The Non-Mysterious “Mystery Deaths”
Penn Jones, former editor of the Texas weekly Midlothian Mirror, originated the popular theory that witnesses to the Kennedy assassination who knew too much were being silenced by an unidentified murder squad. Jones, who believes there were nine assassins at Dealey Plaza, is the author of four self-published books on the case. By 1967, he had compiled a list of eighteen people connected to the assassination who had suffered unnatural deaths. Initially, The London Sunday Times used Jones’s list of eighteen to conclude that the odds against them being dead through foul play within three years of the assassination was one hundred thousand trillion to one.1 But The Times had not taken into account the huge number of people included in the Warren Commission investigation and discovered, after publishing its first edition, that its calculation of the odds was “a careless journalistic mistake.”2 Although it almost immediately issued a retraction, critics often cite the original, incorrect figure.* And Jones continued to expand his list. By 1983, he said there were “over 100 murders, suicides, and mysterious deaths, the strange fate of those who saw Kennedy shot.”3 Sylvia Meagher, in Accessories After the Fact, concluded that “the witnesses appear to be dying like flies.”4 In Crossfire, one of two books upon which the movie JFK was based, author Jim Marrs provided the most comprehensive list. He named 103 mystery deaths.5* In 1991, when NBC’s Today show ran a week of segments on Oliver Stone’s JFK, it concluded by scrolling dozens of names from Marrs’s mystery list on the screen, accompanied by somber music.
Marrs’s figure is culled from among more than 10,000 people who were connected in any way to the Warren Commission investigation, the House Select Committee during the late 1970s, press coverage of the case, and the network of private citizens who are full-time assassination researchers. It would be surprising if 101 people out of some 10,000 had not died in unnatural ways. Yet upon closer inspection, most of the 101 did not even die mysteriously.
No major writer or investigator on the case—even those trying to expose dangerous conspiracies—has died an unusual death. All of the earliest critics, like Mark Lane, Edward Epstein, Harold Weisberg, David Lifton, Josiah Thompson, and Mary Ferrell, are alive and well. Even Penn Jones, who first published information about the deaths, was never bothered and is now seventy-eight years old. No one tried to eliminate Jim Garrison or any of his staff during their judicial probe, nor was Oliver Stone bothered when he “exposed” the government and sanctified Garrison. The key witnesses who claimed to see a second gunman at Dealey Plaza—Jean Hill, Malcolm Summers, Gordon Arnold, and Ed Hoffman—are all alive. Fundamental conspiracy witnesses like Beverly Oliver, who linked Ruby and Oswald, and others like Delphine Roberts, who tied Oswald to Guy Banister and David Ferrie, are still living. Almost thirty men named as the “second shooter” by conspiracy buffs are alive. Frank Ragano, sixty-nine years old, has reportedly sold his manuscript that says he passed the “hit” from Hoffa to Marcello and Trafficante. Carlos Marcello, the New Orleans crime boss who some say carried out an assassination contract for the CIA, enjoyed his retirement until his natural death in 1993, at the age of eighty-three.
What are the causes of death that apparently qualify for the mystery list? And how soon after the assassination were the victims disposed of?
Over half, 53 of the 101, actually died of natural causes—heart attacks (24), cancer (14), complications from surgery (1), and other quite ordinary causes of death, ranging from pneumonia to aneurysms to strokes, with heart failure often listed in a newspaper obituary as the official cause of death (14).6
It would seem necessary that key “witnesses” to conspiracy be eliminated as soon as possible after the assassination, yet the list covers more than two decades. The last death is that of Roy Kellerman, the Secret Service agent in charge of JFK’s limousine. He died of heart failure at the age of sixty-nine in 1984, twenty-one years after the assassination—Marrs lists the cause of death as “unknown.”7 Fifty-one of the 101 did not die until the 1970s, well over a decade after the assassination. As might be expected, more than 60 percent of the post-1970s victims died of old age and natural causes (ages, when available from records, are provided in the entries below). Only 14 of the 101 died within a year of the assassination.
