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

by Todd C. Elliott

  At times during the interview, Marcades would refer to “Melba” as his mother and at other times as “Rose” or “Rose Cherami,” possibly very much like his mother did.

  “Rose Cherami was just a name that was used near the ending of her life,” he said. Marcades said that he did not know where the alias of “Rose Cherami” derived from.

  “Although I think that she used different names in different locations for different functions as everyone near her did,” he said. “I don’t know where that name came from. I can look at some of the names and deduce where they originated, but not ‘Rose Cherami’. I have no clue.

  “I know this woman from many different perspectives. When you mention Melba Christine Marcades, or Melba Christine Youngblood Marcades, that’s the woman that I know as my mother,” said Marcades. “All these other names are different aspects of a human that I have spent 30 years trying to understand and discover … without a lot of help.”

  Michael said that he remembered living in the New Orleans area, when he was very young.

  And when he was older, he also searched and sought out clues to solving the mystery of his mother, possibly in hopes of gaining some closure. He recalled the arduous task of getting her medical records from the Gladewater Hospital, the place where he said his mother breathed her last breath.

  “It was an unusual process [in 1983]. Nothing that I experienced on site was what I would label as normal,” he said. “It took me hours to get access to what I should have been able to have access to in 15 minutes. After hours of the hospital staff frantically searching and making a phone call or two, the file was then pulled out from a very illogical location, it wasn’t in a drawer where you pull out a file drawer and look under the ‘M’s’. It was oddly misplaced, oddly located and oddly presented.”

  Marcades said that he recalled the first time that he saw his mother, “notoriously preserved” in the JFK film portrayal. “If there’s one thing that Oliver Stone depicted accurately, it’s my mother’s frustration to be believed,” he said. “There was no foundation for her to be believed.”

  He said that Stone’s shot of Rose Cherami’s highway death scene, complete with aligned luggage in the background, was a perfect depiction of what the details surrounding her mysterious death suggest.

  “Learning her truth, learning as much truth as I can uncover, is ‘freeing’ for me,” he said. “I’m aware of lots of levels of sacrifices on her part toward me as her son. In the midst of all of this, what you see or what the public sees has nothing to do with what I see as her son, and her sacrificial actions of a mother protecting a son.

  “I know there were times when Mother would not communicate with me directly for years,” he said. “But yet, she communicated with others about me. And in her effort to protect me she would never come directly to me. Perhaps she observed me from across the street at a playground.

  “But I think that there were probably times, given where she was in her life, that if she were going to see me, I would be unaware of it.”

  When asked about his mother’s tendency to, seemingly, skirt prosecution upon being arrested repeatedly, he commented.

  “If something of that magnitude is occurring over and over … I would only say that someone had connections,” he said.

  When asked why he thought that his mother said anything about the JFK assassination, or why she would volunteer any information knowing that it would seal her fate, he answered:

  “I think that it’s the heart of who she was. If you look at [her criminal records] you won’t discover her character,” Marcades said. “Who she was from her upbringing even into her early teenage years, the essence, the values, the desire for truth, the difference between right and wrong … although her life is full of what we would label as ‘wrong’, I’m sure that in her wrongness there were right acts laced in there. I’m convinced that there were times when she took care of people, when she overlooked something, when she lied to protect someone, myself included, or anyone else in our family. So in the final analysis …

  “I am a Christian, but I’m not a raving fundamentalist. And If I’m dying, on my deathbed, and I really come to the realization that things that I have heard all of my lifetime were true, then I seek resolution in whatever way it deems appropriate with God. That’s what I see happening to my mother in these last days, of her knowing and the importance of what she knew. And the importance of trying to right it as much as she possibly could.

  “Dead ends were the plan – by those who saw to it that her life was cut short,” he said. “Many of those who knew her are dead. And those who are alive have different goals; some wish to forget, even without the entire truth. I don’t fall into that category.”

