2021 JFK Assassination Conference

Mark Mueller’s Death Deck Surrounding the #JFK Assassination. Out of order, but starting with Jim Reeves, who knew both Jack Ruby and Lee Harvey Oswald, had a phenomenal memory. Not only a country star but a pilot who may have been a courier of some kind. Buried in Carthage. Who Knew? Our Hale Boggs, on road to being Speaker of the House, and began to doubt the Warren Commission. Plane went down in Alaska. Bill Clinton drove him to the airport.

Others:

Officer J.D. Tippitt, first, at 1:06 p.m. Nov. 22, 1963

Lee Harvey Oswald

Karyn Kupcinet, called an operator 20 minutes before the assassination to say JFK would be shot, daughter of a columnist, died of broken neck

Grant Stockdale, ambassador to Ireland, fell from a building

Betty McDonald or "Nancy Jane Moody," dancer, strangled and hung by her own trousers

Domingo Benavidez, witness to Tippit

Hank Killam, painter, wife worked for Ruby, called a suicide from a plate glass window. Rare way to kill oneself. Coroner said his lone injury was a three-inch deep laceration to his neck. Investigators came to the conclusion that Killam likely threw himself through the storefront window, cut his neck on the glass and crawled onto the sidewalk. Throwing a person or thing out of a window is called defenestration.

Gary Underhill, CIA, gunshot behind ear, predicted his own murder

Hugh Ward, a pilot David Ferrie taught, plane crash

Guy Banister

Dr. Mary Sherman, same day Warren Commission came to NOLA

Jim Koethe, reporter, karate chop as he got out of the shower

Bill Hunter, reporter

Tom Howard--Ruby replaced him as attorney

Mary Meyer, married to CIA guy Cord Meyer, had alleged affair with JFK. Her sister Tony was married to Ben Bradlee.

Rose Cherami, said she knew of assassination in advance, hit by a bus, son Dr. Michael Marcades, wrote a touching book (South Louisiana connection you may recall)

Dorothy Kilgallen had a big story coming out, ruled suicide

Florence Pritchett Smith, married to ambassador to Cuba

Earlene Roberts, Oswald landlady, said to be partially blind in one eye

Al Bogard—car salesman, 24 hours after the assassination, the FBI received a report that a man calling himself Lee Oswald had visited a Dallas car showroom on Nov. 9, to discuss the purchase of a used car and on a demonstration drive rattled a car salesman by driving at speeds of up to 80. Said the customer didn’t have money yet, but would. Account was corroborated by two of his colleagues, one of whom remembered "Oswald" saying in view of the high prices he might have to "Go back to Russia, where they treat workers like men." The showroom was very near to the TSBD, where, of course, the real Oswald was working. Supposedly carbon monoxide poisoning.

Lee Bowers, reported seeing two men standing near the picket fence on the Grassy Knoll. Car hit concrete bridge abutment, said to be poisoned in coffee before

Marilyn Welle, dancer, but may be domestic assault

Lt. Cmdr. William Pitzer, autopsy photographer, Great note taker, about to retire, called suicide, no note. Daniel Marvin claimed to have been solicited by an agent of the CIA to "terminate" him.

Acquilla Clemons, told not to talk about Tippit, was eyewitness

David Ferrie—his stomach was not pumped

Eladio del Valle, anti-Castro Cuban associate of Ferrie being sought by Jim Garrison, shot and ax to head

Robert Kennedy

J. Edgar Hoover, Hale Boggs had called for his resignation

Clyde Tolson, Hoover’s good friend and roomie

Richard Cain, possible gunman

Sam Giancana, Mafia boss, someone got in his house and shot him four or five times in the mouth

Jimmy Hoffa

Johnny Roselli, mobster set to testify again, someone got him from wire from behind with wire, in oil drum in the ocean

John Paisley, CIA, body found fixed to diving weights, shot in the head, but recorded as suicide

Chuck Nicoletti, Mafia, “Chuckie the Typewriter”

George de Mohrenschildt, CIA contract agent, shotgun and ruled suicide

Gary Powers, CIA pilot

Louis Nichols, FBI

Alan Belmont, FBI liaison to Warren Commission

James Cadigan, document expert, accidental fall

Donald Kaylor, fingerprint chemist

J.M. English, forensics

William Sullivan, FBI, hunting accident, predicted his death.

At least 70 of 1,400 JFK material witnesses died unnaturally (10 expected). The probability Is less than 1 in 700 million trillion.

What died besides JFK on that fateful day was truth, hope and some popular movements, said the winner of the Justice for Lee Harvey Oswald Award.

