Oswald Talked: The New Evidence in the JFK Assassination

by Mary LaFontaine, Mary La Fontaine

Put aside all of the speculations and suspicions. This is the Kennedy book that names the players in the cover-up and how they did it. The New Evidence in the Kennedy Assassination brings to the forefront documented records that substantiate a number of conspiracy claims, refute others, and unlock new portions of the scenario that have not been written about before. The La Fontaines examine overlooked clues and present the following pieces of evidence, which support the existence of a conspiracy and establish the crucial link between Oswald and Ruby, the CIA, and other government agencies: A Department of Defense card showing that Oswald was employed by the U.S. government after his 1959 discharge from the Marines. The same kind of card was carried by known CIA agent and U2 pilot Gary Powers. Copies of two matted prints which may have been used to create the incriminating backyard photograph of Oswald with the supposed murder weapon. Plus this book contains testimony by the man who altered the photos for the investigation. Never-before-published records of the burglary of a nearby military armory just one week before the assassination. Associates of Jack Ruby were implicated for the theft but not all of the weapons were recovered by investigators. Arrest records and names of the three enigmatic vagrants who have been at the heart of several conspiracy theories. The evidence suggests their anonymity was a smoke screen to take emphasis off of others who were arrested that day, including one man who was in an adjoining cell to Oswald following his arrest. These few points just scratch the surface of unearthed information presented in this book. Ray and Mary La Fontaine are not conspiracy theorists. They are front-page investigative journalists and producers of PBS and other nationally broadcast programming. Researching police files, legal memoranda from the Warren Commission investigation, and numerous other documented sources, they have attacked the holes of speculation left behind from theorists and filled them in with indisputable facts on the case.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

456 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 1996

Reviews

[Pete daPixie · Rating 3 out of 5]

'Oswald Talked' (well wasn't his Marine nickname 'rabbit'?) remains a fresh and interesting contribution to the November '63 debate. 'The new evidence in the JFK assassination', uncovered by Dallas husband and wife journalist team Ray and Mary La Fontaine made some important advances when published back in 1996.
It was the La Fontaine duo that debunked the 'three tramps' photo as identifying E. Howard Hunt's presence in Dealey Plaza. In fact I do not go along with these authors. The three tramps were in fact Charles Marvin Holt who provided the false Secret Service i.d.'s, Charles Rogers and Charles Harrelson. Neither of these men were shooters.
One of these trails uncovered James Elrod, a new name in this case, unknown prior to the DPD release and the witness giving the evidence that Oswald talked. Christ the guy was in custody for almost 48 hours, interrogated by Police, FBI and Secret Service. We know he talked, but we know nothing because nothing was recorded. What did King Lear say, 'Nothing will come of nothing.' Elrod talked in '64 but his words were buried.
Of the many trails in this book, perhaps the most interesting is the authors take on Silvia Odio's 'Leon in the hall with two Cubans' routine. I reject this idea too and follow Jim Garrison's take, that this did occur. We also have LHO with a military ID card that he shouldn't have been authorised for. Gun running deals for DRE ops with military,CIA and Ruby connections. More LHO/Ruby pre Nov '63 links and LHO as FBI informer double agent.
For a dedicated follower of this case, this book is a valued addition to my collection, and gets three stars for it's factual grounding and it's fresh take on certain issues as well as beating up Gerald Posner on many points. For a non-anorak this may not be rated as high.

[Steven H · Rating 1 out of 5]

WAS OSWALD AN FBI INFORMANT WHO WAS OVERHEARD TALKING ABOUT RUBY?

Authors Ray and Mary La Fontaine wrote in the Preface to this 1996 book, “arrest records dated November 22, 1963… were the records of two… men, who… had been caught in the hectic police sweep of that day. Both were eventually released. Before they were, however, both were placed, for at least several hours on the Friday of the assassination, in the same tiny cellblock with Lee Harvey Oswald. During this interval---documented with a full arsenal of telephone logs and other records---the men overheard Oswald ‘talk.’ Oswald talked about Jack Ruby, about a secret motel-room meeting where money and guns changed hands, and about another prisoner already held in the Dallas jail… One of the inmates overhearing this exchange, John F. Elrod, described it nine months later… to the Memphis sheriff’s office and the Memphis FBI. The FBI responded by attempting to discredit Elrod, lying about his Dallas incarceration, and burying his report for three decades.