Most of the 101 have nothing but the most tenuous connection to the case. In many instances, the persons listed were strong believers in Oswald’s guilt, which should have assured their survival—at least from murder by conspirators.
1964
• C. D. Jackson (heart attack)—his only connection to the case was that he was the Life magazine executive who decided to purchase the Zapruder film.
• Bill Chesher (heart attack) was unconnected to the case, but Penn Jones later claimed, without giving supporting evidence, to have a reliable source who asserted that Chesher could link Oswald and Ruby.
• Guy Banister (heart attack) was the New Orleans private investigator repeatedly and incorrectly linked to Oswald. Marrs writes that Banister was the “ex-FBI agent in New Orleans connected to Ferrie, CIA, Carlos Marcello, and Oswald.”
1965
• Paul Mandel (lung cancer) was a Life reporter who wrote a single article on the assassination.
• David Goldstein (heart attack) is listed by Marrs as a “Dallasite who helped FBI trace Oswald’s pistol.”8 Actually, Goldstein was simply the owner of a Dallas gun shop, Dave’s House of Guns. He supplied a half-page affidavit, as did every other Dallas gun-store owner, that he did not sell a Smith and Wesson .38-caliber revolver, serial number 65248, the gun Oswald used to kill Tippit.9
• Mrs. Earl Smith (heart failure) had nothing to do with the Kennedy case. She is listed solely because she was a friend of Dorothy Kilgallen, a syndicated columnist who wrote about the Ruby trial (see pg. 494).
• Tom Howard (heart attack) was one of Jack Ruby’s defense attorneys. “He had a history of heart disease,” says assistant district attorney Bill Alexander.* “He had a heart attack several years earlier, and was a heavy drinker.”
• Hank Suydam (heart attack) was a Life editor who worked on a couple of the Kennedy articles.
• Earlene Roberts (heart failure and pneumonia) had a history of heart disease. She was the cleaning woman at 1026 North Beckley and saw Oswald near 1:00 P.M. on the day of the assassination.
• Dallas police captain Frank Martin (cancer). Marrs writes that Martin witnessed Oswald’s murder and told the Warren Commission, “There’s a lot to be said but probably be better if I don’t say it.”10 In almost the next sentence Martin told the Commission what he was withholding, that the police were not experienced in handling a prisoner like Oswald, and he was critical there “was no organization at all.”11
• Judge Joe Brown (heart attack) was the presiding judge in the Ruby trial. “Brown never exercised,” Bill Alexander recalls, “ate like a hog, and panted when he walked—some mystery death.”
• Clarence Oliver (heart attack) is listed by Marrs as “D.A. investigator who worked Ruby case” and cause of death is “unknown.”12 “What hogwash,” says Alexander. “Oliver had come to the DA’s office from the police in the late 1950s, and he was in the office when the Ruby trial took place, but he did not work any part of it. The only thing he knew about the Ruby investigation was what he read in the newspapers. And as for the ‘unknown’ listing—hell, there’s a death certificate for him on file, and he had a series of heart attacks before his final one.”
1967
• Jack Ruby (blood clot). Marrs says “He [Ruby] told his family he was injected with cancer cells.”13 That is medically impossible. Ruby was deranged at the end of his life and believed not only that he was being killed by injections, but also that 25 million Jews were being slaughtered on the jail floor below him.
• Jimmy Levens (cancer) was a Fort Worth nightclub owner who casually knew Ruby and had no other connection to the case.
•Harold Russell (heart failure) supplied an affidavit to the FBI, which was made part of the Warren Commission volumes, saying that he saw Oswald fleeing the scene of the Tippit murder.14 He had no involvement in the case thereafter. Marrs says he was “killed by cop in bar brawl.”15 Actually, Russell was in a fight at a party in Oklahoma when he was struck and subdued by police who arrived at the scene. He died of heart failure several hours later, at a local hospital.
