by Joan Mellen
In 1988, at the National Archives, Dr. McClelland saw an X-ray with the right orbit injured, although, as he remembered, President Kennedy’s eyes and face had not been injured. It was either a fake or mixed up with someone else’s X-ray. He also discovered a faked photograph: you could see the thumb and forefinger of a gloved hand— it belonged to Dr. J. Thornton Boswell—pulling the flap of the scalp over the wound together and forward, and making it seem as if the back of the head was intact. He had seen no flap of scalp as, for ten or twelve minutes, Dr. McClelland had stood at the head of the gurney, looking down, deep into the head wound.
So the prosecution lost its best medical witness.
Richard Case Nagell could have identified both Oswald and Clay Shaw as CIA agents. But Nagell refused to name the government organization he had worked for in 1963. He would not name the CIA in court. Garrison concluded that this reticence would have led the defense to eviscerate him as a witness. Nagell was “the most important witness there is,” Garrison believed, “absolutely genuine.” Finally, Nagell was of no use to him.
Nagell’s recalcitrance, his fear that the CIA might try to “eliminate him,” prevented the prosecution from connecting Shaw to the CIA. “Whoever’s taking care of him can’t be too unhappy with him,” Garrison later told Dick Russell. He acknowledged that nothing Nagell said “turned out to be untrue.”
There was a plethora of witnesses who would not come forward: Alfred Moran, who had seen Shaw sign his name as “Bertrand,” was one. Another was Herbert Wagner, who had witnessed Clay Shaw cosigning that loan for David Ferrie. Woodrow Hardy had seen Shaw, Ferrie, and Oswald deep in conversation at Shaw’s house, but he lived in fear. Banister cohort Vernon Gerdes, who had seen Oswald and Shaw together, worked for the Shaw defense. Fred Leemans had contradicted himself. Juan Valdes had melted into the night.
William Turner had not included Thomas Breitner’s claim that Shaw had been introduced to him as “Bertrand” in California in his first report of their interview. Garrison was dubious about using Breitner, as he was about “Donald P. Norton,” who was willing to testify. There was no hope of involving Thomas Edward Beckham, Fred Lee Crisman, Lawrence Howard, Loran Hall, Jack Martin or A. Roswell Thompson. Fear that their homosexuality might become public prevented David Logan and Dr. Lief’s patient from coming forward. Even Eugene Davis would not risk public exposure.
Garrison then further limited himself by deciding not to call any witness who had been in trouble with the law. This ruled out Jules Ricco Kimble, who might have testified that he flew with Shaw and Ferrie to Montreal; it ruled out Edward Whalen, who said “Bertrand” (Shaw) had tried to hire him to murder Jim Garrison. Serving time for bank robbery, Edward J. Girnus had said he saw Ferrie and Shaw together and produced a flight plan for April 8, 1963, in which the pilot, named Ferrie, was accompanied by “Hidell” and “Lambert,” a Shaw look-alike. He, too, was ruled out. The Reverend Broshears had been consigned by federal courts to an institution.
Jim Hicks, a surveyor and Navy veteran, had told the Orleans Parish grand jury that he could place shots as originating from the grassy knoll. He described consistently how he had seen Kennedy’s head explode. Since his trip to New Orleans, things had not gone well for Hicks. He had been incarcerated at Western State Mental Hospital at Fort Supply, Oklahoma. He was residing now at the Garfield County jail for passing bad checks.
Hicks bragged that he would be Garrison’s first or second witness; after all, he had seen a man by the name of Clay Bertrand, who looked just like Clay Shaw, at Dealey Plaza. Hicks asked Jim Garrison to liberate him from jail so he could come testify at the Shaw trial. He would not be needed, Garrison replied.
Dago Garner, who had met Shaw through Jack Ruby, had embroidered so much, Garrison thought, that it was “like flying at night with no lights.” Mark Lane lobbied hard that Charles Spiesel, who believed everyone had a “double,” was too eccentric, too great a risk. Forget Spiesel, use Dago Garner, Lane advised. Garner, at least, knew Shaw had one nipple.
“With my luck, Shaw will drop his pants and he’ll have three testicles,” Garrison joked.
