Colby’s Coded Telephone
As an ex-CIA director, Colby knew how to manipulate communications systems. He had his phone at his weekend home routed through his Washington number. Any outside calls made from his Maryland home appeared on his Washington telephone bill. To make an outside call you first had to tap in a code known only to Colby and his wife Sally. This way visiting guests couldn’t run up long-distance charges on his phone. A local call could be dialed normally.
My question was this: How about if Colby made an outside call to someone while he was cooking, maybe around 8:30 or 8:45 p.m., maybe even later. Could anyone then believe he had decided to go canoeing in total darkness?
Detective Captain J.C. Montminy, Jr
There were plenty of police agencies like the Charles County (MD) Sheriff’s Department all over America, covering sleepy counties. They were pretty good at what they did. But they didn’t often investigate anything out of the ordinary. Colby’s murder occurred on a weekend. Nobody knew who he was. They assumed from the first minute that this was a routine boating accident.
Detective Captain J.C. Montminy, Jr, of the Charles County Sheriff’s Department, was the overall commander of the Colby investigation. Our conversation at his office, tape recorded June 10, 1996:
ZG
Did you check the telephone records to see when was the last time Colby made an outside call?
Detective Montminy
No. Apparently the family did. Apparently they had some type of phone system where any long distance calls are billed back to their regular Washington phone. In fact, they used a code so you couldn’t even call out unless you knew the code. Some of the family members who weren’t familiar with that, when they got down here, had difficulty using the set-up.
ZG
Did you follow it up with Mrs. Colby?
Detective Montminy
After that time period, seven or seven fifteen, there were no calls made out [from 301-259-2905] that we are aware of. Of course there is no guarantee. Somebody could have used that line and made a local call and we don’t know about it.
ZG
Did you ask Mrs. Colby to verify the time of her call?
Detective Montminy
Uh-huh.
ZG
What time was it?
Detective Montminy
I don’t have that down.
ZG
When you went out, did you reach the conclusion it was a boating accident?
Detective Montminy
Yes and no. Of course none of the police officers there knew who Colby was.
The police did not ask Sally Shelton for Colby’s telephone bill which included that Saturday’s outside calls.
Colby’s Wife Speaks
I interviewed Sally Shelton Colby, 52, in her office at the State Department. She was a petite blonde, 24 years younger than her husband, his second wife. Sally Shelton was an accomplished woman. From Missouri, she was a Phi Beta Kappa who had done graduate study as a Fulbright Scholar in Paris. She was the assistant administrator for global programs at the Agency for International Development, and a former ambassador to Grenada and Barbados. Our conversation, tape recorded in front of a witness June 25, 1996:
ZG
I know you’ve gone over your conversation with your husband, and I hate to ask you to go over it again. But would you?
Shelton-Colby
Well, he called, he uh—
ZG
He called? Or you called?
Shelton-Colby
He called, uh-huh. We spoke everyday, at least once a day. Both of us were traveling a lot. He said he had just–normally it takes two days to get the Eagle Wing ready for the summer. But he’d compressed it into one day, so he’d worked very hard. And he’d had a wonderful time, and he said he was tired. He had stopped and picked up some clams and he said he was going to have the clams, which was his favorite dish. Then he was going to take a hot shower and go to bed.
ZG
Do you recall whether he said he was going to have dinner? Or whether he had already had dinner?
Shelton-Colby
He said he was going to have dinner.
ZG
Since the Maryland phone records show up at your Washington house, is there any way you can check so I can develop a chronology?
helton-Colby
If it’s important. I can tell you it was right at six o’clock [Houston time—7 p.m. Washington] when he called me. My mother had just walked in and I was looking at the news.
ZG
Well, could you check to see if he made any calls after that?
Shelton-Colby
I can check if you’d like. I don’t have time to do it before I leave on Friday.
ZG
Then I would appreciate if you would check. So I can see if here were any other calls and I can put together a chronology.
Shelton-Colby
Sure, I’ll do it.
ZG
Would you?
Shelton-Colby
Uh-huh, sure, I’ll do it.
How the Killers Got Away With It
Just as I’d thought, the killers didn’t make many mistakes. The first was unavoidable—Kevin Akers–but with luck they got away with it. I’d say there were from three to five of them. Two on a boat, maybe two or three who went to his house in a car around 8:30 p.m., at nightfall. The two in the car made Colby empty his pockets so if they were stopped he would have no ID to back up his claim that he was an ex-CIA director and these thugs were officers he’d fired. One of the men put the ladder in the water and took the life jacket. Then they drove to the end of Rock Point Road to rendezvous with the boat.