1968
• Dallas County deputy sheriff Hiram Ingram (cancer) had no association to the case. He is only listed because he was a friend of Roger Craig, the deputy sheriff who told the elaborate tale about a phantom getaway car at Dealey Plaza.
• Dr. Nicholas Chetta (heart attack) was the New Orleans coroner who performed the autopsy on David Ferrie. His finding of a berry aneurysm has been confirmed by subsequent forensic pathologists.
• A. D. Bowie (cancer) is listed by Marrs as the “assistant D.A. prosecuting Ruby.” “Wade had him sit at the table during the trial, but there was no reason for him to do that since he knew nothing about the case or the testimony,” Bill Alexander recalls. “He died before he was forty, when a lump the size of an egg came up under his armpit—he had cancer of the lymph glands and went fast.”
1969
• Charles Mentesana (heart attack) was one of several news cameramen who filmed Lt. Carl Day carrying the Carcano rifle out of the Book Depository.
• Mary Bledsoe (heart attack) was Oswald’s landlady for one week in Dallas and was on the bus he boarded after the assassination. Her testimony helped prove he was in flight after the shooting, certainly not someone the conspirators would apparently kill at the age of seventy-two, six years after the assassination.
• Abraham Zapruder (complications from heart disease) took the most famous home movie of the assassination. He sold the film to Life magazine and was uninvolved in the investigation.
• Bill Decker (cancer), the Dallas sheriff in 1963.
1971
• Charles Cabell (heart attack), deputy director of the CIA, was no longer with the Agency at the time of the assassination. Marrs says only that he “collapsed and died after physical at Fort Meyers.”16
• Clayton Fowler (heart attack) was one of Ruby’s defense attorneys. Marrs marks the cause of death as “unknown.”17“That’s crazy,” says Bill Alexander. “Fowler was a World War II fighter pilot who had lost a piece of his leg below the knee. Almost every year they had to cut off a bit more gangrenous tissue. They called him Red because he drank too much and his face looked like a baboon’s ass. He had high blood pressure, bad circulation, and arteriosclerosis.”
1972
• J. Edgar Hoover (heart attack, age seventy-seven), director of the FBI.18
1974
• Clay Shaw (cancer) was the victim of Garrison’s abuse of process. Marrs lists the death only as “possible cancer,” despite the unambiguous death certificate and statements from his treating physicians.
• Earl Warren (heart failure, age eighty-two) was Supreme Court chief justice and chairman of the Warren Commission.
• Earle Cabell (heart disease) was the mayor of Dallas in 1963; his only connection was that he was in one of the motorcade cars.
• Allan Sweatt (heart disease) was a Dallas deputy sheriff who had worked briefly on the case.
• Clyde Tolson (heart disease, age seventy-one) was J. Edgar Hoover’s chief assistant.19
• Earl Wheeler (heart failure, age sixty-seven) was a liaison between the CIA and JFK, but had no connection to the case.20
1976
• Dr. Charles Gregory (heart attack) was one of the surgeons who operated on Governor John Connally. Gregory’s medical testimony was some of the most important supporting the Warren Commission and the single bullet.
• Ralph Paul (heart attack) was Jack Ruby’s business partner in his nightclubs and spoke frequently with Ruby during the weekend of the assassination. Knowing Ruby was his only affiliation with the case.
• James Chaney (heart attack) was part of the motorcade’s motorcycle escort—none of the other escort policemen are listed.
• William Harvey (complications from heart surgery, age sixty), dubbed “America’s James Bond,” was a CIA official who knew of the attempts to kill Castro but had no relation to the Oswald file.
1977
• Ken O’Donnell (aneurysm and liver complications) was one of JFK’s aides and was in the car behind the President in the motorcade. After his Warren Commission testimony, he had no connection with the case.21
• Paul Raigorodsky (heart disease) had no relation to the assassination. The only reason he seems to be on the mystery- deaths list is that he was a business acquaintance of George de Mohrenschildt, Oswald’s Dallas friend.
