Reclaiming History (216 page)

Jim said that Oswald’s CIA handler, Phillips, had gotten Oswald his job at the Book Depository Building. He said that Kennedy’s murder was ordered by the mob and the CIA, with the main figure being Chicago mob boss Tony Accardo. The CIA, at the last moment, tried to call off the assassination but Accardo overruled the agency.

We learn from Jim that Oswald was set up, that he did not fire a round and wasn’t privy to the plan. Oswald also did not kill Tippit. The man who did kill Tippit (Jim wouldn’t say who it was) had been assigned to kill Oswald but he “messed up.” Jim was later paid thirty thousand dollars for his expert services in killing JFK. He believes that Giancana, Roselli, and Nicoletti were murdered later to silence them from telling the authorities what happened, but doesn’t say why “they” haven’t silenced him. I assume it’s because they think he’s a likeable chap. Or maybe they want to hear more of his song. We also learn from Jim that Joe West, the first person who contacted him on this case, was silenced (“they tampered with Joe’s medication”) in 1993 because he was getting close to being able “to get Kennedy’s body exhumed,” and that John F. Kennedy is not buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

Personally, a lot of my questions about the assassination were finally and conclusively answered by Jim, and I don’t need any proof beyond his word. But Jim told Jerry Kroth that if he is ever set free, he has “solid proof” of everything he says and would retrieve the proof from a box of papers he has outside of prison. Kroth writes that “Files’ story…is the most believable and persuasive” he has heard or read on JFK’s murder. “His account,” Kroth says, is “surprisingly credible.” Can you imagine that? And Kroth actually found a publisher to publish his book.
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A
h yes, and then there is Loy Factor, Mac Wallace, and the book
The Men on the Sixth Floor
by Glen Sample and Mark Collom, which has become a favorite of many on the fringes of the conspiracy community.

The key to the story, Sample and Collom tell us, is Lawrence Lloyd Factor, a Chickasaw Indian from Fillmore, Oklahoma. Factor, a World War II veteran, was declared incompetent by the Veterans Administration in 1948, which required the appointment of a legal guardian for him before he could receive his sixty-dollar-per-month disability payments.
⁴⁸
In 1969 he was convicted of first-degree manslaughter for strangling his wife, Juanita, the previous year. A diabetic with one wooden leg, he was being treated in 1971 for hepatitis in the hospital ward of the Oklahoma state prison at McAlester. For some undisclosed reason, Factor decided to tell a story—and a whopper it was—to Collom, another hepatitis patient in the ward. According to Factor, in November of 1961 his wife suggested that they and their kids drive to Bonham, Texas (a few hours away), so they could see President Kennedy, who was going to attend U.S. Senator Sam Rayburn’s funeral there. While Factor was waiting in the crowd on the street in Bonham, a Spanish-speaking man, whom he later identified as Mac Wallace, approached him and asked about his ability as a marksman. Being a hunter, Factor said it was right good. Wallace gave him twenty dollars and told Factor to take his family to a nice dinner.

A year later, Wallace showed up unannounced at Factor’s home. Factor demonstrated his marksmanship for Wallace by shooting bottles with his deer rifle, after which Wallace offered him ten thousand dollars if he would do an unspecified “job” for Wallace and his people, two thousand payable up front, eight thousand when the job was done. A deal was struck. A few days before the assassination, a young Hispanic woman of around twenty named Ruth Ann, accompanied by a man, another young Hispanic, drove to Factor’s home in Fillmore to fetch him for the ride to Dallas. Factor suspected they wanted him to kill someone, but he told Collom he was too afraid to back out. Plus, he needed that extra eight thousand dollars. The two Hispanics drove Factor to a small home in Dallas, where Wallace, the group leader, was already present. For a few days, the group discussed (while Factor sat idly by) their plan to kill Kennedy. Ruth Ann, Factor said, was second in command. Two other people arrived at the house to sit in on some of the planning sessions—Jack Ruby and Lee Harvey Oswald.

