The Disappearance and Death of Dave Walker: A History
Page 10. The Investigation Part 7
"Cocksucker": Who is Nate Thayer?

THE INVESTIGATION WEEK ONE Part 7:  "Cocksucker" Who is Nate Thayer?

"Tammy just appointed me and Nate Taylor as 'official spokesmen and advisors.'"

It was still Sunday evening that second weekend after Dave's disappearance, with investigator Peter Slade's mission up in the air as to whether it would go forward the next day (See Page 8), we were hunting the "suspect" Salao Mao on Sonny's behest and information (See Page 6 ), and Canadian Vice Consul Allison Catmur from the Embassy in Bangkok had just completed her "investigation" in Siam Reap and meetings with Cambodian police authorities and recommended to Tammy that she appoint a spokesperson. (See Page 7).  Tammy Madon phoned me that evening saying that she wanted Nate Thayer and I to act as her family spokespeople and advisors.  I had seen Thayer's name in the e-mail threads but I had no idea as to exactly who he was.

"Karma is a bitch" 

After Googling Nate Thayer I was suitably impressed. Very cool!  This was the American freelance journalist who after years of searching found the shadowy genocidal Khmer Rouge former dictator of Cambodia, Pol Pot ("Brother No. 1").  Pol Pot had murdered between 1.8 to 3 million Cambodians 1975-1979 before he was overthrown and crawled back into the jungle where he remained a malevolent ghost for twenty years until Thayer (with cameraman David McKaige) was the first American journalist to interview him after wading twice into the midst of a heavily armed Khmer Rouge cadre which had put Pol Pot on show trial for a recent assassination attributed to him. 

It can't get any better than that! I thought. Who better than a Nate Thayer to be investigating Dave's disappearance?

While I was familiar with the story of how an American journalist found Pol Pot, I didn't know his name. It never came up. But I heard the story from Dave and it went a slightly different way than the version Thayer tells. 

Dave and I often 'gossiped' about what we saw in our territories, telling tales of treachery and woe, usually other people's. Without ever naming Thayer,  Dave had told me a story he dubbed "Karma is a bitch" about an ambitious American journalist who was led to Pol Pot by trusting local Cambodian journalists and fixers, who were then ripped off by the American when he sold their story as his own scoop to US television for $350,000 ($580,000 in 2015) without giving them credit or a share.  Dave chuckled how the ABC News Network television show 20/20 hosted by the legendary Ted Koppel then in turn ripped off the journalist by repackaging his scoop as their own, distributing his "exclusive" material to other media outlets around the world on the internet "as a courtesy." (He would laugh in that British drill sergeant's lilt "as a courtesy" har har har...) Dave had a whole series of stories like that he dreamed of producing as a Broadway play and graphic novel, Karma is a bitch: tales of justice and degradation.

Frankly, I took Dave's story with a grain of salt.  Dave himself was earning his living in South East Asia mostly as a fixer between his own struggles to write, publish and produce his personal work. Being a fixer is thankless, frustrating work and I thought Dave's story might be coming from that place.  I myself had done stints as a fixer and managed to hustle my way to cameraman, field director and line producer in investigative broadcast television, eventually working for CBC, CTV and CNN overseas. I knew that everywhere we went, there were always legions of local journalists and fixers on whom we depended and who we rarely credited or gave share to in scoops that superstar television on-camera journalists routinely took the credit for and the big bucks.  If Nate Thayer ripped-off locals for his Pol Pot scoop, he did not do anything that 'big name' network TV journalists weren't routinely doing.  Let's give Nate Thayer fair credit for finding and landing an interview with one of the great monsters of the 20th Century: Pol Pot.  It was an extraordinary achievement, no matter what wagging tongues say the back story was.

The Corporate Gang Rape of Nate Thayer

But for his sins mother karma did punish Nate Thayer and punished him severely. Unlike all the other network television journalists who systematically ripped off local sources and fixers and got away with it, Thayer was not inside the "corporate fold." He was a freelancing punk outsider and worse, a print journalist, which in television was akin to being a child molester on a prison block.  ABC TV gang raped Nate Thayer in their corporate shower room, distributing his "exclusive" footage free on the internet around the world to other media outlets with an ABC News logo pasted over it "Courtesy of ABC News". [ American Journalism Review: A Journalistic Coup Turns Sour ][ Your scoop? Nah it's ours if we want it ] It turned out that Thayer had been too long in the jungle and had never heard of the internet or "frame grabs" from his exclusive video footage that ABC News insisted his contract provided for when he took the $350,000.  

