False Witness (35 page)

Some critics noted the oddity of the Clinton story. Oswald seeking work in such a remote location made no sense, except to Garrison. He claimed to the end that those manipulating Oswald wanted him working at the hospital (a psychiatric facility) so they could switch his records from employee to patient to support a later charge that he was a mental case.
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Garrison found nothing preposterous about that idea. He also found nothing strange about these three “conspirators” calling attention to themselves shortly before they participated in the crime of the century.

He wasn't bothered either by the timing of the story's appearance. No one heard about Oswald being in Clinton (or at the hospital) until after Garrison began his investigation.
*
Yet once the assassination rocked the country, the local citizenry should have been buzzing about Oswald's visit. In this small community, people know each other and talking is a way of life. Four years passed, though, before the word “got out.”

For many, all this added up to a bogus tale. But it didn't prove much. Over the years professional and amateur sleuths alike had combed this trail and found little—a whiff of smoke here and there, but no smoking gun. I journeyed to Clinton in 1993 only because I needed to see it for myself. So low were my expectations that I scheduled only a twenty-four-hour stay. That seemed time enough until Aline Woodside, then the head of East Louisiana State Hospital's personnel department, made an offhand remark that opened an unexpected door.

She had just described that long-ago visit to the hospital by a Garrison investigator, State Policeman Francis Frugé, now deceased. At his direction, she and others had conducted an exhaustive, fruitless search for Oswald's job application. “No,” she replied to my question, no one in personnel remembered seeing Oswald, giving him an application, or interviewing him. “We didn't think she saw it,” Woodside said, referring
to the clerk who claimed she spotted the application in the files. Woodside had hinted as much already; so I wasn't surprised. Moments later, I was gathering up my things to leave when she remembered something. “Frugé had an assistant with him,” she said, “a lady.”

That
was
a surprise. I had never seen or heard any reference to such a person.
*

Woodside couldn't remember her name but she made a telephone call and seconds later had retrieved it, along with the name of the town where she was living in 1967. Locating her was almost as easy; I found her the following week. But by then, I was home in California and she refused to speak about the case on the telephone. Yes, she said, her voice soft and southern, she would talk to me about Clinton. Not this way though. Only in person. She was polite, kind, and unmovable. If you're supposed to use my information, she said, “it will happen.” Clearly she thought her information was valuable and, instinctively, so did I. Two months later, I trekked back to Louisiana to meet and interview this mystery lady. I found an articulate, impeccably groomed, and attractive woman in her sixties, who remains today a Garrison loyalist. Her name is Anne Hundley Dischler.
^†

On February 4, 1994, at her home in Eunice, Louisiana, west of Baton Rouge, Dischler, now an ordained minister in the Full Gospel Church,
^‡
sat on a sofa intently examining the sheaf of papers on her lap. She was looking at the twenty-six-year-old notes she had recorded during the five-month period when she and Francis Frugé wheeled along the roads of the hill country north of Baton Rouge, chasing a lead on Oswald that never quite panned out, at least not for them.

Assigned to the Garrison probe in late February, Frugé invited Dischler to assist him. They had worked together in the past and she readily agreed. For three months they followed dead-end “Oswald” leads; then a tip steered them to Clinton. In his book Garrison claimed the team there was Francis Frugé and Andrew Sciambra. It wasn't. The team in Clinton was Frugé and Dischler. They worked with Louis Ivon and his partner at the time, Frank Meloche, but their main contact in the district attorney's office, Dischler said, was Andrew Sciambra. They met with Sciambra periodically and fed him their information. Recalling that period as we studied her records, carefully preserved for over a quarter century, Dischler cleared up some of the mystery that has surrounded this testimony. She also, unintentionally, challenged the legitimacy of the entire Clinton scenario.

In Dischler's notes I discovered the date that their informant launched that scenario: May 18, 1967, three weeks after James Phelan's
Saturday Evening Post
article demolished the basis for Clay Shaw's arrest. The tipster maneuvered so quietly that until now, no one outside Garrison's innermost circle knew he was the source. Jack N. Rogers (Counsel for Louisiana's Joint Legislative Committee on Un-American Activities) delivered the message to the State Sovereignty Commission. From there, Fred Dent, Jr., passed it on to Francis Frugé and Anne Dischler. Dischler recorded it in her abbreviated handwritten field notes, creating the first documented reference to the Clinton story. The informant was Registrar of Voters and KKK Exalted Cyclops Henry Earl Palmer.
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As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, Garrison called the Clinton lead “slim” and spoke of it poetically as a “whisper in the air.” But its real genesis was neither slim nor poetic. A long-time Louisiana political reporter recently described the State Sovereignty Commission as “the Gestapo” of its day. “If they wanted to kick in your door,” he said, “they kicked in your door.” And Palmer outlined in his tip virtually the entire tale later recited in Judge Haggerty's courtroom: Lee Harvey Oswald, arriving in a Cadillac accompanied by Clay Shaw and David Ferrie, attempted to register to vote in Clinton; Oswald also sought employment at the hospital. Garrison had implied what one would expect if the Clinton story were authentic, that it grew one step at a time, as first one person then another recounted his or her recollections. It didn't. When Anne Dischler jotted that brief message from
the Sovereignty Commission in her steno pad, she was inscribing the essential elements of the final story.
¹⁴

