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.

Also a good reminder as to the extent to which the JKFA research community comprises mostly OLD - and getting OLDER all the time - white guys. Does anyone seriously think a roomful of doddering old white guys is going to be sitting around obsessing over this stuff 85 years from now? Nah, cartoon JFKs will be hawking products on TV along with cartoon George Washingtons and cartoon Abe Lincolns (but hopefully not cartoon Oswalds or cartoon Trumps; yes, I know, we already have a cartoon Trump  ).

As I got into the Pitzer/David stuff, this thought occurred to me: While I find the elaborate Lifton/Horne-type body alteration scenarios absurd, it is not inconceivable to me that the mandate to pin the JFKA on Oswald as the lone assassin could have been firmly in place by the night of the autopsy and that basic steps to eliminate body and bullet evidence of another gunman could have been undertaken. This dovetails with my little epiphany that I've previously credited to Larry Hancock - i.e., the cover-up was not necessarily part and parcel of the assassination itself. The evidence would have been altered not "because we were part of a ridiculous conspiracy to pin the JFKA on Oswald but stupidly had gunmen at the front and/or using different ammunition, so now we need to alter the body" but rather "regardless of what the JFKA was all about, we are operating under a mandate that Oswald must be portrayed as a lone assassin for national security reasons." I don't say it's likely, but it's far more likely than the Lifton/Horne-type stuff.

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.

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.)

2) Why didn't everyone hear your beloved "shot pattern"? Funky acoustics?

They all heard the shot pattern that occurred.

Not everyone paid attention to the rhythm of the shots. Of those who recalled a pattern without prompting almost all said that the last two were closer together. 

Those who didn’t notice a pattern, when asked said they were about equally spaced.  James Romack was asked about the spacing in his WC testimony on April 8, 1964:
"Mr. ROMACK. Oh, they happened pretty fast. I would say maybe 3 or 4 seconds apart.
Mr. BELIN. Were they equally spaced, or did one sound like it was closer than another one in time?
Mr. ROMACK. It sounded like to me that they were evenly spaced. They rang out pretty fast.
Mr. BELIN. Have you ever operated a bolt action rifle?
Mr. ROMACK. Yes, sir.
Mr. BELIN. Do you own one?
Mr. ROMACK. Yes, sir.
Mr. BELIN. Did it sound like the shots were faster than it could be operated with a bolt action rifle?
Mr. ROMACK. No, sir."

A few did not offer a recollection about the shot spacing in their initial statement but, later, in describing the shots gave their opinion of how they were spaced.  For example, Steven Wilson said this in his detailed statement to the WC on March 25, 1964 (22H685):

“In a matter of ten seconds or less after car and occupants were obscured from my view by the trees, I heard three shots. I am positive there were three shots, no more and no less. It is my opinion there was a greater space of time between the second and third shots than between the first and second. The three shots were fired within a matter of less than five seconds”.

Note: Wilson was observing from the third floor TSBD on the south-east corner almost directly below the SN. If the first shot had occurred early before JFK passed under the oak tree, as is required by the SBT, Wilson’s view of the car would not have been obscured by a tree. So Wilson’s observation that the shots occured after his view of the car was obscured by a tree means there was no early shot.