American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders

In August 1991, an accomplished freelance writer named Danny Casolaro was found in a scene at the Sheraton Hotel in West Virginia that was so hideously bloody that one of the respondents reportedly fainted. With multiple slash wounds to his wrists, the medical examiner ruled Casolaro’s death a suicide, but those close to the journalist instantly suspected something was wrong with that story. It’s not just some of the questionable details of his death, including someone who may have been seen with Danny in his final days, but the fact that Casolaro was investigating something earth-shattering when he went to West Virginia, reportedly meeting a contact for a story he was working on that would have rocked the world. Did Casolaro anger the wrong people? Netflix digs into Danny Casolaro’s story with an effective four-part mini-series that is more than just a standard true crime series. It’s ultimately about various forms of obsession, betrayal, and arguable insanity. “American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders” sometimes feels like its spinning its own wheels, but that becomes an effective way to replicate what undeniably happened to Danny Casolaro, a man who got so caught up in potential conspiracies that he never found a way out of the rabbit hole, whether what got him there was true or not.