PROBABLE CAUSE AUSTRALIA

A Continuing Inquiry into the JFK Assassination

Double Issue 7 & 8 - November 1994

Probable Cause Australia is the only Australian magazine dedicated to the JFK assassination.

Editorial

As we come to the end of our second year with this big, double issue, the JFK Assassination seems in danger of slipping back into the mists of history and obscurity.

The press have forgotten the case as we approach the 31st anniversary of the death of Truth and Justice in Dallas. Even Gerald Posner isn't being wheeled out to sprout his propaganda like he used to. But still we soldier on, spreading the word, informing the ignorant, trying to do our bit for democracy.

Over our Summer recess, the Centre will be looking at the best mode of attack for the years ahead. Questions have been drawn over Probable Cause, and whether it can continue to be a news-breaking magazine when there just isn't enough news breaking to fill its covers. Its format may change in the next year, as we look at new technology and whether our focus should change from news material to source material. Even the internet may be the place to head. Stay tuned and we'll keep you up to date.

Due to an enforced holiday break for myself this year, there will be no formal get together on or around the assassination date. I will be out of the state and trying to co-ordinate something so big so late is too much. Look out for a formal gathering around the middle of next year.

LAKE BREAKING NEWS:
It is indeed wonderful to report that our very own regular columnist, Wait Brown, has been chosen as the Keynote Speaker at this years Assassination Symposium on John Kennedy in Dallas! Walt and his good wife Jill are, needless to say, thrilled. He will be following in the steps of Norman Mailer who spoke last year. Congratulations Walt!

Speaking of conferences. as reported above the ASK symposium is on again, as is the first COPA (Coalition on Political Assassinations) conference in Washington. COPA, set up as both a research and political lobby group, is keeping its finger on the pulse of all that's happening in Washington. We hope to bring you some of their reports in upcoming issues.

IN THIS ISSUE
Gary Aguilar tells us some home truths about Gerald Posner and his 'research'; we have the 1969 Penthouse interview with the poor, victimised Clay Shaw; Walt Brown tells us why David Belin can't hear like he used to, David B. Perry rides into town to shoot down Posner (he helped Posner research Case Closed!) and the Roscoe White debate with his six-shooters; we have a not-at-all-biased piece of Dallas journalism on our very own researchers; the final interview with the man Oswald missed General Edwin Walker; Paul Jones ventures into the Washington Archives for a ride into pure lunacy; L. Fletcher Prouty hits back at last issue's Edward Jay Epstein article and throws down the gauntlet to any non-believers; a re-print on how the French Intelligence wrote a book on the Kennedy assassination; and the final installment of everyone's favorite crook next door, Richard Nixon.

The above is sure to make fine reading as the assassination weekend approaches and passes and we enter another year or silence. Some will argue our make or break time has passed and that we've run our race. Still, there is hope just one piece of evidence or a stray memo missed by the eagle-eyed censors could make or break us. After 30 years of silence, the US Government is determined now to bury us all in such a mountain of paper and memos (yes, more than the Warren Commission!) and keep us quiet for a few more years until it's too far down the track for anyone to care. We must make sure we don't drown in paperwork or help keep the silence.

If we drop the ball here, there will be no tomorrow - no chance to delve further into the other assassinations of the sixties and the political intrigues that are still happening around us. Lose this one, and we lose it all. We have our best chance with the JFK case - let's show the skeptics and the biased media that we aren't crack-pots or "buffs".

It's up to you.

Aguilar on Posner - The Other Side by Gary L. Aguilar

Dear Mr. Gerlach,
I've little time but I appreciate your note of March 9, 1994. I do have something of possible interest to your colleagues. Mr. Gerald Posner testified before the House of Representatives in the fall of 1993, at the so called "Conyers Committee", and claimed that the autopsy pathologists, James Humes and J. Thornton Boswell, have changed their minds about the location of the bullet entrance wound in the skull. That is, he claimed that he interviewed them both and that they have, in effect, repudiated the low location in the skull for the bullet entrance they claimed to the Warren Commission and to the HSCA under oath, and even again recently to JAMA in their May 27, 1992 interviews. According to Posner, they told him that they now believe that the entrance wound was 10-cm higher than their previous claims -- in the cowlick region at the top of the skull, rather than the base of the skull at the level of the External Occipital Protuberance!

On another matter, Posner, in his book, claims that James Tague, who suffered a superficial flesh wound from a Dealey Plaza fragment at the time of the shooting, was not sure which fragment hit him. Posner made this claim on the basis of an interview with James Tague (See the index to his book, it is not handy to me now or I'd get it for you.) Tague, it should be recalled, told the Warren Commission that he wasn't sure whether it was the second or third shot that hit him -- but that it definitely was not the first shot. Posner's reconstruction of the assassination requires that the Tague fragment was from the first shot, and so Tague's change of recollection is quite important evidentially, of course.

I called both J. Thornton Boswell and James Tague. BOTH SAID THAT THEY HAVE NEVER SPOKEN WITH GERALD POSNER, AND BOTH CLAIM THAT THEY HAVE NEVER DEVIATED FROM THEIR ORIGINAL OPINIONS AND WARREN COMMISSION TESTIMONIES -- THEY HAVE NOT CHANGED THEIR MINDS AT ALL! Boswell TOLD ME the entrance wound in the skull was low, and Tague TOLD ME the first fragment definitely did not hit him -- it might have been either the second or the third, as he's always said. I also called Humes who was quite defensive and reluctant to speak with me, but he said that he stands by his account in JAMA on JFK's wounds, and apparently has not, as Posner asserts, changed his mind to 'recall' that the entrance wound was 10-cm higher than he claimed in the autopsy report. One wonders how many other of Posner's quoted 'sources' would today deny ever having spoken with him.

Please make note of an upcoming JFK conference in Washington, D.C. on October 7, 8, and 9, 1994 which is sponsored by The Coalition on Political Assassinations (C.O.P.A.). This organization was formed in reaction to the feelings of many at the last ASK conference that many qualified critic-authorities were not invited to speak (Jerry Policoff, Roger Fernman, Wayne Smith, Ph.D., etc.), while many other Warren apologists, such as Robert Artwohl, Gus Russo, Ed Butler, Jim Moore, and others were given a forum: With some very important data on JFK emerging in consequence of the Records Release Act, there was a wish that a forum be established to feature ACCOMPLISHED AND RELIABLE CRITICS.

C.O.P.A. was established with this in mind, and includes among its members John Newman, Ph.D., Cyril Wecht, MD, JD, David Mantik, MD, Ph.D., James Lesar, JD, Peter Dale Scott, Ph.D, myself; John Judge, Randy Robertson, MD, Walt Brown, Ph.D., James DiEugenio, Roger Bruce Fernman, JD, James Alcorn, JD, Wayne Smith, Ph.D. Jerry Policoff, etc., etc., etc. I cannot emphasize enough that this group's goal is to feature responsible, carefully considered damning criticism of the 'official conclusions', both at the planned fall conference, but also on an ongoing 'political action' basis in the future. C.O.P.A.'s fall conference will feature what the Dallas ASK conferences might wish they had featured, without David Lifton and Harrison Livingstone. (No insult is meant by excluding Lifton and Livingstone. It was felt, however, that prominent featuring of them might be exploited by the press, as in the past, as a 'sleazy' attempt to sell their books. The conference's credibility, it was hoped, might be enhanced showcasing authorities whose livelihoods or income do not depend on commercial exposure of the tragedy.) With the new revelations that will be featured at this conference, it should be an exhilarating and fascinating time. I hope you are able to come, or can at least send an emissary.

For information, please write to John Judge, or me again.
John Judge P.O. # 772, Washington, D.C. 20044-0772, or call 202-310-1858. You may fax via the Assassination Archive Research Centre at 202-393-7310.

As you might expect, there is much more to tell, but no time to do so!
Best wishes to you,
Gary L. Aguilar, MD
Chairman, Department of Surgery, Saint Francis Memorial Hospital, San Francisco Assistant Clinical Professor of Ophthalmology, Stanford University Medical Center Assistant Clinical Professor of Ophthalmology, University of California, San Francisco Head of Ophthalmology, Saint Francis Memorial Hospital, San Francisco Member, Board of Directors, San Francisco Medical Society Member, American Medical Association

Dear Steve,
Thanks for your letter of June 12, 1994 which included the issue of "Probable Cause". Enclosed please find a copy of my letter I published in the Federal Bar News and Journal. As I've added a few things to the list, I thought to include a more complete listing which follows. Please let me know if you want more. I'm continuing the inquiry. Tony Summers gave me another example, but until I get clearance from him to use it, I'll have to be mum.

Hope you're well. Please come to the COPA conference in the fall in Washington at the Sheraton Washington Sheraton Hotel, October 7 -10, 1994. For information write the Coalition on Political Assassinations, c/o AARC, 918 F Street, Rm, 510,Washington D.C. 20004.

Posner Agonistes
Even without the Pulitzer Prize nomination, it is difficult to exaggerate the praise heaped upon Gerald Posner's work, "Case Closed" for settling the matter of 'who killed Kennedy'. The U.S. News and World Report acclaimed, "Posner now performs the historic office of correcting the mistakes and laying the questions to rest with impressive finality, bringing the total weight of evidence into focus more sharply than anyone has done before. (USN&WR 8/30-9/6/93, p.64.) Scrutiny of both Case Closed, and of the author's public statements on the topic of JFK's death, however, has raised doubts about the reliability of Posner's claims. Some troubling examples of Posner's assertions include:

I) In support of his contention that Mr. James Tague was hit by a fragment from the first of three shots, Posner said that Tague reported in a 1992 interview that he did not know which of the three shots hit him. As recently noted by Harold Weisberg in his new book, Case Open, however, Tague told the Warren Commission that he was not hit by a fragment from the first shot. Gary L. Aguilar, MD called Tague on 4/30/94. Tague told Aguilar the same thing he told the Warren Commission -- the first shot did not hit him. Thus Posner's own eyewitness, advanced in support of his reconstruction of the shooting, flatly controverts the author's hypothesis. Case Closed misrepresents Tague's views which have been consistent over three decades. Moreover, Tague also told Aguilar that he has never spoken with Posner, though the implication of three references in his book is that Posner did speak with him on two successive days.

II) Posner made the following statement in a radio discussion with Peter Dale Scott on 11/12/93:
Posner: "You (Scott) have him [Carlos Bringuier] as a member of the DRE (Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil), this anti-Communist group. I just spoke to Bringuier again the other night on this very issue. It's absolutely not true that he was a member of the DRE and he takes great offense at that. He is not. It's stated a number of times in the book [Scott, PD. Deep Politics] that he is, but that is not the organization that he was associated with."
Less than two weeks after this exchange, Scott telephoned Bringuier in New Orleans, Scott's having spoken to him twice before. Briguier confirmed to Scott the following:
1) He was a member of the DRE, indeed the New Orleans Delegate, and was proud of that association. Thus he could not have taken offense at being so described.
2) He had never denied DRE membership to Gerald Posner, and would not.
3) He had not spoken to Posner, as far as he could recall, since the Spring of 1993, which was several months before Scott's book appeared in bookstores in September 1993. Thus during the conversation Posner cited on the radio, Bringuier was unaware of Scott's book, and so, presumably, was Posner.
III) In a radio disputation with author David Scheim on 11/27/93 the following exchange occurred:
Scheim: "...Even if Oswald was the lone killer, he was seen by a respected businessman in Georgia who became mayor of his town -- this is an FBI report -- he saw Oswald receive money from Joseph Poretto, an underboss --"
Posner (interrupting): "That's absolutely false, and I prove it in the book .... I can't believe that you cite this old information that's been rehashed a dozen times and is now totally discredited."
In fact, not one word in Case Closed is mentioned about the reported payment from Marcello underboss Joseph Poretto to Oswald in early 1963 at the New Orleans Town and Country restaurant. This report, apparently extracted from FBI files by John Davis and first reported in his 1988 book, Mafia Kingfish, was only otherwise mentioned in an epilogue to the 1989 Zebra paperback edition of Scheim's Contract on America. Thus no evidence can be found to support of Posner's statement, "this (is) old information that's been rehashed a dozen times and is now totally discredited."

