False Witness (23 page)

Fourteen plodding days later, from the 1,200 prospects who appeared, the two sides finally settled on an all-male panel with two alternates. Nine of the twelve and both alternates were white, three black, five under thirty and three in their fifties. The lineup was solidly working class and its breadth of interest and intellectual reach failed to impress the media representatives who witnessed the process. If the reporters felt well-disposed toward any of them, it was a black thirty-one-year-old high school teacher. Clay Shaw and his attorneys concurred, believing he might be pro-defense and a leader in the jury room. That was ironic in light of what occurred during deliberations.

The following day, Jim Garrison, looking “fresh and fit” in front of a stand-up microphone, read his fifteen-page opening statement, which he called “a blueprint of what the State intends to prove.” Any doubt that he planned to put the Warren Report on trial was resolved when he finished forty-two minutes later. Evidence about the events at Dealey Plaza was necessary, Garrison said, “because it confirms the existence of a conspiracy and because it confirms the significance and relevance of the planning which occurred in New Orleans.” The state would present the Zapruder film of the shooting and testimony “corroborating” what it showed, “that the president's fatal shot was received from the front.” Garrison named five overt acts the state would prove: the plotting session in Ferrie's apartment; the discussion of rifles, escape routes and alibis; the trip to the West Coast by Shaw the day of the assassination; the trip to Houston by Ferrie that same day; and Oswald's carrying a rifle into the Texas School Book Depository. Garrison delivered two surprises. He referred to
another party
that he said took place in June 1963 “in an apartment in the French Quarter,” where Shaw and Ferrie discussed their assassination plans. And he unveiled a new group of witnesses from Clinton and Jackson, Louisiana, the hill country north of Baton Rouge. They would testify, he said, that in the latter part of August or the early part of September 1963, Oswald had visited that region with Clay Shaw and David Ferrie. (These eight witnesses—six men and two women—would have a long and prominent “shelf life.”)
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Defense attorney Dymond in his opening remarks pinpointed the “core of the State's case”—the “alleged conspiratorial meeting” at Ferrie's apartment. He said the defense would prove that Shaw never “laid eyes on either” Ferrie or Oswald and that Perry Russo was “a notoriety-seeking liar.” He cautioned against “the pageantry” of the Dealey Plaza evidence obscuring “the actual issues in this case.” “We are not here to defend the findings of the Warren Commission,” he declared. “We are not trying the Warren Report in this courtroom.”
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But that's what happened. The defense was forced to ignore the evidence challenging the Warren Report or try to refute it. They finally decided to do the latter.

The state's lead-off witness,
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Edwin Lea McGehee, a soft-spoken, bespectacled barber, was the first of the so-called Clinton witnesses. On a “cool” afternoon when the air conditioner was off and the door was
open, he saw a dark-colored, battered car resembling “a Kaiser or a Frazer or an old Nash” drive up and park in front of his one-chair barber shop. Then a man he later realized was Lee Harvey Oswald entered. Oswald was there about fifteen minutes while McGehee cut his hair and as they talked McGehee noticed a women in the front seat of the car and in the back “a bassinet.” Oswald wanted to know how to go about obtaining a job at nearby East Louisiana State Hospital. McGehee suggested that the local State Representative, Reeves Morgan, might be able to help and gave Oswald instructions to Morgan's home about three miles out of town. Morgan took the stand next and said Oswald arrived on an evening when he was burning trash in his fireplace and that “it felt good sitting there by it.” Morgan told Oswald, who was there about twenty-five minutes, that he couldn't help him get a job at the hospital but suggested that “it wouldn't hurt if he was a registered voter.” Morgan claimed that after the assassination he told the FBI about Oswald's visit but “they already knew it.” (The FBI has no record of a call from Morgan.)

