Tag Archives: #jfk

Delusion, Ep. 24, Dale K. Myers

www.mattkprovideo.com/2025/10/11/delusion-ep-24-dale-k-myers/

Episode 24 of Fred Litwin’s YouTube show, “On The Trail of Delusion.”

A conversation with Dale K. Myers, author of “WITH MALICE” on the assassinations of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Dallas Police Officer J. D. Tippit.

Websites about Dale K. Myers:

https://www.jfkfiles.com/

https://www.oakcliffpress.com/

https://www.jdtippit.com/

TRANSCRIPT:

Intro:

I want to thank everybody for coming this afternoon. My name is Fred Litwin.

Noted author Fred Litwin and of course Fred is also the author of

I was a Teenage JFK Conspiracy Freak, On the Trail of Delusion and Oliver Stone’s film Flam the demagogue of  Dealey Plaza.

Fred Litwin is here. He’s a longtime author and certainly watcher of politics.

joining us uh Fred Litwin, great to have you here. Thank you very much.

[Music]

Okay, welcome to another edition of On the Trail of Delusion, where I try to separate the wheat from the chaff and try to give you something substantial on the JFK assassination rather than the usual grl you’ll find on the internet and on YouTube. And today my guest is Dale Myers. Dale Myers is a 50-year veteran of radio and television. He’s the winner of numerous awards for his work in the broadcast industry, including four Emmy awards for his computer animation work. Dale is a recognized expert on the JFK assassination. And over the last two decades, maybe three decades, he has served as an on camera expert and technical consultant for numerous television channels, including ABC News, the BBC, PBS, the Discovery Channel, and the History Channel.
So, welcome Dale Myers.
Hello, Fred. How are you?
Good. How are you?
I am excellent.
So, my first question is, you know, how did you get started in in researching the JFK assassination?
Kind of a strange thing. in 1975 I had my first radio job up in Cadillac, Michigan.
Actually in the next couple of days will be the 50th anniversary of KISS coming to Cadillac, Michigan.
So there’s a whole hoopla going on up there about that. But it was shortly after their visit. So actually probably in early 1976, one of the high schoolers came up and said, “Hey, our teacher showed us the Zapruder film.”

They had a bootleg copy.

And as you probably know, it hadn’t it had aired on national television, I believe in March of 75, but I hadn’t seen it. And I was anxious to see what it looked like. I said, “Well, can you get the address of where he got this bootleg Super Eight film?” And of course, it was Penn Jones that was selling these.

So, I ordered one. And when I got it, I thought, “Wow.” Of course, you see the head go back and you’re thinking, “Wow, that that looked like from the front or something.” So, I I wanted to learn more about it. I went to the local Cadillac library and I was looking for any book on the Kennedy assassination, specifically one that maybe talked about the Zapruder film and I found one on the on the shelf.

It was called 6 seconds in Dallas by Josiah Thompson, as people will recognize. And so I took that and I read that. I thought, “Wow, there’s a lot more to this than I ever thought.” And so I went back and got another book and another book and as you know, you’re off and running. Yeah. So uh you know it took me I think about two and a half to three years at at that time to crawl through the books and the magazines and the newspaper articles that were available.

Of course there was no internet.

So newspaper articles and magazine would be like in the vertical file they used to call that at the library. So, you know, after exhausting all of those, uh, someone uh, I wrote a letter. I was interested in the the visual stuff and, uh, I heard about the DCA film, which was a collection of 8 millimeter films of the motorcade.

