Episode 44: JFK - The Men Who Killed Kennedy - "The Patsy"

Episode 4: "The Patsy"

Was Oswald innocent? Was his body tampered with in its grave? If he was really a rabid pro-Communist, why was he in the middle of the intelligence agencies in New Orleans, especially the office of Guy Bannister?

Links:

All eps can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0XNiu-yutk

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Men_Who_Killed_Kennedy

https://www.dallasnews.com/news/2010/12/02/lee-harvey-oswald-s-coffin-which-held-remains-before-body-was-exhumed-to-be-auctioned/

Need more? You can visit the website at: https://consaracytheories.com/ or my own site at: https://saracausey.com/. Don't forget to check out the blog at: https://consaracytheories.com/blog.

I am the author of the forthcoming book, Decoding the Unicorn: A New Look at Dag Hammarskjöld, where I explore Dag's leadership style and his personal journey in greater depth. For updates, please go here: https://sara-causey.kit.com/2d8b7742dd. 

Transcript

 Transcription by Otter.ai.  Please forgive any typos!

Welcome to con-sara-cy theories. Are you ready to ask questions you shouldn't and find information you're not supposed to know? Well, you're in the right place. Here is your host, Sara Causey.

Hello, hello, and thanks for tuning in. In tonight's episode, I will continue winding my way through my review of the docuseries the men who killed Kennedy. This is a review of episode four, which was titled The Patsy and it was originally published on October 18, 1991 so let's saddle up and take this ride. As you can probably guess from the title of this episode, it will be centered around Lee Harvey Oswald, aka the Patsy. It opens up with stills and video shots of the Texas School Book Depository, as well as some voice overlays of various people talking about Oswald, some of them saying him, he's a nice guy, quiet, kept to himself, oh, he looked guilty. He was the perfect Patsy because he just looked like he would be guilty of something. He was a weirdo. I didn't like being around him. So we know from the start we're going to get weird, conflicting narratives about who was Oswald anyway? Robert Groden raises the question, we tend to think of Oswald as not acting alone. Was he part of a conspiracy? But what about this question of, What if Oswald didn't do anything? What if he wasn't a pop popper at all? Not just he was a pop popper. He wasn't the only one, what if he didn't pop anybody that day? We learn about the weird circumstance that Lee is in where he's living in a rooming house. Now, even though he has a wife and children, he's not living with them. The wife and children are living with a woman named Ruth Payne, but Oswald is living by himself in a rooming house. We also learn that Lee doesn't drive, so whenever he wants to go to see his wife and kids, he has to rely on other people to give him a ride there. They also interview Wesley Frazier, who would give Oswald rides in the car here and there, and lived a few doors down. Both Payne and Frazier talk about Oswald being outside, playing with the kids, and just kind of seeming like a normal dad, normal family man. In that regard. Frazier relays his infamous story about how Oswald wanted a ride to Marina and Ruth Payne's place on a Thursday night instead of a Friday night, which was unusual. And Lee relays this story that Marina has made some curtains for him, for for him to use in this rooming house that he's staying in. So he wants to be able to go home to pick up these homemade curtains that Marina has made. We also hear that Oswald left some money and his wedding ring behind for Marina, and that he came out to get a ride back to work like on Friday morning with a brown paper package. And when Frazier asks him, what's going on, what are you carrying? He just says, It's curtain rods. Both Payne and Frazier also recount that they made mention of President Kennedy coming to town on Friday and that Oswald did not have any apparent interest at all. He didn't react in any way, just acted totally neutral about it. Frazier notes that the parcel that Lee is carrying, he was sort of like holding it in this weird way, like he has it cupped in his hand, going up to his armpit, and it was about two feet long. And we're told that even if the manlicher Carcano had been broken down, it would have been about three feet long. So there's no way that Oswald could have smuggled it in in that brown paper package. If Frazier is correct, that it was only two feet long, there's no way that that particular parcel could have been the manlicher Carcano, based on the testimony of other co workers and witnesses who saw Oswald in the Book Depository that day, the motorcade was running about six minutes late, but Oswald was not up there in the so called Sniper's lair. If he had been, he would have had to have been on the sixth floor waiting. He wouldn't have known that the motorcade was running six minutes late, more than likely, wouldn't have been there waiting, but yet, there were people that saw him on the first floor, and then another lady who saw him in the lunch room. So if he was really the paw Popper, why wasn't he in the so called sniper's nest at the correct time? Payne tells the story that she and Marina are distressed. Payne says that she went and lit a candle as a form of prayer, and they were sad and distressed about what had happened. Marion Baker, who was the first police officer into the Texas School Book Depository, talks about walking through the building with Roy truly and they find Oswald in the lunch room, and he's calm. He doesn't see. To be distressed or out of breath or sweaty, just just an ordinary day, naturally. This begs the question of, How did all of this happen in 90 seconds? How did he do the Pop? Pop, put the boom stick away, have the shells lined up, and then sprint down from the sixth floor to the second floor, and he's not out of breath. He's calm. He has a soft drink in his hand, and it's just another day in paradise. How does that happen in 90 seconds, especially when you think about the adrenaline that would be going through your body, how does he just appear calm and unruffled? And having a beverage that is that is a weird component of this story. A witness named Helen Markham tells the story of Officer JD Tippett talking to a man she is standing on the corner because she has to wait for traffic to go by because she wants to go down the street and catch a bus in order to go to work. And she sees this drama unfold with Tippett. Another man named Ted Calloway says that he has an encounter with the man who shot Tippett, and he yelled at the man something like, Hey, what's going on out here? And the man mumbles something back to him that he doesn't understand, and then takes off running. Something interesting about this is that Markham and Calloway have differing accounts of what this man looked like as well as what he was wearing. So how can both of these individuals still be Oswald? They interview a researcher named Larry Harris who doubts what we're officially told about Oswald and Tippett and the chronology of events a worker at the theater, because, you know, Oswald had slipped into a movie theater without paying. A worker at that theater said that Oswald would have had to have slipped in sometime between 1pm and 1:07pm which also doesn't make sense with the timing of JD, Tippett murder. I mean, how could Oswald be murdering Tippett and then also be sneaking into this movie theater without paying at the same time, when we see the footage of Oswald being, you know, manhandled around by the police like, Okay, we've caught him. There's a man on the news who claims that Oswald said I got me a president and a cop,

