William Bruce Pitzer: Not exactly a busted factoid

[Lance Payette]

(YAWN)

One of your more insightful contributions, actually. Other than the fact that you appear to have no life other than this forum and to be completely obsessed with adding your $0.0000000002 to every post, I would not have expected you to read far enough to (YAWN) to my last post. I and William Bruce Pitzer, RIP, are deeply flattered.

Mastubatory one-liners aren't my thing. I have a hard time understanding why they are anyone's thing, but they clearly are since they are so prevalent on every internet forum of every variety.

If I were satisfied the LN narrative had been established beyond any doubt, I'm not sure why I would be on a JFKA forum at all or feel compelled to dismiss everyone who raises questions with some dogmatic label like "kook." If I were satisfied the LN narrative had been established beyond any doubt, I think I'd move on to other territory - take up golf, learn to knit, visit all the National Parks, whatever. I can only conclude that for you and your ilk, the LN narrative is not "like" a religion - it is a religion. For those who don't share your dogmatism, your non-substantive responses strike most people as a bad case of protesting too much. It's quite weird.

Good old William Bruce Pitzer is a perfect example of how I manage to maintain any interest at all in the JFKA. I reread one of the leading CT tomes just for the hell of it because I saw it mentioned favorably by a CTer I respect. Dennis David, and the high regard in which he was held as a humble, seemingly truthful human being, piqued my interest. I decided to explore, for my own amusement, the Pitzer angle. I got lucky right off the bat: Kent Heiner's free e-book is a paradigmatic example of what research should look like - take one tale, research the hell out of it, let the chips fall where they may, and change your mind if the evidence demands it. With it as a starter, I decided to exercise my brain and legal skills for no more reason than the exercise. Voila, it turned out to be way more interesting than your seemingly endless pissing matches with MTG.

I even hit upon a slightly different wrinkle: WHAT IF the conclusion of suicide were correct, but that isn't the end of the matter? WHAT IF David's claimed encounter in Pitzer's office were more or less true? WHAT IF, as wacky as I believe the Lifton/Horne stuff to be, there actually were shenanigans at the autopsy - not by conspirators in the assassination itself, but by folks with a mandate to pin the assassination on Oswald for what they believed to be patriotic reasons?

Do I insist this scenario is likely? No, I insist it isn't ridiculous. I insist it's far less ridiculous than the Lifton/Horne stuff. I insist it's consistent with my nagging doubts that the orthodox LN narrative isn't the full story and that the many, many, many direct participants in the events surrounding the JFKA who share my nagging doubts aren't all "kooks." Having seen virtually every species of kook exposed in the many areas of weirdness in which I've been involved, I have a difficult time dismissing Dennis David as a kook.

"Yawn" away - I don't care. "Kook" away - I don't care. You're just the JFKA counterpart to a religious fundie who responds to every substantive challenge with "You're going to hell anyway." At least I can understand why a religious fundie's beliefs are so vitally important to him or her. A LN fundie, however? That's a puzzle.

[John Corbett]

"Yawn" away - I don't care. "Kook" away - I don't care. You're just the JFKA counterpart to a religious fundie who responds to every substantive challenge with "You're going to hell anyway." At least I can understand why a religious fundie's beliefs are so vitally important to him or her. A LN fundie, however? That's a puzzle.

I guess we've seen so many other CTs go down so many other dead-end roads for any of us to get excited about one more. None of these has ever shed light on the question of whether Oswald had any accomplices when he killed JFK.

If any of you ever do actually bag a snipe, let us know.

[Lance Payette]

Lance, in my experience, you won't encourage the "53 words, max" reader to read and consider the points presented in longer forum posts
if short attention span readers or those prejudiced against you generally don't take kindly to your criticism.

As a former Ed Forum JFK Debate moderator and the 2015 - 2016 comments editor of jfkfacts.org, my main observation is that unsolvable topics like
Pitzer's death are much more popular than issues that are much more likely to be solved by putting in adequate research time and trial and error search strings.

