Two Oswalds in the Texas Theater

[David Andrews]

I got confused.  I've amended the post.  I still think: Two doubles - two guns, and a gun switch after the arrest. 

Edited September 23, 2019 by David Andrews

[Cory Santos]

5 hours ago, Paul Jolliffe said:

Steve,

It's actually a little better than that: Ball had actually ended the deposition when Applin volunteered the information about the odd inactions of the mystery man at the back of the Texas Theater!

When re-reading Applin's testimony, it is obvious that Josephy Ball both knew of and desperately wanted to avoid any statement about this mystery man, a man whom Applin later identified as Jack Ruby. How do I know that Ball already knew?

Because Applin told the FBI about this man, and Ball had the FBI reports! Ball knew exactly what to avoid!

Now, was Jack Ruby actually present in the Texas Theater during "Oswald's" arrest?

I don't know. But if we use Peter Dale Scott's "negative template" theory about sensitive names, then I'd guess that yes, Jack Ruby was indeed present in the Texas Theater around 1:50 or so. 

Mr. BALL - Okay, fine, that is all, Mr. Applin.
Mr. APPLIN - But, there is one thing puzzling me.
Mr. BALL - What is that?
Mr. APPLIN - And I don't even know if it has any bearing on the case, but there was one guy sitting in the back row right there where I was standing at, and I said to him, I said, "Buddy, you'd better move. There is a gun." And he says--just sat there. He was just back like this. Just like this. Just watching.
Mr. BALL - Just watching the show?
Mr. APPLIN - No; I don't think he could have seen the show. Just sitting just like this, just looking at me.
Mr. BALL - Did you know the man?
Mr. APPLIN - No; I didn't.
Mr. BALL - Ever seen him since?
Mr. APPLIN - No, sir; didn't. I tapped him on the shoulder and said, "Buddy, you'd better move," and----
Mr. BALL - Were you scared?
Mr. APPLIN - Well, when I seen the gun I was.
Mr. BALL - Did you tell the police officer about this man?
Mr. APPLIN - No, sir; at the time, I didn't think about it, but I did tell--I didn't even think about it when I went before the Secret Service man, but I did tell one of the FBI men about it.
Mr. BALL - Okay. I guess that is all, Mr. Applin. Thank you very much.
Mr. APPLIN - All right.

The lack of follow up speaks loudly.

[Karl Hilliard]

15 hours ago, John Butler said:

 

You said, "The hardest part of Vinson's story for me to accept is that a big C-54 cargo plane could land by the Trinity River near Dallas and not attract widespread attention."  And, that is hard to explain.  There is no mention of anyone talking about planes landing on under construction North Houston Street that I know.  I am not dismissing it out of hand.  Strange things happen.  Would anyone care on the afternoon of the assassination? 

Did not happen in the city proper.  Perhaps an area further south [near Hutchins maybe] if at all.

[Robert Charles-Dunne]

While I am not as hostile to “Harvey & Lee” as many other posters, neither do I accept its basic premise. Finding and using the persona of a dead child (Gordon Lonsdale from northern Ontario ) is NOT the same as raising two kids to share or become one genuine persona. As a predicate for Armstrong’s putative Oswald project, Lonsdale is inaccurate, inappropriate and used misleadingly. As it is the very cornerstone of Armstrong’s hypothesis, the remainder is built on that shaky ground. I state this up-front so there will be no confusion about the following.

The saga of Butch Burroughs is neither as nefarious nor self-serving as some have suggested.

Put yourself in his place for the following thought experiment.

You see a man escorted out the front door of the Theatre by a gaggle of police. He is clearly under arrest and is shouting “I am not resisting arrest” several times as he is press-ganged toward the waiting squad car. You have witnessed the arrest of the man who then becomes the suspect in a cop’s murder and the President’s putative assassin. That’s a life-altering vignette you’ve just seen.

But you also see a second man being escorted from the premises via a rear door. The man isn’t shouting about being under arrest, there is no known struggle to avoid being arrested. He simply leaves the building accompanied by police.

Soon after on the same day, TV reports suggest that the first person removed from the Texas Theatre killed a cop, and is directly implicated in the President’s assassination. This becomes everybody’s primary fixation.

The second man who was escorted from the TT isn’t on the front page of any paper, nor interviewed on radio or TV, nor mentioned by anyone else as an arrested “suspect” in any crime.

In the absence of police charges leveled against the second man, the story recedes as it no longer seems significant. Particularly for you - Butch Burroughs - who saw a second man removed from the Theatre, but who saw no charges filed against the second man to imply he was part of a plot to kill either a cop or a Commander-In-Chief.

When interviewed by authorities and when later deposed by the Commission, you - Butch Burroughs - are asked no questions about a second man taken from the Theatre.

Either it is not thought germane to the central issues surrounding Oswald; or, the second man is germane, was suspected of complicity in the crime, but was then released in the absence of any proof; or, the man was germane, did participate in crimes committed in Dallas that day, but was extricated by the police who accompanied him out the rear door and later allowed him to go free. In this instance, police were not so much arresting a second man, as they were escorting a second man from a crime scene in order that he may escape both Dallas justice and any notoriety. We cannot know with certainty which of those 3 scenarios falls closest to the truth. But we can know that DPD worked furiously to contain and obfuscate any clues leading toward a conspiracy.

It is only later, when prodded by non-law enforcement people who wanted to know everything that you - Butch Burroughs - had seen that day, that you provide some additional details about a second man. Researchers who realize the possible significance ask additional questions, and get additional answers. After all, they realize the possible significance even if you - Butch Burroughs - do not.

With each such interview, new details come to light. Not because you - Butch Burroughs - are elaborating, embellishing or fantasizing, but because you are now being asked pertinent questions, many for the very first time.

You - Butch Burroughs - are then castigated for not having mentioned these things earlier, at a point in time when nobody asked about them and it didn’t seem particularly important. At least not compared with what you witnessed about Oswald who was to rapidly become the lone suspect. At this point, the emergence of a second suspect mitigated against a single assassin, which was even on DAY ONE the necessary consensus, zealously pronounced by all involved in solving the crimes.

Yet, a second man WAS taken by police from the Texas Theatre via a rear door that day. Bernard Haire witnessed the event, thus corroborating Burroughs’ observation. It seems that George Applin was likewise escorted out the rear door, but this does not mean he was necessarily the only man that day to be taken into the back alley. Nor does it necessary follow that Applin was the man thought by Haire and Burroughs to be under arrest.

It is possible, although I believe it to be almost certain, the compiled list of TT witnesses - which DID exist before being inexplicably lost - was deliberately deep-sixed precisely because what the witnesses on the list had seen was anathema to the evolving consensus that one man had killed both the cop and the President. If a witness stated on 11/22/63 that he had seen Jack Ruby, for example, that would have been unwelcome news on that date, but would have been positively incendiary two days later when Ruby slew Oswald.

The police fixation with the balcony, reflected in various after-action reports by DPD, also has an incredibly simple solution. Once Oswald was inside the Texas Theatre somebody phoned police and said a suspicious man had entered the movie house and gone to the balcony. (Possibly even with a rifle.)

We cannot know who gave DPD this tip, but we can know that someone did. Julia Postal, in phoning DPD, did not mention that the suspect had gone into the balcony, nor did she have any way of knowing such a detail. Yet somebody did, or half the police who responded wouldn’t have stormed the balcony looking for him.

And we know that several such calls were made to DPD. Author Leo Sauvage was told by Assistant DA Jim Bowie that police had received a half dozen such calls. Since Postal phoned only once, and didn’t mention the balcony, which of the remaining calls did pinpoint the suspect being located in the balcony? And who might that caller have been? Most important, how would anyone know such a fact unless they were themselves in the Texas Theatre? If there was a payphone in the movie house, did DPD attempt to establish who used it that afternoon? And to whom the calls were placed?

There is a rear-guard push to discredit witnesses and destroy the value of their observations. I expect this from the WC apologists, as it’s the only arrow in their quiver.

