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Mary Woodward has corrected her 11/23/63 Dallas Morning News article from the grave. (She died in 2017.)

Here it is:


The four of us, myself, Maggie Brown, Ann Donaldson, and Aurelia Alonzo, had been waiting about half an hour on the north side of Elm Street when the first motorcycle escorts came by, followed shortly by the President’s car.

The President was waving to spectators on his right.

Very soon there was a horrible, ear-shattering noise that appeared to have come from behind us and a little to the right. My first reaction, and also my friends’, was that as a joke, someone had backfired their car.

I don’t believe anyone was hit by the first bullet.

The President and Mrs. Kennedy looked around [at Z-143], as if they, too, didn’t believe the noise was really coming from a gun.

As the limousine approached us, the President was looking straight ahead, and we were afraid we would not get to see his face. But we started clapping and cheering and both he and Mrs. Kennedy turned and smiled and waved directly at us.

Then after a moment’s pause, there was another shot and I saw the President start slumping in the car.

Instead of speeding up, the President’s car came almost to a halt.

This was followed by another shot. Mrs. Kennedy stood up in the car, turned half-way around, then fell on top of her husband’s body. Not until this minute did it sink in what actually was happening. We had witnessed the assassination of the President.

A Secret Service man got out of the follow-up car and started rushing forward, obstructing our view of the President’s car.

Then I started looking around at the stunned crowd. About ten feet from where we were standing, a man and woman had thrown their small child to the ground and covered his body with theirs. Apparently, the bullets had whizzed directly over their heads. There were three shots altogether.

It still seems like a horrible nightmare.

It will be a real-life nightmare to haunt us all for a long time to come.

As it turned out, we were almost certainly the last faces the President noticed in the crowd.


PS What I wrote in my 11/23/63 article was confused and mixed up (what I got right was that there were three shots, that the first shot was early, that  that the first shot missed everything, and that JFK waved to me and my colleagues right before the shot that caused him to "slump"), but Tom Graves at Duncan MacRae's wonderful JFK Assassination Forum website helped me make sense out of what I hazily remembered, and to him I am eternally indebted. (LOL)

. . . . . .


Here's the original:

Four of us from Women’s News, Maggie Brown, Aurelia Alonzo, my roommate Ann Donaldson, and myself had decided to spend our lunch hour by going to see the President.

We took our lunch along—some crackers and apples—and started walking down Houston Street. We decided to cross Elm and wait there on the grassy slope just east of the Triple Underpass, since there weren’t very many people there and we could get a better view.

We had been waiting about half an hour when the first motorcycle escorts came by, followed shortly by the President’s car. The President was looking straight ahead and we were afraid we would not get to see his face. But we started clapping and cheering and both he and Mrs. Kennedy turned, and smiled and waved, directly at us, it seemed. Jackie was wearing a beautiful pink suit with beret to match. Two of us, who had seen the President last during the final weeks of the 1960 campaign, remarked almost simultaneously how relaxed and robust he looked.

As it turned out, we were almost certainly the last faces he noticed in the crowd.

After acknowledging our cheers, he faced forward again and suddenly there was a horrible, ear-shattering noise coming from behind us and a little to the right. My first reaction, and also my friends’, was that as a joke, someone had backfired their car. Apparently the driver and occupants of the President’s car had the same impression, because instead of speeding up, the car came almost to a halt.

Things are a little hazy from this point, but I don’t believe anyone was hit with the first bullet. The President and Mrs. Kennedy turned and looked around, as if they, too, didn’t believe the noise was really coming from a gun.

Then after a moment’s pause there was another shot and I saw the President start slumping in the car.

This was followed rapidly by another shot. Mrs. Kennedy stood up in the car, turned half-way around, then fell on top of her husband’s body. Not until this minute did it sink in what actually was happening. We had witnessed the assassination of the President.

The cars behind stopped and several men—Secret Service men, I suppose—got out and started rushing forward, obstructing our view of the President’s car.

Then I started looking around at the stunned crowd. About 10 feet from where we were standing, a man and woman had thrown their small child to the ground and covered his body with theirs. Apparently, the bullets had whizzed directly over their heads.

Next to us were two Negro women. One collapsed in the other’s arms, weeping and uttering what everyone was thinking: “They’ve shot him.”

It still seems like a horrible nightmare.

It will be a real-life nightmare to haunt us all for a long time to come.

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Edited and bumped.
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Not that anyone should care, but that's Barbara Munroe on the left, receiving her promotion from the Nurses Corps to the Medical Service Corps in 1957. She was HIGHLY successful, holding some important positions that had never previously been held by a woman, but I couldn't determine when she died.

