Richard Gilbride

On November 8 Paul Trejo asked, who gave the BYP to LIFE- and how do we know this? According to a March 25, 1964 internal FBI memo from Assistant Director Alex Rosen to Alan Belmont, #3 man at the Bureau, "an enterprising young man in the Dallas Police Department" provided the backyard photo to LIFE. Roscoe White is the overwhelming choice, considering that his widow found a previously unknown version (with the rifle in the other hand) among his effects. So not only did he pose for them, he had possession of an alternative copy, worked in the ID division, and had a talent for composite photography. It's not a stretch to conclude that he's the guy who made the backyard composites, and sent one off to LIFE.

Part 1 of my conversation with Rob Clark is now on-line at his tlgpodcast.com In it I discuss Prayer Man, Amos Euins, and the "elderly Negro" seen by Arnold Rowland, tieing these together in recommendations for the ROKC forum, where I was once an administrator. Then I recount the discoveries shared with me from 1st-generation researcher Jones Harris, who tracked me down in 2010. We had many long phone calls. He had some unforgettable doozies to share re: ticket clerk Julia Postal, the Cabana Hotel, the 6th-floor crime scene search, the Tippit scene wallet, Igor Vaganov, Army Intelligence running the presidency, and most especially- a James Bond-esque role played by JFK's personal back-channel to Krushchev, Georgi Bolshakov. The first part of the essay establishes that Oswald left the building at 12:34, a minute later than commonly thought. It will be a bit delayed in getting published. A conflict about whether or not to edit has led to my decision to put it on a website of my own. I have enlisted the expertise of a seasoned JFK webmeister, and in due course it'll be available. It is good to see that there are a lot of efforts put out this particular autumn; it is just as well to relax and hunker down for the approaching winter.

Paul Trejo, Thank you for providing a richer understanding of the names involved with the National Zeitung article. But I have to take issue again with regards to your contention that DeMohrenschildt provided the BYP to Life for its Feb. 21, 1964 cover. He was in Haiti at the time. When he returned to Dallas in 1967 he found in his storage garage a black-bordered version of CE-133-A, the pose used for the Life cover. So when was this contract with Life dated, that you are claiming occurred with DeM? I have never heard about that. When did this information come out? What is this document's provenance- can it be trusted? The quote I provided was directly footnoted by Armstrong- a memo from Rosen to Belmont a month after the cover, that "an enterprising young man" had provided the BYP to Life. Armstrong provided the document number and I am confident this is not a mistake on his part. But this is only tiddlywinks. You have a massive faux pas concerning Tippit being on the knoll, and have said that that conclusion derives from Tom Wilson's computer enhancements. I saw one of his videos a couple years ago, about the hole in the back of JFK's head. He's a talented enhancer and should probably be applying his skills toward Prayer Man instead of Badge Man. And Tippit as Badge Man is the brainchild of Robert Morningstar, where I would guess Wilson got his ideas from. And they are as loopy as they get. Photography is used in conjunction with other evidence, to support or detract from it. It is easily faked and doesn't have the evidentiary weight to stand alone, to be the sole determinant for a legal finding. Imagine standing in front of a jury, holding up Mary Moorman's Polaroid, pointing at a bunch of leaves and the gaps of light between them, and professing that modern computer enhancements conclusively demonstrate that the pock-marked face you see in that bush is JD Tippit. But then Tippit's defense attorney plays a tape of the transcript of the radio call "4100 block of Bonnie View" and then cross-examines the woman shoplifter Tippit put in his squad car outside Hodges Super Market. The question you should be asking here is how was Tippit informed about this shoplifter, because it's not on any of the transcripts. Was it erased? Did he have a private back-channel, such as a walkie-talkie, to communicate with the dispatcher? Please consider the source of this shoplifter information: Larry Ray Harris, one of the most gifted, driven seekers of JFK truth to come down the pike. Do you think Morningstar and Wilson did very much scholastic investigation of Tippit? As they say in the computer biz, "garbage in, garbage out". I had never heard of Sgt. Patrick Dean being up on the knoll, but sorry, can't put my trust in the whimsical memory of Babushka Beverly. Dean interested me enough to record his HSCA interview at the Archives in 2010. He's my leading suspect for escorting Ruby into the DPD basement. The sound quality was not so hot and his audio interview did not get published at the ROKC site. But I've made an appeal to Greg in my recent interview to get some of those tapes on-line, for the historical content.

