The Murder Trial of JFK

By James O. Chipman

These are some of the things you will learn by reading this book:

After almost sixty years, it is time for the world to know the truth behind the

death of JFK.

If Kennedy had won reelection in 1964, there would not have been an

American Vietnam War.

You will learn things about Lyndon B. Johnson that you would not believe

were possible.

John F. Kennedy's assassination started a deep distrust that Americans

have with their government that continues to this day.

A major part of this distrust happened because the government lied to us

about the assassination and lied to us about the Vietnam War.

The conspiracy theory is what Hoover of the FBI came up with and then

passed it along to the news media, the public and the Warren Commission.

This book will tell you what really happened on November 22, 1963.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Mar 16, 2021
• ISBN: 9781662421730

Book preview

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THE MURDER TRIAL OF JFK

James O. Chipman

Copyright © 2021 James O. Chipman

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING, INC.

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2021

ISBN 978-1-6624-2172-3 (pbk)

ISBN 978-1-6624-2173-0 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

For my wife, Joy, who encouraged me to write this book for fifty years.

In the mouth of two or three witnesses shall every word be established.

—2 Corinthians 13:1

PREFACE

What you will learn by reading this book that you never knew before:

President Eisenhower’s summit meeting with Premier Khrushchev in Paris, France, in May of 1960 was destroyed because the CIA, against a direct order from Ike, sent a U-2 spy plane into Russia where the plane was programmed to crash.

President Kennedy never would have allowed the United States to be engaged in an American Vietnam War had he been reelected president in 1964.

JFK and Khrushchev would have started a policy of détente between the two countries twenty years before it actually took place.

The Cold War would have ended twenty years earlier as well.

The Kennedy assassination did not require expert marksmanship as the limo came almost to a complete stop right in front of one of the assassins hiding in a storm sewer opening.

The rifle discovered on the sixth floor was a German Mauser, not the Mannlicher-Carcano, as alleged in the Warren Report.

There weren’t three spent cartridges found in the sniper’s nest on the sixth floor. There were only two. The third was a live round and had never been fired.

The Secret Service was not following their time-honored directives to protect the president. They were following LBJ’s directives that left President Kennedy with no protection at all.

In the world today, there is only one person in a hundred who is under the age of seventy who has any idea of what happened to President Kennedy on that fateful day in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963.

What better way to find out than to listen to the eyewitnesses who were there. You are a member of the jury in Kennedy’s murder trial. Listen to their testimony and then make your verdict.

If you have any preconceived notions of what happened that day, scrub them from your mind. Listen only to the people who were there and not to those who have written in the past in support of the Warren Commission’s conclusions and to the exclusion of most of the witnesses of whom you are about to hear. Their testimony in the past was excluded or changed under pressure from the FBI to conform to a dialogue that supported the thesis that there was only one assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, who fired three shots.

J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI, always adhered to his policy do not embarrass the FBI. What do you suppose the world would think of the FBI if there had been an extended investigation where it was revealed that the FBI had Oswald under surveillance before JFK was shot and that both Oswald and Jack Ruby were informers for the FBI?

Had President Kennedy lived, there would not have been an American Vietnam War. This alone has tremendous ramifications.

If there are any prospective members of the jury who do not have an open mind, they will be excluded from being called to serve in the same manner that the prosecution and defense attorneys select their jurists in the jury selection process.

I have written this book to allow all the witnesses who saw the assassination to finally have a voice and for those who were murdered to keep their testimony silent, to have their murders acknowledged as such. In addition, the book will let you know what really happened. The pressure applied to people to believe the official explanation of events has been unrelenting by the government and by elements of the press.

This was the crime of the century and, when you consider its far-reaching effects, the most important murder since the death of Jesus Christ. Only two others come to mind. The assassination of Abraham Lincoln and the deaths of Archduke Francis Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian-Hungarian throne and his wife, Sophie, on June 28, 1914 which precipitated the First World War.

INTRODUCTION

This is going to be the murder trial of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, which will take place in Dallas, Texas, at some future date. Since this has not happened, it still remains an open case because murder does not have a time limit before going to trial. There is no statute of limitations for murder.

All the witnesses who gave their testimony in the past, living or dead, can now be called by the prosecution to give the same testimony as previously recorded. Only this time, everyone will be called upon to speak; whereas in the past, only those who could support a one gunman with three shots theory were given a voice by the Dallas police and the FBI.