If you're not tribal you tend to be dismissed by both sides. Verifiable facts are of little to no consequence if they conflict with preconceived notions influenced
by much earlier personalities attempting to achieve sufficient notoriety to make a buck off of JFKA. Two who come to mind were Penn Jones and Mark Lane.
Harold Weisberg attempted to straddle the middle, commercially successful book author and long laboring and suffering researcher complaining about his postage
expenses.

My sense that learning anything new is resented as least as often as it is appreciated is strengthened by anecdotal experience. A prime example is my success at finding
things. I'm in the 18th year of my search for JFKA answers and contradictions to "what everybody knows is what actually happened." I receive few enough requests to put my
research abilities to work to accept that most just do not want to know. This supports why "Oswald in the Doorway," an escape from reality much more than it is an
area of serious research, can be such a popular and enduring attention getter, right up there with "Oswald is Innocent!!!!"

A result is one with a common theme of US Crony Capitalism. Discourage asking who potentially had the most to lose if JFK had lived and who did benefit
the most politically or financially because he did not survive his first Presidential term. The answer to the first question was the largest holder of General Dynamics
stock in 1963, Henry Crown, and the two politicians, father and son, who post assassination, 1964 - 2009, "served" a combined 20 years as either VPOTUS or POTUS, despite the brothers Kennedy in possession of so much influence of appearance, position, political, and financial power earlier in November, 1963.

How much has been spent by so few to demonize progressive taxation, the IRS, actual Social Democratic political goals and resulting quality of life comparison, compared to print and electronic media coverage of "Buy, Borrow, Die" income tax avoidance strategy or the result of state legislated abortions being the poorest, least resourced women being almost exclusively the ones trapped in those jurisdictions to experience compulsory full term pregnancy and delivery or back alley abortion methods?

Try this, but read it after the first and second linked topics.
https://web.archive.org/web/20090517015211/http://www.manuscriptservice.com/Pitzer/opinion.html

Thanks, Tom. There is much wisdom in what you say. My "53 word" quip was prompted by a post by one of the Local Gods (in his own mind anyway), which was quickly removed by Duncan, characterizing me as a "pathetic dipshit" who "thinks he's the smartest guy in the room" and writes unreadable "books" that no one cares about.  And that was in response to a post of mine that had nothing to do with the JFKA! (If anyone wants to see what a "book" looks like, try reading Keven Hofeling's 20,000-word AI-generated posts at the Ed Forum. Yes, there is a point at which "this really doesn't belong on an internet forum.")

The problem with internet forums is that they are a hopeless mix of ages, educational levels, psychological quirks, emotional maturity levels, personal hot buttons, etc., etc. I always say it's like standing in the middle of a crowded Walmart and shouting "So, what does everyone think about Bayes theorem anyway?" - and expecting a productive discussion.

In addition, there is also a certain type who is likely to become a forum regular. I used to limit myself to a maximum of 300 posts on any forum precisely to avoid becoming one of "them." I've never accumulated anywhere near as many posts on any forum as I have here. That type - across all forums, even ones dealing with completely mundane, non-controversial subjects - tends to be ultra-assertive and always looking for a fight. He views the forum as his turf, and woe to you if you fail to acquiesce to his dominance. I have a friend who participates on several completely non-controversial (or so you would think) forums like those devoted to photography, and he says they are exactly the same way. Ditto with my experience on golf forums.

Most people just aren't into deep research or thought. Forums like this really are just 95% mental masturbation, little echo chambers to strut your stuff in 20-word (or less) bites and generate 20-word (or less) responses from those who cheer you on or call you a kook. It's just the reality. My participation is truly for an audience of one - me. It's just self-amusement and putting in writing what I think I've learned simply because I enjoy doing it. If someone actually gains something from it, so much the better - but I have no expectations and don't really care.
Now back to Pitzer: Thanks to one of Mark Ulrik's posts at the Ed Forum, I had seen and taken into consideration Allan Eaglesham's work that is still on the Wayback Machine. To his great credit, Eaglesham had the intellectual honesty to disavow "Dangerous Dan" Marvin after first buying into his schtick and to change his verdict on Pitzer from murder to suicide when the evidence demanded it. However, he seemed to have lost interest at that point. Kent Heiner's 2019 update of his excellent little e-book was the latest thinking I could find.

