The_Info_Web/10 - PEOPLE/(T-Z)/Bill Turner.md

category	tags	summary	updated
Authors & Journalists	Person Journalist	Turner later admitted to police that he met with Casolaro but initially refused to specify the time or describe the contents of the papers.	2026-10-15

Bill Turner was a friend and confidante of investigative journalist Danny Casolaro. He met with Casolaro in the parking lot of the Sheraton Hotel in Martinsburg, Virginia, on August 9, 1991, the day before Casolaro's death, to deliver some papers. These papers allegedly included two sealed packages that Turner had been keeping in his safe for Casolaro, and a packet of Hughes Aircraft papers belonging to Turner, who had been let go from Hughes for whistleblowing.¹

Turner later admitted to police that he met with Casolaro but initially refused to specify the time or describe the contents of the papers. He claimed not to know what was in the sealed documents, which had Casolaro's name written across the seal. It was suggested that Turner might have known who Casolaro was preparing to meet that evening and wanted Casolaro to show the Hughes Aircraft documents to that individual.¹

Turner stated he was "scared shitless" about information he had seen connecting Oliver North and the Bank of Credit and Commerce International. He claimed to have seen papers from Casolaro that linked back through the Keating Five and Silverado, a failed Denver Savings and Loan where Neil Bush had been an officer.¹

Bill Hamilton, president of INSLAW, later stated that he had received an affidavit from Bill Turner on "highly classified computer printouts on off-shore accounts that he claimed Casolaro intended to use the night he died in a planned meeting with Peter Videnieks and Joseph Cuellar and others."¹

A Justice Department copy of the Casolaro review records that Turner told the Hamiltons, who relayed the account to the reviewers, that Casolaro planned to meet in Martinsburg with Peter Videnieks, Joseph Cuellar, an unidentified person from Senator Robert Byrd's office, an unidentified IRS employee and the attorney Robert Altman. The review states of this claim and of a report by a caller to the Unsolved Mysteries hotline that Clark Clifford and Altman were seen driving in Martinsburg on the day of the death in a late-model Chevrolet Caprice: "We have no reason to believe either of these claims."² INSLAW's February 14, 1994 addendum to its rebuttal of the Bua report states that Casolaro told Turner that the Friday evening meeting in Martinsburg had been arranged by Cuellar, whom it described, according to Turner, as a U.S. Army Special Forces covert intelligence officer.³

Footnotes

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1. Seymour, Cheri. The Last Circle: Danny Casolaro’s Investigation into the Octopus and the PROMIS Software Scandal. First Edition. TrineDay, 2010. ↩︎

2. U.S. Department of Justice, Casolaro review passage on William Turner's account and the hotline report, DOCID 70098622, release p. 108. https://archive.org/details/DOJReportOnDanielJCasolaro ↩︎

3. Richardson, Elliot L., et al. Addendum to INSLAW's Analysis and Rebuttal of the Bua Report, February 14, 1994, p. 24. https://archive.org/details/AddendumToInslawsAnalysisAndRebuttalOfTheBuaReport ↩︎