Her testimony posed further problems, because the time frame in which she placed Oswald leaving her home made it very difficult for him to have been at the scene of the murder of Officer J. D. Tippit a few minutes later. She saw Oswald waiting at the bus stop outside, after he’d left her house. A couple minutes later, Officer Tippit was shot dead and Oswald was accused of that crime. But the Tippit crime scene was over a mile away and it was established that no buses had come by during that time frame, in the direction of Officer Tippit’s slaying.3
So what happened as a result of those disparities between her testimony and the “official version” of events, one might ask?
After testifying in Dallas in April of 1964, Mrs. Roberts was subjected to intensive police harassment. They visited her at all hours of the day and night, contacted her employers and identified her as the Oswald rooming house lady. As a result, she was dismissed from three housekeeping and nursing jobs in April, May, and June of 1964 alone; no telling how many jobs she lost after that.4
It’s actually fair to say that Mrs. Roberts was probably driven to her death by all the harassment:
Relatives report that right up until her death a year and a half later, Earlene complained of being “worried to death”’ by the police.5
As Earlene herself put it:
Every time I would walk out on the front porch somebody was standing with a camera on me—they had me scared to death.6
1 The Warren Commission, “Testimony of Mrs. Earlene Roberts,” Interviewed by Joseph A. Ball, April 8, 1964: http://jfkassassination.net/russ/testimony/robertse.htm
2 John Simkin, “Earlene Roberts: Biography,” accessed 22 Oct 2012: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKrobertsE2.htm
3 David Welsh, “In the Shadow of Dallas: The Legacy of Penn Jones, Jr.,” Ramparts Magazine, November 1966,
pp 39-50: http://www.unz.org/Pub/Ramparts-1966nov-00039
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
6 Testimony of Mrs. Earlene Roberts to the Warren Commission, April 8, 1964, Dallas, Texas: http://www.history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh6/pdf/WH6_Roberts.pdf
Conclusions Based On Evidentiary Indications
• The case very clearly relates to the JFK assassination and was yet another very obvious case of The Powers That Be intimidating and harassing a key witness because their testimony did not fit the official version of events.
• As far as her death, it appears to have actually been a heart attack, so it’s virtually impossible to determine the cause, but her relatives noted her deteriorating health as a direct result of the intense harassment from which she suffered.
Conclusion
Death: Probably the result of “natural” causes, but another clear case of obvious and intentional witness intimidation, which appears to have actually led to her death.
Victim
Al Bogard
Cause of Death
Carbon monoxide poisoning
Official Verdict
Suicide
Actual Circumstances
Bogard witnessed “Oswald” where the “real” Oswald could not have been. He was subjected to harassment but appears to have been depressed and taken his own life.
Inconsistencies
None, yet many . . . see below.
Al Bogard was the car salesman who witnessed Lee Harvey Oswald—or an Oswald impersonator—test-driving a car at high speeds. That was significant because the “real” Oswald reportedly could not drive. It seemed like a set-up to establish something about Oswald’s history—referred to in intelligence parlance as creating a “legend”—because the person also made the specific point of talking about Russia and telling Bogard, in no uncertain terms, that he could not afford the car at the moment but was expecting to come into a large sum of money in the very near future. He also specifically made the comment—loud enough for others to hear and recall—that maybe he would have to go back to Russia to get a car.
So Bogard remembered writing the name down on a business card: “Lee Oswald”—and when he heard Oswald’s name on television as a suspect in the assassination, he was sure it was the same Oswald and he then tossed the card in the garbage. The FBI heard about that and was very interested, raising the question “WHY?”
22
Al “Guy”
Bogard,
February 15, 1966
The real Bogard question is why did the FBI go thru a trash dumpster to find a Bogard business card on which HE wrote the name “Lee Oswald”? If Oswald had written it, maybe it would matter. But it just makes no sense, except that the FBI left no garbage dumpsters unchecked.1
We figured out why the FBI was probably so “interested” in that business card with Oswald’s name on it. It was very clearly established that the “real” Oswald was somewhere else at that day and time. But the card was actual physical proof that someone impersonating Oswald was at the Downtown Lincoln-Mercury dealership at the same time. Historian Walt Brown offers a plausible explanation for what actually transpired:
Oswald (the one with Marina and Ruth Paine) was clearly alibied for the afternoon of November 9, again shouting imposter. The business card that Bogard wrote the name of “Lee Oswald” on was the hard evidence of the impostor.
And that is why Lawrence called it in. And it also explains why FBI agents combed through the dumpster in search of the card—it was “hard evidence.”
Without the card, (as we know from other instances where real evidence was flim-flammed or else people saw things but were wrong), it could easily have been stated that Bogard was wrong. He had actually waited on a customer named, for instance, “Lou Osborne,” and in the confusion and tragedy of the moment, he mistook “Lee Oswald” for “Lou Osborne,” who, amazingly, bore a striking resemblance to Lee Oswald.
The card would prevent this, and therefore, Lawrence called it in and the FBI looked high and low.
