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Can we trust the Ferrell Foundation?


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Joseph McBride:

My personal dealings with Mary Ferrell quickly alerted me to her duplicity. My investigative reporter's

instincts for a phony quickly kicked in, and I began investigating her background and MO. I go into this in detail in the book and can only summarize it here. I concluded that she was what fellow Tippit researcher Greg Lowrey called "The Gatekeeper," the person delegated by the U.S. government to keep tabs on what genuine researchers and others were doing. She doled out documents and other information to maintain the facade of being a researcher, but she had intelligence connections and spread disinformation. She also actively disliked John F. Kennedy.

Penn Jones warned me to stay away from her. He was a great journalist who was a maverick and was on the case from the first weekend. He turned up many important leads for the rest of us to follow. He made some mistakes and was sometimes sloppy. But he was intrepid, fearless, shrewd, and hard-digging. He was an inspiration to me and many others and was a mentor to me and a friend.

Edited by Joseph McBride, 18 July 2013 - 09:27 AM.

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Quote Joseph McBride

Originally Posted by Joseph McBride on DP Forum viewpost-right.png

Mary Ferrell once tried to recommend to me John K. Lattimer's

LINCOLN AND KENNEDY: MEDICAL AND BALLISTIC COMPARISONS

OF THEIR ASSASSINATIONS as the best study of the medical

evidence in the JFK assassination. I had read it, so this was one

of the moments when I was alerted to her true nature as a

disinformation specialist.

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Judyth Baker discovered that somebody at the Ferrell Foundation is altering evidence:

quote JVB (about her work at Reillys/NOLA with Oswald...)

...I have 11. Hired the same day, May 9, 1963, by Wm. B. Reilly as was Lee Oswald. Started at Standard Coffee, a small subsidiary to Reilly, the same day. Moved, one week later, on the same day, May 16, to Reilly from Standard with Lee. My initial ‘J’ is on most of Lee’s time cards, though two “J’s’ were recently erased at the Mary Ferrell Foundation site (the originals as in National Archives remain unchanged).

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KK

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here are the exact documents, which were altered and how.

Quote JVB

NOTE this information: CD 589, EXHIBIT D-110 –ELEVEN TIME CARDS, REILY, FBI REPORT 03 MAR 1964: TIME CARDS FOR MAY 17 AND MAY 31 HAVE THEIR ‘J’S’ REMOVED, AS WELL AS “MADE 40″ WHICH I WROTE ON BOTH OF THOSE CARDS. UNDER SEARCH OF FBIO DOCUMENTS, AT THAT SITE, PLUG IN “CD 589 03 MAR 1964″ TO SEE THE ALTERED DOCUMENTS. CONTRAST WITH THE UNALTERED ORIGINALS SHOWING ALL THE ‘J’ INITIALS AND ‘MADE 40′ NOTATIONS CLEARLY. (THESE WERE OBTAINED BY SIXTY MINUTES AND NANCY ELDRETH YEARS EARLIER FROM THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES –FROM FBI FILES, SPECIAL PERMISSION AT THAT TIME NEEDED).

Many researchers have copies of the unaltered time cards. Seems we will have to make a YouTube presentation, to show what was done–and why it matters. Erasing my presence from the record has been going on for some time, many of us believe, but this is the most recent example, having been detected in June, 2012.

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Edited by Karl Kinaski
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Can we trust the Ferrell Foundation?

I don't have any personal knowledge whatsoever about Mary Ferrell, the woman. But I, myself, love the Mary Ferrell website (and I'm just a stupid "LNer"). :) I appreciate the tremendous amount of work that has been done by people like Rex Bradford to make available to everyone on the Internet (CTers and LNers alike) the thousands upon thousands of pages of primary source material associated with President John F. Kennedy's murder (more than 1.3-million pages at the Ferrell site).

The massive archive at both the Mary Ferrell site and the History Matters site is something that I couldn't live without. (It'd sure be misery having to live without those sites anyway. I use them for something almost every single day.)

Whenever people (like Thomas Rossley at another forum, for one example) tell me that nobody can speak with any authority on the JFK evidence because we don't "own the 26 volumes" of the Warren Report, I immediately point out that possessing the physical volumes is no longer necessary in this digital age, because people like Rex Bradford (and others who have worked with him, no doubt) have spent thousands of hours of their time in an effort to put every page of every volume online (for free, no less!). And the HSCA volumes too.