The notion that Pitzer was experiencing some sort of personal crisis at the time of his suicide just doesn't seem likely to me. He was about to retire at age 50 after a 30-year Navy career and take a low-key teaching position with a local junior college with which he'd been previously affiliated. His lady friend in Florida accepted the relationship for what it was and placed no demands on him. He had a 29-year marriage, including one son who was still a teenager, and no huge domestic problems. He left no note for anyone, and the letter to his lady friend written 90 minutes before his death indicated he would see her in a few months. His wife said he was "quite enthused" about his teaching position, and he in fact went into the office that Saturday ostensibly to work on a speech he would be giving at the junior college in a few days.

It's very difficult for me to find the vaguest inkling of a reason for a suicide in the above, which is what causes me to wonder "Could there have been something else? Could it have been related to what Dennis David described?"

By all accounts, including his lady friend and Eaglesham's work that you linked, Pitzer was a perfectionist and a dedicated "company (Navy) man" who took great pride in his work and career. He was about to retire with an unblemished reputation. Could something that threatened that reputation have sent him off the deep end? As I noted, Lifton first went to Liebeler with his body-alteration theory just days before Pitzer's suicide. The Kennedy family announced that the autopsy materials would be released to the National Archives at exactly the same time. Did Pitzer in fact know more about the autopsy than even David suggested and fear that it was all going to come crashing down after he was out of the Navy and no longer even in a position to contribute to damage control? Perhaps not - perhaps such speculation is 110% off-base. But such speculation doesn't seem preposterous to me in the context of a suicide that has no other plausible explanation.

This little exercise has also been useful to me in steering my thinking toward the possibility that perhaps there actually were autopsy-related shenanigans but that these were not related to the assassination per se but were simply in furtherance of what was seen as a patriotic, WW3-avoiding exercise in maintaining the lone nut explanation. This to me is not necessarily "likely" (although there is certainly evidence pointing in this direction) but is 1000% more likely than the Lifton/Horne-type scenarios where a huge, preplanned operation to alter the body was part and parcel of an almost comically complex conspiracy.

Voila, I've written another book! 

[Tom Scully]

I guess we've seen so many other CTs go down so many other dead-end roads for any of us to get excited about one more. None of these has ever shed light on the question of whether Oswald had any accomplices when he killed JFK.

If any of you ever do actually bag a snipe, let us know.

Except for the evidence that the same few people were
 behind monitoring DeMohrenschildt before shots were fired in
Dallas, smearing JFK’s legacy after he died, shaking down
Billy Joe Lord. Compare all of that to a sole coincidence, the son
of one of the folks I am describing scheduled to dine
with the brother of the man who earlier on that same day
intended to fire shots resulting in that son experiencing the
elevation of his VPOTUS father to POTUS.

One of the group I am referring to just happened to be a
CIA officer who was the college housemate of Priscilla’s CIA
minder, and a lifelong, hometown friend of a man
who also met with DeMohrenschildt separately on the same April day
in 1963 and who chose as his best man ....
(a former CIA officer who also was the best man in Bush sister Nancy's 1946 wedding)



...a hometown fellow who was prep school housemate of both Demohrenschildt’s
nephew and of Bush.
https://www.jfkassassinationforum.com/index.php?topic=3098.0

This latter fellow positioned E Howard Hunt
to attempt to use altered diplomatic cables to make it
appear JFK had ordered the assassination of South Vietnam’s
leader.

The discovery of the image below prompted my question to Joan Mellen,:

A class of 20 boys who had been together for the prior 8 years was reduced to half as these
ten departed Rochester, NY to attend (Peter Dryer) Choate Academy or (Hawley Ward) St. Paul's...


