OM DENNE EPISODE
THE DEVIL’S AUDITION
Episode Two: The Demons in North Beach
Seventeen days after Valerie McDonald disappeared from San Francisco, Michael Hennessey—the man who had lured her away with the promise of a role in a Dustin Hoffman movie—was dead. Hennessey and fellow ex-convict John Gordon Abbott had fled north to British Columbia, where a confrontation with the RCMP ended in gunfire. Abbott was captured, Hennessey was killed, and investigators reportedly found Valerie’s voter-registration and unemployment-benefit cards among their belongings. TDW_Devil Audition_2
This week on The Devil Within, we return to the Tower Apartments and the dangerous world Valerie had been trying to escape.
Before she vanished, Valerie told friends about large quantities of cocaine and what contemporary reports called “Satanistic” activities inside her building. In San Francisco—the birthplace of Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan—the allegation carried particular weight. But there is no reliable evidence establishing that an organized Satanic cult operated from the Tower Apartments. What is documented is arguably more disturbing: Valerie was surrounded by men with serious criminal histories, including Phillip Arthur Thompson, who decades later would be convicted of the 1971 murder of Betty Cloer. TDW_Devil Audition_2 TDW_Devil Audition_2
Investigators also suspected Abbott, Hennessey and Thompson of participating in an ambitious criminal enterprise involving robbery, automatic weapons and cocaine trafficking. Valerie’s parents came to believe their daughter may have disappeared because she learned something about that operation, although that theory has never been proven. TDW_Devil Audition_2
Valerie had reportedly been threatened. She was frightened enough to move out. Then Hennessey arrived with the irresistible promise of a movie audition, and Valerie disappeared.
For eleven years, her family waited.
Then, on October 3, 1991, hunters discovered partial human remains near the Kettle River in Ferry County, Washington, hundreds of miles north of San Francisco and near the Canadian border.
Nobody knew who she was.
It would take another ten years before anyone realized whom they had found. TDW_Devil Audition_2
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The Devil’s Audition: The Devils in North Beach, on The Devil Within.
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