Hit List-- The Systematic Murders of JFK Witnesses

[Greg Doudna]

1 hour ago, Mark Ulrik said:

What year Benavides' brother was killed is hardly trivial. When you're in the business of killing or intimidating witnesses, it usually makes the most sense to do it before they testify. Maybe it works differently in the US. Have you read Benavides' WC testimony? Did you find anything in there that might have irked the conspirators to the extent that hard measures needed to be taken? I didn't think so.

Well Benavides was so close that if he had seen the killer's face he would be a credible witness in making a positive identification of the killer, who if his physical description in his Warren Commission testimony is to be believed was not Oswald (block cut rear hairline; darker skin complexion). Benavides claimed he had not seen the killer's face (and apparently on Nov 22 told police he could not identify the killer) but would the ones who ordered Tippit's killing (if so) trust a witness who was a few feet away who claimed he had not seen well enough to identify anyone?

Any individual act of violence or threat affecting Tenth and Patton witnesses is difficult to know was related to the Nov 22, 1963 Tippit killing. Still:

• Warren Reynolds was on television saying he had seen the Tippit killer and for no other known reason was shot and nearly killed, never solved. He later was reported (I think this supposedly is from Mack Pate the auto garage owner) to have said he, Reynolds who had been shot, was positively identifying Oswald thereafter "because he wanted to live". 
• There is a report attributed to Callaway or Callaway's wife, I forget which and don't remember where I read it, that has them saying several days close to Nov 22 there was some threat to the Callaways at their business. (I do not doubt that Callaway's positive ID of the fleeing Tippit killer as Oswald was sincere, as opposed to correct, but Callaway did notably tell of Leavelle telling him of Oswald--by name--before the lineup--that the Dallas Police hoped to get Oswald, who was already in the news, "wrapped up real tight" on Tippit, and this witness's desire to help law enforcement may compromise confidence in his positive identification.)
• There is an FBI document saying that Guinyard appealed to the FBI for help complaining that strange unidentified men with guns had come to his house when he was not there asking for him; the FBI said they could do nothing for him because not their jurisdiction and referred him to local Dallas Police. Unclear what that was about or its outcome, but he was a witness of the Tippit killer.
• Acquilla Clemons claimed she was advised to be quiet for her safety by an officer, which possibly could even have been well meaning on the part of the officer, but no police officer is identified who talked to Acquilla and the FBI denied they had been in contact with her. Acquilla Clemons said she had seen the Tiopit gunman and her presence standing at the northwest corner of Tenth and Patton is supported independently from another witness, supporting that Acquilla saw what she said she saw.
• Tatum was a witness who did not come forward because he said he feared it had been a mob killing; then in the late 1970s Tatum was outed not of his doing and identified the gunman as Oswald; was that influenced by his admitted earlier silence for fear of the mob? There was a letter published in Playboy, Aug 1966, from an anonymous writer who claimed to be a witness to the Tippit killing and was keeping silent out of fear for his safety in language similar to Tatum's later language, sounding like it could have been authored by Tatum, except the anonymous letter writer claims he saw two gunmen and neither was Oswald. The later Tatum said he saw one gunman twice and it was Oswald. The anonymous Playboy letter author may have been Tatum--I suspect it was--and Tatum's fear of mob involvement in the Tippit killing may have been the variable that caused the change to Tatum's identification of Oswald. Tatum's acknowledged fear of mob involvement in the killing of Tippit may compromise the credibility of Tatum's identification of the killer as Oswald after Tatum was outed as a witness.
• According to family members of Helen Markham reported by Gavan McMahon in an article in the current Garrison, Helen Markham claimed to family members she saw an "Italian" gunman (darker skin complexion [compare Benavides on the complexion]), supposedly, as the family (mis-?)understood it, in addition (?) to Oswald, whom she recognized and said was mob related. Curtis Craford, of darker skin complexion than Oswald according to FBI description (Curtis Craford was described as "medium" not "light" skin complexion) ate at the Eatwell restaurant across from the Carousel Club where Helen Markham worked as a waitress. Helen may or may not have seen him there, then again as the killer of Tippit, which if so would have caused exactly the terror she experienced. Later on Nov 22 someone at the Eatwell restaurant reported that Ruby had come in, sat at a counter and ordered, asked to speak with Helen Markham, was told she wasn't there, whereupon Ruby left without eating. What was that about? No one knows. According to McMahon's interviews of a Helen Markham daughter-in-law, Helen Markham received a sum of money after her Warren Commission testimony that the family understood to be as someone rewarding her for her testimony. 
• According to an interview of Scoggins' grandson videotaped and made publicly available by McMahon, Scoggins said he had been asked by a Ruby associate to be parked where he was eating lunch in his cab, the day and time when Tippit was shot (https://educationforum.ipbhost.com/topic/30211-pre-arranged-planted-witnesses-tippit-killing/). Rather than McMahon's interpretation of that as a planting of a witness, I read that as a planting of a getaway car option. When the killing of Tippit happened, the killer did go directly around the corner to Scoggins' cab, but the streetwise Scoggins, hearing the shots, had immediately bolted out of and away from his cab due to the risk of being carjacked at gunpoint if he remained sitting in the car. It is possible the Tippit killer intended to have Scoggins drive him away at gunpoint and continued his flight on foot only because Scoggins had wisely left the cab so quickly first. This background from the Scoggins grandson's interview aired in the video could affect the assessment of Scoggins' Oswald identification. 