IV) In his book Posner dismissed Rose Cheramie's remarkable clairvoyance that JFK was to be killed in Dallas by claiming that the witness to Cheramie's statements, Dr. Victor Weiss, reported that Cheramie only mentioned this after Oswald's death. This is flatly untrue, which Mr. Posner must know from the work he cited himself from the 1978 House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) which reported, "[According to Dr. Weiss] Dr. Bowers allegedly told Weiss that the patient, Rose Cheramie, had stated before the assassination that President Kennedy was going to be killed...". Moreover, Mr. Posner certainly knowingly omitted another unassailable, HSCA witness who is mentioned in the same pages Posner misconstrued on Weiss, Francis Fruge. A Louisiana State Police lieutenant, Fruge reported Cheramie made the prediction of JFK's death in Dallas directly to him two days before murder.

V) Posner cited the testimony of Renatus Hartogs, the psychiatrist who examined Oswald as a teenage truant, arguing that Hartog's findings suggested a violent potential. The Warren Commission dismissed Hartog's testimony when an examination of his original report revealed the opposite conclusion. In fact, the Commission concluded, "Contrary to reports that appeared after the assassination, the psychiatric examination did not indicate that Lee Oswald was a potential assassin, potentially dangerous, that his 'outlook on life had strongly paranoid overtones,' or that he should be institutionalized."

VI) On November 17, 1993, before Representative John Conyers and the Committee on Government Operations House of Representatives, Mr. Posner reported that he had interviewed two of JFK's pathologists, James Humes, MD and J. Thornton Boswell, MD. Posner testified that they confirmed to him that they had changed their minds about the location they had given for the bullet entrance of JFK's skull wound. In their 1963 autopsy report, to the HSCA in 1977, and recently again in 1992 interviews published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, both pathologists claimed the bullet entered JFK's skull at the bottom of the rear of the skull, near the external occipital protuberance. Posner, however, informed the U.S. Congress that the pathologists told him that they had erred -- the wound was in fact 10-centimeters higher, at the top rear of the skull. On March 30, 1994 Gary L. Aguilar, MD called both Drs. Humes and Boswell. Both physicians told Aguilar that they had not changed their minds about the location of JFK's skull wound. They stood by their statements in JAMA, which contradict Posner. Startlingly, Dr. Boswell also told Aguilar that he has never spoken with Posner.

One can accept the occasional interpretational error, but when witnesses are repeatedly presented giving the opposite opinions they truly have, and later those same witnesses deny that the cited interviews ever occurred, a rather serious problem is at hand. While one is naturally loath to question the good faith of any author, especially one nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, Posner seems to be begging even Warren Commission loyalists to question his.

Best wishes to you, Steve.
Gary L. Aguilar, MD
Chairman, Department of Surgery, Saint Francis Memorial Hospital, San Francisco Assistant Professor of Ophthalmology, Stanford University Medical Center Assistant Professor of Ophthalmology, University of California, San Francisco Member, Board of Directors, San Francisco County Medical Society Member, American Medical Association Member, California Medical Association

The Penthouse Interview with Clay Shaw

Clay Shaw, a deep-chested soft-spoken bachelor of 57, achieved instant notoriety on 1 March 1967. He was charged by District Attorney Jim Garrison with having conspired with Lee Harvey Oswald and an eccentric one-time airline pilot, private eye and fake psychologist, David Ferrie, to assassinate President John F. Kennedy. Until then, Shaw was barely known beyond his home city of New Orleans, where he lives alone in a handsomely furnished little French Quarter house on Dauphine Street, and has a broad circle of friends, including playwright Tennessee Williams.

But Garrison's sensational charge brought hundreds of American and foreign newsmen racing to the city to satisfy their readers curiosity about the man at the centre of Garrison's "conspiracy" revelation. "My staff and I," Garrison told them, in one of a series of public pronouncements that made headlines around the world, "solved the Kennedy assassination weeks ago. I wouldn't say this if we didn't have the evidence beyond the shadow of a doubt. We know the key individuals, the cities involved, and how it was done."

Denouncing the Warren Report as a fraud and a whitewash, Garrison promised further arrests, and privately assured newsmen that, "this case isn't even close. If you want to lose money, bet against me."

Garrison's reckless claims found a ready audience. A glut of books critical to the Warren Report had eroded confidence in the commission's procedures and the validity of its findings--particularly its key conclusion that Oswald was a lone assassin. Mark Lanes Rush to Judgement had been a best-seller for months and according to a national poll, two-thirds of the US population had come to doubt that Oswald had operated alone.

Two weeks after Shaw's arrest, a special three-judge panel ruled in a preliminary hearing that there was enough evidence to hold Clay Shaw for trial. Garrison produced only two witnesses: an admitted drug addict, Vernon Bundy, and a young insurance salesman-trainee, Perry Raymond Russo. Russo's was the only testimony directly supporting the charge against Shaw. Russo claimed to have dropped in at a party in Ferrie's apartment in September 1963. After the other guests left and while Russo waited around for a ride home--he swore on the stand--Shaw, Oswald, and Ferrie had openly discussed plans to kill the President.

It was only nine weeks later that Kennedy was assassinated and Oswald was charged with the crime. yet Russo did not come forward with this story for four years, after David Ferrie had died. Shaw immediately denied not only the conspiracy charge but that he had ever known or even met either Ferrie or Oswald.

Garrison declared that Shaw had engaged in the conspiracy under the alias of "Clay Bertrand"--a name that showed up briefly in the Warren Report. According to a New Orleans attorney called Dean Andrews, a man using the name had telephoned him the day after Kennedy was killed and asked Andrews to go to Dallas to represent Oswald. After a series of wildly contradictory descriptions of "Bertrand," Andrews was convicted of perjury and ultimately confessed on the stand at Shaw's trial that "Bertrand" was a figment of his imagination and that he had concocted the whole story "to get on the gravy train of publicity."

After the initial headlines generated by Shaw's arrest subsided, a number of outside newsmen began digging into the Garrison investigation. They uncovered some peculiar circumstances. The Saturday Evening Post disclosed, in an article by James Phelan, that Russo had said nothing whatever about Shaw's involvement in the "Kennedy conspiracy" when he first came forward as a witness, but had developed his tale of the conspiracy when asked suggestive questions under hypnosis conducted under the supervision of Garrison's office. The New York Times and Newsweek magazine's Hugh Aynesworth followed with accounts of Garrison's staff pressuring and attempting to induce witnesses to tell incriminating stories. Several of Garrison's staff defected and charged that the "Kennedy conspiracy" existed mainly in his imagination.

In the face of these developments, Garrison began to assert that there was a vast federal conspiracy to conceal the truth about the Dallas tragedy. He declared without qualification that Lyndon Johnson knew that the Warren Report was false and that the assassination was a CIA plot aimed at removing Kennedy because he wanted to ease the cold war with Russia and end the war in Vietnam.

In the two-year-long hullabaloo, Clay Shaw became virtually the forgotten man. He just worked quietly with his four attorneys, Irving Dymond, Edward and William Wegmann, and Sal Panzeca, trying to build his defence. "It is an extraordinarily difficult job to prove a negative," he said later. "How do you establish that you didn't attend a party held years ago, and that you didn't know two men who now are dead and can't confirm your story?"

Late this January his case finally went to trial before a New Orleans courtroom packed with newsmen. The case had aroused such intense passions in New Orleans that it was necessary to examine 1170 possibles to obtain 12 jurors and two alternatives who said they could weigh the evidence objectively. The trial lasted 35 days with Mark Lane sitting at the prosecutors' side and feeding them suggestions. It devolved mainly into a trial of the Warren Report. Despite Garrison's flamboyant boasts of "secret witnesses" and "disclosures that will rock the nation," he produced no evidence of CIA involvement and never even mentioned that agency. His case against Shaw was largely a rerun of the preliminary hearing, resting almost wholly on the testimony of Perry Russo. After a dramatic closing speech in which Garrison appealed to the jurors to save the US from a federal plot that he had not established, the jurors filed out took one ballot, and unanimously acquitted Clay Shaw.

What seemed a fitting conclusion to one of the most bizarre chapters in US jurisprudence proved to be not a conclusion at all. Three days later, at his own instigation and over his own signature, Jim Garrison charged Shaw with perjury for having denied on the witness stand that he had known Oswald or David Ferrie. Shortly afterwards Garrison announced that he had scrapped his plans to retire to private law practice and would run for a third term as District Attorney in November.

Clay Shaw sustained this new legal blow with at least outward equanimity. He abandoned his plans to take a "recuperative vacation" with friends in North Carolina and is once more working out a legal defence with his lawyers. In this exclusive Penthouse Interview, conducted in New Orleans by James Phelan, the central figure in this far-out case says he "is beginning to feel like a character in a Kafka novel," and tells how it feels to be pursued by a District Attorney who just won't quit.

Penthouse: Being accused of plotting to kill an American President is a unique predicament. Could you reconstruct your feelings when you first heard of the charge against you?

Shaw: My reaction was shock, disbelief, incredulity. I was inclined to tell Garrison's men, "Gentlemen, this is a very bad joke," but it was obvious that they were taking themselves seriously. Actually, I had been asked to come out to the DA's office several months before I was charged. Back on December 23 1966, I was questioned by one of the assistant DAs and finally by Garrison himself. They questioned me largely about "Clay Bertrand"-- whom I said I didn't know--and about the Cuban consulate, which had been housed in the International Trade Mart, of which I was managing director, and about the fact that Lee Harvey Oswald had chosen to distribute leaflets in front of the Trade Mart on that pro-Castro Cuban thing he was involved in. I gave them all the information I had and thought no more about it. I had read that a national magazine was reinstituting an investigation into the Kennedy assassination and I thought that Mr. Garrison was working with or for the magazine. I assumed that he was questioning me in search of information in this context and I paid no serious attention to the matter.

Penthouse: You had no idea then that you were under consideration as a suspect?

Shaw: None whatsoever. Then on March 1 1967, I received a phone call from a friend that he had just heard on the radio that a subpoena had been issued for me. I thought that was peculiar--if Garrison wanted any further information from me he didn't have to subpoena me. So I called the DA's office and asked "Do you people want to talk to me?" A Mr. Ivon said they did and I told him I was perfectly willing and when should I come in. He said about 1 pm and I told him I'd be there.

Penthouse: By this time, had you received any hint or indication that Garrison was after you?

Shaw: Only an indirect hint. On the Sunday before I was arrested, Walter Sheridan who was covering the Garrison investigation for NBC--whom I didn't know--called me up and said he wanted to see me. He came down and told me there was a rumour in town that I was "Clay Bertrand," I told him this was silly and ridiculous, that I had never been "Clay Bertrand" and that if there was anyone in New Orleans who would have difficulty using an alias it would be me. And again, I dismissed this from my mind. Innocence, I must say, can be a frightening thing.

So I went out to the DA's office with a perfectly clear conscience, I didn't take a lawyer with me. When I got there they kept me waiting for about two hours, which rather annoyed me. To my mind, I was in the position of a good citizen making himself available to give information to these people, which might or might not be useful. Finally they began to question me about David Ferrie and Louisiana Parkway--where I later learned he had an apartment. I told them I didn't know Ferrie and had never been to his place. Then suddenly they said: "What would you say if we said we had three witnesses proving that you have been there?" I told them that their witnesses were either mistaken or they were lying. At this point it was suggested that I take a lie-detector test. I said: "Certainly not. Why on earth should I take a lie-detector test?"

They told me '"If you don't take a lie-detector test, we're going to charge you with conspiring to kill the President of the United States". To put it mildly, I was stunned. I said, "Well, in that case, I certainly do want a lawyer, and I want one right now." They locked me in the interrogation room, and I tried to call my long-time lawyer, Ed Wegmann, who was out of town. I then tried his brother, William Wegmann, who was not available. I finally got one of their associates, Sal Panzeca, who came rushing to the rescue.

Penthouse: Why do you say that the idea of your using the alias of "Clay Bertrand"--as Garrison charged--was ridiculous? Using a cover name is not unheard of. In fact, on some touchy assignments, journalists occasionally use a cover name.

Shaw: I doubt that you would try to use one in your home town where you were well known. For about 17 or 18 years I had been managing director of the International Trade Mart here and in that capacity I was in the public eye a great deal. I was on television quite often and my picture had been in the local papers. I attended many civic affairs, luncheons, meetings. In addition, I'm a highly recognizable fellow. I'm rather outsized--6 ft 4 inches tall-- and I have a shock of prematurely grey hair that is almost white. In a town of this size, where I had made perhaps 500 speeches and knew literally thousands of people, the idea that I would go around here trying to use an alias is utterly fantastic. Then at my trial, of course, the man who told the story about "Clay Bertrand"-- a local lawyer named Dean Andrews--admitted that he had made up the whole story in an attempt to get in on the Oswald publicity. Andrews finally confessed that Clay Bertrand didn't exist. As someone put it after Andrews testified, "Dean Andrews assassinated Clay Bertrand." And if Clay Bertrand existed only in Andrews' mind, how could I have impersonated him?

