by Jim Marrs
While the rupture of seals on both the vault and the coffin is not an impossible occurrence, several morticians interviewed by this author said such an event is highly unusual. It could be explained by movement of the earth, although north-central Texas is regarded as a very stable area. The broken seals also could be explained by someone having opened the grave prior to the 1981 exhumation.
A logical time for such a pre-exhumation grave opening would have been earlier in 1981, when Marguerite Oswald was buried next to Oswald’s grave. The presence of earthmoving equipment and a canopy covering both graves provided an opportunity for covertly opening Oswald’s adjacent grave.
So, the question has been asked: Was a substitution made for the body in Oswald’s grave?
The answer may be found in a four-hour videotape made of the 1981 exhumation study. The tape was commissioned by Marina Oswald and Eddowes and was produced by Hampton Hall, the son of a Texas politician.
Once the craniotomy question became known to Marina, a friend and neighbor was asked to view the tape. The neighbor, along with his personal physician, viewed the videotape and reported that there was no sign or mention of a craniotomy. This added further suspicions about the exhumation.
Finally, in 1984—four years after the exhumation—a detailed report on the exhumation findings was published in the Journal of Forensic Sciences. The report claimed, “A previous autopsy saw cut in the usual fashion was present on the calvarium with an anterior inverted V-notch in the right frontal region. The calvarium was maintained in continuity with the remainder of the skull by virtue of decomposed mummified tissue. The previously sawed calvarium was not separated nor was it easily dislodged.”
In other words, decomposed, jelly-like skin had coated the Oswald skull, which made it appear to be in one piece.
Researchers were skeptical of this information and turned to Marina for confirmation of the craniotomy by viewing the videotape of the exhumation. Oddly enough, photographer Hall refused to give up the tape, claiming that so much time had elapsed that ownership of the tape had reverted to him.
In February 1984, Marina was forced to go to court to retrieve the videotape she had commissioned. By the summer of 1986, an out-of-court settlement resulted in a promise to return the tape. Apparently, the tape still has not been returned.
The issue should have been a simple one: view the tapes and photos of the exhumation and resolve whether the craniotomy marks were visible on the Oswald skull. But with the tapes still not available even by 2013, this issue remains in controversy, like so much else in the JFK assassination case.
Researchers remain intrigued. If the body exhumed in 1981 was indeed that of Oswald—as confirmed by the forensic pathologists and his Marine dental X-rays—but the exhumed corpse was not that of the man buried in 1963—as claimed by the two morticians—then it is possible that an impostor Oswald was killed in Dallas and his body—or at least the head—exchanged for Oswald’s sometime prior to the exhumation.
And who might have the power and authority to accomplish such a momentous task? The idea that the Soviets, Castro agents, or mobsters could switch bodies is ludicrous. Only the federal government of the United States, with its access to the military and such devices as the Federal Witness Protection Program, could accomplish something of that magnitude.
The impersonation of Oswald would appear to be an issue that could be resolved easily by a truthful government investigation. Instead, it is another area of the assassination full of omissions, inconsistencies, and possible deceit.
In the end, the issue of Oswald’s impersonation may be a moot point, since persuasive evidence suggests that the Oswald in Dallas—whether lone nut, American agent, communist operative, genuine, or substitute—did not kill President Kennedy.
Convenient Deaths
In the three-year period that followed the murders of President Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald, eighteen material witnesses died—six by gunfire, three in motor accidents, two by suicide, one from a cut throat, one from a karate chop to the neck, and five from natural causes.
An actuary, engaged by the London Sunday Times, concluded that on November 22, 1963, the odds against these witnesses being dead by February 1967 were one hundred thousand trillion to one.
The above comment on the deaths of assassination witnesses was published in a tabloid companion piece to the movie Executive Action, released in 1973. By that time, part of the mythology of the Kennedy assassination included the questionable deaths of people who were connected with it.
By the mid-1960s, people in Dallas already were whispering about the number of people who died under strange or questionable circumstances. Well into the 1980s, witnesses and others were hesitant to come forward with information because of the stories of strange and sudden death that seemed to visit some people with information about the assassination.
