Lee Harvey Oswald

[Guest Tom Scully]

Holmes is a guy who was the subject of a nationally distributed news report, circa 1951, because he was a postal inspector who followed his wife's instructions to buy stamps and to mail a stack of Christmas cards she gave to him, and he bought the stamps and then mailed the cards without putting the stamps on them.

[John Dolva]

Obviously, if that can be substantiated, Holmes character was dubious for a considerable time which begs the question of how he came to figure so prominently as a main node of information that led to Oswald and why he amongst all others figured so prominently in the WC hearings and exhibits and why he could tell a number of blatant lies and not be questioned, and, to me importantly, how he came to slip through the cracks for so long past his death. AFAIK until Ian Grigg wrote the four faces of HDH he was a virual unknown, but: Why?

[Guest Tom Scully]

http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=L2AxAAAAIBAJ&sjid=cwAEAAAAIBAJ&pg=5676,3738023&dq=mrs+holmes+bundles&hl=en

Dallas Postal Inspector Slips Up on Detail

Toledo Blade - Google News Archive - Dec 24, 1953

Dallas, Tex. Harry Holmes is a postal in spector and has been working for the post office department 29 years. The other day Mrs Holmes gave him two bundles of Christmas cards ...

Edited October 4, 2010 by Tom Scully

[John Dolva]

Thank you, Tom. (I googled but couldn't find) Ok, So, he must gave been working with the USPO since 1924. Interesting. Another oddity re early history to ponder.

[Bernice Moore]

Thank you, Tom. (I googled but couldn't find) Ok, So, he must gave been working with the USPO since 1924. Interesting. Another oddity re early history to ponder.

john try tom's link in his post, http://news.google.c...s+bundles&hl=en

Dallas Postal Inspector Slips Up on Detail

the article it's right there on the left.when it comes up....b

Edited October 5, 2010 by Bernice Moore

[John Dolva]

Thank you, Bernice. The link worked, my parenthesised comment was a comment on my difficulty in finding an article before Tom posted it. So I got it. It's interesting in a number of ways as it casts doubt on his ''official'' beginnings.

(On a sideline, it possibly places him at about the right age to be the Harry Holmes who in the mid first decade of the 20'th century shot (no witnesses) a younger boy in the head with a shotgun in coffeyville (sic?) in Kansas.) (That news clipping was hard to find too and I don't know if it's still online). Others have noted discrepancies in Holmes background, age origin, education, work history etc. He's an enigma. If the stamps issue is just one thing he has done that is illegal and excused it may be so because no other irregularity has been found out about or have beeen kept silent, which to my mind bespeaks patronage (which actually was traditionally a large part of USPO employment criteria) and possibly binds him into a role. He may have been, through marriage, related to the Trumans.

The fact seems to be that this person, with an apparent dubious background, was a very prominent yet invisible untouchable who wielded a hugely disproportionate influence and was close to most of the major players in Dallas and the intelligence agencies as (just) a postal inspector. So many things about him are odd.

I think it's possibly fortunate that he has slipped through the cracks as likely references could be more easily found now. I repeat what I've stated before re personal belief : I think that whoever can ID the persons with him in his office from where he observed the assassination from will likely have forced a major crack into the core conspiracy.

[John Dolva]

correction, not coffeyville but coffey county : LeRoy Reporter, COFFEY COUNTY, KANSAS

http://skyways.lib.k...s1905_1909.html

from the Leroy Reporter, August 21, 1908

Accidentally Shot

James McClaskey, ten years old son of Mr. and Mrs. Bert McClaskey of Gridley, was accidentally shot and killed by a playmate this morning about nine o'clock. He was at the Holmes home, three miles west of Gridley, and was playing bear with Harry Holmes, a lad about fourteen years of age. The McClaskey boy was down on his hands and knees when the Holmes boy pointed a shotgun at him and fired. The load struck him back of the left ear and came out at the mouth, and death resulted instantly. The report is that the children were alone at the time of the distressing accident, and it is supposed that the Holmes boy thought that the gun "wasn't loaded." The body was brought to Gridley and taken to the home and Mr. McClaskey, who is a rural mail carrier, was notified of this accident. Relatives have been telegraphed for, but the hour of the funeral has not yet been set.

