Life and Death on Montauk

Many of you have read a version of what follows, i.e., the mystery of the death of my friend Peter Beard. I’ve shortened it, did some re-writing, and added my own photographs, which will attempt to tell the story of my relationship with Montauk, N.Y., where I lived for many years. So it is really two stories. I don’t know yet if it works.

I’m hoping to make this a part of my memoir-in-progress, tentatively titled The Art of the Boondock; A Photographic Journey. Comments/criticisms are welcome.

It will be a big book, physically, with some images full page. Click to see them big.

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Note: When someone says they ‘live’ or ‘ have lived’ ‘in’ Montauk, you can be sure they don’t really know the place. See, Montauk in its feel is so much like an island (it actually was an island when, in 1938, the big hurricane covered the Napeague) that it affects one’s description of it, prepositionally, as it would an actual island dweller: An island is lived on  not in (or, alternatively, ‘at’). (Hawaiians seem to be an exception here, although I find myself wincing whenever I hear someone claim they live, say, ‘in Maui.’ Sounds…really wrong.

(dec 29, 9;30 am)

December 26, 2022

The following essay on the death of Peter Beard was written in April of 2020 and subsequently (between Christmas and New Years, 2023) re-written for this book.  As with my state of mind with the original writing, I am again having strange thoughts, not good ones either. The embedded images are not directly related to the text but rather are my memory-visions of the special place I inhabited for much of my life.

Last night (which was Christmas) I had a campfire here in the desert in southern Arizona. It was, as usual, just my pup Gus and myself as dusk fell and I cooked dinner. Suddenly I had a strong desire to shoot a self-portrait, one that would reflect my mood. You may not like looking at it but for me it is successful.

     The reason I am writing these words at all is likewise odd: I woke up this morning with the desire to view the movie My Dinner With André. This was especially strange because I was never that wild about the movie, not like some people. My recollection of it from years ago was that it’s just okay, interesting but not particularly worthy of repeated viewings. But I really wanted to see it again. Now. (How weird is that?) So I fired up the MacBook, looked it up on Youtube and am about halfway through it as I write.

     What got to me, and what inspired me to write this — and, I’m convinced, what subconsciously inspired me to view the flick now — is the part of the movie wherein André Gregory describes a strange night he had at Montauk; he says it was on ‘Dick Avedon’s property.’   

      I don’t know for sure if his anecdote is based on a real experience but I am assuming it was (Gregory seems to say as much in an interview), and it shook me up, mainly when he describes an occult ceremony that took place in ‘a building that had burned down on the property.’ 

   I immediately knew that this wasn’t Avedon’s property; it was Peter Beard’s. Beard’s adjoins Avedon’s out east on what is known as the Montauk Moorlands, for how it could be right out of an A. Conan Doyle story, say, ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’, especially at night or when the fog rolls in off the Atlantic. I assume they had changed the name of the location for reasons of privacy or whatever, since the story has such a… sinister vibe. The house in André’s tale was Beard’s ‘Windmill House’ that had burned down in the 1970s. (No other house has burned down on or near Avedon’s lot, so there is no doubt about this.)

     Thing was, while listening Andrés description I got an intense feeling that I had been there that night on the Moorlands and participated in the ceremony, which involved a mock burial (of André) in the basement of the burnt, derelict house. André tells us  that there were about nine people there. Was I one of them? I still don’t know for sure; classic déjà vu.

     See, I have a terrible memory, mainly long-term, otherwise I would have remembered the Montauk ceremony when I’d first seen the film many years ago. But I didn’t. (I would have remembered remembering it, if you get my drift.) Now I did. Maybe. 

My long-term memory is so defective that sometimes I blank out whole years, can’t conjure any images at all. One time I needed to find the year wherein for a few months I lived in an apartment in Manhattan and drove a taxi at night because I was broke. (A year later I was back doing barrel rolls in a Learjet, but that’s another story.)  The way I recalled it (the year) was this: I was teetering on the edge of insanity and almost went over the brink because the Scorcese film Taxi Driver was in theaters. That much I remembered, and how much I’d identified with Travis Bickle. They actually used my taxi garage on 57th street, although I wasn’t driving yet when they shot it but it sure got my attention when it showed up on the theater screen (which also was on 57th street, two blocks from my apartment on 55th); truly surreal. So I looked up the year of the film ’s release (1976).

     But Jesus, why did I want to be reminded of the Montauk incident? 

  The other thing is the self-portrait I shot last night, which for some reason I had made my screensaver. Fucking spooky image,  at least when I look at it. And I rarely if ever do that, i.e., make one of my photos my screensaver (I’ve since taken it down). Why do I want to have in front of me a creepy version of myself staring out of the darkness over a hellish, fiery pit? 