This was only one of the inconsistencies that ran through Garrison's case. He charged, for example, that I went out to San Francisco on the day of the Kennedy assassination to establish an alibi for myself. But if I had needed an alibi, I could have stayed right here at my desk in the Trade Mart in New Orleans, where everyone knew me. I wouldn't have had to go to a distant, strange city where I was largely unknown.

Penthouse: In the March 1 interrogation that resulted in your arrest, were you questioned by Garrison?

Shaw: No, he wasn't present. As a matter of fact, I have not had one word of conversation with Garrison from that first casual questioning in December 1966 to the present time. My only communication has been his new charge that I committed perjury.

Penthouse: Panzeca says that he felt as if he had been hit by a two-by-four when he found that he was suddenly representing a client charged with plotting to kill the President.

Shaw: He was plainly astonished, as I guess any lawyer would be.

Penthouse: When Garrison's men told you they had three witnesses who would testify that you knew David Ferrie, did they tell you who these witnesses were?

Shaw: They did not. And if they had three at that time, they did not produce them at my preliminary hearing. They produced only one, Perry Raymond Russo. Indeed, every additional witness that they produced at my trial this year had come forward, or been sought out, or acquired after the date of my arrest.

Penthouse: When was the first time you saw Perry Russo, to your knowledge ?

Shaw: The day before my arrest. A friend had dropped in at my house and we were having drinks when the doorbell rang. I went to the door, and a guy I now know to be Perry Russo gave me a false business card with e false name and said he was conducting an insurance survey. I told him I was a very poor prospect. He asked if he could call me later. This visit was for the purpose of Russo's "identifying" me. There was a fellow with him who I learnt later, was from the DA's office.

I would like to point out the rather idiotic logic behind this incident. You will recall that Russo testified under oath that he attended a party at David Ferrie's apartment in 1963 where he claimed to have heard me, Ferrie and Lee Oswald plot to kill John F. Kennedy. Now if Russo's story were true and I had sat in a room with him and two other people and plotted to kill the President, I think I might have recognized him when he came to my door, even if he gave me a false name. I don't know why Garrison thought that Russo would recognize me--assuming his story was true--but that I wouldn't recognize him. But this is just another of a long series of logical inconsistencies that ran through Garrison's case.

Penthouse: Have you ever understood what motive Mr. Garrison ascribed to you for wanting to kill the President?

Shaw: He never ascribed any motive so far as I know. Certainly none was brought forward at my trial. The only motive I've ever heard attributed to me was his statement to a journalist shortly after my arrest, that the assassination was a "thrill killing" like the Loeb-Leopold murder of Bobby Franks. But Garrison quickly abandoned this idea, and in his subsequent public statements he came up with a bewildering series of "principals" end "motives". First was the anti-Castro Cubans who were angry at Kennedy over the Bay of Pigs fiasco. But nothing about the Cubans was brought out at my trial. Then it was the CIA, or certain elements of the CIA, and the FBI. Then it was oil-rich Texas millionaires, and after that the Minutemen. Over the two years between my arrest and my trial, Garrison must have produced eight or ten separate groups of "masterminds," sometimes combining them or switching from one to another. He finally wound up with the major villain being the "military-defence industry complex." According to Garrison, their motive was a desire to remove Kennedy because of his intention of ending the cold war. But other than his quickly abandoned notion that I was a "thrill-killer," I never under--stood what role he attributed to me.

Penthouse: Did you actually know President Kennedy?

Shaw: I met him once, and was greatly impressed by him. When Chep Morrison was mayor of New Orleans, he and I worked closely in the building of the International Trade Mart and the furthering of New Orleans as an international trade centre. When Morrison became our ambassador to the Organization of American States he asked me to come to Washington when he was sworn into office. There were 20 or 30 of us there, and he was sworn in by President Kennedy and I had the opportunity to meet him.

What made Garrison's charge so outrageous to me was that I was a great admirer of Kennedy. I thought he had given the nation a new turn after the rather drab Eisenhower years, and that he was in the tradition of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt--in the stream of liberal Presidents. I felt he was vitally concerned about social issues, which concerned me also. I though he had youth, imagination, style, and �lan. All in all, I considered him a splendid President.

Penthouse: Before your arrest, had you known Jim Garrison?

Shaw: I had met him on occasion. In a city the size of New Orleans--and with the jobs we both had--l would encounter him from time to time at civic affairs, luncheons, meetings. We were on a first name basis--it was "Hi, Jim," and "Hello Clay," but I had never known him to the extent of sitting down and having a drink with him or a meal, and I'd never been in his home nor had he been in mine. In all honesty, I must admit that I voted for him when he first ran for District Attorney.

Penthouse: What kind of reaction did you encounter in New Orleans after you were publicly charged with plotting the Kennedy assassination ?

Shaw: Well, there was a rallying around by my good friends, which was enormously helpful. And I encountered no animosity whatsoever from people here in New Orleans. In fact, when I went out, perfect strangers came up to me and patted me on the back and said, "Don't worry--you're going to come out all right." I never met any evidence of hostility. Immediately after the accusation, I received three or four hundred letters and of these only three were hostile. It was quite apparent from the tone of these three letters that they were written by disturbed people.

Actually, the ordeal brought me some new friends. One of the most heart-warming experiences involved a New Orleans cab-driver. Shortly after the preliminary hearing back in 1967, I called a cab to take me to my lawyer's office. The driver was a typical cabbie--if you called Central Casting he'd be the kind they'd send you. When I got in his cab he said, "Haven't I seen you somewhere before? Your face is familiar." I told him, "You've probably seen me on TV. I'm Clay Shaw." "Oh, you're Mr. Shaw," he said, and flipped down the flag on his taxi-meter. "There's no charge," he said,. "Come on, you have to make a living," I told him, "Besides, maybe I did all these things I've been accused of." "Naw", he said, "Everybody knows that s.o.b. Garrison. We know what's goin' on." He took me to the lawyer's and asked when I would be going home. I said in about 40 minutes. "I'll be waitin' over at that cab stand," he told me. "I've got my Daily Racin' Form." When he took me home, he still wouldn't take any money. "Naw," he said, "you've got a bum rap to fight and I want to help. Whenever you need a cab, give me a ring." I figured he really wanted to do something for me, and I've used Marty ever since. He's a wonderful human being, and by now his family is just like a part of my own. So something good came out of all this.

Penthouse: When you finally came to trial, were you apprehensive about the outcome?

Shaw: Well, I made up my mind very early that my only defence was the truth. I decided to take the stand in my own defence and allow myself to be cross-questioned. I expected that there would be witnesses who would perjure themselves--as there were--and I hoped that the jury would get to the heart of the matter, as this jury did, and would see the flimsiness of the case that had been constructed against me. But of course you never can really know what a jury will do, and it was a very trying experience. As the case drew to a close, I told a number of friends and newsmen that if the jury could convict me on such shoddy evidence as Garrison presented I would go gladly to jail because that would be the safest place to be in a world gone mad.

Penthouse: How would you account for the fact that a total of perhaps eight witnesses positively identified you either as Clay Bertrand or as an associate of David Ferrie?

Shaw: Of these, there were about five from Clinton, Louisiana, who claimed to have seen me up there in 1963 in a car with Ferrie. I think these people actually saw someone who must have resembled me, though I have never been in Clinton in my life. Of course, as people who have studied this case know, there was a private investigator--now dead--named Guy Banister who was involved with Ferrie. Banister did resemble me. So far as the Clinton people are concerned, I must conclude that if they did see someone up there it may well have been Banister, and their testimony was a case of mistaken identification. Even so, it did seem odd to me that they would remember in detail an encounter with a stranger that happened five or six years earlier. In his closing argument to the jury, my attorney Irving Dymond quotes Justice Frankfurter on the lack of reliability of eyewitness identification. Justice Frankfurter said that such identification was the greatest single cause of error in the judicial process. I think that with the Clinton witnesses it was perhaps an honest case of mistaken identity. As to the other few witnesses, I have my own ideas about them, but I don't care to express them for publication.

Penthouse: In his investigation of the assassination, Garrison has been financed in part by a group of New Orleans businessmen who call themselves Truth and Consequences. What is your reaction to their activity in this case?

Shaw: There are many appalling things about this affair but one of the most appalling is that a group of private citizens can contribute money to a District Attorney to investigate this, that, or the other thing. You can see the doors to abuse that this opens. My God, any group of people can go to the DA and say: "We want you to investigate so-and-so and here's the dough." The District Attorney is paid a salary and given a budget and it's his duty to investigate crimes that come under his jurisdiction. There should not be one penny accepted by him under any circumstances whatever to do any particular thing for any group. I think this is fundamental.

Penthouse: Do you know whether Truth and Consequences is still functioning since you have been acquitted?

Shaw: I don't know. I haven't seen any of the principals in the organization. Before the trial we subpoenaed their records, but Judge Haggerty impounded them and says now that they will not be released because they are not pertinent. So we don't even know how much money they contributed privately to the District Attorney, but even a dollar would have been too much.

Penthouse: You have had four lawyers, including one of the most able New Orleans trial lawyers, Irving Dymond, to represent you. Wasn't this rather costly?

Shaw: Extremely costly. In addition to legal fees, there was the matter of hiring investigators to check on some of the peculiar witnesses that popped up in the case. Before Garrison accused me, I was rather comfortably fixed. Now I'm broke. It is a somewhat cold comfort, of course, that I was financially able to obtain competent defence. Throughout these two years, the thought was rarely absent from my mind that had I not been able to do the costly things involved in properly defending oneself, what would have happened to me? And of course there is the corollary to this thought--how many men are in jail now, falsely charged, simply because they lacked the money to defend themselves adequately.

Penthouse: Some of your critics have raised the point that you seemed to be trying to avoid trial. Although you had a speedy preliminary hearing, it took almost two years for your case actually to come to trial.

Shaw: I think the record should be made clear on that point. After all the pleadings had been taken care of--and this took months-- sometime in the fall of 1967 we applied for change of venue. Because of the vast torrents of publicity that poured out of the DA's office and were religiously printed by the local papers, it seemed impossible to get a fair trial in New Orleans. As an alternative to a change of venue, we asked that the trial be delayed for a reasonable period. The District Attorney agreed to a six-month-continuance. In the spring of 1968, we again applied for a change of venue and there was a lengthy hearing on this. It was denied. My lawyers then decided that there was no reason to go to trial on such fraudulent and contrived evidence, and they decided to ask a federal court to enjoin Garrison against any further prosecution. It was their intention to prove in the federal court the false nature of Garrison's case. The three-judge federal court decided against our request for an injunction, but they did enjoin Garrison against further prosecution pending an appeal. It took the US Supreme Court until December of 1968 to rule that they would not hear the appeal. Garrison then set the case for January, 1969. The delays were for proper legal purposes, not for avoiding trial.

When I became involved in this matter, I decided that since I knew nothing about the law I would be guided by my attorneys. The decisions to seek a change of venue and to appeal to the federal courts were all made by my legal counsel and I simply went along with their decisions.

I think it should be pointed out that Garrison repeatedly charged that there was a vast federal conspiracy to keep my case from coming to trial and thereby--in his words--to frustrate him from "bringing out the truth for the American people." But in fact, the Warren court declined to intervene when the matter came before it.

Penthouse: There is a tremendous public curiosity about Jim Garrison's motives in this whole affair. If his case was as flimsy as the jury apparently decided it was, what do you think drove him to push it to trial?

Shaw: I certainly refuse to speculate about what goes on in Garrison's mind. This is a question that only he can answer. The minds of most humans are a labyrinth and Garrison's mind is more labyrinthine than most. Possibly he thought that all this would rebound to his credit somehow--maybe politically--but I'm not going to try to figure out what made him do it.

Penthouse: What are your personal feelings about Garrison now?

Shaw: At the risk of sounding like an early Christian martyr, early on I recognised that I could not bear the burden of hating as much as the circumstances seemed to justify. Hate is a very corrosive emotion and it doesn't hurt the guy you hate. It hurts you. If I had allowed myself for two years to hate--really to hate-- the people who were oppressing me, I don't think I would have survived. What it comes down to is that hate was a psychological luxury I couldn't afford.

Penthouse: Are you a native of Louisiana?

