Ms. Tsarnaev began asking Tamerlan Tsarnaev or his brother to care for Mr. Larking when she wasn't available to work. Mr. Larking's wife, Rosemary, a quadriplegic, also needed help at home. Mr. Tsarnaev seemed to have found a kindred spirit in Mr. Larking. They became friends and had animated talks about politics, people close to the Larking family said.
Mr. Larking also gave him his readings, they said. A Wall Street Journal reporter recently visited Mr. Tsarnaev's apartment in Cambridge, Mass. and read a stack of newspapers, mostly borrowed from Mr. Larking, that allege nefarious conspiracies.
The papers included The First Freedom, an Alabama-based newspaper that espouses "equal rights for whites" and whose websites features a Confederate flag. Another was The Sovereign, a New York-based publication that alleges the U.S. is under the sway of Israeli lobbyists, and that Israel and the Department of Homeland Security were "deeply involved" in the Boston bombings. Neither paper returned requests for comment.
Mr. Tsarnaev got his own subscription to American Free Press, a paper that the Southern Law Poverty Center said promotes anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. A spokeswoman for the paper denied it had such an agenda, saying the paper publishes "news that the established media won't." She confirmed that someone bought Mr. Tsarnaev a "get acquainted" 16-week subscription in December. It expired in April, at about the time of the Boston Marathon attack.
[...]
Mr. Tsarnaev also had a marked-up copy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a long-discredited tract penned in Russia at the beginning of the 20th century. It describes an alleged plan by Jewish leaders to take over the world. Mr. Tsarnaev scrawled 22 words he translated from English to Russian on a back page, beginning with "gentile" and ending with "Mason."
Joanna Herlihy, who rented the apartment to Mr. Tsarnaev and lived two floors below, said he recommended she read it. Ms. Herlihy said she told her tenant to read the notorious origins of the text on Wikipedia, and "now I regret that I didn't have a follow-up conversation with him." The literary forgery is believed by historians to have been concocted by a czarist secret police officer.
Mr. Tsarnaev had an interest in a range of unseen forces. In a three-ring binder from his apartment, he printed out articles on hypnosis, and how to influence others with the power of suggestion.
Mr. Tsarnaev underlined chunks of a speed-seduction course by Ross Jeffries, "How To Create an Instantaneous Sexual Attraction in Any Woman You Meet," including monologues to create an "incredible" connection.
[...]
Mr. Khozhugov recalled how that year Mr. Tsarnaev visited him at college in Washington state and they spent a week together. They watched the movie "Zeitgeist," which called the Sept. 11 attacks a plot of power-hungry elites against the U.S.
Mr. Tsarnaev was interested in the so-called techno-utopian Zeitgeist movement, whose adherents believe in the coming collapse of money-based society and the advantages of an economy managed by computers incapable of corruption.
"He was fascinated with it, he was beginning to think that all sorts of things were connected by a conspiracy of some kind," Mr. Khozhugov said. "If you had a conversation with him, you'd get a feeling that he was still searching, and I'd get the idea that he was going in the wrong direction."
