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
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
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
Some samples of my live sports videography from the past 5 years. I would like to make a video record of your live sporting event. I can do it on my own or as part of a team of camera operators.
I own my own 4K cameras (camcorders and DSLR’d) and my own editing equipment.
Some of this footage was show in HD (not 4K) but scaled up to 4K using Adobe After Effects’ “Detail preserve upscale).
I have since sold all my HD cameras and now shoot exclusively in 4K.
.16 seconds: Bitter Lacrosse Tournament (Round Rock, Texas,) Shot with a Canon Camcorder.
.32 Seconds: Girls Basketball Tournament (San Marcos, Texas,) Shot with a Canon Camcorder.
.35 Seconds: Boys Basketball Tournament, (San Antonio, Texas) Shot with a Canon Camcorder.
.56 Seconds, Kung Fu Class, (San Antonio, Texas) Shot with a Canon DSLR.
.57 Seconds, Girls Basketball Tournament, (Mission Concepcion Sports Park, San Antonio, Texas) Shot with a Canon Camcorder.
1:15: Kung Fu Class, (San Antonio, Texas) Shot with a Go Pro on a gimbal with Time Remapping done in Adobe After Effects.
1:21: Soccer Tournament, (Round Rock, Texas) Shot with a Canon Camcorder.
1:31: Girls Basketball Tournament, (Mission Concepcion Sports Park, San Antonio, Texas) Shot with a Canon Camcorder.
1:35: Kicking World Football Camp, (Pflugerville, Texas) Shot with a Canon Camcorder.
1:40 Wrestle Circus, (Austin, Texas). Shot with a Canon Camcorder and a Canon DSLR. Is Pro Wrestling really a sport? From a videographers point of view- I think it is.
1:44 NL Surf Park, (Austin, Texas). Shot with a waterproof Go Pro.
1:53: HS Football ( Duncanville High School Vs Mater Dei). Shot with a Canon Camcorder and a Canon DSLR.
Edited with Adobe Premiere and some Adobe After Effects, opening and end titles made with Adobe Photoshop.
Some more Basketball footage:
Some more High School Football footage:
Duncanville High School Vs Mater Dei, Aug 27, 2021.
Jesus said: “whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.” (Matt. 25:40)
On April 27, 2025, at noon I showed my documentary “The Least of My Brothers” at the RTF Building at San Antonio College. This is the intro before I showed the film, and then I took questions from the students and teachers who showed up.
This is the promo video I made for the event (a re -edit of a much earlier promo)
This is iPhone video of the intro and Question and Answer session after I showed the documentary:
Transcript of the introduction:
Welcome to our kickoff event of the 2025 multicultural conference as part of Fiesta this is a documentary screening of a film called The Least of My Brothers and the filmmaker is here with us today This is Matthew Kordelski He is a graduate of the film program at Rowan University in New Jersey and the 2D animation program at Austin Community College He runs his own production company for films motion graphics animation podcasts and commercial videos He has an animated YouTube channel about dogs I love it It’s very fun Um He spent 5 years researching the murder of Bill Simpson which is what this film is about Bill Simpson was the first African-American to desegregate the sundown town of Vidor Texas He did not find the answers he thought he would find In this documentary he demonstrates that close examination and inquiry often helps us discover that there is more than meets the eye So without further ado Matt Kordelski any questions for our filmmaker today yeah You know it’s funny You and I had earlier a minute ago were talking about Orson Wells And one time Orson Wells was giving a talk and nobody showed up and the announcer said “Orson Wells has done this,he’s done that, he’s done that, he’s been an actor a writer a playwright.” And Orson Wells comes on and goes “I wish there was as many of you as there are of me”
But anyway uh anybody ever heard of the story of Vidor Texas and what happened there you have from me or from Do you heard of it uh no I mean I heard about it when it happened It was a shocking horrific crime in the National Navy Okay Not too far from where I would live at the time Anybody heard of a Sundown Town oh yeah All right A little bit of backstory This was made in the early 1990s In the early 1990s for good or for bad was the golden era of trash media I’m going to say a man’s name that not so long ago if you said this guy’s name in San Antonio you would provoke a riot Howard Stern he was the king of trash radio You remember that okay Um he was the king of trash radio Just there was no rules Whatever you could do to get attention he did it Jerry Springer on TV was the same thing and all these guys They set the bar pretty low in terms of quality but they set the bar pretty high in terms of ratings It was completely insane People you would neve, r have on your TV show Ku Klux Klansmen, Nazis neo-Nazis
and the host did not want to make it a civil discussion They deliberately would get a Klansmen and somebody from Lewis Farrakhan’s group and hoping they’d fight It was insane Now into this environment they decided to desegregate the white housing complex in Vidor Texas not long after that uh an African-American man moved in and then he got tired of the harassment and the day he moved out he was murdered I heard that and I came to a presumption that surely somebody from the clan killed him I spent five years digging and digging and digging I’ll let we’ll talk about this afterwards I did not find the answer I thought he would But the theme of this festival is more than meets the eye Keep an open mind Don’t make a snap judgment on just because that’s a bad guy who’s done a history of bad things Maybe they didn’t do that thing But hey we’ll talk about it afterwards Thank you for coming
Transcript of the Q&A
All right. Thank you for sharing your video
We can now go to a Q&A.
Can you feel like asking the filmmaker?
And I actually want to start if it’s okay.
Yeah.
Anything that’s. You must have had to talk to a lot of residents.
Her? Yes.
Including some pretty despicable racists and others.
Yeah. Yes. So how do you.
That was my first song.
As I was watching this again was.
How do you engage with someone who
you’re totally opposed to in terms of what they stand for?
And you saw the movie documentary to see some of to talk to them.
How do you measure? It was a lot of discipline. I had to try in my usual. I mean, I was talking to Klansmen and I was on phone calls
with neo-Nazis and, you know, racist people, and I promised I’d be fair.
And then I think I was I mean, I couldn’t it would have been the easiest thing
in the world to cut this, to make it look like maybe the Klan did it.
There’s enough circumstantial.
What if I if I could have done that, I promised them I would, and they were kind of looking like rosy.
Yeah. But, yeah, I just get. I need to buy me a little light and start reading about different races, different ethnic groups.
In other questions, friends. I mean, at some point, somebody, one of your one of your sources that you recorded said, well, there’s no violence here against black people. It’s it’s just threats. The threats are pretty bad.
I mean, that’s not but, you know, like to stand on, my true.
It’s not, it’s not. And, if you’re right, it’s like one thing I was surprised, making is, was when I was talking to Bill Haley, somebody got help.
You got trouble for making threats, but they were rather nonsensical threats.
Somebody said, I’m going to get a load of dynamite and blow up the housing complex.
You go up and saying that even though he never had
the dynamite, there’s no evidence he was really going to do this.
But threat of force.
Now, I’m not a lawyer.
I support you, but yeah, you’re right that that’s no excuse.
I mean, pretty frequently that you can’t yell fire in a theater and you can’t threaten to blow up in front of a solid point.
That’s pretty bad, too.
And by other companies, I mean the bad guy here seems to be the media.
You know, the media come in and they’re, you know, how they’re married or whatever.
But it would be better if we heard, like, you know, actual news clips that would substantiate that.
The one sort of negative thing that we have about me is the evidence that we have is the, the, you show the put the plan to I fair harassment and current affairs
and you know and and and they came up empty
and they wouldn’t let me use any of that footage.
But and so, I mean, that’s pretty bad, but, you know, if if the enemy is the media, it seems like we need
to have those headlines or whatever or clips or descriptions,
you know, specific incidences,
the media, you know, pushing a dishonest.
Okay. You’re you’re right about that.
00:02:54:41 – 00:02:59:00 And I, I thought I made the point that I’m not saying there was no racist
00:02:59:00 – 00:03:03:23 so racism or trouble there, but I’m saying that I think the media exaggerated
00:03:03:39 – 00:03:06:07 and that that provide evidence for the media.
00:03:06:07 – 00:03:09:33 Oh, yeah, but I couldn’t I mean, there’s you can argue all day.
00:03:09:50 – 00:03:11:41 So the TV should have stayed away.
00:03:11:41 – 00:03:13:52 They shouldn’t have covered. It was good.
00:03:13:52 – 00:03:14:53 Is that the solution?
00:03:14:53 – 00:03:16:50 No, I mean, I, I wrestle with that, like.
00:03:16:50 – 00:03:18:04 Okay, you make a very good point.
00:03:18:04 – 00:03:21:08 No, I been let me back up and say I thought it was a film.
00:03:21:20 – 00:03:23:42 And I said in the beginning, oh, yeah, I heard all about this.
00:03:23:42 – 00:03:25:16 No, I had not heard anything about it.
00:03:25:16 – 00:03:28:50 What I thought we were going to hear about is the same as next up in YouTube.
00:03:28:50 – 00:03:30:14 And there on the screen behind you.
00:03:31:35 – 00:03:32:51 Jasper was.
00:03:32:51 – 00:03:33:54 So that was Jasper.
00:03:33:54 – 00:03:35:47 That’s Jasper. Okay, so I was confused.
00:03:35:47 – 00:03:36:50 Did you have the time in me?
