The Lost Son

Jeremiah Duggan died in Wiesbaden, in mysterious circumstances, four years ago. His mother is still searching for the truth.

by Louise Brown and Christoph Albrecht-Heider

Erica Duggan is unable to forget that morning. In her mind's eye, she still sees that clock. It shows 4:24 a.m. That morning, Erica Duggan, in her nightgown, sits in the kitchen of her house in the London district of Golders Green. Her son Jeremiah is on the telephone. He calls from Wiesbaden; his mother assumes him to be in Paris where he is a student.

He tells his mother that he is "in deep trouble". A long half-hour later, Jeremiah Duggan aged 22, is dead, run over on an arterial road of the Hessen state capital. That was four years ago, but ever since that 27th of March 2003, the mother has lived for a single purpose: to learn what really happened that dark morning in Wiesbaden.

This story is about the quest for a truth. The conjectures span the allegation that Jeremiah might have been killed by a cult -- and the result of the Wiesbaden public prosecutor's investigations, which reads: suicide. Actually, the truth may lie in a psychological and legal grey area between both poles.

In order to understand why the Simon Wiesenthal Institute has made an appeal concerning the case to German Federal Minister of Justice, Brigitte Zypries, and why British Members of Parliament have made a cross-party demand for parliamentary debate of the case, it is important to know the reason why Jeremiah Duggan stayed in Wiesbaden in the first place.

Duggan, who studied French at the Sorbonne, was told about an anti-Iraq (sic) conference to be held in Wiesbaden, organised by the Schiller Institute, a branch of the notorious Lyndon LaRouche movement. The US-American Lyndon LaRouche, aged 85, served five years in a U.S. prison for conspiracy.

According to London police, the LaRouche network is "a dangerous political cult." The cult's theses represent a crude mix of leftist and rightist concepts, spiced with many speculations of conspiracy. Most recently the cult has embroiled itself to calling the global climate change a "hoax".

Helga Zepp-LaRouche, the patriarch's wife, is the movement's proconsul for Germany. Time and again for a long 30 years, she has run for a seat in various parliaments, the organisation changes name every now and then, once they were called Europäische Arbeiterpartei, now it's Bürgerrechtsbewegung Solidarität. Zepp-LaRouche heads the Schiller Institute too, who deny any connection to Jeremiah Duggan's death.

According to London police internal records on the Duggan case, "Schiller Institute and LaRouche Youth Movement blame the Jewish people for the Iraq war and all the other world problems. Jeremiah's lecture notes show the ideology's anti-Semitic character." Jeremiah Duggan was Jewish, son of an Irishman and his Jewish mother, whose father escaped from Berlin to England via South Africa in 1933.

For two years, attorney Nicolas Becker of Berlin has represented Erica Duggan's interests in Germany. So far, he is the fourth Duggan attorney from Germany whom the Wiesbaden public prosecutor's office has had to deal with.

Becker went to London to see Duggan, he went to France to interview witnesses, he attended a meeting of Duggan, the British consul general, and the Wiesbaden public prosecutor's office held two years ago, and he drafted the request of several hundred pages length, demanding a resumption of proceedings.

Becker says that "the public prosecutor's office conducted investigations in an exceedingly superficial way", and that they are now preoccupied with "rationalising" those faults. Becker is far from formulating a hypothesis concerning circumstances of offence.
What he wishes to have clarified is exactly what happened in the last hours before the death.

Even Hartmut Ferse, age 58, does not know. In preparation for the meeting, the spokesman for the Wiesbaden public prosecutor's office has once again printed out the various stages this case has gone through since March 27 2003. Ferse, who has been spokesman for the public prosecutor's office for the last two years, is a former director of the Hessen Office for the Protection of the Constitution [German Intelligence service], wishes to be exact, even though he knows the Duggan case better than any other case, given that he is regularly obliged to provide pertinent information.

There is a preponderance of calls from British journalists, since newspapers such as The Independent and The Guardian follow up continuously on Erica Duggan's efforts to have her son's death reinvestigated.

The Wiesbaden public prosecutor's office does not receive favourable coverage. Senior Prosecutor Ferse draws a narrow line of defense. According to him, the bottom line of  March 27 2003 is that "Jeremiah Duggan runs onto the roadway alive and is dead afterwards." There was no evidence of "third-party responsibility". Thus, Wiesbaden closed the case.

Talking with Ferse may convey the impression that his office is not happy any more with that quick dictum of "suicide", knowing the pain it caused for the mother, and knowing as well that investigators merely concluded "suicide" without being able to prove it.