One of the reasons I am lately so taken with photography may be its function as frozen memories, now that I’m older and my memory is deteriorating. And the whole death thing… and… I think it’s time to tell you about Peter Beard…

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An East End Mystery (Tour)

by Allan Weisbecker on April 17, 2020 in Blog

I’m having strange thoughts, more so than usual…

A friend of mine has disappeared and it seems very much like he will never be seen again, not by me, nor by his other friends, nor by his family, maybe not by any other human… I’m talking desaparecido, a word I learned to use in el Salvador in the 1990s.

But who cares? you might be thinking. Statistically, some 600,000 people go missing each year in the United States, tens of thousands never heard from again. What makes this one different? Why should you care? 

His name is Peter H. Beard and you likely have no idea, no picture or image of who he is, except maybe as a vaguely familiar name, maybe attached to some fucking ‘celebrity’ or elite scumbag. If you well know who he is or have ever met him, I suspect you are… unique… in some way (not necessarily a good way).

According to the media, 12 days ago Peter ‘wandered off’ from his home on the wooded cliffs at Montauk, New York, my old home town; this was at about 4:40 PM on March 31, a cold but not freezing day. In reading the stilted, journal-prose the phrase that hit me like a physical blow is the ‘detail’ that Peter ‘suffers from dementia’… what?!

But god I hate that word… and yes, fear it.

I hadn’t seen Peter in about a decade and since my on-the-road bolt from Montauk in 2014 none of my local friends saw fit to inform me of his condition. Just as well, actually, as his ‘disappearance’ somehow softened the D-word blow: I’d rather know all at once that he is no longer the Peter, the man, I knew, and that he no longer walks the planet, i.e., (odds are) he’s dead.

Right. I’d rather picture him dead than… that word. (Why the lack of hope? Look into the stats on people missing for two weeks.)

‘The Sun Disappeared Today, Just Blinked Out!’ as a headline, along with a warning ‘from experts’ that it’s soon apt to get cold out, would not shake me up like pairing Peter Beard’s name with that dreaded word. (I exaggerate only slightly.)

Why do I feel this way about a person I hadn’t seen in so long, and, truth be told, did not ‘hang out with’ all that much. He was so often absent from his isolated compound out east of town, while I was likewise living and scamming in other climes, from North Africa, South and Central America and the Caribbean, Hawaii, with Peter off in (East) Africa mostly, creating art with his camera and his diaries, but mostly with his life… (You want a profound example of photography as lifestyle, this man is it.)

Addendum: He is certainly the example of the Jim Richardson quote ‘If you want to be a better photographer, stand in front of more interesting stuff.’ 

I’m doing my best to write a mini-biography (hagiography/obituary?), short or otherwise, of Peter Beard, to maybe get you to understand why I’d rather know him as ‘disappeared’ than… that other word… But best you just look at more of his art to get a sense of him… (as I write I don’t know if I will legally be able to show you any.)

Addendum: Go to peterbeard.com/works for a glance at who Beard really was. (You may not bother coming back here but that’s fine.)

      His website also has a bio, but I would bet that Peter (not many who really knew him used the familiar ‘Pete’) had zero to do with it; he had to sell his stuff to live in ‘the style to which he was accustomed’, support his family, all that, so the website bio is for buyers and certainly is lacking the laconic, self-effacing Beard ring, along with the endless, audacious anecdotes that defined him as much as his physical artwork. 

Maybe that a Beard diary/collage recently sold for well over half a million will pique your fucking curiosity…  

Sorry for the hostility… I am having strange thoughts…

See… although I haven’t seen him for a decade or more, in a sense I think of him every night, just before sleep… Hold on while I go get my camera. (Beard would appreciate this sort of interruption).

(Ten minutes futzing with lenses, exposures and composition to shoot the above photo of my bunk niche)

…Beard gave me ‘The Elephant’… (the photo is ‘A Beard’ so I’ll switch to that in references) on Christmas Eve, 1986, during a casual visit to his and his wife Nejma’s (pronounced ‘Nah-shma’ but everyone called her ‘Nahsh’) rustic but mostly chaotic ‘cottage’ (plus guest houses, now worth some $20 million, I hear) on the cliffs, and I can… you bet I can…I can picture him stretched out on his cramped, disheveled living room floor…

…this is from a different visit, but it will do: Beard stretched out on that floor (the floor itself is down there somewhere) as I gingerly tip-toe through the kaleidoscopic clutter, zigging past open bottles and cans of paint and ink and bleach and turps, zagging through flotsam treasures, some stained garish, some dusty and halfway hidden, plus his precious wrack line juju stones, varnished so they  always look wet, and here and there actual garbage (I think), and then I hop over Beard’s lean, supine form, outstretched finger smearing a black & white of either Jagger or a wildebeest with red, either paint or blood (his own, usually), me in search of the chair that used to be over there, then Beard, noticing my care to step only on carpet, ordering, ‘No, no, don’t be careful, just plow on through!’ or the like, hoping that a muddy footprint or some spilled color on a wrinkled canvas would sharpen the chaos of his art. 

