A Rose by Many Other Names: Rose Cherami & the JFK Assassination

by Todd C. Elliott

  In a 2010 interview conducted at his home in Mamou, Louisiana, Hatley (or Hadley depending on who’s asking) claimed that he did oversee and manage Kilroy’s. After being shown her infamous mugshot picture (see page 72), he also claimed that he did not know Rose, nor had he ever seen her.

  Incredibly, he also claimed during the 2010 interview that he had “no idea” who Lee Harvey Oswald was, nor had he ever heard the name of the President’s accused assassin.

  However, Manuel stated that he did want to get paid for the interview and what he knew. Whatever he knew, Manuel took to the grave with him in 2011.

  On November 22, 1963, however, Rose Cherami knew of Eunice’s houses of ill-repute, and certainly what had happened on November 20.

  But that wasn’t all she knew. Abandoned by these shady and serious men, Rose might have been the only person ready to tell what she knew to strangers or anyone that might listen. And if she had doubted the truth of her road companions’ murderous intentions, the resounding evidence of that truth came like a jolt as she hit the pavement and the side of the highway.

  Something must have struck Rose on that afternoon in Eunice. Whether it was a moving vehicle, a momentary sense of reason, anger, or the value of life regardless of her own. Perhaps all of these things hit her at once.

  In a cloud of opiates, Rose Cherami staggered to her feet from the side of the road. She was possibly bloodied from the scrapes, and bruised, and she might have been oblivious to the pick-up truck that struck her.

  More than likely, Rose was the source of her own legend, as she later told of how she was “thrown out of a moving vehicle.” This way, Rose – who harbored the mind of a junkie and criminal capable of playing the system – would appear as a victim to medical staff and law enforcement. After all, getting hit by a vehicle on the side of the road because she was high on dope was a story that was incriminating and garnered less sympathy.

  As far as her hell-bent road companions were concerned, Rose Cherami was now someone else’s problem on Highway 190.And if Rose was telling the truth, the vehicle that she had been riding in that day reached Dallas later that evening.

  Chapter Three

  The Register

  It was a Wednesday in Eunice at the local hospital, but it would not be a typical Wednesday. Unbeknownst to the staff at the Moosa Hospital, the week was shaping up to be one of the worst in American history.

  Louis Pavur, a now retired radiologic technologist, recalled in a 2012 interview with the Eunice News that he was working at the now defunct Moosa Hospital on November 20, 1963, offering his assistance to the late Dr. J.T. Thompson and a nurse Broussard.

  “It wasn’t often that we got someone thrown out of a car brought into the hospital. I worked near the emergency room and thought the doctor might need some X-rays taken,” Pavur recalled. “I was present in the Emergency Room when they brought Rose Cherami in. I saw a woman with dark hair who was wearing blue jeans and a white T-shirt, who was not bruised up and did not meet the description of someone who needed x-rays.”

  Pavur said that he remembers Cherami and that day well.

  “I remember that she said that she was thrown out of an automobile and they called Dr. J.T. Thompson, and I was in the emergency room,” Pavur said. “She was a short woman with an average build. This woman claimed she was thrown out of a car, but I didn’t really see any severe evidence of that. I did not hear her say, specifically, that Kennedy would be assassinated. The police took her off to the Eunice City Jail, and it wasn’t until a couple of days later, the day of the assassination, that it had come out that she had predicted it.”

  In other words, Pavur said, when the President was killed, many in the hospital remembered “that woman” who said something about the murder of JFK – which she said was going to happen on that Friday. Pavur said that the staff at Moosa Hospital in Eunice treated her for her bruises and scrapes and determined she had suffered no real trauma from her ordeal.

  One of Pavur’s prized belongings is a photocopy of the original emergency room register with Cherami’s signature, in which she listed Thibodaux, LA as her address. Cherami signed herself in at 4:00 p.m. according to Pavur’s copied document.

  “I thought it was a significant part of history, it’s a piece of history,” Pavur said. “I thought it would be an interesting something to look at one day. I didn’t how deep it was going to go, or the extent of the investigation.”

