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

by Todd C. Elliott

  She said Ruby glared at her in disbelief or shock, because she and her husband used aliases that night. Ruby knew her real name, but played along and left abruptly.

  When she counter-offered $25,000 for the job of piloting and gun-running a boat to Cuba, the colonel offered $15,000 at the third meeting, which was also attended by a new face that Mrs. Rich believed to be, according to her testimony, the son of a powerful mob figure.

  They fled that apartment for the last time, not taking the job or the money. She implied that she and her husband packed their things that night, or shortly thereafter, and drove to New Orleans. About a year later, her husband would be dead, but not before “turning her out” as a prostitute.

  Years later, the name of Youngblood would come up once again in the investigation of another assassination.

  Named by James Earl Ray, the charged and convicted (but never confessed) assassin of Martin Luther King, Jr., during a filmed interview for the HSCA MLK Report (vol.1 p.242) taken during the 1970s investigations.

  In his sworn testimony, Ray said that an FBI agent came to visit him while in prison in 1969 to seek his help in regards to taking “some people out of circulation.” He claimed that the agent showed him about 10 to 15 “pictures that the FBI wanted taken out of circulation” of Latin-looking individuals and even some pictures taken from Dealey Plaza in 1963 immediately following the shooting.

  “One picture was taken in Dallas or something, in 1963,” said Ray in his sworn testimony for the HSCA. “There was no names given. And one picure was an individual named Jack Youngblood.”

  Youngblood would be known to most MLK conspiracy theorists as the “eggs and sausages man,” a stranger who was seen frequenting the nearby diner within days of and the day of the assassination. Youngblood was allegedly arrested immediately after the MLK shooting, but was never held.

  In Waldron’s, Legacy of Secrecy, it is stated that James Earl Ray was much like Rose, in the sense that they were both drug couriers operating for the same Marcello heroin network.

  On Rose Cherami’s death certificate, the name of Thomas J. Youngblood was listed as her father’s name and as the deceased’s informant.

  Was this Jack Youngblood any relation to Rose? If her father’s name was Youngblood, could it have been a brother rather than a husband?

  With her mother’s name listed on the death certificate as Minnie Stroud, Rose must have had some sense of humor in choosing her aliases: she also went by “Mickey,” possibly to her mother’s “Minnie.”

  But how does a father named Youngblood and a mother named Stroud add up to a daughter name Melba Christine Marcades?

  While there were other underworld rumblings of foreknowledge of JFK’s possible assassination becoming inevitable or discussed by the likes of Joseph Milteer – who was a Florida right-wing militant who loathed JFK for his liberal policies – Rose was the first to give an exact time and place: Dallas, Texas on Friday, November 22, 1963.

  While some contend that Rose “laid with dogs and got fleas” as an explanation for her foreknowledge, the possibility of Rose appearing as more of a government agent, or in some way connected to characters in both the criminal underworld and a government agency becomes more plausible.

  If Rose was just a prostitute or whore (the common whore would have been relegated to the whore houses along the wooded highways of Louisiana), she would never have been permitted to be in on any conversation, in some inner circle, where the business of the president’s murder was being discussed.

  While she dealt in prostitution and drugs, it would also appear that she dealt in information. Rose seemed to make it her business to know where and when large shipments of heroin would enter the country and where young girls were being sold into the sex trade. More importantly, she shared her information with authorities.

  Many people were associated with the underworld at the time, yet hardly anyone heard specifically that JFK would be murdered on a Friday in Dallas.

  If they did, they kept quiet.

  Rose did not.

  It looked as if Rose “positioned” herself to be in the right place, at the right time. In other words, she caught the right fleas, lying with the right dogs at the right time.

  Chapter Ten

  The Long D.O.A. of Rose Cherami

  Just as her life was shrouded in mystery, so was her death. It seems that Rose left the surreal in her wake.

  On September 4, 1965, as Jack Ruby sat in a Dallas prison cell for the murder of Oswald, Cherami was again hit by a car, or at least found on the side of a highway.

