by Joan Mellen
Juan was gay. Soon he had made sexual advances to the boyfriend of his neighbor, Gretchen Bomboy. So persistent was he that Bomboy and her boyfriend went to the police, and a restraining order was issued. Juan Valdes, now in his mid thirties, moved to the Patios Apartments at 3101 St. Charles, a redoubt of Uptown bohemians.
Among the tenants at the Patios was a well-respected orthopedic surgeon and oncologist named Mary Sherman, an attractive woman in her early fifties with masses of dark braided hair. When she entered medicine in the 1940s, Sherman had been one of only three women orthopedists in the country. A widow, she came to New Orleans in 1952 from the University of Chicago where she joined the staff of the hospital created by Dr. Alton Ochsner, a longtime CIA asset.
During the summer of 1963, Mr. and Mrs. Owen Hawes were Valdes’ next-door neighbors at the Patios. Hawes worked for NASA, so that at times his whereabouts were unknown even to his wife, Victoria. She came to know Juan, who looked “like a little Jewish accountant.” Juan told her he was born in Miami. He spoke almost without an accent.
Soon Juan was asking Mrs. Hawes to accept packages for him when he wasn’t home, mostly orchids and plants that he imported from Latin American countries. Some, she speculates, might well have included drugs. One day Juan knocked at her door and asked if he might use her telephone. He had his own telephone, he explained, but to make his long distance calls, he wished to use hers. He promised to pay her back at the end of each month. Many of the calls, she noticed, were to Cuba. Others were to Miami.
Shortly after Juan made his request, Mrs. Hawes opened her door to another caller. A man stood there. “Is this Juan’s apartment?” the young man asked. He was very polite, a nondescript young man. Yet Victoria Hawes recognized him at once. They had attended Beauregard Junior High School on Canal Street together, she and this wispy, sad young man, who in school had been so shy that he had gravitated toward anyone who would pay him some attention. He was a “sidelines” fellow, she had thought, and people tended to ignore him, while he seemed not to want to be seen. He was never invited to the King Cake parties the class enjoyed, nor did “Harvey” host any King Cake parties.
At home with small children, Victoria now saw Lee Oswald frequently visiting Juan Valdes. She thought it odd because Juan was so much older. Together Lee and Juan came to her apartment to make the telephone calls to Miami and to Cuba. The walls were so thin that when they were in Juan’s apartment, she could hear them talking in the bathroom, then flushing the toilet over and over, maybe twenty times in a row, and she thought they must be destroying paper. She was curious about them both, not least Juan who often returned from mysterious walks at four o’clock in the morning.
Victoria Hawes noticed as well that Oswald and Valdes were both friendly with Dr. Mary Sherman, to whom Juan spoke in Spanish, an odd association, she thought, between a respectable orthopedist and pathologist and a gay Latino orchid grower whose name even seemed dubious. It now seems apparent that Oswald the Customs agent and Valdes who worked at the Customs House, and at various import-export companies, obvious CIA proprietaries, had much in common. Oswald as a PSI, or Potential Security Informant, would report violations of the Neutrality Act, which forbade self-styled raids into Cuba. The information he conveyed might well have come, in part, from Valdes, now working for a company called “All Transport, Inc.,” located at Clay Shaw’s International Trade Mart.
In 1964, relations between Mary Sherman and Juan Valdes deteriorated. They fought over the garbage. In anger, Valdes threw a bunch of flowers onto Sherman’s private patio area. She told her maid that Juan was obnoxious, a “pest,” and ordered that he no longer be admitted to her apartment. But Sherman’s maid was to remember Dr. Sherman having dinner with Juan at an earlier time.
Although he lived at the other end of the semi-circular floor, when smoke issued from Mary Sherman’s apartment in the early morning hours of July 21st, it was Juan Valdes who telephoned, not the fire department, but, oddly, the police. Mary Sherman’s body was found with unspeakable wounds: on the right side of her body, flesh and bone had evaporated, so that her right rib cage and all of her right arm had disintegrated, leaving a stub, with the lung and other organs exposed to view. The massive conflagration necessary to cause her bones to evaporate would have converted the entire apartment complex to ashes had her injuries been inflicted at the Patios. Yet the curtains hadn’t even caught on fire. The immediate cause of death was a knife wound to the heart. After Mary Sherman’s death, her genitals had been mutilated carelessly through her clothes to make it seem that the crime was somehow sex related. There was no forced entry. Her wallet remained, untouched.
