The General's Secrets

Michael K. Blankenship was 49 years old in January 2000, a mortician who lived in a townhouse in St. Mary's County, Maryland, and who was known around Leonardtown as a brigadier general in the US Army Reserve. Almost none of that was true. He had been born and raised in Rock, West Virginia, the son of a company-store manager for a mining camp and a high-school teacher, one of three boys remembered locally as polite and well brought up. He served in the army from 1970 to 1973, not in Vietnam and not in combat: his military job was baking bread. He qualified as a mortician at the Cincinnati College of Mortuary Science in 1979. the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it In 1989 he moved to Maryland and took a job at the Hunt Funeral Home in Waldorf, and in 1993 he bought a townhouse in St. Mary's County for $100,000 while working as a mortician at the Brinsfield Funeral Home.

What he built around that ordinary life was elaborate. He wore a neatly pressed dark green army uniform, held membership of the Patuxent River Naval Air Station officers' club at Cedar Point, told friends he had studied with Hillary Clinton and advised the White House speech-writing office on military affairs, marched in veterans' parades and spoke at the St. Mary's Veterans Day parade about men he had commanded. By late 1999 he was calling himself a brigadier general and saying he oversaw funerals at Arlington National Cemetery. A state representative who knew him never found the Clinton claims credible. this part of the story is covered for now The will was forged.

On the night of 23 January 2000 his neighbours noticed that the flag he raised and lowered every day was still flying. It stayed up through the 24th and through the worst snowstorm of the year on the 25th. When he failed to appear for work, his employer called the police. Sheriff's Lieutenant John Horn found the house locked with no sign of forced entry, the interior in disarray, and Blankenship dead in the bathroom with ligature marks on his neck, his clothes neat and no defensive wounds. A new handgun sat untouched on top of a dresser, and a note in large block letters had been taped to his computer monitor.

The police called the White House and the army. Nobody at the White House had heard of him, and the army said he had never been a general. details of the account remain covered until revealed the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it this part of the story is covered for now He had flown in under an alias, strangled Blankenship with a rope within about fifteen minutes of arriving, ransacked the house to make it look like a robbery, left the gun, drove Blankenship's car to the airport with the engine running and flew home.

Prosecutors called it one of the most troubling cases they had handled, because the victim had lied to the defendant and because there was evidence he had pursued local juveniles. details of the account remain covered until revealed the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it Blankenship's friends and family mourned a man they had liked while struggling with the fabrications; a former town commissioner said it was time to put the whole thing to rest.