Reclaiming History (235 page)

To accept the mysterious-deaths allegation, one has to believe that in every single one of the more-than-one-hundred mysterious deaths alleged to be murders, the police or coroner’s office that investigated each one and concluded the death was by natural causes or resulted from causes unrelated to the assassination must have succumbed to threats by the conspirators and deliberately wrote up a report that they knew was wrong, or, in more than one hundred cases, they were always wrong in their determination as to the cause of death.

There is no evidence whatsoever that conspirators behind the assassination of President Kennedy have been murdering dozens of people throughout the years who they fear will implicate them in Kennedy’s death. Not one of these so-called mysterious deaths has ever been connected, in any way, to the assassination. The only thing mysterious is how anyone with an IQ above room temperature could possibly buy into such nonsense.

Among the most persistent contentions of the conspiracy theorists is that there was a “Second Oswald,” one or more people impersonating Oswald prior to the assassination. For the purposes of this discussion, “Second Oswald” includes not just alleged Oswald impersonations but also Oswald “sightings” before the assassination. The way the conspiracy theorists have it figured out, if the sightings were truly of Lee Harvey Oswald, the things he was doing, or the people he was with, were of such a nature that they went in the direction of a conspiracy. And if the sightings were not of Lee Harvey Oswald, since it could be proved he was somewhere else at the time, then this means there was a Second Oswald, someone impersonating him, which again goes in the direction of a conspiracy. (The issue of an alleged Oswald impersonation in the Sylvia Odio incident is discussed later in this book.)

The leading current proponent of the Second Oswald theory,
*
which has a considerable number of adherents, is John Armstrong, a well-to-do contractor and oilman from Tulsa, Oklahoma, who is convinced that another Lee Harvey Oswald started impersonating the real one when Oswald was only thirteen. He cites as evidence a December 11, 1963, letter to President Lyndon Johnson from a lady named Alma Cole, who claimed that her son befriended Oswald in Stanley, North Dakota, sometime in the 1950s (her son later provided the year as 1953, when we know Oswald was living with his mother in New York City) and told her that Oswald was reading “Communist books” and said he “had a calling to kill the president.”
¹
Can you imagine that? Oswald is only thirteen and living in New York City, and already, conspirators have set out to frame him for “some” murder they intend to commit, and they start out by sending a teenage Oswald impersonator to Stanley, North Dakota, to tell his young friend about his plans to kill a president someday. If that’s not crazy enough, how the conspirators could clairvoyantly know, when Oswald was only thirteen, where his life would take him so he could even be in a position to be framed, as opposed, say, to being an ornithologist studying obscure birds in the jungles of Bolivia, or a doctor at a clinic in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Armstrong doesn’t say.

As preposterous as this story was, the FBI, as with virtually every kooky story the bureau heard, actually wasted its time and checked it out a month after the assassination by interviewing other people in the small town of Stanley (around eight hundred) who would be expected to know of Oswald’s presence in 1953. None of them confirmed the story. For instance, Bud Will, the proprietor of the City Trailer and Motel where Oswald and his mother were believed to have stayed, checked his motel registrations for the period from 1952 through 1955 and there was no record of the Oswalds staying there. Jerry Evanson, a friend of Cole’s son throughout the summer of 1953 in Stanley, never recalled anyone by the name of Lee Harvey Oswald being there that summer or any other time. Additionally, Ralph Hamre, the county sheriff, said he was familiar with virtually everyone in the small hamlet and had never heard of a Lee Harvey Oswald living there, and did not consider Cole’s son to be a reliable person. Mrs. Harry Merbach, a cousin of Mrs. Cole, said the latter was suffering from a “mental condition” and attempted suicide while living in Stanley by “drinking Lysol.”
²

For his part, Cole’s son, William Timmer, told the FBI on December 27, 1963, that he saw Oswald five or six times in the summer of 1953, that Oswald said he was from New York City and was a member of a gang, and that he spoke about Communism and carried a pamphlet with the name “Mark’s” (Karl Marx) on it and said, “Someday I am going to kill the president and I’ll show them.” Timmer told the FBI that after the assassination, his mother sent him some newspaper clippings of Oswald, reminding him that he may have known Oswald, and it was at that point that he recalled he did.
³

In an interview in early October of 1999, Jack Feehan, one of Timmer’s childhood playmates who Timmer believed had met Oswald that summer of 1953, said he could not recall ever meeting Oswald. In a later interview he said that right after the early October interview he called Timmer about the Oswald matter and Timmer denied knowing anything about Oswald being in Stanley.
⁴