I think I wrote to the National Archives. Marian Johnson was the curator at the time, and I expressed interest in anything they had on the DCA film. Well, they sent me uh an FBI document which listed the names and addresses of those members that were part of that uh association and they also sent it to an a guy out in Iowa. And so he ended up writing me a letter, hey, I I understand you’re interested in the DCA film. So again, this is before the internet, so this was the only way you really hooked up with other people. He then started send he had a vast collection of 8×10 black and whites. he would send me spares that he had. And so my collection began to grow and of course my interest and uh I ended up calling uh the secretary of the DCA and I was inquiring about whether there was still a copy around. As it turned out, he had his own personal copy. He was willing to sell me for 25 bucks. So I bought it and uh you know that’s how I kind of got started and eventually I really got an interest in the tippet shooting because of largely because of Mark Lane’s book. Uh he had written the most on the shooting up to that point that had been in print. I think he wrote his chapter was 14 pages long. Usually it was a couple of sentences or a few paragraphs in other books but he had the most uh that I had read about it. expressed an interest in that and I began to order stuff from the National Archives and you know I was working as a dish jockey they didn’t pay a squat so I had very few dollars to spend you know that was spare so to speak so I actually devised a plan I found this recently a list I would order two 8 by10s and they were like six six and a quarter at the time uh each and so I laid out a plan there was like 50 or 60 that I wanted I couldn’t afford to buy them all at the same time. So I would order like one or two like every month and then they would start coming in six months down the road they start coming in and then I’m I’m kind of leapfrogging. So it took about two or three years to acquire what in essence were the Warrant Commission exhibits on the tippet shooting. But uh you know I was kind of off and running at that point. So what what what you know I think you initially you believed there was a conspiracy but what what’s tell us a bit about your journey from into believing that Oswald was the lone gunman. Well I I tell people I I went the long way around the barn so to speak. Um and I also tell people that you know 90% of what’s written out there is conspiracy oriented. So you can’t if you’re reading the books out there you can’t help but walk away thinking there’s a conspiracy. And I certainly did. I mean, they read Sylvia Mar’s book uh on the tippet shooting, Mark Lanes, of course, I mentioned and you know, and then of course you had Josiah Thompson talking about the shooting in De Plaza. But, you know, yeah, I couldn’t help but think that there had to have been a conspiracy. And uh and so at at one point I started to focus on the tippet shooting because that seemed the easiest to be able to prove. You know, what I’m reading is, oh, he Oswalt’s frame for the tippet shooting. This is all designed to show he had a capacity for violence and therefore they could really hang the assassination on him as well. So I thought, well, if if it’s a frame up, and if it’s the obvious frame up that Mark Lane and the others are talking about, this should be it should be a cakewalk, right? So in Mark Lane’s book, as you know, he had he was one of the few books that had footnotes and he had the documents on the tippet shooting that he was referencing. So just like the photographs, I ordered all the documents from Marian Johnson at the National Archives and you know 6 months later you know you get the documents and I was shocked to be honest that what he had referenced was not only was it not true most of it wasn’t even in the context. So he’d take things out of context or he just flat out lied about it. And I guess the thing, you know, being naive at the time, I used to think that when a publisher published a book, they didn’t publish lies. They had to be facts. I mean, right? The publisher is not going to just publish lies. People would get sued, wouldn’t they? Well, apparently that’s not true. So, uh, one thing I did learn is I never bought a book after that that didn’t have footnotes and reference notes because, you know, and you know, there was a lot of books that came out, the the fast paperbacks that there was no reference notes or anything. There was no way to check what they were saying. So, uh, I was really uh, dismayed at the fact that, uh, Lane had basically lied in his book, Rush to Judgment, in particular about the tippet shooting. I mean, you can go through a lot of the other stuff, but in particular, I I got well verssed on the tippet shooting stuff. With my eyes kind of open, I started to use my uh role at the radio station to be able to open the door that might not have been open to other people. So, years ago, Fred, um before I got into the Kennedy assassination, when I was like, you know, 13, 8th grade or so, I really got a fascination with the Lincoln assassination. Now, not that I’m fascinated by assassinations, but this is just the journey I was on. And there was a book that was out, big picture book called 20 days. And uh I was just always fascinated by the Lincoln assassination, the conspiracy, and just really the crime itself, the the technical aspects of it. And I re I started researching that and I realized, wow, this happened like 150 years ago. I mean, everybody there’s nobody to talk to. They’re all dead. And it was sort of in the back of my mind that when I got into the Kennedy assassination, I thought, you know, here’s where you can make a difference because this is only when I started, it’s only 15 years earlier. And I thought a lot of these people are still alive, you know, and uh again, this is before the internet. So I would go like, let’s say I’m looking for John Smith or in the case of the tippet shooting, Bill Smith. Now you can imagine Smith is a last name and Bill pretty common name. There’s a lot of Bill Smiths in the Dallas area and there’s there was no reason for me to think that he still lived there but you know he had to start somewhere. So I would go to the white pages the telephone book right at the library and I would copy the three or four pages of Bill Smith’s. I would go home and it was like dialing for dollars. I would just start and are you the Bill Smith who used to let no and they’d hang you know whatever they’d hang up and I’d move on. So, I had these huge phone bills at the time, like $3 400 when they should be like 50 bucks. And uh but I would hit pay dirt. I would hit some of these guys. So, I would call from the radio station and it would enable me to feed the phone line through a tape recorder and I would roll tape on all these and make a transcript. And I got pretty good at at doing those. Now what was happening at the time this was 1983 and so I uh the 25th anniversary was coming up and I thought this’d be kind of cool to take these recordings and turn this into kind of a radio documentary kind of theater of the mind. I could play some actualities from the time period which I had begun to collect and then I had these interviews that were kind of exclusive. So and it was going to be on the whole case not just the tippet shooting. So, I would call with that as being sort of the the reason for the call. Listen, the 20th anniversary is coming up. I’d like to talk to you about the assassination. When I got when I talked to police officers, a lot of them were hung up would hang up on me because they’d been burned in the past. Yeah. You know, I wasn’t the first guy to call some of these people. And a lot of these guys were abused by the people that would call them. But occasionally, you would hit a good one. One of them being Jim Lavell was probably the nicest guy in the world. Yep. and he was very open. And the thing with Jim was is if he liked you and he gave you his stamp of approval, he would then open the door. He would vouch for you. So the other cops would then talk to you that you might not otherwise get. So I did uh like 25 or 30 interviews in that 1983 period. most of them with police and eyewitnesses that had not been interviewed before that nobody had ever heard of or had not given testimony to the warrant commission or in like Nick McDonald’s case had given testimony but Nick had been raped over the coals about the mysterious guy that fingered the guy in the back right in the front row there was mysterious guy at least that’s how it was written up turned out of course it was Johnny Brewer who he’s referring to but I could call these guys and ask them the questions that had been asked and left unanswered in all these right books that I’ve been reading. So, it kind of gave me a leg up to to do it that way. So, and I did do the radio documentary. It aired uh in Michigan. It was uh my the news director of the station I was working for uh had it sent to the AP for the AP awards. It actually won an honorable mention. Oh, nice. and and the judges did say it was the best radio documentary on that subject that they had ever heard. So, it was very encouraging to be able to do those kinds of things. Well, yeah, it’s a good thing you did. And I thank God you you found all those witnesses. I have to sort of stop for a bit of a commercial and basically show people the fact that this this book second edition of your book with malice is is just unbelievable and this belongs in everybody’s bookshelf. I mean it’s an incredible book. It is the ultimate guide to the tippet shooting, but also it’s more than that because it gives you a little bit of insight into conspiracy thinking and how to debunk things and what the truth is and uh full of pictures and also it humanizes JD Tippet. He’s not just a a name, somebody who was murdered. He was a a man, a husband, a father, um a real person and and a family who really deeply loved him. And you get a sense of the man in this book and that’s fantastic. Well, thank you. And you know, I got to say that the original version was the uh the kind of burnt orange uh cover in ’98 actually led me to meet the Tippet family, which allowed me to get the inside story about him and then update the book for the version that you just showed, the 2013 edition. And I was very happy to do it for them really because they, you know, I bought your book three times. I bought the first edition, the second edition, and the Kindle edition. Oh, well, thank you very much. And they’re all, you know, the Kindle is the only one still out there, and they’re they’re basically out of print. The you never see the blue one on eBay. I’ve noticed that. And and of course, there were far fewer copies of that that were actually printed. I printed 3,000 of the first edition, 500 of the 2013 edition, and it was really only done because I wanted JD’s sister Joyce to see her brother’s story in print, the the, you know, the family part of the story. So, what had happened is when the 98 book came out, at that time on Amazon, when you made a comment, they actually would include your email address. They don’t do that anymore. and uh uh one of the nieces of JD Tippet commented finally the true story about my uncle and had her email address and so I contacted her and we ended up talking on the phone that led to an interview with her and her sister which then you know they were kind of you know feeling me out and vouching for and then they brought in their parents which was Jad’s uh older sister and his uh his brother-in-law who he had known since they were 16. and they lived right next door on the farms. And uh and then they led me to Joyce, the the younger sister, the brothers. When I say I met the Tippet family, I don’t mean Marie and her children, although I did meet them, right? But she didn’t want to do an interview. And um largely because of something that had been written in the first edition of the book. And even though the the family went to bat for me and tried to get her to do an interview, she refused to do one. And I understood. But as it turned out, I ended up interviewing, you know, his a lot of his cousins, his close friends, people that you would have never uh gotten the story from. And I really think that I ended up getting much more than I would have had I just interviewed Marie. Right. Right. even though I would have loved to have done it. Um I did get a lot of the the backstory from other perspectives. So that was all good. And then uh when the 2013 anniversary was coming up, I thought, you know, I she really Joyce really wanted in the and Christine really wanted to have this part. They said, gosh, it’s too bad that this part of the story is family story wasn’t in the first edition. I said, well, I could do another edition. And so I did basically for them. And so that’s the second edition. And I I’ll tell you what, Fred, if I if I got nothing out of doing either book, meeting them and becoming very close friends and still friends with the family. Worth it. Absolutely worth it for sure. Um, and it’s it’s a fantastic section. You have a lot of pictures as well. So it’s it’s really really terrific. And and I think one of the saddest things to me about the JFK assassinations is that people is is sort of the victims. There’s so many victims of the conspiracy idiots out there. People well like the Tippet family where you have JD Tippet accused of being involved in the assassination. I mean this is this is just such shameful behavior by the conspiracy community. Yeah. And uh unfortunately some of the early conspiracy types approached the family and you know they told me later we we wanted to talk about JD. We wanted to talk about our brother but these people would turn on us. One in particular a very well-known researcher and uh I don’t remember if I mentioned who it is in the book but everybody would know who it is. Yeah. He actually went to her house. She o opened the door. Open arms. Come on. See, he he was over there for two or three days and uh toward the end he said, “So tell me the truth now.” And she was appalled and they got into an argument and her husband come out and threw this guy out of the house. He had managed to she gave one of the the smiling photo. We’ve seen the smiling photo of JD taken in ‘ 61, which is actually a a closeup of his face from a much larger photograph. She gave that to him because that was uh when he was when he was killed, they really the family didn’t have that many photos. And so this was one they thought really represented him smiling. That’s the way they remember him. And then of course there was that police uniform photo from 1957. So those two photos sort of hit the market, but the smiling photo was later. So it wasn’t one of the Warren Commission exhibits. The Warren Commission used his 1952 ID photo when he joined the force and then that 57 photo of him in with the police cap on the uniform. And then the smiling photo came out later because this researcher got it from Joyce and he put it out there. And of course uh she was appalled at his uh you know what he had done. And then I found out in interviewing Murray Jackson, the same guy did the same thing to him. befriended Murray. And Murray was the nicest guy in the world. I wrote in the book, it was like putting on a pair of slippers. This guy was the nicest guy in the world, you know. And here’s the thing, Fred, and you kind of touched on it. When you meet these people in real life, you realize, oh, this guy reminds me of my uncle or my grandfather. You immediately recognize the personality type, and you’re thinking, Murray Jackson was the dispatcher. I know they’ve talked about, oh, he dubbed in these commands to tip it after the fact to cover up whatever they’re imagining. It’s like, there’s no way this guy’s involved in anything like I mean, all that stuff melts away as soon as you meet these people. So, that was a nice privilege to have, but at the same time, I tried to convey that sense in my book so that people that hadn’t met him could at least get a sense of the way I felt when I when I met him. But the same researcher had done the same thing, betrayed Murray and he was he was appalled years later he was telling me he said I couldn’t believe we had exchanged Christmas cards and everything and this guy just turned on me and said okay Murray tell me the truth what really happened what you were part of it right and it’s like oh my god so a lot of these guys if it didn’t happen to them specifically they heard about it and they were jaded so I’m coming in the wake of that kind of stuff and trying to get these guys to open up, right? And some of them would not talk at all. They just said, “I want nothing to do with it.” And just hang up the phone. I mean, this sort of reminds me of what’s happened to Ruth Payne, you know, this who went to in to interview Ruth and she lets him in and does all these interviews and all of a sudden it’s all about her being a, you know, member of the CIA, right? Just crazy stuff. And I went to her talk there in Irving uh was a couple maybe five years ago and I was with uh my good buddy Todd Vaughn. And so she began talking and we got they got about halfway through and I leaned over to him. I said, “So what do you think?” He goes, “Everything I thought about her has melted away.” And of course we had both heard all the conspiracy talk. And I couldn’t agree more. It’s like okay this this is not anything like the person we’ve been told that she is completely different. It’s just like I say when you meet these people not only does it give it a sense of reality uh because you see the personality taste but it also gives you an insight into this event as a historic event. It’s like other things that you may experience in your life and you look back on it, you go, “Wow, I get just three or four fleeting moments of that memory of of a whole weekend. You go to a concert. I just remember this one or two songs and something maybe happened when we went in and that’s it.” And yet when when conspiracy people interview these people and and I was like this at the beginning, so not to be too tough on them, but you kind of you’re expecting them to be able to remember things that you wouldn’t be able to remember about something that happened last week, let alone 25 years earlier. The best story to illustrate this, Fred, was uh I called Bill Alexander, and he was easily the most colorful person I ever talked to. This guy swore like a sailor or a truck driver, but he looked like your grandfather. So, it was very disarming and uh but yeah, he used every four-letter word and then some that he had combined in new extraordinary ways. So, very colorful guy. But at one point uh and I had interviewed him on the phone and in person, but during our interview on the phone in ‘ 83, I started, you know, I’m I’m doing the conspiracy thing where I’m I’m drilling down deep. Okay. So, so you went here and then what happened? You’re there about 5 minutes cuz I really I would do a lot of heavy research. I would find out everything they they had said uh either testimony wise or in a newspaper article. I would then have a list of questions that I would ask them in a specific order um with the one I thought might they might hang up the phone on me. I would ask that last so I get everything in that I needed. Right. But uh but I generally would call them and ask them to, you know, walk through your story and let them tell it unencumbered. That would give me questions that I hadn’t written down in advance. And then I would come back and I’d walk them through the story and have them go through slower while I’m asking questions. And I actually had an FBI guy that told me after I finished interviewing him, he says, “Wow, I just want to compliment you on your interview technique.” Because by doing it that way, you don’t taint the key is don’t taint the person you’re talking to with whatever you’re thinking happened. I started drilling down deep on a specific and he goes, “Let me ask you answer you this way.” He says, “I didn’t have a stopwatch. I didn’t have a tape measure.” He says, “This thing was like a blur.” He says, “I remember specific things very vividly, but the rest of it,” he says, “I don’t remember that much. And I certainly couldn’t tell you, you know, that this happened and then two minutes later or two and a half minutes later this happened. And so that was kind of an eye opener. I realized, okay, yeah, these guys, you can’t ask them questions like that and expect them to to know the answer. I remember somebody asked me, “Did you ever when you talked to Tia Bolley, who is the uh citizen uh who called in on Tippets Police Radio to report the shooting?” And he reportedly looked at his watch and said it said 110. And of course, everybody has used that uh ad nauseium to claim that the shooting happened much earlier than it actually did. And so they would they asked me, “Did you ever ask him about his watch?” And I was thinking, I don’t remember. And I had to actually go back and look at the transcript. And I was, as I was reading it, I was kind of, you know, you started to relive. I’m remembering, oh, I remember, you know, I remember the phone call. I remember him saying these things. And I remember, oh, that’s right. About halfway, this was after the Alexander phone call. And I remember about halfway through thinking, there’s no point in even asking this guy about his watch because a this is 25 years later. He’s not either way. It’s not you could never it would never hold up. If he said, “Yeah, I remember my watch was accurate.” There’s no way that would be believable. You couldn’t hang your hat on it any more than uh most people don’t know his interview in which he said that was actually an affidavit that was two weeks later. You know, he went on vacation. He came back, I think it was December 12th, uh and then gave that affidavit. So, and and so the accuracy of the watch was irrelevant. And I thought I by then I already had the Dallas police tapes and I knew there was a better way to determine the time of the shooting than his recollection of whether his watch was accurate enough or not. And of course it couldn’t have been accurate because the evidence is overwhelming that that shooting happened much later than he remembered from his watch reporting. You learn when you interview a lot of these guys that u that uh and I’m always afraid to to follow behind somebody else who’s done an interview of somebody because they’ve ruined the person. I remember FBI agent Bardwell Odum. I interviewed him and he he was out at the arrest scene at the Texas theater and he had done like a it was a three-s sentence report so there wasn’t much to the story but I thought you never know there could be you know what was the buildup. I wanted to find out why he was out there and so forth. Anyway, he told me this hilarious story. He says, “Yeah, there was a guy he called me one year.” He said, “Uh, can I come down there? I’m gonna fly down. I’m come down there and interview you.” He said, “Okay, if you want to, you know.” So, they arranged a day. The guy comes down. He says he sat here in my kitchen and talked told me for five hours what he thought had happened and then he left. He didn’t even ask me. He didn’t ask me anything about anything that he was involved in. and he just thought that’s all this guy wanted. And you know, I think there’s a lot of people that are kind of amateur armchair detectives that, you know, they’ll track down one of these guys that, you know, now it’s 30 years after I talked to him and there, you know, the guy’s memory is shot. He was probably not. You got people asking Bardwell Odell, do you remember writing a a 302 report on on uh showing Tomlinson the bullet or something? I don’t remember. Well, of course you don’t. He the man conducted thousands of interviews. I know. He doesn’t interview. Then they say, “Well, he didn’t do it. It didn’t happen.” Yeah. And then they said, “The 302 reports must have gotten deep sixed because all we have is this is this uh basically a uh conglomeration of various 302 reports.” Well, no, they didn’t do a 302 report. This is the report. That’s right. Just this is the report, you know. So, there are no 302 reports. And all those agents took notes and then the notes were destroyed for the very reason that we’re talking about so that they’re not grilled and questioned about now wait a minute on this note you added this word and in the report you left that word out. Now why is that? No. The way Hoover wanted it is you once it was committed to a final report. That’s it. This is the record and everything else goes bye-bye. And you know, you can understand that because you know, I mean, I’ve got stuff from my interviews and you know, people say, “Well, you know, how come we’ve never heard his interviews?” Well, first off, it’s my private property and uh eventually I’m planning to have this donated to some library, right? So, somebody will eventually get access after I’m long gone, and they’ll find out that everything that I’m saying is absolutely true. What? There’s no reason to not tell the truth. It’s all there. And uh so anyway, it’s uh I you know I think we’re past the part of being able to interview these pe most of these people are all gone, right? The vast majority of the And so but now and I predicted this years ago, Todd and I would be sitting around and I’d say, you know, eventually they’re going to be interviewing the cousin. Yeah. It’ll be the son of the guy and then it’ll be it’ll be his son. It’ll be the grandson of the guy. And so like you got they’ll ask you Erlene Roberts, you know, great grandson. Well, well, did she did did Oswwell come in at 1257 or did he come in at 1259? What did she tell you? You know, right? And then you hear, you know, and then we got this guy out in Australia who interviewing uh with the Markham family. Actually, it’s the daughter-in-law. So, it’s her son’s ex-wife. I guess he’s deceased now, but I think they were divorced. But regardless, it’s like, what? And then what she’s telling isn’t got any relation to reality. I mean, it’s not even close. You can tell, you know, when you talk to somebody, and I know people say, well, you know, like Jack Tatum, he came he came out 15 years later. You know, it’s that’s not credible because it wasn’t at the time. Well, credibility has more to do than just the chronology. There’s a lot going on there. Just like uh the people that ran uh the Dean’s Dairy Way, right? That I ended up just by happen stance. Well, they contacted me. That was a thing. Their grandson, I guess, contacted me after seeing a write up and saying, “Oh, you know, there’s a part of the story you don’t know about. I ended up interviewing them, but what they’re telling me fits in. You know, there’s some skewed things, but basically it does fit in with the the timeline, the chronology and with what we know is true about when you play telephone, you know, they get skewed and if everybody nobody knows what I’m talking about. There’s used to be a game you’d play telephone or you’d have people in a circle and somebody would start something and you’d pass it on. and they’d whisper it and then the last person would announce what it was and it had absolutely no resemblance to what had begun, what was actually said the first time because each person heard something different or added their own take to it. And that’s kind of what happens when you go through multiple hands with a story like that. So the big question I have for you is well who killed Tippet? Well, it’s obviously Lee Harvey Oswald, right? I mean, you know, you one of the things is if you look, and this is one of my big things, put things in a chronological order. And when you do that, you start to see how this plays out to the people in the order in which it’s happening to them. And then when they’re talking about it, you can see from their perspective, you know, how their part of the story fits in. I’ve always said that I know more about the shooting than the people who are actually there because I know all the parts. I have sort of this omnipotent view, if you will. I can I can step back from the trees and see the forest whereas each of the trees has their own perspective and that’s all they know or a couple of little interactions with others. And and so the uh if if you put things in chronological order, all of a sudden it becomes crystal clear, you know, what happened. Look, and the bottom line is is Oswwell’s caught red-handed with the murder weapon in his hand 45 minutes after the shooting. And when he stands up, he says two things. And for a long time, I thought it was one or the other. And that then that the two things that he supposedly said kind of got skewed. But I’ve I’ve been recently going back over that whole thing. And I’m I’m convinced that in the earliest retellings, he actually did say both things. He said, “This is it and it’s all over now.” So, I mean, two sentences that show resignation to what to what if he didn’t shoot just shoot a police officer and of course more than likely killed President Kennedy as well. Yeah. that whole, you know, so my book picks up, as you know, from after the assa, from the time of the assassination, the shots of Oswald’s escape from the Texas School Book Depository, how he got out to Oakliff, how he encountered Tippet, how he makes his way to the theater, and how he gets arrested. And all that happens within a 45minut span, and you know, all the viewpoints, police, spectators, it they all dovetail. It all overlaps. There’s little things that you know don’t agree completely, but that that would be expected. And so the people that claim, oh, this is all just a frame up and they coers these witnesses to no because it doesn’t read like that. They would the thing would be more in lock step with each other. The fact that things are skewed and there’s a little bit of difference in each story tells you, oh, this is the real thing. This is what happened. So I guess Larry Kfar didn’t did not kill Tippet. You’ve seen that story lately? Yeah, I have seen some of the craziest stuff written. And I uh I hesitate to use the names of the people that write some of this stuff because I don’t want to give them any more glory, if you will, or validation uh than their story deserves, which is nothing. But there’s one guy that uh just writes page after page. It’s like a stream of consciousness page after page and post this on these uh on the education forum, the UK forum. It you read this and it’s like I I I get three or four pages in. I’m already lost. What’s the point? I I’ve forgotten what the point is. But he actually had uh yeah, he’s got Larry Craford there. Uh and he’s got him in order to put his right hand print on the fender of the car and shoot with the left hand. He’s got this guy twisted into a pretzel in his mind and just concocting things just right out of the