Any of these instances considered in isolation can have possible explanations on grounds unrelated to the Tippit killing. But cumulatively, I don't think so in all of these cases.

The Tippit killing has all the appearances of a premeditated professional execution; with Tippit lured to be there at a certain time and ambushed. Reiland of WFAA-TV showed news footage on Nov 22, less than thirty minutes after Tippit's death, of DPD Crime Lab officer Barnes dusting the top of the right front passenger door on the Tippit patrol car for fingerprints, and Reiland reported police were hoping to get usable prints to help identify the killer. They did lift prints but did not disclose what finally came forth three decades later, that those prints were sufficiently usable to easily exclude (according to examiner Lutz) that they had been left by Oswald. That 1990s-reported exclusion of Oswald contradicted the unsigned and unattributed hearsay told in 1964 to the Warren Commission (by Barnes in his testimony) that someone unknown in the Dallas Police crime lab had determined there was no useful information in those fingerprints, nothing to see there.

An argument against the testimonies as to violence or threats against Tippit witnesses is that none of the cases were solved in the form of evidence or confession that organized witness intimidation related to the Tippit killing was happening and by whom. If the gunman was (say) Curtis Craford, he left Dallas on Sat Nov 23, 1963 and could not have been involved in such intimidation himself. 

But there was a Dixie Mafia which was very brutal and ruthless, with members in Dallas, and there were Marcello-Civello-Ruby circles who sometimes cooperated with the Dixie Mafia on matters of mutual interest. Although it isn't proven, that is where some of this witness intimidation and violence, if and to the extent some if not all was related to the Tippit killing, might be situated.

[W. Niederhut]

      In the few years that I have been a member of this forum, I have always been surprised by the posts of several forum members who consistently deny the obvious evidence about the frontal head shot that killed JFK and blew the back of his skull backward, behind the limo-- and the intimidation and murders of witnesses who had information refuting the Warren Commission's Lone Nut narrative.  It's, frankly, bizarre.

     And I noticed that Mark Ulrik, Bill Brown, et.al. have been silent about the evidence that high level CIA officials had foreknowledge of the assassination of Mary Pinchot Meyer-- several hours before the police identified the body or issued any public announcements about her murder.

     Can Ulrik and Bill Brown explain how Wistar Janney and Ben Bradlee knew that Mary Meyer was dead "shortly after noon?"

[Greg Doudna]

Another point: if the Tippit killer was Oswald, then there would be no motive or reason for anyone to intimidate Tippit crime scene witnesses. Intimidation of witnesses related to the Tippit killing only makes sense if the killer was not Oswald, potentially identifiable as other than Oswald, and it was wished that the killer's identity remained unknown. 

Similarly this logic works in reverse with the case of Whaley the cab driver who drove Oswald from Dallas to Oak Cliff on Nov 22. That really was Oswald, that cab ride is Whaley's only connection to the case, and Whaley correctly identified his passenger as Oswald. There was nothing to be covered up or that was covered up in Whaley's story. Later Whaley was killed in a head-on collision, and somehow that death in that traffic accident got written into the lists of suspicious deaths! When that is not a suspicious death at all. 

It was only by freak accident that Warren Reynolds lived instead of being killed on the spot when shot at close range in the head, in Jan 1964 immediately following his public profile in news reports as a witness potentially capable of identifying the Tippit crime scene killer (combined with no other known motive for an attempt on his life). It didn't matter that that expected killing turned out differently with Reynolds living--it sent a message to all witnesses.

