This is a memoir of true horror. Born to a father who tormented her, backed by a mother who enabled the abuse, Dianne Fitzpatrick bears the scars of her trauma bravely. Her long hank of hair, its gold now silvered, still drapes like a scarf across the neck so cruelly wounded with a hot poker when Steven prevented her father from putting out her eyes.

Her pernicious environment was exacerbated when she was placed in the program, dosed and hypnotized and processed and trained. Most of her memories of that time are fragmented; only the more extended episodes are included here. Steven recalls further indignities as the children were passed from hand to hand, and he reports himself being accessed years later for obscure purposes.

While Dianne tends to dissociate, Steven remains fully integrated and conscious, though he has been responsive to the post-hypnotic memory suppression for years. “Whenever you see a clock face, you will remember to forget,” he was told, and so he did.

It was when their mother was dying that Steven and Dianne and one sister got together to discuss what to do, how to take care of the old man and their younger brother. During that discussion, they recalled how their dad had openly used the youngster sexually in the home one time all three were aware of, when their mother was out of the house.

This clear memory of his brother’s abuse troubled Steven and he began to lose sleep as memories of his own abuse arose from the darkness of his mind. First the abuse, then the murders, and only much later that business down at the lab.

It was during the period of his emerging recall that he talked to Dianne, and then her own memories arose that confirmed Steven’s. The first of these to emerge was the lady under the house, whose leg was shaved.

Although Steven did consult with a therapist for emotional support during this period, neither he nor Dianne underwent hypnosis. However, they both did start writing.

I have taken pains to detail the onset of the suppressed memories here, because there have indeed been cases where unethical therapists were caught implanting false memories. But that’s not what happened here.

The suppressed memories were bubbling up because of the destabilizing effect of the impending demise of their invalid mother, leaving the old man alone with the younger boy. They were not induced by any therapist, nor was the emergence therapeutic. While Steven did see a therapist briefly, Dianne just worked her way through her own therapy with her journaling.

The pain and the fear, the rage and disgust and shame that defined their lives only crossed the line to horror when they finally did talk, and they were not believed.

As young as they were, they started talking early. They told their mom, they told their teachers, they told the Church, they told the military and civilian police, they even told the FBI. But nobody ever stopped the old man. Nobody could prove a thing. Instead, they were hushed and shamed for talking.

While Dianne kept her journals to herself, Steven amassed a formidable dossier on his father’s crimes, and he went looking for coverage, pressing it upon anyone who would listen to him.

That’s how he met me. In 2003, I was interviewing survivors of mind control programs for a UK filmmaker who secured an option on our story from National Geographic, who in turn let our option lapse, then went on to release a documentary on mind control taking a different tack.

At that time I was unaware that another UK filmmaker named John Edginton had made a documentary about the case that aired on BBC in 2002, called Our Father the Serial Killer. The film managed to cast aspersions on the sanity and/or veracity of Steven and Dianne.

Making the film was an ordeal. Dianne was shaken to the core by being led into a gut-wrenching abreaction reliving for the camera what happened to Jimmy. And then it was all for naught. They couldn’t find any trace of Jimmy, no little boy gone missing, no black Army cook who reported losing his son.

They showed Dianne hooked up to electrodes then concluded she ought not to dwell on these memories, she ought not to think about them so much. They didn’t say she was crazy, they didn’t say she was lying, but the way it was presented leaves that impression.

In 2015 as this book approached completion, John Edginton read it, and it was actually he who suggested in an email to me: “You are probably going to need to find a publisher who specializes in what might be called true horror.”

And then Edginton went on to unwittingly exemplify the special kind of horror that is now truly Dianne’s fate:

I have to admit that I am quite shocked that none of the work we did with Steve and Dianne, in the nine months or so of making the film, appears to have made any lasting impression on Dianne’s current state of thinking about her memories, at least judging by her account here. I had thought that, in the process of making the film, we had helped her move on somewhat from accepting every memory at face value.

