Mary Ferrell's Enigmatic Past, and how Her Namesake Foundation Added More Enigmata to the Mix

[Phil Nelson]

Or, How Mary Ferrell, Entrusted with National Secrets, Was Ultimately Exposed by Her Own Long Buried Secrets.  See HERE

This is a detailed review of Mary's mysterious past, about how she purportedly became obsessed with collecting documents and government files on the JFK assassination immediately in the aftermath.  This despite the fact that she had never supported Kennedy, and yet she did all of it as a volunteer at her own expense, in her spare time--while she worked full time as a secretary raising four teenagers.  The 2001-2002 acquisition of her files by a venture capitalist named Oliver Curme is also closely examined, to the extent possible due to the lack of true transparency as to who, or what entity, really financed that deal.   

Edited April 7, 2022 by Phil Nelson
grammatic error

[Jonathan Cohen]

And the point of all of this is... what, exactly? Are you actually suggesting that Mary Ferrell and Robert Chapman were intelligence agency assets? If that's the case, I guess I got picked up by some really friendly government spies at Dallas-Fort Worth Airport back in November 1993!

[James DiEugenio]

This is really overlong and uses too many questionable sources.

But there is a there there about Mary Ferrell.

Give you some examples:

1. In all of her many years on the JFK case, how many  research articles did she write? 

She did all of two, both for Penn Jones who had to badger her into doing them.  Now name them. No one can and that tells you how mediocre they were.

2. Mary was very conservative, I mean very conservative. 

She was actually associated with the Minutemen, yep De Pugh's group.  Why would someone like that be so interested in Kennedy's murder?  I mean to the point that she was.

3.  I only talked to her a couple of times.  

Once i asked her about materials from the HSCA since I was thinking of doing a book about that topic. She said what was going to be my take.  I said how the ousting of Sprague resulted in a cover up of the conspiracy.  She replied, "Oh, you think it was a conspiracy?"

4.  When Jerry Policoff did his 1992 article about the media for the Village Voice, Roger Feinman was trying to find out how he got his John McCloy/CBS documents. 

He called Mary.  Jerry, thinking he would do that, also called her.  It turns out she was playing them off against each other: telling Jerry what a good article it was and how it exposed the truth, and telling Roger what a rat Jerry was for using the documents without his permission. I asked Jerry, why would she do something like that?  Jerry said: if you wanted to monitor the critics, would it not be smart to have a listening post in Dallas who everyone thought was a nice sweet elderly lady who had a benign interest in the JFK case?

5.  Mary's youngest son Jimmy is mentioned but not his knowledge about his mom and why he ended up being estranged from her.

When that Garrison infiltrator Tom Bethell fled New Orleans, fearing he would be indicted for turning over the whole master file to Shaw's lawyers, where did he go?  Jimmy  made it a point to meet up with me at a conference.  He wanted to tell me he sought refuge at Mary's house.  And she let him in.  ( Read here for why that is quite objectionable https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/tom-bethell-a-study-in-duplicity-1198) It is  true Bethell was in Texas prior to working for JG, but he stayed with Penn Jones. 

6.  There is a bombshell story that I cannot tell about Mary and Fensterwald.  Why? Because Ed Tatro has been working on his book about as long as Lifton has. He told me about it, but when I wanted to write about it he told me no since he knew more of the nuances than he had told me.  But you can take it to the bank that its something that is really compelling about the subjects.

These are all reasons why Jonathan should not look askance at the subject matter.  Nelson did not handle it well--man does he need an editor.  But there was a lot more to Mary than what met the eye.

Edited April 8, 2022 by James DiEugenio

[Jonathan Cohen]

Jim, who cares if she didn’t write research articles? Who cares if she gossiped (who in this case hasn’t?) And who cares if she was “conservative” ? She was a tireless archivist and historian whose collection of documents is amongst the most valuable ever assembled in this case. Are you, like Phil Nelson, implying Mary was running some decades-long con game to disrupt the JFK research community? Why on earth would anyone do such a thing?

