Jean Hill would finally sneak out of the building when her interrogators took a break, after having been there over eight hours. Later, she would discover that other witnesses experienced similar treatment, including Gail and Bill Newman and Charles Brehm. She had written lengthy notes about her experience and given them to her boyfriend, B. J. Martin, the Dallas patrolman who had flanked JFK’s limousine during the motorcade. Shortly afterward, someone broke into his locker and stole the notes she had given to him to read.76 Her life from that point on would never be the same. She was grilled for hours about what “she thought she saw” and repeatedly told that she could not have possibly seen a gunshot from behind the fence and that if she “knew what was good for her,” she would stop repeating such false testimony. She finally snuck away when they had taken a break but was harassed for months by the FBI into changing her testimony, which she never did.77
As she waited to give her testimony, she endured months of threatening telephone calls. Someone deliberately tried to run her son off the road as he rode his motorbike, and in another incident, persons unknown tampered with the tie-rods on her automobile, causing her to crash the almost new car off an expressway and into a tree. Investigators told her that she and her eleven-year-old daughter survived only because the wet, muddy ground caused the car to decelerate quickly before it crashed into the tree.78
Because of the intense intimidation and constant surveillance that Jean Hill had received from the FBI and the Secret Service in the following weeks, she tried to avoid testifying to the Warren Commission but finally relented to an interview in Dallas by Arlen Specter. This proved to be an enormously traumatic event because Specter aggressively tried to get her to revise her testimony to be compatible with the official version of events that had already been scripted. The insulting and condescending treatment she received from Arlen Specter for not cooperating with him in rewriting her story left her perplexed, confused, and disgusted that no one wanted to hear her story of the truth of what happened. She maintains in her interview that Specter’s behavior was contemptible, that she was coerced and bullied and her testimony cut up, splintered, and fragmented, with much of it taken “off the record” and not introduced. She stated that he became angry with her because she would not change her testimony to conform to his storyline and finally told her, “Look, we can make you look as crazy as Marguerite Oswald and everybody knows how crazy she is. We could have you put in a mental institution if you don’t cooperate with us.”79 Like Jean Hill, numerous other witnesses reported similarly aggressive and condescending treatment by Specter, Belin, and other investigators, as well as the fact that their testimony was changed so much that it could not even be recognized as their words. Substantive, factual changes were made which completely changed their testimony without their permission.80
Officer B. J. Martin
In her book JFK: The Last Dissenting Witness, Jean Hill gave her boyfriend, escort motorcycle Officer B. J. Martin, the pseudonym of “J. B. Marshall,” which was intended to protect his real identity and his reputation since he was a married man at the time. Martin was the Dallas motorcycle patrolman who had ridden beside JFK’s limousine; after several months of enduring the intense postassassination inquiries during which all involved policemen were pressed to conform to the official line, he told of fellow police officers who were near Johnson’s car who had reported some very strange behavior on his part throughout the parade. Because of veiled threats that had been made beginning immediately afterward—and continually for many more years—Martin’s statements had been suppressed for thirty years before being published and have still not been made widely known in the fifteen years since then:
“According to the guys who were escorting his car in the motorcade, our new president is either one jumpy son of a bitch or he knows something he’s not telling about the Kennedy thing”, J.B. had drawled… They say he started ducking down in the car a good 30 or 40 seconds before the first shots were fired… . One of them told McGuire he saw Johnson duck down even before the car turned onto Houston Street, and he sure as hell wasn’t laughing when he said it [At Love Field, before the motorcade left]… while Kennedy was busy shaking hands with all the well wishers at the airport, Johnson’s Secret Service people came over to the motorcycle cops and gave us a bunch of instructions. The damnedest thing was, they told us the parade route through Dealey Plaza was being changed… It was originally supposed to go straight down Main Street, but they said for us to disregard that. Instead, we were told to make the little jog on Houston and cut over to Elm… but that’s not all. They also ordered us into the damnedest escort formation I’ve ever seen. Ordinarily, you bracket the car with four motorcycles, one on each fender. But this time, they told the four of us assigned to the president’s car there’d be no forward escorts. We were to stay well to the back and not let ourselves get ahead of the car’s rear wheels under any circumstances. I’d never heard of a formation like that, much less ridden in one, but they said they wanted to let the crowds have an unrestricted view of the president. Well, I guess somebody got an ‘unrestricted view’ of him, all right.”
“Are you sure it was Johnson’s Secret Service that told you all this?” Jean asked. Surely, there had to be some mistake here, she thought.