I am thinking in particular of how we explored, through psychological tests, the possibility that at least some of these recovered memories may have been rooted in the trauma of their childhood abuse, but that the catalogue of dozens of murders they claim to have witnessed could not and still cannot be reconciled with any actual proven cases of murder.

Casting Dianne into that nether world reserved for those regarded as crazy, or liars, or both—and therein lies the true horror of this tale.

Even though this memoir is true and it is about crime, yet it is not true crime—a genre defined by the publicity generated by the headlines it is ripped from.

One literary agent, who had admired my past true crime work, rejected the book sight unseen and word unread, calling it “not big enough.” By that he meant that the perpetrator was not convicted of any crimes.

Therefore, the book does not provide the gratification of a classic police procedural or a detective novel, where the reader can reasonably expect the forces of good to triumph over evil, and the hero cop to catch the killer and ride off into the sunset sporting “the girl, the gold watch, and everything” (to quote John D. MacDonald).

No proof of Dianne’s story is possible, but I am touched by the authenticity of her voice, and I do not want it silenced, just because it can not cross the firewall of true crime journalism, which relies upon definitive documentation placed on the public record in court to back up the sensational news coverage.

Here without the obligatory distancing and disclaimers, and free from the editorial constraints of mainstream publishing, the voice of the smallest child can be heard, and the reader can absorb the impact directly.

Though it falls outside the true crime genre, this book may well interest the reader who seeks insight into the criminal mind. In many ways, the point of view of the intimate victim is more revealing than even a confessional in the killer’s own words like The Making of a Serial Killer. Alan Watts famously remarked on the inherent difficulty that plagues such introspection: “Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.”

So here we rely on what can be seen through the eyes of a traumatized and dissociative child, as verbalized by a pensive adult and then rendered into a coherent narrative and published with all due respect by your humble servant.

What we see in Silvestras is a different type of serial killer than Danny Rolling. Instead of the hapless hallucinating drifter who wanted to be caught, here we are profiling the undetectable serial killer—a family man with dual citizenship, embedded in the military. We see a skilled, mature, professional perpetrator who selected his victims carefully, and considered himself a past master of corpse disposal.

Whatever he might have done under orders in the special program he appeared to be in, we have no way of knowing. The crimes witnessed by his kids were recreational murders he committed on his own time, where he used them as bait, distraction and cover. In some cases he used the crimes to terrorize, compromise and traumatize the kids, demonstrating his cruelty and power over them, and trying to make them his apprentices.

A military base is the lifeblood of any small community, and common courtesies of good will are traditionally extended on both sides, so when a suspect in a community crime is a soldier, local law enforcement will often defer to the military police. And then within the military organization, rank can be pulled to extend protection to those involved in special operations, or other forms of discipline can be used.

Things that go without saying are written on the wind. Some things just happen that way for no special reason. Others are designed from the start to leave no traces. “Absence of proof,” as the old courtroom saw goes, “is not proof of absence.”

Nobody can say for sure what really happened that kept this perp’s crimes from reaching the criminal justice system, despite the best efforts of his persistent son and his reluctant daughter.

I am just offering these general observations for consideration, in mitigation of the absence of the accustomed proof, and to scratch that itch we all have, the urge for resolution.

There’s always the chance some new evidence will come to light. Until that happens, this book will stand in place of proof, as the statement of the daughter of the unindicted murderer, Silvestras.

Among the papers in the enormous box Steven Griggs sent me in 2003 was a typescript with a cryptic title penciled in: MK Ultra.

Though the program was never identified in so many words with the children, the phrase was not new to me. I recognized MK Ultra as the code name for an umbrella organization funding multiple programs of mind control experimentation and research through the US Government’s military and intelligence agencies, going back to the end of World War Two.

I first heard about MK Ultra from Kerry Wendell Thornley, who had been Lee Harvey Oswald’s commie buddy in the Marines, and had written a book about Oswald before President Kennedy was killed. I produced an exclusive interview with Thornley for A Current Affair, and helped him publish his story, Confession to Conspiracy to Assassinate JFK. Thornley was a bona fide spook, and working on his story gave me a crash course in mind control lasting from 1990 right up to the day of his demise in 1998.

