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[Visidus - The Drowning of an Ex-CIA Director]

On May 6, 1996, the deceased body of former United States Director of Central Intelligence,
William Colby, washes up on a riverbank one kilometer (.6 miles) away from his vacation home
in Rock Point, Maryland about 100 kilometers (60 miles) south of Washington, D.C.1 Born in
1920, Bill parachuted into occupied France and Norway during World War II. Then later joined
the CIA, engaging in their counterinsurgency operations during the Vietnam War.2 In 1973, the
Nixon administration made him the Director of the CIA thinking his military background would
make him acquiescent. However, once Nixon resigned and got replaced by Gerald Ford, Colby
himself was soon ousted for being too non-compliant.3 Two decades later on Saturday, April 27,
1996, Colby had spent the majority of the day repairing his sailboat in preparation to take it out
that summer. Around 6 p.m., he stopped and went to Captain John’s crabhouse to buy a dozen

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clams before heading back home. At 7, he called his wife Sally, who was visiting her mother in
Texas. Sally told investigators Bill said he felt tired and was planning on eating dinner before
taking a shower and going to sleep. At 7:15, Bill’s off-season gardener and caretaker, who came
with a sister to introduce her, started up a conversation as Bill watered the trees lining his
property. Colby’s next-door neighbors saw the conversation taking place firmly marking this as
the last time anyone ever saw him alive.4

d [The Search]

The next afternoon, a handyman named Kevin Akers who was out boating with his family, saw a
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beached, green-fiberglass canoe at the tip of Rock Point; he decided to tow it back to a marina
in case the owners wanted to retrieve it. That evening, Colby’s neighbors called the police after
suspecting something had happened to him. His car was in the driveway even though he
usually returned to Washington around noon and his canoe had been missing for an unusual
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amount of time. The police and neighbors found both doors to his home unlocked, radio and
computer on, wallet and keys left on a table, clam shells in the kitchen sink, dirty dishes, and an
uncapped wine bottle with a glass mostly full.5 Everything else was left untouched and there
were no visible signs of forced entry or a kidnapping, instead his life preserver and paddle were
missing from a nearby shed. This sparked alarm as police discovered the beached canoe Akers
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found belonged to Colby. Investigators promptly began a search, and in the coming days
eventually mobilized 100 helpers with sonar equipment, boats, helicopters, divers, and
specially-trained dogs. Sally returned from Texas to help investigators narrow down the search

1
Jackson, Robert L. “Colby’s Body Discovered on Riverbank”. Los Angeles Times. May 7, 1996.
2
Woods, Randall. “William Egan Colby and the CIA”. April 9, 2013.
- Most if not all biographical details stem from here and other talks by Randall Woods
3
Ibid.
4
Grant, Zalin. “Who Murdered the CIA Chief?”. 2011. http://www.pythiapress.com/wartales/colby.htm
- His reliability is debatable regarding more suspicious elements of Colby’s death that can’t be
easily fact-checked, however he was a journalist and everything that can be fact-checked
matches up
5
Grant reports that Colby wasn’t fearful and didn’t care about whether he was murdered
- His biographer also gives similar anecdotes
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area to Colby’s traditional canoe routes. But as the days wore on, fewer and fewer resources
were dedicated to the search effort.

A week later, an officer found Colby’s body, which had surfaced on the shore of the Wicomico
river - only about 100 meters from where his canoe was discovered.6 Colby was wearing a red
windbreaker, white & blue striped polo shirt, khakis, and socks, with his shoes noticeably
missing.7 Sally quickly confirmed the body was Bill and the Maryland Chief Medical Examiner
Office then conducted an autopsy. The coroner found no visible signs of injury, but found a
build-up of hardened plaque in his arteries.8 They concluded that indicated he had likely suffered
cardiovascular issues—a stroke or heart attack—which caused him to collapse into the water
and eventually succumb to hypothermia before drowning. They also found that the contents of
his stomach suggested he had died shortly after his clam dinner - Colby had probably gotten up

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part way through and decided to go canoeing as he was known for occasionally doing around
sunset. But as there were no witnesses, the police admitted it wasn’t an open-and-shut case.

[Discrepancies]

The greatest evidence of foul play is the various accounts from friends that Colby was a
methodical man and wouldn’t have abruptly gotten up from his (favorite) meal. One such

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acquaintance, a former senator named John DeCamp, wrote:

I have very serious doubts about the description of Bill Colby's death that
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emerged from the police search and the subsequent coroner's inquiry. I do not
possess any "secret information" about Bill Colby's final hours; I base my doubts
on 25 years of near continuous contact and collaboration with the man, a
collaboration which deepened in his final years.
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….
Bill Colby was the single most meticulously careful, programmed, organized
individual I have ever encountered, especially when it came to matters of safety,
security, and personal activities. Therefore, the description given in the media,
surrounding his death, does not cohere with Bill Colby's personality, his
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character, his modus operandi, and my personal experiences with him over many
years.9

