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The death of John Connolly's daughter


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So not to divert the 'Suite 8F' thread, I thought this topic might be worth exploring.

In 1959, the 18 year old son of I.B. Hale was cleared by a Coroner's Jury in the shotgun death of his 16 year old pregnant wife, Kathleen, who was the daughter of John Connolly. The jury found that Kathleen Hale was killed by the accidental discharge of a 20 gauge shotgun.

A fingerprint expert said no prints recognizable as Robert's were found on the gun. However, a palm print which could have been Kathleen's was found. Could have been?

Robert claimed she was in good spirits the night before her death but then suddenly she left their apartment and didn't return until late the following morning. He said that he went out to search for her on several occasions and when he returned from his last trip, she was seated on the couch holding a shotgun. Robert tried to persuade her to put it down but she brought the weapon up to her head. He claimed that, "at the last desperate moment, I lunged at the gun and hit it. It hit the wall and she was still." He claimed not to know if the gun went off before or after he had hit it.

Detective Bob Maige said, "It looked like it was very possible that it was an accident." He continued by saying that, "a little squabble like kids have preceded the shooting."

The charge that killed her entered behind Kathleen's right ear. What the...?

When police arrived on the scene, neighbors were restraining Robert from jumping out the second story window.

I'm am at a quandary as to this making complete sense.

James

Edited by James Richards
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You would wonder in a case like this what the autopsy would have revealed as the time of death....

This is rich.

http://www.freedomwriter.com/issue28/ak1.htm

Road Leads to Alaska-Size Standoff

It's Hillbilly Heaven vs. Park Service

By Blaine Harden

Washington Post Staff Writer

Sunday, September 28, 2003; Page A01

WRANGELL-ST. ELIAS NATIONAL PARK, Alaska -- Psalms sat on Papa Pilgrim's right knee and Lamb perched on his left. Thirteen more of his children -- all of them with names from the Bible, several of them packing pistols -- crowded around. So did his exhausted-looking wife, Country Rose.

It was a late summer's evening in Hillbilly Heaven, a 410-acre ranch in the high country of eastern Alaska. Outside, the temperature dipped below freezing and the encircling mountains had a fresh dusting of snow. Inside the family cabin, potato soup was steaming on the stove and apple pies bubbled in a wood-burning oven. Supper, though, was on hold.

Papa was talking about the abuses heaped upon his family by the National Park Service. His children and wife listened in worshipful silence. No one dared eat.

Pilgrim, 62, whose legal name is Robert Allan Hale and whose past in the U.S. Southwest is as fairy-tale strange as his present in the Alaskan outback, explained how it came to pass last winter that he drove a bulldozer 14 miles across the national park that encircles his land. The Lord, Pilgrim said, told him that clearing a derelict mining road through the park was a loving thing to do.

"In order for me to love my children, I have to be a provider," Pilgrim said. "With great reluctance, I took the bulldozer and used the road. I had no idea what was in store."

Pilgrim's passage on the Caterpillar D4 has resulted in an edgy standoff between his well-armed family and the federal government. The National Park Service has shut down the bulldozed road to his property, dispatched armed rangers to assess park damage and is pursuing criminal and civil cases against him and members of his family.

The brouhaha over the bulldozer -- a drama still unfolding inside the largest U.S. park -- has made the Pilgrims actors in a national dispute over private access to federal land. National environmental groups are demanding that the Park Service prosecute the Pilgrims to the fullest extent of the law, while land-rights activists have embraced them as heroic victims of overzealous federal bureaucrats.

Papa Pilgrim seems to relish the mismatch between the National Park Service, with its helicopters and bulletproof vests, and his "simple family that never knew anything but how to live in the wilderness."

"If the government doesn't let us use that road with a bulldozer, then all they are trying to do is starve us out," Pilgrim said. "It is like the Alamo."

