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Bill Hunter and Jim Koethe


John Simkin

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On 24th November, 1963, Bill Hunter (Long Beach Independent Press Telegram) and Jim Koethe (Dallas Times Herald) interviewed George Senator. Also there was the attorney Tom Howard. Earlier that day Senator and Howard had both visited Jack Ruby in jail. That evening Senator arranged for Koethe, Hunter and Howard to search Ruby's apartment. It is not known what was found but within 16 months all three men were dead.

On 23rd April 1964, Bill Hunter was shot dead by Creighton Wiggins, a policeman in the pressroom of a Long Beach police station. Wiggins initially claimed that his gun fired when he dropped it and tried to pick it up. In court this was discovered that this was impossible and it was decided that Hunter had been murdered. Wiggins finally admitted he was playing a game of quick draw with his fellow officer. The other officer, Errol F. Greenleaf, testified he had his back turned when the shooting took place. In January 1965, both were convicted and sentenced to three years probation.

Jim Koethe decided to write a book about the assassination of Kennedy. However, he died on 21st September, 1964. It seems that a man broke into his Dallas apartment and killed him by a karate chop to the throat.

Tom Howard died of a heart-attack, aged 48, on 27th March, 1965.

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On 24th November, 1963, Bill Hunter (Long Beach Independent Press Telegram) and Jim Koethe (Dallas Times Herald) interviewed George Senator. Also there was the attorney Tom Howard. Earlier that day Senator and Howard had both visited Jack Ruby in jail. That evening Senator arranged for Koethe, Hunter and Howard to search Ruby's apartment. It is not known what was found but within 16 months all three men were dead.

On 23rd April 1964, Bill Hunter was shot dead by Creighton Wiggins, a policeman in the pressroom of a Long Beach police station. Wiggins initially claimed that his gun fired when he dropped it and tried to pick it up. In court this was discovered that this was impossible and it was decided that Hunter had been murdered. Wiggins finally admitted he was playing a game of quick draw with his fellow officer. The other officer, Errol F. Greenleaf, testified he had his back turned when the shooting took place. In January 1965, both were convicted and sentenced to three years probation.

Jim Koethe decided to write a book about the assassination of Kennedy. However, he died on 21st September, 1964. It seems that a man broke into his Dallas apartment and killed him by a karate chop to the throat.

Tom Howard died of a heart-attack, aged 48, on 27th March, 1965.

I will forever blame Earl Warren and Gerald Ford for not taking Jack Ruby seriously in all that he was telling them. "A whole new form of government" is exactly what occurred. Ford I get, he's "one of them" and his payback was to be president, but why Warren participated in this total travesty of justice has always been beyond my comprehension. I know that it's generally believed that he emerged from the room in tears because he was persuaded that he needed to head the WC in order to avoid some sort of (fake) nuclear war, but I have always suspected that they had something BIG on him and that was the reason for the tears. Blackmail. Just my opinion, nothing to base this on...

Hunter, Koethe and Howard clearly knew something rather substantial.

Here's a question for you Tim- (another you won't answer I am sure): If your theory is correct, then who killed all the witnesses???? Castro :)

Dawn

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As far as Jim Koethe goes, the man charged and then no billed of his murder was a petty crook from Mississippi named Larry Reno. Reno was nabbed a few days after the attack with several items from Koethe's apartment in his possession. Koethe and Reno had been seen drinking beer in a local bar and Reno admitted to a beer drinking session in Koethe's apartment a few days before Koethe's body was found.

Reno's lawyer Mike Barclay argued that Reno was of such a small frame that he didn't have the strength to overpower and kill Koethe. At the time, Koethe's death was reported as a strangulation rather than a blow to the throat.

Barclay suggested that Reno was responsible for the burglary but not the murder.

FWIW.

Koethe below.

James

Edited by James Richards
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Penn Jones published the original story (Midlothian Mirror) of the 13 witnesses who died mysteriously in August 1966. David Welsh of Ramparts was asked by Warren Hinckle to check out the story. His article appeared in November, 1966. Welsh claimed that only ten of these deaths were connected to the assassination of JFK.

(1) Penn Jones, Jr, Disappearing Witnesses (August, 1966)

Bill Hunter, a native of Dallas and an award-winning newsman in Long Beach, was on duty and reading a book in the police station called the "Public Safety Building." Two policemen going off duty came into the press room, and one policeman shot Hunter through the heart at a range officially ruled to be "no more than three feet." The policeman said he dropped his gun, and it fired as he picked it up, but the angle of the bullet caused him to change his story. He finally said he was playing a game of quick draw with his fellow officer. The other officer testified he had his back turned when the shooting took place.

