Murder Tales: The JFK Conspiracies

by H. N. Lloyd

  This might all sound like more mad ramblings from the wilder side of the internet, were it not for the fact that the theories two main proponents are eminently sensible men who have detailed knowledge of both how the KGB worked under the cold war regime, and counter espionage as a whole. The first of these men is General Ion Mihai Pacepa; the highest ranking member of the Soviet bloc to defect during the Cold War, his defection caused the whole of the Romanian secret service; and all its clandestine operations; to temporarily ground to a halt. The second researcher is Robert Holmes, a British diplomat who had an intimate knowledge of how defection and espionage worked during the Cold War, and who was versed in counter espionage techniques for his clandestine diplomatic meetings with eastern bloc contacts. When Pacepa defected he had two main objectives, to let the CIA know that Romania was not an independent Communist state that the American’s could happily do business with, and also to tell them that President Kennedy had been murdered as part of a KGB plot. The CIA didn’t want to make too much noise about either of these topics, because both could make them look like a bunch of inept fools. For years the CIA had been telling the public that there was no Russian involvement in President Kennedy’s assassination, and at the same time selling secret technology to Romania on the proviso that they promised not to share the secrets with Russia. Guess what, Romania broke their promise, and every little secret that had been shared with Romania went straight to Moscow, Pacepa could categorically prove this. So if he was right about this embarrassing little fact, then why couldn’t he be right about President Kennedy’s assassination? Both Pacepa and Holmes in their respected books, Pacepa’s ‘Programmed To Kill’ and Holmes’ ‘A Spy Like No Other’, are careful to point out that there is no solid proof to prove their beliefs, however they both believe that given the inconsistencies in the official narrative, their explanations are the best fit available.

  The Three Tramps Theory

  In the chaos after the assassination; newsmen and photographers swamped the area around Dealey Plaza. Photographers from the Dallas Morning News, Dallas Times Herald and The Fort Worth Star-Telegraph; photographed three transients being removed from a train close to the Texas School Book Depository. Some years after the assassination a gentleman called Richard E. Sprague, author of ‘The Taking of America’; and the leading expert in the photographic evidence relating to the assassination, passed the photographs of ‘The Three Tramps’ onto Jim Garrison; as he prepared his infamous assassination prosecution. On Tuesday the 31st of December 1968, Garrison appeared on the Tonight Show with Johnnie Carson, where he showed the pictures to the wider public for the first time; and asked anyone who could identify any of the three men to come forward. The genie was out of the bottle, the photographs became catnip to the assassination buffs. They were examined and scrutinised and theory after theory became built upon the three unfortunates in the photograph.

  The details were poured over in repetitive detail. Firstly the assassination buffs could find no records of the arrest of these three hobos. This was not just peculiar; it was damn right ludicrous, three suspicious men being arrested just minutes after the assassination of the US President, and the police kept not one written record of the arrest of these three transients? Peculiar didn’t cover it. No one could find out who they were, or why they had been arrested. The buffs were also concerned about the disinterested; almost casual; manner with which the police escorted the three potential suspects. The police officers guns were casually slung over their shoulders, or were held in a manner which would have made a quick draw impossible. Then their clothes were picked over, weren’t the tramps shoes just a little too smart for men who had been living rough? This when all put together screamed cover-up, and the buffs began to look for answers. The conclusions they came to seemed quite startling, finding their answers hidden in another government conspiracy nearly a decade later.

  On Saturday the 17th of June 1972, five men were arrested breaking into the Democratic National Committee Headquarters in the Watergate Complex, Washington DC. The men were employed by the offices of the President of the United States, their job had been to photograph documents relating to the democratic parties election campaign, and to install illegal listening devices to help President Nixon get the edge over his rivals in the up and coming Presidential elections. The burglars had been paid via a slush fund, which led directly to the President’s re-election campaign bank accounts. Caught bang to rights, President Richard Nixon, the man Kennedy had defeated in 1960, was forced to resign from office. Two of the men implicated in the whole sorry debacle were American Intelligence Officers by the name of Frank Sturgis and E. Howard Hunt. Conspiracy buffs claimed that these were two of the alleged tramps caught in the infamous photographs.