Per Factor, just before the assassination Ruth Ann drove him to the Book Depository Building and led him up the stairwell to the sixth floor, where Wallace and Oswald already were. Factor was given a rifle. “Wallace told me that if they [Oswald and Wallace] missed, I would be the backup. They [had] wanted me to shoot, but I told them I wouldn’t do it,” Factor told Collom in a subsequent interview in which coauthor Glen Sample was also present. Nonetheless, Factor was told to go to the southwesternmost window on the sixth floor. Wallace was two windows to the east, and Oswald was at the sniper’s nest window at the southeasternmost corner. Ruth Ann, with a walkie-talkie communicating with other shooters, presumably located on the grassy knoll, gave a countdown to Factor, Wallace, and Oswald, signaling them when to fire. But Factor said that although he “ejected a shell from the rifle,” he did not fire it.
*

Following the shooting, Factor said that he and Ruth Ann fled down the stairs
†
and she dropped him off at the Greyhound bus depot. But before she did, even though he hadn’t done what he was paid to do, Ruth Ann was sweet enough to give him his eight thousand dollars. An hour or so later, while he was still waiting for a bus out of town, Ruth Ann came back to the bus depot with Wallace. “They said they had to get me out of town, ’cuz things was too hot there.” Ruth Ann and Wallace, or whoever employed them, certainly could have used some of that eight thousand dollars they gratuitously handed to Factor to make sure they had a dependable getaway car, because—well, let’s let Factor tell the story: “We was headed up through Mead [Oklahoma] when the car broke down, right outside of Mead. I think the clutch went out,” Factor said, so he got out on the highway and hitched his way home, presumably leaving the two masterminds behind the biggest murder in American history sitting in a dead car alongside the road.

Ol’ Loy might have been too incompetent to take care of his own personal affairs, but he wasn’t too incompetent for people to hire him to kill the president of the United States, and in the process, get them to pay him ten thousand dollars for doing nothing. Factor died in 1994.

No rational person could possibly believe this pathetic story,
‡
even, it seems, the authors themselves. In the acknowledgments section at the beginning of their self-published book, the Garden Grove, California, sign-shop owner (Sample) and Bellingham, Washington, real estate agent (Collom) thanked, among others, their wives, who “not only allowed us our
fantasy
, but encouraged it.” In some circles, this is known as a Freudian slip. What Sample and Collom should know is that even if their fantasy was that Lee Harvey Oswald was Kennedy’s guardian angel, and it was Jackie Kennedy who was behind her husband’s murder, there would be many in the conspiracy community to encourage that fantasy too.

W
hy did Wallace mastermind Kennedy’s death? The authors ask the reader to believe that LBJ ordered Wallace, who allegedly was a part of LBJ’s Texas inner circle, to do so. Not too much is known about Wallace, who died in a car accident near Pittsburg, Texas, on January 7, 1971. Wallace, a University of Texas graduate and student body president in 1945 who at one time worked as an economist in Washington, D.C., for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, did, indeed, commit one killing we know about. In 1952, he was convicted in Austin, Texas, of murdering a golf pro, John Douglas Kinser, who had been having an affair with Wallace’s estranged wife. He received a five-year suspended prison sentence. The authors see the dark hand of LBJ in the very light sentence, since Wallace’s lawyer, John Cofer, was one of LBJ’s main lawyers in his successful postelection legal battle for the U.S. Senate against former governor Coke Stevenson in 1948. How Cofer would have the power to bring about Wallace’s light sentence, the authors don’t say. In a 1986 interview with the
Dallas Times Herald
, D. L. Johnson, one of the jurors in the Kinser case, said that he was the only juror who favored an outright acquittal for Kinser and that he forced the guilty-with-a-suspended-sentence verdict by threatening to cause a hung jury if he didn’t get his way.
⁴⁹

To fortify their position that Wallace wasn’t just a heat-of-passion killer of his wife’s lover but a cold-blooded premeditated killer for hire, the authors struggle mightily, without succeeding, to prove that Wallace was responsible for the June 3, 1961, shotgun death of Henry H. Marshall of Bryan, Texas, a regional official for the Department of Agriculture who was in charge of the federal cotton allotment program in central Texas. Marshall, it was claimed, had to be silenced because he could connect Johnson aide Cliff Carter and LBJ with the illegal activities of Billie Sol Estes, an LBJ political ally and fund-raiser Marshall was investigating who had, among other things, been fraudulently obtaining federal cotton allotment payments as well as mortgages on farm equipment that did not exist. As author Alfred Steinberg described Estes, the short, plump young man from Texas “could have written volumes on wheeling and dealing and financial fakery.”
⁵⁰
Estes was eventually convicted in 1963 (after his first conviction in 1962 was reversed because the televising of his trial without his consent was deemed to be a denial of his right to a fair trial) of swindling farmers and banks out of millions of dollars and sentenced to prison. After being paroled in 1971, he was convicted again in 1979 for mail fraud and concealing assets. At Estes’ sentencing before the Dallas federal judge, he told the judge, “I have a problem. I live in a dream world.” The judge sentenced him to ten years.
⁵¹