00:03:36:50 – 00:03:38:22 This everybody, when he got the joke
00:03:38:22 – 00:03:41:34 that Ross just moved away from fighter to get away from the Klan.
00:03:41:36 – 00:03:44:34 I got I think we got a stage town. Ha ha ha.
00:03:44:34 – 00:03:45:51 Jasper and I made it.
00:03:45:51 – 00:03:48:06 People got the joke. I mean, and he really did do that.
00:03:48:06 – 00:03:50:55 That really did happen. Yeah, yeah. Oh. He didn’t.
00:03:50:55 – 00:03:53:44 So you you opened my eyes here to you.
00:03:53:44 – 00:03:55:43 Okay. You know, you think about.
00:03:55:43 – 00:03:58:43 Do we know what happened to the old lady with that?
00:03:59:31 – 00:04:00:49 I don’t think she’s still alive.
00:04:00:49 – 00:04:03:23 She never paid. Who was a paper dancer? They knew.
00:04:03:23 – 00:04:07:31 They they you had to pay X amount of money to these people that you bother,
00:04:07:31 – 00:04:10:30 but they you. She was never gonna pay to take your judgment.
00:04:10:30 – 00:04:12:44 I don’t know how she tried to compensate.
00:09:45:18 – 00:09:47:49 If the Klan had not gone to Vidor
00:09:47:49 – 00:09:51:48 would the Bat Lady and certain other people still be obnoxiously rude, yes,
00:09:51:48 – 00:09:54:42 but that they’re still there, they’re like stoking the hostility.
00:09:54:42 – 00:09:59:00 Yes, I think they they really got people riled up
00:09:59:18 – 00:10:03:06 and getting on TV got them riled up and, you know, bringing up it was violent.
00:10:03:06 – 00:10:04:20 Do You guys know the history of the Klan.
00:10:04:20 – 00:10:08:35 The Klan was originally this rather small thing in Tennessee.
00:10:09:13 – 00:10:13:07 And then there was a play based on the memory of the Klan called The Klansman,
00:10:13:25 – 00:10:16:42 that got turned into a silent movie called “BIRTH OF A NATIONâ€
00:10:17:35 – 00:10:20:27 And they you had to get in trouble for saying this,
00:10:20:27 – 00:10:24:57 but a nationwide craze, flew by flying cosplayers.
00:10:25:10 – 00:10:28:09 They saw the movie BIRTH OF A NATION and the Klan took off again.
00:10:28:31 – 00:10:29:36 Then it kind of faded away.
00:10:29:36 – 00:10:32:00 Then it came back during the civil Rights movement,
00:10:32:57 – 00:10:33:33 and then it kind of
00:10:33:33 – 00:10:36:58 faded away and it bumped up a little bit in the 90s.
00:10:36:58 – 00:10:39:47 I couldn’t tell you what the with the response of it.
00:10:39:47 – 00:10:42:54 But did the Klans being there stir the pot?
00:10:43:00 – 00:10:46:50 get people excited, get somebody who was quietly racist to be loudly racist?
00:10:46:50 – 00:10:48:22 Yes, absolutely.
00:10:48:22 – 00:10:49:01 Absolutely.
00:10:49:01 – 00:10:52:01 And the Klan is always,
00:10:53:02 – 00:10:54:55 you know, it’s all blacks.
00:10:54:55 – 00:10:57:30 Go back to your country, go back to your country.
00:10:57:30 – 00:11:00:16 We’re all guilty of that. Absolutely.
00:11:00:16 – 00:11:02:29 Especially white people. Oh, I go back to your country?
00:11:02:29 – 00:11:04:00 Fine, go back to France, Go back to Russia
00:11:04:00 – 00:11:07:00 Native Americans, you know, and it’s it’s like,
00:11:07:11 – 00:11:11:23 how hypocritical are we too because this was not our.
00:11:11:41 – 00:11:14:35 Our land and boundary delineation.
00:11:14:35 – 00:11:16:07 You know, it. Was already here.
00:11:16:07 – 00:11:20:12 Yes. You know so it was,it was kind of ridiculous.
00:11:20:12 – 00:11:22:10 I completely agree.
00:11:22:10 – 00:11:24:47 And there’s different versions and there’s one
00:11:24:47 – 00:11:28:10 I had one with the history of the Klan. I had another one with the history of Vidor.
00:11:28:10 – 00:11:30:28 And I cut it out because it was boring People thought, but,
00:11:31:53 – 00:11:34:40 they,
00:11:34:40 – 00:11:35:47 One of the Grand Dragons lived there. There was a metal pipe.
00:11:35:47 – 00:11:36:23 Lived there.
00:11:36:23 – 00:11:38:25 And I found his house , there was still
00:11:38:25 – 00:11:41:25 believe it or not, the metal pipe that he would light the cross on
00:11:42:13 – 00:11:44:39 If you go to my YouTube channel, there’s a lot of deleted footage.
00:11:44:39 – 00:11:47:30 If you’re interested, look up, “The least on my brothers†YouTube channel.
00:11:47:30 – 00:11:49:47 Theres things that I cut out because I thought it was slower.
00:11:49:47 – 00:11:52:34 But yes, if I think it goes, of course they’re neo-Nazis.
00:11:52:34 – 00:11:54:45 There was that one group?
00:11:54:45 – 00:11:56:04 They weren’t neo-Nazis.
00:11:56:04 – 00:11:57:23 In so much as he never said
00:11:57:23 – 00:12:01:30 anything about Hitler or Germany or Germany, National Socialism,
00:12:01:53 – 00:12:06:25 but there’s no denying what he wanted for America was a heck of a lot.
00:12:06:25 – 00:12:08:07 Like, what did Hitler wanted for Germany.
00:12:08:07 – 00:12:10:06 So from that point of view, He WAS a Neo-Nazi
00:12:11:16 – 00:12:13:00
00:12:13:00 – 00:12:16:00 So you were shooting this for five years? Yes.
00:12:16:47 – 00:12:18:04 So what kept you going?
00:12:18:04 – 00:12:21:20 And was it that you were trying, as you said, you were trying to prove
00:12:21:20 – 00:12:24:20 that the Klan did it, or like, they were like,
00:12:25:41 – 00:12:26:53 I wanted to make a movie.
00:12:26:53 – 00:12:31:57 I want yeah, I can tell you, I’m some great crusader on a horse
00:12:32:09 – 00:12:33:59 I wanted to make a movie
00:12:33:59 – 00:12:36:16 So I started, but I didn’t want to spend five years.
00:12:36:16 – 00:12:37:40 I never meant to spend five years.
00:12:37:40 – 00:12:40:37 I thought it would maybe be six months, but I couldn’t find people.
00:12:40:37 – 00:12:41:36 I didn’t have time to edit.
00:12:41:36 – 00:12:45:12 I didn’t have access to editing equipment which which was a thing back then.
00:12:45:12 – 00:12:45:50 It’s not today.
00:12:45:50 – 00:12:47:27 You can do it all on your phone,
00:12:47:27 – 00:12:52:02 but back then I to get access to an AVID, get access to BetaCam Cameras 00:12:52:02 – 00:12:53:21 That was not an easy thing to do.
00:12:57:13 – 00:13:00:42 Is that what kept you going was that you were trying to prove
00:13:00:42 – 00:13:02:35 that the Klan was responsible
00:13:02:35 – 00:13:03:38 Yes. Yeah.
00:13:03:38 – 00:13:06:52 So one, I wanted to crack open the case and show what really happened.
00:13:06:52 – 00:13:07:21 You know, I was right.
00:13:07:21 – 00:13:10:40 I wanted to finish my movie, I wanted to, so I did everything.
00:13:11:11 – 00:13:17:47 And what was interesting was I was starting to lean towards thinking: “You know what? The Cops were right†It really was just a drive by.
00:13:18:28 – 00:13:21:06 And I still thought that Vidor was a racist town.
00:13:21:06 – 00:13:24:06 I interviewed somebody who was still living in the complex,
00:13:24:24 – 00:13:28:00 and I was about to pack my camera, and that’s when I looked up.
00:13:28:02 – 00:13:31:39 And then. the shot, of the little girl’s having a tea party
00:13:32:19 – 00:13:36:18 that was going on So I quick grab my camera and video-ed that.
00:13:37:26 – 00:13:40:01 And then I put the camera away and somebody said, “So what are you doing?â€
00:13:40:01 – 00:13:40:55 “Making a movie in Vidorâ€
00:13:40:55 – 00:13:43:55 That was just a black girl who said, this is not a racist town.
00:13:44:58 – 00:13:48:56 So I pulled the camera back out, Miked her up and just interviewed her.
00:13:49:31 – 00:13:52:31 And then like on the drive, home, I thought: hmmmmmm
00:13:52:44 – 00:13:55:06 That was kind of a turning point.
00:13:55:06 – 00:13:56:44 That’s when I kind of realized that I was wrong.
00:13:56:44 – 00:13:59:44 It wasn’t the Klan and Vidor
00:14:01:04 – 00:14:03:43 And then I can’t I’m not going to say it’s not a racist town 00:14:03:43 – 00:14:08:06 To this day You hear about black people not wanting to stop for gas there.