Park Service officials say the last thing they want is violence and that they are worried about another Ruby Ridge standoff or another Waco. They are determined, they say, not to use force in a way that would lead to bloodshed or embarrassing media coverage.

"Our challenge is to avoid confrontation," said Gary Candelaria, superintendent of Wrangell-St. Elias, which is six times larger than Yellowstone National Park. Still, Park Service rangers admit that they are fed up with the Pilgrims, especially with the boys who carry revolvers and rifles.

"What they tend to do is surround you," said Hunter Sharp, chief ranger in the park. "When they do that, cops get nervous. We have had it. We are not going to back off. We represent the people of the United States."

Bulldozing a Right of Way

In a sense, Pilgrim drove the bulldozer through a bureaucratic gap opened by the Bush administration. Over objections from environmentalists, the Interior Department published a rule in January that opened federal land to motorized access in places where roads once existed.

The rule -- a reassertion of an obscure 1866 mining law known as RS-2477 -- has since inspired right-of-way claims on old roads across federal land in the red rock country of southern Utah and across the Mojave National Preserve in California.

Alaska, though, is where the big claims are.

The old mining road that Pilgrim cleared with the bulldozer appears on a list of routes that the state of Alaska could claim as a right of way.

Pilgrim, though, fired up his bulldozer before the state made a claim to that road or any road in a national park in Alaska. Neither the Bush administration nor Gov. Frank H. Murkowski ®, who is a champion of opening rights of way to create jobs, has since said anything supportive of Pilgrim's vigilante romp.

Land-rights activists, however, see the Pilgrim case as a public relations windfall.

"We are going to make the Pilgrims poster children for abuse of federal power," said Chuck Cushman, executive director of the American Land Rights Association, a group based in Washington state that supports claims of private landowners in disputes with federal agencies.

"This is a good family that simply does not know how to deal with bureaucracy," said Cushman, whose group is helping Pilgrim pay for a lawyer and is publicizing his legal problems on its Web site. "They did notknowingly break the law. You have to look into people's hearts."

Environmental groups have been watching the Pilgrims in pained disbelief.

"You just can't take the law into your hands with a bulldozer," said Jim Stratton, Alaska regional director of the National Parks Conservation Association, a nonprofit advocacy group that monitors the parks. "What I am most afraid of is other people who share the Pilgrims' outlook on federal and state law and who are watching this case."

For most of the past year, the Park Service has been playing a careful game of cat-and-mouse with the Pilgrims.

Both sides seem media savvy. When they encounter each other, park rangers and the Pilgrims monitor each other with video cameras.

After months of negotiations, Candelaria, the park superintendent, said he has become convinced that "the Pilgrims are not what they appear." The family wears homemade clothes, tans its own leather, never watches TV and reads only the Bible. "They will give you this simple, homespun, Christian, living-off-the-land act," he said. "But it doesn't ring true."

A Checkered Past

Robert Hale grew up in affluent circumstances in Fort Worth, Tex.

His father was I.B. Hale, an All-American tackle at Texas Christian who in 1939 was the first-round draft pick of the Washington Redskins. I.B. became an FBI agent and later worked for General Dynamics, the defense contractor in Fort Worth.

When he was still in high school, Bobby Hale, as everyone called him then, eloped to Florida with Kathleen Connally. She was 16 and the daughter of John B. Connally, later to become the Texas governor wounded in the assassassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Shortly after the elopement in 1958, Kathleen died of a gunshot wound. A Florida deputy sheriff told Connally, as he wrote in his autobiography, "there may have been a suicide pact, and Bobby backed out."

Asked about Connally's book, Pilgrim denied any suicide pact and said Kathleen's death was an accident. He said he was in the hotel room when she died, but declined to give details about how she supposedly fired a shotgun into her face.

Five years after Kathleen's death, Bobby turned up in Southern California and insinuated himself into the life of another well-known figure from the Kennedy era, according to Seymour M. Hersh's book "The Dark Side of Camelot."

