Into the Nightmare: A Milestone

[James DiEugenio]

I really do not have to summarize Helen Markham, except to say she was given probative value by the Commission.

Today, most people think she is credible up until the shooting.  Then she literally had a panic attack. For instance, saying she talked to the dead officer for about 20 minutes, when , in fact, Tippit was killed instantly. She was treated with ammonia salts while she was in the arms of the DPD, and she literally had to be coached by the Commission to give them a positive ID.  Both Joe Ball and Wesley Liebeler argued vehemently not to use her. But as we know, via Epstein's book, they were overruled by a combination of Redlich and Rankin.

Ominously, Liebeler wrote words to the effect that, although the WR tried to conceal her liabilities, they would not remain concealed for very long.  He was  correct. And Markham became something of a sorry joke when the first round of critical books came out. For instance, to Ball, she denied six times that she recognized Oswald in the line up on 11/22. Ball finally had to ask her a clearly leading question to get her to comply with his agenda. (p. 479) Need i add, this kind of stage play would have never been accepted in court or by a jury.

Joe does a complete job on her in his book. (Pp. 478-84) Including Ball's resistance to using her.  In fact, in a public debate, Ball called her an utter screwball. (p. 482) Recall, this was his own witness, so what does that tell you about the Commission? Bill Pulte suspected she did what she did because the authorities "had leverage on her" due to the fact her son  had been on parole since 1963, and was taken back into custody on a violation in April of 1964. (p. 479)

As Joe notes, Markham gave widely varying descriptions of Oswald, e. g. to Bardwell Odum, and they did not match up with the slain suspect. (p. 480) This is what worried Liebeler,  As he noted, the Commission seemed to think they needed her since she was the one witness who actually said she saw the alleged assassin kill the patrolman.  

One of the most sickening things you will find in Joe's book is when Greg Lowrey tells him that when Markham finally identified Oswald, the police cheered. (p. 482) This over a woman they had to administer ammonia salts to.

 

 

Edited July 30, 2022 by James DiEugenio

[Bill Brown]

1 hour ago, James DiEugenio said:

For instance, saying she [Markham] talked to the dead officer for about 20 minutes...

No.  Just no.

 

Markham never said that and I guarantee that you can't cite for it.

 

[Bill Brown]

4 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

Now that we have laid in the police background of the Tippit case, including a very questionable record of transcriptions--which seemed to improve at each  go round--, the indications TIppit was involved in a manhunt, Nelson's weird reaction to what should have been the same order given to Tippit, and Edgar Lee Tippit's sound information about Mentzel, let us proceed to see what Joe does with the witnesses at the scene.

Joe believes that Clemmons is a key witness, perhaps the most important.  She describes two men on the scene, one the shooter and one appearing to be an accomplice/lookout.  The crucial point is this: neither of them is Oswald. Not even close. (p. 492). And this was going to cause her problems. 

A man with a gun visited her about two days after the shooting. He told her that she might get hurt, "someone would hurt me if I would talk about what I saw.  He just told me it would be the best if I didn't say anything, because I might get hurt."(ibid). This man would appear to have all the earmarks of a Dallas plainclothes detective.  It appears too early for the FBI to be doing a field inquiry. Clemmons ' name must have gotten out through the other witnesses.

Clemmons appeared on camera in 1966 for Mark Lane.  Prior to that she had been interviewed by some researchers  in person and on tape: Golz, Martin, Salandria.  She told Martin that the Dallas police "don't allow me to say anything." When Golz talked to her, one of her sons had a gun on the table.

After the Lane filmed interview, Clemmons vanished.  Researchers tried everything to find her, searching through various databases. (ibid). But Clemmons seemed to be truly fearful about her fate.   After telling Shirley Martin it was two men and they seemed to be talking to each other, she added. "Might get killed on the way to work...They might kill people that know something about it." (p. 493)

As we know both Clemmons and Victoria Adams left Dallas. The DPD did a first rate job in intimidating witnesses who exposed the plot.

 

http://jfkfiles.blogspot.com/2017/11/the-october-jfk-assassination-file.html

 

[James DiEugenio]

"I would like to have a civil conversation about your statement.

Would you mind showing me evidence of any negative thing any sea lion has ever done to you."

https://blog.wcs.org/photo/2022/01/18/how-do-sea-lions-stay-warm-in-new-york-city-new-york-aquarium/

 

 

[Ron Bulman]

 The Tippit Case in the New Millennium (kennedysandking.com) 

As she looked out her window upon hearing the shots, she saw a second police car at the scene. It was in the driveway between 404 and 410 East Tenth. This was adjacent to the spot on the street where Tippit’s car stopped. Knowingly or unknowingly, Tippit had blocked the driveway, which led to an alley at mid-block. She said a man got out of the car, looked at Tippit’s body and then went back down the driveway. He was alongside the car, which was retreating back toward the alley. She also saw a man fleeing the scene in a different direction. (McBride, pp. 494-95)

She was directly across the street from the driveway with the police car in it, seeing this from the second floor looking down on it as it happened.

Edited July 31, 2022 by Ron Bulman

[Sandy Larsen]

12 hours ago, Bill Brown said:

14 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

For instance, saying she [Markham] talked to the dead officer for about 20 minutes...

No.  Just no. Markham never said that and I guarantee that you can't cite for it.

 

I found a citation.