Town Marshal John Manchester, lean and cowboy-handsome, was one of four witnesses who picked up the story from there. They said they saw Oswald, Ferrie, and Shaw in a black '61 or '62 Cadillac parked outside the registrar of voters office in the town of Clinton (population then—1,569). Not all of them saw Ferrie and Oswald. But all four saw the car and the driver and, from the witness stand, pointed to Clay Shaw as the man behind the wheel. Manchester claimed he spoke to the driver, who said he was “a representative of the International Trade Mart in New Orleans.” Manchester described him as “big” with gray hair and a ruddy complexion. The other three witnesses also referred to his size and “gray hair.” One said he was wearing a light-colored hat.

Following Manchester was the Registrar of Voters, Henry Earl Palmer. He testified that the black Cadillac, with the two men inside, was parked near his office from 10:30 in the morning to 3:30 that afternoon and he saw it a total of six times as he went in and out.The passenger had “heavy” eyebrows and “messed-up hair,” Palmer said, like that in the picture he was shown of David Ferrie. On Dymond's cross-examination, Palmer admitted that his identification of the men in the car was based on seeing only the back of the driver's head and shoulders and only “one” of the passenger's “bushy eyebrows.” Palmer first saw Lee Harvey Oswald that
morning, standing in the slow-moving line, mostly blacks, waiting to register. It was mid-afternoon before Oswald finally entered his office. He showed Palmer his Navy I.D. card, bearing “a New Orleans address,” and said he wanted “a job at the hospital in Jackson.” Palmer told him “he did not have to be a registered voter” to get a job there. Oswald (who didn't meet registration requirements anyway) thanked him and left.

The other two who testified about this incident were both black men. Corrie Collins, head of the local chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), was assisting in the voter registration drive that day. He said he saw the black Cadillac, with three men—two in front, one in back—drive up and park near the registrar's office about ten that morning. Only Collins claimed he saw all three inside the car. The one in the rear Collins identified as Oswald. Collins saw him exit the car and enter the registrar's office. Collins said the passenger was David Ferrie and he, too, remarked on Ferrie's hair and eyebrows, saying they “didn't seem real.” William Dunn was another CORE worker. Dunn was unsure about any passengers in the car, but he identified a picture of Oswald as the “young white boy” he saw standing in line waiting to register.

Rounding out this scenario were two women. A receptionist at East Louisiana State Hospital, Bobbie Dedon, said she remembered directing Oswald to the personnel office. A clerk in that department, Maxine Kemp, said she saw an application in the files with the name, “Oswald, Harvey.”

There was little the defense could do with these witnesses. Dymond, arguing hearsay, did prevent most of Oswald's alleged statements from being repeated, which stripped the testimony of some of its impact. He also effectively ridiculed the identifications of Shaw and Ferrie made five years after the fact and based only on fleeting glimpses of the two men. But Manchester and Palmer did more than that. They provided powerful evidence—Shaw had named his place of business to Manchester, and Oswald had produced a military identification card for Palmer. The defense believed all these people were lying but had no way to prove it.

Though these witnesses had no direct bearing on the conspiracy charge, they made Perry Russo's story seem more likely. They also cast a cloud over Shaw's credibility since he said he never met either Oswald or Ferrie, and Dymond had just repeated that in his opening statement. This was no small matter in light of the legal dictum voiced
by the judge during jury selection that if the jurors believed a witness “lied in one instance” about a “material fact,” they had “the right to disregard” the witness's “entire testimony.”

The racially mixed Clinton witnesses, with their nicely interlaced stories and folksy civic leaders, were a strong opening for the state. It would be twenty-five years before the truth about their testimony was discovered by this writer (as described in
chapter 13
).

On the trial's second day, the black heroin addict, Vernon Bundy, took the stand and repeated what he said at the preliminary hearing. To illustrate why he was certain it was Shaw he saw passing money to Oswald that day at the lakefront, Bundy staged a “demonstration.” At his direction, Shaw went to the back of the courtroom and with Bundy watching, walked forward. As he passed, Bundy looked down at Shaw's feet. Bundy asked Shaw to repeat this exercise, which he did. “I watched his foot the way it twisted,” Bundy testified, after resuming the witness stand. He was referring to the slightly splayed way Shaw sometimes walked because of his bad back. “The twisting of his foot had frightened me that day on the seawall when I was about to cook my drugs.” He said he saw it again at the preliminary hearing when Shaw entered the courtroom.
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Bundy's demonstration was devastatingly effective and reminiscent of the touch at the preliminary hearing when Garrison had Russo and Bundy walk to Shaw's chair and place their hands over Shaw's head. Garrison had devised a new choreography. Dymond did what he could to recoup, pointing out the absurdity of an addict leaving the safety of his home to shoot drugs in a public place. That did not, however, erase the impact of Bundy's performance.