When Thayer says that ABC News then told him "if you don't like it, sue us", I believe him.  He then naively (Thayer is "child like" I agree) took them at their word and actually sued the mega corporation with its army of Wall Street shark attorneys for $30 million in punitive damages and loss of income. (Not only was ABC News a division of a multi-billion dollar corporate conglomerate, but as a journalistic entity it also claimed sacred American constitutional immunities in the name of the freedom of the press and the "public's right to know"; go sue that!)   Thayer claims he "won" the case but that his "victory" left him bankrupt and broken. [See: Nate Thayer: How Ted Koppel and ABC TV Tried to Steal my Life's Work 

I believe completely that part of Thayer's story because Ted Koppel and ABC TV's 20/20 ripped me off in November 1991 on an exclusive I had developed in the Soviet Union (with an army of Russian fixers and journalists that I did not credit (but at least paid, and paid very well)) on the KGB files and Russian witnesses to JFK's accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald's time spent in Russia in 1959-1962.  Back then ABC-News said exactly the same thing to me that they said to Thayer:  "If you don't like it, sue us."  But unlike Thayer, I laid down like a dog, and unlike Thayer, I wasn't even sly enough a bitch to get paid for getting fucked anywhere near as much as Thayer was paid to get fucked.   

When ABC-TV tried to mollify Thayer by tossing him a share in a very prestigious Peabody Award (the "Pulitzer Prize" or "Oscar" in broadcast and electronic journalism) that ABC News won for the Pol Pot broadcast, Thayer told them to fuck off and was reportedly frog-marched out of the black-tie Peabody Award dinner by security.  He was the first Peabody Award winner in its 57 year history to turn down the prize.  The guy was a Marlon Brando turning down an Oscar!  Thayer looked like he had integrity. I liked what I saw so far.

"Something is not right with Thayer"

Nate Thayer, however, never recovered from the gang-banging zombie-biting he got at the hands of the syphilitic corporate lowlifes at ABC News. Infected, Thayer is suffering with their virus today, sick in his brain and dead in his heart.  People later told me that Thayer after "winning" his lawsuit ended up a bankrupt bitter broken man living curled up in a fetal position in a small garage apartment in Washington D.C. where reports had him wandering the streets in pyjama pants deep in muttered conversation with his dog in between alternating cycles of appearing propped up at Georgetown lunches and events seemingly lucid, articulate, bow-tied and charming. 

When I brought up the name of Nate Thayer among some of my South East Asia colleagues they raised their eyebrows.  "Something is not right with Thayer these days" some said, making loopy gestures at their head. One colleague quoted  Michael Herr in describing dealing with Thayer as "like being in the middle of some black looneytune where the Duck has all the lines." 

I did not know what to make of all these stories. Now I do, because karma is a bitch.  For all my own sins, and perhaps for Dave's, karma sent us Nate Thayer.

Sympathy for the Devil

Except for righteously stirring shit occasionally as he did recently in defence of bloggers and exploited interns and berating the North Koreans, Thayer hadn't done anything exceptional over the last 18 years. [ Wikipedia: Nate Thayer ] It's a cliché joke, "That's great he found Pol Pot, but what has he done lately?" Ha ha. But seriously, who can be fairly expected to top something like that?  After all what had Henry Stanley done after having found Dr. Livingston lost in the African jungle? Lindbergh after flying the Atlantic solo? Or Neil Armstrong since walking on the moon?  You can never top finding Pol Pot; you can only circle back to it.  

Single-handedly solving Dave's disappearance could have been a great comeback for a guy like Nate Thayer. To now find Dave held prisoner in depths of Cambodia or solve his murder when nobody else could,  was just what the doctor ordered.  It would give Thayer not only a renewed cycle on his claim to Cambodia as his investigative turf, but give him now a second chance to revive his Pol Pot story; to tell his story again but better.  Thayer had been unsuccessfully crowd-funding to do just that, a book he called Sympathy for the Devil. (Although when indie authors today are publishing their own books in print-on-demand (POD) and e-book platforms for an average of $600 to at the very most $2,500 to produce a 300 page book set up to sell, his call for $67,500 in donations to publish his book is a little snake-oily.  [ See: http://www.nate-thayer.com/ ].) 