But, amazingly, there seems to be a certain percentage of "JFK researchers" out there in cyberland who have no idea that the Ferrell and History Matters sites even exist, because more than once I've had to point people to those sites after they seemed to have no clue they were there.

And this archive of Warren Commission "Documents" below is something I hope never disappears. It's almost unbelievable how much stuff is in here, which is material you won't find anyplace else in the online world. And I, for one, am very grateful to everyone who played a part in making material like this available to anybody with a mouse and a keyboard....

Warren-Commission-Documents-Logo.png

Edited by David Von Pein
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Well I know that lots of folks love as many conspiracies as possible but since I'm directly associated with Rex Bradford and the MFF I would answer that you can trust it - based on my personal experience. Rex has done an immense job of putting Mary's documents on line and the bulk of her physical and non-documented materials have been transferred to Baylor University and its archives for physical access. Rex has increasingly worked with the ARRC to put additional material online beyond Mary's documents and on line access to a range of material none of us dreamed of back over a decade ago. For those who want to go back to where it was when I started, with individual requests to NARA and waits of months and years plus hundreds of dollars in duplicate page copy expenses - have at it. For those with doubts, have you ever thought of actually communicating directly with Rex and asking questions? The one problem that we have is that there are now generations of unredactions in documents so I know from personal experience that you can find more extant versions of individual documents than were available to Mary. In fact Stu Wexler and I have found that if you request the same document three or four times you may get increasingly more content....not sure how that works but we have certainly seen it. Heck, maybe that's a conspiracy too....perhaps its all part of a grand plot to discredit Judyth.....that must be it....


Edited by Larry Hancock
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I second Larry Hancock in this matter, the bottom line is that to believe Mary Ferrell's online database which has everything except the proverbial kitchen sink in terms of content helps coverup the truth, is to impugn the character of Rex Bradford, and that doesn't fly. This reminds me of the same type of comments made about Bernard Fensterwald, he was knee deep in JFK research, and an extremely valuable asset to JFK research. Having said that Gerry Patrick Hemming used to visit Mary Ferrell back in the day, but you would have to have been there to know what that was all about. Hemming also visited Jim Garrison, Draw your own conclusions, if you are capable of independent thinking nothing discussed on this thread is a dragoon. In fact, at this late stage in JFK research it isn't "what we don't know" to a great degree but fact checking what we do know, and getting our hands on what's left to be declassified.

Edited by Robert Howard
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Joseph McBride:

My personal dealings with Mary Ferrell quickly alerted me to her duplicity. My investigative reporter's

instincts for a phony quickly kicked in, and I began investigating her background and MO. I go into this in detail in the book and can only summarize it here. I concluded that she was what fellow Tippit researcher Greg Lowrey called "The Gatekeeper," the person delegated by the U.S. government to keep tabs on what genuine researchers and others were doing. She doled out documents and other information to maintain the facade of being a researcher, but she had intelligence connections and spread disinformation. She also actively disliked John F. Kennedy.

Penn Jones warned me to stay away from her. He was a great journalist who was a maverick and was on the case from the first weekend. He turned up many important leads for the rest of us to follow. He made some mistakes and was sometimes sloppy. But he was intrepid, fearless, shrewd, and hard-digging. He was an inspiration to me and many others and was a mentor to me and a friend.

Edited by Joseph McBride, 18 July 2013 - 09:27 AM.

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Quote Joseph McBride

Originally Posted by Joseph McBride on DP Forum viewpost-right.png

Mary Ferrell once tried to recommend to me John K. Lattimer's

LINCOLN AND KENNEDY: MEDICAL AND BALLISTIC COMPARISONS

OF THEIR ASSASSINATIONS as the best study of the medical

evidence in the JFK assassination. I had read it, so this was one

of the moments when I was alerted to her true nature as a

disinformation specialist.

close quote

Judyth Baker discovered that somebody at the Ferrell Foundation is altering evidence:

quote JVB (about her work at Reillys/NOLA with Oswald...)

...I have 11. Hired the same day, May 9, 1963, by Wm. B. Reilly as was Lee Oswald. Started at Standard Coffee, a small subsidiary to Reilly, the same day. Moved, one week later, on the same day, May 16, to Reilly from Standard with Lee. My initial ‘J’ is on most of Lee’s time cards, though two “J’s’ were recently erased at the Mary Ferrell Foundation site (the originals as in National Archives remain unchanged).

