CONSPIRACY: Philip Taylor Kramer

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Philip Taylor Kramer is someone who never accepted the impossible.

He was a successful aerospace engineer, tech entrepreneur, theoretical physicist, and rock star all before he turned 40.

It seemed like anything he wanted to do, he could accomplish.

But there's one goal of his that was truly impossible, not just difficult, I mean, literally against the laws of physics.

A mathematical problem he'd spent his entire life trying to solve.

If he figured it out, the implications would be mind-boggling.

It's the kind of discovery powerful people would kill for or kill to keep quiet.

Because right after Taylor had a major breakthrough, he disappeared without a trace.

This is Supernatural.

I'm your host, Ashley Flowers.

This week, I'm exploring the life of Philip Taylor Kramer.

He was a brilliant mathematician, engineer, and musician who spent his last days obsessed with some secret project that he refused to discuss with anyone.

Whatever he was working on, many of his fans believe it was incendiary enough to get him kidnapped or assassinated.

I have all that and more coming up.

Stay with us.

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Philip Taylor Kramer was one of those people who seemed destined to change the world his resume is a laundry list of accomplishments most people only dream of Starting from basically the moment he's born, he's this incredible Renaissance kid, a math and science whiz who's also got a head for music.

At 12, he wins a school science fair by building a working laser.

That same year, he teaches himself guitar, then goes on to start a rock band in his garage.

He's good, too.

At 22, Taylor becomes the basis for the psychedelic rock band Iron Butterfly.

Taylor spends a few years touring with the band, and after they break up, he's scooped up by the U.S.

military for a top-secret nuclear missile project.

He literally goes from being a rock star to a rocket scientist.

And when that project wraps, he launches his own computer company and revolutionizes the tech industry with a groundbreaking data compression program.

Any one of those accomplishments would have been enough to put Taylor's name on the map, and he's barely hit 40.

He still has plenty of time to change the world with whatever his next project is.

See, around 1994, Taylor is working on a new project for his company, Total Multimedia.

That's all his friends and family know.

Taylor is incredibly secretive about this top secret project.

Not even his wife or colleagues know what it is.

But based on the few hints he drops, it sounds like it's going to be big.

And just knowing the kind of work Taylor has done in the past, they have to assume it's no joke.

So everyone gives him his privacy, knowing he'll unveil what he's working on when the time is right.

Only that day never comes.

On February 12th, 1995, Taylor climbs into his green Aerostar minivan outside his Los Angeles home.

He's supposed to pick up a co-worker from LAX following a business trip.

It seems like an ordinary errand on an ordinary day.

Taylor shows up to the airport super early, like around 45 minutes before his friend lands.

And that alone isn't too weird.

Maybe he just misjudged traffic or something.

But what is odd is he sits in the parking lot, waiting for maybe like 30 minutes.

And then just a few minutes before his coworker's flight actually lands, Taylor leaves alone.

It's not clear why Taylor ditches his coworker, especially after waiting so long, but he's been acting weird all day.

Right before he went to the airport, Taylor visited his father-in-law, who I'm going to call Carl.

Carl has a terminal illness, and I don't think he's expecting Taylor to stop by.

Taylor seems weirdly excited when he shows up.

He says he's figured out something big, and then gives Carl a plastic kaleidoscope of all things.

Meanwhile, he's making these cryptic comments about how the toy is related to this major discovery he's had.

Carl assumes this is related to the top secret project Taylor's been working on, but he doesn't get the chance to ask any questions like why Taylor would come to him with this, because Taylor just leaves the kaleidoscope and then immediately takes off again without explaining any further.

And after he leaves the airport about an hour later, Taylor's behavior only gets stranger.

When he's back on the road, he places 17 different calls from his cell phone.

He contacts his wife, an old friend, his lawyer, a business partner, pretty much everyone he knows.

At first, he sounds really excited.

According to the LA Times, he tells his wife Jennifer he has the biggest surprise for her.

But at a certain point, Taylor's tone changes.

It starts to sound like he thinks something bad is going to happen, like he's not going to see Jennifer again.

He says, I'm not going to see you on this side.

Jennifer is not exactly sure what he means by that.

And while it's obviously a little alarming, it's not completely out of left field for Taylor.

For a while now, he's been acting increasingly paranoid, dropping comments that leave his family and friends feeling really concerned, like how he's worried about some unspecified group of people coming to get him.

When Jennifer presses him on what he's talking about, he won't answer, but he does say that he wants to move into a house with more security.

