Word: brillig
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...began in late September the intriguing mystery of an ex-spook's last voyage, aboard a sloop that he had fancifully but appropriately named Brillig, from the "Jabber, wocky" in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass. After the body was discovered, the CIA insisted that there was no mystery. Paisley was not a spy, said a CIA press spokesman. He was an intelligence analyst. Moreover, he had retired from the agency in 1974. The CIA had no quarrel with Maryland state police theories that Paisley had committed suicide. Six months before his death, he had left...
...facts about Paisley's fate are as elusive as anything conceived by Lewis Carroll. The questions start with the identity of the corpse found in Chesapeake Bay a week after the Brillig ran aground. The body was badly disfigured by immersion and was not viewed by any member of Paisley's family before it was cremated. To obtain fingerprints, the FBI had severed both hands from the body and peeled back layers of decomposing skin. These prints could not be compared with the ones that the CIA said it had sent to the FBI when Paisley was hired...
Whatever the truth, the Paisley case probably will remain one of those frustrating detective stories without a tidy ending. Unless, of course, John Arthur Paisley is still alive and some day reveals what really happened on the sloop Brillig 's final, fateful voyage...