When coffers ran low, he always gravitated back to his writer’s retreat on Vuelta Herradura, whipped up a little Viagra, then went off again . . . all according to Todd.
Leonard flew to Boston for a week in July, then back to Kansas City and a meeting with Skinner at the Manhattan (KS) Holiday Inn. All four brethren in the swimming pool project—Skinner, Pickard, Halpern and Savinelli—convened in Telluride the following month for the annual Mushroom Festival.
Had Leonard ever filed an income tax return (he never did),3 the festival would have fallen under Schedule C as a business expense. Sponsored by the free-form Telluride Institute, the weekend event promised “all things mycological, from the newest advancements in mushroom science to our famous mushroom cookoff.” Skinner and Savinelli had been attending the annual event since its inception in 1984. During the festival, psychonauts owned the city. Leonard felt right at home. By Skinner’s reckoning, it was also a great place to swap psilocybe cubensis and pick up hippie chicks.
Psychonauts flooded the Netherlands that season as well. From Sept. 26 through Oct. 20, Pickard and Halpern flew to Amsterdam for an ethnobotany conference.
“They were spooks and academics at the same time, thinking they were smarter than everyone else,” said Savinelli.
Another obvious business expense, the conference was the perfect venue for drumming up support for Leonard’s Harvard drug policy dream. He and Halpern put up posters at the Amstel Hotel Maatschaapij, inviting inquiry and creating their own psychonaut database—a future resource for FEDS.
Still, interest was only lukewarm. On Oct. 16, Skinner wired them both enough money to get back home.
As Leonard’s bursar-in-chief, Todd purported to know his every move. Before the year wound to a close, Leonard was back in Santa Fe with the swimming pool project. While dropping in and out of his writer’s retreat, he’d let the place go. Even in the high desert where lush lawns and rose gardens simply didn’t exist, the exterior of 110 Vuelta Herradura had become unsightly. Walkways were shabby; shuttered windows, forbidding. Indoors, the place reeked. Nonetheless, David Haley convinced its absentee landlords to accept a lease extension for another year.
As 1998 ended, Leonard was off again. This time, he flew from San Francisco to Frankfurt, allegedly with a false-bottom attaché case his only luggage. He returned to San Francisco twenty-four hours later and spent New Year’s Eve at the Palace Hotel. When he checked out a week later, he settled his $10,640.09 bill with cash. Next stop: the Kansas City Ritz Carlton. He bivouacked with Skinner at his missile silo, then headed back to Santa Fe.
“Skinner played a dangerous game,” said Savinelli. “He’d intentionally overdose people with opiates, then play the life-saving doctor by giving them Narcan.”
On April 28, 1999, Todd was down in his silo, chatting up Leonard in a transcontinental phone call. From the corner of his eye, he noticed a forty-one-year-old computer engineer that he’d hired the day before. Paul Hulebak drove up from Tulsa for a couple days work on Skinner’s IT system.
“Skinner was on the phone to me at the time describing his latest drug episode,” recalled Pickard. “He stopped midsentence.”
Skinner watched Hulebak wobble then slump over his keyboard. What came next, Leonard assumed to be typical Todd histrionics.
“I’ve got a problem,” he told Pickard in a panicky voice. “Call you back.”
But he never did. After he hung up, Todd was preoccupied. Hulebak had gamely taken a couple of the drugs Skinner offered earlier. Now he lay face up, glassy-eyed and unresponsive on the silo floor. He slapped his face, yelled at him to get up, and checked his pupils with a flashlight.
Skinner later told Pottawatomie County Sheriff ’s detectives that Hulebak seized from an overdose of self-administered methadone and hydromorphone. How he’d acquired the cocktail was anyone’s guess. Todd said he immediately took Hulebak to the ER.
Todd did no such thing. He first tried shooting Hulebak up with Benadryl and his own homespun remedies he called “antigens.” When the engineer seemed to be breathing better, Todd ordered three of his employees—Hobbs, Guinan, and Kendall Graham—to help haul Hulebak to a hospital thirty miles away. He reasoned that suspicion surrounding drug use at his missile silo wouldn’t be a factor outside the city limits.
But Skinner changed his mind upon arrival. Hulebak was breathing so well, he did a U-turn and came back to Wamego. There, Skinner and his crew stood vigil, monitoring Hulebak’s recovery.
Only when he stopped breathing, nearly eight hours after the initial seizure, did Todd haul Hulebak to Wamego Hospital, a five-minute drive from the silo.
He was DOA.
“Todd Skinner is evil,” said Hulebak’s sister Kirstin Reynolds. “He considers himself very smart, but I can tell you from speaking with him numerous times that he’s used to dealing with stupid people.”
The Pottawatomie County Sheriff ’s detectives weren’t stupid, but they also knew they didn’t have enough to charge Todd. They turned Hulebak’s body over to the Shawnee County Coroner for autopsy.4 Skinner drove back to his missile silo, which he’d instructed employees to sanitize: no needles, opiates, psychedelics, etc.
Hulebak was not Todd’s first guinea pig. Over time, he became so sophisticated at estimating dosages, potency, and antidotes that he literally thought of himself as a physician bringing zombies back from the dead. His father practiced medicine after a fashion at his chiropractic clinic. Why shouldn’t Skinner follow in his footsteps? He even set up IV stations down in the silo for weekend recreational use.
As with Hulebak, Skinner similarly shot up John Halpern’s assistant. A young Boston College undergrad who’d apprenticed himself first to Halpern and then Pickard, Mike Bauer fell beneath the thrall of Leonard’s lysergic romance and became a junior member of the swimming pool project.
“Mike was John Halpern’s ‘stack rat,’” said Savinelli. “Pickard hired him to research volatile governments like Afghanistan in reference to their drug trade.”
Bauer