which I find that pretty hard to believe, that he said that because he never that. So far as I know, he never confessed to killing anybody and screamed to the media that he was just a patsy one of the police officers, Jim Lavelle, says that whenever he was questioning Oswald, Oswald said that he didn't kill anybody. The police find this out of date. Man liquor, Carcano, bolt action, boom, stick up there. But they struggle to tie this weapon to Oswald, and then also struggle with any proof that he actually fired that manlicher Carcano that day. So at this point we hear a story that Ruth Payne has told very consistently, and she gets weepy eyed basically every time that she tells it, that the police show up to her house to interview Marina and they ask if Oswald had an R, i, f, L, E, she says yes, motions for them to go into the garage and points to this blanket roll. Well, then when the police pick up the blanket roll that supposedly has this man liquor in it, the blanket roll is empty, and that's supposed to be like the OH MY GOD moment of this case, an empty blanket roll. Oswald never confesses, and when he's at Parkland, so after Ruby has popped him, he's taken to Parkland. Some of the same medical staff that treated Kennedy winds up treating Oswald. Paul Peters, one of the Parkland doctors, talks about how there were secret service men there. Some of them hadn't even dressed in green scrubs so they could try to be indistinguishable from actual medical personnel. People were in Oswald's ear. Did you do it? It's time to confess, like just trying to get some last minute, last second confession out of Oswald, of him saying, Yep, it was me. I did it. However, this does not happen. We're told the interesting story that the smudged palm print on the manlicker is not actually found until a little while after Oswald is taken to a funeral home. Is that a coincidence? Hmm, it sure seems awfully convenient to me. A man at the mortuary who dealt with Oswald's body tells the story of agents, and he said he did not know what agency they were from, but agents of some kind with a satchel came in and asked if they could be alone with the body. Of course, the people at the funeral home accommodated that, and it was clear to the mortuary staff that Oswald had been fingerprinted because they found the ink on his fingers and then his palm, and they had to go about removing the ink in order to prepare the body for the funeral. I. The researcher Gary Mack reminds us that even though Oswald is portrayed as this loser, this Kook, this lone nut, weirdo, I mean, he had a military history. He was in the Marine Corps. He was also stationed at Atsugi and monitored you two spy planes. So it's like, Was he really just this wing nut, cuckoo, crazy, a loner, somebody that was stupid, somebody who was small, that wanted to make a name for themselves. Or is there more to this story? We're also told the story that whenever Oswald went over to the Soviet Union and he met Marina, his skill with the Russian language was so good that Marina thought he was a native speaker. Now I can tell you from my own personal experience that doesn't happen on accident. Russian is a very, very difficult language to learn. There are some others that are probably more difficult. I would put polish in that category, because Polish takes the Latin alphabet and there are certain combination of letters that are not pronounced anything like in the English language. However, you have to learn the Cyrillic alphabet. Don't even get me started on Russian verbs of motion. That's a whole other nightmare. And the Russian language doesn't take articles like A, N and V. The way that English does, it is not the kind of language that you could study for two weeks and suddenly sound like a native speaker. It really takes some effort. So if this is true, if Oswald gets over there and he is so fluent, he sounds like a native Russian speaker, how did that happen? One of the researchers says, of course, there's a suspicion that Oswald was trained to be a defector. He was a fake defector. He had been given lessons in the Russian language and lessons in how to act and what to do because he was defecting as a phony. His defection wasn't real. He was doing it as part of a spy operation. They play an interview of Oswald himself speaking, and he misspeaks, it's like a Freudian slip. He says, I was under the protection of and then he stops and says, Well, no, I wasn't under the protection of the American government. What I mean to say is I was always an American citizen. While I was there, I never renounced my American citizenship, and I was never out of touch with the American Embassy. Now, if that doesn't seem fishy to you, I don't know what will. Our old buddy, Jim Garrison is interviewed as well, and he asserts that Oswald was Charlie India alpha, and that he was drawn