Ferse does not know either why Jeremiah Duggan ran onto the B-445 roadway, with vehicles travelling at a speed of about 100 km/h, shortly after 6 o'clock in the morning. And for him, it is "humanly understandable" that the mother is not satisfied by disclosure stating that third-party responsibility does not exist.

The question suggests itself: Does a young British student living in Paris kill himself in Wiesbaden by running into the traffic flow with raised arms? Unlikely. Thus, which events were the ones that led to Duggan being struck by a car on the feeder road and overrun by another?

Attorney Becker wishes that issue clarified; "any conspiracy theories aside, the case merits a full-scale investigation." People are entitled to have circumstances of death analysed, he says. That is the base line of his constitutional complaint now pending [at the Federal Constitutional Court] in Karlsruhe.

For now, that is the latest stage in a row of legal rulings, a quick overview of which reads like so: In June 2003, investigations are closed by the Wiesbaden public prosecutor's office. In November 2003, the British coroner presents his final report: Jeremiah suffered fatal injuries when he ran onto the roadway, while in a state of panic-stricken fear.

In February 2005 attorney Becker files for resumption of investigations. The request is denied by the public prosecutor's office in March 2005. In May 2005, a pertinent complaint is denied by the Hessen Regional Prosecutor. In July 2006, the Higher Regional Court of Frankfurt rejects a complaint against that decision.

The decision of the Federal Constitutional Court is still pending. So much for the case's "German" legal aspect to date. Although a sequence of defeats for Jeremiah's mother, she does not give up the search for answers.

Erica Duggan, a former teacher, has furnished one room of her house in North London as a place of research and remembrance. There she works, surrounded by mountains of files and by books most notably dealing with the LaRouche network. A large photograph of her son close by, Duggan sits at the keyboard, drafting petitions, writing e-mails, researching via internet. To find out the truth about Jeremiah's death has become "her raison d'être", says attorney Becker.

By now, Erica Duggan refrains from making accusations. She does not want to put Jeremiah's Jewish family background in the centre. She merely says what she suspects, namely that Jeremiah represented a threat for LaRouche partisans at the Schiller Institute seminar when he admitted to being Jewish. The old man LaRouche himself had delivered a lecture at that conference. "I think that the group viewed Jeremiah as a threat to their security, as a kind of spy. But first and foremost, I do not believe that Jeremiah wanted to kill himself."

Erica Duggan maintains a suspicion, but above all, she has got many questions. In the course of the past four years, she did research on her own initiative and on her own money, and recently presented new circumstantial evidence during a London press conference. How come, the mother asks, that Jeremiah's blood was found on his passport, the passport handed over to Wiesbaden police by an official of the Schiller Institute after Jeremiah's death? On behalf of Duggan, independent pathologists and forensics have examined the photographs obtained from Germany, depicting the site of the accident and Jeremiah Duggan's dead body.

The experts' conclusion: The vehicles involved in the accident show no traces of blood or clothing. Jeremiah's head and arm injuries are characteristic of those incurred by someone attempting to fend off beatings. Those kinds of injuries cannot be caused by a vehicle.

In Senior Prosecutor Ferse's view, the basis for those claims is "somewhat flimsy." The only data used, he says, are the photographs which his office provided to the British forensics. In matters of detail, however, Ferse cannot comment on those theses, which represent serious allegations in fact. The circumstantial evidence collected by Erica Duggan, a topic of extensive media coverage in the UK, has not yet been made available to the Wiesbaden public prosecutor's office.

At the middle of this week, Erica Duggan provided her new documents to Attorney General Lord Goldsmith, the UK Government's highest-ranking legal counsel. She asks him to do all he can to facilitate a renewed investigation into the circumstances of her son's death, including vis-à-vis the Wiesbaden public prosecutor's office.

A few MPs have supported Duggan in that quest and intend to move for a Parliamentary debate on that issue. "For me, it's not about criticising this or that agency", Erica Duggan says. If a full-scale investigation were to determine that her son had killed himself, "I will accept it."

Although the legal dispute may drag on for a longer while, including an action at the European Court of Human Rights, Erica Duggan's recent foray might be the last one having  large-scale public repercussions.

If the case is unrolled once more, that will not ring down the curtain on it for Erica Duggan. She can't get that morning in her kitchen out of her head, that memory of Jeremiah's last sign of life, that telephone call from Wiesbaden at 4:24 a.m. "His voice on the telephone sounded frightened, he felt threatended", Erica Duggan repeats, "he did not sound like someone who wanted to die."