Trigger warning: This article contains references to suicide and self-harm and includes authentic crime scene sketches related to a death. Reader discretion advised.
Room 517
He was meant to be gone by noon. The checkout time passed, then the quiet of a West Virginia hotel held steady for another hour, the kind of quiet people later describe as ordinary because it has to be.
At about 12:59 p.m., a maid assigned to the fifth floor used her passkey after knocking and getting no answer. The bathroom door was partly open. She saw blood on the floor and on a towel, then backed out and called for help.
Hotel employees gathered, then someone called police. An officer arrived within minutes and started separating witnesses, moving them to wait in the manager’s office while other officers came upstairs. The room began turning from a hotel space into a scene.
Danny Casolaro was found dead in Room 517 of the Sheraton in Martinsburg, West Virginia, on August 10, 1991. Authorities would later say he died by suicide, after being found in the bathtub with multiple cuts to both wrists.
A few feet away from the locked door and the hallway carpet, his work had already started to live a second life. It would be passed from hand to hand, argued over, and written about as if it were a separate character.
The name he gave it
Casolaro had been telling people he was chasing a story that connected scandals most Americans only half remembered. He called the larger idea “the Octopus,” a label that turned disconnected headlines into something with reach, intention, and a single body.
When he left Northern Virginia for Martinsburg, he told friends and family he was going to meet a source. In one later federal memo, the trip is described as part of a self-financed investigation that had consumed more than a year.
At the center of his reporting was a real legal and political fight over software called PROMIS, and a company called INSLAW. Around it grew allegations about how power moves information, how contracts become leverage, and how certain doors stay closed.
Some people who knew him believed he was close to something important. Others, including investigators later tasked with reviewing the record, would describe a man whose theory grew faster than the evidence he could pin down.
Fairfax, before the hotel
Casolaro was born on June 16, 1947, raised in Northern Virginia in an Italian Catholic family. A later Justice Department document describes a financially secure household in McLean, close-knit, religious, with Casolaro serving as an altar boy.
His father was a successful gynecologist, his mother a homemaker, and he was the second of seven children. The same account includes small fractures in the picture, like briefly running away at eleven, and the feeling of being the “black sheep.”
A family tragedy appears in the record as a clean sentence. When Casolaro was fourteen, his mother gave birth to a son who died months later of a heart defect, the beginning, the document says, of many tragic events in his life.
He moved through schools, transferred, did better, then went to Providence College for his second and third years. He traveled to Europe and South America and developed an interest in mountaineering, a detail that reads like restlessness given a respectable name.
As a young man, he spent a summer working on Capitol Hill. While there, he met Terrill Pace, a former Miss Virginia, who was separated and had a baby son. People quoted in the later federal account describe her as the one true love of his life.
The record frames his marriage in practical terms: he left school to support a family. A son, Trey, came later, and the domestic story sits beside the other one, the version where Casolaro was always looking for the next door to push open.
His professional life included writing and publishing, and also business, including computer-industry work that gave him contacts and a technical vocabulary. Friends later described him as painstaking, the kind of reporter who could disappear into research for months.
By 1990, he had turned toward the INSLAW matter with unusual intensity. He began working full-time on the story early that year, convinced it was the center of something broader, a structure that could explain several eras at once.
PROMIS, the dispute that would not die
PROMIS was case-management software used in legal settings, and INSLAW’s fight with the Justice Department became a long-running dispute that drew lawsuits and Congressional attention. Inslaw executives alleged misconduct, including that their work was taken and used improperly.
By the mid-1990s, the Justice Department was publicly insisting the evidence did not support INSLAW’s claims. A 1994 DOJ release said there was “no credible evidence” of a conspiracy to steal the software and recommended the matter be closed.
That release also names the institutional machinery behind the conclusion: internal reviews, Congressional investigations, and a special counsel report produced in the previous administration. It is bureaucratic language, meant to signal finality after years of noise.
Casolaro did not treat the dispute as closed. He treated it like an entry point, something that could lead to other files and other names, the kind of reporting path that starts to resemble a map only after you have drawn it.
Time magazine wrote that he believed the INSLAW affair was part of a deeper tangle that included Iran-Contra and the bank BCCI. The appeal was obvious: separate storms, a shared weather system, one explanation that could hold.
The pressure of a theory
A theory like that does something to time. Days stop being days and become opportunities, phone calls, meetings, bar conversations, receipts, the physical evidence of movement as if movement itself were proof.
In later reviews, investigators would spend pages reconstructing Casolaro’s last days in almost mundane detail. The method is familiar: who saw him, when, what he bought, what he said, what could be verified, what could not.
Those reviews also preserve contradictions. A bartender remembers one time. A desk clerk remembers another. The report will sometimes shrug and call the discrepancy insignificant, because the larger aim is chronology, not perfection.
