A Farewell to Justice

by Joan Mellen

  Through the painstaking work of Dischler and Fruge, Jim Garrison was able to chart how Lee Harvey Oswald had been set up as the “patsy” who would be blamed for the murder of President Kennedy. Three months before the assassination, Garrison would be able to demonstrate, the cover-up had begun, making it apparent that the same people who had planned the crime were behind the cover-up.

  Late in February 1967, a St. Francisville businessman named A. H. Magruder telephoned Garrison about a hunting trip he had taken with a friend, Dr. Victor J. Weiss. Weiss was a clinician at the East Louisiana State Hospital at Jackson, the mental hospital, nicknamed “East” by local residents. On November 22, 1963, at “East,” Weiss had encountered a female patient who spoke of being “involved with a group of men in the assassination of Kennedy.”

  Rose Cheramie was a twenty-eight-year-old prostitute and drug addict with a long police record and time served at Angola. She had worked for a Basile whorehouse called the Silver Slipper Lounge once owned by Jack Ruby. In 1963, Rose, like others of her trade, plied that strip of Highway 190 extending from Opelousas, birthplace of Jim Bowie, to the Texas border where a gas station more than likely doubled as a brothel. One night in November 1963, Rose had been beaten and tossed from an automobile on this highway. A state trooper booked her as a suspected narcotics addict.

  Because Francis Fruge was from Basile and already knew Rose, the doctor at the hospital where Rose was taken called him. When Fruge heard what Rose had to say, he called fellow trooper Donald White, who also had encountered Cheramie. “I’ve got your lady friend here in jail,” Fruge said. “She’s got something to share with us.”

  Three men were traveling from Florida to Texas to kill John F. Kennedy, Rose recounted. ‘These Cubans are crazy. They’re going to Dallas to kill Kennedy in a few days.” When Rose cut her ankle with a razor blade, Dr. F. J. Derouin signed commitment papers and Fruge was ordered to drive her to East. Rose was no stranger to the East Louisiana State Hospital at Jackson. Under the name Melba Christine Youngblood Marcades, she had previously been incarcerated there.

  On Friday, November 22nd, at twenty minutes before noon, Rose was watching television in the hospital recreation area. Scenes in Dallas flashed on the screen. President Kennedy was on his way.

  “Somebody’s got to do something!” Rose shouted. “They’re going to kill the president!” No one paid any attention. “Watch!” Rose cried out. “This is when it’s going to happen! They’re going to get him! They’re going to get him at the underpass!”

  “POW!” Rose yelled as the shots rang out. Or so the story has come down from East Feliciana parish. What is clear is that although Rose may not have been watching the actual motorcade in real time, there is no doubt that she exhibited foreknowledge of the assassination.

  All that weekend Rose talked. Dr. Weiss heard her say she knew Jack Ruby. She believed Kennedy was assassinated because of narcotics traffic on the Mexican border. She herself was connected to a drug syndicate. She was not only a stripper for Jack Ruby, Rose confided. She was one of his drug runners. She had seen Lee Harvey Oswald sitting at a table at Ruby’s Carousel Club.

  That weekend Francis Fruge thought he and Donald White should come forward and “tell what we know.” White urged silence, but Fruge telephoned the FBI in Lafayette. ‘This lady warned us about the assassination,” Fruge said.

  “They’ve already got their man,” the agent said. “Case closed.” Fruge also informed his State Police superior, Captain Ben Morgan, and Colonel Thomas Burbank himself.

  “This is significant,” Fruge said.

  “Francis, get her the hell out of Louisiana,” Burbank said. “I don’t want her here.” The doctor who released Rose Cheramie from East was Malcolm Pierson, a temporary employee with a checkered past. Having been caught with drugs and punished with a suspended license, Pierson was attempting to work his way back into medicine with service at East, a dumping ground for medical men under a cloud.

  On November 28, 1963, a tense Rose Cheramie, in the custody of Fruge and trooper Wayne Morein, flew in a state police plane to Houston. Rose continued to talk. She had been a stripper at another Ruby-owned club, The Pink Door. Oswald and Ruby were “them two queer son-of-a-bitches.” They’ve “been shacking up for years,” Rose said. Ruby’s nickname was “Pinky.” Unsuccessful in penetrating the drug ring Rose described, Fruge returned to Louisiana.

  “Find Rose!” Jim Garrison told his investigator Frank Meloche, who had taken Magruder’s call.