Paul, It is interesting to see the Nov. 29 National Zeitung article, I hadn't seen that before, but this has very suspicious origins and was covered in Harvey & Lee on p. 510. It's 6 paragraphs worth of information, but basically shows that West German reporter Hasso Thorsten was likely prompted to contact General Walker on Nov. 24 to get him to say that LHO was the one who took a shot at him. And Chief Curry was prompted about it at a Nov. 23 news conference. But Liebeler clarified while taking Walker's testimony that this information was not known to anyone until a few days after Nov. 29, and Walker expressed surprise at seeing the Zeitung article, and said he didn't tell Thorsten that LHO was the one. Your thoughts are well-organized and it seems you are on a path towards a book to supplant the new Walker book just out, but you might want to double-check a couple things, which I have issues with. The info on Life getting the backyard photo from "an enterprising young man in the DPD" is directly referenced by John Armstrong as FBI 124-10043-10058 HQ 62-10960-2766. I'm a klutz at finding stuff like that on-line, and spent an hour just proving that again. But while I agree entirely that Jack White nails Roscoe as posing for the backyard photos, I cannot agree about DeMohrenschildt giving the photo to Life. I've studied the Tippit murder quite closely, and can't understand why it's become fashionable to place him on the grassy knoll. Call me a traditionalist, but not only did he take an early lunch at home with his wife Marie, at 12:17 he radioed in: "Be out of the car a minute, 4100 block of Bonnie View." The manager of Hodges Super Market at 4121 Bonnie View had caught a woman shoplifter and called the police. Tippit was somehow informed of this, but it is not known just how. He radioed: "78 clear" 3 minutes later. Researcher Larry Ray Harris interviewed the grocery store manager in 1978, and was told that Tippit had put the woman in his squad car. Grassy knoll studies are specious at best, but it is noteworthy to recall that when I was a member of JFKLancer 5-6 years ago I think it was Jerry Dealey who mentioned hearing, at a DPD get-together about the assassination, that one of the first cops responding remembered seeing Roscoe White up by the stockade fence just after the shots. I can't recall accurately whether that was Haygood, Hargis or Harkness. My own take boils around CIA #632-796, "Jean SOUETRE'S expulsion from U.S.", that being an alias for Michel Victor Mertz. INS Inspector Virgil Bailey recalled in 1980 picking up someone who matched Mertz's physical description and bringing him to the INS offices at 1402 Rio Grande Building; his supervisor Hal Norwood recalled receiving a request from the DPD to come pick up a foreigner they had in custody, whence the Washington INS twice phoned the Dallas INS requesting a pickup on this man. So this division of the Justice Department, run for the time being by Nicholas Katzenbach, wanted this guy deported immediately. And the FBI would learn later that "Souetre" had been "flown out of Dallas." Mertz's personal history fits the profile of someone capable (and experienced in triangulated crossfire ambushes of Nazi officers) of firing a headshot from the knoll. I have many personal obligations to take care of and may be a couple or three days in responding further.