We can prove precious few of the experimental and operational programs funded under MK Ultra, because the records were shredded prior to the Church Hearings in 1973. Only a smattering of accounting records survived the purge to be released into the public domain, but a couple of statements that have been preserved will suffice to convey the nature of it.

One CIA memo dated 1958 states plainly: “The goal of MK Ultra is... controlling an individual to the point where he will do our bidding against his own will, and even against such fundamental laws of nature as self-preservation.”

One mind control subcontractor named Stanley Lovell gleefully described his work ethic as follows: “What I have to do is to stimulate the Peck’s Bad Boy underneath the surface of every American scientist and to say to them: Throw all your law-abiding concepts out the window. Here’s the chance to make merry hell.”

And Captain George White, who ran a psychedelic brothel for the CIA under MK Ultra, said: “I was a very minor missionary, actually a heretic, but I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape, and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest?”

Grateful Dead member Robert Hunter participated in MK Ultra experiments, as did Ken Kesey, who wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. But it was not all giddy fun and games, not just artistic creativity enhanced by LSD.

Unabomber Ted Kaczynski was prodded and provoked under an MK Ultra program at Harvard, and he wanted that to be used in his defense at trial, but the lawyers assigned to him chose to suppress it, thus keeping the true nature of his crimes off the record until it was too late to affect the outcome of his trial.

Victor Marchetti, a 14-year CIA veteran, said in 1977 that the CIA’s claim that MK Ultra had been abandoned in 1973 was a “cover story,” and that experiments likely continued under different names.

Over the years, hard-won information has entered the public domain in a steady stream of personal narratives and a couple of successful lawsuits by those whose lives have been affected by these programs.

And then there is the private research, like the 80,000 words transcribed from the videotaped interviews I’ve done with survivors of these programs. Most of these comprise what I call “road kill on the MK Highway,” people involved in experimental programs that were inconclusive, and terminated without explanation or follow-up. There are also operative assassins, sleepers and super-soldiers. Many have a dissociative tendency that may become a disorder. Then there are those who appear to be delusional psychotics. But who’s to say how they got that way?

Though each story is unique, Dianne and Steven have memories of their time spent in the program that are strikingly similar to memories other survivors have described. In several cases I know of, adult survivors have recognized others they had met as kids in a program.

For example, Ann Diamond is an award-winning Canadian writer who has written a memoir called My Cold War about her own experiences in a program in Montreal. She writes:

I was at this conference in 2008 when Steven Griggs walked up to me and said, “I remember you from the Allan Memorial Institute when you were six years old. I also remember you on a military base near Montreal.” I didn’t know what to make of it. I wondered who he was. And then he said, “I remember you from the Bronfman mansion,” and I started to cry. I rarely cry, but certain things trigger me.

He described what went on inside. He didn’t tell me all of this at once. We kept in touch. He wrote me letters adding more details. He remembered watching me from the back seat of his own family car, as I exited our family car and walked toward the facility on the base, with my hat blowing off and holding a puppy.

Steven apparently has videographic recall, whereas the memories I have are fragmentary, with lots of blocks, but our memories do appear to match each other; the dates and locations are correct.

And another woman Steven’s age who has gone on to become a licensed psychotherapist remembers meeting him as a child at one of the facilities used by the program. They recognized each other as adults by the code names the experimenters had given them as children.

She recalls admiring young Steven immensely because when her mind-control skills were being demonstrated under duress, he interceded on her behalf and rescued her from the overbearing doctors. “Steven literally saved my life,” she says today.

While many other cases have crossed my desk and gone on without further ado, the case of Silvestras Griekshell continues to hold a unique fascination; it’s like a modern-day Hansel and Gretel, with the brave brother and the clever sister under the control of their father, a homicidal maniac who tortures and threatens them, then goes on to turn them over to dangerous strangers. In this case, the part of the witch would be played by the boys down at the lab.

