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Erica Duggan's son Jeremiah participated in a cult's seminar in Germany. Then he died. But did he commit suicide, really?
 
By Frank Nordhausen

LONDON. Erica Duggan is able to tell by the minute exactly when her search began. It was the moment when police arrived in the middle of the night and told her that her son, Jeremiah, had committed suicide in Germany. Ever since, she has done nothing else but search for an explanation. And because she has done that publicly, there is probably no-one in the UK by now who isn't aware of the mysterious story of the "suicide student". The riddle surrounding the Jewish Englishman Jeremiah Duggan, age 22, who was found dead on a German motorway on March 27, 2003, after
having attended a seminar of a strange cult.

His story was first told in London's Jewish quarter of Golders Green. Large dailies followed, such as The Guardian, The Independent, and The Times, as well as television. The Washington Post reported in its weekend supplement. Just recently, the story, dealing with a U.S. cult, Germans, and Jews, took the front page of Daily Mirror, the mass-circulation newspaper. The headline read, "Did that British student get killed by a sinister political cult?"

Tuesday last week, again reporters crowded around Jeremiah's mother, a red-haired elderly lady, in a London terrace house. There has been a presentation made to MPs in Parliament and this has featured on each and every UK TV channel. Mrs Duggan and her lawyers have presented new findings from experts which support the opinion about how her son got killed in Germany. She said, "I assert the right to have proper investigations done by the police."

In her search for truth, Erica Duggan has spent nearly all of her private money. "How else should I have been able to investigate?" she asks. Because that's what the former teacher did exclusively during the past four years -- evaluate records, request expert opinion, locate witnesses. She traveled to Paris, Wiesbaden, and Berlin several times, looking for clues.

It is the fourth anniversary of Jeremiah's death, and the Duggan affair begins to grow into an image problem for the Federal Republic of Germany and for the German police. "Nazis will forever be Nazis", young bloggers on the internet comment. But actually, it is not about Nazis, but about a U.S. cult which is widely considered rightist extremist. And it is about the stubbornness of German authorities that does make a bad impression, not only in in UK.

Jeremiah Duggan would probably be alive today, had he not gotten, during a semester at the Sorbonne in Paris, in the clutches of that cult, who shipped him and other young people to a   Wiesbaden conference in March 2003. It was the 8th day of the U.S. Iraq war -- a topic on the conference agenda. The cult leader himself was scheduled to speak at that "Schiller Institute" conference -- the fanatical U.S. millionaire, conspiracy theorist, and  convicted fraudster Lyndon LaRouche, the wife of whom, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, leads the organisation's Wiesbaden-based German section. That conspiracy cult has a German followership of approx. 300 people, appearing in different guises, be it Europische Arbeiterpartei, be it Brgerrechtsbewegung Solidaritt (BSo), be it Schiller Institute. The LaRouche movement has claimed to have the "sure formula" for any problems and, next to Scientology, is the cult soliciting most aggressively in German streets at this time.

Following Lyndon LaRouche's speech, Jeremiah remained in Wiesbaden, just as most of the approx. fifty participants did,  to participate in a "cadre school", an event which a former member has described to Berliner Zeitung as "massive brainwashing". Two days later, in the middle of the night, Jeremiah rang his mother in London: "I am in deep trouble, please help me." He was merely able to add that he was in Wiesbaden, then the line went dead, and the same happened with another brief phone call a short while later. Erica Duggan says that his voice was filled with "deadly terror".

The time then was 5:30 a.m. Thirty-five minutes later, the young man was lying on the B-445 motorway near the Wiesbaden suburb of Erbenheim, dead. Close by the cult headquarters. There were already traces leading to the cult at that time, but German police apparently were not interested in that. Three motorists had stated that Jeremiah had been running about the motorway. Then, one vehicle hit him, and another ran over him. Just three hours after Jeremiah's death, police decided on suicide. There were no extensive interviews of witnesses, nor a forensical examination, nor were LaRouche cult people questioned. Jeremiah's body was transferred to England, where blood samples were taken by a coroner, who found neither alcohol nor drugs. Everything had been resolved, or so it seemed. "We did all that had to be done at the time", says Hartmut Ferse, Chief Public Prosecutor for the city of Wiesbaden. "There was no evidence of external influence whatsoever. We have no reason to blame ourselves."

But Erica Duggan just could not believe that her son had committed suicide. "He was a young man full of the joys of  life, newly in love, and had no psychological problems. Why should he have done that?" she asks. The Schiller Institute, the existence of which had been unknown to her before, did not provide any information.

