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Jack White: "The Roscoe White curse"


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When I showed interest in locating Jim Braden -the guy arrested in Dealy Plaza and also living at a hotel 20 minutes from the hotel where RFK was killed- I was warned that I am entering the "Big Leagues", meaning that I should do it at my own risk.

Who rendered this warning to you?

Someone I consider as a friend, researcher Bill Kelly who is a writer. So that was a "friendly" warning. :rolleyes:

Hi Denis,

Indeed I am a friend and that was a friendly warning, as Jim Braden is most certainly a major league player, though not someone who should be considered violently dangerous, like Luis Angel Castillo, who Peter Dale Scott was warned about. I hope you haven't given up interest in attempting to locate however, and if you do, please let me know because I'd like to talk to him.

It's sometimes fun to play hardball in the big leagues, though it's easier to get hurt.

Jim Lesar, the head of the Assassinations Archives and Research Center in DC, said that his mentor and founder of the AARB, Bud Festerwald, did indeed die after returning from Texas looking into the Roscoe White story. Larry Harris is another one who focused on the Tippit murder who died mysteriously.

BK

Edited by William Kelly
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Incidentally, two weeks ago, I had to undergo ear surgery for the damage done 13 years ago. A five-inch incision was made in my scalp behind the ear so the surgeon could get to a serious infection inside the ear.
Has anyone checked for implants? This could rate right up there with the mysterious "listening devices" around Dealey Plaza, and the more recent attempt by the City of Dallas to expose Plaza-ites to a deadly nerve toxin, the nefarious purposes of which remain hidden.

Was this sarcasm or just a sick attempt at humor?

Chuck

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Incidentally, two weeks ago, I had to undergo ear surgery for the damage done 13 years ago. A five-inch incision was made in my scalp behind the ear so the surgeon could get to a serious infection inside the ear.
Has anyone checked for implants? This could rate right up there with the mysterious "listening devices" around Dealey Plaza, and the more recent attempt by the City of Dallas to expose Plaza-ites to a deadly nerve toxin, the nefarious purposes of which remain hidden.

Was this sarcasm or just a sick attempt at humor?

Chuck

Neither. Or both. Take your pick.

Or maybe it's just an IOU, in which case you don't have a need to know if you don't already.

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  • 10 years later...

Amazing that as late as 2006 there would still be talk of threats ( whether relating to actual physical concern or just a possible quagmire of time and effort in certain areas of JFK study ... or even as a joke?) to anyone investigating the JFK and RFK events.

Back the early years, I could definitely see threats to those getting too involved in the Roscoe White area.

I always considered him to be a person of serious and valid suspicion.

I could never buy that a person with such similar and same-time intriguing military activity and serving location background to Oswald..."just happened" to move to the same "Oak Cliff" area of Dallas as Oswald and become a Dallas Police Officer mere months before 11,22,1963.

And add in White's marriage to Geneva Toland who was connected to Oswald's killer Jack Ruby at some level ( any level is suspicious. ) White's own friendly association with Ruby and White's pastor's recollections about him and especially the pastor's recounting of White's sin confession of stating he ( White ) had killed on foreign and American soil.

I am posting a copy of the Pastor's summary regarding White whether this is credible or not.  I believe that if it is even half true...that White nefariously had something to do with the events in Dallas on 11,22,1963.

 At 21, Rock married Geneva Toland, who was just 15. A year later he joined the Marines.

In August 1957 he sailed aboard the U.S.S. Bexar, from San Diego to Yokosuka, Japan. One of his shipmates was Lee Harvey Oswald. For the next five and a half months, White and Oswald were assigned to the 1st Marine Air Wing, first at Atsugi, Japan, and later at Subic Bay, in the Philippines. Oswald was a radar operator in Marine Air Group 16. The two groups may have been quartered miles apart, but Oswald and White probably drank at the same enlisted-men’s club. Being Texans a long way from home, there’s a good chance the two met. Atsugi, incidentally, was one of the bases from which the CIA operated its ultrasecret U-2 reconnaissance flights.

