Killing of Calgary-born scientist tied to mysterious U.S. deaths, disappearances despite quick arrest

The shooting death of a Calgary-born astrophysicist in mid-February in front of his Southern California residence sent shockwaves through his academic and professional circles.

Carl Grillmair was an undergraduate at the University of Calgary before earning a master’s degree from the University of Victoria, eventually earning his PhD outside of Canada. In the 1990s, he joined the California Institute of Technology’s Infrared Processing and Analysis Center, which partners with NASA on a wide range of research activities.

Grillmair, 67 at the time of his death, accumulated accolades while at CalTech. In 2011 he was awarded NASA’s Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal after having studied deep space on a number of NASA telescopes.

“His methods on exoplanets and galactic structure studies were truly detective work, allowing him to infer events that took place many billions of years ago,” said CalTech astronomer Sergio Fajardoa-Acosta, calling Grillmair “irreplaceable.”

Two days after Grillmair was killed on Feb. 16, a 29-year-old who lived two miles away in Llano, Calif., was charged with his murder. Freddy Snyder is scheduled to face arraignment next week.

While all defendants deserve the presumption of innocence, and a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s spokesperson admitted it doesn’t appear the victim and alleged killer knew each other personally, police appear satisfied they have their man.

Nevertheless, Grillmair’s name has surfaced for weeks as being part of a cluster of deaths and disappearances of scientists working for the U.S. government or adjacently in academia that have been deemed suspicious by online sleuths.

This week, officials from Donald Trump’s administration and his Republican Party confirmed they will investigate.

‘Doesn’t pass the smell test’

Republicans James Comer and Eric Burlison of the House’s oversight committee said the panel will examine the disappearances and deaths since 2023 of “at least 10 individuals” with a connection to U.S. nuclear secrets or rocket technology, and that those cases “may represent a grave threat to U.S. national security and to U.S. personnel with access to scientific secrets.”

Adding confusion to the matter, Comer of Kentucky posted hours later that the death of “at least 11 of America’s top scientists” in those areas is “fishy and doesn’t pass the small test.”

Meanwhile, the FBI — which since 2025 has cut back on the tracking of both domestic extremism monitoring and tracking of foreign election interfence attempts — told the right-wing news outlet Daily Caller this week it’s “spearheading the effort to look for connections into the missing and deceased scientists.”

Burlison told NewsNation he wouldn’t be surprised “if our adversaries, China, Russia, Iran, or any other adversary saw an opportunity to take out some of our nation’s top scientists.”

The probes have been cheered by some true crime podcasters, but there are dissenters to Burlison’s line of thinking.

Daniel Engber, a writer known to debunk junk science studies, was scathing in the Atlantic, deeming it “another piece of flagrant nonsense [that] has ascended to the highest levels of U.S. politics and media.”

“To call it a conspiracy theory would be far too kind, because no comprehensive theory has been floated to explain the pattern of events,” he said.

Pattern ‘not real’

Mick West, author of 2018’s Escaping the Rabbit Hole: How to Debunk Conspiracy Theories Using Facts, Logic, and Respect, is also unimpressed by the supposed connections.

“The deaths are real. The families’ grief is real. The pattern is not,” he wrote on his Substack page.

West characterizes what is occuring as a “death list fallacy.” The most famous occurrence in modern times arguably stems from when a few authors in the 1960s compiled lists and cast a suspicious eye toward the deaths of many people closely or even tangentially connected to President John F. Kennedy, his assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, and Oswald’s killer, nightclub owner Jack Ruby.

West, using a sample size of what he estimated to be about 700,000 individuals with top secret clearance in the aerospace and nuclear agency work population, argues that ordinary mortality averages for such a population over a 22-month period would result in about 4,000 deaths, 70 homicides and 180 suicides.

James Walkinshaw of Virginia, one of few Democrats to comment on the list of names, suggested to CNN on Tuesday that the connections may be specious beyond statistical probabilities.

“The United States has thousands of nuclear scientists and nuclear experts,” Walkinshaw told CNN this week. “It’s not the kind of nuclear program that potentially a foreign adversary could significantly impact by targeting 10 individuals.”

The most recent disappearance is that of retired major-general Neil McCasland, 68 years old. McCasland, who once led the Air Force Research Laboratory at the Wright-Patterson base in Ohio, has not been seen since Feb. 27 in his hometown of Albuquerque, N.M., and his revolver is reportedly missing.

“He was on our list to talk to, and he disappeared, so that kind of piqued our interest,” Burlison recently told News Nation, presumably referring to the topic of unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UFOs, which has animated the committee for two years.

The local sheriff’s office responsible for investigating his disappearance has said publicly there hasn’t been evidence yet linking it to his classified work. Susan McCasland Wilkerson has alluded to unspecified health issues her husband has dealt with, and is also dubious.

“He retired from the [air force] almost 13 years ago and has had only very commonly held clearances since,” she said in a Facebook post. “It seems quite unlikely that he was taken to extract very dated secrets from him.”

McCasland Wilkerson also suggested her husband’s unpaid consulting work for an UFO research organization led by Blink-182 member Tom DeLonge was so inconsequential as to not merit idle speculation.

It’s not clear why adversaries would resort to homicide or forced disappearances in an era of increasing cyber capabilities. And other individual cases might also not stand up to scrutiny as having been the work of nefarious agents working for clandestine or political purposes.

As Engber points out, Melissa Casias, was a 53-year-old administrative assistant at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, not a scientist. Casias’s husband worked at the same lab in a more senior position — which could complicate any murder or abduction theory that connects her downfall to her work. Her daughter told NBC’s Dateline her mother was dealing with a “huge amount of stress” ahead of her 2025 disappearance.

The official cause of death is not known for Jason Thomas, a 48-year-old Novartis “pharmaceutical researcher” as described in the Comey-Burlison letter. Thomas’s body was found at a Massachusetts lake, and it is known that his parents had died in quick succession not long before his disappearance.

Monica Reza, who worked as the director of materials processing for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, was reportedly about 30 feet from a hiking companion on the Waterman Trail last year at Angeles National Forest when she was last seen. Accidental hiking deaths are not unheard of, including near that very trail, where a woman was ruled to have died from hypothermia four years earlier.

The “MIT scientist working on nuclear fusion” mentioned in the Comey-Burlison letter seemingly refers to Nuno Loureiro, gunned down in December. But his purported killer, Claudio Neves Valente, was an acquaintance dating back many years to their native Portugal, and Valente also committed a deadly mass shooting at Brown University before killing himself.

After Grillmair’s death, local residents told the Los Angeles Times of erratic behaviour exhibited by Snyder, perhaps not the behaviour of a stealth assassin. Grillmair reportedly called the police in late 2025 to report an incident of alleged trespassing by Snyder, perhaps offering a more prosaic motive for the deadly violence that followed weeks later.