  Pavur said that he knew the time was right to make a copy of the emergency room register when FBI, government officials, or men flashing such credentials, came to Eunice and took medical records from Moosa and an arrest record on Rose from the Eunice Police Department.

  “That’s when I found out that she had predicted that Kennedy would be assassinated, when they came to the hospital and did all of this stuff,” Pavur said. “After that, I said ‘Jesus! I’m going to get a copy of that.’ That happened so many years ago, I can’t remember what happened to the original emergency room register.”

  Pavur said that also present at the Moosa hospital that afternoon of November 20, 1963 was the late L.G. Carrier, at the time with the Eunice Police Department. Pavur said he remembered Carrier arriving shortly after Cherami was brought in. Jane Carrier, widow of L.G. Carrier, said that her husband related to her that he overheard the radio report about Cherami and then went to the hospital.

  She said that he also told her about FBI agents visiting Eunice “within days” after the Kennedy assassination. “They came a very short time later and picked up all the records,” said Mrs. Carrier. “L.G. told me that they came and took her records from Moosa and from the jail.” Mrs. Carrier said that her late husband was one of the few locals who actually heard Cherami speak of a plot to kill Kennedy.

  “Nobody bothered investigating, they all thought she was a nut case,” Carrier said. “At the time they probably didn’t know that she worked with Jack Ruby. And that’s probably where she overheard something about the plot to kill Kennedy.”

  Ruby, a Dallas night club owner and a man who was affiliated with Chicago and New Orleans organized crime lords, killed Oswald on live television following his arrest, as the suspected assassin was being led from Dallas city jail to the county jail two days after Kennedy was assassinated on Friday.

  Pavur believes that JFK was assassinated as the result of a conspiracy. Pavur said that he did not believe that Lee Harvey Oswald, a New Orleans native, had shot Kennedy, mainly because his sister worked in a New Orleans department store with Oswald’s mother, and that Oswald was often around the store. “She said that Oswald was ‘too stupid to get out of the rain,’” Pavur said. “She said he would just get lost in the department store. That he just wasn’t smart.”

  As for this strange patient named Rose Cherami, apparent “narcotics withdrawals” or some strange symptoms associated with drugs made this woman a candidate for the drunk tank at the Eunice jail.

  “We didn’t know if she was drunk or hopped up when she was talking to us in the Emergency Room. She was talking kind of out of her head when she was talking to us,” Pavur said. “I assume that it was why she was released to the Eunice Police Department.”

  Such strange, drug-fiend behavior triggered a hospital staffer to contact Lt. Francis Fruge of the Louisiana State Police. According to both research, and his own sworn testimony, a hospital worker from Moosa phoned Fruge in regards to Rose.

  Whether he picked her up on the side of the highway or at the hospital, Rose was in his custody now. It would be his responsibility to move Rose Cherami from the hospital to the Eunice jail.

  Chapter Four

  Meanwhile Back at the Eunice Jail

  Lt. Francis Fruge of the Louisiana State Police was from a smaller town west of Eunice called Basile.

  During his routine highway patrol up and down U.S. Highway 190, he probably remembered the policeman’s ball, scheduled for that evening of November 20, 1963.

  Fruge was invited to attend. However, his festivities wo
uld be cut short by Rose.

  When Fruge first met Rose Cherami is unknown. Fruge had probably encountered Rose, at one point or another along U.S. Highway 190, as it was his routine to patrol the highway, investigating various prostitutes and drug-runners. That day, anyone who saw a distraught Rose on the side of the highway probably cringed and knew something was highly unusual about the situation.

  Chris Mills, a UK writer, detailed a Fruge-Cherami encounter in his essay entitled “Rambling Rose.” Mills wrote that Fruge happened upon “a woman who seemed to be the victim of a road traffic accident. Although she did not seem badly injured Fruge thought it prudent to take her to the Moosa Hospital in Eunice to be examined. During the journey the woman told Fruge that her name was Rose Cheramie [sic], explaining that she was en-route from Miami to Houston via Dallas.”