That is a prima facie interpretation of the Warren Reynolds shooting, even if it is not proven.   

[Pat Speer]

On 3/6/2024 at 8:25 PM, W. Niederhut said:

Jim,

Belzer's hit list of murdered JFKA witnesses is substantial, and the forensic evidence and actuarial probabilities are extremely suspicious-- the diametric opposite of what Pat Speer claimed (above.)  

All of the identified cases in the book were people who had knowledge about people and events relating to JFK's murder, and many died when they were threatening or scheduled to spill the beans-- e.g., Gary Underhill, the journalist from L.A. (Hunter?) who had been in Ruby's apartment,  Mary Pinchot Meyer, Dorothy Killgallen, David Ferrie, William Sullivan,  (and a few FBI lab technicians) the officer who filmed the Bethesda autopsy, Giancana, De Mohrenschildt, and dozens more.  (I'm naming a few off of the top of my head.)

In Lee Bowers case, he was driven off the road by a mystery vehicle into a concrete wall, and he told the EMTs prior to his death that he thought his coffee had been drugged at a local diner, before returning to his car.  Bowers had also, reportedly, told family members that he had not reported everything that he witnessed on 11/22/63-- in the parking lot behind the picket fence-- because he was afraid.

Curiously, this is the precise opposite of what Pat Speer just claimed (above.)  Pat's 0-2 here.

My impression from studying the Hit List data is that someone was carefully monitoring these witnesses over time -- tapping phones, etc.-- and ordering hits when they had evidence of impending testimony refuting the Warren Commission narrative.

Incidentally, William Sullivan told friends that he thought he was going to be murdered, prior to his Congressional testimony.

My hypothesis is that these systematic murders of witnesses were implementations of the 1964 CIA Executive Order instructing Agency personnel to do "whatever is necessary" to promote public acceptance of the Warren Commission Report.

 

I had a long talk with a reporter (whose name I don't remember) who wrote a book on Bowers' death and found nothing suspicious. She knew she'd sell more books if she said it was suspicious, but she couldn't find anything. 

I spoke with her at a Lancer conference, and was allowed to talk with her at great length because no one else seemed interested. 

I don't know if you've been to a JFK conference, William, but they are a strange place. The presenters present all kinds of material--some supporting a conspiracy, and some not. But the audience---the audience are largely wide-eyed people hoping, almost praying, to hear something shocking and crazy. That's what they paid for--to be entertained with bedtime stories about an evil "they" out to destroy the world. This is what they cling to, true or not.

So when someone like myself or Buell Frazier or Kenneth Salyer or this woman provides a non-conspiratorial explanation of a particular piece of evidence, the crowd gets restless, and you can even sometimes hear rumblings of "limited hang-out" or "mockingbird" whatever. 

Now I have the Belzer book somewhere but it is not handy. Can you cite the sources provided by Belzer re Bowers' supposed statements? I didn't remember his speaking to anyone before dying, and am wondering if this is something Belzer got from Penn Jones, etc, who was simply repeating a rumor. 

[Pat Speer]

6 hours ago, W. Niederhut said:

      In the few years that I have been a member of this forum, I have always been surprised by the posts of several forum members who consistently deny the obvious evidence about the frontal head shot that killed JFK and blew the back of his skull backward, behind the limo-- and the intimidation and murders of witnesses who had information refuting the Warren Commission's Lone Nut narrative.  It's, frankly, bizarre.

     And I noticed that Mark Ulrik, Bill Brown, et.al. have been silent about the evidence that high level CIA officials had foreknowledge of the assassination of Mary Pinchot Meyer-- several hours before the police identified the body or issued any public announcements about her murder.

     Can Ulrik and Bill Brown explain how Wistar Janney and Ben Bradlee knew that Mary Meyer was dead "shortly after noon?"

I know we've been over this 100 times. But you claim there was a  "frontal head shot that killed JFK and blew the back of his skull backward." 

Now, no matter what you think...frontal shot or no...this isn't accurate.

1. The films of the shooting show the skull fragments flying forwards. 

2. The two largest fragments found afterwards were found in front of JFK.

3. One of these fragments indisputably (yes, even in the eyes of those claiming the back of the head was blown out) derived from the front of Kennedy's head. 

4. The closest eyewitnesses in a position to view the fatal wound in the plaza placed the wound by the ear or on the face, and not on the far back of the head.

Now you can disagree with these points of evidence, and claim they have all been faked, etc. But you should not be surprised when some accept the validity of this evidence over what some witnesses later remembered, and what some writers desperately want you to believe. 