This book contains only a representative selection of the crimes the man committed, as recalled by Dianne. There are dozens more recalled by Steven. The most common impression of a serial killer is that he displays distinctive patterns, with a preferred type of victim and manner of committing the crimes. Not so our Silvestras. He perpetrated across all demographics and used an impressive variety of modus operandi.

Steven listed some of the weapons he had seen his father use:

• A German made automatic pistol 1910/21 Haerens Tojhus serial #5298 that was an antique and was getting near impossible for him to get bullets for; left over from his days of working in the Lithuanian Death Camp.
• A small pocket knife with a 2” blade for slitting throats.
• A garrote for crushing throats, 10” piece of bailing wire with an empty thread spool at each end.
• Bailing wire for tying off amputated limbs and restraining.
• A hacksaw for amputating limbs.
• An axe for inflicting head injuries and removing heads.
• A shovel for striking and throat jabbing.
• Handcuffs.
• Rope.
• Flaming sticks to the eyes, throat and anus.
• His penis, fists and teeth.
• Rocks and 2x4s to the head.
• Cigarette burns
• Prolonged imprisonment in various small out-buildings without water or food.
• An assortment of hand-to-hand combat techniques that largely revolved around head and throat-crushing along with neck-breaking.

Conspiracy Theory. Most people take it for granted that talking about a conspiracy is a sign of paranoid schizoprenia — a mental illness right next to delusional psychosis — and people who do consider conspiracies are automatically shunned. Nobody wants to be “that guy,” always off in a corner muttering, “They’re out to get me!”

Yet the idea that conspiracy is a concept only imagined by the diseased mind is completely illogical. Anyone who has ever seen a Shakespearean tragedy knows it wasn’t a lone nut who stabbed Julius Caesar. All such compelling dramas involve conspiracy. Because secret mischief is a big part of our lives, and it always has been.

The word conspire comes from Latin, meaning “to breathe together.” Legally, it just means two people plotting to commit a crime, even when the plot is never carried out. It’s common knowledge that more prisoners do time for conspiracy for than other crimes.

Today we are so accustomed to the obligatory tinfoil-hat off-your-meds meme we have forgotten that not so long ago, it didn’t exist. It only appeared in 1967 in the form of a now-declassified CIA memo known as CIA Dispatch 1035—960, with talking points for dissemination by agents to influential contacts throughout the media. This was in furtherance of covering up the assassination of President Kennedy.

“With this memo and the CIA’s influence in the media,” wrote Peter Janney, whose father was a high-ranking CIA executive, “the concept of conspiracy theorist was engendered and infused into our political lexicon and became what it is today: a term to smear, denounce, ridicule, and defame anyone who dares to speak about any crime committed by the state, military or intelligence services. People who want to pretend that conspiracies don’t exist — when in fact they are among the most common modus operandi of significant historical change throughout the world and in our country — become furious when their naive illusion is challenged.”

Frank Wisner, the first chief of political warfare for the Central Intelligence Agency, called his worldwide propaganda machine “The Mighty Wurlitzer,” and he used this array of front organizations to play any propaganda refrain that caught his fancy.

Operation Mockingbird was Wisner’s brainchild, born in 1948, and by 1953 when Allen Dulles took over the program, some two dozen media chains were under CIA control. According to Alex Constantine, by the end of the fifties, “some 3,000 salaried and contract CIA employees were engaged in propaganda efforts.”

Once the term conspiracy theory was effectively weaponized, with stalwarts like William Paley, Henry Luce, and Richard Hofstadter on board to feed the flames, it proved to suppress critical thought even better today than in the sixties when it was just getting started.

James Tracy is an expert in conspiracies. He was a professor of communications at Florida Atlantic University who taught a course called “Culture of Conspiracy,” that examined “the relationship between commercial and alternative news media and socio-political issues and events,” until he was fired in 2016 when his teachings became too controversial. Three years earlier in 2013, he had posted this to his Memory Hole blog:

Today more so than ever news media personalities and commentators occupy powerful positions for initiating propaganda activities closely resembling those set out in 1035—960 against anyone who might question state-sanctioned narratives of controversial and poorly understood occurrences. Indeed, as the motives and methods encompassed in the document have become fully internalized by intellectual workers and operationalized through such media, the almost uniform public acceptance of official accounts concerning unresolved events such as the Oklahoma City Murrah Federal Building bombing, 9/11, and most recently the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, is largely guaranteed.