blue. And uh you know there’s him and then there’s of course that Harvey and Lee site and the guy that runs that website, Jim and you everybody knows his last name. Just totally made up Westbrook and Croy are in on it. They’ve got these two cops killing this other cop for they don’t really explain why, but somehow Tippet’s a dirty cop. But again, if you read the family stuff, it’s like there’s no way that’s even remotely true. And so, you know, I really have distanced myself from all that. I used to get into uh the arguments early on and uh and I found that it didn’t matter what kind of logic and rationale you used, they completely reject it. And so, there was no point. And a lot of those same people from 30 years ago have resurfaced. are back out there on the forums trying to validate their existence on the planet with absolute just rubbish. So I really feel sorry for people you we used to think and maybe you remember this when the internet first started I used to think wow this would be great for the JFK research not only will I be able to contact other people easier but you’ll be able to you know have you know good discussions and do the research and work together and so forth. It’s like none of that’s happened. It’s filled with crazy people. They’re just absolutely lunatics. The the only thing I I would say is is that, you know, I I know that if I fight with some of these zealots on the education forum, I’ll never never convince them of anything I say, no matter what. But I do think there are some people who lurk who just sort of are watching that you can influence, you know, who can see, oh, there’s sort of some sane people around who uh aren’t super uh crazy when it comes to arguments and they present some interesting arguments. So, I think you could win people that way, but the zealots, I mean, forget it. I mean, they’re they’re they’re unreachable. No. And so, I leave it to guys like you to take those people on. I did for a while. Now, it’s your turn, Fred. Yeah, you take them on and eventually there’ll be somebody else that’ll pick up the the baton and they’ll run with it. They do need to be challenged. I agree. And I do write occasional blog articles. Uh when it’s when it’s what I like to do is let them take all the rope they need and then when they’re done or when I think they’re done, then I’ll just wind that back in and let them hang themselves with it because they say some of the craziest stuff that’s just so easily unproved. Uh, I’ll just say one thing. For instance, years ago, you know, I bought a copy of the Dallas Police Tapes from Pen Jones. He was selling the the ZRA film and the Knicks films and and he had the Dallas Police Tapes, which the pedigree was actually uh from Judy Bonner, who got them from Marie Jackson, who got them from JC Poles. I mean, all this stuff kind of dubtales, but those tapes have been out. And it wasn’t until recently when I realized they’re not even nobody ever digitized that whole set and put them online. So most of these guys that are talking, they’re arguing about what’s in the transcripts and how the discrepancy in the transcripts and I’m thinking you don’t need the transcripts anymore. We have the recordings. Yeah. What what are you looking at the transcripts for? It doesn’t give you the time, you know. So the transcript shows a time check of 116 and then the next one is at 119. And I think in one of the transcripts there’s a typo and it says 110 and then they and then it’s typed over and says 119. So somebody’s making a big deal. Look, they’re altering they’re altering the transcript. They’re not altering anything. First off, you if you listen to the recording, you would see that 3 minutes went by between that 116 time check and the 119 one. So it’s can’t be 110, which is which comes up after 116 to begin with. And in fact, I there’s a Warren Commission document where they point this out. They said, “Hey, there’s a problem with this transcript.” They they noticed it back in 1964 and said, “This can’t be because the earlier check is 116. How can it go from 116 to 110 and then 119?” So that that’s why that was changed because it’s an obvious typo. But so you get people arguing about the time of the shooting and uh and what I love is they absolutely dismiss everything Helen Markham said except that 106 time that she gives for the time of the shooting which is a guess because in one of her early reports she said when they asked her about the time she says around 1:30. So they of course they ignore that one because the 106 is so much better. But obviously it can’t be 106. If you just listen to the the recordings and yeah they weren’t continuous but once the tippet shooting happened all that activity it the tape is almost uh continuous right for a large portion of it is continuous and all you have to do is do a linear regret regression. I I said that right in the front of my book and people act like they don’t know what the hell I’m talking about. All right. Well, type in linear regression and figure it out. I mean, it’s not that hard. You’re basically just plotting a a line on a on a graph and you’re seeing you’re seeing if the time checks that they’re given are falling within a parameter. Look, I was a disc jockey for years, right? We had a we had a sweep clock, right? And you would it you know, if I had a break that’s coming up and it it was scheduled for 110 and let’s say it’s really 109, I would just say it’s 110. Yep. you know, because it it didn’t it didn’t really matter. And then there was a sweep hand, so you know, you weren’t doing it to the second anyway. But I would I would find that generally speaking, if you looked up and saw where the sweep hand was at, if you were about 15 seconds on the sweep hand before the before the the spot-on minute at the top up until about 45 seconds after, you would probably say that minute. So, let’s say it’s 12 known. So 15 seconds before at 11:59 45 seconds you might start saying 12 noon and you would say 12 noon from then all the way till actually 12 noon plus 30 seconds or maybe 45 and then right in that 45 range you would tend to say it’s now 12:01 right so basically you know there’s sort of the think of it as sort of this 45se second floating window and so when I did the linear regression I’m looking at this and I’m imagining, okay, so here’s uh in particular, I think they use the 119 time check and they mention it three or four times. And that’s really the best when you find those instances where they mention that time check several times because you can then take that and you kind of slip this back and forth to test. Okay, so the first time he says 119, is that exactly 119? And the last time he says it, well, so let’s say it’s a minute later. Is now is he has he skewed the time a little bit? Let’s try it. So if I slip the whole thing this way back a minute earlier, so that his last 119 is actually 119. How do the rest of his time checks line up? And how do the time checks before that line up? Well, you find it that doesn’t work. So basically I do a linear regression of all the time checks and then you slide it back and forth and find the sweet spot where it actually matches right it’s precise during all of that time. Now is that exactly accurate supposed real time? Well no as as JC B said there’s no way really to correlate the tape recordings with real time. What’s real time? Are we talking atomic time in Washington DC? Uh, are we talking based on what how they’ve set their clocks in Dallas in the dispatchers’s office? So, there’s no real way. But we know it’s not five minutes off. Yeah. Yeah. It’s not, you know, it’s not 10 minutes off. No, you’re within 60 seconds of the real time. And so just for to put together my chronology, I then attached seconds because I’m measuring between events. So if the tape recording is running in real time and in some of the like I say right after the shooting, there’s a lot of activity. So it is pretty much running in real time. You can measure between this statement and that statement. That’s exactly 15 seconds. So I can say if he says it’s 119 here and that’s 119, this is 119 15. and so on and I could work through the whole thing. It’s not designed to say, okay, that thing happened exactly at 119 and 15 seconds. But it is designed to say that happened after the event that happened at 11910 and before the thing that happened at 11920, right? The chronological order is correct. The exact time could skew a little bit. And when it comes to the tippet shooting, you don’t, you know, we’re not talking about something where you need to be that precise anyway. Um, you know, Oswald, the the whole thing. Could Oswald have made it to the tippet shooting scene in time. And again, I was a conspiracy theorist, so I I know all the arguments. I know where the skeletons are buried. So, the the whole idea of that betrays the fact that, well, look at all the evidence that shows eyewitness accounts, the physical evidence that that he is there at the time of the shooting. So, therefore, he had to have made it. So, now you have to go back to, okay, so when was the last time he was seen? And then of course when when you really investigate that you find out okay it’s actually there’s a margin there’s a window when he could have got to his rooming house and it’s actually earlier than everybody thinks. Just because Erlene Roberts said he got he came in about 1. Now what does that mean? Does that mean it’s 10 to one? Does that mean it’s 5 to one? Does that mean it’s 10 after one? you know, so he and and then she said he was at one point she said he was only in his room long enough to put on the jacket and come back out. So she kind of uh suggested it was maybe 30 seconds or less. And then of course she made the statement where he was in there three or four minutes. And you and I both know plenty of people that when you ask him about timings, they’ll use the term minutes and not seconds when they mean seconds. Yeah. And you know because it’s just a frame of they just mean a short period of time and a lot of people have no sense of time. Being a disc jockey I actually got an an internal body clock after 10 years. I can tell when 3 minutes have gone by because I would know I’ve got so much time to get down and get a cup of coffee and come back up. I got to be back in the studio before that song ends. So you get a sort of an internal body clock. And I think cops, people that work jobs where the clock is an important factor in what they’re doing, I think they developed a body clock. So, I’m just saying that uh you know the that whole timing of when JD Tippet is is uh what time was he shot has been so misused and so mischaracterized. So using the tape recordings you find that the you know T uh or rather Domingo Benvitas he said he got in he couldn’t work the radio and you hear this mashing button sound again if you only have the transcripts and you don’t have the recording so you don’t know any of this right you don’t see somebody’s mashing the button like they’re they’re keying the mic but they’re not saying it. So they’re hitting the button and letting it go and what he’s probably doing is that’s he’s pushing the button down letting it go and he’s talking and of course they can’t hear that. So then he’s listening and nobody’s saying anything in response. So he he imagines it again and does the same thing. And uh now I’m I’m imagining that because I’m trying to figure out, okay, it didn’t work. Something like that had to have happened. And we can hear him mashing the button for almost a minute before Tia Bowie comes on who said that he walked up and here’s this here’s Domingo Benvitz in the front. He didn’t know his name, but he said there was a Mexican fellow there. He didn’t know how. He said, “I don’t know how to work it.” He takes the microphone and so from the last mash button there’s a short pause 10 seconds or 15 seconds and then all of a sudden Bowie comes on it’s clear as a bell. So you can see how this all lines up with both the stories that they told and the sounds we’re hearing. And when you wind that back from Bowie’s call, which if you look at all the time linear time regressions and the the time checks after that starts at about I think it now don’t quote me on this, it’s in the book, but I think it was 11734 something like that is when he first comes on and he talks for about 40 seconds. So, just after 118. Um, and if you wind that back, you can hear Bowi almost or I’m sorry, Domingo Benvdas almost a minute earlier mashing the button and we know that he didn’t jump right out of the truck. He said the guy went around the corner and so it’s not that hard. We know the distances involved. He he described him as trotting. We and everybody else did too. He’s he’s trotting to the corner around the corner. So you know, okay, it’s about 25 to 30 seconds to do that over 150 ft. And he said that he thought it was a domestic dispute. He thought the guy lived in the corner house, so he was afraid to come right out. But we also know that Helen Markham after when he went around the corner. The Davis girls have come to the front door. They’re seeing Helen Markham screaming, pointing, and saying, “He killed him. He killed him.” And then by her own account, Markham said as she ran to Tippet at that point. So it’s hard to imagine that Domingo Benvitas would be still sitting in his truck 30 seconds later when Helen Markham arrives at the body and we now know that other people are starting to come out of their homes. So the the idea that he sat Yeah, I believe he testified, I sat in the truck for several minutes. This is another incident where people are using the term minutes. And what they really mean is a short period of time, an unknown short period of time, but not necessarily minutes. And when you look at all that, you can see it’s probably a much shorter period of time. So anyway, you work all back. I ended up with my time of the shooting is at about 11430. So just before that’s when Oswalt stops Tippet. They’d probably have a 10-second uh conversation, nothing longer. And it occurred to me that um one of the and let me just say this, I don’t think JD Tippet had any idea that this was the presidential assassin or that he was in any danger. Generally, police officers don’t like somebody approaching the car when they’re seated because you can’t respond. And so I know some some people we we don’t know if Tippet called Oswald over to the car or he came over on his own valition, but I I I suspect Tippet wouldn’t have called him over to the car simply because he would have rather get gotten out and talked to him rather than be sitting in the car. But he could have. It’s possible, I guess. I’ve heard some people just as an aside say, “Yeah, it’s it’s very tight. It’s he’s just there. He’s just in time to get there.” that that made him hard for them to believe he did it. And I’m thinking, well, it’s not like he’s standing around waiting to shoot somebody. Of course, it’s just enough time to get there. And reality is very tight. I mean, by very nature, it has to be very tight. But yes, people don’t understand the whole nature of an alibi. If you really want to prove an alibi, you can’t say it would take you five minutes and you would only have you really only had 5 minutes and 4 seconds or you have to have you have to have something extreme to really prove an alibi. Exactly. what we’re all what we’re all doing when we recreate the the walk is proving it’s it’s possible. That’s it. It’s possible. And he had the jacket zipped up. I think when he leaned down, he’s got to be sweating. I’m thinking his hair’s got to be wet. It’s It’s stuck to his forehead. And if I’m a police officer, that’s the kind of thing that looks suspicious. You’d be thinking, well, it’s 68 degrees. Why wouldn’t you just take the jacket off and carry it? I mean, why has he got this thing zipped up? I also wonder whether his hair was disheveled because Bledsoe said that he looked a bit crazy on the bus. Maybe his hair was a bit disheveled as well. And uh it could have been and it was a windy it was considerably windy. Um and then there’s another thing that came out. Um the BBC did an interview with An McCraven. Now they pronounce it as McCravy. It was phonetically pronounced. But if you if you look in the uh if you look in the U city directory, there was a Charles Mc Raven M Capital R a V I N right and his wife’s name was Anne. And so that fits. So it’s not Anne McCra. It’s not Anne McCravy, it’s Anne McCraven. But in her BBC interview, she said that she saw the guy that eventually shot Tippet, who we know is Oswald, run by her house. Then she said, so in her chronology, the guy runs by and then the police car pulls over. The police officer got out and the guy shot him, you know, in a wink of an eye that quick. What intrigued me though was her statement that the guy ran by her house because it occurred to me, wait a minute, he can’t be running he can’t be running east on 10th, right, with Tippet driving up behind him because Anne McCraven lived in the house that was east of the shooting scene. If he’s running past her house, he’s got to be running toward the corner. And then that made sense with the chronology. She says he ran by the house, then the police car pulls over. So that got me to thinking that. Now my my theory that I proposed in the book, and that’s all it is. It’s just a theory, but it’s based on the eyewitness accounts. You had two groups of witnesses. One that said he’s walking west. We’re talking about Oswald. And one that says no, he’s coming from the east. And for a long time, people were were trying to say it was one or the other. And it occurred to me, well, wait a minute. What if what if it’s not one or the other? What if they’re both right? He is coming from the west. Does a quick about face and then is walking east. And that’s what causes Tippet to Well, when you realize where if he’s walking and where he stopped where he stopped by Tippet, I figured I back timed. Okay. Where would he make the turn? Where would he turn around? How close to the corner? We know he didn’t pass the corner because this was my main argument is Scoggins never saw him. He’s the cab driver sitting at the corner having lunch. He never saw him before the shooting. He he thought he was he thought he was walking west or at least he said I he was facing west when I first saw him. And frankly the cab would have been parked right there at the sidewalk where the intersection was. So, if Oswald had been coming from the east, as the Warren Commission said, he literally his pant leg would have brushed right against the the cab. How could how could he miss that? So, my thought was, okay, he’s coming from the other direction. Does an about face before he reaches the corner and is walking back. And as it turns out, there’s a bunch of trees and so forth, but there’s kind of a clearing right toward the the corner. And I think he’s just reaching that clearing. And here’s Tippet approaching. And they would have eye contact. Well, now add in the An McCraven thing. What if Oswalt’s walking briskly toward that corner, spots the approaching, the tippet car is quite a ways down the street, but he sees and he thinks, I got to get around the corner before he gets there. So, he starts running, runs past McCraven’s house, and it’s almost to the corner and realizes, now this is again all speculation, but realizes, I’m not I’m not going to make it. I’m not going to get to the corner before he gets there. So, he slams on the brakes, turns around, and starts walking back the other direction. Now, the only thing I’ve added into this that’s different from what’s in the book is I’ve added the possibility he actually might have been running that last few seconds before Tippet spot him, which would just look even more suspicious. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the other thing that people don’t really factor in as well is that is that Oswald on his way to Tenth and Patton could have, you know, walked um through people’s gardens, backyards, and stuff and uh, you know, there were fewer fences back then, so maybe he didn’t, you know, he could have taken a more d a more direct route. Who knows? Yeah. And nobody’s ever really going to know. I’ve seen people re online recently speculating. We’ve all have. I did the same thing. What if he went this way and went that way? They’re trying to get him around to be coming back from the west, but they use the most, you know, the most the furthest route and they say, “Oh, it’s not possible he could.” No. Again, as you said earlier, to create an alibi, you got to look what’s the shortest the shortest possible way he could get there. And then if that doesn’t fit the window that’s available to him, then you might have something. But of course, it fits the window that’s available to him because all the other evidence again show that just supports it that yes, it’s him. There’s no question about it. So, the most direct route, we come right down Beckley. You do a little zigzag at Davis uh Patton to 10th and then he walks right down 10th in the opposite direction heading east, gets around close to Marcellis, returns and comes back the other way. And I remember Gary Mack years ago said, “Well, Dale, you would have walked right past Helen Markham and Scoggins and all these people and they didn’t see him.” And I and I had to remind him and other people have made the same argument recently. It’s like, no, the the other people aren’t sitting there waiting for the shooting. Look, Scoggins is at the gentleman’s club and he comes up only after he’s only in his cab a couple of, you know, a couple of seconds, maybe a minute, starting to eat his lunch when this happens. So, he’s not even in his cab. Roswell would have come by the first time. Helen Markham wouldn’t have left the washeteria yet by her own account when he came by the first time. Uh Bert and Smith were at their brother his Bert’s brother’s house over on 9inth and then they said they came back to his house over at at the corner there at at Denver and uh and 10th and again so they wouldn’t have been there the first time. So actually it’s almost as if Oswwell would have come through the neighborhood and then all the players moved into their position as he’s coming back. So yeah, it it could have still happened that way. I I tell you, Fred, I’ve spent more time thinking about this stuff, right, than anybody on the planet. And so, uh, I know the story pretty well. I know where the holes are and where they’re not. So, do you want to show us? You have some computer stuff. Do you want to show us? Yeah. All right. So, these are these are the color versions of the graphics that I used uh created for the book. And, uh, so this kind of gives you the the overall lay of the land. Uh, this is Jefferson Boulevard. If you can see the little hand motion here. Yeah. Uh here here’s here’s Tenth and Patton. This intersection here. And if we zoom in, this is where Tippet’s police car ends up stopping. And as everyone can see here, Tenth comes down, does a little elbow, and then this is Marcelis here. And that uh the bus stop where Oswalt’s transfer was good would have been right here at this corner. And this is the library right where Adrien Hamby parked his car here and ran across the lawn and uh CT Walker was driving down here and saw him run across the lawn and that’s when he hollered he’s in the library get some people over here. Oswald’s escape path is going to be down here behind the Texico station and then down the alley. So I’m going to uh I’ll walk you through here the next couple. So, we’ve kind of reoriented ourselves here. We’re we’re just east of Denver and 10th. And the first sighting of Oswald coming back in this direction is made by the foreman on this apartment job that was going on right here. And he left to go up to the Town and Country uh cafe to have lunch. Now, we’re not sure exactly where this occurred, but somewhere in this stretch uh east of the elbow and before Marcela Street. And you can see I’ve got Jimmy Bert and Bill Smith standing in front of his house. And then there was the uh the tile layer and his uh this is uh Jim Archer and Jim Brewer are eating lunch in in a truck here. Okay, so we got to switch our view around here. So, here’s our here’s our Oswald character coming down 10th Street passing in front of the um apartment complex being worked on and Bert and Smith are standing out in front here. Now, I didn’t talk to Jimmy Bert was killed in a traffic accident, so I didn’t interview him. Uh, but I did talk to Bill Smith and he said he never saw the guy walk by, the guy being Oswald. Bert, of course, always said he did see him before he got down to the shooting. So, it’s possible that Smith had his back to him. I asked Smith, “How was how was Bert’s veracity on this?” He said, “Well, we were all drinkers at the time.” So, but he says, “I didn’t see him. That’s all I can say.” All right. So, as Oswald approaches uh the corner, he does something really interesting. He goes behind the truck. So, these two guys are sitting in the truck and Jim uh Jim Archer is here in the driver’s seat and his buddy Brewer is sitting next to in the passenger seat. Archer didn’t notice the guy because, you know, uh Brewer is blocking his view as he approaches, but Brewer said, “No, no, the guy was coming from the west.” So, Archer doesn’t notice anything until the shooting happens way down the street. But the fact is Oswwell didn’t go in front of the truck. He went behind it, which I thought was interesting. It’s almost like he’s trying to avoid people. All right. So, now we have here’s Oswald approaching now the corner of Tenth and Patton. And you can see uh hang on a sec here. Computer is refreshing. All right. So, here comes Tippet. You can see the Abundant Life Theater down or the the Abundant Life temple down the street. Here comes Tippet’s patrol car. Scoggins is sitting in his cab here. Helen Markham is approaching the corner on her way to catch a bus down at the corner of Jefferson. And here comes Oswwell. Now, I’ve removed the trees on both sides of the street. So, there’s trees along about here. And then it kind of busts free and there’s only one tree located here. So, from from what I can gather, Oswell could have gotten as far as this bush right about this point before he turned around and started back on the opposite direction. And Anne McCraven, by the way, would have been living in this house. And Tippet’s going to pull up in front of this driveway right here. Okay. So, that’s our that’s our setup. Go to the next slide. All right. So, here’s the basically the moment when Oswell does an about phase. Tippa would have been just approaching the corner. You could have easily seen that happen. Ellen Markham is now standing on the corner waiting. Now traffic is also approaching from the other direction and just the traffic we know about. So we know that Jack Tatum is coming. So is Domingo Benvitas, but 10th Street’s actually kind of a busy street because people would use it to avoid Jefferson Boulevard and they could run parallel to it. So there could have been other traffic passing here at the time is all I’m saying. All right. And so on our next uh slide, just as Tippet is pulling up alongside the guy over here and Helen Markham is watching, right? Yep. And and by the way, Aquilla Clemens is working in this house here. Second house off the corner behind and beyond Helen Markham. If you come down here while this is going on, this is when Jack Tatum is coming up the street and starting to turn the corner. As he as he’s making this turn, he said he looked down the sidewalk and he could see Tippet just pulling over to the curb and this guy walking. So, he is one of the witnesses that as Oswwell coming from the east. And of course, Burton and Smith are over here on the corner and they’re looking down there. Again, I’ve removed trees just to make this clearer, but there’s a lot of foliage in between here that would make this not an easy view, a direct view. All right, next slide. Uh, Jack Gray Tatum now is folded front and coming right behind him is Domingo Benvitas in his pickup truck. And as Tatum is passing now, he says, uh, JD is leaning over in the car and Oswald has his hands in both hands in the zipper jacket, so he’s not actually leaning on the car. So, this is the 15 ft that Jack Tatum talks about that he was that close to Oswald. Everybody thinks, “Oh, it’s after the shooting.” And they’re going, “No, wait a minute. Oswell runs around the corner and Jack Tatum’s here. That’s that’s longer. That’s way more than 15 feet.” Now he’s talking about earlier when he drove by. He’s less than a car length away. So he got a good look at him. And then our next slide is just the time it takes Tatum to drive past and get to the intersection. And uh the stop sign is for traffic coming this way. So technically he could have rolled straight through. I know my own driving habits is any intersection I slow down and kind of I don’t necessarily stop at I’ll I’ll do a kind of bump and roll just to avoid I’ve seen too many people get t-boned at these intersections. Just because there’s no stop sign doesn’t mean somebody’s not going to run it. And this is where Oswald pulls the gun and shoots across the hood hitting Tippet. Domingo Beneditz pulls his truck into the curb. Helen Markham’s on the corner here. And it’s not really clear whether Aquilla Clemens hears the shots and comes out on her porch or is already out on the porch. But after the shooting with tip it down on the on the pavement, Oswald now leaves and cuts across this corner. The Davis girls come out on the front porch and so they’re only 15 20 feet away from as he cuts through these bushes. And the cab driver is rolled out of the cab. He started across the street and he realized there’s no place to hide. So he just come back and duck behind this rear quarter panel, the left rear quarter panel. And of course, uh, Ellen Markham’s on the corner watching all this. And we believe according to Aquilla Clemens account that she has come out off the porch. He’s either on the porch or in the in the uh in the process of coming out toward the sidewalk at this point. So this is our overview at at this juncture. And our next slide as well cuts through these bushes. And when he does, he’s throwing he throws a shells, two shells here. They did find uh another shell underneath this window. And it’s not clear where um Barbara Davis found her shell, but I believe in this area here. And of course, then there was a fifth shell that their father-in-law recovered. And that probably was recovered here as well. So the two that Domingo Benvdas recovered were probably the two that were right in this area. Right. So as Oswald passes, he uh Scoggins here who’s kneeling down behind the car, hears him say, “Poor dumb cop or poor damn cop.” So Oswwell starts down the street goes a short distance and as we’re going to see here next slide

