By Shivani
Please take a look at all of Kristin’s capital K letters shown here. In each one of the 4 samples known to be from Kristin’s hand, including the one that looks most like a signature, her capital K comes together, the second line (or lines, depending on how one writes) touches the first straight line of her K.
Snyder’s sign-in at the Jan-Feb 2003 Intensive.
Snyder’s sign-in at the Nov 2002 intensive.
Snyder’s second sign-in at the Nov 2002 intensive.
As noted before, that’s Kristin’s first letter of her first name, kind of a big deal even during childhood and learning to print.
Her known Ks are dynamic-looking, but the K used in her name on that final note is not dynamic at all. It is made by an unsure–looking hand.
So Kristin’s K capitals do not resemble the K in her name, as printed in the note found in the Toyota pickup. Nor does the S in the Snyder surname in the note from the truck curve as Kristin’s known capital S letters curve. In fact, the “suicide note” capital S looks like a backwards “2.” Again, these K and S letters are Kristin’s initials, along with M for her middle name, which she didn’t include as often when she wrote her name. These two letters are especially significant to me because they start her first and last name.
Another thing is that I still think that Kristin might very well have written only the first sentence, (paragraph) of the note left in the truck. The rest of it really looks to me that it came from someone else’s hand. Additionally, the first sentence of that note is neutral and rather like an introductory paragraph.
“I attended a course called Executive Success Programs (aka Nexium) based out of Anchorage, Ak + Albany, NY.” This first sentence was written in handwriting which is mostly cursive.
The rest of the note is where the subject matter begins to veer off into a potent expression of psychological difficulties and becomes quite graphic in describing Kristin’s internal organs as rotting, as one of her perceived dissociative sensations.
This content and the rest of the note do not have Kristin’s right hand slant to its letters, words. It is unusual for someone’s slant to morph. Really, it is. Plus the cursive writing practically disappears from the second, more alarming paragraph, which is not only more printed than it is in the cursive style of writing. The major difference, overall, is that the “slant” is straight up and down, not slanting right or left.
It is more like the way that [Name Redacted] printed her name on the intensive’s attendance sheet, just as an example. The right handed slant is gone.
Esther and Ed’s Visit to Kristin Snyder’s Home
Now, why does one imagine that Esther Chiappone Carlson and Ed Kinum happened to be at Heidi and Kristin’s home a night or two before Kristin disappeared?
Kristin was upset already. Esther had housed Kristin in New York, when evidently Kristin was being messed with privately (or not so privately) by Raniere, and Esther knew the drill about Raniere’s lies about being a celibate. Boy, did she know. She herself had already faced that Raniere was with multiple sexual idiots or disciples who protected his false image. Esther was gaslighting Kristin while fully aware that she was pushing a huge lie.
Esther Carlson Chiappone accepted and guarded Raniere’s deceptions about his sexual conduct.
Why weren’t Ed and Esther, as key parts of the intensive staff, looking over their notes or insights about everyone in the intensive, reviewing the day’s work? Why were these two all over Kristin and Heidi? How come they didn’t just go to their homes, their own beds, to their dinner tables to have a meal, to rest and to be relaxing with their loved ones, if either is capable of feeling love?
Why not go ahead and speculate that already, Kristin was assigned a pair of Salzman/Raniere, etc. guard dogs to keep running interference, perhaps especially between Heidi and Kristin? Were they at Kristin and Heidi’s house to spy or to try to control Kristin and/or to influence Heidi and to follow the Executive Success Program’s agenda, which was also their agenda?
The part here about Ed Kinum lying next to Kristin, who was said to be facedown and sobbing on the floor, is exceedingly bizarre. What could have he been saying to her? Was he sticking to Nancy Salzman’s and Esther Chiappone’s demanded gaslighting script? Esther was right there, too, with Ed. So you tell me what the hell Ed was doing.
Had Ed Kinum been positioning himself differently, he wouldn’t seem to be as inappropriate. He could have sat next to her as she cried. He could have even tried to help her by putting a hand on her shoulder or trying to help her to rise up after awhile, instead of being so “supportive” of her staying facedown and in despair. He could have seen to providing her with some Kleenex or a drink of water. But, of course, the two interlopers, Esther and Ed were not there to help Kristin Snyder. Not at all.