But who cares what motivated Thayer to help search for Dave, or even if he profited from it, as long as he brought Dave home alive.  In fact I thought at the time that Thayer's self-interest was a good thing!  It was a much more a tangible and dependable motivator than some ephemeral altruistic impulse from friendship for Dave that could easily wane with frustration, cost and self-doubt.  If only Nate Thayer was able to deliver on the promise to find Dave... (I would have worked with the devil himself, if it saved Dave.)    

True, Thayer had been recently exposed plagiarizing like a schoolboy copying other journalists' work in his blogs. [See: Nate Thayer is a Plagiarist;  How Nate Thayer Plagiarizes; New York Magazine: Did Nate Thayer Plagiarize?  Columbia Journalism Review: Nate Thayer Accused of Plagiarism.  The Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) website that follows misconduct in journalism  'pleaded-down' his offense to incompetent "sloppy" attribution (on the part of a journalist claiming twenty-five years experience) but only after the CJR pulled from their website a public discussion forum thread that illuminated the finer nuances of Thayer's misconduct. [ Nate Thayer: Freelance Plagiarist? Sloppy, yes. Plagiarist ... doesn't look like it ]

While a conviction of conspiracy to commit murder in a field investigative security operative might be a welcomed skill set, a record of plagiarism reflects a person's lack of credibility or incompetence; or worse, both. Not reassuring qualities in an investigator on whom Dave Walker's fate might depend.

Even so, having now been forewarned of some of Thayer's past, I will relate here my own personal first hand observations of Nate Thayer and the kind of person he is.  For me when I meet a new person they are much less of what they did in the past than what they will do now, unless they prove me wrong.  Both Dave and I thought that way, that people intrinsically are good and do good things and that the best bet in life is usually to trust until proven wrong, rather than never trusting enough to find out its inner essence. That's why we were friends for nearly twenty-five years.

"I know Cambodia. Dave Walker is dead."

Now that Thayer and I had been appointed together by Tammy as her "spokespersons and advisors" I thought one of us would be soon calling the other to introduce themselves.  When Thayer did not call me, I called him that Sunday night.

Thayer was on a good day.  His booming deep voice with its East Coast tinge was polite, pleasant and friendly but exuding an undertone of aggressive American 'can do' confidence.  He was likable but clownishly arrogant at the same time; his opening hand was his finding Pol Pot back in 1997.  He was still all puffed up on this as his prima facie credential for finding Dave Walker, and had nothing else to offer after that.  It was immediately a "do you know who I am" kind of part monologue part sermon from the Mount. I eventually interrupted him to give him a 'hale-fellow' on that, chirping in, "yeah, I know the Pol Pot story, we are lucky to have you onboard in the search for Dave." [Or something friendly like that... acknowledging his Pol Pot greatness and getting on with the task at hand of finding Dave.]

With a 'Caesar has spoken' majesty and the smarmy sincerity of a war department messenger, Thayer suddenly burst out, "Dave Walker is dead."

"How do you know that?" I asked.  That was the first time I heard anybody say something like that.  "Do you have some new information?"

"I know Cambodia," Thayer pronounced. "Dave Walker is dead." 

I challenged Thayer on that, insisting "We don't know anything of the sort.  There is no evidence at this moment that Dave is dead, and until I have such evidence, my presumption is not only that Dave is still alive, but that if he is being held captive, Dave being who he is and the training he had, has a better than average chance of surviving captivity anywhere if we can find him in time. We need to think Dave alive and find him with urgent fury as fast as possible."

Thayer responded, "If I was in Cambodia, I could find out exactly what happened to Dave in a week."  (Gee, that long?)

What surprised me was realizing that Thayer was not in Cambodia, but that he was in my own time zone about a 90 minute flight south of me, in Washington, D.C., as blind and remote from Cambodia as I was.  In the masses of e-mails, I had overlooked reading down to the bottom of the one that introduced Thayer as somebody 'currently' based in Washington.  My bad. I am not even sure when Thayer was actually last in Cambodia.  Who is working in the field? I wondered.