But what happened to Jeremiah during those five days that he spent there? And how did he get onto that motorway outside the city in the early hours of March 27? Just one thing seems to be clear: whatever happened was not as simple as the version suggested by police and office of public prosecutor.
 

Erica Duggan intensified her own investigations when the Wiesbaden office of public prosecutor closed the proceedings two months after her son's death -- and she found evidence and witnesses in a way that a professional detective might not have done any better. She interviewed former members of the LaRouche organisation and learned about indoctrination and mind control.

She even located cadre school participants and talked with them. It turned out that Jeremiah had rubbed the cadre school's organisers up the wrong way, namely due to two factors: When he was seven years old, he had participated in psychotherapy at the renowned London Tavistock Clinic, together with his parents, on the occasion of their divorce. In the LaRouche organisation's paranoid system, that clinic is considered a brainwashing institution of British Secret Intelligence Services. And during the seminar, when speakers held diatribes against the purported Jewish world conspiracy, on which the cult puts the blame for the terror attacks of September 11, Jeremiah got up and said, "I am Jewish." One participant reported that they "put Jeremiah in the wringer because of that."

Then the evening of the following day arrived. Jeremiah had been lodged in the Wiesbaden apartment of veteran LaRouche disciples. Giselle, a young participant from Paris, who confided in Jeremiah's mother, is the last person so far having stated to have seen Jeremiah alive. In a protocol, she writes that the Englishman had told her, totally shaken, that "I don't trust LaRouche any longer."

The U.S. cult leader still stayed in Wiesbaden at that time, as Erica Duggan found out only recently -- and that is important. Because throughout his life, Lyndon LaRouche has been afraid of Jews, "psychos", and the British. He has warned his disciples that those circles would send their brainwashed zombies to kill him, the world's saviour. His paranoid perceptions seem to fit exactly on someone who had the bad luck to be in the same place during those days: Jeremiah -- British, Jewish, possibly a "psycho" agent.

Meanwhile, Erica Duggan has discovered a couple of appalling inconsistencies. There was yellow clay on Jeremiah's shoes -- yet, far and wide around the site of the accident, that kind of soil does not exist. One cult member stated to have lent Jeremiah his mobile phone in the night of his death, for making phone calls -- yet, the distress calls did not originate from that mobile phone. Jeremiah's passport was sprinkled with brown spots. The mother had the spots analysed by a forensic doctor -- and he found blood. A DNA comparison with remaining blood samples from Jeremiah showed that the blood on the exhibits was Jeremiah's -- plus that of another person. But, which other person?

The most important lead was given by British pathologist David Shove, who had examined Jeremiah's body. When Mrs Duggan had an opportunity to talk with him one and a half years ago, he said, "According to my records, Jeremiah was battered to death, as shown by his head injuries."

"But no", said the mother, "allegedly this was a road accident." 
 
"Impossible. Such kinds of injuries cannot be caused by an accident."

In November 2005 Erica Duggan succeeded in obtaining photographic negatives of the German investigative photos. Those 75 photographs depicting the site of the accident, and her dead son, were presented to several renowned experts, who used up-to-date methods of digital imaging for examination. She and her lawyers presented the results to Members of Parliament on Tuesday last week. "The stories told by Jeremiah's body and by the vehicles involved in the accident do not match, and they do not match the police report." The expert opinions state that "the head injuries show the characteristics of wounds caused by a battering instrument. The possibility that they were caused by a vehicle may be excluded." And although the young man allegedly was run over by vehicles, his body and his clothing show no traces thereof. After the meeting, several MPs declared that they now intend to bring up the case in Parliament, to do whatever is required to make sure that German police reopen investigtions.

What did really happen in Wiesbaden-Erbenheim in the night of March 26, 2003? In her protocol, witness Giselle describes how all the other participants of the cadre school were assembled in the Erbenheim cult office the day after and were "sworn in on the suicide hypothesis". One of the cult's "most fanatical recruiters" is alleged to have stated that "Jeremiah was brainwashed, thus represented a danger to the organisation, and thus nobody should feel self-reproach because of his death."

Might it be the case, asks Erica Duggan, "that the entire accident was staged, and that Jeremiah was dead before? Or that he was brutally interrogated as a spy, beaten, and chased upon the motorway in panic?" Suddenly, anything seems possible. Just one thing is for certain: German authorities have contributed next to nothing so far to a solution of that mysterious case. Up until now, courts have refused to reopen the proceedings. Therefore, a Constitutional Complaint has been filed with the Karlsruhe Federal Constitutional Court, by Mrs Duggan's lawyer Nicolas Becker of  Berlin.