Jack Perdue, Curator

It's hard to believe that it has been two years now since the senseless assassination of Bill Gates on December 2, 1999.

A year ago, it seemed like it would be a year of great promise. Citizens for Truth unveiled the first independent research report on Gates' assassination at their "first annual" research conference. A documentary filmmaker was working on a "major film" about the group and their criticisms of the Gates' assassination. At that same conference, David James and others split away to found a new group, Citizens for Action, promising more aggressive investigative and agitation actions.

Yet where is Citizens for Truth now? There was no "second annual" research conference, nor even the apparant attempt to organize one. Citizens for Truth's officers, most notably Debra Meagher and Mark Anderson, have grown chronically silent, apparantly unable to galvanize any kind of an organization whatsoever. Their research report? Parts of it made it onto their website, and copies were distributed at the conference -- but it remains essentially undistributed and, therefore, essentially unread.

Perhaps Citizens for Action fared better? Hardly. While David James insists his group is "making important strides in the investigation", the organization's website has been a "coming soon someday" since February, and they've held no public rallies the way David grew famous for with Citizens for Truth.

Even Brian Flemming's documentary film project on Citizens for Truth seems to be forever in appearing, and there's not been an update on the film website in months.

Don't get me wrong -- I'm not necessarily one of those dedicated to "Hidell might not have done it" theories, and my personal opinions tend to be as much influenced by the work of Veronika Warren and Gerald MacAdams as it is by Citizens for Truth. As a biographer of Gates, I keep an open mind and a desire to chronicle the variety of reactions the tragedy created.

Unfortunately, that reaction from the public is best labeled what it is: a growing feeling of apathy and inaction. If my opinion on these matters sounds bleak, remember that I hoped to write this article about rememberances of the second anniversary of Bill Gates death -- and on all the Web, I could only find a single example to cite. Cheers to you, Diana Wilmington ... you're doing more to keep Gates' memory alive than the entire "community" of people who were supposedly dedicated to that task.