  The third tramp the buffs rather unbelievably claimed was a gun-for-hire hit-man by the name of Charles Harrelson, father of the famed American actor Woody Harrelson. Harrelson, the buffs claimed, could be linked to the whole conspiracy via one of Jack Ruby’s associates, a man called Douglas Matthews, who was friends to both Ruby and Harrelson. In 1982, whilst on the run and high on drugs; Harrelson made a lengthy confession to being the alleged second shooter that fateful day in Dallas. He would later go on to draw maps and diagrams showing where he had hidden, and where he had fired his fatal shots from; as the Presidential car had passed along Daley Plaza. Of course the FBI didn’t believe a word of it, and told Harrelson as much; tellingly in 2003 Harrelson himself withdrew his claims. This hasn’t stopped the conspiracy buffs from claiming that the ‘Tall Tramp’ was Charles Harrelson. In 1998 an anthropomorphic study of the photographs of the ‘Tall Tramp’ and contemporaneous photographs of Harrelson, came to the conclusion that there was a 90% chance that Harrelson and the ‘Tall Tramp’ were one and the same person. A later similar study, which used updated computer technology and facial recognition software; came to the conclusion that there was a staggering 99% chance that the ‘Tall Tramp’ and Charles Harrelson were the same person.

  Of course there is never any consensual harmony over any detail of the assassination. The ‘Three Tramps’ had been named as Sturgis, Hunt and Harrelson, but of course others had to disagree. The tramp in the foreground of the photographs had become lovingly known as ‘Frenchy’ by the buffs. Those buffs unhappy with the suggestions of Sturgis and Hunt now suggested that ‘Frenchy’ was a man who had taken part in one of the other great political assassinations of the 1960’s. When an early police sketch was released of a potential suspect who had been seen fleeing the scene just minutes after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jnr, some suggested that the sketch bore a striking resemblance to ‘Frenchy’. Could ‘Frenchy’ have been a professional political assassin? Carrying out two of the most infamous political murders in history? We’ll never definitively know, but I think it’s telling that the sketch bears an even more striking similarity to James Earl Ray, the man convicted of killing Dr. King. Not ones to let a good theory die, the buffs counter attacked any criticism of the theory; by highlighting that James Earl Ray was allegedly helped in his assassination of Dr. King by a man called Raoul. The man Raoul was never traced by the police, but Raoul was a known non de plume of Frank Sturgis, Watergate robber and possibly one of the ‘Three Tramps’. Another name thrown into the hat for Frenchy was CIA agent David Lamar Christ[i]. Christ was one of the CIA’s first bug-men, a man at the spearhead of the new frontier of technology, who took full advantage of increasingly smaller and more precise surveillance equipment. He was fully security cleared to take part in Project Argon and Corona, which were projects to use the latest satellite surveillance to map out Soviet territory and military instillations. Unfortunately Christ wasn’t very good at field work. Just like the Watergate criminals, he got himself caught in Havana; trying to steal a Chinese codebook, after he realised the diplomats he had bugged where speaking in an un-deciphered code. He did a spell in a Cuban prison, and came out a very bitter man, feeling that the CIA had left him to hang out to dry. Christ be
came of interest to conspiracy buffs when in 1977 the House Select Committee on Assassinations asked the CIA if they had any records that could confirm or deny that Christ had been in Dallas on the day that Kennedy had been assassinated. The CIA stonewalled the request, basically saying that it would be too much work and effort for them to go back into their files to discover such information. What they did say was interesting though, the CIA made a rare admittance, that they had given Christ travelling funds; for him to make an alleged trip to Boston just two days before the assassination of President Kennedy. The CIA could not confirm or deny if Christ had taken this trip.

  The ‘Old Tramp’ was thought for years to be Howard Hunt, but again others disagreed, one other suggestion was that the ‘Old Tramp’ was Chauncey Marvin Holt. Now Holt was a bit of a fantasist, he was a circus performer by trade, a tightrope walker, but in 1991, as Oliver Stone’s film JFK hit the headlines, Holt confessed to Newsweek that he had been one of the men on the grassy knoll. More specifically he had been the bogus Secret Service agent who had been scaring people away from the scene with fake ID. Holt claimed to have secretly been in the CIA for decades, and to have juggled four identities, to have taken part in the assassination of Kennedy, and to have been the accountant for another Kennedy conspiracy favourite, Meyer Lansky. Of course there was no evidence for any of it, just like there is little evidence for anyone else being proven to be the Three Tramps.

  1992 should have sounded the death knell to the Three Tramps theories, as the police finally found their long lost paperwork; and released to the press the names of the tramps, Gus Abrahams, John F. Gedney and Harold Doyle. None of these very traceable and real people had any connections to organised crime, the CIA or any other shadowy group or organisation that would have wanted the President dead. They were three out of work men travelling around the country trying to find employment in order to support their families. Gedney was tracked down, he was by then sixty-seven and had become a well respected city hall official in Melbourne, Florida. Harold Doyle was sixty-one; he was living in Klamath Falls, Oregon, where he worked as a pool attendant. The ‘Old Tramp’ had been seventy-six year old Gus Abrahams, he had died in 1987, but his sisters confirmed it was indeed him in the photographs of the tramps. She regretfully informed Mary La Fontaine, the researcher who finally tracked them all down, that Gus had been an alcoholic in the 1960’s; and it was very doubtful he had even known who the President was, let alone have wanted to kill him. Of course the positive identification of the men still doesn’t stop some of the more hardened conspiracy buffs, they simply see the identification as smoke and mirrors, trying to distract the unwary from the truth, when the truth really is the men in the photo were just tired, lonely and desperate, looking for work in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  The Desecration o f Officer J. D. Tippit

  One of the many talents of conspiracy buffs is their ability to take any given facet of any given case and twist it so that it becomes something completely new, alluring, beguiling and fascinating. Take Police Officer J. D. Tippit, he was the thirty-nine year old police officer; shot dead by Lee Harvey Oswald; when Tippit attempted to pull him over, due to Oswald matching the police description of the assassin that had been put out over the police wire. Yet his tragic death has been used and twisted by others to push their particular pet theory. The simplest of these theories, proposed by researcher Jim Marrs, is that Tippit was murdered by one of Oswald’s fellow assassination conspirators, in order to give the Dallas police ‘itchy trigger fingers’. The conspirators believed that if they shot dead a police officer then the police would be less likely to take Oswald alive, the police would kill their patsy before he could open his mouth and incriminate anyone else. This theory doesn’t really stand up to close scrutiny, seeing as Dallas taxi-driver William Scoggins and Dallas city resident Helen Markham, both witnessed the shooting and positively identified Oswald as Tippit’s killer.

  The second conspiracy theory that largely involves Tippit does much to besmirch his name and memory. This second theory is favoured by researcher Robert D. Morningstar and was published in his book ‘The Ultimate Secret of the JFK Assassination’. It is a tad more complex, but I shall attempt to retell his tale as simply as possible. Morningstar believes that J. D. Tippit was the fabled gunman on the grassy knoll, in order to understand this assertion we have to turn our attention to a Polaroid photograph taken by Mary Moorman; as President Kennedy was being assassinated. Indeed it has been calculated that this startling image was taken just .06 seconds after the President’s head had exploded from the killing shot. The photo was taken from a vantage point where it captured Abraham Zapruder filming the scene, and the grassy knoll itself. For years the photograph was thought to be just another harrowing image taken that day in Dealey Plaza. Then in 1982, Gary Mack, the curator of the Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas, noticed something in the photograph, something he couldn’t believe no one had seen before. At the very back of the photograph, behind the picket fence and wall; on the right hand side, under the shadow of a large oak tree, there can be discerned several smudges of light. These smudges when enlarged, Mack believed, showed someone wearing a police officer’s uniform and badge; firing a rifle, their face partially hidden by a puff of gun-smoke. The photo of ‘Badge-Man’ was heralded as proof positive that there had been a gunman on the grassy knoll as the conspiracy buffs had always contended. For years names were dropped into the hat left; right and centre as to who the identity of ‘Badge-Man’ just might have been. Then Robert D. Morningstar carried out some ‘computer enhancements’ of the ‘Badge-Man’ photograph, which he believed brought out; in more detail, the image of the police officer firing the gun, and the finer details of his uniform. From the patches of light in the photo, Morningstar began to discern smaller badges or markers on the arm of ‘Badge-Man’, and a pen top sticking out of the breast pocket of the police officers uniform. This rang a bell in Morningstar’s head, somewhere he had seen a photograph of someone with similar badges on the arm of his uniform; and a pen sticking out of his shirts breast pocket. Morningstar went back to other photos taken in and around Dealey Plaza that day, and he found a police officer who seemed to match the details exactly, it was one of the police officers who had been escorting the ‘Three Tramps’. Then Morningstar seemed to reach a startling conclusion, as he studied the ‘Three Tramps’ photograph he came to believe that one of the police officers in the ‘Three Tramps’ photograph was J. D. Tippit. Morningstar went back to his ‘computer enhanced’ version of the ‘Badge-Man’ photograph, and examined the light and shaded smudges that made up the fuzzy image, and he compared them to the man he believed was Officer Tippit in the ‘Three Tramps’ photo, he believed they were an exact match. Officer Tippit was ‘Badge-Man’; therefore Officer Tippit was the real killer of JFK! Morningstar claims to have uncovered two eyewitnesses who both state that they witnessed Officer Tippet standing on the grassy knoll; on the day of the assassination. One of these eyewitnesses remains unnamed; meaning their evidence cannot be verified, the second source proves even more problematic, seeing as it is Morningstar himself, stating that he saw Tippet on the grassy knoll that November day in 1963.

  Morningstar went further, claiming that after murdering the President, and playing his part in escorting the ‘Three Tramps’ to a police station, Morningstar believed Tippit had a pre-arranged meeting with another conspirator, who turned, betrayed and murdered Tippit, not only to ensure his silence, but for a far more nefarious purpose. Used as evidence to back this assertion up is the testimony of Lee Harvey Oswald’s landlady, Mrs Gladys Johnson, who claimed that after Oswald returned to her house, after murdering the President, a police patrol car pulled up outside her home, tooted its horn, and then drove off. This Morningstar claimed was Tippit signalling Lee Harvey Oswald to their fateful meeting, where Oswald turned on Tippet and murdered him. Why did Oswald (or possibly some other conspirator) murder Officer Tippit, if he had been so instrumental to the conspiracy? Well,
you see Tippit held a passing resemblance to President Kennedy, and the conspirators needed a body that wasn’t so riddled with bullets, because President Kennedy of course had been shot to bits in a calculated crossfire. Some have claimed that Tippit looked so much like President Kennedy he had been nicknamed ‘Jack’ by his fellow police officers. Morningstar hypothesised that Tippit’s body was swapped with President Kennedy’s. Tippet’s murderer being careful to ensure that the wounds inflicted on Officer Tippit matched what the official findings would ultimately conclude in the Warren Report, that President Kennedy had been murdered by a lone gunman firing from the 6th Floor of the Texas Schoolbook Depository. If an autopsy had been carried out on the real President’s body, they would have discovered it was riddled with bullets fired from every angle of the crossfire, more evidence he had quite clearly been murdered as the result of a conspiracy. So in the famous photographs of President Kennedy’s autopsy; we are not looking at the dead President, but at Officer J. D. Tippit. Morningstar claims that several techniques have been used to put people off looking too closely at the photographs, and as a result discovering the truth. One such technique Morningstar claims has been utilised; is a swastika being drawn in blood over some of the more messed up areas of the body. Morningstar argues that people now associate the swastika with a deeper more unsettling evil, and so subconsciously refuse to look properly at the image of the bloodied body; in order to avoid looking at the swastika.