From Anthony Summers' book The Kennedy Conspiracy (1980):

She [Markham] said she talked to Tippit and he understood her until he was loaded into an ambulance. All the medical evidence, and other witnesses, say Tippit died instantly from the head wound. A witness who also saw the shooting - from his pickup truck - and then got out to help the policeman, put it graphically: "He was lying there and he had - looked like a big clot of blood coming out of his head, and his eyes were sunk back in his head.... The policeman, I believe, was dead when he hit the ground." Mrs. Markham said it was twenty minutes before others gathered at the scene of the crime. [Which we know happened before the ambulance arrived.] That is clearly nonsense.

Bolding is mine.

 

Edited July 31, 2022 by Sandy Larsen

[James DiEugenio]

Thanks for straightening out the Sea Lion Sandy.

Ron, I am going to get to that shortly.

But what I am doing here is showing how dubious the official story is and how you should not trust anyone who bandies it about like its not.

[Charles Blackmon]

How much is the going rate for "guarantees" nowadays? 

[Bill Brown]

14 hours ago, Ron Bulman said:

 The Tippit Case in the New Millennium (kennedysandking.com) 

As she looked out her window upon hearing the shots, she saw a second police car at the scene. It was in the driveway between 404 and 410 East Tenth. This was adjacent to the spot on the street where Tippit’s car stopped. Knowingly or unknowingly, Tippit had blocked the driveway, which led to an alley at mid-block. She said a man got out of the car, looked at Tippit’s body and then went back down the driveway. He was alongside the car, which was retreating back toward the alley. She also saw a man fleeing the scene in a different direction. (McBride, pp. 494-95)

She was directly across the street from the driveway with the police car in it, seeing this from the second floor looking down on it as it happened.

http://jfkfiles.blogspot.com/2020/11/doris-e-holan-and-tippit-murder.html

[Bill Brown]

6 hours ago, Sandy Larsen said:

 

I found a citation.

From Anthony Summers' book The Kennedy Conspiracy (1980):

She [Markham] said she talked to Tippit and he understood her until he was loaded into an ambulance. All the medical evidence, and other witnesses, say Tippit died instantly from the head wound. A witness who also saw the shooting - from his pickup truck - and then got out to help the policeman, put it graphically: "He was lying there and he had - looked like a big clot of blood coming out of his head, and his eyes were sunk back in his head.... The policeman, I believe, was dead when he hit the ground." Mrs. Markham said it was twenty minutes before others gathered at the scene of the crime. [Which we know happened before the ambulance arrived.] That is clearly nonsense.

Bolding is mine.

 

No.  Just stop it.

 

I was asking for a cite (from Markham) where she said she talked to Tippit for twenty minutes.

 

I did not ask for Anthony Summers' irresponsible misinterpretation of what Markham said.

 

What Markham said was that when she went over to Tippit, he tried to say something.  This is a far cry from saying that she said she talked to Tippit for 20 minutes.  He was most likely having agonal respirations.  This idea is corroborated by Frank Cimino, who stated that Tippit moved slightly and groaned.

 

It is not my concern if some of you do not know the evidence and therefore rely on something written in a book by a conspiracy author who is being irresponsible with the testimony of a witness.

 

[James DiEugenio]

Now, another supposed good witness for the prosecution was the cab driver Scoggins.

The problem with Scoggins was that he never got a clear view of the suspect.  He view was obscured by foliage and then he  ducked down in his auto. Further, he was  at the same line up as another cab driver, Whaley.  In fact Whaley refers to him in his testimony. Whaley, the other cab driver, said anyone could have picked out Oswald. It was not just the physical dress and appearance  either, as anyone can see from pictures and in clips from JFK Revisited.  Oswald was literally screaming at how unjust that line up was; plus the others gave fictional names, but he gave his real name. (Meagher, p. 257.)

Finally, when the FBI showed him a spread of pictures, after the line up, Scoggins admitted that he picked the wrong photo. (Marrs, Crossfire, first edition, p. 341)

 

 

Edited July 31, 2022 by James DiEugenio

[James DiEugenio]

Warren Reynolds was also a witness who said he chased the assailant after the shooting.

Reynolds had Benavides syndrome.

Initially he failed to identify Oswald.

After he was shot, his memory was replenished and he did identify  Oswald. (McBride, p. 305)

Edited July 31, 2022 by James DiEugenio

[James DiEugenio]

Let me add, Joe quotes author Gaeton Fonzi and the film maker deAntonio in his book talking about the fear in Dallas, especially surrounding the Tippit case.

I already quoted this in relation to Clemmons.  But Fonzi wrote about it in general.  He wrote that many of the witnesses were hard to locate, and some moved without notice, leaving no forwarding address. He wrote they where all aware of the strange things that had happened, particularly to other witnesses. (McBride, p. 461)

Salandria noted this also, especially in relation to Markham. She would not meet with VInce for  an interview.  She then relented.  But when he came back, as John Kelin has written, there were two police cars in front of her apartment. The cars left, but then Mr. Markham refused to allow them entry. When asked if they had been threatened, the man said yes.

(https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/conspiracy-theory-why-no-one-believes-the-warren-report)

[Sandy Larsen]

5 hours ago, Bill Brown said:

What Markham said was that when she went over to Tippit, he tried to say something.

 

Do you have a transcript of Markham's exact words? From that I should be able to tell whose interpretation is correct, yours or Summers'. Or my own.

 

[Joseph McBride]

About Mary Ferrell from my book INTO THE NIGHTMARE:

 

 

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.