”As we pursued the documentation for this startling disclosure… the newly released records from the FBI, CIA, and U.S. Army began to tell the true story of Lee Harvey Oswald and the assassins of President Kennedy. It soon became clear that the [FBI], far from investigating the assassination, had participated in a massive cover-up about Oswald. It also became clear why: conducting a real investigation would have disclosed the embarrassing fact that Oswald, the accused assassin of the president and Dallas police officer J.D. Tippit, had been recruited in March 1963 as an FBI informant… It was in the role of FBI informant that Oswald visited New Orleans later that year, returned to Dallas in early October, and on November 16, warned the Bureau of an impending assassination attempt on the present by a ‘Cuban faction.’ … a conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy required that the conspirators be associated with Oswald…

“Only one group conspicuously fills this bill. It happens to be the same virulently anti-Castro group known… to have been holding clandestine meetings in Dallas only weeks before the assassination, seeking to set up an armed invasion of Cuba in … November 1963… it was this group that Oswald infiltrated as an FBI informant, and they knew it. He became the perfect patsy. Suspicions of Oswald intelligence involvements have been with us for more than thirty years.” (Pg. 5-7)

They note, “One week after the city made its well-publicized opening of police files, Mary La Fontaine walked into … Dallas City Hall… she had tried to persuade her husband, Ray… that somehow a significant scrap might have slipped past the career experts … like the arrest records of the three tramps… of the scores of persons hauled in by Dallas police on the day of the assassination, only five men other than Oswald had actually been arrested… [One] was for a man who… [was] too far from downtown to have been one of the three tramps. His name was John Franklin Elrod…” (Pg. 25-29)

They continue, “It was Oswald whom Elrod had on his mind when his older brother Lindy… picked him up from the Dallas jail… ‘John told me that day he was in the same cell with Lee Harvey Oswald and that he knew Oswald didn’t kill Kennedy.’ … Elrod’s account that he shared a cell with Lee Harvey Oswald would go a long way toward explaining some mysteries---why [Elrod] fled Dallas after his release from jail, for example. But did his claim square with the known facts about Oswald’s incarceration? Would the Dallas police really have put the accused presidential assassin in a cell close to another inmate? The answer, it turns out, is yes. When Oswald … was brought into the downtown Dallas police station [it was] not for assassinating the president, but for the murder of a policeman… Contrary to police reports in the Warren findings that Oswald was kept isolated while in confinement, phone documents show that he was placed just one cell apart from [Daniel Wayne] Douglas… This suggests that other, if not all, prisoners suspected of complicity in the assassination were kept in the same three-call F block… What Elrod was calling a ‘cellmate’ may have been that… or he may have been an inmate in an adjacent cell, with whom Elrod, in F-3 perhaps, could talk through the bars. The fact that Elrod describes Oswald sitting on a toilet---because he and Douglas were on the beds---suggests the former interpretation.” (Pg. 39-40)

They go on, “Lee Harvey Oswald started the last forty-eight hours of his life in cell F-2… he had spent at least some of his hours in custody within talking distance of another inmate, either in the same F-2 or an adjacent cell… Elrod says today that he was put on a chain with Oswald, appeared in lineups, and was interrogated ‘around the clock’ for forty-eight hours until Roby shot Oswald… There can be little doubt that Elron understood… that his cellmate had been the one who was supposed to have killed Kennedy---and that the very man Oswald had been talking about… Jack Ruby, had shown up in the police station shortly afterwards and shot him dead with a pistol… And so john Elrod dropped out… and returned to the safe obscurity of his mother’s home…” (Pg. 41)

They add, “The connection Elrod establishes between Elrod and Ruby is … depending not only on Elrod’s oral testimony… but on a paper trail of records…. [Elrod states] ‘Everyone involved in this thing has ended up dead.’ …The only survivor is Elrod, the man who heard what he shouldn’t have, and who then tried to tell the FBI; they did not listen. But the documents that tell Elrod’s story also survive…” (Pg. 42) They state, “One decidedly Unambiguous clue is a Department of Defense ID card found in Oswald’s possession following his arrest… the USMC has admitted issuing the ID to Oswald prior to his discharge in 1959… the card’s significance was overlooked for more than thirty years.” (Pg. 66)

They recount, “Three decades after testifying to the Warren Commission, Carlos Bringuier … no longer believes [Oswald] was acting under FBI or CIA auspices … Oswald killed Kennedy, Bringuier says, but he wasn’t crazy, and he wasn’t alone. He was operating under the control of Cuban intelligence. ‘I can’t prove this in my legal mind,’ says ex-lawyer Bringuier, ‘but in my OTHER mind… I am certain Castro ordered Kennedy killed.’ … For all that, there is evidence that it was Bringuier’s first intuition---what Oswald had some association with the FBI---that may have been closest to the mark.” (Pg. 163-164)

