William Bruce Pitzer: Not exactly a busted factoid

[Lance Payette]

Rereading William Matson Law's In the Eye of History last week sent me off on a brief William Bruce Pitzer tangent. Pitzer’s mysterious death has been the subject of previous threads here (for example: https://www.jfkassassinationforum.com/index.php/topic,984.0.html), so I’m not going to rehash all the twists and turns. The Pitzer saga has everything a JFKA junkie could want – elements of genuine mystery, tons of conspiratorial misinformation, hoaxers, crackpots, and witnesses whose credibility is difficult to assess. Your intrepid factoid-buster remains at least somewhat intrigued and perplexed.

I was fortunate to find, right off the bat, this 132-page e-book: WITHOUT SMOKING GUN: Investigating the Death of Lt. Cmdr. William Pitzer, https://www.memresearch.org/wsg/WSG-2019.pdf. The author, Kent Heiner, had originally published the book in 2004. The link is to his 2019 edition. He admits that in 2004 he was too quick to jump on the conspiratorial bandwagon and align himself with one of the worst of the hoaxers/crackpots (Dan Marvin, who claimed the CIA had attempted to recruit him to assassinate Pitzer). He now accepts, as do most people who are knowledgeable about the case, that Pitzer in fact committed suicide and was not whacked as one of "JFKA mystery deaths."

Is that the end of the story? Just a Lieutenant Commander in charge of the Audio/Visual Department at Bethesda who shot himself in the head on October 29, 1966? Everything else is just a mishmash of conspiracy factoids?

Well, no, not so fast, for three reasons that cause me to remain perplexed.

1. There is no clear – or even murky – explanation for Pitzer’s suicide. It just doesn’t fit who he was or what was going on in his life. His family was adamant that he never would have, and did not, commit suicide. Read the book. And yet, if he did kill himself, there had to be some reason, right?

2. Dennis David – one of those whose credibility is difficult to assess – was a friend of Pitzer’s. Pitzer served as a mentor to him several days a week in his quest to become an officer. On the day of the JFKA, David was Chief of the Day at Bethesda and thus was involved in the proceedings. See https://spartacus-educational.com/JFKdavidD.htm. He was interviewed for Law’s book. To his credit, he made no claims about Pitzer being at the autopsy, which would have bolstered the tale I'll describe in the next paragraph; the highly dubious Jerrol Custer subsequently claimed that Pitzer was all over the place, filming the proceedings, but Custer’s story is almost surely BS.

David did claim, however, that he visited Pitzer in his office a couple of days later on personal business unrelated to the JFKA. Pitzer was surrounded by autopsy photos and was examining a 16mm film of the autopsy. Since Pitzer was the head of the Audio/Visual Department, this is not implausible. David said he and Pitzer didn’t engage in extensive discussion but did observe a bullet hole in JFK’s forehead and agreed he’d been shot from the front.

David first surfaced in 1979, when a newspaper article (in which David had simply mentioned a black hearse and a shipping casket in an offhand way) caused David Lifton to contact him during the preparation of Best Evidence. Lifton had great respect for him and wrote a memorial of sorts at the Ed Forum when he died in 2017.

David initially had all sorts of “facts” in support of a Pitzer homicide that turned out to be flat wrong (e.g., Pitzer was left-handed but the gunshot was to his right temple – in fact, Pitzer was right-handed). He did acknowledge his mistakes, however, and in posts at the Ed Forum indicated he was equivocal on the issue of suicide versus homicide. He doesn’t strike me as a publicity-seeking wacko.

3. Could David’s tale of the encounter in Pitzer’s office possibly tie into the suicide of Pitzer almost three years later, on October 29, 1966? I don’t know, but these two facts are intriguing even to a factoid-buster:

On October 24, 1966, just five days before Pitzer’s death, Lifton made his first contact with former WC attorney Wesley Liebeler, then a UCLA law professor, about his body-alteration theory. We don’t know what Liebeler did with the information.

On October 29, the very day of Pitzer’s suicide, the executors of the estate of JFK executed a deed of gift to the National Archives of the autopsy materials, https://aarclibrary.org/publib/jfk/arrb/master_med_set/pdf/md111.pdf. RFK had announced shortly before that the Kennedy family had made this decision.

If what David described were true, could either or both of these events have triggered Pitzer’s otherwise inexplicable suicide? A serious, by-the-book officer, did he fear he was about to be caught up in the ultimate scandal? We’ll never know, but it’s too intriguing for me to declare the Pitzer death just another busted factoid. If there is no connection, it’s certainly one more bizarre twist in an assassination that is chock-full of them.