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KK

Joseph was commenting on Mary herself, not the current foundation. And I was told by her son Jimmy in 1997 not to trust her. And he gave me plenty of reasons.

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Dawn that's not the title of this thread so I commented on the Foundation.....as to the latter, all I can say is that from my relatively limited personal experience I saw Mary question and challenge everyone including people like Hemming and others and clinically cut many of them to shreds if she found them to be unreliable, one of the sharpest individuals I've seen, with ice cold critical faculties. If she had an agenda or let her politics drive her I didn't see it - unlike may in the "conspiracy community" I saw no evidence of her pre-judging or letting emotions rule....her negative assessment of Judyth was one of the later examples of that. I think our quest would be a lot better off if we had more researchers as analytical as Mary was...but then that's just my style.

Which is of course not to say there might be a lot I don't know, I can only comment on what I saw which was only a short span of her total involvement. I was introduced to daughter, never new her son.

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Larry During the 80's I enjoyed a lovely relationship with Mary, Nothing frequent, just some correspondence and some calls. She was very charming and I, like everyone in the community, had nothing but total request for her. Then in late June of 1990 I moved to Austin. Didn't know hardly anyone here. When the Roscoe White story broke BIG I had a very strange experience with Mary over the phone. She wanted me to come to Dallas and "cover they story" for her. Told me she could not get time off from work. That seemed very odd. A few days earlier while at a friend's birthday party my car was crashed in a hit and run, so it was in the shop being repaired. I did not have a car to get to Dallas I told her. (Had not yet gotten a rental). I was working at t law firm and was required to use a computer and word perfect, something I had never done before. So in her insistence that I come to Dallas, she asked me to come to her home and she would give me the word perfect program and teach me how to manage it. It all struck me as strange, she was TOO demanding and it made no sense why she could not get across town- or wherever- and gather all the information she needed on this seemingly big break in the case.

I would meet Jimmy Ferrell, who was and is a good friend of Rachel Rendish, seven years later and learned a lot. (For one thing there was a specific "reason" according to Jimmy that she requested me to come to her home.)

End of hijack. I have the upmost respect for Rex and her research is very valuable. I only brought up Mary herself because KK re- posted Joe McBride's own experiences and observations. Which triggered my own memories, and all the stuff her son told me on the many occasions I saw him, usually up at Jay Harrison's/.

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I've certainly heard enough to know that there were issues around Mary - and that she was accused of building files on researchers. I also know she would "assign" projects, one I recall was getting a couple of folks to go to Mexico City to research the address on the "Hunt letter". I came in relatively late, I do know a few of my subjects that she was very interested in and wanted to discuss but I never got anything more than encouragement. I also recall Harrison Livingston's book which cast her and several of the Dallas researchers in a negative light and really came down hard on Mary for keeping track of researchers. Given my history with both Harry and Mary I'm pretty comfortable with giving that round to Mary...grin.

Anyway, I suppose anyone who has been into this as deeply and as long as Mary was is bound to pick up a good deal of baggage and for that matter make some mistakes, I know I have. I'll confine myself to commenting on the MFF which I did see jell early on as Ollie Curme was actually acquiring the material from Mary. I've worked with Rex since then (and longer, back to when HTML and pdfs were both new and exciting) so I do have a pretty good picture of that part of the story....and I was the one who first linked Ben and Rex up on what ultimately was the hard copy transfer of materials to Baylor. All part of my document geekishness I suppose..

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@Mods: The threat should be renamed: Who trusted Mary Ferrell, and can we trust the Ferrell Foundation. I think the two topics belong together.

I was stunned, when I first saw prove of heavy online-document tampering of the MFF, which is a site where a lot of researchers bank on. I was stunned when JVB, who discovered this tampering, mentioned it to Jefferson Morley, who declined to go into that strange little thing, and said just words to the effect: There is no tampering at MFF, and it's boss, my Friend Rex Bradford is a good guy. Maybe. But in fact there IS a document alteration and it would be nice, when somebody of that Foundation would come forward to explain it.

Me too I thought, Mary Ferrell was an honest Cter.