The term conspiracy theory has been the most blatant example of how linguistics are manipulated to implant invisible mechanisms in the minds of the public, which go on to automatically provide cover for a multiplicity of crimes.

These crimes are planned in advance so that should it come to light, it will rebound against the witnesses or victims. Typically, they suffer ostracism, with loss of emotional and economic support at the very least.

Here are a couple of other linguistic shields that function invisibly to repel investigation of crimes.

• The Shield of Incredibility. In this case, factors that are difficult or impossible to believe are built into the situation. The classic example would be when the perpetrators dress up as aliens or witches, or don a white rabbit costume, as MK Ultra uber-shrink Louis Jolyon West was known to do when putting children through traumatic experiences as part of his experimental protocol. Bryce Taylor being the sex slave of Jack Benny, and Cathy O’Brien being raped by “Big Dick” Cheney are both scorned, as everything else they report is dismissed. Though the witnesses may be truthful, their entire testimony is stricken from the record because the State objects to the bizarre details. And the editors tell the freelance writers to go away and don’t come back with any more stories.
• The Shield of Repugnance. Things can be done that are so disgusting, the witness or victim is inhibited from reporting them. The reader cringes from reading them. The talking heads tiptoe around them. There are entire systems that rely upon this reflex. I am not going to give a repugnant example, just a mildly offensive one: the so-called “Underwear Bomber.” In place of this perpetrator’s name and visage and sociopolitical history, his motivations, his associations, his handlers, the resolution of his case, all that remains is an unavoidable image of a man’s underwear. And what’s inside it. Butt-level consciousness of what people do with their butts. So you see how the stink of this association taints all discussion and analysis of this particular conspiracy.
• The Shield of Mystification. Events can be contrived in such a way that to explain the situation becomes overly complicated, and to listen to it or read a briefing becomes too taxing. When codes are used, you have to explain what they mean before you can explain how they were deployed. Very few criminal conspiracies merit such grueling analysis, unless there are massive amounts of money involved. Victims and witnesses are mystified, so a great deal of their mental energy goes into trying to fit square pegs into round holes, and constructing theories to explain the situation, which is so extraordinary they are left unmoored from the common-sense guidelines they have learned from a normal, unremarkable life. Once they are stymied, they are unable to take decisive action and may make bad strategic decisions that work against them.

Good Little Soldiers is a tale told from behind all of these shields, and so the conditioned response is bound to involve skepticism; it’s not worth the effort to look into it because nothing can be proven, it’s too complicated, it’s too horrible, and it’s too incredible. It would take a conspiracy theory to explain it, and that has been rendered a social anathema.

It takes great courage for Dianne to speak out so forthrightly despite all of the social sanctions put in place by these weaponized memes in order to protect the perpetrators of an evil even greater than that of the recreational homicides she witnessed.

Dealing with Dianne for a decade, I can say she presents a consistent personality whose accounts of events never vary; who cannot be led by suggestive questioning into changing her story, as you would find in those who are “just seeking attention”; who can withstand repeated questioning and probing, without the evasions and inconsistencies you encounter in the chronic liar as well as the fantasist.

And then there’s Steven. I’ve known him even longer than I have Dianne and I am able to cross reference what he tells me with what Dianne tells me. He too shows consistency in the impact of his traumatic childhood. I see no reason to challenge Steven’s sanity or veracity.

The names of their siblings have been changed to protect their privacy. One sister has been institutionalized.

The other sister told John Edginton: “Quite often, Steven and Dianne would go off to places with my father. And in my mind as a child, I thought they were the favorite children, because why did they always get to go off with Dad, and I never got to go with them.”