by now Frank Samino who lives in the second house here has come out he hears the gunshots here’s screaming he comes out Helan Markham is hollering he killed him he killed him the Davis girls are here at the front door and Oswald’s come around the corner and he’s heading down this side of the sidewalk, but then quickly crosses the street probably because Sam Guiinard is washing a car here in the alley and he can see if he continues down, he’s going to run right into this guy. So, he crosses the street and he’s coming this way. Now, over at standing on the porch of this used car lot is Ted Callaway, who I thought was the best witness that I ever talked to and maybe the best witness in the whole thing. He hears the five gunshots. Friends of his that were with him, Bey Cersei, who I’ve got shown here, and some other people are standing there in the office, and they said, “Well, somebody’s got firecrackers.” And he being a uh US Marine during World War II and trained on the pistol range in San Diego later, immediately recognized those are pistol shots. He runs to the sidewalk and when he gets here, he said he looked up the street and he sees the cab driver crouched behind the car and just then he sees like a genie. He sees Oswald materialized jumping through this bush coming toward him, crossing the street and coming down with the pistol in a raised pistol position. And as soon as he crossed the alley and got about right here, he’s about 56 feet away. This is when uh Ted Callaway hollers to Oswald, “Hey man, what the hell is going on?” And he kind of slows up. Now, the cars are parked across the sidewalk, so Oswalt’s got to come out. He either go in front of the uh traffic, but according to the used car people on the Johnny Reynolds lot, he comes out into the street and actually finishes this journey down the center of the street. And so he comes around these cars, comes back to the sidewalk here. In the meantime, out on the front porch with Johnny Reynolds on this upper porch, Johnny Reynolds comes out with LJ Lewis and BM Patterson and Harold Russell. So they’re watching this guy coming out down the street onto the sidewalk and he gets almost to this corner. Now, this isn’t quite completely accurate, but according to uh there was one additional eyewitness that I talked to who was, you know, this was the Harris Brothers motor lot, and the owner the owner’s son was actually dropped off. There’s a bus stop. The bus stop that Helen Markham was going to was on this corner to go downtown. And then the opposing bus stop was on this corner going this way. And so Jimmy Harris, the son, had been in with some friends, school friends down at the motorcade, watched the parade and it was coming back just as this was happening. So they’re on the bus. He’s just getting off or had just gotten off the bus, was here a short time. So he said Oswwell came to this corner and looked like he was going to cross the street and then hesitated and then turned and started up toward Mars Brothers in this direction. So a little bit of a detail that most people aren’t aware of. And uh at this point is when Reynolds and BM Patterson decide we’re going to follow the guy. So they’re following across the street. They’re kind of tailing Oswald as he comes up the street here. Now, the way they originally told the story is Oswald comes up, passes the the Dean’s Dairy Way, which is a convenience store, if you will, like a 7-Eleven, and then cuts between this building and the the Texico service station and into the back of the lot. And uh then Reynolds said he and Patterson run across the street and they talked to the mechanic and and they say, “Oh yeah, the guy just came by here.” Well, the way that Brocks told it is, “No, five minutes elapsed between the time Oswald passes them and Reynolds comes over here.” And so then I years later, I get the story from the dairy way that in fact Oswald attempted to get into one of these buildings. Now, I I’m showing the dotted line here between the buildings cuz we’re not sure which one he attempted to get into, but when the police got there and WFAA was filming, Ron Ryland was filming, they’re filming the back of this house. So, it could have been this one as opposed to this one. But what’s interesting, and we’ll go to the next slide. If you go around the back, the stairs, these these 3D models I built are based on photographs. The stairs coming to this upper balcony do come in from this side. So Oswald could have slipped between the two buildings. Come up here. Now the reason what what she heard that is um Dodie Dean was working cash. She heard somebody like trying to break into one of these doors and then heard somebody coming down a set of rickety stairs. And when she looked up, Oswald’s passing in front of her, kind of taking the jacket off as he’s passing in front of the store. And of course, he’s then going to go between these two buildings. So, it’s a little unclear exactly uh whether he’s breaking in back here or breaking in down here or coming around the front. But we know that there was a delay and that Reynolds and Patterson who were over here. But when they told the Brocks 5 minutes later about a guy passing him, they said, “Yeah, he probably shot a policeman.” Well, if you think about it, there’s How do they know a policeman was shot? They hadn’t been to the shooting scene. or had they? So, I surmise. And the other thing is is when the police are brought over here, Reynolds is telling him he thinks the guy’s hunkered down in one of these buildings. So, I’m I’m pretty certain that he thought he went into one of the buildings. He and Patterson then leave. Probably not. Probably Patterson stays. Reynolds goes first. And then of course uh Reynolds, Warren Reynolds is the one who gives the first description to uh Roy Walker who’s at the tippet shooting scene and uh and then he brings the police back here and of course the rest of the story. So we’ll go to the next slide. So what happens is is after Oswald tries to break into one of these buildings, probably the closer one, he passes and there’s like three garage doors. This is the type of building this is. The cash register is right here. And Dodie Dean sees Oswald as he walks by and uh taking in the process of taking the jacket starting to take it off. So he then cuts back next to the Texico service station comes back and then the jacket is eventually found behind this car back here. So he cuts between the buildings and then probably re-enters the alley. And one of the reasons that believe that’s true is that in the meantime way back over here, Bert and Smith have run down to the shooting scene. They see that it’s a police officer and by their accounts, they ran down this way with the intent of going all the way to Jefferson. But when they got to the alley entrance here, they looked down this way and they said they saw the guy running west in the alley. Okay. And so the timing is such that this would have been after he reentered the alley and to them they always thought no, he had cut through the alley to begin with and ran all the way down this way. So that’s how that whole story about um that Helen Markham then later told because Burton Smith were friends with her son Jimmy Markham. That’s how that whole story got um told that oh he cut through the alley and never went to Jefferson. No, there’s plenty of there’s plenty of eyewitnesses that show that he went all the way to Jefferson and then later Helen Markham I think in the late60s started telling how he cut across this lot into the alley and went. So there were later stories that got told and embellished. So in anyway, uh within within two minutes or three minutes of the shooting, Oswald is gone. He’s out of there. All right. So 20 minutes later, here’s how the arrest unfolds.