It is an affair much to be regretted, and the parents have the fullest sympathy of the many friends.

--Democrat.

edit add : This can't be the HDH. It places his age at about 69 in 63.

Edited October 6, 2010 by John Dolva

[William Kelly]

I'd like to address Oswald's possible motives and wonder if this is the place for it, whether there is another thread on just Oswald's motives, or whether to start another thread all together.

BK

Okay, here's part of it. It's a work in progress. Comments and corrections appeciated.

BK

Lee Harvey Oswald – Possible Motives

In the classic The Detection of Murder – A Handbook for Police Officers, Detectives, Coroners, Judges, and Attorneys (Greenberg, 1953), Paul B. Weston and William F. Kessler, M.D.write, “There are four causes of death – 1) natural, 2) self-inflicted, 3) accidental and 4) murder.”

“It is the duty of the police to investigate the circumstances attending the death by examination of the scene and questioning witnesses. His object is to explore the events that led up to it and seek a reconstruction of the last hours spent on earth of the deceased. From this portion of the initial investigation, it is expected that a reasonable conclusion as to the possible mechanism of death can be made.”

The Corpus Delicti they say, “is the essential elements of a crime and the criminal agency. In homicide, it is divided into two component parts, the first of which is the death of the person, and the second is that the death is produced through a criminal agency.”

Quoting the New York Penal Law, they note that, “No person can be convicted of murder or manslaughter unless the death of the person alleged to have been killed and the fact that the killing by the defendant as alleged, are each established as independent facts; the former by direct proof, and the latter beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Convicting someone on the basis of circumstantial evidence, two general rules are to be observed, the first that “the hypothesis of guilt should flow naturally from the facts and be consistent with them all, and the evidence must be such as to exclude, to a moral certainty, every hypothesis but that of guilt…The facts proved must be all consistent with and point to guilt, and must be inconsistent with innocence.”

As everyone who has ever watched a cop show on TV or read a pulp paperback detective novel, in order to convict someone of murder in a court of law means, motive and opportunity to commit the crime must be presented, and in the case of Lee Harvey Oswald being a suspect in the shooting at Dealey Plaza, he had both the means, owning the rifle found at the scene, and opportunity, since he worked in the building from which the crime was committed.

But with Oswald, no motive was determined, and while there were many mass speculations of possible motives, those who investigated Oswald’s background were perplexed by this.

As this (Commission Document 107 FBI Sup. Investigation of Assass. Pres. Kennedy},

[ http://www.maryferre...07&relPageId=73 ]

dated 13, January 1964 notes:

“Investigation has (1) developed detailed background information concerning Oswald from his birth to his death; (2) strengthened the evidence that Oswald was the assassin of the President although no clear-cut motive has been established; and (3) despite numerous allegations which have been investigated, developed no sound evidence indicating that he received any financial assistance or that any other person, group, or foreign government inspired or directed the assassination or was cognizant of his plan to assassinate President Kennedy. On the contrary, the data developed strongly indicates that he acted on his own initiative or impulse with little advance planning.”

According to The Detection of Murder Handbook by Weston and Kessler, motive is defined as, “that which stems from within the individual, rather than from without. It is that which incites and individual to certain actions. Motive is the ‘why’ of the act, the reason for it.”

Intent, they say, on the other hand, “is the result of the motive, and is the bridge between motive and action. Without intent, no action would be taken. When plans are made to do some act then an intent to do that act has been made as the result of some motivation. The intent in murder is to kill. The motive might be anything.”

Most importantly, the Handbook on The Detection of Murder says, “Motive or its absence may be of considerable importance in determining the intent of the defendant. Murderous intent may be inferred from motive clearly established, while the absence of motive is more than pertinent to the question of intent where it is an issue.”