  And what does the future hold for the son of Rose Cherami?

  “Someone asked me recently, ‘aren’t you worried about this? Aren’t you worried about continuing to ask questions? Aren’t you scared?’

  “Why should I be scared? Why should I be scared about seeking the truth, about the woman who gave birth to me,” he said. “If something happens to me, there’s too many people that know me. You know, it might be a real benefit for something to happen to me. It might actually foster truth. Because hundreds of people know me, many of them are discovering that I am the son of Rose Cherami.”

  At the time of this interview, Michael was in the process of writing his own book about his mother.

  Epilogue

  First Person, Last Words

  Rose Cherami was the strangest woman that I’ve never known.

  A couple of strange incidents happened to me while I was writing this book. One of which, I will share.

  First, let me state that for years I had always wanted to read a book on Rose Cherami. I had no idea, however, that I would be the one to write that book, the first book on Rose Cherami.After watching JFK, for perhaps the 30th time, I decided to do an investigative journalist piece on something that I could research in my Louisiana backyard.

  I had never been to Eunice, Louisiana until the summer of 2010. I was living in Lake Charles, some 50 miles away, at the time, while my wife was serving with the Louisiana National Guard deployed in Iraq.

  Since Eunice is featured at the start of that film, I figured that it was a good place to start. I lucked out and found some individuals, on day one, who were still alive and remembered the legend of Rose Cherami.

  When you follow history and the JFK conspiracy theories, you learn about all kinds of characters like Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby. And when I first rolled into town, I saw a place called Ruby’s cafe, and that, jokingly, raised my eyebrow in my conspiratorial view of things.

  Unfortunately, some people that I interviewed were (and still are) reluctant to go on the record, out of fear.

  I felt that, in the face of this ingrained fear, I was doing the right thing. And I wanted to be first kid on my block to carry on the torch of truth seekers and researchers for a new generation for JFK, MLK and RFK researchers.

  By the end of 2012, I secured gainful employment at the Eunice News. I wanted to work in Eunice, to develop, and hopefully solve, the mystery of Rose Cherami in the town that first heard her words.

  On November 22, 2012, the 49th anniversary of the JFK assassination, Rose Cherami made the front page of the Eunice News. I felt like it was a poetic justice in some way, and it was a surreal moment for me when I saw the printed edition.

  The story ran in some of our sister newspapers and was featured on their respective websites.

  The story was hot.

  I had garnered more than 20,000 reads, or “page views,” of my story on Rose, as it went viral in six days time from the paper’s eunicetoday.com website. At the time of this writing, the story had garnered over 26,000 views in about three months.

  It was the biggest story of my career. Then the book deal came.

  Then a strange, anonymous package came for me one day.

  I was reading a story from a past-edition of the Crowley-Post
Signal – a sister paper to the Eunice News – which featured a guest writer who remembered when JFK visited Crowley, some 10 miles to the south of Eunice, in 1959 as a Senator with his lovely wife. The writer recalled how Jacqueline Kennedy spoke her Parisian French to the mostly Cajun-French crowd – who ate it up.

  A contributor to the piece claimed that Crowley was “the birthplace of Camelot,” due to the fact that shortly after JFK’s visit to Crowley, he would announce his candidacy for President of the United States.

  As I had written in my piece (and in this book) that Eunice, the next major town to the north, was “the birthplace of the JFK assassination conspiracy theory,” I thought to myself, “How odd”: it all began and ended in my neck of the woods.

  Just after I finished reading the Crowley piece, one Friday in January 2013, I was told that a package had come for me. The package was anonymous, no return address. When I opened the package, I noticed that it was a box full of old, near-mint condition newspapers and magazines.

  The final edition of the Amarillo Globe-Times for November 22, 1963 had a headline that read: “HIDDEN ASSASSIN KILLS PRESIDENT.”

