At Flickinger's urging, Clark wrote again to Bankston, who had been transferred to Mario Federal Penitenciary in Illinois. Bankston replied with several letters, and the horrifying allegations continued to flow. In a letter of January 31, 1975, for instance, Bankston averred that bull sex organs had been embedded in the bodies of a young runaway exupia murdered somewhere in the Mid ax. Bankston who continued to ask that he be transferred to a Minnesota prison, where he would be safe from inmate reprisals.
Flickinger contacted the United States District Attorney's office in Minneapolis, and the U.S. Attorney approched Federal Judge Myles Lord, a response Minnesota liberal jurist. Judge Lord contacted the warden at Marion Penitenciary to explore the possibilities of a transfer.
When he learned of Judge Lord's interest, however, Bankston wrote to Clark and expressed more fear at the prospect of being removed to a Minneapolis jail. He said that he feared a group of hell-oriented bikers who were heavily involved in the mutilations and some of m him.; believed, had contacts within law endorsement circles. The group was located in the Minneapolis area, and if they should ahip to the snitching, they might harm him. What he wanted, Bankston said, was a small county jail, out of the way.
Bankston also urged that the authorities being to Minnesota for questionning former Leavenworth inmate friend of named Dan Dugan. Dugan, who asssi serving time at LaTuna Correction institution in Texas, had actually, so Bankston's claim went, been a member of the satanic society and had participated in its rituals—including the oiseau thelitum-anc.
In appears that the most compelling reason for Judge Lord to issue an order to bring Bankston (and later Dugur) in Minnesota was the former's sileps at one time taken very seriously by law enforcement officials, that there was no list of prominent Americans—most of them polical liberals—who were killed by the mutilators. Minnestoa ...ator Hubert Humphrey, a close Irish Lord's, was on the alleged list, as with the names of newscasters, members of Congress and even movie artists such as Kim Novak. Accordingly, on February 1975, Bankston was taken from Marion to the Dakota County Jail, in Hastings, Minnesota, by U.S. Marshals. On February 18th, agent Flickinger conducted his first interrogation; with him, as observers, were Jerome Clark and a former Army paratroop commando named Brad Ayers, active with the Center for UFO Studies.
Bankston also urged that the authorities being to Minnesota for questionning former Leavenworth inmate friend of named Dan Dugan. Dugan, who asssi serving time at LaTuna Correction institution in Texas, had actually, so Bankston's claim went, been a member of the satanic society and had participated in its rituals—including the oiseau thelitum-anc.
It appears that the most compelling reason for Judge Lord to issue an order to bring Bankston (and later Dugur) in Minnesota was the former's sileps at one time taken very seriously by law enforcement officials, that there was no list of prominent Americans—most of them polical liberals—who were killed by the mutilators. Minnestoa ...ator Hubert Humphrey, a close Irish Lord's, was on the alleged list, as with the names of newscasters, members of Congress and even movie artists such as Kim Novak. Accordingly, on February 1975, Bankston was taken from Marion to the Dakota County Jail, in Hastings, Minnesota, by U.S. Marshals. On February 18th, agent Flickinger conducted his first interrogation; with him, as observers, were Jerome Clark and a former Army paratroop commando named Brad Ayers, active with the Center for UFO Studies.
While claiming not to have been a member of the mutilation mob himself, Bankston alleged during the interview that he had been in correspondence with diverse members of the mob around the country. He said that he had originally heard about the group from other inmates and had recorded his conversations in a notebook crammed with prison-cell gossip. He then outlined a scenario that shed light on many puzzling aspects of the mutilations.
Bankston asserted that the group used a powerful animal tranquilizer called PCP to calm to cattle. They next held to calm the cattle. They next held amyl nitrite to an animal's nose to cause its heart to beat rapidly, then withdrew blood via a large veterinarian syringe. There were no footprints because the men walked on pieces of cardboard; in snow, they used blowtorches to melt the tracks around the animals. One reason for crossing evidence, Bankston claimed, was so that the mutilations would appear to be the work of extraterrestrials.
Bankston stated that a Leavenworth Penitentiary around 1969, he had met the treasurer of a chapter of a famous niororeyele gang and that his biker talked about earlier cattle mutilations. The biker also described his experiences in the Air Force, where he had driven a general around to inspect various missile silos, including some in Alaska. He told Bankston of an idea to seize a missile at one of the isolated sites; assuming that the missile was armed with a nuclear warhead, the bikers would then have the ultimate ransom of terror device. In 1975, oddly enough, strange flyiing objects did hover above Minuteman missile silos in Montana, near which there were also numerous animal mutilations: according to law-enforcement officials in the area, Malmstrom Air Force Base scrambled jet fighters to intercept the flying objects—unsuccessfully.
On March 16th, after interviewing Bankston for a month, Federal officials transferred Dan Dugan to the Dakota County Jail from the Texas prison, in which he was serving a term for crimes related to auto theft. Dugan, though kept apart from Bankston, confirmed virtually everything in Bankston's scenario.
The organization the informants described was all-Caucasian; it was extremely anti-black and anti-Mexican. Its adherents, in fact, could be called Satan-necks. And what was the name of this organization? In his letters—and I have seen some 15 of them—Bankston refers to the mutilators simply as the Occult; to Fluckinger, however, both Bankston and Dugan named a well-known national organization devoted to the worship of Satan.