  “You’re working for Jim Garrison now,” Colonel Burbank told Fruge. “You’re assigned to him on the Kennedy assassination on twenty-four-hour call.”

  “Find her, I want her!” Garrison told Fruge. On March 6, 1967, in search of Rose Cheramie, Fruge flew to Houston with Meloche and Anne Dischler. Rose’s mother and sister denied they knew a “Rose Cheramie.” Back in New Orleans, Garrison uncovered Rose’s twenty aliases and her crimes. Her name appeared in many places, but not in any of the Warren Commission indices of names. The state police had not taken her photograph or prints. Finally Fruge came up with an old mug shot and a rap sheet.

  Fruge discovered that in 1965 Rose had been again thrown from a car and this time had been run over. Her suitcases had been placed in the middle of a deserted country road near Big Sandy, an unlikely place to be hitchhiking. Although a motorist had hit Rose, she was alive. Once more she talked, this time to a Texas Highway Patrol officer named J. A. Andrews: She was a stripper for Ruby. Ruby and Oswald were bed partners.

  Rose Cheramie’s death certificate reads “bullet hole in head,” although hospital records mention no bullet hole. Her death was ruled “accidental.” Fruge could uncover no record of the driver who killed Rose at the address he had provided. Jim Garrison requested that Rose Cheramie’s body be exhumed, but Texas authorities refused to comply.

  In Basile, convinced that Rose Cheramie had direct knowledge of the assassination plot, Fruge showed photographs of Cubans provided by Garrison to Hadley Manuel, the manager of the Silver Slipper. Of the two men he had seen with Rose, Manuel identified Sergio Arcacha Smith (a “dapper, mustachioed, ex-fink for the CIA,” Richard Case Nagell called him), and a man he called “Osanto,” the CIA’s own Emilio Santana. Will Fritz, the Dallas police captain, told Fruge of diagrams of the Dealey Plaza sewer system that had been found in Arcacha’s Dallas apartment.

  The FBI never informed Garrison about its November 28, 1963 interview with a Margaret Kay Kauffman in Pennsylvania, who had contacted the state police about a Silver Slipper flier she had found. On the back, in pencil, was the name “Lee Oswald.” To the right was “Rubenstein, Jack Ruby” and at the bottom “Dallas Texas.” A Cuban doctor named “Julio Fernandez” had lived next door, Kauffman said. (For more on this, turn to page 464.)

  Dischler and Fruge began to investigate reports that Lee Harvey Oswald had been spotted in towns radiating out of Baton Rouge. Because people were frightened to talk to them, Dischler sometimes identified herself as a reporter for the Lafayette Daily Advertiser. Cal Kelly was positive he had seen Oswald in June 1963 at a restaurant in Walker, Louisiana, having doughnuts and coffee. The waitress had remarked to him that he looked like a stranger.

  “Probably I am,” Oswald said. “I just came from Cuba. I caught a freight truck out of Florida. I’m on my way to Dallas, as soon as the driver gets some sleep.” In the parking lot was a truck with a man asleep at the wheel. When Kelly and his twelve-year-old grandson watched the assassination events on television, they were both positive the man had been Lee Harvey Oswald.

  In April, Dischler and Fruge followed up a lead involving a brawl at the Lafayette Holiday Inn lounge. The source had been Robert J. Angers, whose column, “Anecdotes and Antidotes,” appeared in the Daily Advertiser. This was one incident that Angers did not share with his readers.

  Angers was a longtime CIA asset, who wrote for William Gaudet’s Latin American Reports. Having run into Angers in Guatemala, Alberto Fowler pegged him as a “ri
ght-wing extremist,” who undercover for the FBI. In May 1963, Angers had been honored by Arcacha’s Cuban Revolutionary Council for an editorial in his paper, the Franklin Banner Tribune, which read, in part, “America can no more afford the risk of a Communist Cuba than she can a Communist Louisiana.”

  Angers was “tight-lipped” and obviously holding back when Fruge and Dischler asked what he knew about the ruckus “Oswald” had created at the Holiday Inn. They turned to witnesses at the scene. A belligerent troublemaker, introducing himself as “Lee Harvey Oswald,” had created a disturbance as he criticized the Kennedy family. A barmaid named Lou Domingue was so upset she began to cry. In the ensuing skirmish “over another queer at the lounge,” a knife flashed, then fell to the ground. The lounge manager, Harold Guidry, picked it up.