00:14:08:06 – 00:14:10:35 But is that true? Or is that hype?
00:14:10:35 – 00:14:11:44 Yeah, I don’t know.
00:14:11:44 – 00:14:14:11 I played with the idea of making a sequel.
00:14:14:11 – 00:14:17:49 Maybe for a hidden camera on a black guy Have him go buy gas and see what happens.
00:14:18:10 – 00:14:19:08 I thought about that,
00:14:19:08 – 00:14:21:29 In other words, the exact same thing A CURRENT AFFAIR did?
00:14:21:29 – 00:14:25:35 OOH! Gut Punch! Well done sir!
00:14:25:35 – 00:14:28:04 Now know you say that. Yes I would. Well.
00:14:28:04 – 00:14:31:04 Oh all right, I’m doing another question like
00:14:31:40 – 00:14:34:23 okay, I was just going to just make your own comment.
00:14:34:23 – 00:14:39:06 I think what what makes us feel resonant all these years later is that,
00:14:40:23 – 00:14:43:16 you know, we live in an era of are conspiracy theories.
00:14:43:16 – 00:14:46:35 I mean, you know, with social media and all that, and it shows how
00:14:47:08 – 00:14:51:03 people were even back then, 30, 40 years ago,
00:14:51:18 – 00:14:54:18 we’re still doing things for,
00:14:56:05 – 00:14:59:05 you know, coming in from outside to kind of,
00:14:59:23 – 00:15:02:23 you know, start this,
00:15:02:47 – 00:15:05:23 make it look like things are going on in the town.
00:15:05:23 – 00:15:07:50 The media was feeding on it and all that.
00:15:07:50 – 00:15:10:57 And, doing what, I guess would we call fake news?
00:15:11:26 – 00:15:14:55 And, you know, this was all happening back then,
00:15:15:15 – 00:15:24:40 and that leads us to the era here now where people are very skeptical about about the media and maybe rightfully so,
00:15:25:24 – 00:15:33:50 Apparently they missed lot of the stuff that was going on in Vidor was really primarily outside forces.
00:15:33:50 – 00:15:40:45 And, you know, and then the whole thing about it’s about the death of Simpson is, you know, the conspiracy theories
00:15:40:45 – 00:15:46:43 It took a long time to unravel that it really was just, you know, street crime. Right?
00:15:47:36 – 00:15:51:25 Everybody even think that it was a coincidence
00:15:51:25 – 00:15:54:25 you never even got to sleep in his house
00:15:54:29 – 00:15:55:25 on the night that.
00:15:55:25 – 00:15:57:57 He was going to go to sleep in his house.
00:15:57:57 – 00:15:58:53 He gets killed.
00:15:58:53 – 00:16:02:47 Yes. What a freaking coincidence, this amazing coincidence.
00:16:02:47 – 00:16:07:08 And that’s why I had first thought for sure it had to be somebody from Vidor that did this.
00:16:07:36 – 00:16:09:11 Although in hindsight, I think about it.
00:16:09:11 – 00:16:12:10 I spent a lot of time talking to the Klansmen and reading their literature.
00:16:12:13 – 00:16:17:19 I am NOT ori Klan at all. I’m just saying from their point of view,
00:16:18:08 – 00:16:21:31 if Bill Simpson had been killed the day he moved IN to Vidor
00:16:21:31 – 00:16:26:58 I’d say maybe it was the Klan On the day he moved out? Why would they care?
00:16:26:58 – 00:16:31:00 I mean, I could almost see the Klan paying for the U Haul to help him move.
00:16:31:00 – 00:16:38:49 I am joking but Yes, yes, it is an incredible irony.
00:16:39:43 – 00:16:42:42 And, you know, I gave some a little bit of,
00:16:43:17 – 00:16:44:07 not lip service,
00:16:44:07 – 00:16:47:07 but I brought up the conspiracy theories, like, people think that people think that
00:16:48:06 – 00:16:50:41 that when you get into how the landlady.
00:16:50:41 – 00:16:53:28 How did she get into HUD housing for me, I looked into that.
00:16:53:28 – 00:16:55:38 It was completely genuine. It was aboveboard.
00:16:55:38 – 00:16:58:18 She never rented throught HUD before. You’re right, she didn’t
00:16:58:18 – 00:16:59:56 Nobody wanted to rent to Bill SImpson
00:16:59:56 – 00:17:01:48 Nobody wanted the publicity.
00:17:01:48 – 00:17:03:13 She saw him on TV.
00:17:04:15 – 00:17:05:44 She says,
00:17:05:44 – 00:17:08:49 I did this out of the kindness of my heart to give the guy a place to live.
00:17:09:32 – 00:17:12:32 Ive talked to some people that,
00:17:12:57 – 00:17:14:11 I to go.
00:17:14:11 – 00:17:16:35 It was partly, that she wanted the money.
00:17:16:35 – 00:17:17:41 She wanted to rent that house.
00:17:17:41 – 00:17:23:16 She had a house to rent, she had an empty rental property that she couldnt rent anybody because it was in a bad neighborhood.
00:17:23:52 – 00:17:28:04 So instead of that house laying empty shes now getting some H.U.D. money.
00:17:29:55 – 00:17:32:17 Plus the notoriety
00:17:32:17 – 00:17:35:17 Yes. Yes.
00:17:35:31 – 00:17:38:31 She she,
00:17:38:33 – 00:17:40:12 she wouldn’t appear on camera.
00:17:40:12 – 00:17:43:24 Partially because her Hollywood agents told her not to.
00:17:45:10 – 00:17:48:24 At the time I made this, you know, you saw the thing where she.
00:17:48:25 – 00:17:51:12 She was in the National Enquirer.
00:17:51:12 – 00:17:53:52 “Landlady taking back the streets.â€
00:17:53:52 – 00:17:55:51 She’s cleaning up her neighborhood.
00:17:55:51 – 00:17:57:06 She’s a crusader.
00:17:57:06 – 00:18:00:06 No, she wanted to increase the value of a rental property.
00:18:00:11 – 00:18:03:27 And there was talk of making either a movie or a TV show about her.
00:18:04:28 – 00:18:06:40 And Delta Burke was going to play her.
00:18:06:40 – 00:18:09:40 Oh, wow. And,
00:18:10:08 – 00:18:12:45 No, no, it was it was going to be Delta Burke.
00:18:12:45 – 00:18:15:31 If it was a TV show It was going to be Kathy Bates if it was a movie 00:18:16:33 – 00:18:19:54 And for, you know, for whatever reason, that didn’t happen.
00:18:22:18 – 00:18:27:42 You guys didnt ask about this, (I thought somebody would,) I’ve toyed with the idea of making a sequel
00:18:27:42 – 00:18:30:42 “Vidor Today†I might do that one day.
00:18:31:00 – 00:18:33:56 There actually been
00:18:33:56 – 00:18:35:33 three sequels to my movie
00:18:35:33 – 00:18:39:11 That I didn’t make I got paid for some of it.
00:18:39:58 – 00:18:43:03 The story, the, the billboard, the fall. Is it.
00:18:43:05 – 00:18:46:12 “This is Vidor, where you can get away with murdering a woman.â€
00:18:46:37 – 00:18:47:49 Did anybody hear that story
00:18:49:00 – 00:18:49:40 that had
00:18:49:40 – 00:18:53:41 absolutely nothing to do with racism, with the Klan, the Kathy page?
00:18:54:37 – 00:18:56:22 This young woman in VIdor.
00:18:56:22 – 00:18:58:54 Was killed in mysterious circumstances.
00:18:58:54 – 00:19:01:27 The circumstantial evidence
00:19:01:27 – 00:19:05:03 points to the ex-husband just incredible amount of circumstantial evidence.
00:19:05:03 – 00:19:06:37 But they can’t prove it.
00:19:06:37 – 00:19:07:43 The father was so angry.
00:19:07:43 – 00:19:09:47 Is is so obviously the ex-husband.
00:19:09:47 – 00:19:11:55 Why aren’t the Vidor cops doing anything about this?
00:19:11:55 – 00:19:13:59 He put up those billboards. to embarrass them.
00:19:13:59 – 00:19:14:15 He’s.
00:19:14:15 – 00:19:16:50 I think somebody from the police took a bribe.
00:19:16:50 – 00:19:18:40 I don’t believe. I just think they couldn’t prove it.
00:19:18:40 – 00:19:21:32 It’s one of these things that we know is that guy.
00:19:21:32 – 00:19:23:31 We can’t prove it.
00:19:23:31 – 00:19:26:25 So there was a been a couple of things like,
00:19:26:25 – 00:19:29:36 Unsolved Mysteries with Robert Stack did the Cathy Page story.
00:19:30:05 – 00:19:33:14 The Cathy Page story also kind of inspired
00:19:33:21 – 00:19:36:21 the Movie “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouriâ€
00:19:36:48 – 00:19:38:21 I remember them going back five years ago
00:19:39:24 – 00:19:43:03 that the writer said he was driving from Florida to California.
00:19:43:03 – 00:19:44:12 He saw billboards here.
00:19:44:12 – 00:19:47:01 You know, why is nothing being done about this murder.
