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The Reston Caper -- Sources and People

New -- 30 March 2009

 

The continuation of The Reston Caper by Sol Aris:

 

2

Sources and People

 


Greetings,
 
As promised (or if you like, "warned", hehe...) we're back with the continuation of the Reston story.
 
Everything we know about the Art of Detection, says that an investigator has to look for something incongruous that stands out in the affair, as it usually proves to be a valuable hint in the search. So like I said, I started looking for "anomalies and unusual things" about Reston and around it. As I knew absolutely nothing about this town till then, I decided to read everything I could find about it on the Internet.
 
The very first website I was led to by a Google search was that of the Reston Storefront Museum. It has lots of valuable information about the history of the town, with the story of its planned founding and even reprints of the original documents from Robert Simon's proposal.
 
And one of the first pages I looked at there, was this Historic Timeline of Reston [1].
The very top entry on the timeline reads:


"1649: England's King Charles II deeds vast Northern VA holdings -- including what is now Reston -- to seven of his supporters."


 

I know I mentioned this bit here a few times before, but I really like repeating it, because it just seems so unlikely and almost absurd - it was this little historical factoid from that website that sent me into my current frenzy about the Grail. I was certainly the right man to see that entry on the timeline, because I happened to remember that in the year 1649 Charles the Second was NOT the King of England. In fact England had no king at all but a Commonwealth Government for most of that year, and for the month that it did have a king - it was not Charles II but his father Charles I, who was beheaded on January 30. And the two Charles's were no ordinary kings but Stewarts, descendants of the Merovingians (and Jesus himself!) and Guardians of the Grail and all that.
 
So here I am, looking for "anomalies" - and sure stumbled onto a pretty major one right at the very beginning. How can something as basic as the Original Land Grant of the Reston lands be written incorrectly in the history books! Surely they know their British Royalty Tables. Yet they named the wrong king, but why? For that matter, they could've said anything at all about that land, like that it was given by Charles I the previous year, or by Charles II later - and it shouldn't have mattered a hoot to anybody. But no, they just had to put in that blatantly wrong factoid. Something wasn't right about this.
 
Everything I knew about ancient mysteries or "forbidden history" was telling me that this incorrect entry on the historical list was put there on purpose by "something or somebody", in order to make people like myself investigate this matter deeper. So I did look further into the history and geography of the region, and discovered many other fascinating things. I'll try to describe most of these in depth later, but first there was also the "social history" of Reston to uncover. I had to understand what was the mood in that town, how life was treated and so on - and the best way to do that was to read what people who lived there had to say about it.
 
The second website I got to in my Reston Quest was the Reston Web [2] where hundreds of old residents shared their memories of different periods in the history of the town. I read that whole page, and in fact that entire website, and afterwards felt like I was really getting engulfed in the town atmosphere, knew how it was built and what it looked like.
 
Gwen Ames' murder is mentioned there by a couple of people as something that cast a shadow on the town early on. Many other strange or accidental deaths are noted there as well, this is where I got part of my list of the "prematurely deceased" from that town. And a few other names are listed in connection with Gwen.
 
It was the mention of these names on that website that actually began this whole investigation a couple of years before I started looking into this in the Spring of 05 - because they caused "my informant" to suddenly remember all those dim forgotten events from the early seventies. And it seems the time has come to consider who this person is and why these names had suddenly struck up such a memory.
 
This is of course our old friend Laura Macdonald, with whom the original founding members of the Zeta Astro list, and me in particular, share many fond memories of the good times we had on the TT forums and places around it. She had been on my little dream-interpretations list from the beginning as well, and showing a very good intuitive knack for solving the dream symbolism. Laura has been a good personal friend of mine since around mid '00. Many of my friends from Israel who went through New York City since then had met her and had also become her friends. And this includes my mother from California, who had also visited Laura several times.
 
From the very beginning Laura was my main source of information about this town, and certainly about the events surrounding Gwen Ames' murder and what was going on in Reston in those days. And she was the person I was most concerned about, when I said that I don't want anybody getting hurt as a result of the publication of all this information today. Some people may take it very wrongly, the fact that she let a stranger like myself become privy to such personal affairs. After all, trying to solve an old forgotten murder in many ways invariably involves a great deal of muck-raking and uncovering personal secrets.
 