  I always found the Associated Press story fascinating, as it ran all over the country stating that Dallas Police “believed that the fatal shots were fired by a white man about 30, slender of build, weighing about 165 pounds, and standing 5 feet 10 inches tall.”

  Even with today’s technology, Dallas Police would be hard pressed to have that kind of a description for a murder suspect some 30 minutes following the murder. I often wondered why the Dallas Police didn’t just put Oswald’s address out there as well.

  There were a couple of things on the front page of the now antique newspaper that I had never heard reported. Story headers at the bottom of the page read: “ Young Man Is Arrested” and “Officer and Agent Slain.”

  The first story, also an AP story, read, “Soon after President Kennedy was assassinated today in Dallas, a white man in his mid 20s was arrested in the Riverside section Fort Worth in the shooting of a Dallas policeman.”

  Certainly this story was about the shooting of Dallas Police Officer J.D. Tippit. Many eyewitnesses never fingered Oswald for that murder and many researchers believed that Oswald could not have done the shooting, based on the ballistics and the timeline of the event.

  The article stated that the man who was arrested had black, curly hair, unlike Oswald. I immediately thought of Jack Youngblood, who also had wavy, black hair.

  The mystery man in the article was handcuffed and taken to Fort Worth city jail.

  The second story on the front page stated that a Secret Service agent and a Dallas policemen were “shot and killed some distance from the area where President Kennedy was assassinated.”

  People well versed in the JFK conspiracy lore know of the aforementioned Dallas police officer slaying as that of J.D. Tippit. But this was the first that I’d ever heard about a Secret Service agent being slain.

  Also included in the package was an edition of the Springfield Daily News for Friday, August 12, 1949.

  Among big articles about U.S. military equipment being used to fight communists in Greece on August 11, 1949, I spotted a small story out of Miami with a curious headline: “Strip Tease Dancers Spend Night in Jail.”

  I immediately thought of Rose. And then, I thought, “Why would a Missouri newspaper run a story from Miami?”

  According to the vintage news story, eight strippers were arrested in a nightclub in Dade County. The sheriff was quoted as saying, “We’re cleaning up the county.” I wondered how that had worked out for them down there in 1949.

  Then there was an edition of the Honolulu Advertiser (Sunday) for March 16, 1952 included in my package.

  The headline plastered atop the page read: “REDS PUSH ‘GERM’ CHARGE.” A smaller headline near the top of the page read: “Propaganda Radio Blasts Stepped Up.”

  At the time, the Korean War was in full swing and the Red Chinese had allegedly begun a “germ warfare” campaign against the U.S. In the article, the Chinese accused the U.S. of dropping “germ-laden insects” from American planes. The Chinese claimed to have photographed “various types of containers” which contained fleas, mosquitoes and flies that had been dropped into communist territory by American forces.

  I immediately thought of Judyth Vary Baker’s book Me & Lee, and her research and work into a military-intelligence project which involved biological warfare. There were also echoes of Dr. Mary’s Monkey, which also sheds light on biological warfare research.

  However below that story about U.S. germ warfare, another headline read: “U.S. Considers UN Probe Of Germ Claim.” It was a one-paragraph story denouncing Soviet charges that the U.S. would engage in such a thing.

  Mixed in with the old newspapers were 1963 issues of Newsweek, Time and Life magazines – which depicted JFK, LBJ and Secretary of State Dean Rusk on the covers.

  Rusk – who was JFK’s Secretary of State and carried over into the Johnson administration – was a man that JFK was disappointed with over the Bay of Pigs failure.

  I also learned that Oswald, while he was in Russia as a defector, wrote John Connally – who was the recently resigned Secretary of the U.S. Navy before he was the governor of Texas and shot alongside JFK in Dealey Plaza – to protest that his hardship discharge from the Marines was altered to “undesirable” due to his defection.

  Oswald thought that the soon-to-be Governor Connally was still the head of the U.S. Navy at the time he wrote the letter. Was it possible that Connally knew of this Oswald defector? Did Oswald know Connally? Did Connally ever receive that letter?

