Chuck Yates Needs A Job

0:20 Hey everybody welcome to Chuck Yates needs a job the podcast this is a treat my guest today is Matt Crompton who is a world renowned lawyer a world renowned musician but he's not here because of that

0:34 Matt welcome in and tell us why you're here yeah I've got a thank you for that very flattering introduction that shot very nice I just started or have a podcast coming out called solving JFK so I'm

0:51 pursuing the audacious goal of trying to figure out what happened in the Kennedy assassination from an objective truth standpoint comparing conspiracy theory arguments to war and report defender

1:05 arguments point by point so we know for a fact that at least what have you got you got to season one recorded that you're going to drop. Yeah, I've got 26 episodes recorded. I've got the audio.

1:19 Done and then I've got four episodes actually three that are like fully done that have the the music and the sound effects And the audio clips. So basically I wrote a script and then I and now we're

1:33 going back And then we sort of shine each one up and and make it, you know, add all the multimedia Well, I can't wait to hear about it, but I know you haven't solved the Kennedy assassination

1:43 because you're still alive and right so the I'm real quick. I grew up My dad went to Southwestern med school the teaching hospital for Southwestern is parkland. Of course where Kennedy went My dad

2:03 started there in the fall of 65 So everybody that worked on Kennedy was you know, my dad's professors in med school My dad also figured out very early on the way you dealt with all the indigence that

2:18 came through Parkland is you had to get the medical records, but the medical records locked up at 5 pm. And so when you were on night shift, you had to break into the records room, get the records

2:32 of the patients, and that's how you were able to diagnose them. Well, when you did that, you also wandered through and you read everything about Lee Harvey Oswald, you read everything about Jack

2:41 Ruby, you looked, there was some Conley stuff in there, you looked for Kennedy stuff and you couldn't find anything. So anyway, I've always been fascinated with the Kennedy assassination because

2:57 of that. I wrote my senior thesis on it at Rice University. So that's why I'm interested. Why are you interested in this? Yeah, well, I don't have a story of being personally connected to the

3:09 case like you do with your dad there, which is really cool So my interest, you know, I was always sort of interested in it. generally just, you know, the first time I heard about it. Oh,

3:22 there's an assassination of the president and then the guy that killed him was killed a few days later. And then all these, you know, attaching all these things to it, I started to pay attention

3:31 to it. Probably when the movie JFK first came out and I was a kid, that's, you know, I was like 10 years old. That's when I became aware of it. And then I was a senior in college doing some

3:45 student teaching of 1960, American history, 1960 to the present for sophomore high school history, before I went to law school my last semester of college. And of course I was very focused on

3:56 going out and drinking at Ohio University. And the JFK assassination offered the most videos that I could show the class for the topic. But in the course of being a slacker, I did dive into the

4:13 topic more, I've read a few books at the time, you know. And I definitely was, you know, I was certainly came in on the conspiracy side of things. And

4:24 yeah, what happened was sort of led me down the road of doing the podcast, actually, is I read a few more books and I went, I think I got this and I think it was a conspiracy and I think I know

4:35 what happened. And then I went on to these Facebook forums and there's all these, you know, guys in there that have been doing this for a long time and they are certain that Oswald did it alone

4:47 They'll bet their whole lives on it. And that, there's certainty about it. Sort of made me go, okay, so this is not, we don't have a consensus. People have strong disagreements about it. And

5:01 so what I realized though, is in these message boards, it's kind of a metaphor for politics today. Like what happens is, you know, conspiracy theory personnel will make some argument. Oswald

5:13 couldn't have been in place to fire the shots, right? And then. The Warren report defender doesn't address that argument. They then go to what they think their strong argument is. Yeah, but

5:22 seven people saw him shoot off as a tippet, right? Yeah, but Kennedy's body went back into, has had went back into the left. Yeah, but look at the paperwork for the rifle, right? So nobody

5:34 addresses each point. So what I'm trying to do is, attorney is what I do for a living, I'm an attorney. I'm trying to go issue by issue and do basically like you would do in litigation. You'd

5:45 have jury instructions You asked the jury to make a finding on each little micro issue. So that's kind of what we're gonna do is make a finding on all these issues. That's cool. Now at the risk,

5:58 so I wrote my senior thesis on this 35 years ago, something like that, 30 years ago. And I read the books and I try to keep up as I come along, but I will be somewhat dated on this. So at the

6:10 risk of being what one of the famous referees sits there and boos me as the same idiot that drinks too much wanders out and can't find his car in the parking lot. I may be that on the Kennedy

6:23 assassination, but I'm fascinated by this. So let's jump in. So

6:28 kind of tell me about the podcast and how you're structuring it. Are you going to kind of go episode by episode's an argument like you laid out just a second ago? Yeah. So, you know, what people

6:40 tend to do, and I've had the good fortune or bad luck maybe of sort of getting some followers on TikTok and seeing with that audience is like. And people want to jump straight to the conclusion.

6:54 Nobody wants to go, let's talk about the witnesses in the schoolbook depository and inventory everything they said, right? Because what they want to do is they want to go, you know, the CIA did

7:05 it or LBJ did it or the driver did it or whatever. Whatever they think happened, they want to put that out there. And then If you think something else, then you're stupid. You gotta show your

7:16 work. This is like a real, real complex math problem. And you can't just go, the answer is four. You gotta show pages and pages and pages to back it up because it's just so hotly disputed. But

7:30 in terms of how we're gonna organize it, so the first episode is a prologue. So that one is basically just where are we? What happened in the case? Why do I care about it? What am I trying to do?

7:45 We dive into the story of this guy, Ralph Yates, early on. He's one of the people that saw an Oswald lookalike, which is sort of late. So late the Yates story on us, given that I like his last

7:56 name. Right, right, right. Okay, so just basically this guy, Ralph Yates, he's an air conditioner repairman, and he picks up a hitchhiker. He's just a good Samaritan on the highway, really

8:11 close to where

8:14 Oswald's rooming house was, right? near Oak Cliff and Dallas. His wife is with Ruth Payne in Irving. And anyway, this hitchhiker, this is the Wednesday before the assassination. Hitchhiker

8:25 starts telling Yates all these strange things. He goes, Hey, you hear the president's coming on Friday. Yates goes, No, you know, interesting, cool. I don't remember what he said exactly to

8:38 that. But then the guy starts talking about, Do you think somebody could shoot him from a tall building? And then the same person he had with him, a paper sack, and he told Yates that he had

8:52 curtain rods in the sack, right? So that's kind of weird. Then he started talking about knowing Jack Ruby, right? So, and the guy goes, Well, you know, it meant nothing to Ralph Yates on the

9:05 Wednesday before the assassination. So ultimately Yates drops this guy off at his place of business, which is the Texas School Book Depository, okay? Uh, and then he, he tells a coworker of his

9:18 about the interaction. Um, it says the guy's weird and says, set all these things. President's assassinated on Friday and Yates sees Oswald on TV on Saturday. And then he tells his coworker, Hey,

9:31 that's, this is the guy I saw. He goes and he tells the police, the police then refer him to the FBI. He gives, uh, three polygraphs. He takes three polygraphs where he tells a story to the FBI

9:41 and he passes the polygraphs. The problem with that is that we know that Lee Harvey Oswald was at, at the school book depository at the time that Yates picked up this hitchhiker. So it can't be Lee

9:52 Harvey Oswald. So the question is who did he pick up that, that looked just like Oswald and set all these things that, you know, appear to be trying to incriminate Oswald. So, so anyway, uh,

10:06 and this is the craziest thing. Um, Jay Edgar Hoover sends an urgent teletype to the Dallas FBI office. telling them to reexamine Yates

10:17 because he must be mistaken. He does a fourth polygraph, passes this one again, and this time the FBI tells Yates, well look, you're not lying to us, you really believe what you're saying 'cause

10:27 you keep passing the polygraph, but what you're saying can't be true. So we're going to have to commit you to an insane asylum against your will. So they committed this guy is like 30 years old,

10:39 father of five, they commit him to an insane asylum, and he dies nine years later in the asylum. So, you know, when I heard that I went, why do they care? You know, it's really crazy. So that

10:55 is sort of the introductory. We're talking about the overall layout of the podcast. That's the first little nugget within like the first 60 seconds because it's

11:04 sort of a microcosm of the case overall, right? You've got the whole, well, that wasn't Oswald 'cause we know Oswald was in the schoolbook depository So there's the argument, you know. to defend

