The Day Stan Died

Stanley Meyer collapsed at a restaurant table in Grove City on the evening of Friday, 20 March 1998, and died in hospital the next day. He was 57. What is known about that weekend comes from a handful of sources that mostly agree and disagree in ways worth noticing: his brother Stephen, who was at the table; the Grove City Record, which had the story that week; the Franklin County coroner and the Grove City police, as reported; the Columbus Dispatch, which went back over it nine years later; and, twenty-two years on, the Belgian who paid for dinner. This page puts them side by side.

The weekend

Two months earlier, in January 1998, the Grove City planning commission had approved a research campus on 56 acres along Seeds Road. Philippe Vandemoortele, a Belgian who had been funding Meyer since early 1995, had bought the land. The Water Fuel Cell Development Center was to be inaugurated on Saturday 21 March, and Vandemoortele organised a weekend visit around it: arriving Friday, leaving Sunday. He brought a friend, Marc Vancraeyenest, at Meyer's request, to improve how the two of them communicated by computer. Stephen Meyer, an engineer living in Minnesota who came down every fortnight to work with his brother, had been in Grove City for two weeks. According to their sister, Barbara Ferret, the brothers had just "knocked down some final roadblock" and were celebrating; Stephen said they were working on the resonator and had planned to test the final model within five weeks.

On Friday evening the four of them sat down at the Cracker Barrel on Stringtown Road. Stephen's account, given to the Dispatch in 2007, is the one the world knows: Stan took a sip of cranberry juice, grabbed his neck, bolted out of the door, dropped to his knees and vomited violently. "I ran outside and asked him, 'What's wrong?' He said, 'They poisoned me.' That was his dying declaration." Vandemoortele's account, given in 2020, is shorter and does not contradict it: "A few minutes after we were seated, Stan has a brain problem, an ambulance comes and he leaves with his brother."

An ambulance took him to Mt. Carmel West Medical Center. He was pronounced dead there at 6:20 p.m. on Saturday 21 March. The Dispatch's retelling in 2007 compresses the collapse and the death into one scene in the car park; the Record's report the same week, the obituary notice, and Vandemoortele's memory all have him dying the following day. "The next Saturday, his brother told me that he had died," Vandemoortele wrote. "The next day, Sunday, I flew back with the booked flight. There was nothing more I could do."

Stephen remembered the Belgians' reaction differently. "I told them that Stan had died and they never said a word, absolutely nothing, no condolences, no questions. I never, ever had a trust of those two men ever again."

The investigation

Grove City police cordoned off the house and laboratory at 3792 Broadway. Captain Dennis Ciesinski told the Record: "Given what he did for a living, there are certain circumstances that we need to look at. It's the coroner's belief that a brain aneurysm occurred, but he's waiting until the results of the toxicology test come back before making a final ruling. Officially, we're treating it as a questionable death."

The Franklin County coroner, Dr. William Adrion, found that Meyer had suffered a ruptured brain aneurysm, and that he had high blood pressure; his certification, two months after the death, is set out below. Toxicology found only two drugs: lidocaine, a local anaesthetic also used in cardiac resuscitation, and phenytoin, which is given to control seizures. Both are consistent with emergency treatment of a man who had collapsed. Nothing else was detected. The ruling was a cerebral aneurysm, and the police, absent any evidence of foul play, closed the case on the coroner's report after a three-month investigation.

Lieutenant Steve Robinette, the lead detective, said in 2007 that the case "was laced with all sorts of stories of conspiracy, cloak-and-dagger stories." The file included taped interviews with more than a dozen witnesses. It did not include tapes of the two Belgians; Robinette allowed that their interviews may simply not have been recorded. The Dispatch's calls and e-mails to both men in 2007 went unanswered.

The funeral was at Evans Funeral Home, 4171 E. Livingston Avenue, on Thursday 26 March 1998, with a memorial service at 6:30 p.m., Pastor Gary A. Keller officiating. The obituary named his wife, Marilyn; his twin brother Stephen Foster Meyer; his brother Henry B. Meyer; and his sister Barbara Ferret. He was preceded in death by his parents, Marie Hessler Meyer and Henry Stewart Meyer.

