Dr. Mary’s Monkey

by Edward T Haslam

  It was a very perplexing situation, and I had to be very careful. On one hand, I did not even want to consider the possible implications of what could be phony information, because it might taint my view of the real information that I had fought so hard to get. On the other hand, I had seen and heard a lot of strange stuff over the past three years. And much of it pointed in this direction. It was not unusual for unsupported information to lead to supported information. So I did not reject what Dr. X said either. But the bottom line was that I could not use it if I could not confirm it. I decided to gate-keep the information, and not let it “inside” until I could verify it.

  I needed an action plan to sort all this out. I created my first “information test.” I decided to get Dr. X to repeat what he told me a second time. If he wouldn’t repeat it, there was no point in my worrying about it. I called Dr. X back the next day and asked him to repeat everything he had said to me the previous night. He agreed. I was listening for inconsistencies. There weren’t any. I recorded the phone call and made detailed notes.

  Before this second phone call, I wasn’t sure if I had anything real or not. Now I was sure that I either had good information or disinformation. The difference was subtle, but important. I figured the odds were 2-in-3 that I was being manipulated for some reason. My stress level doubled. Suddenly, I was back on the trail, and the stakes were higher than ever.

  During my research, I had come to rely on a cadre of friends and researchers who sent me information. If I was being set up, I would be expected to rely on these same resources, any one of whom might be working with Dr. X. I needed to use a clean source, someone that nobody could anticipate. Not only did I need to figure out how to confirm the information, I would also need to figure out whom to trust with the assignment.

  Again, the key question: Where was the accelerator?

  I needed to locate it. I started to make a list of every medical related facility in the New Orleans area. If Mr. Y’s information was accurate, it meant the cover was so deep that every facility in the area, even the unlikely locations like Hotel Dieu and the Children’s Hospital, should be included on the potential location list. I tried to remember as much as I could about each facility. What I had heard and seen. What they looked like. Where they were located.

  As I compared my location list with Mr. Y’s story, the focus became obvious: the machine guns. There were very few places where soldiers with machine guns could wander about without making the patients extremely nervous. To do so would attract attention and thereby compromise secrecy. I quickly eliminated high-traffic facilities, like Charity Hospital and Ochsner Clinic, from my list. Other facilities, like the Children’s Hospital,4 were better candidates because they were low-traffic sites with sprawling campuses. I focused for a moment on the Children’s Hospital. The very fact that most people would consider it an unlikely location made it an interesting possibility.

  The Children’s Hospital was located in the University Section, between Magazine Street and the Mississippi River near Audubon Park. I had driven by it frequently during my years at Tulane. Its shady campus was covered with old oak trees whose heavy limbs hung near the ground. I had only been inside the hospital once. My mother and I had gone there to attend a memorial service for my father, who had died the previous summer. He had been president of the small hospital, and they were dedicating a therapy room in his honor.

  A nurse had given us a tour. It was a gallery of courage, and I remember the children. They were stubbornly happy, despite the fact that they could have had plenty of excuses to be sad. When the nurse explained that the hospital’s name was being changed from Crippled Children’s Hospital to Children’s Hospital, a bedridden child said, “Yeah, we’re children. Not just crippled children.”

  After the tour, we went outside and joined a crowd of about 100 people who had gathered near the hospital’s main entrance for the dedication ceremonies. I escorted my mother. We stood in the sun and listened. Speeches from local dignitaries went on for nearly an hour. I became hot and bored, and my mind wandered.

  I started looking around and noticed a group of old buildings across the street. They were surrounded by an unusually high brick wall. I studied the scene carefully. Several buildings were visible. All had pitched roofs and had been built of brick in the federal style of architecture common to the years before World War I. Fungus grew on the portions of the wall shaded by the ancient oak trees. I realized at the time that I had never seen anyone go in or out of this facility. In fact, it appeared to be abandoned, all of which made it seem rather mysterious. The windows of the building closest to the wall looked to be boarded up from the inside. The general appearance was very governmental, and very spooky. I wondered what it was.

  Finally, I asked my mother. She said that it was the back entrance of the U.S. Public Health Service Hospital, and that I should be quiet and listen to the speeches. I had obliged, as best I could, but actually was busy pondering what a great location the U.S. Public Health Service Hospital would be for covert operations. Trucks full of whatever could drive in through the wooden gates on one side of the campus, and cars could enter from the other. Once the gates were closed, no one on the outside would have any idea what was happening inside.

  Whoa! Covert operations! ... Machine guns! I snapped out of my reverie of recollections. The U.S. Public Health Service Hospital was operated by the U.S. military. Here was a place that could have had soldiers with machine guns. And who would go into a quarantine station unless they had to! What a great place to set up a secret laboratory!

  Further, the U.S. Public Health Service had crossed my path several times during my investigation. The two most important:

  Ochsner’s FBI file showed that at one point he had received covert payments from the U.S. Government at the U.S. Public Health Service Hospital.

