There are contradictory claims concerning certain events related to the death which, at this point, seem irreconcilable. It is difficult, if not impossible, to now verify them either way with a sufficient degree of certainty. That’s not all that unusual regarding a now relatively obscure event that occurred many decades ago. It is true and noteworthy that some of the claims surrounding the death are unsubstantiated and vague. Yet the fact that the truth apparently lies somewhere in the middle doesn’t preclude Mr. Posner from stating that Mr. Perry “conclusively proved” that Bowers’ death was accidental.6 That would be convenient, but there’s just one tiny little problem. It isn’t actually true.
A former member of the Texas Highway Patrol, Charles Good, concluded that another car had indeed forced Bowers car off the road. He testified that eyewitness testimony confirmed that.7
Mr. Perry acknowledged that his investigation revealed that Charles Good was indeed a former member of the Texas Highway Patrol, “who claims to have investigated the accident” (apparently an attempt to minimize the investigatory skills of Mr. Good!),
1 Ibid.
2 Ibid.
3 Gerald Posner, Case Closed
4 David Perry, “Now It Can Be Told: The Lee Bowers Story,” accessed 5 Nov 2012: http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/bowers.txt
5 Geraldo Rivera, “The Curse of JFK,” May 6, 1992, Now It Can Be Told: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcXJJsZs7LE
6 Ibid.
7 John Simkin, “Lee E. Bowers: Biography,” accessed 5 Nov 2012: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/
JFKbowers.htm
and did conclude that a car ran his friend, Lee Bowers, off the road.1 But Mr. Perry couldn’t dismiss the results of Charles Good’s investigation, so he instead attempts to minimize them, stating that it is possible that Bowers had been driving the car in the rear and “If the driver in front wasn’t looking in the rear view mirror he would not know the accident occurred.”2
In fairness, here is the concluding paragraph of the folks on the “other side” of the issue:
In the end, Monty Bowers (brother of Lee Bowers) concluded Lee’s allergies contributed to his death. Both Monty and Lee had severe allergies and were prone to fits of sneezing. They took antihistamines that provided little relief. Monty told representatives of the insurance company his allergies bothered him that day. He assumed Lee experienced similar symptoms. Could it be, Lee took antihistamines, dozed off, and struck the abutment? Is it possible a sneezing fit caused him to lose control of the vehicle? In my view the answer is YES. I will modify my opinion when someone comes forward with verifiable facts to the contrary.3
As for us, frankly, there seems to be something a bit more sinister than a mere matter of sneezing here. So we’ll stick with Mr. Good from the Texas Highway Patrol, who investigated the same case and concluded that his friend’s car was forced off the road.
1 David Perry, “Now It Can Be Told: The Lee Bowers Story,” accessed 5 Nov 2012: http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/bowers.txt
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid.
Victim
Marilyn Walle (also known by her stage names “Delilah” and “Miranda” and as Marilyn Moon, Marilyn Magyar and April Walle), exotic dancer who was regular performer at Jack Ruby’s Carousel Club in Dallas
Cause of Death
Multiple Gunshots
Official Verdict
Murder
Actual Circumstances
Shot by her husband
Inconsistencies
None apparent
Conclusions Based On Evidentiary Indications
As a dancer at Ruby’s club, it was known that she witnessed Oswald’s presence there on several occasions, as well as the fact that it was very apparent that Oswald and Ruby knew each other (a fact confirmed by various people at the Carousel Club). However, her murder appears to have been a domestic case, unrelated to the JFK assassination.
24
Marilyn “Delilah” Walle,
August 30, 1966
Victim
Mary Pinchot Meyer
Cause of Death
Two gunshots from a .38 at point-blank range; first, to the back of the head, second, straight through the heart, from the front.
Official Verdict
Murdered indiscriminately while out for her morning run; Possible sex crime.
Actual Circumstances
Wife of high-level CIA officer; had a serious affair with President Kennedy; thought the would-be investigation of JFK assassination was a total whitewash and used her own high-level connections to research who really killed JFK. Her death caused a frantic search for her diary by the CIA’s Counterintelligence Chief.
Inconsistencies
Numerous (see text below)
357 Nina Burleigh, A Very Private Woman: The Life and Unsolved Murder of Presidential Mistress Mary Meyer (Bantam: 1999), 294.
25
Mary Pinchot Meyer,
October 12, 1964
The body of Mary Pinchot Meyer is examined. It has been observed that, for a local Washington murder, a lot of “men in suits” and trench coats were certainly on the scene very quickly. A photographer at the crime scene made the following cogent observation: “The police kept us on the other side of the canal for a long time. I took the picture with a long-angle lens, and when I look at it now I wonder who all those men in the picture were.”357
Mary Meyer was a gifted artist and had an aura of intelligence which men found very attractive.