They wonder, “the less-settled question of Ruby’s motivation for killing Oswald remains. Did he… receive mob ‘orders’ to do in a patsy who properly should have killed on the spot… Was it then necessary for Ruby, whether he received orders from higher-ups or not, to silence Oswald in order to sever his own recent ties to him as part of an anti-Castro gunrunning ring… Was it the realization of Ruby’s own impending exposure, as Oswald inevitably started talking, that changed [Ruby’s] demeanor from indifference to frenzy during his nightmarish assassination weekend?” (Pg. 217)

They state, “Oswald’s final preassassination meeting with the FBI occurred on … November 16… a teletype was said to have been received in the New Orleans office of the FBI by … a Bureau security patrol clerk … When [these] claims came to light, however, none of the agents whose names he had jotted on the face of the reconstructed Teletype would officially corroborate that they had been informed by the clerk of a preassassination threat against Kennedy in Dallas…” (Pg. 300-301)

They report, “Linda Bell, soon to be co-executive producer of ‘Hard Copy’… asked Mary what made her think of them… Mary explained what they had, focusing on Oswald’s cellmate John Elrod… In the meantime, Mary heard from a New York producer named Johnny Parson… Mary and Ray met with Parsons in a motel room in Dallas… In essence, ‘Hard Copy’ agreed to serve as corporate funder… for the little matter of telling the truth about the Kennedy assassination to the American public… It seems likely that the Elrod revelations---courtesy in large part of ‘Hard Copy’---will ultimately overshadow the … PBS/BBC project for ‘Frontline.’ If so, it would be an irony that …One of the major historical events of our fast-closing century was ultimately chronicled not on educational television, or even on a commercial network, but on a tabloid.” (Pg. 346-348)

This book will appeal to some JFK conspiracy theory fans.

[Lee Tracy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book impressed me when it was released in 1996. At the time, I still believed in a low-level conspiracy (Cuban exiles, mobsters, rogue CIA agents). Today I am inclined more toward a higher-level conspiracy involving elements in the military, Secret Service and others. Still, this book contains a lot of (thoughtful) speculation about the low-level figures on the fringes of the assassination plot. I've always been an agnostic about the Tramps in Dealey Plaza, so I wasn't upset by reports that they really were just tramps. Even Harold Weisberg, one of the pioneers of assassination research, had said as much going back to the early 1970s.

The John Elrod story is problematic. It's hard to believe that Oswald was kept with other prisoners. In fact, other researchers have documented that he was held in isolation. Elrod may instead have seen/overheard John Thomas Masen, who looked quite a bit like Oswald. Unfortunately, the book don't include a photo of Masen. The authors do a pretty good job examining the enigmatic, contradictory lives and careers of George de Mohrenschildt and Lee Harvey Oswald, the events in New Orleans in the summer of 1963, various gun-running activities, Cuban exile groups, and the possibility of Oswald being an FBI informant and fake leftist. At least they cover these issues better than most mainstream media reporters EVER have. They also raise some interesting questions about Silvia Odio's story.

The authors make a serious error on page 46 when they state that a first generation copy of the Zapruder film was made for the Dallas police. In fact, the first generation copies made that weekend were in the hands of the Secret Service, the FBI and Zapruder himself. In the Appendix on the Case Against Oswald, the authors go back and forth on the viability of the "evidence" against Oswald. The case against Oswald has been much more effectively demolished in the last 15 years or so by other authors, but I credit the La Fontaines with trying to keep an open mind.

[Jeffrey Lyons · Rating 4 out of 5]

I quite enjoyed this book when I read it over 10 years ago. There are so many books out there about the JFK assassination conspiracy. And there was a move that came out that opened up all those rumor mills.

As a reader, I think this book lays some of that to rest. We will never know for sure. But this book makes us think that Oswald really did it after all. The authors clarify a few things that have had conspiracy theorists going wild. The evidence is overpowering as far as this book is concerned. And I have seen a few TV documentaries about this using the Zapruder film and science to suggest that it could really have been a lone gunman in a building behind the President.

If you are fully convinced that there was a CIA or mafia conspiracy that led to the President's assassination, this book is not for you. But if you look at it from a scientific and realist you might find it intriguing.