  In 1960 Dr. Sarah Stewart left her powerful post at the National Institutes of Health to join the U.S. Public Health Service, the same year that Dr. Bernice Eddy announced that she had found a cancer-causing virus in the monkey kidney cells upon which the polio vaccine had been grown.

  Finally I had a possible location: The U.S. Public Health Service Hospital. Now I needed confirmation. I had to get someone on the ground in New Orleans to look for more information. Whom to ask? Whom to trust?

  There were two brothers in New Orleans whom I knew only by reputation. Both had lived in uptown New Orleans for years, and were interested in the Garrison case. I called one (Romney Stubbs) and asked him if he would help me with some research. He agreed. I did not tell him about Dr. X, Mr. Y, or any of the information I had obtained from them. I only asked him to see if he could find any information which might indicate whether or not there had ever been a linear particle accelerator on the grounds of the U.S. Public Health Service Hospital.

  One week later he called back. Here is what he had to say:

  In the late 1980s, the federal government had sold (or leased) the U.S. Public Health Service Hospital to the State of Louisiana for $1. The State renovated the buildings, and converted the campus into a long-term care facility for teenagers. He knew an employee and went to see her. He asked her if she knew anybody who might know about “the old days.” She gave Romney the name of a building manager who had since retired. This man had been directly involved with renovating the buildings in the late 1980s. We will call him Mr. Z.

  Romney tracked down Mr. Z and interviewed him. No, he had not seen a linear particle accelerator, but he did see some very unusual things when he first came on board. He explained the situation. The campus had about ten buildings, one massive building which was the hospital itself, and nine or ten smaller buildings, some of which were residential in design. Mr. Z’s first task was to plan for the renovation, so he had to thoroughly inspect all the buildings and inventory the situation. Mr. Z noted that all of the buildings, except one, were in comparable condition, with old desks and file cabinets full of papers scattered throughout the buildings. It was what one migh
t expect to find in old government buildings whose funding had been gradually phased out. The only exception was a three-story building toward the back of the campus.5 It was completely empty. There was not a single desk, file cabinet, or piece of paper in the entire building. It had been swept clean. Everything had been carried off, except two pieces of medical equipment: a large microscope and a tissue slicer used for making microscope slides. It had obviously been some type of laboratory.

  Mr. Z had been trained as an engineer, and had worked with electrical systems in large buildings his entire career. He knew what to expect. He remembered the building with the microscope because the electrical wiring was very strange. In fact, he had never seen such heavy wiring in a building before. It had obviously been for extremely high-voltage electrical equipment, more powerful than any he had ever encountered. The equipment had been removed, but the wiring was still there. Mr. Z also noted that some of the rooms had very unusual features. One room had metal walls which were grounded by heavy cables. He described the other room as a circular shaped “operating room” on the ground floor. It was surrounded by a group of small airtight rooms which were completely lined with one-inch thick asbestos sheets on the doors, walls and ceiling.

  I barely noticed that Romney had stopped talking. The silence hung in the ether. He said, “Well?”

  I was speechless. Finally I mustered, “Tat’s it.”

  He laughed and said, “Tat’s it! Tat’s what?”

  “Tat’s the building the accelerator was in.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because it matches the description that I was given by my source. It is exactly what we were looking for. It’s just that I didn’t really expect to find it.”

  The heavy gauge electrical wiring was needed to handle the huge currents required to run the 5,000,000 volt accelerator. The room with the metal walls was the control room. The metal walls were to protect the operators from the radiation. The heavy-gauge grounding wires were to reroute any errant electricity to the ground. The airtight asbestos-lined rooms were the chambers that the radioactive beams had been deflected into. What he described as the “operating room” was where the pyramid had been.

  The accelerator itself and the platinum pyramid had been removed (and the building had been cleaned) when the lab was shut down. All that remained were the hard-to-remove items, like the high-voltage wiring, the metal walls and asbestos lined rooms. Romney sent a hand-drawn map of the campus and photographs of the key buildings. The accelerator had been located in the Infectious Disease Laboratory of the U.S. Public Health Service Hospital.

  THE DIMENSIONS OF MY INVESTIGATION had suddenly changed. This was not a rag-tag operation run out of David Ferrie’s apartment; it was a full-blown U.S. Government laboratory financed with millions of dollars from the public treasury. A state secret supported by the most powerful political forces in the land. A medical Manhattan Project set up in hopes of protecting the public from an epidemic of cancer which the government itself was largely responsible for. A 5,000,000 volt linear particle accelerator had been quietly placed on the grounds of the U.S. Public Health Service Hospital so that cancer-causing monkey viruses could be roasted with radiation in secret.

