Chewbacca Costume¶
The Chewbacca Costume is the expensive Chewbacca-style costume, stolen from Apollo's dry cleaners, in which an ex-military hoaxer was found executed on Frotter Comstock's land.
| Type | Item |
| Aliases | Bigfoot costume |
| Owner | Derek Edwards (originally) |
| Last known holder | Evidence (the body in it was examined by McManley) |
| First appearance | Appalachia 06 |
Description¶
The costume was bought for cash at Comic-Con by the amateur photographer Derek Edwards, who said it "smelled pretty strongly like fat nerd." On the corpse it was soaked in what looked like real blood. The bandolier had been removed and mud rubbed into the fur in an attempt to make it look less like Chewbacca, though Andre noted it was "pretty clearly Chewbacca" (Appalachia 06).
It was stolen from Apollo's dry cleaners about eight months before the body turned up, according to Derek (Appalachia 06).
Properties¶
The costume has no special properties. It worked as a convincing Bigfoot disguise from a distance, and was used with plaster-of-Paris footprint molds. Someone cleaned up the fake prints after the killing, leaving a snapped-off plaster toe and a few nice fake prints in the mud (Appalachia 06).
History¶
Discovery. Frotter Comstock reported a dead Bigfoot on his land. The team found a man in the costume at the base of a hill below Comstock's buildings, shot in the back of the head while standing, which Kurt judged to be about a .357 Magnum. Underneath were plain clothes with every tag cut out. Tattoos of an anchor on his bicep and a trident on his calf led Kurt to identify the man as a former Navy SEAL (Appalachia 06). Andrew announced the man was "capped"; the sheriff scolded him that every death, even in a Chewbacca costume, deserves gravity.
The theft. Derek, whom the team reached through the Gold Bug newspaper and met at the Spud Hut, said his costume had been stolen from the dry cleaners. The dry cleaner's owner admitted the storage-area latch had been broken for a couple of months, that several items vanished, and recognized the dead man as an out-of-town drifter he had seen hanging around (Appalachia 06). The man registered at the Motel and Suites as "John Doe"; he is later called Troy Cleaver.
Aftermath. The costume came up in Andrew's report to Big Bill: "We're not surveilling Bill Clinton. We're surveilling dead Chewbacca." (Appalachia 07)
The explanation. In Appalachia 09, the worker Clive said the conspiracy included a mercenary who melted the gold down. Kurt said he was pretty sure Jan had killed the mercenary, since a dead man in a Bigfoot costume with ex-military tattoos had been found in the forest. Clive confirmed that the dead man was the mercenary ("God damn it, he did the Bigfoot thing"). He said he did not know where the mercenary got the costume and that he had told him it was stupid because people would know it was Chewbacca. Clive added that the fake Bigfoot sightings were meant to discredit people who had seen workers that escaped, and that Jan Martense had told him the mercenary took care of the problem. See The Bigfoot Hoax. When Kurt later questioned Jan at Black Site Omaha, he said he assumed Jan had taken care of the mercenary in the woods, and Jan did not deny it (Walkers 01).