For the vast majority of people, this will be the first time they have ever heard any of this testimony, but it nevertheless took place, although now long forgotten.

The prosecution will call as its first witness the president of the United States, John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

Mr. President, do you recall what you said when you won the Democratic nomination in 1960?

Yes, I do. Yesterday was the best day of my life, and today is the worst day of my life.

How can it possibly be both?

It was the best day because I received the Democratic nomination to be president. It was the worst day because I had to accept Lyndon B. Johnson as my vice presidential candidate.

The spin about this by the LBJ camp was that it would help the ticket win the South. In reality, Kennedy had no intention of naming LBJ to the ticket. LBJ was not even on his long list, much less on his short list. JFK had decided to choose either Senator Symington of Missouri or Senator Henry Jackson of Washington.

Can you tell us, Mr. President, what changed your mind?

The prosecution will now call JFK’s personal secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, to give us the answer.

When JFK met with Johnson and Rayburn, he was given an offer he could not refuse. It was Hoover of the FBI who was also involved. It was his evidence of JFK’s womanizing that was being used to blackmail him into putting LBJ on the ticket.

Hoover and LBJ lived just a short distance away on the same street for over nineteen years. J. Edgar used the FBI to blackmail people in getting them to do what he wanted or to help LBJ to get people to do what he wanted!

The truth about all the various rumors concerning Kennedy’s selection of Johnson as his vice presidential nominee has taken almost as much time to emerge as the truth about the assassination. There were several people who witnessed this, including his brother Bobby, Clark Clifford, Hyman Raskin, and of course, his secretary, Evelyn Lincoln. They can confirm that LBJ called Kennedy just before his acceptance speech.

Since JFK had already selected Symington over Jackson, why would he then reverse course and pick Johnson? It’s too bad Kennedy didn’t have caller ID at that time.

Liberals in the party went ballistic. Salinger was outraged. O’Donnel said the choice was a disaster and told JFK it was the worst mistake he ever made. He was so furious he could hardly talk. O’Donnell was Kennedy’s liaison to labor.

In your first move after the nomination, you go against all the people who supported you, Walter Reuther, the president of the United Auto Workers Union, exploded in a profane fury.

He and the other labor leaders had never forgiven Johnson for his vote for the Taft-Hartley Bill, which allowed the states to elect to make union membership optional.

Mr. President, what do you have to say about all this?

I’m forty-three years old, and I am the healthiest candidate for president in the US. I’m not going to die in office, so the vice presidency doesn’t mean anything. Did it occur to you that if Lyndon Johnson becomes the vice president, I’ll have Mike Mansfield as the Senate leader, someone I can trust and depend on?

By allowing Lyndon Johnson to become the vice presidential candidate, John F. Kennedy unwittingly signed his own death warrant. In later years, after both Kennedy’s were dead, Johnson would claim to his favorite authors, historians, and associates—the ones who accepted practically everything Johnson said at face value, not realizing their own credulity in doing so—that he was always Kennedy’s first choice, thus explaining why there were so many conflicting stories and misrepresentations about the widely reported drama that unfolded at the Biltmore Hotel, validated by many of the other participants.¹

Chapter 1

Witnesses

You are sitting on a panel of twelve jurists listening to the testimony of valid witnesses presenting their accounts of what happened on November 22, 1963, before and after. You be the judge.

DOROTHY KILGALLEN

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the most popular television show on Saturday night was Gunsmoke. Each episode started with this description given by actor James Arness as he portrayed Matt Dillon, United States Marshall: There’s only one way to handle the killers and the spoilers around Dodge and in the territory out west and that’s with a US Marshall and the smell of gun smoke. I’m the first man they look for and the last they want to meet. It makes a man restless and a little lonely.

This was followed on Sunday night with a much watched show on CBS, What’s My Line. A panel of experts would try and discover what the occupation was of a mystery guest, and Dorothy was one of the panelists. It was watched by twenty million fans, and it lasted for fifteen years.

Her full-time occupation was an investigative reporter. She had an unerring instinct for news. She had a brilliant style of writing. She was accurate and had an uncanny ability to produce scoops and an inordinate speed in turning out copy.

Over the years, Dorothy covered a series of famous murder cases and was instrumental in helping a man accused of killing his four-month pregnant wife gain a new trial. His name was Dr. Sam Shepherd, and DNA evidence later cleared him. From 1950 to 1960, she wrote anti-Castro articles, with firsthand accounts from Cuban exiles living in Miami.

