Chandra Levy and Mary Caitrin Mahoney

“Who killed Chandra Levy?” is a question that is once again being asked in Washington, now that the case against illegal Salvadoran immigrant Ingmar Guandique, who had been railroaded off to prison for the crime on very scant evidence, has fallen through. Now, more than ever, because of the many similarities and connections to another Washington railroad job, we should also be asking who killed Mary Caitrin “Caity” Mahoney and why she was killed?

A rather curious web site, NStarZone.com, with an undated, unsigned article entitled, “What Really Happened to Chandra Levy,” had previously speculated about a lot of highly sensitive information that Levy, an aspiring and perhaps actual covert agent, might have stumbled upon. The article also makes some apt connections to the Vince Foster and the Mahoney deaths:

The lead FBI investigator in the Chandra Levy case was Special Agent Bradley J. Garrett. He is known as "The Fixer", because he is called in to find patsy's to take the blame for government murders. Notice a few details from his past: Garrett was the lead FBI investigator in the strange death of Clinton White House Deputy Counsel Vincent W. Foster. Foster's body was, like Levy's, found in a heavily wooded area near Washington D.C.. The official cause of death, touted from the outset as a suicide, was declared due to a gunshot fired into the mouth. The weapon, said to be a black 1913 Army Colt .38 Special six-shot revolver, was said to have been found in Foster's hand.

It is significant, therefore, to note that x-rays of the initial autopsy of Vincent Foster's corpse are listed by Federal coroners as now being "missing", and that no one in the Foster family recalls there being a firearm of that model or appearance anywhere, ever, in their residence. Also, there was no blood found on the cuff, sleeve, or wrist of Foster, as would have been elicited naturally, from what they call "blowback", by a self-inflicted gunshot held close inside the soft-palate. The first witness to find the body insisted that there had been no gun near the body. The memory in Foster's pager had been erased. Foster's office at the White House was looted. Secret Service agent Henry O'Neill watched Hillary Clinton's chief of staff, Margaret Williams, carry boxes of papers out of Foster's office before the Police showed up to seal it. There were indications the body had been moved, and a Secret Service memo surfaced which reported that Foster's body had been found in his car! Garrett helped to completely cover up these glaring inconsistencies.

Garrett was also the lead FBI investigator in the murder of Clinton White House intern, Mary Caitrin Mahoney. You see, A U.S. Secret Service Agent assigned to checking doors at the White House, opened a door one night and found Hillary Clinton in a compromising sexual position with Ms. Mahoney, a known lesbian since her high school days. Hillary was furious and whacked him in the head with a metal ashtray. Ms. Mahoney was shot to death at a Starbucks Coffee Shop, right in the heart of Washington DC, a short time later. On July 7, 1997 Mahoney was in the Starbucks cafe cleaning up after closing time with co-workers Emory Evans and Aaron Goodrich. Sometime after 9 pm, two gunmen got inside and shot all three to death. Mahoney was singled out for the most horrendous fate - as if she'd been the killers' prime target. Of the ten shots fired, she was hit five times at point blank range, including at least once in the face. The final bullet was delivered to the back of her head after she'd already fallen. In one hand, in a death grip, Mahoney clutched the keys to the store's safe, which held the weekend's receipts of more than $10,000. D.C. cops were mystified by the apparent lack of motive in the crime.

The safe hadn't been opened. The cash registers were undisturbed. The store hadn't been ransacked. None of the victims' personal belongings had been touched. One wonders why a high-powered Washington FBI agent, with ties to the intelligence community, was involved in a case claimed to be a routine robbery murder case, supposedly committed by a small time criminal, one Carl Derek Cooper. After 54 hours of questioning by Garrett and another agent, Cooper signed a confession that he immediately repudiated as soon as he got to court. During his 54 hours of interrogation, Cooper had consistently denied the crime and volunteered several times to take a lie detector test. Most of the testimony against him was by agent Garrett, and based on Garrett's representation of what Cooper had said during the interrogation. The questioning was not recorded or videotaped. Garrett had sucessfully arranged to blame the crime on a vulnerable nobody.

