher wrote. “But helping her will make me a criminal in deed as well as thought, and I don’t expect I’d be fairly or mercifully treated. So I am going to accompany Susan to the world beyond. By the time you read this, we will have made our passage.”
On Sept. 30, the letters arrived, and two bodies were found in the seashore.