[Chad · Rating 4 out of 5]

This peculiar book is essential reading for anyone researching JFK. A husband-and-wife team (or wife-and-husband team, since the book pays repeated homage to Mary's sharp intellect and talent for cracking mysteries) has pieced together an extraordinary series of chains of circumstantial evidence to arrive at a very credible conclusion as to why Jack Ruby killed Lee Harvey Oswald on November 24, 1963. The two men almost certainly knew each other, lending tremendous weight to the conspiracy version of the assassination.

The interaction between different federal agencies - in particular the FBI, ATF and Army Intelligence - in tracking gun-running operations that served hardcore anti-Castro Cuban exiles in Dallas is dealt with in painstaking (often tortuous) detail. The reader is treated to accounts of the customary territoriality and jealousy between divisions of the US government, which in this case, as in so many others, furthered the tragedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963.

One thing I found a bit irksome was the authors' self-congratulatory tone in relation to their discovery of the true identity of the famous (or infamous) "three tramps" supposedly found in a railway car behind the grassy knoll after the shooting and photographed as they were led away in police custody. Indeed, the authors do actually appear to have identified the men in the photographs correctly, and they did uncover the record of their arrest (hidden away for many years) from the day of the assassination. But a discrepancy lingers.

Until the arrest records were found so many years later (1992), it had been universally accepted that these three men were taken from the rail car between 12:30 and 1 PM. This made the photo itself “off," until it was revealed that the time of the arrest was actually 4 PM, which explained why the men being led across the plaza cast such long shadows on the ground. Still, all the accounts that the three tramps had been arrested in the half-hour following the assassination might make the photos more than just routine snaps. I think the scene was staged.

The three men - Harold Doyle, John Forrester Gedney and Gus Abrams - have often been identified as Charles Rogers (CIA operative), Charles Harrelson (contract assassin) and Chauncey Holt (go-between for CIA and Mafia). But while the La Fontaines are correct that this is a misidentification of the men photographed, it would make sense for the photographing of 3 actual hobos who looked like Rogers, Harrelson and Holt to have been conducted as a distracting "psy op," in this case under the supervision of a US intelligence veteran with tremendous experience in that very field: Gen. Edward Lansdale.

Indeed, Lansdale was identified in one of the photos by Col. Fletcher Prouty, former liaison between the CIA and Pentagon, who knew Lansdale well. Lansdale, according to Prouty, can be seen walking past the tramps as they are led away under the custody of police officers whose uniforms have "non-standard" features. The photos were only found years after the event, and later still, Charles Harrelson, a professional hit man and sniper of some repute, claimed in an interview from prison to have killed JFK. For all the brilliant ability of Ray and Mary La Fontaine in deciphering plots swirling around the assassination, they don't seem to have pondered this possibility at all.

Other strange aspects of the book include the coverage of the death of Oswald acquaintance George De Mohrenschildt (the authors convincingly demonstrate it was a suicide, yet totally omit De Mohrenschildt's last-minute plea to CIA Director George H. W. Bush for help); and the odd deference to the ridiculous "single bullet theory" (concocted by the odious Arlen Specter) on the basis of a "mathematical model" introduced by a group called "Failure Analysis" in 1992. Omitting mention of De Mohrenschildt's desperate letter is forgivable; treating Arlen Specter's "magic bullet" with anything other than the contempt it deserves is not.

Still, this is a must-read for other areas of the subject. The authors take gentle jabs at conspiracy researchers they clearly respect (e.g. Marrs, Summers, Fonzi), and on the whole they treat Case Closed author Gerald Posner, politely, as a blowhard (describing him eloquently as a "Warren pitbull" at one point). Their analysis of the Cuban exile Silvia Odio's story of Lee Harvey Oswald being brought to her doorstep one late-September night in 1963 by a couple of Cuban men she had never met before will be of great interest to those familiar with the tale. Highly recommended.

[james · Rating 3 out of 5]

The husband & wife authors wrote this book 30 years after the assassination of President Kennedy with then (circa 1992) recently released documents. These were, for the most part, the result of the Dallas Police Department's release of all its documents about the murder of John Kennedy. There is plenty of interesting material here, but it is a bit long.

If you'd like to know more about the Kennedy assassination, or an overview of it, I recommend that you obtain this book from the library and read the last 2 parts: one, a time line of the investigation; and two the last part entitled The Case against Lee Harvey Oswald. This will show how ridiculous the official report, known as the Warren Commisiion Report is.

[Kathi Jackson · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn't read all of this book because it's much too detailed for me.