In an August 9, 1984, letter to the Department of Justice, Estes’ lawyer, Douglas Caddy, said that Estes, who some believe never forgave Johnson for not fixing the case against him back in 1962, was “willing to testify that LBJ ordered…the killing of President J. F. Kennedy,” and that “Mac Wallace” murdered Kennedy for Johnson. Pretty serious charges, right? The problem is that Estes, who had been released on parole in 1983, said that LBJ had ordered
seven other
murders, and he transmitted his orders through his close aide Cliff Carter to Mac Wallace, who committed the murders. The murders included not just Henry Marshall, but—get this—LBJ’s own alcoholic younger sister, Josefa Johnson, who died, per her death certificate, not as a result of a homicide but from a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of forty-nine on December 25, 1961, after coming home from a Christmas party at LBJ’s ranch. Also among the seven people whom LBJ, per Estes, had Wallace kill for him was John Kinser, the man who was having an affair with Wallace’s wife.
⁵²
*
It obviously was loony bird time, but the Department of Justice, to avoid charges of indifference, actually sent three eager investigators down to Texas to interview Estes, but Estes cancelled the interview. A con man to the end.

No remotely believable evidence that Mac Wallace had anything to do with the assassination has ever surfaced, and in fact, around the time of the assassination, Sample and Collom say he was living in Anaheim, California, where he worked for Ling Electronics from 1961 to 1969. (When I called Ling Electronics on February 20, 2002, they said their employment records did not go back to 1963, and hence they were unable to provide documentation for Wallace’s employment with them.)
⁵³

Nevertheless, the myth of Wallace being one of the shooters of Kennedy persists. Conspiracy theorist Walt Brown, the editor of the substantive
JFK/Deep Politics Quarterly
, claimed, in a May 29, 1998, press conference at the Conspiracy Museum in Dallas and in the October 2001 edition of his publication, that a latent print examiner from Texas, Nathan Darby, was furnished with a copy of the only latent print found on the cardboard cartons inside the sniper’s nest that was never identified,
⁵⁴
†
as well as the 1951 fingerprint card for Wallace following his arrest for the murder of John Kinser, and that the expert made a positive match, finding fourteen points of identification. (Recall that our boy Loy Factor put Wallace several windows to the
west
of the sniper’s nest.) According to Darby’s March 9, 1998, affidavit, the match was of “the left little finger.”
⁵⁵

On November 20, 2001, I spoke over the telephone with Darby. Eighty-seven at the time, he told me he had been the head of the Austin, Texas, police department’s Identification and Criminal Records Section for several years. He had retired from the force and was still living in Austin. I told him I had trouble with his finding a “match” between prints found at the sniper’s nest on the sixth floor and the fingerprint exemplar card of Malcolm Wallace. “Why?” he asked. “Because,” I pointed out, “the unidentified latent print found on the sixth floor was a palm print, not a fingerprint, and unless you’ve come up with something new, I’ve never heard of anyone matching a palm print with a fingerprint.” Darby, sensing he had been taken, told me that he had been given “two fingerprints, one from a card, the other a latent. It was all blind. I didn’t know and wasn’t told who they belonged to [it was much later, he said, that he heard Malcolm Wallace’s name mentioned], although I recognized the layout of the card [he said all identifying features had been blacked out] as that of the Texas Department of Public Safety. I wasn’t given any palm print.
They were both fingerprints
. Of course, you can’t compare a palm print with a fingerprint.”

So much for Malcolm Wallace at the window and another desperate attempt by the conspiracy community to implicate
anyone
other than Lee Harvey Oswald for Kennedy’s murder.

Or so one would think. But one Barr McClellan, who at one time was a lawyer in an Austin law firm that represented Lyndon Johnson, came out with a book in 2003 that claims LBJ was behind Kennedy’s murder, anchored on the same allegation that Wallace carried it out for LBJ. It seems that it was McClellan and an associate of his, one J. Harrison, who approached Darby with the two prints and engaged his services in March of 1998, McClellan alleging to his readers that the latent fingerprint they gave Darby was found on one of the four book cartons. McClellan says that Wallace put together a three-man hit team (Oswald firing two shots from the sniper’s nest window, Wallace firing one shot from the third window over, and one “Junior” firing the head shot from the grassy knoll) to kill Kennedy for LBJ. Indeed, McClellan said he had “confirmed” that LBJ was behind
eleven
murders in Texas, “with nine more possible.”