Asked if it might have been strategic to separate them, she agreed: “It would make sense, military strategy, divide and conquer. Never let one person know what the other person knows. Because then they could never get together and say hey, something’s going on here, maybe we should do something about it.”

Asked if she could believe her dad was a murderer, she replied: “I’m sitting on the fence about that right now. Because I don’t have my own memories to validate, it’s a scary thought. I do remember sitting in the car a lot like this.” She covered both eyes.

“And my protection was to close my eyes. Somehow or other, I learned to just shut my eyes, turn my head, right when something happened. They’d say ‘Did you see what happened?’ and I’d just say, ‘No, I didn’t see anything,’ because I turned my head, maybe instinctively, so I would never witness anything brutal.”

She recalls that she once told a playmate her dad was a Russian. “I was called home and my father took off his belt and started beating me, and told me I was never ever to tell stories like that again. I don’t know if I went unconscious, or you know how kids do, they leave their body, but I do remember my mother screaming, ‘You’re gonna kill her! You’re gonna kill her!’ I always had the sense that if we were really bad enough, he would kill us.”

The military have reasons of national security to keep their secrets involving any programs or personnel. And law enforcement likewise often have their own reasons for failing to apprehend criminals.

For example, take the case of a convicted serial killer who confessed to 49 murders. In The Devil’s Right-Hand Man: The True Story of Serial Killer Robert Charles Browne, Stephen G. Michaud and Debbie M. Price tell how the case was worked for five years by an all-volunteer cold-case squad headed by retired FBI agent Charlie Hess and retired police detective Lou Smit, who experienced great frustration, even traveling to six states, without being able to close a single case.

The book is a real eye-opener when it comes to the law enforcement response to a bona fide serial killer volunteering evidence in case after case that might not have been handled properly by the local law enforcement team. Not that this involved any conspiracy, just that the investigators met such determined resistance to admissions of slip-ups or neglect.

With all due respect to Friar Occam and his Razor, sometimes the simplest explanation is not actually the true one after all. Especially when the truth involves a bona fide criminal conspiracy involving liability at the highest level, a legacy from the past that keeps on dealing dividends as those traumatized under these programs work out their fates as best they can.

As for your humble servant, putting my own name on a story of this nature hasn’t been easy either. One well-known author I asked to review the book replied: “I’ve been forced to give up any involvement in work on mind control. I can have no connection to it. If I do communicate with subjects or writers on this topic, or endorse a book with mind control in it, there will be retaliation. I simply can’t have anything to do with all that. If I do, the torture that I lived with for a decade returns and my life is not worth living. I have to steer clear.”

It took three years for a very protective Steven Griggs to vet me before introducing me to his reclusive sister. So it was in 2006 that I began to befriend this remarkable woman and to earn her trust enough to build a working relationship. This book was developed to its current form by myself serving as the executive partner, working from a wealth of journal entries Dianne had made over the years, as well as meetings, correspondence and phone calls with both Steven and Dianne.

Just as with Killer Fiction, The Making of a Serial Killer, and Confession to Conspiracy to Assassinate JFK, once again I have remained invisible throughout the narrative, the better to put my co-author in the spotlight. I just thought it might help if I’d step in here myself for a moment right at the end, to put this project into perspective.

It is beyond the scope of this book to educate the reader on the historical background of these programs, but throughout the years I’ve been working with Dianne on this book, I have continued my own research. So I am including a list of readings I can recommend.

To be clear: Dianne Fitzpatrick wrote the journals she shared with me from her own personal experience; she did not need to do any research at all for this book.

Of course she is literate, she reads as well as she writes, but she has not read any of the books I have listed here.

Dianne is exceptionally sensitive and highly intelligent, but she does not do the internet, she does not do email, and she does not do public appearances.

She does, however, live close enough to the sea to surf the healing waves, and she has somebody to love.

Excerpt | Afterword | Contact
Sondra London | Dianne Fitzpatrick
GOOD LITTLE SOLDIERS
RUNCIBLE TALES | SONDRA LONDON DOTCOM