The murder of a scientist born in Calgary is tied to the mysterious death of the US, the disappearance despite the immediate arrest

The shooting death of the Calgary-born astronomer in mid-February outside his Southern California home sent shockwaves through his academic and professional circles.

Carl Grillmair had an undergraduate degree from the University of Calgary before obtaining a master's degree from the University of Victoria, and eventually received his PhD outside of Canada. In the 1990s, he joined the California Institute of Technology's Infrared Processing and Analysis Center, collaborating with NASA on many research projects.

Grillmair, 67 at the time of his death, earned honors during his time at CalTech. In 2011 he was awarded NASA's Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal after studying deep space on numerous NASA television programs.

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

Two days after Grillmair was killed on February 16, the 29-year-old who lived two miles from Llano, Calif., was charged with murder. Freddy Snyder is scheduled to be arraigned next week.

Although all the defendants should be presumed innocent, and a Los Angeles County Sheriff's spokesman admitted that it does not appear that the victim and the killer knew each other personally, the police seem satisfied that they have their man.

Still, Grillmair's name has surfaced for weeks as part of a series of deaths and disappearances of scientists working for the US government or close to academia that have been seen as suspicious by Internet experts.

This week, officials in Donald Trump's administration and his Republican Party confirmed they would investigate.

'She doesn't pass the smell test'

James Comer and Eric Burlison of the House oversight committee said the panel will investigate the disappearances and deaths of at least 10 people from 2023 connected to US nuclear secrets or rocket technology, and that those cases “would represent a serious threat to US national security and to US personnel with access to scientific secrets.”

Adding confusion to the matter, Comer of Kentucky tweeted a few hours later that the deaths of “11 of America's leading scientists” in those areas “are dangerous and do not pass the least scrutiny.”

Meanwhile, the FBI — which as of 2025 has withdrawn from tracking both domestic extremists and tracking foreign election meddling efforts — told the right-wing newspaper The Daily Caller this week that it is “conducting an effort to trace communications with missing and deceased scientists.”

Burlison told NewsNation that he would not be surprised “if our adversaries, China, Russia, Iran, or any other adversary sees an opportunity to take away our nation's top scientists.”

The probes have been enjoyed by some true crime podcasters, but there are those who disagree with Burlison's line of thinking.

Daniel Engber, a well-known junk science writer, was furious at The Atlantic, calling it “another piece of brilliant nonsense. [that] has risen to the highest levels of US politics and media.”

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

The pattern is 'not real'

Mick West, 2018 author Escaping the Rabbit Hole: How to Defeat Conspiracy Theories Using Facts, Intelligence, and Respectand is not happy with the links that are said to be linked.

“Death is real. The grief of families is real. The pattern is not,” he wrote on his Substack page.

West describes what's happening as a “wrong death row.” The most famous event in modern times undoubtedly dates back to when several writers in the 1960s compiled lists and cast a suspicious eye on the deaths of many people near or in connection with President John F. Kennedy, his assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, and Oswald's assassin, nightclub owner Jack Ruby.

West, using a sample size of what he estimates to be about 700,000 people with secret clearances at the aerospace and nuclear agencies, says that the average number of deaths for such people over a 22-month period would result in about 4,000 died, 70 were killed and 180 committed suicide.

James Walkinshaw of Virginia, one of the few Democrats to comment on the list, suggested on CNN on Tuesday that the connection may be more special than statistical.

“The United States has thousands of nuclear scientists and nuclear technicians,” Walkinshaw told CNN this week. “It's not the kind of nuclear program that a foreign adversary could potentially have a significant impact on by targeting 10 people.”

The recent disappearance of retired Major-General Neil McCasland, aged 68. McCasland, who once led the Air Force Research Laboratory at the Wright-Patterson Center in Ohio, has not been seen since Feb. 27 in his hometown of Albuquerque, NM, and his revolver is reported missing.

“He was on our list to talk to, and then he disappeared, so that piqued our interest,” Burlison recently told News Nation, possibly referring to the topic of UFOs, which he has served on the committee for two years.

The local sheriff's office investigating his disappearance said there was no evidence linking this to his work. Susan McCasland Wilkerson referred to unspecified health problems her husband faced, and it is doubtful.

“He retired [air force] about 13 years ago and has had frequent permits since then,” he said in a Facebook post.

McCasland Wilkerson also suggested that her husband's unpaid consulting work for the UFO research organization headed by Blink-182 member Tom DeLonge was so useless that it was not worthy of idle speculation.

It remains unclear why adversaries would resort to killing or forced disappearances in an age of increasing cyber capabilities. And some cases cannot be considered the work of malicious agents working for secret or political purposes.

As Engber points out, Melissa Casias, was a 53-year-old administrative assistant at Los Alamos National Laboratory, not a scientist. Casias' husband worked at the same lab in a senior position – which would complicate any assassination or kidnapping theory linking his downfall to his job. His daughter told NBC The date line his mother was under “great stress” before his disappearance in 2025.

The official cause of death is unknown for Jason Thomas, a 48-year-old Novartis “medical researcher” as described in the Comey-Burlison letter. Thomas' body was found in a lake in Massachusetts, and it is known that his parents died in quick succession before his disappearance.

Monica Reza, who worked as director of materials analysis at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, was reportedly about 30 meters away from her companion on the Waterman Trail last year in the Angeles National Forest when she was last seen. Accidental hiker deaths are not uncommon, including along that trail, where a woman was determined to have died of hypothermia four years earlier.

The “MIT nuclear fusion scientist” mentioned in the Comey-Burlison letter appears to be referring to Nuno Loureiro, who was shot in December. But her alleged killer, Claudio Neves Valente, was an acquaintance of hers since she was born in Portugal many years ago, and Valente also committed a mass shooting at Brown University before killing himself.

After Grillmair's death, local residents told the Los Angeles Times about Snyder's mysterious behavior, perhaps not the behavior of a serial killer. Grillmair reportedly called the police in late 2025 to report Snyder's alleged burglary, perhaps providing a major impetus for the violence that followed a few weeks later.