Hardy Shoe Store is about this distance, about 100 yards from the front of the Texas theater. And uh so as as we know the story, Oswald had stepped into this glass vestibule. Johnny Brewer saw him, thought he was acting suspicious. A police car with a siren makes a U-turn and they’re basically responding to the the Oakcliff Library call for a suspect. And as soon as Oswald starts up the street, Brewer comes out and he’s standing here. Now, he didn’t come out right away because he said Oswald was almost to the theater by the time he came out. So, there was some delay before he came out, but he’s standing here. Now, he knew Julia Postal. And while Oswalt’s heading toward the front of the theater, a police car, another police car zips past the Texas theater, excuse me, and this brings Julia Postal out of the ticket booth, right? So, she comes out to the comes out and she’s facing West and this gives Oswald an opportunity to slip behind her back into the theater. And of course, what he doesn’t know is that Brewer is seeing this happen. So Brewer comes up the street and asks Julia Posto, “Did you see that guy?” And she sort of h expected to see him because she said when she was coming out of the booth out of her peripheral vision, she saw a guy approaching and then when Brewer comes up, she realized, well, the guy never passed me and he’s nowhere to be seen, so he must have gone into the theater. And this is what alerted Brewer to go in. him and uh Butch Burroughs kind of make sure that no one’s left the exit doors, so he must still be in there. He Brewer comes back out as Postal call the cops and of course they now come to the theater. So this is the view if we’re the screen. We’re looking back onto the main floor. There’s two main aisles, a center section and then a left and right section. Oswald is sitting third row from the back, second seat in when he’s arrested. Originally, he’s in the fifth seat in. And today, these three rows are gone. They built a little stage back here. So, if you go there now, you can actually see the drill holes in the cement where they’ve removed rows. So, you could actually take a tape measure, which we did, measure the distance between these three rows, and then you could use that or these four rows. Use that. take the last row that’s there currently and measure back and you could you could basically figure out exactly where Oswwell was sitting. Anyway, he’s in the fifth seat in and Brewer has gone down and he’s down here near the front um behind the velvet uh curtains that are hanging at this exit here. And uh when the house lights come up, he sees Oswell back here in this fifth seat stand up, step to the aisle like he’s going to exit. And of course, the cops are pouring in. So, he just sits back down in the second seat and that’s when uh McDonald and the and the cops are at the back door and they start rattling the back door. Brewer lets him in, points out, “Yeah, I can show you the guy. He’s in the brown shirt.” He points out Oswald. There’s very few PE patrons in the theater. McDonald comes down. He searches these two guys and basically comes up the row this way at the same time. And I don’t I can’t remember the officer’s names, but I believe it’s TA Hudson and CT Walker. And there’s another uniformed officer. They come up. And so when McDonald approaches Oswald, he’s kind of facing this way. And then at the last second, he spins toward Oswald and says, “Get on your feet.” These three officers are now entering the row behind Oswald, Oswald’s row, and a row in front of him. So they’re kind of coming in from this direction. And McDonald, of course, says, “Get on your feet.” Oswalt stands up, brings his hands up without being asked about shoulder high. And as he does that, he says, “This is it. It’s all over now.” And when McDonald reaches down to pat down his waist, Oswald slugs him and then reaches for the gun. And the fight ensues. These three guys come running in. They pull Oswald back over the seat in a in a headlock, this officer behind him. The other two officers get on both hands, and of course, it’s a little bit of chaos before they subdue him, right? And so, uh, there you have it. That’s the shooting to the arrest. And that covers from 115 to about 150. So, about 35 minutes is the time period that we looked at. As David Bellon said, this is the Rosetta Stone of the GFKs. I mean, it’s just so clear. The evidence is so so overwhelming and and yet people just can’t seem to accept it. Yeah, it’s pretty straightforward. I mean, he’s caught red-handed with the gun in his hand. And you’ve heard the thing probably about the bent firing pin, which I traced back to it was a newspaper article in which they were trying to speculate why the shell didn’t go off. When Oswald fired, it clicked. Now, there are a couple of versions. McDonald always said the web of his thumb, you know, he he grabbed the they’re you’re taught to grab the cylinder so that it can’t rotate when you’re trying to pull the trigger, right? and and so his that puts the web of his hand on the near the back of the cylinder that the hammer the hammer comes back and as it snaps forward he said it caught his hand there were numerous officers that said they saw a dent near the primer we’ve seen the shells that were taken out of the boat none of them have a dent there there is one with a slight dent but it’s way off center and couldn’t have been caused by the hammer striking the primer uh lightly or whatever. So, uh, who knows whether the Now, there is a little bolt in a in a revolver. There’s a little bolt lock. So, it’s a double-action pistol. You you can you can pull the hammer back, right? And it clicks and this little metal slide gets locked in there and that holds the hammer back until you pull this the trigger a second time basically, and that releases the lock and the hammer comes forward. or as in a in the doubleaction revolver that it was, you just pull the trigger once, comes all the way back, and if you keep pulling the trigger, that lock never gets into place, and the hammer comes down and and hits the shell. It’s not clear as to what happened, but it is clear that Oswald did attempt to fire the pistol. Certainly had it pointed at at uh McDonald’s head. Yeah. I mean, how do you explain that? This is it. It’s all over now. And then he tries to basically go out in a in a in a cop suicide and of course that doesn’t happen and uh he’s caught red-handed, you know. And so I would just briefly say the one of the main arguments that was made early on by Sylvia Maher and Mark Lane is they suggested and that’s all they could ever do. They suggested the shells have been switched because Jo, the way they explained it, couldn’t find his marks. But if you look at Joe Po’s testimony, he’s very clear that he can’t remember whether he made the marks or not. And Jim Lavell told me years later, and he knew Po, you know, they still went went to retirement parties and uh gettogethers with the police association. He said, “Look, you know, sometimes officers just get in over their heads.” He says uh he didn’t mark the shells. There was no reason to mark the shells in the scene. The head of the crime lab, George Dowy, was there collecting shells. He took he he was the one that took the shell directly from uh Barbara Davis. There’d be no reason. But Po could give the shells to Dowy. Dowy could put his mark on it, which he did. Verify these were given to me by Po. He would testify to that. And that there’s the chain of custody. You didn’t need Po marking the shelves. and and also a post said that he he marked his initials JMP. Well, I went to the National Archives, right, for my book to to look at the shelves for his hand, something that no one had ever done. I hired a photographer to come in and take photos so that we could put them in the book. I made sketches of the marks because they’re very hard to see. You got basically, you know, you’ve got burnt propellant in there that’s years old and then you’ve got these marks that are are scratched through the burnt propellant. And of course, it’s now oxidized, so some of it’s kind of green on the inside, but they’re very hard to see. And there’s no way that you could take that little shell, which only has an opening of about a quarter of an inch, and put any kind of you couldn’t put three initials in there. You’re lucky if you can get one. Most of these cops said they put a mark in it that they would recognize. They didn’t necessarily initial it because there’s no there’s no room to initial it. You just now George Dowy kind of put it’s almost a scripted D like you would a cursive kind of the letter D and it’s kind of a in one of them it’s kind of clear what it is the other one it’s kind of a butcher’s job some of the other guys simply made a z an O and kind of put a line through I mean all they’re looking is I’ll make a mark that I will recognize as the one I made and so the uh the two shows that the Davis girls turned in there’s a clear line of you know forget Po let’s take him out of the equation the other two shelves were clearly there’s a clear chain of of uh possession and so what’s the argument now they switched only two of the shelves I mean and and then you’ll hear that from stupid people who read comic books and watch TV shows that don’t know what the hell they’re talking about saying well yeah it was just a sloppy frame up yeah right yeah it’s a sloppy frame don’t be stupid and then when would they do it here’s the other thing years ago I was still a conspiracy theorist Paris and I got hired to be the tippet spokesperson on front lines 1993 show who was Lee Harvey Oswald. I had gone to the AS conference in Chicago. I met Gus Russo there. He found out I was the into the tippet shooting. He was the connection. He made the connection between me and Frontline. I go out to WGBH in Boston. I meet Mike Sullivan. I go into his office and he says, “Well, tell me about the tippet shooting.” So, you know, I’m laying out the big grand conspiracy plan, you know, from memory. Here it is. I lay it all out, the switch shells, all the stuff that everybody talks about today. And uh he looked at me and he said, “What if you’re wrong?” And I was floored. My first thought was, “Man, I didn’t make a convincing case.” But he wasn’t asking that. He was simply saying, “What if you’re wrong?” Because in everything I was saying, I was raising the same questions that Sylvia Maher and Mark Lane and every con Larry Ray Harris, all the conspiracy people had brought up before that, but never tried to answer. And I thought, okay. And then so I I realized if this is going to be the ultimate book on the tip of shooting, and at that time it’s going to be a conspiracy book, I’m going to have to answer the questions. I can’t just do what everybody else did. I’m gonna have to answer the questions. And so I like what uh when I did finally finish the book and I ended up convincing myself that in fact Mike Sullivan was correct. I was wrong. And uh and I asked uh Bob Johnson who was the head of the AP in Dallas at the time to write the forward. I was very glad to see that he wrote a line in there something about Meyers. uh to get to the truth, all he had to do was lift up every stone and look under every rock. And really, that’s really what it was. It was come up with the answers. Like, okay, so who was the mysterious guy that Nick McDonald talked about in his byelined article that he said a mysterious fellow, even his dad, I don’t know who it was, pointed out Oswald. Well, it turned out when you dug into the story, he didn’t write the story. The story was written by a staffer. And I asked Bob Johnson, he recognized the style and he told me who it was who wrote the story most likely. Now, he didn’t know for sure, but he said the style was reminiscent reminiscent of this particular writer. And he said, “In fact, we never would let I mean, and it makes sense. We’d never let Joe Citizen write the article. We would write the article for them. They would read it over, make sure it’s and then they would they we would put their by line on it because it made it better. Here’s Nick McDonald telling the story of the arrest, but it’s not written by Nick McDonald, right?” So the whole idea of the mysterious person and I and of course when I talked to Nick McDonald, you know, to button up the the the story completely, who did you mean by the mysterious? No, I just meant Johnny Brewer. So, you know, all the stuff begins to melt away. And I found it was just like uh picking up a handful of sand at the beach and letting it run through your fingers. Eventually, you’ve got a handful of nothing. And that’s what today all they all they can do is grasp at the sand and come up with chain of custody. Yeah. And I would challenge them what with the same question Mike Sullivan challenged me with. What if you’re wrong? And then try and prove yourself right or wrong. Yeah. You know, and eventually you’ll find out the truth. Everybody’s got to do their own journey. I can appreciate that. Yep. Again, going back to I went the long way around the barn, but I wrote down what I found. Uh, most people are not going to have the advantage of being able to interview a lot of the people that I did because they’re long gone, but their story is preserved and I think the the abundance of the evidence is clear. Oswald killed Tippet. Absolutely no question about it in my mind anyway. And uh it’s a historic fact as far as I’m concerned. Well, I’m glad you took the long way around the barn. And again, I strongly recommend everybody, everybody go buy this book.
It has to be in your collection. If you can’t find it, find it secondhand or in Kindle. It is worth every page, every penny. It’s a great great book.
Thank you very much.
Thank you, Dale, for appearing on On the Trail of Delusion.
Oh, thanks for having me. It was a pleasure.