Citing unreleased FBI documents, Hersh writes that Bobby joined his twin brother, Billy, in breaking into the Los Angeles apartment of Judith Exner, a woman who later acknowledged having an affair with Kennedy. An FBI agent observed the break-in on Aug. 7, 1962, but made no attempt to arrest the Hale brothers, according to Hersh.

In the book, Hersh speculates that the break-in was part of a successful attempt by the Hales' father, I.B., then chief of security at General Dynamics, to blackmail Kennedy into giving the company a major defense contract.

"That is ridiculous," said Pilgrim, when asked about the Hersh book. "I wasn't there, and neither was my brother. Mr. Hersh is a xxxx."

Through the 1960s and into the '70s, Bobby Hale called himself "Sunstar." He lived in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, worked on a commune in Oregon and says that he "rode a horse across South America on my quest to find the answer."

While camping out in the Southern California desert, he met Kurina Rose Bresler, a 16-year-old from suburban Los Angeles. She would become the mother of the 15 children now living with him in Alaska. (Pilgrim has three other children from two previous marriages.) "My daughter was running around with friends, and they were into drugs at the time -- that's when she met Bobby," said Kurina's mother, Betty Freeman, an actress and singer who lives in Sherman Oaks, Calif. She is married to producer Joel Freeman, whose movies include "Shaft."

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One of things we now know is that to keep people from talking after the assassination of JFK, threats were made against the children of those who had important information about the case. Did this also happen to John Connally? Here is an interesting interview with Nellie Connally that appeared in the Dallas Morning News on 22nd November, 2003:

"It kept going through my mind like a phonograph record playing over and over and over. But for John, it was even worse. His first night home, he cried out in his sleep. I would just pat him on the shoulder, and he'd go back to sleep. Ten days after, I asked him, 'What is it you dream, dear?' And he said, 'Nellie, somebody's always after me. With a gun.' So I just let him cry out. He did that for a month or six weeks and they were always after him."

Her own waking nightmare "has us all in the car. Everyone's having a wonderful time. Everyone's being so good, and then all of a sudden the horror starts. There is never anything good after that happening in that car. The car is filled with yellow roses, red roses and blood. And pieces of the president's brain."

Connally regrets that President Kennedy's legacy - and, by extension, the nation's - could have been so much brighter in the years ahead. "We were all in our 40s," she says of the passengers in the top car of VIP's. "We all had so much to give."

But Dealey Plaza would come to dictate an entirely different reality.

"For the first time in my life, I feared for my family," she said. "And I never had before. Mark, our youngest, was 11 at the time. There was this wall at the governor's mansion (in Austin) that he loved to walk around. Well, he could no longer walk around that wall. We were afraid somebody would snatch him off of it. Sharon, 14 at the time, could no longer go anywhere without someone going with her. It became, in some ways, a difficult life for us, and for me. And even to this day, I still take a glance behind me, just to make sure."

Great research James and Lee. The use of the shotgun does not surprise me at all. This was the way that a large number of people who knew too much about the assassination died. This included Phil Graham who committed suicide with a shotgun before the assassination. It has to be remembered that Mac Wallace killed Henry Marshall with a rifle and tried to make it look like suicide. This is not incompetence - it is a warning. Wouldn't it frighten you when people have such powerful friends that they can convince the authorities that people who are obviously murdered are ruled as suicides?

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John,

Let's not forget that in 1969, Fred Korth's daughter Verita, supposedly killed herself with a 20 gauge shotgun. Same sort of weapon involved with the Hale death and also the weapon of choice for George De Mohrenschildt.

I think it is worth mentioning that as a mode of taking one's life, woman rarely resort to such violent measures. It would be interesting to get some statistics regarding that.

FWIW.

James

Edited by James Richards
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John,

Let's not forget that in 1969, Fred Korth's daughter Verita, supposedly killed herself with a 20 gauge shotgun. Same sort of weapon involved with the Hale death and also the weapon of choice for George De Mohrenschildt.

