As many of you probably know by now, David Crowley, the writer/director behind the planned feature film Gray State was found dead along with his wife and 5 year old daughter over the weekend in what appears to be a murder-suicide that happened around Christmas. I hesitate to even bring some of this stuff up and get involved in this whole ordeal in the wake of such a tragedy, but theres been SO MUCH conspiracy theorizing surrounding his death that I really feel I should say something. Because for several reasons I just dont think he was assassinated. I hope to God that he and his family were killed in botched home invasion or something like that, because I liked Crowley, but honestly... I have a bad feeling that the whole murder-suicide angle the media has been reporting is exactly right. I actually knew David Crowley. Not incredibly well, really, but he was a fellow libertarian filmmaker and someone I would have counted as a casual friend. I first reached out to him in December 2011 while I was working on One Mans Terrorist and I ran across the very first Gray State-related video he ever released. I thought it was awesome to see another libertarian filmmaker out there making films with similar subject matter. After that, we chatted a fair bit on Facebook and email, met up and hung out at Paul Fest in August 2012, exchanged script notes on each others projects, and talked about potentially working together in the future. He always seemed to be good guy to me. Hardworking, intelligent, and intense. Sometimes a bit cryptic and short online, but generally friendly, and much more laid back in person. To be honest, for once I can actually totally understand all the conspiracy theorizing. This situation is weird, it seems out of character, and given the subject matter of Gray State, well… I can definitely see how it looks like an assassination. Hell, as someone who spends a lot of time debunking conspiracy theories, Ive often joked that even if *I* were ever to die of anything other than old age itd inspire a lot of conspiracy theories. So I totally understand why so many of you immediately thought that this seemed incredibly suspicious, but please allow me to present you with some reasons why you should at least keep your mind open to the idea that this really was the murder-suicide the media has been reporting it as. In 2012 and 2013 we chatted relatively regularly, but over the last year or so my contact with him was pretty sporadic. After I learned of his death, I went back and read through our last few conversations. When I did that, something hit me… He was having money issues. He told me over a year ago that “finally went broke,” and on that occasion and another several months later, he asked me how I made ends meet as someone who does filmmaking sort of full time. I’ve attached screen grabs of these conversations, but I mostly want to share with you the second instance of this, because last June he said something to me that, in hindsight, is incredibly chilling: David Crowley, 6/19/14: “let me ask you something how do you live with filmmaking as your profession? last we talked you do the odd paid gig now and then how do you stay motivated? dont you panic when things get slow? Dont you stress and worry? I cant get away from evil thoughts some days.” This is BY FAR the best (though not the ONLY) evidence I have that the murder-suicide angle is accurate. At the time, I didn’t really think anything of his “evil thoughts” comment. I figured he meant that he was feeling dejected due Gray State not taking off quite the way he’d hoped and that he was considering abandoning the project or something. I didnt ask him to elaborate on it, and we just shifted into talking about filmmaking contests and YouTube revenue as a source of income for the next half hour. As I looked back through our conversations and checked out Crowley’s Social Media profiles, I started to notice a few other weird things. The first thing I noticed was that, some time in November or December, he unfriended me, which is really strange to me seeing as how we were casual friends and libertarian-filmmaking peers who had talked about working together in the future during our last ever conversation (more on that later). I checked with Lucas Wolf, and it turns out he had been unfriended by Crowley as well. I’d be really curious to see how far it goes, because I suspect that he unfriended a LOT of people for seemingly no reason. His Instagram profile is still following mine, but he hadnt updated it since October 1st. The next thing I notice is that the two pictures I can still see on his personal facebook page are… Really weird. Sometime after our last conversation at the end of October, his profile picture—which in the past had usually been a very professional and high quality headshot—changed to a really strange picture of a dog that appears to have been taken with a cell phone. The lighting is terrible, the framing is awkward, the focus doesn’t seem to be right, and due to what appears to be a drop ceiling behind the dog, it almost looks like it was taken by someone laying on their back on the ground (I’d really love to know what date it was uploaded, but as we aren’t FB