So, Hawley Ward was an usher in book editor MS Wyeth's wedding, the two having
been classmates at St. Paul's after transferring out of the school where Ward had
been Tom Devine's and Peter Dryer'a class of 20 classmates for eight years.







https://d6rq5l99ggc22d.archive.is/esTuB/1d3f3f7ff94f5a7c77899dfc489a073d9b017bcc.jpg





Priscilla’s HSCA testimony implicated Dulles family cousins
and her book editor, who was associated both with DeMohrenschildt and the
folks I described above, wth the 15 year sequestering of Marina Oswald!
Silenced, 1964 - 1978:
Knowlton was also Priscilla's book agent.:

https://ia800504.us.archive.org/19/items/nsia-OswaldMarina/nsia-OswaldMarina/Oswald%20Marina%20068.pdf
 Liz Smith New light from Oswald widow
Perry Knowlton, won't allow Marina to discuss the book in any way without their permission for at least a year after its publi- cation. But this column can tell you the book will shed new light on Lee Harvey Oswald. It will reveal his intense, lifelong hatred of women and show us he suffered from dislexia, an...

Priscilla's book editor, MS Wyeth, happened to be the son of the architect who designed DeMohrenschildt's father in law's, Philip Sharples' home on
dead end, Woodbridge  in Palm Beach in 1951. The Wyeths lived two lots away, at 152 Woodbridge, from the Sharples. The elder Wyeth also designed, in 1925,
the lifelong residence of Joseph Dryer at 80 Middle Rd. and resided at 62 Middle Rd. until he moved to dead end, Woodbridge. Wyeth Sr, also designed Mar-A-Lago.

[John Corbett]

Except for the evidence that the same few people were
 behind monitoring DeMohrenschildt before shots were fired in
Dallas, smearing JFK’s legacy after he died, shaking down
Billy Joe Lord. Compare all of that to a sole coincidence, the son
of one of the folks I am describing scheduled to dine
with the brother of the man who earlier on that same day
intended to fire shots resulting in that son experiencing the
elevation of his VPOTUS father to POTUS.

One of the group I am referring to just happened to be a
CIA officer who was the college housemate of Priscilla’s CIA
minder, and a lifelong, hometown friend of a man
who also met with DeMohrenschildt separately on the same April day
in 1963 and who chose as his best man ....
(a former CIA officer who also was the best man in Bush sister Nancy's 1946 wedding)



...a hometown fellow who was prep school housemate of both Demohrenschildt’s
nephew and of Bush.
https://www.jfkassassinationforum.com/index.php?topic=3098.0

This latter fellow positioned E Howard Hunt
to attempt to use altered diplomatic cables to make it
appear JFK had ordered the assassination of South Vietnam’s
leader.

The discovery of the image below prompted my question to Joan Mellen,:

A class of 20 boys who had been together for the prior 8 years was reduced to half as these
ten departed Rochester, NY to attend (Peter Dryer) Choate Academy or (Hawley Ward) St. Paul's...


So, Hawley Ward was an usher in book editor MS Wyeth's wedding, the two having
been classmates at St. Paul's after transferring out of the school where Ward had
been Tom Devine's and Peter Dryer'a class of 20 classmates for eight years.







https://d6rq5l99ggc22d.archive.is/esTuB/1d3f3f7ff94f5a7c77899dfc489a073d9b017bcc.jpg





Priscilla’s HSCA testimony implicated Dulles family cousins
and her book editor, who was associated both with DeMohrenschildt and the
folks I described above, wth the 15 year sequestering of Marina Oswald!
Silenced, 1964 - 1978:
Knowlton was also Priscilla's book agent.:

Priscilla's book editor, MS Wyeth, happened to be the son of the architect who designed DeMohrenschildt's father in law's, Philip Sharples' home on
dead end, Woodbridge  in Palm Beach in 1951. The Wyeths lived two lots away, at 152 Woodbridge, from the Sharples. The elder Wyeth also designed, in 1925,
the lifelong residence of Joseph Dryer at 80 Middle Rd. and resided at 62 Middle Rd. until he moved to dead end, Woodbridge. Wyeth Sr, also designed Mar-A-Lago.

