Who Trolled Amber? - Pig Iron - Episode 4: The kaleidoscope

Episode Date: September 11, 2023

There is a new layer of horror to Chris's story – and in trying to understand it, Basia investigates the evidence that Chris was killed on purpose. The team figures out how to get to South Sudan – and how to finally meet the essay-writer.Listen to the full series today. For the premium Tortoise listening experience, curated by our journalists, download the free Tortoise audio app. For early and ad-free access to all our investigative series and daily and weekly shows, subscribe to Tortoise+ on Apple Podcasts.If you’d like to further support slow journalism and help us build a different kind of newsroom, do consider donating to Tortoise at tortoisemedia.com/support-us. Your contributions allow us to investigate, campaign and explore, and to build a newsroom that is responsible and sustainable. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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This episode contains descriptions of graphic violence. So I've just spoken to Swampy, whose real name is Chris Garrett, and he's the former tree surgeon, former volunteer fighter who's in Ukraine. And he said to me, well, he told me what to do. He said, you should Google Craig Lang, Ukraine, Sudan. So that's what I've done. The first few things that come up are things I've already seen. They're about the double murder in Florida that Craig is accused of. But as I dug a bit deeper, I managed to find the legal documents that were published with the murder charge in

Florida. And in those, there's a statement by an FBI officer. And it's really interesting. It says that in June of 2017, that's two months before Christopher Allen goes to South Sudan himself, Craig Lang and two other people from Ukraine entered South Sudan, were arrested, and they were deported. So that confirms that that trip happened. But as I kept going, there's another fascinating thing

that I found in this pretty obscure article. It's really just one line. It's a quote from a South Sudanese government spokesman who said that those three men, including Craig Lang, had been deported and that they claimed to be journalists. But I know Craig Lang wasn't a journalist. He was a fighter. So the obvious question now is,

were these two trips connected, Chris's and the mercenaries? If the South Sudanese thought that these mercenaries were pretending to be journalists, is that what they thought that Chris was doing? Could that be why he was killed? Reporting this story feels a bit like looking into a kaleidoscope. Reporting this story feels a bit like looking into a kaleidoscope. You know those things that, as you turn them, the coloured shards inside start to shift and make new shapes?

Because it's not necessarily what you know about Chris that makes the difference. It's how you piece it all together. Each new discovery is like a turn of the dial, all the facts falling together in a new way and a new picture emerges. And I say this because the FBI statement and this news article prompts a turn of the dial. Chris had become close to some of the fighters, but now it's all significant in a new way. It's part of a different picture. Like, I remember that Joyce told us in Maine that Craig Lang had stayed at Chris's apartment in Kiev. I don't think it was this planned thing. Chris was surprised that he was,

I mean, there was no time to argue with them. Yeah, they might have slept a night there or something on the floor. We don't really know, I don't think, very much about how close that relationship was. Now, everything in my mind is pointing to those two critical months, July and August 2017, the month before and the month of Chris's trip. I'm Basha Cummings and from Tortoise this is Pig Iron, episode four, The Kaleidoscope. You know it's a difficult thing to talk about. Yeah I mean it's been a long, long time since anybody asked me about Chris.

So it's something that I had put somewhere and I locked the doors. And I don't know if I'm going to be able, I mean, we'll see. We'll see if I'll be able to open them again, but let's see what comes out of it. The person I speak to next was, I think, one of the closest people to Chris in the months before his death. Helena, his girlfriend. She was 22 when he was killed, a student from Belgium. When, do you remember when you first met Chris and how you met him? I do. I think, I mean, it was funny because you told me over the phone that Chris met Jeremy in 2015 in Paris for the first time. And so when he came back from that trip, he met me for the first time.