Garrison considered calling Julia Ann Mercer, and later thought he “probably made a mistake not calling her.” He made her appearance voluntary. “Frozen with fear,” as Garrison put it, Mrs. Stinson did not rise to the challenge of citizenship. Another witness who could testify to a conspiracy was William Walter, but the FBI sealed his lips. Moo Moo’s inefficiency cost Garrison two Clinton-Jackson witnesses, Gladys Palmer and Dr. Frank Silva.
Violence erased some of Garrison’s potential witnesses. Andrew Dunn had died in a Clinton jail. Dallas policeman Buddy Walthers, who had agreed to testify for Jim Garrison, was murdered before he could describe the fourth bullet he found that ruled out Oswald as the lone shooter.
The Reverend Clyde Johnson, who could place Shaw, Oswald and Ruby together at the Capitol House Hotel, termed himself “the ace-in-the-hole” in Jim Garrison’s case. To protect Johnson, Garrison put him u p at a women’s dormitory at Southeastern Louisiana College at Hammond. On the day before he was scheduled to testify, Clyde Johnson was beaten up so badly he had to be hospitalized. A few months later, he was shot to death.
Governor John Connally, who had always insisted that one bullet did not strike both him and President Kennedy, again ruling out Oswald as the sole shooter, traveled to New Orleans with his wife.
“The CIA must have gotten to him. He wouldn’t have come unless the CIA had gotten to him,” Garrison said. Mortified, William Alford drove out to the airport to inform Connally that he would not be needed after all. But even Hugh Aynesworth believed Connally’s animosity toward Jim Garrison disqualified him as a state witness.
Despite their possessing the prosecution witness list, the Shaw defense was worried. Those they feared the most were Raymond Cummings, the Dallas cab driver who had driven Oswald and Ferrie to the Carousel Club; Dago Garner; the ubiquitous Emilio Santana; and former O.S.S. officer, now a Montreal banker, Major L. M. Bloomfield, who could talk about Shaw’s relationship to the Centro Mondiale Commerciale, with whom he shared board membership. By January 30th, through Aynesworth, the Shaw team was aware that Jim Garrison knew about Charles Spiesel’s peculiarities.
Shaw’s lawyers wanted to call Richard N. Billings. He had been “unable to make a final determination of Russo’s credibility,” Billings said. He considered Perry Russo “a fairly respectable witness,” and believed “elements of his story.”
The best direct evidence Garrison had that Shaw knew he was participating in the murder of President Kennedy was in Perry Russo’s testimony. Although his behavior did not have to be criminal, according to Louisiana conspiracy law, Shaw had to have performed an overt act to further the criminal agreement. One of his coconspirators had to be involved, while the state also had to demonstrate that Clay Shaw knew the general scope and aims of the conspiracy. The jury would have to believe Perry Russo’s account of the gathering at Ferrie’s apartment, where “Leon Oswald” had been present, and the assassination discussed.
“I wasn’t ready,” Garrison would reflect later. “But I had to go.” He had believed that the government would never “let it go to trial.” They’ll kill me first, he told Bill Alford. Now the trial was upon him.
STATE OF LOUISIANA V. CLAY SHAW
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"I will not be able to produce any bank presidents. I will not be able to present any presidents of Chambers of Commerce. I will not be able to produce any newspaper publishers as witnesses. Because there were no people like that around any of the meetings that were taking place.
—Jim Garrison
THE OBSTACLES THRUST INTO Jim Garrison’s path as he attempted to expose the conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy had been murderous, sinister and unrelenting. They ranged from the untimely death of David Ferrie and the illegal efforts of Walter Sheridan to the lies published by the CIA’s media assets who had attached themselves to the Shaw defense team. They incl
uded the ambush of a key witness, Clyde Johnson, and the discrediting of another key witness, Perry Russo.
Garrison was also concerned that, to a jury, talking about Shaw’s work for the CIA would be like “talking about UFOs.” Later, Garrison would compare himself to Santiago, the aged fisherman in Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. Garrison, too, had caught a “monster fish.” But by the time he reached shore, went to trial, that prize specimen had “long since been picked apart by sharks.” It was among his most apt conceits.
Sensitive to accusations that he had been in search of personal publicity all along, Garrison chose not to prosecute the Shaw case himself, entrusting Jimmy Alcock and Al Oser with that task. Hong Kong flu had given way to viral encephalitis, and Garrison was not well. His back was so painful that he could stand for only a few hours a day. Mort Sahl and Mark Lane appeared in his bedroom one morning only for Garrison to haul himself out of bed and crawl across the room on his hands and knees. “Gentlemen,” Garrison said, as he passed them on his way to the bathroom, “you are looking at one of the most powerful men in the state of Louisiana!”