  According to Mills, Fruge brought Cherami to the Moosa Hospital. Regardless, she became someone else’s problem.

  Whatever the case, Fruge’s testimony before the HSCA hearings in 1978 stated that someone from the Moosa Hospital called him in to take responsibility for Rose – who was already in their care and showed signs of being a raving drug addict under the influence.

  Though nothing can be confirmed, allegedly a man by the name of Frank Odom picked Rose up on the side of Highway 190 in his truck after nearly grazing her with his vehicle. Allegedly, Odom drove her to Moosa Hospital and left her there.

  Perhaps Odom was even the first to hear Rose and her rambling about an assassination. I was unable to interview Odom. Eunice residents, along with Odom family members, confirmed in 2010 that Mr. Frank Odom had been long dead.

  According to H.P. Albarelli’s book, A Secret Order: Investigating the High Strangeness and Synchronicity in the JFK Assassination, Odom alleged that Cherami cursed him out “something fierce” for the duration of the ride to the hospital.

  Regardless of who took her to Moosa Hospital, Cherami was transported to Moosa after being found on the side of the road.

  There is merely circumstantial evidence as to who took her to the hospital, or which side of the highway she was on. The fact is that at 4 p.m. she had signed the emergency room register at the Moosa Hospital as “Rose Cherami” on November 20, 1963. On the register, Rose listed her address: “Thibodaux, Louisiana.”

  From Moosa, Fruge was the one who was tasked with escorting Rose to the Eunice city jail. After a brief stay at the Eunice city jail, she was committed to the Jackson East Louisiana State Hospital upon the recommendation of Dr. F.J. DeRouen – who was assistant coroner of St. Landry Parish.

  Before committing Rose to a state hospital, Dr. DeRouen allegedly first met her that day in the Eunice city jail. He was called to the jail because the police reported to him that they had a woman in the jail who had begun to act irrationally and violently.

  According to documentation found within Jim Garrison’s National Archives on Rose, “she appeared to suffer severe narcotic withdrawals” while at the hospital. Rose was “taken to jail and given a sedative but she soon became agitated, stripped off her clothing and slashed her ankles.”

  Rose purportedly cut her ankles with her fingernails and then proceeded to scratch the walls of the jail cell, bloodying her fingertips and nails.

  Is it possible that Rose was faking her symptoms to get a transfer to the state mental institution? Was this just another example of her criminal mind working, playing the system?

  In a 2012 interview with the Eunice News, Dr. DeRouen said that he did not remember much: not seeing Rose Cherami at all, seeing any female patient acting irrationally or violent, giving a sedative that caused an adverse reaction, hearing a patient mention a plot to murder JFK, nor transferring any woman to the Jackson East Louisiana State Hospital.

  Dr. DeRouen also could not remember that he had determined that Cherami was a heroin addict of about nine years, who had shot her last intravenous cocktail at about 2 p.m. that day.

  Although DeRouen did not remember Rose Cherami, he did not deny treating her. He said that due to a recent stroke, his memory was not what it used to be. “If you say that I did those things, then I must have done them,” Dr. DeRouen said at his Eunice home in that interview with the Eunice News. “I just have a hard time remembering that time in my life.”

  However, Dr. DeRouen said (like most Americans in regards to the watershed moment) that he remembered the Friday that Kennedy was assassinated, and that he had been in his office on 2nd Street in downtown Eunice. He also remembered that he was not a fan of President Kennedy.

  When asked about Rose babbling some plot to kill Kennedy in Dallas, DeRouen denounced it as the symptoms of narcotic withdrawal or blamed the drugs that she was on at the time.

  But no drug has a documented side-effect of making a user able to point to a time and place where a person, in this case the leader of the free world, would be murdered.

  As Dr. DeRouen struggled with his memory in 2012, an anonymous Eunice resident disclosed that the doctor’s memory trouble following his stroke may have been a ruse. The reliable source, well versed in the Eunice connection with the Rose Cherami incident, said that he had questioned Dr. DeRouen in the late 1990s prior to his stroke. The source said that Dr. DeRouen volunteered no information back then either.

