by Jim Marrs
It does stretch the imagination to the breaking point to believe that Lyndon Johnson would have been stupid enough to allow a convicted hit man who could be connected to him within fifty miles of Dallas on November 22, 1963. Some researchers theorize that Wallace’s prints may have been planted on the sixth floor by someone else in an effort to ensure Johnson’s ongoing cooperation.
James E. Files, born James Sutton, on the other hand, also was a soldier and has claimed to be the Grassy Knoll gunman. He definitely can be connected to both the government (both CIA and military) and the Chicago mob.
Entering the US Army in 1959, Files said he was eventually sent to Laos to operate with secret counterinsurgency US forces called “White Star” teams. Colonel Fletcher L. Prouty confirmed to this author that he was involved with such teams but had never heard of Files. While in the military, Files said, he was recruited into CIA operations by David Atlee Phillips, the same person Judyth Vary Baker named as Oswald’s handler.
After leaving the military, Files said, he became a race car driver and was recruited as a driver by Charles “Chuckie” Nicoletti, described as a premier hit man for the Chicago Mafia. Files said it was Nicoletti who sent him to Dallas with a Chevrolet Impala loaded with guns after an assassination attempt on Kennedy in Chicago failed in early November 1963.
Once in Dallas, Files said, he called David Phillips to inform him he had arrived and soon he was visited at his motel by Lee Harvey Oswald, who arrived driving a green pickup truck similar to one owned by Jack Ruby. Although Oswald reportedly had no driver’s license, such a technicality has never stopped others from driving. As will be seen, this was not the only incident of Oswald driving a vehicle. Files said Oswald drove him around showing road exits out of Dallas. Files said he then knew the operation was being orchestrated by Phillips, since no one in the Chicago mob knew Oswald.
By the morning of November 22, 1963, his boss Nicoletti had arrived in Dallas along with mobster Johnny Roselli, who claimed to have flown in on a “military flight.” Files said on orders from Nicoletti, he drove Roselli to nearby Fort Worth, where he watched as Roselli received a package from a man at a pancake restaurant. On the drive back to Dallas, Roselli told Files the man was a mob-connected nightclub owner named Jack Ruby and that the package contained phony Secret Service identification as well as security plans for Kennedy’s motorcade. As outlandish as this may sound, it is supported by Ruby’s sister Eva Grant, who later told authorities that Ruby had the motorcade security plans in advance. A letter marked “personal and confidential” to Dallas police chief Jesse Curry from Dallas FBI chief J. Gordon Shanklin dated April 13, 1964, reported that Grant told the bureau that “we” had been given a copy of the security plans for Kennedy’s visit prior to his arrival.
Later that morning, despite the overcast weather with some drizzle, Files said, he and Nicoletti strolled along the Grassy Knoll in Dealey Plaza, laying their plans. Nicoletti said Roselli mentioned an “abort team” to stop the assassination and that he was getting cold feet about involving CIA personnel. Files was told Roselli wanted out and that Nicoletti recruited him as backup. It was understood that Files was not to fire from the knoll unless it appeared that Kennedy might leave the plaza alive, and that Mrs. Kennedy was not to be harmed.
Files said the weapon he chose was an experimental model Remington XP-100 .222-caliber pistol with a foregrip called the “Fireball.” A gunsmith for the mob had loaded the bullet tips with mercury, which created an explosive effect. According to Files, the mercury created “all the killing power of a 30.06” in the smaller weapon.
As the motorcade came into alignment with his position, Files said, he decided he must make his shot. He fired one round that struck Kennedy in his right temple (from Files’s position, this was initially described as the left temple causing considerable confusion and criticism until he clarified it). After biting on the shell casing and leaving it behind on the knoll’s wooden picket fence as a “calling card,” Files then loaded the Fireball into a briefcase and casually walked away to join Nicoletti and Roselli at a car parked near the Dal-Tex Building, from where Files later learned Nicoletti had fired a rifle. The trio drove away unchallenged.