In 1959 White reenlisted for six years but inexplicably changed his mind in 1962 and applied for a hardship discharge. In the meantime, Oswald had also received a hardship discharge, had defected to Russia for 31 months, and then was allowed to return to the United States without so much as a debriefing by U.S. intelligence. Oswald’s odyssey stretched credulity beyond all reason: Many of his Marine buddies just assumed that Oswald was an American intelligence agent. Early in 1963, Roscoe White moved his family to the Oak Cliff section of Dallas, where Lee Harvey Oswald was living.

Geneva White remembers her husband’s talking about a friend from the Marine Corps named Lee, particularly a story of how Lee got drunk one night and kept falling down a flight of stairs. Among the memorabilia that Rock brought home after his discharge was a photograph of a group of Marines waiting to board a ship in the Philippines: Oswald is clearly identifiable in the foreground, and Geneva says that the Marine in the background whose face is shaded by the bill of his cap is her husband. The same photograph, cropped differently, was published in Life magazine three months after the assassination. Another souvenir was a .22-caliber two-shot derringer. Geneva remembers that Rock told her, “Keep this in a safe place. It’ll be worth a lot of money some day.” The derringer is similar to the one that fell out of Oswald’s barracks locker in 1958, wounding him in the arm.

Geneva recalls being introduced to Lee Oswald a few months before the assassination at a rifle range near the Grand Prairie Naval Air Station, where White and Oswald were practicing marksmanship. A few weeks later, she saw Oswald in a grocery store near their home in Oak Cliff. “I saw your friend Lee today,” she told Rock, who became irritated and told her to never mention that name again. About the same time, Geneva caught her husband in bed with a woman named Hazel, an act of infidelity that severely strained their marriage. Rock promised that the affair was over, Geneva recalled, but when she happened to overhear Jack Ruby mention Hazel’s name one night at the Carousel, she stopped outside the door of his office and eavesdropped. She heard Ruby tell her husband: “Hazel is the contact.” Ruby said something about the Bay of Pigs and how Kennedy had betrayed them. The longer she listened, Geneva said, the clearer it became that her husband and Ruby were talking about killing the president. This, at least, is the memory of a dying woman with a history of shock treatments.

Policemen who worked with Rock White find the mere suggestion that he was involved in the assassination ludicrous. “Let me put it this way,” said W.L. Barnard, now retired from the Dallas Police Department. “Roscoe was one hundred percent jarhead Marine, just like me, trained to follow orders. Now do you suppose a man like that would kill the Commander in Chief of the United States of America?” John T. Williams, another former Dallas policeman said, “The whole story is unbelievable. Rock never told anyone that he was personally acquainted with Oswald or knew anything about the assassination.” White quit the police force in October 1965—two years to the day after he signed on—telling fellow officers he was quitting because of financial and marital problems.

In the six years that followed, Rock White made a number of unexplained trips to New Orleans and other places. “I was never sure what was happening.” Geneva says, “but I was raised to let the man do the thinking and not ask questions.” In 1968 White moved his family to Mountain Home, Arkansas, supposedly to work for the post office. But nobody at the Mountain Home post office remembers him, and postal employment records don’t go back that far. Later that same year the family returned to Dallas, and White became the assistant manager of a five-and-dime store in Richardson.

“The family appeared to have money,” recalled the Reverend Jack Shaw, who was their pastor at Central Park Baptist Church. “New car, new home. As I recall, Roscoe pledged ten thousand dollars to our building program.” White’s sons, Ricky and Tony, had new bicycles and go-carts, and the family purchases a cabin on a lake in Central Texas. Rock continued to mess around with other women, and Jack Shaw counseled the couple and prayed with them on several occasions. “Rock poured his heart out to me,” Shaw said. “He told me he had sinned against God, his country, and especially against his wife. He told me he had taken human life on foreign soil and here at home. I knew he had been in the service and had been a policeman, and I didn’t press him for details.”