What a jigsaw puzzle the assassination is. No one could organize all the parts on purpose. What politician would now say the government has lied to us? (I think Trump might). How will we get on the right trajectory to learn the truth?  Ever wonder why Kennedy’s was a public assassination?

First speaker Barr McClelland said Jackie said, “Don’t ever say LBJ in my presence again.”

Barbara Honegger went over conspiracies. Was Sen. John Tower perhaps assassinated? Tower and his daughter were collaborating on a second "tell-all" book about Iran-Contra that was reportedly going to "name names" and were killed in a plane crash.

Dr. Cyril Wecht said Kennedy and John Connally were 30 inches apart. The motorcycle behind the motorcade was splattered with blood so much that the driver thought he had been shot. How can a bullet shot down from the Texas School Book Depository go upwards in a body (magic bullet). The skull was intact and nothing was in the coffin? What?

The British royal family wanted to buy the watch JFK was wearing because it bore traces of mercury from the mercury bullet from the grassy knoll. Why the British wasn’t stated. Which led me to Google Presidential watches.

Were there two Lee Harvey Oswalds? #Duplicate Because the famous Life picture with the gun, “Backyard Man,” has been thoroughly examined with Blender 3D technology tools. Larry Rivera used grids, overlays and textures. There are several versions of the photo and the poses are not the same. In one, Oswald is not wearing a ring on either finger. In another, he has a ring on his right finger. In another he has a ring on his left finger and is wearing a watch. Dallas Police Officer Roscoe White was trained in photography. He was one of Officer J.D. Tippit’s best friends, but was not at his funeral. Roscoe has a similar pose of himself on a beach and the Backyard Man lines up like that. Rivera measured interpupillary distance and the cleft. The photos were found in Ruth Paine’s garage. Apparently, there are no aerial photos of that fateful day; someone asked.

They say LHO mail-ordered a gun. Why would anyone use a rifle with a paper trail to kill a President?

The Harper Fragment was a piece of bone from President Kennedy's skull that was discovered in Dealey Plaza on the day after he was assassinated. Many have argued that it proves that Kennedy was shot from the front. The fragment is supposedly a piece of occipital bone from the very back of Kennedy's head. Billy Harper, who discovered the piece of bone, took the fragment to his uncle, Dr. Jack C. Harper, and Harper took the bone to Methodist Hospital where is was examined by Dr. A. B. Cairns, who was chief pathologist. His opinion was that "the bone specimen looked like it came from the occipital region of the skull." It’s possible that an animal moved the bone between the time Kennedy was shot and the time Harper discovered it over 24 hours later.

Roger Craig Jr.’s sheriff deputy father found a Mauser 7.65 at the TSBD. Others later said it was a different gun. HE WAS THERE. He was fired, got run off the road trying to dodge a car and was in the hospital a year. His car was also bombed when he went to visit Jim Garrison and he was burned in the chest. Something finally got him. His son does not think it was suicide; he just renewed his driver’s license and was writing his memoirs. He had bruises on his knees. The father also saw a dark-skinned person leave the scene in a Rambler wagon and let someone else talk to a suspicious lady in an Impala. His partner was a gun buff who had a sporting goods store. Suddenly what they said was a Mauser was called a 6.5 Italian carbine rifle. Craig was told he didn’t “hear or see anything.”

Vince Palamara said Gerald Behn, the Secret Service Special Agent in Charge for the White House detail, was not in Dallas. He was on his first full vacation that weekend. I don’t know if that means someone didn’t want him there or he was staying away on purpose. Palamera said the Secret Service has guarded multi-story rooftops since FDR and that the Secret Service is the boss of the President. They removed agents from the back of the car where they were normally stationed for obstruction. He said Clint Hill, who jumped into the car, was drinking the night before. There were some impersonators in Dealey Plaza. The body was taken illegally out of Texas.

How can one person know so many people? He said people just appear in his life. Douglas Caddy, JFK Conference speaker, was counsel for the Watergate burglars (E. Howard Hunt). And Billy Sol Estes. He learned of the assassination in the private office of Gov. Nelson Rockefeller. He once set up a card table to campaign for McCarthy in front of St. Louis Cathedral. He met Guy Banister at the Roosevelt Hotel. Hunt told him Kennedy was assassinated because he was about to disclose “Alien Presence” to the Soviet Union and that the CIA had an assassin unit. He also knew N.J. Gov. Charles Edison, son of Thomas Edison. He said Hoover and MacArthur played bridge with him and that he lived in the Waldorf. Caddy went with Bill Buckley to Edison’s lab. Buckley was godfather to Hunt’s kids. Caddy was roommates with Tongsun Park at Georgetown. He said Mac Wallace, an LBJ associate, (long story you would have to Google), had no redeeming qualities and there is no telling what he would do for LBJ. He said General Foods used CIA offices. Caddy called Oswald a patriot and it is unfair how he has been treated. He said it is a government cover-up. President Harry Truman once wrote an op-ed that said he was disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment and wanted it restored to its original assignment as the intelligence arm of the President. There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position and I feel that we need to correct it, Truman said.