into a situation where he could be used as the scapegoat. Jim Garrison talks about guy banister and how he's this man in the shadows, somebody else is always up front, whereas guy banister, who had been an agent before was was just lurking in the shadows, and he believes that Oswald's sheep dipping, which is making someone look like something that they're not creating a false ID, creating a false aura around somebody. The sheep dipping of Oswald is this pro Castro, pro communist dude, is taking place out of guy Bannister's office, which, again, this makes no sense, because you have guy banister, who's to the far right wing, who hates communism. Why would you have Oswald in there with you printing up pro Castro, pro Cuba, pro communism, literature that doesn't make any sense at all, just as we see in Oliver Stone's film JFK, Jim Garrison starts looking around this particular area of New Orleans and discovers all of these connections to the intelligence community, all within this very centralized little web in town. And he says, in the center of this there's this whole complex of intelligence agencies and their presence in New Orleans. And then in the center of this you have guy banister sheep dipping Oswald to look like some rabid communist. They also interview a man who is a barber in Clinton, Louisiana, and he says that this man comes in and asks for a haircut and starts talking about how he's from New Orleans. He needs a job. Do you know of anybody that's hiring? And the barber tells him about the mental hospital. And when he says that it's a mental hospital, he says, The man just kind of jumps in his seat, and he says things like, well, do they have all kinds of jobs there? I mean, like, would they hire an electrician? So the guy's like, well, I don't know. I can send you over to the representatives house. I mean, he might be able to help you. And the barber says he got the distinct impression that it was like the man was trying to be memorable. He was trying to say things that were a little bit off the wall, not in normal barber shop conversation, like he wanted to be remembered. He also notes that the man didn't actually need a haircut. This is another just hmm, things that make you go Hmm, that don't quite add up with Oswald being the pop popper. So the representative, Reeves Morgan, talks about how a man came to the door and said, Hey, I was sent in your direction. I've heard that there's an. Opening at the mental hospital in the electrical department, and I was wondering if I if you could help me get on or knew somebody who could. And the representative said that he just seemed like an ordinary, nice guy and didn't have any trouble with him. Now, after they see the picture of Oswald on television, after he's been arrested, both the barber and the representative realize we've seen that guy before. In fact, the representative immediately realizes that's the same guy who came by here looking for a job in the electrical department at the hospital. And these people in Clinton keep expecting that authorities of some kind are going to come down there to interview them about Oswald, and it just doesn't happen. Jim Garrison theorizes that it was desirable for Oswald to get this job inside the mental hospital as part of his sheep dipping, so that maybe they could get the testimony of a doctor or two, and they could continue to paint Oswald as a crazy, a lone nut, a kook, a communist sympathizer, and just a flat out insane individual. They show a video of Marguerite Oswald, Lee Harvey Oswald's mother, distraught, talking about how she felt like Oswald had done more for the country than anybody else. He was falsely accused. Now they go back and talk to the mortician again, the one who had Oswald's body, and he says, about three weeks after the burial, some agents turned up and said, Did you see scars on the body, on the wrists from when he had that suicide attempt over in Russia? The mortician thinks about it and says, I honestly don't remember seeing any scars. It's not that I was looking for any, but I just, I don't remember seeing any scars like that. And allegedly, the agent tells him, well, we just don't know who we have out there in that cemetery in 1981 Marina has Oswald's body exhumed to find out who is in the casket. Is the body still in the casket? Could he have been the victim of some type of switch. I mean, what? What's going on with this body? The mortician says that at the time of the burial, he put Oswald in a steel reinforced concrete vault, and that it was hermetically sealed, and this vault is guaranteed not to break crack or go to pieces. The mortician alleges that when he opened it in 1981 it was broken. He also alleges that the casket had been disturbed. Of course, if you look this story up in mainstream media, you will be told that the body was exhumed. It was definitely