The above is pretty much how it went that Christmas Eve night so long ago, when Beard presented me with his gift, The Elephant. 

 [Note from the 2022 rewrite: Some of my most unforgettable and absolutely strangest Montauk experiences came after the summer season (the movie anecdote was late fall, on Halloween), when ‘no one’ was around, other than… weirdos. What follows is not the night from My Dinner With André, but there were many strange nights at Beard’s, and in spite of my memory lapses I do remember the following events.]

It was the early/mid ’70s and I can’t be more time-specific, except that it was summer, and way after sundown.  

I’m up at Beard’s with a mixed crew of locals and ‘Up-IsIanders’ (anyone from west of the Napeague stretch of Montauk Highway), and we were out on the grassy Atlantic overlook Beard had cleared from the thick Montauk bramble on his high promontory, the dozen or so of us surrounding the mysterious, snake-filled ‘pit’ (‘snake-filled’ literally, like in Gunga Din); there was no fence or barrier, nothing to prevent a disoriented or otherwise blitzed guest from stepping or staggering right the fuck into that lunatic pit (or off the cliff onto thin air, followed by a surely fatal fall to the rock beach below). And the moonless East End night, apart from glowing spliff-ends, was ink black, visually impenetrable.

I had latched onto a visiting Manhattanite (a way Up-Islander), one of the many stunning females Beard attracted like feminine iron filings to a very male bar magnet, and was doing my best to set up the night, if you get my drift. She was in fact a ‘super-model’, a household name of that time (also as an actor), and in the midst of my own braggadocio (likely regarding my recent Moroccan hashish smuggling exploits) she all of a sudden undid her belt, wiggled her lithe form with wry feminine grace, then to my stoned surprise in a blink she disappeared from view; where she had stood a moment ago was only the void of the moonless night.

It was like Poof! and she was gone (speaking of desaparecidos!). Jesus, I must have been thinking, how fucked up am I?

Then, hearing an odd sound, sort of a continual splat, I glanced down to see her dazzling upturned cover girl face as she squatted there in the dark, having herself a mighty whiz. She hadn’t bothered to move or shuffle anywhere. Just dropped trou, squatted and let ‘er rip. (The wiggling had been to lower her jeans.)

Returning to upright, buckling and grinning, she said (and yes, after all these years I recall the words exactly), ‘You guys have it fucking easier in some areas,’ referring to the mechanics of urination. (To anyone thinking ‘how gross!’ or the like, for me, Ms Super-Whiz’s move was merely her mammalian way of signaling sexual interest.) 

Need I even say Those Were The Days?

There must be a thousand… no, uncountable… likewise bizarre and wonderful and unforgettable anecdotes in the lives of those who knew and cavorted with Peter Beard.  

I have to tell you something, and maybe it will help you get it: That framed photo of The Elephant is my only possession that has gone everywhere with me since ’86, in all my travels, including my Captain Zero journey, my farm/surf life in Costa Rica, back to Montauk, then off to Mexico in an even smaller truck than for Zero; for that road trip the The Elephant was screwed into the overhead since there was no wall that would take it…

But you get the idea… nothing, no watch, no old leather wallet or coat or piece of jewelry, no manuscript, nada, has been with me this long. And, as you can see, it was overlooking me as I slept last night, as every night. Partly art, partly inspiration, it’s all I have that’s… priceless isn’t quite the right word, since I’ve been offered $28,000 for it and am mulling a possible deal; I need a new camera and maybe that new 1.2 portrait lens…

The inscription, in Beard’s meticulous, elegant but still masculine, almost calligraphic hand, reads…

(Horizontally), ‘To Allan’

‘With Salaams’ … and regards… as ever… Peter

Driftwood Cove… Xmas, ’86’

Then the meat of it, at the bottom of the (long dead now) tusker’s image…

‘of the lion, the leopard, and his other flesh-eating neighbors, he went in no fear, for the flesh of his mighty carcass was above their daring, and so his peaceful career might have continued, had it not occurred to some cunning mortal to invent that magic dust called gunpowder.’

 Could you come up with that prose, half drunk late night on Christmas Eve, off-the-cuff for a casual friend? Or, better, would you?

What is that you say? Ironic, or even hypocritical, that Beard would write such a sentimental reflection, given that he himself vehemently lobbied for legal pachy slewing with that ‘magic dust’ and long guns. But, see, in Beard’s view, the culling of the over-populated herds (as the bush became the mall) when he wore the white hunter hat, almost certainly staved off the species’ doom (from starvation) in certain sectors of sub-Saharan Africa.