Garrison made the opening statement, defining the Louisiana conspiracy statute. He outlined a series of overt acts, of which he needed only one to convict Clay Shaw. “Oswald” shooting at the president was an overt act, but Garrison did not state that Lee Harvey Oswald fired a rifle at Dealey Plaza. He had long been convinced from the paraffin test and other evidence that Oswald was not a shooter.
Nor did he insist that the “Leon Oswald” at Ferrie’s was Oswald himself. That “Leon” was a “slightly erroneous game card,” he was to say. Yet the mention of any “Oswald” at all demonstrated foreknowledge and participation in the conspiracy, since history had connected an “Oswald” to the assassination, whether he was the patsy Oswald himself said he was, or a killer. Anyone associated with someone named “Oswald” was a coconspirator.
In his opening statement, F. Irvin Dymond declared that Clay Shaw never knew David Ferrie or Lee Harvey Oswald. It was so blatant a falsehood that it seemed from the start as if Shaw had suborned perjury from his own lawyer. James Phelan had laid the groundwork for Dymond’s case with his false contention that Perry Russo had not mentioned Shaw at his first meeting with Moo Moo Sciambra. To defend Shaw, Dymond required the falsehood that Shaw’s presence at Ferrie’s gathering was a lie suggested to Perry Russo under sodium pentothal.
The Clinton witnesses, black and white, were put on first. None could be shaken in their certainty that they had witnessed Shaw, Ferrie and Oswald together. John Manchester “put it all together,” James Kirkwood was to write, but it was ludicrous that Corrie Collins would have participated in a Manchester-engineered plot. Nor did either Garrison or Alcock prepare these witnesses in advance, as the Shaw lawyers charged. To the dismay of barber Lea McGehee, they had not been prepared at all.
Unable to shake a feisty Manchester, Dymond resorted to civil rights baiting: Hadn’t Manchester tried “everything within your power” to keep blacks from “getting registered?” Discrepancies between the earlier interviews with the Clinton witnesses and their trial testimony were negligible: Oswald’s pants were never hospital whites. Shaw may or may not have put on a hat.
With the African-American witnesses, Dymond played to what he assumed would be the lower-middle-class jury’s racism, the two black jurors notwithstanding.
“This is your testimony under oath?” Dymond demanded belligerently of Corrie Collins, as he would of no white witness.
“Beg your pardon?” Collins said. Boos and hisses issued from the audience at Dymond’s palpable display of disrespect. Even Judge Haggerty was offended.
“You don’t have to repeat that, Mr. Dymond. It is obvious he took the oath,” Haggerty said.
“I am trying to make sure he realizes it, Judge,” Dymond replied brazenly. “I am trying to find out whether he had forgotten it.”
“No, I haven’t forgotten it,” Corrie Collins said.
A note from his employer, the U.S. Postal Service, demanded that Collins report for work early on Saturday morning, even as they knew he had been testifying in New Orleans. Corrie Collins never bothered to inform Jim Garrison that he had been fired for testifying at the Shaw trial. Lea McGehee returned home to Jackson to discover a man trespassing on his property. Arrested by deputies Hardy Travis and Alvin Doucet, the man telephoned the International Trade Mart in New Orleans.
“Our main case was the perjury case,” Garrison said later, acknowledging that the prosecution’s inability to connect Shaw’s trip to Clinton and Jackson in the company of Oswald and Ferrie with the assassination rendered that evidence only partially effective. Richard Popkin, more sanguine, considered Shaw’s appearance in Clinton and Jackson “the one real piece of linkage” with the assassination. The other was the identification of Shaw as Clay Bertrand.
That Shaw was less than open with his lawyers is reflected in an advertisement Wegmann and Dymond placed that week: “Will the person who signed the name ‘Clay Bertrand’ in the guest register of the Eastern Airlines Lounge, Moisant Airport, please call! . . .” Or perhaps the advertisement was a desperate New Orleans lawyer’s publicity stunt.
On the stand, Vernon Bundy, despite his understandable unwillingness to acknowledge that he had been convicted of stealing from a cigarette machine, repeated how he had observed Oswald and Shaw at the sea wall. Bundy requested that Shaw walk to the rear of the courtroom. Then Bundy sat down in Shaw’s chair and asked Shaw to approach him.