She married Cord Meyer Jr. in 1945; he was a “rising star” in the CIA. Her husband became involved in the CIA’s organized effort to sway public opinion through infiltration of the U.S. major media in a secret campaign known as Operation Mockingbird. According to Katharine Graham, publisher of the Washington Post, Cord Meyer was the principal “operative” of Mockingbird.1
Among Cord and Mary Meyer’s best friends and companions in Washington was Ben Bradlee, Washington’s bureau chief for Newsweek, who then became editor of the Washington Post. Mary’s sister, Toni, was married to Ben Bradlee. So it was a very close-knit group at the peak of the Washington, D.C. press corps. Mary and her husband were also close friends with James Angleton and his wife; Angleton was the notorious head of Counterintelligence at CIA.
As Cord Meyer’s politics drifted farther and farther to the right, it apparently alienated Mary and she filed for divorce in 1958. She cited “extreme mental cruelty” as her reason in court documents.2 Mary became certain that she was under surveillance after leaving her husband. Her telephone and bedroom were bugged and she was sure that James Angleton was responsible.3 On several occasions in the summer of 1964, she would come home and find that someone had been in her apartment while she was away.4 She reported these incidents to the police and her friends were well aware that she was frightened by her circumstances.
It was known that Mary had an affair with President Kennedy and that, especially for his “track record,” it was a much more serious relationship than typical.
While Kennedy had many affairs while in the White House, Angleton insisted that the President and Mary Meyer “were in love. They had something very important.”5
1 Deborah Davis, Katharine The Great: Katharine Graham and Her Washington Post Empire (Institute for Media Analysis: 1991).
2 John Simkin, “Mary Pinchot Meyer: Biography,” Spartacus Educational, accessed 2 May 2012: http://www
.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKmeyerM.htm
3 Burleigh, A Very Private Woman
4 Simkin, “Mary Pinchot Meyer: Biography”
5 Joseph J. Trento, The Secret History of the CIA (Basic Books: 2005).
President Kennedy enjoyed her company and her intelligent conversation, and while it’s not known how much of a political nature he shared with her, it’s thought to be a great deal.1
Since Mary had been married to a CIA officer involved in media propaganda and was well-traveled in Washington political circles, it has been suggested that she had Preside
nt Kennedy’s confidence and that he probably shared a great deal with her. It is even reported that Mary and President Kennedy shared marijuana and took an LSD trip together.2 The fact that Mary was also a close friend of CIA Counterintelligence Chief James Angleton has led to speculation that Mary knew a great deal about what actually happened in the JFK assassination and the reasons for the cover-up that followed. Many have speculated that Mary “put two and two together” from her various sources. It has been reported that she was upset about the absence of authentic information about the assassination contained in the Warren Report, which was published shortly prior to Mary’s murder. She read it, was apparently furious about what it contained, and made it clear in statements to her Washington friends that the truth should be told instead of the “whitewash” contained in the official version of events. It has therefore been speculated that silencing her was the real reason for her murder.3
Mary left her home on the morning of October 12, 1964, to go out for her morning run. She was shot twice at point-blank range with a .38; the first shot was toward the back of the head and the second shot was to her heart. She died instantly.
A black man named Ray Crump was found nearby, arrested, and charged with the crime. He had no link to the shooting forensically; he was tested for nitrates and none were found on his hands; there was no blowback of blood on his clothing or person.4
1 Peter Janney, Mary’s Mosaic: The CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary Pinchot Meyer, and Their Vision For World Peace (New York: Skyhorse, 2012).
2 Timothy Leary, Flashbacks: An Autobiography (J.P. Tarcher: 1983).
3 Janney, Mary’s Mosaic
4 Zalin Grant, “Mary Meyer: A Highly Suspicious Death,” Zalin Grant’s War Tales (Pythia Press: 2011): http://www
.pythiapress.com/wartales/Meyer.html
Mary socialized closely with President Kennedy. At left are Ben and Toni Bradlee, Mary's sister.
The case was big news all over Washington, as they could not find the murder weapon. A massive search came up empty even though an army of police officers and scuba divers searched every possible place nearby. Police even drained the water in the canal near the running path but came up with nothing.1 They tried Raymond Crump for the crime anyway.
The newspaper reports hid the fact that Mary’s ex-husband was a senior CIA officer; they described him as a government official or an author. The newspapers also reported incorrectly that Mary had been killed during a rape attempt—there was never any evidence of that, although it became the police “theory.” The Washington Post reported that Mary was believed to be “victim of robbery attempt,” for which there was actually little or no evidence. Cord Meyer reported that he supported the police version that the accused Ray Crump had attempted to sexually assault Mary and then killed her when she resisted. Cord Meyer’s exact words were:
I was satisfied by the conclusions of the police investigation that Mary had been the victim of a sexually motivated assault by a single individual and that she had been killed in her struggle to escape.2
Is it just us, or does that sound like it was written by a CIA attorney? To which we say Hogwash, Mr. Meyer. And we don’t have to call him a liar; his own long-time personal assistant did that:
Mr. Meyer didn’t for a minute think that Ray Crump had murdered his wife or that it had been an attempted rape. But, being an Agency man, he couldn’t very well accuse the CIA of the crime, although the murder had all the markings of an in-house rubout.3
It turns out that the whole case against Mr. Crump was an exceedingly obvious case of hogwash. It was a real smear job, right in the spirit of “Hey, don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story.” It could be said that the only problem with the charges against him was that there was absolutely no evidence supporting them.
