by H. N. Lloyd
Being the man with the greatest to gain by Kennedy’s death, it isn’t surprising the Lyndon B. Johnson’s name has been thrown into the hat. Indeed in 2003 a Gallup poll discovered that 20% of Americans believed that Lyndon B. Johnson had some hand in the murder of his predecessor. The story begins in Johnson’s native Texas, when he was involved in business with a dubious little man called Billie Sol Estes. Estes made Johnson’s nefarious and corrupt activities look like the actions of a saint. Estes was so corrupt in his business dealings that his daughter stated, ‘we worried about him being killed for years’. He was a man of extreme double standards, he claimed to be a man of god, who hated profanity, who hated drinking, who believed that dancing perverted the soul. He was a daft creationist who believed in the literal word of God and the bible, at least when it suited him. He had shrewd, unforgiving, stirring eyes, framed by thick black rimmed glasses, he had a chubby baby like face topped with a mop of black curling hair, with large ears that jutted from his head un-forgivingly, a face that should have looked jolly or even faintly comical, but instead he managed to look steely and mean. He was one of six children born to a poor farming family, but by the age of thirty he had turned a single sheep given to him by his father as a birthday present, into a multi-million pound business empire whereby he virtually owned his own hometown of Clyde, Texas. By 1959 he had a business empire worth $150 million, which was mostly based on a Ponzi scheme. Estes had sold anhydrous ammonia tanks to farmers across Texas, except the tanks didn’t exist; you see Estes had sold the tanks to the farmers as an investment. He told the farmers that he could find companies willing to rent the tanks off of them. So Estes took the money, and then gave them small payments back telling them it was the rent money from the none existent tanks. He further subsidies the scheme by taking out millions of pounds worth of mortgages on the tanks, mortgages taken out at banks that were out of state, this conveniently meant that the banks could not check whether the ammonia tanks existed or not, but of course no one would ever think that multi-millionaire businessman Billie Sol Estes would be pulling a fast one. He then began to persuade farmers across America to buy land off of him in Texas, and set up Cotton farms there, they would then lease their original farms back to Estes for $50 an acre; with an elaborately complicated contract in place; that stated in the small print that any default in mortgage payments on the cotton fields would mean Estes would take ownership of their farms. The farmer’s first mortgage payment would be delayed for twelve months as an alleged act of goodwill, but with no cotton produced from the imaginary cotton farms at the end of the year, the farmers would naturally default on the payments and Estes would get ownership of their farms and homes. It was a highly immoral, let alone illegal, form of land grabbing that; like his ammonia tank scheme, was allowed to go on for so long because four members of the Department of Agriculture had been bribed to look the other way. It was during an endeavour of leasing imaginary grain silos to the government that Johnson and Estes became business partners. This deal was highly suspicious, and it transpired that the same four members of the Department of Agriculture had received more bribes to facilitate these illegal contracts. By 1961 Estes and Johnsons business dealings over the grain silos were being investigated by a more honest official at the Department of Agriculture. Unfortunately the honest man from the ministry, Henry Marshall, died before he could finish his investigation, he committed suicide, by seemingly taking part in a high speed car chase, crashing his car into a tree, getting out of the car, bludgeoning himself on the back of the head, shooting himself five times in the face, then getting back into his car and gassing what little life he had left out of himself. Yes he was quite clearly murdered, but the death was amazingly ruled a suicide by a corrupt coroner. Then six more business associates of Estes and Lyndon Johnson’s turned up dead, George Krutilek, Ike Rogers (and his secretary), Harold Orr, Coleman Wade, John Douglas Kinser, and surprisingly his lover Josefa Johnson, Lyndon Johnson’s own sister. They all died in peculiar or mysterious circumstances which had massive question marks hanging over them, two gassings a plane crash and two alleged household accidents. John Douglas Kinser was shot in the back, on a golf-course; the killer was a close friend and political aid to Lyndon Johnson by the name of Malcolm Wallace. Wallace was placed on trial for first degree murder, a trial where he was defended by Lyndon Johnson’s personal lawyer, a man named Edward Clarke, who was also known as ‘The Secret Boss of Texas’ due to the political sway and fear he held there. It was a trial that Lyndon Johnson was said to follow extremely closely. Wallace was found guilty of the cold blooded and seemingly motiveless murder, a capital offence in Texas, but amazingly Judge Charles O’ Betts sentenced Wallace to just a five year suspended sentence! Years later, on the day of President Kennedy’s assassination, the police would find a latent print from a little finger on one of the cardboard boxes that comprised the snipers nest in the Texas School Book Depository. Nathan Derby, one of the most well respected Latent Fingerprint Examiners in the United States, with thirty-five years experience working for the police and the US Army, examined the fingerprint and discovered that it belonged to of all people Johnson’s murderous aid; Malcolm Wallace. Derby noted thirty-four points within both sets of fingerprints that matched, to put this into perspective only between twelve and twenty matches are needed to gain a conviction based on fingerprint evidence in a criminal trial. The Dallas Police Department sent the fingerprint evidence to the FBI; so that they could mount a case against Wallace, and after eighteen months the FBI languidly announced that they disagreed with the country’s most eminent fingerprint expert, Derby was wrong, the latent fingerprint found in the Texas School Book Depository did not belong to Malcolm Wallace. Derby was livid; he couldn’t understand what the FBI were talking about, he stated that his ‘dying declaration’ would be that the latent print found in the snipers nest belonged to Malcolm Wallace.
In the case of Josefa Johnson, the drunken, drug addled, loose lipped sister of President Johnson, it was death by an alleged cerebral haemorrhage, although this diagnoses couldn’t be proved as an autopsy wasn’t conducted, despite it being state law. The death of George Krutilek, Billie Sol Estes’ accountant, was even more suspicious, it looked for all intent and purposes like a gassing, with a pipe leading from his car exhaust into his car, but Krutilek had absolutely no carbon monoxide in his system, he had in fact been bludgeoned on the back of the head. Despite this clear evidence of murder, the coroner unbelievably ruled that Krutilek had died of a heart attack!
In 1963 Estes was finally convicted of 57 counts of fraud; and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. Then in 1984, when he was up before the Grand Jury for even more fraud offences, Estes told the Grand Jury that the investigator Henry Marshall, his six business associates, his accountant, President Johnson’s sister, and President Kennedy had all been murdered on the orders of Lyndon B. Johnson, in an attempt to cover up the true extent of Johnson’s involvement in the multi-million dollar frauds they had both perpetrated. Johnson had co-opted his former aid, ex-marine Malcolm Wallace, who Johnson had wrangled a job in the Department of Agriculture, to commit the murders. Estes claimed that Jack Ruby was used as a middleman to recruit Lee Harvey Oswald as the patsy for the Presidents’ assassination. Oswald was picked by Ruby because his political leanings were so dubious that anyone looking into them would be distracted from the real reason of the assassination, which was to save Lyndon B. Johnson from serving a very long prison sentence for fraud. You see Johnson knew that the axe was about to fall, he’d heard a rumour that Kennedy knew all about the illegal silo transactions. The Kennedy’s had found themselves a witness who was willing to testify to save his own skin; this man could prove that Johnson was corrupt and dangerous. The witness was a high class pimp and gangster, and another of Johnsons’ dubious business associates, by the name of Bobby Baker. Even if Johnson could silence Baker, President Kennedy would know that Johnson had been involved in his death, and President Kennedy would still drop J
ohnson as his Vice President candidate for the 1964 elections. Yes, before President Kennedy’s assassination, Johnson was on borrowed time, with only months left before he was to be unceremoniously kicked out of high office for his corrupt business associations. Johnson knew that if this happened then an investigation would surely follow and he would be finished for good. Estes claimed that in response to this threat Johnson had micro-managed Kennedy’s trip to Dallas, selected a route that would take the motorcade through the perfect assassination spot, Dealey Plaza. Johnson picked there because the motorcade would have to slow down as it turned a corner, which was overlooked by a high-rise building, where a sniper could easily shoot from an open window. Estes claimed that the gunman was Malcolm Wallace, who was himself murdered in 1971, and that his murder was staged to look like a car accident. How did Johnson get away with it all? Well, the CIA helped him to cover it all up, why did they do this? Well; because they were just as threatened as Johnson was by President Kennedy, of course. Kennedy remember, had threatened to disband the organisation. In return for helping to cover up his role in the Presidential murder, Johnson promised to save the CIA once he was President.
The whole story sounds ridiculous of course, and there is little proof to prove any of it. Then earlier this year former aid and strategy advisor to President Richard Nixon, Roger Stone, stated that he had uncovered unbelievable documentation that proved in writing that Lyndon B. Johnson instructed a young Richard Nixon to employ a young Jack Ruby onto the House of Representatives payroll in 1947, soon after this Jack Ruby moved from Chicago to Dallas. Now Stone is yet to publish the document, or indeed the wider research he has completed since this discovery, this he has promised to do in his forthcoming book, ‘The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ’. We should all wait with baited breath as his findings could be incendiary...
Richard Milhouse Nixon: 1959 Richard Nixon was Vice-President under Dwight D. Eisenhower, and he was responsible for ‘Operation Forty’, a CIA plot to assassinate the new Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Operation Forty involved several people who would become world famous for other nefarious actions, E. Howard Hunt, Frank Sturgis and Gordon Liddy. Operation Forty finally came to fruition and cumulated in the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion, under the auspices of the recently elected President Kennedy. Kennedy was furious when the operation failed, and he point blank refused to take another pot shot at Castro. Infuriated at Kennedy’s pro-Cuban stance, Nixon and his Operation Forty buddies decided to assassinate Kennedy in a manner that would implicate Castro, giving them the perfect excuse they needed to mount another invasion and finish the job they had started. The assassination operation was codenamed ‘The Big Event’.
By 1972 Nixon was the thirty-seventh President of the United States of America, and word got to him that his political enemies had stumbled upon concrete evidence of his involvement in ‘The Big Event’ and were holding it in a safe at the Watergate Hotel. So Nixon sent his old Operation Forty/The Big Event buddies Hunt, Sturgis and Liddy to break into the Watergate complex and recover the notebooks holding the incriminating evidence of the Presidential murder plot. The rest as they say is history.
Where did this shocking revelation about Nixon’s involvement come from? Well it was the deathbed confession of E. Howard Hunt, recorded for posterity by his son Saint John Hunt. It was a lovely story, but Saint John Hunt, who was hawking the tale, was unable to provide any supporting proof of the alleged conspiracy other than his father’s un-corroborated confession on a CD. The biggest piece of historical evidence which rules against this theory being true stands out a mile, the proposed invasion of Cuba that the assassination was meant to herald never came to pass. So either Richard Nixon completely miscalculated the situation, which I doubt, or the confession was a pack of lies.
