Still on the Case
Conspiracy Buffs live in a world of uncertainty, haunted by goat’s heads, a pristine bullet, and bouncing skulls. But the most haunting uncertainty of all is this: who was Lee Harvey Oswald?
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Of course, Penn’s army of gunmen doesn’t spring entirely from his overactive imagination. We’re standing on the railroad tracks now, the ones that cross over the Triple Underpass. Penn points out the famous railroad signal-tower perch of the late Lee Bowers. Up there on November 22, 1963, Lee Bowers had a clear view of the area behind the stockade fence that crests the grassy knoll. Right about here, where Penn, Elaine, and I are standing, police officer Joe Smith stopped a man who was exiting the scene with suspect haste, as Smith testified before the Warren Commission. The man showed Secret Service credentials to Smith. The Secret Service says that none of its agents would have been there at that time.
As for the late Lee Bowers, it was his “mysterious death,” shortly after his Warren Commission testimony, that set Penn off on his twenty-year chronicling of deaths and disappearances of witnesses with dangerous knowledge.
“Lee Bowers was killed in a one-car accident in my hometown of Midlothian, Texas,” Penn tells me, his drawl just crawling with embittered sarcasm. “The doctor in Midlothian who examined him told me that when he admitted him, Bowers was in some sort of strange shock.”
Some sort of strange shock. The tour of Dallas with Penn and Elaine puts me in shock. Some sort of strange trance. Ordinary features of the landscape are beginning to assume sinister aspects. The whole city seems to be teeming with teams of gunmen, backup gunmen, the ghosts of murdered witnesses.
Even things that are not there somehow testify, in Penns’ vision, to the work of conspiratorial intelligence. We’ve been cruising along Stemmons Freeway on the route the motorcade would have taken to JFK’s speaking engagement at the Dallas Trade Mart. Past the site of what was once the old Cobb Stadium before it was torn down. There were reserve gunmen on top of the stadium, Penn tells me.
And we cruise by the site of the old Highlander Hotel in Highland Park. Now replaced by some big new condo tower. “The paymaster stayed here, “ Penn tells me. “It’s also where the gunmen stayed the night before. They tore it down completely. I think it’s significant that all these buildings were torn down.”
Penn is fascinated by the first-class treatment the gunmen got before the day of the shooting.
“They treat the gunmen real well before,” he tells me. “They’re mighty important. Every wish of theirs must be complied with.”
Almost wistfully he describes the wish-fulfilled life of the gunmen in the secret safe houses he says they occupied the nights before the Night Before.
“There was one up in Lake Lugert, Oklahoma,” he says. “That was some damn place. They had anything the wanted. Gambling, women. Lobsters flown in daily. Sheeit.”
Of course, Penn says, things changed for the gunmen the Day After.
“They loaded them in the two getaway planes and then just blew up the planes — one of ‘em over the Gulf of Mexico, the other one down there in Sonora Province, old Mexico.”
Not every shrine had been torn down. Some have been quietly disintegrating. The Oak Cliff sites. The Earlene Roberts rooming house to which O. returned shortly after the shooting. The house, where he and Marina had lived as their marriage disintegrated that year. Jack Ruby’s raunchy apartment and motel pads. The Texas Theater, where O. was finally cornered.
“They just let this area decay,” Penn says — as if even the inexorable organic breakdown of wood fiber is due to a conscious decision they made.
I’ll never forget pulling into the driveway of this Oswald-and-Marina abode. It isn’t so much the shock of discovering around back the hauntingly familiar outside staircase that served as a background for the controversial O.-with-rifle-and-nose-shadow pix.
No, it is the expression on the face of the ancient Mexican man who apparently lives in the decaying shrine now. Evidently Penn is a regular, fairly well tolerated visitor here; when we arrive, the man — who is sitting on the sagging, splintered front porch with a child who appears to be his grandson — waves familiarly at Penn. But as we pass, I notice a deeply puzzled expression come over his face. Why do these crazy Anglos keep cruising my driveway? What kind of satisfaction is it they’re after, that they never get?
But the thing I’ll remember most about our tour this ay is not the haunted landmarks or the ghostly gunmen they conceal. The thing I’lkl never forget, for its intensity and authenticity — and intensity that explains the shadowy world they’ve created — is the grief of Penn and Elaine.