This whole convoluted story began in 1987 when a Dallas-area man named John Rademacher told Texas assassination researchers he had recently found two .222-caliber shell cases with the aid of a metal detector on the Grassy Knoll. One was located about ten feet east of the picket fence close to the pergola where Zapruder stood, while the other was some sixty feet farther to the northeast. One of the casings had an odd-shaped ring around the neck.
Among those who heard Rademacher’s account was Texas private investigator Joseph H. West, who had already developed an intense interest in the JFK assassination case. West previously had gathered information that Nicoletti and Roselli may have been involved. Nationally syndicated columnist Jack Anderson wrote that Roselli on more than one occasion had indicated to him that he may have participated in the assassination. A 1999 book by Salvatore “Bill” Bonanno, the son of crime boss Joseph Bonanno, also claimed Roselli played a role in the assassination. Offering no evidence, Bonanno said Roselli fired from a drainpipe along Elm Street and was aided by French mobsters.
It must be emphasized that Files himself never sought publicity by going public with his story. This was the result of a tip from retired FBI agent Zechariah “Zack” Shelton, who had worked organized-crime cases during his time with the bureau. Shelton told West in the early 1990s that if anyone left alive knew about the assassination, it was most probably James Files, who by then was serving time in the Statesville Correctional Center in Joliet, Illinois, in a separate case involving the shooting of a police officer. West subsequently tracked down Files and approached him for his story. Files initially refused to talk but eventually warmed up to the personable West and finally agreed to talk, with the understanding that he would not betray anyone in the mob who was still alive.
West prepared for a formal taped interview with Files. About this same time, he filed a forty-five-page motion in federal district court to have the body of President Kennedy exhumed and examined by forensic pathologists, including Dr. Charles Wetli, the deputy chief medical examiner of Dade County, Florida. In an affidavit, Dr. Wetli said a postmortem examination could show whether Kennedy’s body had been tampered with in an attempt to skew the autopsy results. “If we’re given an opportunity to exhume, it will settle all these arguments,” said West. His motion was rejected by federal judge Norman Black but West said he planned to appeal to the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals.
Before either his appeal or the Files interview could take place, West entered a hospital for heart surgery in early 1993. He did not recover and those close to his situation, including his wife, did not believe his death was a natural one. His exhumation suit was dismissed for lack of prosecution and the Files interview was turned over to Houston photographer/researcher Robert G. Vernon, who proceeded with the Files interview.
After initial taping had been completed, Vernon learned from Files about his biting on a shell casing following the assassination and recalled the Rademacher story from West’s notes. Vernon obtained the shell casing from Rademacher and sent it to Dr. Paul G. Stimson of Houston, a member of the American Board of Oral Pathology and the American Board of Forensic Pathology. No mention was made of the Kennedy assassination; Stimson was simply asked to analyze the .222 Remington spent casing. In a letter dated October 4, 1993, Dr. Stimson, after describing in detail the marks on the casing, concluded, “The indentations are oriented on the shell casing in a pattern that would be consistent with the maxillary right central incisor making the larger mark and the two smaller marks would be consistent with the lower right central and lateral incisors. It is my opinion that the marks are consistent with having been made by human dentition.”
Human teeth marks on the casing appeared to be tangible evidence that connected Files with the Grassy Knoll. However, like so much else in the
assassination case, giant holes began to appear in this story.
Once informed of the JFK assassination connection, Dr. Stimson backtracked on his analysis of the casing marks as from human teeth. In addition, there has never been any explanation for the second .222-caliber shell casing found on the Grassy Knoll. Files said he fired only one. Other details of Files’s story also failed to check out. Some researchers suspected that West may have unconsciously passed along assassination information in the form of questions to Files that he used to bolster his claims.
A final blow to Files’s account may have come in 2006, when researcher Allan Eaglesham, following a painstaking investigation into the little-known world of ballistics and headstamps on ammunition, published a paper titled “The Tell-Tale Dash: James Files and the Dented Cartridge Case,” in which he demonstrated that the .222 shell casings Radenmacher found could not have been manufactured before 1971. If proven correct, this dismisses them, and hence Files’s account, as true assassination evidence.