But they didn’t find the card—or so they would have us believe, and Bogard was subjected to Nosenko-like interviews, including one in the cells of the Dallas jail, prior to his “suicide” in February of 1966.2
The mention of “Nosenko” was in reference to a brutal interrogation of a Russian spy, suspected of being a double agent. There was so much obfuscation and elimination of unwanted evidence that Walt Brown titled his book The Warren Omission, in reference to that.
After the JFK assassination when the case obviously should have been investigated to determine what witnesses actually saw, instead, those interviews were obviously structured to avoid certain facts and are noteworthy for what they did not cover. There were “clearly-orchestrated interviews”
1 Walt Brown, Ph.D., 26 Oct 2012, email to author.
2 Walt Brown, Ph.D., “Jack Lawrence: A Patriot for All Seasons,” JFK/Deep Politics Quarterly, Volume 15 #2, January 2010, page 10, emphasis in original.
conducted by the FBI (nobody asked where they thought the shots came from).1
Attempts by authorities to marginalize certain individuals should also be highly suspicious in their own right. For example, the FBI clearly attempted to marginalize the testimony of Arnold Rowland, who told them that, with certainty, he saw a man in the 6th floor window of the School Book Depository whom he could not identify as Oswald.
What Rowland did not see was an identifiable Lee Oswald with the
gun. . . . Because he didn’t see that which had to BE seen, the FBI sent a bevy of agents scurrying to interview anyone who would state for the record that Rowland had a nasty habit of lying or making things up for the sake of getting attention.2
Yet, if Rowland had wanted attention, he could have made himself instantly famous by simply telling the FBI what they had wanted to hear; that it was possible that it could have been Oswald whom he saw with the rifle. To his credit, he didn’t—because he knew it was not true.
I know of no other instance where the investigating agency, in this case, the FBI investigating a state crime, went to the trouble of checking out the h
onesty quotient of any OTHER witnesses—just the one who saw something he should not have seen.
So he’s a liar and he didn’t see it.3
Bogard was maligned in much the same manner, albeit rougher and more blatant.
Bogard was not asked to describe the man he saw, because he “positively identified him.” He wasn’t taken to a lineup, and subsequent to this, he was given a lie-detector test. He was also beaten severely by individuals unknown, and re-interviewed by the FBI several times, including an interview held in the Dallas Police Department jail cells, on the date of September 17, 1964, when the Warren Report was being printed.4
It’s not clear what exactly drove Bogard to commit suicide. It is clear that he was bullied around by the FBI and that—as he himself put it—“people were out to get him.”5
1 Walt Brown, Ph.D., “The ‘Who’s Who’ of the Texas School Book Depository,” JFK/Deep Politics Quarterly, Volume 15 #1, October 2009, page 36.
2 Walt Brown, Ph.D., “TMWMTM: (The Men Who Missed The Money: Parts I,II) Arnold Rowland and Albert Guy Bogard,” JFK/Deep Politics Quarterly, Volume 15 #1, October 2009, page 21, emphasis in original.
3 Ibid, page 21, emphasis in original.
4 Ibid, page 24.
5 John McAdams’ phone interview with Harper on June 1, 2001: “Dead in the Wake of the Kennedy Assassination, Albert Guy Bogard: Mysterious Death?”: http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/death14.htm
They searched high and low, like an episode of CSI, to find that business card, but they never found it.
Instead, they found Bogard by the side of the road. “Graveyard dead.”1
Conclusions Based On Evidentiary Indications
• It appears that Bogard did indeed commit suicide.
• Bogard’s first cousin, Jimmy Harper, found the body. Although he did not provide information indicating death by something other than suicide, his cousin did say that Bogard “knew that people were out to get him, and may have taken his own life for that reason.”2
Conclusions
Suicide: Possibly the result of being pursued and/or harassed by unknown parties.
1 Walt Brown, Ph.D., “TMWMTM: (The Men Who Missed The Money: Parts I,II) Arnold Rowland and Albert Guy Bogard,” JFK/Deep Politics Quarterly, Volume 15 #1, October 2009, page 24, emphasis in original.
2 John McAdams’ phone interview with Harper on June 1, 2001: “Dead in the Wake of the Kennedy Assassination, Albert Guy Bogard: Mysterious Death?”: http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/death14.htm
Victim
Lee Bowers
Cause of Death
Wounds suffered in automobile crash
Official Verdict
Accidental
Inconsistencies
1. An eyewitness reported that Bowers’ car was driven off the road by another car.
2. Bowers, who did not die immediately, is said to have reported to emergency personnel that he believed he had been drugged during his stop for coffee shortly before the crash.
23
Lee Bowers,
August 9, 1966
Lee Bowers was a very important witness who was in a unique vantage point during the assassination and clearly reported seeing things that starkly contrasted with the official version of events.
Lee Bowers’ testimony is perhaps as explosive as any recorded by the Warren Commission. He was one of sixty-five known witnesses to the President’s assassination who thought shots were fired from the area of the Grassy Knoll. (The Knoll is west of the Texas School Book Depository.) But more than that, he was in a unique position to observe some pretty strange behavior in the Knoll area during and immediately before the assassination.
