Revisiting the 2019 Mysterious Death of Erin Valenti

Frank Report is taking another look at the October 2019 death of Erin Valenti.

Before her death, Valenti lived in Salt Lake City with her husband, Harrison Weinstein, a psychologist. 

Erin Valenti, at the time of her death, was 33. She seemed in excellent physical condition. She hiked the sandstone canyons, climbed rocks, rode the Provo River in an inner tube, and skied.

Valenti was also the founder and chief executive of Tinker Ventures. Her company, with 120 employees mainly in Pakistan, designed, developed, and scaled technology products built for iOS, Android, and the web.  

Tinker built over 700 products, including mobile apps, SaaS applications, tech-enabled marketplaces, and consumer websites for Facebook, Skullcandy, LiveNation, Pearson, MetroPCS, and emerging startups.

Before founding Tinker, she was Director of Product Development at Overstock.com, supervising a team of 250 engineers. 

Valenti often talked and theorized about bleeding-edge technology, such as drug-free, implant-free, mind-controlling, brainwave interface technology, brain-machine, or brain-computer interfaces.

Her company website linked to CTRL- labs, Thomas Reardon’s “neuroscience and behavior” center. 

CTRL-labs assembled scientists and technologists:

• PhDs in computational neuroscience
• Biomechanics paired with hackers and coders
• Experts in signal processing, machine learning, and human-computer interaction
• Industrial designers

CTRL- labs published: 

“The future of brain-machine interfaces is non-invasive. Instead of surgical implants, CTRL- labs uses state-of-the-art detection and machine learning to read your neurons from outside the body. The first step will be technology precisely picking up the signals from inside your body to control devices outside of it with little more than natural gestures. The next step – and we are already closer than most people realize – will be reading the intention directly from your brain.”

Valenti had no history of mental-health disorders or substance abuse.

Scott Rafferty, a Utah entrepreneur, told Business Insider that Valenti spoke of quitting her million-dollar business, but never meant it.

She told him she felt responsible for the welfare of more than 130 engineers and their families on the other side of the world.

She also planned to finance a startup accelerator inside her company and start a clothing line for professional women.

In late summer, Valenti spoke to Rafferty about wanting an executive coach. Rafferty’s coach was about to hold a retreat in California.

A Final Trip

On October 1, 2019, Valenti flew from Salt Lake City to Orange County, California, to attend Create Powerful, a three-day seminar designed for business owners.  

The seminar was in the beach town of Laguna Niguel.

Create Powerful is a workshop designed for leaders to reflect and move beyond their perceived limits. 

Rafferty said he saw Valenti mingling with guests at a sunset dinner on the hotel lawn. 

The seminar has been described as 

1. “an intense immersive live course designed for individuals who are committed to personal and professional growth, becoming more powerful leaders of themselves and others and experiencing their relationships in a powerful way,”
2. It is for “people connecting to their personal power.”
3. When you attend the course, “you will gain a new relationship with fear and you will see it differently and have a different kind of experience with it.”
4. The “course will change your life.”
5. It will cause a “transformation.”
6. Cost $6500

After the seminar, on the morning of Thursday, October 3, Valenti flew into the Bay Area for a two-day conference in Monterey for founders and tech investors.

During the weekend, she met with friends and former Silicon Valley colleagues for dinners and brunches. Friends said she talked excitedly about a new business venture. She planned to fly back to Salt Lake City on Monday, October 7, to attend the Women Tech Awards ceremony. 

According to her family, Valenti called daily during her trip and expressed excitement about coming home and putting her new ideas to work for the company. The seminar renewed her interest in hiring a local team, which would allow her to pursue other interests while still running Tinker.

On Sunday, she had dinner in Palo Alto with J.J. Kardwell, a principal at Summit Partners. He was Valenti’s first boss.

He recalled her excitement over the workshop — how it had helped her reconcile her work troubles.

“She cared deeply about Tinker,” Kardwell told Business Insider, “and it mattered a lot to her identity. She was very committed to the continued path there. But she realized she could do both. She had elevated enough as an executive and entrepreneur that she realized she didn’t have to be one thing. Any normal human can do one thing.”

Agitated Phone Calls

Valenti is believed to have been last seen by Dean Jacobson, a former manager of hers at Summit Partners, in Palo Alto, on Monday, October 7, in the afternoon.

Afterward, Valenti called her parents. She had just left her friend and was going to the airport to fly back to Salt Lake City. But she told her parents that she couldn’t find her rental car. She said she thought she had parked it around the corner. 

Her parents called her back after dinner. She had found her rental car, a gray Nissan Murano, and began the short drive to San Jose International Airport.

The SUV, with California license plates, did not have any tracking devices.

On the drive to the airport, Valenti spoke to her mother and brother on speakerphone. 

They said she sounded manic and confused. She told them about plans for Thanksgiving.

They said she talked fast and erratically and wasn’t making sense. 

Valenti said she had refueled the car not more than 10 minutes ago, but now the car was running out of gas, and “I’m going to miss my flight.”

Her mother called Valenti’s husband, Harrison Weinstein, and asked him to contact her immediately. 

For the next few hours, both continuously spoke with her on the phone, taking turns until almost midnight.

She continued to be agitated. 