1) The informant "Lee" apprised the Secret Service that four snipers planned to shoot Kennedy with high-powered rifles. They were right-wing paramilitary fanatics. The attempt would probably be at one of the Northwest Expressway overpasses, along the motorcade route. That's quite consistent with info that might be garnered by DRE infiltrator Lee Harvey Oswald. Directario Revolucionario Estudiantil, the CIA-funded Cuban student revolutionary group. If I remember correctly, one of the snipers was named Homer Ecchevaria. I'll grant that it's remotely possible that "Lee" worked at the Chinese restaurant near the North Side flophouse where 4 high-powered rifles were noticed. But I doubt we'll hear the real story until LHO is exonerated. I do agree that he was playing both sides on November 22nd- in contact with an abort team, infiltrating a kill team. 1.3) LHO was surely the shooter? That looks entirely sketchy to me. 2 men, 2 cars, LHO no drive. Imagine if this went to trial in July '63. Would you, as prosecuting attorney, be confident of a conviction? Guilt must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. 5.4) I hadn't seen that 1975 Walker letter to Frank Church, thanks- but Oswald in custody by 12 pm the night of April 10th? Which lieutenant do you think might have informed Walker about this, a few days afterwards? Jack Revill? Rio Sam Pierce? Or...? And how did the DPD manage to find Oswald that night? And who could possibly have been his accomplice? Was the accomplice also placed in custody? This is a spurious lead and Walker offers no definitive information. I'd class it close to hearsay. I suspect that Walker has an ulterior motive here, and uses this "hearsay" to amplify his own status. (i.e. first they tried to get Walker, but they missed, so they went after JFK). 6.0) Life obtained the backyard photo from "an enterprising young man in the Dallas Police Department." (Rosen to Belmont, FBI internal memo, 3/25/64). i.e. Roscoe White, who joined the DPD on November 5th, worked in the ID Bureau, was an expert at trick photography, had an oddball copy of the backyard photo found among his effects after his untimely death. Sorry, can't buy that Walker had any kind of leverage with Life, which was a Mockingbird branch of the CIA (e.g. Zapruder film). And if you say of course not, then why would Walker be complaining to Church about the CIA attempting to shoot at him, if one of his functionaries (Roscoe) had provided Life (i.e. the CIA) with the cover photo for its 2/21/64 issue? Agree that Mike Robinson's story reeks of truth, but the evidence on the grassy knoll points to a French hitman. Sources here are INS inspectors Virgil Bailey and Hal Norwood. 7) Kierkegaard was the acknowledged founder of the philosophical school of thought known as existentialism. "The human being is spirit. But what is the spirit? The spirit is the self. But what is the self?The self is a relation which relates itself to itself, or that in the relation which is its relating to itself. The self is not the relation but the relation's relating to itself. A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity. In short a synthesis. A synthesis is a relation between two terms. Looked at in this way a human being is not yet a self." - As Despair is the Sickness Unto Death He hated Hegel, and most of his short life wrote dualistic polemics (posing as thesis & antithesis) exposing the weaknesses of the much-vaunted System of Hegelism. This philosophical trend grew into that dialectical materialistic monster, Marxism. Hegelism's highest synthesis was the State, and greatest creation was Hegel's System. Cute. In the hands of Lenin & Stalin it produced 30-plus million executions in the Lubyanka prisons. And the good ol' New World Order uses the same ol' Hegelian tactics of create a problem, start a reaction, propose a solution (thesis + antithesis = synthesis) to massage events to their liking. But this scheme gets bamboozled continually by God-inspired individuals who completely undermine their most conniving Machievelian plans- Michael Faraday, Crazy Horse, Nikola Tesla, Vladimir Putin, and the hits just keep on comin'.

Please do not construe this as a personal attack, Paul Trejo, as you are entitled to pursue whatever angle of research that satisfies your curiosity, and to the hilt. But in another thread you state, "The reason that LHO was selected as the Patsy, was precisely because LHO tried to kill Walker back in April 1963." And I think that you would agree that that sentence concisely encapsulates your point-of-view. So you deem it irrelevant to November 22nd, that an FBI informant named Lee broke up the November 2nd assassination plot in Chicago? That a mangled steel-jacketed 30.06 recovered from the Walker home by the DPD became instead a copper-jacketed 6.5 after the assassination, i.e. allegedly fired from a Mannlicher-Carcano? Walker himself denied this bullet was authentic in 1978. That just after the shot Kirk Coleman runs to his backyard fence and sees 2 guys run to 2 cars under the floodlights at the church parking lot next door? http://www.history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh26/html/WH_Vol26_0237a.htm And Ruth Paine wrote her mother on October 14th that "I started giving [Lee] driving lessons last Sunday (yesterday)." WCH XVII p. 151 and testified (II p. 514) "I offered to give him- give Lee lessons on Sunday afternoons and we managed to do it a few Sunday afternoons, I think three altogether and there were a couple of weekends we didn't get the lesson in, something intervened... I think the last lesson was November 10, being the last Sunday." Am I missing something? The Walker shooter apparently had the ability to drive, at night. LHO didn't have any practice at that ability, not according to Ruth Paine. All I see is a frame job on LHO, painting him as a potential political killer. Eerily similar, in terms of trumped-up evidence, to the Tippit-murder frame job, which painted him as a cop-killer. Therefore, since a + b = c, a president-killer, in the skewed logic of the Warren omission. Have you never studied how Kierkegaard demolished Hegel's skewed dialectics?