During our conversation, the doors did seem to open for Helena, little by little. She told me about the two years they'd had together, how they'd fallen in love, sharing books and adventures. I remember him telling a story about the time he got captured by the separatists. They said that they were going to cut his ear off, and so that was a story that intrigued me, obviously. That's pretty impressive for a first date. That's true, yeah. Helena told me about a trip they'd taken together to Belarus, one where Chris talked about the fighters,

about who they were and what they meant to him. And there we had the conversation about what it means to be good. And this is something I remember, he was talking I mean he was hanging out with these people of right sector as of and you wouldn't say they were good people in a sense that now I have to watch my words I don't know what I can say but like Chris told me stories about them and you wouldn't say they were nice people, they were good people. But Chris believed or wanted to believe that they were good on a different level. I mean, that's what he told me, like I think they're good on a deeper level

because when I'm with them they care for me and they stand up for me and they will help me if I'm in trouble and that they had really connected that they were friends and then we were talking about, like, can you really be friends with people of the far right that have certain thoughts, certain opinions? But Chris was, I mean, he was friends with them. How did you interpret what he was saying to you? Did you believe that what he was

saying could be possible? No, I think differently about this. And also back then. I mean, yeah, you can be friends, you can be friendly. But at some point, I mean, there are borders crossed. I get the feeling again, that Chris struggled to reconcile his two worlds. On the one hand, he had Helena, his parents, kind, good people far from the battlefield. And on the other, there were the fighters and his inescapable draw to people like Craig Lang. Did he ever mention to you an episode

with some of his mercenary foreign fighter friends that they had gone to South Sudan or they had wanted to go? Did he mention that to you? Yeah, but that was really in the later stages. That was in the last week we saw each other or something. But did you get a sense that that had happened then or had happened sometime previously? That his friends went to South Sudan?

I don't know, that's some... I couldn't say because my memory's playing. Yeah, I don't know. Memory is always slippery, in grief even more so. And it was nearly two hours into our interview, with those doors now open, that Helena really let me in. And there I learned about the horror that still haunts her as she gripped a scarf that had belonged to Chris.

I needed to be close to them. And then once I was there, it became clear that there were things to be done. She was telling me about how she traveled to the US to be with Chris's parents soon after he was killed. You know we met with the funeral director and it was such a crazy conversation so he was uh saying like if you want an open casket then well we're probably gonna have to give him some sort of hat but that will be very unnatural or something and they would say like yeah i mean obviously i'll put a lot of makeup so he wouldn't really look i mean it was a horrible conversation and why were they suggesting putting a hat on him there is this thing

this conversation that I had with Joyce over the phone but actually I have never been sure if that conversation really happened I mean she said something really horrible I have never been sure if that conversation really happened. I mean, she said something really horrible about what had happened to Chris. I don't know if she actually really said that, but at the same time, I also don't think I'm going to make that up. Or she said that they took his brain out.

That's what i remember and then she was like who would do something like that and why i mean that you didn't make that up okay one of the things that we would like to try and answer is what happened. Because in the post-mortem, the pathologist does suggest that it's missing. That it's missing? That it wasn't there at the time that the post-mortem was conducted. Oh, wow. Oh. Fuck, I really thought I made that up. Wow, there's a lot more questions than I thought.

I thought I had all the answers. Or I thought I had a good idea about what happened. I need to explain. When Jeremy first came to me with this story, there was one detail that stood out from the rest, and it concerns what happened to Chris's body in South Sudan. It's something that, understandably, has shaped the family's idea that this was more than just an accident, before the connection to the fighters, before the mystery essay arrived.

And it comes, in part part from the pathologist the man who performed the post-mortem in san diego and really it comes from a single line in his autopsy report okay so i've got the autopsy report up in front of me chris was shot five times once to the head twice to the neck and once in each leg and then at the bottom of the second page and it goes through each of those injuries in some detail in kind of bullet points but at the end of the second page it says that his body was partially embalmed and as a subclause on there it says that the right and left cerebral hemispheres were not identified at autopsy. And then in brackets, it says removed remotely prior to arrival of body at SDM EO, which would be...

