Reclaiming History (234 page)

At the time Miss Kilgallen died on November 8, 1965, her husband, Richard, and twelve-year-old son, Kerry, were asleep in other rooms in the townhouse.
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When you are alleging murder, as Penn Jones was in his book, this is a rather important detail, one that Jones didn’t bother, naturally, to include. Did the conspirators somehow gain entry into Miss Kilgallen’s townhouse and bedroom in the middle of the night and force alcohol and barbiturates down her throat without her making any noise that would alert her husband and son? Kilgallen’s body was found by the maid, a copy of Robert Ruark’s
Honey Badger
by her side.
¹⁷
So there was absolutely nothing suspicious and no evidence of foul play. Or are we expected to believe that Miss Kilgallen was murdered by the conspirators who killed the president, but that these conspirators “reached” the Manhattan police and medical examiner and threatened them not to write her death up as a murder?

Finally, assuming that Kilgallen did have a private interview with Ruby, it took place at the Ruby trial in Dallas during
March of 1964
. But wait awhile, folks. Didn’t Miss Kilgallen die in November 1965, one year and eight months later? You mean to tell me a
gossip
columnist, or any columnist, would wait
twenty months
to break a sensational story? They wouldn’t even wait twenty minutes, would they? Wouldn’t they report it immediately so they wouldn’t be “scooped” by some other reporter? Yet her biographer confirmed what Hugh Aynesworth said, that Kilgallen never wrote any article about the alleged interview with Ruby.
¹⁸

There is a footnote to all of this: Mrs. Earl E. T. Smith was a New York City society figure who wrote a Sunday column in the Living Section of the
Journal-American
under her maiden name, Florence Pritchett. When she died of a cerebral hemorrhage (Penn Jones tells his readers that the cause of death was “unknown”) at her Fifth Avenue home just two days after Miss Kilgallen,
¹⁹
it simply was too much of a coincidence for Penn Jones, who ominously linked the two deaths to the Kennedy assassination cover-up. Jones said the two were “close friends” (“Possibly,” he speculates, “Mrs. Smith was the trusted friend” to whom Kilgallen allegedly said she was going to break the case wide open; Penn doesn’t mention, or didn’t know about, the hairdresser story), but again offers not one scrap of evidence to support this assertion of friendship.
²⁰
Other than their working at the same paper (Kilgallen, full-time, Mrs. Smith, probably mailing her column in once a week) and most likely at least being acquaintances, they certainly moved in different worlds. The tart-tongued and aggressive Miss Kilgallen, described by a colleague as a “newspaperman in a $500 dress,” worked in the rough-and-tumble field of investigative journalism, almost exclusively male at the time. Mrs. Smith, a member of the Four Hundred in New York, was very active in the arts and in charity work and mingled with the swells from the Social Register. Per her obituary in the
New York Times
, she and her husband (the American ambassador to Cuba just before Castro took power) were close friends to President Kennedy and his wife, were frequent White House guests, and were Palm Beach, Florida, neighbors.
²¹
In the absence of any evidence presented by Jones that they were “close friends,” the assumption (even if they had lived in the same apartment and worked everyday for the same company) has to be they were not. And in Lee Israel’s 485-page biography of Kilgallen, there isn’t even a single reference to her. Indeed, he writes that Kilgallen had very few female friends, her closest being Jean Bach and Lillian Boscovity.
²²
But even if they were friends, so what?

Jones, naturally, doesn’t bother to tell his readers that Mrs. Smith, per the
New York Times
, “had been in ill-health since mid-August” (almost three months
before
Miss Kilgallen’s death) and “had recently been discharged from Roosevelt Hospital.”
²³
It should finally be noted that even
Ramparts
magazine, which so effusively endorsed Penn Jones’s powerful imagination, could not swallow his claim that Kilgallen was silenced, conceding that “we know of no serious person who really believes that the death of Dorothy Kilgallen was related to the Kennedy assassination.”
²⁴