In the summer of 1971, shortly after Geneva returned from a trip to New Orleans, she suffered an emotional breakdown and was hospitalized for about a month. Jack Shaw was surprised that the family hadn’t sought his spiritual guidance but sensed that there was some reason for their reluctance. Years later he learned that on the trip to New Orleans, a strange and sinister man had approached Geneva in a nightclub, reminded her about Rock’s part in the Kennedy assassination, and told her: “We have another job for Rock. Tell him he has forty-eight hours to get in touch.” Apparently White never got in touch with the man.

By this time White had a better-paying job at M&M Equipment Company. But in September he was fatally burned when a leak in an acetylene torch flamed up, causing a can of chemicals that was stored under his workbench to explode. On his deathbed White told Jack Shaw that the explosion was no accident. Shaw assumed there would be a criminal investigation, but there wasn’t. White’s family eventually reached an out-of-court settlement with the chemical manufacturer for $57,000.

Not long after that, Geneva and her two sons moved back to her parents’ home in Paris, where she remarried. Jack Shaw didn’t see or hear from her again for nearly twenty years.

 

 

Edited by Joe Bauer
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I recall some discussion online about the late Gary Mack following his sudden death that centered on the possibility his secret employer got him taken out. What the supposed crime committed was not disclosed. Some suspected Robert Groden pulled his plug somehow.

If Mack is added to a list of notorious 'Oswald did it' preachers, how many have recently died? Hmm..let's see...there's Vince Bugliosi (for starters).

McAdams groupies & cheerleaders & the few LN's that post here at EF all seem to be hanging in there.

Anyone checked David Von Pein's pulse lately?

(lol)

Some might find it interesting to compare the LN fatality rate vs. the CT rate. I suspect the CT fatalities far exceed the LN'ers, but I haven't seen any data that proves it.

Brad Milch

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If it's true that Roscoe White was as close to Jack Ruby as his widow declares; including Ruby coming to their house to share barbeques and have his dog Sheba play with her kids...to me this is a very singularly special and important "cross-over" implication regards Roscoe White.

The cross-over connection of White to both Oswald (in their very similar military serving times, activities and military and personal life residency locations ) and ( rather intimately ) to Jack Ruby - Oswald's killer.

How many others in the JFK affair cast of characters could claim such a unique dual main character connection?  

David Ferrie perhaps?

Ah, well.  Guess this is just another of the 100's of JFK/Oswald/Ruby coincidences that we are told are only important in our own over-active imagination conspiratorial minds

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I liked Jack personally.  

But he was wrong about this one. Nobody did their due diligence in advance,  and it burned a lot of people.

Plus, it gave us a black eye since there were a lot of media down there in Dallas that day.

Personally, I think we should stay away from trying to name the actual assassins, especially at this late date.

 

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Regards Roscoe White's pastor's recounting of White stating he had taken life on foreign soil as well as here at home...

in his duties in the Dallas PD in the "photo" area, White certainly didn't take anyone's life " here at home" in that 2 year long employment position.

An action like that would have been recorded.

How much of Geneva's White's explosive and JFK event incriminating recollection statements regards her husband must a rational person dismiss?

Okay, the woman had shock treatments which certainly could effect someone's memory.

However, 65 years of life experience has taught me to not  "totally dismiss" testimony from people of socially incorrect ( even psychologically challenged ) backgrounds.

People with alcohol problems, drug problems, criminal background problems and even mental health treatment backgrounds.

Often it is "this group of people" who tell more of the truth than so-called upper social class types. Who often don't want to get involved in the dirty business of crime or wrong doing.

Bugliosi constantly tried to dismiss many of Jim Garrison's witnesses as all a bunch of drug addicts, criminals, attention seekers, etc.