Coming from anyone else, this kind of talk would have been a big red flag that he was suffering from paranoia or some kind of psychological break.

But the thing is, Taylor has worked on a top-secret nuclear weapons project.

His company is doing groundbreaking things in the tech industry.

So he actually does have valuable secrets that plenty of people might want to get their hands on.

In light of all that, Jennifer can't help but wonder if Taylor really has stumbled onto something big, something incendiary enough to put a target on his back.

After Taylor gets off the phone with Jennifer, he continues making calls to friends.

When he talks to his old bandmate, Ron Bushy, it almost seems like he's saying goodbye, especially when he says, I love you more than life itself.

The last confirmed call he makes is to 911.

This is a short call and a baffling one.

Taylor's all over the place, jumping from topic to topic.

At the end of the call, he tells the operator that he's planning to kill himself.

Before the operator can get anything else out of him, Taylor hangs up.

And that's the last anyone hears of him.

Taylor doesn't show up at home or at work.

As the days pass, the police search all over Los Angeles, but there's no sign of him or his van anywhere.

Now, given what he said on that 911 call, it's natural to assume the worst.

But if it's a suicide, there should be a body, right?

But days become weeks and neither Taylor's body nor his van turn up.

Even with Taylor's ominous last words to police, his family can't stop thinking about his warnings that he might be in danger.

Maybe he wasn't having a mental break.

Maybe he was right.

Jennifer isn't the only person Taylor mentioned his fears to either.

His dad, Ray, remembers an ominous comment Taylor once made that if he ever got into real trouble, he'd make a false suicide threat.

That statement feels chillingly prescient.

Like, if Taylor knew something was about to happen to him, maybe he made a suicide threat to the police as sort of a warning sign to his family that something wasn't right.

Or if he was actually kidnapped or something, maybe he was forced to make the call under duress.

Either way, it is a big red flag, and Taylor's family aren't the only ones who are suspicious of foul play.

The FBI gets involved, and one of the main theories they look into is, well, it's kind of bonkers.

The theory is that international spies or terrorists helicoptered into Los Angeles and snatched Taylor right off the highway.

And, okay, that sounds pretty far-fetched, but considering Taylor's past work with nuclear weapons, which could be very dangerous if it fell into the wrong hands, it's not that ridiculous.

Whatever secret project he was working on for total multimedia could have been just as sensitive.

The FBI doesn't say who they're looking at as suspects, but any number of groups might have wanted to get their hands on Taylor's secrets.

It could be a terrorist group or a foreign government like North Korea or Russia.

But ultimately, the FBI isn't able to find much.

Since the 911 call, Taylor hasn't used his credit card or shown up on any security footage across the city.

His family even plasters Los Angeles with missing person posters, but nobody calls in.

And And Taylor isn't exactly easy to miss.

Dude is like six foot five and weighs 220 pounds.

With absolutely nothing to go on, the FBI concludes that there's no evidence to support or rule out a kidnapping, which essentially leaves the investigation back at square one.

It's like Taylor dropped off the face of the earth until February 28th, about two and a half weeks after his disappearance.

That day, Taylor's wife Jennifer misses a call on their home phone.

When she checks the answering machine, there's a message with Taylor's voice.

He says, hello, hello?

Then silence.

That's it.

The recording ends.

Jennifer is absolutely positive that the voice is Taylor's and she should know he's her husband after all.

If that's true, it means Taylor is alive.

But where is he?

And how did he disappear so completely when even the FBI is looking for him?

The stranger the situation gets, the more Taylor's friends and family are convinced that whatever happened, it has to be connected to his secret research project.

And that is a dangerous can of worms to open because based on the clues he left about his work, It's not just the type of thing that could get you kidnapped.

It's the kind of discovery that could change

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Now, back to the story.

When Taylor goes missing on February 12th, 1995, a lot of his friends and family speculate that his disappearance has something to do with his job.

He seems to be working on some top-secret project that's going to change the tech industry and maybe more than just the tech industry.

Taylor hasn't told anyone what he's working on, not not exactly, but there are hints.

Based on his comments, the closest anyone can piece together is that it's some kind of data transfer technology that could let two users on opposite sides of the planet exchange files instantaneously, not just quickly, I mean literally at the same instant, which is supposed to be impossible.

According to the theory of relativity, nothing can move faster than the speed of light.

It sounds abstract, but it's a principle that affects everything in the physical universe.

It's also a problem Taylor spent his entire life trying to solve.