I think it is worth mentioning that as a mode of taking one's life, woman rarely resort to such violent measures. It would be interesting to get some statistics regarding that.

FWIW.

James

Frank Wisner, Phil Graham's buddy at Operation Mockingbird also "killed himself" using a shotgun. William Pawley went the same way. Do did Leo Damore (the journalist who discovered who killed Mary Pinchot Meyer). Roger D. Craig and Carlos Prio also died from "self-inflicted gunshot wounds"

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Guest Stephen Turner
John,

I think it is worth mentioning that as a mode of taking one's life, woman rarely resort to such violent measures. It would be interesting to get some statistics regarding that.

FWIW.

James

My Webpage

Quote, "Males tend to choose methods that are more immediatly lethal, Says Larry Berman PHD, AAOS, "Hanging is common, but more than 60% of men who killed themselves in 2000 did so with a shotgun. Women tend to choose less decisive means of commiting suicide, such as an overdose of pills."FWIW

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Guest Stephen Turner

Papa was talking about the abuses heaped upon his family by the National Park Service. His children and wife listened in worshipful silence. No one dared eat.

. Still, Park Service rangers admit that they are fed up with the Pilgrims, especially with the boys who carry revolvers and rifles.

For most of the past year, the Park Service has been playing a careful game of cat-and-mouse with the Pilgrims.

Both sides seem media savvy. When they encounter each other, park rangers and the Pilgrims monitor each other with video cameras.

"the Pilgrims are not what they appear." The family wears homemade clothes, tans its own leather, never watches TV and reads only the Bible. "They will give you this simple, homespun, Christian, living-off-the-land act," he said. "But it doesn't ring true."

Shortly after the elopement in 1958, Kathleen died of a gunshot wound. A Florida deputy sheriff told Connally, as he wrote in his autobiography, "there may have been a suicide pact, and Bobby backed out."

___________________________ ____________ ___________________________________

I find the suicide pact idea quite convincing, Hale is obviously a control freak, all of his sexual relationships appear to be with teenage girls, the quote about his family sitting listening "WORSHIPFULLY whilst papa pontificates is telling. In my experience suicide pacts between two lovers always involve similtaneous death, either by ingestion of alcohol and drugs,or jumping. I have never come across a case where a weapon has been used, first by one partner, then the other, so if suicde pact it was this points too two possibilities. 1Seeing what a shotgun does to the human body, Hale simply chickened out, and made up the cock, and bull story about the gun going off by accident. Or 2, Hale murdered his young wife, and attempted to make it appear like an accident. There is much about Mr Hale that "Doesn't ring true."

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It might seem strange that I am suggesting that a death in 1959 might be related to the assassination to JFK. However, 1959 was an important year for the Suite 8F Group. This was the year that the Air Force began to argue that it needed a successor to its F-105 tactical fighter. It was decided that the US Navy needed the same kind of aircraft. This became known as the TFX/F-111 project.

1959 was also the year that General Dynamics was on the verge of bankruptcy. It needed the TFX project to survive (by the time the project was eventually cancelled in 1970 it had created $22 million in revenues for General Dynamics). The president of General Dynamics was Frank Pace. He had been Secretary of the Army in 1951-53. His assistant was Fred Korth who was a member of the Suite 8F Group with Lyndon Johnson and John Connally.

To get the contract General Dynamics needed people involved in the decision making process. This is why Johnson blackmailed JFK to get Connally the post as Secretary of the Navy. He was also probably responsible for getting General Dynamics’ lawyer, Roswell Gilpatric, as Deputy Secretary of Defense.

For some reason, Connally was reluctant to get involved in this scandal. He probably felt that they would never get away with it. Was the killing of his daughter something to do with this? Anyway, although he agreed to become Secretary of the Navy, he resigned from office before the contract was signed (he claimed he wanted to concentrate on local politics and was eventually elected as Governor of Texas). LBJ then had to blackmail JFK in giving the job to Korth. Released documents show that Korth and Gilpatric played important roles in making sure that General Dynamics got the TFX contract.