Shaw: Yes, I was born in a small town north of here. I went to New York in my early twenties and lived there until the war. I was in public relations and advertising. I went into the army in 1941, and became deputy chief of staff to General Charles Thrasher, who commanded Northern France, Belgium and Luxembourg as the supply base for the three armies fanning out across Europe after the invasion of the continent. It was a very interesting job to have everything at the right point at the right time for a million men moving forward and I learnt some things about organization from it. When I was discharged, I wasn't sure what I wanted to do. There was a group of men here in New Orleans who had an idea of reconstructing an old building as an international trade centre, and they invited me to come in and work on the project. I spent 18 years altogether--first reconstructing the old building and then planning and financing a new $15,000,000 structure--the present International Trade Mart. The Trade Mart was designed to increase trade through the port of New Orleans, and if I do say so myself, we did a pretty good job. There has been an increase in trade here year after year. When I was 52--in 1965--I decided that I had achieved what I set out to do. The new building was a reality and I decided I wanted to travel and to write. I had accumulated a little. money. It was not that I had so much money, but I am a man of rather few wants and what I wanted most was freedom. I wanted to travel before I had to be carried up the gangplank on a steamer. I thought then that my whole life was planned, and I did get to make a trip to Spain and to England. Then I came back here, and suddenly the world fell in on me on March 1 1967.

Penthouse: In his public utterances, Garrison repeatedly declared that the CIA had a major role in the Kennedy assassination. In this connection, the Rome newspaper Paesa Sara published a long story alleging that you were connected with an "international commercial organization" named Centro Maondiale Commerciale, which Paesa Sara termed "a CIA front." What is your explanation?

Shaw: Back in 1959 or 1960, a young Italian came to see me in New Orleans and told me about a world trade centre that was being planned in Rome. The idea was to have one place where buyers coming into the Common Market area would find all the Common Market countries represented in one centre. He wanted my advice and asked me to serve on the board of directors, I had no objection if it was a legitimate project. I investigated it and found that the head of it was a man named Imre Nagy, who had been the last non-Communist premier of Hungary. Some of the other people involved were Italian senators, Journalists, lawyers, and other responsible people. It was agreed that we would have an exhibit at their centre, and they would have one at the mart here in New Orleans, and we would exchange information and so on. I didn't mind being on their board, although there was no money involved, but I would have to go to Rome annually to the board meetings and my way would be paid, so why not? Then they ran into difficulties, but they finally got the centre opened. It turned out to be either badly planned or badly organized and it closed very shortly, and that was the last I ever heard of it. I never heard that it was a CIA operation and I don't know that it was. I'll say this--it was a highly unsuccessful operation which is not customary with the CIA. Other than what I've told you, I know nothing more about the Centro Mondiale Commerciale. I have never had any connection with the CIA.

Penthouse: You say that defending yourself against Garrison's charge has wrecked you financially. Do you feel that you should be compensated for this?

Shaw: I certainly do. I don't know what responsibility the state has for the erratic actions of one of its officers. My lawyers are studying this now with a view to recouping my losses. I don't know the legal obligations, but I think as a matter of equity somebody ought to have to reimburse me. Good Lord, a District Attorney can wreck anyone financially on his mere whim by filing serious charges against him.

Penthouse: Has there been any move by any state legislator to put in a bill of relief on your behalf?

Shaw: Not so far.

Penthouse: Do you plan to sue any of the people involved in the charges against you?

Shaw: My lawyers are studying this now, and I'll be guided by them. My personal inclination is to sue everybody in sight. If they find a cause for action, you better believe that I'll be willing and eager to go to court. I'd like to put a number of people in the dock where they'll have to answer the questions.

Penthouse: What do you think will happen to Garrison as a result of having lost his case against you?

Shaw: There are elections coming up in November and Garrison has announced that he will run for DA again. There already is one opponent in the field against him and I hear another candidate will announce shortly. After that, what happens will be up to the people of New Orleans. If they decide that they want Jim Garrison to continue in office, well--so be it. I think it was Lord Acton who once said the people get the government that they deserve. Personally, I think that some move should be made to curb the tremendous powers of the District Attorney by revising our laws, but so far nothing has been done.

Penthouse: A number of the members of the national press who covered the Garrison investigation and your trial commented on the apparent apathy of New Orleans toward what happened to you. Now that you have been cleared, there seems to be a tendency merely to revert to business as usual. Do you think New Orleans is unique in its response?

Shaw: I wouldn't say that what happened to me couldn't happen elsewhere, because it could. But I think New Orleans is a unique city in some respects. For one thing, it is a sort of fantasy-land. This stems from its preoccupation with Mardi Gras. This not only pervades the weeks before the carnival but occupies everyone's attention for many months of the year. People devote a tremendous amount of time and attention to working out the costumes they will wear as dukes and kings, and sometimes I think they forget that they are not really dukes and kings. So there is an abiding air of fantasy here and I think it is easier for people here to accept the kind of fantastic plot that Jim Garrison spun. Any rational analysis of the various contradictory statements that he made and the wild variety of "solutions" he came up with before my trial would impel a person of common sense to the conclusion that he really had no case. I would say that New Orleans provides a good culture in which Garrison's bacteria could grow.

Penthouse: Now that you have been quickly and unanimously cleared by the jury, what do you think the future effects of the case will be?

Shaw: As to the effects on me, personally, I don't think I'll ever be entirely free again. I'll be known as the man who was accused of this heinous thing. This doesn't disturb me too much, now that the truth has been legally established. It has certainly had the effect of impoverishing me, but that doesn't truly disturb me too much, either. The French have a saying that the wounds that come from money are never fatal. I suppose that I can make my living somehow as I've done in the past. It has had considerable effect as far as Mr. Garrison is concerned. His credibility on a national scale has been completely destroyed. It would be truly ironic if he now discovered some new information of a serious nature. I greatly doubt that anyone would pay him any serious mind.

Penthouse: Do you agree or disagree with the findings of the Warren Commission?

Shaw: By and large, I agree with them. I think there were certainly errors, both of omission and commission, but I think that fundamentally their conclusions were sound and valid. Just one point, that no one ever much dwelt on. There were five Republicans on the commission and two Democrats. If there had been any attempt in the report to cover up on the part of the administration, you can be sure that those Republicans would never have signed the report. They would have brought out a stinging report of their own and this would have become an issue in the next presidential campaign. I just don't believe that if there had been any kind of cover-up or whitewash or collusion that Republicans of the stature of Gerald Ford or Sherman Cooper would have gone along. By exposing this they could have put a Republican in the White House and they would have exploited it to the hilt. And that's just one reason for accepting the report.

The commission conducted something like 25,000 interviews and there were about 500 witnesses whose testimony was taken under oath. I simply cannot believe in any conspiracy that would have to run from the Dallas police on up to the president of the United States. If Mr. Garrison's ideas were taken seriously, there would have to be a cast of two or three thousand people involved. Certainly by now there would be some leaks somewhere, some death-bed confessions.

I think that it was just Lee Oswald, a poor psychotic loser, who got a lucky shot at the President. People find it difficult to believe that the great golden prince should be killed by this psychotic little man, crouching behind paste-board boxes, with a cheap mail-order rifle. But the fact that it is inappropriate doesn't mean that it didn't happen. Life is full of inappropriate things, and I believe that I am a well-qualified person to make that statement. I speak from first-hand experience.

Penthouse: Mr. Shaw, thank you.

The Tippit Assassination and David Belin's Hearing Loss: You Are the Jury! by Walt Brown, Ph.D.

Shortly after 7 p.m. on November 22,1963, Lee Harvey Oswald, who was either a malcontent Communist Castroite or an agent of the US government who had staged a successful "defection" to the USSR, was charged and arraigned for the premeditated murder of Dallas Police Officer J.D. Tippit.

The Dallas authorities at least got half the story right, and in so doing, they clearly disproved the second part of the allegation. J.D. Tippit's murder was premeditated; that being the case, it is inconceivable that Oswald, suddenly aware of his "patsy" status and on the run from the Book Depository, would compound his existing problems by going to a predetermined location and dropping the hammer on one of "Dallas's 'finest.'"

Warren Commission Counsel David Belin took the testimony and heard the evidence to prove this; he just chose not to hear what he was told, so the standard Tippit story was carved into Warren Commission cuneiform by the same witless scribes who swallowed the magic bullet and carved that fantasy on all of pharaoh's pylons and obelisks.

To his credit, Counsel Belin donated the royalties from his books, November 22, 1963: You are the Jury, and Final Disclosure; The Full Truth about the Assassination of President Kennedy, to charity. (It should strike the reader as odd that a Warren Commission staff attorney would publish a book which contained the "full truth about the assassination of President Kennedy," inasmuch as he had already put his name on the Warren Report, which we were told was the "full truth...") To his discredit, he still seems to believe the drivel contained in those books.

Many of the Warren Commission's errors and/or lapses of judgment can be attributed to the compartmentalization of their investigation. An occasional snippet (rhymes with Tippit) of testimony might be heard by one staff member without it striking an odd chord, because that counsel had not been privy to other testimony. That was not the case, of course, with the medical testimony taken by Arlen Specter, where the suborning of perjury became a fine art; nor was it true in the case of the two innocent witnesses who testified before David Belin, and gave him the Tippit case on a platter. Ever the gracious host, he declined to accept the judicial offering from those less fortunate than he.

Belin's "Hearing Loss" began on March 26, 1964, in the headquarters of the Warren Commission, the Veterans' Building at 200 Maryland Avenue NE, in Washington, a faceless bureaucratic edifice of little note where the FBI had supplied the Commission with projectors, a scale model of Dealey Plaza, and, undoubtedly, a dozen or so undetected listening devices.

On that fateful March 26, Belin would serve as the front man for Commissioners Warren, Ford, and Dulles, who were "present" for the testimony of Helen Markham, William W. Scoggins, Mrs. Jeanette Davis, and Ted Callaway.

The operative concern here is the testimony of William Scoggins, a poor wretch of a soul who had only achieved an eighth grade education before embarking on a series of menial occupations which culminated in him being a 49 year old hack driver in Dallas on November 22, 1963.

Scoggins had delivered a fare and then gone to the Gentlemen's Club, a lunchtime eatery located not far from the infamous corner of Tenth and Patton, where J.D. Tippit would die in a hail of bullets. After the preliminary questions were seen to, Belin asked Scoggins, "All right. Did you see the police car go across right in front of yours?" Scoggins answered, "Yes; he went right down the street. He come from the west, going east on east Tenth." Belin then asked a reasonable question: "Then what did you see?" Scoggins: "I noticed he stopped down there, and I wasn't paying too much attention to the man, you see, just used to see him every day..." [emphasis added to cure "hearing loss." Testimony from 3H, 324-325.]

Scoggins told Belin, in effect, that he took no notice of Tippit because he was accustomed to seeing that officer in that particular location at that general time of day on an apparently regular basis. This strongly suggests that Tippit was not there merely by chance on Black Friday, and it also suggests that some dirty dealings were done with respect to the Dallas Police radio logs (original copies of which are now available from the D.P.D. archives @ .25/page.). At 12:48 p.m., November 22, amidst what was undoubtedly the greatest personhunt of the 20th Century, and amidst radio traffic that is devoid of any non-assassination related comment, we find the routine transmission to two officers, one of whom was J.D. Tippit, to move into Oak Cliff and be "at large" for any emergencies that came in. Recall: no other officer was contacted for hours, except with respect to the assassination, and subsequently, with respect to Tippit's assassination. Clearly, the log was dummied up after the fact, as Scoggins' testimony indicated, as even a poor old cabbie knew where to find Tippit at lunchtime on most days. So he didn't have to be dispatched to that location -- he was there anyhow. We shall soon discover why.

Belin's hearing loss was even more acute seven days later, on April 2, 1964, in the office of the U.S. attorney, 301 Post Office Building, Bryan and Ervay Streets, in Dallas, Texas. On this equally inauspicious occasion, Belin was on his own, taking the testimony of Mrs. Charlie Virginia Davis. Mrs. Davis, who was sixteen on that day and had been married forseven months, lived in a dual apartment residence at 400 East Tenth Street, which is the standard address given for the Tippit murder.

Again, following preliminaries, Belin asked the reasonable question: "Where was the police car parked?" Mrs. Davis, obviously uninformed about the neighborhood, nevertheless gave an answer that would arrest anyone's attention.

Anyone but David Belin's attention, that is. She answered, "It was parked between the hedge that marks the apartment house where he lives in and the house next door." [6H 458] First we had Scoggins saying that Tippit was in the neighborhood so often that he was virtually a part of the landscape, present but unremarkable. Now we have the testimony of a witness who apparently saw Tippit at that location so often that she believed he lived there!