Doom staved off for now but not for long!? as Beard often ranted, referring to us as much as the magnificent animals he so famously shot, usually with cameras but when warranted, with a firearm, although I don’t agree with his view of mankind as a disease, a blight on the planet, with overpopulation our coming downfall… ‘too many seals on the rock’ being one way he has put it. Beard gives us too much credit here, methinks… in a backhanded way, but no matter, too late to argue…  

Okay, six days later, it’s over now. Nineteen days in total since his vanishment and the fate of P.B. is known to the world (or is it really?) The remains of my old chum were right there, hiding in plain sight, as it were. But I’m getting ahead of myself…

The truth behind the fate of Peter Beard — and I promise surprises are coming — is how I want to wind up this half-assed, half memoir/half obit —, but beforehand I have to say one last thing (to get you to care): 

(Here I have to tell you I am grimacing in thought, furrowed brow.) 

I am not easily… maybe at all, ever… impressed by other humans, their doings, their lives… the 95% who are dishonest to the marrow don’t make the first cut… and the rest, the remaining 5%…

…those who have read my books might correctly suspect that, if nothing else, I know a creative life when I see it lived, if only to compare with my own, and I can tell you that there is not a man or woman on this planet that is on the same list as Peter Hill Beard, in making art out of living life. Not… close… I cannot even come up with number two on that list and I include as ‘possibles’ those I’ve only heard or read about, be they a Hemingway or a Picasso or a Joshua Slocum or even a goddamn Indiana Jones (Beard lived a life you couldn’t make up)… and yeah, to be on the list you gotta make your living a… a certain way (no rules, you know it  when you see it kind of thing).  

Although Beard flowed from the sort of stock I deeply distrust — born a New York aristocrat, heir to a railroad fortune on his mother’s side and tobacco riches on his father’s, plus his later status as a Yale alum (that fucking spook grade school)… Yeah, a Yalie… there’s a thought, an image steeped in… irony? (I need a different word here.)

I would bet a valued possession that when ‘they’ came to recruit him… that he was spook-recruited is an absolute guarantee, given his pedigree, social circle, and world-wide haunts…

…yes I’d bet when they came for him he was polite but adamant  in his rebuff. Yet… yet, who knows? Maybe old P.B. (as some call him) was silently ushered in to Skull & Bones or facsimile thereof (as it turns out, Beard was tapped for the equally secret/occult Scroll & Key, which, according to historian Anthony Sutton, is of the same spooky ilk as Skull & Bones) and has fooled us all with his black ops doings for the past half century. (Talk about Confessions of a Dangerous Mind! Aside from the title as dead on description of Beard, there’s more real truth in that movie than any nightly news broadcast… and so forth.)

If so, if Beard was one of ‘them,’ I missed the ‘tell’ completely.

Sleep is amazing. I had some awful flashback dreams last night, maybe related to my dissatisfaction with this essay, maybe not, but I awoke and instead of reminiscing or wondering about Beard or needing to view some movie from years ago, I was repeating to myself another East End ‘Peter’’s name, Matthiessen, Peter Mattiessen, a likewise gone but certainly not forgotten local-celeb figure, a colleague of Beard’s if not a close friend (I’ve heard they had issues), and a man of both letters and adventures, who shared many of Beard’s interests and proclivities.

Peter Matthiessen had a major effect on my life, my career as a writer, and in many ways reminds me of P.B. His 1978 The Snow Leopard won him the National Book Award (among other laurels) and is his version of Beard’s magnum opus, The End of the Game (or, many  would say, it’s the other way around) in its poignant celebration of a beautiful and endangered wild thing. You could probably get away with calling P.M. sort of a Beard minus all the babes (although as a young man he did fine his own self I’ve heard). 

The effect Matthiessen had on me was via a different and much less touted book, Mens’s Lives, his homage to the bay fishermen of Long Island’s East End. Having been deeply moved by the book, I finagled a meeting with Matthiessen at his home just ‘upIsland’ in Water Mill, which led directly to my writing a screenplay on the subject of local fishermen. It was up there with the best writing I’ve done. (And yes, it sold to H-wood, with Jon Voight enthusiastically attached, and made me a ton of money; I’d still love to see it get made.)

Regarding Mattiessen, I’ll quote from a book review of The Snow Leopard:

‘What makes the book stand apart form all others like it is Matthiessen who is a much more nuanced character than your average adventurer and the resulting narrative is a many layered and often exalted one.’ All of which could be said about Beard and his work. 

From Wikipedia: ‘A co-founder of the literary magazine The Paris Review, he was the only writer to have won the National Book Award in both nonfiction (The Snow Leopard, 1979, category Contemporary Thought) and fiction (Shadow Country, 2008).^[2] He was also a prominent environmental activist.’ (Ditto re P.B., more or less.)

Wait wait wait, you may be thinking. What does any of this have to do with… anything? Well okay, here comes the reveal, or part of it, and I’ll use good old Wikipedia so you know it’s the truth (ha ha!):

Peter Matthiessen (May 22, 1927 – April 5, 2014) was an American novelist, naturalist, wilderness writer, zen teacher and CIA officer. (Wikipedia)

Addendum: A detail, plus an implication thereof: Did you notice the missing comma in the quote, the one following ‘zen teacher’? Did you notice the subtextual impression its omission leaves? Yeah, right, this mates the two ‘jobs,’ doesn’t it, as if they were part of the same… something? Zen teacher and CIA officer! And the… touch behind the word ‘officer’; not ‘agent’ or ‘deep cover operative’ or (my fave) ‘spook.’  