11:13 in the war and report side. You have the conspiracy entry of two Oswalds. Why would there be two Oswalds unless there was something weird going on? And then you have the FBI doing something that

11:23 seems very unjust. There's no due process. Just go straight to this insane asylum. So there's a lot of little interesting stories like that. E8 is one of the more sensational ones. But so that's

11:37 our, yeah, go ahead. And that came out with the release of documents, right? Where we found out this story. So this hasn't been, I mean, nobody knew about this in 1966 or '67. Yeah. The way

11:53 that I found out about the Yates story is the book JFK and the Unspeakable by James Douglas. So it's one of the, his book is one of the best conspiracy landing books. I think it's a little bit hard

12:09 to read because he jumps back and forth between all these conversations about, you know, Cuban and Vietnam foreign policy Without like there's there's not like a narrator explaining. He's just

12:21 jumps back and forth But there's so many just little crazy stories and what we're gonna cover all of them What and so what I do that my process Because admittedly I'm someone who came into this with a

12:34 conspiracy theory leaning, right? I got I take my Vincent Boogly OC reclaiming history and my Gerald Posner case clothes Like the two seminal war and report defender books and whenever I find

12:46 something that I think is just like a smoking gun I go what did they say about this right and Ralph Yates is not mentioned in Boogly OC's book

12:56 at all now Maybe it's because this maybe it's because of stuff, you know, I want to say you know, you know Look this up, but I think the JFK and the Unspeakable book came out before Boogly OC's

13:08 book was published I don't know if he just wasn't aware of the file because it hadn't come out yet, but I, that was surprising to me that it wasn't even addressed by, by neither him nor post or

13:18 posters more understandable because that was his book was written earlier, but um, but anyway, so, so that, that's kind of the lead in on this. Yes, that's the prolog, real quick, real quick,

13:31 uh, just, uh, for interest sake. You know what I did with my thesis is I basically said, if someone succeeded in life, whatever their story was Having to do with the assassination, it was a lie.

13:47 And if somebody died early, they weren't telling the truth. And it actually creates this, this intrigue, this conspiracy, and I'm sure we'll get into some of that But the official story is Warren

13:60 Commission was Lee Harvey Oswald, Axlone, Lone Gunman, fires the three shots from the sixth floor book Depository, later shoots JD, JD Tippett.

14:13 is arrested and a act of heroism by Jack Ruby, another lone assassin kills Lee Harvey Oswald case clothes. So what's episode one about? What's the first thing you dig into? So we go prologue and

14:31 then the next one is basically like a, we look at the history of the investigations. So we look at the three big civil litigation matters 'cause I'm trying to lay out, what's the record? What is

14:44 the fair game for me to look at? Well, all the evidence from all the investigations, the Warren report, the House, the Warren report, Jim Garrison's

14:55 indictment of Clay Shaw in New Orleans, the church committee, the pipe committee, the Rockefeller Commission, the House Select Committee on Assassinations, the ARRB and then documents since then

15:11 and then the civil litigation. The three civil litigation thing Three cases of litigation that have touched on the assassination one of them is Charles Crenshaw one of the doctors in Dallas The

15:24 American Medical Association said that he wasn't even in the room At the time and he sued them for defamation and they settled and retracted their article

15:34 Another one is Liberty Lobby versus or e Howard Hunt versus Liberty Lobby basically this former CIA officer of Vincent Marchetti wrote an article in a newsletter saying that e Howard Hunt was one of

15:52 the conspirators and he was in Dallas that day and he was involved and So Hunt said no, that's not true. How defamatory, you know, so he sued him for defamation or actually for libel. It was in

16:01 writing and hunt one at first and it was appealed Mark Lane was the attorney for Liberty Lobby and Mark Lane, uh, convinced basically convinced the jurors there. Maybe he So it's debate, it's

16:15 disputed, right? The pure conspiracy angle is Mark Lane convinced the jurors that

16:23 E Howard Hunt was the chief person behind the assassination. And then the other side is no, he didn't convince any juror of that. And the truth is there's a couple jurors who have admitted that

16:34 Lane did convince them. And there's a couple of jurors who said, we voted that way not because Lane convinced us, but because the standard for defamation is a higher standard when it's a public

16:44 figure, it has to be intentional, et cetera. So there's a lot of nuance, right? And I'm trying to unpack the nuance to land on what the real truth, like what's really going on here.

16:56 So Mark Lane just wrote really the first conspiracy book called Rush to Judgment. I mean, he's the OG or the grandfather of - Indeed. Maybe the Warren Commission's not correct.

17:10 Yeah, Mark Lane and Vince Solandria, the guy from Philadelphia, the two OGs. And it penned, Penn Jones also in Dallas. Then the last civil litigation matter is the spiciest one.

17:25 Oh man, this is like a, this is a whole rabbit hole to go down. Basically, it's

17:31 the family of this guy, Henry Marshall, who was killed in 1961 Henry Marshall was a

17:39 investigator for the Department of Agriculture. He's investigating this guy, Billy Solestis, who's basically tied in to LBJ, okay? He's sort of like - I don't have to tell the tech something

17:49 about Billy Solestis, but there you go. So Billy Solestis, so he's investigating Billy Solestis and he dies while he's investigating him. How does he die? Five gunshots. It's ruled a suicide

18:06 right so so uh so the family some 20 years later, because this case actually was decided in 1985, 24 years later, the family basically

18:18 files some sort of litigation to get a declaratory judgment that, no, this was a murder, and the judge determined that it was a murder, and it wasn't a suicide. What's interesting is one of the

18:31 things the judge relied on was the testimony of Billy Solestis that Lyndon Johnson ordered Henry Marshall, the guy that was exhumed to be killed, just like he ordered the murder of his own sister

18:47 and president Kennedy, right? So that's a little spicy, you know what I mean? That's like, whoa, that's great. But the thing is, this is just an accusation, right? So it's,

18:59 you know, the question is, is this disinforma, is this intentional disinformation, or is there something to it? And, you know, this is a season three issue. Right. So back to the, what are

19:10 we trying to do here? Like see what I like. Yeah. Go ahead. Sorry. What I always like, what I always like to say is, as a Texan, I'm going to be a little disappointed if I'll be jaded and have

19:19 something to do with it. Because yeah, hey, come to my hometown. So what's what's going on? So that you're laying out all the court cases and where we get a lot of our evidence. What's episode

19:29 two? Yeah. So here's where we go. Here's the bottom line We go basically scene by scene of the case to figure out, did the war on report get it right? And if not, what are the open questions,

19:42 right? So season one, we're not we're not going to solve the whole thing. It's it's a big bag. There's a lot of stuff. So we look at the schoolbook depository. The first the first episode, the

19:51 question is where was Oswald when the shots were fired, right?

19:56 So let's talk this because I've always I've had three things that really bother me about the Kennedy assassination. And one of those

20:15 is how did he do all the things he did? And then

20:25 on the second floor, encounter officer Baker in the time that they said he did, or so go. You're on, tell me about the book depository. And why is he up there shooting? 'Cause my whole thing is,

20:38 I guess what I should have said was my conclusion is, I don't think Oswald's shot. I think Oswald was having lunch somewhere and told not to be around anyone. But anyway, go ahead. Well, there's

20:50 really two different questions. The first question is basically before the shots and after the shots, right? So where was Oswald before 1230? What's the evidence on that? And we have a lot of

21:01 different witnesses that basically say that he was on the first the second floor, although, you know, as late as 1215. We've got someone in Deli Plaza that sees a gun sticking out the window at

21:13 1215. So if Oswald's on the first floor at 1215, he can't be in the window at 1215. Moreover, the woman that said 1215, they interviewed her later and it turns out she had actually said 1225,

21:26 not 1215. They changed her time, according to her, right? So there's that. And then that's the before of it all And then the other thing is there's a guy, Bonnie Ray Williams, who's eating his

21:39 chicken lunch, they're on the sixth floor, pretty close to where the assassin's nest is. The assassin's nest has got an official name, but the place where they thought he was shooting from, there

21:51 was much a box stacked up so he could kind of hide behind it. But Oswald, if he was going to arrive,

22:01 they say Bonnie Ray Williams finished his lunch at like 1220 It's a disputed issue, it's got a little bit of a range. But let's say, you know, it's the time they say 12, 20, Oswald would have

22:11 had to arrive and not be seen by anybody because by the way, William started his lunch around noon. Right? So there's, it looks good for Lee Harvey Oswald not being the shooter. That's that side

22:24 of it. Now let's look at the second part. Now, the biggest witness in favor of Oswald being a shooter is a guy named Howard Brennan. And he says he saw Oswald, actually, Oswald himself in the

22:36 window with the gun. And, but he's across the street and he's on the ground. And he failed to identify Oswald that night at the police lineup. So he changed his story for the Warren Commission.