him. Nothing to see, hear people Move along. Move along. There's also a macabre story about how he was actually buried in a very simple pine box, which contradicts at least to some degree, what we're being told in this documentary, and that one of the morticians tried to auction the original pine box off as like a morbid curiosity thing, which sounds super creepy to me, honestly, the whole darn thing is super creepy to me, the mortician that they are interviewing here in the men who killed Kennedy talks about how he went to Baylor with the body after it was exhumed, and he recognized that the clothing that was still on the corpse was the same clothing that he had put on Oswald's body at the burial. He noticed that the head on this body had not had an autopsy performed on it. Now he said that the original body had been removed and it had the marks on it from being autopsied and x rayed, but the head on the body at Baylor during the exhumation did not have the marks from an autopsy, so this mortician's theory is that somebody tampered with the corpse that they lifted it out as best that they could, and it didn't go exactly according to plan, which is why part of the vault broke and the casket itself had deteriorated and was no longer in good condition, which, when we think about that in the context of somebody trying to auction off a rickety pine box, maybe it makes a bit more sense, but his theory is that somebody tampered with the body, and they wanted to make sure that the head of the real Oswald that would match the dental records would be in there, should the body ever be exhumed again? Now we don't know if that's true. Okay, I'm just I'm telling you what this man on the Docu series is saying. That's his theory. Somebody tampered with the body, somebody replaced the head. The researcher Harris says that his conclusion is that Oswald was not responsible, not responsible for the pop pop of JFK, or for the murder of JD. Tippett Frazier, Oswald's former co worker, said that he just didn't think Oswald had it in him to be a murderer like that. Just didn't see any signs that Oswald would wind up being a pop popper of a president. Jim Garrison is again interviewed and. He says that he believes Oswald is totally innocent of the crime, and that through the rewriting of history and disinformation campaigns, Oswald has been cast as a villain. He believes that it was Oswald's desire to actually help the country, to be patriotic, but now we see him as a villain, a murderer, and with that, this episode titled The Patsy ends, it brings up some interesting information. Now, whether you want to go down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole of Oswald's body was tampered with and it was replaced with a different head, and then, how would that even happen? I don't know, and I don't claim to know, this is a little bit like Maury Terry's book, The Ultimate Evil for me, we can get sidetracked on all sorts of things that relate, even in just the periphery to the death of JFK. But the thing is, when you read Maury Terry's book and you start to hear these witnesses saying it wasn't David Berkowitz the person that shot me, or the person that I saw as an eyewitness was tall and thin and blonde, or I saw a person that looked female. It was not David Berkowitz. You stop and think, Well, it sounds like the Son of Sam murders that were all blamed on Berkowitz. Some of them just couldn't have been Berkowitz. Now, whether you want to go down the rabbit hole of the Satanic Panic and who killed Roy Raiden and why? And this guy that Maury Terry calls Mr. Real Estate, who's supposedly buried with an upside down cross, that's a whole separate issue. That's a whole separate ball of Satanic Panic wax, if you choose to go there, to me, the more compelling story is, Why were there more than one Son of Sam killers? Why did the cops arrest Berkowitz and then just say Case Closed? We're done here. That shouldn't have happened. That's how I feel about the death of JFK. Now we can go down all of these individual rabbit holes, especially a crazy rabbit hole about the body got exhumed and somebody wanted to auction off the coffin, and was there a head swap? Why was the coffin damaged? Why was Oswald fingerprinted in the morgue? You can go down those rabbit holes. To me, I think the overarching conclusion that I come to, just apart from this Docuseries, is that even the story of Oswald stinks to high heaven. Forget about everything else that's connected to the pop, pop that doesn't make any sense when you just start digging into the life and then death of Oswald, that doesn't make any sense either. But what do you think if you watch this episode? What are your conclusions? What strikes you as being important? Stay a little bit crazy, and I will see you in the next episode.

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