  This time the injuries proved fatal.

  Her death certificate read that she was found dead outside of Gladewater, Texas, apparently after she had been walking on Highway 155 about one and a half miles east of Big Sandy at about 2 a.m.

  In fact, when she was found, she was still alive and breathing.

  According to some accounts, at 2:15 a.m., Jerry Don Moore of Tyler, Texas was driving out of Big Sandy down a stretch of Highway 155 he had also driven down 15 minutes earlier. He saw something strange in the road that hadn’t been there 15 minutes before. Moore recalls seeing three or four suitcases laid along the yellow line in the middle of the road. He swerved to the right to miss the luggage. That was when he noticed the woman lying on the side of the road.

  All of this was verified by Jerry Don Moore, himself, in a published 2010 interview for Lagniappe Magazine, a bi-weekly, free tabloid based in Lake Charles, Louisiana.

  “It looked like she was sleeping,” Moore recalled. “She had her arms folded under her head like she was sleeping, with her elbows out. She was laid out parallel to the highway on the right-hand side, and she wasn’t in the road; maybe her elbow was, but it was just barely in the road. She was more in the gravel between the highway to her left and the grass and the ditch to her right.”

  Reacting quickly so as not to hit this person on the side of the highway, Moore said that he slammed on his brakes, which banged under his car’s chassis twice as he swerved.

  “I know I didn’t hit her. I ran off into the ditch and finally got my car up out of the ditch and back onto the road. And then I went to check on her and she was still breathing, but very short breaths – and then she would stop. And that’s when I noticed tread marks on her arms. But the car I drove then had bald tires with no treads. It looked like someone else had run over her.”

  Moore was asked whether he thought the mysteriously positioned pieces of luggage in the middle of the highway were strategically placed with the intention of forcing a motorist to swerve and hit the laid-out Cherami.

  “Hell yeah, as night is night and day is day, you could tell it was a set-up to run over that woman,” said Moore. “It looked as if someone had done this sort of thing before.”

  Moore admitted to doing 70 to 80 miles per hour and drinking his libation of choice, Seagram’s Seven Crown, all night. He also admitted to trying to assist a barely alive Rose Cherami. He claimed he stopped a car of black men and women traveling north on the highway. But they didn’t seem anxious to help move the suitcases out of the road as he asked them to. He claimed that at this point, he noticed a red Chevrolet parked on the side of the road opposite of the spot where he’d found Cherami. He figured it was a 1963 or 1964 model, a relatively new car.

  “It was in the roadside park area. It was cherry red. The lights were off and the engine was off,” said Moore. “I couldn’t see anyone in the vehicle.”

  Moore wondered if there was someone in that car, waiting.Could someone have been in that car watching this scene unfold in the darkness? Did someone need to verify that a loose end like Rose had been knotted up?

  After Moore grabbed Cherami under her arms and loaded her body into his back seat, Moore said, he then drove her into town for medical attention.

  He stopped briefly in Hawkins, Texas, where he was told by a policeman that the nearest hospital was in Gladewater. But the police officer knew of a doctor in Hawkins and offered Moore
a police escort.

  On her arrival at the doctor’s home, Cherami was laid out in the early morning dew of a front yard. After a quick examination, the doctor phoned an ambulance and had Cherami taken to Gladewater Memorial Hospital. Moore recalled the doctor giving her a couple of shots and telling him she was suffering from brain damage.

  “I was concerned.” said Moore. “I was scared. And I didn’t hit her. Nor did I expect any of this. I really just wanted to get home to Tyler that night.”

  But he didn’t drive back to Tyler immediately. He waited until the ambulance came and followed it to the hospital. After that, he returned to the site of her luggage still mysteriously placed on the yellow highway line on 155.

  “I thought I could help identify her. So I went and got her luggage for her. I did go through some of her luggage to look for a name or an ID. But then I brought her luggage back to the hospital.”