Well Oswald’s motives and intentions are clearly an issue when none can be identified, so it is an issue that must be addressed, even though the Warren Commission and everyone who accuses Oswald of being a murderer clearly and conveniently ignore.

As for possible motives, Weston and Kessler say there are seven specific motives – 1) profit, 2) elimination, 3) revenge, 4) jealousy, 5) conviction, 6) sadism, 7) sex.

As for Oswald, sex has been suggested by some who espouse him as Kennedy’s killer, like Warren Commissioner Gerald Ford, who wrote a book Portrait of the Assassin (x) that promotes the ideas that Oswald was impotent and beat his wife, even though she had a baby, Oswald’s daughter, less than a month before the assassination, and he was a proud and considerate father.

Others say Oswald killed the President because his wife spurned him the night before, though this possible motive fails to consider the fact he would have had to take the brown paper bag to work with him in order to return with the rifle, something he had to decide to do before he went to the Paine home in Irving the night before.

They also tried to fly the idea that revenge was the motive, putting forth the notion that Oswald accidently shot JFK while trying to kill Governor Connally, the former Secretary of the Navy when Oswald’s Marine Corps discharge was changed from honorable to undesirable, which Oswald unsuccessfully tried to rectify in a letter to Connally. Thus the motive of retribution and revenge, but his brother Robert, also an ex-Marine, said his brother talked to him about that problem and didn’t seem to hold a grudge against Connally at all.

For many Oswald appeared to be motivated by conviction because of his defection to the Soviet Union, his Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC) activities, and the alleged trip to Mexico City to visit the Cuban and Russian embassies to get a visa to Cuba and Russia. He was a diehard, leftist, Commie defector, or so they said, with the Warren Report concluding, “Oswald was moved by an overriding hostility to his environment. He does not appear to have been able to establish meaningful relationships with other people. He was perpetually disconnected with the world around him….” Or so they would have us believe.

Conviction is the fixed conviction that anything, including murder, is necessary to carry out a plan, whether its religious, political or personal, but it was clearly established that Oswald actually liked President Kennedy and never said anything detrimental about him.

The Warren Commission pushed conviction as the most likely motive for Oswald to kill the President, but they also give us a choice, noting also that “He sought for himself a place in history,” though that motive is hard to swallow since Oswald himself denied having committed the crime and claimed to be “a patsy.”

There was a point in time where it looked like we would get to the bottom of all this when former prosecutor Richard Sprague was named the chief counsel of the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), and began to undertake a serous investigation into the assassinations of President Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr.

When asked about Oswald’s motive, Sprague is said to have responded, “I am not interested in whether Oswald was fed at his mother’s breast or not, my approach to motive is more direct.” Although he is reported to have been the son of two psychiatrists, Sprague successfully prosecuted the killers of the president of the United Mine Workers, and knew how to investigate and prosecute those responsible for a political assassination, and wasn't about to resort to hypothetical psychology to find an excuse for the assassination.

But then the powers that be in Washington were shocked that there would be a serious investigation into the murder of the President and had Sprague removed and replaced by G. Robert Blakey, the university professor, author of the RICO statutes and promoter of the conspiracy theory that the Mafia was behind JFK’s assassination.

Most of those who continue to promote the idea that the Mafia was behind Oswald, say that he was promised money, and that profit was his motive, though no one who actually knew Oswald or studied him believes that Oswald ever did anything for money. To make a lot of money was never the reason Oswald did anything.

Some of those who claim Oswald killed JFK alone say that he did so because he was just plain crazy, and we’ll never know why he did it, but the psychologically deranged motive can also be consider and rejected for a number of reasons.

TO BE CONTINUED.

Edited October 21, 2010 by William Kelly

[Tom Hume]

Hi Bill,

This sounds interesting - I'll pay attention.

Edited October 21, 2010 by Tom Hume

[William Kelly]

Hi Bill,

This sounds interesting - I'll pay attention.

Okay Tom,

Here you go.

http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2010/10/lee-harvey-oswald-motives.html

Let me know if the link doesn't work.

