Hit
List
Hit List
An In-Depth Investigation into the Mysterious Deaths of Witnesses to the JFK Assassination
Richard Belzer and
David Wayne
Skyhorse Publishing
Copyright © 2013 by Richard Belzer and David Wayne
All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Belzer, Richard.
Hit list : an in-depth investigation into the mysterious deaths of witnesses to the JFK assassination / Richard Belzer and David Wayne.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-62087-807-1 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Kennedy, John F. (John Fitzgerald), 1917-1963--Assassination. 2. Witnesses--Death--United States. 3. Witnesses--Texas--Dallas--Biography. I. Wayne, David, 1963- II. Title.
E842.9.B444 2013
973.922092--dc23
2013001767
Printed in the United States of America
History will not absolve us if we do not, once and for all,
reveal all that is known about the greatest, most tragic murder mystery
in American History. After all, 90 percent of the American people believe
that there was a conspiracy to assassinate John F. Kennedy. The other 10 percent
work for the government or the media. This book is dedicated to
the 90 percent: May you forever question, hold accountable, and improve,
the great gift from our forebears; what historians have called our
“Experiment in Democracy.” Let us all join in this quest to
preserve the very soul of our nation.
Anybody can commit a murder, but it takes an expert to commit a suicide.1
—Legendary CIA asset, Bill Corson, who held a uniquely close position to the highest and darkest echelons of the Central Intelligence Agency.
People are eliminated. Honey, you don’t know how many people are just eliminated, just on the operating table alone. They just need to be disposed of. And don’t ever believe what you read in the papers. It’s all made up.2
—Joe Shimon, a professional assassin and deep cover operative who, for decades, did the dirty work for the “permanent Government” of U.S. military and intelligence—and who finally divulged the above facts to his daughter, late in his life.
Someday you will read that I have been killed in an accident, but don’t believe it, I’ve been murdered.3
—William Sullivan, high-ranking member of FBI, head of Division 5, Counterespionage and Domestic Intelligence, who was officially killed “in a hunting accident” shortly thereafter.
All I know is that witnesses with vital evidence in the case are bad insurance risks.4
—New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, when asked about all the deaths of witnesses who had been sought for testimony.
1 Peter Janney, Mary’s Mosaic: The CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary Pinchot Meyer, and Their Vision For World Peace (Skyhorse Publishing: 2012), 267.
2 Janney, Mary’s Mosaic (Shimon interview, February 15, 2007), 384.
3 John Hawkins, “Right Wing News,” 20 Aug 2007. Robert D. Novak, The Prince of Darkness: 50 Years Reporting in Washington (Crown Forum: 2007).
4 Donald W. Miller, Jr., MD, “Pursuing Truth on the Kennedy Assassinations,” 2012: http://lewrockwell.com/miller/miller40.1.html
Table of Contents
Important Background Information
1. Officer J. D. Tippit
2. Lee Harvey Oswald
3. Jack Ruby
4. Jack Zangetty
5. Melba Christine Marcades
6. Karyn Kupcinet
7. Grant Stockdale
8. Jim Koethe
9. Bill Hunter
10. Dorothy Kilgallen
11. Florence Pritchett Smith
12. Betty McDonald
13. Eddy Benavides
14. Bill Chesher
15. Hank Killam
16. Gary Underhill
17. Guy Banister
18. Hugh Ward
19. Deslesseps Morrison
20. Maurice Gatlin
21. Earlene Roberts
22. Al “Guy” Bogard
23. Lee Bowers
24. Marilyn “Delilah” Walle
25. Mary Pinchot Meyer
26. Lieutenant Commander William B. Pitzer, USN
27. Manuel Rodriguez Quesada
28. Gilberto Rodriguez Hernandez
29. Eladio del Valle
30. David Ferrie
31. Rolando Masferrer
32. Dr. Mary Sherman
33. J. Edgar Hoover
34. Louis Nichols, FBI
35. Alan Belmont, FBI
36. James Cadigan, FBI
37. Donald Kaylor, FBI
38. J. M. English, FBI
39. William Sullivan, FBI
40. Richard Cain
41. Sam “The Man” Giancana
42. Johnny Roselli
43. Chuck Nicoletti
44. George de Mohrenschildt
45. President Carlos Prío Socarrás
46. Jimmy Hoffa
47. John Paisley
48. Gary Powers
49. Jim Reeves
50. Senator Robert F. Kennedy
Conclusion
Appendix
Index
Important Background Information
In the three-year period which followed the murder of President Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald, 18 material witnesses died: six by gunfire, three in motor accidents, two by suicide, one from a cut throat, one from a karate chop to the neck, three from heart attacks and two from natural causes. An actuary engaged by the London Times calculated the probability that at least 18 witnesses would die of any cause within 3 years of the JFK assassination as 1 in 100,000 trillion.5
Thus began the promotion of the 1973 film Executive Action, and a controversy that became legendary.