22:52 So, so that's Brennan. Then there's after the shots are fired, okay. So he's in the,

23:00 he's in one corner of the bell. I forget which corner it is exactly. I don't want to say the wrong one He's a one-quarter. the gun is found in the other corner of the building. So he has to take

23:10 the gun, stash it in the other corner of the building, and then come back and go down the stairs to be at the second floor landing, and oh, perhaps have a coke in his hand, because it was

23:23 reported that he had a coke in his hand by all these people. And he would have had to do it, and they said that he was not a breath or anything. The time was one minute and 18 seconds. And then

23:32 you have,

23:35 excuse me, you have the testimony of Sandra Stiles, Victoria Adams, and actually Victoria Adams is the one that saw him before. Their names are escaping me. Sandra Stiles, there's three women.

23:49 Vicki Garner, there's someone else's name just gave me right now. But basically, they came down the stairs shortly after, and they didn't hear anything.

24:01 Oswald, they say that they went downstairs immediately after the shots were fired. In fact, they started to go downstairs before the car had even gone under the overpass. So it's pretty immediate,

24:12 okay? But they don't hear Oswald and it's the same stairs. So, you know, those are the whole thing of could he been in place to fire the shots. That episode looks pretty good for Oswald. It

24:23 looks pretty good for conspiracy theory at the end of that episode. So some other things on there, 'cause this is one of the points that just really bothered me is, I believe in Posner's book.

24:34 Posner basically is doing the timeline by having him go from the sniper's nest, if you will, to the other side of the building to hide the gun. And that's straight shot 75 feet or so. But pictures

24:52 from later that day show boxes and crates everywhere So Oswald could not have gone straight shot. he had to basically walk around the boxes to get there. That's one thing. Number two, there was a

25:05 bullet in the rifle. So he had to reload. Now, I'm not saying you can't reload while you're walking, but the

25:14 third thing is there's a whole lot of discussion on did he just toss the rifle? It looked like it was actually buried and hidden under some stuff, which may or may not take some time The other big

25:27 issue is there were, I believe two people on the fifth floor sitting underneath the stiper's nest that testified that they heard shell casings hit the ground and the rifle actually being reloaded,

25:43 but they did not hear anybody run off. And so you kind of got in the FBI duplicated it, they said, yes, they were gonna be able to hear the shell casings hit the ground, but they didn't hear

25:57 somebody run off. Oswald had to be humpin' it to be able to do this. And then you get into the whole mess of Officer Baker, who was following the motorcade in his motorcycle, sees pigeons flying

26:14 off top of the building. So he races in, he meets up very early on with Truly, who's the general manager, I believe in the book Depository, and they start going up He sees Oswald on the second

26:28 floor, and it's really hard to duplicate that if Oswald hasn't just immediately run down. And so if you start putting a coke in Oswald's hand, he had to go into the kitchen, get a coke, it starts

26:42 messing with a timeline. So that one's always bothering me. So I agree with you. That's probably the point Oswald, a good defense lawyer creates enough. Hey Dave, and to his credit, what did

26:53 Oswald say when he was interviewed by the police. I was sitting in there having lunch on the second floor. Right, right, yeah. So there's that, where was he? And then we look at, did anybody

27:07 see him? How did he get to the school book depository that morning? Did anybody see him bring the gun in? Did anyone actually see him with the gun? Like what evidence is there with that? And it's

27:17 interesting because then you start, some of these things, like we just said, Oswald being in place, that one looks real good for Oswald I think there's overwhelming evidence, it's tough. But

27:28 what people do, people who, let me just say, I think you can be a reasonable person and believe that the Warren report got it right. I think it's possible, okay? Yeah. I don't think, I'm not

27:43 one of these people that goes, it was a conspiracy and screw you, if you know what I mean? Like, you're a fed. I get that on TikTok all the time because I won't commit to whatever. have the

27:56 freedom to find out what's actually going on. Not a fad,

28:01 but at any rate, these issues, what we find overall is a lot of these issues are disputed. And you hear something first, and you go, this doesn't sound good for Oswald. So one of the questions,

28:18 are there any fingerprints tying Oswald to the gun? And the answer is yes There's fingerprints tying Oswald to the gun. Doesn't sound good for Oswald. But then, there's the counter argument.

28:31 What's the counter argument on that? Those fingerprints came on an index card that was mailed separately 10 days later.

28:41 And by some police officer who goes, oops. Sorry. So basically, if you wanna believe, like here's the weakness in all the argument. I mean, obviously it's a case by case point by point issue.

28:51 That's why we're doing the podcast But basically, conspiracy theorists. their weakness in their argument is you have to believe the government fabricated a ton of evidence. Like you have to believe

29:02 that a lot of people were involved in that. That's my thing. Yeah, a lot of people were involved. Right. So that's definitely the whole, someone would have talked. That's definitely the

29:11 weakness in the conspiracy theory argument.

29:14 The weakness in the Warren Report defender argument is you have to sort of suspend disbelief as to why all these people would have lied about something, right? So you go, okay, the government

29:26 records are authentic, they didn't make anything up. But instead, all the Dallas doctors are, you know, their initial recollections, at least of where

29:37 the head wound was, were incorrect, maybe not all, okay, the vast majority. The Seabird and O'Neill Report, Jager Hoover sent two of his FBI agents to the autopsy, and their audience for their

29:51 report was Hoover you wanted to know what's actually going on. And basically with They said mirrored what the Dallas doctor said for the most part. So you have to think that they're not telling the

30:02 truth. And then all the witnesses, the people that saw on the overpass that said they saw smoke coming from the grassy knoll, you got a few witnesses, there's some witnesses, like there's a

30:12 witness he's in the men who killed Kennedy, which is like the seminal JFK assassination conspiracy series, I think pretty much most people who are interested in the assassination are at least

30:22 familiar with the men If you've seen all those, the men who killed Kennedy, yeah, absolutely. I thought it was the gold standard and what I think we find in the men who killed Kennedy now that

30:31 I've sort of gotten more serious about it is that there's a lot of stuff that is gold in there mixed with stuff that's disinformation and it's hard to pick out what's what a little bit, that's kind

30:42 of what, you know, but ultimately it ends up being opinion anyway at the end of the day, so I'm going to look at all of it. If it's disinformation, we're going to be able to say it is or go, I

30:53 don't know, it's open question. So, um, You know, other questions in the first season, we're gonna look at

31:04 how did he escape from the schoolbook depository? And that's really interesting. I'm glad you brought that up 'cause number two thing that bugs me about the Kennedy assassination is you're gonna

31:16 shoot the president, okay?

31:22 You probably should have an escape plan, I would think, you know, even though it was kind of thrown together last minute 'cause the exact route wasn't published until two days before and all that.

31:35 But if you're gonna do this, you ought to have an escape plan. What it feels like to me, and I'll let you get into the details of it, but basically, you know, what happens is he walks out of the

31:47 building several blocks. He catches a city bus, the city bus is stuck in traffic, He walks a few more blocks to the downtown bus department. He hails a cab, drops him off close to, but about 10

32:03 minutes away from his boarding house. He then goes into his boarding house, grabs a pistol and a coat. He doesn't really have much money. He's maybe got enough money for a bus ticket, but that's

32:17 about it. And then he just appears to be walking aimlessly around If I'm going to shoot the president, I have my pistol and my boot, if I think I'm going to need it, that to me felt very much like,

32:32 Oh shit, something went down. I'm potentially in trouble, but correct me what I missed. No, I mean, I think everything you said was right. I don't know that it was a 10-minute walk. I want to

32:46 say maybe it was like a three or four-minute walk to his place, the cab driver dropped him off But approximately, it was not the front door.