Conspiracy theorist Armstrong says that confirmation of an Oswald (not the real one, Lee Harvey Oswald, per Armstrong, but Oswald’s impersonator) “in North Dakota comes from several sources. Oswald told Aline Mosby, in a November 14, 1959, interview in Moscow, that after living in New York ‘we moved to North Dakota.’” Armstrong goes on to say that when Oswald was arrested in New Orleans in August of 1963, he told Lieutenant Francis Martello “that he had moved from New York to North Dakota.” However, the Oswald who told Mosby and Martello this story was not, per Armstrong, the real Oswald, but Oswald’s impersonator, “Harvey Oswald.”
⁵
(Why the architects of this all-important conspiracy to frame Oswald would not have Oswald’s imposter use Oswald’s exact name of “Lee Harvey Oswald,” Armstrong does not tell us.) In any event, even Oswald’s alleged imposter did not make the statements Armstrong says he made. Nowhere in Martello’s entire, August 10, 1963, interview did Oswald tell Martello he had ever gone to, or lived in, North Dakota.
⁶
And nowhere in Martello’s testimony before the Warren Commission did Martello say he did.
⁷
As far as UPI reporter Aline Mosby’s November 1959 interview of Oswald in his hotel room in Moscow is concerned, all of her original notes of the interview are set forth in a Warren Commission volume,
⁸
and Oswald told her, “We moved to New Orleans,”
⁹
not, as Armstrong says, North Dakota. Oswald never mentioned North Dakota in the interview.
*
So much for “Oswald’s” brief excursion to the thriving metropolis of Stanley, North Dakota, in the summer of 1953 to announce for posterity that although he was only a youngster, when he grew up he was going to “kill the president.”

The Second Oswald theorists, then, have Oswald’s imposter—apparently working at the behest of the CIA, FBI, or some other sinister group—impersonating Oswald all the way from Stanley, North Dakota, in 1953 to his grave in a Fort Worth cemetery in 1963, the real Oswald not being killed by Jack Ruby and possibly still being very much alive.

Oswald sightings were a predictable adjunct to the assassination. Shortly after the assassination, the Dallas police, FBI, and other law enforcement agencies were deluged with calls from hundreds of people who thought they had seen Oswald prior to the assassination at places and times when, the evidence showed, Oswald was elsewhere. This phenomenon inevitably arises in every high-visibility criminal or missing-person case. As author Jim Moore points out, “Whenever a sensational event takes place, there are always people who, for one reason or another, proclaim and manage to convince themselves that they have had previous contact with an individual associated with the well-publicized event.”
¹⁰
Although many of these sightings are by sincere people, just as many are by those who are merely seeking publicity, some of whom will literally do anything to become part of the case. The “anything” can even go to the extreme of confessing to the crime. Indeed, one of the reasons why law enforcement officials routinely withhold (from the media and public) details of a sensational crime that only the perpetrator would know is to eliminate as suspects those who falsely claim to have committed the crime. In the Kennedy case, the sightings of Oswald were as common, and deserving of almost as little credence, as Elvis sightings after his death.

Conspiracy theorists know, as you and I do, that the great bulk of people who claim to be in possession of valuable information on any highly publicized matter are so full of it that it’s coming out of their ears. For instance, conspiracy theorist John Davis says that “while writing
Mafia Kingfish
, all sorts of people in Louisiana climbed out of the swamps and bayous to enlighten me on the assassination plotting of Marcello, Ferrie and Banister. They all turned out to be frauds.”
¹¹
Yet this same Davis buys the Second Oswald sightings and argument completely, uncritically accepting, at face value, the Second Oswald allegations to be discussed hereafter. In his book, he writes that the evidence is “convincing beyond a reasonable doubt” that conspirators staged “a number of incidents” in and around Dallas in September, October, and November of 1963 that could “some day be used to frame” Oswald. “The conspirators hit upon the idea of deploying two Oswalds, perhaps even three, the real Oswald and one or two imposters, to accomplish this aim.”
¹²

The Second Oswald allegations and sightings have ranged from the possible (Odio incident) to the preposterous (that an Oswald impersonator was so good he even fooled Oswald’s own family). Setting aside the Odio incident (see later text), all of these allegations, with one exception, are either unsupported by any credible evidence or patently unworthy of belief on their face.