But ok, he did not have to be there,  Thayer "knew" Cambodia and presumably had connections there even if he was now based in Washington.  I was only on the first week of building my network of connections on the ground over there. To tell my own embarrassing truth, when Thayer in his salesman pitch told me he had a network of operatives in Cambodia and a sophisticated investigative machine, I had at first no reason not to believe him. Why would I think that Thayer was crazy and had nothing in Cambodia? His entire investigation would turn out to be a Potemkin Village, reduced in its final weeks to investigating other investigators and sniffing around old ground in Keswick here in Canada.  But at this point I wanted to trust Thayer so much that I actually began to calculate as I spoke to him how much it would cost for us to fly Thayer over to Cambodia and if he would go.  I even thought, maybe if we don't hire the contractor Peter Slade full time tomorrow that the pledged money Lovisa Inserra raised (See Page 8) could be used to fly Thayer over.  That's how much I wanted to believe in Thayer for the sake of Dave.

When I brought up my concerns about Sonny Chhoun as Dave's business partner, Thayer responded,  "I know Sonny. I spoke with him.  I don't think he has anything to do with it," he said, again exuding that 'seen it all - know it all' confidence that brooked no questioning.

The oddest thing that Thayer said, was that he thought the house I identified in Keswick, Ontario, which Dave owned and which the "suspect" named by Sonny Choun in Cambodia had been living in at one time, had nothing to do with Dave's disappearance.  It had been just a matter of hours that the house and its connection to Salao Mao had been identified, so I was a little perplexed as to how Thayer could be so quick to be so sure that it had nothing to do with Dave's disappearance.  Thayer gave the impression that he had uncovered something better, more direct sources of information on what exactly had happened to Dave, and he told me I needn't bother looking further in the Keswick end. As always when anybody tells me not to look further into something, I put it first on my list to investigate.  (In fact that evening I got requests from Richard Ehrlich that I pull a "lure" I posted in the Find Dave Walker Facebook to snag information on Salao Mao and that I not call Sonny because "because some fresh activity has begun and others are asking for us to all step back." (See Page 9) I was still trusting Ehrlich and those statements from him combined with what Thayer was telling me, convinced me that something was indeed being developed by an ongoing investigation in Cambodia that Thayer was privy to.

Nate Thayer and I agreed (or maybe I thought we agreed) to jointly work out a strategy as the family spokespersons and advisors on how to manage Canada's Foreign Affairs Department into either pressuring the Cambodians to take Dave's disappearance seriously and conduct a transparent investigation or pressure Cambodia into accepting help from Canadian investigators, presumably the RCMP.  I suggested that pressure be brought on the Cambodians to yield their jurisdiction, as they had to the French recently when some French citizens were murdered in Cambodia. ( See Cambodian Daily "French Judge to investigate" .)

Thayer seemed to be very hostile to the Canadian Embassy in Thailand, arguing that it was outrageous that it took them a week from the date of Dave's disappearance to fly somebody out to Siem Reap.  I argued that considering that the Embassy was not really officially informed that Dave had vanished until as late as Tuesday morning, that flying somebody out by Friday was not actually all that negligent, considering we still had no evidence that Dave, as unlikely as it was, had not wandered off by himself on his own accord to "happy hut", ie., met a woman and was shacked-up with her. The reality of the problem was that as a middle-aged single male expat in SE Asia, Dave Walker was not exactly a priority to any Embassy to fret over his being absent a week, no matter how strange the circumstances.  I tried to convince Thayer to imagine the thinking of the Canada Foreign Affairs bureaucrats. It would make it easier for us to deal with them, I said, regardless of whether we agree with them, if we understand how they think and try to work their mindset.  Bureaucrats in my experience, need to be led like children.

Tomorrow was Monday, and the Vice-Consul had just returned from Siem Reap to her base at the Canadian embassy in Bangkok.  It would probably take a day before she could write and file a report on her visit in Siem Reap and declassify it for us. As the family spokespersons to the Foreign Affairs Department we were anticipating to be given an "official" update on what the Canadian government had achieved in Cambodia and what they proposed to do next, if anything, by the next day or day after.  

Once we had on record the Canadian official position, I suggested to Thayer, we can jointly draft our response and advise Tammy on her best next course of action depending upon what the Canadians had to say.

Later that night (early morning) I sent Tammy the following summary of my conversation with Thayer.  There was no sense of trouble with Thayer in it and I was enthusiastically and optimistically looking forward to working with him.

