re: Dr. Mary’s Monkey

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1) The author, Judith Vary Baker, is mentally ill.
2) If you take a shot every time she uses the phrase "cancer causing monkey virus in the book, you'll need to go to rehab by the time you finish reading this piece of fiction.

I could go on, but you probably get the point. It's an interesting tale, especially if you're from New Orleans, but very hard to accept as fact.

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She's actually an alleged conspirator. Edward Haslam wrote the book but to your point, the author uses these phrases alot.. "What if", "Could it have been" and "I think", among others.

I do believe she was involved in some secret projects for sure. There's nothing Earth shattering or ground breaking about that but the means of her death is likely not what's asserted in the book.

The author asserts she was first accidentally or deliberately, severely injured by some sort of "particle beam" accelerator and that this is what caused her severe burns. He believes this happened in a secret lab.

Haslem goes on to assert a mattress fire could not have caused the severity of her burns (her remains were found on a burned mattress). Additionally, Haslem asserts that after she was burned (not yet killed) by the particle beam, her colleagues on the secret project went ahead and finished her off in the lab, and then took her body back to her apartment. While there, they engaged in some half assed attempt at making it look like it was some sort of rape or passion killing. They stabbed her dead body a few more times and then set her on fire. Haslam alleges her colleagues set her body on fire to cover up the particle beam mishap.

Well numerous forensic pathologists have countered this assertion and have stated a mattress fire could have absolutely caused her burns. Additionally, a pathologist who examined her states she was dead before she was burned and he states this because there was no soot in her lungs. Had she been alive after she was burned, as Haslam asserts, she would have breathed in soot. Which means she was killed and then set on fire. Again, Haslam asserts the opposite. He says she was burned (in the secret lab) and then killed with a knife, while still in the lab. Her being burned prior to her stabbing however has been disproven.

Like I said, the book is interesting and she was indeed murdered. Why she was murdered? I don’t know but she was likely into some heavy, covert shite, which really isn't that big of a deal. Alot of scientists were.

But it's interesting though how Haslam just completely glosses over the police theory that she was murdered in a crime of passion. After all, her genitals were cut with a knife. To hear Haslam tell it however, this was largely incidental. You could tell he really didn't want to talk about that part of it.

Haslam himself (in a reluctant, obligatory way) briefly eludes to how she was heavy into the New Orleans counter culture and ran with some weirdos. It's probably more likely she was killed by another lesbian or some whackadoodle she knew. There's also a very reasonable theory (which Haslam ignores) that she was killed by a known, nut fellow Doctor at the Ochsner clinic. But none of this fits the narrative Haslam wants to create.

After reading the book, you just sorta get the feeling that it's some reachy attempt, in a long line of attempts to cash in on the Kennedy assassination.

And one final thing. Haslam would have us believe that Dr. Mary was working on a secret project to cure the inevitable cancers that were to come from the polio vaccine and that this secret project was started by the US Government. He asserts that the Government wanted to protect us all. Well when has the Government ever shown that level autruism toward its own people?

And if you don't buy that one, he gives you another. He proffers that the project was a secret plan to give Castro some sort of monkey cancer.

It's a fanciful book that would've been more interesting had a better author handled the subject matter.

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1) The author, Judith Vary Baker, is mentally ill.

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That weird. Did she also go by the name of Edward T. Haslam?