T
he vast majority of the witnesses on the various mysterious-death lists of the conspiracy theorists (e.g., conspiracy theorist Jim Marrs’s book
Crossfire
lists 104 witnesses) weren’t connected with the case in any known way whatsoever, and had absolutely nothing of any known value to say about the case (e.g., Donald Kaylor, FBI chemist in the fingerprint section who wasn’t even assigned to the Kennedy assassination investigation and died of a heart failure in 1977; DeLesseps Morrison, New Orleans mayor at the time of the assassination who died in a plane crash in 1964; Francis Gary Powers, U-2 pilot shot down over Russia in 1960 who died in a helicopter crash in 1977; etc.). But of those who did have a connection—such as Roger Craig, Earlene Roberts, Lee Bowers, and Dallas deputy sheriff Eddy Raymond “Buddy” Walthers—all of them,
without exception
, had already told their story, most of them on the public record, so what could possibly be achieved by killing them? For instance, as previously indicated, Craig not only had told his story on radio and TV and to conspiracy writers many times, but also had given an affidavit to the sheriff’s office and two affidavits to the FBI and testified before the Warren Commission.

The buffs are so silly that in addition to President Kennedy and Officer J. D. Tippit, they even have people like Abraham Zapruder (heart attack, 1970), J. Edgar Hoover (heart attack, 1972), Lyndon Baines Johnson (heart attack, 1973), and Earl Warren (heart attack, 1974) on their mysterious-death lists.
²⁵

So silly that when Dorothy Hunt, wife of CIA agent E. Howard Hunt (believed by some buffs to have been in Dallas on November 22, 1963 and a co-conspirator in the assassination), died with sixty other passengers on a United Airlines flight that crashed on landing in Chicago on December 8, 1972, her death was listed as suspicious. Apparently the conspirators were so eager to silence poor Mrs. Hunt that they decided to take sixty other people with her.
²⁶

So silly that when Edward Benavides, who the buffs say resembled his brother, Warren Commission witness Domingo Benavides, was shot to death in a Dallas bar in February 1964, they allege that it was a case of mistaken identity, Domingo probably being the intended victim, and list Edward’s homicide as “particularly suspicious” and, by implication, unsolved.
²⁷
Actually, he was shot by a drinking companion, who confessed to the killing and served twenty months for manslaughter.
²⁸
It should be recalled that Domingo Benavides, who saw Officer Tippit being murdered, never identified Oswald as the killer. He only said Oswald “resembled” the man and refused to make a positive identification.
²⁹

So silly that when Marilyn “Delilah” Walle, a former Oriental dancer at Jack Ruby’s Carousel Club, was shot eight times by her husband in their Omaha apartment in 1966 (he was charged and subsequently convicted of her murder), the zany buffs alleged (without bothering, naturally, to cite any source for this allegation) that Walle was “planning a book on the assassination,” so the conspirators murdered her and framed her husband.
³⁰

So silly that they even list the homicide of Dallas deputy sheriff Buddy Walthers (who searched Dealey Plaza for evidence and helped subdue Oswald in the Texas Theater) as a mysterious death.
³¹
But there was nothing mysterious about Walthers’s death. An escaped convict from Georgia, Walter Cherry, shot Walthers when he and his partner, Al Maddox Jr., entered Cherry’s motel room in Dallas on January 10, 1969. Cherry was convicted of Walthers’s murder on June 27, 1970.
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But wait. Maybe, just maybe, the conspirators who killed Kennedy helped Cherry (who was serving a life sentence for a robbery because he had seven prior felony convictions) escape, sent him to Dallas, holed him up in a motel room, and then sent an anonymous tip to Walthers that Cherry was there, thereby setting up Walthers to be killed. But why would they want to kill Walthers? I don’t know.

So silly that when Michael D. Groves, the army captain who had directed military honors at President Kennedy’s funeral, died of a heart attack while eating dinner at his home in Fort Myer, Virginia, on December 3, 1963, the buffs categorized it as a suspicious death.
³³

Not only did the majority on these mysterious-death lists die completely natural deaths, but if the theorists believe the Kennedy assassination conspirators murdered these people to silence them, why would they wait so long to do it? Marrs’s 1989 book includes some who died as late as 1984 (Roy Kellerman, Secret Service agent in the presidential motorcade who died in 1984 of a heart attack),
twenty-one years after the assassination
. Jack Ruby, of course, is on all the buffs’ mysterious-death lists, but Ruby died from a pulmonary embolism and cancer of the lungs and brain on January 3, 1967, more than three years after he murdered Oswald, supposedly for the mob. Why would the mob wait 1,137 days to silence Ruby? Weren’t they afraid he’d point the finger at them on any of the hundreds upon hundreds of days before then?