32:55 It was not the front door, okay. Everything is like so, just so, if I go to 10 minute, I just, I try to get it exactly right, 'cause I just, I'm used to, you know, people chirping. But the,

33:07 you know, the biggest question is, all right, so you just laid out why would

33:15 he basically have no plan and sit there and wait to be caught, essentially? And the, and I've made this argument too, this is one of the things where I'm in the Facebook forum, comes with these

33:24 guys that are super serious. And I made the exact same argument you made, okay? And just overwhelmed with responses of, you know, Oswald's a crazy person. You can't try to understand a crazy

33:35 person. He's a loon, he's like, their theory of the case is, he just on a lark brought the gun to work that day. And then the same thing that you mentioned before, why didn't he take the shot?

33:46 When he came around the corner of Elman, Maine,

33:51 know that the motorcade oh yeah we're gonna have to talk that one next but yeah okay that's yeah go ahead sorry no no I was gonna say keep going on the escape thing because I think the Warren the

34:03 Warren Commission defenders say to your point he's crazy at that point he didn't think he was gonna get out of the building and so he really didn't have a plan yeah well if there's also the why would

34:18 he not why would he not have taken the easier shot but why would he not have been in place far in advance this is his play brought a gun just to kill the president and oh by the way the motorcade was

34:29 supposed to it was running like 20 minutes late so so if it would have been on time he would have totally missed his opportunity and the counter argument to this is well it wasn't that important to

34:39 him whether he shot Kennedy or not it was just kind of like he's just on a lark just doing like crazy things crazy people do who are we to try to understand crazy people right this is the the argument

34:49 I mean to me what is he's going around sitting next to different people in the Texas theater. He goes and he sits right next to each one of them. This is what he's witnessed doing by one of the

35:01 witnesses there. I forget the name. It's cited, don't worry. Everything, every factual proposition is cited in this podcast. But I mean, he looks like he's intelligence. He looks like he was

35:12 told to go there and he's trying to meet somebody. But that's sort of, that's a down there. See, the challenge with this case is everybody wants to jump straight to the. Was he CIA, what? And

35:23 I'm just trying to answer all the preliminary questions first. And then we'll go to that. Season two, when we get to it, it's gonna be who was Oswald, really? And then season three is, if not

35:33 Oswald, then who? That's when we start going down all these different angles. But

35:39 yeah, did you wanna talk more about the. Yeah, so let's do this. So

35:44 the third big thing that bothered me, And this came in to question for me when I went up. to Dallas and went to

35:55 the sixth floor of the depository, the museum. And actually, this was before they glasted in. So I mean, this was early days. I actually was able to sit right in front of that window and look

36:06 straight out. This is before they'd glasted and done the reconstruction with the boxes. This was like very, very early days. And what - is just so obvious to me is if you're gonna shoot the

36:20 President of the United States and you want an easy shot to kill him, he comes down Main Street, he turns right onto Houston. We can get into the whole conspiracy on should they have just gone

36:32 straight down Main and not taken Stemans freeway. There's also the whole intrigue about to turn left from Houston onto Elm Street is actually more than a 90 degree turn And supposedly a secret

36:49 service rules say you never turn the president more than 90 degrees. But anyway, so you turn onto Elm right there. He slows down stops. Even I could hit that shot. The safest place for a bird in

37:03 the world is me with a shotgun in my hands and the bird being about 10 feet above me. I'm a horrible shot, but even I could make that shot. And then you look.

37:13 down Elm Street where the shots actually occurred. That's a gradient of about 11 degrees. He's going down and away. And there's a whole bit of discussion on exactly what trees were actually in

37:29 place at the time of the assassination. 'Cause they've got pictures, but when the FBI came out to do their recreations, there was a question of whether some of the trees had been pruned or not But

37:42 that's a really, really hard shot. And what you hear Warren Commission defenders saying is, well, he let the car go there so that he could shoot and make his getaway, which then contradicts,

37:55 well, why didn't he have an escape plan? But two, I actually think that made it more likely he's gonna get caught because the car was early on in the motorcade and the police were following behind.

38:06 So actually he's got the police, if he waits to shoot down Elm Street So anyway, That's always bothered me. He's a wacky, wild and crazy guy. Who are we to try to project

38:22 wisdom onto him, I guess is the counter argument. I mean, I think it's a persuasive point. What you're talking about though, is the difficulty of making that shot, that's nicely into sort of the

38:33 next section of things we look at, which is Oswald's rifle. We look at the documentary evidence for it, like actually the order that he placed, and the deposit and how the company, I forget the

38:51 seaport rifle, seaport traders, or whoever it was, the place he ordered it from, we follow their deposit. We follow the serial number. We find the ship from Italy where the Carcano was shipped.

39:07 You really trace it back all the way.

39:11 So that doesn't look good for Oswald, right? But then this conspiracy counterpoint is, well, the FBI had an informant and it was the Dallas Postal Inspector. They were supposed to fill out all

39:22 these forms to get firearms, none of those were filled out. No one remembers ever seeing a rifle there, right? So basically it just goes back to, do you think the government fabricated evidence?

39:33 If so, they were in a position to, but you kind of have to, if you're a conspiracy believer, you have to go back to that well many times is the challenge. But, so then there's the,

39:46 was Oswald a good shooter, you know? And, and there's, this is a mixed bag. There's, you know, people point to his Marines records and there's one instance of where he's an average to good

39:57 shooter, the last time he shot, he was horrific, he was terrible. He got the rating of Marksman, which is the lowest rating, right? But the time before that, it was much better So it's um.

40:09 It's a little bit of a mixed bag. So an interesting point on that front that again, one of the other things that's always bothered me is official record, according to the Warren Commission, is he

40:20 shot three times. The first shot missed. And the first shot actually hit the curb and a piece of debris flew up and hit a guy by the name of James Teague in the face. James Teague actually had a

40:36 cut in blood So I mean, it was real, it was not him saying that. At some point later,

40:44 the FBI went in and dug metal out of the curb where the mark was made and matched it to the rifle, or the ammunition appropriate for that rifle. But what's weird about that? And again, crazy guy,

41:00 who knows? So he wildly misses the first shot. When he can aim the whole time, Wildly misses it. and then nails two shots that are as good as shooting as you can possibly do. So I mean, it's

41:16 almost like he throws up an air ball on a layup and then he steps back in cans to three pointers back to back, which I'm not saying can't happen, but I think I hit the first shot. I might miss it a

41:29 second. I think the most damning conspiracy theory sort of favored evidence when it comes to the shots being fired outside of the Zapruder film and the medical stuff, which we'll get to, is all the

41:44 witnesses that tell you how it sounded and the sequence of the shots. There's dozens of witnesses who say, Yeah, I think there were three shots. It went, Pow, pow, pow. Like everybody says

41:59 that the second two shots were in quick succession. And that's a deal breaker for being able to load it with the

42:11 carcano. But again, the war on report weakness, if you're a war on report defender, is you gotta go eyewitnesses are mostly wrong. Most of the eyewitnesses are wrong. Believe the government,

42:23 not the eyewitnesses. Believe the documentary report evidence, not the eyewitnesses. So look, in the criminology, it is true that eyewitnesses are wrong in many cases, but what are they wrong

42:37 about? They're wrong about identifying someone they've never seen, right? But they're not often wrong about did you see, like approximately what happened? You know what I mean? Right.

42:47 Especially when you average a lot of people together. Another issue is the Italian, the gun. What was the gun? Was it a Carcano or was it a German Mauser? Because there's different reports of

42:59 different guns. And why does that matter? It kind of sounds like a red herring. If there really was a Mauser, then what the heck is that? There was another rifle up there that like, what was

43:08 that? And how did it get out of there? So, you know, the biggest question is why was that, how was that something that was wrong in the early reports? 'Cause early reports, even on television,

43:20 is that it was a Mauser. How could they get that wrong? So that's a question. And then on Deli Plaza, we look at the abnormalities with the motorcade and security plan, kind of what you talked

43:31 about. There's a guy named Vince Palomera that's kind of the expert on secret service stuff on the conspiracy side of things. And then we look at, you know, where do people see shots coming from

43:41 in Deli Plaza? Were there any, here's a big one, were there any secret service agents that were in Deli Plaza that day outside of the motorcade? And the answer is no. But there are numerous

43:53 witnesses that say that they saw someone with a badge at the top of the grassy knoll, tell them to get down and go away. So who's that guy? Yeah, there are multiple people and they also in those

44:07 reports, it's pretty consistent that people talk about the guy had really greasy dirty hands. And if you're gonna say, well,

44:19 maybe it was a police officer instead of Secret Service or something, maybe that's mistaken, but time and time again, witnesses are talking about very greasy dirty hands on that person. That's

44:32 true, that is definitely true.

