Here we begin our list of three more "mysterious deaths" which have not been previously reported,2 even as we add Eastern Airlines to the cross-connected nexus of Oswald, NOLA intelligence circles (CIA/ONI), and suspect deaths. One of the most suspicious airline crashes in Eastern Airline history was Flight 304 out of New Orleans just a few months after the assassination. A passenger on board, Jules Charles Robert (sometimes misspelled... there is no "S" on his last name, "Robert"), had been an Executive with the William B. Reily Coffee company at the same time Lee Oswald worked there--the summer prior to the JFK assassination. Just after the assassination, Mr. Robert was killed in a mysterious crash toward the north side of Lake Pontchartrain. See The Times-Picayune, April, 2014, here:
The "crash" was mysterious because it was more likely an explosion, as in a bomb, not an accident. It happened shortly after take-off, just as the plane reached altitude. Airline bombs can work that way: triggered by a simple pressure-altimeter when a plane hits cruising altitude. The accident report does cite a minor mechanical problem with the pitch trim compensator, but the pilots were aware of it before take-off, and knowing how to compensate for it, took off with apparently no great concerns. The best reports show that turbulence was moderate and the plane was only three years old with a flawless safety record. The four-engine jumbo jet had a light load of just 51 passengers. No distress call was given by the veteran pilots, the flight recorder was blank, and most strangely of all, half of the plane and passengers were never recovered--the pieces that were recovered were just that: pieces. The debris was scattered over a wide area. The plane hit water, and the passengers had been seat-belted into their padded seats... yet their bodies were found in shreds. A Coast Guard officer observed the plane "explode" either before or after it hit the water. Eleven witnesses on the north shore heard an explosion--not just the sound of a plane hitting water, as it was accompanied with a huge flash of light. Again: according to news reports, only "bits and pieces" of the bodies were found, despite crashing into just 20 feet of water in an easily-searched lake.3
This would not be the only crash involving Eastern Airline pilots during the sixties and early seventies. I have new, never-published testimony from the son of a pilot who flew with Eastern based out of New Orleans area in the early sixties. His dad was a fellow pilot with David Ferrie, and he also flew with Eastern Airlines pilot James Aubrey "Tex" Kilcrease. Tex later crashed at the controls of a private Cessna 182, N869TX, lost en route to Mexico City on Dec 7, 1973.
A New Source
My confidential, highly-credible military source gives this account:
"My father was on the periphery of the JFK scenario and rarely talked about it until near to his death. He was scared, and that man feared few things! In early 1957, my dad got out of the Navy, having served as a pilot in the Korean conflict, and went to work for Eastern Airlines as a junior copilot, based in New Orleans. Back then, whoever was your Captain called the shots and you had to "party" with your boss. [While I was a toddler,] we were living in Covington, across Lake Pontchartrain. [Covington is in Saint Tammany Parish, where Ferrie and Oswald were seen together at a CIA training camp.] According to my dad, a whole parcel of "cowboys" were based out of [Eastern Airlines in] New Orleans... many needed extra cash. Enter the CIA and private businessmen. New Orleans was easy to fly in and out of back then [to Cuba and Mexico City]. Much easier than Florida. Once you did one run [for the CIA], they had their hooks in you. My dad said he was approached more than once but steered clear. He knew David Ferrie as Dave, an Eastern Airlines Captain... my dad flew with him a number of times. Ferrie pressured my dad to come to some of the parties he hosted at his French Quarter residence. It was there that my dad met Lee Harvey Oswald. Dad's impression of Oswald was that this was a weird enlisted Marine who tried (but failed) to fit in with the rest of the fly boy party crew. Obviously, he did not think much about it until Oswald hit the news in '63. After that, Ferrie supposedly died of a heart attack [sic: coroner deemed it a stroke] and my dad was very circumspect regarding the cause of death. It was rumored that Ferrie had significant ballistics and trajectory research/data in his residence that never came to light. My dad also said that the cowboy "moonlighters" ceased the secret flying trips right around the time the assassination took place. By the Spring of 1965 all the pilots had been transferred to other bases.
"No less than four of his colleagues that flew for Eastern in NOLA died under questionable circumstances. Two names I recall, besides Ferrie, were Steve Pegram and Tex Kilcrease. Both quit flying for EAL after the shooting, and both died prematurely. [After the assassination,] Pegram moved to Newnan, Georgia, and told my dad that he was being watched and didn't leave his basement for over a year. I have no details about Pegram's untimely death, but I recall inferring from my parents' words and attitude it might have been suicide."