00:19:47:01 – 00:19:51:26 He saw a billboard. He got the idea. and he wrote a completely fictitious story insired by that billboard.
00:19:52:21 – 00:19:53:42 Another sequel
00:19:53:42 – 00:19:59:10 Somebody approached me, Anthony Griffith black NAACP lawyer that represented the Klansman
00:19:59:10 – 00:20:00:30 He wouldn’t talk to me on camera.
00:20:00:30 – 00:20:01:55 He talked to me on the phone.
00:20:01:55 – 00:20:05:21 Well, someAfrican-American podcasters contacted him
00:20:05:21 – 00:20:08:33 and they did something I didn’t do, but they talked him into doing it.
00:20:09:08 – 00:20:14:01 So there’s his story is on the internet, and they’re using clips from my movie in that one.
00:20:14:01 – 00:20:17:26 And there was a TV series or like, it’s on Netflix or on one of those,
00:20:17:37 – 00:20:20:26 Got Saved Texas by Richard Linklater
00:20:20:26 – 00:20:22:26 and one of the episodes is A History of racism,
00:20:22:26 – 00:20:24:36 and they use a lot of footage from, from the movie.
00:20:26:04 – 00:20:31:12 I also had a lot of problems, you guys arent RTF Majors But I didnt have that much footage of The Klan,
00:20:32:06 – 00:20:33:55 There’s only,
00:20:33:55 – 00:20:37:05 I went just did internet searches on pictures of the Klan
00:20:37:06 – 00:20:40:06 He knows a lot of that, I Photoshopped it
00:20:40:32 – 00:20:42:19 I’m going to confess that I was a bad boy.
00:20:42:19 – 00:20:43:45 One of the shots in a burning cross.
00:20:43:45 – 00:20:46:02 I faked that
00:20:46:02 – 00:20:48:58 I got 2 wooden dowels glued together and set it on fire,
00:20:48:58 – 00:20:50:42 because I just needed a shot of a burning cross
00:20:50:42 – 00:20:52:48 I don’t do anything for you about the Olympics.
00:20:52:48 – 00:20:55:18 How did you feel in that moment setting it on fire?
00:20:55:18 – 00:20:56:29 I did in my backyard. I didn’t feel good about it.
00:20:56:29 – 00:20:57:34 I do in my backyard. I didn’t feel good about it.
00:20:57:34 – 00:20:59:29 And I also felt journalistically dubious.
00:20:59:29 – 00:21:01:51 But Im not lying I mean, It did happen.
00:21:01:51 – 00:21:04:46 I just didnt have a shot of it as, like, one of the early versions.
00:21:04:46 – 00:21:06:05 I said “FAKEâ€
00:21:06:05 – 00:21:09:43 Some of the words on the screen ok we get it
00:21:09:43 – 00:21:11:28 Cough. Doris and unrelated news.
00:21:11:28 – 00:21:14:09 At one time you shared stock footage that you were clear to specify.
00:21:14:09 – 00:21:15:35 This is stock footage. Yes.
00:21:16:38 – 00:21:17:19 And I don’t I don’t
00:21:17:19 – 00:21:20:44 know why I didnt do that on the cross, but I think that and,
00:21:21:04 – 00:21:24:47 there was I, for a very short time, was talking to Hollywood
00:21:25:09 – 00:21:26:42 and, like, turning this into a “MOVIE movie”
00:21:26:42 – 00:21:29:08 Oh, man. This is it. This is my dream come true.
00:21:29:08 – 00:21:32:16 And then Waco happened, like, oh, we’re going to follow that story. We’ll get back tto you
00:21:32:16 – 00:21:33:31 Maybe we’ll do something with this.
00:21:33:31 – 00:21:39:07 And, any aspiring screenwriter s in the room,
00:21:39:07 – 00:21:41:02 Every made for TV movie, every one.
00:21:41:02 – 00:21:50:21 Not every movie, every major TV movie is the story of a woman trying to save her family through the strength of her heart.
00:21:50:21 – 00:21:53:06 And I like that may be a recurring theme, but I say no.
00:21:53:06 – 00:21:55:45 It’s ever since they told me that I can’t look at a made for TV movie without going
00:21:55:45 – 00:21:57:33 oh my God, that is it.
00:21:57:33 – 00:22:00:24 So they either wanted to do the story of the two black women who moved out,
00:22:00:24 – 00:22:02:15 or the story of the mayor of Vidor
00:22:03:38 – 00:22:06:16 and I was talking to both of those people,
00:22:06:16 – 00:22:09:50 the 2 women who moved out and the mayor of Vidor about doing the movie and,
00:22:10:42 – 00:22:14:15 the mayor didn’t want to do it because of the bad publicity.
00:22:14:29 – 00:22:16:38 The two women wanted to do it, but andthen the movie never happened.
00:22:16:38 – 00:22:19:15 So, what are you going to do
00:22:19:15 – 00:22:21:54 Anything else I want to talk about,
00:22:21:54 – 00:22:24:46 you know,
00:22:24:46 – 00:22:27:46 I can talk a little about this, anyone else?
00:22:28:02 – 00:22:29:19 What do you think?
00:22:29:19 – 00:22:30:53 I think it was the head of the Klan.
00:22:30:53 – 00:22:33:26 He didn’t want to speak about the bus?
00:22:33:26 – 00:22:36:25 Because he was guilty as sin!
00:22:37:37 – 00:22:39:50 He did drive through that neighborhood.
00:22:39:50 – 00:22:42:49 Not HIM but HIS Klan group
00:22:42:49 – 00:22:45:34 His Klan group did go through that neighborhood.
00:22:45:34 – 00:22:46:42 Did drive through the complex.
00:22:46:42 – 00:22:50:01 There was somebody with a machine gun that is a “threat of force.â€
00:22:50:01 – 00:22:53:56 That’s intimidation by third force actually pointing a gun
00:22:53:56 – 00:22:57:08 at somebody and saying, I’m going to shoot you is a worse crime,
00:22:57:51 – 00:23:01:00 but you driving it through, holding a gun, that’s a crime too.
00:23:01:27 – 00:23:03:51 That’s intimidation by “Threat of force.â€
00:23:03:51 – 00:23:06:26 I dont know about HIM
00:23:06:26 – 00:23:09:25 but his group absolutely did that.
00:23:09:27 – 00:23:13:59 And that’s why he wouldnt talk about it because it could come back in court later on
00:23:15:20 – 00:23:17:06 He was pleading the 5th
00:23:17:06 – 00:23:18:10 He did that.
00:23:18:10 – 00:23:21:40 And then, the voice over in, what was the lady’s name?
00:23:21:40 – 00:23:24:27 Lynn Marie Garsee
00:23:24:27 – 00:23:26:08 Garsee Yes.
00:23:26:08 – 00:23:29:08 Did you does your voiceover saying that she had
00:23:29:21 – 00:23:32:43 kind of orchestrated multiple interviews for you? Yes.
00:23:33:24 – 00:23:34:58 I went to the bathroom.
00:23:34:58 – 00:23:38:14 Did this version have the interview with the woman whose leg got shot off?
00:23:39:12 – 00:23:39:35 It was.
00:23:39:35 – 00:23:42:24 She got me that interview
00:23:42:24 – 00:23:44:42 No TV network in the world, you get that?
00:23:44:42 – 00:23:46:48 She kept saying no . Lynn Marie Garsee got me that
00:23:46:48 – 00:23:47:22 Copy that.
00:23:47:22 – 00:23:50:22 And she got me.
00:23:51:09 – 00:23:52:50 Oh, she got me around the neighborhood.
00:23:52:50 – 00:23:55:40 The shots at Bill Simpson’s house.
00:23:55:40 – 00:23:57:43 She she pointed out that at the house,
00:23:57:43 – 00:24:01:11 and she stood there and, she got me…..
00:24:01:11 – 00:24:01:40
00:24:01:40 – 00:24:05:11 I think there was an she gave me some other phone numbers.
00:24:07:11 – 00:24:10:11 As far as her getting caught
00:24:10:50 – 00:24:13:50 lying on TV.
00:24:15:04 – 00:24:17:28 Remember the part where the the TV crew went to her house
00:24:17:28 – 00:24:20:28 to talk to her about this, and she said people had warned her, not to talk
00:24:21:04 – 00:24:23:01 I can’t prove this.
00:24:23:01 – 00:24:24:39 I think she was just exaggerating.
00:24:24:39 – 00:24:28:06 She probably should like the attention she was at that point in time.
00:24:28:06 – 00:24:30:00 She was about to be famous.
00:24:30:00 – 00:24:33:08 It was sort of making her story into a TV show or a movie,
00:24:33:23 – 00:24:36:53 and she said, people came to me and threatened me not to talk
00:24:37:26 – 00:24:39:21 Who came to you? What are you talking about? When did this happen?
00:24:39:21 – 00:24:41:59 I think she was making herself dramatic.
00:24:41:59 – 00:24:43:31 I think from that.
00:24:43:31 – 00:24:45:29 But I think that’s what happened.
00:24:45:29 – 00:24:47:59 Okay, so you don’t think that she said that you believe.
00:24:49:23 – 00:24:51:22 No, I do not, I do not.