44:34 Then we kind of look at, I mean, we look at, again, could Oswald have made the shots in time? We look at this recruiter film and all of that. Well, and the rifle actually, the rifle actually,

44:46 when the FBI tried to do it with Oswald's rifle, the scope was off. Now the innocent defense of that is, Well,

44:58 it's my rifle, I know it's off.

45:03 Oh yeah. Just one more thing. There's a throw in there. So in terms of the scenes, we got the schoolbook depository, then we look at the rifle and the shooting, and then we go back to Deli Plaza

45:12 and look at all the witnesses there in Deli. And then, and that takes a couple episodes, right? And then we go to Parkland, okay? And look at - Oh, there you go. Was Jack Ruby at Parkland?

45:24 When, what did the doctors say about the wounds at Parkland? The thing about Parkland is,

45:31 the, it's not just doctors giving, you know, a deposition testimony, months later, we have the medical reports from that day. You know what I mean? So, if you're doing medical malpractice

45:44 lawsuit, one of the things you get is all the documents related to the case, you get a medical report, 'cause that's something that's taken in the course of business. You're not generally gonna

45:52 lie about a medical report. The medical reports from Parkland mirror, everything the doctors say. And again, the Parkland doctors basically support conspiracy because they generally say that it

46:04 was not generally a number of them say that this is an entry wound, not an exit wound, where they later did the tracheotomy. And they also said that the wound was in the back of his head, not on

46:16 the side of his head, right? So what the argument people make is, well, emergency room doctors are trying to save lives, not diagnose, you know, how it happened. They're just Yeah, that

46:27 wasn't their job. They're not

46:31 focused on that, but the counterpoint is, you know, could you tell if someone had a hole in the back of their head, especially the guy that the most persuasive, uh, a mad is Dr. McClelland, um,

46:41 who's holding the head. He's right there. He's the one closest to Kennedy's head. And he just talks about how like stuff's falling off on his like brain matters falling off onto the floor because

46:53 there's such a big hole in the back of his head. Like I don't know seems like you can remember that, but you know, maybe not. I mean, like it's a tough one. So two points here. One, Dad will

47:07 tell you that the second, the third shot rang out Kennedy was dead. I mean, Dad said the head wound killed him. There was no recovery from that. Dad said if he had a chance to recover, it would

47:21 have been because of the medical talent he saw at Parkland. So this is not a dock in the box on the corner There's some bad neighborhood somewhere. Dad says this is premier medical talent that

47:35 literally was the best. And my dad's a good doctor. And he says it's because he was trained by the best. So that's number one. Second thing - and you and I talked about this the other day - there

47:49 was a guy by the name of Earl Rose. And Earl Rose was a county medical examiner and a pathology professor. And the interesting thing is Oswald would not have been charged with a federal crime 'cause

48:02 he violated no federal crime, but he would have been charged in the state of Texas for murder. And at that point, state law said every defendant to a murder charge has the right for the victim to

48:15 have an autopsy done by the county medical examiner. So Earl Rose was supposed to do the autopsy on JFK and all sorts of speculation, no definitive, but there is at least one train of narrative

48:36 that Earl Rose got called and he was in the room before Kennedy even got there. That they knew he was dead, or at least potentially gonna be dead. So he was there, he saw all the stuff going on.

48:50 And Earl Rose was kind of quincy before there was a quincy. You're too young to remember the TV show, a doctor that fought crime by using medical knowledge to do it. One of the things Earl Rose did

49:02 one time is a girl was found shot dead in her apartment by a shotgun. The police are arresting the boyfriend who's in the room, the boyfriend's gone. I swear to God, the shots came from outside.

49:16 Earl Rose goes, hold on. He puts string in each one of the holes, bullet holes in the girl And he gathers the string back because the shotgun scatters as it shoots. And lo and behold, the

49:29 gathering place was outside. And there was a big limb on the tree. And they go out there. They find cigarettes and tennis shoe prints. Turns out it's an ex-boyfriend. So I mean, he was fighting

49:42 crime, real straight shooter. So anyway, dad took pathology from Earl Rose. They were actually pretty good friends One time after class, it's dad and another student. And the other student walks

49:56 up and says, I'd love to ask you about the Kennedy assassination. Very fascinated by blah, blah, blah. And Earl Rose looked at the student and just said, everything I have to say is in the

50:05 Warren Commission. You can read it there. I don't talk outside of that. Student goes, oh, okay, walks off. And just my dad and Earl Rose in the room by himself. And Earl Rose looks at my dad

50:18 and says, that was an exit wound. Meaning it was an entrance wound Pointing to that, and Earl Rose arguably saw that before the tracheotomy was done. And as dad says, Earl Rose knows the

50:32 difference between an entry and an exit wound. So when I wrote my senior thesis at Rice, so this is spring of '91, Earl Rose, I believe was teaching in Iowa at the time. I somehow tracked down

50:47 his number, this pre-internet, but somehow I do this, I call him and I say, Hey, I'm Chuck Yeh, tell me. You know, Charles III, my dad's junior. He was a student of yours and Earl Rose

50:59 actually said, I remember your father, I was quite fond of him. And I said, well, you know, and I repeated the story about dad said, you said this in the room. And I'd just like to know if it

51:10 was true. And Earl Rose said, I bet you would, and he hung out.

51:18 So anyway, somebody who wants to live. Somebody that potentially wants to live and maybe I'm glad he didn't tell me and I didn't publish a book or anything. But Dad said if Earl Rose did the

51:30 autopsy, we would know exactly what happened. That he was that good. Yeah. Right, yeah. Yeah, that's cool that

51:42 you have that personal connection to the assassination. I'm sure it's funny, I hear something like that. And my mind goes, that sounds like a conspiracy. But then you could share that same story

51:58 on one of these Facebook groups and they'd hit you with like nine citations of how actually Earl Rose, you know, like it's just, I don't know, it's just, it's wild. And you know, all fairness

52:08 of Earl Rose and my dad are close and they hadn't talked in years, but if they're close and I say, I say, you know, I'm right in my thesis at Rice and I heard this and I'm, you know, breaking

52:22 the story, his answer allows me to put it in my thesis where if he says, hey Chuck, your dad's making that up, your dad's pulling your leg, which is quite possible. I mean, my dad might do that.

52:35 But, so there is an explanation for why you're right. Just one other thing here, this is kind of a side note, but my favorite conspiracy theory that I think's been disproven, but there was a

52:50 gunsmith named Howard Donahue

52:54 theorized that what actually happened is Oswald shot three shots from up there, but the actual fatal headshot was fired by Secret Service agent George Hickey with an AR-15 because he rose up when he

53:17 heard the first shot with his gun and it accidentally fired and that was the shot that killed Kennedy So his point on that is one, it explains the big cover up because there's huge embarrassment here,

53:30 number one, number two, it follows

53:35 what the Dallas doctors were saying in terms of observations and then it makes sense on why Bethesda would say something different because they knew they had to cover it up There's also,

53:49 you know, one of the bullets, you know, went through.

53:55 And supposedly the Carcano bullets are really tough so they would have gone straight through. And in fact, the bullet that hit Kennedy and then hit Conley, the magic bullet, if you will, the

54:09 pristine bullet is totally intact. But the headshot bullet seemed to just disintegrate 'cause they had pieces of bullet everywhere and the like And so he said, that's more symptomatic of an AR-15

54:25 type ammunition. So that was his whole theory, which I love the book. I read the book about it, it's great, it's exciting. The only problem is not even one witness said that. And again, you've

54:39 got to have everybody covering that up. Let's talk a little bit about the cover up part of it because that's something that, and I don't want to give, give the game away here. Okay. But then you

54:50 don't have to give the game away. I want everybody, I'm gonna watch, I'm gonna watch all these podcasts and I want everybody else to. No, no, no, no. The whole thing with a cover up is this.

