Max Collins - Ask Not

Madeleine Brown did not go public about her long relationship with LBJ until 1997, revealing that her son Steven was sired by the late president. Steven, whose physical resemblance to his famous father was striking, filed a $10.5 million lawsuit against Lady Bird, Johnson’s widow; but Steven died of cancer before the case was settled. Madeleine wrote a tell-all book that combined rapturous descriptions of lovemaking with Lyndon with revelations about her lover’s cold-blooded role in the assassination, but the book did not receive widespread distribution or attention.

In 1970, Beverly Oliver came forward as the so-called “Babushka Lady” evident in photos and films of the Dealey Plaza tragedy, and published a memoir in 1994 that also received little attention. The 8 mm film she shot has never been found, though the House Assassinations Committee made the attempt.

Jim Garrison’s investigation into the Kennedy assassination remains a source of controversy — Bobby Kennedy, initially supportive, later came to call the larger-than-life prosecutor a fraud. Bobby’s reaction did not surprise me — Garrison’s primary line of inquiry was CIA involvement, which might have brought Operation Mongoose to light, tarnishing JFK’s memory and RFK’s political future.

Garrison might have convicted David Ferrie as a JFK assassination conspirator, had the pederast pilot not died a mysterious suicide himself in 1967, leaving two unsigned notes (cause of death: a supposed brain hemorrhage). The crusading DA had to settle for tangential figure Clay Shaw, New Orleans business executive, who was acquitted in 1969, after the only criminal trial to grow out of the assassination to date. Notably, Garrison used his subpoena power to show the Zapruder film in public for the first time. His investigation inspired director Oliver Stone’s 1991 film JFK, which fictionalized Garrison much as The Untouchables television series and movie did Eliot Ness. But Stone’s film, as controversial as Garrison himself, led to the passage of the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 (the year of Garrison’s death) and the formation of the US Assassination Records Review Board, making available to the public previously classified documents.

The groundbreaking work of Flo Kilgore and Mark Lane opened a floodgate of conspiracy research and theorizing, with a conspiracy cottage industry rising up to produce hundreds of books on the assassination, ranging from the ridiculous to the sublime. Defenders of the Warren Commission Report did their best to trivialize all such researchers into “conspiracy nuts,” much like Lee Harvey Oswald himself had been deemed a crank with a gun. Even before Oliver Stone, however, the public remained largely skeptical of the Warren Commission.

In the wake of Watergate, and with the Zapruder film in wider circulation, the Gallup Poll reported that 81 percent of the American public considered the JFK assassination the result of a conspiracy. The House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) was established in 1976 to investigate the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., and the shooting of Alabama governor George Wallace. The Committee issued its final report in 1978, concluding that a conspiracy was responsible for the assassination of JFK.

The two-year span of the House investigation sparked another round of witness deaths, some mysterious, others blatant.

Roger Craig, the former Dallas County sheriff deputy, continued to speak out about what he’d witnessed surrounding the assassination. Returning from a meeting with Jim Garrison, Craig was shot at, his head grazed. His car was forced off the road in 1973, resulting in a debilitating back injury that ended his law-enforcement career. In 1974, Craig answered a knock at his door and was struck by a shotgun blast, wounding his shoulder. In 1975, he died of a rifle wound in his father’s home, a supposed suicide at thirty-nine.

A key Oswald associate, George De Mohrenschildt, was being sought by the House for testimony when he presumably blew off his own head with a shotgun, a shooting termed “very strange” by the Palm County, Florida, sheriff’s office.

Mobsters called to testify at the House Assassination hearings had a particularly tough go of it. In 1975, Sam Giancana, while frying up peppers and sausages at home, was shot six times in the back of the head with a .22 automatic, and several more in the mouth — a mob message that a squealer had been silenced. In 1976, Johnny Rosselli turned up in an oil drum in a bay near Miami, strangled, shot, and dismembered. In 1977, Chuckie Nicoletti, sitting in his car in a suburban Chicago restaurant parking lot, was shot in the head three times, gangland-style, and the vehicle set afire.

No such abrupt fate awaited Carlos Marcello. While serving the last of several prison sentences, he suffered a series of strokes, became seriously disabled, and began showing signs of dementia. He lost the power of speech and any sense of who he was, finally reverting to infancy, dying in 1993.

Clint Peoples, promoted to Senior Captain in 1969, left the Rangers in 1974 and became US Marshal for the Northern District of Texas. Even after retiring, he continued to investigate Henry Marshall’s murder, pressuring an imprisoned Billie Sol Estes to set the record straight. In 1983, a recently released Estes appeared before a grand jury and testified that LBJ has sent Mac Wallace to dispose of whistle-blower Marshall. With both Johnson and Wallace deceased — and the reputation of a US President to consider — the jury did not act upon these accusations; but they did officially change Henry Marshall’s suicide to death by gunshot. Peoples, working to prove Mac Wallace’s role in the assassination, died in an automobile accident in 1992, although his last words indicated he’d been run off the road.

In January 1971, Frank Felton was found dead in the same bed where his wife Flo had been found. At first called a heart attack, the death was deemed an intentional drug overdose — a real suicide in a case riddled with fake ones.

Mark Revell continued as the entertainment writer on the Indianapolis News into the early 1980s. He went on to work as a photographer of art studies, later receiving a master’s degree in Christian Counseling from Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University.

I saw Janet Adams a number of times in Chicago over the next ten years, though Jada’s Carousel fame soon faded, just as her extreme sexpot style receded in the popular culture. We were never really an item but had a great time whenever we got together, though I was never tempted to become her fifth or sixth husband, or whatever number was next. She died in 1980, and some have made her death out as another mysterious one. It wasn’t. Riding a motorcycle, she turned in front of a school bus, which was unable to stop. Nothing mysterious about that, just sad as hell.

LBJ stepped down from the presidency, a man defeated by Vietnam and the dire popularity polls it engendered. He seemed to be making way for Bobby Kennedy’s candidacy. It’s just possible Bobby had something on Lyndon that helped the President make that tough call. Undoubtedly Jack Kennedy’s successor did some great things, but he was also a political animal capable of doing anything for power. Fighting depression, in poor health after severe heart problems, he died in 1973, two days after his second term would have ended.

No one from the House Committee approached me to testify, by the way, and I didn’t come forward. Most of what I’d discovered was secondhand or old news by that point, and certain things I could not reveal, as there’s no statute of limitations on murder. That’s the reason this particular memoir could not be published until after my death.