It’s important to note that, during the exact same time period that this plethora of suspicious deaths occurred, President Lyndon Johnson and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover were in the process of slamming the door on any and all evidence that implied a conspiracy in the JFK assassination. As historian Walt Brown grimly notes:
Johnson’s “actions were a virtual guarantee that the truth would be buried and” furthermore, “the assassination would not have been carried out if those behind it did not have the full acquiescence of the incoming President and the FBI Director.
They controlled everything once the shots ended.
They controlled everything but they did nothing.”6
<
br /> For those unfamiliar with the historical context, the chain of events was extremely unnerving:
• First, President Kennedy was gunned down in broad daylight on a Dallas street during a parade;
• Minutes later, in a somehow related crime, Dallas Officer J. D. Tippit was murdered on the street in a hail of bullets in a different section of town;
• Two days later, the accused assassin of President Kennedy was murdered while in Dallas police custody, with the event being captured on national television;
• Then, a seemingly endless list of witnesses started dying, many from obviously unnatural causes.
5 Jim Marrs, Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1989).
6 “Actions Speak Much Louder than Words—what, exactly, did Johnson and Hoover do?,” Walt Brown, Ph.D., JFK Deep Politics Quarterly, Vol. 17, #4, July, 2012 (emphasis in original).
Body Count
Author Kent Heiner did an excellent job of detailing the alarming rise in the “convenient deaths” of JFK witnesses:
The weekend of November 22, 1963, was a bloody one. But these three deaths—Kennedy, Tippit, and Oswald—were only the beginning. There would be dozens of suspicious deaths to follow over the years.
• “Dorothy Kilgallen, the nationally-famous reporter who interviewed Jack Ruby in prison, died of unexplained causes after hinting at an explosive breakthrough in the Kennedy story.
• A panicked intelligence professional named Gary Underhill reportedly came to a friend’s home in fear of his life on the night after the assassination, raving about the (CIA) Agency’s Southeast Asian drug traffickers having killed the President, and committed ‘suicide’ days later.
• A railroad worker who saw a shooter on the ‘grassy knoll’ died in an automobile accident.
• Strippers employed by Ruby had reported having seen him with Oswald before the assassination; they too were soon dead.
• Sheriff’s deputies who talked too much about what they saw were killed on duty or driven to suicide.
• A witness who saw men other than Oswald fleeing the TSBD (Texas School Book Depository building) after the shooting received several telephoned threats and survived multiple attempts on his life.
• And, of course, there is the Pitzer case.”7 Lieutenant Commander Pitzer was at the Kennedy autopsy and then was killed under very suspicious circumstances.
• Just to top it off, even President Kennedy’s mistress, Mary Pinchot Meyer, was silenced forever in an assassination so professional that one CIA insider said it “had all the markings of an in-house rubout.”8
7 Kent Heiner, Without Smoking Gun: Was the Death of Lieutenant Commander William Pitzer Part of the JFK Assassination Cover-Up Conspiracy? (TrineDay: 2004), 113.
8 Janney, Mary’s Mosaic, 346-347.
The observation that it was numerically impossible for so many witness deaths to simply be coincidence had dramatic implications: Witnesses who “knew something” were being systematically eliminated. On the other side of the coin, government pundits have, for decades, dismissed the “myth” as an “urban legend” and countered that the math was all wrong (and they even got that newspaper cited above to say so, too).
Like most people, we were initially unsure what to make of it all. After all, events don’t “consult the odds” prior to happening; they simply happen. Then someone comes along later and figures out what the odds of it happening were. Some of the deaths seemed purely coincidental; heart attacks, hunting accidents, etc. Others clearly seemed noteworthy; witnesses who did seem to know something and did seem to die mysteriously.
When we embarked upon this study, we initially viewed statements such as the one which follows with an appropriate sense of caution.
When Congress established the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) it gave the committee the mandate to investigate any relevant murder or mysterious death, specifically President Kennedy and Martin Luther King.
But there were three murders that weekend in Dallas – the President, police officer J. D. Tippit and Lee Harvey Oswald. During the following years many other witnesses and suspects in the assassination of the president were murdered or died under strange and unusual circumstances.
Many witnesses died or were brutally murdered during the course of the committee’s investigation, some shortly before they were to testify under oath.
Most of those who died violently had knowledge of Lee Harvey Oswald’s activities or had knowledge of the CIA/Mafia plots to kill Fidel Castro.9
As researcher William Kelly aptly notes, the would-be “investigation” was flawed from the start:
Rather than address each of the deaths individually, or conduct a proper investigation into any one death or murder, they had the Congressional Research Service at the Library of Congress compile all newspaper and magazine articles “. . . concerning those deaths,” and evaluate only the known facts.