I resent it when it is used by people who contend a blatant conspiracy, yet insist that actual witnesses be demoted into insignificance because the witness testimony they offer doesn’t comport with the critics’ own conspiratorial view.

It is not merely unjust to the witnesses who are thus castigated, it is a violation of the most basic precepts of investigating anything, any time, anywhere: evidence leads to a conclusion; one’s conclusion doesn’t lead to evidence supporting it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Robert Charles-Dunne]

Duplicate post.  There's two of everything, it seems.

Edited September 22, 2019 by Robert Charles-Dunne
duplicate post

[Steve Thomas]

1 hour ago, Robert Charles-Dunne said:

Since Postal phoned only once, and didn’t mention the balcony, which of the remaining calls did pinpoint the suspect being located in the balcony? And who might that caller have been? Most important, how would anyone know such a fact unless they were themselves in the Texas Theatre?

Robert,

 

I always thought these balcony calls were a double cross. The anonymous caller or callers didn't "know" the suspect was in the balcony. They only knew that's where the suspect was "supposed to be", and somebody was being sold down the river.

 

Steve Thomas

[Paul Jolliffe]

3 hours ago, Karl Hilliard said:

Did not happen in the city proper.  Perhaps an area further south [near Hutchins maybe] if at all.

Karl,

Here is the landing area, according to Robert Vinson: next to the Trinity River, between I - 35 and the Corinth Street Bridge. Vinson described the landing as "very rough." That fits with the terrain.

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Dealey+Plaza/@32.7621142,-96.8072064,44a,35y,122.48h,72.87t/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x864e9915d508f639:0xcfa47bf25b709fe0!8m2!3d32.7788184!4d-96.8082993

According to L. Fletcher Prouty, it was just long enough for a skilled C-54 pilot to land and take off. Prouty claimed that the Berlin Airlift vets did indeed have that ability. 

 

[Jim Hargrove]

Our point about the Konon Molody/Gordon Lonsdale saga is that Molody was a native-born Russian who moved, with the assistance of the Soviet NKVD chief, to California at the age of seven to live with his aunt, who posed as his mother.  (Wikipedia states the move occurred in 1934, but HistoryofSpies.com and Harvey and Lee put the date at 1929).

Molody lived in the United States for less than 10 years, but during that time he became fluent enough in the English language and U.S. culture that he was able, a bit later and for the better part of a decade, to pose as a U.S. student and businessman, mostly in London, and to work for at least several years as a Soviet spy. He was arrested in London in 1961, charged with spying, and convicted that same year.

The Molody/Lonsdale story has some obvious similarities to our picture of the Russian-speaking Harvey Oswald.  We believe both came to the U.S. with the help of intelligence agencies, and both within a relatively short time were able to pose as U.S. nationals.  Both were spies.  There were also some obvious differences between the two cases.  I’ll leave it to others, if there is sufficient interest, to point them out.

That said, it is simply wonderful to see that Robert Charles-Dunne has returned to this forum.  Even when he has the impertinence to suggest potential faults in some of my most deeply held beliefs, I cherish his posts, and hope sincerely that he will choose to stay with us for a while.  Welcome back, Robert!

[John Butler]

21 hours ago, Karl Hilliard said:

Did not happen in the city proper.  Perhaps an area further south [near Hutchins maybe] if at all.

Here is a map of the TSBD to Hutchins area today.  In 1963 there would be considerably less city in either area.  The growth comes later as 3 presidents (Johnson, Bush, and Bush) get to spend a lot of money in Texas.

We do know that Houston Street north of the TSBD was under construction at the time of the assassination.  This can be seen in various films on that day.  At the time this was south of the river but north of the city proper with not much going on towards the Trinity River.  The Houston Street north on the TSBD was not there and under construction.  So, one could guess there was not much in that area. 

Hutchins is 11 miles south of the TSBD very near the Trinity.  I don't see any major roads near the river, but one just off the river.  Is there any evidence there was road construction there at the time of the assassination?

