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THE INVESTIGATIONS

Assembled from various sources both from the net and the press

JFK visited Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963 in order to raise funds for his presidential race in '64, to patch up the rift between liberal and conservative elements in the Texas Democratic Party, and POSSIBLY to choose a new running mate (either Texas Governor John Connelly or US Sen. Ralph Yarborough) to replace Lyndon Johnson, whom the Kennedy's disliked.

While riding thru the Dealey Plaza, shots rang out at 12:30PM. Both JFK and Gov. Connelly (riding in the same car) were hit. The 2 men were rushed to nearby Parkland Memorial Hospital. Gov. Connelly recovered from his severe wounds, but JFK was pronounced dead at 1PM.

At around 1:10PM, Dallas cop JD Tippit was murdered several miles away. A man similar in appearance to the Tippit killer was arrested in a nearby theatre, and he was identified as Lee Harvey Oswald. After a long police interrogation, Oswald was also charged with JFK's death.

2 days later (Sunday, Nov. 24), while Oswald was being transferred to the county jail for 'safe keeping', Jack Ruby (Dallas strip club owner and a convicted Mafia pimp) stepped out of the crowd of reporters and shot Oswald. After Ruby's arrest, it took over half an hour before Oswald got to Parkland Hospital; he bled to death during this time.

THE WARREN COMISSION

On Monday, Nov. 25, new President LBJ set up the special Warren Commission to study the assassination, and all Texas investigations were halted. Its 7 members were: 1) Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, 2) former CIA Director Allen Dulles (who had been fired by JFK), 3) Chase-Manhattan President John J. McCloy, 4) Sen. Richard Russell, 5) Sen. John Sherman Cooper, 6) Rep. Hale Boggs (later was killed in a plane crash), and Rep. Gerald Ford (future president). Since the Warren Commission had no investigators of its own, the group was forced to rely on Hoover to provide necessary data and witnesses.

Since killing a president was not a Federal offense in 1963, JFK's autopsy should have been performed in Texas. But FBI officials illegally moved the body to Bethesda Navy Hospital (Maryland), where 3 military doctors (Humes, Finck and Boswell) with little real-life experience performed an erroneous autopsy.

Based on these doctors' findings and other hastily-gathered evidence, Hoover published a short paper announcing his conclusions: Oswald, a crazed pro-Castro communist, murdered JFK because he hated Kennedy for attacking Cuba at the Bay of Pigs (April 61). Ruby then murdered Oswald out of patriotism. Both men acted alone: there was no conspiracy. After spending 10 months and several million dollars, the Warren Commission came to the exact same conclusions, publishing an impressive-looking 26-volume report. Almost everyone-the gov't, the media and the public - praised the Commission's efforts and agreed with its findings. Some of the people who actually read the report were stunned by its failings: many witnesses and pieces of evidence that contradicted the Commission's views were clearly left out. Claiming reasons of "national security", the Warren Commission locked up over 10,000 files and pieces of evidence (including JFK's now-missing brain) for 75 years - until 2038.

Ruby, who refused to talk, was convicted of murder and sentenced to the death penalty. But he won a new trial on appeal, and threatened to "spill his guts", hinting that "top gov't officials" were behind JFK's death. Ruby died in jail of cancer shortly before his re-trial (Jan 67).

THE GARRISON INVESTIGATION

Associated Press New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison with members of his staff.

Later that year, New Orleans DA Jim Garrison (who didn't believe the Warren findings) came to believe that several shady characters in his state may have been involved in a plot to kill JFK.

It was a three-ring circus. A flamboyant district attorney, with visions of conspiracy, proposing a series of theories, most of them bizarre. What he first called a "homosexual thrill killing" evolved, under the influence of the conspiracy buffs who flocked to New Orleans, into a massive CIA and federal government plot.

It started with a tip that a local man had acted as a getaway pilot in the assassination. Garrison had begun to investigate Kennedy's death two days after it occurred, and his inquiry led him to the strange figure of David W. Ferrie, a gay pilot who worked for Mob boss Carlos Marcello (who had publicly threatened to kill BOTH Kennedys) and who claimed to have worked for "Operation Mongoose" (a CIA and Mob-run program to overthrow Castro). In the meantime, Garrison used bits of information that were tenuous at best to link "Clay Bertrand," a shadowy figure who supposedly had wished to defend Lee Harvey Oswald, with Clay Shaw.

After Ferrie's suspicious "suicide" (or murder?), Garrison brought respected local millionaire businessman Clay Show to trial on charges that he conspired to kill JFK. Garrison told Warren Commission critics what they wanted to hear: that Kennedy had been the victim of a right-wing cabal and a conspiracy that involved anti-Castro Cubans and the CIA. When critic Mark Lane asked Garrison how he knew all this, the D.A. replied: "Which group do you think did it, retired circus clowns?"

In the two years between the Shaw hearing and the trial, Garrison's staff interviewed hundreds of would-be witnesses. There are certain sensational cases that have a fascination for unstable people and fetch them forth in droves. A classic example was the "Black Dahlia" mutilation murder of playgirl Elizabeth Short in Los Angeles. Over the years, dozens of people came forward and confessed to this crime, which still remains unsolved. Celebrated cases also attract witnesses who are not psychotic, but who falsely identify key figures out of faulty memory or a desire to lift themselves out of dull anonymity into the spotlight. Chief Justice Frankfurter once commented that eyewitness testimony is the greatest single cause of miscarried justice. In a sensational case, a careful prosecutor often spends more time winnowing out false witnesses than he does working with authentic ones.

Garrison's case was weak: many of his key witnesses lacked creditability because they were black, gay, prostitutes or drug addicts, while subpoenas issued to more reliable witnesses were blocked by gov't officials as claimed by Garrison. One of the withnesses showed up wearing a toga and identifying himself as "Julius Caesar."