On the Trail of Delusion, Episode 24, Lawrence Haapanen on UFO’s, JIm Garrison, & the JFK murder

www.mattkprovideo.com/2025/09/29/on-the-trail-of-delusion-episode-24-lawrence-haapanen-on-ufos-jim-garrison-the-jfk-murder/

On the Trail of Delusion, Episode 24, Lawrence Haapanen on UFO’s, Jim Garrison, & the JFK murder

TRANSCRIPT:

(INTRODUCTION:)

I want to thank everybody for coming this afternoon. My name is Fred Litwin.
Noted author Fred Litwin. And of course, Fred is also the author of I was a teenage JFK conspiracy freak, On the trail of delusion. and Oliver Stone’s film Flam. The demagogue of Dealey Plaza.
Fred Litwin is here. He’s a longtime author and certainly watcher of politics.
Joining us, Fred Litwin, great to have you here.
Thank you very much.

[Music]

Welcome to another edition of ON THE TRAIL OF DELUSION, where I try to separate the wheat from the chaff and try to give you something substantial on the JFK assassination rather than the usual gruel you find on YouTube and around the internet.
Today my guest is Larry Haapanan who is an historian out west um who’s been long involved with the JFK assassination.
He’s been involved with the military and investigating UFOs and he’s got a long career on the history side uh both JFK the presidency and the assassination. So welcome Larry. And uh first question is how did you get into the JFK assassination? Well, um I guess because it happened. Uh and at that time, November 22nd, 1963, I was attending u college at the University of Washington. I was a history major and um I also happened to be an ROTC cadet. So the day it happened, I was wearing my army uniform, Army ROC. I later shifted over to Air Force, but I I happened to be home for lunch and uh an older woman from down the hall knocked on the door and said she wanted to use our phone and apparently she was having trouble with hers and she said the president had been shot and of course I was dumbfounded and so I watched the coverage on TV for a while. Then I went to uh back to class. Everything was cancelled that afternoon and uh of course that whole weekend was kind of a you know a bewildering uh unreal kind of a experience uh all the way through the shooting of Oswald and the the funeral the following Monday in Washington. And uh so as a history major, I kind of perked up my ears and was, you know, paying maybe more attention than the average person to what seemed to be history in the making. I um in my teenage years, I was a kind of a Civil War buff and that peaked an interest in the Lincoln assassination, right? And I had a book by Otto Eisenchiml that I picked up at a secondhand bookstore. And uh you know, so I had I had a past interest in that. So the Kennedy assassination wasn’t the first one I got interested in, but I waited, you know, of course, uh eager to find out what the Warren Commission would decide, right? uh immediately after the report was made public, the networks, TV networks had special programs on the Warren Report and so I audio taped uh I think ABC’s special report right on that and for quite a long time then afterwards I was kind of you know pretty content to let the Warren report be a accurate summation, you know, of of what had happened. I guess maybe I wasn’t going as far as Gerald Ford when he said the Warren report would stand like a gibraler of factual literature through the ages to come. But nevertheless, during the years to come, I I uh pretty much um thought the War Report had dealt with it adequately. But then in 1966, I made the dubious choice, I guess, that that kind of changed my life in a way of of getting a copy of Rush to Judgment by Mark Lane right after it came out, right? And that made me think that perhaps there was a conspiracy. And so then I started delving into the 26 volumes at the university library you know and getting books by Weissberg for example and later Sylvia Maher and Edward j. Estein of course
nd looking you know what articles began to appear in magazines like look and ramparts and Saturday Evening Post and Minority of One and Esquire. Then of course in I guess February 1967, I was walking down a street in Los Angeles. I think I was there on a debate trip and you know there was a headline, Jim Garrison is investigating the assassination. So of course I began following the u the Garrison investigation which I probably will touch on later. So that’s how it happened. So yeah, I mean I mean Mark Lane was very very influential. I mean, did you start corresponding with some of these people back then? Uh, no, I didn’t. In 1967, I graduated and got my commission in the Air Force and went on active duty. From the money I got from my first paycheck, I ordered the 26 volumes of the Warren Commission. I hadn’t been able to afford the $76 before that. That doesn’t sound like a lot today, but back then it would be like a whole month’s rent. You know, it was many hundreds of dollars in today’s money. and and so I began researching the 26 volumes on my own. And then in 1968, I joined up with a couple of other guys from Seattle, my hometown, in the Washington State Citizens Committee of Inquiry. Then I began to meet, you know, know other people. You knew you knew George Renard from Seattle and Paul Hul and Halverb and Bill Turner in the Bay Area and Fred Nukem in Los Angeles and through him David Lifton and Ray Marcus I met uh William Costalano other people of that area and George Renar, right? You knew you knew George? Oh yeah, George Rener was a lifetime friend of mine. We Right. Yeah. I continued to uh know him for decades. He passed away in 2017 and and uh I really lost a friend when he passed away. Yeah, he has some of the more interesting letters and stuff uh that are out there. I don’t know if there’s anything more in his papers, but it was always interesting to read a George Rener uh letter. Well, yeah, he had a terrific sense of humor as did Fred Nukem. They they their letters would sometimes, you know, turn to satire and jokes. And George mailed uh Fred a dead cockroach on one occasion and that was named Andy. And you know, they they had in particular a real uh humorous uh take on things at time. What was your experience just curiosity with Raymond Marcus? Because I I sort of gather from some of his letters he seemed rather pedantic, but what what was your experience with Raymond Marcus? I met him once when he came over to Fred Nukem’s house and I happened to be staying with Fred. Okay. Fred and Ry had a very contentious relationship to put it mildly because Fred loaned him a copy of the Zapruder film and Ray wouldn’t give it back and you probably know about that. Yeah. That’s all related to the Farewell America story. Uh you bet. Yeah. Okay. So, look, tell how did you get involved with the with the Garrison investigation and what did you do um for for Jim Garrison? Well, yeah. The ironic part of it is I was a serving officer in the US Air Force. Therefore, I had a kind of a arms length relationship with the garrison investigation. But uh what happened was um Ed Jeffs who was a reporter for the Tacoma News Tribune and chair of our committee in the Seattle Tacoma area, he um called me one day when I happened to be home in Seattle because I would go there uh sometimes on weekends or on leave and um he said, “Hey, we’re southern cops.” which of course wasn’t technically true, but you know, he was trying to joke around a little about it because he had gotten these letters from Garrison’s office appointing him and me as representatives of Garrison’s office. This is in like September 68, you know, several months before the Shaw trial, right? And uh the office would send those letters out to literally God only knows who or how many. And I know I had one, Ed had one, Fred Nukem had one, which I’ve seen, and you know, I’m sure others. Do you still have yours? Oh, definitely. Okay. Love to see that. Oh, yeah. Well, you know, I take I have mixed emotions because on the one hand, I thought there was um some hope for the Garrison investigation and then Fred and I turned out to be disillusioned about that after the Shaw trial, but at the same time, I felt like I was doing something, right? The president had been shot down like a dog in the street, and there were what seemed to be good questions that had been raised about it. And the vast majority of Americans, you know, may have thought that there was a conspiracy, but they weren’t doing anything. They weren’t lifting a finger, right, to look into it themselves. And so, um, I didn’t have any direct communication with Garrison’s office. And that was I I think the way I wanted it, but I did go through uh Steve Burton occasionally. He was the uh citizens committee of inquiry chairman in Los Angeles, right? A young college student at the time. Basically, I went out on my own, you know, to kind of uh pursue a u a avenue of inquiry that nobody else was pursuing on Garrison’s investigation. And that was looking into G. Clinton Wheat. Clinton Wheat is a uh another fellow who was subpoenaed by Garrison, I think at the same time as Dr. Stanley Drenin, right, in Los Angeles. And that came about because Lauren Skip Hall had uh told Garrison about these two guys and and he knew them both well. and um you know he talked to Garrison about how they had been uh leaders in the right-wing movement in the LA area and um and wheat had had meetings in his home in Los Angeles where where uh people like uh Colonel um Gail of the California Rangers and Edward Eugene Bradley and uh Paul and you know other people right Garrison was u at least somewhat interested in uh you know they were uh people that would go to these meetings these so-called patriotic meetings at wheat’s house and so Garrison wanted to talk to wheat and Dannon Dannon went to court and got a judge to um turn down uh Garrison’s request for Drenin to go testify on the grounds that Grant Drenin said he had patience as a physician. He had patients that depended on him for uh treatment and he just couldn’t tear himself away from LA, right? And the judge went along with that. Wheat, on the other hand, just went on the lamb. He just picked up uh and it so happened that he had been living for several years just outside Clamoth Falls, Oregon, which is where I was stationed at the Air Force at the time. So I was uh you know we and and I had been in the same place. Um so that put me kind of Johnny on the spot to uh look into wheat. So Wheat was from Louisiana. He was a convicted murderer who had gotten a pardon. Um he was um a heavy equipment operator by occupation and had moved to LA, owned a very large house and um set himself up as you know kind of a leader of the far right there. In 1964, he chaired something called uh committee of 1 million Caucasians to march on Congress. Uh they didn’t actually have a million people show up at that time. And he was also a guy who the FBI had an eye on. And um he he moved to LA or from LA to to Oregon. Was Was he a Minute Man as well or? Well, I’d put him You know, it’s hard to separate the groups in LA. That’s right. The California Rangers, the Christian Defense League, the NSRP, right? They they over overlapped. Yeah. Uh I think in their membership and in their uh certainly in their goals. So whether he was ever officially a Minute Man, I doubt. But um he was part of that paramilitary. Right. Right. Yes. So I set off to try to find out what happened to him and I got in touch with reporters at the Reading Record Search Light newspaper down in California, right in California. And they were covering this because wheat had been traced to a cabin in a remote location in Shasta County, California. and they had actually interviewed his wife. Uh but he had disappeared a second time. Uh one day a car arrived. He piled in and people drove him away leaving his wife behind. And um so I was able to, for example, you know, listen to a taped interview with Mrs. Wheat. Uh one one reporter in particular um Wes Hughes was very uh active in uh investigating wheat and that that and also you know other associated characters. So, um, I kind of teamed up with Wes Hughes for a while, and I also got myself acquainted with Hal Hunt, who lived in Bernie, California, and he was the right-wing racist publisher of, uh, the National Chronicle, uh, which had a rather wide readership, I think, in the far right. and he was an old fellow who was sort of uh I guess hungry for some kind of company or someone to pay any attention to him. So I would occasionally drop by and talk with him at his office and um we got along pretty well although of course I was totally out of step with his uh political beliefs. But he thought that I was kind of a fellow traveler with his cause. So or else I wouldn’t be there. Uh so he would um he would tell me things and uh was you know quite um talkative uh and and so that was interesting. And then I talked to people in law enforcement. I really don’t know why some of these I talked to right-wingers in Los Angeles about wheat and his male. Uh, one lady in particular, her daughter, a teenager, had uh, apparently run off with a fellow named Joseph Raymond Kerry who was originally from Texas and been living in Southern California and and he was apparently a minute man. and uh Carrie and this lady’s daughter had disappeared and she had written to all kinds of the local hardight paramilitary types in these different groups I previously mentioned. So she gave me a list of the people that she’d written to to look at and it was, you know, kind of like a who’s who of the more notorious characters, right? White wing in the LA area whose names I ran across in print in various places or newspaper stories or so on, but I never found wheat despite my uh digging. Do we know what ever happened to him? Yes. He he died in 1979 in Shasta County, California. In other words, he eventually came back to Shasta County with his wife, right? In the 70s, I guess, and lived there until his death and then he was buried back home in North in Louisiana, right? Yeah. His his wife told the story that she had heard from somebody who said they were an army man and that she would go to Colorado Springs. She could see your husband again. And apparently he made some illusion to an army fort. Uh I forget the name of it off hand that was near Colorado Springs. She herself seemed to be kind of doubtful about where he had initially gone. Hal Hunt told me something interesting though because we were talking about wheat, you know, basically uh taking off for parts unknown after he was subpoenaed. And and Hunt told me that if Wheat went to New Orleans and talked to the DA, the whole right wing would be finished. And I think that’s kind of an exact quotation of what he said. I guess there was a fear that wheat had um such an inside knowledge of this far right wing of of characters. It would not be a good idea for him to sit in front of a grand jury. Yeah. I mean I think of I mean uh Edgar Eugene Bradley who was in the middle of that crowd. I mean, it appears that the only reason Garrison got interested in him was basically a feud between him and some of the other right-wingers. Oh, you bet. Yes. In August 1968, I went to Los Angeles and a meeting was set up between me and the two major witnesses against Bradley. Uh, and I guess I can name them because I doubt they’re alive, but Carol and Tom Thornhill, right? Yeah. Yeah. names that a lot of people I think will recognize if uh and they told me all kinds of things, you know, about how Bradley was this uh leader of a faction of the Minutemen that wanted Kennedy dead, not really a Dew faction, but a rival faction. And then um I went down again in early ‘ 68 after the Shaw trial. And one night at Fred Nukem’s I said, “Why don’t we phone Bradley and see if we can talk to him?” And Fred was a little dubious about that, but I got on the phone and I talked to Bradley and he said, “Come on over.” So Fred and I went to Bradley’s house and u he met us at the door and said, “Don’t you Garrison guys ever give up?”

