Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  We know from the firearms examinations conducted by the Warren Commission and HSCA firearms experts, and the neutron activation test conducted by the HSCA, that all the Winchester Western bullets and bullet fragments in this case matched up with each other. No fragment from any other bullet (the AR-15 bullet is manufactured by Remington Arms, not Winchester Western) was ever found. And the stretcher bullet and two large fragments (Commission Exhibit Nos. 567 and 569) found in the presidential limousine were determined to have been fired from Oswald’s Carcano rifle to the exclusion of all other weapons.

  For Donahue’s theory to work, in addition to all of the above problems with it, Oswald would have had to fire (as Donahue contends) only two bullets. But we know that three expended shell casings were found beneath the sixth-floor sniper’s nest window where Oswald was. One of the three cartridge shells found on the floor beneath the sixth-floor window, Commission Exhibit No. 543, had a dent on the mouth of it. Donahue says that “the dent in the empty shell found in the depository…would have precluded a third shot from that location.”73 Donahue’s source? Josiah Thompson, a professor of philosophy, not a firearms expert, who says in his book, Six Seconds in Dallas, that because of the dent, the cartridge case “could not have been fired in any rifle—its lip will not receive a projectile.” Thompson goes on to speculate that the dent occurred before November 22, and therefore the cartridge was not fired that day.74 One possibility he failed to consider was what obviously happened. The dent occurred on November 22 when the cartridge shell was being ejected from the Carcano. Not only firearms experts from the Warren Commission, but those from the HSCA concluded that Commission Exhibit No. 543 was fired in and ejected from Oswald’s rifle. When asked if the dent could have occurred “during the loading process” of the cartridge into the breach of the Carcano, Donald Champagne, one of the HSCA’s five firearms experts, testified, “No sir.”

  Question: “Could it have occurred during the ejection process?”

  Answer: “Yes.” Champagne went on to say that Monty Lutz of the firearms panel (my firearms expert in London who was a past president of the Association of Firearm and Tool Mark Examiners) test-fired four cartridges from the Carcano, one of which had a “similar deformation of the mouth of the cartridge case.”

  Question: “Are you saying then when your panel test-fired CE-139, out of four fired cartridges, one was ejected with a dented mouth?”

  Answer: “Yes sir, that occurred during the ejection process in firing the weapon.”75

  Dedicated and sincerely convinced he was correct, Donahue attempted to interview Secret Service agent Hickey himself, but Hickey did not respond. I imagine his position was that Donahue’s claim was so absurd it wasn’t worth responding to. Donahue also made every effort to testify before the HSCA, even enlisting the support of his congressional representative in the Baltimore area, where he lived. Donahue was interviewed by HSCA investigators but that’s as far as it got, the HSCA refusing to allow him to testify and clutter up the official record with such sublime silliness. Though Hickey did not respond to Donahue, some other Secret Service agents did not remain mute. For example, when he called Agent Winston Lawson, Lawson said, “That’s about the biggest bunch of bull—I have ever heard in my life. That’s absolutely ridiculous. That’s all I’ve got to say. Thank you for calling. Goodbye.” Agent Richard Johnson said, “That’s way out. My God, that’s way out. That’s too far out to even think about.”76

  Donahue was led so far astray by his obsession that Menninger writes, “The more he [Donahue] thought about it, the more he was inclined to believe the government had probably made the right decision in keeping the truth from the American public in 1963…There could have been no way of knowing how the American people would have reacted to news that Kennedy had been killed accidentally.”77 In other words, even before the Warren Commission, the U.S. government knew Hickey had killed Kennedy and suppressed this fact from the American people. My, my.

  The back cover of Mortal Error reads, “On November 22, 1963, two men shot the President of the United States. They had never met or heard of each other. They did not work for the same people. They knew nothing of each other’s existence. One of them meant to kill the President. The other actually did…The Warren Commission was wrong. The conspiracy theories about the CIA and the Mafia are wrong. JFK, the movie, is wrong. Here is the hard evidence pointing to the bullet, the gun and the man who killed John Kennedy. And the real reason behind the cover-up.” Fortunately, Mortal Error has not been mortal in its impact. Other than Howard Donahue and his biographer Bonar Menninger, I know of no serious student of the assassination who takes the book or its contents seriously.