“I guess they were Secret Service… . They were sure as hell acting like they were in charge, and I know they were with Johnson, because when they got through telling us what to do, they went back to his car. Oh, and that’s another thing. They changed up the order of the cars in the motorcade before we started out. Originally, the car carrying Johnson was supposed to be right behind Kennedy’s car, but they decided to put a carload of Secret Service in between the two main VIP cars. That didn’t make a helluva lot of sense to me either, but it might at least explain why Johnson was so ready to duck … maybe he forgot about putting that Secret Service car between him and Kennedy… If he knew there was going to be shooting, maybe he was thinking he was a lot closer to the intended victim than he really was.”81
In April of 1964, Jean Hill asked Martin a question that had been lingering in her mind for sometime, “‘I want you to refresh my memory about something you told me a while back … You said you escorted Johnson back to Love Field from the hospital that day … I was just wondering how he acted.’ ‘Well, … he acted scared, but that’s just it—it was like he was acting, not like he was really in fear of his life. I remember hearing him yell to somebody as he was getting in the car. He said, ‘We’ve all got to be very careful. This could be a worldwide conspiracy to kill off all our leaders.’ The thing that struck me was he seemed to be in total charge already. Everybody else was kind of numb and reeling with shock, but Johnson was in full control, giving orders and telling people what to do.’” Martin also commented that “our new president’s up to his neck in this mess … he either caused it to happen or knowingly allowed it to happen … he did everything possible to make the Dallas police back off the case and leave it to his hand-picked ‘investigators.’”82
Dallas Police Captain Will Fritz
Author Jim Bishop described Captain Will Fritz, head of the Homicide Division of the Dallas Police Department, as “a big bifocaled man with hyperthyroid eyes who wore a cowboy hat. He was shrewd as captain of Homicide, but he had the potential pensioner’s attitude of obeying the boss without question.”83
But Captain Fritz was changed by JFK’s assassination—more correctly, its stunted investigation—in a way that clearly tortured him for the rest of his life. Until then, he had been a much-respected homicide detective who “lived by the book” and knew how best to get information from his prisoners. Captain Fritz had been a proud man of very high integrity who would have never cut short an investigation for politically based reasons. His reputation was that of an effective interrogator and a careful, thorough investigator whose percentage of successful arrests for murder over a ten-year period was 98 percent. Fritz gained nationwide attention when he headed the investigation of
the assassination and was the first person to question suspected assassin Lee Harvey Oswald just hours after Kennedy was shot on November 22, 1963. It was immediately after this interrogation that he received the first telephone call from Cliff Carter on Air Force One, suggesting that they “had their man” and noting all the reasons to shut down the investigation. Hours later, though he still did not elicit a confession from Oswald, Fritz said he had all the proof he needed to convict, and before midnight, he formally charged Oswald with the president’s murder.
The new president’s aide Cliff Carter, as requested by his boss, made a number of calls Friday afternoon from Air Force One and the White House later in the evening. Johnson realized that it was essential to get control over the police investigation at an early stage while curtailing public announcements by the local officials who might say things not helpful to their mission. He called Dallas District Attorney Henry Wade, Police Chief Curry, Captain Fritz, and State Attorney General Waggoner Carr to request that they avoid making any official statements or discussions relating to conspiracy. If anyone questioned his authority to make such requests, he used President Johnson as the authority for the request; he also brought pressure on Curry to retract statements made by FBI agent Hosty regarding Oswald’s known Communist affiliations, and Curry did so.84
In the calls that Fritz received from Cliff Carter in the White House between Friday evening and Saturday afternoon after the assassination, he was repeatedly advised to cease the investigation. He was told, “You have your man.” As noted above, “finally, he received a person to person call from the new president who specifically ordered him to cease further investigation. [Officer Frank B.] Harrell not only confirmed Fritz’s remarks to researchers, but also relates that Fritz was ordered to stop the interrogation of Oswald”85 (emphasis added). For years after the assassination, Fritz rarely spoke of the case and turned down repeated offers for books and articles. A former Dallas newsman who became a correspondent for CBS News, Bob Sirkin, wrote an article a few years ago about conversations he had with Captain Fritz in regard to these points:
August 22, 2003
HELLO, CAPTAIN FRITZ HERE
By Bob Sirkin
In September of 1977, I was preparing to leave WFAA-TV in Dallas for a new position as a Correspondent for ABC News, based in Atlanta. I had a final task to complete before leaving town. I needed to arrange a meeting with a legendary, retired Dallas Police Captain; the first man to interrogate Lee Harvey Oswald following his arrest on November 22, 1963, for assassinating the President of The United States.
I met Captain Will Fritz for breakfast, at a small, shabby downtown Dallas cafe. Fritz was old, frail and in failing health. But his mind was razor sharp. Fritz lived nearby, at a residential hotel, not far from Dallas Police Headquarters; the place he worked for the better part of his life. We took a booth toward the rear of the cafe.
Over plates of bacon, eggs and toast, I asked Fritz the burning question: “Captain, would you consider sitting down with me, for an on-camera interview about that phone call you took from the White House on November 22, 1963? With that, Fritz dropped his fork on his plate, raised his head and stared at me long, hard and coldly. “Not now. Maybe I’ll write something, someday,” Fritz curtly replied. Disappointed, I finished my breakfast, politely said good-bye to Fritz and left for my new position in Atlanta.
A few years later, Will Fritz passed away. Here’s what Fritz, reportedly, took to his grave: After completing a marathon interrogation of Lee Harvey Oswald, Fritz was told that there was a call holding for him from the White House. On the line, the newly installed President of The United States, Lyndon Johnson. President Johnson reportedly told Fritz … “You’ve got your man, now we’ll take it from here.”