  “Lee Harvey Oswald” had signed his bar slip “Hidell,” then fled without paying. Fruge and Dischler had no photographs to show the lounge manager. They did discover that there was no “Hidell” registered at the hotel, although Jessie Romero, working behind the desk, remembered the man named “Oswald.” Romero thought he had returned after the assassination, claiming to be a cosmetics salesman, a “cousin” of Lee Harvey Oswald. He was a “good size” man with hazel eyes and blonde hair, although when Romero saw a photograph of the actual Oswald, she said he “greatly resembled the man in the incident.” Another witness, Ernie Broussard, was also certain the man had been there in September, “a few months before the assassination,” only to return a few weeks later. Dischler and Fruge were unable to discover whether charges had been filed against “Hidell” for running out on his bill.

  Frank Meloche told Dischler and Fruge that Jim Garrison was “very interested in Oswald being in Lafayette. If you need anything, holler.” Garrison in New Orleans, and Fruge and Dischler in the field, began to discover that there were quite a few men that summer and autumn who went around calling themselves “Oswald.” An artist, Cedric Rolleston, said a man in the lobby of the Bentley Hotel in Alexandria on October 11th or 12th said his name was “Lee Harvey Oswald.” He had predicted that “a lot of Catholic rulers are going to be killed in a few months.” After the assassination, Rolleston called the FBI, which dismissed his information as “unreliable.”

  Dischler and Fruge concluded that the man at the Holiday I had been a decoy who had foreknowledge of the assassination, as reflected in his enlisting the real Oswald’s alias, “Hidell.” The State Police had tracked him from Morgan City, up to Lafayette, then to Beaumont, Texas, Houston and Dallas. A “foreign lady” had been with him in an old car. It was late September or early October.

  In New Orleans, a witness named Corinne Verges Villard, who worked at the New Port Motel in Morgan City, whose part-owner was Carlos Marcello, told Garrison of having seen Oswald. Jack Ruby was a frequent customer. Villard said Ruby returned in midNovember in search of her boss, Pete Guarisco. Accompanying Ruby on this visit was a young man who “appeared very nervous.” He wore a T-shirt and faded blue jeans. Villard then identified a photograph of Lee Harvey Oswald as the man with Ruby that day.

  When the FBI arrived, Villard spoke of Ruby, but did not volunteer that Oswald had been there, or that in late September or early October a woman with a foreign accent asking for a room had been accompanied by the same man who had been with Ruby. The woman’s hair, she remembered, was a “golden reddish color,” not Marina’s brown.

  Some time later, Governor McKeithen’s aide, Aubrey Young, found a woman named Barbara Messina, who had dinner with Ruby several times in 1963; each time she was picked up by a gray-haired man in a Cadillac. On these occasions, there was a nice-looking young man with Ruby, one whose picture she “saw on television after the assassination.” Then Messina disappeared, too frightened to meet Moo Moo and Steve Bordelon.

  Yet another decoy surfaced: a man by the name of Lee Harvey Oswald had replied to an ad for a garage apartment in Baton Rouge, on October 25, 1963. Fruge’s supervisor revealed that they had reports of a “traveling Oswald” causing disturbances all along the route to Texas, all recorded by the state police.

  On April 28th, Fruge and Dischler met with Garrison’s staff at Tulane and Broad. “Frank Jeanette,” Rose Cheramie’s pimp, had been seen at “Jim’s Lounge” with a Ruby stripper, they learned. They wanted to proceed to Shreveport, following the trajectory of the Holiday Inn lead. Two sets of Oswald tracks, one heading for Texas by way of Clinton and Shreveport, the other by way of Morgan City and Lake Charles, with a man calling himself “Oswald” and attacking the Kennedys, suggested that a cover-up was in place well before the assassination. Later Ned Touchstone, editor of The Councilor newspaper, who had also been investigating the Louisiana roots of assassination, would apologize to his readers for not pursuing the divergent tracks of Oswald, who “could have had a double.”

  Jim Garrison put aside this set of leads in favor of an incident he believed was more promising. Fruge and Dischler had discovered that people in East Feliciana Parish had observed Oswald in the company of both David Ferrie and Clay Shaw. Information of the trio traveling together in the area had begun to circulate early in 1964.

  John R. Rarick, district judge for the Feliciana parishes, East and West, was having his thick black hair cut at the Jackson barber shop of his supporter, Lea McGehee. The quintessential gossiping barber, McGehee had been a Navy cryptographer in Korea handling “top secret” matters and working with surveillance aircraft. The barber was nothing if not observant. The judge, in turn, was a good listener.