Two realities should be kept in mind in any discussion of the Second Oswald theory. First, an attempted impersonation of Oswald would serve no purpose unless the impersonator resembled Oswald to such an extent that third parties thought the impersonator was actually Oswald. The problem that presents itself, however, is the extreme difficulty in finding one human being who looks almost exactly like another. For instance, even when national contests are conducted to find celebrity look-alikes, the likeness is often not that great. Where would these conspiratorial forces find someone who looked just like Oswald (not just facially, but in his approximate height and physique) and get him to go along on some mysterious mission for them, doing things in various cities (even other countries, Mexico and Russia) and giving his name as someone he was not, Lee Harvey Oswald? Second, whomever the framers of Oswald found to impersonate him, once Kennedy was killed and Lee Harvey Oswald was accused as the assassin, the impersonator would immediately know whom he had been impersonating and why.
*
And the threat of his informing the authorities on the people who had employed him would be very real. Even if they killed him, what about his family and friends, people he may have told about his new life? But maybe the CIA, FBI, KGB, or whoever allegedly framed Oswald discovered that one of their very own miraculously looked like Oswald’s clone, so they didn’t have to go outside their group to get an impersonator. And maybe, just maybe, alligators can do the polka. Of course, in the fantasy world of the conspiracy theorists, there is no room for the aforementioned practical considerations. But to reasonable minds, the high improbability that any group seeking to create an Oswald imposture would be able to overcome these two obstacles is alone good reason to look at the Second Oswald allegation with immense skepticism.

The premise of all these allegations is that the real Oswald was being set up, framed, for the assassination.
¹³
Without this premise, the impersonation argument makes no sense and is irrelevant. With this premise, if some group were framing Oswald, they would necessarily have their Oswald imposter say and do things which would lead an observer to the conclusion that the real Oswald killed the president. As New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison, a firm believer in the Second Oswald theory, said, “Someone had been impersonating Oswald. And…the reason was obvious. A trail of phony incriminating evidence had been carefully laid down prior to the execution of the president, leading to Oswald as the scapegoat.”
¹⁴
But the reality is that, as with virtually all of the Second Oswald sightings, the alleged impersonator said and did no such things.

The following, in rough chronological order, is a brief discussion of the more well-known Second Oswald allegations and sightings. As with the mysterious-deaths allegations, to discuss all of them would take an entire book. The reader should know, of course, that because I’m not discussing
all
Oswald sightings and impersonations, the conspiracy theorists will predictably and automatically say, “Ah, but Mr. Bugliosi failed to mention _____.”

Other than the Stanley, North Dakota, impersonation, the first suggestion of an Oswald impersonator, ironically, came from none other than FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. In a June 3, 1960, memorandum to the State Department’s Office of Security concerning Oswald’s renunciation of his American citizenship at the U.S. embassy in Moscow on October 31, 1959, Hoover concludes, “Since there’s a possibility that an impostor is using Oswald’s birth certificate, any current information the Department of State may have concerning subject will be appreciated.”
¹⁵
In his book
Conspiracy
, Anthony Summers (a Second Oswald devotee), true to the hallowed tradition of conspiracy theorists to religiously quote selectively, quotes only this last paragraph of Hoover’s five-paragraph memorandum, and then ominously and disingenuously asks his readers, “What led to [Hoover’s] feeling that there [was] a possibility of imposture?”
¹⁶
Summers wasn’t about to answer that question for his readers. Reading Summers, one would naturally think that Hoover’s reference to Oswald’s birth certificate and the possibility of imposture must have stemmed from some information in the FBI’s possession not referred to anywhere else in the memorandum. But the very preceding paragraph, which Summers conveniently makes no mention of, reveals why Hoover made the birth certificate reference and where he most likely got the idea of imposture—from Oswald’s mother, Marguerite. Hoover points out in the paragraph that Marguerite had informed the FBI the previous month that Oswald had taken his birth certificate with him when he had defected to the Soviet Union, and that three letters she had written him had been returned to her undelivered. Also, she had recently received a letter addressed to her son from the Albert Schweitzer College in Switzerland indicating that he had been expected to show up at the college on April 20, 1960, but hadn’t. The mother, Hoover said, was therefore “apprehensive about his safety.” In the infinite research on the assassination, no one has yet been able to dredge up any indication that the FBI had evidence at the time of Hoover’s memorandum that someone might be impersonating Oswald. From this fact and from the context in which the subject paragraph was written, it would appear that Hoover used rather loose language in speculating about the possibility of an imposter.