Below that is a hypnotic session with Dennis David. I couldn't make heads or tails out of much of it, but the hypnotist reportedly said that on a scale of 1 to 10 for credibility, David was an 11. He starts talking about the Pitzer encounter at about 45:45.

With that, the rabbit hole is officially closed.



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If you don't want to explain how the affidavit is fake, that's fine.

In april, I already told you that they were fakes. You claimed that you already had made an attempt to verify.


I have no need to lie.  Also, I have pics.  Not that you'll ever see them.

As for your "ego" comment, you're being foolish.  I didn't speak of having dinner with Buell Frazier until it was necessary.  I posted the two affidavits where Frazier acknowledges that the rifle was in the car.  You called them fakes.  That prompted me to inform you that I've already made an attempt to verify.

Like you, I simply wanted to verify for myself (in this case, the authenticity of the two affidavits).  If I had plans to speak of what was discussed during this pizza dinner with Buell, then I would have asked him (and Dave Perry) right then and there if I could discuss (on various internet forums and Facebook groups) what we talked about.

How many times are you going to comment on something which you know nothing about?

It has been three months since that and you still haven't told us what the result of your "verification" is.

Instead, you play dumb and simply go back to pretending the affidavits are authentic, so you can once again ask for them to be proven fakes.

I have no need for hypocrisy here.  I have indeed shown a statement (signed, in fact) by Frazier where he acknowledges that the rifle was in the bag, i.e. the bag was large enough for the rifle, i.e. the bag couldn't have been carried the way Frazier described.

Hilarious.

I'm not going to get into a "prove it's fake" conversation. If you want people to believe that Frazier actually would admit in a real affidavit that he lied to the police and the WC, have at it!
The next time you see him (if you ever saw him to begin with) tell him about your "find" at Ripley's believe it or not and see how he responds.

4
If nothing else, I am thorough. In a frenzy of near-terminal boredom, I peeked out of the rabbit hole and skimmed all 387 posts at the Ed Forum in which Dennis David was mentioned. Understandably, the vast majority dealt with the shipping casket issue, which does not interest me at all. However, I did discover some negativity toward David – especially on the part of Pat Speer, who for some reason seems almost incensed by David’s Pitzer claims and who fudges the truth a bit himself.

For the sake of completeness, let’s include this stuff …

Pat says that Lifton had “warned him” about David “years ago,” suggesting that David had never said anything to him about Pitzer and that David was a bit of a “fantasist.” Pat himself notes that it’s possible this was sour grapes on Lifton’s part because he had failed to follow up on the Pitzer angle, which would have been perfect for Best Evidence. The Heiner e-book sides with David on this issue. In the 1975 newspaper article, the subject of which was Pitzer, David did refer to having seen “slides” that showed a frontal wound – so it seems almost unbelievable that Lifton would not have pressed David for what the hell that was all about. It also seems unlikely that Lifton, who relied so extensively on David as a major player in the body-alteration scenario, would have “warned” Speer that David was a “fantasist.”

In his 2017 memorial tribute to David, Lifton declined to dive into the Pitzer matter. He said, “Yes, of course we talked about it, and that was the one thing we had to ‘agree to disagree’ on.” He indicated that the difference related to whether Pitzer had been murdered (David) or committed suicide (Lifton). He felt that David had been close to Pitzer and that believing in murder invested the death with greater meaning; he did not address David’s claim of the encounter in Pitzer’s office.

To me, David’s claim in the 1975 interview of having seen slides showing a frontal wound strongly suggests to me that the Pitzer encounter was not a long-after-the-fact invention. Speer repeatedly refers to David as having surfaced “decades later.” 1975 was not decades after 1963, and for all we know David might not have surfaced at all if the erroneous newspaper article had not raised his hackles. He was no Judyth Vary Baker.

Here is a post by Pat describing why David’s story is “riddled with problems”:

1) Pitzer did not work with film and photos, but closed-circuit TV.

OK, but he was the officer in charge of the Audio/Visual Department.

2) There is no evidence the closed-circuit TV system was in use on 11-22-63.

OK, but David never said it was. (There has been speculation, however, as to whether it might have been in operation during the autopsy.)

3) There is no evidence he had anything to do with JFK's autopsy.

OK, but David never said he did. David himself was not at the autopsy and specifically said he didn’t believe Pitzer was either. He did not know the origin of the film and photos he saw in Pitzer’s office.