"whatever he suggests will be brilliant please vronsky, listen very closely to whatever *nate thayer* says... always first ask *nate thayer,*...i will *never* include any email from *you* or *tammy* or *nate thayer,* without *first* getting *detailed confirmation* from *nate thayer* about what i should or should not do" 

That Sunday night I also e-mailed as an operational courtesy our trusted dispatcher and "assignment editor" Richard S. Ehrlich in Bangkok to bring him into the loop on the appointment of Thayer and myself as co-spokespersons. I was still dyslexically referring to Nate Thayer in my e-mail as "Nate Taylor." It was news to Ehrlich that I had been appointed as co-spokesperson and advisor. (Thayer had been telling people that day that he had been appointed family spokesperson and advisor "in charge of the investigation" without mentioning that Tammy wanted us to co-share those functions.) (See Page 8)

In my e-mail I assured Ehrlich that I would be counting on his counsel and asked him to "don't say anything yet about this until its announced." 

Richard S. Ehrlich chose to now e-mail me the following "congratulation", directly addressing me with a cc: to Tammy Madon and Thayer.  It was a typical 'office politics' weasel move.

Thayer: "I have formally been appointed the adviser and spokesman for Tammy Madden...We have an extensive and very sophisticated team of investigators."

If Richard Ehrlich's above e-mail attempting to undermine my credibility in Tammy's perception annoyed me, the below e-mail from Nate Thayer forwarded to me the next day by Canada's Foreign Affairs Department angered me.  It had been sent earlier that Monday without my knowledge and advice and in it Thayer as "adviser and spokesman for Tammy Madon" berated Vice-Consul Catmur and an Ottawa desk-bureaucrat Jean-Francois Parizeau for not immediately jumping to respond to his earlier e-mail or telephone calls of the morning.  Thayer had not even the courtesy to 'cc:' me on it.  There were no "we" in the e-mail, it was all "I".

His tone was unnecessarily adversarial with Foreign Affairs before we even knew their position.  The wise thing to have done was to first hear what Foreign Affairs had to say, listen, think, and then decide together whether to attack or sweet talk Foreign Affairs depending upon what they said.  But now Thayer had shot his mouth off and defined a battleground where perhaps no battle needed to be fought. 

I was also troubled to hear that next day, again Thayer's claim that "we had an extensive and very sophisticated team of investigators who have been and are working on the ground in Cambodia..."  This was still news to me because as far as I could see we were solely depending on what Sonny was feeding us and on a couple of e-mails from the anonymous blogger LTO http://ltocambodia.blogspot.ca/ who had gained unauthorized access to Dave's hotel room and searched it, perhaps contaminating the evidence. And we had hardly made anything near "significant progress" as Thayer falsely claimed.  If there was any progress, I had not been briefed on it. I didn't like this deceptive approach Thayer was taking with Foreign Affairs.

The below response from Foreign Affairs to Nate Thayer's moronic e-mail was swift and decisive.  At their request, Tammy Madon fired Thayer as spokesman that same afternoon, but had not told him or me yet.  I had no idea this was happening as I was giving lectures all afternoon on Monday (although Thayer would accuse me of being behind it.)  When this e-mail arrived from Foreign Affairs in response to Thayer's letter, informing him he was no longer a spokesperson, it must have gone off like a bomb inside his fragile ego.

Thayer would accuse me of having a part in his removal, but I had no idea until the e-mail arrived shortly after 6:00 P.M.  I had been lecturing all afternoon and the few messages on Facebook I sent that day to Tammy I had received no response to until the above e-mail came in.

Earlier, while finishing my lecture that afternoon, I met with a colleague, a former border services intelligence officer, a specialist in the Cambodia-Laos-Thailand region who was very familiar with the training and current state of the Cambodian Police and Military and had excellent contacts in that region.

I had still not heard from Tammy that day, but that was not unusual.  She was at work.  Immediately afterwards I returned to my office at the university and was drafting the below report on the meeting to Tammy and Nate when the e-mail came in informing me that Thayer had been removed as spokesperson. I finished my below report and sent it out as I waited to hear from Tammy as to what is going on.  I cc'd Nate on it on the assumption that nothing has changed in his diligence and commitment to finding out what happened to Dave, even though he would no longer be functioning as the official spokesman for Foreign Affairs.  I assumed that we would be retaining Thayer as an advisor and that we would all soldier forward together in finding Dave.

The rapidity with which things would suddenly go crazy would leave me breathless and sleepless.

Thayer: "[I] have already halted all activities on behalf of Dave that I was previously and am currently involved in."

