“I found him a subject of interest for my research in novel drugs of abuse (e.g., Marquardt),” he said. “He was very familiar with variations of ayahuasca. Skinner attached himself with numerous members of the (psychonaut) community, and promoted himself as an heir with an interest in research.”
Alfred Savinelli remembers the Skinner/Pickard link in less dramatic terms. As the person most responsible for putting them together, he remains almost apologetic. John Halpern once praised Skinner as “the world’s greatest liar.” Savinelli agrees, but would hardly characterize that title as praise.
“The very worst kind of human being,” he said.
As with Halpern and Pickard, it was Rick Strassman’s DMT study that first brought Skinner knocking at Savinelli’s door. Skinner wanted some of that Spirit Molecule. He simply had to meet Strassman.
Alfred made the introduction. Strassman has never thanked him.
“Skinner showed up at my office at the University of New Mexico in ’92 or ’93,” said Strassman. “He talked about all the drugs he had made and all the drugs he had taken. It was not a conversation but more like me listening to a guy possessed. I didn’t get a good feeling. It was one of the few times my instincts were right.”
Gordon Todd Skinner was born to the manor, Oklahoma-style. He and his family moved to Tulsa in 1967, when he was three. His father, also named Gordon, operated a chiropractic clinic. His mother, Katherine, ran a successful industrial spring manufacturing firm.
An imperious woman with a head for business, Katherine divorced and remarried thrice before her son entered high school.1 In between weddings, she raised Todd. He came to understand that the father figures in his life were expendable.
Skinner attended private Cascia Hall Catholic Preparatory. He was eccentric, even as a freshman. He wore blazers and ties, fur coats, and switched over to full tux on free dress days. His second stepfather, Gary Magrini, chauffeured him to campus in a 1957 Bentley.
Skinner spent off hours at the Peace of Mind bookstore, the closest thing Tulsa had to the Brotherhood of Eternal Love’s Mystic Arts World. He haunted the shelves devoted to sorcery.
At Cascia Hall, Todd excelled at all the traditional geek pursuits: chess, martial arts, mathematics. One classmate remembers Belushi behavior in the cafeteria. He’d capsize lunch trays, then run off giggling.
He gravitated early to altered states. While peers made papier-mâché volcanoes, Skinner extracted tryptamines from tumble-weeds. One friend’s father, a NASA engineer who helped design the space shuttle, found Todd and his son synthesizing DMT in the basement. He warned the boys against messing in Pandora’s box. Todd ended that friendship.
Skinner saw himself as Promethean—stealing fire from the gods and dispensing it in the form of mind-blowing sacraments to convert the Great Unwashed, starting with his school chums.
“All of my high school friends just lined up to take anything that I had,” he recalled. “I was just a scientist saying, ‘Try this out.’ And unfortunately, they were all just guinea pigs in line. Some of them thought it was great, and some of them don’t talk to me to this day. . . .”
His Cascia Hall yearbook featured Todd in all-white karate jumpsuit. The caption read, “REMEMBER: His penmanship, the wing-tip collar, ‘How’s the Universe?’ and N2O (nitrous oxide).” Classmates recall Todd lugging tanks of laughing gas to school and offering free huffs in the boys’ room.
After graduation in 1982, Skinner’s parents sent him to Heidelberg for an expensive international education,2 but like Pickard, he flunked out first semester. He returned home angry, ashamed, but unapologetic. He worked half-heartedly but only occasionally at his mother’s Gardner Springs Company. He had zero interest in mechanics. He preferred staying up on the latest New Age chemistry through a loose knit “neuro-network” of like-minded psychonauts.
Like Leonard, Todd eschewed narcotics. Street drugs were for losers, though he didn’t mind selling them. Skinner was a capitalist, after all, and what the people demanded, he gladly supplied.
For himself, however, Skinner maintained higher standards. During one of several Mexican marijuana treks through Laredo, Texas, he’d also loaded 10,000 peyote buttons in gunnysacks and hid them in the trunk of his car. He told himself he was on a mission for the Native American Church, though none of its 250,000 members were aware of his magnanimity. He planned to extract the mescaline, which he regarded as a sacrament, then sell it to the Navajo, but felt dutybound to sample it first. The Doors of Perception opened.
“I was in a room that was small and all of a sudden it was like a set on the Ponderosa!” he recalled, his awe as fresh as a nosegay of Morning Glories.
As a newly-enlightened psychonaut, Skinner began attending any and all psychedelic conferences. Though Savinelli insisted he doesn’t remember, Skinner maintained they first met at the annual Telluride Mushroom Festival in 1984, when Todd was only nineteen.
The following year, Skinner attended Mycophile IV, another ‘shroom celebration staged in the San Juan Islands off the coast of Seattle. Mycophile drew many a heavy hitter from the hallucinogenic fringe: holistic health guru Dr. Andrew Weil, fungi expert and future TED talker Paul Stamets, PhD, and Albert Hofmann protégé Jonathan Ott,3 English translator of Hofmann’s German memoir, LSD, My Problem Child. Skinner felt right at home.
His stepfather’s profession commanded much of young Todd’s non-psychedelic attention. Gary Magrini was a career IRS agent recently assigned to the DEA—a glamour job in Skinner’s eyes. Magrini worked at the periphery of tracking cartels, contributing to national intelligence and conning con men. He also spent a lot of time keeping his stepson out of trouble.
When Las Vegas police arrested Skinner the summer after high school for trying to pass bad checks, Magrini sprung him and got the charges expunged. He also forgave the lad for making off with Magrini’s government-issue sidearm.
But he could not check his stepson’s appetite for drug trafficking or spinning truth into fiction.
One day in the spring of 1984, Skinner called the Tulsa FBI office with
