Bernard Haire was there

[Sean Coleman]

I was preparing a monologuous diatribe explaining Bernard Haire when I stumbled across this DJ post and decided to (lazily) let it do the talking instead…….

If BH is to be believed, then a small piece of the puzzle can be solved. Simply put…..LHO arrives at the flicks first, is downstairs to meet his contact. BH’s guy ends up upstairs   where DPD’s finest apprehend him, hold him, waiting to usher him out the rear door as the circus below tumbled into the street out front. Simplistic, sorry, I know, but sometimes less is more.

[Charles Blackmon]

Somebody (don't know who?🙄) is going to argue this is "illogical". 

[Greg Doudna]

Others have pointed out in the past that the man Bernard Haire saw taken into a police cruiser out the back door may have been George Applin, theatre patron that day who was the only theatre patron taken by police downtown to give a statement. There is no claim to my knowledge that Bernard Haire claimed the man looked like Oswald, only that he assumed it was based on seeing what he thought was someone taken out under arrest. But a George Applin escorted by officers into a cruiser as a witness to be taken to headquarters, not under arrest, could be a simple mistaken interpretation on the part of Bernard Haire of what he saw.

The reason I think that is correct that the man Bernard Haire saw was Applin--unrelated to shooting of anyone--and not the mystery man in the balcony, and likely the actual killer of Tippit, reported encountered by deputy sheriff Bill Courson (in Sneed, No More Silence)--is it is known that Applin was taken by police downtown (not as a suspect but as a witness), and it would be somewhat odd if no one saw Applin being taken into a police cruiser by police, meaning it makes full sense that that is what Bernard Haire was seeing. Therefore I reason what Bernard Haire witnessed was the (innocuous) taking of Applin downtown by police which is known to have occurred, with no actual reason to suppose either Applin or the man Bernard Haire saw resembled Oswald in physical appearance. I realize this is a lot less "exciting" explanation of what Bernard Haire saw than florid stories of "Oswald doubles", but so be it. It makes the best sense of the facts to me.

Edited July 13, 2022 by Greg Doudna

[Paul Brancato]

Greg - that seems logical enough. Was it common practice to escort witnesses in police cruisers? That seems odd.

[Sean Coleman]

Good point PB, it gets even odder when you throw Douglass’s Butch Burroughs into the mix - there’s definitely hearsay (eyesay?) of two suspicious Oswaldian types in the theatre that day….oh no, have I unexpectedly prompted another H&L debate? Please…no no no 🫣

[Ron Bulman]

1 hour ago, Sean Coleman said:

Good point PB, it gets even odder when you throw Douglass’s Butch Burroughs into the mix - there’s definitely hearsay (eyesay?) of two suspicious Oswaldian types in the theatre that day….oh no, have I unexpectedly prompted another H&L debate? Please…no no no 🫣

We need a modern-day bumper sticker, an online meme so to speak.  "Haire Was There" to attract attention to the subject, get people to wondering, what the heck does that mean?  Might it rock on Tic Tok?  A 30 second video of a crowd at the back of the TT with an "Oswald" being escorted from the back door as a "Haire" from his back door points and shouts "There he is, the man who shot the President"!  

[John Butler]

21 hours ago, Sean Coleman said:

Good point PB, it gets even odder when you throw Douglass’s Butch Burroughs into the mix - there’s definitely hearsay (eyesay?) of two suspicious Oswaldian types in the theatre that day….oh no, have I unexpectedly prompted another H&L debate? Please…no no no 🫣

Hi Sean,

I hope not.  Other than the recent covid experiences and after problems related, I have not posted anything.  Secondarily, not posting anything on H&L is also something I am not doing.  Harvey and Lee has been well discussed by Armstrong, Josephs, Hargrove, and Larsen.  There are literally thousands of facts pointing to the spy doubles, H&L.

Jeremy and Jonathan, save your ink.  It will be wasted since I am not going to reply to any of your loose reasoning, insults and ad hominem.  I never thought I would have seen it, but Jim Hargrove finally gave up trying to have a discussion with those two.        

Edited July 12, 2022 by John Butler

[Jonathan Cohen]

3 hours ago, John Butler said:

There are literally thousands of facts pointing to the spy doubles, H&L.    

As usual, your definition of the word "facts" is different than practically anybody else's on this forum besides Professor/forensic dentist/fake motion picture analyst Sandy Larsen.

 

3 hours ago, John Butler said:

I never thought I would have seen it, but Jim Hargrove finally gave up trying to have a discussion with those two.        

Finally!

[Jeremy Bojczuk]

Sean Coleman writes:

Quote

it gets even odder when you throw Douglass’s Butch Burroughs into the mix - there’s definitely hearsay (eyesay?) of two suspicious Oswaldian types in the theatre that day….oh no, have I unexpectedly prompted another H&L debate? Please…no no no

I, too, really hope we've seen the last of any doppelganger-related nonsense here.