BK

[Robert Howard]

Even among those who believe Oswald fired the shots that killed President Kennedy, there is some rational thinking, when it comes to motive.

And, I believe if you subtract the percentage that believe Oswald was trying to kill Governor Connally, [for the purpose of this post, another gunmen, or gunman

is not what Is being addressed], the only, in my estimation, of a causus belli for Oswald assassinating Kennedy was the issue of American foreign policy toward Cuba. With the Cuban Missile crisis having already taking place, despite some strong public statements by government officials as well as President Kennedy, it can be argued the media atmosphere in November 1963, the talk regarding Cuba had toned down, at least a bit.

This issue too is fundamentally flawed, Oswald was not so stupid to think that LBJ would be more liberal in his foreign policy than JFK, and so the logic there is flawed as far as Oswald's motive.

Another point is that Oswald had argued that capitalism would eventually die.

In the JFK Presidency, Kennedy was being labeled as an appeaser

a Communist and a Socialist, [sounds familiar even in 2010, just substitute closet Muslim for appeaser;]

My point is that for someone who, at least on the surface, projected the beliefs of a Leninist-Marxist, any ersatz "motivation" to kill JFK, from that area of the left political spectrum is downright moronic, which probably explains why, to a degree areas such as mentally disturbed are so often used to describe Oswald.

I would go as far as to say the only valid conception of Oswald as an assassin, regarding psychology and motivation, would be if Oswald was maintaining the cover or facade of a left-winger, which ironically, I believe he was.

I suppose I am one of the few people who does not believe that Oswald fired any shots from the Texas School Book Depository or in the killing

of Officer Tippit.......

If Oswald had lived the ballistics evidence, or lack thereof [chain of possession, primarily] would have required a very extreme approach by the

prosecution, such as a trial without reporters in the courtroom, and a gag order on those in the courtroom, which would not have been possible

which is why we are so intimately familiar with the historical Jack Ruby.

An interesting allegation, in Gus Russo's Live by The Sword, concerns Russo's argument that the "backyard photos," Russo, at least in Live By The Sword

page 117, maintains that Oswald sent one of the photos to The Militant, "Almost certainly, he [Oswald] sent the paper a print of one of the backyard photos

to ingratiate himself with the publisher....."

But then in the footnote, [#13, page 537] he adds, "Oswald conceivably also sent a print to the Secret Service Office of the White House, where an agent named

John Norris would adamantly remember seeing it pasted on a wall before the assassination, then noticed it gone on November 22nd That has not been

confirmed by fellow agents, although Norris feels they should be able to remember the photograph. It is almost unthinkable that Oswald was planning to kill

the President in March or April [or even through the summer of 1963.] Memories play odd tricks on people involved in celebrated cases. But, if Oswald

did, in fact, send a print to the White House, it would be further evidence not of his criminal intent at this time, but of his inordinate hunger for recognition

and appreciation...."

So we are to believe Oswald woke up on November 22, decided he had been a failure, and the motive which even Russo admits is lacking

in the spring and summer of 1963, entered his mind as the only logical thing to do.....

There is a reason the majority of American's never have believed Oswald did it, and lack of motive is a large part of why that is.

Edited October 21, 2010 by Robert Howard

[Steve Duffy]

Wonderful post, Robert.

[Robert Howard]

Wonderful post, Robert.

Thank You, Steve

To Tom Scully, and John Dolva, there is now a Harry D Holmes thread.

[Tom Hume]

Bill, I asked a question in this post and then removed it. I'm going figure out a better way to put the question and then re-post. Tom.

Edited October 25, 2010 by Tom Hume

[William Kelly]

Hi Bill,

This sounds interesting - I'll pay attention.

Okay, here we have a live, breaking news story about someone who has been taking pot shots at the Pentagon and USMC Museum, whose psychological profile indicates that he may in fact be an active duty Marine with a grudge.