54:59 I wanna just throw out maybe a possibility for people to consider. If you're someone who goes, there's no scenario where you'd have multiple people participating in a cover up. I would challenge

55:13 you to consider, okay, what if all those people were given a cover story that they actually believed and they believed that their lies were noble for a different purpose, right? So this is kind of

55:25 like the onion peel theory of the case. Mark Lane was one of the first people that talked about this, but Earl Warren and Lyndon Johnson are on the record also talking about it. And it's this,

55:36 this is the whole, again, I'm getting ahead of myself here, kind of a season two thing, but Oswald went to, supposedly went to Mexico City, okay? shortly before the assassination. And

55:50 supposedly, he went to the Cuban embassy and the Russian embassy. And this, this is meant to show that, hey, he was actually, it was a conspiracy. Oswald did it, but it was the Cubans and the

56:01 Russians. And look, they got us, okay? And if we don't lie about some of these things, then the American people are going to demand retaliation and we're going to have to go into a nuclear war.

56:18 We have to. We can't let them kill our president. So we need you to go lie to the American people. We need you to basically craft this lie to protect people from finding out that it was a

56:32 conspiracy by Russia and Cuba. And the thing is, if that's the case, then most of the people that are like the street level FBI agents that are doing things that are shady or whatever in the case.

56:44 that that would be understand they're not a bad person. They're a patriot, right? Like if that's what they believe is happening. So I think that, I'm not saying that is definitely what happened.

56:53 I'm just saying, you have to preserve that as a possibility. What if they did know, but they thought it was good and they still believed it was good. So they continued to not say because they

57:02 thought they were being so good. Even though a lot of people have sort of ruined the secrecy by admitting Earl Warren put this in his memoir. It's in the Earl Warren memoirs Well, and

57:20 you can, I mean, make the circle even smaller. Maybe that's J. Edgar Hoover, Robert Kennedy, Lyndon Baines Johnson, Earl Warren, and maybe like Arlen Spector who winds up being a senator, but

57:30 he's a young lawyer for the Warren Commission. And maybe they're the folks that just get together and say, We have to do this. You can put pressure on subordinates Okay, this is the story they

57:44 want. I'm gonna get fired if I don't. Maybe my bonus is gonna be better. We all have had jobs where our boss wants this. We don't know why, but we're gonna do it anyway. So it doesn't even have

57:57 to go out as big as people are thinking, you know? Yeah, and yeah, we get to all that stuff later. I don't know that Robert Kennedy was, I think they've kind of kept him at length But yeah,

58:12 it's definitely a lot of possibilities of what it could be in terms of people's motivation to say something other than what's actually going on. So,

58:22 but yeah, man, we talk autopsy, we talk single bullet theory and magic, is the magic bullet theory a kid to be possible and out of the count? Everybody goes, the magic bullet came down here and

58:31 then it went this way and this way and did all these crazy things. And then the counter argument is no. the jump seat was moved in, it was lower, and actually, if you look at the trajectory, it

58:41 all kind of matches up. And you look at that, and you go, Huh? I don't know, but then you look at the bullet, and the bullet itself is pristine, just like you said, it's only missing a few

58:51 grains, not grams, grains. And so the amount of, like one thing that kind of gives that away, like my opinion as to why I don't think the magic bullet theory is credible is the weight of the

59:05 bullet that was left behind in Connolly's wrist and thigh

59:11 is gonna be larger than the grains, the amount of bullet that was lost from the pristine bullet. Now, the problem with this, with my point I'm making, is that

59:23 this just hasn't been proven. So you look at the ex-ray, Connolly's ex-ray, as you can see the particles in his body, But he wouldn't have them take, he wouldn't allow them to be removed so that

59:36 you can actually measure and see. In fact, wait a minute, if you weigh the particles from his body, and you weigh the bullet, and then you take the weight of a normal bullet, is it gonna be more

59:46 than a normal bullet, right? But that analysis wasn't ever done. But the chain of custody for CE-29-9 - One other thing when we're on the pristine bullet that has to do with Conley, and I'm gonna

1:00:01 mess these details up, so I'll give you the spirit of it, even though my details may be wrong. What Dad says watching the Zapruder film is

1:00:14 he doesn't believe it could be a single bullet because Dad says with the

1:00:23 injuries that Conley had, and oh by the way, Dr. Red Duke, who's a very famous Texas doctor who passed away a few years ago, was a young intern actually working on Conley not in another. Just a

1:00:36 bit of trivia. Dr. Red Duke was on TV in Houston, Texas. I'm Red Duke and

1:00:42 a colorful character, but anyway. What Dad would tell you is with Conley's injury, Conley, when he got shot because of the injury to his nerves and his arm, his hands would have immediately gone

1:00:55 open. And so his hat drops. So

1:01:02 the fact that there's a Pruder film that you see Kennedy reacting and Conley still has his hat and then it, you know, it takes longer than what Dad thinks would been the reaction time is Dad's

1:01:17 guesstimate that it was a second bullet that hit Conley. Yeah,

1:01:22 yeah, yeah, that makes, I mean, there's

1:01:27 five people that have custody of the bullet from the time it's discovered of the time it gets. until it gets to the Warren Commission. And there's all kinds of issues with

1:01:40 the chain of custody. We go into it, we spend this a lot of time on it. It was found on a stretcher. I mean, it was found on a stretcher that they're not even sure that Conley was on, right? So

1:01:50 yeah, yes, outside of his operating room. But also it was found before the doctors did the surgery on his leg,

1:01:60 which is that's what it, you know, the bullet landed in his leg It was the last thing. And anyway, it's just one more of those things. Now, war and report defenders have a counterpoint for it.

1:02:13 They have a counterpoint for everything. So except for Ralph Yates. They don't have a

1:02:21 counterpoint for Ralph Yates. But the counterpoint would be like, you know, interesting story doesn't matter because we know Oswald did it. Right. Well, I mean, it could have gotten stuck in

1:02:34 Conley's leg. He's wheeled in on this stretcher and it just pops out. It just falls out. And you know, as they're moving him around, they don't. So, I mean, again, it's impossible. It's

1:02:45 impossible. Yeah. That's right. That's right. JD Tippett is probably one of the areas of the case that gets the least amount of attention. But I forget which researcher was and said this, the JD

1:02:58 Tippett part of the case is sort of like the Rosetta Stone to the Kennedy assassination. That's where you kind of go, What is happening here? So,

1:03:10 two things, two reasons why. One

1:03:15 is Tippett's behavior before is wild. He's doing all these crazy things. He's sitting waiting at a. He's waiting for people to get off of a bus at this place that. was the bus that Oswald was on,

1:03:30 before he got off the bus to get into a cab, Tippett's sitting there waiting for Oswald to get off of that bus. Like it's, now we don't know if that's what he was doing, but that's where that bus

1:03:39 stop was, right? So, and then he goes to top 10 records, urgently goes in to make a phone call, nobody answers and he slams it down and he's all upset. And that phone is still there today. I'm

1:03:52 looking forward to going to top 10 records and I'm in Dallas next weekend I'll be down there for the Citizens Against Political Assassinations Conference. So it's all the super lifelong researchers

1:04:05 who are just gonna ridicule me for solving JFK. Son, I've been doing this for 40 years. Like, I get it, I get it. I'm just trying to make a cool podcast, man. I wanna listen to what these

1:04:15 people have to say. But anyway, so, and then Tippett pulls over a guy and then he frantically searches that guy's backseat like this is like in minutes before. And then the guy that ends up

1:04:28 killing Tippett, who, you know, it's allegedly Oswald,

1:04:32 walks back, the witnesses that saw this, see the guy walk back towards Tippett. If he's fleeing the police, why would he stop and walk back to the police car and put his hands on the, he's had

1:04:45 his hands in the way. It was like he knew the person, you know what I mean? Yeah. So that's weird, but there's some arguing, right? The witnesses also said they were arguing, didn't they?

1:04:58 That was, so basically it was starting out nice and then the guy got around and walked out and then the shooter he was on the passenger side window. He then walked around to the driver's side,

1:05:12 Tippett got out and then he shot and killed Tippett.