In a column which appeared on July 15, 1959, Kilgallen became the first reporter to imply that the CIA was working with organized crime to knock off Fidel Castro. The FBI had been surveying Dorothy since the 1930s and now tried to dig up more dirt on her.

On August 3, 1962, she became the first journalist to refer publicly to Marilyn Monroe’s relationship with a Kennedy. Within forty-eight hours, Marilyn was found dead of a drug overdose at her Los Angeles residence. The inquiry into her death was marred by numerous unanswered questions and contradictions in the medical findings. Kilgallen wrote that the real story hasn’t been told, not by a long shot. Such bold reporting was not common in American journalism at that time. She could not have known that her own life would end under circumstances similar to Marilyn’s.

Then John Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. As a formidable crime reporter, she immediately started asking tough questions of the authorities. Chief Jesse Curry said right after the shooting: Get a man on top of the overpass and see what happened up there. Kilgallen noted that he lied when he told reporters the next day that he initially thought the shots were fired from the Texas School Book Depository.

On September 25, 1964, she ran an interview with Acquilla Clemons, one of the witnesses to the shooting of Officer Tippit, whom the Warren Commission never questioned. Clemons told Kilgallen that she saw two men running from the scene, neither of whom fit Oswald’s description. The police investigation showed that Tippit had been shot with an automatic pistol, and Oswald had a revolver.

Dorothy’s last public reference to the JFK assassination appeared on September 3, 1965, when she challenged the authenticity of the famous Life magazine cover of Lee Harvey Oswald supposedly holding a rifle. She also chastised Marina Oswald for vouching for it. The incriminating photo has since been discredited by analysts who say Oswald’s head was pasted on the body of someone else.

But Dorothy Kilgallen’s biggest scoop, an exclusive interview with Lee Harvey Oswald’s killer, Jack Ruby, got her killed. She told friends after her Ruby interview that she was about to blow the JFK case sky-high. On November 8, 1965, she was found in her home dead after her regular appearance on What’s My Line?

She was found propped up in a bed she never slept in, with a book she’d finished months before. And of course, her notes were never found and her close friend in whom she had confided with was also found dead. She died from acute ethanol and barbituate intoxification, circumstances undetermined, similar to what Marilyn Monroe died from.

She had no drug or alcohol problems in her life, so why would she kill herself? Especially after having the story of a lifetime to reveal.

And what do you do if you can’t sleep? You turn out the lights.

In the murder scenes of both Dorothy and Marilyn, the lights were still on!

The New York cops did nothing. I mean nothing. The lead detective on the case, who had six children, abruptly resigned from the NYPD without a pension and, a short time later, moved out of town and opened a pricey restaurant.

The best evidence to suggest that the several drugs found in Dorothy’s blood were not self-administered is that only one drug, the one she normally rook, was on the glass on the nightstand.

Dorothy’s inquiry into Jack Ruby’s ties to the Mob, and her relentless exploration of the Warren Report’s gross inadequacies, threatened to expose dark secrets that powerful people both in and out of government did not want revealed. The Freedom of Information Act confirms that the FBI perceived her exposés as enough of a threat that they monitored her closely.

If you want to know more about this, read Mark Shaw’s book titled The Reporter Who Knew Too Much.²

JACK RUBY

The prosecution will now call to the stand Jack Ruby.

Can you remember what you said to reporters after you were granted a new trial?

Yes, I said the world will never know the true facts of what occurred and the people who carried it out.

Are these people in very high positions, Jack?

Yes.

Why has no one seen the film footage at the time it was shot?

"Because certain people with enough power didn’t want you to see it. Just like they didn’t want you to see the Zapruder film. Imagine what would have happened if the American public was shown both of those films.

Gentlemen, I want to tell the truth.

If Adlai Stevenson was the vice president, there never would have been an assassination of our beloved President Kennedy.

When asked to explain, he said, "Well, the answer is the man in office now, LBJ.

"A whole new form of government is going to take over the country and I know I won’t live to see you another time.

"Read A Texan Looks at Lyndon by J. Evetts Haley and it will open your eyes to a lot of things. This man is a Nazi in the worst order.