Starting early on in the investigation, there was an attempt to pin the Levy murder on a minor criminal, Ingmar Guandique, an illegal immigrant from El Salvador who had been known to assault joggers in the area. After he passed a lie detector test, and the complete lack of any possible similarity between his crimes and the known facts of the Levy case, they dropped it. Then on March 3, 2009, despite the fact that there was NO new evidence, DNA or otherwise, except for some laughable "jailhouse confessions" that inmates use to get time off from their sentences for "cooperating" with authorities, the DC police officially charged Guandique with the crime.

An email that I sent to the anonymous owner of the web site on August 1 gives an idea of why I characterize the web site as “curious.”

Subject: Hillary and Caity Mahoney Tryst?

Hi NorthStarZone:

As you may know, I have probably written the definitive articles on the Starbucks massacre and Hillary’s lesbianism.  I am now working on an update of my Starbucks story now that they’ve freed the patsy in the Chandra Levy case, and I ran across your article on Levy’s death.  You have done a good job of encapsulating the problems with the official Vince Foster and Starbucks stories, to my mind.  You make one statement about Mary Caitrin Mahoney that is new to me, though:

You see, a U.S. Secret Service Agent assigned to checking doors at the White House, opened a door one night and found Hillary Clinton in a compromising sexual position with Ms. Mahoney, a known lesbian since her high school days.

Do you have a source for that?  Is it possible that the story might have originated with my “Is Hillary Clinton a Lesbian” in which I do not identify the woman in bed with Hillary because she was not identified in the story as it was told to me?

Dave

It does not surprise me that I have received no response to the email, because, in all likelihood, the assertion is false and there is no source that could be cited. Yes, Mahoney was not just a lesbian but an activist for lesbian causes, as we have noted, and she was an intern in the White House in the early Clinton days. The writer appears to have made up out of almost whole cloth the story that Caity and Hillary were discovered in bed together by a Secret Service agent. It’s too bad, because the rest of what he has to say about the Starbucks massacre and the framing of the hapless black petty criminal, Carl Derek Cooper, is generally accurate.

The writer also hits some of the best highlights on the Foster case, showing why we may properly describe Vince Foster, himself, as the government patsy in the Foster murder. The only slightly sour note is his invoking of that Secret Service memo saying that Foster’s body was found in his car. There is such a memo and former Clinton crony, Larry Nichols, has been making a big to do about it recently as though it had just now come to light. In fact, that memo has been on the public record for quite a long time and is even mentioned by journalist Christopher Ruddy in his book, The Strange Death of Vincent Foster. The Secret Service had no direct involvement in the Foster case; the memo repeats what they were told by Lt. Patrick Gavin of the U.S. Park Police on the night of Foster’s body discovery. What Gavin told the Secret Service is completely inconsistent with the observations of the numerous other witnesses in the case and the Secret Service has long since said that the report was simply an error.

The most important observations the NorthStarZone writer makes is that Bradley Garrett was the lead FBI investigator in all three of the cases, Foster, Levy, and Starbucks, and that he employed dubious methods in obtaining a confession from Cooper in the Starbucks case. I have previously made the same point. In fact, in the Foster case, Garrett and the FBI were lead “investigators” from the beginning, contrary to the writings of fake opposition journalist, Christopher Ruddy.

The False-Confession Specialist

More important than Garrett’s role in the Starbucks frame-up, though, might have been that of the lead detective in the case for the DC government, Jim Trainum. Here is how The Washington Post glowingly describes him and Garrett in a typically overlong article in 2003:

At 42, Det. Jim Trainum had built a reputation as one of the best investigators in the department. In contrast to some in D.C.'s central homicide unit, he was not noted as a sharp dresser or a man with street flash. He had been a paramedic before he became a cop, and he had only a high school education, but he also had a sharp, questioning mind. He was known for his meticulous, thinking-man's approach. And he had once been written up in Forbes magazine after he busted one of the biggest fencing operations in the city; a white guy, he had gone undercover in the inner city and fooled everyone into thinking he was a junkie.