[James DiEugenio]

Please Jonathan.

The woman was on the case for something like 35 years and she accumulated an archives second to none. And she wrote all of two articles in that time period, and no book?  And you do not find that at all unusual? I do, since it indicates to me she really was not interested in the circumstances of Kennedy's death.

You missed the point about Jerry and Roger.  If you don't get it, I am not going to go into it.

You did not mention the Bethell case, or her asking me, "oh you think its a conspiracy", and her extremely rightwing orientation.  Those people thought Kennedy was a communist.

Edited April 8, 2022 by James DiEugenio

[Joseph McBride]

From my 2013 book INTO THE NIGHTMARE: MY SEARCH FOR THE KILLERS

OF PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY AND OFFICER J. D. TIPPIT:

 

THE GATEKEEPER

 

After it became clear to me that the introduction into evidence of the audiotape on which the HSCA based its halfhearted conclusion of conspiracy was designed to discredit the whole investigation, I became keenly interested in tracing the provenance of the tape to see how this could have happened.

According to Fort Worth researcher Jack D. White, the tape was first brought forward by Gary Mack, who took it to Mary Ferrell, the supposedly self-appointed den mother of assassination researchers in Dallas (Dallas Tippit researcher Greg Lowrey called her “The Gatekeeper”). But according to Mack, who worked with Penn Jones on his newsletter The Continuing Inquiry, Jones gave him the original clue and a copy of the tape. Mack, a former Fort Worth NBC-TV announcer who changed his name from Larry Dunkel while working as a disk jockey, eventually turned into a lone-nut theorist after he became the curator of The Sixth Floor Museum at the former Texas School Book Depository in Dealey Plaza, which exists primarily to debunk conspiracy theories while misleading and distracting tourists at the site of the murder. Its raison d’être seems to be to protect the image of Dallas by attempting to perpetuate the Warren Commission’s version of events. Mack’s ally Ferrell supplied favored researchers with documents from her ample files (since her death in 2004, available online at maryferrell.org), and she has been hailed by many researchers for her supposedly self-effacing generosity toward the cause of history. In an article on the acoustics evidence, Myers discusses the provenance of the tape and cites Mack’s 1979 report that Jones originally suggested they look into the question of a stuck microphone on a police motorcycle that blocked a radio channel during the motorcade. “Penn was of the opinion that the communications were jammed on purpose,” Mack wrote. Mack thought such a police radio tape might contain sounds of shots. Jones provided a tape that was of insufficient quality to work with, but Ferrell came up with a better one. Ferrell, White said, tracked down a first-generation copy of the tape made from a police Dictabelt and presented it to the HSCA.

As I later found after making contact with Mary Ferrell myself, she actually had deep connections with U.S. intelligence. She was a member of the Agency of Former Intelligence Officers (AFIO), founded by CIA agent David Atlee Phillips, who many researchers believe helped organize the Kennedy assassination plot and the framing of Oswald in particular. Ferrell’s excuse for being a member, that she was infiltrating the organization to learn more about U.S. intelligence, seems laughably transparent. “We know Mary Ferrell has many contacts with the FBI and other government agencies,” Lowrey told me. “I’m also suspicious of her association with Hugh Aynesworth,” the Dallas reporter who covered the case from the first day and has long been an opponent of conspiracy theorists, as well as serving as an FBI informant during the Garrison case. “You can start in any direction,” said Lowrey, “and ultimately it will lead you to [Ferrell]. You will come back to her.”

Ferrell was a legal secretary for the Socony Mobil Oil Company in Dallas at the time of the assassination. As well as putting her in the circle of big oil in Dallas, the Mobil association gives Ferrell at least a tangential link to some key Kennedy assassination characters, including people involved in oil, the White Russian community, and U.S. intelligence. Volkmar Schmidt, a German-born Dallas petroleum geologist who claimed he tried to turn Oswald against General Walker and therefore felt “a terrible responsibility” for the Walker assassination attempt and the Kennedy assassination, told researcher William E. Kelly in a 1995 interview that in 1963 he worked for a Dallas branch of Mobil, the Field Research Laboratory of the Magnolia Petroleum Company. Schmidt said he met George de Mohrenschildt and Ruth Paine, the Oswalds’ CIA handlers, and Paine’s husband, Michael, “through the circle of young professionals at the Magnolia labs.” It was at a February 22, 1963, party arranged by Everett D. Glover, a chemist with the labs, at a house he shared with Schmidt, that Schmidt had a long talk (“about two solid hours”) with Oswald about Walker and other political topics, including Kennedy and Cuba (Schmidt claimed Oswald was “hateful” toward Kennedy, and that he tried to turn that feeling against Walker, telling Oswald the general was a racist and “kind of a poopoo”). At the same party the Oswalds were introduced to Ruth Paine; Glover told the Warren Commission that Ruth spent most of her time that night speaking with Marina in Russian. As well as by George de Mohrenschildt and his wife, Jeanne, the party was attended by others from the Magnolia labs and by George’s oil industry friend Samuel Ballen. Armstrong writes in Harvey & Lee, “There is little doubt the purpose of this social gathering was to provide CIA operative George DeMohrenschildt the opportunity to introduce Lee Harvey Oswald and Marina to CIA operative Ruth Paine. During the next 10 months, until November 22, 1963, Oswald’s activities were closely monitored by either DeMohrenschildt or Mrs. Paine” [italics in original].

Mary Ferrell was a lifelong Republican who disliked Kennedy (Lowrey put it more strongly: “She hated John Kennedy; it was no secret”), and she admitted in 2000, “I didn’t even care enough to go down on Elm Street to watch the motorcade.” A feature on Ferrell in the Dallas Morning News on the twentieth anniversary of the assassination in 1983 mentions that she was downtown that day “but didn’t bother interrupting her lunch” to see Kennedy. The writer, Brad Bailey, hinted at the strangeness of this paradox in her career: “Mrs. Ferrell didn’t particularly like Kennedy as a president or as a fellow Catholic. . . . So she has a hard time explaining the fireproof library building in her Oak Lawn backyard with floor-to-ceiling shelves containing virtually every document ever published on the assassination. Nor can she easily explain the additional 25,000 pages of FBI documents spread across her living room floor or the clippings and papers that fill another room.”

The most I could get from Ferrell when I asked about her motivation, a question that seemed to momentarily take her aback in our last conversation in December 1992, was the vague response, “I just didn’t think they went to Oak Cliff and picked up the man who did it in a darkened theater. Somehow it just didn’t make sense.” Ferrell was surprisingly equivocal on some of the most-discussed topics surrounding the assassination. She said she refused to see Oliver Stone’s JFK because when reporters called her, “I was really glad I didn’t have to lie and say I didn’t like it or I did like it.” As for New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison himself, she told me, “I loved Jim Garrison -- I wavered between thinking he’s insane and thinking he’s a genius.” And as for Oswald, she said that if people “come to me and say, ‘I think Oswald acted alone, and do you have documentation?,’ I just politely say, ‘Go somewhere else.’ Everything I do is based on Oswald did not act alone. Not that he didn’t act. I don’t know.” And the Morning News reported in 1983 that despite all her research, she had “given up hope of deciding what really happened that day in Dallas. ‘We have now had about four major investigations, and I consider that the truth is still hidden from us,’ she says.”

Some of the explanation for what that newspaper described as Ferrell’s “compulsion” to serve as a repository and clearing house for assassination research can be found in another paradox about Ferrell. Her obituary in the Morning News referred to how she “worked more than thirty years as a legal secretary for a law firm and also in the Governor’s office in Austin.” She was a conservative who kept close to the power center of that era in Texas by working for Democrats, including Governor Dolph Briscoe in 1973-74, and she was “a close personal friend” of John Connally, Lowrey noted.

Ferrell was even closely connected to those who determined the route of the Dallas motorcade. It was in 1964, soon after the assassination, according to Lowrey, that Ferrell became a legal secretary in downtown Dallas to Eugene M. Locke, who headed the law firm of Locke, Purnell, Boren, Laney and Neely and was also the head of the State Democratic Executive Committee of Texas. (Ferrell claimed on various occasions that she did not start working for Locke until 1967 or 1970. Locke died in 1972.)  In addition to heading a major law firm and having oil, land, and construction interests, Locke in his official position with the state party helped plan the presidential trip to Dallas. A crucial meeting that helped decide on the route of the motorcade -- violating Secret Service regulations by causing it to make a sharp turn from Houston onto Elm Street, past the Texas School Book Depository, slowing the motorcade to eleven miles an hour in the kill zone -- was held in Locke’s office, although Kennedy aide Kenneth O’Donnell apparently was responsible for the final decision that determined the route. (See more on Locke and that meeting in Chapters 15 and 16.) Lowrey suggested, though without having proof, that Ferrell could have helped her soon-to-be-employer Locke with those arrangements. That seems more of an educated guess when one considers that her husband, Hubert (Buck) Ferrell, who worked for Eagle Lincoln-Mercury in Dallas at the time of the assassination, supplied some of the cars for the motorcade, and that Mary Ferrell said her own car was used in the motorcade when “They quickly ran out of cars.” According to assassination researcher Todd Wayne Vaughan, who interviewed both Ferrells, Mary supplied her own recently purchased 1964 Ford Mercury Colony Park station wagon for the motorcade, and it was used as one of the “VIP” cars.

My dealings with Mary Ferrell in 1985-86 were what made me aware of her duplicity. I first called her to ask her confidential advice about a previously unknown FBI document I had found that seriously undermined the Warren Commission’s lone-gunman theory, and she betrayed my trust (see Chapter 15). After being thus alerted to her dishonest modus operandi, I began delving into her dubious background and concluded that after the assassination she set up shop with the backing of the federal government to serve as a clearing house and watchdog in Dallas, doling out favors while actually going about her main business of keeping tabs on what researchers were doing and selectively, subtly feeding them disinformation. As a result of her clever application of spycraft and her faux-motherly act, many researchers naively regarded her as a guru with a disinterested dedication to the truth. When I called her again in 1992 to request an in-person interview about her background and involvement in the case, she pressed me hard to find out what aspects of the assassination I was researching, and when I carefully gave her only general answers, saying that my areas of interest included the roles played by researchers, she refused to meet with me and said she didn’t want to be interviewed about her own background. Lowrey said, “Mary stays in the shadows. Her agenda is subtle and devious: ‘What are you going to do with it?’” Penn Jones gave me some good advice: “Stay away from her.”

Ferrell’s production to the HSCA of the tape made that allegedly contains audio impulses demonstrating that four shots were fired in Dealey Plaza seemed suspiciously timely to me. It seemed to buttress the notion of conspiracy but more likely was cleverly orchestrated  by Ferrell to discredit it in due course, like a planted mine sure to go off and destroy everything that surrounded it. Anomalies and ambiguities surrounding the tape itself made the HSCA’s belated “discovery” and endorsement of four shots dubious. That was probably seen by Blakey and others on his staff as a convenient late-arriving fig leaf with which to cover themselves by suggesting a conspiracy while not investigating its participants fully and honestly. The problems surrounding the tape were manifold, including debatable photographic evidence of the police motorcycle with a stuck microphone that supposedly recorded the sounds, claims by some skeptics that the tape actually was recorded about a minute after the assassination, and above all the inherent difficulties of interpreting the sound impulses allegedly found on the tape and synching those impulses with films of the assassination (including the altered Zapruder film). These problems would keep various experts, conspiracy theorists, and lone-nutters alike busy for years of debate, sometimes switching sides back and forth to add to the confusion. That may have been the point of the whole exercise initiated by Mary Ferrell with the collusion of Gary Mack. In the process, many studies were made, and much ink was consumed, but the subject only became more intractable, as, indeed, it seemed to me almost from the beginning, given the near-impossibility of reconstructing credible gunshots from a belatedly produced Dictabelt recording made in part with a police microphone of uncertain location.

By so badly muddying the waters, the claim by the HSCA about shots being recorded on the tape most probably was intended to distract attention from the actual likelihood that more than four shots were fired in Dealey Plaza. This was among the more sophisticated and effective disinformation ploys launched against the finding of the truth of what happened in November 1963, but just one of the many obfuscatory maneuvers that began the first day and continue to the present. “All this stuff that went to the HSCA from the nucleus of people revolving around Mary Ferrell probably was concocted by mixing it with half-truths,” Lowrey noted. “Their MO is propping up a story and then shooting it down -- damn effective.” The HSCA Report, while saying that there were two gunmen, nevertheless claims that a single shot from the Grassy Knoll, the closer of the two alleged firing locations, missed, and blames Oswald (who was in the second-floor lunchroom of the Depository at the time) for firing all the shots that hit Kennedy, Connally, and bystander James Tague. Researcher Jack White, who continued to believe that “shots are recorded on the tape,” nevertheless aptly called the HSCA Report “a half-horse, half-zebra, half-assed kind of report.”

The HSCA, in my view, largely succeeded in disproving the (naive) notion that this case could be investigated fairly by a government up to its eyes in direct involvement in the planning, execution, and coverup of the crimes themselves. Like the Warren Commission investigation before it, the HSCA investigation also turned up a wealth of evidence and fresh leads that, ironically, cast doubt on its own conclusions. A further problem was that some of the HSCA’s work product, including reports of witness interviews, did not reach the public until the 1990s, delaying both its utility and its ability to cast doubt on the HSCA’s own conclusions. The material was sealed until after the film JFK helped provide the impetus for the establishment of the ARRB, which helped free six millions of pages of previously classified material in U.S. government files. That material has proven invaluable in filling in some of the important gaps in our information about the case and in calling attention to previously hidden aspects of these events.

Despite the flaws of the HSCA investigation, with all the genuine revelations that were being made about the case in the 1970s, as well as all the controversy engendered by true and false leads, the seeds of doubt were being widely sown again throughout the land. If I had been led astray from the initial evidence I heard with my own ears on the afternoon of November 22 and from my sense that first evening that Oswald was telling the truth in denying involvement in the killings of Kennedy and Tippit, I was now beginning to reclaim my first impressions as the truth.

[James DiEugenio]

As Joe explains at length above, its difficult to explain Ferrell's motivations and actions.

 

[W. Tracy Parnell]

4 hours ago, Phil Nelson said:

Or, How Mary Ferrell, Entrusted with National Secrets, Was Ultimately Exposed by Her Own Long Buried Secrets. 

You lost me at Judyth Baker. Honestly, this seems more like a story about the petty differences among researchers than anything else.

[Paul Brancato]

3 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

This is really overlong and uses too many questionable sources.

But there is a there there about Mary Ferrell.

Give you some examples:

1. In all of her many years on the JFK case, how many  research articles did she write? 

She did all of two, both for Penn Jones who had to badger her into doing them.  Now name them. No one can and that tells you how mediocre they were.

2. Mary was very conservative, I mean very conservative. 

She was actually associated with the Minutemen, yep De Pugh's group.  Why would someone like that be so interested in Kennedy's murder?  I mean to the point that she was.

3.  I only talked to her a couple of times.  

Once i asked her about materials from the HSCA since I was thinking of doing a book about that topic. She said what was going to be my take.  I said how the ousting of Sprague resulted in a cover up of the conspiracy.  She replied, "Oh, you think it was a conspiracy?"

4.  When Jerry Policoff did his 1992 article about the media for the Village Voice, Roger Feinman was trying to find out how he got his John McCloy/CBS documents. 

He called Mary.  Jerry, thinking he would do that, also called her.  It turns out she was playing them off against each other: telling Jerry what a good article it was and how it exposed the truth, and telling Roger what a rat Jerry was for using the documents without his permission. I asked Jerry, why would she do something like that?  Jerry said: if you wanted to monitor the critics, would it not be smart to have a listening post in Dallas who everyone thought was a nice sweet elderly lady who had a benign interest in the JFK case?

5.  Mary's youngest son Jimmy is mentioned but not his knowledge about his mom and why he ended up being estranged from her.

When that Garrison infiltrator Tom Bethell fled New Orleans, fearing he would be indicted for turning over the whole master file to Shaw's lawyers, where did he go?  Jimmy  made it a point to meet up with me at a conference.  He wanted to tell me he sought refuge at Mary's house.  And she let him in.  ( Read here for why that is quite objectionable https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/tom-bethell-a-study-in-duplicity-1198) It is  true Bethell was in Texas prior to working for JG, but he stayed with Penn Jones. 

6.  There is a bombshell story that I cannot tell about Mary and Fensterwald.  Why? Because Ed Tatro has been working on his book about as long as Lifton has. He told me about it, but when I wanted to write about it he told me no since he knew more of the nuances than he had told me.  But you can take it to the bank that its something that is really compelling about the subjects.

These are all reasons why Jonathan should not look askance at the subject matter.  Nelson did not handle it well--man does he need an editor.  But there was a lot more to Mary than what met the eye.

Thanks Jim, and Joseph. Boy am I curious about the Fensterwald story. 

[Ron Bulman]

I'd read about the Gatekeeper in Joe's book.  But this gets way deeper!  Her son killed in a mob drug deal behind Campisi's?  What was it her granddaughter married to George De Morenschildt's grandson?  Baker . . .  More.  I've read Livingstone was considered an ass hole by many but was he right? Jeez.   

[Pat Speer]

On 4/7/2022 at 4:37 PM, Jonathan Cohen said:

Jim, who cares if she didn’t write research articles? Who cares if she gossiped (who in this case hasn’t?) And who cares if she was “conservative” ? She was a tireless archivist and historian whose collection of documents is amongst the most valuable ever assembled in this case. Are you, like Phil Nelson, implying Mary was running some decades-long con game to disrupt the JFK research community? Why on earth would anyone do such a thing?

One of the best TV programs ever produced about the assassination was one put out in the aftermath of the HSCA, featuring Anthony Summers. I picked up a VHS of this program at a Salvation Army for a dollar and was shocked when it turned out not to be the schlock one usually finds, but a program with original interviews of key witnesses. It painted a mighty disturbing picture. Well, like I said, I couldn't believe the clarity of the thinking behind it. Unlike The Men Who Killed Kennedy, this program had a focus and wasn't just a compilation of dubious people saying dubious things, many of which made no sense. So I paid close attention to the credits and what did I find? That the chief researcher and consultant on the project was Mary Ferrell. 

So it's incorrect that she did nothing beyond collecting stuff. If one combs through her archives, moreover, one can find that she created numerous timelines and notes to be shared with her fellow researchers. 

As far as her never writing a book... I can totally relate. When I started looking into this case, I decided to record my ideas and discoveries in a free online "book" that gradually became a series of "books". This was for a number of reasons. Here are the prime ones.

1. Upon collecting a number of the key books on the case, I was horrified to find that a large percentage of the material was out-dated or repetitive of what was in other books. A 300 page book on the case might offer 100 pages of material not in other books, and 50% of that might be crap or stuff that had been made obsolete by subsequent discoveries or the increased availability of superior images. I kinda felt like it was wrong to ask people to pay 20 bucks for 50 pages of what would ultimately be relevant info.

2. I knew that the number one criticism of JFK researchers was that they were in it for the money. I knew, for that matter, that very few had actually ever made any money. So I thought I'd cut that critique off at the ankles by not pursuing the almighty dollar.

3. I knew, furthermore, that far too many researchers were hoarding documents, interviews, and other possibly important materials for that great pay-day in the sky. It made me feel sick then, and continues to do so now. How can people complain about the government holding back documents to avoid embarrassment when they are hoarding them and failing to share them with others for an even less worthy cause: money money money. It's disgusting. As a consequence, I have come to believe the real heroes of the case are those that acquire and share materials, such as Weisberg, Lesar, Ferrell, Bradford and Curme, and that those who save up mountains of stuff for their "books for the ages" are not heroes at all, but vampires. 