Isn’t it strange that Oswald, who hasn’t worked a lick most of his life, should be fortunate enough to get a job at the Book Building two weeks before the president himself didn’t know as to when he was to visit Dallas. Now, where would a jerk like Oswald get the information that the president was coming to Dallas? Only one person could have had that information, and that man was Johnson, who knew weeks in advance as to what was going to happen, because he was the one who was going to arrange the trip for the president. This had been planned long before the president himself knew about it, so you can figure that one out. The only one who gained by the shooting of the president was Johnson, and he was in a car in the rear and safe when the shooting took place. What would the Russians, Castro, or anyone else have to gain by eliminating the president? If Johnson was so heartbroken over Kennedy, why didn’t he do something for Robert Kennedy? All he did was snub him.

But if I am eliminated, there won’t be any way of knowing.

I won’t be around for you to come and question me again.

JUDITH VARY BAKER

She was a very good student in curing cancer and attended the University of Florida and worked at the Roswell Park Memorial Hospital. Her expertise was learning how to use cancer as a viable weapon. At the age of nineteen, she arrived in New Orleans on April 20, 1963, and met Lee Harvey Oswald.

He introduced her to Captain David Ferrie with Eastern Airlines and then to Dr. Mary Sherman and Dr. Ostner. This group was working on cancer research. Their goal was to get Castro ill with cancer. At the same time period, she also met Guy Bannister, who had been in charge of the Chicago Office of the FBI and Jack Ruby and Clay Shaw.

They were assembling products that could be used against Castro and were using x-rays to destroy his immune system. It was during this time in the summer of 1963, that Oswald was also promoting his pro-Castro image.

Their work had progressed to the point where they wanted to test the cancer virus on prisoners to see if it worked. At this point, Lee went to Mexico City to give them the virus to kill Castro. She started getting wet feet with the prospect of killing people, and Dr. Oxner told her that she and Lee were expendable if they didn’t do what they were told.

Judith and Lee had been lovers during this summer in New Orleans. They now separated and went their own ways. She kept her secret for forty years and still believes that Lee was an innocent man.

Jack Ruby was familiar with this cancer research and knew what it could do, and he knew that he too was expendable. After having a successful physical exam, he suddenly came down with cancer and died.³

JAMES T. TAGUE

"It has been nearly fifty years since I braked to a halt because of the traffic that was stopped in my lane as I was about to enter Dealey Plaza that day in November 1963. My car was not quite out from under the Triple Underpass. I sat there for a moment wondering why traffic had stopped and then got out of my car and walked the three or four short steps into the openness of Dealey Plaza to see why traffic had stopped, when I noticed the president’s limousine up by the School Book Depository. I then heard the pop of a firecracker.

"Then there was the crack-crack of two rifleshots, and I felt something sting me in the face. I did not realize it in that instant, but the sting was caused by debris flying up from a bullet hitting the curb of the street in front of me. That bullet was from a missed shot intended for President John F. Kennedy. It was the start of making my life very interesting.

I felt the missed shot was important, because to me it indicated there was more than one shooter. I raised my hand and related to a reporter what I knew—the story was printed nationwide, and I was at last called to testify. The Warren Commission’s findings were altered and history took a different direction.

ROSE CHERAMIE

Her real name was Melba Christine Marcades. She was riding with two men from Miami to Dallas. On the night of Wednesday, November 20, 1963, they stopped at the Silver Slipper Lounge in Eunice, Louisiana. One of the men threw her out the door onto the street. Previously, they told her their purpose was to pick up some money, pick up her baby being held by another man, and to kill Kennedy!

Louisiana State Police lieutenant Francis Frugé was called to Moosa Memorial Hospital in Eunice to get her. He took her in an ambulance to East Louisiana State Hospital on November 21. While there, Rose told the staff and the doctors that Kennedy was going to be killed in Dallas.

After the assassination, Frugé called the hospital and told them not to release her until he had a chance to talk with her. When he did so on Monday, November 25, she described the two men as either Cubans or Italians. She also said she was going to check into the Rice Hotel in Houston, where reservations were already made for her, and pick up ten kilos of heroin from a seaman coming into Galveston. The police checked out her story and found out that the ship with the seaman Cheramie said had the heroin was about to dock in Galveston.

She saw an article in the newspaper about Ruby killing Oswald on Sunday, and it said that Ruby did not know Oswald. She laughed and told Frugé that Ruby and Oswald were very good friends. She also told him that she used to work for Ruby as a stripper in his nightclub, and because of her employment, she also knew Lee Harvey Oswald. She said she was a drug courier for Jack Ruby and that he and Oswald had been shacking up for years.

Just four days after the assassination, with a provable, credible, live witness,