Actually, it’s Elaine’s grief. I already know about Penn Jones’ grief. It is all there in Forgive My Grief, his saga of murdered witnesses to the truth. The title is from Tennyson, by the ay, from a passage of In Memoriam addressed to God, who took away the poet’s closest friend:
Forgive my grief for one removed,
Thy creature, whom I found so fair.
I trust he lives in thee, and there
I find him worthier to be loved.
Elaine’s involvement in this whole thing is hard to figure out, though. Why would a bright, young, attractive woman - young enough to have hardly known who JFK was when he was shot — why would she immerse herself in the buff biz after two decades, when it doesn’t look like the case is on the verge of being cracked and all Penn offers is the despair and futility of mourning one lost witness after another?
I began to get a clue to what might be motivating Elaine during the course of the tour, on our way back from the Oswald-and Marina house, when Elaine spots a fat woman on the street.
“That looks like my stepmother,” she says. “God she was unfair to me. Every time I see a fat woman, I think of her and how unfair she was.”
“Look at that concrete bridge abutment up ahead,” Penn is saying. “That’s where William Whaley [the taxi driver who took Oswald from downtown to Oak Cliff] died in a crash just after he tried to testify about Ruby and Tippit.”
“My mother died when she was twenty-five,” Elaine says. “Most of the rest of my close relatives are dead now. All I have left is my grandmother.
And so it continues as the tour winds down, a counterpoint of Penn’s public grief and Elaine’s personal grief.
Later, after the tour is over and we are cooling off with some beers, Elaine tries to explain why she has made Penn’s project her life’s work.
“From the moment I met Penn, I knew that’s what I was gonna do — work on the case with him,” she tells me. “And when I started, I was so excited.”
“What happened?” I ask.
“Then I met all these people, and I saw there was no hope.”
“Which people?”
“The other people on the case.” She reels off a long list of prominent buffs.
“What’s wrong with them?” I ask.
“They none of them really loved John Kennedy. I remember meeting David Lifton and asking him point-blank, ‘Did you love John Kennedy?’ And he wouldn’t’ give me a direct answer. And that’s the real question: did you love the man? If you didn’t love him, why work on the case? Then it’s just a hobby or some kind of excitement.”
Penn Jones interjects an anecdote about Lifton, who has attracted a certain amount of envy and resentment from other buffs for repackaging familiar criticisms of the JFK-autopsy mystery into his trajectory-reversal theory. It requires us to believe that the conspirators shot Kennedy from the front, then spirited his body away and altered the wounds so that the autopsy would establish that the fatal bullet came from behind. Lifton is one of the few commercially successful buffs. Best Evidence was on the New York Times best-seller list for four months and sold hundreds of thousands of copies in paperback.
Penn tells me, “I was at this party out in California some years ago, and it was a party for me, and David Lifton was trying to get in, but they wouldn’t let him. So I went out and told him, ‘David, I’d like to have you in, but the party’s not being given by me. It’s just for me.’”
Lifton denies that the incident ever happened. And now it seems the tables have turned anyway, with Lifton getting the attention and going on all the talk shows, and Penn’s newsletter, according to Elaine, in decline.
“We’re down to two hundred subscribers now,” she says. “And most of them are old. Pretty soon they’ll die, and in a few years we’ll be down to fifty. And that’s what we have to look forward to. In two more years it’ll be all over. It’s pretty sad.”
But Elaine isn’t going to give up.
“You get used to people laughing at you. You get used to the scorn and the ridicule. You put up with hit because if you really believe in something, you don’t stop, no matter what. It’s like a religion.”
She and Penn drift into a talk about religion, specifically about Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk and philosopher, Penn’s idol.
“When Penn’s gone, I’m gonna become a hermit like Merton,” Elaine says. “Why should I bother with people anymore? I’ve lost everyone I loved except my grandmother and Penn. When they’re gone, there won’t be anyone.”
Elaine’s sadness has become so deep and so comprehensive that it’s hard to believe it could get worse, but we haven’t really touched bottom yet. She rallies briefly, then heads down again.
“But I guess you’ve go to keep up the fight, “she says, rather unconvincingly. “Still it’s pretty sad. It’s heartbreaking, depressing. There are days when Penn and I both weep over it. We both grieve over it.”
“Over it?” I ask. “You mean— “
“It’s sad for the state of the country. But really it’s more sad for John Kennedy. That’s what we can’t get over.”
It is then that I realize that these people are not buffs. They are mourners. Their investigation of the assassination is a continuation of his last rites that they can’t abandon. Unlike the rest of us, they haven’t stopped grieving.
My Library