We know, of course, that Officer Tippit did not live there, and since there is no record that the house Mrs. Davis believed he lived in was a residence where crime was so prevalent that Officer Tippit had to investigate on such a regular basis, we must question his reason(s) for being there so often. From other research that has been done, it can be inferred that Tippit was in that neighborhood that often in pursuance of an amour impropre.

Sorry, Counsel Belin. Those people did not whisper to you. They told you things you didn't want to hear, so you pretended you didn't hear them. After Scoggins gave his indication of Tippit's regularity in the neighborhood, he told of seeing someone else down the street on foot. Belin did not pursue the "Tippit in the neighborhood" concern; he asked, "When you first saw this man, had the police car stopped or not?" [3H 325]. When Mrs. Davis testified that she saw the police car by a hedge where she believed the officer lived, she was asked by the ever-astute Belin, "Was it on your side of East 10th or the other side of the street?" [6H 458] This is a throw-away question born of "suppression" mentality, as there were no doubt piles of documents and photographs which could have answered the question about which side of the road Tippit's car -- and shortly after, his body, were on.

Let's put Belin aside [he earned it] and allow the plot to thicken. If the question "What one and only one event could distract a police department from an investigation of the shooting of the President of the United States, what would that event be?" were posed to a given number of individuals aware of police procedures and behavioral traits, the vast majority would answer simply, "The only such event would be the shooting of a fellow officer," and they would be right.

Now let's look at the timing. Despite several witnesses in the general vicinity of Houston and Elm who immediately told police of seeing a weapon in a specific window of the Texas School Book Depository, no officer arrived in that "sniper's nest" until Luke Mooney "discovered" three spent cartridges there at 1:12. Exactly ten minutes later, Constable Seymour Weitzman and Sheriff's Deputy Eugene Boone found -- well, let's call it a rifle, since they both identified it as a Mauser.

The key times here are 1:12 and 1:22. The Tippit shooting was called in at 1:18. Now that is timing! The stage prop shells and rifle are found, but then an "officer shot" call comes in, timed more perfectly than the punchlines in vaudeville, and the focus of attention moves from the TSBD to the Tippit scene. Deputy D.A. William Alexander, upon hearing the Tippit call, decided, from his vantage point at Houston and Elm, that Tippit's killer was also JFK's assailant, and led the posse to find the one man who had committed both crimes. This might have seemed a reasonable supposition if the two crimes had occurred a few minutes and a few blocks apart. But several miles and 45 minutes stretches police theorizing, given the urgent problem of having bupkis, suspect-wise, with respect to the Dealey Plaza crime before charging off to solve the one at Tenth and Patton.

Yet charge off they did. Scoggins indicated that he called the shooting in to his dispatcher, but that an ambulance arrived at the Tippit scene before he finished giving details to his dispatcher. [3H 326] Again: the timing is too slick. Ambulances do not cruise through neighborhoods as do taxis. Of equal note, while there are numerous photos of Tippit's car, which neither committed a crime nor was a victim of one, there is no picture of the dead officer on the ground, nor were chalk lines drawn as are done in every other homicide committed since Magna Charta was signed. "Well, by that time there was more policemen there than you could shake a stick at. They were all over that place..." Scoggins concluded. [3H 333]. But they were not all over the TSBD. Not any more. Not after the props were found; not after the Tippit call came in, right smack-dab-in the middle of the most half-ass crime scene search(es) in history.

What can we conclude? For openers, we can posit three very strong motives for the death of Jefferson Davis Tippit. First, his death drew already limited manpower away from the primary crime scene well before the entire area was secured or searched; second, Tippit's death gave authorities an excuse to arrest a suspect in a theater, and convince themselves, "Case Closed," to coin a phrase, on the other, more important murder that had occurred that day. And finally, it allowed the Dallas p.d. to be purged of an individual who was giving the department a black eye with his "amour impropre," which was so obvious that both a cab driver in the neighborhood and a local tenant believed Tippit to be part of that landscape.

And if those two folks knew where to find good ol' J.D., we can posit with certainty that his real killers knew where he was spending his not- so spare time.

Real killers? What about Oswald? Consider the motives: Did Oswald kill a police officer so that fewer people would search the building in which he worked, assuming perhaps that they would abandon the place altogether? Not likely. Did Oswald kill Tippit to draw attention to himself, to enhance his suspect status, or, like his Belinesque motive for the murder of JFK, because he was a Castro Red? Hardly. Lastly, did Oswald kill Tippit because he was carrying on with a paramour localized in and around Tenth and Patton? Of course not.

Which brings us back to David Belin, who defends every Warren Commission word and punctuation mark to this day, and dusts off his bow tie whenever necessary, and points to the 26 volumes of Warren Commission evidence on selected t.v. appearances and boasts of how deep the investigation went. Except, of course, for the two answers spoken to him that he ignored. So, Mr. Belin, let us seek final disclosure: I challenge any group of twelve objective Americans to read your book, November 22: You Are the Jury, and my first book, The People v. Lee Harvey Oswald, and let them be "the jury" and decide on the guilt or innocence of Lee Oswald. With all due respect, sir, you will never get a conviction. Never. And I say that with confidence because you didn't demonstrate much "conviction" in your search for the truth.

Case Closed . . . NOT! by David B. Perry

Synopsis
The premise of Case Closed is Lee Harvey Oswald and Oswald alone killed President John F. Kennedy. Oswald, an ex-Marine, malcontent and Russian defector fired three shots from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository on November 22, 1963. Oswald fired shots at Kennedy who was riding in a limousine. The first shot missed. The second passed through the President's back or neck, dependent on which version of the "evidence" you accept, and struck Governor John Connally who sat in front of Kennedy. Connally sustained wounds to his back, chest, right wrist, and left leg. The bullet finally lodged in his left thigh. The third shot struck Kennedy in the right side of the head ending his life.

Later that afternoon, a hospital orderly discovered the second bullet on a gurney at Parkland Hospital. Remarkably this bullet (Warren Commission exhibit 399) had only slight deformity at the base. Pro-conspiracy theorists refer to this missile as the "magic" bullet.

Approximately 45 minutes after the Kennedy assassination, police officer J.D. Tippit was patrolling the Oak Cliff section of Dallas. Tippit confronted Oswald who was attempting to escape. Oswald shot and killed the officer and fled to a nearby movie theater. Police converged on and sealed off the building after receiving a call from the theater's ticket seller. After a scuffle, they apprehend Oswald.

On November twenty fourth, two days after the assassination, Jack Ruby, a local night club owner shot and killed Oswald in the basement of the Dallas Police Station. Case closed.

The Purpose Of This Paper
I am puzzled by the number of authors both pro and anti-conspiracy whose books upon scrutiny reveal inconsistencies. The majority of these books have been pro-conspiracy and often sensational to boost sales. The writer will usually select testimony, recollections, interviews, evidence and research that supports his or her thesis. Un-named sources provide important clues. There is a tendency to cross cite each others work. Now we have Gerald Posner's Case Closed that unmasks some of the duplicity but unfortunately does so by using the same conventions.

I intend to site the contradictions within the text as well as between the book and Gerald's two major sources, The Warren Report and the Warren Commission's twenty-six volumes of evidence. I propose to show you can't have it both ways.

A Truly Magic Bullet
On page 328 Gerald is trying to explain Kennedy's so called "blast injury" near the sixth cervical vertebra. This we find resulted in the President's assumption of the 'Thorburn Position" in which Kennedy's arms jerked up giving the appearance of his clutching at his throat.

"The bullet [second] did not have to hit [Kennedy's] spine to cause such an injury -- entering the body at more than 2,000 feet per second and traversing very close would be enough." Here damage to the spine relates to speed of the bullet. However, ten pages later the bullet must be slow enough to fall from Connally's thigh onto the gurney with only slight deformity at the base.

How is this achieved? On page 338 we find "The 6.5mm slug left Oswald's rifle at 2,000 feet per second and hit Kennedy at the base of the neck between 1,700 and 1,800 feet per second." Mr. Posner shouldn't use one entry velocity (2,000 feet per second+) to prove spinal cord injury then change to another entry velocity (1,800 to 1,700 feet per second) to support the "magic" bullet theory.

Selectively Unstable
Page 72 - The State Department notifies The Immigration and Naturalization Service that Oswald is an "unstable person."
Page 84 - Katya Ford, one of Marina's friends, considered "[Oswald] a mental case... We all thought that at some point."
Pages 87 and 89 - George De Mohrenschildt, one of Oswald's closest friends in Dallas, considered Oswald "a harmless lunatic... was a semi-educated hillbilly... an unstable individual, [and] mixed-up."
Page 99 - Volkmar Schmidt, a German geologist introduced to Oswald by George De Mohrenschildt felt Oswald "appeared to be a violent person."
Page 184 - "..., the KGB agents thought Oswald's rantings were evidence of an 'unstable personality.'"
Page 215 - Oswald asked Dallas FBI receptionist Nanny Fenner to deliver a note to Agent "Hasty." Her recollection of the note was "Let this be a warning. I will blow up the FBI and the Dallas Police Department if you don't stop bothering my wife."

It looks as if Gerald has definitely proved Oswald capable of violent acts. So how does he explain the government's lack of interest. How did Oswald slip between the cracks of justice? It may be overwork that killed Kennedy.

Page 217 - Once FBI Agent Hosty "determined Oswald 'was not employed in a sensitive industry,' he did not take a priority over the other twenty-five to forty cases assigned to him at any one time."

Here a trained FBI agent responsible for shadowing Oswald was one of the few individuals who failed to recognize his "target" as unstable. In Case Closed I discovered Gerald often paints a sympathetic picture of government officials such as Hosty, who failed to perform responsibly. In this case he lets this agent and the FBI off the hook on page 409 with "The FBI, anxious to downplay its contacts with Oswald, withheld information from the Commission, including Agent James Hosty's receipt of a note from Oswald." Remember the FBI was also responsible for the destruction of that note.

Selectively Strong Oswald has to be one of the great Jekyll and Hyde personalities of all time. The early chapters of the book detail Oswald's ill treatment of his wife Marina. The book's index shows references to:
Oswald, Marina
Oswald's beating of, 80, 81n, 83, 85, 90, 93-94, 95-96, 97, 99, 102, 105, 109

On page 117 Oswald returns from his attempt to assassinate General Walker. He tells Marina he is sorry he missed and failed to kill the General. Marina berates him and pulls out a note he left her which in essence explains the details of the plot. Marina tells him she "would go to the police and I would have proof in the form of that note." I expected the next paragraph to detail Oswald's physical abuse of Marina. There is none.

On page 120 Oswald has decided to kill Richard Nixon. We are led to believe he wants to assassinate Nixon because the newspaper that day ran the following headline - Nixon Calls For Decision To Force Reds Out Of Cuba. Before Oswald can leave the apartment, Marina locks him in the bathroom. On the basis of previous descriptions of their relationship Marina should receive a sound thrashing. It never happens because Marina claims "... my husband... is not strong and when I want to and when I collect all my forces and want to do something very badly I am stronger than he is."

It would seem Oswald is abusive only with respect to trivial incidents. If Marina finds him in a killing mood she applies sight pressure and he becomes passive! Again and again explanations for these types of incongruities are left out of the book.

Who's Zoomin Who?
Page 275 - '"The critics, trying to exonerate Oswald of the Tippit murder, question the accuracy of the witnesses by highlighting any inconsistencies. They claim [Helen] Markham, who was excitable and at times hysterical, identified Oswald by his clothing and not his face."

Gerald is confusing the "critics" with the Warren Commission. It was Commission Counsel Joseph Ball who claimed Markham was an "utter screwball." Additionally, in order reinforce the point that Oswald is a lone gunman, Mr. Posner himself uses inconsistencies in the stories of Delphine Roberts (p. 141), Jean Hill (p. 251), Gordon Arnold (p. 257), Ed Hoffman (p. 258) and Dr. Charles Crenshaw (p. 314).

Gerald further vacillates in the use of his favorite Dealey Plaza witness, Howard Brennan. On page 247 Brennan is "leaning against a four-foot-high retaining wall..." I'm sure some will debate the validity of that statement as Brennan was actually sitting on the wall . . . a minor point (CE 477). However, Brennan sees Oswald in the sixth floor window and '"To [Brennan's] amazement the man still stood there in the window. He didn't appear to be rushed."