Meanwhile the boat backed up to Colby’s canoe, which was pointed outward and tied to the pier by a small rope at the rear. They hooked their tow rope to the front and jerked the canoe so hard in taking off that the tie-up rope frayed and released. They towed the canoe to the place where Akers found it. One guy from the boat pulled the canoe to shore and another guy from the car joined him in helping fill the canoe with sand. The boat took off immediately. The second guy from the boat climbed into the car with the other two guys and Colby.
Why did they want to make sure the canoe didn’t move?
They wanted everybody to think that Colby had drowned in this specific area. That was because they were coming back by car with Colby’s body the next weekend and would dump him in the water not far from where the canoe was found. This was the only place on Neale Sound where they would have unobserved access to the water from a dead-end road only 40 meters away.
In Kevin Akers’ opinion, the canoe could not have washed up at the place it did unless someone towed it against the clockwise current. It would have washed up on the same side of the spit as Colby’s body. But the killers had to tow the canoe there because it was the only place in the area that had enough sand to anchor the boat so it wouldn’t move. The place where Colby’s body was found, on the other side of the spit, had little sand, as is apparent in the photos I took with Akers.
Why didn’t they just kill him there and dump him into the water?
Because it wouldn’t be easy to drown Colby and to make it look like an accident. But if they killed him and let his internal organs decompose for a week the medical examiner couldn’t tell how he had died. And they were betting the examiner would call it a drowning accident.
What errors did they make?
- Kevin Akers – This wasn’t an error but a coincidence. They pulled the operation off within five hundred meters of his house. He knew better than anyone the water and the currents around Rock Point. He became immediately suspicious when he saw the canoe. He told the police about the excessive sand and they wrote it in their report. But his information was ignored. He was just a fishing village guy with not a lot of education, and it looked to the police like a routine boating accident.
- The Missing Life Jacket – The killers didn’t know whether or not Colby always wore his life jacket. If it turned out he did, and they just threw the life jacket in the water, then where was his body? They decided to take the jacket with them and hoped that nobody noticed. In fact, everybody did notice the missing life jacket and talked about it, including his son Paul, who brought it up with me. But most people did not want to connect the missing jacket to possible foul play.
- The Unexplained Tow Rope – In their haste the killers left their tow rope attached to the front of Colby’s canoe. No one had ever seen a tow rope on Colby’s canoe. Why would he need it? Again, that was a point people talked about but nobody wanted to connect it to possible foul play.
My Investigation Ends
I thought there was a good chance that Colby had made an outside call on Saturday night at 8:30 or later and it would show up on his telephone bill. I felt this would be serious proof that somebody had killed him.
Sally Shelton assured me she would find the telephone bill that would include any outside calls made on Saturday, April 27, 1996, and let me know. Since I knew how meticulous Colby was—he paid the bills—I was sure the bill was there.
But I did not get to see the phone bill, despite my repeated requests. I drew no conclusions or inferences then or now concerning Sally Shelton Colby’s refusal to help me obtain the telephone record. She was a wife who had lost her husband two months before and still in that state of grief that happens to all of us when we lose a loved one.
On my last call to Mrs. Colby, when I asked about the telephone bill, she said to me, with exasperation: “I think you are on a fishing expedition.”
She was right.
I was fishing to find out who murdered her husband, William Egan Colby, a former CIA director, and the man I considered the most capable and effective American to serve in the Vietnam War.
_______________________________________
ZALIN GRANT served as an Army Intelligence Officer in Vietnam. A former journalist for Time and The New Republic, he is the author of six books, including FACING THE PHOENIX: The CIA and the Political Defeat of the United States in Vietnam, which was also translated and published without permission in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.
from <http://www.pythiapress.com/wartales/colby.htm>
John Decamp, the attorney that uncovered much of the Franklin pedophile ring truth, worked for CIA Director William Colby and tells of his character and the unlikelihood that the events described in the official story could possibly have been the way Colby died. He thinks he was murdered.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pVu1QvpoYY
Kay Griggs, a Former Marine Colonel’s Wife who listened to her secret society and assassin husband for 11 years spoke briefly about the Colby murder and what she believes happened based on her knowledge of ‘wet operations’:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqHxU83LwSw
A son’s riveting look at a father whose life seemed straight out of a spy thriller. The secret world of a legendary CIA spymaster. Told by William Colby’s son Carl, the story is at once a probing history of the CIA, a personal memoir of a family living in clandestine shadows, and an inquiry into the hard costs of a nation’s most cloaked actions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEWyYSIcmeU
