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.

[Lance Payette]

Still on the case, even if no one else cares because posts over 53 words are unreadable "books" to the intellectual giants here  ...

Amazingly enough, at one time the members of the Ed Forum included Dennis David, "Dangerous Dan" Marvin and Allan Eaglesham. Eaglesham was the premier on-the-ground, nuts-and-bolts researcher of the Pitzer matter. At one time, he was firmly in the "murder" camp. By the time of his postings at the Ed Forum in 2006, he had accepted the verdict of suicide. Alas, Eaglesham tended to respond with links to his website, which is no longer accessible.

Eaglesham had nothing negative to say about David (in contrast to what he had to say about Marvin) except that David's claim of Pitzer being left-handed had started the inquiry off on the wrong foot (is that a pun of some sort?). David's claim was a good-faith one - he had played cards with Pitzer on many occasions, and Pitzer always dealt with his left hand. (Hey, I am firmly RH but putt LH!). Anyway, it was just an error. I will post later as to why I find David at least arguably credible and not an obvious flake.

David posted only 6 times at the Ed Forum - he was 67 when he joined - and only a couple were about Pitzer. He said this about the supposed encounter in Pitzer's office:

In the film and the pictures I saw only the body was shown. It did show hands that moved the body but no picture showed faces, etc. Some of the surroundings were visible but quite honestly we paid little attention to that. The body and the wounds it had sustained were our focus. Bill only commented as to the location/magnitude of the wounds, that the temple wound appeared to be an entrance wound. I did wonder at the tracheotomy incision, considering the size and location of the exit wound in the parietal/occipital area. It seemed to me that the tracheotomy was an exercise in futility. Bill's demeanor, hard to say, I know we both got teary eyed. Magnitude of what we saw? We saw what we felt was a frontal entry wound in the right forehead with a large exit wound in the rear of the skull of a President we both admired and liked. How Bill felt when the Warren Report came out, I do not know. I felt disgusted and very, very angry but I was also afraid to say anything, and didn't until my talk with the Waukegan Sun reporter. Even then I would not allow my name to be made public.

Here also is a "Dennis David" thread started by Robin Unger in 2005 that has David's responses to questions, including a bit more detail as to what he supposedly saw: https://educationforum.ipbhost.com/topic/3622-dennis-david/.

The point of my original post, in case anyone didn't grasp it, was: EVEN IF Pitzer's death was a suicide, was it perhaps nevertheless JFKA-related? All the other discussions seemed to have the focus that if it was suicide there was nothing further to talk about.

[John Corbett]

Let us know what you find out in this rabbit hole.

[Lance Payette]

This is my ex-lawyer’s assessment of Dennis David’s credibility.

The knee-jerk LN response, of course, is that David had to be a flake; I tend to disagree. (Kent Heiner’s e-book that I linked deals with Bugliosi’s misinformed character assassination of David, based on VB’s inaccurate understanding of what David had actually claimed. Heiner pretty well nails VB to the wall at page 41.)

William Matson Law spent a great deal of time with David and clearly found him credible; he is the lead interview in the 2005 edition of Law’s book In the Eye of History. Allan Eaglesham, an editor by profession, apparently helped with the editing of Law’s book. I saw in the 2018 thread on this forum that I linked where Mitch Todd had said David went mysteriously silent when Eaglesham located a nurse at Bethesda who could have corroborated part of his story and that this caused at least a temporary rupture in their relationship; I couldn’t find anything about this, so perhaps Mitch can enlighten us. (Jerrol Custer, who placed Pitzer at the autopsy, had all sorts of personal problems and JFKA-related bitterness, and neither Eaglesham, Kent Heiner nor even David in his later years found him to be credible.)

1. David first came forward in 1974, after the Waukegan News-Sun had run an article about the JFKA. David found something in the article so inaccurate that he called to complain. The reporter asked what made David such an expert. “Because I was there,” David replied. This resulted in a follow-up article in 1975 with the theme of Pitzer perhaps being a JFKA mystery death. The article has numerous inaccuracies, some attributable to David and some to the reporter. You can read the article in its entirety at pages 37-38 of Heiner’s e-book that I linked.

The article twice referred to Pitzer as having filmed the autopsy, which David never claimed at any time. The reporter must have inferred this from something David said. The article does not specifically refer to the encounter in Pitzer’s office, saying only that David had seen slides indicating a shot from the front.

Regarding David’s credibility: He came forward only in a response to a small-time newspaper’s article that he believed contained gross inaccuracies. The reporter prompted him to tell his personal story. Very, very significantly, he insisted on anonymity. He made no exaggerated claims, and in fact what he told the reporter is the same as what he said the rest of his life.