1:05:16 So what's interesting is this guy then leaves and you have, I don't know the exact number I've had in my head, five to 10 witnesses who say he looked a lot like Oswald. Okay, but they all say that

1:05:30 he's wearing a white shirt and a zip up jacket. They don't say that he's wearing a white shirt with a brown shirt over it and a zip up jacket. Of course,

1:05:41 you could go, well, you're not gonna be able to see the brown shirt if he's wearing a jacket and it's totally covered. Maybe you didn't see it. But you would think that of all those witnesses,

1:05:50 one of them would have been able to correctly identify that he had a brown shirt on And this gets into the whole, you know, where are there two Oswalds? This is a repeating theme of the podcast is,

1:06:04 like

1:06:06 what are you signing up to believe, right? So one of the, like if it's a conspiracy theory and it's not Oswald alone and there's some shenanigans going on, like the most likely way that happens is

1:06:19 with two Oswalds, which is totally bonkers. It is bonkers, yeah, I agree But with the reason I say it's the most likely. is because that's what the records set. We have five people saying that,

1:06:31 you know, now I'm going back to Deli Plaza. We have five witnesses who say that they saw a man run out of the back of the book depository, the school book depository, down the hill in Deli Plaza

1:06:41 and get into a green national, light green national rambler. What is that? What is that?

1:06:47 Those five people are unrelated. It's not like they were, you know, a husband and a wife that talked about it later,

1:06:55 yeah Right, so I'm just, again, and then the counter argument to that is, well, that's crazy. Unpack that for me. And my response to that is, fair enough. Not ready to unpack it yet. I'm

1:07:06 still kind of digesting it myself. That's all I'm saying. But so yeah, the tip of shooting is pretty interesting. And then we get into, you know, Oswald in the Texas theater. We got somebody

1:07:19 else in the Texas theater that says there's two Oswalds We got Butch Burroughs, the concessionaire. says that he saw a guy go out the back and get arrested and the guy go out the front and get

1:07:28 arrested. We know Oswald came out the front, where'd the other guy go? And then within like half an hour after that, Oswald is identified by a guy who's a mechanic in a nearby parking lot and he

1:07:43 goes up and makes eye contact with them, he writes down the plate before the guy as the guy drives away and the plates registered to JD Tippett's best friend. What? What are we doing? Oh, wow

1:07:54 It's just like, and the counterpoint to that is, weird coincidence. Right. That guy must have been mistaken. Yeah, oh, that's, that's, wow. That's, that's, I hadn't heard that one before,

1:08:12 but yeah, no, I can't wait 'til you get into, and I don't wanna steal your thunder 'cause I'm looking forward to listening to the podcast, but the two Oswald stuff, you know, When there's smoke,

1:08:25 there's fire. There's just so many occurrences of people swearing. They saw Oswald at the same time for a long time, not just, you know, the 72 hours around the assassination. Yeah, and there's

1:08:40 also people that saw Oswald at a shooting range. There's a kid, Homer, somebody, Dr. Homer, some I remember his name was Homer, like Homer Simpson. This doctor and his son went to a shooting

1:08:50 range and they said they were next to a guy who looked identical to Oswald and he was shooting like some crazy gun and like saying all types of crazy stuff, right? But it's like, we know on those

1:09:02 days where people say that they saw this, Oswald himself was with Ruth Payne and Marina. Right. And Ruth and Marina support his alibi that he couldn't have been at the shooting range. Also, he

1:09:14 didn't have a car. So there's also an Oswald lookalike sighting at a guy who talks about killing the president from a tall building when he's going to buy a car. There's also an Oswald lookalike

1:09:26 sighting where the morning, this guy buys a coke at a nearby convenience store near Deli Plaza that morning. And the guy goes, no, he was in here. It looked just like him. But we know that,

1:09:37 yeah. The interesting part about that is lifelong friends of Oswald will say he was a Dr. Pepper guy. And yet you have a couple of instances of somebody buying a coke instead of a Dr. Pepper Now,

1:09:53 the innocent explanation is, hey, they just didn't have a Dr. Pepper, so I got a coke. All right. Or whatever. My favorite conspiracy is that this whole thing is just a big ploy by Coca-Cola.

1:10:04 It's like basically like, they're working in, they're, it's like an in-conspiracy advertising placement. Like in TV shows, they, you know, they like pay to have their product. It's a product

1:10:14 place where inside the conspiracy theory. So that's good. All right. So Matt Yeah, I always love to end. every podcast with five questions. So are you up for five questions, JFK assassination

1:10:33 edition? Oh my gosh, this is like my dream. I love it. All right, let's do this. And I'm actually, I bet you're gonna get all these. But anyway, so that day, that fateful day of the

1:10:46 assassination, there were three presidents in Dallas on that day, name them, two of them are obvious.

1:10:57 People who had previously been president or would go on to be president. Yes, all of the accounts, LBJ. LBJ at Kennedy, and then, is this the Nixon was giving a speech at the Pepsi thing? Yeah,

1:11:12 exactly, so Richard, Richard Millhouse Nixon was a, and this is what's really interesting. He spent the night at the Baker Hotel and he had security outside his door. But the security was not

1:11:25 there because Richard Nixon was the former vice president. The security was there because three doors down was the actress Joan Crawford, who was the widow of the chairman of the Bodler's

1:11:38 Association of Pepsi And that's why she was at the meeting. So, you know, okay, you go, okay, that's just a weird, you know, little cork of fate. And actually Nixon wrote Jackie Kennedy a

1:11:52 really nice letter, talking about how they were friends before they were adversaries Well, if you start thinking the CIA did it, who in effect ran the CIA under in the Eisenhower administration?

1:12:06 Whose baby was the Bay of Pigs that Kennedy fucked up? A lot of the characters you're going to get into probably in about season three pop up in the Watergate scandal. The same names, you know, so.

1:12:19 Have you ever heard of Daniel Sheihan? No. Okay. Look him up, his lectures were on YouTube. This guy was an attorney, he isn't attorney. He's like a pretty famous attorney. He's done a lot of

1:12:33 like civil rights stuff.

1:12:36 So anyway, he started out in his career working for F. Lee Bailey. Okay, yeah. He's a famous defense attorney. Embossed and they represented two people that are very connected to all these

1:12:50 things James McCord, the Watergate burglar, who had a check in his pocket when he was arrested. And Santos Traficante, the mobster. So these guys told Sheihan what happened. They just laid the

1:13:08 whole case out. So he teaches at university of California, Santa Clara. This just shows you how much the environment's changed around conspiracy theories. He taught a whole class and it's all on

1:13:20 YouTube of his lectures and he goes deep. but he basically has personal knowledge and he kind of lays out like sort of the ultimate conclusion. He kind of lays out. Now, I don't know, you know,

1:13:30 I haven't got around to vetting it and cross shit. That's one of the things I'm gonna talk to like the experts at this conference I'm going to like, what do you think about Daniel Sheehan? Because

1:13:39 that guy seems to lay it all out and the people that are involved told him. So it's like, I don't know. So yeah, so the next one, one last thing I'm next in And the movie are the show, The Men

1:13:53 Who Killed Kennedy. They're talking about this big meeting that was at the Murchison Ranch and Nixon's there and LBJ's there and Bush's there and all these things. That appears to have never

1:14:03 happened.

1:14:05 That appears to be one of the things from The Men Who Killed Kennedy that's kind of like disinformation. But it is true that Nixon was in fact there. It's just not true that there's no evidence that

1:14:14 Nixon was at this Murchison party. It was my, again, and maybe there is, but I've heard a lot of credible people on the conspiracy side of it going, that's not true, that's disinformation. Yeah,

1:14:24 so Nixon supposedly boarded

1:14:28 a flight

1:14:31 about an hour before the assassination. So he was actually in the air when it happened. But by the way, just a quick side note, my favorite Watergate story is everybody always says, G Gordon

1:14:45 Litties, the only one that didn't talk. And whenever you ask G Gordon that, he said, That is not true The young Cubans we hired to break in with us, they never talked 'cause when they were on the

1:14:58 witness stand, they said the prosecutors were pointing and saying, Is that the man that ordered you to break in? And the young Cubans line was, I don't know, all those white guys look the same to

1:15:09 me.

1:15:12 That's great, that's great. All right, so you're one for one on question. Question number two, March 6th, 1975,

1:15:21 on the TV show Goodnight America. What young, enterprising reporter reveals the Zepruder film to the public for the first time? Harald Orvera. Ah, there you go, yeah, in the wild. Harald

1:15:38 Orvera. It is crazy, yeah. Well, what's crazy is that sort of exposed Dan Rather as someone who wasn't telling the truth, okay? That was question number three. What prominent broadcaster

1:15:50 actually lied about that? And go ahead and set up what Dan Rather did. Dan Rather says that, oh, I've seen the film of it. And you can see in the film, his head snapped violently forward after

1:16:03 being right. Right. That's not what happened. 'Cause CBS was bidding against Time Life to buy the Zapruder film. So they were allowed to view it once. And so the defense of Dan Rather is I viewed

1:16:16 it once. I was on live TV having to talk about it I still don't know how you get violently. forward out of that. And he actually demonstrates it when he talks, you go on YouTube and see it. So

1:16:32 you're three for three.