Hunter, who covered the assassination for his paper, the Long Beach Press Telegram had written:

"Within minutes of Ruby's execution of Oswald, before the eyes of millions watching television, at least two Dallas attorneys appeared to talk with him."

Hunter was quoting Tom Howard who died of a heart attack in Dallas a few months after Hunter's own death. Lawyer Tom Howard was observed acting strangely to his friends two days before his death. Howard was taken to the hospital by a "friend" according to the newspapers. No autopsy was performed.

Dallas Times Herald reporter Jim Koethe was killed by a karate chop to the throat just as he emerged from a shower in his apartment on Sept. 21, 1964. His murderer was not indicted.

What went on in that significant meeting in Ruby's and Senator's apartment?

Few are left to tell. There is no one in authority to ask the question, since the Warren Commission has made its final report, and the House Select Committee has closed its investigation.

(2) David Welsh, Ramparts (November, 1966)

Hunter covered the Kennedy assassination more or less on a lark. He was a police reporter for the Long Beach paper and a good one, with a knack for getting along with cops. He drank with them, played cards with them in the press room - he was a sharp and lucky player - and they would often call him at home when a story broke. Hunter was a big man, described by friends as rough, jovial, "very physical," with an attractive wife and three children.

There was no real need for the Long Beach paper to send a reporter to Dallas, but Hunter, who grew up there, managed to promote a free trip for himself with the city desk. In Dallas he ran into Jim Koethe, with whom he had worked in Wichita Falls, Texas. Koethe asked him to come along to the meeting in Ruby's apartment; they arrived to find Senator and Tom Howard having a drink.

Bill Hunter was killed just after midnight on the morning of April 23, 1964 - only a few hours after George Senator testified before Warren Commission counsel that he "could not recall" the meeting in Ruby's apartment. Hunter was seated at his desk in the press room of the Long Beach public safety building when detective Creighton Wiggins Jr. and his partner burst into the room. A single bullet fired from Wiggins' gun struck Hunter in the heart, killing him almost instantly. The mystery novel he was reading, entitled Stop This Man!, slipped blood-spattered from his fingers.

Wiggins' story underwent several changes. His final version was that he and his partner had been playing cops and robbers with guns drawn when his gun started to slip from his hand and went off. The two officers were convicted of involuntary manslaughter. Sentnece was suspended. There were so many contradictions in Wiggins' testimony that Bill Shelton, Hunter's city editor and old friend from Texas, is "still not satisfied" with the official verdict. He declines to comment about any possible connection between Hunter's death and the Kennedy assassination. "But I'd believe anything," he says. It is a curious footnote that Shelton's brother Keith was among the majority of Dallas newspapermen who found it expedient to leave their jobs after covering the assassination. Keith was president of the Dallas Press Club and gave up a promising career as political columnist for the Times-Herald to settle in a small north Texas town. One reporter who was asked to resign put it this way: "It looks like a studied effort to remove all the knowledgeable newsmen who covered the assassination."

Members might like to see a photograph of Bill Hunter.

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  • 7 years later...

From an article by Rich Archbold that appeared in yesterday's Long Beach Press-Telegram:

One of the Southern California stories involved Bill Hunter, a veteran and respected reporter for the Press-Telegram and a friend of (David) Henley who was shot to death in Long Beach police headquarters April 23, 1964.

In a chapter entitled, "Killing in Long Beach: Accident or Conspiracy?" Henley writes about the Press-Telegram sending Hunter to Dallas to cover the aftermath of President John Kennedy's assassination.

Hunter witnessed Lee Harvey Oswald's death at the hand of Jack Ruby, covered Ruby's trial and interviewed several of Ruby's friends after Ruby had been jailed.

When he returned to Long Beach to cover the police beat, Hunter was reading a book in the police headquarters building at Broadway and Magnolia Avenue downtown when a policeman shot Hunter through the heart. The policeman initially said he had dropped the gun and it fired accidentally as he picked it up.

But he changed his story later and said he was playing a game of "cops and robbers" with another police officer with loaded revolvers and his gun went off accidentally.

Five months after Hunter died, a second reporter who also had covered Kennedy's assassination, Jim Koethe of the Dallas Times-Herald, was killed in his apartment. Fourteen months after Koethe's murder, a third reporter who covered the deaths of Kennedy and Oswald, Dorothy Kilgallen, was found dead in her New York town house.

In his book, Henley said conspiracy theorists attempted to link the deaths of the three reporters to "sinister forces," reasoning that the journalists "had been done away with to prevent them from uncovering the truth about the Kennedy-Oswald murders."

Henley told me in an interview this week that he does not believe in the conspiracy theory. "I think Hunter's death was just an innocent tragedy," he said.

http://www.presstele...g-adventures-at

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