David Crowley began keeping a journal in April of 2014. He was twenty-eight years old, and he lived in Apple Valley, Minnesota, with his wife, Komel, and their four-year-old daughter, Raniya. The journal was “a life report, since I suspect my feelings right now in nostalgia or reflection might be of value,” Crowley wrote. By the time he stopped making entries, seven months later, he had inadvertently created a psychological document of which very few examples are known.

Crowley had been a soldier in Iraq and Afghanistan. Afterward, he had gone to film school, and in 2010 he began writing a script that he called “Gray State,” in which a totalitarian foreign regime conquers the U.S. government and a band of patriots form a resistance. On LinkedIn, Crowley described “Gray State” as “a film about a near future collapse of society under martial law.”

Crowley’s engagement with “Gray State” was consuming. “Every little part of this project is me,” he recorded himself saying. In addition to writing six very different drafts of the script, he made three trailers, for which he auditioned, rehearsed, and directed the actors; drew storyboards; designed costumes; found locations and got permits; acted as the director of photography, overseeing as many as four cameras at once; and composed music and special effects. As if inhabiting the world he was creating, he periodically cut his hair in a Mohawk and wore combat fatigues and body armor. An actor named Danny Mason, who helped write the first draft, told me that Crowley would take him on hikes through the woods at three in the morning. “We’d come to a clearing and he’d say, ‘See that field?’ ” Mason said. “ ‘Imagine there being a convoy there and fires in the distance.’ ”

Crowley posted a trailer for “Gray State” on YouTube in 2012. It has been watched more than two and a half million times, and the film has more than fifty-seven thousand followers on Facebook. Its supporters included “conspiracy theorists, survival groups,” Crowley wrote, “libertarians, veterans,” and “the military,” many of whom believe that the government has plans to impose martial law, confiscate guns, and hold dissidents prisoner in camps built by FEMA.

Crowley had a patchwork system of beliefs. He regarded himself as a Libertarian, but he identified with the left-leaning wing of the Party, not the militant one—being a soldier had made him a pacifist. After uploading the trailer, Crowley spoke at a Ron Paul event in Tampa, hoping to raise money. “Gray State,” he said, would explore such trends as “the slow yielding of our quiet American towns and streets to a choking array of federal surveillance grids, illegal police checkpoints.”

Through a crowdsourcing campaign, Crowley collected more than sixty thousand dollars, much of it after the conservative radio commentator Alex Jones had Crowley and Danny Mason on his radio show “Infowars,” in 2012, to discuss “the impressive film you’re working on.” The world depicted in “Gray State” was already “happening here,” Jones said. “The people who have hijacked our country, they’re admitting it. They’re admitting that we’re an occupied nation by foreign banks, they’re admitting they’re getting rid of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution.”

“We have people who are living in the Alex Jones world who know what’s going on, and the people who simply don’t,” Crowley replied. “Gray State,” he added, was factual and “could be described as a documentary.” (Jones declined my request for an interview.)

In January of 2015, Crowley and his wife and daughter were found shot dead at their home. Reports of their deaths appeared in the United States and abroad. The Huffington Post called Crowley a military man, and USA Today called him a filmmaker. The police determined that Crowley had shot his wife and child and then shot himself, but commentators on the Internet soon began saying that Crowley’s death seemed “suspicious” and “mysterious,” and that he had likely been murdered by government agents intent on preventing the movie from being made. Among certain conspiracy-minded, anti-government, Libertarian, and alt-right believers, Crowley has become a species of martyr. In January, the international hacking collective Anonymous, which declared war on Donald Trump last fall, posted a tribute to Crowley, suggesting that the government killed him. A spokesman, wearing a Guy Fawkes mask and addressing “my brothers and sisters of the world,” said that the circumstances do “not sound right.”

On Facebook, there is a page called “Justice for David Crowley & family,” which says that its purpose is to “help to clear the good name of David Crowley.” The page is overseen by an accountant in Minnesota named Dan Hennen. He and Greg Fernandez, Jr., a tech worker in California, conduct long discussions on YouTube in which they find fault with the police investigation and ask why someone whose future seemed so promising would kill himself.

Hennen believes that the crime scene was staged by Crowley’s killer. He mentions a sliding glass door at Crowley’s house that the police discovered slightly open—“Very suspicious in Minnesota in the winter,” he told me. Furthermore, no neighbors heard gunshots. “A forty-calibre gun, which is what the police found, is so loud that it would have woken up the whole neighborhood,” Hennen said. “I believe a silencer, or a suppressor of some sort, was used by the killers.”

These theories are contradicted by Crowley’s journal, which was given to me, along with videos and recordings, with the permission of Crowley’s family, by the filmmaker Erik Nelson, who produced “Grizzly Man.” For A&E IndieFilms Nelson has made a documentary about Crowley called “A Gray State,” which will have its première in a few weeks, at the Tribeca Film Festival. Nelson read the reports of Crowley’s death, which led him to watch the “Gray State” trailer. “It seemed incredibly well made,” he told me. “It was clear this guy was in command of all the skills necessary to his craft.” When he read that the police had found hours of videos and voice recordings on Crowley’s computer documenting his family and the progress of “Gray State,” he thought that they might be the basis for a film. Nelson saw Crowley as a solitary obsessive, fiercely making art in an unlikely place.

The journal is dominated by Crowley’s notes as he wrote “Gray State”—what he wished for it to be, his anxieties about whether he could manage it, and the audience he imagined it would reach. He also wrote about his ambitions in general (to have a screenplay produced by 2016, to be a millionaire by 2017), his feelings for Komel (“God I love that woman. Strong, beautiful, ferocious, and deadly intelligent”), and his determination to be a good father. As the entries progress, however, insights appear to arrive unbidden and to impose themselves on him. “I’m expecting to wake up somebody else,” he wrote. “Vast personality changes are happening too fast to write about every day.” And: “I am being prepped for some slide into oblivion or destiny.”

Crowley was losing his mind, and he didn’t seem to know it. Journals of people overtaken by psychosis are rare—accounts of madness tend to be written by people in the midst of their illness or retrospectively by those who have recovered. Crowley was handsome, gifted, and charismatic, but he was also deeply unsure of himself. He owned a number of self-hypnosis recordings meant to overcome his insecurities. He thought that the convulsive things that were happening to him were the result of his endeavor to become more confident, poised, and commanding. He thought that he was developing a new self.

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Crowley was born on July 7, 1985, the middle child of Dan and Kate Crowley. His brother, Dan, Jr., a personal trainer, was older by three years, and his sister, Allison, an architecture student, was younger by two. The three of them were brought up in Owatonna, Minnesota. Dan, Sr., is an engineer who has his own company, which makes equipment he designed to coat solar panels and architectural glass. He and David’s mother divorced when David was twenty.