It's a phrase that adds a new layer of horrendous possibilities for Chris's parents. His body had been in the custody of the South Sudanese government for a number of days before being handed back to the U.S. embassy. Could they have tampered with his body or the soldiers who killed him? Could someone have been removing evidence? It's all possible in that phrase, removed remotely, because the word removed suggests a remover. It suggests intent. And John and Joyce have, over the years, tried to confirm what exactly the pathologist had meant by it. But when they tried to contact him, they didn't get a reply. And when they pushed again, his response did little to clarify anything. So I tried to reach the pathologist myself.

He's called Robert Stabley. Jeremy warns me that it's unlikely I'll get a reply. I've emailed him twice asking to discuss the post-mortem. Nothing. It's not only the question of what happened to Chris's brain which feeds the idea that something more sinister happened to him. There are two photographs, too, and after making sense of the post-mortem, Jeremy suggests it's time I look at them myself. Shall I come round? Yeah, yeah.

OK. So these appeared on a number of different websites and chat forums. They're disturbing, but important pieces of evidence. And just to warn you, I'm going to describe them to you. So he's lying in some grass. He is beside what looks like a Ziploc bag. He's wearing a long-sleeved top that's sort of pulled up around his chest.

You can see on his left hand he's got a piece of red material tied around his wrist. And he's clearly been shot in the head because it looks like quite a lot of his skull is missing. It looks like that, yeah. And there's blood in the grass and his eyes are open. I cannot imagine how distressing that would have been to see as his parents. Did they see these?

I don't know about John. Joyce hasn't seen them. Joyce has, but... I mean, that is an utterly awful image to publish anywhere. In the second image, you can see that Chris's trousers have been pulled down, exposing his genitals. It's clearly an act of humiliation, and it's even more upsetting to look at. I think it's important for me to see them, one, to understand,

or to try and understand what happened to him. Two, it's important for the question of targeting, for me to understand it's also important I think from the war crimes question about how the body was treated yeah I think I don't think I can really

yeah join you in this if I haven't seen them. It's also very difficult to report on the story without knowing. Yeah. Why do that to a person you didn't mean to kill? It's exactly because the photographs could suggest intent to kill that they've become an important part of the family's legal case

calling for an official investigation. And on top of that, their lawyers argue that humiliating Chris's body could constitute a war crime. How do you feel looking at these again? Quite unsettled. Yeah. Both the post-mortem and the photographs had added together to make Chris's family feel like someone meant to kill him. But because the original pathologist still isn't answering my emails, I turn to another man.

And he was taken from South Sudan to London to San Diego, where the autopsy took place. I was introduced to Dr. Klaas Bushman through working on another story involving a horrible death. Klaas works at the University Hospital in Kiel in Germany. I'd like to talk to you about your interpretation of the post-mortem and the details of it. What I want to know is whether he can explain what might have happened to Chris's brain and explain why it wasn't there at the time of the post-mortem, 14 days after Chris was killed.

It's a crucial question. If we can understand what happened to it, we can figure out if it could be evidence that he was killed on purpose or not. Parts of the brain were missing. Large parts of the brain were missing. The brainstem was there and the cerebellum was also there. And this, in my mind, fits rather perfectly to the injury pattern because Mr. Allen was shot in the head and in the neck,

obviously from a larger distance with obviously larger war ammunition, maybe a machine gun or something. And this is a high energetic, high kinetic trauma. And this might cause the part of the body which is hit, especially when it comes to bony structures, to literally explode. It's a phenomenon called the Cronlein shot, named after a Swiss surgeon called Rudolf Ulrich Cronlein. In 1899, he observed how a high-velocity bullet can remove a brain, and it tallied with what Klaas was saying, that a long-distance shot could have done this to Chris. But I think we can see or at least assume that parts of the brain were lying in the grass

and the skull is open then due to the injury pattern. This is the most probable explanation for the missing parts of the brain at autopsy. So it's actually not something that surprises me or that I've never seen before as a forensic pathologist. You have seen something like this before? Yes, we have seen shots to the head, gunshots to the head with similar injury patterns, yes. In preparation of this podcast, of this interview, I checked the internet for sure about the case.