 

Edited March 9 by Pat Speer

[Chuck Schwartz]

I believe this essay is relevant to this thread...https://archive.politicalassassinations.net/2013/04/executive-action-jfk-witness-deaths-and-the-london-times-actuary/

[W. Niederhut]

1 hour ago, Pat Speer said:

I had a long talk with a reporter (whose name I don't remember) who wrote a book on Bowers' death and found nothing suspicious. She knew she'd sell more books if she said it was suspicious, but she couldn't find anything. 

I spoke with her at a Lancer conference, and was allowed to talk with her at great length because no one else seemed interested. 

I don't know if you've been to a JFK conference, William, but they are a strange place. The presenters present all kinds of material--some supporting a conspiracy, and some not. But the audience---the audience are largely wide-eyed people hoping, almost praying, to hear something shocking and crazy. That's what they paid for--to be entertained with bedtime stories about an evil "they" out to destroy the world. This is what they cling to, true or not.

So when someone like myself or Buell Frazier or Kenneth Salyer or this woman provides a non-conspiratorial explanation of a particular piece of evidence, the crowd gets restless, and you can even sometimes hear rumblings of "limited hang-out" or "mockingbird" whatever. 

Now I have the Belzer book somewhere but it is not handy. Can you cite the sources provided by Belzer re Bowers' supposed statements? I didn't remember his speaking to anyone before dying, and am wondering if this is something Belzer got from Penn Jones, etc, who was simply repeating a rumor. 

Pat,

     I've been to a lot of lectures in the Ivy League (Brown and Harvard) during my eight years back East, but I've never been to a JFK conference.  What so-and-so said at a conference carries little weight with me, unless I know that the speaker is a knowledgeable, honest expert who isn't selling something.  (Perhaps I've attended too many Big Pharma-funded medical lectures during the past 40 years.)

     This skepticism seems all the more justified in the case of the JFK assassination-- given the plethora of CIA-funded disinformation in our media (including social media.)

    Honestly, I prefer reading books and articles.  It's easier to analyze written arguments and data with precision.

    IMO, Belzer's book, Hit List, is fairly well written and strictly evidence-based.  I'd give it an "A" as an interesting JFKA reference book about the forensic details of 50 JFKA witnesses who died under suspicious circumstances.  The authors also include actuarial stats about the astronomical improbability that these clusters of witness deaths occurred by chance.

     Belzer & Wayne point out that most of these improbable JFKA witness deaths cluster, temporally, around four basic periods; 

1) shortly after JFK's assassination, 2) during the Warren Commission investigation, 3) during the Garrison investigation, and 4) during the HSCA investigation.

    So, withal, I'm somewhat puzzled by the negative opinions of Hit List on the forum, by people who have, apparently, never read the book.  It reminds me of the negative spin about Col. Fletcher Prouty's books by several forum members who never read them.

     Speaking of which, did Belzer's book, Hit List, get Prouty'd by the CIA propaganda people in 2013, possibly on the grounds that he was merely a comedian and actor?  We could use similar criteria to dismiss Bob Dylan's song, Murder Most Foul.

     The fact that Belzer was a popular television actor, if anything, seems like a positive for the JFKA community, in that he had the potential to publicize damning facts about the cover up of the JFK assassination.

     But, instead of celebrating Belzer's evidence-based contribution to increasing public awareness about the cover up of the JFK assassination, some people around here are erroneously smearing him.

 

Edited March 10 by W. Niederhut

[Chuck Schwartz]

Here is one more essay on this subject...https://spartacus-educational.com/JFKdeaths.htm

[Pat Speer]

1 hour ago, W. Niederhut said:

Pat,

     I've been to a lot of lectures in the Ivy League (Brown and Harvard) during my eight years back East, but I've never been to a JFK conference.  What so-and-so said at a conference carries little weight with me, unless I know that the speaker is a knowledgeable, honest expert who isn't selling something.  (Perhaps I've attended too many Big Pharma-funded medical lectures during the past 40 years.)

     This skepticism seems all the more justified in the case of the JFK assassination-- given the plethora of CIA-funded disinformation in our media (including social media.)

    Honestly, I prefer reading books and articles.  It's easier to analyze written arguments and data with precision.

    IMO, Belzer's book, Hit List, is fairly well written and strictly evidence-based.  I'd give it an "A" as an interesting JFKA reference book about the forensic details of 50 JFKA witnesses who died under suspicious circumstances.  The authors also include actuarial stats about the astronomical improbability that these clusters of witness deaths occurred by chance.