Keep digging that rabbit hole deeper. Absolutely nothing in there than indicates anyone was an accomplice to the assassin. Anyone who rejects that Oswald was the assassin has no hope of ever figuring out the truth of the assassination, and the only way to make the case for conspiracy is to provide evidence that somebody, anybody, conspired with Oswald to kill JFK. We're coming up on the 63rd anniversary of the assassination and no one has been able to make that connection. Is there any reason to believe anyone ever will.

CTs keep treating the JFKA as if it is giant game of Clue and they think if they keep reshuffling the cards, they can produce a different outcome. The only correct answer is that Oswald, did it from the TSBD, with a Carcano rifle.

[Tom Scully]

Keep digging that rabbit hole deeper. Absolutely nothing in there than indicates anyone was an accomplice to the assassin. Anyone who rejects that Oswald was the assassin has no hope of ever figuring out the truth of the assassination, and the only way to make the case for conspiracy is to provide evidence that somebody, anybody, conspired with Oswald to kill JFK. We're coming up on the 63rd anniversary of the assassination and no one has been able to make that connection. Is there any reason to believe anyone ever will.

CTs keep treating the JFKA as if it is giant game of Clue and they think if they keep reshuffling the cards, they can produce a different outcome. The only correct answer is that Oswald, did it from the TSBD, with a Carcano rifle.

https://time.com/archive/6841111/investigations-the-inquest-begins-getting-closer-to-nixon/

//This automatic response to any White House request was also demonstrated by the State Department. In Au gust 1971 it cooperated with Hunt after receiving a memo from the White House and two calls from David Young, an Ehrlichman assistant on detached service from Henry Kissinger’s Nation al Security Council staff. Young telephoned William B. Macomber Jr., then a Deputy Under Secretary of State. Macomber granted Hunt full access to the most secret “back -channel” communications (meaning only the addressee and sender should see them) between the State Department and its embassy in Saigon for a period in 1963. Hunt copied 240 of these classified cables.

According to sworn testimony by Hunt, he then examined the cables to determine whether there was any indication, as he hoped, that President John Kennedy had ordered the assassination of South Viet Nam’s President Ngo Dinh Diem. Hunt said that this study was supervised by Charles Colson, then special counsel to Nixon. Hunt claimed that he showed Colson some cables that could conceivably have been interpreted as implied orders from the Kennedy Administration to “pull the trigger against Diem’s head.” According to Hunt, Colson declared: “Well, this isn’t good enough. Do you think that you could improve on them?” Hunt said he would need technical help to fabricate something more conclusive, but Colson replied: “This is too hot. See what you can do on your own.”

To draft a cable that sounded authentic, Hunt said that he then used a White House Xerox machine, a razor blade and a typewriter. Because it lacked the proper type face, however, he knew it would not stand careful scrutiny. He and Colson, Hunt testified, thereupon tried to convince a LIFE correspondent, William Lambert, that the cable was genuine. Lambert was impressed at first but later became doubtful and never wrote about it....

My research results you are reacting to include a small number of people. The odds the associations, timing, and the coordinated activities of the people named were
coincidental are untolled, dismissing the majority of them to pure chance is unreasonable.

The "hands on" activities of the people I am naming took place between 1959 and 1978. The initial relationships began as far back as when the were classmates
as early as 1931.

1931 - Tom Devine, Peter Dryer, Hawley Ward, begin school together at private Allendale-Columbia School in Rochester, NY. Devine's father, Adrian is headmaster.
Tom Devine's grandmother was a first cousin of John D Rockefeller III's father-in law.

..What approach would you take if you were to do and share JFK Assassination research that would be more productive than my approach? Should the details I and others who employ the research techniques I employ, not be found and shared? Are they mostly unimportant? How do you know?