There was a discussion or an argument about the fact whether there has been crossfire or not. I think the only thing we can say is that from a forensic point of view, death happened immediately after he was hit. When I look up examples of a cron line shot in medical journals, all the images look precisely like that first picture of Chris's that Jeremy had shown me. It really seems like this could explain Chris's missing brain. And Dr. Klaas isn't the only one to say so. Two other experts in neuropathology and ballistics say the same thing. To me, it feels fairly definitive, something concrete.

me it feels fairly definitive something concrete if two leading pathologists look at the post-mortem and say this isn't unusual the bullet probably removed the brain what would you think then i mean i i hear it but i just think the real the person the only person who saw the actual wound that's medical is stably and it's just very difficult not having him comment on it in some detailed way. But if he won't do that? Yeah, it's just a very difficult thing. I guess we'll have a probable, well, it'll be a balance of probabilities, won't it? But isn't that all we're likely to have five years on? Well, it depends.

I don't know. If Stabley were to talk, perhaps not. Well, I've tried him twice, so... He's obviously very not keen to be in the spotlight. This question of what happened to Chris's brain is one of the darker parts of the story that's always been obscured from view. Before now, it's not been a public detail. But it's a detail I've thought about when I've spoken to journalists

who are familiar with South Sudan. Because many of them wonder if maybe the family and Jeremy have fallen into a conspiracy theory with the idea that Chris was killed on purpose. The consensus seems to be Chris was killed in crossfire. End of story. Best leave it alone. But then I remember what Chris's parents have had to think about. Those photographs, the suggestion of a missing brain, and now this mysterious letter.

And that's not all. OK, my notes are a little bit scattered, so just bear with me as I go through them. One afternoon, we're sitting together going back through evidence and Jeremy tells me about a tip-off he'd been sent a couple of years ago. The information he received from a source focuses on Chris's movements just as he arrived in Uganda before crossing the border into South Sudan. It's a claim that involves the much feared National Security Service in South Sudan, the NSS. He had an ex-NSS source who claimed that

Chris's killing was premeditated and that he was tracked from... The NSS is a security network that essentially runs South Sudan. It sows fear and violence, clamps down on free speech and any political opposition to the president, a man called Salva Kiir, and to his party, which is called the Sudan People's Liberation Movement, the SPLM. The source told Jeremy that maybe the Ugandans tipped the NSS off, that Chris or a Western journalist was with the rebel spokesman. Maybe this could have led to his death. That would make sense. Uganda and South Sudan are very friendly. And did you ask him for any evidence beyond this call?

I don't think anyone had any hard and fast proof that was the problem everyone was just speaking to their sources and unable to as they as he said corroborate anything i don't know where the ethical line is with that you know as in like if i knew these things but i couldn't stand them up i don't know whether i would tell you if i was in this person's position because it will massively influence how you think about the death of your cousin but without evidence and now you have all of these hints but it might be i don't know it might it might be too late or it might be impossible to get the evidence look he he was very clear about making certain i knew a lot of this, all of this was rumour. Right.

And nothing had been substantiated. So I really can't blame him for putting false thoughts in my head, which I did not have. With all this swirling in my head, all this rumour, I call a Canadian journalist, Sam Midnick. She's much more open than other journalists to speak about Chris. It was very sad, it was shocking, and I think everyone wanted answers. Sam was in South Sudan when Chris was killed, working for the Associated Press, a big American news agency. Now she lives in Burkina Faso, and we spoke in between her many reporting trips. She did her own investigation into what

happened to Chris, published in the South African newspaper, The Mail and Guardian, in 2019, two years after he was killed. You know, as a journalist, when something like this happens, you start digging, You start asking questions. You know, what happened? Sam's reporting was really important for Chris's family and for their legal team because she interviewed government soldiers who said they saw Chris taking pictures. And they told her that it didn't occur to them that Chris might have been a journalist. One sergeant told her,

We saw him taking photos. We thought he was a white rebel that was filming. So I asked her what she made of the tip-off that Jeremy had been sent. If the first allegation that he was tracked and targeted because he was with the rebels, that they knew he was going to be there, is that likely? Is that a likely scenario based on your experience? There's nothing in my reporting that speaks to the fact that he was tracked and targeted and followed in. I would have questions as to, you know, for what purpose and why would they be tracking him? And even if they knew he was coming in with the opposition, you know, what would the reason be for them to follow him, track him? It's really hard to speak to that.