Juan had been heard to come in at dawn by his downstairs neighbor, Helen Wattley.
“If I had to say now who did it, it would be Juan,” homicide detective Frank Hayward said. No record remains of a search warrant of Valdes’ apartment or of his being interviewed at the scene, although Hayward later revealed he had seen orchids everywhere, proving he had been inside Juan’s apartment. Interviewed at police headquarters, Valdes was permitted to type his own statement. Then, although Hayward wanted to question him further, Lieutenant James Kruebbe ushered Valdes quickly out the door. Later, as a polygraph operator, Kruebbe would be instrumental in challenging the credibility of important Garrison witnesses.
Hayward and his partner Robert Townsend continued to demand that Valdes submit to a polygraph, and Valdes agreed, making an appointment. He did not keep it. His lawyer had advised him to decline, Valdes explained.
The police wondered if Mary Sherman might have found out something about Valdes, implicating him in her death. One secret that has been kept until now is, of course, Valdes’ acquaintance with Lee Harvey Oswald the previous summer. After a month, the police were ordered by higher authority to cease investigating the Mary Sherman murder entirely. Four months later, Townsend concluded: “they didn’t want this thing solved.”
Mary Sherman was known to do nighttime work, perhaps with a linear particle accelerator, one of which was known to have been in use in New Orleans at the time, and that could account for her bone injuries, injuries even a crematorium would not approximate. Only that her work was top secret explains why, if she had been injured in an accident, an ambulance was not immediately summoned. The heavy wiring capability at the soon-vacated U.S. Public Health Hospital at the end of Magazine Street, nicknamed, “the Lab,” was close to where Oswald had resided with Marina. Circumstantial evidence suggests that this hospital was Sherman’s extracurricular destination and the scene of her bizarre injuries. At “the Lab,” secret research—black ops—proceeded in the dead of night. Sherman worked frequently until midnight, and Juan Valdes was given to those nighttime walks.
“The Lab” was later quarantined and guarded by armed police, suggesting too that secret government research proceeded there. In 1999, Robert Buras discovered that the facility, now empty, was still guarded by armed police. The remains of heavy wiring suggest equipment of great force, like a nuclear particle accelerator through which cancer cells might be transferred from one animal to another, or toxic biological weapons developed, likely projects for secret research. Less likely was that Sherman was merely working on an anticancer vaccine. That CIA secret research was proceeding in New Orleans matches Dr. Alton Ochsner’s status as a CIA asset.
A blank vaccination card signed by “Dr. A. J. Hideel” was found in the possession of Oswald when he was arrested in Dallas; the card had been issued by this same hospital. The fact that Oswald hung around the U. S. Public Health Service Hospital places his summertime companion Ferrie there as well, even as Oswald’s connection to Juan Valdes connects him to Mary Sherman.
Reporter David Chandler confirmed to New Orleans author Don Lee Keith that Mary Sherman was doing “research with cancer cases.” A former FBI agent named Edgar Saux (Sachs), administrative director of the Ochsner Clinic, where Mary worked at her day job, said Sherman had special connections to obtain valuable drugs and was writi
ng a book on bone cancer. Could she have had some relationship to David Ferrie? her colleague Gordon McFarland was asked. “Absolutely,” he said. Jim Garrison first thought that a fragmentary treatise on cancer research found at David Ferrie’s apartment might have been authored by Mary Sherman, and the white mice at Ferrie’s apartment might once have belonged to her. Mary Sherman was also a good friend of Ferrie’s doctor, Martin Palmer.
Don Lee Keith, attempting to track down Juan Valdes in the late 1970s, interviewed a Mr. Gilley at Emery Ocean Freight, one place where Juan had worked. “You don’t want anything to do with him!” Gilley said. Then, abruptly, he hung up. At All Transport, Inc., a Mr. Quartler remembered Valdes well. “I’ll never forget him!” Quartler said. “Anything I could tell you about him, I wouldn’t tell you over the phone.” Quartler was told the reporter had something belonging to Valdes and wanted to give it to him in person. “Throw it away!” Quartler advised.
All references to Dr. Ochsner or his clinic were expunged from the police report of Mary Sherman’s death, although he was her employer. Mr. and Mrs. Hawes were left with a sixty dollar unpaid telephone bill. Then an anonymous telephone call came, the voice sounding like Juan’s: “You better move,” the man said. They did.