00:24:51:22 – 00:24:55:30 They could easily set him up in Vidor
00:24:55:30 – 00:24:59:35 Like she got him the house so that the Klan know where to go in order to get him?
00:24:59:35 – 00:25:03:03 Anyway, It woldnt that hard to figure out where he went,
00:25:03:03 – 00:25:06:03 But no, I do not think she had anything to do with that.
00:25:06:19 – 00:25:09:31 She set herself up as a saint. “I got Bill Simpson a place to live.â€
00:25:09:50 – 00:25:13:13 One of the one of the attorneys for East Texas Legal Services
00:25:13:13 – 00:25:15:53 said they talked to her right after the shooting,
00:25:15:53 – 00:25:18:28 and they said, did you hear about what happened to Bill Simpson?
00:25:18:28 – 00:25:20:57 She said, yeah, isn’t that terrible?
00:25:20:57 – 00:25:23:45 How am I going to get my next month’s rent?
00:25:23:45 – 00:25:28:03 Nobody would tell me that story on camera
00:25:29:08 – 00:25:31:41 Anybody else?
00:25:31:41 – 00:25:31:57 All right.
00:25:31:57 – 00:25:34:57 Matt I hate to cut you off
00:25:35:31 – 00:25:35:54 on time.
00:25:35:54 – 00:25:40:55 To see the deleted scenes, look up YouTube “The Least of my brothers.â€
00:25:40:55 – 00:25:44:28 And thank you for sharing such a challenging but important film
Is there anything of interest in the so-called “secret files” about the President John Fitzgerald Kennedy (JFK) assassination?
President Donald Trump said he would release all the files in his first term, then “THEY” asked him not to do so. Suspicious?
Then Trump said he’d release everything in his SECOND term, and so far… he hasn’t?
Why won’t Trump release the files? What is in them that needs to be kept secret?
Was the Warren Commission hiding something? Something that might indicate a second shooter or that Lee Oswald was working for a government security agency?!?!?
Was the Church Committee hiding something?
What did the 1978 House Select Committee on Assassinations have to hide? What were they afraid of?
What material(s) did the Assassination Records Review Board decide not to release to the public and Why?
Welcome to the first episode of On the Trail of Delusion, a podcast that separates reality from fiction in the JFK assassination. Our guest is Robert Reynolds who is an expert on the JFK assassination files. You can visit his terrific website at http://www.jfkarc.info
Here are some video clips of the goings on in Dealey Plaza ( Dallas, Texas) to commemorate the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963.
I disagree with many of the things said and done today ( November 22, 2024,) but remembering President Kennedy will always be a good thing.
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 Stones film flam at the demagogue of Dealey Plaza Fred Litwin is here he’s a longtime author and certainly Watcher of politics uh 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 fact from fiction and actually provide you an intervie with with real substance uh as opposed to some of the conspiracy nonsense you see on the web u today is a special day my guest today is Dave Perry somebody I’ve been dying to talk to for quite some time who is an incredible JFK researcher let me tell you a bit about him Dave is a graduate of Massachusetts State University at Worster Massachusetts Dave worked for 30 years for the Continental insurance company and he ended up as the assistant vice president of Southern Regional operations and we’re going to talk about some of his experience in a few minutes he’s been researching the JFK assassination for over 40 years he’s got an incredible website which you’ll see in the notes and on the screen which you could read a lot of his terrific research he’s got a superb book out about the JFK assassination he has uh debunked all sorts of things he’s been on many many documentaries including a PBS front lines 1993 documentary who was Lee Harvey Oswald he is an incredible researcher and I’m really glad to have him well thank you for having me I think this is going to be a little bit of fun yeah yeah so let’s just start off and just tell me a bit about how you got into the JFK assassination well this goes back to 1976 it was the bicentennial year and I was looking for some things to do to kind of celebrate the occasion and I decided I was going to do two things one I was going to build a model of the USS Constitution wow and the other one because I was reading about uh problems with the Kennedy assassination and the fact that they might be reinvestigating and since I was a claims adjuster I figured I would uh look into that too over the years I often wondered if I should have stuck with building the model of the Constitution yeah we all have similar questions like that but in the end it uh what what happened was I I was a claims adjuster uh at the time and uh I was primarily involved with workers compensation cases and they’re a little bit different because uh instead of uh like Auto liability where you’re trying to protect the company and work as compensation you’re trying to set it up to pay the employee for their injuries and during the course of this I’d also investigated a couple of workplace fatalities and I knew how to get in the court records I knew how to talk to attorneys that kind of stuff and I figured well I’m going to start working in that direction with the Kennedy assassination I was from Massachusetts and uh but I didn’t have much interest in them uh I was really not a fan fan of the cedes but then uh what happened was I started looking at the literature and a lot of it looked fishy particularly a lot of the books that were written early on there were no endnotes there were no references to things uh sylv Mar did a a great job because she started looking into the uh the Warren volumes with which are pretty difficult to work your way through and I read uh Josiah Thompson’s book 6 seconds in Dallas read Mark Lane’s book uh I looked at Mark Lane a little differently from the beginning because I was of the opinion because I dealt with ambulance Chaser attorneys that I thought he was kind of an ambulance Chaser he got in cahoots with margarite Oswald and became the point person on the case and if you’ve ever watched defense attorneys uh they have a tendency to try to you know get the case so there’s so much reasonable doubt that you’re going to say hey well it it really maybe there’s an issue here so I knew we were going to have that problem so what I did was I started reviewing the literature I started uh trying to get documents of course at the time uh it was extremely difficult as a matter of fact I really didn’t get into uh the document end this and probably until the late uh 1980s early 1990s uh when I figured out a little bit about Freedom of Information and the one thing I’ll always remember I don’t know how it is now because most of this stuff is online but I remember at one point uh I wanted to get a hold of the Lopez report on Mexico City because we were all thinking that was really a bizarre episode and at the time you had a credit account when you when you first signed in to the National Archives they allowed you 50 pages as an individual so I started uh ordering Pages under my wife’s name my name my son’s name my daughter’s name I left the dog’s name out of it Aussie would not pass alello aie was not named after Oswell he was actually named after russie osbor but anyway uh I had in the end I had burned up all my 50 pages particularly I burned up a lot of them getting the tip and autopsy photos I was one of the first ones to be able to get those officially under Freedom of Information so when I sent for the Lopez report they said I could have a copy but it was going to cost me about 25 bucks so I sent him the check and I got this oh I want to say about 250 pages of which 20 words were visible right the whole thing was redacted and we we ran into a lot of that so then I hooked up I’m sure you’re familiar with the late Harold Weissberg yeah and he taught me how to skirt my way through Freedom of Information because you had to be kind of very specific back in those days as to what you wanted all you would be turned down but he showed me the ins and outs of it and I was able to begin to file in the correct way and I managed I’ve got notebooks full of stuff some of it now which has appeared unredacted you can go back in get some of it but as usual we’re still waiting for more of the files to come out so I guess the short story is I use my background as a uh claims adjuster to be able to get myself know where to go you know most people wouldn’t know technically where to go to get a death certificate right right well I’ve done that many many times I’d also testified quite a bit so when in the 1990s unsolved history knocked on my door I had a pretty good idea of you know how to handle that kind of information to make it more relevant to what was going on okay so it’s great you had the some real skills to actually go out there and investigate uh uh on your own as opposed to uh I remember when I first got into the case I read Mark Lane’s Rush judgment and and I couldn’t check his footnotes because uh I lived in Montreal Canada no no Library had the 26 volumes so I couldn’t even check his footnotes and of course I couldn’t afford to buy the 26 volumes back then so it was kind of frustrating not being able to go any further um it’s kind of amazing we have so much online today that’s an amazing part of the case and I had been into Dallas uh originally to train a a group of heavy equipment people on how to detect heavy equipment that was being stolen and sent to Mexico so I came down here and of course the first thing I did is I scrambled down the street and walked into daily Plaza right and like everybody else I was completely shocked at how small it was y when my company transferred me down here this was my chance to get involved with a lot of the people that had been doing this for a while the JFK Center Gary Shaw and Larry Howard matter of fact I I worked across the street from Mary Ferrell uh Mary Ferell was a secretary in the office building next to me and we go to lunch quite a bit uh eventually met Gary Mack back when he was working at a radio station here in Dallas Jack White and another thing in my past life uh originally uh uh I was working up in Upstate New York up in Glenn Falls for continental and my uh 13-year-old son for Christmas wanted a electric guitar and I went and I bought him the electric guitar and I asked the people in the store hey who can teach my son rock and roll I don’t that’s what he’s interested in and they said well as’s a guy in Glenn Falls where you live you’ll be lucky if you can get a hold of them his name is Gus Russo right so I called Gus up and he said yeah I’ll take him on so first visit I bring him in and he’s got this rack of books on the Kennedy assassination and I said hey you’re into this too and that’s how we became good friends so I’ve known him long before just about anybody else in this and the interesting thing is once I moved to Dallas he’d literally come down and and stay with me well the next thing that happened was I was working as a volunteer uh behind the counter of the now defunct uh JFK Center in the Dallas West End and that was uh Gary Shaw and Larry Howard were co-directors I was also at the time very friendly with Jim lvll he’s a detective in the white cowboy hat right left to Oswalt Gus had come into town so I I said to uh Jim uh his he had a favorite restaurant Mexican restaurant in Dallas I said I’m going to take you out to lunch Gus and I were waiting and in comes Jim lvll and he’s got Gary Shaw Larry Howard and Bud finsterwald who was with the assassination archives and Research Center in Washington run by him and Jim are and uh I suddenly realized Jim has stiffed me for a big [Laughter] lunch and uh we’re talking