4) David had credibility issues of his own. To sell the murder angle, he'd told people Pitzer was left-handed, but his family insisted he was right-handed. And when Eaglesham saw the autopsy photos, he confirmed that the wound was on the right side.

OK, but David had played cards with Pitzer on many occasions and saw him deal with his left hand. It was a natural assumption on David’s part. The issue was not resolved until 1995, when “Dangerous Dan” Marvin spoke with Mrs. Pitzer by telephone. The rumor of a wound to the left temple was not started by David and was not put to rest until Eaglesham examined the photos many years later.

Moreover, Pat like everyone else seems to assume that David’s claims go poof if Pitzer committed suicide. The question I have raised is: Do they? Sure, it would be way more exciting if a plausible claim of murder could be made, but I don’t believe a verdict of suicide necessarily puts the issue to bed.

The final “problem” highlighted by Pat is that David changed the location of the frontal wound over the years:

5) And that's not the only reason to question David's credibility. He started out claiming the small entrance on JFK's head was here:

The photos below illustrate what Pat was talking about. He said David “was recently discredited by our own Sandy Larsen, when Sandy demonstrated that David had initially claimed the wound shown him was on the temple, but then changed it to being high on the forehead, after becoming a darling of the research community.” You can decide for yourself how significant this change was. It looks pretty close to me. Pat referred to David as having become a “darling” of Mantik and Aguilar, and it’s quite possible that David did fudge a bit as he become more enmeshed in the CT community – but it seems to me that his claims remained quite consistent and low-key. Moreover, Sandy took Pat to task for "dishonestly" mischaracterizing what he had actually found.

The first image is from "The Men Who Killed Kennedy."





Lastly, concerning the issue of possible lucrative post-retirement employment offers to Pitzer, Allan Eaglesham stated in 2004, “Mr. David also says Pitzer had offers for employment from local TV stations. I believe there were two offers, made over the telephone, from a national network.” By the time of Eaglesham’s involvement, I believe that Pitzer’s plan to teach at a junior college was known, so apparently David was talking about other offers and was sticking with the story he had told the newspaper in 1975.

5
Munroe was an officer in the same educational outfit at Bethesda as David and Pitzer. According to David, he, she, and Pitzer made up an impromptu office lunchtime bridge club (of.....three). According to the story, David ran into Munroe after the suicide when he was stationed at the Navy's Great Lakes station. He said that she told him that she also believed that Pitzer was murdered, presumably for the same reasons. As such, she would be valuable corroboration.

OK, my mistake. I was searching for "Monroe." I did at least verify her existence. She was an MSC, which I believe is the rank to which David was aspiring. Apparently, however, there is no question that lots of people including the family suspected Pitzer had been murdered, which is why the Navy and FBI undertook the level of investigation they did.
6
Aguilar is obviously intelligent, literate and informed on topic.

Lots of intelligent, literate, "informed-on-a-subject" people are nuts.
7
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.
Munroe was an officer in the same educational outfit at Bethesda as David and Pitzer. According to David, he, she, and Pitzer made up an impromptu office lunchtime bridge club (of.....three). According to the story, David ran into Munroe after the suicide when he was stationed at the Navy's Great Lakes station. He said that she told him that she also believed that Pitzer was murdered, presumably for the same reasons. As such, she would be valuable corroboration.
8
Just to close the loop, extensive Google searches have failed turn up anything about the Barbara Monroe episode or even anything about a Barbara Monroe in connection with Bethesda. I even searched Eaglesham's co-authored 2014 book The JFK Assassination Revisted: A Synthesis, and came up empty. Eaglesham, who is now 81, is apparently a full-tilt body-alteration fan, and the book is dedicated to Lifton and Horne. EEK! Sorry, there is just too much evidence that the casket was never out of sight on Air Force One and that the body was in it, wrapped as it had been at Parkland, when it arrived for the autopsy. I really think my own thread "A rational solution to the shipping casket factoid?" solves the casket mystery, and Harold Weisberg would agree if he were available: https://www.jfkassassinationforum.com/index.php/topic,4435.0.html. In fact, William Bruce Pitzer would agree if he were available. In fact, ... oh, never mind.

I think I've now reached the bottom of what shall henceforth be known as the Potentially Non-Factoidal Pitzer Rabbit Hole.
9
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.
10
Dr. Gary Aguilar gives his view of two shots striking JFK on 11.22, including one shot from the GK.

Aguilar is obviously intelligent, literate and informed on topic.

Interesting presentation, whether one agrees or not.

Caveat emptor, and draw your own conclusions.


Gary Aguilar is a long time conspiracy kook going back to at least the early 1990s.
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