Do you think that getting to the truth of what happened on that day is possible? I think it's always possible. I think it's just, it could take time. But I also think there's a point too, where it's, you know, do we have as much as we're ever going to have? The thing is, we do have something new, the essay and its curious author, who keeps telling us that he wants to meet in person because only then can he tell us what he really knows. So after talking to Sam, it feels like the right time to figure out how we can get to South Sudan. ACAST powers the world's best podcasts.

Here's a show that we recommend. Hi, I'm Una Chaplin, and I'm the host of a new podcast called Hollywood Exiles. It tells the story of how my grandfather, Charlie Chaplin, and many others were caught up in a campaign to root out communism in Hollywood. were caught up in a campaign to root out communism in Hollywood. It's a story of glamour and scandal and political intrigue and a battle for the soul of a nation. Hollywood Exiles, from CBC Podcasts and the BBC World Service. Find it wherever you get your podcasts. ACAST helps creators launch, grow, and monetize their podcasts everywhere.

Acast.com So we feel that we need to go to try and speak to some of these rebels and to speak to these people who have made claims that Christopher Allen was targeted. I'm not a war reporter, so I don't have hostile environment training, neither does Gary. So we feel that we need some advice on how to approach this story, what precautions to take, and we were hoping that you might be able to help.

The first thing you do when you're thinking of doing a dangerous reporting trip, if that is you have the luxury to work in a newsroom, is you consult a risk specialist, someone who knows war and can help pick holes in whatever ambitious plan you've dreamed up for yourself. It's a service that costs money, a service that Chris probably wouldn't have been able to afford as a freelancer struggling to make ends meet. And I do a lot of risk assessments for groups investigating the murders of journalists, including... This is Frank Smythe. He works with the New York Times and a bunch of the big news organizations. And I thought that talking to Frank would help us figure out the nuts and bolts of a trip to South Sudan. So I recorded it on my phone, thinking that this would just be for me and for my producer, Gary, and for Jeremy. But I underestimated Frank. So I'm familiar with high-risk investigations, but this is even higher risk

than most of those investigations, right? Mainly because it's South Sudan, right? Which I would put up there with, you know, Mexico might be a place on par as other problems a lot of journalists get killed with south sudan the only place more dangerous i can think that would be the central african republic in which frank was telling us think very carefully and that's before you introduce jeremy into the mix if you Google Jeremy, it's immediately obvious that he's Chris's cousin. And that could draw attention to us if we tried to enter South Sudan and start asking

questions about Chris's death. But there's an element to it that I'm not sure you're going to get where you want to go. I think it's going to be extremely dangerous to attempt to even get to where you want to go. I'm not sure you're going to arrive at the destination you're looking for. Before we talk about risk, you to arrive at the destination you're looking for. Before we talk about risk, you know, a risk assessment, hostile environment training. Yeah, you wouldn't need all that. But hostile environment training, it's like, it's like somebody gives you a few boxing records. Doesn't mean you're going to get in the ring with Mike Tyson and survive.

I like the fact that you guys want to do the story, right? Because it's the kind of story that I'd be intrigued by. I'm both supportive and I'm a little scared. Yeah. You know, because I really get it. Like, oh, this guy, he sounds like a man after my own heart, right? He went a little too far and paid for it, unfortunately, right? You know, I'm not judging him, right?