it up and uh all of a sudden Bud starts talking about how they’ve got the things solved they’ve got a a person who knows exactly what went on and I always remember he he looked at the both of us and said well after this uh what are you guys going to do for a hobby in essence you know rather than chasing this around well about a couple of weeks went by and lo and behold I get an invitation through bud to go to the press conference now at the time uh Gary Mack was working at kxas Mary was doing whatever she was doing and I was the only one that that uh of the group of us that got invited to the press conference so I go to the press conference and there’s this Ricky Don White who’s uh claiming that his father uh not only shot Kennedy from the grassino but also uh JD tippet and as I’m listening to this stuff there were certain parts of the story that really didn’t make sense so afterwards I went up and I talked to a little bit to get a little more background on them and it just wasn’t it wasn’t working out right so I went back to the JFK Center talked to Gary Shaw and said look I’m an exclaims adjuster I want to look into this want to literally help you out so the first thing that I did was I went down to the Records building because Ricky claimed he lived across the street from tippet at the time of the assassination well to verify it I went down and I got uh the deed records uh well it turns out that they both families did live on Glen karon but Ricky moved there four years after the assassination H so that was the first crack the next thing I did was is time had gone by I had been sending the information I was gathering up to Harold Weissberg and we were trying to figure a way uh to get Rosco White’s military file actually uh went to the United States Navy because he was part of the Marine Corps and filed the Freedom of Information there uh relying on the fact that he had now become a public figure that was one of the you could do back in those days if they were a public figure so I set the news clippings and I got denied so what I did was I refiled again about two months later with the adant general of the United States Navy and coincidentally in the request I asked for the request for anybody else who had requested the military his military records rasco White’s military records so about 3 weeks go by and I get this huge packet that’s got Rosco White’s complete military file along with a note that the only other person who was requested the record was Ricky White and he requested it in 1989 but he was claiming he found the military records about three or four years earlier in in his father’s Foot Locker I started to thinking wait a minute here why would he be requesting them if he already had them that kind of stuff I also found out that Rosco had been burned in a a fire they were claiming he was killed because he wouldn’t take on one more assignment well what I did was it turned out that the fire was an industrial accident my line work right I went down to the courthouse and found all the lawsuits around it including the fact that everybody was saying it was flat out an industrial accident he was welding some material exploded on them was not the way they were describing so over a period of six months I had determined that this story was bogus and and I didn’t wasn’t quite sure what to do with it
Gary suggested I I write an article for the third decade when that got around I started getting phone calls from people well you know how to do this you know how to do that and that was the point I should have gone back and built the model of the Constitution
That’s when I went down the rabbit hole right
So then what I started
Well the next thing that came up is I got a call from Bower’s sister-in-law
She had seen a program with Geraldo Rivera called NOW IT CAN BE TOLD which claimed that Lee Bowers was killed because of something he said
And to make a long story short I investigated that one and I found out that the whole Geraldo show was based on some false premises uh like the fact the death certificate was missing well I went down a city hall and asked for a request for the death certificate.
They told me I had to wait because it had to come up from Austin I got I had the death certificate within about a week and the other thing that they came out in the show was that the a what about the autopsy well that’s missing too well when you got the death certificate it was so obvious he was killed in an automobile accident that that no autopsy was required so it got to be every one of them I looked into yeah there’s actually a good book about his death out there I don’t know if he worked on that book but uh I guess he had an allergic reaction and that caused him to uh to crash or whatever well the other thing about uh interesting about Bowers years later I got a phone call uh from a woman who uh was retired accident investigator for the Department Department of Public Safety (*Anita DIckason).
I originally thought from talking with relatives that he had bad allergies and in my article I said he I thought he sneezed or something and lost control and and hit a bridge
A bridge abutment and by the way the the bridge abutment they talk about is a little concrete post it I think it’s Stones movie it’s like a train trestle
no it’s very very small
But I talked to the ambulance driver who nobody had interviewed and he said when I got there he was unconscious
And of course Penn Jones wrote a story about it which was actually fiction about
this woman came along and she had access to stuff that I didn’t have and she wrote a book about it too based on some of was based on my stuff
But she found out why there was more information about why no autopsy was conducted that kind of stuff
And it appears that he had a heart attack before went unconscious and hit the post
So he was never driven off the road by a black car all that kind of stuff right
Right now the one the one thing I I like we talked about a little bit about this before that I want to get into is
It seems like every year particularly on the anniversary new books come out and this year was no different
well first of all
Retired secret service agent Paul Landis came out with a book where we suddenly discover that he found a bullet in the limousine and didn’t know what to do with it so he put it on a stretcher
right
Which became CE 399
I did a little segment on my web page and what I try to do in my articles is show for example
how the Secret Service operated as opposed to what is going on in a particular book now Landis through his co-author goes into a great great detail about how although he was a secret Service agent he didn’t know what to do with the bullet
You know he didn’t know who to turn it into
So he brought it around and he put it on the stretcher and of course that became the famous e399 the pristine bullet
years ago and I I’m going to back up because this is a rather interesting story that kind of put me on the trail of Oswald was definitely involved and whether or not he acted alone is another question
But anyway he and Marina were estranged
Marina was living in Irving with Ruth Payne
He was moving around but he ended up in a rooming House in Oak Cliff
Right
he used to get a ride into work every once in a while in and out of work with Buell Frasier who was an order filler at The Book Depository
19 years old at the time and uh when he wanted to go out and visit Marina
Buell would drive him in and out so the word is out that Kennedy is Coming to Town
there’s going to be a motor Cade so everybody in The Book Depository is talking about this
well Lee comes over to Buell and says :
“hey can I get a ride out to the house tonight?”
Buell says yeah okay and then he went back to him and he said
“well wait a minute this is not Friday this is Thursday”
and he says “yeah but I got to get some stuff from the house ”
So Buell gives him a ride out the next morning uh Oswald walks down to Buell’s house with a brown paper bag which he puts in the back seat
Buell’s driving him into work asks him
“what that is”
and he says “well that’s curtain rods”
and that’s the beginning of the famous curtain rod story
yeah
the only people I was ever
able to verify that story with was Buell who would be a sole Source but I also managed to do it with Lenny may Randall his sister who he was living with him
so there were at least two people that talked about this bag
May have gotten it right or wrong but that’s what it was that morning Marina wakes up because the night before they had a fight Le was trying to get back to her actually promised her hey if you get back with me I’ll buy you a washing machine uh she wasn’t having any of it so the next morning she gets up and she looks on the dresser drawer and there’s about $79 there which is about every penny that Oswald had and in this teacup that she got from her grandmother in Russia is Oswald’s wedding ring now to a lot of us that spoke volumes yeah also when he made the attempt on walker uh Marina indicated he left a lot of instructions on what to do if he was caught including how to get to the jail how to bail them out that kind of stuff so anyway the of uh what happened was uh Ruth Payne called into the FBI and said hey uh because Marina had gone downtown to be interviewed now they figured out who was involved she says I I found this wedding ring what do I do well few hours later two Secret Service agents appear at the door take the wedding ring and give her a receipt and mark it now this is just a wedding ring and they’re creating a chain of evidence right right and here you got Paul Landis years later saying he didn’t know how to handle the Magic Bullet
I also found an article from the 1980s where he gave an interview to the press a big long interview about the assassination and back and back then he said he found a fragment and then he gave it to somebody he wasn’t sure who
yeah
So as time goes by I guess memories get better y What It Is
Well the aside to to that wedding ring story, the wedding ring disappeared
completely disappeared
And I guess you know time goes by I I want to say back in the early uh 2000s the this Century
I get a call from a friend of mine who has a friend who’s a lawyer over in fort worth and they’ve got this box of material on the Kennedy assassination and they don’t know what it is
And they want to go through it but they want somebody who knows about the assassination
So I go over to this Law Firm over in Fort Worth and I’m going going through it and to me
Oh as an aside the attorney that originally handled the case had instate dementia
so he they brought the box over to him he had no idea
So they didn’t know what to do with it and
so I’m looking through this and I determined that what had happened was Priscilla McMillan Johnson was trying to write a book with Marina
eventually did it was called “MARINA & LEE”
and this was the paperwork for the copyrights and all the information to create this book
So I’m pulling all these files out and I’m generally figuring out that’s what it is
it’s nothing that exciting and then come out comes this little envelope and inside it was Oswald’s wedding ring
I could not believe it
I looked on the inside to drive to and there was a little hammer and sickle in there s
o I figured this this was probably it
it had been missing nobody knew about it so then I’m trying to work on the provenance
I got in touch with Hugh Ainsworth we we had him call the autopsy doctor that that did the re autopsy on on Oswald
no that that didn’t have anything to do with it
So then I uh I had had an episode where Marina and I got into it a little bit over something and we didn’t get along anymore
So I had Ainsworth call her up and say hey Dave Perry’s found the ring
She didn’t want it so now the Law Firm is trying to get rid of it