George H. W. Bush: The Bush dynasty and their Presidential terms in office are probably the most contentious since that of Richard Nixon, so it’s not surprising that the Bush family has become embroiled on some level in the Kennedy Conspiracy. It was the well respected investigative journalist Russ Baker who originally brought the first President Bush into the line of fire, when he began to hear dark and disturbing rumours; as he researched his biography of the Bush family, ‘Family Of Secrets’. George H. W. Bush astoundingly claimed that he could not remember where he was or what he was doing on Friday the 22nd of November 1963, an incredible thing to say when it is a well worn adage that everyone knows where they where and what they were doing when they heard the news that President Kennedy had been assassinated. Doing what Russ does well, research, he was able to prove unequivocally that George H. W. Bush was not only in Dallas on Friday the 22nd of November 1963, but that he was actually in Daley Plaza at the time of the assassination. This amazing claim was later supported by the work of researcher John Hankey who uncovered photographic evidence to prove the claim, a photograph of George H. W. Bush; stood in front of the Texas School Book Depository, surrounded by police officers, talking to some suited officials. Even more suspiciously, later that day Bush announced the death of President Kennedy at a Rotary Club dinner in Tyler, Texas. He then promptly walked off stage and telephoned the FBI; Bush identified himself by name and stated that he was the President of the Zapata Offshore Drilling Company, and that he had information pertinent to the assassination of President Kennedy. That’s right folks; the future President of the United States of America contacted the FBI in the hours after the assassination of the incumbent President; and told the feds that he had information regarding the President’s murder. Startling stuff. Bush stated that he had heard hearsay that one of his employees, a man named James Parrott, had mouthed-off about killing President Kennedy when the President was due to visit Houston, Texas. Bush then gave his current address as the Sheraton Dallas Hotel, further proving that he was in Dallas on the day of the assassination. Bush would have carried on denying any knowledge of being in Dallas on the day of the assassination; if John Hankey hadn’t unearthed from the forgotten vaults an FBI memo that stated plainly in black and white what Bush had said to an FBI agent over the phone that day.
More evidence began to turn up which placed Bush’s blank memory surrounding the assassination in a dubious light, researcher Joseph McBride uncovered an intriguing memo written five days after the assassination of President Kennedy, penned by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. The memo concerned the FBI’s fears that anti-Castro factions might take advantage of Kennedy’s assassination; to invade and overthrow Castro, using Kennedy’s murder as a rallying call. In the last sentence of the memo George H. W. Bush was named as the CIA liaison for any information concerning such activities. From this memo, which was entitled ‘The Assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy’ John Hankey surmised that it was indeed future President George H. W. Bush who was supervising the ‘misguided anti-Castro’ factions the memo talked about, and indeed that George H. W. Bush probably had a large hand in organising and planning the devastating Bay of Pigs foul up. What about that phone call to the FBI? Why did Bush do such a stupid and possibly incriminating thing? Well Hankey and Russ believe that Bush made the phone call from the town of Tyler, Texas, as an alibi; to show the world that he wasn’t in Dallas that fateful day. All he wanted to do was get his name down on some official documentation, which would then tell the world he hadn’t been in Dallas on the day Kennedy died, the only problem was that Bush could easily have made the short journey to the town of Tyler after the assassination; in time to make his incriminating phone call, so it was no alibi at all really. Hankey offers a further reason for the phone call, what if something had gone wrong in Dallas, and Bush had become incriminated in the devastating events somehow, therefore the only way to give himself some room to manoeuvre was to make the hasty phone call which created a paper trail for him away from Dallas. What could have gone so wrong for Bush in Dallas that he needed to endanger himself further by making the strange and incriminating phone call? Well, several people on the day of the assassination stated that they
felt that shots had been fired from the Dal-Tex building, a building directly opposite the book depository. When going through the records Hankey came across a statement from an eminently respected Dallas Police Officer called Roger Craig, who stated that, ‘the arrests made in Dealey Plaza that day... (there was) one in particular by R. E. Vaughn of the Dallas Police Department. The man Vaughn arrested was coming out of the Dal-Tex building...The only thing Vaughn knew about him was that he was an independent oil operator from Houston, Texas. The prisoner was taken from Vaughn by Dallas Police detectives and that was the last he saw or heard of the suspect’. Now could that independent oil operator from Houston, Texas, have been George H. W. Bush? Was Bush arrested by a good honest copper unaware of the greater machinations of the CIA operation he was stumbling into? Was Bush then forced to act rashly to give himself an alibi once more senior officers had extricated him from the sticky situation?