Hit List: An In-Depth Investigation Into the Mysterious Deaths of Witnesses to the JFK Assassination
Page 25
There is also a link to the JFK assassination in this case that could not be more obvious:
. . . Warren Commission investigators started taking their testimony in New Orleans on the morning of July 21, 1964, several hours after Mary Sherman’s murder. Some consider this coincidental timing suspicious, and have speculated that her death may have somehow been related to the Kennedy assassination or to her association with David Ferrie.2
1 Ibid, 232-271.
2 Ibid, 134, emphasis added.
• Only an intensely focused and directed force of extremely high energy—such as a lightning bolt, or a beam of high-voltage electricity or radiation—would be capable of creating the extent of damage sustained in the victim. Therefore:
• Victim, necessarily, had to have sustained the first set of burns somewhere other than the official crime scene (her home), and at a time prior to being taken to her home and then set afire.
• Few devices capable of rendering such a directed beam of high-intensity energy were in existence in 1964:
The partial charring of her scalp (without burning the rest of her hair) is evidence that this device focused its energy very precisely. Very few pieces of equipment would be capable of producing such a combination of burns. A linear particle accelerator is one.1
1 Ibid, 237.
Dramatic Inconsistencies Concerning the Death
of Dr. Mary S. Sherman
1. It is impossible that the fire burned hot enough to cause the extreme damage to the right side of her body, literally disintegrating her entire right arm and the right portion of her chest and stomach. The hair on her body was unburned. The mattress was smoldering, but not burning, and clothing was singed, but not aflame . . . but the right side of her body was totally vaporized, bone and all. No apparent cause could have inflicted such extreme damage. It has been suggested that her sensitive work with a linear particle accelerator was the actual source of the injury. No other viable explanation currently exists.1
2. Forensics revealed that the clothing was placed atop her body after death but prior to the arrival of emergency personnel.2
3. Most of the stab wounds were post-mortem, in what could be termed a bizarre case of “reverse staging”—the crime scene was intentionally staged to make her death appear to be a case of murder. But the victim was apparently already dead in a previous location, and brought to the staged scene at her home.3
4. Also reportedly recovered at the crime scene were “blood-soaked gloves.”4 Those gloves may have yielded valuable DNA information, especially with the new technologies available. However, they were destroyed—along with much other preserved evidence from the Mary Sherman case—during the flood disaster in New Orleans that followed Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The classic observation by author James DiEugenio bears repeating, regarding the “blood-drenched gloves” found in her apartment: “Think about that one.”5
5. Dr. Sherman worked very closely with David Ferrie and Dr. Alton Ochsner, both of whom have been linked to Lee Harvey Oswald on a classified anti-Castro bioweapons project.6
1 Haslam, Dr. Mary’s Monkey
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid, 9.
5 James DiEugenio, “Posner in New Orleans: Gerry in Wonderland,” Citizens for Truth about the Kennedy Assassination, accessed 11 Dec. 2012: http://www.ctka.net/posner_jd.html
6 Baker, Me & Lee
1. Testimony for Warren Commission investigators began in New Orleans on the same day that Dr. Sherman was killed.1
2. Judyth Baker—who had worked on the cancer project with Dr. Sherman, Dr. Ochsner, David Ferrie, and Lee Harvey Oswald—was warned by David Ferrie, after Oswald was arrested, that she too would be killed if she told what she knew.2
3. Signs of a cover-up included:
• Police classified it as a burglary, then issued a press blackout;3
• The fact that her arm was missing was withheld from the public;4
• Her FBI file revealed a letter from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover directing his agents not to assist New Orleans Police with an investigation;5
• Her body was cremated, precluding further forensic investigation.6
• Police reports were withheld for almost thirty years.7
• Author John Davis, in the book Mafia Kingfish: Carlos
Marcello and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy, wrote that Dr. Sherman’s death may have been related to Ferrie’s death and that she was “David Ferrie’s closest female friend.”8
• A “misinformation” job (and a sloppy one at that) was done by Gerald Posner in the book Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK. Mr. Posner made quite a few evidentiary errors regarding the Dr. Sherman crime scene in the section of his book very transparently entitled “The Non-Mysterious Mystery Deaths”; proving yet again that some people—as the old saying goes—just refuse to let the facts get in the way of a good story.9
1 James DiEugenio, “Posner in New Orleans”
2 Baker, Me & Lee
3 Haslam, Dr. Mary’s Monkey
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid.