  Suddenly a myriad of questions surrounding Mary Sherman’s mysterious murder came into focus. Is this where her near fatal burns occurred? Would the massive amounts of energy needed to operate the linear particle accelerator explain how her right arm and rib cage were burned off? Had her arm been burned off by the radiation beam itself? Or had she simply been electrocuted by operating the five mega-volt machine? Had her clothing been cut off because she received medical treatment for those third degree burns she suffered? Was she stabbed in the heart by one of the medical staff that had been treating her for those burns, to terminate her surreptitiously? Was she standing on U.S. Government property at the time of the incident? Was she relocated to her apartment to preserve the secrecy of a covert medical laboratory and prevent embarrassment to the U.S. Government?6

  Imagine the political consequences of revealing all of this to the press. Talk about explosive! Talk about a situation that needed to be covered up! Now I understood why the police investigation into her murder had been shut down so abruptly. It was power in its purest form. The Feds told the NOPD to shut down the investigation, or else.

  Now we had the answer to our pivotal question, and the incidental pieces started to fall into place. For example, I had always wondered why the damage to Mary Sherman’s body was primarily in her right arm. Why hadn’t the electricity traveled down her leg (to the ground) and exploded out her foot as was common in high-voltage electrocutions. The grounded steel walls provided the answer. The bolt of electricity would have likely come from something Mary grabbed with her right hand. Could it have traveled up her right arm and exploded out the back of her right shoulder into the grounded steel wall behind her? Since steel is more conductive than human tissue, the surge of electricity could go into the steel wall and then into the grounding cable, rather than down her leg into the wooden floor. I started to see the room as a giant spark plug – full of juice and ready to explode. Her arm would be the weakest part of the grounding path, “burning out” the way that the soft metal in a fuse burns out when too much electricity goes through it.

  So what might she have grabbed? And could it have been loaded with electricity ready to climb up her arm?

  I discussed the situation with a radiology technician. She pointed out that if you had an electrical problem with a machine, the standard safety procedure was to grab the circuit breaker by the handle and pull it down. This would shut off all the electricity to the machine. Whoever was running the accelerator would be trained to grab that handle at the first sign of trouble. If someone had wanted to sabotage the operation, or simply murder a key participant, a good method may have been to tamper with the machine’s wiring and run the main power supply back to the circuit breaker, so that whoever grabbed the handle would be maimed or killed. Was this just an accident? Was the accident really “accidental.” Was this murder? Was this sabotage?

  Whatever happened to Mary that night, it required unusually large amounts of energy to damage her body in the manner reported. Amounts of energy consistent with equipment like the linear particle accelerator at the U.S. Public Health Service Hospital in New Orleans.

  FINALLY, WE HAD THE LOCATION and our mosaic’s elusive image had started to appear. With it came explanations capable of sustaining our sprawling story. The trail followed the polio vaccine. It all started back in the 1950s, at the height of the polio vaccine inoculations. The moment Stewart and Eddy discovered cancer-causing viruses, top government scientists privately feared there might be a problem involving the contamination of the vaccine. By then they had already inoculated millions of children. They immediately branded the problem as National Security to keep it secret, and it is logical that they would have asked Dr. Alton Ochsner to look into it. Not only was he the former President of the American Cancer Society and a stockholder in one of the laboratories that produced the polio vaccine, but he had already lost one grandchild to that very vaccine. He understood the problem better than anyone. It was 1957, the date of Ochsner’s first “Sensitive Position” for the U.S. Government.

  Soon the research identified an Asian monkey as the natural host of the cancer-causing polyoma virus, and gave the virus a less hysterical name: SV-40. Then they found the same virus in the monkey kidney cells upon which the polio vaccine was being grown. By 1959 the government knew it had a problem. Vice President Nixon knew he had a problem.

  Nixon had been given the task of rebuilding NIH in 1955, after the disastrous introduction of Salk’s polio vaccine had killed dozens of children, and given others polio. He had signed off on Sabin’s new polio vaccine. In fact, in terms of domestic casualties, he was holding the bag for the biggest problem in the nation. It threatened to destroy the careers and reputations of everyone involved. The legal liabilities were astronomical. The po
litical consequences were incalculable. It would have been the most politically sensitive secret in America. They had to do something about it, and whatever they did had to be kept super-secret. Disclosure was unacceptable.

  National Institutes of Health electron accelerator installed in the radiation wing of the US Public Health Service’s Clinical Center during the late 1950s. It produced high-voltage electron energy 25 times more powerful than that from any other commercially available electron generator at the time. The 30-ton apparatus was used in research on the biological effects of high-energy radiation.

  This high-voltage section on the top level of the three-story installation would be fully-enclosed in a pressurized tank of insulating gas during normal operation.

  It is likely that before long Dr. Ochsner was offered a new assignment: to develop a vaccine to prevent an epidemic of soft-tissue cancers. It was a noble cause, but an extremely dangerous project. They would be using radiation to mutate monkey viruses. What if something went wrong? What if they accidentally created a terrible new disease? Ochsner agreed on the condition that the work would be done on U.S. Government property. There could be no question about the fact that he was working on a national security assignment at the request of the highest officers of the U.S. Government. If anything went wrong, he had to be clear of personal responsibility, and there could not be any rub-off liability for either Ochsner Clinic or Tulane University. It was October 1959, the date of his second “Sensitive Position” assignment for the U.S. Government. The wheels were set in motion.