Finally, in the late 1970s, the House Select Committee on Assassinations felt compelled to look into the matter. But aside from attempting to discredit the London Sunday Times actuarial study, the committee was unable to come to any conclusions regarding the growing number of deaths. The committee said it could not make a valid actuarial study due to the broad number and types of people that had to be included in such a study.
In response to a letter from the committee, London Sunday Times legal manager Anthony Whitaker backpedaled on the publication’s original statements by writing, “Our piece about the odds against the deaths of the Kennedy witnesses was, I regret to say, based on a careless journalistic mistake and should not have been published. This was realized by the Sunday Times editorial staff after the first edition—the one which goes to the United States . . . —had gone out, and later editions were amended.”
Whitaker said there was no question of the actuary having gotten his answer wrong: it was simply that they asked him the wrong question. “He was asked what were the odds against 15 named people out of the population of the United States dying within a short period of time to which he replied—correctly—that they were very high. However, if one asks what are the odds against 15 of those included in the Warren Commission Index dying within a given period, the answer is, of course, that they are much lower. Our mistake was to treat the reply to the former question as if it dealt with the latter,” he explained.
This settled the matter for the House committee, which apparently made little or no attempt to seriously study the number of deaths that followed the JFK assassination. Jacqueline Hess, the committee’s chief of research for the JFK investigation, reported, “Our final conclusion on the issue is that the available evidence does not establish anything about the nature of these deaths which would indicate that the deaths were in some manner, either direct or peripheral, caused by the assassination of President Kennedy or by any aspect of the subsequent investigation.”
But the controversy continued well into 2013. Blogger Richard Charnin, who holds a master’s degree in applied mathematics and is a former numerical control engineer for Grumman Aerospace Corporation, has provided a detailed analysis of this issue. Charnin argued that the US population is not relevant—the number of JFK-related witnesses is. Charnin also pointed out that Whitaker neglected to provide unnatural-death mortality statistics.
Utilizing a comprehensive spreadsheet database of suspicious unnatural witness deaths, probability calculations, and Warren Commission, Garrison/Shaw trial, and HSCA witnesses, Charnin stated:
The identity of the actuary has never been revealed. The Sunday Times editor did not provide details on the methodology. In fact, he claimed that the problem was misstated, implying that the actuary’s probability calculation was wrong. [My] analysis will show that the actuary’s calculation was essentially correct. It will show that the editor’s 1977 response to the House Select Committee on Assassinations was misleading and incomplete. And that HSCA statistical expert Jacqueline Hess’s claim that the actuary’s calculation was “invalid” due to the “impossibility” of defining the “universe”
of material witnesses was disinformation. The number of JFK-related witnesses is a finite 1,400 plus [as provided by Michael Benson’s 1993 book Who’s Who in the JFK Assassination]. The dismissal of the actuary’s odds was just a continuation of the cover-up.
Former Los Angeles prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi also argued against the significance of the JFK witness deaths, citing Robert M. Musen, vice president and senior actuary at Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. Musen had calculated the odds of 15 people out of 2,479 in the Warren Commission Index dying within a three-year period, assuming a median age of 40, to be 98.16 percent.
Bugliosi failed to note that fewer than five hundred witnesses actually testified to the Commission and that several names included in the index, such as George Washington and other presidents, were not witnesses and, in fact, had no connection to the assassination. Furthermore, Musen failed to consider unnatural deaths. “Even assuming 2,479 names,” explained Charnin, “approximately four unnatural and 70 natural deaths from the list would be expected over a three year period. . . . The odds that at least 15 of 2,479 would die unnaturally within 3 years is one in 46,000. The odds of 18 dying unnaturally is 1 in 3.6 million.”
Charnin said his analysis countered the “feeble attempts to rebut and obfuscate the actuary’s 100,000 trillion to 1 odds” by showing at least 33 of 1,400 JFK assassination-related witnesses died unnaturally in the three years following the assassination. “The probability of this occurrence is 1 in 137 TRILLION TRILLION! Only two or three would normally be expected,” he said.