As an example, my latest is posted in the Cord Meyer thread. I was searching for relationships of Joseph F. Dryer and family and Thomas J. Devine and family, all of Rochester, NY. Instead a reference to Louise Hooker and Devine's maternal grandfather, Charles W. Dodge caught my eye.

Then, pursuing the obvious, I researched whether Charles W. Dodge has married a close relative of Edward Gordon Hooker; whether Demohrenschildt's step nephew and oil exploration partner was related to Devine's grandmother, and thus, to Devine.

George L. Ohrstrom, Jr., and Family, Father was Prescott Bush ...

https://educationforum.ipbhost.com/topic/18989-george-l-ohrstrom-jr-and-family-father-was-prescott-bush-friend/

Apr 8, 2012 – Miss Alexandra Mills Is Bride of TJ Devine ... Mrs. Thomas J. Devine and of the late Prof. and Mrs. Charles W. Dodge,

Instead, I found that Devine's maternal grandmother, Louise Hooker Dodge, was the first cousin of Elon Huntington Hooker, father-in-law of John D. Rockefeller, III, who married Hooker's daughter, Blanchette Ferry Hooker, in 1932.

David Milton's son-in-law, George O'Neill, was employed at Train, Cabot. Thomas J. Devine was employed at Train, Cabot.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abby_Rockefeller_Mauz%C3%A9
Abby Rockefeller Mauzé - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

She had two daughters with her first husband, David Milton: Abby Rockefeller Milton, married George Dorr O'Neill; Marilyn Rockefeller Milton, married William .....

Robert G. Stone, Jr. married Godfrey Stillman Rockefeller's daughter, Marion. Thomas J. Devine was a director at Stone's Stonetex oil exploration company. Robert G. Stone, Jr. was the Harvard Fund officer linked to the manipulative bailout of Harken Energy. Harken's Alan Quasha had bought George W Bush's worthless oil exploration company, resulting in Bush having the funds to buy one percent of the Texas Ranger's baseball team, positioning Bush as a viable contender for Texas governor.

Marion Rockefeller's brother, Godfrey Anderson, became a Bell, Dallas helicopter test pilot in the late 1950's at the time David Mitlon headed the Equity Corp., majority owner of Bell Aircraft and appointed George O'Neill to the Bell board of directors and Walter Dornberger as Bell V.P.

If you're communicating to me that you think the details in the above example are trivial or unimportant, please post why, and how you know this.

I see them as building blocks. 

Who was most exposed financially after the failure of the Bay of Pigsinvasion?

https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Godfrey_Stillman_Rockefeller
Godfrey Stillman Rockefeller - SourceWatch
Freeport McMoRan Background "riginally Freeport Texas, the company had became Freeport Sulphur and a bastillion of the elite including the Whitney family, Godfrey Stillman Rockefeller, Chauncey Stillman, Jean Mauze (husband of Abby Rockefeller), Augustus Long (Texaco), and Robert Lovett (friend

1944 -

https://sigmachi.mit.edu/docs/beaver_sigs/1946_bsig_vol1946_no1.pdf
The Beaver Si
Alpha Theta of Sigma Chi
Summer term, 1944
....Of the officers, Ritchie
was Consul, Freiberger was
Pledge Trainer. and Howland
was Magister. Hunter M. Bennett, Jr., "Gary" Coit, Jr., and
Bruce Mayer were then pledges. Accordingly, the chapter conducted a vigorous and successful
July Rush Week. John Taylor
was Rushing Chairman and...
among his most active assistants
were "Tod" Howland, Freiberger, Brannan, Bennett and Coit.
A large class was pledged, headed by Norman Meullen andfor
followed by Carl Bergmann, Thomas Devine, Bradford Endicott, Robert Jenkins, Perry Nies.
Howard Hendershott,

Mary Ferrell Foundation

https://www.maryferrell.org/php/cryptdb.php?id=GUIDE-302
Cryptonym: GUIDE-302
104-10135-10088: PARTIAL CONTACT REPORT ON MEETING WITH PRISCILLA JOHNSON, 30-31 JAN 2/4/64 report 17457 by Gary Coit, SR/CA: Coit interviewed Priscilla Johnson about a Soviet student named Aseev at Harvard who had decided to defect to the US.