The contrast between the story’s reputation and the documentary tone of the record is part of why the case keeps returning. A myth wants a clean arc. A file like this offers a pile of facts that refuse to line up neatly.
Wednesday, August 7
On Wednesday, August 7, 1991, a close friend, Ben Mason, came to Casolaro’s house. The later federal account says Mason reported Casolaro was in an “exuberant” mood and showed him papers arranged in a specific order.
That same account includes the voice of a doctor who had spoken with him. In a letter described in the file, the doctor wrote Casolaro sounded “enthusiastic” and was “looking forward” to meeting a source, while seeing no traits associated with suicide.
With hindsight, that certainty softens. The document says the doctor later believed Casolaro could have committed suicide, based on what he learned about physical evidence and the circumstances that followed. The past tense does heavy work here.
What matters is not which assessment feels more satisfying. What matters is that the people around him were describing two versions of the same man in real time, and neither version cancels the other cleanly.
Thursday, August 8
Early on Thursday morning, Casolaro called Ben Mason and, according to the later federal record, laughed off a failed attempt to rejoin a woman he had met at a hotel bar. Then, the file says, he told Mason he was going to West Virginia.
That day includes a small, domestic detail: he paid a homeowner’s insurance premium at his agent’s office. A friend overheard him asking people there for directions to West Virginia, the sort of practical question that reads differently after a death.
After leaving the office, he drove to Martinsburg and checked into the Sheraton Inn off Interstate 81, receiving a key for Room 517. The desk clerk remembered him saying he was late for an appointment at a nearby restaurant and bar.
A bartender at the Stone Crab Inn later recalled Casolaro arriving around midday. The report notes a timing mismatch between that memory and the desk clerk’s, then moves on, treating the conflict as background noise in the bigger timeline.
At the Stone Crab Inn, the bartender said Casolaro mentioned meeting “some Arabs” around 1:00 p.m. According to the same account, no one arrived. Minutes later, Casolaro asked for quarters and stepped outside near phones and machines.
Later, a waitress at a Pizza Hut identified him as arriving around 3:30, ordering a pitcher of beer and a small pizza. The report says he drank the beer and ate little, then left around 4:00, still alone in the narrative.
From there, he appeared at the hotel’s lounge, Heatherfield’s, where a bartender remembered serving him. A 3M employee named Michael Looney was also there, and police later interviewed him as part of the attempt to account for the night.
Friday, August 9
By Friday at midday, Casolaro told the front desk he would be staying one more night. Around 1:30 p.m., a maid spoke with him outside his door, and another maid cleaned the room while he waited in the hallway.
The maid noticed a bottle of wine on the lamp table. She thought he had slept under the bedspread but on top of the blanket, a detail that sits in the record because it suggests a restless night rather than a neat one.
Later that afternoon, he returned to the Stone Crab Inn and drank beer for hours. A bartender there later described him as depressed and lonely, a descriptor that would become part of the file’s argument that suicide was plausible.
A receipt trail follows him. The record notes credit card purchases, including food and beer, and even the exact amount paid for beers and a sandwich. It is the kind of specificity that feels almost cruel after the fact.
After leaving the Stone Crab Inn, the report says he placed a collect call to his mother’s house in Fairfax County around 6:00 p.m. A family birthday party was planned, and he told her he would be late, “if he made it at all.”
That evening, a group from Pennsylvania checked into rooms around his, visiting Martinsburg for a soccer tournament. Around 9:00 p.m., one of them saw someone matching Casolaro’s general description enter Room 517 with a key.
The witness did not see the person’s face, only the back, and noted a brown paper bag. In the record, it is a single paragraph. In the story’s afterlife, it becomes one of the lines people underline.
Shortly after midnight, Casolaro walked across the parking lot to a Sheetz convenience store. A clerk brewed fresh coffee for him, and witnesses later said he seemed relaxed, making small talk, then walking back toward the Sheraton.
Saturday, August 10
The rooms around him were occupied overnight, and the later record says no one reported unusual noises from Room 517. The next morning, it says, no one saw unusual activity near his door, no one seen entering or leaving.
Then the noon deadline arrived. He was supposed to have checked out by 12:00 p.m. At 12:59 p.m., the maid entered after knocking, saw the bathroom door half open, saw blood, and left to call for help.
When police began their first look, they found what they later described as a clean and orderly room aside from the bathroom. A second layer of procedure followed, including interviews, photographs, and the first decisions that would later be criticized.
The coroner, Sandra Brining, entered with her husband, a city paramedic, and the file says he photographed the body and the bathroom area. She noted eight cuts on the underside of Casolaro’s left wrist and four on the underside of his right.