  Perhaps the most famous (not by their given names) of the “other” assassins are the “three tramps.” The fact that there never was any evidence at all of their guilt is irrelevant to the conspiracy theorists. To the buffs, there was one big piece of incriminating evidence against the tramps: they weren’t Lee Harvey Oswald! And in the balmy and unhinged conspiracy universe, no evidence of guilt is stronger against someone than that he isn’t Lee Harvey Oswald. Indeed, if the three tramps, or any of the many other assassins of Kennedy (other than the self-proclaimed ones) whom the conspiracy buffs have pointed their fingers at through the years, were ever put on trial for Kennedy’s murder and were to cry out, in desperation, from the witness stand, “Please, tell me what I have done!” the resounding answer from their conspiracy prosecutors would be, “You’re not Lee Harvey Oswald, you fool.”

  Shortly after (no one seems to know the exact time) the president was shot on Elm Street, five Dallas police officers in Dealy Plaza, some of whom had just been ordered to go there on a Code 3 (emergency), were instructed to go to the railroad tower. A civilian had told one of the Dallas police supervisors that a man in the tower “had some information.” One of the five, Marvin Wise, told the FBI in 1992 that he went to the tower and spoke to the controller (presumably Lee Bowers, though Wise said he could not remember his name), who told him he had seen three men running down the tracks and climbing into a coal car. The controller directed the officers to the specific car, which Wise said was “several hundred yards from the control tower,” and which was south of Dealey Plaza. And then Wise and Officer Roy Vaughn were the two who actually entered the car and rousted the three. One of the three was carrying a bag containing a bar of soap, a shirt, a towel/rag, a can of spam or Vienna sausage, and a jackknife. The three were taken into custody and transported back to the sheriff’s office, where Sheriff Bill Decker and some of his deputies talked to the three for a few minutes. Wise was then instructed to take the three to Captain Will Fritz’s office, and by himself (he said it was not uncommon in those days to transport several prisoners by yourself), he drove the three to City Hall, two of them handcuffed to each other in the backseat and one, unhandcuffed, riding in the front seat with him.

  Wise said that since he was “convinced” the three had nothing to do with the assassination, he felt “guilty and ashamed” to bring the three hoboes to Fritz’s office, thinking the elite detectives would “think less” of him. He deposited the three at the Homicide and Robbery office and an hour later was instructed to bring them back to the sheriff’s office, which he did. Wise said the three were never booked and were soon released, but he could not remember if they spent the night in a “Hold For Decker” tank.78

  While they were first being escorted to the Dallas sheriff’s office on Houston Street, the transients were photographed several times near the Book Depository Building by photographers from the Dallas Morning News, Dallas Times Herald, and Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Except for these photographs, and the controversy they generated, the transients, who later became known as the “three tramps,” dissolved into history for many years because, it was believed, no reports were ever made memorializing their arrest, or if they were, they had been destroyed as a part of the assassination cover-up.*

  Who were these transients, these tramps? Their anonym
ity at once frustrated and tantalized conspiracy theorists for years. Because there was no evidence that the authorities ever identified them (which went beautifully in the direction of one of the theorists’ favorite arguments, “a cover-up” by the same authorities), and because they did not look quite as disheveled and unkempt as many rail hoboes do (though obviously bedraggled in their appearance, they seemed to be relatively clean shaven, did not have long, uncut hair, and their shoes did not appear to be overly worn),† the conspiracy community believed that the three men were somehow involved in the assassination.

  The “tramp” photos were first accumulated by conspiracy theorist and computer expert Richard E. Sprague in 1966 and 1967, and he turned them over to New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison in 1967 when the latter was conducting his investigation of Clay Shaw for the murder of the president. During his January 31, 1968, appearance on The Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson, Garrison proceeded to hold up for the camera a photo of the three tramps, suggesting they were involved in the assassination. After a split second, Carson brought Garrison’s arm (and hence, photo) down, realizing the potential liability for defamation of accusing someone on national television of murder without any evidence.79

  An interesting vignette demonstrating the extent to which the three-tramps allegation went involved one of Garrison’s first lead investigators in the Shaw case, William C. Wood, a former CIA officer fired from the agency in 1953 because of alcoholism. Garrison gave him the pseudonym Bill Boxley, hoping to conceal his CIA pedigree since Garrison was alleging the CIA had a hand in the assassination. Boxley was known to feed Garrison’s fantasies by dredging up bogus evidence to support them. One such fantasy was that a New Orleans construction worker named Robert L. Perrin was actually the gunman on the grassy knoll.