The trial was a sham. President Lyndon Johnson’s extensive influence (lest we forget, he became the new president due to the assassination) is a reoccurring common denominator of both the cover-up after the JFK assassination and the “clean-up” operation (control of exposure from witnesses like Mary Pinchot Meyer) that followed. For example, the judge who controlled the case was a political ally of Lyndon Johnson;4 he ruled that the private life of Mary could not be mentioned in court.5 All the links to the CIA—including the highly pertinent facts that she had been married to one and had traveled in those power circles for many years, circles which included President Kennedy himself—were never allowed to be spoken of in the courtroom.
It was well known among her friends that Mary kept a diary and an urgent search for it began after her death. When Ben and Toni Bradlee went to Mary’s home to search for the diary, they found CIA Counterintelligence Chief James Angleton already there,
1 Burleigh, A Very Private Woman
2 Cord Meyer, Facing Reality: From World Federalism to the CIA (University Press of America: 1982).
3 Janney, Mary’s Mosaic, 346-347.
4 Simkin, “Mary Pinchot Meyer: Biography”
5 Burleigh, A Very Private Woman
looking for the same thing. Reports differ about what happened to the diary, but in any event, it was destroyed. Legally, it belonged to Mary’s children, but hey—that’s just legally. When you’re dealing with the CIA, then all that’s important is realistically—and realistically, Mary’s children were never even allowed to view its contents.
Zalin Grant, an author and Army Intelligence veteran, did an excellent job of detailing most of the various inconsistencies of this case.1 Peter Janney, who was very close to this story, has also amassed an incredible amount of important information.2 We have added to those and provide below, in list form for the sake of clarity, the “big things wrong” with the case.
1 Zalin Grant, “Mary Meyer: A Highly Suspicious Death,” Zalin Grant’s War Tales (Pythia Press: 2011): http://www.pythiapress.com/wartales/Meyer.html
2 Janney, Mary’s Mosaic
Key Points in the Assassination of Mary Pinchot Meyer:
The “unknown victim” (a point of importance later on) was pronounced dead at 2:05 p.m.. “Dr. Rayford observed that rigor mortis had not yet set in, which meant that she couldn’t have been dead for more than two hours.”1
The identity of the victim was not officially learned until after 6:00 p.m. Prior to 6:00 p.m., she was only known as an unidentified female murder victim.2
The killer either knew her or jogged up from behind on the exercise path to pass her, because both shots were point-blank range (six inches or less from her body) and Mary was strong, in good physical shape, and would not have let an attacker get that close without screaming for help, fighting him off, or both.3
The killing was, by all reports, an extremely professional job. She was shot “execution style”; one shot to the back of the head and one more straight through the heart to make sure she was dead after she went down. Both shots were lethal and quick, fired from a .38, with apparent precision. This was clearly not some casual shooting, but a cold-blooded, up-close-and -personal professional job:
Mary appeared to be killed by a professional hitman. The first bullet was fired at the back of the head. She did not die straight away. A second shot was fired into the heart. The evidence suggests that in both cases, the gun was virtually touching Mary’s body when it was fired. As the FBI expert testified, the “dark haloes on the skin around
1 Janney, Mary’s Mosaic, 48.
2 Janney, Mary’s Mosaic
3 Grant, “Mary Meyer: A Highly Suspicious Death”
both entry wounds suggested they had been fired at close-range,
possibly point-blank.”1
Dr. Rayford not only agreed with, but amplified, concerns that the act was very professional, as he noted the presence of the precise “kill shot”:
Things were not at all like they were supposed to be.
The second gunshot had been fired with particular precision: The bullet pierced the right lung and severed the aorta. Death would have been instantaneous. That bothered
Rayford. The degree of expertise suggested the work of a professional.2
The fact that she was murdered when leaving her home for her regular exercise routine is also indicative of a professional hit because professional assassins seize upon just such a routine as the most opportune time to strike.3
The gun was never found despite a massive police search (another sign of a very professional job).4 The search was “unprecedented in its scope and manpower” and even used a team of Navy scuba
divers.5
The fact that she was murdered execution-style makes it highly likely that it was a professional hit. This was not a matter of a “crime of emotion” or a straight robbery or rape attempt; it was a cold-blooded killer who knew how to perform the deed seamlessly and without emotion.6
A former CIA “cleaner” (agent and assassin) later admitted that he had been instructed by the CIA, first to survey Mary Meyer, and then later to assassinate her after he received the “K” (contract) to “terminate” her. His name, officially, was William L. Mitchell, but that was his operational alias.7
A high-level CIA officer, Wistar Janney, exhibited clear foreknowledge of the assassination. Ben Bradlee wrote that Janney called him with the news “just after lunch,” and Wistar Janney also informed Counterintelligence Chief James Angleton well before the victim had even been identified.8
Hit List: An In-Depth Investigation Into the Mysterious Deaths of Witnesses to the JFK Assassination Page 19