  “Oswald was here,” McGehee told Rarick. It had been late summer of 1963, an afternoon so quiet that you could have shot a cannon down the street and not hit anyone. But that day was less sultry than usual. Not bothering to turn on his air conditioner, McGehee opened the door. A young man who didn’t need a haircut entered. McGehee had seen a battered green automobile with a woman and a bassinet in back. Idly, he wondered whether the man had arrived in that car.

  “A barbershop is a good place for a haircut and information,” Oswald said.

  McGehee eyed him with suspicion. He knew “all or most everybody in town.” This must be one of those CORE workers. By 1960 only ten Negroes were exercising their franchise, and CORE had targeted East Feliciana Parish for a major voter registration drive. Hanging on McGehee’s wall was a poster given him by Judge Rarick of Martin Luther King Jr. at the “Communist” Highlander School in Monteagle, Tennessee, “proof” of how the civil rights movement was Communist-controlled. Hoping for a juicy argument, McGehee turned Oswald’s chair so that he stared directly into the face of Martin Luther King. But Oswald did not react. Oswald said nothing at all about the poster. Instead he remarked that he had come from New Orleans in search of work.

  “Don’t you have any friends in New Orleans who can help you?” McGehee asks. Oswald has come a long way.

  “I have no friends,” Oswald says. Then he volunteers that he is looking for a job at the East Louisiana State Hospital.

  “Do you know this is a mental hospital?” McGehee says.

  “Oh!” Oswald says. He is surprised. Then he asks whether they “have all sorts of jobs, like electrician.” The largest employer in the area, East had a sheet metal shop, a power plant, a dairy. . . .

  “You have to know somebody to get a job there,” McGehee says. “If you know somebody you have a better chance.” The sanction of the right politician was crucial.

  “That’s a nice haircut,” Oswald says, standing up. Pleased by the compliment, McGehee directs him to the home of state representative Reeves Morgan, who controls patronage in East Feliciana Parish. He even draws Oswald a map.

  “Do you have change for a five?” Oswald asks. As he departs, McGehee, washing his hands, looks out the window. The green car is nowhere in sight. Suddenly a large black car with a big wraparound bumper pulls up from Church Street, adjacent to the Washateria next door. (In Jackson, the churches are on Bank Street and the banks are on Church Street.) Oswald is seated in back, his arms splayed across the
back of the front seat. There are two people in front, and they are all laughing as the car, pulling onto State Road 10, passes in front of the barbershop on its way to Clinton.

  At the home of Reeves Morgan, Oswald introduces himself as “Oswald.” Morgan’s teenaged daughter Mary, anxious for a better look at this young man, parades through the living room on her way to the freezer out on the porch. Outside, seated up in a tree, Morgan’s young son Van is playing “Tarzan.” He eyes the black Cadillac in the yard and the man with white hair behind the wheel.

  Morgan explains that you must register to vote to get a job at East. If none of his constituents wants a job right now, Oswald might have one, Morgan says.

  “What do you mean by ‘constituent?’” Oswald says. He is indignant. “You mean you have to see a politician to get a job!” Soon he is again cordial, offering his full name, “Lee Oswald.” But he is too late. Morgan has made up his mind. “A smart aleck white boy who evidently was a nigger lover appeared in a black Cadillac,” Morgan said later. When Morgan went outside to see Oswald off, the Cadillac sped off so quickly that he was almost run over in his own driveway.

  After the assassination, Reeves Morgan, in Jackson for a haircut, talked with McGehee about the man both of them recognized from television as their visitor.

  “Mr. Reeves, we need to call the FBI,” McGehee said.

  “I already have,” Morgan said. “They told me they knew Oswald was in the area.” A few days later, the FBI had called and asked what Oswald had been wearing.

  It had been a summer of strangers in East Feliciana Parish. A big, olive-complected “Cuban,” a tough “soldier-of-fortune type” with wavy black hair and a heavy beard, had come in three or four times for a haircut. McGehee had chatted about Honduras. He thought the man worked at lawyer Lloyd Cobb’s Marydale Farms— the same Cobb who was Clay Shaw’s superior at the International Trade Mart. In April 1978, during HSCA depositions, McGehee would reach for the photo identification book and select “Lawrence Howard” as his 1963 customer. Alarmed, lawyer Jonathan Blackmer quickly changed the subject to McGehee’s stint as a Navy cryptographer.