     Belzer & Wayne point out that most of these improbable JFKA witness deaths cluster, temporally, around four basic periods; 

1) shortly after JFK's assassination, 2) during the Warren Commission investigation, 3) during the Garrison investigation, and 4) during the HSCA investigation.

    So, withal, I'm somewhat puzzled by the negative opinions of Hit List on the forum, by people who have, apparently, never read the book.  It reminds me of the negative spin about Col. Fletcher Prouty's books by several forum members who never read them.

     Speaking of which, did Belzer's book, Hit List, get Prouty'd by the CIA propaganda people in 2013, possibly on the grounds that he was merely a comedian and actor?  We could use similar criteria to dismiss Bob Dylan's song, Murder Most Foul.

     The fact that Belzer was a popular television actor, if anything, seems like a positive for the JFKA community, in that he had the potential to publicize damning facts about the cover up of the JFK assassination.

     But, instead of celebrating Belzer's evidence-based contribution to increasing public awareness about the cover up of the JFK assassination, some people around here are erroneously smearing him.

 

I actually have the Belzer book...somewhere. I think he even quotes me in there somewhere, although I don't remember the context. My complaint was that he included too many people, many of whom were only loosely affiliated with the case. 

As far as the actuarial stuff...I assume you know about the end of the film Executive Action and what happened afterwards. At the end of the movie it quoted a London paper claiming that the odds of the suspicious deaths being a coincidence were billions to one or some such thing. But that this was later debunked. It turned out that the numbers were cooked, essentially. 

As I recall, the original number was created by taking the number of witnesses to testify before the commission, and then adding on a few who died. But this was bad math. The actual number should have been created by the number of witnesses to testify before the commission, and then adding on the thousands of people who were tangentially related to the assassination, who both died and did not die. 

The deaths of those reporters comes to mind. There were literally hundreds of reporters in Dallas on the day of the assassination, and its aftermath. The accidental deaths of a few of them, who never claimed to have top secret knowledge, is not surprising.

Now, to be clear, the crop of deaths in the mid-70's is a lot harder to dismiss. I remember when I first started researching, and discovering that heck this guy died just before the HSCA and heck that guy died just before the HSCA and so on. 

So I don't dismiss the premise of the book. I just think it was too broad. 

P.S. One of the guys who died surprisingly and prematurely during the HSCA was Manuel Artime. He was only 45 at the time, and was likely to have knowledge about the CIA's attempts on Castro and the possible re-routing of these attempts onto Kennedy. I don't recall. Is he in the Belzer book? 

Edited March 10 by Pat Speer

[Ron Bulman]

Regarding Lee Bowers, Belzer and Wayne reference David Perry's article "Now It Can Be Told: The Lee Bowers Story", who admits Texas Department of Public Safety aka The Highway Patrol Officer Charles Good "claims" to have investigated the accident, and concluded his friend Lee Bowers had been run off the road, into a bridge abutment.  They also reference John Simkins Spartacus biography of Lee Bowers.  From it.

 On 9th August, 1966, Lee Bowers was killed when his car left the road and crashed into a concrete abutment in Midlothian, Texas. Robert J. Groden later reported "Lee Bowers was heading west here on highway sixty-seven heading from Midlothian down to Cleburne and according to an eyewitness he was driven off the road by a black car. Drove him into this bridge abutment. He didn't die immediately, he held on for four hours and during that time he was talking to the ambulance people and told them that he felt he had been drugged when he stopped for coffee back there a few miles in Midlothian."

(2) Anthony Summers, The Kennedy Conspiracy (1980).  Lee Bowers was questioned by the Warren Commission but was cut off in mid-sentence when he began describing the "something out of the ordinary" he had seen. The interrogating lawyer changed the subject.  (Ball).

 

(5) Robert J. Groden, High Treason (1989)

Lee Bowers was heading west here on highway sixty-seven heading from Midlothian down to Cleburne and according to an eyewitness he was driven off the road by a black car. Drove him into this bridge abutment. He didn't die immediately, he held on for four hours and during that time he was talking to the ambulance people and told them that he felt he had been drugged when he stopped for coffee back there a few miles in Midlothian.

6) Charles Good, member of the Texas Highway Patrol, formed the opinion that another car forced the Bowers' vehicle off the road. He was interviewed about the accident in 1991.