Allen Dulles, tried to trick President Kennedy into sending U.S. forces to rescue the group of invaders who had landed on the beach at the Bay of Pigs, Cuba, in April 1961, with no chance of success, absent the speedy commitment of U.S. air and ground support. Kennedy fired Dulles and his co-conspirators a few months after the abortive invasion and told a friend that he wanted to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds.”

Judyth Baker, Oswald’s mistress, said he liked horses, biology and read Margaret Mead. Fall in love with life and Live Love were her messages. She said he taught her to walk with her feet straight ahead. She liked to be guided. He drew cartoons and liked pets, saying “Hello, Mr. Cat. Hello, Mr. Toad.” She said he made her more human; she was too much of a scientist, that he balanced her. Her husband would send her a postcard postmarked NOLA and say, “See you next time I come through.” She said they were both in horrible marriages. She added that someone came up with four wallets that belonged to Oswald. 

She gave germ-free mice cancer in seven days. David Ferrie’s mom had cancer. He had a big skeleton (for teaching cadets). He knew lots of languages. He was kicked out of two seminaries. 

I never thought about this before. In May 1963, JFK impersonator Vaughn Meader won the Grammy for Album of the Year for his comedy record “The First Family,” a spoof on the Kennedys, and was one of the nation’s most popular entertainers in the nation. Later, his life into a tragic downward spiral. After the assassination, the popular album was pulled from stores, along with its sequel, as Cadence Records didn’t want to appear to be making money on the murder of the president. Meader’s gigs were canceled and his career was effectively over.

A New Orleans tour guide spoke on an Oswald tour he gives. I ordered his book called The New Orleans GuideBook to Lee Harvey Oswald.

A Repainting History contest was held before the conference and one of the entries showed how everyone was a pawn.

People came from Liverpool, Phoenix, North Carolina, Virginia, Michigan, Maryland, Baton Rouge and the Desert Sun newspaper area.

My Mother’s JFK Treasure Leads To Finding Author Who Hasn’t Spoken To Media in 58 Years

By Mary Ann Van Osdell

A 15-year-old New York sophomore’s class assignment on President John Kennedy’s assassination went viral so to speak before social media even existed.

Barbara Jones Maher’s poem, “Special Delivery from Heaven,” was famous in 1963 and is still found on eBay. It was one of my mother’s treasures. It has been translated into 10 languages and made into a recording. People from all over the world (Europe and Asia) sent Barbara letters when they read it.

“This is the only time I have ever responded to someone wanting to talk about my JFK poem despite many such requests over the years,” Barbara said, adding that said has had her reasons for not speaking about it. “There seem to be a number of compelling reasons for me to do so at this moment in time,” she said.

“I felt the poem had little literary merit,” said Barbara, now 73, who has enjoyed writing since she was 5.

Her English class at Sacred Heart High School in Yonkers was asked to submit a eulogy for Kennedy for the school newspaper. Always obedient since it was a Catholic school, Barbara is still surprised she didn’t write a eulogy. “It was out of character for me.” She wrote the poem in 10 minutes.

“It came from my heart and was never meant for anyone else,” Barbara said. Yet it touched the city in which her father served as police lieutenant and later deputy chief (he worked on the Son of Sam case). He shared the raw copy with his precinct and so many others wanted copies that it was sent over the teletype system.

The school newspaper was being dedicated to the slain President. Because of Barbara’s sentiments, the New York Journal-American did a Sunday feature and other large newspapers also published -- before the Sacred Heart Green-Gold Echoes. The school newspaper lost the scoop.

“It went from friend to friend,” Barbara said. Her brother Edward, a student at Iona College, showed it around campus and he was also swamped with requests. More and more newspaper reporters got a hold of it.

“It just blew up,” Barbara said. “It gave people comfort.” Barbara said camera crews began following her around, even at the bowling alley.

The Post Office delivered mailbags to her high school and some put money in their letters. Barbara’s parents returned the money and responded personally to hundreds of letters “despite the expense of postage." The letters were kept in several large suitcases and poem-related articles and clippings were in several scrapbooks, but sadly their house was completely destroyed by fire. Barbara only has a few in her basement. Her father died as a result of the fire and her mother not long after.