8 John H. Davis, Mafia Kingfish: Carlos Marcello and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy (McGraw-Hill: 1988).
9 Haslam, Dr. Mary’s Monkey, 135: citing Gerald Posner, Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK (Random House: 1993).
Conclusions
There is not yet sufficient evidence to conclusively prove a direct link between the death of Dr. Mary Sherman and the JFK assassination. However, Dr. Sherman was very clearly at work on a bioweapon that was ultra-secret in nature. Oddly, this is a case where an apparent medical accident, due to its nefarious and top-secret nature, had to be disguised, and the method chosen for that subterfuge was to disguise it as a murder. And it almost worked. Except for the fact that murderers could not disintegrate limbs with particle accelerators; at least not in 1964 they couldn’t. It’s possible that Dr. Sherman’s death was intentional, hence murder. But for the time being, the preponderance of evidence actually leads to the following conclusion:
Death by medical accident accompanied by “euthanasic termination”; Crime scene was then staged as a murder in order to preserve the secrecy of the top-secret research project with which she was involved.
FURTHER RESEARCH
Dr. Mary’s Monkey: How the unsolved murder of a doctor, a secret laboratory in New Orleans and cancer-causing monkey viruses are linked to Lee Harvey Oswald, the JFK assassination and emerging global epidemics, Edward T. Haslam, 2007, TrineDay
Me & Lee: How I Came to Know, Love and Lose Lee Harvey Oswald, Judyth Vary Baker, 2011, TrineDay
Mafia Kingfish: Carlos Marcello and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy, John H. Davis, 1988, McGraw-Hill
Wim Dankbaar, “Judyth Vary Baker,” JFK Murder Solved: http://www.jfkmurdersolved.com/judyth.htm
David Ferrie: Why He is Important in the Kennedy Assassination—And Efforts Being Made to Hide It, Judyth Vary Baker, April 6, 2011, James Fetzer: Exposing Falsehoods and Revealing Truths: http://jamesfetzer.blogspot.com/2011/04/david-ferrie-why-he-is-important-in.html
The Mystery of David Ferrie, John S. Craig, July, 1995, Fair Play Magazine: http://acorn.net/jfkplace/09/fb.back_issues/05th_Issue/ferrie.html
Victim
FBI Director, J. Edgar Hoover
Cause of Death
Heart attack
Official Verdict
Natural Causes
For an incredible span of forty-eight years, John Edgar Hoover maintained control of the FBI like a pariah, blackmailing politicians to the extent that even President Truman and President Kennedy were afraid to cross him because they deemed the political “cost” too high.1 As one author aptly summed up his reign of power controlled by the fear of what was in his confidential files:
1 Richard Hack, Puppetmaster: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover(Phoenix Books: 2007).
33
J. Edgar Hoover,
May 2, 1972
Hoover does not have to exert pressure, he is pressure.1
Hoover’s death has been regarded as suspicious by some members of the research community.2 Though Hoover knew much about the assassination of President Kennedy (and much about just about everything) and was instrumental in the cover-up (he apparently helped engineer the suppression of information), his death does not appear to be the result of that. We researched the circumstances and, if anything, it appears to be more related to the events of Watergate, which took place in the same time frame of when Hoover died.
We obtained one report that was very interesting. Researcher extraordinaire, Mae Brussell, believed Hoover’s death was indeed related to Watergate and the fact that Hoover possessed damaging information about the Nixon Administration:
There is considerable evidence that he may have known about the White House “dirty tricks.”