More security for Marine Corps Marathon

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/local-breaking-news/crime-and-public-safety/more-security-for-marine-corps.html?hpid=editorialpromo

Organizers of Sunday's Marine Corps Marathon said additional security measures were being installed along the route following news that the National Museum of the Marine Corps in Prince William County was fired upon for a second time this month.

While not offering specifics, U.S. Marine Col. Dan Choike called the measures -- being developed in conjunction with the FBI and local authorities -- "robust" and said there would be no delays to the race schedule.

"Safe races have been conducted [in the past] and this year is going to be no different," Choike said. "We are going to run this race taking into account the incidents that have taken place... and additional measures are being put in place already at a low cost."

The main event begins at 8 a.m. Sunday. The start line is just south of Arlington Memorial Drive on Route 110 in Arlington. The finish is by the Iwo Jima Memorial.

See a marathon route map.

More details on the shootings can be found at Crime Scene.

var entrycat = 'Crime and Public Safety, DC, Maryland, Virginia'

By Washington Post editors | October 29, 2010; 2:41 PM ET

Categories: Crime and Public Safety, DC, Maryland, Virginia

Shooter may be Marine, FBI says

Authorities said Friday that they think the shooter who has fired on three government buildings in the Washington area in recent days -- and may have shot, for a second time, at the National Museum of the Marine Corps overnight -- might be a U.S. Marine with a grievance against the Corps.

The shooter was urged to contact authorities during a Friday news conference at FBI offices downtown. "We'd like to know what his grievance is and how we can try to resolve it," said John Perren, acting assistant director for the FBI's Washington field office. "We'd like to hear his side of the story."

Authorities were investigating shots that were fired overnight at the National Museum of the Marine Corps in Prince William County. While not confirming that the latest shots were connected to the three previous ones, FBI officials said they are investigating as though they were.

This is the second time the facility has been targeted this month. The building was closed when an unknown number of shots were fired at it, according to Sgt. Kim Chinn, a Prince William police spokeswoman. No one was injured.

Museum employees arrived Friday about 6 a.m. to find several new bullet holes in a glass window in the same area where previous holes were found, said museum spokeswoman Gwenn Adams. The shots were fired from the direction of Interstate 95, and authorities said it was possible the gunman fired from a vehicle.

"We understand he may feel a great deal of stress in his life at this moment," Perren said. "However, relieving his stress by shooting at buildings puts others at risk. Acting out this way can eventually lead to disastrous and tragic consequences that we all wish to avoid."

The new investigation comes a day after authorities, citing ballistics testing, announced that the same gun was used to fire shots at the museum Oct. 17, the Pentagon Oct. 19 and a vacant Marine Corps recruiting station in Chantilly this week.

Meanwhile, the area is preparing for Sunday's Marine Corps Marathon. During a Friday afternoon press conference, organizers said additional security measures were being installed along the route.

While not offering specifics, U.S. Marine Col. Dan Choike called the measures -- being developed in conjunction with the FBI and local authorities -- "robust" and said there would be no delays to the race schedule.

"Safe races have been conducted [in the past] and this year is going to be no different," Choike said. "We are going to run this race taking into account the incidents that have taken place... and additional measures are being put in place already at a low cost."

No one was injured in any of the confirmed shootings. At the moment, Prince William police are handling the new investigation at the museum, but FBI agents were headed to Triangle to pick up "some evidence of something that happened" overnight, FBI spokeswoman Katherine Schweit said Friday morning.

She said she could not specify what the evidence is. The museum is closed for the day, and Prince William police turned visitors away at the gate.

Wayne Hinaman of Cincinnati pulled up in a minivan with tourist brochures in the passenger's seat. Hinaman said he was in town for the Marine Corps marathon and decided to visit the museum. Undeterred by the news of the shootings, he said he was unconcerned about safety at Sunday's marathon.

"If you're not living on the edge, you're taking up too much" space, Hinaman said, smiling.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/crime-scene/update-on-the-news/more-shots-possible-at-usmc-mu.html - more

Okay Tom,

Here you go.

http://jfkcountercou...ld-motives.html

Let me know if the link doesn't work.

BK