Kerry Thornley - The Dreadlock Recollections

In Appointment in Dallas (Hugh McDonald Publishing, 1975) by Hugh C. McDonald as told to Geoffrey Bocca, on page 165, a mysterious CIA-KGB hit man known in the book as "Saul" and allegedly one of the John Kennedy assassins describes Oswald's behavior during an interval when "Saul" claims to have been tailing Lee in Mexico City during the summer of 1963:

"He was always alone at mealtime, and he talked audibly to himself, all the time. His snatches of conversation were not rational. He seemed obsessed with 'Marina', I know now, of course, that that was his Russian wife, and kept saying the words 'shining hero,' and giggling to himself."

Had Oswald by this time discovered that there was an eavesdropping device concealed on his person, it is possible that his chatter was more rational than might be supposed, particularly if he was using the same type of intelligence community cant that might also explain seemingly nonsensical passages in Sirhan Sirhan's journal. While such a hypothesis may seem far-fetched at first glance, it is not at all inconsistent with the things Brother-in-law said to me about possible uses of electronic surveillance.

Brother-in-law brought up the subject himself at the beginning of one of the conversations, telling me that the European wire recorder was much superior to the method popular in the U.S., particularly for the clandestine recording of a conversation.

"You know they can also edit and doctor recorded materials to make it sound like you said things you did not say."

I always pointed out that such fakes could be detected technologically.

"That's right, Kerry," he would say in a tone of inexplicable sympathy. "They can."

All these chats contained a sense at the time both of desolation and desperation, in that they seemed to be the brainchild of desperate individuals.

Sometimes, for a glimpse of a moment, I would wonder if Slim and Gary had maybe murdered both their wives, allegedly sisters, and were now "on the lam" in a terrible Leopold-Loeb crunch that required an entire, cumbersome, hopelessly complex conspiracy to explain their actions to the world.

Upon those fleeting occasions, my psychological defense was to forget about it as unlikely, and then to dismiss lingering remnants of the unpleasant possibility with the probability that no such conspiracy would succeed anyhow.

In other words, a combination of intellectual cowardice and irresponsibility for problems I felt unequipped to solve permitted me to lock the whole experience away somewhere in the unvisited archives of my memory.

Over and over he asked me if I thought there could be any such thing as the perfect crime.

I was extremely skeptical of any such possibility, for in those days I understood almost nothing about the nature of practical politics.

Brother-in-law would say to me, "I think I can commit the perfect crime."

My mental context contained images of Carlos Marcello and his friends. I believe, but am not certain, that Gary said he had grown up in Kansas City in the neighborhood of someone involved in the Ma Barker gang. I envisioned him as having in mind something along the lines of the Brinks robbery.

"Maybe," I said, "but I doubt that you'll get away with it." Not only was my perspective distorted by his cover, but also by years of cops and robbers movies and television programs such as Dragnet .

Yet it also passed through my mind that a crime wave launched by Brother-in-law would be characterized by the bizarre, embellished with Nazi mystique, perhaps, and possibly involving "snuff movies" and weird religions.

We met in spirit in a black, moist, gnomic forest, fertilized already so tragically by means of such methodically cruel methods as to sometimes frighten even Hitler himself. We seemed to stand there at times in misty heartbreak, and commented to one another about the forbidden beauty of the flowers they had fed themselves upon the decayed flesh of those millions of victims.

Serenely superior to the trauma, Brother-in-law had the fierce willingness to admit to the mayhem, to discuss it in as much detail as any normal person. Then he would insist that you look with open eyes at the quaint drama of these bizarre foreigners who combined science with superstition, politics with astrology, police brutality with unorthodox epistemology, to somehow produce something hideously dynamic.

Sometimes he was like a brilliant chemist, prowling through the exploded ruins of the laboratory of a colleague who had hovered at the instant of his unfortunate tragedy upon catalyzing the Holy Grail. This fellow knew better than to believe in the efficacy of ancient philosopher's stones, but the possibility of synthesizing one had occurred to him.

Our political scientist took a cold, curious attitude towards others. His colleague's experiments upon homo sapiens evidenced in the debris did not disturb him, but only seemed silly in their extravagance. Why cause millions of people to suffer when with a fraction of the number of victims, tormented conspicuously enough, one could probably perform the equivalent sociological alchemy? The only misfortune, it seemed to him, was that the state of the art was that of alchemy, not of nuclear physics.

Whenever Brother-in-law was not boring, he was terrifying, yet somehow he seemed, perhaps because of the simple protective effects of trauma on my part, to be more boring than anything else.

Another psychological phenomenon took place within me in his company, a perceptible draining of energy through the bottom of my stomach or spine.

Upon reading Omar V. Garrison's Tantra , a book of Tibetan sexual yoga, I discovered that such an effect is produced in victims of Tantric black magic. According to the Avon paperback, The Occult Reich , Hitler often seemed to visitors and associates to function as a human energy vacuum, with a parasitical vigor that just sapped every room of its energy when the little man strode in. Every now and then I continue to meet an individual who has this effect on me, independent of any personality traits, and I have talked to others who have at one time or another felt the same awful drain of energy in the presence of a mysteriously enervating individual.

I have heard this phenomenon can be produced with drugs, particularly with belladonna. As I recall, Brother-in-law was a host who served a lukewarm cup of weak instant coffee when I first arrived and then dispensed with hospitality altogether. The cup was made of plastic and shaped like a tea cup. It seems I was always sitting there, drowsier than I wanted to admit, though by no means heavily drugged, if drugged at all, wishing to hell the creep would at least offer me some decent coffee.

It is also a distinct possibility that upon other occasions I was placed in a formal hypnotic trance. Once Brother-in-law discussed the Bridey Murphy case with great enthusiasm and asked me if I thought further examples of reincarnational memory uncovered with hypnosis should be researched, but adequately, he emphasized, by someone with resources.

When I objected that I did not believe in reincarnation, he replied with sympathetic approval, "Neither do I, Kerry, but I think the possibility should be investigated anyhow, by someone with more money than those guys who wrote the Bridey Murphy book, someone who could conduct a very thorough investigation."

He made sure to obtain my agreement. But I do not remember personally volunteering to be the subject of any such probe.

I do possess a distinct memory of sitting with Slim, late one afternoon, close to twilight, in a corner bar in some podunk Louisiana town, waiting for Brother-in-law to return. All I remember is that we were sipping beer in a place that resembled in structure the Napoleon House, with openings to the street instead of walls on two sides, but plainer, with Seven-Up signs instead of wrought-iron frills. I cannot at this point recall how we got there or where we went afterwards.