American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders’: Why a Chilling Scene About JFK’s Assassination Is Key to Docuseries
By Medeea Greere
American Media Group
February 29, 2024

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Ten years ago, a New York photojournalist named Christian Hansen became intoxicated with the case, submitting freedom-of-information requests and piling his apartment with boxes of research and documentation. His longtime friend, filmmaker Zachary Treitz, chronicles Hansen’s obsessive quest for the truth of (DANNY) Casolaro’s death in “American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders” (available on Netflix).

“I didn’t read a lot of conspiracy literature before this,” Treitz tells TheWrap. “I didn’t have strong opinions on the JFK assassination or aliens or Roswell. So the lodestar for what were were doing was just asking simple questions: What happened to Danny? What was he writing about? How can all these people know each other? How do all these things fit together?”

Though not difficult to follow, “The Octopus Murders” is so packed with data, some from apparently unreliable narrators, that the series turns meta and eventually folds into itself. Especially in its compelling third and fourth episodes, the show becomes a deft examination of how following a mystery can be its own perpetual motion machine, challenging us to question the ways that true crime obsession warps the mind.

That idea comes to its sharpest point in the series’ most spellbinding sequence. Halfway through the third episode, titled “The Game,” we’re introduced to Cheri Seymour, a California-based writer and investigative reporter whose 2010 book “The Last Circle” is about Casolaro’s reporting and death.

Chillingly, Seymour describes a meeting she claims to have had in 1992 with a man named Robert Booth Nichols at his home – a safe house, Seymour says she suspected. Nichols was a “government facilitator” and had met Casolaro as a background source for the book Casolaro was writing. Seymour claims Nichols told her that “no journalist has done enough work to deserve to know” the reason why Casolaro was murdered.

Then, Seymour says, Nichols showed her video of what he claimed was the real Zapruder film, the infamous recording of the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas.

But in this version, the kill shot does not come from across the street. As Seymour vividly describes in the series, the purported video showed the driver of Kennedy’s car turns around with a gun in his hand and shoots the president at close range in the head.

“I’m thinking, ‘This isn’t the tape I ever saw before,” Seymour says in the episode. She claims Nichols then played the real Zapruder film, where he pointed out a tree in the background that had the bottom of its trunk missing – a tech glitch, he falsely told her, that proved the “media version” was doctored.

Nichols then snarled to Seymour, “Nothing is at it appears to be.”

American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders | Official Trailer
https://youtu.be/mHcBh4EBudk