2. David didn’t surface again until 1979, when David Lifton contacted him. Unfortunately, Penn Jones had seen the 1975 newspaper article and worked it into the 1976 edition of Forgive My Grief, expanding the story with absurd “details.” No one knows where (if anywhere) Jones got these “details,” which included Pitzer being subjected to a “horrifying” debriefing and repeatedly being warned by someone from the military to keep his mouth shut. Insofar as David is concerned, Jones simply quoted the newspaper article, did not identify David by name and clearly never interviewed David. Alas, Jones’ nonsense (and some further elaboration by Harrison Livingstone, including David claiming to actually have been at the autopsy) forever colored the supposed "Dennis David story.”

3. David Lifton somehow became aware of the newspaper article during the preparation of Best Evidence in 1979. He was intrigued by David’s low-key description of the arrival of the body. This is what David had said in the 1975 article: “We were scared to death. There had been rumors even then that a conspiracy was involved and no one was taking any chances. Kennedy’s body was brought in through a back door in an unmarked ambulance. An official motorcade from the airport contained only an empty casket.” This, of course, was a perfect fit for Lifton’s body-alteration theory. Oddly, Lifton really wasn’t interested in the Pitzer stuff, and there is question as to how much he and David discussed it, if at all.

Regarding David’s credibility: Lifton contacted him; he didn’t contact anyone. His story was remarkably low-key. He made no bombastic claims about having seen the body or being told anything remarkable. He didn’t even claim that he had been told JFK’s body was in the shipping casket. He said he was simply alerted “Your visitor has arrived” and assumed that meant JFK. Although he, after long association with Lifton and the body-alteration crowd, said he thought JFK’s body was in the shipping casket, he never claimed to know this. Indeed, I believe he was entirely truthful as to what he observed. For the reasons set forth in this thread started by me, I believe there was a black non-military hearse and a shipping casket:  https://www.jfkassassinationforum.com/index.php/topic,4435.0.html It just didn’t contain JFK’s body and had nothing to do with any alteration of his body. Far from casting doubt on David’s credibility, I believe his low-key, non-sensational account of this aspect of his story greatly enhances his credibility.

4. David’s story has three prongs: the shipping casket prong, the Pitzer prong, and this one, the "bullet fragments" prong. The night of the autopsy, an unnamed lieutenant asked him if he knew anyone with a security clearance who could type up a memo for an unnamed agent. David said he was cleared up to the level of Secret and could certainly type since that was his job. The three went to an office where the agent produced a small bottle with four bullet fragments and dictated the memo. After dictating the memo, he took it, all carbon copies, and the ribbon from the typewriter. He told David to forget he had been there and reminded him that this was all classified. He allowed David to pour the fragments into his hand; David said the four fragments were cumulatively too large for one bullet but too small for two.

Regarding David’s credibility: He told exactly this story in the 1975 newspaper article and never expanded it. Again, it was told in a low-key, anonymous way. However, David’s recollections were conveniently vague. He later said he couldn’t recall the name of the lieutenant. The newspaper article says the agent was Secret Service, but David later said he thought it was Sibert or O’Neill (which it clearly wasn’t) but possibly a Secret Service agent and certainly a government agent of some sort; he didn’t think he could identify the agent even if shown a photo. This is why I described David’s credibility as “difficult to assess.” This all sounds extremely iffy, but it’s also an odd little incident to have invented out of whole cloth and was never described in a sensationalistic way that magnified David’s role or importance.

5. Then, of course, there is the Pitzer encounter.

Regarding David’s credibility: Pitzer being at the autopsy would have greatly enhanced David’s tale, yet he never claimed this. To the contrary, he specifically said he didn’t recall Pitzer at all. When the highly dubious Jerrol Custer placed Pitzer there, David was at first relieved to have his story “confirmed” (in a way, since this would explain Pitzer having the film and photos) but came to doubt that Custer was reliable. David clearly was close to Pitzer, who acted as his mentor and with whom he played cards on numerous occasions. So this was a real relationship; David didn’t insert himself into an encounter that would have been highly unlikely, and we also have to wonder if he would have invented a tale about someone who had been so close and helpful to him. I think it’s also significant that, like everything else, the encounter was always described in a low-key, non-sensational way. David didn’t have Pitzer making any bombshell statements or revelations or even explaining what the hell he was doing.

All in all, I lean toward David having some level of credibility. Despite considerable involvement with the CT community that surely colored his perceptions, he never changed or expanded his basic story. Whether his story helps explain Pitzer’s suicide, we’ll never know. Perhaps the other autopsy-related events on and immediately before October 29, 1966 were pure coincidence – but if so, what was the reason for Pitzer’s mysterious suicide?

(Almost 1,400 words, my intellectually-challenged non-readers!  I know, I know, it’s way more fun and entertaining to read “The first shot occurred at Z195, you ignorant CT dumbass” followed by “No, it didn’t, it was Z228, you posturing LN putz” for 148 threads and 3,012 posts, but I guess as an ex-lawyer I just have an incurable addiction to wordy substance. I learned early in my legal career that when I filed a pithy appellate brief saying "The trial judge was so stupid he should be removed from the bench, and the appellant's 65-page opening brief is such a piece of crap the attorneys should be disbarred" - well, I generally didn't have much success in convincing the appellate panel.)

[Mitch Todd]

This is my ex-lawyer’s assessment of Dennis David’s credibility.

The knee-jerk LN response, of course, is that David had to be a flake; I tend to disagree. (Kent Heiner’s e-book that I linked deals with Bugliosi’s misinformed character assassination of David, based on VB’s inaccurate understanding of what David had actually claimed. Heiner pretty well nails VB to the wall at page 41.)

William Matson Law spent a great deal of time with David and clearly found him credible; he is the lead interview in the 2005 edition of Law’s book In the Eye of History. Allan Eaglesham, an editor by profession, apparently helped with the editing of Law’s book. I saw in the 2018 thread on this forum that I linked where Mitch Todd had said David went mysteriously silent when Eaglesham located a nurse at Bethesda who could have corroborated part of his story and that this caused at least a temporary rupture in their relationship; I couldn’t find anything about this, so perhaps Mitch can enlighten us. (Jerrol Custer, who placed Pitzer at the autopsy, had all sorts of personal problems and JFKA-related bitterness, and neither Eaglesham, Kent Heiner nor even David in his later years found him to be credible.)

1. David first came forward in 1974, after the Waukegan News-Sun had run an article about the JFKA. David found something in the article so inaccurate that he called to complain. The reporter asked what made David such an expert. “Because I was there,” David replied. This resulted in a follow-up article in 1975 with the theme of Pitzer perhaps being a JFKA mystery death. The article has numerous inaccuracies, some attributable to David and some to the reporter. You can read the article in its entirety at pages 37-38 of Heiner’s e-book that I linked.

The article twice referred to Pitzer as having filmed the autopsy, which David never claimed at any time. The reporter must have inferred this from something David said. The article does not specifically refer to the encounter in Pitzer’s office, saying only that David had seen slides indicating a shot from the front.

Regarding David’s credibility: He came forward only in a response to a small-time newspaper’s article that he believed contained gross inaccuracies. The reporter prompted him to tell his personal story. Very, very significantly, he insisted on anonymity. He made no exaggerated claims, and in fact what he told the reporter is the same as what he said the rest of his life.

2. David didn’t surface again until 1979, when David Lifton contacted him. Unfortunately, Penn Jones had seen the 1975 newspaper article and worked it into the 1976 edition of Forgive My Grief, expanding the story with absurd “details.” No one knows where (if anywhere) Jones got these “details,” which included Pitzer being subjected to a “horrifying” debriefing and repeatedly being warned by someone from the military to keep his mouth shut. Insofar as David is concerned, Jones simply quoted the newspaper article, did not identify David by name and clearly never interviewed David. Alas, Jones’ nonsense (and some further elaboration by Harrison Livingstone, including David claiming to actually have been at the autopsy) forever colored the supposed "Dennis David story.”

3. David Lifton somehow became aware of the newspaper article during the preparation of Best Evidence in 1979. He was intrigued by David’s low-key description of the arrival of the body. This is what David had said in the 1975 article: “We were scared to death. There had been rumors even then that a conspiracy was involved and no one was taking any chances. Kennedy’s body was brought in through a back door in an unmarked ambulance. An official motorcade from the airport contained only an empty casket.” This, of course, was a perfect fit for Lifton’s body-alteration theory. Oddly, Lifton really wasn’t interested in the Pitzer stuff, and there is question as to how much he and David discussed it, if at all.

