Fix the Bus

Where was Lee Oswald between 9/25/63 and 10/3/63?

Do we trust the eyewitnesses and bus ticket evidence from Mexico, or do we trust the eyewitnesses from South Texas who swear Oswald was hanging around their neck of the woods at the time.

How about neither?

Eyewitness testimony after the Lee Oswald story had been plastered on the nation’s news networks doesn’t cut the mustard for me. I need a little more.

The Mexico City story has more weight to it, although, if LHO truly was there, and the cameras outside the embassy demonstrated such, why didn’t the CIA run around town showing us the evidence? That they did not do so tends to indicate that he was not there.

There seems to be a plethora of Oswald sightings in and around this Mexico City visit. It’s like an intermission, a resting spot, an oasis in the desert, where everybody can dump in or re-zero their theories.

We have the Mexico City visit, the South Texas sightings, and the Odio visit.

Maybe we can approach and solve this Mexico City visit a different way. We need a fresh approach.

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If I were planning the assassination of JFK, surely by the end of September, I would begin my final approach. Killing the President properly is like landing a jet. You don’t suddenly swoop in and land. You have to start descending from a distance, from way back. It’s similar to how most men divorce their wives. I’ve noticed that a favorite time to spring the news of the divorce is on Thanksgiving day. I’ve seen this happen a couple of times. The guy starts contemplating his move months ahead of the big day. He chooses T-Day so that he can wrap things up by the end of the year, or so he thinks. He doesn’t want to spend one more Christmas with that woman. The same sort of logic applies to JFK. Three years was enough.

So, Labor Day is a good landmark. By Labor Day, I want to be thinking about the final approach. I’ll give myself some leeway. I already know by now that JFK is coming to Dallas. Through my inside contacts, I have a pretty good idea that he’s going to go through Dealey Plaza. The men I work with in Dallas will eventually force the card and get JFK to where I need him to be.

I’ve decided that LHO is going to be my patsy. He is going to set up the decoy nest at the TSBD. I’m going to play on his desire to be a member of the team by having him meet the team. I need these guys to get together and bond. I also need to do some preliminary training.

I will need a place that is sequestered and out of the way. I may need people to shoot their weapons.

Where am I going to do this? To answer this, I must consider who will be doing the job.

I am going to choose Israeli assassins. I am choosing Israelis for various reasons. Number one, they have more experience than anyone else in the year 1963. They have been at war with the Arabs for nearly forty years now. Number two, they work closely with our CIA. Number three, I don’t want an American pulling the trigger. I don’t want any American to feel even one percent doubt in pulling the trigger. Number four, Israelis (Jews) are better at keeping secrets. After thousands of years of persecution, they have learned how to do this to near perfection. Number five, I need two of my assassins to be women. The women will be the assassins on the grassy knoll. No one will suspect a woman of shooting the President. They will dress in plain clothes, and they will blend in when the crowd rushes the knoll. Jews have no problem using women. Not using women is a Christian thing. Number six, and the best reason of all: If anyone tries to implicate Israelis, I can hide behind the shield of anti-semitism. It works every time.

Because I am importing Israelis, foreigners, I do not want them to stick out or be noticed. Some may not speak English. For that reason, I am not going to fly them as a group into a major airport where many people may notice them. I could fly them in one at a time, and have them meet in a hotel lobby, I suppose, but then again, they would be meeting where too many prying eyes exist.

It’s far better for me to sequester them at a ranch where nobody is around. I’ll fly them to straight to the ranch.

I’m going to pick South Texas, because South Texas is the perfect place for scoundrels and rascals. All the great rascals come from South Texas. Lloyd Bentsen, Clinton Manges, Oscar Wyatt, Morris Jaffe, George Parr, the Kings, the Klebergs. All the other great rascals like Sid Richardson, Clint Murchison, Lyndon Johnson, the Bushes, come down to South Texas to do deals and hunt.

South Texas is the perfect place because people expect things like this down here. The remoteness, terrain and proximity to Mexico provide an ideal environment for skullduggery. Nobody knows what you’re doing.