I spoke with an old boy who was repairing fences at the time of the accident. He said he saw two cars coming down the road one behind the other. He turned away for a moment, heard a crash and looked back. One car had hit a bridge abutment and the other kept going.

(9) David Welsh, Ramparts (November, 1966)  

On the morning of August 9, 1966, Lee Bowers, now the vice-president of a construction firm, was driving south from Dallas on business. He was two miles from Midlothian when his brand new company car veered from the road and hit a bridge abutment. A farmer who saw it said the car was going 50 miles an hour, a slow speed for that road. There were no skidmarks to indicate braking.

Bowers died of his wounds at 1 p.m. in a Dallas hospital. He was 41. There was no autopsy, and he was cremated soon afterward. Doctors saw no evidence that he had suffered a heart attack. A doctor from Midlothian, who rode in the ambulance with Bowers, noticed something peculiar about the victim. "He was in a strange state of shock," the old doctor said, "a different kind of shock than an accident victim experiences. I can't explain it. I've never seen anything like it."

Bowers widow at first insisted to Penn Jones that there was nothing suspicious about her husband's death. Then she became flustered and said: "They told him not to talk."

 

I'm pretty sure I've read this somewhere else but can't remember where at the moment. Officer Good did not investigate the accident at the time of it.  But he did so anyway on his own time, as a friend of Bowers.  He interviewed the farmer fixing his fence right by the road.  He also went to the wrecking yard and looked at the car finding a dent and different color paint along the drivers side.

 

 

[Pat Speer]

59 minutes ago, Ron Bulman said:

Regarding Lee Bowers, Belzer and Wayne reference David Perry's article "Now It Can Be Told: The Lee Bowers Story", who admits Texas Department of Public Safety aka The Highway Patrol Officer Charles Good "claims" to have investigated the accident, and concluded his friend Lee Bowers had been run off the road, into a bridge abutment.  They also reference John Simkins Spartacus biography of Lee Bowers.  From it.

 On 9th August, 1966, Lee Bowers was killed when his car left the road and crashed into a concrete abutment in Midlothian, Texas. Robert J. Groden later reported "Lee Bowers was heading west here on highway sixty-seven heading from Midlothian down to Cleburne and according to an eyewitness he was driven off the road by a black car. Drove him into this bridge abutment. He didn't die immediately, he held on for four hours and during that time he was talking to the ambulance people and told them that he felt he had been drugged when he stopped for coffee back there a few miles in Midlothian."

(2) Anthony Summers, The Kennedy Conspiracy (1980).  Lee Bowers was questioned by the Warren Commission but was cut off in mid-sentence when he began describing the "something out of the ordinary" he had seen. The interrogating lawyer changed the subject.  (Ball).

 

(5) Robert J. Groden, High Treason (1989)

Lee Bowers was heading west here on highway sixty-seven heading from Midlothian down to Cleburne and according to an eyewitness he was driven off the road by a black car. Drove him into this bridge abutment. He didn't die immediately, he held on for four hours and during that time he was talking to the ambulance people and told them that he felt he had been drugged when he stopped for coffee back there a few miles in Midlothian.

6) Charles Good, member of the Texas Highway Patrol, formed the opinion that another car forced the Bowers' vehicle off the road. He was interviewed about the accident in 1991.

I spoke with an old boy who was repairing fences at the time of the accident. He said he saw two cars coming down the road one behind the other. He turned away for a moment, heard a crash and looked back. One car had hit a bridge abutment and the other kept going.

(9) David Welsh, Ramparts (November, 1966)  

On the morning of August 9, 1966, Lee Bowers, now the vice-president of a construction firm, was driving south from Dallas on business. He was two miles from Midlothian when his brand new company car veered from the road and hit a bridge abutment. A farmer who saw it said the car was going 50 miles an hour, a slow speed for that road. There were no skidmarks to indicate braking.

Bowers died of his wounds at 1 p.m. in a Dallas hospital. He was 41. There was no autopsy, and he was cremated soon afterward. Doctors saw no evidence that he had suffered a heart attack. A doctor from Midlothian, who rode in the ambulance with Bowers, noticed something peculiar about the victim. "He was in a strange state of shock," the old doctor said, "a different kind of shock than an accident victim experiences. I can't explain it. I've never seen anything like it."

Bowers widow at first insisted to Penn Jones that there was nothing suspicious about her husband's death. Then she became flustered and said: "They told him not to talk."

