UNSOLVED MYSTERY DEATH-RIDDLE SOLVED
Aonline conspiracy theorist has completed an unauthorised investigation into the death of his immediate predecessor. And now he is poised to stun his community of online followers by revealing that there were no suspicious circumstances surrounding his forerunner’s sudden demise.
LEADING
Retired postman DOUG CRESSWELL is the administrator of FoilHatz, an online forum where over 50 amateur sleuths discuss hot topics – everything from the moon landings to the deaths of celebrities – and challenge accepted explanations. And he admits that he is as surprised as the next person to discover that the former administrator of Foil-Hatz, Stan Bunnet, in fact died of natural causes.
“Stan was a great investigator into the truth, and as such he will have made a lot of enemies,” said Cresswell. “But after twelve months of researching the circumstances surrounding his death, I came to the conclusion that Stan died of a massive heart attack, just like the coroner said he did.”
“I’m gobsmacked,” he added.
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Bunnet, who launched the website Foil-Hatz in 2010, suffered a heart attack, his third in five years, in November 2022. He was taken to the Queen’s Medical Centre in Nottingham, but was pronounced dead on arrival. His death at the age of 78 came as a shock to the FoilHatz community, but their sadness was quickly replaced by suspicion.
“Straight away we thought something wasn’t right,” said Doug, who immediately took on the mantle of forum administrator. “78-year-old, 28-stone men who have had a couple of heart attacks don’t just go around dropping dead.”
Cresswell immediately launched an investigation into the events surrounding his predecessor’s death, fully expecting to uncover a labyrinthine network of shadowy, elite figures executing a meticulouslyplotted assassination. And he began by following a lead that a rogue CIA death-cell operating in the Stapleford area of Nottingham had carried out a contract killing on Bunnett.
“Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t believe the CIA itself carried out Stan’s assassination,” he said. “They’re way too shrewd to get their hands dirty on a job like this. But if you’d been in this game as long as I have, you’d have thought that Stan’s death had CIA written all over it.”
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Cresswell set out to prove that the suspected rogue Stapleford cell had slipped the leash of Agency control and begun offering their lethal services for hire on the international market. “Ordinary people don’t appreciate how massive and diffuse the CIA truly is,” he said. “Nobody is actually running the show. It’d be impossible. Wake-up sheeple.”
Cresswell has long assumed the CIA would take an interest in Nottingham because of the ancient system of sandstone caves underneath the city centre, which he believes US Government spooks are right now using for covert operations and hiding things.
“I thought that if I could demonstrate that Stan had revealed evidence for the existence of this cell,
the tangled web of his death would unravel like a ball of wool,” he said.
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But despite months of research on the internet and in the local library, Doug was unable to gather a single shred of proof to support this critical plank of his theory. “I spent nine months scouring the web day and night,” he said. “Thousands and thousands of hours. But nothing. The CIA trail proved a dead end.”
However, a chance viewing of a documentary on Netflix about the Salisbury poisonings led to a Eureka moment for the 20-stone former postie. “It suddenly struck me that Stan’s death bore all the hallmarks of a Soviet toxic substance hit,” he said.
“My blood ran cold. The Russians. What the Hell had Bunnet got himself into?”
But after inspecting postings on the Foil-Hatz messaging board, Doug found no evidence to suggest that Stan had got a little too close to the truth about some Kremlin affair or other, requiring him to be taken out of the picture, permanently.
“Most of Stan’s posts from around September 2021 were about the care home he’d moved into after his second heart attack,” he said. “He mainly posted about a childhood friend he’d found living there, what the food was like, the flowers in the garden, that sort of thing.”
“In the last post he made, he said he missed his wife, and regretted wasting so much of his time in her final years staring at a bloody computer screen,” he said.
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Cresswell is all too familiar with Occam’s Razor – the premise that the simplest explanation of something is usually the most likely one – and whilst he thinks that it is nearly always bullshit, he admits that on this occasion Occam’s Razor probably holds true, and Stan’s death occurred exactly as the authorities said it did.
“We in the Foil-Hatz community only ever want the truth, and on this occasion it appears that nobody had got to Stan,” Doug said. “He was just old and lonely, and rather sad about how things had turned out for him. He was 28 stone, smoked like a chimney and his ticker went. Simple as.”
However, fellow truth-seeker Phil Knowsely, administrator of the website Truth Area 51, told us he was sceptical of Doug’s findings.
“It’s obvious that someone has got to Cresswell,” he said. “Either he had a hand in Stan’s death himself, or he knows who killed him.”
“The truth is out there, and the investigators of TA51 will get to it,” he added from his Truth Area 51 research headquarters in his mum’s house.