The state's next witness was a surprise in a variety of ways. Charles I. Spiesel, an accountant who had lived in New Orleans in 1963 but presently resided in New York City, was a nicely dressed, professional-looking man who spoke well and made quite a positive impression as Alcock led him though his story. On an evening in June 1963, at a bar in the French Quarter, Spiesel met David Ferrie, who was with two
women and another man. Spiesel accompanied the group to a party at an apartment near “Dauphine and Esplanade.” This was Clay Shaw's neighborhood, and Shaw was one of the ten or eleven men at the party. Spiesel was introduced to all but he remembered only Shaw by name. The women left, as well as the other man in Ferrie's original group. Those who remained ended up sitting around a large table criticizing President Kennedy. At one point someone said, “Somebody ought to kill the son of a b!” The conversation, Spiesel said, seemed to amuse Shaw. Another man, “about five feet nine inches tall” with “a beard and dirty blonde hair and one finger in a splint” asked how it could be accomplished. The others concluded that “it had to be done with a high-powered rifle [with a] telescopic lens and about a mile away.” According to Spiesel, who “was quite alarmed by the tone of the conversation,” Shaw and Ferrie discussed how the killer could make his getaway, with Ferrie agreeing that it could be done by airplane.
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People present in the courtroom that day speak about the hush that fell over the room as Spiesel spoke. “You could literally hear a pin drop,” a woman said recently. Spiesel told “a tidy story,” one reporter wrote. And he told it well. Shaw and his attorneys and supporters were stunned and grim. First the Clinton eight, followed by Bundy's demonstration, and now this. About then, Salvatore Panzeca was being pestered by one of the court deputies. “I keep getting messages,” Panzeca recently recalled, “that my next door neighbor, Bill Storm, is calling me.” Panzeca was annoyed. Didn't Storm know this trial was important? Finally he gave in, left the courtroom, and called Storm back. “He says, ‘Sal, I hear on the radio that Mr. Spiesel is testifying against your client. Let me tell you a little bit about him. I worked with him for many months in a CPA firm. And,' he says, ‘I'm telling you the guy is a nut. He hears voices. He thinks the world is tape recording his life. He had his daughter, before she went away to college, fingerprinted.' And he's giving me all this in a real hurried way and I'm saying, ‘Bill, are you sure?' ‘Oh, yes, Sal, I know the guy is kooky. He sued the City of New York.' He's telling me all this and I can't write it down fast enough. I said, ‘Bill, stay by this number.' I go inside and I start telling Bill Wegmann, I said, ‘When Irvin gets to cross-examine ask [Spiesel] these things about voices, tape recordings, people suing him for being too short,' and Bill Wegmann thinks I'm crazy!”
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The questions were passed to Dymond and when his turn came he coaxed some devastating admissions from Spiesel. In 1965 he had filed a
16 million law suit against a psychiatrist, a detective agency, a horse-racing association and others charging that they had, among other things, interfered with his sex life. The defendants had conspired to convince people that he and his family were Communists, Spiesel said, and during 1962, 1963, and 1964 had put him under a “hypnotic spell.” In 1964 he sued the City of New York for subjecting him to “hypnosis and mental torture.” Dymond also forced him to concede that he had tried to sell his conspiracy party story to CBS for
2,000. The defense arranged for a copy of the pleading in Spiesel's multi-million-dollar lawsuit to be flown to New Orleans overnight. Dymond had it in hand when he resumed his cross-examination on Saturday morning and used it to glean more damaging details from the hapless Spiesel.
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