 

 

[Vince Palamara]

I know Harry Livingstone had some scathing things to say about her in KILLING THE TRUTH (1993). That was the book that turned the research community off to Harry. Despite having two best-sellers (one of which was a best-seller twice [High Treason]), Harry was never invited to any major conferences and was treated like a pariah from then on. I personally witnessed when he showed up unannounced at COPA 1996 and researchers were in panic mode. Some of them (grown men) were literally running for cover! Harry showed up at the dinner that night honoring his nemesis Robert Groden and, to our astonishment, he behaved himself.

But back to the subject at hand: Harry thought Mary was evil.

[James DiEugenio]

Mary's function was to do just that, supply files to everyone.  That is how she kept active in the community.

If Pat Speer's  online book is not a book what is it? I have seen the film he is talking about and sorry I don't agree to its quality. And second, it has not stood up well. I think most people would fall asleep if they saw it.  

Harry's book Killing the Truth did not go about what he was trying to do in a wise way.  I mean that was Harry.  And Bart Kamp found out who his 'source" was.  It was Rothermel.  To understand why that was a mistake one must read what Joan Mellen wrote as an addendum to her book on the Baron, Our Man in Haiti

But to slough off Bethell fleeing to Mary's home after betraying Garrison, and her saying to me, "Oh, you think its a conspiracy?" I mean please.

I am sorry I cannot reveal the info from Ed Tatro.  But that would seal it.

But really, does no one here think that there were people planted to monitor what we were doing?  I sure think there were.  How does one explain Epstein?

And let us never forget, why would anyone from DePugh's movement have an interest in who killed Kennedy?  Contrary to conventional wisdom, Garrison at first suspected it was that group that was in on the murder of JFK.  That is why he hired Bill Turner.  Bill had written a book on the subject. If you recall, Revilo Oliver thought JFK was a communist puppet.  To have one of the most extensive, if not the most extensive private archives on the JFK case, and to have written no books and only two articles on the JFK case in what, about forty years?  And on those two she had to be coaxed into writing  them by Penn Jones. 

So one has to ask, I think, just what was her interest in the murder of Kennedy?  To collect an archives? 

 

 

 

Edited April 10, 2022 by James DiEugenio

[Pat Speer]

1 hour ago, Vince Palamara said:

I know Harry Livingstone had some scathing things to say about her in KILLING THE TRUTH (1993). That was the book that turned the research community off to Harry. Despite having two best-sellers (one of which was a best-seller twice [High Treason]), Harry was never invited to any major conferences and was treated like a pariah from then on. I personally witnessed when he showed up unannounced at COPA 1996 and researchers were in panic mode. Some of them (grown men) were literally running for cover! Harry showed up at the dinner that night honoring his nemesis Robert Groden and, to our astonishment, he behaved himself.

But back to the subject at hand: Harry thought Mary was evil.

I've had several people who knew Harry tell me that it wasn't that he was a difficult personality, but that he was mentally ill, and a danger to others. I've heard he made sexual overtures to the children of his fellow researchers. If one person told me that I might believe him, but to have multiple people who didn't see eye to eye on much tell me essentially the same story, well, I am forced to suspect there's a there there. 

Having read several of his books, moreover, only fuels that suspicion. The man spent half his "career" complaining about his fellow researchers and questioning whether or not they were conspiring against him and against the truth. He was paranoid with a capital P, in may opinion. 

So why trash the dead? Well, to put his complaints against Ferrell in context, that's why. 

[Pat Speer]

I found the Summers video on YouTube. I haven't re-watched it in years, so it's probably outdated. But it was miles better than anything that had been put out by the major networks up till that time. And is still better than the most everything to come out since. It paints a picture of a possible conspiracy. And doesn't rely on dubious photo and medical analysis to do so.