My source is highly-credible because I know his personal history and his integrity (I've known him for over 30 years), but also because everything he told me is consistent with history... and he was no JFK-conspiracy buff. He had no idea that Tex Kilcrease was a minor character named in Jim Garrison's files (and never mentioned in popular JFK-assassination books). Garrison had sent his investigator to nose around in St. Tammany Parish (site of the anti-Castro training camp run by David Ferrie). The investigator inquired with local law enforcement about any area pilots (because of the Ferrie/Eastern Airline connection). Garrison's file contains this report: "The following information was received from Lt. Hudgeons [of St. Tammany Parish]. Airline pilots that he personally knows of that live in that area: Tex Kilcrease [of] Covington. Also has private detective agency... Lt. Hudgeons says he does not trust this subject."
Kilcrease's mysterious plane crash further confirms my source's story of mysterious deaths. The crash happened during the Watergate investigation, which subpoenaed Watergate burglar and CIA agent E. Howard Hunt. Hunt had his own NOLA connections, and confessed on his deathbed to involvement in the Kennedy assassination.
So we find, again, reports of mysterious plane crashes and suicide, all with similar motifs, the too-familiar ending for many JFK-case witnesses, especially those entangled with the CIA. Exactly one year before Tex disappeared in his Cessna, Congressman Hale Boggs, also in a Cessna, mysteriously disappeared in Alaska, silencing his dissent on the Warren Commission\. Like Kilcrease, Bogg's plane wreckage was never found despite an intensive, widespread, 39-day search. Unlike the recent Malaysian 370 airline disappearance into the unending oceans "down under," the Cessna's were lost over land in a finite search area.
Two Oswalds in Paradox
Without even going as far as some do in proposing that Oswald literally had a lookalike double, we know there were, figuratively-speaking, "two Oswalds": the Solitary Lee and the widely-networked Entangled Lee. The official Lee Harvey Oswald portrait is of an isolated, friendless misfit; a solitary, dysfunctional nut; a communist with no community. In sharp contrast, the other Lee is a young man with a hundred connections: in the Cuban anti-Castro movement; in the underbelly of New Orleans; in Miami, Cuba, Mexico and Russia; in the CIA and the FBI. This Entangled Lee was a paradox: 1. Most everywhere he went, Lee strangely associated with both left-wingers and right-wingers, lawbreakers and law enforcers. 2. Entangled Lee used a score of aliases, also inconsistent with the official Lee, whose motive for killing JFK is said to be for the purpose of making his name famous.
Any politician or author who painted a portrait of Solitary Lee became enriched; any witness to the Entangled Lee ran a statistically-high chance of dying young! I cannot overstate this point: we have uncovered the reality of the Entangled Lee, despite the reward/punishment factors working against us and despite the death of key witnesses.
Posner expended his entire Appendix B to ridicule the topic of a hundred "Mysterious Deaths" that conspiracy researchers have catalogued. Start at the top: his flippant denial of the significance of Oswald's murder betrays Posner's bias. The most suspicious death of all was the silencing of the scape-goat, which Posner "explains" as the work of yet another "crazy lone-gunman," Jack Ruby. If Ruby was so crazy, why did the Dallas police allow him repeated access to Oswald, inside their police station? They knew him as a sane, successful businessman, otherwise they surely would not have let their guard down around such a shady character (Ruby ran a strip joint, and with known criminal ties, looked the part of a gangster.) Posner lies by claiming Ruby did not make any phone calls to the Mafia, when records unearthed by the HSCA and ARRB show plenty. Ruby also made good use of untraceable phone booth calls. But the icing on this death cake is that Ruby himself later admitted to a high-reaching conspiracy. Oswald's death at the hands of Ruby is indeed "mysterious," (i.e. "suspicious"), and for many of us it is a literal "smoking gun" because it silenced the key witness. This is how conspiracies are kept quiet. Corpses make great co-conspirators; you can count on mummies to stay mum.
There are so many more corpses, where do we start? Ferrie and Banister were both dead before Garrison could drag them into court. Several witnesses that would have been problematic for the Warren Commission had "accidents" by the time the Report was released. By the end of the House Investigation in the 70's, over a hundred of the people connected to the "lone Oswald" nexus were dead--most by accident, suicide, murder or plane crash.4 Here again, Posner and other debunkers ridicule this claim, cherry-picking to highlight any names that, frankly, were natural deaths that should not have been listed in the first place. Given space, I would argue with Posner's ridicule on some points, but agree with him on many others... nevertheless, we would still be left with an irrefutable core of violent deaths. I do the math this way: the longest lists contain over 120 suspicious deaths. I remove 30 who seem to be natural or coincidental, but add the three new names in this article, plus add Oswald and Kennedy's names, and we still arrive at 100 persons with legitimate connections to the case who truly had violent or questionable deaths. 100! That's a record number of strange deaths surrounding any person, much less a "loner," if you wish to call Oswald that. The statistics strain credulity. One statistical study puts the odds in the trillions.
Let's just say that involvement with JFK or LHO proved to be very bad for a person's health.
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