  The only inconvenient problem is that Perrin’s wife confirmed that Perrin, who had been discharged from the service for hysteria and had a history of mental disturbance, died in New Orleans on August 28, 1962, over a year before the assassination, and the coroner ruled the cause of death was suicide from “acute arsenic poisoning.” No problem. Boxley told Garrison he found witnesses who saw Perrin alive in Dallas shortly before and after the assassination, convincing Garrison that Perrin had faked his death. Further, the enterprising Boxley went out and found some neighbors who, although they never had a good look at Perrin in the neighborhood, and couldn’t identify him from a coroner’s photo, identified, from a photo, one of the three tramps as being someone who lived across the hall from Perrin. The situation got so far out of hand that Garrison was actually planning to indict Perrin (who, as I mentioned, was dead) and the three tramps for Kennedy’s murder on November 22, 1968, the fifth anniversary of the assassination. When Garrison’s staff, fearful he was about to ruin himself and whatever credibility his investigation had, was unable to talk him out of it, they enlisted the help of Warren Commission critics Harold Weisberg and Vincent Salandria. Weisberg made Garrison see how worthless Boxley’s work had been and Salandria convinced him Boxley was a CIA “plant,” resulting in Garrison firing Boxley. Weisberg said that one of Garrison’s assistants, Andrew Sciambra, was so grateful to him for getting Garrison to stop his suicidal plans that “he treated me to a homemade Italian dinner cooked by his wife.”80

  The tramp story remained a heavy topic of conversation and speculation within the conspiracy community for years after Garrison’s near indictment of them in 1968. But it wasn’t until 1974 that two conspiracy theorists, Alan J. Weberman and Michael Canfield, hit on what they thought was pay dirt. Comparing the photos of the three tramps with every “suspect” imaginable, they concluded that two of the tramps were none other than two of the convicted Watergate burglars: Howard Hunt, the former CIA agent, and Frank Sturgis, the soldier of fortune who ran arms for Castro in the Sierra Maestra mountains of Cuba and who conspiracy theorists have always believed to be a CIA agent or operative. Hunt was thought to be the shortest of the three tramps; Sturgis, the tallest. If true, which Weberman, Canfield, and many in the conspiracy community believed to be the case, this was “proof” of CIA complicity in the assassination. Weberman and Canfield turned the comparison photos (which immediately started appearing in alternative-press newspapers throughout the country) over to comedian-turned-civil-rights-advocate Dick Gregory, and it was Gregory who, because of his celebrity, became the point man on radio and television for the accusation. The next year, 1975, the national print media took notice, with stories about Gregory and his Hunt and Sturgis charges being reported in Rolling Stone magazine on April 24, 1975, and Newsweek magazine on April 28, 1975.81

  The story started gaining such momentum that when the Rockefeller Commission conducted its investigation of CIA activities within the United States in 1975, it took testimony from Gregory, Hunt, Sturgis,* and several other witnesses on the issue. Remarkably, of the eighteen pages of its June 1975 report that were devoted to the Kennedy assassination, seven (almost 40 percent) dealt exclusively with the three-tramp issue. The commission concluded that Hunt and Sturgis were not two of the three tramps. It said that the weight of the evidence was that Hunt and Sturgis were in Washington, D.C., and Miami, Florida, respectively, on November 22, 1963. What conclusively proved they weren’t the transients in Dealey Plaza was a comparison of the tramp photos with those of Hunt and Sturgis by FBI agent Lyndal Shaneyfelt, a nationally recognized expert in photo identification and analysis. Although two of the tramps bear a resemblance to Hunt and Sturgis, they clearly are not one and the same. Shaneyfelt found, among other things, that the tramp believed to be Hunt was much older than Hunt, was two inches shorter, and had a more pointed chin and more bulbous nose. The Sturgis tramp looked Nordic, whereas Sturgis (real name, Frank Angelo Fiorini) looked Latin. Also, other facial features were different and the tramp was three inches taller than Sturgis.82 Indeed, even Rolling Stone magazine, pro-conspiracy in its early San Francisco years, commissioned the Institute of Forensic Sciences in Oakland, California, to make a comparison of the tramp photos with those of Hunt and Sturgis, and the institute concluded Hunt and Sturgis were not the tramps.83

  While the Rockefeller Commission was in the midst of its hearings on the CIA,* Weberman and Canfield published their book Coup d’État in America, in which they went beyond the mere charge that Hunt and Sturgis were two of the three tramps, alleging that Hunt and Sturgis most likely were two of the actual assassins.