The same examination noted a bruise on the inner part of his upper left arm and no other visible signs of trauma. The report also records “light” rigor mortis and early livor mortis patterns, details meant to pin down time without drama.
During that examination, the bathtub water was drained, and the report says no sample was preserved. Brining classified the death as a suicide and contacted a funeral home to transport the body, starting a chain of handling decisions that fueled suspicion.
The bathroom door was removed to allow the body to be taken out. The report notes the body was placed in an ambulance and taken to a funeral home in Martinsburg, a detail that reads strange until you remember how ordinary jurisdictions can be.
After the body was removed, police locked the room but did not formally seal it, according to the later account. Detectives returned on Monday to conduct a further investigation after family members alerted them to his work and the threats he had reported.
The note
A suicide note became part of the official story almost immediately. Time magazine reported that a note was found near his body and quoted part of it: “I’m sorry, especially to my son,” followed by what it called the official verdict, suicide.
In a Washington Post account from days after the death, his brother questioned that note and its authenticity. He also questioned whether it sounded like Danny’s voice, arguing that his brother would write a long letter, not a brief line.
A later federal review described the note as having been tested. It said handwriting and ink analyses matched Casolaro’s known writing, and it also records a thumbprint on the legal pad, details intended to close the door on forgery claims.
There are two ways a note functions in a story like this. It is evidence, and it is also a narrative object. It creates an ending people can quote, even when they disagree on what happened.
The missing briefcase
Casolaro’s papers became an obsession of their own. A desk clerk recalled he might have had a beat-up briefcase, though he was not sure. The later review notes that no briefcase was found in Room 517 or in Casolaro’s car.
Police searched hallways and stairwells, then later searched dumpsters and an area along Interstate 81 near the hotel. The report says they were unable to find a briefcase, and it notes the absence the way a file notes a missing limb.
That detail feeds the case’s enduring split. In one version, the missing briefcase is the simplest proof that someone intervened. In the other, it is a familiar investigative gap: an item remembered inconsistently, never confirmed, never recovered.
In the Washington Post’s later account of the suicide ruling, officials said they spent more than 1,000 hours investigating murder theories and still concluded the evidence pointed to suicide. That phrasing is careful, procedural, meant to sound final.
Another file that refused to stay closed involved Mary Doefour, a woman who died under an invented name in a state institution, and the reporter who kept reopening her records until a buried identity began to surface.
The room gets cleaned
One of the early facts that disturbed his family was the speed of everything after the discovery. Time reported that after a few hours of investigation, police took his body to a funeral parlor and that it was immediately embalmed, before his family had been reached.
The Washington Post also reported that embalming occurred quickly, and that the room was cleaned by an industrial contractor. Those details do not prove murder. They do explain why the family felt the ground shift under their feet.
In a case already soaked in suspicion, procedural messiness reads like intent. It is one of the core themes here: how ordinary local practice can look like conspiracy once a story has a name like “the Octopus.”
The later federal narrative leans hard on what it can account for, and what it cannot. It documents interviews of hotel employees, reports that none saw anyone enter or leave the room that morning, and holds to the absence of forced entry.
The keys and the hallway
The hotel manager told police there were six keys to Room 517, that Casolaro had been given one when he checked in, and that the remaining keys were stored at the front desk. Police found Casolaro’s room key among his belongings.
That description is meant to narrow the possibilities. Yet the witness detail remains: someone matching his general description entered with a key at about 9:00 p.m., face unseen, brown paper bag in hand. The record keeps both facts without resolving them.
In a later reconstruction, the same file says no one heard unusual noises and no one was seen entering or leaving the room the next morning. Quiet is a kind of evidence here, and also a kind of blankness, because quiet can mean anything.
What the file says about his state of mind
The official story of suicide often hinges on psychology, and Casolaro’s case is no exception. DOJ’s 1994 release said many friends described him as depressed and concerned about professional failures, including the inability to generate income from the investigation.
That same release said he was suffering from multiple sclerosis. The line is brief, almost a label, but it points to the way investigators sometimes gather circumstances into a shape that makes the final act legible.
The later federal account preserves contradictions even here. It includes witnesses describing him relaxed at Sheetz after midnight, making small talk. It includes a friend describing him exuberant days earlier. It includes a bartender describing him lonely.
The file also records the habit of drinking over those days in Martinsburg, with beer, wine, and bar tabs appearing again and again. A person can drink from celebration or despair, or both, and paper rarely tells the difference.
The Octopus expands
Casolaro’s project did not live only in West Virginia. It lived in phone calls, in Washington conversations, in sources who knew what to say to keep him chasing. Time described his belief that the Octopus included Iran-Contra arms dealings and BCCI.