New York businessman named Charles Speisel was an impressive witness — until the defense started asking him questions. He claimed he had been at a Shaw party where criticisms of the president had turned into talk of ways to kill him, disintegrated under cross-examination. Among other things, Speisel said he had been hynotized 50 or 60 times. When asked how he knew this, he replied: "When someone tries to get your attention--catch your eye. That's a clue right off."

Jules Ricco Kimble wasn't put on the witness stand in the Shaw trial, but that doesn't stop Garrison from repeating his stories in the book On the Trail of the Assassins. But his credibility could hardly be more suspect.

Jack Martin Another witness who placed Oswald at 544 Camp and told numerous "interesting" stories was Jack Martin. Out-of-town conspiracy writers were happy to accept Martin's statements at face value, as was Oliver Stone. But local people were more careful:

A States-Item reporter, who has spent more time than most listening to Jack Martin talk, describes him "as one of the most interesting men I ever have met." "He is as full of that well known waste material as a yule hen. On the other hand, he is many times a very competent investigator who has the friendship and confidence of reputable, well-placed individuals. He drinks, often to excess, but bears no real evidence of being an alcoholic. He desperately wants to be loved, and this is his downfall. Often, he wants to please everyone, everywhere so damn much that he ends by hurting the people who have befriended him. He must be taken with a grain of salt leavened by a grain of confidence. If you listen to him for two hours, often you will receive two minutes of useful information. I suppose, to sum him up, he is like a muddy river. You have to use a very fine filter." Rosemary James & Jack Wardlaw, Plot or Politics?, p. 48.

Jack Martin was well-known in New Orleans, and uniformly regarded as unreliable. Not surprisingly, Garrison never put Martin on the stand.

Richard Case Nagell was a witness who gave considerable "information" to the Garrison investigation, but never testified. But this doesn't stop Garrison from using Nagell's stories about CIA and KGB foreknowledge of an assassination plot in On the Trail of the Assassins, and saying that "Nagell impressed me as being utterly honest and sincere" and that "I was satisified that a fabricated tale was not in this man's makeup" (On the Trail of the Assassins, pp. 185,186).

Garrison's key witness in his case against Clay Shaw was Perry Raymond Russo. During the Shaw trial, Russo told a story of an "assassination party" in which Shaw, David Ferry, and Lee Oswald discussed killing Kennedy. Yet Russo's testimony underwent an interesting "evolution" between the time he first came forward in Baton Rouge and his court testimony. He was repeatedly questioned, repeatedly shown pictures of Clay Shaw, and then given "truth serum" and put under hypnosis at least twice. Russo was, according to Dave Reitzes, the "Way Too Willing Witness," who proved extremely pliable in the hands of Garrison and his staff.

Shaw also lied on the witness stand, denying his 30-year service in the CIA. "Circus" would become an apt description of the Shaw trial. Garrison's use of the newly -released Zapruder film of JFK's shooting and other key evidence to convinced jurors of 2 possible conspiracies: 1 to kill JFK, and another to cover up the truth. During the trial, Garrison's life was virtually ruined by death threats, IRS audits and a brutal media smear campaign accusing the former war hero and FBI agent of everything from alcoholism and homosexuality to Mob involvement and mental illness !

In his books Jim Garrison claimed that his office was riddled with government spies, and one "spy" he singles out was "Bill Boxley," supposedly from the CIA. Internal CIA documents show that the Agency knew about "Boxley," but did not feel him to be of any potential use.

Associated Press Clay Shaw was acquitted in 1969. He died five years later.

After deliberating only 45 minutes, the jury set Shaw free. Yet the acquittal was not the end of Shaw's problems. The next day, Garrison charged Shaw with perjury. It would take three more years before the U.S. Supreme Court comfirmed a lower court ruling that the charges be dropped.

By then, though, Shaw had been ruined. His health was broken, his money spent. A month after being charged he had written in a diary, released some years ago by friends who wished to salvage his tarnished reputation: "There are only three alternatives. Kill yourself, you go crazy and thereby blot the matter out; or, you can endure."

"This is going to be an enormously costly business, and I am not sure of being able to recoup financially," Shaw wrote in March 1967. "I had planned my retirement so carefully, having determined the point on the actuarial tables where I would probably die, and prepared myself to live to this point and, indeed, a little beyond. This case, of course, will change all that."

Shaw died of a brain tumor in New Orleans in 1974. He was 61.

After the trial Garrison prospered. He went on to be elected to the state 4th Circuit Court of Appeals. He wrote books about his assassination theories. And he was exalted as a hero in Oliver Stone's 1991 film, JFK, in which he was portrayed by Kevin Costner and even given a cameo role, as Chief Justice Earl Warren. What happened to Garrison would not have surprised his chief assistant, Jim Alcock. During the Shaw case, Alcock wrote that "Garrison will come out of this smelling like a rose. That guy has more luck than anyone I know."

Garrison died at age 70 in 1992.

THE HSCA INVESTIGATION

In the late 70's, public outcry after the Watergate scandal resulted in a 2nd gov't investigation by the House Select Committee on Assassination (HSCA). This group was prompted by physical evidence (including eye witness accounts and an audio tape proving 4 shots had been fired) to conclude that TWO men had fired at JFK. However, the HSCA concluded that since the single shot fired form the Grassy Knoll (to JFK's front) Must have missed, this meant Oswald fired the other 3 bullets (including the fatal head shot) from the Texas school Book Depository (to JFK's rear). The HSCA locked up its files until 2029, claiming (like the Warren Commission) reasons of "national security".

 

 

Batrcop.com>JFK Assassination Page>The Investigations