An article in the Harvard Crimson quotes Felipe De Diego, a Cuban exile who took part in the break-in at psychiatrist Daniel Ellsberg’s office, as saying:
Two burglaries took place at Hoover’s Washington home. The first was in the winter of 1972 to retrieve documents that might be used for blackmail against the White House.
“After the first burglary,” according to Diego, “a second burglary was carried out; this time, whether by design or misunderstanding, a poison, thyonphosphate genre, was placed in Hoover’s personal toilet articles. Hoover died shortly after that.”
Thyonphosphate genre is a drug that induces heart seizures. Its presence in a corpse is undetectable without an autopsy. No autopsy was ever performed on the body of J. Edgar Hoover.3
Apparently, it would not have been the first time:
In 1975, The Washington Post reported: “E. Howard Hunt, the former CIA agent who helped engineer the Ellsberg and Watergate burglaries, told associates that he was ordered to kill (Jack) Anderson with an untraceable poison obtained from a former CIA doctor, but that the scheme was dropped at the last minute.”4
The history leading up to the Watergate scandal and Hoover’s death are very interesting, as the two events clearly intersect:
1 Jan Knippers Black, United States Penetration of Brazil (University of Pennsylvania Press: 1977).
2 Malcom Abrams, “30 Watergate Witnesses Have Met Violent Deaths,” 12 July 1976, Midnight Magazine: http://www.maebrussell.com/Mae%20Brussell%20Articles/Watergate%20Deaths.html
3 Abrams, “30 Watergate Witnesses Have Met Violent Deaths”
4 Michael Benson, Who’s Who in the JFK Assassination: An A to Z Encyclopedia (Citadel: 2003), 208.
Nixon had instituted a White House intelligence unit in 1971, and Hoover had objected. It would have taken power and influence away from the FBI. It was only a short time later that Hoover suffered break-ins of his apartment (shared with Clyde Tolson, his longtime associate and reputed lover). These break-ins were sworn to by Felipe De Diego, past associate of E. Howard Hunt, under the direction of former FBI man G. Gordon Liddy. Hunt and Liddy were later connected with the Watergate break-in.
Prior to the Watergate burglary of the Democratic National Convention, Attorney General John Mitchell ordered the FBI to wiretap selected organizations and influential people. Hoover agreed to the task, but insisted that he keep the original transcripts of the tapes in his secret files so they could not be changed. Mitchell then asked his close friend, Robert Mardian, to get the transcripts from Hoover’s secret vault and remove them to John Ehrlichman’s safe in the White House. The man who was assigned this mission was a senior FBI official named William Sullivan. Sullivan was later killed in a strange “hunting accident.”1
We cover the very strange and very self-predicted “accidental” death of William Sullivan in the following chapter.
By this time, Hoover was a marked man. The Nixon administration had already demonstrated the intention to remove anyone who got in its way, and Hoover was surely in the path of politics.
The Committee to Reelect the President (CREEP) set up its own intelligence operation, staffed with former CIA and FBI employees and other renegade mercenaries, who would shore up Nixon’s empire against all future comers. One of those who posed a serious threat at this time was Hoover. It is speculated that he knew the truth about the Nixon/Kennedy Assassination connection and was prepared to take Nixon down in self-defense by revealing what he knew. It was at this critical time that Hoover died.2
Veteran researcher Pat Speer also noted the importance of the context in Hoover’s death:
Over the next few months, both G. Gordon Liddy and Pat Buchanan wrote extensive analyses for Nixon, explaining why he had to sack Hoover, but Nixon kept backing down. In early ’72, shortly after Hunt first contacted Bernie Barker, someone broke into the FBI office in
Meridian Pennsylvania and began distributing documents to the media, which included the words COINTEL PRO. The revelations of FBI agents-provocateur targeting the anti-war movement among others spurred Hale Boggs to publicly criticize Hoover on the floor of Congress. Many thought this was the end of Hoover. But he somehow hung on. Then bam, he died in his sleep.