Then there is the strange case of John Christian, who in a 2010 deathbed confession claimed he was the Grassy Knoll gunman.
Calling himself a “wild child,” Christian grew up hunting in rural Texas. He claimed he could “hit a frog’s eye with a non-military rifle.” His mother abused him, sometimes beating him with a two-by-four board. Christian said he ran away from home before he was ten years old and “took care of himself.” Often in trouble with the law, he was given the choice between jail or the military. Finishing training at Fort Polk, Louisiana, in early 1963, Christian said, he was sent by train to Alaska, where he distinguished himself with his shooting prowess.
In late November 1963, Christian said he was pulled out of field maneuvers and told he was to eliminate a threat to national security. He learned his target was to be President Kennedy, who he was told was “doing a lot of drugs” and would likely start World War III. “I felt I was just a patriotic man doing my job,” said Christian later.
On November 21, Christian said, he was flown by helicopter to Eielson Air Force Base near Fairbanks, Alaska, and from there via military plane to Carswell Air Force Base in Fort Worth, Texas. He was then taken to the Cellar club in downtown Fort Worth, where he slept on the floor of the kitchen while Secret Service agents were “debriefed” in the main club area. The next morning, he was driven to Dallas and given a choice of weapons in the vehicle’s truck. “I chose one with an open sight—no scope,” he said.
Lying prone on a mat along the north–south axis of the wooden picket fence atop the Grassy Knoll, Christian said, he fired a rifle through a small gap in the fence. He said there were men in suits to shield him from any interference. After he struck Kennedy in the head, he said he simply walked away while another man left with the rifle wrapped in a coat and yet another picked up the mat.
Christian’s most astounding claim was that he was returned to his base in Alaska by a high-flying jet and arrived there in time to stand with an honor guard that evening for the fallen president.
He said he left the Army within two years on a hardship discharge and returned to north Texas. After a stint as a mercenary, he eventually became a rural county judge with a respectable reputation. In 2006 he was diagnosed with inoperable cancer and decided to tell his story to attorney Sheila Grace Neal of Azle, Texas. Neal confirmed one of Christian’s claims—that he had paid no taxes since 1965. This apparently was partial payment for his role in the assassination. “I’ve seen his tax records,” reported Neal. “He owed taxes but he was never required to pay them.”
Christian died from cancer in June 2010, just days after giving his account to this author. Like other assassination stories, at this late date and because he claimed his military records were all stolen from him by “men in suits” in the late 1960s, there appeared no way to independently corroborate his confession.
A recent addition to the confessed gunmen is a man who only called himself “Anonymous.” In the book The Man on the Grassy Knoll, reportedly published posthumously in 2011, he tells a compelling but dubious tale of being recruited out of college by a CIA operative named “Mr. Smith.” This tale concerns a conspiracy of only three—the anonymous narrator, Smith, and Lee Harvey Oswald, whom he knew only as Ozzie Hidell. His story could have been acquired from assassination literature and there are some questionable statements: Jack Ruby acted entirely on his own, Oswald’s employment at the Depository was a sheer accident, and the conspirators shared drinks in a downtown Dallas hotel at a time when no one could buy mixed drinks in the city.
The same problem of buying alcoholic drinks in dry 1963 Dallas appeared in the confession of an assassin called only “Saul” in a 1975 book, Appointment in Dallas: The Final Solution to the Assassination of JFK, by former Los Angeles County sheriff’s detective Hugh C. McDonald. Saul confessed to McDonald during a one-time meeting in England that he fired on Kennedy from the Dallas County Records Building.
Serious researchers believe that as a means of cover-up, several credible persons were spoon-fed such false “confessions” to confuse future investigators, a common disinformation practice in the intelligence field.
While there is a lack of evidence to support such stories, they do serve as a good example of how a truly experienced sniper could have been insinuated into any number of assassination plots. The shooter could do his job and walk away without any contact or knowledge of any other participants. This type of redundant backup contingency also is typical of military/intelligence planning. Such a tactic ensures that a morass of false leads and red herrings are left behind to confuse investigators.