Regarding David’s credibility: Lifton contacted him; he didn’t contact anyone. His story was remarkably low-key. He made no bombastic claims about having seen the body or being told anything remarkable. He didn’t even claim that he had been told JFK’s body was in the shipping casket. He said he was simply alerted “Your visitor has arrived” and assumed that meant JFK. Although he, after long association with Lifton and the body-alteration crowd, said he thought JFK’s body was in the shipping casket, he never claimed to know this. Indeed, I believe he was entirely truthful as to what he observed. For the reasons set forth in this thread started by me, I believe there was a black non-military hearse and a shipping casket:  https://www.jfkassassinationforum.com/index.php/topic,4435.0.html It just didn’t contain JFK’s body and had nothing to do with any alteration of his body. Far from casting doubt on David’s credibility, I believe his low-key, non-sensational account of this aspect of his story greatly enhances his credibility.

4. David’s story has three prongs: the shipping casket prong, the Pitzer prong, and this one, the "bullet fragments" prong. The night of the autopsy, an unnamed lieutenant asked him if he knew anyone with a security clearance who could type up a memo for an unnamed agent. David said he was cleared up to the level of Secret and could certainly type since that was his job. The three went to an office where the agent produced a small bottle with four bullet fragments and dictated the memo. After dictating the memo, he took it, all carbon copies, and the ribbon from the typewriter. He told David to forget he had been there and reminded him that this was all classified. He allowed David to pour the fragments into his hand; David said the four fragments were cumulatively too large for one bullet but too small for two.

Regarding David’s credibility: He told exactly this story in the 1975 newspaper article and never expanded it. Again, it was told in a low-key, anonymous way. However, David’s recollections were conveniently vague. He later said he couldn’t recall the name of the lieutenant. The newspaper article says the agent was Secret Service, but David later said he thought it was Sibert or O’Neill (which it clearly wasn’t) but possibly a Secret Service agent and certainly a government agent of some sort; he didn’t think he could identify the agent even if shown a photo. This is why I described David’s credibility as “difficult to assess.” This all sounds extremely iffy, but it’s also an odd little incident to have invented out of whole cloth and was never described in a sensationalistic way that magnified David’s role or importance.

5. Then, of course, there is the Pitzer encounter.

Regarding David’s credibility: Pitzer being at the autopsy would have greatly enhanced David’s tale, yet he never claimed this. To the contrary, he specifically said he didn’t recall Pitzer at all. When the highly dubious Jerrol Custer placed Pitzer there, David was at first relieved to have his story “confirmed” (in a way, since this would explain Pitzer having the film and photos) but came to doubt that Custer was reliable. David clearly was close to Pitzer, who acted as his mentor and with whom he played cards on numerous occasions. So this was a real relationship; David didn’t insert himself into an encounter that would have been highly unlikely, and we also have to wonder if he would have invented a tale about someone who had been so close and helpful to him. I think it’s also significant that, like everything else, the encounter was always described in a low-key, non-sensational way. David didn’t have Pitzer making any bombshell statements or revelations or even explaining what the hell he was doing.

All in all, I lean toward David having some level of credibility. Despite considerable involvement with the CT community that surely colored his perceptions, he never changed or expanded his basic story. Whether his story helps explain Pitzer’s suicide, we’ll never know. Perhaps the other autopsy-related events on and immediately before October 29, 1966 were pure coincidence – but if so, what was the reason for Pitzer’s mysterious suicide?

(Almost 1,400 words, my intellectually-challenged non-readers!  I know, I know, it’s way more fun and entertaining to read “The first shot occurred at Z195, you ignorant CT dumbass” followed by “No, it didn’t, it was Z228, you posturing LN putz” for 148 threads and 3,012 posts, but I guess as an ex-lawyer I just have an incurable addiction to wordy substance. I learned early in my legal career that when I filed a pithy appellate brief saying "The trial judge was so stupid he should be removed from the bench, and the appellant's 65-page opening brief is such a piece of crap the attorneys should be disbarred" - well, I generally didn't have much success in convincing the appellate panel.)

In the Waukeegan Sun article that started this all, David says this about Pitzer's death:

1.) Pitzer was determined to have shot himself in his office at Bethesda with a ".45" (presumably a Colt model 1911)
2.) The gun was found in his right hand
3.) But Pitzer was left-handed
4.) Pitzer had accepted a lucrative $60,000-a-year job with a TV network in NYC, and thus had no reason to kill himself. $60,000 today would be something like $500,000 in today-dollars.

In the 1990s, Eaglesham and Palmer were able to talk to Pitzer's friends and family. They also obtained access to the crime scene report (including photos) and autopsy report. They found that:

1.) Pitzer shot himself with a .38 revolver.
2.) The gun wasn't found in either hand; it was found on the floor near Pitzer's right knee.
3.) Pitzer was right-handed
4.) There was no lucrative TV network job. Pitzer had accepted a teaching position at a nearby community college.
5.) Pitzer had  been caught having an extramarital affair. He was also about to transition out of the military after 20 years, which can be a highly stressful transition.

