Post by forcon on Apr 8, 2020 16:22:47 GMT
The Death of Senator Bill Perry
Whoever you had asked and regardless of their political beliefs, they would have told you that the death of Illinois Senator Bill Perry was a tragedy. Perry, a Democratic senator who had risen through the ranks of the United States Navy and then spent over a decade as a civil servant in the State and Treasury Departments before holding numerous state and local political positions, died on the fourth of March from what was initially thought to be a heart failure. At the age of sixty-four, Perry was, to his shame, a smoker (that habit was a holdover from his military career) and he certainly enjoyed red meat and a good whisky, but he was in overall good physical condition, engaging in daily jogging sessions as well as partaking in outdoor activities in his leisure time. Perry would spend weekends with his wife and daughter when she wasn’t away at college, hiking and camping on the Ozarks. It was the Senator’s wife, Angela Perry, who was unfortunate enough to discover the body of her husband upon returning from a shopping trip. Bill Perry had been found slumped across the dining room table, not breathing. Angela had dutifully called 911 and requested not only an ambulance but police as well, but it was too late to save Senator Perry.
Illinois State Police investigated Perry’s death and found nothing suspicious. There were no defensive wounds on Perry’s body, no ligature marks, and no signs of forced entry into the Perry residence – nothing. The autopsy, performed on the seventh of March, however, found something that would trigger perhaps the most shocking scandal in American history. A tiny circular wound, small enough to be missed by anything but the most skilled medical examiner, was located beneath Perry’s armpit. The cause of the wound was unmistakable. It was from a needle. The local law enforcement agencies immediately called in the Federal Bureau of Investigation and, by the tenth of the same month, a massive multiagency task force was working on the case from the FBI’s field office in Springfield. It was rather rapidly leaked to the Washington Post that the FBI suspected foul play in Perry’s death. The FBI set to work tirelessly to uncover the motive behind his murder. A thorough search of the house in Decatur, Illinois, where Perry had died had at first revealed nothing, but a more thorough search had discovered the presence of an unregistered ‘burner’ phone beneath the floorboards in his office. The device was well-hidden, although not enough to fool expert investigators.
When the phone was sent to Quantico, where the FBI’s headquarters resided on the US Marine Corps base there, analysts quickly got to work. They uncovered a series of phone calls between Perry and an unknown number from someone in Washington D.C. Several days of tireless work led to the FBI uncovering the identity of the man on the other end of the phone. There was confusion when the individual in question was located. Was he a North Korean spy, or perhaps a Pentagon official or a defence contractor? A member of the revered ‘military-industrial complex’ that Perry had criticised brutally during the last Senate appropriation hearing before his demise? No, the phone belonged to a young man named Jake Shelley. Shelley was nobody important, to say the least. He was a twenty-seven-year-old from Boston, who had led a troubled life. He worked at a convenience store and lived in a tiny apartment just outside of D.C. The FBI brought Shelley in for questioning. The young man wasn’t arrested, but he was ‘firmly’ asked to explain why he had been on the receiving end of seventeen phone calls from Senator Perry during the last six months. Shelley was reluctant to talk, until the promise of protection – a new identity and armed security personnel – was brought up. He believed that he was in danger should he tell the FBI what he had told Perry. Though the young man didn’t have a fantastic life, he had a job, a home and numerous friends. He didn’t want to give any of that up by going into witness protection, and so the FBI reasoned he wouldn’t lie about something that would lead to him losing much of what he valued.
Shelley burst into tears before explaining what had happened to him to the FBI agents. As a young boy, he had been taken from the orphanage in which he lived, in Miami, Florida, by a burly man who told him he wasn’t allowed to leave the car. Shelley, only seven at the time, had naturally done as the grown up told him. He’d remained in the car for several hours as it trundled northwards. They had reached their destination at sunset, allowing the FBI to hypothesise that it was located somewhere perhaps in Virginia or West Virginia. The location itself had been on the site of an abandoned factory. What Shelley had seen there had ruined him. Dozens of other children, boys and girls alike, some older and some younger, were being held at the factory. From there, the victims had been ‘farmed out’, to use Shelley’s own words, to people who were prepared to pay top dollar to spend a few hours with them. Such people reportedly included figures in Congress, several government departments, law enforcement, and the finance industry. The anecdote shocked and appalled those FBI agents who were listening, but there was more to come. Shelley told of his escape from ‘The Farm’ during his teenage years. He suspected he would have been executed had he remained there until he reached the age where keeping him alive was no longer profitable. For over a decade, he had been underground, living under a false identity in D.C. until he had been contacted by Senator Perry six months ago.