They were there at the home of two intensive attendees who were problematic. The two of them were there to help Raniere and Nancy Salzman and themselves, it seems to me.
Frank Parlato 
Janine Morrison 
J.J. O'Hara 
Richard Luthmann 
Marie White 
Paul Serran
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The signature from the sign-in sheet and from the suicide note appear to be written by the same person. No one writes their letters exactly the same way, every time, so there are bound to be some small differences between the two.
Shivani, if a person was attempting to copy Kristin’s signature, why wouldn’t they make the letters as close as they could to the examples that they had? If there are no other examples where the K has a gap, then it seems likely that Kristin made that letter slightly different at that time, probably due to her state of mind at that moment.
You’re reading too much into a single letter. Professional hand-writing analysis does not work that way.
Samples, please. Her N and slant as Shivani points out is VERY interesting. Calling all ex NX’ers who’re holding docs that may have other samples of [Name Redacted]’s handwriting! Send to Frank ASAP so we armchair detectives can solve this one
I don’t think Ed Kinum was on the floor at Kristin Snyder’s house; it was during the intensive if I’ve been told the accounting correctly.
This is much worse as many staff members and students witness this totally weird behavior happen.
If Ed Kinum had a patient in his practice show up in the same state of mine Kristin Snyder was in, it would have been malpractice for him to not get her the proper help.
So is this situation any different?
Kinum knew what was the right thing to do but he had two conflicting issues running against what should have been done.
One, Ed Kinum didn’t have a very successful chiropractor business at the time. He had two young children, was divorced and had child support to pay. He needed his head trainer position and the money that came with it to pay his bills.
Two, Ed had both heads so far up Esther’s pussy that he would do whatever Esther wanted. Even if that meant not getting Kristin the help she needed.
Ed and Esther are responsible for whatever happened to Kristin Snyder. They were the NXIVM representative on site. Not that they take any responsibility off of Kieth Raniere, who called all the shots or Nancy Salzman who followed and barked out all of Raniere’s orders.
All four NXIVM leaders need to be held accountable.
There are a lot of sketchy “facts,” as this occurred a long time ago, which makes peoples’ memories faulty, and many of the witnesses have reasons to lie. Good luck getting to the bottom of this story.
Ed Kinum is supposedly a Chiropractor.
Dr. Dannielle Roberts is an Osteopath.
Keith Raniere is a Psychopath who makes people eat and drink strange concoctions that do not work.
Brandon Porter is a Sociopath who did unauthorized medical experiments on people.
None of these are conventional medical care givers.
Here is the website of Kinum Chiropractic.
http://www.kinumchiropractic.com/contactus.shtml
http://www.kinumchiropractic.com/index.shtml
It turns out that Dr. Kinum now practices chiropractic medicine in Scotia New York, which is very close to Albany, Schenectady and CLIFTON PARK.
If you get sick near Albany, New York go to another metro area for medical care.
Ed Kinum is a righteous moralistic prick. He knows exactly what happened to Kristin Snyder. Ed, if you are reading this, you need to reserve your seat in the front row of the bus now. The truth will surface and there you will be! You may soon be rooming with Keith at the MDC!
Walking out of Nxivm did not insulate you from the death of Kristin Snyder.
Esther is a narcissist that left her husband and took their 4 young children to jump into Keith’s bed! As a mother, it was shocking to see her leave 4 children in Alaska for months while she was teaching intensives in Albany.
One day, Esther proudly showed the group a faxed drawing of the family done by her then six-year-old daughter. She was too young to be writing letters and was sending her Mom drawings.
Esther, moving to Florida does not protect you from your past actions. Fess up to your participation in Kristin’s murder.
Esther sounds like a real catch.
A lot is made about VanDump being of shady character, but all of these women like Esther, the Sleazemans, etc., who chose to be and remain with him for years don’t fall far from his tree.
The women were the sh!t fertilizer that allowed Raniere’s tree to flourish.
Amateur handwriting “experts” shouldn’t be giving their analysis, let the experts do it. Who cares what Kinum was doing laying on the ground? The question is what role, if any, did he have in Snyder’s death?
Is it necessarily surprising that if Snyder was in the midst of a psychotic breakdown, delusional and about to kill herself, that her hand might be unsteady?
And Kinnum is a long-term practitioner in another quack therapy cult – one which even once tried to pass itself off as a religion, like Scientology. He could have been trying to align his energy field with Snyder’s in order build rapport, who knows.