• Louis Nichols (heart disease and cancer, age seventy-one), a former FBI official, had briefly worked on the case.22
• Alan Belmont (cancer, age seventy) was a retired FBI official who provided a general overview of the Bureau’s investigation to the Warren Commission.23
• Donald Kaylor (heart attack) was a chemist in the FBI’s fingerprint section, with no specific assignment to the Kennedy case.
• J. M. English (heart attack) was former director of the FBI Forensic Sciences Laboratory.
1978
• Garland Slack (heart disease) was one of several witnesses who mistakenly identified a man at a Dallas shooting range as Oswald. He was not involved in the case after making his 1964 statement.
• C. L. Lewis (cancer) was one of the dozens of Dallas deputy sheriffs who worked on the case.
1979
• Billy Lovelady (heart attack) was the Book Depository employee photographed in the building’s doorway during the assassination and mistaken by many buffs for Oswald.
1980
• Jesse Curry (heart attack), the Dallas police chief.
• Dr. John Holbrook (heart attack), a psychiatrist, was a prosecution witness at the Ruby trial, testifying that Ruby was not insane at the moment he shot Oswald. “He supported the Warren Commission case,” says Bill Alexander. “These fellows [the buffs] are getting their sides mixed up in who is supposed to be getting knocked off.”
1981
• Marguerite Oswald (cancer, age seventy-three), Lee’s mother.24 Immediately after her son’s arrest She hired Mark Lane to represent her, and over the years she gave and sold dozens of press interviews about many aspects of the case.
• Frank Watts (cancer, age eighty-three) was the chief felony prosecutor for the Dallas district attorney. “He was in his eighties, for God’s sake,” Alexander remarks. “He had nothing to do with Ruby. He sat at the table with us during the trial and did not question one witness.”
1982
• Peter Gregory (heart failure) was a member of the conservative Russian émigré community in Dallas and one of those who first befriended Oswald after his return from Russia. He testified before the Warren Commission but had no involvement with the investigation after his testimony.
• Dr. James Weston (heart attack) was a pathologist who examined the JFK autopsy X rays and photos for the House Select Committee. Marrs himself writes he “died while jogging, ruled natural causes.”25 Weston was one of nine forensic pathologists on the Select Committee’s medical panel and was in the majority of eight who confirmed the medical findings of the Warren Commission. All of the other doctors are still alive at this writing—and perhaps the surprise survivor (from Marrs’s point of view) is Cyril Wecht, who for twenty years has led a vocal oneman campaign to prove medically that the assassination is a conspiracy. Wecht is alive and well and is the medical examiner for Allegheny County, Pennsylvania.
• Will Griffin (cancer) was an FBI agent who was one of scores assigned to taking witness statements for the Warren Commission in 1963 and 1964.
• W. Marvin Gheesling (heart failure) was an FBI official who had a minor supervisory role in the 1964 investigation.
1984
• Roy Kellerman (heart failure, age sixty-nine) was a Secret Service agent in the presidential motorcade.26 He was retired and living in Florida when, Marrs says, he died of “unknown” causes. His death and its cause were actually reported in numerous newspapers.
The Unnatural Deaths
While the fifty-three listed above died of natural causes, the following forty-eight died unnatural deaths. Who were they and why are they on the mystery-deaths list?
1963
• Karen Kupcinet (murdered in Los Angeles two days after the assassination) was the daughter of a Chicago television host. According to Penn Jones, unidentified sources reported that she screamed into the telephone, before the assassination, that the President was going to be killed. There is no corroboration for the report, yet Marrs still begins his list with her death.
• Also, according to Penn Jones, Jack Zangetty (Marrs lists it as Zangretti; murdered) was the manager of a motel complex in Oklahoma. Jones asserts that Zangetty told friends about three assassins scheduled to kill JFK, that Ruby would kill Oswald, and that the Sinatra family was involved. There is no support for Jones’s claim, and the author could find no record of such a death.
1964
• DeLesseps Morrison (plane crash) was the mayor of New Orleans during 1963. He had no association to the case.