"Street thugs think cops are macho types, and Jim's not that way," says Jim Vucci, who was Trainum's sergeant for 10 years. "And it threw them off. They're not threatened by him. If they only knew what comes out of the end of his pen. Jim was the very best detective I ever worked with."

Trainum was on Starbucks from Day One, along with Det. Tony Patterson, who was assigned to the case as part of the regular rotation. Trainum immediately turned to a man many considered the smartest homicide investigator around, an FBI agent based in the District named Brad Garrett.

Garrett, 48, could not have appeared more different from Trainum. Where Trainum was garrulous, messy and plumpish, Garrett was streamlined, taciturn and taut. An ex-Marine and ex-federal parole officer, he still looked like the fashion model he had once been, but for a scary, laserlike intensity tempered only slightly by a Zen quality. In matters of dress he went in for clothes by Hugo Boss and Armani, often entirely in black. He had a PhD in criminology from the University of Louisville, and he was just coming off one of the greatest investigative triumphs in the recent history of the FBI, a 4 1/2-year manhunt that snared Mir Aimal Kasi, a Pakistani who had killed two CIA employees in 1993 outside the agency's headquarters in McLean. On a previous trip to Pakistan, Garrett had helped catch Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the first attack on the World Trade Center. With both Kasi and Yousef, Garrett had elicited confessions on the plane rides back from Pakistan. (emphasis added ed.)

Garrett was something of a local legend within area law enforcement -- his nickname was "Dr. Death," a nod to his prowess as well as to his doctorate, his black wardrobe and his undertaker's calm. That reputation had led Trainum to seek out Garrett to consult on a case in 1994. In talking that case over, each found he liked the way the other's mind worked. Trainum was the energetic tactician, always grasping for a solution. Garrett was the cool strategist, always seeking patterns. "The reason he and I work so well together is we're willing to not get locked into one thought. To look at it as a puzzle," Garrett says. "The way you solve a puzzle is you just keep adjusting what you are doing."

If there ever was a case of a Washington Post article that is best read between the lines, this one is it. In all the tons of verbiage that they lay upon us, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that the police had no actual evidence that linked Cooper to the crime. The case against him, in fact, is even weaker than the case against Guandique in the Levy murder. I don’t know of any actual exculpatory evidence in the case against Guandique such as there is with respect to Cooper, but The Post somehow didn’t find room in its article to mention it. Prior to the murders, a witness had tried to gain entry only to find the front door locked, with the employees cleaning up inside and waving him away. By failing to mention this fact, The Post doesn’t have to explain how Cooper was able to gain entry later for his “botched robbery.”

Bullets from two different guns were used in the killings, which would lead a reasonable person to conclude that there were two shooters. Cooper in his confession says that he used both guns in the killing and says that he then buried them on the grounds of a Catholic home for unwed mothers in Hyattsville, Maryland, near his DC home. The police claim they went digging in search of the guns but came up empty. The Post article mentions none of this because they would have to have explained this little news item from The Washington Times, which I reported in a previous article:

Roman Catholic Sister Josephine Murphy was surprised to read in the newspapers yesterday that the man charged in the triple killing at the Starbucks coffee shop hid the guns he used on the property of her Hyattsville facility.

I never knew the police were looking for anything. I was just so surprised, said Sister Josephine, chief executive officer of St. Ann’s Infant and Maternity Home, which is part of the Archdiocese of Washington.

It is virtually inconceivable that the police would have gone digging on Sister Josephine’s property not just without her permission but also without her even having realized it.