Apart from being busily employed fulltime in a mid-management position in a bank, Tammy Madon was not really good with e-mails, sometimes unable to follow the multiple duplicate threads that spawned into different directions.  I had difficulties following all the threads myself.  Tammy's main form of communications at the time was her Facebook messaging system.  Tammy was busy at work and was unable to respond to Thayer's e-mails in a timely enough manner to satisfy Mr. Thayer.

Now Nate Thayer did something that I considered no person claiming to be a friend of Dave's would have ever done, let alone any credible reputable investigator.  Informed that he was no longer "spokesperson" he turned on Tammy and began intimidating her, a victim's family member, by threatening that he had "halted all activities on behalf of Dave" and is "obligated" to tell people who he had recruited on Dave's behalf "to stand down now as they agreed to these efforts based on our personal and professional relationships." 

Although I did not say it yet, my first reaction to readings Nate Thayer's below e-mail to Tammy was, "YOU COCKSUCKER!"

 "[Spokesperson] means the guy who the government lies to... Not the guy who the government listens to..."

It wasn't just about Dave. I also felt a protective sense of  outrage for Tammy Madon, the target of his threat.  I regarded Tammy as sincere but out-of-her-depth in something like a mysterious disappearance of a family member in a place like Cambodia. I am not even sure if Tammy had ever been out of Canada without Disney Cruises being involved. Shit, I had gone to work deep undercover in Chechnya buying nuclear weapons material at one time, but with Cambodia, even I felt out of my depth!  Who wouldn't be?  I imagined how vulnerable and helpless Tammy must have been feeling trying to make the best decisions possible for Dave, not knowing whether he was still alive or dead. 

Moreover, by some weird coincidence, even though Tammy Madon was younger than me, she strangely resembled my recently deceased ninety-five year old grandmother.  She had the same petit tight-mouthed thin-lipped thin pencil eyebrowed flinty big bug-eyed glasses framed features that my granny had.  She was my 'babushka' without the wrinkles and it was hard for me to disassociate Tammy from my own grandmother.  In a way, Dave over our twenty-five year friendship became a brother that I never had, and by extension, I almost felt a familial connection to Tammy.

When I read Thayer's email in which he told Tammy he is withdrawing his resources and telling people to stand down from looking for Dave, in a superhuman act I held my temper and called Thayer on the phone, explaining to him in as calm a voice as I could muster that Tammy tended to confine herself mostly to Facebook Messenger and maybe she had missed Thayer's e-mails and not to take offence and that Tammy's decision was not a sign of no confidence in him.  I truthfully at the time told him that both I and Tammy have full confidence in him and wanted him to stay on and work with him.  Thayer replied that Tammy had undermined his "authority" and that he had no choice but to withdraw from the investigation.  I pleaded with Thayer to think of Dave first, and not pull back the resources and people he had mobilized to look for Dave.  Thayer coldly replied that he was "too busy" to talk further to me and ended the conversation.

I followed up the call with this below e-mail and waited politely for him to call me back when he was less busy.

Thayer did not call back.  After waiting a decent amount of time, I called Thayer again, this time he hung up on me rudely, without speaking.

I had no idea just how toxic Nate Thayer was going to be. I was in ignorant bliss assuming that I was working with merely a "temperamentally arrogant" genius talent who had earned the right to be arrogant.  His finding Pol Pot still impressed me.  I worked in the past with 'super-stars.' Some were humble while others were not, some were nice some were not, but all of them had achievements under their belts and were very brilliant at what they did.  There was no way for me to see him for what he really was until later when I came to understood just how hollow and false Nate Thayer really is. 

I thought at the time that I was going to be working with him, or at least "around" him if I had to, no matter what.  In fact, that is what Tammy Madon was hoping too.

In desperation I turned to Richard Ehrlich and asked him to calm Thayer down, talk some sense into him or mediate a dialogue between us. If Thayer had told what I believed might be his "team of investigators" to stand down, I needed as quickly as possible to get them back on the job.  (If only that team existed.) From Ehrlich's e-mails the night before, I knew Ehrlich thought Thayer was a god, but Thayer's e-mail threatening Tammy was just so wrong in my own perception, that I could not conceive or fathom Ehrlich not seeing the same wrong that I saw.  I turned to our dispatcher "dispatcher" for discreet help in soothing Thayer's apparently bruised ego and getting on with the task at hand, finding Dave.

"I am going to make this public in two hours if this cocksucker does not adjust his priorities."