The death certificate

The State of Ohio certificate of death, state file number 021157, was filed on 24 March 1998 from a form signed the day before by Keith N. Norton, M.D., deputy coroner, of 520 King Avenue, Columbus. It records:

The cause was left open for two months. A supplementary medical certification, certificate 2306, signed by William R. Adrion, M.D., Franklin County Coroner, on 21 May 1998 and filed with the registrar on 27 May, completes it:

Two details to set beside the press. The certificate has him pronounced dead at 8:25 p.m., where the Record that week said 6:20 p.m. And it gives Columbus, Ohio, as the place of birth, which the birth certificate leaves at "Ohio".

The scans were posted to the ionizationx forum by its member Jim Miller with the autopsy and toxicology reports; the forum's database has since gone down and the archive's mirror never captured the images. The pages reproduced here came by way of a member of this community.

"They poisoned me"

The dying declaration is the whole basis of the belief that Meyer was murdered, and it rests on one witness: Stephen. Nobody has ever produced a mechanism, a substance, or a motive that survives contact with the coroner's findings. A ruptured aneurysm in a 57-year-old with untreated high blood pressure produces exactly what the witnesses describe: sudden violent pain in the head or neck, confusion, vomiting, collapse. A man who believed for twenty years that the oil industry, the government and foreign agents were after him, feeling that pain come on at a table with two foreign investors, would say what Stan said.

Two later embellishments should be set aside. A video circulated on YouTube showing what was said to be a page from the coroner's file identifying the Belgians as NATO officers; the video is gone, no such page has surfaced anywhere else, and Vandemoortele says he has no idea where the idea came from. And the rumour that the Belgians fled the country the same night is answered by their own itinerary: they flew home on the Sunday, on the flight that had been booked before they came.

The two Belgians

Philippe Vandemoortele is a member of the Vandemoortele family, the West Flemish food group. He created the Alpro soya drink, which became a worldwide brand, and left the family business in 1995, the year he met Meyer. In 2008 he received INSEAD's Innovator Prize. He was not, as Stephen and the newspapers had it, one of two investors: by his own account he was the only one, and Vancraeyenest "had nothing to do with the project". He funded Meyer for three years, bought the Seeds Road land, and, in his words, "even paid his bills the week before". After the death he declined to finance Stephen's continuation: "I felt too much greediness, secrecy and lack of knowledge and ideal. For me, it was over. Stan was my friend and nobody else."

Marc Vancraeyenest was there to help with computers. His later life is in the patent record below: an engineer and inventor, working with Vandemoortele at a company called Letec in Ooskamp.

In July 2020 Vandemoortele answered the Dutch sceptic Pepijn van Erp, who had been trying to reach him for years while writing about water-fuelled cars for Skepter. Van Erp published the reply on 10 November 2020. It is the only time either man has spoken publicly about that weekend, and it is worth reading in full at the source; the parts that bear on the death are these:

I met Stan at the beginning of 1995 and found his project interesting for its possible contribution to mankind. We became friends and I supported him financially until his death. During those 3 years, I saw Stan regularly. He was extremely suspicious, and I don't know more about his technology than anyone else, i.e. his publications. So I had to have a lot of faith, but I couldn't see anything except his official demos. I am convinced that his project was real, not fake. My feeling was that his discovery was a kind of technical coincidence, he had trouble making it real industrial.

Stan's technology obviously disturbed a lot of established values, and Stan had become very paranoid, which didn't make his research any easier. Only his twin brother, Steve worked with him in the last year. Otherwise, I didn't see anyone there, apart from the secretary of his church community.

I had bought the land in Grove City for him, he wanted to have a place to build a research centre. The intention was to officially inaugurate this on Saturday 21 March 1998. Because of this, I organised a weekend visit as often, arrival Friday 20, and departure Sunday 22. I had taken Marc Vancraeyenest with me, at Stan's request, to improve our communication via computers. Marc Vancraeyenest had nothing to do with the project.