Then I read INTO THE NIGHTMARE, where Joseph McBride writes a whole Chapter called THE GATEKEEPER, about her, accusing her of a DISHONEST MODUS OPERANDI, in her dealings with fellow researchers, which convinced me, that Mary Ferrell was one of the biggest moles in the CTer community ever. Note: among her friends were Hugh Aynsworth, Gary Mack and Barb Junkarrinnen. During the Garrison case, she served as FBI informant, and she was a member of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers AFIO, founded, yes, by David Atlee Philips. She was a lifelong Republican who disliked Kennedy.

Dallas Tippit researcher Greg Lowrey said to McBride: "She hated Kennedy, it was no secret."

Mary Ferrell was involved in the DPD Audio-tape hoax, (together with Gary Mack) she was involved in the Roscoe White hoax---she was, somehow involved in a campain to smear JVB...

Not only Joseph McBride and Lowery had strange experiences with her. JVB had it. Dawn Meredith had it...

Wouldn't be online document tampering of a site of a Foundation namend after her the natural sequel of Marys DISHONEST MODUS OPERANDI? I think so.

KK

Edited by Karl Kinaski
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Karl, have you discussed this with or brought it to the attention of Rex Bradford? Certainly it should be explained - is there any sign Judyth asked him for an explanation. Is it just one document - you call it "heavy tampering" so I assume its more than one and certainly more than one that would relate to Judyth. If somebody can email me particulars I will pursue it with Rex - but it would be nice to have some facts and some history for him. I certainly hope such broad accusations are being made on something more than a single assertion from JVB.....

Edited by Larry Hancock
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Kathy and all, I have emailed Rex on this - it will be pretty embarrassing if nobody has at least raised the question with him up to this point. And as you say, good practice would be presenting a trusted copy of the original from a source such as the Archives and then requesting he investigate what was posted on the MFF site....and of course the documents there do come through separate channels including the ARRC. He will have to do some research on that as well as whether the document(s) in question came from multiple sources eg WC, HSCA, via what channel.

I think at this point there are a number of individuals including Barb, Pamela and possibly Dawn who might have some comments on Judyth herself as a source but at least in this case if Rex has some real detail to investigate I'm sure he will make an effort to resolve it.

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@Mods: The threat should be renamed: Who trusted Mary Ferrell, and can we trust the Ferrell Foundation. I think the two topics belong together.

I was stunned, when I first saw prove of heavy online-document tampering of the MFF, which is a site where a lot of researchers bank on. I was stunned when JVB, who discovered this tampering, mentioned it to Jefferson Morley, who declined to go into that strange little thing, and said just words to the effect: There is no tampering at MFF, and it's boss, my Friend Rex Bradford is a good guy. Maybe. But in fact there IS a document alteration and it would be nice, when somebody of that Foundation would come forward to explain it.

Me too I thought, Mary Ferrell was an honest Cter.

Then I read INTO THE NIGHTMARE, where Joseph McBride writes a whole Chapter called THE GATEKEEPER, about her, accusing her of a DISHONEST MODUS OPERANDI, in her dealings with fellow researchers, which convinced me, that Mary Ferrell was one of the biggest moles in the CTer community ever. Note: among her friends were Hugh Aynsworth, Gary Mack and Barb Junkarrinnen. During the Garrison case, she served as FBI informant, and she was a member of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers AFIO, founded, yes, by David Atlee Philips. She was a lifelong Republican who disliked Kennedy.

Dallas Tippit researcher Greg Lowrey said to McBride: "She hated Kennedy, it was no secret."

Mary Ferrell was involved in the DPD Audio-tape hoax, (together with Gary Mack) she was involved in the Roscoe White hoax---she was, somehow involved in a campain to smear JVB...

Not only Joseph McBride and Lowery had strange experiences with her. JVB had it. Dawn Meredith had it...

Wouldn't be online document tampering of a site of a Foundation namend after her the natural sequel of Marys DISHONEST MODUS OPERANDI? I think so.

KK

Regarding the Garrison investigation and Mary's alleged FBI informant status one of the things JImmy told me was that she actually sent him to NO as her spy to help sabotage Garrison's investigation. And he told me the reason she tried to get me to come to her house was two fold: to take a photo as she takes photos of everyone and investigates them, but...(and this is going to sound very strange I know) that she was a practicing witch, and needed a photo for this purpose. Jimmy talked about all of these things and more on several occasions. Rachel (Rendish) has talked with him about writing something with her, to the effect of growing up with Mary and her true role in the JFK assassination.

Dawn

Dawn

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