Well, we assured him that we were not strictly speaking garrison guys at that point. And then he um he proceeded to tell us the ins and outs of that feud, right? And how there had been an attempt to firebomb his house, you know, and he had been more or less thrown out of his own church. Not that he was the preacher, but he was a I guess founder or leader of a uh church there in Los Angeles, right? And um you know, and and how he had been feuding with people like Adelot Thornhill and um Yeah, you’re right. Yeah. Well, there was even a lawsuit. They were they were suing each other as well. There was a big lawsuit going on. Oh, I know. I went and I’m thinking in 1971 I went to LA and yeah attended one of the court sessions in that lawsuit. Oh really? Wow. Yeah. Carol uh Inelot and Tom Thornley were out in the hallway. I guess if they looked at me they they perhaps didn’t recognize me from meeting me in ‘ 68. Dennis Mau was there with them. Okay. Yeah, of course he was the young fellow who had supposedly known about a uh rattling plot to kill Kennedy in LA in 1960. Am I right, I think. And that’s when he was like 14 years old or something. I was Yeah. 15, 14, right? Um but I didn’t actually I never met Mau, but I did see him because he was there. And then I sat in the courtroom with the with Bradley or near Bradley and yeah that was yeah eventually he won the suit and was awarded $1.

I he suffered all kinds of personal uh u difficulty and uh you know he was a u reserve deputy sheriff and when Hubert Humphrey visited LA in 1968 he was told you know we we don’t want you in on any security arrangements concerning Humphrey’s visit because if something happened to Humphrey you know and you were there uh it would be you know terrible. So it did that was one way it affected him but of course his reputation suffered. He talked about going in a store once and you know the proprietor you know when they found out who he was said and oh are you’re the guy that killed Kennedy. Yeah. He had to suffer through that. Now, in uh August 68, Fred Nukem and I went to Edgar Eugene Bradley’s house again and we had a sitdown interview with Jerry Patrick Heming and Lawrence Howard and that of course Patrick Heming um dominated the conversation to the point where I don’t remember anything that Howard had to say, but Right. P Jerry Patrick Heming of course is, you know, well known as having been a a teller of tall tales and a and a blabbermouth and and somebody you know that you just really had to ask yourself uh what what what has he said that is true or you know he he he he told us for example you know that he met Oswald in LA or rather a suburb of LA in 1959 right Oswald was a murdered um El Toro at the at the home of the uh Cuban council in LA. You know, he had very interesting stories, but that was kind of uh a unique I thought it was kind of a unique place where we would end up interviewing Howard and and Heming at Edgar Eugene Bradley’s house. Fascinating. I mean, my my favorite Heming story is this the year that he he he u he was on a panel at JFK Lancer, the conference in Dallas, and he was so rambling and incoherent that everybody started laughing and there’s a write up on the web of that of that session where they just can’t believe just like how, you know, this guy’s completely incoherent, you know, just making up these stories. It was it was quite a funny little writeup. between 68 and 71, I met Bradley on several different visits to LA, you know, and and he was a very personable guy. Uh seemingly, you know, very sincere and uh it was a, you know, I had a whole different take on him, of course, than the one I had when I first went to LA. And all I knew was Garrison has had this guy arrested, you know, and wow, I’m in the same city as Edgar Eugene Bradley. I didn’t even know him. But what I did know him, of course, are and and he he went on being uh in in associated with Fred Nukem. I think Fred testified I I’m not sure about this, but I think Fred testified at his uh tri at the trial, you know, when he sued Okay. Bible. He was going originally to sue other people. Yeah. As well. I think Mark Lane. I have I have a copy of of like the four-page uh suit against Mark Lane. Yeah. But I don’t I don’t know. I assume it didn’t really go anywhere. Yeah. I didn’t meet Mark Lane until 71, but Well, it’s it’s it’s just it’s f I mean fascinating. I mean, I really feel for Bradley. I mean I when I point out to people that you know Garrison I mean I mean he made a he charged Bradley with with conspiracy to to assassinate Kennedy and then like oops I made a mistake. I mean that’s it’s quite a mistake to make. Yeah. Yeah. Um Bradley told me once that he was visiting the Pacific Northwest and dropped in on Fred Chrisman uh after this was all over. It would have been, I think, between 68 and 70. And I guess they had a I would have loved to have been there for that. I guess they had a chat, you know, where they compare notes on what it’s like to be a garrison suspect. So, you know, this is all amazing material. What So, tell us a bit about Fred Chrisman and and and that part of your work uh for the for the Garrison investigation. Yeah. Well, I occasionally got asked to do something to look into Chrisman. Uh, we had kind of a division of labor in that up in the Seattle Tacoma area. Uh, Ed Jeffs who covered Chrisman as a reporter, you know, for the Tacoma News Tribune. Uh, so Eds and George Rener. Um, my two uh, comrades up there. I hope the word comrade doesn’t get misinterpreted. uh in in the committee they they hand did most of the investigating of Chrisman and um I did the wheat into things, you know, because by by mere chance I guess um you know we organized the committee of inquiry before either Weat or Chrisman had actually been subpoenaed. They were not yet subpoenaed as witnesses by Garrison. So, and then it just so happens that Chrisman crops up in Ed and George’s backyard, so to speak. And then a few months later, uh, or excuse me, earlier, um, Wheat, who lived just outside the town where I lived in Oregon, uh, got subpoenaed. So, we were both kind of, uh, lucky to be so close. some of his characters and so but occasionally I would get asked to do something or I would talk to people about Chrisman. Uh like I went to Veil, Oregon where he went to high school and I talked to a couple of people there who knew him. Uh another occasion I u was asked to look into some gypsy who uh was supposed to be tied up with uh with Chrisman, right? And this lived in Oregon. So I I kind of got the Oregon end of the Chrisman um u detective work. Yeah. And well, didn’t he have a house in Oregon or his wife his wife or his wife’s father had a house in Oregon? Well, his father, Fred Chrisman, Senior, right, uh lived in Portland and um had raceh horses. He had a, as I understand it, a concession at the racetrack there. And yes, he does seem to have had a ranch or farm. Now, that got made into a big deal. And that’s what brought Fred up the coast from LA in July 68 after uh Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated. Fred wanted to leave the country for a while. He just, you know, couldn’t put up with it. He wanted to go to Canada to Vancouver Island and just get away from America and Americans for a while, which he did. But on the way up, he stopped and visited me in Clamoth Falls, Oregon. Right. Yeah. Out of the blue, I got a knock on the door one day after after I came home from the base. And here’s Fred Nukem in a, you know, with a beard wearing sandals and I was there in my Air Force uniform. So, we kind of made a contrast. And but we really, you know, warmed up to each other very quickly and we went out to dinner together. I I took him out to the wheat place after wheat disappeared for parts unknown. The house he’d been living in, an old school house, burned to the ground. And I I would imagine he was the one that burned it, right? But um yeah, so I took I took the Nukems out there and showed him that. So um and then Fred kept going up the coast on the way to Vancouver Island and uh stopped to see George and Ed or you know and then on his way back I was in Seattle. So we all had another little reunion then. But yeah, Fred uh was sent up north uh as kind of a u side to his heading for Vancouver Island to look into Chrisman. And he did find a Chrisman farm in u the rural part of Oregon west of Portland. Well, I I have to laugh because Garrison Babe, pardon? No. Well, Garrison was the one who wrote a a memo to the HSCA saying, you know, look, isn’t it strange? Shaw went to Portland after San Francisco after the assassination. And guess what? You know, uh, Chrisman has a farm or his father has a farm out there. Isn’t that strange? Yeah. And one rumor had it that uh G. Clinton Wheat fled to that farm before he went back down to Chasta County, which I think is ridiculous, right? Yeah. And another version was that there were uh Sato masochistic parties or something that went on there. I mean there there were rumors uh going around about the Chrisman farm or the white farm uh you know that never of course had any uh any real basis but but yes his father does seem to have had a farm. And so Chrisman was involved in the sort of the Mory Island uh hoax. Yeah. 1947. Do you want to talk a bit about that or you had recently I know as a guest Adam Golitlightly? Yeah. And he mentioned my name I two or three times. I I’ve been trying to uh do some research that might be helpful to him. And uh yeah, Maui Island of course was this case where Fred Chrisman and another guy named Harold Doll, you know, supposedly reported um these doughnut shaped flying saucers going over Doll’s boat out in Puget Sound near Mauy Island and dropping debris on the boat that killed the dog and injured uh Doll’s son. And then a couple of early UFO spotters, Kenneth Arnold and Amil Smith, came to Tacoma. Arnold had been hired by Ray Palmer, you know, who was a publisher of Amazing Stories and Flying Saucer Magazine and Fate magazine later, right? Uh Palmer paid um Arnold to go there to look into Mari Island and Arnold recruited Smith to come with them. And then um and they had discussions with Chrisman and Dah. And then a couple of uh at their behest, a couple of Air Force uh UFO investigators from Hamilton Air Force Base in California flew up in a B25 and talked to Chrisman Adall and supposedly got a hold of some of these fragments and then the two the two officers Davidson and Brown in flying back their their B25 crashed and they were killed. So that’s kind of the whole thing in a nutshell. Of course, it was written off by the FBI and the Army Air Force as a hoax. It got a lot of newspaper publicity, particularly after the B25 crash. Yeah. Um, I think what separate, you know, I’ve asked myself, what makes Mari Island unique, if anything in that early period where there were UFO sightings and other hoaxes going on all over the country, but particularly in the West Coast. And I guess what stands out is number one, it had this dramatic element to it. This kind of sci-fi approach to what happened that none of the other UFO sightings had. They were all just visual sightings of shiny things uh or bright things in the sky. Here you had donutshaped flying saucers that were dropping debris on people, right? Uh, and you know, so it had this sci-fi element to it that nothing else had going. And and also, um, secondly, oh, by the way, Chrisman was a big fan of sci-fi. Um, I had somebody tell me that he should have been a science fiction writer. uh you know, somebody who knew him uh told me that, but he he perhaps Maui Island was his way of u you know, making some money if they could get their story published and number two, you know, allowing him to be kind of the sci-fi author in a way. The other thing though about Mari Island was the death of the two pilots or or officers, you know, that was just a terrible tragedy. Yes. And again, put a whole different cast on it. It made it a bigger more more uh I guess as uh as Ed Rupel the the project blue book chief later called it. You know he he said it was the second biggest hoax and the dirtiest hoax you know that they ever that ever happened in UFOs. So the deaths just added to the sensationalism and the publicity and all that kind of thing that it got. So it stood out. Yeah, it was tragic. I mean, it’s hard to then to admit, you know, it was a hoax after two people have been killed. I mean, it’s just a it was horrible, horrible thing. Yeah. I met the nephew of one of the pilots or the officers, Philip Lipson and Charlotte Lever, who I’ve known for years. Uh they wrote a book about Mahari Island and then they appeared and I came along at a UFO festival south of Seattle a number of years ago and uh two guests showed up. One was the nephew of one of the pilots and the other was a lady who was Hal Doll’s or Harold Doll’s daughter. But but his Yeah. the pilot the pilot’s uh nephew he he was just very broken up and this is like you know decades later but he just seemed to be very broken up and emotionally affected by uh kind of you know reminiscing about that whole event. Yeah. That was really tragic. Yeah. Yeah. Very tragic. And so then Crispen went on and he I mean he he met Thomas Beckham and they they were sort of two characters who got involved in a variety of little schemes. I mean at one point Chris Chrisman even did a UFO conference I think at one point. Oh yeah. He he went to one or two UFO conferences that I know of. Yes. Um yeah, he continued occasionally to try to get some mileage out of the fact that he had been, you know, at the there at the beginning, you might say. And uh he he, you know, he was touted or at least by him or or Harold Dah, you know, as being a kind of like a character out of the Invaders television show and that he was the most knowledgeable guy on UFOs around and so on. So what is the theory? What’s the theory that about Chrisman and the JFK assassination? Where how does how does he supposedly fit into the assassination? after Beckham was subpoenenaed I think in December uh the around the end of 1967 and he was subpoenaed because of his association in New Orleans in the early 60s you know where the anti-cast movement and was supposed to be kind of a knowledgeable guy when it came to people like uh Banister or Yeah or whatnot Jack Martin too. Yeah. So he got subpoenaed, but also there had been letters and contacts from people to Garrison’s office saying, “You ought to look into Beckham.” Beckham after got subpoenaed said, “Uh, gosh, the only time I was ever in Dallas was with my manager.” You know, I I was a country singer, still am, and my manager then was uh Fred Chrisman, and we did make a trip to Dallas, but that was 1966. So he publicly brought Chrisman’s name up uh almost a year before Chrisman got subpoenaed and um somebody in Garrison’s office made a you know had had had noticed an anonymous letter that mentioned Chrisman and Beckham that had been written in I think May 67. So in February 68, Bill Boxley, who was a investigator for Garrison, sat down with Bob Lavender in San Francisco and Lavender met Beckham in Omaha. And then not that long later after Beckham had a, you know, parted company with Chrisman in the Puet Sound area, Lavender shows up in uh in Olympia, Seattle, Tacoma, that area associated with Chrisman. And Lavender told Boxley, you know, all kinds of things uh about Chrisman. There were uh you know the anonymous letters particularly the one from Florida which I think was written in late ‘ 67 it uh you know spelled all kinds of allegations about Chrisman that he knew Klay Shaw that he knew Tippet which is really I think crazy uh that New Orleans dozens of times you know and so on and so forth. all these things kind of piled up and eventually led to uh and then Ed Jeffs who who you know would report on Chrisman in Tacoma um he was investigating and in touch with Garrison’s office and so eventually you know in November 68 uh uh Chris got called as a witness and he he went down to New Orleans and testified and didn’t have anything very valuable to say about anything. And uh you know there are several things about Chrisman though that I think deserve to be brought up. One is he had a very brave and distinguished record as a um Army Air Force pilot in World War II right in the China Burma India Theater. He did, I think, what looks to me like some good work on behalf of the gypsies in Tacoma that really got uh quite a bit of notice and drew attention to the plight of gypsy people, not just there, but across the country. It’s kind of an underrepresentative, ignored, left behind kind of a segment of the population. So, I think he did some good work on behalf of gypsies. I personally don’t consider that to have been a a con job on Chrisman’s part as much as it was, you know, a sincere attempt to help them. And then of course he had a many years as a teacher uh and school administrator you know so he really did some positive constructive things in his life but he would also turn around and get involved in in some dubious activities from time to time. Uh some of which maybe he didn’t even want to get involved in. So tell tell us a bit about um you know the fact Garrison included Chrisman in in the first draft of his book on the trail of the assassins. Yeah. Before that was published he he had Chrisman in there and then uh so he he had contact you know he had trouble getting it published and I think he had contacted you and and Fred Nukem for some help in adding some information about Chrisman. Yeah I had continued to to research Chrisman over the years. I got I met a fellow named Khani Hanohano in Seattle in 1971 at a UFO study group and he after I got out of the Air Force and Colani uh was a had a strong interest in Chrisman. So Colani and I collaborated for many years in researching Chrisman. Um, and uh, you know, in 1978, I was listening on radio to the broadcast on NPR, I think, of the, uh, House Select Committee hearings. Uh, and one day they bring up Chrisman, you know, and their photographic panel had looked at those photos of the tramps, right? You know, one of them could not be ruled out as Chrisman. They couldn’t say definitely it was, but they couldn’t. So I contacted the House Select Committee and ended up talking because they called me back. I think Cliff Fenton, the chief investigator for the House Select Committee. I told Fenton that when I taught high school in Oregon in the mid70s, I met a woman who had been a teacher with Chrisman at Reineer High School. And I, you know, I asked her, “Well, do you remember what went on and so on?” And and she told me about distinctly remembering Chrisman being in high in the high school the day of the assassination. And so I told Cliff Fenton about that. They ended up, as you know, I’m sure, getting u uh you know, affidavits, the teachers that had taught with him and could vouch for that. And of course, even in his book, Murder of a City, that came out in 1970, he said that’s what he was doing. But that hadn’t gotten much attention or that would that been pretty much overlooked. That book wasn’t a bestseller. It wasn’t widely read. Um, so anyway, the House Committee’s report ended up saying, you know, we we were able to exclude Chrisman despite what the photographic panel said. He, you know, he he’s clearly not one of the tramps, right? So, in n in the late 80s, Jim Garrison was working on his book on the trail of the assassins, and he contacted Fred Nukem and asked him if he could help him out in any way with the Chrisman end of his research, which at that time, as you said, was going to be a big part of the book. Yeah. And by that time, you know, he thought Chrisman was a CIA agent. And uh well, Fred turned to me because he knew I had been doing research on Chrisman far beyond, you know, what we did back in the 60s. So I wrote to Garrison and I later had a phone call with him, uh, you know, where I said basically, it’ll do your book more harm than good to put Chrisman in it. Well, on the phone call, Garrison explained to me some of the reasons, you know, we had for wanting to uh finger Chrisman, like the fact that Chrisman taught in a town in Oregon that wasn’t too far from Dallas, Oregon, where Larry Craford was from originally. And it was kind of like, yeah, but not even at the same time. um you know so he gave me some very weak reasons. But one thing that you had a a uh installment of your blog cover was was something that I independently arrived at myself and that was that Garrison thought Chrisman because he’d worked at Boeing represented this conglomeration of aerospace companies that was behind the assassination. Right. Yes. Yeah. in the late ‘ 68 that that was a big revelation for Garrison that aerospace companies like General Dynamics or Lockheed or North American or Boeing in particular uh you know that some group of those companies uh I don’t need I don’t mean to indict all of them that was his bag but uh you know he really thought that was who was behind the assassination and Chrisman was obviously uh still working for Boeing. Yeah. In fact, he worked there from 60 to 62 in the personnel department. I I talked to a woman who had worked in the personnel department back when Chrisman was there and she told me that he had a pretty mundane job and um you know, it definitely didn’t involve u any cloak and dagger kind of stuff that Garrison described to it. Well, I spoke I spoke to uh the publisher I think apprentice hall, one of the companies that turned down Garrison’s book and I spoke to him and he basically said one of the problems was that Garrison had promised all this information about Chrisman and the CIA and nothing materialized and that was one of his chief reasons for turning down the book. Yeah. I found on the internet and and you may have done so as well the actual letter from the editor or publisher. Yeah. Explaining that to Garrison. Yeah. That that what you just have the material you have on Chrisman is just too weak. So it turned out back when I talked to Garrison, of course, I had no idea that that was happening. So, it turns out my call to Garrison wasn’t the only or even an important reason why he dropped Christmas in the book, but maybe it had a little bit to do with it. I don’t know. Well, I’m sure it had a lot to do with it, but uh perhap what I don’t know is is did uh didclar, who is the editor of his book, did he also help uh or take, you know, tell Garrison to take out Chrisman? Okay. I I don’t know the answer to that. I mean, the the scar papers are locked up in the AARC, and I’m just dying to get to look at those papers, which might tell us more about um the editing of Garrison’s book. You bet. Well, there’s so much we know and even so much more that we don’t know and would like to, you know, and it’s a shame that we don’t have access. But, of course, it would take a hundred people a lifetime of work to to go through a lot of what’s out there that that we unfortunately uh don’t have the time to look at or or have access to. Yeah, I’m I’m hoping that the ARC does digitize a lot of their stuff because they have an awful lot of interesting material um that’s just sort of sitting there in like they have like five different warehouses um in the DC area. So, I’m I’m wish they would digitize it. Well, right. or as another example of what’s sitting around somewhere, I hope, you know, is the uh 40 filing cabinets and stuff that David Lifton accumulated because I don’t think everything in it would be garbage, you know. No, I’m sure he had a lot of Garrison material and he had all sorts of stuff, letters from other other researchers and Oh, yeah. and the results of interviews that he did. Yeah. Some of which he never mentioned in print. Yeah. I know. Oh, I mean that that stuff is somewhere and I’m I wish somebody would digitize it. I I can tell you that somebody is now digitizing Gayan Fon’s records. Mhm. Which is I have like a banker’s blocks full of correspondence with Lifton. Okay. He was, you know, I only met him once in my life, but uh 25 years ago or so, you know, we kind I I became in close contact with him again. And for years, you know, he would share and I was, you know, not always convinced by what he was sharing, but uh I I enjoyed knowing him. I enjoyed knowing Lift. Yeah. I I had one phone call with David Lifton and and uh I had called him in Las Vegas. I wanted to talk about the the the question whether uh General Lameé was at the autopsy. And it was a very very it was a fun conversation with with David in his apartment. There was only one small space where he got good cell reception. And so if he moved slightly, he would lose connection. At one point we did lose connection. And he immediately sent me an email. Call me right back. And I called him back and we spent over an hour on the phone. He was reminiscing about, you know, the different different uh publishing companies that took on best evidence. And it was a bit of a reminiscing time for him. I think, you know, he appeared to me a bit lonely or wanted somebody to talk to. Yeah. I had a lot of long conversations with him or conversations that would come at late pretty late at night for me and uh it was always enjoyable to talk to him. Uh and he yeah he would reminisce quite a lot. So, just uh you know, we don’t have that much time left, but can you tell us a bit about your um your work in the military uh on investigating UFOs? Sure. Yeah. I was stationed at Kingsley Field, an Air Force base in uh Clamoth Falls, Oregon for three years. And um it wasn’t long after I got there that they decided that I ought to be as a you know brand new second lieutenant with not enough work I guess to do. Uh that in addition to my job as base disaster preparedness officer that was my main duty there for three years. They would make me the uh UFO project officer for the base. And that meant that u I would investigate in the field UFO reports that arrived from people generally in the southern Oregon northern California area because we were very close to the California border. We were kind of what I thought of as the greater Mount Shasta area in the manner of speaking. So, and a few months went by before I got my first uh report to look into, but over a period of time from 68 on, and of course, this was for project blue book. So, I would send reports to them and also to the Condan Committee at the University of Colorado, which was investigating UFOs under an Air Force contract. And some cases I investigated I didn’t report because they just didn’t seem to have anything to go by. You know, like somebody saw a little light in the sky going over at night, which could be anything, right? So, I would talk to them and then I would, you know, and take the written report. they’d fill out a form and you know then I would decide not to send it into project blue book because they wanted something that was more sub you know sub had some substance right so um every few months on average I would get a report uh and I think maybe twice I sent in a report in writing you know or by fax to um to project blue book and the conan committee And then after the con or after the project blue book was shut down in December 69, a few months went by. And in April 70, I got another report. At that point, I decided, well, I may not be working for Project Bulbick anymore, but I’ll go investigate it anyway. It was a report by a couple of Air Force sergeants of what they thought was a landing of a UFO on a mountain in Northern California. That turned out to be very interesting. Um, they were good witnesses. They they showed me a picture that they made of the UFO that looked very interesting, right? It it looked a lot like a picture I’d seen of a UFO in France. And um I had a geer counter with me and a Polaroid camera. And when I took a photograph of what they said was where the UFO landed, you know, with a Polaroid camera, you’d pull the thing out and then you could watch it develop, as you may remember. Yep. Yeah. So, I’m looking at this photograph, visualize in front of my eyes, and what I’m looking at is the sergeant off in the distance, trees and logs, and then what looked like flames of fire coming out of the ground. I thought, you know, now that may have been an anomaly of the film. I I totally recognize that in retrospect, but you can imagine my reaction and looking at this photo and seeing what I couldn’t see with the naked eye that looked like fire coming up, right, from the ground. But so that turned out to be very interesting. But I had nobody to report it to. Project Blue didn’t exist anymore. So um I just put it in my file, which I still have. I still have my file of all my reports and notes and photos and things like that because otherwise I would have just it would have gotten thrown away, right? Project blue ended. So, what what do you make of the current activity with UAPs that’s going on right now? I you know, I don’t know really what to make of it. It’s kind of bewildering. Um, I never been much of a believer in u in the actual existence of of some kind of alien hardware flying around in our skies. So, uh, even though I have a interest in flying saucers that goes back to my real really back to my childhood, I was a regular reader of Fate magazine as a teenager and I bought books about UFOs back when I was maybe 10 or 12. And as I Yeah. So I had this long history of interest in UFOs. But when I actually started investigating them, I found that the witnesses were very reputable, credible people. But my the difficulty is how do I as the investigator establish what it was they saw or even really for sure what it looked like or how it behaved, right? So they would draw me diagrams and give me a description, but then you know it was a case of do I really think this is truly unidentified? Um I’ve got some statistics here. the two years uh 1968 and 1969.

Um 68 there was only project rule book only uh categorized three sightings that whole year as unidentified and then in ‘ 69 only one. So, I came in at a point where Project Blue Book was treating very very few UFO sightings as being truly unidentified. Um,

for what? Well, I’m I’m just amazed that like Luna has her hearings uh in Washington and then she she actually was on Joe Rogan show claiming that our advanced technology today is because of of aliens. I mean, it’s just it’s I I couldn’t believe she actually said that. And uh Well, I can believe she said it, but I can’t believe it’s true.

That’s true. Yeah, you’re right. Yeah. Well, yeah, go ahead. Oh, well, yeah, go on to another topic if you have time. Yeah. I mean, I think what I’d like to do is just sort of um there’s so much more to talk about. I mean, I’d just like to get your thoughts on the current state of JFK assassination research, what you think about the assassination today, and how that’s changed over the years. I It’s a just a generally broad topic. Well, I think I’ve grown more skeptical over the years, you know, about many of the claims that are made, the conspiracy theories and so on. I’ve decided now that I’ve got to a certain point in life that I would like to be neutral on the subject of the JFK assassination. I know that’s a way of probably alienating everybody else who has any interest in this subject, but I’d kind of like to take the stance that I’m neither pro- conspiracy theory nor totally anti-conspiracy theory because I think there is some uh possibility, you know, kind of thinking from an epistemological viewpoint that we don’t know quite enough to be able to say flatly that there was no conspiracy of any kind. Um Oswald might have conspired with the groundkeeper at Daily Plaza, you know, so that that guy would make his lawnmower backfire and be a distraction as Oswald fired the shots. I’m not saying that happened. Please don’t get that. I’m saying that would be But that kind of conspiracy, of course, would thrill no one. No one would knock themselves out for decades trying to prove that kind of conspiracy. It it just wouldn’t rise to the level of what would make people who believe in a conspiracy happy, right? Yeah. But on the at the same time, some kind of low-level conspiracy that doesn’t have to include everyone and their brother uh or every, you know, every letter agency of the government. uh you know you can’t rule totally 100% with 100 you know moral conviction rule that out and I don’t imagine um the uh you know what I’m saying is going to make some people happy but uh on the other hand the conspiracy theories that have come along you know the the the thing is to look at them each in turn and see what’s wrong with them and there’s always something wrong uh or there’s always something lacking or something more that I’d like to see before I would buy into them. So individual conspiracy theories I have yet to be convinced. Um, but you know, I think debunkers, if you want to use that term, it’s really kind of a unpleasant term in a way, you know, like UFO debunkers. But, um, you know, the the people that that the conspiracy theorists would would despise as being debunkers are really doing the conspiracy theories a service as cons, you know, being critics of what they do. Uh it’s setting up guard rails. It’s saying, “Look, if you want to have a decent conspiracy theory, don’t do this or don’t bring up that, right?” But, you know, uh uh yeah, kind of narrow your thinking and try to weed out the garbage and the untruths and the mistakes that you’re making and then see what you have left and maybe build on that. Um yeah, I totally agree. I totally agree with that. I’m surprised that more conspiracy believers don’t do some of that work. Um, policing themselves. It’s it’s very important. The other thing I would say about a possible conspiracy is I think the one thing that I don’t know about is was somebody egging Oswald on that we don’t know about in Jim Host thought so. You know, Jim Hosty, who I got to know back in 1983 when he came and talked to my uh JFK assassination class in Kansas. He came on two different occasions and and spoke at link both times. I also met him once at his home and we talked on the phone and corresponded for years after that. Um, you know, he talked about the Castro regime murder mount. That’s the way he put it. that he thought that perhaps not with intent as far as Oswald was concerned, not that they were particularly addressing him, but you know, he was just influenced by and egged on in a way by the rhetoric that was coming out of Havana. Now I think eventually Hosty went a little bit further than that because in his book Assignment Oswald, you know, he says in in a he makes an assertion that I think has gotten very little if any attention. He asserts in Simon Oswald that Oswald was photographed in Mexico City on a street with Kikakov.