friends any more, I can’t see that). The next picture is his cover photo, which is some kind of horribly-put-together panoramic shot of his front yard. It was posted on October 29th, the day after he talked to me about collaborating on a potential Gray State web-series and then never messaged me again. I actually think it might have been a botched attempt at one of those 360-degree panoramic ball photos you occasionally see on Google Earth. Lots of new smart phones can do them. The picture is bizarrely stitched together, has an extreme fisheye look to it, massive patches of it are black due the camera moving, and legs that I assume to be Crowley’s hilariously and awkwardly poke into the shot in two places thanks to the haphazard stitching. For a guy who really knew his way around a camera and usually posted very professional-looking photos, pictures like these two just don’t make any sense. To top it all off, he made some rather strange posts on his professional facebook page (the one that people “like” instead of “friend”) between October 22nd and 24th. Posts like: “All the convicts I speak to are better read.” “Ive had more servings of absinthe this week than Ive had meals, and the balance of life, work, family have never been more balanced. I reject your notions of sanity and supplant my own.” “Youre either the fool who doesnt follow your dreams, or youre the fool who does.” “Absinthe while edit” He also posted a quote on the 24th that isn’t really all that weird. He said, “Youre either the fool who doesnt follow your dreams, or youre the fool who does.” Which, like I said, isn’t that weird. But the comment he made on that post about 2 hours later IS weird. He simply said, “Somebody tell me what you feel”. These two posts combined definitely give the impression that he was going through something emotionally trying at the time. Considering the fact that only 3 days later he contacted me and at least one more person about working on a Gray State web-series, could it be that the emotionally trying thing he was going through was a huge Gray State setback? The grammatically incorrect and not-at-all-punctuated allusion to drinking “Absinthe while edit,” actually made his brother Dan Crowley ask, “Is that why you never respond to texts?” Which definitely seems to indicate that he hadn’t been doing very good at staying in touch with his family. All in all, from the the weird pictures and posts to the random unfriending, that’s pretty strange behavior if you ask me. Not particularly alarm-raising in most circumstances, but when someone’s being accused of murdering his wife and daughter and committing suicide, well… It does at least HINT that he could have been going through some mental problems. As far as not responding to his brother’s texts goes, there’s more evidence that Crowley was becoming withdrawn than just that. Here is an excerpt from a Minneapolis/St. Paul Fox Affiliate that came out in the wake of the Crowley family’s deaths: “Charles Hubbel was an actor in the trailer and says in recent months Crowley became despondent that the project had lost steam. ‘September time... he stopped talking to people,’ Hubbel says. ‘He asked me to stay in touch with him so we could support each other, and he just stopped taking my calls... He was in a place where he needed help, and it was too big for him to help himself.’” So there’s definitely a pattern of Crowley becoming withdrawn and uncommunicative here. His brother experienced it... Charles Hubbel experienced it... Even *I* experienced it! And, as I’m about to get to, there were others who experienced this despondency too... Now, switching gears again, one common question I keep seeing people ask is, “Why would he kill himself? Gray State was set to go into production with a thirty-million-dollar budget soon!” I think that this idea comes largely from a post that my friend and liberty-musician Jordan Page made on his Facebook page, but I’m almost positive it’s not true and that Jordan made the statement in error based on some kind of misunderstanding (Jordan, if you have solid evidence that this is true, please forgive me, and please share it with us!). First of all, while Crowley definitely HAD met with some big producers and been working towards a deal like this, to the best of my knowledge (And yes, I do have at least a LITTLE BIT of inside knowledge here), nothing had ever been made concrete. Certainly if that much money had ever been set in stone and the film had really been about to go into full-on production, it would have been announced on the Gray State page. Secondly, the last time Crowley and I ever chatted was October 28th, 2014, when he contacted me and asked if I would be interested in producing for Pacific Northwest scenes in a potential nationwide Gray State web-series. You know what the fact that he was looking into making Gray State into a web-series tells me? That there’s almost NO WAY he had a thirty-million-dollar budget secured. If he did… Why would he have been considering a web series? In fact, just knowing that he was considering a web-series makes me think that he may well have been getting desperate to just get the project made SOME HOW even if it has