So Dennis David was batting 0 for 4 here. Eaglesham and Palmer thought they found a corroborating witness for David's stories, a naval officer named Barbara Monroe. They contacted David for assistance in reaching her, but he suddenly stopped responding to their several requests. When they discovered she had died, and informed him of this, his relationship with them returned to normal.

That last act is what lawyers like to call "consciousness of guilt" though you probably know this already.

[Lance Payette]

In the Waukeegan Sun article that started this all, David says this about Pitzer's death:

1.) Pitzer was determined to have shot himself in his office at Bethesda with a ".45" (presumably a Colt model 1911)
2.) The gun was found in his right hand
3.) But Pitzer was left-handed
4.) Pitzer had accepted a lucrative $60,000-a-year job with a TV network in NYC, and thus had no reason to kill himself. $60,000 today would be something like $500,000 in today-dollars.

In the 1990s, Eaglesham and Palmer were able to talk to Pitzer's friends and family. They also obtained access to the crime scene report (including photos) and autopsy report. They found that:

1.) Pitzer shot himself with a .38 revolver.
2.) The gun wasn't found in either hand; it was found on the floor near Pitzer's right knee.
3.) Pitzer was right-handed
4.) There was no lucrative TV network job. Pitzer had accepted a teaching position at a nearby community college.
5.) Pitzer had  been caught having an extramarital affair. He was also about to transition out of the military after 20 years, which can be a highly stressful transition.

So Dennis David was batting 0 for 4 here. Eaglesham and Palmer thought they found a corroborating witness for David's stories, a naval officer named Barbara Monroe. They contacted David for assistance in reaching her, but he suddenly stopped responding to their several requests. When they discovered she had died, and informed him of this, his relationship with them returned to normal.

That last act is what lawyers like to call "consciousness of guilt" though you probably know this already.

Thanks for the Barbara Monroe clarification. Apart from that, I knew the rest. I still can't find anything at all about Monroe - nada. Do we know why Eaglesham/Palmer thought she could corroborate David's story, and what part they thought she could corroborate? Seemingly it couldn't have been the encounter in Pitzer's office? I would have to know much more before concluding that David's lack of help in locating her was consciousness of guilt.

As you probably know, there was all sorts of misinformation swirling around the death of Pitzer, including a wound to the left temple that supposedly "disproved" a suicide until Eaglesham nailed down that there wasn't. So God knows where David got the misinformation he relayed to the reporter in 1975. He may have just been repeating rumors he had heard, as opposed to inventing falsehoods (the left-handed claim was a plausible mistake on his part). I don't see the mistakes in the 1975 article as impacting his credibility too damagingly.

As to the network job offer, the woman with whom he was having the "affair" (see below) said that he described post-retirement job offers (plural), as did David. It was well-known, at least to his family, that he was retiring to teach educational television at Montgomery Junior College, the main campus of which was located very near his home until 1965 and for which he had done work. Mrs. Pitzer said he was "quite enthused" about the new job. In fact, on the Saturday of his suicide he went into his office to work on a speech he would be delivering to Montgomery students in a few days. So "pre-retirement stress" as an explanation for his suicide just doesn't add up to me.

The "affair" scarcely qualifies for that description. The woman had met him while he was on a business-related trip to Florida exactly a year before his suicide. They went on a few "dates" during a week but were not sexually intimate. A few months later, he flew her to Atlanta to join him for two days, and they were intimate. They corresponded casually, but he next saw her in Florida the month of his suicide, the last day being exactly one week prior. He wrote her a letter 90 minutes before his suicide in which he talked about seeing her in Florida in January. Possible red flags were that he said he was "in deep trouble at home" (his wife didn't seem to think so) and that the woman should not write again "until you hear from or of me." The woman could see no reason for his suicide. From the Navy's investigative report: "He seemed to like his work and always put his duty ahead of personal affairs. He spoke of employment opportunities awaiting him upon retirement. In discussing his family problems, he never seemed morbid or unduly upset; on the contrary he was a cheerful, mature individual." She also said that their relationship "was one of mutual understanding and did not involve matrimonial, or serious romantic implications. Each mutually respected the other, and sought to protect the other’s reputation and prevent friends and families from discovering the association."

Many suicides are, of course, puzzling and even inexplicable. I find Pitzer's really puzzling and David's story at least credible enough to have some suspicion there may have been a connection. It's one of the very few potential factoids I've explored that left me thinking there might actually be something to it.