  If so, Oswald possibly presented himself as the perfect patsy, the commie defector-fall guy.

  It should be noted that Connally wanted in on the presidential ticket in 1960. Before he was appointed Secretary of the Navy at LBJ’s behest, Connally wanted to be on the 1960 Democratic Presidential ticket. Connally even expressed a disdain for Kennedy, publicly denouncing his ability to be President with his Addison’s disease.

  Why would Connally resign a higher-paying, Federal cabinet position to run for the governorship of Texas after only 11-months on the job? Could the Bay of Pigs fiasco have played some part in his resignation?

  Were plans in place for the assassination of JFK as early as 1961?

  In Me & Lee, Judyth Vary Baker alluded to the fact that the plot to assassinate Castro in Cuba shifted to JFK in Dallas, with the same operators and plans. And that the FBI had been compromised due to the fact that Mafia or CIA agents had “dirt” on J. Edgar Hoover – who could have been disgraced and damaged if it were disclosed that he was a closeted homosexual.

  I recalled seeing Judyth Vary Baker for the first time on the History Channel’s series The Men Who Killed Kennedy. Instead of getting Castro, it would prove easier to for “The Men Who Killed Kennedy” to get JFK.

  Baker told me in a 2013 interview that her “book tour” and rare appearance in New Orleans was just that … rare. Baker said that she had appeared by Skype to visitors of the bookstore in New Orleans. She said that she “could not get a guarantee from the Governor of Louisiana” that she would not be picked up, or arrested, for appearing in the state.

  When I asked why, she claimed that she feared being arrested by people who accused her of having foreknowledge, or plotting with Oswald, in the assassination of JFK.

  I again thought of Rose, as I often do.

  Here was another woman in Louisiana who possibly had some foreknowledge of the assassination of JFK.

  When I am in Eunice, on any typical work day, I often think of Rose as I travel the U.S. Hwy 190. This was the same road that Rose and the possible assassins traveled.

  When I first drove into town, back in 2010, I caught myself looking along the side of the highway, looking for the unknown. As if I might spot some clue, some trace of Rose Cherami.

  I found the unknown and tried to make it known. The more facts that I have brought out about Rose Cherami on
ly lead me to ask more questions.

  One day I drove by the old Moosa Hospital in Eunice. I considered going inside the abandoned and boarded up facility to get some photographs. I was told that the hospital was now a den of homeless, drug-addled vagrants who could be randomly spotted at night urinating off the roof top. The old Moosa hospital, for all of its historical significance, has been defaced by weather and vandalism over the years.

  Is it appropriate that these vagrants, the tortured souls and ghosts of human beings – who could be seen as “children of Rose Cherami” – now haunt, in life, the place that Rose haunts in death?

  I drove around the side of the hospital, near the emergency room entrance, to take photographs of the exterior. I then drove around to the back of the two-story complex where Rose Cherami once stayed, a place depicted in an Oliver Stone film.

  It was then that I noticed it. It was so eerily coincidental that I had to take a photograph.

  A road ran directly behind the Moosa Hospital, and if it continued the road would run directly into the hospital.

  It was Rose Street.

  The cross street: Charmaine.

  The street signs for Rose and Charmaine Streets forced my hand to take a picture. It was a close enough coincidence, I figured.

  I wondered to myself, after I took in the still shot, if we as a people would listen the next time another Rose Cherami came along.

  In the words of John F. Kennedy, from his final speech given in Fort Worth on the day he died:

  “This is a dangerous and uncertain world.… No one expects our lives to be easy – not in this decade, not in this century.”

  Index

  A

  Amarillo Globe-Times

  B

  Baker, Judyth Vary

  Bowers, Donn E.

  C

  Carousel Club

  Carrier, Jane

  Carrier, L.G.

  Castro, Fidel

  Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)