I think by the time he wrote ASSIGNMENT OSWALD which was like around 10 years after I met him,
he brought that up which he had never mentioned to me but you know so I think Hostie over time became a conspiracy theorist but thought that it was the Cuban and or the Russian uh governments that were behind it. Right? more than just Oswald picking up something from the news that Castro may have said. Yeah. Castro did it theory was also bought into by other people like um you know two men that in ‘ 63 were very much involved in Cuban affairs in the department of the army were Alexander Haig and Joseph Calfano. and they both expressed over the years their conviction that Castro was behind the assassination. And uh I don’t know that we can totally rule that out. Also Gus Russo’s theory about uh Oh yes, Gus Russo. You bet. Yes. Yeah. And we I guess we normally think of him as being anti-conspiracy, but on the other hand, he he certainly uh did some intriguing research on the on the Castro angle. Yeah, very much so.
Okay, look, I think there’s a lot more we can talk about in this. We’ll we’ll probably have to do another interview at another time, but thank you very much for session.
It was a lot of fun.
Thank you very much

Episode 20, Janet Bannister

www.mattkprovideo.com/2025/08/18/episode-20-janet-bannister/

On the Trail of Delusion, Episode 20, Janet Banister

Guy Banister’s great niece and host of the true crime podcast “Skeletons In The Closet,” discusses her great uncles legacy and reputation.

Fred Litwins website: http://www.onthetrailofdelusion.com

Janet Banister’s website: https://www.dapperjackalopemedia.com/

Music by: Power Music Factory Channel URL : / powermusicfactory

Countdown to Dallas, Ruth Paine’s House

Countdown to Dallas, Ruth Paine’s House

www.mattkprovideo.com/2025/07/01/countdown-to-dallas-ruth-paines-house/

The night before the assassination Oswald  came home with his co-worker from the  depository, Wesley Buell Frasier.
It was thursday november 21st.

Oswald never visited Marina on Thursdays . He always came home on friday
The reason he came home on Thursday was to ostensibly try and woo Marina back into moving in with him.
Oswald even told her that ” if you agree to  come back with me i will get an apartment  in dallas tomorrow”
Marina rebuffed him.

It’s believed at that point of course Oswald went to his other option which was to retrieve his gun.
Probably around 9:00 or so, it’s believed oswald went into the  garage to fetch his rifle.
Let’s go in.
It was kept in a blanket similar to this one
This is not the the exact blanket of course but a blanket similar to that 
oswald’s rifle was disassembled in 
at the book depository the brown  wrapping paper bag to conceal that 

So he came into the garage here took the pieces of the rifle out of the blanket.
Slipped them into the bag 
After that he probably left the package in here
Some historians think it probably would have been too risky for Oswald to bring the package into the house.
There was no reason to he could easily retrieve it and more safely retrieve it the next morning.
Now Oswald went to bed before Marina did 
She finished some house chores then took a long bath went to bed with oswald 
It was her belief that oswald was still awake at one point 
She touched his leg he shoved her leg away apparently the next morning on the bedstand as you  can see here this is a replica of the china cup that Marina brought with her from the soviet union .
According to her, Oswald that morning placed  his wedding ring and approximately $187.
He told marina then that she could use the  money to buy the washing machine that she wanted.
Oswald then went into the garage, according to the official version of events, picked up his rifle and then walked down the block to Wesley Buell Fraziers house
So Oswald retrieved his rifle from the garage walked not too far
about a block down west fifth street
this is where we are crossed the corner of west fifth and westbrook came here to the home of his workmate Wesley Buell Fraziers
Oswald came here with his package stood outside the garage

Here this window is the kitchen of the Randall home.
Linnie Mae Randall was doing the dishes in front of the sink.
She later testified that she looked out the window saw Lee harvey oswald with the long package.

B-Roll clips for Yarovskaya /Moricet Episode

www.mattkprovideo.com/2025/06/20/b-roll-clips-for-yarovskaya-moricet-episode/

Some motion graphics and B-Roll shots I hope to use in the next episode of “On The Trail of Delusion”

Created with Adobe After Effects and Photoshop.

The next episode of ON THE TRAIL OF DELUSION will have interviews with Canadian JFK expert Dennis Moricet and acclaimed film maker Marianna Vera Yarovskaya .

https://mayfilms.com/

Countdown to Dallas, Episode 5, Was the Parade Route Changed

www.mattkprovideo.com/2025/06/06/countdown-to-dallas-episode-5-was-the-parade-route-changed/

Countdown to Dallas, Episode 5, Was the Parade Route changed?

www.paulbrandus.com

Countdown to Dallas, Episode 5, Was the Parade Route changed?

One claim of conspiracy theorists is that the motorcade route was deliberately moved to ensure that the Presidents car went down Elm street (underneath the depository) instead of Main Street

Here, as you can see, that is not possible, because of the concrete abuttment between the two streets

This is Main Street here,. Over here is Elm Street

Today, as in 1963, it is physically impossible to do that.

The only way to get to Stemmons freeway to the Trade Mart again was to go down Elm Street.

And now you know the rest of the story.

More stories on the assassination, and the events leading up to it,

in my latest book,

Countdown to Dallas,

Available everywhere books are sold.

There is also a Countdown to Dallas Podcast produced by Evergreen Podcasting that is also available everywhere

Countdown to Dallas, Episode 4

www.mattkprovideo.com/2025/06/05/14030/

One claim that conspiracists often make about the Kennedy Assassination is that a second person was spotted on the sixth floor of the Texas School  Book Depository minutes before the shooting proof, they claim, of a conspiracy

I’m Paul Brandus, author of Countdown to Dallas, and just minutes before the shooting there was indeed a second person on the sixth floor just steps from Lee Harvey Oswald and his sniper’s perch.

but this does not mean there was a conspiracy

Here now the rest of the story:

Around 5 minutes to 12 the Kennedy motorcade was underway headed for downtown Dallas.

At the depository, employees excited that the President would soon pass by, knocked off early for lunch.

as he was heading downstairs one  employee Bonnie Ray Williams said he saw Oswald 

at the depository employees excited that the president would soon pass by knocked off early for lunch
as he was heading downstairs one employee Bonnie Ray Williams said he saw Oswald on the fifth or sixth floor he wasn’t sure which
but moments later another employee Charles Given went to the sixth floor to get his cigarettes
there he saw Oswald
they had a brief conversation

Given said “Aren’t you going downstairs it’s near lunchtime.”
Oswald “No sir.”
Given left now minutes after that brief encounter Bonnie Ray Williams also returned to the sixth floor
“why?”
“To watch the presidential motorcade.”


At the time everyone was talking like they was going to watch from the sixth floor
Williams testified and while he waited for his buddies Williams ate his lunch a chicken sandwich and bottle of Dr pepper
he remembers sitting in front of the third or fourth window
Williams recalled quote “I couldn’t see too much of the sixth floor because the books at this time were stacked so high if there was anyone else up there on the sixth floor,”
Williams neither saw nor heard anyone
now here’s where it gets interesting
down on Houston Street a young man Arnold Roland was standing with his wife Barbara
looking around his eyes drifted up to the sixth floor of the depository
there in the corner window he saw a man holding a rifle with a telescopic site
roland assumed that this was a Secret Service agent there to protect the president
so it never occurred to him to point this man out to a nearby police officer
but Oswald was not the only person Roland saw on the sixth floor
his wandering eye also saw what he described as ” a colored man a few windows away”
this was Bonnie Ray Williams eating his lunch
now the other guys that he was going to watch the parade with
James Garman and Harold Norman were their names
had earlier been down on the sidewalk but decided the view would be better from the fifth floor of the depository
why the fifth floor?
because the sixth floor here shown that day was a jungle of boxes
by now as Garman recalled it’s between 12:20 and 12:25 just minutes before the assassination they were soon joined by Williams who had finished his lunch
leaving this greasy bag and empty soda bottle near the window
bonnie Ray Williams had been so close to Oswald while he ate that police and the media later thought the garbage had been Oswald’s
a month after the assassination this book published by United Press International and American Heritage repeated this mistake writing
in the caption quote “The sniper had dined on fried chicken and pop while waiting patiently to shoot the president.”
One report said “Wrong.”
But it does show just how close how tantalizingly close Bonnie Ray Williams sat to the man who was about to murder the president
this proximity helps explain why two other men on the street here at the southwest corner of Houston and Elm saw Oswald sitting perfectly still
their names Bob Edwards and Ronald Fiser
moments before the motorcade appeared Edwards spotting Oswald told Fiser quote “Look at that guy there in that window he looks like he’s uncomfortable.”
Were words to that effect
fischer chimed in quote “This man held my attention for 10 or 15 seconds all the time I watched him he never moved his head he never moved anything just was there transfixed
he looked to be 22 or 24 years old.”
It’s likely that Oswald who was 24 never moved because Bonnie Ray Williams as we’ve established was just feet away eating his lunch
meanwhile Oswald was also seen by yet another man who sat here tantalizingly close to the window his name was Howard Brennan
here’s Brennan at that spot in a recreation of November 22nd
he saw Oswald in the sixth floor window right above James Gar Harold Norman and Bonnie Ray Williams
who had by now joined his buddies on the fifth floor
“I saw this man on the sixth floor,” Brennan later testified he added “There was no other person on that floor that ever came to the window that I noticed there were people on the next floor down which is the fifth floor colored guys.”
The time frame here is about 12:22 which lines up with the Williams testimony
Brennan could give exact times because from his vantage point he could see the big clock the famous Hertz sign that in 1963 stood on the roof of the depository
now let’s go back to Ronald Fiser about 30 seconds before the shooting
30 seconds fischer looked up again an affidavit he gave to Dallas police that very day said
“I looked up at the window and noticed that he seemed to be laying down or in a funny position anyway because all I could see was his head.”
When the presidential car turned left onto Elm Street there was but one person on the sixth floor here in the southeast corner window not two as some conspirators have alleged
and now you know the rest of the story
more stories on the assassination and the events leading up to it in my latest book
Countdown to Dallas
available everywhere books are sold
there’s also a Countdown to Dallas podcast produced by Evergreen Podcasting that is also available everywhere

 

  

Countdown to Dallas, Episode 2, The Backyard Photos

mattkprovideo.com/2025/06/05/countdown-to-dallas-episode-2-the-backyard-photos/

Countdown to Dallas, Episode 2, The Backyard Photos

These video episodes have now moved to their own YouTube Channel!

Countdown to Dallas, Episode 1, New Channel

http://www.mattkprovideo.com/2025/06/05/countdown-to-dallas-episode-1-new-channel/

Transcript

The President’s car is now turning on to Elm Street and it will be only a matter of minutes before he arrives at the trademark

[Music] On October 14th, 1963 Lee Harvey Oswald applied and got a job at a place called the Texas School Book Depository

Here’s how it looked at the time
A nondescript red brick building perched on the southeast corner of Houston and Elm Streets
It offered a magnificent view of a place called Daily Plaza.
Here’s the building today
Now the question of just how Oswald got the job just 5 weeks before President Kennedy’s motorcade drove right by has been a longstanding question for those studying the assassination
Some think it’s fishy
Surely they say proof of a conspiracy
I’m Paul Brandus a longtime White House-based journalist speaker at seven presidential libraries
My latest is Countdown to Dallas.
In Countdown to Dallas I tell the rest of the story about Oswald and the depository
And for one surprising twist you might not know about stick around to the end of this short video
That mid-October 1963 story starts here in the Dallas suburb of Irving where Oswald’s wife Marina and their 21-month-old daughter June were living with a woman named Ruth Payne.
Marina was also days away from giving birth to her second daughter Marina the young Soviet

Immigrants a woman she met through the local immigrants

Marina was the victim of spousal abuse
Lee was a wifebeater hitting Marina on a regular basis
Ruth who wanted to improve her Russian took Marina in

That’s the backdrop
Oswald living on his own was also unemployed
He had just gotten back from Mexico City after a futile effort to get a visa to travel to Cuba
He needed a job badly
On the 14th Ruth Marina and some other women in the neighborhood were having coffee and the subject of Lee’s unemployment came up
Oswald had several job prospects
One was at a bakery
the other driving a truck but Lee didn’t know how to drive
One woman at that coffee Lenny May Randall mentioned that her brother Wesley Bule Frasier had just gotten a job at the Depository in downtown Dallas
She thought they might need an extra man
Now Marina Oswald’s English was poor
Lee did not allow her to learn it
So Ruth Payne called the depository and spoke with a boss there
His name Roy Truly
Truly said yes he could use another man to fill orders for school books
Tell Oswald to come down and apply
Now you have to remember what a pathetic work record Oswald had.
He’d been fired from two jobs in just the past 6 months
And a potential third employer checked on a reference who said Oswald was not a good employee
Oswald was unwanted
His skills were minimal
but a menial job filling boxes with books Oswald filled out this job application
His address was a lie
Said he’d lived in Dallas continuously
That was a lie
he had just gotten out of the Marines and was honorably discharged
Two more lies
that he had been on his last job for three years
Another lie
Five lies on one page
It’s a reflection of Lee Harvey Oswald’s habit of lying about well just about everything
But unlike other potential employers Roy Truly did not check on any of this
It was just a menial job after all
So Oswald lucked out
So that’s how Oswald got his job at the Depository
A group of suburban women having coffee
lacking the skills to work in a bakery or drive a truck
having poor references that might have resulted in work elsewhere
on and on
It took a series of small things for this job to work out
Now I mentioned one final twist to this story that may surprise you
I’ll get to that in a second
But it’s also important to remember this
When Oswald got the job President Kennedy’s visit to Texas had not been finalized
A trip had been announced but the final decision on Dallas would not be made until a month later
November 14th when the location for Kennedy speech at the Trademart was set
That decision that location was made by none other than Ken O’Donnell the president’s top White House aid
The Secret Service had recommended other locations
Other parts of town which would have meant different motorcade routes
Conspiracy theorists who are sure that Oswald’s job was some kind of setup
that he was somehow placed in the depository can never explain how all of these little things unconnected ranging from suburban women having coffee to President Kennedy’s own right-hand man picking that final location occurred
And here’s the final twist to this story
You might not know that in 1963 the Texas School Book Depository had another location at 1917 North Houston Street.
Roy Truly the boss nearly assigned Oswald to that location.
Had he done so Lee Harvey Oswald would have been nowhere near Dealey Plaza on the day of the president’s visit.
Great tragedies often take a series of small and seemingly unconnected events to occur
This was one of them
There are other stories to tell about Oswald his life
that very different era
decades of presidential security and the attitude of numerous presidents towards it
And also the science of cognitive dissonance
why humans are wired to think and process information and data the way they do
and why this fuels the beliefs that so many people have in assorted conspiracy theories
Not just the Kennedy assassination
but everything from Pearl Harbor to the moon landing to 9/11 even Princess Diana’s car crash
The science behind our beliefs that’s also explored
All of this and much more can be found in my latest book Countdown to Dallas and in a podcast of the same name Both are available everywhere

On the next On the Trail of Delusion… April 2025

On the next episode of Fred Litwi’s “On the Trail of Delusion… “April 2025

An April Fool’s Day prank made with Photoshop, Adobe Animate, After Effects and Adobe Premiere.

Obviously, this is a joke video not really connected to Fred Litwins ongoing YouTube series.

www.youtube.com/@onthetrailofdelusion

onthetrailofdelusion.com