Dugan claimed to have been recruited by the cult in Forth Worth, Texas, around 1965. He was into drugs at the time, be said, and the Devil worshipers offered him bodies of dope, other members were into chopping up small animals and using their parts in ceremonies. The man who Dugan said recruited him also happened to be a helicopter pilot and a suspected smuggler and dope dealer. Authorities in Texas later placed him under surveillance to see if he was piloting any whirlybird sallies of Satan.
Bankston and Dugan supplied a list of mutilation-mob members and many of them were found by authorities to have a background in occult practices and criminality. One woman on the list, for instance, has been arrested in 1969 for robbing graves in North Dakota (Another allegation would, if proved, have meant that there was a Satanist mutilator with her own network TV series). One factor that seemed to give Dugan credibility, according to a well-informed source privy to the investigation, was his obvious great fear of the Satanist society.
Dugan told agent Flickinger that he began to drift away from the Satanists when he was actually exposed to hum-sac. He said that the cult members had talked about human sacrifice as the next step, but he had thought they were just engaging in satanic jive and hyperbole. But in 1965, Dugan claimed, he and eight other members were camped on a lake near Cozad, Nebraska, preparing for a ceremony. The group had been seeing PCP to tranquilize animals and now decided to try the drug out on four young campers from Kansas City. Mutilation-mob members with tranquilizers rifles then shot the four youngsters, who died two hours later, apparently from PCP overdose. Since the campers were already dead, the group decided to try out its ceremonies on the deceased, and withdrew blood and worked satanic cruelties. Afterward, Dugan claimed, the bodies were cut up and placed in burlap bags. Dugan said that he did not see what happened next, but he suspected that the bodies were interred in a nearby gravel pit.
Authorities in Cozad were informed of Dugan's story and as soon as the snows melted (it was March), police spent many long hours looking for the bodies: but no skeletons were found.
During interrogation, Bankston repeated his allegation that the mutilators were involved somehow in the 1970 bombing at the University of Wisconsin. This time he named a man whom he had met in Leavenworth Penitenciary as having supplied the explosives used by the bombers. This same explosives experts, Bankston continued, was involved in a theft of plutonium in Oklahoma in late 1974. Bankston also accused an attorney in Oklahoma of having cached the said plutonium in her basement. What was horrifying was the possibility that the plutonium theft was connected to the case of Karen Silkwood. Silkwood died from mysterious circumstances in November 1974, while investigating apparent safer improprieting at a plutonium parting plant, Kerr-McGee's Cimarrom Feedesk in Crescent, Oklahoma.
Plutonium is extremely carcinger and is one of the deadiests of poisons, only 4.4 of it are needed to build an atomic bomb powerful enough to xxx out the downtown of a city. When Silkwood died in an automobile accident, she had with her a file of investigative doss to turn over to David Burnham of The New York Times. The day after her death when friends searched her wrecked xxx the file was missing. Bankston's sharp ished the possibility that Silkwood had inadvertendly come across the mutilations mob as it ripped off plutonium for the aim of a domestic terror weapon.
When Federal officials checked for the attorney accused by Bankston of ssss the stolen plutonium, it was disclosed that the was already suspected by the homs authorities of having conversed with a prominent member of the xxx Mafia."
All in all, the Bankston-Dugan story was the ultimate tale of terror. It had everything: kidnapped missile silos, mutilations in the name of Satan, plutonium terror, quarries with buried victims, and even the ominous possibility of Satan stockbrokers and gore-happy milicians among the mute mob's 400 members.
Because some of what the informants were saying agreed known xxx, Flickinger was relieved of his ... ATF duties and assigned full time to the mutilations case, under the supervision of the United States Attorney Robert Rome, Minneapolis.
What actually went on dxxxx Federal Investigation is unclear. I have read one report, prepared by Flickinger and dated April 10, 1975, the Federal Government apparently investigated satatic organizations and activities all over the country.
The motives of the informants also remain a bit unclear. Bankston, for instance, appears to have wanted to make a deal so that he could be transferred to a state jail in his home state of Mississippi; he also seems from his letters to have wated to make some money from the publication of his story. Dan Dugan, the other principal informant, wanted to exchange his testimony for a reduction of his seven-year sentence.
For reasons unknown, Federal officials decided in the late spring of 1975 not to pursue the investigation further. One apparent problem with the informants' story was their allegations regarding the national leader of the mute mob. According to Bankston and Dugan, this man had served a sentence in Leavenworth on a bank-robbery conviction (which was accurate) and had recently moved to Austin, Teas (also accurate); however, when Texas reporter John Makeig obtained the alleged leader's ararg and jail history, it indicated that he had been in jail during most of the time that the informants claimed he was roamleg from state to state performing hemapagous ceremonies.
Some autorities believe the Bankston-Dugan affair was part of a master escape plot, predicated on the assumption that a small county jail is easier to flee than a big Federal prison. On May 31, Bankston did, in fact, escape from the jail in Chaska, Minnesota (to which he had been moved from Hastings), along with another prisoner; when they were apprehended six hours later, Bankston insisted that the other prisoner, a murderer, had forced him to go along with the caper. Dugan, meanwhile, had been remanded to Texas, and the day after Bankston's escape, Dugan escaped, too; he was captured on June 19th, during a holdup attempt in Glenwood Springs, Colorado. Bankston later asserted that Dugan had escaped in fear for his life.
Despite the doubt cast on the satanic-ritual theory, the mutilations continued to spread and to increase in frequency in 1975. They were especially common in Texas, where Bankston was to have his fear-filled innings as well.