I'm rather late in reading your JFK articles. But I did want to thank you for all of your excellent work. The bits about the competing narrative frames (especially the frontloading ones) have been very helpful.
One thing stood out for me here: "Ralph Yates did as the FBI suggested. Within days of checking in at the hospital, his mental health rapidly deteriorated."
Mental hospitals are notorious for drugging their inmates (who are essentially prisoners) with mind- and soul-destroying chemicals, so his rapid decline doesn't surprise me at all. And then the electroshock treatments made things even worse. It's a sad story, and one that is not unique by any means. I'm sure the FBI knew that getting Yates into a mental hospital would be the end of him.
Thank you Mark! Yes, it's not possible to know for sure, but I agree with you that Yates's rapid decline after visiting the mental hospital indicates that whatever they did to him there was probably responsible for that decline, whether the electro-shock started immediately, or whether it was a result of the medications they gave him. I didn't want to insist in the article that what happened to Yates was deliberate without more information than I have, but by laying out the sequence of events from FBI to mental hospital to mental breakdown, I think the picture is painted pretty clearly.
I'm glad the narrative frame process is helpful. It is my hope that by detailing this process, I can help people reason through the maze of this case more effectively, as well as navigate through other areas of official deception in the historical record. I also wanted to demonstrate that by using this method, the Oswald-did-it theory can be conclusively discarded, and the method can further be applied to sorting through the remaining facts in the case, sorting through and discarding ungrounded theories and speculations, and firming up a cohesive framework for understanding the case, what actually happened, and what the implications are.
This is an excellent article. I'm fascinated to know who messed up between generating the Yates incident pre-11/22 and conjuring the need to press Frazier for his curating rods account on 11/22. To me, the clear inference is that the DPD were either largely or only used by the plotters in the cover-up... not the planning prior to Dealey Plaza.
Thanks so much, Paul! My sense of things is that the Tippit shooting is a place where foreknowledge within the DPD can be seen. I've found Armstrong's work convincing regarding the involvement of Westbrook and Croy in Tippit's murder and the framing of Oswald for this.
Reports about the second police car at the scene, the familiar way the shooter interacted with Tippit, the presence of Croy at the scene immediately after the shooting, and the familiarity with Tippit among the residents at that street corner all combine to convince me that Tippit's murder was a setup. Tippit's encounter with the shooter appears to have been a prearranged meeting at that location, also attended by whomever was in the police car in the alley (presumably Croy). The purpose of it was to sacrifice Tippit to create an excuse for arresting and charging Oswald.
The connections that have interested me along these lines are first if all, the connections between Jack Ruby and the Dallas Police. The plot against Kennedy was going to require police cooperation in framing Oswald - as well as the deaths of Tippit and Oswald. This is the locus of DPD involvement: some planning beforehand, and decisive action after the assassination to achieve these objectives.
Ruby is the logical point-man as the go-between who linked the DPD and the deeper heart of the plot. His apartment was only a few blocks from where Tippit was killed, the shooter was seen by witnesses walking from the direction of Ruby's apartment, and many of the witnesses to the shooting and aftermath had Ruby connections. Many witness reports also place Ruby in the company of the man who was likely impersonating Oswald.
The other thing that jumps out at me is the role of Austin's Barbeque as a hub of right-wing activity and coordination. Tippit worked there, Croy mentioned his plans to go there on the day of the assassination, and it hosted meetings of the local John Birch Society chapter, headed by General Walker, who delivered a speech there on at least one occasion. We also have Tippit-shooter witness Warren Reynolds who was very close to Walker, was the go-between who set up meetings between Patrick Hemming, Loran Hall and Walker, and who was later shot in the head. The prime suspect in the Reynolds shooting was removed from suspicion due to an ailibi from Ruby associate Nancy Mooney, who turns up dead herself from supposed suicide a week or two later.
I'm going to go into all this in my next article, but long-story short, there is a nexus of webbed connections that link Ruby, the DPD, the Tippit murder, General Walker, the backyard photos, and the Oswald impersonator. What this points to in my mind, is that Walker's role in the plot was primarily to do with the setting up of Oswald in Dallas and coordinating with the hard right and soldier of fortune wing of the plot. Ruby was the operational coordinator closer to the action in who kept his contacts inside the DPD updated and set up the Tippit scene and ambush. He would have been more like the project manager of the Tippit/Oswald part of the plot.