The Inslaw dispute itself had attracted years of competing accounts, court decisions, and political arguments. By the early 1990s, even the fights about the fight had become part of the landscape, with new claims rising as old ones collapsed.
A Justice Department memo from October 1993, written ahead of a meeting with the Casolaro family, explicitly links his death to INSLAW and describes his “octopus” theory as connecting alleged conspiracies from the 1980s. It reads like government language trying to contain myth.
That memo lists who would attend, including his brother, his mother, and a long-time friend. It also acknowledges the “unusual circumstances” and the public concerns raised by the House Judiciary Committee, giving the family’s suspicion an official place on the page.
Congress enters the story
In 1992, the House Judiciary Committee broadened its inquiry to include Casolaro’s death. A later DOJ narrative says the committee’s report raised questions about the circumstances and the adequacy of the police investigation and autopsy, and it notes a formal request for an independent counsel.
The Washington Post reported that House Democrats asked the Justice Department for an independent counsel to investigate Casolaro’s death. By then, the story had moved beyond Martinsburg and into the national capital’s own machinery of inquiry.
This shift matters because it changes what “evidence” can mean. A local police file is built to close a case. A Congressional investigation is built to question institutions. Each produces records that look persuasive to different readers.
The later federal account describes a review conducted by an assistant U.S. attorney and an FBI agent, including interviews across multiple states and consultation with forensic experts. It also notes a behavioral-science “psychological autopsy,” a phrase that can sound colder than it is.
It even notes that investigators reviewed documents at the CIA and FBI headquarters, a detail that tends to inflame the story in retelling. In the file, it sits as one step among many, presented as routine due diligence once the case became national.
The evidence that feels like story
Some details in the record feel chosen for a different genre, even though they are there for forensic reasons. One section discusses wine bottles of a particular brand found at his home, matching bottles found in the bathroom and luggage, with the brand reportedly unavailable in West Virginia.
Another discusses shoelaces: shoes at his house missing laces, laces found at the death scene, comparisons attempted, results inconclusive. These are the kinds of facts that can make a case feel either more grounded or more haunted, depending on what you already believe.
A file does not care about atmosphere. It cares about possible explanations. Yet atmosphere is what survives when people tell the story aloud, the reason “white wine” and “shoelaces” recur in conversations long after other details fade.
The note, the missing briefcase, the cleaned room, the drained tub water, the rapid embalming. None of these facts alone prove homicide. Together, they explain why a family could read procedure as erasure, and why the word “Octopus” stuck.
What the brother said
Casolaro’s brother, Anthony, became the public voice refusing to accept the suicide ruling. In the Washington Post, he described Danny as “always upbeat and positive,” arguing he did not fit the shape investigators were drawing around his death.
He also questioned the short note found in the room, saying it did not sound like his brother, and pointing to the oddity of embalming before relatives were notified. In the same report, he said those actions added to the “sense of conspiracy.”
The public argument here is familiar: who has the right to define a dead person’s last state of mind. Police look at evidence and pattern. Family looks at memory and voice. The gap between those two ways of knowing becomes the whole case.
The official ending, and the refusal of it
In January 1992, West Virginia authorities reiterated that Casolaro had killed himself by slashing his wrists, saying they had investigated murder theories and maintained the original conclusion. The Washington Post described the suicide ruling as the end of a more than 1,000-hour investigation.
In 1994, the Justice Department again echoed that conclusion, stating its report concurred with the Martinsburg Police Department that Casolaro committed suicide. The same release framed the matter as exhausted by forensic evidence, toxicology, and review.
Still, the file itself preserves how even official reviews had to navigate the story’s gravitational pull. It describes how questions kept surfacing, how media leads multiplied, how investigators chased claims raised in press and in Congress, and how the myth kept generating new paper.
One of the most revealing parts is not a dramatic fact but a sentence about process. The record describes being “besieged” with calls and inquiries, the police forced to devote substantial time to receiving incoming calls, as if the outside world itself became another pressure on the case.
What remains in the paper
Casolaro’s movements in Martinsburg were reconstructed as far as receipts and witnesses could allow. Even then, the record admits gaps, periods where his whereabouts cannot be pinned down with certainty, followed by the quiet suggestion that he was probably in his room.
The planned meeting that brought him there remains the story’s most durable blank. In one section, the record says he told people he was going to meet a source but that no one recalled him ever identifying who the source was, and his descriptions of it were inconsistent.
The same section says investigators found no evidence he met anyone in West Virginia connected to the Octopus project, and that most of his time was accounted for, much of it spent drinking. It is the file’s way of narrowing possibility without theatrical certainty.
In another corner of the record, there is a scene of a man still acting like a man with plans. A call to his mother. The mention of a birthday party. The words “if he made it at all.” The file holds it without interpretation because the file is not allowed to grieve.