A red line indicates where Houston Street heads north toward the Trinity River.  All things considered Vinson's description is a better fit for the Houston Street / TSBD area than Hutchins.  Who knows.  There may have been regular landings of planes in that area.  I doubt it, but we have no proof one way or the other. 

That is simply based upon lack of evidence for the Hutchins area.  I would tend to agree Hutchins was probably less of an urban area in those days.  Who in the city would see a low flying plane (100 to 200 ft) make a landing out there in Hutchins and who would care any way.

Paul Jolliffe offers an interesting map of the area.  I have backed off from his image for more distance and this is what we see.  The Hutchins area to the southwest is still a less urbanized area today. 

 

We need to keep in mind that most of what we see between the city proper and the Trinity River was not there in 1963.  I suspect what we see between Dallas proper and the Trinity River was once flood plain no one wanted to build on.  It appears today that flooding of the Trinity River is contained by embankments on each side of the river allowing building in what was once flood plain.

Unless I have screwed up the direction of Houston Street in should look like this back in 1963.  It is based on the loop moving north from the Trinity as noticed on the first Google map.  The spot on this map is marked by an X.  The Trinity is about four tenths of a mile from the TSBD.  Some witness, I believe a policemen, said he saw birds flying up from this area directly after the shooting. 

 

Edited September 23, 2019 by John Butler

[Jim Hargrove]

Warren Burroughs told interviewers that the Oswald double he saw arrested in the theater was handcuffed.  Is there any evidence that George Applin was handcuffed?  There certainly is no mention of that in his affidavit or in his testimony.  

Even though Mr. B. says as if it were a known fact that Mr. Applin was the second man Mr. Burroughs thought he saw arrested, can we safely assume this is simply not true since there is no evidence whatsoever that Mr. Applin was ever handcuffed?

[Jeremy Bojczuk]

Mr B wrote:

Quote

I presume that Jim doesn't take at face value Burroughs' statement that he "saw the second Oswald placed under arrest and handcuffed".

Jim Hargrove wrote:

Quote

That is NOT a direct quote from Mr. Burroughs.  It is a statement by James Douglass describing what was said.  It could easily mean that the second Oswald had been handcuffed already by the time Mr. Burroughs saw him.

Only by closing one eye and squinting very hard can those words be taken to "mean that the second Oswald had been handcuffed already". Douglass is a competent writer. Unless he was embellishing Burroughs' account, he wouldn't have used that precise form of words ("saw the second Oswald placed under arrest and handcuffed") if all Burroughs had told him was that he saw someone being taken away, already in handcuffs.

The clear implication is that, if we are to believe Douglass, Burroughs claimed that the fake Oswald was actually "placed under arrest and handcuffed" on the ground floor. Either Burroughs had invented seeing the ground-floor arrest decades after the event, having recalled seeing something happen on the ground floor that looked vaguely like an arrest, or Douglass was embellishing Burroughs' account.

Jim Glover's form of words could be taken to be describing someone who had already been arrested in the balcony, but that's not the case with James Douglass's version. And, of course, Burroughs said nothing about any of this to Jim Marrs in 1987: no arrest, no handcuffs, no balcony.

There are two other reasons to doubt that Burroughs had seen anyone who had already been arrested in the balcony:

(a) Burroughs did not tell Douglass that he had seen a suspect come down the balcony stairs accompanied by police officers, as that person must have been if that person had already been arrested in the balcony.

(b) Burroughs did not tell Douglass that he had seen a suspect come down the balcony stairs at all.

We know both of these things because in amongst all of Douglass's speculation is the phrase, "either on his own or already accompanied by police". If Burroughs had mentioned to Douglass that he had seen a suspect "accompanied by police", Douglass certainly would not have written "either on his own or". And if Burroughs had mentioned that he had seen a suspect come down the stairs already under arrest, Douglass certainly would not have been unsure about whether or not the suspect was accompanied by police.

We can be sure that if a suspect had come down the stairs under arrest (and therefore accompanied by police), Burroughs would have seen it, for two reasons. Firstly, we know that Burroughs was standing close to the stairs. Secondly, we know that he had earlier noticed a much less noticeable event, a woman walking up those stairs on her own, an event he recounted to Jim Marrs in 1987.