On page 264 the author claims "After firing the final shot, he slipped through the narrow gap he had created between the cartons of books. He hurried diagonally across the sixth floor, toward the rear staircase." Hurried? Brennan said Oswald didn't appear rushed. Diagonally? Photographs show the sixth floor randomly littered with stacks of cartons.

On page 266 Oswald's "actions [after leaving the Depository] are unquestionably those of someone in flight." Two pages later Oswald is in a cab. "Before the taxi left the station, an elderly woman approached and asked [the driver] to call her another cab. Oswald offered her that cab, apparently in the belief that it would be easier for him just to take another one than wait for [the driver] to help the woman."

Oswald has to be the only assassin to use public transportation to affect an escape. Since when does "someone in flight" give up a ride and wait for another cab? Incredibly Gerald offers no explanation for this bizarre behavior.

One Coca Cola Please:
On page 265 Oswald purchases a Coca Cola as he "was now left in the empty [Book Depository] lunch room..." after his confrontation with Dallas police officer Marrion Baker and Book Depository manager Roy Truly. Truly testified that Oswald "didn't seem excited or overly afraid or anything. He might be a bit startled, like I might have been if somebody confronted me." (3H225)

Chapter 12 has the title "He Looks Like a Maniac." This relates to a statement made by Mary Bledsoe, Oswald's former landlady. When Oswald left the depository he walked a few blocks east and caught a city bus. Mary Bledsoe was a passenger. In Mr. Posner's view her observations must be important. Here's how it looks when compared to other statements in the book:

WITNESS	LOCATION	ATTITUDE	PAGE #
Brennan	Sixth Floor	Not Rushed	264
Truly	Lunch Room	Calm	265
Bledsoe	City Bus	Manic	267
Whaley	Taxi Stand	Offered Cab to Lady	268

Amazingly the most sensational and irresponsible quote becomes this chapter's centerpiece!

Lets Go To The Audio Tape
Many researchers wonder why there are no recordings of Oswald's interrogation while he was in the hands of the Dallas Police Department. The question is certainly a valid one. Apparently this feature was not unique to law enforcement agencies. On page 354 we discover the Dallas Sheriff's office had at least twenty-two surveillance recordings of Jack Ruby. The Chicago FBI had thousands and thousands of hours of tape recordings of the top mobsters in Chicago.

So why didn't the Dallas Police employ such techniques with Oswald?

Rather than question representatives of the Dallas Police Department, Gerald relies on a secondary source. On page 342 former assistant district attorney Bill Alexander explains "We had to inform him that he did not have to make any statement, and that any he did make had to be voluntary, witnessed and reduced to writing, and could be used against him." Alexander later reveals " ... so why even take the chance since the physical evidence was so strong."

In my view Alexander has a strange concept of prisoner's rights. He assigns the police an almost incredible ability to collect strong physical evidence within hours of the crime! He describes a model law enforcement group except when it came to protecting Oswald.

I have an additional point about Gerald's extensive use of Bill Alexander. In a note on page 348 "...Alexander and two local reporters concocted a story that Oswald had been FBI informer S-179 and had been paid $200 a month." If the assistant district attorney was up to concocting stories immediately after the assassination, how much of what he has to tell can we believe?

Chapter 12
Unfortunately, Chapter 12 is shot full of contradictions such as the Bledsoe episode mentioned previously. Here are some more examples:
Oswald is unprepared for his moment with destiny. He only had four bullets. "They were all he had left from his last practice session." This brings up several questions all unanswered. 1) Where and when was his last practice session? 2) What happened to the shell cases he left or gathered from that session? 3) Where is the box or any box for that matter that contained the shells? and 4) Where is the gun cleaning kit?

After the Walker shooting Oswald claimed he buried his rifle in the ground (pg. 113/114)! Lee is a marksman who never owned equipment to clean his weapons. Wouldn't Oswald, living as a pauper, collect his shell casings to save expenses? The book never addresses these issues.

Page 275 - In reference to the Tippit shooting - "The first call reporting the shooting came in to the police at 1:16 when two witnesses, T.F. Bowley and Domingo Benavides, ran immediately to Tippit's car and called it in on the police radio."

1) Benavides testified before the Warren Commission that he did not immediately run to Tippit's car.
2) Benavides never called in on the radio because he didn't know how to operate it.
3) Bowley who also waited before approaching the cruiser was the one who actually made the call.

Benavides testified before the Warren Commission. The Warren Report (WR pg. 166) credits him for a call he never made. T. F. Bowley, the man who actually radioed in, was never called to testify. He is not mentioned in the report. Why? Maybe because Bowley claimed he looked at his watch at the time of the shooting and it read 1:10. Under the government's time line Oswald would not be able to reach the scene by 1:10.

Incidentally, Benavides maintained he couldn't identify Tippit's assailant. Because of this the police never took him to the station to view the lineup.

On page 278 we discover "Oswald left behind critical ballistics evidence. Benavides and Virginia and Barbara Davis found four shells that Oswald had emptied from his gun while escaping. These shells were matched, to the exclusion of any other gun, to Oswald's revolver, which he had with him when captured just blocks away."

Technically these three sentences are accurate. But as with other information gleaned from The Warren Report, all is not as it appears.
1) The Commission never asked Benavides to view and identify the shells that he found.
2) Benavides turned his two shell casings over to Dallas police officer JM. Poe.
3) Gerald has not revealed what Poe said when asked to identify the shells as the ones he received from Benavides. "Poe indicated he marked the two shells with 'JMP' but could not find his identification on any of the shells." (24H415)

4) What did the Davis' have to say? "Barbara and Virginia Davis could not identify their shells when asked to do so." (24H414)

Case Closed never mentions the following incident. The Warren Commission asked the opinion of firearms expert Cortland Cunningham concerning the one bullet removed from Tippit's body immediately after the shooting. The Warren Commission referred to this bullet as exhibit Q13. Cunningham states "The bullet Q13 is so badly mutilated that there are not sufficient individual microscopic characteristics present for identification purposes." (24H263)

What did the Commission do with this piece of information? Instead of using Cunningham's statement for the final report they chose instead that of Dr. Joseph D. Nicol. Read on and you will understand why. Nicol claimed "This bullet (Q13) was fired from the same weapon that fired the test bullets to the exclusion of all other weapons."

More Magic With The Rifle
Early in the book (pages 20 and 21) Sgt. Zahm and Major Eugene Anderson, two Marine marksmen, claim Oswald had "an easy shot." Unfortunately The Warren Commission never asked either gentleman to reproduce their effortless blast.

We must wait until page 410 to discover that "In replicating the firing of the Carcano [rifle], and figuring trajectory angles, the Commission used FBI tests that had a platform at the incorrect height when compared to the sixth floor of the Book Depository."

This is an understatement. I am not a surveyor nor an expert in geometry. However, I tend to believe that reducing the height from approximately 60 feet [the window] to 30 feet [the platform] and allowing the marksmen to fire at stationary rather than moving targets would tend to distort the result. (3H444)

Those "writers who present cases of guilt by association supported by rumor an innuendos" (Page 472)
Page 277 "A high ranking Dallas police official who was a member of the force in 1963 told the author there was another witness who had positively identified Oswald as the shooter [of J.D. Tippit] but was never publicly identified. Evidently, the man was married and had been at a house in Oak Cliff visiting his mistress for an afternoon tryst."

Page 314 "A senior Dallas doctor who is a close [Dr. Charles] Crenshaw friend admitted to the author, 'If you spend time with him, he starts to confabulate, or plot or plan, and that sort of thing.'"

I think serious research requires the naming of sources particularly when they are revealed as important witnesses or are used to impugn an individual's character.

The NEW Autopsy
Originally, I believed Doctors Boswell, Humes and Finck carried out the Kennedy autopsy. After reading Case Closed I have to conclude it was actually performed by Doctor Michael Baden. Why? Because there are 18 pages that reference the three autopsy doctors while Baden gets 15.

Overall Mr. Posner and Doctor Baden have little regard for these physicians. Between pages 300 and 304 we find Humes and Boswell were not trained in the forensic aspect of autopsies, Finck had never done a gunshot wound autopsy, a proper examination should have taken two to three days, and a lot of things weren't done.

It seems the trio was so ineffective there is no need to deal with them. There is more space devoted to getting certain Parkland doctors to recant on the neck wound. In their Warren Commission depositions Parkland doctors Baxter (6H42), Jones (6H55) and Peters (6H71) thought this wound was one of entrance. Doctor Malcolm Perry maintained the wound was of entry during questioning at a press conference but claimed he didn't have enough facts when he testified before the Warren Commission (6H11). On page 306 we find Jones and Baxter have changed their minds because they didn't know about the back wound. At page 305 Perry claims the media took his remarks "out of context." I can't find a reference to Peter's testimony.

Mr. Posner spends little time with the autopsy doctors. And of course, the autopsy doctors have judiciously avoided any reference to Connally's wounds and in essence refuse to discuss the "magic" bullet theory. Why? Because both Doctors Humes (2H376) and Finck (2H382) testified before the Warren Commission that the bullet retrieved from Connally could not possibly have been the one that hit Kennedy in the back or neck. Gerald decries witnesses who change their stories. So what of these many doctors?

Gerald did re-index the Warren Volumes (page 419). He had to know about the Humes and Finck testimony yet he never mentions it. We are left with apologies for the confusion created by a bungled autopsy.

Maybe the answer lies in the footnote on page 419. Gerald discovered by re-indexing the volumes that Sylvia Meagher reflected bias in citing areas where "Oswald was innocent." I suggest the author is guilty of the same technique. He failed to instruct us on the doctors contradictory testimony.

Conclusion:
With the exception of Gerald Ford and David Belin, I know of very few individuals who believe The Warren Commission's investigation was adequate. Case Closed discusses this very point on pages 409 through 413. Somewhat sympathetically we hear that the FBI and ClA "held out" on the Commission. Walter Cronkite feels this "weakened the credibility of The Warren Report." Walter misses the mark. We all should be concerned with the credibility of some members of the Commission for selective use of information to support a pre-conceived conclusion. We should also be concerned with the credibility of many authors and witnesses be they pro or anti-conspiracy for they have done exactly the same thing.

Of course this book does not close the case. It is merely another man's theory. Some individuals claim "we must get the word out on this awful, terrible, unfair and deceptive book!"

Baloney... on this issue the public does not believe the Warren Commission, Walter Cronkite, the lone nut theory or the single bullet theory and they are not about to believe Gerald Posner.

Many of our self appointed spokespersons don't care a whit about discussing the merits or faults of the book. They only want to get their faces and voices on TV or radio. They have spent years praising each other for their eloquence and have lost all debating skills if they possessed any to begin with. They pop up like prairie dogs on any tabloid TV show that will have them. They have gotten fat and happy hanging out at the autograph tables of various symposia, hoping to be recognized as an expert. More than likely their public rantings are doing more to sell this book than the extensive efforts of Random House's publicity staff.

If this case does get closed it will be through the efforts of the real researchers who toil in silence. They are the ones who want to see justice done.

The Final Conspiracy - Obsessed With A 30-Year-Old Murder, JFK Assassinologists Go To Court To Silence One Another by Rebecca Sherman

Attorney-at-law Brad Kizzia is hardly able to contain himself. Punching his phone to put the caller on hold - in mid-conversation - he sputters excitedly to a visitor in his office: "Do you know who this is?"

"It's Mark Lane!" Kizzia blurts, unable to await a guess. "The Mark Lane." When the name elicits only a blank stare, the stocky, rust-haired barrister twirls his executive chair around. "Over there on the bookshelf!" he exclaims, wagging an index finger at the overstuffed rows, a veritable library of such JFK-assassination classics as High Treason, JFK: Breaking the Silence, and On the Trail of the Assassins - one of the two books on which Oliver Stone based his movie, JFK. Among the many esteemed tomes: an autographed copy of Rush to Judgment, published in 1966 by, of course, Mark Lane, the dean of "assassinologists" - and the very same man who is now dangling on interminable hold.

Lane is calling Kizzia, a 39-year-old insurance and personal-injury litigator at the conservative downtown Dallas firm of Strasburger & Price, to announce his plans to file a lawsuit. Not about an accident or malpractice claim, but because Kizzia shares Lane's passion: proving that the assassination of America's 35th president was the product of a sinister, and as yet unearthed, conspiracy.

It is no accident that this lawyer has pinned a poster-sized diagram of Dealey Plaza on the wall of his 44th-floor office, which offers a clear view of the assassination scene, including Dealey Plaza, the former Texas School Book Depository, and the edge of the grassy knoll.

