Solar Eclipses & Woodrose Wine

A drug-world courtship that spans DEA stings, peyote visions, and a $600K wedding meltdown.

As Gordon Todd Skinner developed his drug dealing empire throughout Boston, the Caribbean, and Tucson, he befriended dozens who joined him in psychedelic capers. Most weren’t adjusted to the disorienting internal states, and he found himself babysitting novice trippers more often than he wished. Psychedelics allowed access to inconceivable realms, but they could also be lonely places. He came to value those who were experienced and could hold their own during voyages, and he particularly longed for partners with whom he could commute while inside psychocosmic spaces.

Kelly Rothe was attending a culinary school in Rhode Island, and dating a Boston marijuana dealer. While visiting her boyfriend, they dropped by a hotel where he planned to pick-up supplies from his main distributor, a man who was introduced by the alias P.C. Carroll.

When Rothe first laid eyes on Skinner, he was handing out bundles of marijuana to other dealers in the presidential suite of the Ritz-Carlton. It was 1987, and though he was only four years her senior, Skinner had already lost much of his hair and wore a beard—an anachronistic look back then. He struck Rothe as an equation she couldn’t quite solve.

The Hammer Drops

A bust seemed imminent; Skinner could sense it. In January of 1989, the Gloucester County Drug Task Force ran a sting on Skinner in which they attempted to buy $80,000 worth of marijuana from him. Eighty-two pounds of marijuana were discovered near a hotel in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, and Skinner was charged with possession and intent to distribute. Bail was set at a million dollars cash, and he ended up incarcerated in New Jersey on a marijuana-related kingpin charge.

From jail, he reached out to his former dealers, and by chance, Kelly Rothe picked up the phone. She remembered meeting Skinner in Boston, and there was a positive enough charge for the calls to continue.

“Whatever you’re interested in, he’ll find out about it and you’ll have the most inspiring conversation you’ve ever had about it,” Rothe says. “I started to see a lot of potential in him. I found myself wishing I could fall in love with him.”

While jailed, Skinner cooperated with the Drug Enforcement Agency on an investigation they were conducting involving international drug cartels. In September of 1989, he signed an informant agreement that sent him to the Caribbean on assignment. He continued romancing Rothe while island hopping: he sent her packages loaded with books and healthy lifestyle products and called from the Cayman Islands. They spoke for hours at night.

After the informant operations ended, he was remanded to jail in New Jersey. Four days before Christmas, he was freed and his charges were reduced to conspiracy to distribute marijuana plus unsupervised probation (later, this charge would be used by Oklahoma prosecutors to enhance his prison sentence from the standard 14 years to life). His stepfather, Special Agent Gary Magrini, flew up to New Jersey and escorted Skinner back to Tulsa for the holidays.

Totality in La Paz

Calls between Skinner and Rothe increased in frequency and energy, until they eventually met in person. In 1991, Skinner, Rothe and her younger brother Justin jetted to La Paz, Mexico just to witness a 7-minute total solar eclipse of July 11. On the Flagstaff leg of their vacation, they consumed peyote together—a first for Rothe and her brother.

“You can see the space between things that are supposed to be solid—they move, and you can see the vibration,” Rothe recalls. She spent the day dancing among anthropomorphized Aspen trees, their eyes smiling back at her. Justin had intense hallucinations, however, and seemed troubled by his visions. To this day, Rothe wonders if Justin had foreseen his death by asthma attack in 1998.

“I have those experiences still, where I see future things happening, and get answers about patients,” Rothe says.

“You believe that there is some relationship between what is perceived [during drug use] and the future?” I ask.

“Sure, yeah,” she says. “How can you understand God or this life potential? I could put it in words, but there’s a lot I don’t understand.”

Today, Rothe is a small-town doctor. Tanned and trimmed by summer hikes, she carries herself with confident ease; her smiles are angular and bright. Friends describe her as an earth-mother type, but she calls herself type A and aggressive. Those characteristics converged when she mashed a hiking sandal against the accelerator of her Prius. We rollercoastered through winding rural roads, eventually pulling up to her house enshrouded in a maze within the Blue Ridge Mountains. Rothe lives off the grid, forages the occasional family meal, and practices sustainable farming. She admits psychedelics still influence her lifestyle and her career. She’s board certified in palliative care, and she performs craniosacral and Reiki therapies for her patients.

“Breaking open those doors of perception helped me break through my traumas and to the other side of that,” she says. “To learn love and forgiveness— and not be just angry and rebellious.”

Goblets of Woodrose

Kelly Rothe knew that Gordon Todd Skinner was a seasoned drug dealer, a psychedelic expert, and a government informant. She decided to marry him. Rothe express-mailed her proposal to him in a decorated envelope. Skinner accepted the offer in a fitting ceremony. On November 17, they conjoined through a psychedelic engagement at the Westin New Orleans Canal Place hotel. Skinner made an extraction from Hawaiian Baby Woodrose (Argyreia nervosa) seeds and poured the elixir of ergoline alkaloids into gold-plated silver goblets that he had bought for the occasion¹.

“We had deep conversation, getting to know each other better, talking about what this commitment was going to be and what that might look like,” Rothe says. “When two people go into a trip with the same intention, it can be pretty powerful. We actually merged in a way that is hard to describe.”

As the psychoactivity intensified, they integrated through laughter and chatter over geeky topics like neuroscience and physics.

“Space is out of the variable, so there is not that distinct [sense of] solid between your physical selves. And then there can be communication that happens without language,” she says. “I wouldn’t call it a merging of souls, but lots of other solid things getting out of the way. It’s very intimate.”

The coalescence caused them to think their bodies conjoined and their minds swapped. Skinner recalls wondering how strange it felt to have a vagina; for Rothe, there was a visceral sense of separation as they came down from that experience.

“We literally were pulling away from each other like I might imagine an evolutionary being coming out of the water,” she says. “There was like a mucus between us, on our regular skin…. and then we pulled apart and came back into ourselves as individuals.”

For his part, Skinner felt as though Rothe had transferred a terrible cold to him by covering him with nasal discharge. Following the Hawaiian Baby Woodrose communion, Skinner presented Rothe with a platinum ring. She began wearing it that day.

Subscribers continue below, where you’ll hear Rothe describe her psychedelic union with Skinner in depth, see photos from the official wedding (including the planner), and learn more details about Skinner’s marriage to Rothe.