 

I'm pretty sure I've read this somewhere else but can't remember where at the moment. Officer Good did not investigate the accident at the time of it.  But he did so anyway on his own time, as a friend of Bowers.  He interviewed the farmer fixing his fence right by the road.  He also went to the wrecking yard and looked at the car finding a dent and different color paint along the drivers side.

 

 

You inspired me to look up the name of the woman I spoke to regarding Bowers. Her name was Anita Dickason. She was an experienced accident investigator who'd looked into the case. Here's a link to her book. 

https://www.amazon.com/JFK-Assassination-Eyewitness-Conspiracy-Bowers/dp/1480803359

Edited March 10 by Pat Speer

[W. Niederhut]

Pat,

I'm responding in red (below.)

Pat Speer wrote:

I actually have the Belzer book...somewhere. I think he even quotes me in there somewhere, although I don't remember the context. My complaint was that he included too many people, many of whom were only loosely affiliated with the case. 

Too many?  All 50 cases in Belzer's book are linked in some fashion to the JFK assassination, as he cogently explains.

For some cases, there were one or two degrees of separation from primary actors -- as in the case of Karyn Kupcinet, whose father, columnist Irv Kupcinet, knew Jack Ruby and some Chicago mobsters, and became silent about the JFK assassination and Ruby after his daughter's shocking murder.

As far as the actuarial stuff...I assume you know about the end of the film Executive Action and what happened afterwards. At the end of the movie it quoted a London paper claiming that the odds of the suspicious deaths being a coincidence were billions to one or some such thing. But that this was later debunked. It turned out that the numbers were cooked, essentially. 

Belzer's opening discussion of the actuarial statistics begins with correcting the erroneous Executive Action probability.  (He gives an appropriately sarcastic nod to the newspaper that eagerly debunked the math error.  We all know how reliable the mainstream media has been when it comes to debunking the Warren Commission narrative.)

But he and Wade then demonstrate that the probability of an estimated 70 unnatural witness deaths occurring in a sample of 1,400 JFK witnesses (from 1963 to 1977) is still infinitesimally small -- in the trillions-to-1 range.  

As I recall, the original number was created by taking the number of witnesses to testify before the commission, and then adding on a few who died. But this was bad math. The actual number should have been created by the number of witnesses to testify before the commission, and then adding on the thousands of people who were tangentially related to the assassination, who both died and did not die. 

What are the actuarial probabilities of these unnatural deaths occurring from 1963 to 1977 in a 1,400 person sample?

The deaths of those reporters comes to mind. There were literally hundreds of reporters in Dallas on the day of the assassination, and its aftermath. The accidental deaths of a few of them, who never claimed to have top secret knowledge, is not surprising.

 Jim Koethe and Bill Hunter were two reporters who had actually been in Jack Ruby's apartment that week.  They were both murdered shortly afterwards.  Koethe was killed by a burglar (and karate expert) who just happened to steal his notes for material he wanted to publish about the JFK assassination.  Hunter was shot in the heart by a cop in an L.A. police station who said he accidentally dropped his gun!  (Then he changed his story and said he was just horsing around with his gun when it fired, killing Hunter instantly.)

Nothing to see here.  Move along now.

Now, to be clear, the crop of deaths in the mid-70's is a lot harder to dismiss. I remember when I first started researching, and discovering that heck this guy died just before the HSCA and heck that guy died just before the HSCA and so on. 

The same spike in JFK witness murders occurred during the Warren Commission investigation and during the Garrison investigation.  David Ferrie is the most famous example from 1967.  And we all know that the CIA and FBI were aggressively sabotaging Garrison's investigation at the time.

So I don't dismiss the premise of the book. I just think it was too broad. 

Too broad for what?  We're looking at 14 years of systematic murders of people who knew too much.  That's a broad time period involving a broad array of witnesses capable of debunking the Warren Commission narrative.

P.S. One of the guys who died surprisingly and prematurely during the HSCA was Manuel Artime. He was only 45 at the time, and was likely to have knowledge about the CIA's attempts on Castro and the possible re-routing of these attempts onto Kennedy. I don't recall. Is he in the Belzer book? 

Artime is mentioned in the conclusion of Hit List, but he doesn't have his own chapter.

[Robert Morrow]

I believe almost none of those deaths in Hit List had any relation to the JFK assassination. I have not seen evidence to indicate otherwise.

[Pat Speer]

2 hours ago, W. Niederhut said:

Pat,

I'm responding in red (below.)

Pat Speer wrote:

I actually have the Belzer book...somewhere. I think he even quotes me in there somewhere, although I don't remember the context. My complaint was that he included too many people, many of whom were only loosely affiliated with the case. 