An objective look at both the number and the causes of death balanced against the importance of the person’s connection to the case plus the timing with concurrent investigations still causes raised eyebrows among researchers.
This section has been titled “Convenient Deaths” because these deaths certainly would have been convenient for anyone not wishing the truth of the JFK assassination to become public.
Government apologists, in particular the CIA, have gone to some lengths to discredit the idea of mysterious deaths plaguing assassination witnesses. A 1967 memo from CIA headquarters to station chiefs advised, “The [Warren] Commission staff questioned 418 witnesses—the FBI interviewed far more people, conducting 25,000 interviews and reinterviews—and in such a large group, a certain number of deaths are to be expected.”
However, the means of eliminating unwanted witnesses certainly existed, both then and now. Testifying before the Church Committee about CIA improprieties in 1975, CIA technicians revealed a variety of TWEP technology—“Termination With Extreme Prejudice”—that cannot be detected in a postmortem examination.
One letter from an agency consultant to a CIA officer listed circumstances under which people could be killed but made to look like natural death, accident, or suicide. The letter went on to show that undetected murders do not necessarily have to be the result of sophisticated technology. It stated, “There are two techniques which I believe should be mentioned since they require no special equipment besides a strong arm and the will to do such a job. These would be either to smother the victim with a pillow or to strangle him with a wide piece of cloth such as a bath towel. In such cases, there are no specific anatomic changes to indicate the cause of death.”
While it is obvious that the CIA—and hence the mob through operatives who work for both—has the capability of killing, it is less well known that the agency has developed drugs to induce cancer. Jack Ruby claimed to have been given such a drug just as he was granted a new trial.
As far back as 1952, a CIA memo reported on the cancer-causing effects of beryllium: “This is certainly the most toxic inorganic element and it produces a peculiar fibrotic tumor at the site of local application. The amount necessary to produce these tumors is a few micrograms.”
Local law-enforcement officers and coroners are not equipped, either by training or by inclination, to detect deaths induced by such sophisticated means. They look for signs of a struggle, evidence of a break-in, bruises, or marks on the victim. With no evidence to the contrary, many deaths are ruled suicide or accident. Others are ruled due to natural causes, such as heart attack.
The possibility of convenient deaths leads one into a well of paranoia, yet this long list cannot be summarily dismissed.
Consider the question: When does coincidence end and conspiracy begin?
It is especially interesting to note how the deaths are grouped.
Early Deaths
Early deaths included Mary Richardson, wife of the New Orleans minister to whom Judyth Vary Baker revealed knowledge of the New Orleans cancer lab; Jack Zangretti, who expressed foreknowledge of Oswald’s shooting; and Gary Underhill, a CIA officer who claimed the agency was involved.
Early in 1964, as the Warren Commission investigation was getting under way, there was a rash of deaths of people who may have known of an Oswald-Ruby connection. These included former Ruby employees Betty McDonald and Teresa Norton; Hank Killam, husband of a Ruby employee, and Teresa Norton; Dallas reporters Bill Hunter and Jim Koethe, both of whom had been in Ruby’s apartment the weekend of the assassination. Dead in New Orleans were former FBI agent Guy Banister and his private investigator Hugh Ward, who was killed in a plane crash along with New Orleans mayor DeLesseps Morrison. Eddie Benavides, brother to J. D. Tippit shooting witness Domingo Benavides, was shot in the head, apparently mistaken for his brother.
About the time the Warren Commission Report was released in the fall of 1964, Mary Pinchot Meyer, a JFK confidante and former wife to CIA chief Cord Meyer, was murdered and C. D. Jackson, the Life magazine senior vice president who locked away the Zapruder film, died. Shortly after Jackson’s death, Life writer Paul Mandel, who tried to explain Kennedy’s throat wound by saying he turned rearward to wave, also died.
Deaths in 1965 included Ruby’s first lawyer, Tom Howard; Guy Banister’s pilot Maurice Gatlin; and Rose Cheramie, who reported the assassination in advance. Also dead were Mona B. Saenz, a Texas employment clerk who had interviewed Oswald; David Goldstein, who had helped the FBI trace Oswald’s pistol; and columnist Dorothy Kilgallen and her close friend Mrs. Earl Smith, who may have kept Kilgallen’s JFK notes, which subsequently disappeared. In December 1965 William Whaley, the cabdriver who reportedly drove Oswald to Oak Cliff, became the only Dallas cabdriver killed on duty.
