Episode 6: The Dark Matter of Llano – The Death of Carl Grillmair

In this episode, we investigate the brutal February 2026 murder of Carl Grillmair, a world-renowned Caltech astrophysicist and NASA veteran. Known as a "detective of the deep," Grillmair’s life was cut short on the front porch of his remote desert home in Llano, California—just eleven days before the disappearance of Major General Neil McCasland.

A Mind of Cosmic Scale

Working out of Caltech’s Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC), Grillmair was a pioneer in the study of dark matter and the discovery of stellar streams—ghostly trails of stars that reveal the violent history of our galaxy's formation. His work was so foundational that it was used in the very same aerospace tracking and missile defen ...