Officer! Like a cop on the street or someone who might arrest you. I can only imagine Matthiessen’s anguish at his own Wiki page… they were fucking with him, truly. 

They love irony – and those liiittle details – those mind-fuck fucks at Wikipedia! (If you don’t understand Wiki is an Intelligence op then… wise up or get lost.)

How did they suck him into their slimy world? The question is truly begged, with our boy Peter as well.

Point being, though, is that my inspiration, my adored environmentalist hero, the man of letters who’d casted nets with my friends the Lesters (13th generation baymen), was a life-long mind controlling, culture-creating motherfucker. When I was enlightened on this, and it was just after Matthiessen’s  passing… disappointment doesn’t come close. 

(Imitating an effete, whiny voice) But his magazine, The Paris Review, was, like… communist propaganda, wasn’t it?! Remember this one: ‘The best way to control the opposition is to lead it ourselves.’ Think that was V. Lenin? More like A. Dulles. How naive are you?

Here’s how it went this morning, and how my mind works: I’m scanning this thing for edits (didn’t do enough of that, did I?), something about Matthiessen still buzzing in my head, when I zero in on this dumb-ass blurt, written yesterday:

‘If so, if Beard was one of ‘them’ I missed the ‘tell’ completely.’ 

Remember what I was talking about? When ‘they’ (the spooks, CIA probably) came to recruit him, Beard would ‘politely, but adamantly decline,’ blah blah blah. Did my naivety bring you up short? No? Okay, not your job.

Remember how I was so sure the spooks wanted him, something about his… ‘his pedigree, social circle, and world-wide haunts…’ Here’s one I sort of forgot: ‘If the CIA wants you, they will have you.’ And if they wanted Matthiessen they’d surely want Beard, a couple peas in a pod those two, with Beard bigger and riper. (And by way of comparison: If they wanted Peter Matthiessen, which was obviously the case, they really wanted Peter Beard!)

Plus, think about when they would have approached him: the early ’60s, around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, humanity on the verge of oblivion, and on the verge of the culture-created 1960s (the whole hippie/drug thing was a psy-op, a biggie, believe me or don’t), Peter thinking, then saying, ‘Me, a ‘secret agent’? Then, maybe after snorting a line: ‘Sure, sounds like fun!’ And yes, look it up, Yale is the spook recruitment institution with occult cults like Scroll & Key a bedsheet-sized red flag.

Addendum: This was also around the time of the Kennedy assassination, which even the mainstream media now admits (via Tucker Carlson, for one) the CIA had a hand in. And Africa! The whole continent was in revolutionary turmoil as colonialism went bye-bye, with The Great Game expanding south from Central Asia and the good old U.S. of A. edging out the Brit Empire as main Good Guy vs Those Commie Bastards. Beard, at the very least, would have been perfect to keep an eye on Kenya and its neighbors, if not as an outright provocateur in that arena. 

And had Beard in a rare moment of clarity actually abjured ‘governmental service’, how easily ‘they’ could have blackmailed him into a mind change! Whaddam I, nuts? With P.B.’s outlaw mindset, his penchant for that other magic dust (a.k.a. ‘Peruvian marching powder’), and so on, it’d probably take all of ten minutes to bring him in!

It would only be later when he realized what spookdom really means, what it does to you. Too too late, mate.

But there are up-sides too … recalling all the ’legal scrapes’ Beard got into, then, somehow, walked away from, often via ‘diplomatic means.’  One time Beard caught a poacher on his Kenya ranch and hung him by his thumbs and then… and so forth… and was sentenced to be whipped and then jailed for many months. But then, suddenly… he is back at Studio 54 partying with the latest super-model, the Kenyan authorities somehow placated.  

Close to Jackie, a former paramour of her sis, Lee Radzwill, Beard knew all the elite, and bedded the comely of the females. The thought of an eavesdrop on Beard-pillow talk must have had the spooks… drooling, so to speak.

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That’s all, that’s it, the above scribblings are (mostly) from 2020. I’ll get down to the nitty and the gritty, now that I know (pretty much) the whole story. (Sorry about this back-and-forth, now-I-know-now-I-don’t bullshit but it feels important in laying in context.) 

At this point in my earlier (2020) writing Peter had not yet been found and although I knew he was dead, I had not really thought about how/why this might have come about. I knew something was very wrong based on the intensity and failure of the search. 

Here’s what is all but impossible, even though it’s… wait for it… The Official Story: Beard wandered off and died of ‘natural causes’ (as opposed to homicide). Based on ‘the evidence’, that’s the claim.