• Hugh Ward (same plane crash as Morrison) was a private investigator who was also unconnected to the case. He probably qualifies for the list since he was acquainted (because they had the same profession) with Guy Banister.
• Betty MacDonald (suicide) had worked for Jack Ruby, and was an alibi for Darrell Garner in the shooting of Warren Reynolds (see Chapter 12).
• Hank Killiam (murdered) was the husband of a Ruby employee. He also reportedly knew a fellow roomer at Oswald’s Beckley Street boardinghouse.
• Dr. Mary Sherman (house fire) had no connection to the case, though she was acquainted with David Ferrie. Marrs says she was “possibly shot.” According to the medical records, she was killed in an accidental fire, and there was no gunshot wound on her body.
• Bill Hunter (accidental shooting) and
• Jim Koethe (murdered). Both were reporters who had stopped by Ruby’s apartment on November 24, 1963, after the shooting of Oswald. There, they spoke to one of Ruby’s attorneys, Tom Howard, Ruby’s roommate, George Senator, and a friend of his, Jim Martin. That was the extent of their association with the case. Both wrote about the November 24 visit and described it innocuously. Hunter was killed in California when someone dropped a pistol and it accidentally discharged. The Dallas police believed Koethe’s murder was the result of a fight with a gay lover.27
• Eddy Benavides (murdered) was the brother of Domingo Benavides, one of thirteen witnesses who placed Oswald at the Tippit murder scene. But Eddy had nothing to do with case. Domingo’s Warren Commission testimony was important in identifying Oswald as the murderer of J. D. Tippit. Domingo has continued to give interviews and is alive and well.
• Gary Underhill (suicide) was, according to Penn Jones, a CIA agent who claimed the CIA was involved in JFK’s death. The evidence that Underhill was an agent is from an undisclosed source known only to Jones, and there is no corroboration that he ever said that there was CIA complicity in the assassination.
• Mary Meyer (murdered) was allegedly one of JFK’s mistresses. Except for her reported liaison with the President, she was not associated with any aspect of the case.
1965
• Maurice Gatlin (injuries from a fall) was a pilot who is probably on the list because he was once hired by Guy Banister for an unconnected investigation.
• Dorothy Kilgallen (drug and alcohol overdose) was a nationally syndicated reporter. Marrs claims she “had private interview with Ruby” and was going to break open the case.28 Her “private” interview with Ruby was when she spoke to him for a few minutes during a recess in the courtroom during his trial, surrounded by other reporters.29 There was no scoop pending by the time Kilgallen drank herself to death.
• Rose Cheramie (struck by car) was the heroin addict who was mistakenly said to have foreknowledge of the assassination. She made up her story after Ruby had shot Oswald (see Chapter 18).
• Mona Saenz (struck by a Dallas bus) worked at the Texas Employment Commission where Oswald had applied for work while living in Dallas.
• William Whaley (car accident) was the Dallas cabdriver who drove Oswald from the bus station to Oak Cliff immediately after the assassination. Marrs lists under cause of death “the only Dallas taxi driver to die on duty.” Whaley had a head-on collision, in which his taxi passenger was critically injured, when the eighty-three-year-old driver of the other auto had a fatal heart attack and lost control of his car.
1966
• Marilyn “Delilah” Walle (shot to death by her husband) was a former Ruby employee.
• Lee Bowers (car accident) was in the train switching station at Dealey Plaza and testified to seeing “some commotion” near the picket fence. Bowers told his story not only to the Warren Commission but also to Mark Lane for his book and film documentary.*
•Albert Bogard (suicide) was the Dallas car salesman who claimed Oswald had test-driven a car with him, although none of his co-workers supported the story. He was fired shortly after he told the story and had no other relationship to the case.
•James Worrell (car accident) was a Dealey Plaza witness who testified in detail about the Carcano rifle he saw fire the shots from the southeast corner of the sixth floor of the Book Depository.30 His testimony supports the Warren Commission conclusion about the location of the assassin.