Bowers, then a tower man with the Union Terminal Co., was stationed in his 14-foot tower directly behind the Grassy Knoll. As he faced the assassination site, he could see the railroad overpass to his right front. Directly in front of him was a parking lot, and then a wooden stockade fence and a row of trees running along the top of the Grassy Knoll. The Knoll sloped down to the spot on Elm Street where Kennedy was killed. Police had “cut off” traffic into the parking area, Bowers said, “so that anyone moving around could actually be observed.”1
What Bowers observed from that unique vantage point facing down upon the now infamous “grassy knoll” has fascinated JFK researchers for decades:
Bowers made two significant observations which he revealed to the Commission. First, he saw three unfamiliar cars slowly cruising around the parking area in the thirty-five minutes before the assassination; the first two left after a few minutes. The driver of the second car appeared to be talking into “a mike or telephone”—“he was holding something up to his mouth with one hand and he was driving with the other.” A third car, with out-of-state plates and mud up to the windows, probed all around the parking area. Bowers last remembered seeing it about eight minutes before the shooting, pausing “just above the assassination site.” He gave detailed descriptions of the cars and their drivers.
Bowers also observed two unfamiliar men standing on top of the Knoll at the edge of the parking lot, within 10 or 15 feet of each other . . .”one man, middle-aged or slightly older, fairly heavy-set, in a white shirt, fairly dark trousers. Another younger man, about mid-twenties in either a plaid shirt, plaid coat, or jacket.” Both were facing toward Elm and Houston, where the motorcade would be coming from. They were the only strangers he remembered seeing.2
On August, 9, 1966, Lee Bowers was killed when his car left the road and crashed into a concrete abutment in Midlothian, Texas.
1 Welsh, “In the Shadow of Dallas”
2 Welsh, “In the Shadow of Dallas”
As it was reported in the book, High Treason:
Lee Bowers was heading west on highway 67 from Midlothian down to Cleburne, and according to an eyewitness was driven off the road by a black car, sending him into a bridge abutment. He didn’t die immediately; he held on for four hours, and during that time, was talking to the ambulance people and told them that he felt he had been drugged when he stopped for coffee back a few miles in Midlothian.1
According to the author, Penn Jones, Bowers began receiving death threats after testifying to the Warren Commission about what he had seen and after giving further evidence to attorney, Mark Lane.2
Bowers widow at first insisted to Penn Jones that there was nothing suspicious about her husband’s death. Then she became flustered and said: “They told him not to talk.”3
Researcher David Welsh reported that the attending physician, who accompanied Bowers in the ambulance, “noticed something peculiar about the victim.”4
He was in a strange state of shock, a different kind of shock than an accident victim experiences. I can’t explain it. I’ve never seen anything like it.5
There was no autopsy and, apparently, the body was cremated soon afterward.6
Doctors saw no evidence that he had suffered a heart attack.7
The obvious question was asked by investigative reporter, Geraldo Rivera:
But why would Lee Bowers have been killed when it seemed that he had already told all he knew?8
Well, there was, reportedly, a very good answer to that: The documentary stated that Bowers confided in his minister that he had seen “more than he had told publicly.”
1 Robert J. Groden & Harrison Edward Livingstone, High Treason: The Assassination of JFK and the Case for Conspiracy (Carroll & Graf: 1998)
2 Penn Jones, Jr., “Disappearing Witnesses”
3 Welsh, “In the Shadow of Dallas”.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid.
8 Geraldo Rivera, “The Curse of JFK,” May 6, 1992, Now It Can Be Told: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcXJJsZs7LE
A friend of Bowers, Walter Rischel, told reporters that Bowers had been afraid to tell all that he actually witnessed during the JFK assassination. Rischel said that Bowers had confided him with information that was much more specific about the assassination, bu
t that he was afraid to “go public” with it for some very good reasons.1
Lee had disappeared for about two days—one night I know for sure—which was very uncharacteristic of him. And when he came back, one of his fingers was missing on one of his hands. So Lee gave Monty (his brother) some excuse for what had happened, which Monty didn’t accept. So he called the local hospitals, the clinics, and some doctor’s offices, and there was no record of anyone, certainly not Lee, going in and having that taken care of.2
Shortly afterward, he was killed in the mysterious auto accident.
Author Gerald Posner and researcher David Perry before him, have attempted to preclude the tale of Bowers’ death as nothing more than sensationalism. As Posner put it, it was “conclusively proved” that Bowers’ death was accidental.3 Posner is apparently referring to the article by Mr. Perry, Now It Can Be Told: The Lee Bowers Story.4 Posner and Perry are primarily referring to the criticisms of the investigatory work in a Geraldo Rivera documentary that investigates the death of Lee Bowers, and certain claims which were aired on the program.5 Some of the criticisms of that program were very valid; others, in our opinion, were not. It is actually an excellent brief documentary that you can watch online: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcXJJsZs7LE
Hit List: An In-Depth Investigation Into the Mysterious Deaths of Witnesses to the JFK Assassination Page 18