Why do I say it’s impossible? To start with, because every square meter from town to the point (some five miles) was searched, and, again, no body was found for three weeks. Dogs (plus aircraft) were quickly brought in, meaning the afternoon of his day of vanishment and the pups could find no scent leading from the grounds. Ditto the helicopter gadgetry. Mull that, please. (More to come on that detail.)

And as of the next morning up to one hundred cops, firemen, volunteers and friends, combed the woods, especially between Montauk Highway and the Beard property (less than a mile). Had he merely fallen down and died in his wanderings either the dogs or the scores of searchers (by land and air) would surely have found him. (I know those woods and there is no doubt about this.)

Right where he was (finally) found was ground zero for the search.

I’ll say it again: A hundred human searchers, plus bloodhounds and corpse-sniffing dogs, helicopters and drones equipped with thermal imaging gear. And for nineteen days, with Beard (or his corpse) within shouting distance of his house, no sign of our boy?  

Then, out of nowhere this happens on March 19th, going on three weeks later: a Montauk local tells his buddies that he will find Peter; he even orders one friend to ‘stay by the phone’ and boom, it’s back to the woods we go and at ground zero he immediately does find Beard, his remains. More on what this bizarre ‘coincidence’ might portend in a bit.

The local guy is a long-time acquaintance of mine, a surfer and retired NYC fireman we all call ‘Fireman Dave.’ I spoke to him by phone for about an hour a couple days after he found Peter. 

‘Animals didn’t get to him and his skin wasn’t discolored or anything. He looked good.’ After nineteen days? He looked good?

Plus, Fireman Dave had found one sneaker about 100 yards from the body and noted that Beard was in his stocking feet. The other sneaker was never found.

But hold on, here, even assuming Beard’s life-long spookery, how does it relate to his vanishment? Good question? Mmmm… not really, not given his… dementia. (I knew it would come back as a clue.)

Recall ex-CIA chief William Colby’s ‘disappearance’ from his home on the Potomac, leaving his laptop running and the backdoor open; an ex-CIA chief doing this is a very odd occurrence; then, eight days later, his body washes up, the media telling us that it was a ‘canoeing accident’ or ‘suicide’ or… whatever bullshit ‘they’ want us to believe… for the fact is that Colby’s autopsied body had only been dead and in the water for two days at most, leaving six days unaccounted for…

And of course there had been a mammoth search, which came up empty… until… there he was, Beam him down, Scotty kind of  thing. Think about how that could happen without… 

….and is Colby’s poof-disappearance then his ‘resurfacing’ starting to sound familiar? 

Motive? According to those close to him, Colby, long retired from the Agency, had begun to reflect on his life, his career, the amount of death and misery he was directly responsible for (the horrendous Phoenix Program in Vietnam, Colby’s baby, accounted for tens of thousands tortured and slaughtered) and with his dirt nap looming (the natural one) had been spewing Agency dirt, out of guilt.

See, ‘they’ killed him, of course, but wanted to ‘talk to him’ first, suss out how many others knew what he knew, and so forth, hence the time lag between disappearance and corpse floatation. 

By the way, who are ‘they’? Do your own research is my advice but ‘they’ are the several cabals that run this sorry old earth — the ‘human’ (hah!) aspect of it — and they love to tickle us with hints and bread crumbs leading to their own front door.

So what am I saying? The CIA killed Peter Beard? 

Pretty much, yes, though not necessarily the CIA. Spooks, yes. Most definitely.

Why is his death certificate sealed (I checked)? If there was an autopsy — and there damn well should have been (no mention, one way or the other) — what was the time of death, the date of death? Who did the autopsy? Was it an out of state ringer? Likely there was no (official) autopsy at all; that would be the safest spook-route. 

But most important: What were the conditions of his socks when he was found?

Why are the socks so important? If they were not torn up and stained from Beard’s shoeless ramble over rocks and stumps and damp soil, then he surely was murdered. (But for me the mere fact that he was shoeless tells me that, especially given that one shoe went permanently poof. Where did it go?)

Once they were done with interrogation (and I wince in considering method), and then, post mortem (the spooks are now able to simulate/fake whatever ‘cause of death’ they want), Beard’s remains were lowered (or dropped) in the woods from a spook-chopper — unmarked, black, on whisper mode — along with one shoe tossed out, giving the appearance that the corpse was over-looked in the search (riiiight). But the point being, all would appear to be well now, case closed. Had he not been found, the ‘search’ would have gone on and on, with all sorts of ‘family jewels’ spook-stuff maybe coming to light. Can’t have that. Got to shut down the rumor mill tout de suite. 

This had to happen before… well, someone like me stepped forward to point out a few… problems… with the ‘official story.’

But mainly, the spooks like to advertise their handiwork, hence the one shoe mysteriously missing (impossibly, unless a seagull took off with it), and the stocking-feet condition of the corpse in the first place.