A short while later, the FBI seized full control of the most famous murder investigation in U.S. history. The FBI was also about to seize control of the main suspect, Lee Harvey Oswald, before he was fatally shot by Jack Ruby in the basement of police headquarters.
Mary Ferrell of Dallas, perhaps the world’s most renowned JFK Assassination researcher and archivist had petitioned the Warren Commission and House Select Committee on Assassinations to release Will Fritz’s testimony. In parts of it, Fritz alludes to the LBJ phone call. But details remain sealed …
Following his death, some members of Fritz’s family told me how despondent he was over the FBI snatching the Oswald investigation from him. Unknown, is whether Fritz, given the opportunity, could have gleaned from Oswald details of the alleged cover-up … and could have determined whether Oswald acted alone.
It is abundantly clear that Fritz’s testimony is considered too dangerous to be revealed; as with the Win Scott and the George Joannides documents and others which remain under seal—assuming they haven’t already been destroyed, as many other documents have already been—they are coincidentally those which contain real truths that would lead directly to the exposure of the real story.
Gordon Arnold
There were other witnesses who were treated similarly to Jean Hill, Gordon Arnold among them; he was turned away by men who quickly flashed a badge, mouthed the words “Secret Service,” and ordered him away from the area despite the fact that there were no actual Secret Service agents assigned to that area. Mr. Arnold, who was on leave from the army, had been looking for a good spot to take a film of the motorcade, first choosing the railroad overpass at the end of Dealey Plaza. Arnold was stopped by a well-dressed man who showed him a Secret Service badge. A Dallas police officer and a county deputy sheriff reportedly encountered a second such “agent” on the grassy knoll immediately after the shooting. Arnold then found a good spot a few feet in front of the stockade fence. As the motorcade approached and he began filming, he felt a shot whiz past his left ear. He threw himself to the ground in an automatic reflex, probably as a result of his army training. Arnold’s film was also was confiscated immediately afterward by a uniformed police officer.86 Senator Ralph Yarborough, sitting in the same car as Lyndon Johnson (who is by then lying flat behind the front seat-backs, according to the police escorts beside his car),87 saw Mr. Arnold “hit the dirt” and thought his reaction was that of an experienced “combat veteran.”
The Killing of Officer J. D. Tippit: Crumbling the Old (Faux) “Rosetta Stone”
Warren Commission Attorney David Belin called the Tippit shooting the “Rosetta Stone” to the JFK assassination. “After all, Oswald killed that policeman. Why would he do that if he hadn’t killed the President?”88 In fact, that was the only thing that connected Oswald to JFK’s murder, yet it has become clear to anyone examining the evidence that there is nothing that connects him to Tippit’s murder, and in fact, the evidence actually clears him completely. The evidence suggests that there were in fact two shooters because there were two different bullet types/brands extracted from his body. It remains unclear whether the murder of Tippit had anything at all to do with Kennedy’s assassination. A more likely scenario was that it was simply retribution by the husband of the woman Tippit was known to have been sleeping with. The Warren Commission was only interested in selecting enough pieces of “evidence” to link the shooting to Oswald despite the fact that the vast preponderance of evidence did not support such a link. Their conclusion was based on selecting the least credible witnesses of the shooting and ignoring the ballistic evidence:
• The chief witness for the Warren Commission was Helen Markham whose credibility was questioned even by the commission lawyers. She claimed to have talked to the dying Tippit for twenty minutes, yet medical authorities said he was killed instantly. She said she saw Tippit’s killer talk with the policeman through his patrol car’s right-hand window before shooting him, although pictures taken at the scene show that window was shut. She was hysterical at the time and subsequently could not identify Oswald in a lineup. Later, in her testimony before the Warren Commission, Markham stated six times she did not recognize anyone in the police lineup that evening before Commission Attorney Jo
seph Ball prompted her with a hint of how to answer. “Was there a Number two man in there?” Markham responded, “Number two is the one I picked … When I saw this man I wasn’t sure, but I had cold chills just run all over me …”89 She was hysterical on November 22 and again as a witness months later, although in a quite different context.
• Joseph Ball, the commission’s own senior counsel, referred to Markham’s testimony as “full of mistakes” and characterized her as “utterly unreliable.”90
• Other witnesses at the scene—William Scoggins, Ted Calloway, and Emory Austin—stated that they never saw Mrs. Markham in the minutes immediately following the shooting.91
• A number of other witnesses were excluded by the commission in deference and favor to a witness who was criticized by its own staff as being unreliable; some of these included Mr. and Mrs. Donald Higgins who lived across the street, Acquilla Clemons and Frank Wright, other neighbors, and T. F. Bowley who used Tippit’s police radio to inform the dispatcher of the shooting. Ms. Clemons saw two men standing near the police car, one of the men with a pistol, waving away the other. The other man, running away toward Jefferson Street, was described as “kind of short, kind of heavy.” The second man was described as tall and thin, wearing a white shirt and khaki slacks. Neither description was close to being that of Lee H. Oswald. Frank Wright stated that he had come out of the house midway through the episode, just in time to see a man circling around the police cruiser and get into an old, gray car on the other side of it, then driving off rapidly.92
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