Not only would Burroughs have seen a suspect being escorted down from the balcony by the police if such an event had happened, but he would also have seen George Applin being escorted out of the building by the police, an event that we know happened. As a friend of Jim's has pointed out, Burroughs never claimed to have witnessed two similar events:

(1) an Oswald double being led away by the police, and

(2) George Applin being led away by the police.

If Burroughs had seen one such event, he would surely have also seen the other, had both events actually occurred. But Burroughs only claimed to have seen one of them.

The same source points out that Applin himself never mentioned seeing a speculative arrestee being brought down from the balcony and taken out via the rear door. I've just checked Marrs and Douglass, and Jack Davis didn't mention it either. Applin and Davis would surely have seen such an event, had it occurred. Only one person, apart from the real-life, historical, one and only Lee Harvey Oswald, was escorted out of the building by police officers, and that one person must have been George Applin.

If we want to use Burroughs' statement in 2007 (or at least Douglass's version of it) to support the arrest of an Oswald double in the Texas Theater, we must accept that the arrest took place on the ground floor. If we are claiming that there was no arrest of an Oswald double on the ground floor, Burroughs can only have been recounting a confused 44-year-old memory of seeing the one event that we know for certain took place: George Applin, on the ground floor, speaking to the police and then being escorted by them out of the building so that he could give a statement.

Of course, we can't say for certain that Burroughs' memory was mistaken, just as we can't say for certain that George Applin was 7' 3" tall and disguised as Groucho Marx. But there are very good reasons to doubt Burroughs' reliability as a witness, at least concerning his account of seeing the arrest in the Texas Theater of someone who looked like Oswald but was not him, an incident that first saw the light of day 30 years after the event, and an incident that he didn't think was worth mentioning to an inquisitve, conspiracy-minded researcher several years earlier.

Butch Burroughs' evidence for an arrest in the balcony is very weak. Even weaker is the evidence from the police reports. We know that there is a perfectly rational explanation for the reports' claim that someone using the name Oswald "was arrested in the balcony", as I explained in a previous post.

If we want to take the reports literally, we need to find a plausible reason why an imposter who looked identical to the real-life, historical, one and only Lee Harvey Oswald told the police his name was Oswald, thereby blowing wide open the carefully planned and professionally choreographed impersonation. We also need to find a plausible reason why no-one in the Dallas police department thought it was worth mentioning that two men with the same name and the same physical features had been arrested in the same building at the same time.

Without those plausible reasons, we are forced to say goodbye to the police reports. Once we say goodbye to the police reports, we also say goodbye to the presence in the Texas Theater of a long-term, multilingual, Hungarian refugee Oswald doppelganger with sloping shoulders, a fake mastoidectomy defect that he had acquired in a hospital that hadn't been built yet, and a fake mother named Marguerite who vanished without a trace immediately after the assassination.

Not everything that happened on the day of the assassination was part of a massive, all-encompassing conspiracy. Unfortunately, unsolved mysteries do tend to attract paranoid people, who seem to think that the bigger and more implausible a proposed conspiracy is, the more likely it is to be true.

Jim also writes:

Quote

Warren Burroughs told interviewers that the Oswald double he saw arrested in the theater was handcuffed.

No, Burroughs only told one interviewer, James Douglass, that the person he saw being placed under arrest on the ground floor was handcuffed. There's no mention of this in Marrs' Crossfire, nor in either of Jim Glover's brief accounts.

The "handcuffed" element appeared for the first time in 2007, 44 years after the event. Whether it was one of those details that get added to stories when the stories are repeated over and over, or whether Douglass applied some literary licence, there's no way of knowing. But we do know that it's further evidence of Burroughs' story expanding over time.

It gives us one more reason to doubt the story's authenticity. If Burroughs really did see someone who looked identical to Oswald wearing handcuffs, there's even more reason to expect him to have told that story to Marrs. But he didn't.

[Jim Hargrove]

So Burroughs was lying, to summarize Mr. B’s typically long-winded post above.  What a surprise!

