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?
Dealey Plaza. It’s a hot morning in August of this year, and motorists whizzing down Elm Street are witnessing a curious, if not sinister, phenomenon. Three people have gathered around a manhole at the foot of the famous grassy knoll. There’s an attractive young blond woman, a spry, grizzled older fellow in a Coors cap, and a guy in his thirties with a tape recorder. The older guy is bending down and—demonstrating remarkable vigor—pulling the hundred-pound manhole cover out of its recess in the sidewalk.
Then he stops. Waits for a Dallas Police Department squad car to cruise by and disappear into the darkness of the Triple Underpass. At last he has yanked the massive iron seal clear of the opening that leads down to the storm sewer system honeycombing the underside of Dealey Plaza.
Then he does something really strange. He walks out into the middle of Elm Street traffic, heads uphill between two lanes of oncoming cars, and plants himself in the middle of the road about 25 yards upstream.
“Okay now, Ron. I’m standing right where the president was when he took the head shot. Now I want you to get down in that manhole,” he yells at the younger guy, who, not to be coy, is me. “Elaine,” he calls out to the woman, “you show him how to position himself.”
So here I am, out in the midday sun, lowering myself into this manhole. It’s kind of cool down here, though some might call it dank. While it is nice to escape the pounding of the direct sunlight, this is not my idea of summer fun. But this is no ordinary manhole. This is the historic Dealey Plaza manhole that a certain faction of assassination buffs—led by Penn Jones, Jr., the guy in the middle of Elm Street—believes sheltered a sniper who fired the fatal frontal head shot on November 22, 1963. This manhole is the first stop on a grand tour of Dallas assassination shrines, during which, among other things, Penn has promised to show me the exact locations from which, he says offhandedly, the nine gunmen fired at John F. Kennedy that day. Sort of the Stations of the Cross Fire in conspiracy-theory gospel.
You remember Penn Jones Jr., don’t you? The feisty, combative country editor of the Midlothian Mirror. Author of the four-volume (so far) privately printed series called Forgive My Grief, the continuing account of his JFK-assassination investigation, which focuses on the deaths and disappearances of the 188 witnesses (so far) who Penn contends knew too much about the assassination conspiracy to be permitted to live.
Well, Penn Jones, Jr., is still on the case. He has retired from his editor’s post to a farmhouse in Waxahachie, where he lives with his disciple and research associate, Elaine Kavanaugh, and publishes a monthly assassination newsletter, the Continuing Inquiry.
“Elaine,” Penn yells out, “get Ron to back up against the wall there. Then he’ll know what I mean.”
I think Penn has sensed that I have some reservations about his Manhole Sniper theory, and this elaborate positioning is designed to address my doubts. In fact, I am skeptical.
Not the least of my problems with the Manhole Sniper theory is that it requires the putative manhole assassin to have popped up the hundred-pound manhole cover at just the right moment, fired a shot, then plopped it down over his head without any of the surrounding crowd taking notice of his activity. But Penn is determined to set me straight on this misapprehension.
“Okay now, Ron, you’ve got to move back so’s your back is touching the rear of the hole there,” Elaine says.
I follow her instructions and find myself completely under the overhang of pavement. In total darkness, except…well, damned if there isn’t a perfect little rectangle of daylight coming through an opening in the pavement right in front of my eyes, and damned if Penn Jones’ face isn’t framed right in it.
“That’s the storm drain in the curb side you’re lookin’ out now,” says Elaine.
“See what a clear shot he had?” Penn Jones yells out. “Okay, Elaine, now pull that manhole cover back over on top of him. Ron, you’ll see that even in the dark you’ll be able to feel your way to one of those runoff tunnels he used to squirm his way under the plaza to the getaway.”
Elaine begins to lug the heavy seal over the hole. Over me.
“Well, actually, Elaine, I don’t think that’ll be necessary. I get the picture,” say, hastily scrambling out, visions of the glowing eyes of sewer rats sending shivers through me.
Penn Jones hustles over dodging traffic, and drags the cover back into place. He gives me a look that says, “Uh huh—another one not prepared to follow the trail all the way,” and then he sets off on a trot up the grassy knoll to what he says is the next point of fire.
But before we follow Penn Jones up the grassy knoll, before we get any deeper into the labyrinthine state of the art of JFK-assassination theory, let’s linger a moment on the manhole demo, because we’ve got a metaphor here for my own stance in relation to the whole web of conspiracy theory that the assassination buffs have spun out over the past twenty years. Because I’m going to be your guide in this excursion, and I want you to trust my judgment and powers of discrimination. I want you to know my attitude toward these people, which can be summed up by saying that I’ll go down into the manhole with them but I won’t pull the cover over my head.