Perry had been in the midst of conducting an investigation into Russian intelligence operations on American soil. Perry’s intelligence investigation had led to his discovery of the human trafficking ring in the top circled of American politics. His theory was that Russian intelligence officers were using the involvement of many American political figures in human trafficking and child sexual abuse to blackmail them into doing Moscow’s bidding. The threat of Perry’s investigation had, the FBI concluded, led to the murder of the good Senator in a killing that was meant to appear like a heart attack. Three days after the Shelley interview, on March twelfth, the FBI was finally able to match an image from a surveillance camera at a Chicago train station to an individual that was known not to them but to the Defence Intelligence Agency. Yuri Volkonov, a Captain in the GRU Spetsnaz, had been extremely careful during his time in America, but not careful enough. The identity of Volkonov was made by matching footage from various areas of Illinois where it was suspected a killer might be hiding out, to those in the known FBI, CIA and DIA databases. Volkonov had served in Ukraine, Syria, and Libya in the Spetsnaz and was a suspected war criminal as it was. Surely, now, it was too late? Volkonov would have left the United States and would be back in Russia by now, wouldn’t he?
Surprisingly, the answer to that question was no. Volkonov had been ordered to lay low for some time, and while he had indeed left the United States, he was not back in Russia. The GRU officer had been granted an embassy position in Vienna. This was part of a ploy to cover his tracks. Volkonov was said to have been at the embassy at the time of the killing. The Director of National Intelligence took this information to the President, who responded angrily that Volkonov would not be allowed to get away with this. However, instead of contacting Moscow and demanding Volkonov’s surrender, which would likely never happen, the President ordered that Volkonov be ‘snatched’ and brought back to the United States for trial. Commandos from Delta Force initiated the ‘snatch’ on March twenty-ninth, abducting the shocked Volkonov from a backstreet in Vienna. This was done without, it must be said, the consent of the Austrian government. American diplomats were, however, able to persuade the Austrians to look the other way while they smuggled Volkonov out on a chartered CIA flight back to RAF Northolt in Britain. There, he was greeted by a squad of US Air Force Security Police airmen, who escorted Volkonov back to the FBI headquarters at Quantico. There, he was charged with Federal First Degree Murder.
Meanwhile, the investigation into ‘The Farm’, a closely guarded secret by the FBI, was making progress that would shock the nation. Combining information from Mr. Shelley – who was now in a safe house in Oregon with Federal Marshals patrolling the vicinity round-the-clock – with satellite imagery and records of buildings abandoned over a thirty year time period, three suspected locations were uncovered, two in West Virginia and one in Virginia. All three buildings were raided by the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team. Two came up empty; they were nothing more than simple abandoned factories. While the third site, located in West Virginia, hadn’t had any children in need of rescue or any criminals present, it had been rife with evidence that such crimes had, in fact, taken place. The building had been abandoned for at least five years, but there was ample evidence to suggest that unspeakable crimes had taken place here. Days later, the FBI discovered a mass grave with the bodies of over a hundred young adults, who had been shot dead and buried beneath the factory grounds. Though some of the corpses were over two decades old, skilled forensic scientists were able to deduce that most of them had been raped or otherwise sexually abused at some point. The scene was so shockingly vile and harrowing that even the most hardened Federal Agents were disgusted by what they saw.
Worst of all – but also most helpful – were the photographs. They had been hidden away in the depths of the rat-infested basement of the factory, tucked behind two bricks. Why it had been left there was a mystery. For such a professional (for lack of a better word) operation to make such an amateurish mistake was beyond comprehension. Yet the scrapbook of abuse provided the FBI with the information necessary to begin making arrests. The face of Congressman Adam Burke was identifiable in the concealed photos. Burke was quietly arrested in the middle of the night of April fourteenth. When threatened with the death penalty, he pleaded guilty to numerous counts of rape, sexual abuse of children, kidnapping, espionage, treason, and fraud in order to have his death sentence replaced by a term of life without parole. Burke was a minor player in the operation. But he knew where the new ‘Farm’ was located. The operation hadn’t simply shut down after Shelley’s escape a decade ago. It had moved. The individuals behind it had deep pockets and lofty connections. They had been able to set up a new Farm in Pennsylvania. Two days later, the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team came storming in. The sights were appalling. Dozens of terrified, shackled children were rescued. Two guards, former soldiers in the employee of a private security firm, were shot dead and many others captured. Those captured included Harry Arnold, a mercenary who had taken over the role of ‘procurer’ of children and head of security for the operation some ten years ago, and John Winston, the effective head of the organisation and a figure in organised crime. As news of the human trafficking ring hit the papers, dozens of men and a few women were photographed being dragged from their homes in handcuffs as the FBI closed in on the monsters who had been the customers of the services offered at the Farm.
Over the course of the next few weeks, ninety-four arrests were made. Those arrests would lead to eighty-seven convictions in connection with the Farm. Charges related to the Farm included rape, sexual abuse and assault and kidnapping. Furthermore, over a dozen of those high-placed individuals were looking at treason and espionage charges from instances where the GRU had used their activities to blackmail them. Captain Volkonov, the assassin who had callously murdered the brave Senator Perry due to his efforts to expose The Farm, was sentenced to death by lethal injection for the murder of Perry. John Winston and Harry Arnold likewise received death sentences, despite the pleas of the latter to make a deal. Most of the figures who bought ‘services’ from The Farm were sentenced to lengthy prison terms, including seventeen sentences of life without parole. As for Bill Perry's legacy, he is a household name in America and the Western world, one that is synonymous with not only patriotism but morality and principle. The new Ford class aircraft carrier is set to be named after him.