And I wish his afterlife was a good one if there is one, right? Who knows, right? But it's also, you know, at the same time, is this worth it to you? Is it worth it to you? That's what I'm questioning. Risk, as I learn with each conversation I have, is an intimate thing. It's something that only you can measure, an internal compass pulling between the sometimes competing directions of family,

ambition, adventure and purpose. And it's partly why Chris's story is so interesting and so divisive. To some journalists I speak to, his trip was an enormously risky gamble, reckless. But others say, yeah, I probably would have done it myself. I don't think I would have made the leap that he made. And I think also, yeah, a lot of people generally felt like, you know, he kind of crossed the line. It's a question that I ask myself a lot. I think he was unlucky. It was a bad luck. I don't know. I think he was unlucky. It was a bad luck. I don't know. And it feels uncomfortable for me, letting you in on this bit,

when our compass says this is too risky for us. So we need a plan B. What about Kenya? Kenya, I think, is a different proposition. Let's look into that. Don't you think? Yes, I think so. Where are you now? I'm working on a radio bit with Chris.

Recording this course, which is OK. Hope to come to Kenya. Can you meet me there? Can he travel? Now we need the essay writer to agree to meet us in Kenya. OK, shall I tell him we're ready? Are we ready? For the essay writer's own safety, we aren't telling you his name. We've disguised his voice and we won't reveal anything about his identity. Hello?

Hi, it's Jeremy. How are you? What we can say is that he's speaking to us from a refugee camp and we offer to cover the costs for him to travel to meet us in Nairobi. Do you think it's safe for me to meet you? Is there any risk? No, there's no risk at all. You know what happened to Christoph Allen? Touched not only me, but the whole of my group. But anyway, it's good that I will be meeting you people face to face and you will hear.

You will hear from me about it. And yeah, we shall talk more when we meet face to face. Just before we go, do you know that the stuff that you put in that letter is true? Yes. Okay. I'll be in touch.

The first hurdle has been cleared. Place, date, time. Wow. It's happening. It's happening now. It's quite a different prospect, sitting in the spare room in my house in Melbourne and making a call in December before Christmas. Yeah.

For something which could have been so complicated to arrange, it all feels unnervingly straightforward. But then the essay writer's tone starts to change so you said hey can i start checking out whether you are who you say yeah so i followed up with that um and he um he said he eventually responded and he said, he eventually responded and he said, look, it's OK, but I prefer that it happens after our Nairobi meeting. We want to check if this guy is who he says he is. In the essay, he lists name after name, people he says who can vouch for him. But after initially being open to us doing this, he changes his mind. He becomes much colder.

So I started to think this doesn't feel good. Yeah. So I said, well, who can I contact? He said, let's meet first and we can arrange that jointly. And so then I thought this is actually getting really quite bad. Yeah. So I said, why is that? And then he got angry.

And he said to me, so choose any contact and that's it. And I said, I don't want to do anything to upset you, but I'm keen to understand your thoughts. Then he said, then you wait. So you're saying to him, I want to contact any number of the people that you put in the essay as referees. And he's saying... Wait. Something is different. But also, what has to wait until we see each other in person?

That's just the other thing that's slightly freaking me out. Like, why can none of this happen beforehand? Yeah. Next time in Episode 5. Death is always so painful, but one cannot keep quiet. We're actually right over South Sudan now, coming up

over Juba. This is an increasingly crazy journey, I guess. Truth is always painful. And it is hard to understand. Do you think we will understand in the end? Or do you think the truth is going to be there's too many shades in South Sudan? then this series is reported and written by me basher cummings additional investigation is by

jeremy bliss the producer is gary marshall location recording by christopher estergaard additional reporting and editing by Xavier Greenwood. Additional editing by David Taylor. Sound design is by Carla Patella. Original theme by Tom Kinsella. With thanks to Charlotte Alfred, Richard Stupart, Brian Adeba, Halima Atumani, Bob Seddon and Dr. Jacob Machka. The executive producer is Kerry Thomas. Peg Iron is a Tortoise production.