All the police ever really had against Cooper was his confession, and that confession could not even be supported by the facts. Cooper could not locate the supposed murder weapons and he could not explain how he gained entry into the locked retail establishment. Here’s how the final confession came down, according to The Post:

Near midnight, Cooper, who had once again requested a polygraph, was given a computerized voice stress test. When the Prince George's [County, MD] detectives told him he showed deception on questions about Starbucks, he began to breathe heavily and sweat. At one point, [Det. Joe] McCann mentioned that one of the Starbucks victims knew a man Cooper knew. Cooper seized on this and said that the man had done the robbery while Cooper had waited outside as the driver. Then he shifted and said he went inside with the man and an accomplice, who did the shootings while he was in another room. The man he fingered was arrested, but quickly eliminated as a suspect -- he had been shot several times and was a virtual invalid at the time of Starbucks. Confronted with this, Cooper broke, finally and completely. "Sit down, Joe," he said. "Let me tell you." He told McCann that he had in fact acted alone. "I've wanted to admit this ever since it's happened," he wrote in his final confession. "It had to be known."

What The Post fails to tell us at this point is the importance of a suspect who might have known one of the three victims. That would explain how the killer was able to gain entry at the locked store. The newspapers, in fact, touted the man that Cooper fingered as the killer the next day. Only later did they discover that Keith Maurice “Boo” Covington (whom The Post for some reason fails to name here) was a virtual invalid and incapable of the crime. Anyone reading the newspapers at the time knows full well that if Covington had not had his handicap, he would have been the man sent off to prison, with Cooper as the crucial witness against him. That’s why I titled my original article, “Starbucks Fall-Back Fall Guy.”

And what was Detective Trainum’s role in all this. The Post tells us that he and Garrett played “bad cop” to the Prince George’s County crew’s “good cop.” As we learn from a 2014 article in the Washington City Paper, Trainum is something of an expert in this false confession business:

Public radio host Ira Glass could cost the District $5 million, thanks to a new lawsuit. Revelations made on an episode on Glass' This American Life have landed the Metropolitan Police Department in hot water, according to a lawsuit filed against the District yesterday.

The case centers on Jim Trainum, a former Metropolitan Police Department detective who's gone on to criticize how easy it is for police to obtain false confessions.

In February 1994, working a case about a body found near the Anacostia River, Trainum interrogated potential suspect Kim Crafton. After a 17-hour interrogation, Crafton confessed to the murder.

But Trainum soon discovered through the logs at Crafton's homeless shelter that she couldn't have committed the crime. She was released from jail 10 months later, but Crafton claims that the charge nevertheless cost her jobs and custody of her children.

Trainum lays out how easy it was for him to accidentally obtain Crafton's bogus confession in an October 2013 This American Life episode. Crafton even makes an appearance in the episode to explain how damaging the confession was to her life.

Here, in relation to a New York murder case, is described as a “national expert” by CBS News on what he and his cohorts were able to elicit from the hapless Cooper:

But Jim Trainum, a former detective with the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Police Department and a national expert on false confessions, tells "48 Hours" investigators "cherry-picked" her statements out of 11 hours of contradictions and denials. Trainum, who has a lawsuit pending against him for allegedly and unwittingly getting an innocent woman to confess to murder, suggests police asked Graswald leading questions and manipulated her into delivering answers they wanted.

It would be nice if Trainum should find his conscience in the Starbucks case, but I imagine that larger concerns militate against it.

Where Is Black Lives Matter?

Anyone looking for an example of a black person suffering an injustice at the hands of the police could hardly find a better one than that of Carl Derek Cooper, now serving a life sentence in prison for a crime that he clearly did not commit. It is also a case in what the BLM movement is good at, staging loud, unruly demonstrations, might actually be able to accomplish something positive. What Cooper needs most of all is that attention be drawn to the injustice that was done to him, and the BLM movement could certainly do that. Moreover, not that the other two lives are unimportant, but one of the three victims at the Georgetown Starbucks, Emory Evans, was a young black man. His murderers are going blithely unpunished, and I should think the BLM folks should be upset about that, as well.

I’m afraid, though, that we will have to wait a long time for BLM to get incensed over the injustice done to Carl Derek Cooper. I suspect that that would not be the case if Mary Caitrin Mahoney’s name did not appear prominently in the widely circulated “Clinton Body Count.”

David Martin

August 4, 2016

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