  If there was no raving, drug addled, female inmate at the Eunice city Jail, then how did Rose end up in one of the biggest state mental facilities in the area, hours before JFK would be cut down?

  Better question: why?

  Was it something she said?

  Chapter Five

  Going to Jackson

  The late Lt. Francis Fruge was, without a doubt, the man who was also tasked with driving Rose to the East Louisiana State Hospital – which was a state mental facility in Jackson, Louisiana.

  Fruge found himself summoned back to the Eunice jail from his festive evening at the policeman’s ball. And he was, perhaps, the first to hear Cherami’s strange tale in detail, about how President Kennedy would be killed in two days in Dallas by the men with whom she traveled.

  So that evening of November 20, 1963, Lt. Francis Fruge was called back in to the Eunice jail, allegedly some time after 10:30 p.m. He was to accompany the mess that was Rose Cherami to the Jackson hospital. Indeed, he would drive her all the way there. And by the time they would get her admitted into the hospital, it would be November 21, 1963.

  Fruge drove her to the state hospital, nearly a two-hour drive to the east. Fruge would testify before the House Select Committee on Assassinations on April 18, 1978, that during this pivotal time frame, “She related to me that she was coming from Florida to Dallas with two men who were Italians or resembled Italians. They had stopped at this lounge and they’d had a few drinks … and had gotten into an argument or something. The manager of the lounge threw her out and she got on the road and hitchhiked to catch a ride, and this is when she got hit by a vehicle.” The lounge Rose Cherami spoke of, Fruge stated, was indeed the Silver Slipper, a house of prostitution.

  Fruge further testified that upon questioning her of her business in Dallas: “She said she was going to, number one, pick up some money, pick up her baby, and to kill Kennedy.”

  And perhaps after hearing such an astounding statement coming from the back seat on a nearly two hour drive that night, the only sound would be the hum of the engine on the highway, as eyeballs shifted to the rear-view mirror after Rose gave her “word from the underground” to Fruge.

  Perhaps Lt. Francis Fruge and Rose Cherami locked eyes for a second or two in that rear-view mirror. Maybe it was the thunderous silence of disbelief that permeated the night air on a lonely highway in Louisiana.

  It’s not impossible that, at that moment, lightning flashed in the distance, sealing their destiny.

  Flashing forward to 1978 before the HSCA, Lt. Francis Fruge would recall that Rose Cherami, when relating these stories to him, seemed quite lucid.

  Records indicate that Cherami would be in for her second visit to this state hospital in
Jackson. Previously, she was institutionalized for being “criminally insane” on July 13, 1961, according to Louisiana State Police and FBI records.

  This time Cherami was taken to the same hospital – which Lee Harvey Oswald had applied for employment just months prior in Summer of 1963. The day after she was admitted, Kennedy was murdered in Dealy Plaza in Dallas.

  In her book A Farewell to Justice, Joan Mellen described Cherami’s stay in the state mental hospital (p. 206):

  “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!’ Cherami shouted. ‘They’re going to kill the president!’ No one paid any attention. The motorcade pulled into view. ‘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!’”

  Shots rang out in Dallas.

  A phone rang in the Jackson state hospital. Rattled by the shooting of JFK in Dallas, Fruge frantically called the hospital to get Cherami back in State Police custody. He allegedly told the staff not to release her until he arrived. However, he was told by hospital staff that he could not collect or question Cherami until Monday.

  As he waited, Fruge allegedly called the FBI in Lafayette, Louisiana, who told him the case was closed and that they already had their man. By Monday, the world would know the names of Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby.

  On Monday, according to his HSCA deposition, Fruge was finally able to question Cherami, who spoke of how “two men traveling with her from Miami were going to Dallas to kill the President. For her part, Cherami was to obtain $8,000 from an unidentified source in Dallas and proceed to Houston with the two men to complete a drug deal.”