Addendum: This is getting long so I won’t go into details or proofs but ‘missing shoes’ are an occult fingerprint in a homicide or violent black op. A ‘wink and a nod’ to each other, as used by the powers-that-be. (View the film ‘Wag the Dog’ for details on this, and check out the book The Most Dangerous Book in the World; 9/11 as Mass Ritual.) 

I’ve made at least a dozen phone calls to the East Hampton Detective who handled the matter and — the one time I got him on the phone — was hurried along in my questions (‘the case is still open so I can’t talk about it’), then he basically hung up on when I asked about the condition of Peter’s socks. Since then I’m always sent to voicemail and never get a call back.

But according to Vanity Fair, in the East Hampton cops’ view ’there was nothing suspicious’ about Beard’s manner of passing. 

Hilariously, V.F. also quoted Fireman Dave’s opinion that there was ‘nothing suspicious’ about the condition of the remains. This is a detail but not a small one. Why would this big shot magazine quote Dave (perhaps you gotta know him to get the humor here), unless they were under orders to spill any beans, however ridiculous, that implied all was well, nothing to see here, folks!?  

And so we circle back to dementia (maybe). One of the very first symptoms of its oncoming is the spilling of whatever is on one’s mind, the blurtation of memories, as it were, be they accurate or distorted… be they trivia or state secrets. (What’s a ‘state secret’ anyway, when you have the perspective of a distorted mind?)

Did P.B. make a blabbermouth boo-boo, which got back to his handler or fellow Agency traveler?  

If you’ve stuck it out this far, you have the picture.

And so I’ll wrap this up, this summation of my memories, my thoughts on the vanishment and magical materialization of Peter Hill Beard, and the giveaway bears repeating: For nineteen days they did not find the body, notwithstanding it lay at ground zero in a mammoth search operation, a hundred searchers, sniffing dogs, thermal-equipped choppers and drones. They tell us he lay less than a mile from his front door! (As you will see, this last bit, while technically true, is more misdirection, i.e., a couple hundred yards after all is less than a mile.)

In his stocking feet! How would an outdoorsman like Beard lose his shoes, even one shoe, let alone both? The one Fireman Dave found was a running shoe with laces tied (how do they come off with the laces still tied?!), the other still missing, never found. Does that make sense?

The spot where he was found must have been gone over multiple times and if he really did ‘wander off’ then why couldn’t the hounds pick up his scent a few rainless hours later? 

Postscript 

I got around to reading the Beard biography, Wild, The Life of Peter Beard; Photographer, Adventurer, Lover by Graham Boynton, and as a result some new thoughts surfaced, especially after a long conversation I had with a mutual friend of Peter’s and myself, and an important figure from the book (a talented artist who for now shall remain nameless). 

Addendum: It’s an interesting book — if swamped with names you will not have heard before — well-crafted, somehow avoiding the rambling incoherence typical of its subject matter’s lifestyle. Worth a read, certainly if you knew Peter. 

During our conversation our mutual friend described a trip he made with the book’s author and Fireman Dave back to where Dave found the body. It was another revelation: the location was ‘a ‘few minute walk’ from the dirt road approach to the dead end (and Beard’s property); plus the entry point to the woods was only about 50 yards from the gate to that property, and the exact spot most of the search parties used as a rendezvous.  

Wait a minute. That’s way less than the ‘2/3 of a mile’ or ‘under a mile from the house’, as claimed by the media (and Fireman Dave, ‘officially’) as location of the body. (So, in reality, Beard was found within shouting distance of home.) Also, the media all say Beard was found on Camp Hero State Park land, which is clearly untrue. Where did they (the media) get this misdirection, which would go still further in giving the false impression that Beard wandered far ‘off the search grid’? (Although they in fact thoroughly went over the State Park with the dogs, aircraft and ground searchers.)   

Camp Hero State Park (known to locals as ‘the air base’) is a former military installation (the huge derelict radar tower stands hundreds of feet high on the cliffs) and supposed locale for the CIA’s Project MkUltra’s more bizarre ops (which were in turn the inspiration behind the hit ‘Stranger Things’ Netflix show). Claiming Beard was found here may also be some subtle misdirection for those into wilder, occult ‘conspiracy theories.’ Or, come to think, indicating the locale with the ‘vibe’ of a ‘CIA Montauk Project’ is not really misdirection at all. It may be just another, indirect, slimy form of occult braggadocio. 

So the cops/media equivocated about all the important details, i.e., where the body was found, the lack of suspicious circumstances, plus told us nothing at all about an autopsy (if there was one), and most important of all, that sealed Death Certificate… 

This is worth a repeat: What screams out in vain frustration is the simple question When did Peter Beard die? That we, the world, i.e., the appreciators of the man’s art and life, are denied this information (in the dozens of media proclamations that he had passed on), is an abomination and an admission of not only of someone’s guilt in a premeditated murder, but an orchestrated cover-up as well. 

