Astrology at Work: Richard Jewell
Back in 1996, while the Summer Olympics were being held in Atlanta, Georgia, a pipe bomb was placed under a bench in that city's newly constructed Centennial Olympic Park. The bomb was set to go off in the middle of a rock concert when it would likely have killed hundreds of people. Instead, an alert security guard named Richard Jewell spotted the bag that contained the bomb and notified the police. He then worked feverishly, along with other officers, to clear the area.
At 1:20 AM the bomb exploded. Even though one person was killed and several others injured, Jewell’s alertness was credited with staving off what would have been a major terrorist event. At first he was celebrated as a hero. But some people in the F.B.I. had other ideas. They decided that Jewell fit the psychological profile of the bomber. These suspicions were leaked to the press and Jewell immediately went from presumed hero to presumed guilty.
We don’t have a complete horoscope for Richard Jewell but a chart done for noon on his date of birth (click on Richard Jewell to see the chart) reveals that he was a Sagittarian by Sun sign with Mercury in Capricorn and the Moon in Virgo. Those last two placement would have made Jewell more detail-oriented and practical that the typical Sagittarian. Mars in his chart in in Leo, closely trine to the Sun. This explains Jewell’s ambition to be a police officer. Generally speaking, there is not much in this partial horoscope indicating extremism or duplicity.
Unfortunately, that was not the way the F.B.I. saw it. They repeatedly questioned Jewell and searched his home twice. And while the F.B.I. was pressuring Jewell to confess, the press was making his life miserable. Newspaper articles and the TV news portrayed Jewell as chubby ne’er-do-well who had staged the bombing in order to make himself look important. During the next several weeks, as the bombing was being investigated, Richard Jewell watched as his reputation was shredded and his hope for a career in law enforcement seemingly dashed.
What was going on his Jewell’s horoscope during this time? Saturn, which was transiting Aries, had just gone retrograde a few days before the bombing. It was now moving slowly in a 90 degree square aspect to Jewell’s Mercury. The most basic reading of transiting Saturn square your natal Mercury is “bad news,” and Richard Jewell heard and read plenty of that over the next several weeks when he was under this aspect. He knew he was innocent, but another thing about this aspect is that it makes it hard for you to get your message across.
Saturn remain within a degree of a square aspect to Jewell’s natal Mercury until late August. By September, after talking to just about everyone who knew Jewell and pursuing a variety of false leads,it began to dawn on the agents investigating Jewell that they were getting nowhere. In October the Bureau officially notified Jewell was no longer a person of interest.
The investigation shifted. However, in the court of public opinion and in Jewell’s life, the damage had already been done. Jewell spent the next several years pursuing lawsuits against the broadcasters and news people who had essentially ruined his life. Most of the cases were settled out of court and most of the money went to pay his legal fees.
I’m fairly sure that if we had a complete horoscope for Richard Jewell we would see a troublesome transit of one the angles of his horoscope during this period, but the Saturn square to his Mercury tells us a lot. In our increasingly media conscious world, “bad news” or bad news reporting can take on epic, life changing, proportions. It’s something to keep in mind the next time you see Saturn heading toward a hard aspect to your Mercury.