But guess where most inner city police crime investigators get most of their tips in their cases? Tips that lead to suspect identification and prosecution?  Other criminal background drug using and selling perps!  Often the subjects cohorts!  

I guarantee you that in attaining many of his court convictions as an L.A. District Attorney, Bugliosi and his teams relied on testimony from many of this class of people.

But, getting back to Geneva White and the credibility of her amazingly incriminating statements; she had so much to share on this subject matter and a mentally damaged or disturbed person would have tripped up way more times than she did...IMO.  I don't think anyone can ever totally dismiss Roscoe White as some innocent character in the JFK event affair.  

 

 

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Joe, if you have 65 years of life experience, how old were you in your avatar photo?

 

Or did you succeed in what Ponce DeLeon failed at?

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Mr. DiEugenio...don't I wish.

I was about 30 to 34 in that photo.

Not even sure exactly when it was taken.

I think it was taken in our back yard at the time or in Big Sur, California where I have always liked to spend much recreation time.

 

 

 

Edited by Joe Bauer
Sober Reflection
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Joe,

Nice summary of the life of Roscoe White.  The most interesting event that you omitted, though, allegedly happened on 11/22/1963, and was reported by Mike Robinson.   He claims that he personally heard Roscoe White confess to the murder of J.D. Tippit.

As for Jack Ruby, I accept as historical fact the portrait of Ruby provided by Texas journalist, Seth Kantor, who claims to have known Ruby for several years.   The book is, Who Was Jack Ruby? (1978).  

According to Kantor, Jack Ruby was simply a pimp -- and nothing much more than that.  As such, he was beholden to the Dallas Police to keep operating underground.   (Dallas Sheriff Bill Decker, IIRC, wrote a book about Dallas criminals, with a chapter dedicated to Jack Ruby, showing the two high-class bordellos that Ruby operated in Dallas).

In the opinion of Seth Kantor, it was the Dallas Police who persuaded Jack Ruby to kill Oswald.  They would have urged him on, called him a hero, promised that he would get off easy, or perhaps be transformed into a national hero.   For Kantor, the pimp Jack Ruby had nothing at all to do with the JFK assassination, and was himself a patsy of the DPD in the murder of Oswald.

If this is true, then based on your biography, Joe, I find it easy to believe that Roscoe White would have been first in line to persuade Jack Ruby to murder Lee Harvey Oswald.   They had a personal relationship, for one thing, via Geneva White.  Also, if Roscoe really did kill J.D. Tippit, then Roscoe would have been specially motivated.

Regards,
--Paul Trejo

Edited by Paul Trejo
typos
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9 hours ago, Chris Newton said:

DeM

Jackie O's Mom, George HW Bush, the Dallas Russians and of course, LHO

Chris,

Joe was asking how many people had a dual connection to both LHO and Jack Ruby before the JFK assassination.

By unanimous consent, that was only Roscoe White.   Others are only debated.   Ron Lewis claimed to be one.

Regards,
--Paul Trejo

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On 1/13/2017 at 9:48 AM, Paul Trejo said:

Chris,

Joe was asking how many people had a dual connection to both LHO and Jack Ruby before the JFK assassination.

By unanimous consent, that was only Roscoe White.   Others are only debated.   Ron Lewis claimed to be one.

Regards,
--Paul Trejo

 
 
 

Joe Bauer   Wrote:

"How many others in the JFK affair cast of characters could claim such a unique dual main character connection?"

 

Paul: I think Joe's question was a little more broad.

However, in the LHO - Ruby, narrow scope, I'll suggest Larry Cafar. He served in the Marines, arguably WITH LHO, in Japan.

DeMorhenshildts web, I agree, is perhaps the most dynamic. I'll add something to that web. Michael Paine's "mother was Ruth Forbes Young, financial backer of International Peace Academy and daughter of Elise Cabot Forbes, a scion of the Cabot family." -Wikipedia

 

Edited by Michael Clark
Tried to edit out long blank space...unsuccessfully.
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