Walker would be up the ladder in the plot as a higher-level facilitator with people like Charles Willoughby and HL Hunt coordinating things at a level above Walker. At that level, you get a web of connections between the CIA, military, Texas oil, organized crime, and the moneyed establishment. From there, different compartmentalized tendrils extend down to New Orleans, Cuban exiles, mercenaries, Secret Service, etc. - and, the tendril that extends to Ruby and the DPD.
Based on all this, my guess is that Ruby himself is the most likely candidate for settling on the "curtain rods" story and encouraging the Oswald impersonator to stage a hitchhiking ride and get this into the witness record. Ruby would have told his DPD contact(s) inside the plot that "we're going with curtain rods." Either this message got scrambled, leading to duplicating stories, or Frazier was always going to be the targeted witness to deliver that story, but that Yates story was planted as insurance in case that one fell through. It proved to be easy to brush aside the Yates account when the time came. Indeed it was 40 years before Armstrong and Douglass brought consciousness of this incident forward.
OK, that's enough for the moment! I could go on like this indeterminately...
I agree with all your points while happily conceding I don't know too much about the Walker shooting. But I can't help wonder if Oswald was actually Prayer Man and therefore not inside the TSBD where it may have been part of the original plan for him to be shot in there as the fleeing assassin by a 'quick- thinking cop' therefore preventing Tippit's shooting and everything that followed until 11/24 11.21am from taking place.
Yes, those are good points, Paul! I believe it makes sense for the plan to have been to kill Oswald rather than arrest him, as you mention. It seems likely to me that Oswald was on the first floor at the time of the assassination and that he was the Prayer Man figure captured on film.
To do so at the TSBD would require a cop who knew Oswald was a patsy ahead of time and knew what he looked like. That cop would have to rush in immediately and find Oswald, and if there were witnesses, have an available excuse for shooting him. If all of that were able to come together, then yes, he could have been shot there.
But that scenario is a lot harder to pull together than it would have been to shoot Oswald at the Texas Theater, where there is an assigned meeting place, Oswald's going to be sitting in place for long time periods, and it's possible to get multiple cops to surround him who have been dispatched and gathered there due to Tippit's murder. Also, the Tippit murder makes it possible to plant the second wallet with the fake Hidell IDs and Oswald's photo so police who get to the theater will know who to shoot/arrest.
Also, by setting up Oswald for Tippit's murder in a staged scene, this could be used as evidence that he also killed Kennedy. With very flimsy evidence against Oswald in the Kennedy shooting, the Tippit shooting sealed the deal in the minds of many. It also occurs to me that it would be more justifiable to gun down a suspect who is supposedly running rampant, killing a cop randomly after killing the president.
It would makes sense to kill Oswald right away, to reduce the chances that he would do something he wasn't expected to do and foul up the plans. So perhaps he would have been shot at the TSBD if there were a good chance for this right away. Those conducting the cover-up would have found a way to make the narrative work. But it seems likely to me that tagging Oswald with an additional murder was considered a needed part of the frame-job, and he was always intended to be found at the Texas Theater.
Why didn't they shoot him at the theater? My best guess is because he didn't actually have the hand gun on him - it had to be planted on him. That required getting close to Oswald, since there were witnesses in the theater. They couldn't just drop a gun on top of him after gunning him down in cold blood. In the process of planting the gun on Oswald, the cops had to get very close to him, and no one was able to get a clear shot at Oswald after that.
This may point to another reason he wouldn't be shot at the TSBD: he wouldn't have a gun in his hand, so there would be no excuse for shooting him. The way it went down with Ruby shooting Oswald looked very fishy to most anyone who is able to join a couple dots, but I think it might have looked even worse for police to have gunned Oswald down at the TSBD with no way they could have known he was supposed to have been the shooter. That's the main thing the Tippit killing does for the plot: it provides an excuse for attention to turn to Oswald as the suspect, and could have provided a good opportunity to kill him at the time of arrest, under the cover of the story that Oswald was running amok and might kill another cop if he wasn't killed first...