The NXIVM culties were a bunch of whacky amateurs, and trying to make sense of what they did from the framework of normal thinking, is likely a pointless exercise.
“He could have been trying to align his energy field with Snyder’s in order build rapport.”
That’s exactly what he was doing. The real questions I have are for Heidi. Does she remember anything of what Ed and Esther were saying to Kristin or herself? In other words, what angle were they coming from?
I have another couple of questions for Clifford: Why didn’t she take Snyder to a doctor instead of allowing her to lie face-down on the floor for over an hour? Why didn’t Clifford take her “spouse” to a hospital or home after she broke down in the NXIVM class? I would assume they talked outside of the class, which was being taught by virtual strangers, in the days before Snyder disappeared. Every time I look at something related to NXIVM, it seems virtually EVERYTHING is f*cked up, not just the main NXIVM characters.
Agree . I can’t imagine letting people kick my spouse out of a class. I would have his back . But maybe we saw this because it was a cult . People had a hard time making their own decisions . So they accepted what others said
I think it was Clifford and her mom’s first class, so they shouldn’t have been sucked into the cult thinking yet.
If Kristin were being drugged, it could have and probably would have affected her penmanship, even drastically, especially if she was given more than one “typical” dose or amount. In my opinion, if she had been drugged and then wrote, her writing would reflect that drugged state considerably more than what is showing. It does look to me that she was drugged, under the Anchorage command of Esther Carlson Chiappone, who took her orders from Nancy Salzman, who was ruling the Anchorage ESP staff and directing procedures to protect Raniere and his dictatorship.
However, Kristin was most likely to have been dosed to quiet her, to shut her down, not to have had her compose some “suicide” note which carefully censored all of what Kristin was really saying about Raniere or about rape and pregnancy.
I think that someone wanted the note to be legible and was trying to copy her handwriting but not altogether observantly or successfully. To me it looks like the one writing it pretending to be Kristin began her inclusions with the note’s second paragraph, sometime after Kristin wrote the first sentence, to start what she never finished, at the top of a page. The subsequent writingis too neatly printed and didn’t attempt to replicate Kristin’s cursive script much at all. The slant used by Kristin is absent. The contents of the note do not address at all what Kristin had kept saying to loud.
Why not?
As I kept looking at the first page as a whole, it became increasingly more striking to me that Kristin might very well have only written the first sentence and that the rest was added by another hand and more crucially, by another mind and mindset.
It doesn’t seem at all likely that her slant would’ve transformed from a forward slant into one that is straight up and down. Changing the slant of writing, even on purpose, takes actual practice, to make that slant change become usual or consistent. To change arighthand slant into an straight up and down slant is a weak sign. It does not even try to reflect Kristin’s own natural slant I think it was not done well! My sense of what I see and analyze is from not only the lettering of the contents of the note, but particularly, I’m observing the meaning what the note said, what it was implying.
Although the change of manner between the first sentence and the rest of the contents is very marked, with the first sentence being neutral, what shows as self-expression after that first sentence veers into a completely different “voice” to me.
What is somewhat frustrating is that no one else is discussing or analyzing those differences within the note as a whole. I cannot force my observations on someone else’s viewpoints. Nor do the differences change what I can and do infer.
That writer’s voice is busy detailing a perception of internal disorganization and symptoms of paranoia, feelings of helplessness and of interiorized separation, with the notable, emphasized accompaniment of descriptive organic sensations of “disintegration.”
Raniere preached about his conceptualization of disintegration, using this specifically as a method of entrapping others into the parameters of his controlling mechanisms, couched in dogma. His minions imitated him and were sold on his dogmatism. That is as plain as day. They too were willing and happy to focus upon disintegration as a means of separating and isolating others, of calling those who were “disin5egrating” as being in need of waking up and seeing things as Raniere wanted them to see.
The writer’s voice, in the second paragraph, launches into a validation of Raniere’s bullshit by showing “the voice of Kristin” as disintegrated. It is hard to see how anyone who analyzes the note can miss this sudden and abrupt CHANGE of viewpoint. I see the change of viewpoint being demonstrated in the note’s contents as a change of WHO was composing the note itself. The motive of the note switches immediately after the first sentence. Is that not obvious?