• William Pitzer (suicide) was a naval lieutenant commander who Marrs identifies as the “JFK autopsy photographer.”31 A friend of Pitzer’s claims he was in the autopsy-room gallery at Bethesda filming the event with a home movie camera, but no one at the autopsy remembers him. He is not on the official list of those present. His purported film has never been produced. The story was exploited by Robert Groden and Harrison livingstone in High Treason, and Marrs picked it up for his mysterydeaths list.
1967
• Eladio Del Valle (murdered) was an anti-Castro militant killed in Florida. He was warned shortly before his death that a murder contract was put on his head by Castro agents. Garrison wanted to question him as part of his anti-Castro investigation.
• David Ferrie (brain aneurysm) was mistakenly and repeatedly linked to Oswald. Marrs lists the cause of death for the eccentric adventurer as “blow to neck, ruled accidental.” The coroner’s report and death certificate show it was an aneurysm, with no foul play involved.
• Leonard Pullin (car crash) was a civilian employee in the Navy who helped film the assassination documentary The Last Two Days. He was a cameraman, not a reporter, and never claimed to have any special information.
1968
• Philip Geraci (accidental electrocution) was the fifteen-year-old youngster who spoke to Oswald at Carlos Bringuier’s store in New Orleans when Oswald tried to infiltrate the anti-Castro movement.
• Clyde Johnson (murdered in personal dispute) was considered and rejected as a witness in Clay Shaw’s trial. Johnson, who claimed he could put Shaw and Oswald together, was so unreliable that not even Garrison used him. Marrs implies that he was killed before he could testify.32 The Shaw trial finished on March 1, and Johnson was not killed until July.
• John Crawford (plane crash) was, according to Marrs, a “close friend to both Ruby and Wesley [Buell] Frazier, who gave ride to Oswald on 11/22/63.”33 When Frazier was asked about Crawford, he had never heard the name.34 In Ruby’s personal papers there is no evidence he knew Crawford. The story was apparently started by Penn Jones.
• Buddy Walthers (gunshot) was a Dallas deputy sheriff who helped search Dealey Plaza the day of the assassination. He was shot and killed when he and his partner, Al Maddox, tried to arrest a fugitive, James Walter Cherry.
• Henry Delaune (murdered) had no relationship to the case, but is evidently listed because he was the brother-in-law of the New Orleans coroner, Nicholas Chetta, who ruled on David Ferrie’s death.
1970
• George McGann (murdered) was head of the Dixie mafia, and while he had no connection to the assassination, he is listed because of his marriage to Beverly Oliver, the woman who now claims she was the “babushka lady” at Dealey Plaza.
• Salvatore Granello (murdered) was a mobster who was linked to the CIA plot to kill Castro.*
• Darrell Garner (drug overdose) was a business rival suspected of shooting Warren Reynolds, a witness to Oswald fleeing the scene of the Tippit murder. Gamer had no relation to the assassination investigation, and he is evidently listed only because he was the prime suspect in the wounding of a man who also happened, coincidentally, to be a witness in the Kennedy case (see Chapter 12).
1971
• James Plumeri (murdered) was another gangster who was part of the CIA effort to kill Castro.
1972
• Hale Boggs (plane crash) was the House majority leader and former Warren Commission member. As with many people on the list, it is not clear why he qualifies. Since he was supposedly a member of the “Warren Commission cover-up,” any team of assassins eliminating dangerous witnesses would be expected to let Boggs live.
1973
• Thomas Davis (electrocuted while cutting a power line during a robbery) was a convicted bank robber who may have run guns to Cuba during the 1950s. He also knew Ruby.
1974
• Dave Yaras (murdered) grew up in Chicago with Ruby and was later a local hoodlum. Ruby had only sporadic contact with him over fifteen years, and none during 1963.