And it is no accident that Kizzia is at the center of the latest twisted wave of the 30-year-old controversy surrounding the martyred president: he represents conspiracy theorists who are suing other conspiracy theorists for defamation - and who allege that the attacks upon them are part of yet another conspiracy. Jokes Kizzia: "You could call what I'm doing, 'On the Trail of the Character Assassins.'"

The assassination of John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963 in Dallas has inspired more than 250 books - and at least as many theories. Dissatisfied with the Warren Commission conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, serious researchers, buffs, and assorted flakes have made their various cases for the involvement of the CIA, the FBI, Soviet intelligence agents, anti-Castro Cubans, the Mafia, and extraterrestrial beings.

Kizzia himself blames the Cubans. He believes exiles sent to overthrow Castro during the Bay of Pigs fiasco were angry at Kennedy for abandoning them - and conspired to kill JFK to provoke a war against Cuba. "It didn't work," Kizzia explains. "Because the CIA and the FBI covered it up. I think a lot of well intentioned people participated in the cover-up because they thought they were doing their country a service by avoiding World War III."

Though he admits he snatched up the law office with the assassination vista when the opportunity presented itself, Kizzia insists, "I don't spend hours looking out the window, wondering." Likewise, he says he resists the temptation of a lunchtime stroll two blocks away to the scene of the crime - including the Sixth Floor exhibit, featuring more than 400 photos and an inside view of the sniper's perch. "I've only been there twice since it opened. Really.

"I'm not obsessed," he declares, before pausing to contemplate his words. "Of course, obsessed people would deny that they are obsessed."

Rhetorical characterizations aside, Kizzia is clearly part of the passion that keeps the Kennedy assassination controversy alive.

"I've been thinking for a long time about writing an open letter to District Attorney Vance," Kizzia announces brightly, "and asking him to reopen the investigation of the case. I know he lost the Railey case, and maybe he wouldn't want to take on something as controversial as this during reelection, but there were three murders in Dallas County - Kennedy, Officer Tippet, and Oswald. Ruby was prosecuted for murdering Oswald, but there is no statute of limitations for the other murders."

"People have written books claiming they participated in conspiracies to murder the president. They either need to be exposed as frauds or they deserve to be prosecuted."

Just a third-grader when the president was shot, Brad Kizzia became "totally fascinated" by the assassination - "as a murder mystery and as a cover-up"--while a political science major at Austin College in Sherman. That's when he wrote a term paper on the case and invited Mark Lane - the Mark Lane - to speak on campus about his theory of CIA involvement.

That's also when Kizzia, who picked up Lane from the airport, recognized that not all his peers shared all his passion. "The turnout was disappointing," Kizzia remembers. "I guess not that many people at that time were as interested in the assassination as I was."

Undaunted, Kizzia through the years became an avid student of JFK conspiracy theories. In 1991, he noticed a newspaper ad for the first annual "Assassination Symposium on Kennedy," or "ASK," being held in Dallas.

It is there Brad Kizzia made the connections that would make him the man for unhappy conspiracy theorists to call. It is there that he met Tom Wilson - and heard about what we shall call "The Second-Gunman-Detecting Machine."

When Tom Wilson invented his device, officially called "Image Processing with Computer Analyses Systems," he harbored only mundane industrial ambitions. Wilson, after all, was a retired engineer living in Murrysville, Pennsylvania - about as far from the 20th century's foremost murder mystery as one can get.

He had been tinkering with his machine for eight years by 1988, when a revelation struck him one crisp evening, as surely as it befell Archimedes fitting in his bathtub. "l was in my office doing repetitive tests on the machine I had invented for my work in the metals industry," Wilson, now 61, recalled in a recent telephone interview with the Observer. "It could detect bare metal, or flaws, in metal products. When that happened, the monitor would register a flash, or sparkle. But I had to run it over and over again. I was bored."

Wilson ejected the metals test tape and popped in a video of a TV documentary about the 25th anniversary of JFK's assassination. This moment of boredom would change his life forever.

When the famous Mary Moorman photograph of the grassy knoll appeared on his screen, flashes and sparkles materialized behind the knoll's wooden fence. "That meant an object behind the fence was metal," explains Wilson. "But the area behind the fence was dark. Why would something shine if there is nothing there?"

To find out, Wilson, a metals-industry consultant, abandoned all his projects and concentrated on testing the Moorman photograph. Months later, he emerged triumphant: "Yes, there was a metal object behind the fence," he recalled. "And yes, there was a person firing a weapon."

Additional studies, he insists, proved that another shooter was lurking behind the fence: "I'm not going to say I know who did it or why," Wilson says. "But it was proof there was a conspiracy."

Wilson felt certain he had cracked the case that had stumped the nation's top criminal investigators. But there was a problem: Wilson couldn't find anyone who believed him - or would even listen to his claims. Adamant that he would not profit from his discovery, nor allow its exploitation, Wilson says he turned down offers by tabloid TV shows that wanted to break the story. Instead, he solicited the attention of Dan Rather and The New York Times, among others. "I had this hard evidence," he says. "I tried to call, to write letters. I didn't hear back."

Despite the rebuffs, Wilson continued his research. But now, there were other problems. Measurements and photographs he had taken at Dealey Plaza in November 1990 didn't match his other data. So on the morning of December 17, 1990, Wilson commandeered his wife Marcelyn, several of her metal pie pans - to which he had affixed various sizes of fabric and glass "targets" - and jumped on a plane back to Dallas.

Once at Dealey Plaza, Wilson, a heavy- set man with thinning gray hair, instructed his wife to stand holding the pie pans in front of her face while he photographed her in three critical spots; the pedestal next to the grassy knoll where Henry Zapruder filmed the fatal shots; the site across from there where Mary Moorman photographed the grassy knoll; and smack in the middle of Elm Street (and busy traffic) the location where Kennedy's head would have taken the fatal shot as he passed by the grassy knoll.

A bewildered Oliver Stone, at work on JFK, watched this odd couple from the safety of the sidewalk in front of the old School Book Depository. "Do you mind if I ask you what you're doing?" a member of Stone's crew asked Marcelyn as she scurried to find her next cue.

"I can't tell you," the inventor's wife responded. Eventually, Wilson recognized Stone and approached him. And soon, according to Wilson, the couple and the filmmaker were sharing hot dogs and swapping opinions about the precise location of the presumptive assassin (or assassins) who fired from behind the wooden fence.

Weeks later in Murrysville, Wilson received an offer from Stone to consult on his movie-in-progress. Wilson worked, for the most part, authenticating photographs. "I never did see a movie star," he complains.

But the Stone connection did help win Wilson a feature role before the first annual Assassination Symposium on Kennedy, in November 1991. Invited to speak, he says he paid his own way. "It was my first chance at a legitimate forum," Wilson explains.

The annual symposium now attracts thousands of assassination buffs to the Hyatt Hotel and Dealey Plaza. "Assassinologists," as ASK organizers say their participants prefer to be called, pay a $175 registration fee for four days of panel discussions on such topics as "JFK 101: An Assassination Primer," "Intelligence Community and Defectors," "Eyewitnesses," and "New Leads and Revelations."

Although most speakers had been allotted but a single hour, Wilson's 1991 talk lasted more than two hours. "I was going to pull the plug on him," remembers an ASK organizer, "but I was told if I did, the crowd would riot. They were completely mesmerized by what he was saying."

A Dallas Times Herald reporter named Mark Potok, himself an assassination buff, covered Wilson's talk and wrote an article about it published in the Times Herald on November 16, 1991. In the story, Dr. Cyril Wecht, a noted forensic pathologist and former president of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, was quoted calling Wilson's work "beautiful."

But others were less generous. Their statements, as quoted in the Herald, would incite a lawsuit.

"It's a series of massive lies," declared David Belin, counsel to the Warren Commission, according to the Herald story. "The man is basically making an outrageous claim." The Warren Commission had, of course, concluded that the assassination was the work of Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone. Like everyone else with an opinion on the subject, Belin had offered his point of view in print - with two books that supported the single assassin theory, November 22: You Are The Jury, and Final Disclosure: The Full Truth About the Assassination of President Kennedy.

The Times Herald reporter also sought comment from Robert Blakey, chief counsel and staff director of the House Select Committee on Assassinations; the committee had concluded that Oswald most likely did not act alone. Blakey, who has offered his own conspiracy theory in a book titled Plot to Kill the President (later reissued under the title Fatal Hour: The Assassination of President Kennedy by Organized Crime), was quoted saying about Wilson's theory: "You know the saying among computer people, 'garbage in, garbage out'? This is garbage."

Wilson, who previously had no standing in the world of assassination theorists, was unwilling to let these attacks on his new-found stature go unchallenged. "You don't have to take this, you know," Wilson says a friend told him after he'd returned home to Murrysville. A short time later, Wilson received a letter from Brad Kizzia, who had heard him speak and had read the newspaper criticism of Wilson's presentation. After mulling over the matter, he had hopped on a plane back to Dallas and was sitting in Brad Kizzia's office.

Stone's movie, JFK, had just come out amid a storm of controversy, and Kizzia had written an opinion piece in The Dallas Morning News defending the film, for which Wilson had served as a consultant. That allied the lawyer with Wilson - and against Belin, who had aggressively attacked Stone's film.

In most intellectual debates - particularly the dicey business of unproven conspiracy theories - proponents of various points of view attack one another freely without fear of litigation. Theorists, after all, are supposed to offer sharply contrasting opinions about public controversy.

But Wilson wasn't going to take it. Angered by the published comments in the Times Herald article, in November 1992 he filed a defamation suit against both Blakey and Belin. Brad Kizzia is handling the litigation for Wilson.

Belin could not be reached for comment.

Blakey, reached at his office at Notre Dame School of Law in South Bend, Indiana, where he is a tenured professor, declined to talk directly about the case. But he noted the oddity - and potentially chilling effect - of the litigation: "The debate on the Kennedy Assassination ought to be free and robust. If people get sued every time a reporter calls them on the phone, then that severely limits that freedom."

On April 13, 1993, Kizzia, suing one conspiracy theorist on behalf of another, flew to South Bend to depose Blakey. Though the deposition was ostensibly being taken to determine whether Blakey could be sued in Texas, Kizzia took the opportunity to quiz Blakey about CIA memos and retouched Life Magazine photos of Oswald. "Tell me how that's related to jurisdiction," Blakey demanded, refusing to answer the question.

Kizzia also quizzed David Belin, in an April 7, 1993 deposition taken to help determine proper jurisdiction, about photographs of the grassy knoll and Dealey Plaza. "Do you feel that all persons who take issue with the Warren report are liars?" Kizzia asked. Belin's attorney advised him not to answer because the question had nothing to do with jurisdiction. Kizzia pressed on. "...Did you come into possession of or did it come to your attention that there was, I believe, a CIA memo in 1967 that was distributed instructing and encouraging agents on how to counteract critics of the Warren Commission?" he asked. Belin again declined to answer.

Through an April 17, 1993 affidavit, even Oliver Stone makes a cameo appearance in Wilson's lawsuit. The affidavit reads, in part: "John W. Belin has made speeches, given public appearances (including appearances on network television), and has written letters and articles that were published in newspapers and magazines around the country which have attacked me, the movie JFK, and people associated with the movie. He has unjustly called us liars and profiteers...Mr. Belin has apparently undertaken a nationwide campaign to strike back at those who voice opinions different from his own in connection with the JFK assassination.

"I, like most Americans, want to know the truth regarding the assassination of President Kennedy, but the process of determining the truth through public discussion is undermined when people are discouraged from disputing the so-called 'official' government versions of the truth because of fear that their reputations and integrity will be smeared by influential people."

Stone was not available to address the issue of how Wilson's decision to sue critics - including a prominent Stone critic - might promote "the process of determining the truth through public discussion." Stone's publicist Mark Pogachefsky, says the filmmaker has no comment. "I think we'll just let the affidavit speak for itself," he says.

Wilson's suit was recently dismissed for lack of personal jurisdiction; federal judge Barefoot Sanders ruled that none of the defendants had sufficient ties to Texas. But Wilson is appealing the decision. And he says he intends to refile in Pennsylvania if the appeal isn't successful.

"I am willing to stand up under oath and say exactly what I have found that positively shows there was a conspiracy," the inventor of the "Second-Gunman-Detecting Machine" declares from his home in Murrysville, Pennsylvania. "If people want to do the same, we'll see who's telling the truth."

Brad Kizzia holds an elegant black and white book in his hands and opens it from back to front. Although the volume was a gift from the author, it is the only book in his collection that Kizzia hasn't read - and for good reason. The book is written in Japanese. Its title, however, is in English: JFK: Conspiracy of Silence, by Charles Crenshaw, M.D.