I'm rather late in reading your JFK articles. But I did want to thank you for all of your excellent work. The bits about the competing narrative frames (especially the frontloading ones) have been very helpful.
One thing stood out for me here: "Ralph Yates did as the FBI suggested. Within days of checking in at the hospital, his mental health rapidly deteriorated."
Mental hospitals are notorious for drugging their inmates (who are essentially prisoners) with mind- and soul-destroying chemicals, so his rapid decline doesn't surprise me at all. And then the electroshock treatments made things even worse. It's a sad story, and one that is not unique by any means. I'm sure the FBI knew that getting Yates into a mental hospital would be the end of him.
Thank you Mark! Yes, it's not possible to know for sure, but I agree with you that Yates's rapid decline after visiting the mental hospital indicates that whatever they did to him there was probably responsible for that decline, whether the electro-shock started immediately, or whether it was a result of the medications they gave him. I didn't want to insist in the article that what happened to Yates was deliberate without more information than I have, but by laying out the sequence of events from FBI to mental hospital to mental breakdown, I think the picture is painted pretty clearly.
I'm glad the narrative frame process is helpful. It is my hope that by detailing this process, I can help people reason through the maze of this case more effectively, as well as navigate through other areas of official deception in the historical record. I also wanted to demonstrate that by using this method, the Oswald-did-it theory can be conclusively discarded, and the method can further be applied to sorting through the remaining facts in the case, sorting through and discarding ungrounded theories and speculations, and firming up a cohesive framework for understanding the case, what actually happened, and what the implications are.
This is an excellent article. I'm fascinated to know who messed up between generating the Yates incident pre-11/22 and conjuring the need to press Frazier for his curating rods account on 11/22. To me, the clear inference is that the DPD were either largely or only used by the plotters in the cover-up... not the planning prior to Dealey Plaza.
Thanks so much, Paul! My sense of things is that the Tippit shooting is a place where foreknowledge within the DPD can be seen. I've found Armstrong's work convincing regarding the involvement of Westbrook and Croy in Tippit's murder and the framing of Oswald for this.
Reports about the second police car at the scene, the familiar way the shooter interacted with Tippit, the presence of Croy at the scene immediately after the shooting, and the familiarity with Tippit among the residents at that street corner all combine to convince me that Tippit's murder was a setup. Tippit's encounter with the shooter appears to have been a prearranged meeting at that location, also attended by whomever was in the police car in the alley (presumably Croy). The purpose of it was to sacrifice Tippit to create an excuse for arresting and charging Oswald.
The connections that have interested me along these lines are first if all, the connections between Jack Ruby and the Dallas Police. The plot against Kennedy was going to require police cooperation in framing Oswald - as well as the deaths of Tippit and Oswald. This is the locus of DPD involvement: some planning beforehand, and decisive action after the assassination to achieve these objectives.
Ruby is the logical point-man as the go-between who linked the DPD and the deeper heart of the plot. His apartment was only a few blocks from where Tippit was killed, the shooter was seen by witnesses walking from the direction of Ruby's apartment, and many of the witnesses to the shooting and aftermath had Ruby connections. Many witness reports also place Ruby in the company of the man who was likely impersonating Oswald.
The other thing that jumps out at me is the role of Austin's Barbeque as a hub of right-wing activity and coordination. Tippit worked there, Croy mentioned his plans to go there on the day of the assassination, and it hosted meetings of the local John Birch Society chapter, headed by General Walker, who delivered a speech there on at least one occasion. We also have Tippit-shooter witness Warren Reynolds who was very close to Walker, was the go-between who set up meetings between Patrick Hemming, Loran Hall and Walker, and who was later shot in the head. The prime suspect in the Reynolds shooting was removed from suspicion due to an ailibi from Ruby associate Nancy Mooney, who turns up dead herself from supposed suicide a week or two later.
I'm going to go into all this in my next article, but long-story short, there is a nexus of webbed connections that link Ruby, the DPD, the Tippit murder, General Walker, the backyard photos, and the Oswald impersonator. What this points to in my mind, is that Walker's role in the plot was primarily to do with the setting up of Oswald in Dallas and coordinating with the hard right and soldier of fortune wing of the plot. Ruby was the operational coordinator closer to the action in who kept his contacts inside the DPD updated and set up the Tippit scene and ambush. He would have been more like the project manager of the Tippit/Oswald part of the plot.