Students Don Ear Muffs to Shut Out Band Music
Daily Boston Globe – Aug 14, 1947
… rhumba music yesterday asked the Boston Licensing Board to shut down
the Hotel … one of 16 Tech students livings in the adjoining Sigma Chi
fraternity house … Other student were Thomas Devine of Rochester who
told of taking refuge in ..

https://educationforum.ipbhost.com/topic/27246-priscilla-johnson-mcmillan-and-the-cia/
Priscilla Johnson McMillan and the CIA - The Education Forum
However, Coit told her he would "probably be back to see her from time to time to see what she knows about specific persons whose names might come up, and she at least nodded assent to this." Priscilla Johnson's Wikipedia article points out she married George McMillan in 1965. He is described as a

Priscilla's cousin, David, thanked by the author, in her book Marina and Lee for shielding Marina from the press upon the release of the WC Report.

[Michael T. Griffith]

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 the "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.

So Pitzer supposedly killed himself because he was about to be caught up in a scandal regarding the JFK autopsy materials?! Seriously?! This is not the kind of backward logic one would expect from a self-professed "academic."

I recommend the lengthy chapter on Pitzer's death in Richard Belzer and David Wayne's best-selling book Hit List: An In-Depth Investigation into the Mysterious Deaths of Witnesses to the JFK Assassination, published in 2013 (chapter 26). For an online source, I recommend the article on Pitzer's death on the Spartacus Educational website: https://spartacus-educational.com/JFKpitzerW.htm.

A few facts that Belzer and Wayne document:

-- Pitzer was just about to retire and had a good job lined up. He had no conceivable motive to kill himself.

-- Pitzer's right hand tested negative for GSR/nitrates, indicating he had not fired a revolver.

-- The FBI's own paraffin test in this case indicated the revolver was held some 3 feet away from Pitzer's head when it was fired.

-- The FBI was unable to find any evidence that Pitzer had acquired ammo for the revolver that was signed out from the security office in his name.

-- A heel print found near Pitzer's body was not from the shoes Pitzer was wearing.

-- Pitzer wrote himself a note to remind himself to return the revolver he had signed out.

-- Pitzer's family said he had been repeatedly threatened to keep quiet about his knowledge of the JFK autopsy.

And, pray tell, other than the fact that his story, if true, suggests Pitzer was murdered, what is your basis for saying that Lt. Col. Dan Marvin, a decorated war hero, was "one of the worst of the hoaxers/crackpots"? Where do you get that? As an Army vet and a Vietnam War scholar, I am well acquainted with Lt. Col. Marvin's outstanding service in Vietnam.

I agree with Belzer and Wayne:

Special Forces Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Marvin, a decorated war hero, has testified and written extensively about how he was requested by the CIA to assassinate Lieutenant Commander Pitzer. Lieutenant Colonel Marvin had nothing to gain (and a lot to lose) by clarifying the historical record. A man of high character and loyalty, no one has been able to refute his account. (p. 288)

Lt. Col. Marvin authored the highly acclaimed book Expendable Elite: One Soldier's Journey into Covert Warfare. Marvin fought in the Korean War and then took part in Special Forces operations in Vietnam during the Vietnam War. Marvin commanded Green Beret Team A-424 in South Vietnam and headed 12-man Special Forces team that attacked Viet Cong sanctuaries in Cambodia. In Vietnam, he frequently worked with the CIA. He received three decorations for heroism.

Marvin was also honored by the Hoa Hao in Vietnam. He was awarded with the Hoa Hao purple silk scarf by the Hoa Hao Central Committee when they named Marvin an Honorary Hoa Hao, the only American ever to receive that honor.

As a 21-year Army vet myself, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth when some WC apologist smears a decorated Army Special Forces veteran just because that veteran held a different view of the JFK case and of Pitzer's death. (Lt. Col. Marvin died in 2012.)