Was Boeing Whistleblower's Death a Murder Staged As Suicide?

Circumstances and pistol found in victim's right hand are extremely suspicious.

The purportedly self-inflicted gunshot death of Boeing whistleblower John Barnett on March 9, 2024 is extremely suspicious. Just reviewing a report from a local, Charleston S.C. news station, I noted the following:

Barnett’s attorneys, Law Office of Robert M. Turkewitz, LLC and Brian Knowles of Knowles Law Firm, PC, released the following statement Tuesday afternoon:

John was a brave, honest man of the highest integrity. He cared dearly about his family, his friends, the Boeing company, his Boeing co-workers, and the pilots and people who flew on Boeing aircraft. We have rarely met someone with a more sincere and forthright character.

In the course of his job as a quality manager at Boeing South Carolina, John learned of and exposed very serious safety problems with the Boeing 787 Dreamliner and was retaliated against and subjected to a hostile work environment, which is the subject of his pending AIR-21 case.

John was in the midst of a deposition in his whistleblower retaliation case, which finally was nearing the end. He was in very good spirits and really looking forward to putting this phase of his life behind him and moving on. We didn’t see any indication he would take his own life. No one can believe it.

We are all devastated. We need more information about what happened to John. The Charleston police need to investigate this fully and accurately and tell the public what they find out. No detail can be left unturned.

Police confirmed Barnett was found in his orange 2015 Dodge Ram truck dead from a gunshot wound to the head Saturday morning. Police were sent to the Holiday Inn on Savannah Highway shortly before 10:20 a.m. to perform a welfare check, Sgt. Anthony Gibson said. An incident report states a friend named Rob, who has been confirmed as Rob Turkewitz one of Barnett’s attorneys, called the hotel to request that they check on Barnett.

Hotel employees knocked on the door to his hotel room but after they did not get an answer, they checked the parking lot for the vehicle the friend described and made the discovery, the report states.

Barnett’s truck was in the hotel’s back parking lot, an incident report states. An orange truck was located Tuesday at an impound lot in North Charleston. The woman working the counter said the truck had Louisiana plates and was the subject of a police hold.

Charleston County Coroner Bobbi Jo O’Neal said Barnett died Saturday “from what appears to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound.” Police said Barnett had a silver handgun in his right hand with his finger still on the trigger and had suffered an apparent gunshot wound to his right temple.

The last sentence above, which I highlighted in bold, raises the suspicion that John Barnett was murdered, and his murder was staged to appear to be a suicide. If a contact gunshot wound was found in this case, law enforcement should NOT assume it is necessarily evidence of suicide. A skilled assassin may succeed in getting muzzle contact when he fires the shot.

Had Barnett fired the shot into his right temple, it is unlikely the pistol would be found in his right hand. The combination of recoil, gravity, and his right hand going limp when the shot fired into his brain would have likely resulted in the pistol separating from his hand. That his finger was still on the trigger is highly suggestive of staging.

John Barnett: One of his friends has stated that he told her, “I ain’t scared, but if anything happens to me, it’s not suicide.”

I happen to be familiar with the literature on murders staged as suicides. Vernon J. Geberth—a retired Lieutenant-Commander of the New York City Police Department—has published extensively on this phenomenon. His paper Equivocal Death and Staged Crime Scene presents some basic elements of this type of crime.

I recently published a book about a series of gunshot deaths that happened in Dallas in the seventies and eighties. In two of the cases I investigated, the Dallas County Medical Examiner ruled the deaths suicides. However, as I show in my book, the evidence displayed in crime scene photos and the totality of circumstances reveal that the Medical Examiner made these rulings in error. In fact, both victims were murdered and their murders were staged to look like suicides.

I recently produced a documentary film in which I present the evidence that led me to draw this conclusion. Like Boeing whistleblower John Barnett, the second victim—a forty-year-old woman named Betsy Bagwell—was found shot to death in her car with the revolver in her right hand. Betsy Bagwell’s death—presented at 33:27 in my documentary—is an illustrative example of how a murder may be committed in the victim’s car and staged to look like a suicide.

I hope that John Barnett’s family and attorneys have obtained copies of the police crime scene photos and all other documentation of Mr. Barnett’s death and are having these analyzed by independent forensic experts.