When Owen Hawes brought the telephone bill to the FBI during Jim Garrison’s investigation, another call came: “Stop sticking your nose in business that doesn’t concern you!” So they moved again.
On May 24, 1967, Jim Garrison subpoenaed Juan Valdes before the Orleans Parish grand jury. The Times-Picayune described him as a “Latin playwright.” Valdes was interviewed not by the grand jury, but by a once-and-future CIA operative who had joined Garrison’s staff, William Martin. Two months later, on July 28th, Martin finally produced a memo of this interview.
Of photographs he was shown, Valdes identified Clay Shaw, whom he had “seen in and around the International Trade Mart for many years.” He had “never associated with or been a member of any of the Cuban Revolutionary anti-Castro groups,” he said. The subject of Oswald and the subject of Mary Sherman did not arise, according to this report. Martin writes that Valdes was “fat,” a “soft and mild-mannered person and would not appear to be the stocky powerful Cuban we are looking for.” Garrison had instructed all his investigators to search for a thick-necked, pockmarked Cuban who had appeared on a WDSU television film of Oswald.
Later, appalled by Martin’s disloyalty, Garrison would tell his staff when he received questionable information, “sign the memo ‘Jones Harris’ [another of his less-than-reliable volunteers] or William Martin’ because if the files are ever grabbed by the U.S. government, this one will not be appreciated.” Martin was certainly an FBI informant as well. The day after Martin interviewed Valdes, the FBI’s Division Five (Intelligence) did a name check on Valdes for “All References (Subversive & Nonsubversive).” A laundry list of documents involving Valdes emerged from the Bureau files. One, a 105 file, belonging to “Lee Harvey Oswald,” and dated November 1963, was marked “destroyed.”
By 1969, Juan Valdes had disappeared from the New Orleans City Directory.
Years later, Edward Butler, head of INCA, the Information Council of the Americas, a right-wing anti-Communist propaganda group, met with Dr. Ochsner, who financed INCA. Butler revealed he knew Juan Valdes, even as Mary Sherman had been a financial contributor to INCA. And long after his official investigation had come to a halt, Garrison learned Mary Sherman had donated money to one of the anti-Castro training camps, a fact known to Life magazine. She had taken care of the trainees there.
CIA reporter Hoke May told Don Lee Keith that Mary Sherman had indeed been a close friend of David Ferrie, a fact Jim Garrison was never able to prove. May thought that Ferrie worked with Mary Sherman on a cure for cancer. Ferrie, an expert at medical documentation, worked on medical briefs for G. Wray Gill. Ferrie’s brother Parmely had said that Ferrie had once flirted with the idea of becoming a doctor.
David Ferrie’s association with Mary Sherman is not as farfetched as it first appears. There had been thousands of mice in the U.S. Public Health Service building. Ferrie had possessed cages of white mice that some speculate had come to him from Mary Sherman. These mice he at one time stored at the apartment of one of his young boy-acolytes, Michael Otty Clyde Wakeling, at 209 Vinet Street, where a “sickening odor” pervaded. Wakeling testified for Jim Garrison that Ferrie was using these mice “to develop a cure for cancer.” But, rather than searching for a cure, Ferrie was more likely to be injecting mice with viruses to learn how to transfer cancer from one organism to another, in keeping with his history of schemes to assassinate Fidel Castro. His experiments with mice seemed to match his fantasy of sending a bomb-laden mini-submarine into Havana harbor.
Hoke May’s source was Jack Martin, who knew that Ferrie and Mary Sherman had a close personal connection. Sherman had been initiated into involvement in clandestine Cuban activities by David Ferrie, Martin told May. Having heard rumors that David Ferrie either had killed Mary Sherman, or at least been partially responsible for her death, Garrison told Playboy he wondered whether Sherman’s death was connected to her association with David Ferrie. Without more evidence, he could go no further.