“Dry Hole” Byrd, the owner of the TSBD, had a plant near Crystal City. That’s pretty close to Laredo. There used to be a WWII internment camp there also. It housed families of German, Italian and Japanese descent. It was called the Crystal City Alien Enemy Detention Facility, and it was run by the INS.

Here are some pictures. Boy, that Oswald was one bad dude, eh? Not like our leaders.

Maybe the assassins met there. Or maybe they were at George Parr’s ranch near San Diego, Texas. That’s just to the west of Alice on your map there. In fact, there were a number of Oswald sightings there. Maybe they let Lee bring Marina around. Maybe it was a work-play conference. Maybe they said to Lee: “It’s okay to drive a car down here, Lee; no need to put up the pretense. Why don’t you take the wife and kid and have a good time.”

Why George Parr’s ranch? It seems logical to me. George was under pressure from the law and the press. He was compromised. Maybe the money made him an offer: “Let us use your ranch, and we’ll stave off the predators for a bit.” I’m sure Lyndon, who was politically astute and mindful of people who had helped him in the past, might have lent a helping hand. Maybe he did. It sure took a long time to convict George Parr. In fact, it wasn’t until after LBJ’s exit from power in 1968, and death in 1973, that the law caught up with him.

Yes, George Parr’s ranch is an option I would have considered.

What I would want to do is set up a meet and greet for my assassins. I need to lay out the mission for them in detail and get their ideas. Plus, I need to get Lee to buy into the mission. He’ll have a lot of questions. The more I involve him, the better it is for me. I can’t compartmentalize him and say that he will set up a decoy nest without him meeting the team. Having women on the team is a selling point, because men are suckers. Generally men think women won’t betray them; but they always do.

Now, why would I speculate that LHO might be sequestered away for the purpose of planning the assassination of JFK? Well, Oswald had to be somewhere, right? If he’s not in Mexico City, where is he? No one has reported him in Dallas. No one has reported him in New Orleans. So where is he? It is fair to speculate that he is being sequestered away somewhere. Since, it seems logical to me that he was involved in the assassination, I would assume logically that he would be sequestered away for the purpose of helping to plan it.

Now, of course, this is pure speculation. But, this is how this game of Sudoku is played. We speculate. We can’t just go on evidence alone. We’d never solve a puzzle if we waited.

Now, here are a few questions for us: Why doesn’t Oswald call back home to let Marina know that he is okay? If he is in Mexico, why doesn’t he pick up a phone? Isn’t she worried? Doesn’t Marina care? Doesn’t Lee want to talk to his daughter? He can surely call collect to Ruth Paine’s house. The Paines have plenty of money. I was living in Mexico in 1977, almost Oswald’s age. I called back home to my mom all the time. I didn’t have any money. I called collect. Why couldn’t Lee pick up a phone?

The fact that he didn’t call back tells us a lot about where he might not have been, and it tells us a lot about Marina. A normal wife would care. A normal wife gets after her husband if he doesn’t call when he is on his way back home from work. So if Marina doesn’t care, maybe it’s because she knows what’s going on and why. Maybe Marina is the spy we always thought she was.

At any rate, there are sightings in South Texas. What do they mean without at least one piece of hard evidence? We’d have to at least come up with some solid logical reasoning why LHO would tool around South Texas, with Marina and June in tow, looking for a job. It doesn’t make any sense. I could see why he might have the wife and kids with him on a short trip; but why would he be looking for a job if he knew he was going back to Dallas?

To begin with, not all the sightings are consistent. Yes, they do describe LHO fairly consistently, but that’s not a difficult trick as LHO was on the news quite a bit after the assassination. Maybe these observants are retrofitting their memories in order to accentuate their place in history.

Given that we aren’t ever going to find a piece of hard evidence to place Oswald there, why would he be tooling around South Texas? Can we think of a good reason?

So this prompted me to not dismiss these South Texas sightings and ask a few questions.