The English version is a different matter. Kizzia has scrutinized every word of the Fort Worth doctor's book; after all, Dr. Crenshaw is his client.

The book was published last year with help from Cleburne-based assassination researcher Gary Shaw - who serves as director of the JFK Assassination Information Center - and writer Jens Hansen. The book is mostly a personal account of what Dr. Crenshaw, then a third-year resident at Parkland Memorial Hospital, says happened on November 22, 1963.

Crenshaw was one of 15 doctors who played a role in attempting to save the president's life - he helped insert and drip an IV into the president's leg. Two days later, he says, he assisted in resuscitating Lee Harvey Oswald after Jack Ruby shot him.

Crenshaw, now 60 and the semi-retired head of surgery at Tarrant County's John Peter Smith Hospital in Fort Worth, claims several controversial facts in his book. First, he maintains that two bullets struck Kennedy from the front - a critical point for conspiracy theorists, since Oswald could have only shot Kennedy from the rear. According to Crenshaw, one bullet hit Kennedy in the neck and another in the temple near the hairline, creating a massive wound at the back of the head. Crenshaw not only claims to have seen the wound himself; he says the autopsy photographs have been altered to disguise the evidence.

While one other physician who treated Kennedy backs Crenshaw's published account, several other doctors who cared for the president have said they do not recall such a head wound. Much of the harshest criticism of Crenshaw's book - and the words that would spur him to sue for defamation, according to Kizzia - appeared in the May 27, 1992 issue of JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association.

David Breo, the author of one of the JAMA articles, interviewed the two doctors who performed the autopsy and four doctors who treated Kennedy at Parkland on November 22, 1963. Writes Breo: "...no one can say with certainty what some suspect - Crenshaw was not even in the trauma room; none of the four [doctors] recalls ever seeing him in the room." Breo quoted Dr. Charles Baxter, a surgeon who treated Kennedy at Parkland, as saying: "I've known [Crenshaw] since he was three years old. His claims are ridiculous. The only motive I can see is a desire for personal recognition and monetary gain."

On April 9, 1992, the Dallas Morning News published an opinion column by free-lance writer Lawrence Sutherland, who attended a press conference Crenshaw called in Dallas. Sutherland's column repeated some of the statements in Breo's JAMA report and included some of Sutherland's own choice rhetoric: "Conspiracy of Silence is peddling lies."

Although Crenshaw's book stayed on the New York Times best-seller list for months, Crenshaw claims that the JAMA article and the Sutherland column defamed him. He had been carved up by many of the same critics who attacked Oliver Stone.

In March 1993, Crenshaw and Shaw filed a defamation suit against the Morning News and Sutherland. (The other author, Jens Hansen, did not file suit. He told the Observer, "I didn't sue because I didn't feel like I had been damaged.") Two months later, Crenshaw and Shaw added four more defendants to the suit: the American Medical Association, which publishes JAMA; JAMA's editor, George Lundberg; writer David Breo; and, finally, Oliver Stone's archnemesis, David Belin. Belin was named because of interview excerpts published in the News on May 17, 1992, according to Kizzia. In part the story quoted Belin as saying: "I think that the press should demand of the Dr. Crenshaws of the world, of the Oliver Stones of the world, or the Mark Lanes of the world, full financial disclosure. Because hundreds of thousands of dollars have been made out of the assassination."

Not exactly a vicious example of character assassination. But enough for Crenshaw and Shaw, whose suit accuses all the defendants of "individually and/or in concert and/or conspiracy" making defamatory comments."

Kizzia says the published criticism of JFK: Conspiracy of Silence in JAMA and the News damaged book sales as well as Crenshaw's reputation. "In the JAMA article, it suggests that Dr. Crenshaw wasn't even there," declares Kizzia. "There is no question he was there and participated with the resuscitation efforts."

On that issue, Kizzia has a point. In fact, transcripts of the 1964 Warren Commission hearings show two witnesses identified Crenshaw as having participated in the attempt to save Kennedy's life. The New York Times and Columbia Journalism Review also have both criticized the JAMA article for its sloppy research. It failed to note that several doctors had changed their stories over the years since the assassination; writer Breo even interviewed his own editor, George Landberg.

Kizzia complains that Dr. Crenshaw was not interviewed for the JAMA article. But when asked if Crenshaw would comment for this story, Kizzia said his client was unavailable. "I think Dr. Crenshaw was really shocked by the responses to the book," Kizzia says. "I know it really hurt him personally and emotionally."

Kizzia notes that the AMA called a press conference to promote the Breo article. "Was there a conspiracy to silence Dr. Crenshaw?" he asks rhetorically. "I don't know. I do know that there are groups and organizations that have an agenda, and Dr. Crenshaw is certainly a threat to that agenda." The AMA is one such group, Kizzia maintains; he declines to list others.

Through their attorneys, Lundberg and Breo declined to comment on the suit. David Belin also did not respond to requests for an interview about this matter.

Gary Shaw, a 55-year-old Cleburne architect and well-known assassinologist, insists he and Crenshaw filed suit as a last resort after the News and JAMA declined to publish their rebuttals and letters to the editor. The critiques of the book focus on Crenshaw. He says: "We have no problem with anyone who has a different approach to the assassination case. What we have a problem with is personal attacks."

Shaw, who grew up in Cleburne, says he made frequent trips to Dallas before Kennedy was killed to drink in Jack Ruby's Carousel Club. "I heard the scuttlebutt that Ruby was Mafia and to be careful around him," he says. Shaw, who was 25 years old when Kennedy was killed, says he doesn't know who killed Kennedy. "I'm certain that if Lee Harvey Oswald was given a trial he would have been found probably not guilty. We've really not been told the truth by the government. There has been a cover-up."

Brad Kizzia's call from Mark Lane - the Mark Lane - who makes his living as a Washington attorney, concerned a suit Lane wants to file against the hottest JFK author of them all: Gerald Posner, whose best-selling 1993 book, Case Closed, made the August 30 cover of U.S. News and World Report.

From his law office, Lane declared he plans to sue Random House, Inc., publisher of Posner's book Case Closed, "for millions and millions of dollars" this week in U.S. district court. The basis for the suit, according to Lane: a promotional ad published in the August 24, 1993 New York Times that shows Lane in a photograph with other conspiracy theorists, including Oliver Stone. The photo's caption reads: "Guilty of misleading the American public." Lane says he is preparing a suit against Gerald Posner for "the incredible errors in his book."

"I'm not settling the case, either," Lane says at fever pitch. "Not unless Random House wants to give me the publishing house so we can publish books by eyewitnesses to the assassination whose books can't get published."

Lane, who says he will handle his own case with help from another Washington attorney, was calling Brad Kizzia because the Dallas lawyer has already fired his first legal salvo at Posner - on behalf of Dr. Charles Crenshaw. Case Closed quotes "a senior Dallas doctor who is a close Crenshaw friend" in distinctly unflattering terms: "If you spend time with [Crenshaw], he starts to confabulate, or a plot or plan, and that sort of thing. We are not dealing with a normal individual...He has had a stroke and can't operate anymore. I think it is a bag of worms of ego, going over the hill, the last hurrah." In September, Kizzia fired off a letter to Posner and Random House demanding an "immediate retraction and apology" for "the outrageously defamatory comments" about Crenshaw in Case Closed.

Posner's book attempts to dismantle the conspiracy theories set up by Lane, Crenshaw, and others over the last 30 years; much to the dismay of many active assassinologists, he concludes that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

"It is a book filled with errors," Lane says. Then, dishing out the most stinging insult a conspiracy theorist can offer, he adds: "It's very possibly the worst thing since the Warren Commission published their report."

Posner, resting for a few minutes between endless rounds of radio and television interviews to promote Case Closed, laughs when he hears that Lane intends to sue him. "He's been saying that for two months now. Every time I turn on the radio, he's saying it.

"Let me guess: Did he say my book was worse than the Warren report?"

Posner, saying that "truth is the absolute defense," insists he wasn't prepared for the response to his book. "It's created a lot more controversy than I hoped. This shows you how far our country has come. Thirty years ago, Lane was considered the skeptic. Now, when I'm the one who's backing the Warren report, I'm considered the skeptic."

Posner muses for a moment about the prospect of one author trying to silence another by going to court. "What is it about Case Closed? It's almost as if he doesn't want anybody to read it."

This week, Brad Kizzia - appropriately enough - will moderate a panel discussion of doctors and lawyers during the third annual Assassination Symposium on Kennedy. Norman Mailer, who is writing a book about Oswald, will deliver the keynote speech at the Hyatt Hotel.

It is clear that, within this gathering of conspiracy theorists, Gerald Posner has assumed the status of the assassinologists' antichrist.

Tom Wilson, for example, whose invention caused such a stir in Dallas two years ago, is devastated that a story Newsweek planned to write about him was replaced by a story on Posner's new book. "Everything Posner says is black, I say is white. It's very difficult to take."

Wilson suspects the decision to pull the story about him might have been, yes, part of an effort to conceal the truth. "I have a feeling certain interests don't want this [information] to come forward," Wilson says. Then, in a moment of self-insight, he adds: "You can get so paranoid with this."

An employee with the symposium, who didn't want her name used, says Posner has been invited to speak this year but may not come because Norman Mailer, who is writing a book about Oswald, will be speaking. Posner confirms that he won't be coming and that Mailer's presence - as well as the ASK group's hostility toward his book - are among the reasons.

The symposium staffer says Lane is not welcome. "He came to the first one to speak and stood up and told all of us we were exploiting Kennedy's death and trying to make money off of the assassination." Ironically, Lane's 1966 best-seller, Rush To Judgment, is considered the first commercial success for a conspiracy theorist. Hundreds of other books about conspiracy theories have followed. Hundreds more are surely to come.

So the gathering known as "ASK" - dedicated to airing divergent views about the assassination of President Kennedy - will take place without the presence of several key figures on both sides of one of America's longest-running historical debates.

"Some days," says the symposium staffer, "I think they are all loony."

JFK ASSASSINATION HACKS by L. Fletcher Prouty

There has grown up around us during the past three decades the "Cult of Assassination Hacks." These are the writers of little experience, who know little about the subject, and who spend their time frivolously, and libelously doing their best to demean those who do. Many are paid to prostitute themselves in such a career. One of these, pre-eminent in this sordid game, is Edward Jay Epstein.

In the last issue of Probable Cause, June 1994, there is a reprint of "JFK: The Second Coming of Jim Garrison" by Epstein. In an effort to assure the reader of his erudition, he leads off with a quote from Karl Marx, "All great events and personalities in world history happen twice. The first time as tragedy, the second as farce." Epstein succumbs to that idea by adding a wild comment for no reason at all, "Oliver Stone's film JFK is a case in point." So Epstein prefers to be recognized as a Marxist.

Behind this bit of scholastic whimsy, Epstein gets down to his dirty work, his true goal and foul duty. He sets out to demean, to libel and to mis-quote Oliver Stone, Jim Garrison, and myself.

He proves himself to be a very brave man. Oliver Stone is perfectly capable of handling such attacks; Jim Garrison has died; and Epstein must have assumed that "Man X" would not be able to fight back. I wish to assure him that "Man X," this writer, is alive, well, and able to fight back especially against uninformed, somewhat ignorant types such as Edward Jay. I challenge him to an open debate...any day.

There is no point at present to counter every lie and slander Epstein has contrived, although that would be a pleasure. However one subject he butchered stands alone because of its significance. Epstein begins with the implication, a la Marx, that the film "JFK" is a "Farce." We know it is not!

One thing must be made clear. During the three decades that the unmitigated farce, popularly known as the "Report of the Warren Commission" has held sway, little or nothing has been done to actually solve the murder of President John F. Kennedy. Only one man has risen during those three decades to bring that case into a legitimate court and to prosecute one or more of the conspirators. This man was Jim Garrison. Against horrible opposition from the highest sources, and including the murder of potential witnesses for his case, he did in court and in his remarkable books, more than anyone else for the cause of justice.

The law of the land requires that all murder cases be tried in the state where they occur. The murder of President Kennedy has never been tried in a court in the state of Texas. Garrison attempted the next best thing. He tried in Louisiana.

Secondly, during these same three decades no one had made a serious and meaningful attempt to bring this case before the public in such a way that the exposure would totally demolish the contrived 26 volume mythology of the Warren Commission. This was the objective of Oliver Stone, his loyal cast and production team, and his writers with the film "JFK." His objective was not to solve t