You need a connoisseur when you’re dealing with the tangled thicket of theory and conjecture that has overgrown the few established facts in the years since the events of that November 22. You need someone who can distinguish between the real investigators still in the field and the poets, like Penn Jones, who’s luxuriant and flourishing imaginations have produced a dark, phantasmagoric body of work that bears more resemblance to a Latin American novel (Penn is the Gabriel García Márquez of Dealey Plaza, if you will) than to the prosaic police-reporter mentality I prefer in these matters. You need someone with something akin to what Keats called negative capability—the ability to abide uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts without succumbing to the temptation of premature certainty. You need someone like me. I rather fancy myself El Exigente of conspiracy-theory culture, like the “Demanding One” in the TV coffee commercial. I’ve covered the buff beat since the early seventies—you might call me a buff buff—since the time, before Watergate, when everybody laughed at the idea of conspiracies.
So with El Exigente here as your guide, let’s look at who’s still on the case after twenty years and whether they have anything worth saying. What are the real mysteries left, and is there any hope we’ll every solve them?
I remember the way the residents of the little coffee-growing village in the Savarin commercial gather, buzzing nervously around the town square, awaiting the arrival of El Exigente, the white-suited coffee taster whose judgment on their beans will determine the success or failure of their entire harvest?
Well, the buff grapevine had been buzzing furiously for days before my departure for Dallas. Cross-country calls speculating about the nature of my mission. My past writings on the subject extricated from files, summoned up on computer screens, and scrutinized suspiciously. Indeed, angrily in some cases, as I learned the morning of my departure, when I received an irate call from newly ascendant buff David Lifton, author of the most successful of the recent buff books, Best Evidence. He accused me of plotting to trash his cherished trajectory-reversal theory.
As I set out for Dallas on the eve of the twentieth anniversary of the Dealey Plaza shooting, I was aware that I was heading into a buzz saw of buff factionalism. Long-festering rivalries and doctrinal disputes were dividing the Dallas-area buffs after years of beleaguered unity. Some of the bitterness can be attributed to the aftermath of the British invasion of Dallas buff turf in the past decade. Fist there was British writer Michael Eddowes with his KGB-impostor theory: the Oswald who returned from the Soviet Union in 1962 wasn’t the same Lee Harvey Oswald who defected to the USSR in 1959 but instead was a clever KGB impostor who used the name “Alek Hidell” (one of Oswald’s aliases in Dallas and New Orleans). A few years later British writer Anthony Summers came to Dallas to research his theory that Oswald was not a Russian but an American intelligence operative. Both writers swept through town, wined and dined the local buffs, wrung them dry of their files and facts, and departed to publish completely contradictory conspiracy theories.
Eddowes’ book, The Oswald File, left the most lasting legacy of divisiveness; it launched the epic embarrassment of the Oswald exhumation controversy. Eddowes maintained that his KGB-impostor theory could be proved by examining the body buried in Fort Worth’s Rose Hill Cemetery under Oswald’s name. Dental and medical evidence would show that the body belonged to an impostor, he said.
A number of Dallas Buffs invested a lot of credibility in the exhumation crusade. Mary Ferrell, for instance. The great archivist. For years she had labored diligently to collect and index everything ever written about the assassination, every document, every clipping, every scrap of potential evidence. Her husband built a room in their back yard to hold the ever-expanding files. They bought two German shepherds to protect their stock. And for all those years, unlike the publicity-happy buffs who used her work, she had never sought to publish a theory of her own, had never abandoned her archivist’s neutrality, had just gone on compiling her ultra-authoritative, supercomplete name index to the JFK assassination. Sample entries from the name index indicate its comprehensiveness:
Boyer, Al—Hairstylist. He accompanied Josephine Ann Bunce, Jamye Bartlett and Bonnie Cavin to Dallas from Kansas City, Missouri. Warren Commission, vol. 22, p. 903.
Boykin, Earl L. Wife, Ruby O. 1300 Keats Drive. Mechanic at Earl Hayes Chevrolet. Probably the same as Earl Boykin, who gave his address as 1300 Kouts at the Sports Drome Rifle Range one of the days Oswald was allegedly there. Texas Attorney General’s Report.
My Library