When Thayer hung-up on me again, after the third time I tried to call him that evening, I lost it.  It may not be a good excuse for what I did next, but for a week I had been sleeping maybe two or three hours a day, as I worked through a 9 A.M. to 5 P.M. Toronto and Ottawa time zone and then proceeded to work Cambodia time twelve hours ahead from 10:00 PM to about 6:00 A.M. from my own zone.  Plus my lecture load at work. Plus grading students, plus deadlines to meet on several book deals I was juggling.  I was getting punchy by Monday night, and wanted to go home, and now Thayer was acting up like a high strung ballerina, I thought. (If only that was all it was...) 

In a follow-up e-mail to Ehrlich, I called Thayer a "cocksucker" and threatened to make public his disgusting threats to Tammy to abandon Dave.  "Cocksucker" was not a comment on his sexual preference, which I have no idea of, but just a generic expletive describing what he was; a cocksucker!

When Thayer hung up the phone yet again, I went berserk.

Tammy had finally weighed in a few minutes later, writing to us all.  For the sake of peace and Dave, I responded to Tammy's below e-mail and made the first gesture of reconciliation and apologized to Nate Thayer for losing my temper.

At midnight I was still trying to sooth Thayer's ego. I knew "spokesman" was a bullshit thing.  All it meant was I'd be privy to what Foreign Affairs was stating to the family and could decide whether to make it public.  There was no other "authority" that came with it. I followed up on what I thought we need to be working toward next together.

Thayer responded:

Okay.  This guy is one piece of work I thought, but I am going to get some sleep and leave this now. It seemed to me that at least Thayer was back on board after reading Tammy's e-mail and the storm was over. That was the important thing.  I would be arguing for several weeks more to come, "Thayer is crazy but he might be just crazy enough to find Dave..."  Nobody wanted to lose him at that moment.

"now, sleepy time for you vronsky, and all will be well after you click your heels 3 times"

Then I saw something from Richard Ehrlich in my inbox.  It was bizarre and almost taunting in some strangely incoherent way.  Instead of "I", Ehrlich kept writing "eye".  It was disjointed and intemperate, I had never quite seen anything like it from Ehrlich before. It was like the yapping of lap dog at my heels. The whining of a hyena cur.

I was still feeling happy and relieved in the belief that while I had not exactly soothed my suddenly disintegrating relationship with Thayer, that at least he was willing to continue helping us to find Dave.  If I had been one of those explosive angry personalities, Ehrlich's ill timed e-mail could have set me off again.  But assuming that Ehrlich had not known that Tammy had settled both Thayer and myself down, I actually thought Ehrlich message was funny in its stupidly bad timing, a 'comedy of errors.' By now Ehrlich was more and more taking on the character of a clown or buffoon.   I even tried to make a feeble joke about Ehrlich's ill-timing in sending that e-mail, and responded in what I thought was a conciliatory joke from me to his message.

Apparently not, as now Thayer showed the inexplicable need to keep going, triggering this next exchange.

I also was disappointed in Ehrlich, who instead of calming and mediating things between the Nate and myself, actually provoked Thayer further by forwarding him my ill-tempered rant in which I had ungraciously called him a "cocksucker."  I was appalled that Ehrlich did not see just how inappropriate and unethical Thayer's threat had been; especially from somebody claiming to be a personal friend of Dave's.  I would never abandon the investigation into Dave disappearance.  I am still on it now as I write this in March of 2015 a year later.  I'd like to know what Thayer is doing in the cause of justice for Dave.  Or Ehrlich (other than threatening to sue me for writing this.)

This website has now exhausted describing the first week of what was going to be a two and half month investigation. This page has described how my first twenty-four hours of dealing directly with Nate Thayer was like and what our "investigation" into Dave Walker's disappearance was becoming by the beginning of its second week--we were all becoming screaming drama queens.  Things were now going to only get worse and it explains why reportedly it will be Cambodian children who will find Dave's body at Angkor Thom in May two months later, and not us. 

So much of what would happen now would happen in the shadow of Nate Thayer's ego and everything he did to ensure he had an exclusive monopoly on Dave's disappearance and break the "scoop" himself, even as we'll see, if it meant withholding evidence from the Edmonton Police which was about to become the Canadian "agency of record" for the investigation into the disappearance of Dave Walker.

COMING NEXT: WEEK TWO - INSIDE THE INVESTIGATION PART 8 - Enter Edmonton Police