So it would appear that the best guess for the Grassy Knoll gunman is that of Roscoe White, whose story also has been dismissed by most due to the lack of verification even after nationwide publicity.
Roscoe Anthony White, nicknamed Rock, reportedly left behind a diary detailing his role in the assassination. This became known through his son, Ricky Don White, a high school football hero from Paris, Texas. Ricky White said involvement in the assassination case may have begun in early childhood, when he recalled a hunting trip with his father to west Texas in the fall of 1963. He saw his father practice shooting rifles with two other men from high positions into an open car.
He also recalled that on the Sunday Ruby killed Oswald, the elder White arrived home, appeared very agitated, and suddenly left Dallas with his family.
Earlier, on October 7, 1963, White had joined the Dallas Police Department. While in training he was assigned to the Crime Scene Search Section, which included work in the police photographic lab. He resigned from the police in October 1965 and in 1971 was killed in a freak explosion at a Dallas business where he worked as a shop foreman. He received a Masonic funeral on September 27, 1971.
Ricky White recalled that in 1975 investigators from the House Select Committee on Assassinations questioned his mother, Geneva, about her employment with Jack Ruby and a backyard photograph of Lee Oswald never before known to exist. The existence of this unpublicized third backyard Oswald photo—and especially the fact that the exact pose in this photo was re-created by authorities in a photo published by the Warren Commission—proved that evidence against Oswald was suppressed while in the hands of the government.
It was during the time of the committee that a neighbor warned Ricky that the HSCA might make public his father’s name in connection with the assassination. He was told that Roscoe had belonged to something called “JTAG” (“Don’t ask me what that means,” said the neighbor who claimed to have worked for US intelligence), a team of specially trained soldiers sent into different countries to create wars and conflicts, including assassination plots.
When White’s name was never mentioned by the HSCA, Ricky White tried to forget the whole thing. By 1982, he and his family were living in west Texas, when he received word that his grandfather W. S. Toland had died. The Toland family had acted as surrogate parents to Ricky.
Following the funeral, family members gathered at Toland’
s Paris home and were going through his effects. It was in a storage shed in the backyard that Ricky found an old Marine footlocker belonging to Roscoe. Inside were a Bell and Howell camera, several press clippings regarding the JFK assassination, a bank deposit box key, and a small book filled with handwritten notes. The book was a diary that mentioned $500,000 in bearer bonds in a bank deposit box.
Ricky found the diary entry for November 22, 1963, chilling. He read it over and over, committing it to memory. He recalled that it stated:
Lebanon [a code name for one of the assassins] (Sixth Floor), Saul [another code name] (Records Building), Mandarin [Roscoe White’s code name] (Stockade Fence). Shots fired from upper buildings for diversion. Shots fired, looks as if target was hit. Shot from fence, definite hit. Man on other side fence in way. Shots again from upper buildings, no hit. Target open, fired, definite hit. Gun retrieved by man to the side, took to railroad area. Whirled over fence, took man down to protect myself. Ran around back of fence, down embankment to car. Drove to Oak Cliff, met officer. Told officer not to drive by house. Something was at this point wrong. Forced to take out officer at 10th and Patton. Not going as planned. Back tracked to car, drove back to the area of take out to locate other passenger. Failed to transport subject to Redbird. Realized what a mistake I had made, hope it is all over. Back to DPD awaiting information.
Ricky immediately took this information to his mother, who had briefly worked for Jack Ruby in the fall of 1963. She told him she knew nothing of the diary but that she had suspected Roscoe may have had something to do with the assassination.
Not certain how to proceed, in 1988 Ricky contacted Midland, Texas, district attorney Al Schorre for help in opening the bank deposit box. He also told Schorre about the diary. Schorre and his assistant initially were excited over the find, as were some local oilmen who financed Ricky’s efforts to investigate the matter. The FBI was notified. Agents made a duplicate of the bank deposit box key but Ricky was never able to access the box. “I think the FBI made $500,000,” he speculated later. With the federal government involvement, local interest waned.