As a matter of fact at one time I got a call from Robert Oswald and he said well I’m interested in getting my hands on the ring
And I said well you know this is a family thing next in line for the ring is June and if she doesn’t want it next in line is Rachel
Because in the meantime I’ve been talking to the Sixth Floor and their attorney said there’s no way we can we can get it so there it sits in this law office from for about 10 years about 2012
I get a call from a uh an auction house up in New Hampshire
Now the interesting thing was I used I was doing provenance work for this auction house
the vice president calls me up and says
“hey I understand You’ found Oswald’s wedding ring”
I said yeah
And he said
“we have it and what had happened June had found out about it contacted them our and hour auctions right”
and uh eventually they came down uh because they wanted to film me and how you know the history of how I got a hold of the ring
and then they flew me and my wife Up To Boston because the auction was in Boston for the auction
And it brought in $9,000 it was it was given
well course I I I called uh RNR auctions and I said hey yeah I know you’re not going to do this but I’m going to ask anyway who bought it well they can’t do that but they did say that it it was sold to a woman in Texas did the money go to June or uh I don’t know how all I know there was uh $90,000 plus another 20% went to the auction house right so was actually I think 108 or 100 I I have the feeling the money might have been split between the whole family okay you know I don’t I don’t know where Rachel is but I think June moved in to the Dallas area and Marina lives out in rock wall and I’m thinking oh gee that’s too bad uh it would be great to have it in the sixth floor well I think about a year went by the dates are kind of fuzzy over a period of time but I got a call from uh Nicola Lanford uh the director and she says Hey tonight I want you and my wife Nikki want you both to come down here I got something to show you after hours we went down after hours and the woman donated the ring oh nice to the sixth floor and she brought us up to the sixth floor and they I think they have it in a big display case there so I turned to nickol and I said do you know this is the only thing in this Museum that actually belonged to osmo yeah so it’s really amazing all these little you know once you get to be known yeah how to swirl your way into the archives the calls you get so yeah so you’ve been involved in so many in so many things I mean you you have you’ve debunk so many things in in uh down in Texas I mean I’d love to hear some of your stories I don’t know if you want to talk about uh Mr wit or Tosh plumbley or Beverly Oliver uh or Judith I mean they’re all great stories Steven Louie was an interesting one when I was working behind the counter at the JFK Center he people would roam in and out was really funny you know you’d look up and all of a sudden Robert groden would be in from Pennsylvania Harry Livingston would be in people would be dropping in and out he came in one day and was just poking around and he he asked me a question and somehow or other I determined who he was and I said can we have lunch so I went out to lunch and I said okay from your own mouth I want to hear the story of the umbrella man and of course I I guess he was of that generation where maybe Kennedy would remember how John and his dad got kicked out of England because his dad was a Nazi sympathizer right yeah and the prime minister at the time was a guy named Neville chamber who always carried an umbrella and the way Whit told the story was I was going down there because I felt Kennedy was going to be a big appeaser just like his father and what I wanted to do was uh show him the Neville Chamberlain connection and that that was basically it and of course when he when he appeared before the house select commit people would come back and say who saves an umbrella that long well I do know and also I don’t know if you ever saw the pictures of it but uh somebody on the panel asked him to the open to open the umbrella and of course this was when the story of the poison dart coming out of the elev umbrella was going on so the whole panel ducked when he opened the kind of funny yeah it was a flet supposedly a flet yeah bu
[ __ ] you still get that you still mean I mean just uh what two years ago Oliver Stone told an interviewer that that he he perhaps a flette was fired to Kennedy the the thing about it is uh I I’ve over a period of time I’ve read a a lot of Psych psychological information I read a lot of Elizabeth lofa stuff she’s very good cognitive all that kind of material but what has always gutten me is the people who come to a conclusion and then get the evidence that tracks to whatever conclusion they’ve already come to and disassociate themselves with anything unrelated or that might screw it up and then over a period of time there’s always somebody that’s coming out of the wood woodwork that kind of becomes a I don’t know a thing a celebrity an assassination celebrity Jean Hill she became one Beverly Oliver and then most of them start embellishing their stories and once they start embellishing the stories then if you’re a good investigator you can go in and you can kind of look at the timelines and could this really have happened and that that was that was basically all I was doing I I have calendars that show what Oswell was doing on a certain date what Beverly Oliver was doing on a certain date that kind of stuff right but what was he was an interesting s line I mean I’ve met a lot of great people through this I’ve also met a few rather strange folks I had one fellow write me a letter telling me he was going to have me indicted as a traitor because I didn’t believe Beverly Oliver and I’ve got a few of those letters on file well that would have been an interesting lawsuit I mean I mean that would have been a lot of fun um so yeah do you want to I mean you dig in do you want to talk about um I don’t know Tosh plumbley Tosh plumbley is an interesting character because he’s currently Rob Riner included Tosh plumbley in his uh who killed JFK podcast as one of the people um who who flew uh John roselli and E Howard hunt uh to the null um you know that
morning well what’s interesting about Plumley uh now again I’m going back to the last century here I’m going back to 1990s right uh the fellow who wrote Crossfire Jim Mars he used to have a monthly meeting of assassination group IES uh over at uh University of Texas at Arlington and he invited me and Gary uh to these meetings well Gary and I got to the point when we would go over there every every month there would be something outrageous coming up and all of a sudden we hear that uh plumbley is coming over and I started looking into it and I couldn’t figure out he W he was claiming I couldn’t figure out if he was claiming that he flew in the hit team to redb bird airport or he flew the prevention team into redb bird airport yes reading the various stories and I didn’t know if they were embellishments or not but Gary and I got together and we looked through the available literature and we would we decided that that the Crux of the whole story was where he was standing now for those of you that have never been to daily Plaza you’ve all heard of the grassy null well you can literally flip that over to the other side so there is a mirror image of the grassy null on the other side and plumbley claimed he was standing with another person halfway up that null uh basically that’s what he said in one of his stories right so when we got there we listened to his speech and um then they had a question and answer session so Gary said Well when the motorcade was coming down Main Street where you I was standing there when it made the right turn on the Houston Street where were you standing I was standing there when it made the left turn onto Elm I was standing there when it went under the triple underpass I was standing there now we Gary and I had already set this up so Gary said well let me explain something to you if if you are where you were you are going to appear in one of the canceler photographs does anybody happen to have one of the canciller photographs and I had Groen one of groden’s books that had two pictures of the canciller photographs and of course he’s not in either of them right nor is his sidekick so now all of a sudden well maybe I was farther up the hill than I originally thought that kind of stuff so at that point we knew the story was was kind of bogus and then later on uh under Freedom of Information I managed to get a whole bunch of information on plumbley and found out that he forged the pilot’s license uh he ended up at jail for kiting checks all kinds of stuff so he went from an Ohio jail to being involved in the the Kennedy assassination so that but but Gary and I had figured very early on that that was a bogus Tale
But it it it creates excitement that yeah he’s one of these sort of Adventure characters who appear in you know uh Jerry Heming and and uh there was a Jim Rose character I don’t know Jim Rose from The Garrison era who was also sort of one of these people who had supposedly flown people around and Gordon Noel uh a bunch of these people seem to be involved in the case and and Richard case Niguel who was another one you know and and and yet when you look closely at them it’s just it’s just it’s not there’s nothing really there yeah and and it’s it’s like the general public they are really not that dis disc Discerning first thing when I get a hold of a book I start looking at the footnotes and where the footnotes are coming from right and of course then you have the problem with somebody is footnoting a bogus situation and now with AI and all the other internet capabilities it’s getting worse but fortunately it’s more modern um basically what I’ve been doing over the probably about the past 10 years is working on oswal’s trip to Mexico City right to a lot of us that is the Lynch pin of this whole thing uh if if you follow the TR course first of all the CIA denied they were following him they were following him since 1959 but it took us a long time to get that information out of them without it being being redacted so and my personal opinion is uh when Oswell went to Mexico City and got turned down by the Cubans and the Russians uh he he was really trying to get out of the country he was going to ditch his family and go back to Russia basically is what we think the Russians declined him the uh Cubans declined him and he went back into the United States and um at that point the CIA in Mexico City should have called the FBI in Dallas and the FBI in New Orleans because they were the two previous locations where he lived and said we don’t know where he is but we think he’s coming back in town now the FBI in Dallas knew where Marina was so this whole thing could have been avoided if the CIA made a phone call and my personal opinion is the reason they didn’t make the phone call is because they were working on uh with the FBI on discrediting the P fair play for Cuba Committee of course all Oswald was the only member in New Orleans which was a hot bed of Andy Castro stuff uh and they were just letting him go because they they figured they would use him in the future never expecting that he would end up in the situation that he did and over the years uh not only me I’m sure you know Jeff Morley and Newman and a few others we managed to get the cable traffic after the assassination and Langley and Mexico City were all beside themselves because I’m I’m of the opinion they they really knew and dropped the ball on that whole thing well I don’t know if you’ve read Gus Russo’s book brother brothers in arms yeah which is a very interesting take on what happened in Mexico City and I’m going to have him on in a future date to go over uh Cuba and Mexico City and this new new book a woman I know about June Cobb that’s a very interesting book uh uh she had done a lot of good research on June and Jerry Cobb uh which is a whole other you know these these things are like spider webs they go everywhere but unfortunately in at the end of her book she’s determined that the Babushka lady is really an assassin which we have a lot of questions about that that conclusion well was the Babushka lady Beverly