1:16:36 All right, what prominent media figure actually drove Lee Harvey Oswald's mother from

1:16:49 Fort Worth to to Dallas on the night of the assassination and give us kind of the backdrop on that story. Prominent media figure drove Oswald's mother to dad to from Dallas to Fort Worth and then the

1:17:02 assassination. Yeah, I don't think you got me on that one. I don't know if I know that one. Okay. Bob Shafer. Bob Shafer. Okay. So CBS News meet the or face the nation. He was a young

1:17:17 reporter for the Fort Worth star telegram. He worked the night desk. The assassination happens. He immediately goes to the office. Because he's the young reporter, everybody else is over in

1:17:29 Dallas trying to break the story. He gets a phone call and a lady says, I need a ride over to Dallas. He says, Ma'am, we're not a taxi company. We're in newspaper, and the president's been shot.

1:17:43 And she says, I know my son has been accused of shooting him. So Bob goes over with another fellow, I'm blanking on the name, but picks her up. He interviews her in the back of the car on the

1:17:56 drive. And back in those days, press people didn't identify themselves as the press. He had a hat and a suit on, so he looked like he might be a detective of some sort. He walks into the Dallas

1:18:08 police department with Mrs. Oswald. He's there for about six hours. At about hour six, Mrs. Oswald goes, I really like to speak to my son. So Bob Schiefer goes to the police chief, says, hey,

1:18:24 Ms. Oswald would like to speak to her son. They said, well, okay, I guess we should do that. So Bob Schiefer is actually thinking he's gonna get in and be able to talk to Oswald.

1:18:39 He turns around to go get Ms. Oswald and the police chief goes, by the way, who are you? And he has to disclose, I'm Bob Schiefer and I'm a reporter. So he gets kicked out But the interview with

1:18:50 Ms. Oswald got picked up nationally. So it made his career. And literally till the day he retired at CBS News, if you called his office, he answered his phone. 'Cause he said, if I don't answer

1:19:05 that phone call, I'm not at CBS today. So all right. Well,

1:19:10 I didn't know that part of the story. So there's a lot of like tangential things that like trivia of it all that I don't know So that's just good, it's a good thing to learn. Question number five

1:19:22 and the final question. All right, smart guy, who actually did it? Ah,

1:19:31 I don't wanna say right now. Exactly, I was like, I think I know for the go listen to the podcast. Yeah, I think the move is,

1:19:42 I mean, here's the thing. If I go, okay, I as well did it alone, then first of all, we gotta go issue by it The only way to do it is to go issue by issue. And what you find when you do that is

1:19:55 you got a column, but like we were saying, I think it looks good for Oswald, the

1:20:01 question of where was he at the time the shots were fired. It doesn't look, you know, it's not that strong that he was in place. It seems to be more evidence that he wasn't in place. But there

1:20:11 are things that you go, geez, did they really fabricate the autopsy? It's like, could they really affect, did they do that really?

1:20:21 Of course, there's fairly strong evidence that they did, OK? But

1:20:27 another thing, here's a big weakness in the conspiracy theory part of the case. If it was a shot from the front, where did that bullet go? Yeah. I don't know. I mean, I don't have the answer to

1:20:41 that. That's something that's a compelling question, I think. But look, I mean, ultimately, you've got to look at all the issues And again, just going back to the, why did I

1:20:53 do this podcast? This is one really big question. I want us to be able to talk. So I'm intrigued by conspiracies. I'm intrigued by things that I'm not supposed to look at. When somebody, when

1:21:06 the people on TV go, we're putting a curtain up around this topic. Do not go look at that, or if you do, we're going to label you mean names that will hurt you socially and professionally, right?

1:21:19 Well, what's behind there? Why are you, what is that, right? So I'm one of these like free speech people like, no, you should not ban people from misinformation because, you know, as we've

1:21:27 seen with stuff about, you know, the thing with the, I don't wanna say the wrong word on YouTube and get in trouble. The thing where everybody was sick, some of the stuff on that that was banned

1:21:37 before, now it's turned out to be, oh, maybe that was, you know what I mean? The things change before you have information. There needs to be room for healthy debate. The JFK assassination was

1:21:46 so interesting about this It's the one thing that a majority of Americans agree was a conspiracy, but they can't agree how it was a conspiracy. And as a country, how are we acting? Are we acting

1:21:59 like it was a conspiracy or it wasn't a conspiracy? The answer is we're acting like we don't know. Okay, we don't trust the government, right? Like generally it's like, I don't know, they may

1:22:10 have done that. But if they did it for sure, like no one's like revolting, you know what I mean? Like people aren't like holding like picket signs. road testing. You know what I mean? So the

1:22:21 net results is just a loss of faith in government a little bit, right? So what I want to figure out is either one or two things is the case. Either we should trust the government and that's

1:22:32 misplaced skepticism and cynicism about the government. You know what I mean? If it looks like Oswald did it alone or they lied but it was a benevolent lie to protect us from nuclear war. But on

1:22:45 the other hand, if it was a conspiracy, and if it was a conspiracy that involved the government, the CIA, FBI, Secret Service, whatever parts of the government, you know, you want to say we're

1:22:55 involved, really what you're alleging is a coup, right? And if there was a coup, it's not like, it's not like there was ever a reset when it went back to being an uncoup, right? So that's why

1:23:08 it's so important. And it's just so hotly disputed that I just realized like you got to be able to go issue by issue by issue by issue and then say I think these happen you know, these things happen

1:23:19 for these reasons. Here's my 37 reasons why I think this. Here's my 20 reasons why I think this. The counterpoints are these 14 reasons, and I hear you, but I'm gonna go with the 37. You know

1:23:30 what I mean? Like that's kind of, we're getting into the details. That's the plan. Well, two things kind of in closing. I had a statistics professor in college that always used to say if someone

1:23:45 won't show you their raw underlying data, they're lying to you. Amen. Anybody ought to be willing to do that. You know, we locked up all the Kennedy stuff for 75 years. We reduced the time, but

1:24:00 even Trump came to office saying, I'm gonna disclose it all. And there's still what, 5, 000 documents, 3, 000 documents that are 5, 000. 16, 000 remain classified. There was just a lawsuit

1:24:12 filed by the Mary Ferrell Foundation and Biden's supposed to disclose the remaining remaining. miles by December 15th, but they went ahead and found this lawsuit to force him to do that because

1:24:23 probably what he would do is go, Here's a thousand, we're keeping the other 15, 000 and definitely take a hike. So they're going, No, you got to disclose it and if you don't disclose it, the

1:24:31 law allows them to not disclose it, but they have to go document by document and explain their basis for not disclosing it. And they haven't done that. So that's number one and that being said to

1:24:43 see how far reaching this actually is, Bill Clinton supposedly at his very first cabinet meeting said, I got two questions. One, do we really have a UFO at Area 51, and who killed Kennedy?

1:24:56 I believe he was told the, well, maybe those are the UFOs they told they wouldn't tell him anything about it, he says. I forgot what his answer was to that. But yeah, it's, you know, I'm

1:25:08 definitely more open-minded on the case now that I've looked into it deeply And I understand why people can think all the different things they think, and it's overwhelming I really appreciate you

1:25:19 having me on today and give me a chance to talk to you. Tell everybody the podcast name, where they can find it, where's the Twitter, social media, give them all the deans. Thanks. It's a

1:25:31 solving JFK. The website is solvingjfkpodcastcom. It's

1:25:37 available everywhere you listen to podcasts. So we're on Apple, Spotify, Amazon, Stitcher, you know, all the different networks And yeah, the trailer is out right now. You can go and subscribe

1:25:50 to it wherever you listen to podcasts. And we'll go every week. We'll have a new episode on Tuesday. We'll take a couple of weeks off around the holidays. And then we end up finishing season one

1:26:03 right around mid-May. Cool. Cool. We'll just say, you know, I'm available to come on any time when you need an exercise. Appreciate it. I'm going to have to get your Earl Rose story There we go.

1:26:15 It's true true as far as you know

1:26:19 Yeah, appreciate it man, thank you so much.