The fact that I. B. Hale’s son was with Kathleen Connally when she died does seem extremely suspicious. Hale, a former FBI agent, was head of security at General Dynamics. In John la Carre’s book, The Constant Gardner, he makes the point that the head of security at large corporations are often responsible for arranging the deaths of people who pose a threat to the business interest of the company. Carre is a former MI5 agent and knows how these things work.

In Seymour Hersh’s book, The Dark Side of Camelot, he points out that it was two of Hale’s sons who were involved in the break-in at Judith Campbell Exner’s apartment. Hersh suggests that General Dynamics were involved in blackmailing JFK into agreeing the TFX contract. We do know that JFK was concerned about LBJ’s corrupt activities. It was the reason that JFK gave Evelyn Lincoln when he discussed the sacking of LBJ as VP. We also know that RFK was leaking information about LBJ’s corrupt activities to John Williams. In October, 1963, JFK sacked Korth as Secretary of the Navy. JFK did not appear to be responding to General Dynamics blackmail threats. Maybe the death of JFK was the next stage in the TFX story.

It is also possible that the assassins were firing on John Connally as well as JFK in Dallas. He must have been considered a dangerous witness to have around. Does this also explain Nellie Connally’s comments that she feared for the lives of her three remaining children after the assassination.

The fact that Korth’s own daughter kills herself with a shotgun in 1969 is again highly suspicious. Was Korth threatening to talk about the TFX contract and the JFK assassination?

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So not to divert the 'Suite 8F' thread, I thought this topic might be worth exploring.

In 1959, the 18 year old son of I.B. Hale was cleared by a Coroner's Jury in the shotgun death of his 16 year old pregnant wife, Kathleen, who was the daughter of John Connolly. The jury found that Kathleen Hale was killed by the accidental discharge of a 20 gauge shotgun.

A fingerprint expert said no prints recognizable as Robert's were found on the gun. However, a palm print which could have been Kathleen's was found. Could have been?

Robert claimed she was in good spirits the night before her death but then suddenly she left their apartment and didn't return until late the following morning. He said that he went out to search for her on several occasions and when he returned from his last trip, she was seated on the couch holding a shotgun. Robert tried to persuade her to put it down but she brought the weapon up to her head. He claimed that, "at the last desperate moment, I lunged at the gun and hit it. It hit the wall and she was still." He claimed not to know if the gun went off before or after he had hit it.

Detective Bob Maige said, "It looked like it was very possible that it was an accident." He continued by saying that, "a little squabble like kids have preceded the shooting."

The charge that killed her entered behind Kathleen's right ear. What the...?

When police arrived on the scene, neighbors were restraining Robert from jumping out the second story window.

I'm am at a quandary as to this making complete sense.

James

In 1984, in accordance with Billie Sol Estes’ desire to have his book published on his relationship with LBJ/Mac Wallace, I arranged for Lucianne Goldberg, a prominent New York literary agent whom I knew, to travel to Texas to meet with Billie Sol.

I picked Lucianne up at the Dallas-Ft. Worth Airport and we drove to Abilene to meet with Billie Sol. In the midst of our discussion with Billie Sol, Lucianne interjected the topic of the death of John Connally’s daughter. She said that when she read the small item about it in a newspaper at the time it occurred she remarked to herself that “this was the start of something big.” But for some reason the story never had legs, to use journalistic lingo.

Billie Sol responded to Lucianne’s observation by stating that when Connally’s daughter died under mysterious circumstances, Connally immediately went to where Robert Hale was and where the death had occurred and attempted to toss Hale over the balcony, which would have resulted in Hale’s death.

Billie Sol always maintained that the only person LBJ feared was John Connally, who would stop at nothing to achieve what he wanted.