to be with a budget MUCH smaller than he had originally intended.. I’m including a screen grab of this conversation, but the gist of it is just that he wanted me to potentially act as some kind of producer for a Gray State web-series in the Pacific Northwest. After he briefly mentioned this to me, he never got back to me and never wrote me again. The end of this conversation in the screen grab I’m providing is the last time I ever had contact with him. Interestingly, I learned from a random comment on a post on the “Gray State: The Rise” Facebook page that he talked with at least one other person about this Web-Series idea; a guy named Scott Forbes. I’m including a screen grab of that as well. Again, I think this is indicative of the fact that he was trying to make Gray State happen WITHOUT massive amounts of cash. The final reason why I think that the idea Crowley and his family were assassinated is highly implausible is because, being one of the relatively few people who have actually READ the Gray State script, I just don’t think it was quite the threat to the establishment that many of you are making it out to be. I don’t know why anyone on my friend’s list wouldn’t believe that I’ve read the script, but in case this post get’s spread beyond my friends list and people question the veracity of my claims, I’m including screen grabs of the front page of the script AND an additional “Cheat Sheet” packet that Crowley sent me along with it. The script is interesting, to be sure. It’s a bit messy and hard to follow at times, and whether or not the movie would have been any good would have REALLY depended on the execution (more-so than most films are), but I have to at least applaud it for being different. It is FAR weirder and more surreal than I think anyone who saw the concept trailer would have been expecting. Though there are elements of it present, it isn’t exactly the Red Dawn-esque insurgency epic that I think a lot of people were expecting. It delves into some very weird, surreal, occultish stuff. It probably could have been awesome, but it also could have devolved into an absolute mess. An interesting mess, but a mess none-the-less. None of that is that terribly important, though, because my real point here is that the film just WASN’T the massive threat to the establishment that so many people are treating it like. At the end of the day it’s just a dystopian science fiction film. Sure, “Gray State: The Rise” (which I admittedly know less about) is a documentary, but as far as I know it was just a compilation of interviews, news footage, stuff Crowley shot at rallies and the like, and research compiled from publicly available sources. Basically, it probably wasn’t going to be all that much different than Alex Jones’ “Police State” documentaries. it’s not like we’re talking about groundbreaking investigative journalism here that was set to expose some massive secret the government doesn’t want us to know. The Gray State script has a lot of pro-liberty themes, but I ultimately don’t see it being any more of a threat to the establishment than movies like The Matrix, V for Vendetta, or The Hunger Games are . In fact, due to the fact that those films are less esoteric, more accessible, and have clearer messages, even in the best-case scenario where Gray State secured a full thirty-million-dollar budget and Crowley executed it perfectly, I can’t see it having a bigger impact than any of those films have had. Like the three aforementioned films, I can definitely see it being enjoyed by the liberty movement and even having the potential to get open-minded people thinking and “wake them up,” but it wasn’t going to inspire a revolution. It wasn’t going to change the hearts of die-hard statists. And it DEFINITELY wasn’t going to expose some secret that the government doesn’t want us to know. It was purely a work of fiction. Now, I really hate to speculate so much here, but since I’ve laid out all of this evidence I guess I should at least try to guess what it might mean. Unfortunately, as much as I want this to be a triple murder instead of a murder-suicide, I think that what happened is that Gray State was falling apart, Crowley was struggling financially, and between that and who knows what other factors he just snapped. I strongly suspect we will find out in the coming weeks that Gray State suffered a BIG setback, likely toward the end of October. I hope that everyone who is following this case and speculating on it will refrain from jumping to the conclusion that David Crowley and his family were assassinated and at least CONSIDER any evidence that comes out indicating a murder/suicide. It’s incredibly tragic either way, but exponentially more so so if he really did take the lives of his wife and daughter himself. If you REALLY want justice for David Crowley and his family, and the evidence ends up pointing to a genuine murder-suicide as I personally think it already does, then you’ll try to use this senseless tragedy as a reminder to always be ready to give help to the mentally ill, and to be willing to ask for help if you yourself ever start to suffer from depression or mental illness.
Posted on: Wed, 21 Jan 2015 18:45:03 +0000