When Taylor was growing up in the 1950s and 60s, his dad, Ray, was a professor of engineering at Youngstown State.

He's big into theoretical mathematics and he thinks he can use it to solve some of the biggest questions out there, like how to move something faster than the speed of light.

Ray spends a big chunk of his professional career searching for a way to cross the light speed barrier without breaking the laws of physics.

He calls this theoretical formula the equation.

Ray regularly takes his work home with him and talks it over with Taylor.

And Taylor's like 12, but he is such a math prodigy, he's able to follow along.

At one point, he asks Ray, hey dad, why are you always working on this one equation?

And Ray basically tells him, there is only one equation.

Everything comes down to this one equation.

Based on what Taylor's colleagues and family members gathered about his secret project, it seems that he took his dad's comment to heart.

He seems to have kept working on that problem for all those years, searching for the equation.

And there's one major clue that Taylor's project involved the speed of light.

Remember the kaleidoscope he left with Carl the day he disappeared?

You know how kaleidoscopes reflect little geometric shapes, sort of like a multicolored snowflake?

Well, in mathematics, repeating patterns like this are sometimes known as fractals.

And this is simplifying things to a ridiculous degree, but a lot of the theories about breaking the light speed barrier involve the way light is made up of fractals.

So let's connect the dots here.

Taylor indicated that the kaleidoscope was somehow related to a huge discovery he made, and his friends and family members already believed he was working on breaking the light speed barrier.

So did he solve it?

Did Taylor finally find the equation?

If he did, it's hard to explain just how massive the implications would be.

Faster than light travel would make it possible to cross galaxies in the blink of an eye, or possibly even to travel through time.

That's right, time travel is one of those things that we think of as impossible, but that's mostly because of the light speed barrier.

Lots of scientists theorize that if an object could move faster than light, it would actually end up traveling backwards in time.

If Taylor figured out how to make that happen, no wonder people would be after him.

Suddenly, the search for Taylor has become the search for one of science's biggest secrets.

And that search still isn't going well.

By late February, Taylor has been gone for a couple of weeks, and the police finally get their first break in the case.

A few eyewitnesses come forward with potential sightings.

Right around the time Taylor left that answering machine message for Jennifer, a man matching his description walked into a pawn shop in Los Angeles.

Yeah, the same city the police have been searching high and low for weeks.

The store's owner, this guy Daniel, actually chats with the man for a while about computers.

It isn't until later, when Daniel sees one of the missing person posters that he realizes the guy has got to be Taylor.

He's 100% confident.

The customer looked just like him, and he seemed pretty knowledgeable about technology.

So Daniel reports the sighting to authorities, but of course, by the time they get there, the trail has gone cold.

There are other similar tips, like a woman who says that a man matching Taylor's description showed up at a yard sale.

He was looking to buy some new clothes, but nothing fit him.

He was long gone before the police arrived.

But even though they haven't found Taylor, the police are encouraged by these tips.

So so they keep blasting the story far and wide in the hopes that someone has more useful information.

Taylor gets profiled on America's Most Wanted and Unsolved Mysteries, after which 400 people call in to say they've seen Taylor.

But each lead the police follow takes them to another dead end.

Most of these witnesses are strangers who have never met Taylor before, so I suppose some of these sightings could be lookalikes.

Except, there aren't a ton of guys who fit Taylor's physical description, so it's hard to believe that all of these are mistakes.

At this point, Taylor's family takes things into their own hands.

They hire a private detective and a psychic, hoping one of them will be able to find something the police haven't, but they both come up empty-handed.

About a month or two after Taylor's disappearance, the trail has gone totally cold, and it stays that way for four long years.

But on May 29th, 1999, officials finally find Taylor in a condition that raises even more questions about what happened to him.

Coming up, Taylor comes home.

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Now back to the story.

It's a beautiful Saturday afternoon in May 1999, and a pair of hikers are exploring the Santa Monica Mountains just outside of Los Angeles.

Walter Lockwood and his companion, who I'll call Paco, are walking through canyons well below this winding street called Decker Canyon Road.

This isn't exactly a picturesque hike.

The woods are littered with garbage and all these abandoned cars.

At one point, Walter spots a green van that's pretty smashed up.

Like, it doesn't just look abandoned, it looks wrecked.

The windshield is completely shattered.

And it's directly under Decker Canyon Road.

The only way it could have ended up here in this state is if it plummeted the 450 feet from the street.

The van is wedged in between rocks or trees.

So when Walter tries to get a closer look, he has to scramble through this tight space and basically press himself right up against the van.

