Since the beginnings of mankind, the world has harboured secret societies and conspiracy theorists have conspired to link the societies to unsolved mysteries to create plausible explanations.  So it is with the murder of the two French photographers at the Buzludzha Monument in Central Bulgaria.

Monument at Buzludzha, Central Bulgaria
Courtesy Kathmandu & Beyond

As promised in my earlier blog about these murders, I followed a lead that started with another blogger’s website, Abandoned Berlin, that led me to a book titled MEAT: Memoirs of a Psychopath written by Dr Cerys Davies and available as a free download on Smashwords.  But, be warned: the book is horrific and does not mention these particular murders but it led me to a much larger book (308,000 words), The Gabrielites: MEAT: Memoirs of a Psychopath, The Definitive Edition also written by Dr Cerys Davies that did mention the murders and that’s the subject of this follow-up blog.

It turns out that Dr Cerys Davies is a pseudonym for Jonathan Taylor, an English song-writer, folk singer and author. His first book, MEAT… introduces a transsexual psychopath named Gabriel 13 (Gabriel after the archangel; 13 because he becomes the thirteenth member of a secret sex-and-murder society) and charts his progress from novice boy killer to full-blown psychopathic murderer and of his eventual transition from male to female.  In The Gabrielites… book, Her Holiness Gabriela 13, as she is now called, establishes the Gabrielites secret society, a death cult modelled on the mind control techniques of the 18^th century Illuminati secret society, and reveals how the Buzludzha Monument became the headquarters of the society.  The members secreted themselves in lower-level research laboratories located in six additional sub-floors below the main chamber and, these days, accessible only via a secret tunnel whose entrance is located in a nearby wood.  The laboratories were where the Gabrielites conducted secret experiments on a radioactive powder called Orange Dust which, when ingested or inhaled causes psychosis that eventually kills the recipient.  And it’s here, in a section titled The Holy Order of the House, we discover the true story of what happened to the two Frenchmen.

This section of the book records the minutes of a 6^th October 2012 meeting of the Gabrielites, held in Buzludzha and relates how the meeting was ‘rudely disturbed and the start time (08:00) delayed by approximately 50 minutes’.  Later, one of the attendees at the meeting (The Witness) tells how two young men with cameras and French accents had been in the building overnight and were caught, severely beaten and taken away to somewhere in the depths of the building.  Later, their bodies were found, throats cut, in a burnt out car a short distance from the Buzludzha building and they were subsequently identified by the Bulgarian Police as two French photographers, Achille Pinet and Marrok Brideau, from Paris.

Memorial to Achille Pinet and Marrok Brideau, Buzludzha Monument
Snagged from Abandoned Berlin, November 2013 blog

Of interest is the murder date on the cross: 5^th October, 2012; one day before the meeting date.  On this day, the photographers had mentioned that they planned to stay overnight at the monument to take star trails – photographing the night sky at regular intervals to capture the movement of the stars.  They were discovered by the Gabrielites early on the morning of the 6^th (the disturbance shortly before 08:00).  It is also reported that they were staying in a hotel in Kazanlak, a town around 30 Km south of Buzludzha and that the hoteliers in the town had subsequently asked the Bulgarian Police not to talk about the murders in order to safeguard their income from those using the hotels as a base to visit the monument.

Dr Cerys Davies, aka Jonathan Taylor, author of The Gabrielites…, at the shrine, circa 2105
Image snagged from the book.
Note: the location of the memorial is different from the 2013 location above.  Who moved it, and why?

Later in the book, Gabriela 13 addressing someone called Brian admits to the construction of the shrine: ‘I made the cross. I laid the flowers and replaced them as necessary, and I left the Bible (New Testament, pocket sized, red plastic cover), the candle and the remembrance book.  Yes Brian, I, Gabriela 13 built that shrine to the two dead French men.  Why?  I guess it was fun at the time, mocking them, the dead, from below.’

So, there you have it.  The two Frenchmen were murdered by the Gabrielites and Gabriela 13 herself, the leader of the death cult, built the shrine as a mockery to their memory.  I did wonder about the names however.  Achille is a French name for a boy but Marrok is a very unusual name originating from Arthurian legends.  I played with the names using an anagram solver and came up with Patience Hill or Anthill Piece (Achille Pinet) and Buried Ark Roam or Abroad Murkier (Marrok Brideau), none of which makes any sense.  I also searched far and deep into the Web looking for a newspaper article or similar about the murders and found nothing.   So I am led to the only conclusion possible: the two Frenchmen were indeed murdered by the Gabrielites in the depths of the Buzludzha monument and that the local hoteliers have conspired with the Bulgarian Police to suppress the story in case it impacts revenue from tourists.

There’s no other explanation, is there?

(^_^)