The evening of my arrival, Friday, we went to the restaurant with his twin brother Steve and my friend. A few minutes after we were seated, Stan has a brain problem, an ambulance comes and he leaves with his brother. The next Saturday, his brother told me that he had died. His death was a great shock, especially the loss of a friend and also a valuable project.

Immediately after his death, many heirs appeared like magic. Including his wife whom I never saw or heard of before. Especially his brother Steve wanted to continue working and asked if I wanted to finance further. I refused.

I have some doubts about whether his death happened by chance, but I know nothing more than anyone else. What is certain is that I didn't kill him, he was my friend and I even paid his bills the week before. Why someone made a fake video about me and my friend as Stan's killer remains a mystery to me. Maybe someone who wanted to draw the attention away from himself?

His work and his death have aroused a lot of interest, about the miracle invention and about conspiracy theories. Now more than 20 years have passed and no one has been able to imitate his technology and his heirs have not become rich.

Van Erp made one observation that is hard to answer. The murder story begins with Stephen, the only witness to the last words. Yet by Vandemoortele's account, and consistent with Stephen's own bitterness at being refused, Stephen asked the same two men to keep funding the work after the funeral. One does not usually ask that of the men one holds responsible for a brother's death.

What they patented afterwards

Neither man patented anything to do with water or fuel. What they did patent, through Letec NV, is a medical device: light and pulsed magnetic fields applied to living tissue, sold as the Xentix and marketed against burn-out, which the Dutch sceptics' site Kloptdatwel examined in 2014 and found no evidence for. The filings, with their family members:

The 2004 family claims a system with at least one light source and a magnetic source "capable of generating a pulsing magnetic field", with the frequencies, phases and amplitudes adjustable "so that resonances and/or interferences may be obtained in the biological cellular structure". The 2010 application, the only one on which Vandemoortele is named, adds faceted coated reflectors and a "Tri-Wind Magnetic Coil Assembly".

One detail in that 2010 application will stop any reader of this archive. Its coils are wound with bifilar wire of stainless-steel alloy, polyimide-coated at 20 to 33 microns per strand, two isolated strands side by side in a dog-bone cross-section. That is Meyer's own recipe for the resonant charging chokes: stainless-steel wire, bifilar, insulated, wound in pairs. It appears nowhere in the 2004 filings, which Vancraeyenest made alone, and appears in the one filing that carries Vandemoortele's name, twelve years after he last sat in Meyer's laboratory. Whether that is inheritance or coincidence the record does not say. It is the only place the two men's later work touches Stan's, and it is the opposite of a water fuel cell: not a way of splitting water, but a way of putting pulsed fields into a body.

Sources

• "Inventor Stanley Meyer dies", Grove City Record, 25 March 1998, by Gregg Rettig and Kathy Evans. The report of the week: the time of death, the police cordon, Captain Ciesinski, and the family.
• "The car that ran on water", Columbus Dispatch, 8 July 2007. Stephen's account of the table, the police file, the coroner's findings, the toxicology, and the Belgians' silence.
• "Local inventor's claims inspire others to follow", Columbus Dispatch, 2009. The restaurant named, and the dying declaration again.
• Eugene Mallove, "Stanley Meyer, 'Water-Fuel Cell' Inventor and Promoter, Dies Suddenly", Infinite Energy, 1998, reproduced above, which quotes the Dispatch of 27 March 1998 and the obituary notice in full.
• Pepijn van Erp, "Stanley Meyer, the inventor of the water-powered car, was not killed by Belgian investors", 10 November 2020, carrying Philippe Vandemoortele's statement of July 2020.
• The patents at Google Patents: US 7,744,522 B2, WO 2005/107866 A1, US 2012/0078328 A1.
• The Stephen Meyer interviews on this site, six hours from 2007, in which he says in part 1 that Stan "passed away this month" and gives the date wrongly as the 17th; the six are read and checked here.

The autopsy and toxicology reports that Jim Miller posted with the certificate have not been recovered. If you hold copies, the archive would like to see them.