As a result, naturally, they found very little. There was little to no detail in the very vague news coverage of those deaths; in fact, it was almost as though someone had made sure that there was little to find and that those “facts” were intentionally vague. Therefore, it became clear that the many coincidental deaths were never properly investigated.
So we investigated, case-by-case. We also checked on the math. We examined the facts and re-examined the odds. We learned that more important than the number of witness deaths occurring in the first year after the JFK assassination is the fact that most of the convenient deaths of witnesses occurred at precisely the time of the two major investigations into the assassination: During 1964, for the Warren Commission investigation, and then again in 1977, when witnesses were being called for the Congressional investigation by the HSCA.
9 William Kelly, “STRANGE DEATHS STUDY,” 27 Aug 2007, “Deaths of Witnesses,” The Education Forum: http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=603&st=105
We will answer the immediately imperative question first: The experts, whom we worked with, determined that the initial estimate above was wrong. The correct odds are not 1 in 100,000 trillion. The correct odds are lower. However, lest one presume that there is not substantial cause for concern, the correct odds are “only” 1 in 167 trillion; and you read that correctly, that’s trillion with a t. To be exact, it’s 1 chance in 167,145,910,421,722. They even “show their work” in case you’re interested:
The correct equation should read: Probability of at least 15 unnatural deaths among 1,400 witnesses within a 1-year period:
“The probability is equal to 1—the sum of the probabilities for 0 to 14 deaths:
P (X > 14) = 1 – [ prob (0) + prob (1) + prob (2) . . . + prob (14)]
P (X > 14) = 1 - ∑P (i) where i=0, 14
P (X > 14) = 5.98E-15
P= 1 in 167,145,910,421,722 = 1 in 167 trillion”10
The odds against “exactly 15 unnatural deaths among 1,400 witnesses in a 1-year period” are actually quite a bit higher: They are 175 trillion-to-1.11 But 167 trillion-to-1 is sufficiently substantial for us. We think it’s safe to call a 167 trillion-to-1 shot quite unlikely; a tad suspicious, even . . .
The obvious counter-attack to that will be that there weren’t really 15 “true” deaths of witnesses due to unnatural causes. And they’re right, there weren’t—we have verified that there were actually more than 15.12
The numbers get even worse, moving forward, because witness deaths increased dramatically at the time of the 1977 Congressional investigation:
In the 14 years following the JFK assassination, there were a minimum of 70 unnatural deaths out of approximately 1,400 witnesses. The probability is 1.40E-33 or 1 in 714,705,498,316,173,300,000,000,000,000,000.13
That’s over 714 million trillion trillion. Just to put that in perspective, try this on for size:
That number is greater than all of the stars in the universe and grains of sand on earth. There are an estimated 300 billion trillion (3E23) stars in the universe. T
hat’s 3 followed by 23 zeros: 300,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. There are an estimated 700 thousand trillion (7E17) grains of sand on earth or 7 followed by 17 zeros:
700,000,000,000,000,000.14
10 Richard Charnin, “JFK Assassination: A Probability Analysis of Unnatural Witness Deaths,” 18 May, 2012: http://richardcharnin.com/jfkprob.htm
11 Ibid.
12 See the Appendix for the original list and updates to it..
13 Richard Charnin, “JFK-Related Deaths,” (accessed 10 Sept. 2012): https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AjAk1JUWDMyRdDFSU3NVd29xWWNyekd2X1ZJYllKTnc#gid=1 and Richard Charnin, “JFK Calc Spreadsheet,” (accessed 10 Sept. 2012): https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AjAk1JUWDMyRdDFSU3NVd29xWWNyekd2X1ZJYllKTnc#gid=0 and Richard Charnin, email to author 9 Sept. 2012
14 Richard Charnin, “JFK Assassination: A Probability Analysis of Unnatural Witness Deaths,” 18 May, 2012: http://richardcharnin.com/jfkprob.htm
Richard Charnin is an author and quantitative software developer with advanced degrees in applied mathematics and operations research. He paints a very clear portrait of the JFK witness deaths in the context of the mathematical landscape:
I have proved mathematically what many have long suspected:
The scores of convenient JFK unnatural witness deaths cannot be
coincidental.15
Another huge increase in the amount of witnesses dying in a short period of time occurred just around the time that witnesses were being called in the nationally observed testimony for the HSCA from 1976–1978, which was re-investigating the JFK assassination (due to the obvious fact that it had never really been investigated the first time). It’s not possible to determine the exact number of witnesses slated to testify before the Committee, because much of their work was conducted in secret, records were sealed, and what they did divulge was largely obscure and confusing—historians are still sorting through it all. Some of the documents are still sealed; scheduled to be released at a future date. It was basically what is known in intelligence parlance as a “limited hangout”; they admitted it was a conspiracy but slammed the door on delving deeper into it. Historian Walt Brown, Ph.D., observed that the witness testimony is still difficult to access because:
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