But I now have it from her in writing, that she's urging me to publish all of my findings nonetheless, notwithstanding the private matters they concern, and regardless of the possible consequences to herself. I find such behavior to be very brave, and just want to take this opportunity to thank her again for being this way.
 
I'm sure one day she'll appear here and explain it all herself. (:-) Her own circumstances had changed a great deal since we began this investigation, and she's just temporarily very busy with other things, but will probably join us again shortly. And meanwhile I'll have no choice but to refer to her in the third person, as another character in our tale.
 
So to go on with the story - Laura was born in Reston in 1954 (or actually an even smaller town right near Reston, called "Oakton") and lived there till around '73, but moved away near age 20 and had only gone back for occasional visits to her family since. 
 
But all this time she had kept in close touch with a group of about ten-fifteen Restonites from a similar age-group, who had been friends while growing up in that town. They met regularly, at least once a year, in different fun places where these people live, like Hawaii. This group is called "the Inner Core" and it exists until today, peopled by some very nice folks some of whom I've corresponded with. The very existence of such a group is of course very unusual - that people would stay close friends after so many years.
 
Evidently though, none of the members of the "Inner Core" actually continued living in Reston. And none of them had ever been in Gwen Ames' crowd, or even knew her personally. Because as noted earlier, the heroin users are not people one hangs out with, unless you're a junkie yourself. Gwen's name did come up occasionally in conversation through the years - but merely as just another one of the many weird things that happened around Reston (and as it turned out, there were a LOT of weird things that happened there...) Laura never considered trying to solve that old mystery before, until something happened to make her remember.
 
In late Spring of '03 Laura was getting nostalgic for her hometown, and decided to become involved in volunteering to set up the upcoming annual Reston Festival. To get more with it and get herself back into the feel of her old town (she had by this time been living in Manhattan for about twenty years), she joined a couple of Restonite mailing lists, and also went through the postings on that same "Reston Memories" page linked above, that I found myself reading two years later. On that page, for the first time in thirty years, she saw the name Gwen Ames written down in connection with Old Reston.
 
This sent her spiraling down memory lane, and to the fact that Gwen's mother Priscilla is *still* the best-known socialite in town, and is still the organizer of the very same festival, on the last day of which her daughter was murdered 30 years before. It suddenly seemed extremely curious to Laura that the heinous crime remained unsolved, and a woman of Priscilla's clout and social station never insisted on finding the murderer of the only child she ever had in this life.  
 
But next to Gwen's name she read another one, in that same message on the Reston-web from somebody remembering these events. This name was "Paul Lurie" - a person Laura knew well in her youth in Reston, and whose mention at that point had suddenly brought back a whole series of strange and unpleasant recollections.
 
It should be noted here, that one of the curiosities in this case was that it should suddenly start bugging Laura so much after all these years, when she never as much as mentioned it before and never thought of it. Myself and all her Inner Core friends, as well as other people annoyed by her sudden relentless persistence about this, had all posed this question to her - what had suddenly made her so curious about what happened back then? And Laura said that it was seeing the mention of the names Gwen Ames and Paul Lurie written together in that message.
 
This connection caused her to remember her own encounter with Gwen Ames, and the fact that she had in fact "officially met" Gwen only once in her life, and then through this Paul person. Moreover, it made her remember the very unpleasant incident she herself had with Paul Lurie, which evidently made her completely repress his memory in her mind, so that she did not think of it at all until she suddenly saw his name next to Gwen again three decades later.
 
And here we are entering a whole different portion of the tale, so I think we better save it for Chapter 3, honorable readers (:-). But this time I hope to continue with it in the next hour or so, and it should be up before long as well. This story is just completely itching my fingers to get out, I won't fully rest till I get it all down.
 
You shall hear from our people soon,


Sol

____________________

[1] http://www.restonmuseum.org/timeline.html

[2] http://www.restonweb.com/contrib/memories.html

 


3 -- Spring of 1972

 

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