Oliver well I I invest this was another one I in I investigated this actually trying to determine if Beverly was the Babushka lady and right away I ran into some problems she was literally discovered by Gary Mack back in the 1970s she claimed that uh she had a prototype yesika Super Eight camera right that she got from her boyfriend Larry Ronco who worked over at the Six Flags amusement park in Dallas that she took film of the motorcade which would be similar to the next film and that the FBI confiscated the film that’s the basic story so the first thing I wondered after I found out about Larry Ronco Larry Ronco uh worked at Six Flags and ran the photo booth you would go up to the booth to buy film right so my and and primarily they sold Kodak film and later on through statements that she made I found out that this camera had a cartridge in it that she had to send to Rochester to be
processed Rochester at the time being the headquarter I think it still was the headquarters of Kodak so the first thought to that came to my mind is how how does a 20s something singer at Six Flags
uh and her boyfriend get a hold of a prototype camera from Japan where you have to set the cartridge to
Rochester I it just made no sense sense right well the first thing she she denied is she said uh she never said it was super rate well then she’s got to lay that one back on uh Gary Shaw because in his book coverups uh he describes her saying it was a super R Cameron but that’s the bottom line how does uh how do you get a hold I mean a 20s something year old singer at Six Flags has got a Japanese prototype superate camera oh and by the way two years before the camera came out matter of and one year before Kodak invented the Super Eight now what I found is this is that when you start questioning these people right and they have this exotic material the first thing they’ll do is they will say oh it was a
prototype all right and then you contact the people involved as I did with yeshika and Kodak and you find out no no prototype existed on November 22nd
1963 the other one related to this is another fellow by the name of James files he claims he was the grassy n assassin and he killed Kennedy using a Remington xp100 gun some articles were written about this gun actually the XP 100 took 222 rounds I believe and in his article he has a picture of the gun and he changed the two maybe it was 221 and he changed the last number to a 222 so it would match the story well when I wrote my article on my web page about the problem with the weapon files comes back and says he got a prototype so what I did is and again this is kind of the stuff most people don’t know all of these companies have historians right so in the 1990s I call up Remington firearms and I still remember the guy’s name Jack Heath was his name talk to him right and I told him the story and he said well send it up to me and then he called me back up and he says this is completely ridiculous first of all the XP 100 did not come out until 1964 so that was what I wrote in the article and then files comes back and says say well I had a prototype oh and now I remember it was it was chambered to take the the 221 and he said that he bored out the barrel to take a 222 so now wait a minute here are you going to go through all this problem why don’t you just put a 221 in it well he had to do that so he could dove dale with this article written by this guy John ramaker right because ramaker had already changed the 221 to the 222 so I called Heath up and I said he he’s got a prototype he says how are these people getting hold of these prototypes when we’re keeping these completely undercover so I go would go through these and you know some oh no I had a prototype of this or a prototype and it and when you catch them then they get defensive they get they get mad at you right right yeah yeah for sure um tell me a bit about um your friendship with Hugh answorth cuz I think it’s a he he was a great man and uh I knew him uh for a brief period I’ve been to his house a few had dinner with him a few times and he was very very kind enough to give me a blurb for one of my books and uh I really really really miss you a lot well this one’s kind of funny this the the Ricky White story just opened the floodgates as far as I was concerned I came home from that press conference and I was sitting with my wife and saying we got to watch the news tonight because this is like big media I mean CNN had a camera there um so uh we watched the news and I said this this thing is not lying I’ve talked to this guy and there something fishy and on the TV comes this guy named Hugh aworth and he’s a reporter for the Dallas Morning News and he says well I’ve known about this and this seems rather fishy to me to
paraphrase so I watch him and I go over remember this is last century so I go to the phone book and I look and lo and behold there’s hu ainsworth’s phone number so I called him up and I said look I was at the press conference uh I’m working on this case I’m a Kennedy researcher uh and he’s kind of weary and I I said I just like to meet you and by lunch had discuss this a little bit so he says okay I’ll meet you for lunch we picked the place in North Dallas and he said I’m going to give you about 15 or 20 minutes so we go over we meet sit down and two hours later right is still going on and he finally says well I got to get back he says I got to say you are the TR strangest conspiracy theory guy I’ve ever met in my life and we got to start meeting once a month well I would start going over to his house and at the time uh I was uh Microsoft uh certified in Windows 95 and he had a computer and he and his wife Paul are they’re one of these people people that there ought to be police tape around the computers you don’t want to let them near them so so it turned out we’d go over there and we’d talk about various investigations he did along with uh I’d work on his computer because within the course of a month he completely screw the thing up so uh and what we not only talked about Kennedy he did he did a lot on the non- serial serial killer Henry Lee Lucas I mean he he did a lot of stuff he he managed uh to coordinate the uh Marina’s uh selling of the historic diary he was well actually uh he was the Space and Science Guy for the Dallas Morning News nothing was going on that day November 22nd so he went down in the daily Plaza to see the president he was there when Kennedy was shot uh he and another reporter are walking by a a patrol car and they hear this radio call that a policeman has been shot in O Cliff so he decides this may have something to do with it so he goes down uh he didn’t get up close to the the tippet shooting scene but he was with some of the police officers doing the search he ended up in the Texas theater when Oswald was arrested so he goes back to the newspaper and he tells the editor you know he’s got all this stuff he says write it up and a couple of days go by and the editor comes out to him and says hey look you’re really the point guy on this they’re going to transfer Oswald out of the jail I want you to be down there to cover that so it turns out he’s the only person on the face of the Earth who was at all three places yeah amazing assassination Oswald’s arrest and his his assassination the B when I was at his house I not he uh we were talking and he showed me on his desk a CD of U Perry one of Perry Russo’s hyp hypnotism sessions
uh when he was in New Orleans for Jim Garrison and so I said look can I borrow that i’ like to make a copy he said yeah take it but just send it back to me and so I took it back to Ottawa made a copy sent it back to him and it turns out that that um the National Archives Nara has lost or they can’t find their own copies of Russo’s Hypno hypnotism sessions they supposedly it’s supposedly on tape and so I was really happy I got one of them from Hugh yeah so that again it was It was kind of interesting because uh as I mentioned the floodgates for me open with that Ricky White story yeah yeah so was was was Hugh FBI or was he CIA here’s the other problem we have with this is that uh over a period of time I got friendly with CI local CIA and FBI guys right so people have come back and said well you know he was working for buck rll no but I appeared on TV with him and I sat down had lunch with him so this is the the the bashing of somebody you don’t like their opinion of so what you do is you skew it and you say well he he was involved in this and involved in that it’s it’s rather funny uh you know pen Jones most I’m sure most of the people watching this will know who pen Jones is yep well Hugh believed that pen Jones was one of these guys that was constantly gilding the Lily so to speak and I came to that I mean I I knew Penn and it was It was kind of the same way he would take some story and you know roll it way out of proportion but uh he and answorth did not get along at all it turned out at one of these Jim Mars meetings somebody got up and said do you realize that pen Jones got the uh Elijah Thompson heroism in journalism award for his work on the Kennedy
assassination so everybody else goes home and thinks that’s real interesting
I go home and say well I want to check up on that well the first thing I found out was it wasn’t over the Kennedy assassination it was it was two years before over the politics that went on in midan and Penn had a newspaper and he was writing these articles in this newspaper and the building got firebombed matter of fact I drove there down there one time to meet with the then current owner a guy named baram alderdi who showed me where the molotov cocktail hit well it turned out long after the award he got the award it was found out that the molotov cocktail was not thrown uh by political rivals or somebody trying to burn down the newspaper but by pen Jones’s son who was slightly autistic oh wow so I keep working on this and eventually I’m over to Hugh’s house and I said hey you know a few weeks ago uh found out that uh Jones got this award for heroism and journalism he says really yeah I said yeah and I said they were claiming was over the Kennedy assassination but it was not it was over the politics down there and I said what I found out is and I I know you and pendan get along there were articles written about how you might have gotten into a fist fight with him at one time I can’t prove that and he kind of chuckled and I said but uh it turns out that to get this award uh because he was with a little local newspaper he had to get an on board from a bigger newspaper so they sent the material to the Morning News
I said the the submission for the award required two signatures and the first signature is the editor of the Dallas Morning News and the second signature is [Laughter] you
that’s a very good story then all of a sudden he said you know wait a minute many years ago said
oh my God it probably was me so I said said yeah you didn’t like the guy but you were kind enough to get him the award that is a terrific story there are millions of these little stories that you that you run into that are so funny but all it is is Serendipity
yeah you for sure
they they take Serendipity and turn it into a conspiracy
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