Let’s play the question game. Let’s say that Oswald was at George Parr’s ranch, Los Horcones. Let’s say that Oswald was let in on this mission to assassinate the President. Suppose Marina and little June were there with him. Suppose Oswald had his own car down there and was driving around sin official license or con unofficial license. If all that were the case, why on earth would Oswald be looking for a job at KOPY in Alice and then KBOP in Pleasanton? If he knew he was going back to Dallas, why would he bother in applying for a job in South Texas?

If he was in Alice on October 3rd, then Freer later that evening, then back in Alice on October 4th, where did he spend the night. Nobody recognized him in any of the hotels and motels. Did he spend the night in his car? Marina was quite the complainer; does she seem like the kind of wife who would sleep the night in the car? Perhaps Lee and Marina returned to George Parr’s ranch that night and slept there. Surely if they had spent the night on the side of the road, someone would have noticed them. No, it seems logical to me that if LHO was in the South Texas area, he was at George Parr’s ranch.

For the purposes of this discussion, I’m going to believe that he was there, and that he did walk into KOPY on 10/3/64 and 10/4/64.

One look at the station gave me an idea. Here is KOPY today.

As a person who has driven extensively through South Texas for many decades now, I think I may know why Lee Oswald stopped at that station.

He liked what he saw. In short he quickly fell in love with South Texas. The country suited him. He fell in love with South Texas in the same way I did. There is a beauty in remoteness and isolation. It is a healing salve to a wounded soul. And Lee Oswald’s soul was surely wounded.

There in South Texas, you have none of the cruelty and complexity of our modern civilization. It’s open ground, endless sky and scrub brush. Flatness is soothing.

Primitive dwellings dot the landscape.

It’s you and nature alone.

Lee Oswald tooled around South Texas and liked what he saw. And so he traveled the back roads through Freer, to Benavides, to San Diego, to Alice, to Pleasanton, to San Antonio, then back down to Corpus. Perhaps he traveled to Houston through Victoria. Surely, compulsive newspaper reader (a sinister undertaking according to Gus Russo) Lee Oswald picked up the Alice Daily Echo and read some of the history of the area. Maybe he read about Caro Brown and George Parr.

Here is a route he might have traveled. George Parr’s ranch is just a few miles south of Benavides. Is it possible that David Ferrie flew him in to one of multiple small airports in the area?

For a day or two, while on vacation with Marina in tow, perhaps Lee thought fleetingly about not going through with the mission. Lee was a person too, not just a mindless assassin as the media would have you believe; it would only be natural for him to think about the life he gave up by deciding to become a spy. Maybe, he thought, I could drop my life, settle down here and blend into the landscape. The South Texas landscape will do that to you. Its vastness and isolation will force you to rethink your life, to empty the pain you’ve experienced, to re-evaluate the programming you’ve received. You become a different person.

People who come to South Texas and stay feel like they’re in an elite club. When I first came to the Rio Grande Valley, I was told by a native: “I don’t care what else is going on in the nation. I don’t care if there’s a full-blown depression. Nothing affects the valley.”

It’s true, and I suspect LHO sensed that.

It’s a different world.

But alas, duty beckons, and so Lee Oswald, professional spy, took the long road back to Dallas.

Did it happen?

I think so.

Now , for those of you who are skeptics, take a look at this passage from the book: Dukes of Duval County: The Parr Family and Texas Politics by Anthony R. Carrozza.

At one o’clock in the morning on July 31, 1967, the FBI San Antonio office received a call from Mrs. Pat Luby of Los Altos, California, advising them she had information concerning the Kennedy assassination. She learned that former Alice district attorney Sam Burris was being held at Corpus Christi Spohn Hospital against his will. Mrs. Luby stated she was told by Burris’s wife, Dorothy, a friend of hers, that Dr. Fitelli and Dr. Paul Gutman were keeping Burris and a man named Lester under narcotics and being paid by George Parr to “keep them quiet “because they had learned something about the assassination. Mrs. Luby said it was all part of a “a political matter headed up by President Johnson and is directed through the George Parr machine.” Apparently the FBI found no basis of the allegations because they recommended “no investigation be conducted” concerning the reported incident.

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