The spook response: ’Your precious Peter Beard died sometime between March 31 and April 19! Isn’t that good enough for you nosy bastards?’

I never did care for Fireman Dave and now I wonder why I didn’t ask him why, after just shy of three weeks, he so suddenly decided he’d find Beard. The one guy who, when I pointed out the myriad holes in the official story, got all uppity/contemptuous about ‘conspiracy theories.’ (After our phone conversation, Fireman Dave suddenly got so nasty in his Facebook comments — I only use my page to display my photographs — that I had to  ‘unfriend him.’ )

Addendum: By the way, ’conspiracy theory’ is a term that didn’t enter the lexicon until CIA — as part of their Operation Mockingbird (look it up) inserted it into the mainstream media description of Warren Report detractors in 1964.

My point being that if ‘they’ wanted the body to suddenly ‘be found’ where it was not for three weeks, a retired NYC fireman with a contempt for conspiracy theories, is as good an ‘asset’ as any.

Back in 2020 I sent a FOIA request to the CIA looking for any documents with Beard’s name on them. Ever since the movie JFK and the Church Committee Hearings in the mid-1970s it’s been a liiiitle easier to pry stuff loose from the spooks, but not much, not if the docs contain any ‘family jewels’ (their phrase) implications. About half a year later I got one of their ‘We cannot confirm nor deny’ replies, meaning they have stuff but I ain’t goin to see it. If they really have nothing, they just say so, i.e., ‘we have been unable to locate any of the records you seek.’ 

As Jordan Peterson and others have pointed out, ‘Sometimes no answer is in fact an answer.’

(Almost) End of Story

I at first deleted the following, fearing it would cloud the issue, but… regarding my recollections/theorizing, conspicuous in absence is any substantive mention of Beard’s wife, Nejma, especially that which I did not know about her behavior starting around the time I left Montauk eight years ago.

My recollection of ‘Nej’ (‘Nahhsh’) is that of a cold and calculating woman — she never seemed glad to see you if you popped in for a visit and seemed impatient for you to leave — and this impression is very much reenforced by Boynton’s book and the mutual friend from it. I’ll not go into this deeply, notwithstanding the slight possibility that she is somehow involved in the homicide, if only in an after-the-fact and indirect manner — perhaps for her own physical well-being or financial gain — at the very least by the withholding of vital information, but I’ll mention a couple or so issues, partially from the book but mostly via a long conversation I had with the mutual good friend of Beard and I, previously mentioned.

Over the past few years Nejma sealed off virtually all Beard’s friends, did not let them past the property gate. Our mutual friend said he hadn’t seen Beard in years because of ‘the Nejma problem’, which was a shock. When I asked if anyone we knew was a witness to Beard’s ‘dementia’ he said no one he knew of. Another shock, a big one.

‘So,’ I replied, ‘this ‘dementia’ business is coming from Nej and no one else?’ 

‘Right.’ This really gave me pause, as I hadn’t trusted Nejma even before the revelation that she’d cut off Beard from his long time friendships. Plus, at a particularly nasty point in their turbulent (an understatement) marriage, Nejma had accused Beard of molesting their daughter, Zara. Everyone knew this was preposterous, and Nejma rescinded the accusation when they reconciled, but it’s an indication of the degree of deceit she is capable of.  

A question: Beard’s Last Will and Testament left it all to Nejma but what if he was thinking about a change (Peter’s artistic legacy being up there in seven figures)? Hey, just asking.

If Beard was snatched by a black ops team, and given Nejma’s watchful protectiveness (to the extent that old friends could not visit him) — and what with the sheltered isolation of the Beard compound — how was it done without her knowledge, if not consent? Just asking.

It’s medically helpful for someone with dementia to be in the company of old friends and familiar situations. So: If Beard did suffer from dementia (Alzheimers or whatever the etiology) and Nejma really cared about his well being, she would have welcomed visits by old friends. So we can scratch off our list of possibilities anything to do with genuine caring from her end.

According to Boynton, in January 2020, just a couple months before his vanishment, Peter had a long phone conversation with Karen Blixon’s grand nephew, who said Beard sounded lucid. 

Mmmmm….

Addendum: It surely would be useful to know when the ‘dementia’ issue first surfaced, i.e., if it was before or during the vanishment and search ops. If the latter is the case, and if it’s a Nejma lie, perhaps it’s after all an innocent one: A way to persuade everyone that Beard did not bolt of his own free will from his ‘imprisonment’ (which many surmised). In other words, the lie would goose the searchers and hence is not truly devious. 

If Beard suffered from dementia there must be medical records somewhere that verify it. If someone is aware of them, please be in touch with me. It may be a vital thread. 

Then again, in this tangled web, this East End Mystery, it may not have any bearing at all. Maybe Peter Beard was simply a man who knew too much.

                          Allan Weisbecker, Arizona desert, February, 2023