In their unharnessed zeal to show that Warren Commission witnesses have been murdered to silence them, the conspiracy theorists haven’t stopped to realize that they also have the unnamed conspirators murdering witnesses who could only help, not hurt, their cause. Since these conspirators obviously would not want it to be known that anyone else was involved with Oswald, or that someone other than Oswald killed Kennedy, why would they want to silence people who supported the Warren Commission’s position that Oswald killed Kennedy and acted alone? Just a few examples: Why would the conspirators kill J. Edgar Hoover or Earl Warren, both of whom, as indicated, are on the buffs’ mysterious-death lists? Or William Whaley (who died in a head-on car collision on December 18, 1965, when an eighty-three-year-old driver, who also died, was traveling north in Whaley’s southbound lane without his headlights on in a drizzling rain), the cabdriver who Oswald suspiciously had drive past his rooming house and drop him off a few blocks later? Or James Cadigan (who died from injuries sustained in a fall at his home in August of 1977), the FBI handwriting expert who identified the signature “A. J. Hidell” on the coupon sent to order the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle as being Oswald’s handwriting? Why kill Harold Russell (heart attack, 1967), who identified Oswald running away from the Tippit murder scene?
³⁴
I know the buffs believe the conspirators will do anything to silence people who can expose them, but are the conspirators paranoid and crazy enough to kill people who can only help them?

The latest mysterious death some buffs say was a murder to prevent the truth from coming out? None other than JFK’s son, John F. Kennedy Jr. The story goes that shortly before his death on the evening of July 16, 1999, he told friends he intended to launch a new investigation into his father’s assassination; somehow the word got out to the conspirators and they sabotaged his small Piper Saratoga plane, causing it to crash into the sea off Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, with his wife and her sister aboard. The National Transportation Safety Board’s conclusion that “spatial disorientation” by JFK Jr. was the cause of the fatal crash? Just a cover-up.
³⁵

Gerald Posner, in his book
Case Closed
, has a good section on the mysterious-deaths allegation, and perceptively points out that “no
major
writer or investigator on the case—even those trying to expose dangerous conspiracies—has died an unusual death.”
³⁶
Indeed, I’m unaware that
any
of the hundreds upon hundreds of conspiracy theorists and authors have been murdered or died unusual or unnatural deaths. As
New York Times
columnist Tom Wicker points out in his review of Oliver Stone’s movie
JFK
, “If a conspiracy as vast and consequential as the one claimed could have been carried out and covered up for three decades, why did the conspirators…allow Mr. Stone to make [his] movie? Why not murder him, as they supposedly murdered others? Why, for that matter, didn’t they knock off Mr. Garrison himself when—as Mr. Stone tells it with so much assurance—the New Orleans District Attorney began so fearlessly to follow their trail?”
³⁷

The House Select Committee conducted a thorough investigation of the entire mysterious-deaths allegation. Jacqueline Hess, the House Select Committee’s chief of research for the Kennedy assassination investigation who was in charge of the mysterious-deaths project, concluded her testimony before Congress saying,

We…asked the Library of Congress to compile all newspaper articles which had appeared concerning any and all the individuals. We further asked them to give us their evaluation of the critical literature and the press accounts on each individual and to make recommendations with respect to further investigation in each case. Independently, we sent requests to the Bureau of Vital Statistics, the medical examiners’ offices and the police departments in the jurisdiction in which each death was believed to have occurred, for the death certificates, medical records, police reports, and any other documents which might exist concerning the death. Because there were many cases in which there was no information indicating the appropriate jurisdiction, we sent letters to the pertinent offices in Dallas and Fort Worth, Texas, in New Orleans, Louisiana, and in Miami, Florida, listing all the names on which we desired information. In the case of some of the individuals, information was requested from federal investigative agencies. In the cases of [Johnny] Roselli and [Sam] Giancana, we requested and received a briefing on the Justice Department investigations of those deaths. In the cases in which further investigation was deemed necessary, it was initiated. Our final conclusion on the issue is that the available evidence does not establish anything about the nature of these deaths which would indicate that the deaths were in some manner, either direct or peripheral, caused by the assassination of President Kennedy or by any aspect of the subsequent investigation.
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