And when he looks in the window, he sees something long and thin in the driver's seat.

It's a human leg bone.

When he peers closer, he realizes it's a badly deteriorated, headless corpse.

Walter freaks out.

He and Paco scramble away, but while they're running, Walter puts his foot down right on a human skull.

Somehow, the corpse's skull ended up on the ground outside the van.

This spooks Walter even more.

They rush across the creek and then they finally calm down enough to call 911.

Within a matter of hours, investigators identify the van as Taylor's and they find his ID in the corpse's wallet.

They send the skull to their forensics lab and successfully match it with Taylor's dental records.

So, Philip Taylor Kramer is officially dead.

The police tell the press that they can't say anything for sure, but they think it's likely that Taylor took his own life.

But obviously, there are details here that just don't line up.

Like the condition of Taylor's body.

The coroner's office tells the press that Blunt Force trauma played a role in his demise, which is consistent with his car plummeting 450 feet into the canyon.

But they also admit that there might have been other factors in his cause of death that they can't identify.

Not to mention the fact that his head was somehow detached from his body and thrown out of the van.

Plus, the coroner's office tells the LA Times that they have no way of knowing how the van crashed.

So nobody can say for sure if Taylor drove off the road on purpose or if he accidentally lost control of the car or if someone intentionally ran him over the cliff.

They can't even say with any certainty when he crashed.

Remember, hundreds of people claim to have spotted Taylor since his disappearance, including including his wife Jennifer, who heard his voice on the phone two and a half weeks later.

Now it's possible Taylor didn't die the same day he vanished.

Maybe he hid out somewhere for a few weeks before the crash happened, but it's hard to say how he managed to avoid the police, his family, and the FBI in the meantime, especially without using his credit card or parking his big green van anywhere it could be seen.

He might have been abducted and held hostage for a while before his kidnappers dumped dumped his body in the canyon, which makes sense if you discount all the witnesses who saw Taylor walking around of his own free will during those weeks.

But there's another theory that's just as possible.

What if Taylor wasn't kidnapped or murdered or even actually dead at all?

What if he faked his own death to evade whoever was after him?

Now, You might be thinking, okay, but the police found a body that matches Taylor's dental records.

But remember, the hikers who discovered Taylor's car stepped on the skull.

From the reports, it sounds like the skull was damaged, but I'm not sure to what extent.

If the jaw wasn't completely intact, that might make it harder to match the dental records with any certainty.

Of course, there are still questions to be answered, like, if it wasn't Taylor, whose body was it?

How could Taylor possibly stage this crash all by himself?

And where did he go afterwards?

But I guess we're talking about a guy who's a verified genius.

If we're supposed to believe he could break the light speed barrier, I'm sure he could figure out how to fake his death and disappear.

As wild as it sounds, some Iron Butterfly fans think that Taylor planned to fake his death long before his disappearance, and he left clues in the band's biggest hit, Inagata De Vita.

A quick listen to the track makes it clear why they would latch onto this song.

It's a trippy, 17-minute minute groove full of nonsense lyrics that you can read pretty much anything into.

But it's hard to take this theory seriously.

Not just because hiding messages in song lyrics seems like a stretch, but because Taylor didn't even write them.

He didn't even join Iron Butterfly until 1974, and Inagata Divida was released six years earlier in 1968.

So he definitely didn't plant hidden messages in that song unless he traveled back in time and wrote it before he joined the band.

Now, it might sound like I'm joking, but some of Taylor's fans actually believe this.

I'm not saying that Taylor did time travel.

Honestly, hard evidence to support this theory is pretty thin, but it would answer some of the strangest lingering questions about this mystery.

Like how he was seen walking around LA weeks after the date when police think he died.

I don't completely understand the physics here.

mean, really, I don't think anyone does.

But the idea is he could have traveled into the future to after his own death.

He could still be out there right now walking around alive while his body decomposes in the cemetery.

I know it's pretty unbelievable.

Next to the time travel theory, the idea that Taylor was kidnapped by terrorists seems downright plausible.

Maybe that is what happened.

Or maybe he just suffered a nervous breakdown after a life of balancing two stressful, high-profile careers.

But if that's the case, I still want to know what he was working on when he disappeared.

So many lingering threads and questions, we might never know the whole truth.

At least until we join Taylor on the other side.

Thanks for listening.

I'll be back next week with another episode.

To hear more stories hosted by me, check out Crime Junkie and all Audio Chuck Originals.

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