Douglass's book is worth reading, but it's let down by his decision to build a conspiratorial narrative out of as many pieces of evidence as possible, no matter how weak those pieces of evidence are. What he should have done was dismiss all the weak evidence, and create a narrative from the solid evidence.

One weak piece of evidence was the man who was escorted from the rear of the Texas Theater. As Greg Doudna points out (and as Greg Parker originally pointed out at https://reopenkennedycase.forumotion.net/t2051-time-to-kill-another-myth-there-was-no-second-oswald-arrested-at-the-theater), the man almost certainly was George Applin, who had nothing to do with the assassination. Applin was just an ordinary guy who chose the wrong day to give up sniffing glue go to the movies.

I summarised the problems with Butch Burroughs' story nearly three years ago, here:    

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/topic/25901-two-oswalds-in-the-texas-theater/?do=findComment&comment=407170

Reasons to doubt Burroughs' story

There is a perfectly credible candidate for the incident Burroughs saw:
    (a) George Applin, like Oswald, was a young (21-year-old versus 24-year-old) white man.
    (b) Applin spoke to the police on the ground floor and was escorted by them out of the building.
    (c) He probably left by the rear door, for several reasons: the police who spoke to him had entered by the rear door; their cars were parked in the alley by the rear door; they would almost certainly have taken Applin away in the cars they had arrived in; and none of the many witnesses at the front of the building reported that anyone other than Oswald was taken out through the front door.
    (d) Over the decades, Burroughs' memory of seeing Applin being taken away by the police could easily have changed into a memory of an arrest.

We know for a fact that George Applin was taken away by the police, in order to give a signed and witnessed statement (see his affidavit). But no-one in the Texas Theater who would have witnessed the event Burroughs described -- not Burroughs, not Jack Davis, not George Applin himself, not any of the police officers -- reported seeing more than one such incident, apart from the arrest of Oswald.

Burroughs had failed to mention his story when he was interviewed by Jim Marrs in 1987. Marrs was keen to learn whether anything even vaguely conspiratorial had occurred in the Texas Theater. He would certainly have questioned Burroughs closely, and would certainly have reported Burroughs' story if it existed in 1987, but he didn't.

Burroughs' story didn't emerge until 1993, three decades after the event.

Burroughs' story evolved and expanded over time:
    (a) 1964, Warren Commission: no arrest.
    (b) 1987, Jim Marrs interview: no arrest.
    (c) 1993, Jim Glover: arrest and taken out the back.
    (d) 2007, James Douglass interview: arrest, placed in handcuffs, and taken out the back.

There is no reason to connect Burroughs' story with any arrest in the balcony:
    (a) He did not explicitly mention to any of his interviewers over the years that he had seen anyone, let alone a suspect under arrest in handcuffs and accompanied by police officers, come down the stairs from the balcony.
    (b) He would certainly have seen such an event, if it had happened, because we know from his Warren Commission testimony (Hearings, vol.7, pp.14-17) that he was at his concession stand, which was close to the stairs (see a plan of the building), and he had earlier seen and reported a much less noticeable incident, a woman walking up the stairs by herself (Marrs, Crossfire, p.353).

Burroughs did not claim that he had seen an arrest in the balcony. The phrase in Douglass's JFK and the Unspeakable ("saw the second Oswald placed under arrest and handcuffed": p.293) in fact implies that the event he saw took place on the ground floor.

Burroughs did not see an arrest take place in the balcony at all:
    (a) Burroughs did not tell anyone, ever, that he had seen an arrest take place in the balcony.
    (b) He never claimed to have gone up to the balcony.
    (c) He implied, according to Marrs' and Douglass's accounts, that he stayed on the ground floor and never went up to the balcony while the police were in the building.
    (d) He would not have been able to see into the balcony from his position on the ground floor at the back of the auditorium.

Burroughs did not tell more than one interviewer that the man he saw was in handcuffs. The only mention of handcuffs is in Douglass's account, from an interview in 2007, 44 years after the event.

It is an uncontroversial fact that when people recall past events, especially events from several decades earlier as in Burroughs' case, they forget some details and unwittingly add others. There is no reason to assume that Burroughs' memory was less fallible than anyone else's. 

One element of Burroughs' story that might well be true is of seeing Oswald arrive much earlier than the official account allows. This early arrival, along with Oswald's behaviour outside the Texas Theater, may have an innocent explanation: maybe he had arranged to meet Marina and Ruth after work, to go shopping nearby, and he decided to watch a film in the meantime.

There's no need to assume that Oswald was under instructions to meet a contact, or that any other cloak-and-dagger activity was involved, or that he was aware of the post-assassination hue and cry, or even that he was aware that JFK had been killed. As with other aspects of the case, we can dismiss the lone-assassin speculation without having to invent some sort of all-encompassing conspiracy.