Behind the Lines
The Fourth Tramp
Jay says: Why is then, if those three were "tramps", were they wearing very good shes? Why do we have to wait forever until the real truth of the assasination is released? What were Nixon and Hoover doing in Dallas the night before? What about te sabot recovered from the roof of the Dal-Tex building when the roof was re-done? Oswald was likely a CIA or double agent--the Russians didn’t want anything to do with him--they smelled agent. He had a high security clearance when in the service, and actually was a sharpshooter in the Marines. Whenm he said "I’m just a patsy" he was probably telling the truth, but was in on the assasination to some extent. Jay Martel (February 19th, 2010 at 6:43am)
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Mary La Fontaine had solved one of the most famous and provocative mysteries of the assassination, but the story disappeared as surely as if it had fallen into a black hole. The Houston Post ran a story by the La Fontaines on the front page, but the Associated Press halfheartedly distributed a story that identified the La Fontaines as “conspiracy theorists,” which, as they say in their book, is a code name for “nuts.” The Washington Post and the Boston Globe mentioned the discovery without crediting the La Fontaines in brief stories about other aspects of the assassination. A Current Affair did a segment about the tramps but claimed the discovery as its own. And that was that. The result is that even people who maintain an interest in the assassination and habitually read new stories about it may not know that the three tramps have been positively identified and that this avenue of speculation about the assassination is a dead end.
The temptation is to blame the dreaded media for this failing, particularly because there are people who believe the media are part of the conspiracy to cover up the truth, but the real fault lies with the La Fontaines. Their story in the Houston Post mentions the three tramps almost as an afterthought and never clearly explains the importance and the certainty of Mary’s discovery. Instead it describes at some length several photographs the Dallas police took simulating the famous photograph of Oswald in his back yard holding radical newspapers and the rifle that killed Kennedy. For years conspiracy theorists have speculated that this photograph is a fake, but in 1979 the House Select Committee on Assassinations proved beyond doubt that the photograph was genuine. In the Post, the La Fontaines chose to concentrate on their new information about the photograph, because it suggests a conspiracy, more than on their solid research on the tramps, which demolishes any conspiracy theory involving them. They chose mystery and speculation over truth.
And they did it again in Oswald Talked, for Mary found something else of interest in that file. There were three other arrest sheets besides those of the three tramps. One, apparently misfiled, was for an arrest several days later. One was for Daniel Wayne Douglas, a 19-year-old car thief from Memphis who had the bad luck to choose that day in Dallas to turn himself in. And the third was for a 31-year-old man named John Elrod who, like the three tramps, had been arrested along the railroad tracks north of the School Book Depository. Elrod’s arrest record was not known to exist either. It was important because he claimed to have been the cell mate of Lee Harvey Oswald.
Nine months after the assassination, Elrod appeared at the sheriff’s office in Memphis looking for help. Elrod was an alcoholic and now, though he was trying to dry out, he had been drinking and contemplated killing his wife. At the sheriff’s office, he confessed to something else that was bothering him. He said that while he was in a cell with Oswald the day of the assassination, a prisoner with a battered face had been brought down the corridor by guards. According to Elrod, Oswald had said he knew the man because he had seen him in a motel room a few days earlier discussing selling stolen guns with four other men, including Jack Ruby. The Memphis sheriff contacted the FBI. Agents interviewed Elrod and filed reports of his statements. They sent to Dallas for his arrest records, but the reply came that there was no record of Elrod’s being arrested on November 22, 1963. The FBI assumed Elrod’s tale was the fantasy of a drunk and proceeded no further. Now Mary had found proof that he had been arrested that day after all.
That would not amount to much if there weren’t a few other tantalizing facts the La Fontaines found to support Elrod’s story. Oswald was put in a cell at some point during the afternoon of his arrest. A log prisoners were required to sign to make telephone calls showed that Oswald was in cell F-2. The F cell block was a corridor with three small, adjoining cells. No known record shows what cell Elrod was in, but in 1993 he told the La Fontaines that “a kid from Tennessee who had stolen a car in Memphis” was also in the cell. The same phone log shows that Douglas, the confessed car thief, was in cell F-1. And there really was a prisoner with a battered face in the jail that day. He was Lawrence Reginald Miller, now dead, who on November 18 was the passenger in the front seat of a blue Thunderbird carrying guns stolen from a military arsenal. The car crashed along Hall Street in downtown Dallas while being pursued by the police. Newspaper stories the next day refer to Miller’s injured face. And, to complete the circle with exactly the sort of fact that could mean everything and could mean nothing, the driver of the Thunderbird, Donnell Darius Whitter, worked in the garage where Jack Ruby took his car. Indeed, he had personally worked on Ruby’s car.
This is the kind of tale that makes wading through assassination literature rewarding. And isn’t it a great story! The three prisoners watching the convict with the bloody face paraded before them, the meeting in the motel room with Ruby, the stolen guns, the chase through downtown Dallas in a blue Thunderbird with Jack Ruby’s mechanic at the wheel…not that I believe that all this proves anything. Elrod’s story may be true, but there is no proof he was in the cell with Oswald. He could have, for instance, been in a cell with the man with the battered face and learned his story from him. And, even assuming Elrod was in the same cell, there is no proof that Oswald said a thing. Indeed, why would Oswald, who was smirky and elusive in everything he is known to have said after the assassination, who was smirky and elusive during his time in the Marines, in Russia, in Dallas, and in New Orleans, suddenly start talking cordially and intimately to a teenage car thief and a drunk. Surely, whether Oswald was part of a plot or not, he would have suspected that anyone put in a cell with him was there to inform on him to the authorities and thus would not have volunteered that he knew Ruby.
By discovering the identities of the three tramps, the La Fontaines have made a real and important contribution to the history of the assassination. Few books on Kennedy can make that claim with justice. By discovering Elrod, they have made an ingenious story based on a few related or unrelated facts. Most books on Kennedy can make that claim. Oswald killed Kennedy all alone, but people will never believe it in their hearts. There are too many bizarre facts, too many deep and foreboding characters, and too many hypnotic stories to weave around them.
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