• Joseph Milteer (died from injuries suffered from a heater explosion) was a right-winger in Miami who told a police informant in November 1963 that Kennedy would be killed when he came to Miami (November 18, only days before his Texas trip). For a time, critics claimed Milteer was identified in one of the photographs taken at Dealey Plaza, but photo analysts for the Select Committee proved it was not him. Beyond his boastful claim in November, there is no link between Milteer and the events in Dallas.
1975
• Sam Giancana (murdered) was the godfather of the Chicago mafia. The thousands of hours of surveillance tapes on Giancana, starting in the late 1950s, show that he knew nothing about the assassination or about any alleged mob plot.
1976
• Johnny Roselli (murdered) was a mafia liaison with the CIA in its effort to assassinate Castro.
1977
• Carlos Soccaras (suicide) had no relationship to the assassination, but he raised money for anti-Castro Cubans.
• William Pawley (suicide, age eighty) was an extremely wealthy adventurer who helped found the Flying Tigers in Asia during World War II and later was U.S. ambassador to Brazil, also holding high positions in the State and Defense departments.35 He strongly opposed Castro, and solicited American support for the anti-Castro Cubans. He had no association with the assassination.
• George de Mohrenschildt (suicide), Oswald’s closest Dallas friend, is included although he gave extensive testimony to the Warren Commission, as well as press interviews in succeeding years.
• Lou Staples (suicide), a former Dallas radio announcer who conducted several radio programs about the assassination, was living in Oklahoma when he killed himself.
• James Cadigan (died of injuries suffered in a fall at his home, at age sixty) and
• William Sullivan (shot accidentally at age sixty-five by a hunter who mistook him for a deer) were both retired FBI employees.36 Cadigan was a document expert whose involvement with the case ended with his 1964 Warren Commission testimony, and Sullivan was an official later in charge of counterespionage.
• Francis Gary Powers (helicopter crash) was the U-2 pilot shot down over the Soviet Union in 1960. Oswald had been assigned to a U-2 base and was in Russia when Powers was downed.
• Joseph Ayres (shooting accident at a firing range while on vacation with his family) was the chief steward on JFK’s Air Force One.37
* In the eighteen names Jones provided the newspaper, he had included Lee Oswald, J. D. Tippit, Jack Ruby, and David Ferrie among the material witnesses (HSCA Vol. IV, pp. 464–65).
* Actually there are only 101. Marrs lists Teresa Norton as a Ruby employee, and says she was “fatally shot” in August 1964. He also lists Karen “Little Lynn” Carlin, another Ruby employee, as being a “gunshot victim” in 1966. Teresa Norton was another name used by Karen Carlin—they are the same person. Sylvia Meagher, Robert Sam Anson, and David Scheim all reported that Carlin died in August 1964 in a Houston hotel fire. But there is no record of such a fire, much less a death certificate. Moreover, Carlin testified a second time to the Warren Commission on August 24, 1964, after the date she was supposed to have died. Marrs provides no citation for the 1966 date, and does not list a location, month, or day. Until there is proof of her death, Marrs’s list of 103 must be reduced by two. (A woman purporting to be Karen Carlin contacted conspiracy theorist J. Gary Shaw in 1992 and told an intricate story of conspiracy. There is no substantiation yet that the 1992 woman is the real Carlin.)
* Bill Alexander, who prosecuted Ruby, was familiar with everyone connected to the Ruby trial. The author asked him to comment on the Ruby-related deaths, and he is quoted whenever they appear.
* Since Bowers’s car drove off the highway into a concrete abutment, there was suspicion he might have been forced off the road. Researcher David Perry, in “The Lee Bowers Story,” (published in the Third Decade, an assassination newsletter), conclusively proved that Bowers’s death was accidental.
* Granello is one of three mobsters listed only because they had some association with the CIA-sponsored effort to kill Castro in the early 1960s. As Select Committee chief counsel G. Robert Blakey, said: “It’s established beyond all reasonable doubt that the Cubans were connected to the mob, and the mob was connected to the CIA, but the President they were planning to assassinate was Castro, not Kennedy.”