[Jeremy Bojczuk]

Jim Hargrove writes:

Quote

So Burroughs was lying

No, there's no reason to suppose that Burroughs was lying, i.e. deliberately saying something he knew or suspected to be untrue.

He was recalling an event that had occurred several decades earlier. It often happens in such cases that some details get forgotten and other details get added.

We know that George Applin spoke to police officers on the ground floor and was led away by them to give a statement. It really isn't difficult to see how Applin's encounter with the police might have evolved, several decades later, into an arrest.

We know several things about Burroughs and the Applin encounter:

- Burroughs was in a position to have seen such an encounter.
- Burroughs didn't report more than one such encounter.
- No-one else reported more than one such encounter.
- Applin is likely to have been escorted out of the rear of the building, matching Burroughs' story.
- Burroughs' story didn't emerge until 1993, thirty years after the event.

The obvious conclusion is that Burroughs' story was a flawed recollection of Applin's encounter with the police.

Having disposed of Butch Burroughs, let's turn to the surviving element of Jim's Texas Theater fantasy. I've already pointed out that there is a perfectly credible, non-conspiratorial explanation for the "arrested in the balcony" element of the reports. I wonder what Jim has to say about the other reasons I gave for doubting the accuracy of the police reports:

Quote

If we want to take the reports literally, we need to find a plausible reason why an imposter who looked identical to the real-life, historical, one and only Lee Harvey Oswald told the police his name was Oswald, thereby blowing wide open the carefully planned and professionally choreographed impersonation. We also need to find a plausible reason why no-one in the Dallas police department thought it was worth mentioning that two men with the same name and the same physical features had been arrested in the same building at the same time.

What sort of incompetent doppelganger gives the game away by telling the cops that his name is Oswald? Why did no-one notice, in the half-century or more since the assassination, the remarkable coincidence that the police raid on the Texas Theater had resulted in the arrest of two men who looked identical and who were each called Oswald?

Any ideas?

(Apart, obviously, from the usual "Look over there at the Bolton Ford incident! No, stop looking at the Texas Theater stuff! Look at these school records instead! I said, forget about the Texas Theater! Oswald was in Taiwan the whole time, or the Bronx Zoo, or North Dakota or somewhere!")

We might also ask: why was it necessary to send someone who looked identical to the real-life, historical, one and only Lee Harvey Oswald into the Texas Theater anyway? If the man's purpose was merely to lead the police to the building so that they could find Oswald, why did the man have to be Oswald's exact double?

P.S. Did Jim seriously think I was claiming that Burroughs was lying? I would have thought that this bit should have given him a clue:

Quote

Burroughs can only have been recounting a confused 44-year-old memory

Incidentally, a friend of Jim's has pointed out that Jim himself is happy to accuse all sorts of people of lying, when it suits him.

[Jim Hargrove]

In the last line of the post above, Mr. B. urges forum members to click a link to Greg Parker's site and read the latest about me there. Now,  I never go to Mr. Parker’s site, but I’m told by others that he seems to track just about all my posts and write bout how horrible they all are.  What a hoot!

Shortly before he was banned from this forum, Mr. Parker claimed that some image files I linked contained a virus.  I wanted to make sure the bogus claim wasn’t deleted later, and so I captured an image of it.  Here ‘tis:

It was easy to prove my files contained no viruses.  My webhost helped and at least one of the moderators here indicated that no one except Mr. Parker seemed to get a virus.

But it got me thinking that Mr. Parker clearly has viruses on his mind, and one of the reasons I don’t go to his site is just to be certain I don’t, uh, catch anything there.  There are various types of malware now that don’t even require browser clicks to propagate.

Mr. Parker’s endless attention to me is amusing, though.  Perhaps there just isn’t much to do down there in Aussie land.
 

Edited September 25, 2019 by Jim Hargrove

[Jeremy Bojczuk]

Greg has given his side of the story here:

http://reopenkennedycase.forumotion.net/t2051p50-time-to-kill-another-myth-there-was-no-second-oswald-arrested-at-the-theater#30904