Forty years later, detective Frank Hayward remained too uneasy to discuss what he knew about the unsolved Mary Sherman case, even with a fellow retired police officer. Sherman’s connections to Valdes, Valdes’ connections to Oswald, Oswald’s connections to Ferrie, Ferrie’s connections to Clay Shaw, and Shaw’s close connection to his fellow CIA operative, Dr. Alton Ochsner—all link the mystery of Mary Sherman’s tragic death to the Kennedy assassination. It is true that there is no direct line of evidence between the murder of Mary Sherman—or Mary Sherman’s nighttime research—and the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Yet a close colleague of Lee Harvey Oswald, the man blamed for Kennedy’s death, a man as Oswald’s cohort hitherto unknown to students of the assassination, was the chief suspect in Sherman’s murder.
Historians have remained unable to connect Mary Sherman to Oswald’s mentor, David Ferrie, despite Jim Garrison’s speculation that there was a connection. Yet Garrison’s source, Jack Martin, whose bona fides have over and over been established, whose CIA background emerges in this history for the first time, told Hoke May that Ferrie and Sherman were connected and well-known to each other. It was, of course, Jack Martin who opened the Louisiana case by revealing on November 22, 1963, the connection between Ferrie and Oswald, which, despite Ferrie’s disclaimers, turns out to have been more true than historians have even realized. Moreover, the government cover-up of Mary Sherman’s death rivals that of the Kennedy assassination itself.
Although he never quite connected Oswald with Juan Valdes, Garrison worked hard to develop leads placing Oswald with anti-Castro Cubans. “The Cuban threat runs so clearly through this that the theory on which we started no longer is a theory to us,” Garrison said. Cubans were “in the picture continually.” Jack Martin had told him that Oswald knew Sergio Arcacha Smith, who was close to Bobby Kennedy and his special group training to assassinate Fidel Castro, a group that was watching Oswald, so that he seemed almost to have been admitted into its ranks.
In New Orleans, Oswald had visited the clothing store Casa Roca, managed by the New Orleans representative of a CIA-funded militant anti-Castro group called Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil(DRE). The Miami DRE in the summer of 1963 was handled by a seasoned CIA operative, George Joannides, who specialized in psychological warfare and propaganda.
In New Orleans, Oswald enacted a well-orchestrated scenario designed to establish his public identity as a pro-Castro Marxist. Having approached the DRE representative, Carlos Bringuier, with an offer to join his group, Oswald then engaged in a street scuffle on Canal Street with Bringuier and two followers.
In a letter dated August 1st and postmarked August 4th, five days before he jostled with Bringuier, Oswald wrote to V. T. Lee of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, describing a confrontation with
anti-Castro Cubans while he was demonstrating that had not yet taken place. “Through the efforts of some cuban-exile ‘gusanos,’” Oswald writes, “a street demonstration was attacked and we were officialy [sic] cautioned by police.”
In this public display of Oswald as a Marxist, the DRE played a major role, even as those many telephone calls to Miami from the apartment of Victoria Hawes, recorded on her telephone bills, and having vanished into the maws of the FBI, allowed Oswald to have been directed in his confrontations with the DRE by Joannides, their CIA handler and a skilled propagandist. Joannides’ chief DRE contact in Miami, Luis Fernandez-Rocha, quickly discerned that Joannides was the handler not only of the DRE, but of others as well.
The DRE also helped Oswald make his nonexistent Marxism public in New Orleans through the assistance of CIA media asset Bill Stuckey, who moderated a radio debate between Oswald and Bringuier that summer. It would appear that Joannides’ intelligence clearances became more profound from December 1962 on, when he was approved for access to “Special Intelligence.” Nearly fifteen years after Jim Garrison’s death, the CIA, which had released the personnel files of many dead agents, concealed Joannides’ records, refusing to release them, and willing to subject themselves to a bitter FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) lawsuit.
Oswald had located Bringuier through his fellow FBI informant, Arnesto Rodriguez (1213-S). Rodriguez’s father was a CIA asset (AMJUTE-1), the cryptonym standing for the CIA’s on-island surveillance network. But Arnesto’s brother, Emilio, was an even more significant Agency employee, receiving posthumously the CIA Medal of Merit, its second highest award.
Emilio’s address book was a veritable Who’s Who of CIA notables. It included the telephone number of David Atlee Phillips and the means of contacting CIA officials from Desmond Fitzgerald to Richard Helms himself. In pursuing the Rodriguez family, Jim Garrison would be cutting across CIA sources, methods and operations, past and present. Emilio, who had remained behind in Cuba after the Bay of Pigs, continued to work for the CIA under Desmond Fitzgerald and was with the CIA during the Garrison investigation.