Barbara got a formal thank you from Jacqueline Kennedy. The poem is in the Congressional Record. On  Jan. 15, 1964, in Rep. Jacob Gilbert’s extension of remarks, he called the poem “splendid” and  added that it had beautiful thoughts of a young lady that will touch everyone.

Notoriety was unwelcome to Barbara. She called herself a “nerd,” and most importantly, was someone who never wanted to profit from a murder. Barbara refused compensation for appearances in the tri-state area beyond gas and tolls.

Barbara did agree to read occasionally at her father's urging and they attended the annual Alfred E. Smith dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria. She wore a velvet gown and her father donned a tuxedo. She met Cardinal Francis Spellman and Bishop Fulton Sheen. Spellman founded the event in 1945 to raise funds for Catholic charities supporting children.

Barbara is also a lifetime member of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers.

She turned down four academically-earned college scholarships as well as two others offered by generous benefactors touched by her poem. Instead, she married her high school sweetheart Bobby at age 19. Sadly, he died of cancer just ten years later, leaving Barbara to raise their two little girls alone.

She lucked into a teaching job at her alma mater, later got a bachelor’s degree and a master’s in psychology in three years and has taught college classes.

Barbara said she never gave an English assignment that she wouldn’t do herself. The students did not write their names on their papers, but used identification numbers. Therefore, they could talk about the papers, not knowing who wrote them. She put her own work in the mix. 

A giant laminated copy of her poem was placed at Sacred Heart and later sent to her parents.

Barbara is now retired and enjoys a memoir writing group with a dozen talented people. Barbara takes great joy in having her daughters and teenage grandson living nearby.

Barbara said she never set out to defy her parents about getting a free education, but thought marriage was the right thing and has no regrets. “We had nothing and we had everything,” she said.

“I value the same things as before,” she added.

She met “wonderful, generous people” as a young poet. She says sometimes she just says, “It happened and I can’t believe it happened.”

However, “any number of people claim to have written it” and one could buy copies on plates and placards from others. It’s disheartening, but Barbara has come to terms about everything and will no longer rule out going to Kennedy memorials or conferences in the future.

She doesn’t have an opinion on who killed Kennedy. “I don’t know. At the time I knew little,” she said. “I was enamored with him and deeply moved, but have no strong feeling on who did it.”

Barbara remembers being in Mr. McCormick’s American history class when a rare notice came over the public address system. The announcement said, “Something terrible happened and we need to say a prayer.”

Later, the students were told about the assassination and Barbara said you could hear a pin drop. Class was dismissed early.

Years later she was teaching in her classroom and watched the Twin Towers burn.

Editor’s Note: With the possibility that this story stirs up more media requests of Barbara, I wanted to make sure she was prepared. She answered, “Yes, I’m an adult now.”

 Sidebar

Everything happens for a reason. Nothing happens by accident.

Barbara said there are some really strange parallels/coincidences that appear to be at force after being tracked down for this story. She said she keeps humming a spiritual from a key scene in The Color Purple, “Maybe God’s trying to tell you somethin’.”

“I hope you don’t mind that I Googled you,” she told me after I also used Google to find her. I found her father’s obituary since his name was on the explanation of the poem. It led to finding Barbara’s sister on Facebook. Her sister passed on my phone number.

“Your interests are important to me,” Barbara texted.

Since reading “Gone with the Wind “ as a young girl, she’s been obsessed with all things Southern, from culture to cuisine and all things in between. Visits one day to New Orleans, Savannah and Charleston are at the top of her bucket list.

The ninth annual JFK Assassination Conference (where I have been asked to give the opening prayer and sparked my interest in finding Barbara) is being held at the Magnolia Hotel in Dallas where the famous Pegasus Flying Red Horse adorns the roof. Barbara’s brother flew F-15s and his squadron was called Pegasus. He died Nov. 5.

Barbara found that I love memoir writing. She does, too. She knew that I wrote a book called Hands Pointed Up, which includes inspirational sayings that include the word "up” to help people keep a positive attitude. She is always inspired by her late husband's positivity and his favorite expression in the face of ANY adversity--big or small--was “It’s Just A Little Inconvenience.” In fact, J A L I is the title of the memoir she is currently writing.

She noticed I once served on the Food Bank board of directors and said she, too, worked on food drives.

She thought my name was German and her brother loved to visit Germany. My maternal grandparents were born in Germany.

Yes, something, rather Someone, was at play for us to connect. Thank you, God.