Too many?  All 50 cases in Belzer's book are linked in some fashion to the JFK assassination, as he cogently explains.

For some cases, there were one or two degrees of separation from primary actors -- as in the case of Karyn Kupcinet, whose father, columnist Irv Kupcinet, knew Jack Ruby and some Chicago mobsters, and became silent about the JFK assassination and Ruby after his daughter's shocking murder.

As far as the actuarial stuff...I assume you know about the end of the film Executive Action and what happened afterwards. At the end of the movie it quoted a London paper claiming that the odds of the suspicious deaths being a coincidence were billions to one or some such thing. But that this was later debunked. It turned out that the numbers were cooked, essentially. 

Belzer's opening discussion of the actuarial statistics begins with correcting the erroneous Executive Action probability.  (He gives an appropriately sarcastic nod to the newspaper that eagerly debunked the math error.  We all know how reliable the mainstream media has been when it comes to debunking the Warren Commission narrative.)

But he and Wade then demonstrate that the probability of an estimated 70 unnatural witness deaths occurring in a sample of 1,400 JFK witnesses (from 1963 to 1977) is still infinitesimally small -- in the trillions-to-1 range.  

As I recall, the original number was created by taking the number of witnesses to testify before the commission, and then adding on a few who died. But this was bad math. The actual number should have been created by the number of witnesses to testify before the commission, and then adding on the thousands of people who were tangentially related to the assassination, who both died and did not die. 

What are the actuarial probabilities of these unnatural deaths occurring from 1963 to 1977 in a 1,400 person sample?

The deaths of those reporters comes to mind. There were literally hundreds of reporters in Dallas on the day of the assassination, and its aftermath. The accidental deaths of a few of them, who never claimed to have top secret knowledge, is not surprising.

 Jim Koethe and Bill Hunter were two reporters who had actually been in Jack Ruby's apartment that week.  They were both murdered shortly afterwards.  Koethe was killed by a burglar (and karate expert) who just happened to steal his notes for material he wanted to publish about the JFK assassination.  Hunter was shot in the heart by a cop in an L.A. police station who said he accidentally dropped his gun!  (Then he changed his story and said he was just horsing around with his gun when it fired, killing Hunter instantly.)

Nothing to see here.  Move along now.

Now, to be clear, the crop of deaths in the mid-70's is a lot harder to dismiss. I remember when I first started researching, and discovering that heck this guy died just before the HSCA and heck that guy died just before the HSCA and so on. 

The same spike in JFK witness murders occurred during the Warren Commission investigation and during the Garrison investigation.  David Ferrie is the most famous example from 1967.  And we all know that the CIA and FBI were aggressively sabotaging Garrison's investigation at the time.

So I don't dismiss the premise of the book. I just think it was too broad. 

Too broad for what?  We're looking at 14 years of systematic murders of people who knew too much.  That's a broad time period involving a broad array of witnesses capable of debunking the Warren Commission narrative.

P.S. One of the guys who died surprisingly and prematurely during the HSCA was Manuel Artime. He was only 45 at the time, and was likely to have knowledge about the CIA's attempts on Castro and the possible re-routing of these attempts onto Kennedy. I don't recall. Is he in the Belzer book? 

Artime is mentioned in the conclusion of Hit List, but he doesn't have his own chapter.

He claims someone like Kupcinet, who wasn't even a witness, was within the 1400 people closest to the assassination? A more realistic number would be the closest 100,000. 

As far as the reporters... Hunter's death was almost certainly an accident. if "they" had wanted to murder him, they most certainly would have killed him in a manner where no one would have been arrested, and been convicted of manslaughter. It is also unreasonable to assume he had any inside dirt on anything, as he had written articles saying Oswald did it. 

As far as Koethe, I've read other sources which insist he was strangled, and not killed by a karate chop. And that he was gay and perhaps killed as part of a hate crime. Now I have no idea, but I hope Belzer gets into this stuff rather than rely on Penn Jones and Robert Groden etc, who are not exactly reliable. 

 

[Sandy Larsen]

7 hours ago, Robert Morrow said:

I believe almost none of those deaths in Hit List had any relation to the JFK assassination. I have not seen evidence to indicate otherwise.

 

If the "1 in a trillion" odds of that many people dying was calculated properly, then you are wrong.

If, however, the calculation was badly mangled, then you may be right.

Statistics don't lie... if you know how to use them.