Investigators also spoke with Riconosciuto's lawyer, Louis Buffardi, and Riconosciuto himself repeated the details of his involvement with PROMIS, but both made another unexpected connection of it all to a 1997 Octopus-style double homicide in Hercules, California. Like members of the Cabazon tribe before them, the bodies of 12 year old Brendan Abernathy and his 43 year old father Neal, who owned a car repair shop, were found bound in their living room, wrapped in electrical cable and shot execution style. Acquaintance with Riconosciuto may have been among the motives for their murder. Mountie McDade joined Hercules police detective Sue Todd in a prison interview of Riconosciuto, but the details of how the Canadian case relates to the California murder, as well as its connection to Ari Ben-Menasche and Mohammad El Fayed, and to the death of Diana, remains unclear.

End Notes:

[1]. An internet posting to the Conspiracy Theory Research List (CTRL) from September 11, 1997 echoed reports that photographs from the scene at one point reveal a motorcyclist ahead of the Mercedes popping flashbulbs into the eyes of driver Henri Paul.

[2]. A short list of suspicious details about the car crash:

It took an hour and forty minutes to get Diana to the Pitie Salpetiere hospital (four other hospitals were closer); early news reports had Diana up and walking around immediately after the crash; a few weeks prior to the accident, the Mercedes had been stolen from the garage of the Ritz hotel, where the fatal ride began; contrary to normal procedures for bodyguards, guard Trevor Rees-Jones fastened his seatbelt before the ride, and was the only one to survive the crash, and later claimed amnesia about it; Henri Paul appears sober in video footage taken at the Ritz Hotel just before the fatal ride; the French opened up the tunnel roadway only hours after the crash and neglected to collect important evidence.

[3]. Mohammed Al Fayed owns the posh Harrod's department store in London. He has been a champion in trying to ferret out government documents held in secret and other information concerning his son's death.

[4]. Khashoggi spent three semesters studying economics at Chico State University in California before starting a business renting his truck to companies doing business in Saudi Arabia. After college, he developed those contacts into a role as a liaison between US and Saudi corporations and the Saudi military, primarily under Sultan bin Abdul Aziz. That role, in its various legal and extra-legal dimensions, brought Adnan Khashoggi to great wealth as a broker of long-term deals involving military hardware. [5]

Alex Constantine notes: "Tiny Rowland was the publisher of London's Observer until a reporter Tom Bower researched the financier's past a few years ago and discovered him to be a former Hitler Youth Corps leader. Rowland served a spell in an allied detainment camp toward the end of the war, then migrated to S. Africa and found enormous wealth there in the mining industry. Thereupon he relocated to the UK topurchase the Observer and rub shoulders with some of the most nototrious movers in the world business community, including Daniel Ludwig, a hotel magnate who retains a PR agency solely to keep his name out of the newspapers." (10/13/97)

[6]. Peter Rushton claimed on the ALT.POLITICS.ORG.CIA Internet list that he had been given "a large file of allegations against Rowland" by Francesca Pollard as part of a counter-offensive launched by Mohammad Al Fayed against intrique by Arab industrialist Ashraf Marwan, working as a front for Tiny Rowland, to secure a large number of shares in the House of Fraser, the company that owns Fayed's Harrod's.

[7]. Lawton, Valerie and Thompson, Allan, "Rigged Software Claimed To Hack Intelligence Files," Toronto Star, August 28, 2000.