This might make sense if that had been how Kristin was behaving. However, Kristin was seen as being disruptive, and not because of paranoia or freaked-out bodily sensations of deadness or numbness.
Instead Kristin was talking about having been raped and drugged by Raniere and about being impregnated. This content is completely absent from her so-called suicide note, yet she was known to have kept talking determinably about this during the intensive. She said Raniere had forced sexual aggression into her. She was devastated, she was in considerable emotional pain because of him and she was legitimately outraged and very unhappy about all of this. In fact she couldn’t be stopped from addressing it repeatedly. This was her major concern. We know that she was removed from the group at least three times for bringing up this subject of her experiences with Raniere. We have been shown how this exposure from her was exactly why she kept being pulled out of the intensive.
Yet none of this is mentioned in what is supposed to be her suicide note(s.) So who was concealing this? Kristin, who would not quit addressing it? I hardly think so.
What else can I say but take it or leave it? I see what I can see and am aware that I cannot prove it. It’s theoretical. So too is it theoretical to posit that Kristin wrote the these contents of psychological disconnection and put herself into Resurrection Bay.
Remember the overall context of what and who Kristin was encountering. She was an innocent facing a criminal organization of lying hucksters who were adamant about denying what she had to say. Come on! We do know that much.
I look at the parts and at the whole, the entire presentation of the note’s segments (and I do see that note as having been composed in 3 different segments. The lettering, the spacing, the slant shown and the parts of what is not being shown and can be analyzed, seen individually as components to compare and to contrast with Kristin’s known penmanship and most especially with we have been shown, over and over again, to be what Kristin had experienced and kept being forced to experience during the intensive. Malevolence. Lies. Humiliation. Isolation. Gaslighting.
As hurt and angry as Kristin might have felt about these circumstances, she kept going. She was courageous. She did not surrender. She kept up her fight. For the love of God, who can ignore that? Even if you don’t give a shit about the love of God, who can ignore simple intelligence or realism? Maybe someone whom cannot or will not walk in Kristin’s shoes can ignore simple, practical application of common sense, which is the very foundation of intelligence.
Yet the overall contents of the note are what is the most striking. I see showmanship begin immediately after the first sentence. That could be because showmanship is a fundament of my own childhood and teenage experience, spending hours, days, weeks in rehearsal as a girl who was absorbed in theater and was learning the craft. (?)
So again, I think that Kristin wrote only the first sentence of this 2 page note and that a nasty conspirator ho was involved in gaslighting Kristin and ultimately making her disappear wrote the rest.
You can understand that despair or frustration or even contending with fear or heartbreak usually does not lead to or end in insanity. Tough as these experiences are, most people begin to adapt to change, like it or not. Maybe we are changed inside or even exteriorly, but we tend to be adaptive, and we have to be, just to survive, to endure, to outlast. Otherwise we’d almost all be raving lunatics. Kristin seemed like a strong and even a hearty individual. Certainly she was offered no support to even begin to accept her experiences.
Kristin was defrauded. She was cheated. It
Instead these group leaders acted as tyrants, and it was their way or the highway, and Kristin had to get LOST. She was not helped. She was being denied any help at all. One way or another Kristin was deliberately destroyed. I do not think or feel that she killed herself or that she went insane.
Enough. I’ve written enough about this “suicide.” More repetition is not going to change the choices of what others interpret. So there’s no use indulging in the blues over it. I won’t disregard Kristin’s nature or how I see her. Kristin could have been my child who grew up to be such a beautiful woman. The connection gets stronger, not weaker. “Blessed is the match consumed in kindling flame.” That’s how this all feels to me. Kristin being silenced for being truthful remains on my heart and mind. Peace to her, to her loved ones, to those who strive to do right by her.
Shivani you have no personal knowledge of Kristin, NXIVM, her situation, or any of the people involved. Everything you say is total assumption and is solely based on nothing but your own belief system and second hand information, most of which came to light 17 years after the fact.
Everything you say needs to be taken with a very large grain of salt.
Do you ever consider that your speculative ideas may be cruel and harmful to Kristin’s family?
Actually Kristin’s sister, Kim, has told me she is very pleased with what Shivani has written.
It’s only my opinion but I think Shivani has written intelligent and considerate articles pertaining to Kristin Snyder.
“Blessed is the match consumed in kindling flame.” Is a beautiful quote.