  The authors, whose book never rises to the level of elementary-school scholarship, tell their readers that two of the tramps “fit the descriptions of the men seen running” from the assassination scene after the shooting. But they are so inept that they actually say that the older of the three tramps, whom they believe to be Hunt, and whom they described as someone of “very thin build” who wore “no coat,” fit the description of the man Jean Hill saw running from the Book Depository Building toward the railroad tracks. But they quote Hill as saying the man she saw was “shorter than Ruby/stocky” and wore a “brown overcoat.” How these two descriptions, which the authors themselves give, match up with each other is only known to them. The authors also say the tallest tramp, the one they believe to be Sturgis, and whom they describe as “175–200 lbs./6 tall,” fits the description of the man Jesse Rice (see endnote) saw running in the railroad yards, whom they quote Rice as saying was “145 lbs./5’6 or 7.” To suggest that 175 to 200 pounds and six feet tall fits the description of someone who is 145 pounds and five feet six or seven inches tall is not just goofy but non compos mentis. The authors said they did not know who the third tramp was, but originally suspected he was an Oswald impersonator. Later, in 1992, they concluded he was Dan Carswell, believed by them to be a CIA operative.84

  In 1978, the HSCA revisited the issue, and its panel of forensic anthropologists concluded that none of the three tramps were Hunt or Sturgis. The HSCA also compared several other conspiracy “suspects” (including Dan Carswell, whom they also eliminated as a tramp) and concluded that only one, Fred Lee Chr
isman, a New Orleans minuteman, had facial measurements “consistent” with any of the tramps. However, the HSCA could not establish any link between Chrisman and the assassination, and further, it “independently determined that Chrisman was not in Dealey Plaza on the day of the assassination.”85

  Even before the JFK Act, in October of 1992, ordered the release of all records related to the assassination of any “local law enforcement office” that assisted in the investigation of the assassination, the Dallas Police Department released thousands of pages of arrest and investigation reports on January 27, 1992. On February 3, 1992, at the Dallas Municipal Archives and Records Center journalist Mary La Fontaine, after finding nothing of any real value among these recently declassified and released documents, discovered among a different batch of documents voluntarily released by the department back in 1989, the arrest records (which, as indicated, were previously thought to have never existed, or to have been destroyed) of the “three tramps.” Their names were Harold Doyle, John F. Gedney, and Gus W. Abrams.86

  According to their November 22, 1963, arrest reports, filed by Dallas police officer W. E. Chambers, the three tramps, Doyle (age thirty-three, home address Red Jacket, West Virginia), Gedney (thirty-eight, home address “None”), and Abrams (fifty-three, home address “None”) were arrested as “investigative prisoners” for vagrancy and robbery. The sparse report says they were “taken off a boxcar in the railroad yards right after President Kennedy was shot.” The reports said the men “are all passing through [town]. They have no jobs, etc.” The three were kept in custody until 9:25 on the morning of November 26 and released.

  A front-page article on Mary La Fontaine’s discovery written by her and her husband, Ray, in the Houston Post on February 9, 1992, prompted an immediate search for the tramps by the FBI and many others. But it was the La Fontaines themselves who tracked down Harold Doyle in 1992 in Klamath Falls, Oregon, and who ended up producing a February 25, 1992, segment on A Current Affair on their search for and interview of Doyle which received the highest rating, a 14 share, in Current Affair history. In the interview, Doyle said that although he had heard of the tramp controversy throughout the years, he never came forward because to do so might implicate him in the assassination, and “the tramps had nothing to do with it.” As for the notoriety of identifying himself, he said, “I am a plain guy, a simple country boy, and that’s the way I want to stay. I wouldn’t be a celebrity for $10 million.”87 On February 29, 1992, four days later, the Portland office of the FBI interviewed Doyle, who advised the agents that around the time of the assassination, he, Gus Abrams, and John Gedney had been riding the rails in Texas. The three arrived in Dallas during the early morning hours of November 22, 1963, and spent the night at the Irving Street Mission in Dallas, where they “showered, cleaned up,” and were fed. After a noon meal, they headed to the railroad yards intending to hop a freight to Fort Worth. While inside a “coal car” they were confronted by several police officers, who told them not to move or they’d be shot. They were arrested, he said, interrogated about the assassination at the Dallas Police Department, and released a few days later.88