While there are differing reports as to whether Colby left dirty dishes on the sunroom table
where he was eating or in the kitchen sink, another friend to Colby, a journalist named Zalin
Grant, whose investigation has been vital to this video, pointed to the wine bottle which was left
on the table and noted “Colby was the kind of guy who would have capped the bottle before
leaving and put it in the fridge.” Moreover, both his neighbors and wife wondered why he would
choose to go out that night, especially since the New York Times reported that day there were

6
Accounts differ as to exact locations - here I rely on Grant’s description of the area
7
Shields, Todd. “Colby’s Body Found Along River Shore”. The Washington Post. May 7, 1996.
8
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Autopsy_report_of_William_E._Colby_(1996).pdf
9
DeCamp, John W. “The Franklin Cover-up”. August 16, 2011.
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winds “gusting up to 25 miles an hour and whipping up two-foot whitecaps”.10 Sally told
reporters during the search, “I don’t understand why Bill went out in it. He was a cautious
man.”11 This and other accounts of the couple’s phone conversation conflict with the presumably
incorrect Associated Press report that the Sheriff said Bill told Sally he would go canoeing that
night. While Colby’s drinking could have impaired his judgment, the coroner found that he had a
blood alcohol concentration of 0.07 which is still under the legal limit for drunk driving in the U.S.
Another oddity is the fact that Colby’s life jacket was never found during the 9-day search even
though Sally had told investigators that Colby always brought his life vest inside the canoe.12

Regardless, assuming Colby had finished watering his trees at 7:30 - even though Grant states
his gardener claims it would have taken him another 30 minutes - steamed his clams, roasted
his corn, got a bottle of wine, and started eating at the table in the sunroom (not the kitchen

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table indicating he was acting leisurely) before getting up halfway through, and retrieving his
equipment from a shed - it would have most likely been after the 7:57 sunset when he set out.13
While this timeline alone is not particularly surprising since he sometimes went canoeing during
twilight, Grant reported the medical examiner told him Colby had died “one to two hours after
eating”, meaning it would have been around 9 or 10 pm - a time when it was near-dark if not
completely pitch black.14 Another strange piece of evidence comes from Grant’s interview with
Kevin Akers. Akers reported it took nearly an hour for him and his wife to clear the sand from

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the capsized canoe - which he found suspicious since he had been out the day before and
hadn’t spotted it, meaning that abnormal amount of sand had been accumulated by just two tide
cycles. Akers, who is very familiar with the local waters, also thought that the clockwise tidal
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currents near the spit should have swept the canoe to the same location where Colby’s body
was found, not on the opposite side of the spit.

[Theories]
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Grant posits that a couple of men abducted Colby while another group used a boat to tow the
canoe away. Once the group got to the shore of Rock Point, they filled the canoe with sand to
ensure authorities would think Bill had drowned in that area. The sandbar they chose was easily
accessible from Rock Point road, in fact you can see in this photo the police managed to drive a
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car right next to the riverbank. Grant alleges the group killed Colby, put him on ice and let his
body decompose for a couple of days to obscure the true nature of his death from coroners,
before dumping it back when police activity had died down in the area. While Grant does not
propose this alternate theory, it’s also possible that they could have drowned Colby immediately
and dumped his body near the canoe. The reason he couldn’t be found for 9 days could simply
be because of the murky waters. Either way his missing shoes could be a sign that he was
struggling when being suffocated. But instead of always invoking the ominous “they”, let’s
explore his list of enemies.

10
Weiner, Tim. “Ex-Director of CIA Disappears While Canoeing on Choppy River”. NYT. April 30, 1996.
11
https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-press-democrat-williamegancolby11/22758086/
12
https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/178488844/
13
Sunset / Twilight timings taken from https://www.timeanddate.com for that location / date
14
Ibid. Astronomical twilight ended at 9:34 pm
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Despite his short tenure as director, Colby was one of the most if not the most divisive figures in
the intelligence community. In Vietnam, he headed a pacification effort named CORDS. A part of
this was the Phoenix Program - which many critics dubbed an assassination arm that
purposefully carried out 20,000 wrongful killings. When Colby became Director of Central
Intelligence, he fired swathes of agents in order to make the CIA less compartmentalized
sparking rumours from colleagues that he was a soviet mole. Meanwhile he was embroiled in
congressional hearings; rather than adopting a policy of plausible deniability, he gave up many
CIA secrets including the so-called “family jewels”, a 693-page report compiled by his
predecessor that outlined unorthodox & illegal CIA activities including wire-tapping and
assassination attempts against foreign leaders. All this culminated in his tacit firing, although
whether he still covertly helped the agency is debated.15 That being said, there doesn’t seem to

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be one clear culprit - maybe his death was an accident. Ultimately, it will remain a mystery.

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15
Colby asserted in interviews after he was fired that he did not have any connections with the agency
besides his secrecy agreement