The deaths of those potential witnesses continued in 1966, including Ruby trial judge Joe Brown, Oswald’s landlady Earlene Roberts, and Ruby dancers Marilyn Delilah Walle and Karen “Little Lynn” Carlin. Also dead were Albert Bogard, who told of Oswald test driving a new car prior to the assassination; captain Frank Martin, the Dallas police official who said there was a lot more to be said in the assassination; and Lee Bowers Jr., who told of seeing men behind the wooden picket fence at the time of the shooting.
Deaths in late 1966 included the reported suicide of William Pitzer, who photographed the JFK autopsy; Jimmy Levens, a Fort Worth nightclub owner who hired Ruby employees; James Worrell Jr., who saw someone flee the rear of the Texas School Book Depository; Clarence Oliver, a district attorney investigator who worked the Ruby case; and Hank Suydam, the Life magazine official in charge of JFK stories.
In 1967, as New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison began his JFK investigation, Jack Ruby died, along with Navy photographer Leonard Pullin and Harold Russell, who witnessed the escape of Officer Tippit’s killer. There were also the deaths of key Garrison witnesses David Ferrie, who died from a blow to the neck ruled accidental; former Ferrie roommate Eladio Del Valle; and cancer researcher Dr. Mary Sherman.
New Orleans–connected deaths continued into 1968 with that of New Orleans coroner Dr. Nicholas Chetta, who had ruled on Ferrie’s death, and Philip Geraci, who spoke of an Oswald–Clay Shaw connection.
In early 1969, deaths included Henry Delaune, the brother-in-law to coroner Chetta; E. R. “Buddy” Walthers, the deputy sheriff who saw the bullet in the grass in Dealey Plaza; and the Reverend Clyde Johnson, who was scheduled to
testify in the Shaw trial. Also dead were Charles Mentensana, who had filmed a rifle being brought out of the Depository; John Crawford, a close friend to both Jack Ruby and witness Wesley Frazier; and Mary Bledsoe, an Oswald neighbor who also knew David Ferrie.
In 1970, Dallas underworld figure George McGann, who was married to the “babushka lady” Beverly Oliver, was murdered. That year also witnessed the deaths of Abraham Zapruder and Dallas County sheriff Bill Decker. In 1971, a fiery explosion at work killed Roscoe White, identified by his son as the Grassy Knoll gunman. Also dying by mid-1971 was Darrell Garner, arrested for shooting Tippit witness Warren Reynolds; Clayton Fowler, Ruby’s chief defense attorney; CIA deputy director General Charles Cabell; and mobsters James Plumeri and Salvatore Granello, tied to CIA assassination plots.
Strange Deaths Continue
Between 1972 and the end of 1976, during the time of the Church Committee investigations into CIA improprieties, there again was a spurt of deaths among JFK assassination figures. These included House Majority Leader and Warren Commissioner Hale Boggs; FBI director J. Edger Hoover, along with his assistant Clyde Tolson; Chief Justice Earl Warren; Garrison suspect Clay Shaw; Dallas mayor Earle Cabell; CIA officer William Harvey; and General Earl Wheeler, a liaison between JFK and the CIA. Murder victims included Dave Yaras, a close friend to both Jimmy Hoffa and Jack Ruby, and mafia bosses Sam Giancana and John Roselli, both scheduled to testify to the Church Committee. Also dying during this time were Ruby-connected gunrunner Thomas E. Davis; Ruby business partner Ralph Paul; Connally’s physician Dr. Charles Gregory; Dallas motorcycle officer James Chaney; and J. A. Milteer, the Miami right-winger who predicted JFK’s death and the capture of a scapegoat.
The year 1977 produced a bumper crop of candidates for listing under convenient deaths connected to the JFK assassination—including the deaths of six top FBI officials, all of whom were scheduled to testify before the House Select Committee on Assassinations.