“I watched his foot the way it twisted,” Bundy said. “That is the foot that was twisted that day.” He denied he had made any admissions in Parish Prison to Miguel Torres or “John the Baptist.” Dymond’s attempt to impugn Bundy as a narcotics fiend went nowhere.
On the matter of Charles Spiesel’s eccentricities—fingerprinting his daughter and his theory that everyone had a double—the prosecution played Russian roulette, not fully registering the harm Tom Bethell’s theft of the witness list had done. On direct examination, Spiesel did well, as he described a conversation in June 1963 between Shaw and Ferrie regarding whether the assassin could be flown away from the assassination safely. Spiesel revealed that Shaw, moving as if he believed he was graced with impunity, spoke openly about the murder of President Kennedy.
At a party at 906 Esplanade, a house that had been owned by Clay Shaw only the previous month, next door to an identical house, 908 Esplanade, still owned by Shaw, Spiesel heard talk of a “highpowered rifle with a telescopic sight.” Shaw and his friend Arthur J. Bidderson had apartments at 906. If Spiesel did not identify the exact building, he was close.
The Shaw defense had hired Walter R. Holloway, a former FBI agent, to investigate Spiesel. “They’ve even contacted our boy in New York, Charles Spiesel,” Alcock had told Bethell when the jig was up. On January 30th, Aynesworth wrote to Wegmann: “Garrison knows that you know about Spiesel and that we have tried to contact him.”
The CIA had already provided the Shaw defense with information about Spiesel’s furrier father, Boris, and had produced a letter from Spiesel to John McCone, dated October 4, 1962, complaining about how he had been “hypnotized continuously” and “harassed” by police officers. Aaron Kohn provided a 1965 letter from Spiesel, and stated Spiesel was “emotionally disturbed.” Fearing that Spiesel might be the “Russo of the trial,” the Shaw defense had sought ammunition to undermine this witness—and found it. Panzeca would later claim that the Shaw defense learned the truth about Spiesel only “four minutes” before cross-examination, but the evidence is otherwise. “The Jack O’Diamonds was prepared for him,” Jack Dempsey says.
Under cross-examination, Dymond elicited Spiesel’s history of lawsuits charging his enemies with using disguises. He exposed how Spiesel viewed the New York police as enemies who hypnotized him and harassed him. And he forced Spiesel to admit that when his daughter returned home from LSU at the end of a semester, he fingerprinted her to be certain this was the same gir
l he had sent off to college.
At that moment, coming on February 8, 1969, he saw his case flying out the window, “like a Tom turkey,” and reasonable doubt flying in, Jim Garrison said later. William Alford concluded that Spiesel had been “one of those plants” placed to destroy Garrison’s case, even as Spiesel’s knowledge of Shaw’s real estate had been established to lure Garrison into accepting him as a witness. Richard Popkin viewed Spiesel as a “set-up.” Spiesel was, Garrison would conclude, “a pleasant-mannered bomb unloaded on us for the trial by the Company.” For the government, “destroying an old-fashioned state jury trial was like shooting a fish in a barrel with a shotgun.”
As Perry Russo prepared to take the stand two days later, the Shaw defense visited his father to ask whether Perry was receiving psychiatric treatment.
“Bunk!” Frank Russo said. Nor had he ever known his son to lie. The Shaw team subpoenaed Russo senior, then chose not to call him.
On the stand, Russo quoted the talk at Ferrie’s gathering of “three-sided triangulation,” of two shooters escaping and one being “captured as a scapegoat or a patsy for the other two.” He told how Shaw and Ferrie had outlined their alibis, and swore that during Sciambra’s first visit, he had identified not only photographs of Shaw, but of Ferrie, Oswald, Arcacha and Santana. Sciambra’s memo of his Saturday meeting with Russo had omitted other items, such as their discussion of who would replace Fidel Castro, Che Guevara or Raoul Castro? He had seen “Clem Bertrand” wearing a hat, Russo added.
In an exhausting cross-examination that runs to hundreds of pages, Dymond focused on undermining the identification of “Leon Oswald” as the “real Oswald,” even as the name itself indicts Shaw. Russo understood that it didn’t matter whether “Leon” was “the Oswald that showed up in Dallas,” or was someone posing as Lee Harvey Oswald who “wanted to be remembered in that place at a certain time.”