When I told related this comment by Billie Sol to Shearn Moody soon after Lucianne Goldberg’s visit in 1984, Moody told me that in recent days the wife of a Galveston County public official had told him that a person close to Connally had called the official’s wife, who was a friend, in alarm and said that John Connally was “in a killing mood.”

Lucianne would later became famous as the key person who exposed the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal using information that she obtained from Linda Tripp. She has her own web site, www.lucianne.com, where die-hard right-wingers daily post their news articles.

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More on Hale for anyone interested...

http://www.pilgrimfamily.com/

http://exchristian.net/2/2005/09/on-family...ilgrim-says.php

http://www.mccarthy-kennicott.com/MJ2003/page2.html

http://www.adn.com/news/alaska/pilgrims/st...p-6959966c.html

The latest update - March 1, 2006. Maybe a call to the correctional facility might yield something.

http://www.adn.com/news/alaska/story/7490815p-7400915c.html

Rape, incest trial for Pilgrim family patriarch postponed until early May

Robert Hale's trial for rape and incest has been postponed until May.

Hale, who adopted the name Papa Pilgrim as the patriarch of a large and reclusive family in the Wrangell Mountains, was scheduled to go on trial in Glennallen next week. He was indicted in September by a Palmer grand jury on multiple charges of rape, assault and kidnapping involving one of his 15 children.

Hale eluded capture in the remote town of McCarthy when Alaska State Troopers arrived by helicopter to arrest him after his indictment. He was captured in Eagle River 12 days later.

At a pretrial conference Tuesday, Hale's trial date was postponed to the week of May 8. He is represented by the public defender agency, which sought the delay. In the meantime, Hale remains at Mat-Su Pre-Trial Facility.

During several years living near McCarthy, Hale and his family were engaged in a high-profile faceoff with officials at Wrangell-St. Elias National Park over access to their land. Local residents were split over support for the Pilgrim family, but some national private-property and land-rights organizations praised their stand and provided lawyers for their legal access case.

In February, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected their claim to having rights to travel by bulldozer through the park over a unused mining road without going through a permit process and environmental review.

-- The Associated Press

Favorite quote from one of these articles...

"An old-timer I knew out here once told me, 'You never really get to know somebody till you eat a bag of flour with them,' " Bay said.

Robert Hale is the grey bearded man at the far right.

post-675-1144865673_thumb.jpg

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Hale, a former FBI agent, was head of security at General Dynamics. In John la Carre’s book, The Constant Gardner, he makes the point that the head of security at large corporations are often responsible for arranging the deaths of people who pose a threat to the business interest of the company.

One of the JFK conspirators named in the Torbitt document is Patrick Hoy, identified with Henry Crown as owners of "the controlling block in General Dynamics between 1960 and 1966." Also named is David Hoy, no detail given.

In R.B. Cutler's 4/3/77 handwritten note to Richard E. Sprague, he says "Gary Shaw showed pictures of Frenchy around Gen'l Dynamics (Dallas?) everybody said that's Jerry Hoy." Then there's the note "that is Raoul - the guy that paid Ray - and the 'lead' tramp in Dealey Plaza."

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Hale, a former FBI agent, was head of security at General Dynamics. In John la Carre’s book, The Constant Gardner, he makes the point that the head of security at large corporations are often responsible for arranging the deaths of people who pose a threat to the business interest of the company.

One of the JFK conspirators named in the Torbitt document is Patrick Hoy, identified with Henry Crown as owners of "the controlling block in General Dynamics between 1960 and 1966." Also named is David Hoy, no detail given.

In R.B. Cutler's 4/3/77 handwritten note to Richard E. Sprague, he says "Gary Shaw showed pictures of Frenchy around Gen'l Dynamics (Dallas?) everybody said that's Jerry Hoy." Then there's the note "that is Raoul - the guy that paid Ray - and the 'lead' tramp in Dealey Plaza."

Fascinating post. Rather than takeover this important thread I have started a new thread on the Hoys and General Dynamics?

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