At one point, she told her mother: “It’s all a game. It’s a thought experiment. We’re in the Matrix.” 

According to reports, Valenti asked her mother, “Are you in on it?”

Her mother, a retired nurse, asked if she was drunk, had taken any drugs, or had somebody given her something. 

Valenti responded no.

Weinstein also asked the police to conduct a welfare check.

According to the family, the police called Valenti on the phone, and she told an officer she was just joking around.

The phone appeared to have died at some point, and calls went to voicemail.

“Matrix” is a mathematical term used in the movie The Matrix to illustrate the code used to make up simulated reality. What is the “matrix”? It is a world created by computers, built to control and transform humans.

She missed the flight from San Jose, California. 

Missing Person

Her family reported Valenti missing to the San Jose PD. Police declining to file a missing person’s report, told the family that Valenti was an adult and could have just taken off for a few days.

Valenti’s husband flew out the following day to look for Valenti.

Valenti’s parents followed a few days later. They hired a private investigator.

People who didn’t know Valenti posted her photo to Facebook groups for hikers in the Bay Area.

One friend enlisted the help of a drone hobbyist, who offered to fly over areas where Valenti’s phone had last pinged cellphone towers.

Then on Thursday, police finally filed it as a voluntary disappearance.

During the time she was missing, there was no activity on any credit/debit/atm cards. 

Before her phone was turned off, it was tracked to a location in South San Jose’s Almaden Valley, not far from the airport.

Disappointed with the response of the police, the family set up a “Help Find Erin Valenti” Facebook page, and Bay Area locals volunteered to search.

The page stated that it was “completely possible to have a sudden onset of symptoms like this for a variety of mental health and physical reasons (even if there have not been previous symptoms). Erin should be considered a vulnerable person at severe risk and the police should be involved, although they have continued to treat her as a voluntary missing person. If anyone has any influence with the San Jose of California police, I urge you to make this point.”

The page continued, “Harrison (Erin’s husband) is also a psychologist and Erin’s mother is a nurse. It is difficult for me to understand why the police are not giving greater credence to people who have experience with people in psychiatric and medical crises and who absolutely believe that Erin’s last calls indicate that she was at peril.”

Search Ends

On Saturday, October 12, a volunteer found Valenti’s rental car parked a few blocks from where her phone was last located – on the 6500 block of Bose Lane, a residential street near the Sam Jose airport.

Looking inside, the volunteer discovered Valenti’s body in the back seat. 

An investigation by San Jose police found no evidence of foul play, authorities said. There were no outward signs of trauma or physical harm. 

Blood tests were negative for common prescription drugs and other substances.

Her parents spoke to the media and said they believed she had suffered some kind of manic episode. 

“Her thoughts were disconnected. She talked a mile a minute. She’d say ‘I’m coming home for Thanksgiving,’ then in the next she was saying she’s in the Matrix,” her mom, Whitey Valenti, said.

Valenti’s husband said she had no history of mental illness.

“There’s never any history of anything like this, no mental health diagnosis, no hospitalization, no substance use, no arrests — as clear of a record as you can get. This is incredibly unlike her. She is an extremely high-achievement, successful person,” he said.

It took months for the autopsy report.

The San Jose medical examiner’s office’s autopsy report determined she died of “sudden death in the setting of an acute manic episode.” 

Though the report did not explain what killed her, other than she died of “natural causes.”

A manic episode, characterized by feelings of euphoria, racing thoughts, and feelings of connectedness, is typically followed by a period of depression or irritability. 

Valenti had a previous diagnosis of a thyroid condition treated with medication. The autopsy report noted that her condition could have contributed to her death. Blood samples, however, were not satisfactory for analysis.

A police review of Valenti’s electronic communications in the days before her scheduled return showed symptoms of a “manic episode,” according to the San Jose medical examiner’s office.

Authorities also said a review of her medical records “suggests that the etiology of her final manic episode was related to an emerging, previously undiagnosed psychiatric disorder.” 

Let’s look at the facts.

1. An apparently healthy 33 year old woman who skies and climbs.
2. Successful high-tech businesswoman.
3. No history of mental illness.
4. An interest in brainwave – AI interfacing.
5. Takes a trip to attend an “intense immersive live course” designed to “change your life” and gain a “new relationship with fear.”
6. She tells her family she is excited about coming home and implementing what she learned.
7. On the drive to the airport, she descends into mental illness and dies of “sudden death,” which means, by definition, death within an hour of an acute manic episode.
8. She is missing for days and then found in the backseat of her car, supposedly parked for five days on a street a few blocks from where her phone was last tracked four days before.
9. None of the search party volunteers found the car until five days after she disappeared, though they were looking around the area, suggesting the car may not have been there the entire time.
10. It seems unlikely that a car with a body in the backseat would go unnoticed on that particular street.

Several things could have happened.

Among these are:

The seminar might have provoked the manic episode or exacerbated an emerging mental illness.

As some suggest on the internet, she might have been a victim of non-invasive brain-machine interfaces, which not only read the intention directly from the brain, but also can make strong suggestions to the brain.

Or perhaps she died, as stated in the official autopsy report, of a sudden, fatal descent into mental illness, and within an hour, death by natural causes.