  Curiously, Moore said that he figured that she was a whore because of the fact that he found a “douche-bag” or “hot water bottle” in one of her suitcases. He explained that it was a telltale sign of a prostitute.

  It’s alleged that at some point, Cherami remarked to one of the ambulance crew or hospital staff, “I worked for Jack Ruby.” Perhaps Rose thought that was important enough that people should know about it unto her last breath.

  None of these allegations have ever been verified with members of the hospital staff.

  However, one thing was certain, Cherami faded into the blackness of death less than two years after JFK was murdered.

  As the morning faded into place, Moore finally got home to Tyler at 4:30 a.m. Energized from the strange set of circumstances, he couldn’t sleep.

  Worried, concerned and possibly feeling guilty, he soon found himself back at the Gladewater Memorial Hospital – between 9:30 and 10 a.m. – to check on Cherami.

  As Moore returned to the hospital, his strange morning got a bit stranger. The woman he found had died. Hospital staff informed him they had called in a doctor from Dallas who came in the wee hours of morning.

  “I surely didn’t think that she would die,” said Moore. “I mean, she didn’t seem to be in that bad of a condition. There wasn’t a single drop of blood on my car, on her, or in my backseat. I didn’t see any blood. They told me ‘after that Dallas doctor got here, she didn’t last long.’”

  Why would a fully functional hospital call for a doctor in Dallas, which is 80 miles away? And who was this Dallas doctor?

  In three places on her death certificate are the letters D.O.A. (denoting “dead on arrival”). Yet the certificate states the time of death was 11 a.m. The time of the accident is clearly marked 2 a.m. on the death certificate.

  This begs the question, did it take 9 hours for Rose Cherami to die? How long did it take to get to the nearest hospital — seven hours?

  Even if Rose had been driven to a Dallas hospital to be pronounced DOA, the certificate would have recorded an earlier time of death than 11 a.m.

  “I know I was there by 10 a.m. and they said she was already dead,” said Moore. “So I don’t know where they got that 11 a.m. I thought they told me that she died around 7:30 that morning.”

  Investigations were open and shut rather quickly. Moore claimed that the day after Cherami’s death, the Highway Patrol showed up at his door to investigate his vehicle. They found no blood on the exterior of Moore’s vehicle, not a drop of blood in the back seat, and nothing to directly link Cherami and Moore. The case seemed closed.

  “When they came over the next morning, I thought it was strange that they seized my driver’s license. I don’t know why they took my license. They didn’t even give me a ticket. They held on to my license for six months.”

  When Moore was asked why he thought that they did this, he replied, “Beats the shit out of me.”

  Some suggest that when she was found, Cherami had a small caliber bullet lodged in her skull. The death certificate didn’t mention a bullet; just damage to her skull.

  Where was Rose going?

  Why were her bags taken out to the middle of the road and seemed to be strategically placed there?

  Whom was she riding with?

  Did she know the person?

  Was this just another unfortunate accident for Rose Cherami?

  Over the years, Moore would hear urban legends about Cherami, the woman whose fate had become entwined with his own. The most interesting story Moore told was that she had been driven to Texas from New Orleans on the night before she was found on the road.

  According to Moore, legend has it that she got in a car with “some Navy boys” from New Orleans and they were bound for Dallas that night. Supposedly, they took a wrong turn off Highway 80 towards Big Sandy. This would have put them on Highway 155 at sometime early the next morning. As the story screeches to a halt, there’s little explanation as to whether these men had paid her to have sex or had raped her and refused to pay her and had then kicked her out of their vehicle.

  Was it coincidence or an amalgamation with the Highway 190-Eunice story?

  The newspaper that reported on her death gave Rose another alias: “a Duncanville woman” who was found dead.

  Rose’s death certificate listed her address as Duncanville, Texas. The area where Rose was found near Big Sandy, Texas, is hell and gone, more than 100 miles away from Duncanville, Texas. Rose was found on a farm-to-market road – which would have been a poor choice for any hitchhiker, as it was in between two major highways.