Hopefully Michel Victor Mertz's arrest record has attached successfully. After the war there was battery, forgery, burglary. a 1951 acquittal for murder, 1953 attempted murder of a policeman, 1965 incitement of a riot, finally serving 8 months of a 5-year sentence in 1971 for heroin trafficking. Souetre pointed to Alexander Sanguinetti, liason office between the SDECE and the French Interior Ministry, as the man responsible for protecting Mertz. (Service de Documentation Exterieure et Contre-Espionage) Mertz had been part of Sanguinetti's secret unit of barbouzes- Corsican mobsters- groomed by the SDECE to penetrate the OAS. SDECE protection for the Marseilles drug labs allowed them to run amok during the 50's and 60's. US Federal Bureau of Narcotics records on French heroin production during the late 50's to early 60's are still restricted at the National Archives due to national security (2003 information). Mertz's name was kept out of FBN files until 1965. Bud Fensterwald: "Several times during the 1960s, the US asked France to take action against Mertz, but the French refused because of his SDECE and Gaullist connections. He was literally known as one of the 'untouchables'." During this era the Paris division of the US Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs had never even heard of him. Photos of Mertz seem to have disappeared from the French SDECE, military, prison and newspaper archives. Two poor-quality prints appeared in "The Heroin Trail", 1974 Newsday. I have never seen these, but they sure would be interesting.

What convinced me that Souetre's alias had been used by ex-French Resistance commander & international heroin smuggler Michel Victor Mertz was this 1999 interview of Souetre by journalist Monique Lajournade, which took place at the same Riviera casino Souetre had been working PR at when the National Enquirer found him in 1983: "This was the Resistance led by Commandant Gandoin, a pro-Communist resistance in the area of Tulle in the Creuse... they killed all the right-wing people who in the future could have been hostile to the rise of communism in that area... he took part in those rudimentary murders. One cannot say that Mertz was a war hero; he was really just a murderer and it was as a murderer he was used." Souetre said that American investigators questioned him after the assassination, which impelled him to do some detective work on Mertz. "I can tell you that I got immediately interested in Mertz when I saw the direction events were taking. I told myself you'd better find out as many things as possible on this guy. Someone like that had the perfect profile of a gangster... The US authorities- who were able to find me so easily- never pursued Mertz for proper questioning. When they approached me, I proved to them that I wasn't the one in Dallas, that I had never been to the United States." "What shocks me most is to see that Mertz was never interrogated. First, he was on the crime's location, then he got expelled by the FBI, exfiltrated to Canada. One doesn't get rid of a suspect like that so quickly. One tries to get proper information from him. Consequently, Mertz was able to continue with his illegal activities... And to be able to move around the way he did and especially with his police records, he must have had very important support from a very high level... They had plenty of time to go to the French police with a rogatory commission. I had a rogatory commission who came to interrogate me. They could have done the same with Mertz. I told them what I'm telling you now... At any rate, the French services could have known about the preparation of the assassination but wouldn't have given the information to the US authorities. Or maybe they did transmit the information, and then it was hidden."

As far as I could ascertain, this was entirely an in-house collusion only, with possible entanglement by the CIA. There is a serious possibility that foreman William Shelley worked also for the CIA, and it would come as no real surprise if others in management were found to be Agency personnel, too. I am thinking of Truly and TSBD president Jack Cason in this regard. And I do consider building owner D.H. Byrd to be a CIA asset, stemming from his Civil Air Patrol affiliations. The information on Shelley is in one of William Weston's articles, "The Glaze Letters", found at MaryFerrell in the journals section: The Fourth Decade, Vol. 6, No. 4, May 1999 Good question. I had seen a rumor where Truly was affiliated with the John Birch Society, but couldn't find any supporting data.

I have a new essay recently completed, "Inside Job", which should be available soon on another website. It is 75 pages and has 99 photos and diagrams. I have just completed an interview about it with Rob Clark and Part 1 will be posted soon at his show's site, thelonegunmanpodcast.com The abstract reads: The complicity of Texas School Book Depository employees in the murder of President John F. Kennedy is examined. Several were actively involved in the assassination conspiracy, and several more are charged with being accessories after the fact.

I am a long-time researcher seeking membership at your forum. I have a new essay coming out about the TSBD, 75 pages with 99 photos/diagrams, which is what I am mainly interested in discussing. I have a long interview coming up that will detail that new TSBD study, which will be aired during successive weeks this November. It would also be a pleasure to join some old friends at your forum in various conversations