Walker would be up the ladder in the plot as a higher-level facilitator with people like Charles Willoughby and HL Hunt coordinating things at a level above Walker. At that level, you get a web of connections between the CIA, military, Texas oil, organized crime, and the moneyed establishment. From there, different compartmentalized tendrils extend down to New Orleans, Cuban exiles, mercenaries, Secret Service, etc. - and, the tendril that extends to Ruby and the DPD.
Based on all this, my guess is that Ruby himself is the most likely candidate for settling on the "curtain rods" story and encouraging the Oswald impersonator to stage a hitchhiking ride and get this into the witness record. Ruby would have told his DPD contact(s) inside the plot that "we're going with curtain rods." Either this message got scrambled, leading to duplicating stories, or Frazier was always going to be the targeted witness to deliver that story, but that Yates story was planted as insurance in case that one fell through. It proved to be easy to brush aside the Yates account when the time came. Indeed it was 40 years before Armstrong and Douglass brought consciousness of this incident forward.
OK, that's enough for the moment! I could go on like this indeterminately...
I agree with all your points while happily conceding I don't know too much about the Walker shooting. But I can't help wonder if Oswald was actually Prayer Man and therefore not inside the TSBD where it may have been part of the original plan for him to be shot in there as the fleeing assassin by a 'quick- thinking cop' therefore preventing Tippit's shooting and everything that followed until 11/24 11.21am from taking place.
Yes, those are good points, Paul! I believe it makes sense for the plan to have been to kill Oswald rather than arrest him, as you mention. It seems likely to me that Oswald was on the first floor at the time of the assassination and that he was the Prayer Man figure captured on film.
To do so at the TSBD would require a cop who knew Oswald was a patsy ahead of time and knew what he looked like. That cop would have to rush in immediately and find Oswald, and if there were witnesses, have an available excuse for shooting him. If all of that were able to come together, then yes, he could have been shot there.
But that scenario is a lot harder to pull together than it would have been to shoot Oswald at the Texas Theater, where there is an assigned meeting place, Oswald's going to be sitting in place for long time periods, and it's possible to get multiple cops to surround him who have been dispatched and gathered there due to Tippit's murder. Also, the Tippit murder makes it possible to plant the second wallet with the fake Hidell IDs and Oswald's photo so police who get to the theater will know who to shoot/arrest.
Also, by setting up Oswald for Tippit's murder in a staged scene, this could be used as evidence that he also killed Kennedy. With very flimsy evidence against Oswald in the Kennedy shooting, the Tippit shooting sealed the deal in the minds of many. It also occurs to me that it would be more justifiable to gun down a suspect who is supposedly running rampant, killing a cop randomly after killing the president.
It would makes sense to kill Oswald right away, to reduce the chances that he would do something he wasn't expected to do and foul up the plans. So perhaps he would have been shot at the TSBD if there were a good chance for this right away. Those conducting the cover-up would have found a way to make the narrative work. But it seems likely to me that tagging Oswald with an additional murder was considered a needed part of the frame-job, and he was always intended to be found at the Texas Theater.
Why didn't they shoot him at the theater? My best guess is because he didn't actually have the hand gun on him - it had to be planted on him. That required getting close to Oswald, since there were witnesses in the theater. They couldn't just drop a gun on top of him after gunning him down in cold blood. In the process of planting the gun on Oswald, the cops had to get very close to him, and no one was able to get a clear shot at Oswald after that.
This may point to another reason he wouldn't be shot at the TSBD: he wouldn't have a gun in his hand, so there would be no excuse for shooting him. The way it went down with Ruby shooting Oswald looked very fishy to most anyone who is able to join a couple dots, but I think it might have looked even worse for police to have gunned Oswald down at the TSBD with no way they could have known he was supposed to have been the shooter. That's the main thing the Tippit killing does for the plot: it provides an excuse for attention to turn to Oswald as the suspect, and could have provided a good opportunity to kill him at the time of arrest, under the cover of the story that Oswald was running amok and might kill another cop if he wasn't killed first...