  The newspaper that reported her death, the Gladewater Mirror, played off Rose’s death as a front-page, statistical news story about how dangerous the highway was, as it had claimed another life. The paper made no mention of her real story, her family or her possible connection with the JFK assassination.

  Even the death certificate, itself, makes odd Rose’s end at the age of 41.

  The time of injury is listed at “2:00 a.m.” In the space on the death certificate which denoted the interval between onset and death, the record shows: “8 hrs.”

  The coroner in Gladewater filled in the three blanks on the certificate with “D.O.A.,” three times in places that concerned statistical date information.

  In other words, her death certificate would read: “I hereby certify that I attended the deceased from D.O.A., 19___ to D.O.A., 19___ and last saw the deceased alive on D.O.A., 19___.”

  Did the coroner overstate the obvious? Does any coroner certify living persons?

  Ross Delay, the coroner in Gladewater in 1965, signed off on Rose’s death certificate on 9-11-65, five days after her body had already been removed for burial by funeral home personnel.

  Rogers Funeral Home, under the direction of Rex F. Rogers, assisted in burying the truth in the Wheatland Cemetery in Texas.

  Before being a subject of myths, Cherami was the subject of an autopsy, which the Texas hospital was unable to locate in 1967 when Jim Garrison hired investigators to get the report. To this day, no investigator has seen the autopsy report on Cherami.

  The man who may have the only existing copy of the autopsy report, possibly one of the few persons to have viewed the report, is Rose’s son, Michael.

  Chapter Eleven

  Son of Rose Cherami

  As Lt. Francis Fruge and many others believed that Rose Cherami had direct knowledge of the assassination plot, so does her son.

  Dr. Michael Marcades, 60, the Director of Music Ministries of First Methodist Church in Opelika, Alabama, had a minor role in the strange tale of Rose Cherami as “her baby.” If there can be a real biography of Rose Cherami, only one man could truly complete every chapter from his perspective.

  He said that he was 10 at time of the JFK assassination.

  “My mother may have been a lot of things, but she wasn’t a liar,” said Marcades in a 2012 phone interview for the Eunice News. “When it came down to life and death, in her mind I think she knew the difference between right and wrong. Was she a prostitute? Yes. Was she a drug trafficker? Yes. Did
she lose her entire sense of moral compass? No.

  “I don’t believe that she was lying. I believe that she told the truth out of frustration. I believe in that hospital in Louisiana, she was screaming the truth and no one would listen because of her background. I mean, how different life and history would have been had someone actually paid attention to the ravings of a prostitute-drug trafficker.”

  Marcades said that he, like many others, believes that she is the first JFK assassination conspiracy theorist. He noted that she believed in a conspiracy while President Kennedy was still alive.

  In a 2013 interview, Marcades questioned some of the state records which deemed his mother “criminally insane.” “What did criminally insane mean in 1961? Was it that she was a woman who had a tendency to be involved in criminal activity? And that was deemed criminally insane?

  “The things that I remember about her: she was beautiful, well kept. She was brilliant. She was capable of learning and doing just about anything.”

  At the time of Rose’s death, Marcades stated that he was living with his grandparents in the Houston area or had possibly then just recently moved to the Dallas area.

  He said that he does remember living in Houston up until the 4th grade. “I was probably in Richardson, Texas,” he said, during Rose’s final days.

  Marcades said that he agreed with St. Landry Parish Assistant Coroner, Dr. DeRouen – who in 1963 allegedly determined that Rose had been a heroin addict for 7 to 9 years in the days leading up to the assassination.

  “Somewhere around 1957 or 1958, saw her periodically, after that just a few more times … but I remember them well. Marcades said. “I want you to understand that I don’t walk on eggshells about my mother. I have a great deal of pride. I believe my mother was a brilliant individual who got off on the wrong track and didn’t know how to recover. And she had some tendencies in her personality that kept from returning, possibly, to what we would refer to a normal life. And then at some point there was probably no option to return.”