1 Roberts & Armstrong, The Dead Witnesses, 77-78.
2 Ibid, 78.
A month later the Watergate burglars were captured.
I’ve often wondered if Nixon didn’t have Hoover killed, and if someone—maybe McCord, maybe the CIA—figured it out, and arranged for the Watergate bubble to burst.
I believe it’s as likely Hoover was murdered as Sullivan.1
Researchers Craig Roberts and John Armstrong determined that the theory on the “mode of death” is not as outlandish as it may at first seem:
Hoover’s cause of death is listed as “hyperactive cardiovascular disease.” Basically, this is a heart attack. Yet no history of heart problems exists and no autopsy was performed to confirm the “findings.”
On December 12, 1973, an article in the Harvard Crimson appeared, reporting that two burglaries of Hoover’s apartment had occurred, and that during the second entry, Hoover’s “toilet articles” were coated with a solution of thyon-phosphate poison, that, when touched, caused an immediate heart muscle seizure. Other sources mention the use of sodium-morphate, which accomplishes the same results.
It must be noted here that Hoover believed that separate bullets, fired from different locations, struck Governor Connally and President Kennedy. He also believed that the Oswald who defected to the Soviet Union was an imposter and that the real Lee Harvey Oswald was still running around loose somewhere.2
Conclusions Based On Evidentiary Indications
Possible Murder: Not specifically linked to JFK assassination.
1 Pat Speer, “Was William Sullivan Murdered?” 19 April 2005: http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=3694&st=0
2 Ibid, 78-79.
Victims
Louis Nichols, Assistant FBI Director (Third in command of FBI)
Alan Belmont (FBI Liaison to Warren Commission)
James Cadigan (FBI document expert who examined evidence)
Donald Kaylor (FBI fingerprint expert who worked case)
J.M. English (Head of FBI Forensics Laboratory)
William Sullivan (Head of Division Five, Domestic Intelligence)
Official Cause of Death
Louis Nichols: Heart attack
June, 1977
Alan Belmont: “Long illness”
August, 1977
James Cadigan: “Accidental fall at home”
August, 1977
Donald Kaylor: Heart attack
October, 1977
J.M. English: Heart attack
October, 1977
William Sullivan: “Hunting accident”
November 9, 1977
Official Verdict
Natural causes and accidents; no foul play in any cases.
Inconsistencies
1. Statistically, the odds of six top FBI officials—all with information directly related to the JFK assassinat
ion—dying within a six-month period and prior to their scheduled testimony as witnesses before a Congressional committee investigating the assassination, are sufficiently astronomical as to make their natural occurrence literally impossible.572
2. William Sullivan specifically predicted that he would be murdered and that it would be made to appear as an accident. It was not a casual or flippant remark, but rather a precise statement that occurred exactly as he had predicted it would.
34–39
Six Top FBI Officials Linked to the JFK
Assassination Who
Died in a 6-Month
Period, Prior to Their Scheduled Testimony
The deaths of witnesses increased dramatically during the 1970s, when the House Select Committee on Intelligence Activities and the House Select Committee on Assassinations began scheduling witnesses to appear before their committees. Gangsters linked to the assassination started dropping like flies, and at exactly the same time too.1 Among them were top Chicago crime boss Sam Giancana, his top hitman, Chuck Nicoletti, and their link to the CIA’s Castro assassination program, Johnny Roselli. Other Chicago mobsters included Richard Cain and Dave Yaras, mobbed-up Jimmy Hoffa, LBJ-affiliated hitman Mac Wallace, Lucien Sarti, Carlos Prío Socarrás, Rolando Masferrer, and George de Mohrenschildt. It read like a Who’s Who of the CIA’s Mafia connections, especially as it related to the Agency’s anti-Castro operations—and they were all conveniently dead.