Moreover, in identifying the source, she was also identifying the key Clinton player, Henry Earl Palmer, the interrogator of Oswald. And while someone else seems to have slipped Palmer's information into the bureaucratic maze, instigating Palmer's interview, I later learned otherwise. Jack Rogers, the original conduit,
¹⁵
was married to Palmer's former wife. So anyone mapping the real course of this tip would draw a short circular line beginning and ending with Palmer.

In her notes, dated and written in a rapid but lucid hand, Dischler chronicled a broad and intense search for information to corroborate Palmer's tip, recording a remarkable number and variety of names. The Congress of Racial Equality is mentioned, as is Ned Touchstone, publisher of the [White] Citizens Council newsletter,
The Councilor
. In addition to Jack Rogers, other prominent Louisiana political figures (such as Judge John Rarick) are there, and an occasional visitor from Washington, D.C. Governor McKeithen, Dischler said, sometimes made an appearance at their meetings. But most of them are ordinary people, contacted because they were somewhere when something occurred or knew someone who was. She entered long lists from Palmer's voting rolls, individuals to be questioned in the hope one would remember Oswald, his companions, or the Cadillac. Five other Clinton witnesses appear: Lea McGehee, Reeves Morgan, John Manchester, Corrie Collins, and Bobbie Dedon. Dischler said she recognized the name of another, Maxine Kemp, but recalled nothing about her. Only William Dunn, one of the two black CORE workers, was entirely new to her.
¹⁶
In all, Dischler filled three shorthand notebooks that she turned over to Garrison's office where they were copied and returned to her. Deeply committed to the work she and Frugé were doing, Dischler remembers it vividly.

During our two-day interview, she delivered four surprises, three of them shockers. Her description of what she and Frugé were seeking was the relatively minor one. “Garrison's office gave us the report,” she said, “that these four men—Ferrie, Shaw, Oswald, and [Guy] Banister—had been [to Clinton] and we were supposed to dig up information as to what Oswald was up to there.” Garrison's official version (and the trial testimony) placed only three men in Clinton, and
Banister wasn't one of them. Richard Billings did indicate in his notes that the number of men in the car was four, but no one in Garrison's office ever claimed that publicly, nor that the fourth man was Banister. That would fit with Garrison's thinking, however. He believed what occurred in Banister's office was the
key
. Dischler also said that when she and Frugé arrived in Clinton, some of the people they spoke to had already seen one of the pictures they were using.
¹⁷

Dischler's first stunner was her description of that picture. It was a three-by-five, black-and-white photograph of the Cadillac supposedly taken while the car was parked across the street from the registrar's office. Inside were the four men. “Clay Shaw was in the driver's seat—it looked like him to me,” she said. “I remember the white-haired man in the picture and the small face of Oswald. It seems like Oswald was on the passenger side of the front seat but I'm not sure. And it seems like I remember a darkened area in the back of the car where [Ferrie and Banister] were supposed to have been.” This picture came from the district attorney's office, she said, perhaps from Sciambra. She recalls it being in a folder and Sciambra, she said, always had a folder, though it could have been one of Frugé's. The picture received special treatment. Dischler never had it in her possession, and Frugé had it and “showed” it but only at the beginning and only for a short while.
¹⁸

No one ever claimed that any picture of the black Cadillac taken in Clinton existed, much less one with Shaw and Oswald inside.
*
But anyone with a composite such as that would have possessed a powerful brainwashing tool. And someone with that picture, Dischler said, had been there ahead of them. Who it was remains a mystery.

Dischler's second stunner was what their informant, Henry Earl Palmer, had to say. He told them Oswald actually registered to vote and signed the register. Palmer showed them where Oswald had written his name and the signature had been erased and another name written over it. But when they returned the next day to get a copy, Palmer told them the page was “missing.” He showed them the book, which Dischler believes was bound in some way, and said, “You see this is all that's left.” He couldn't or
wouldn't tell them who he thought had erased the name in the first place, Dischler said, nor who he thought had removed the page.
¹⁹

Startled by the dramatic conflict here with Palmer's courtroom testimony (and the implications), I pressed Dischler about this. “It looked like where Oswald had signed his name,” she stated firmly. “You could make out part of the ‘O' and, while I was looking at the signature, Henry Earl Palmer was saying to me that ‘this is where Oswald signed.' ” I told her that Palmer didn't testify to any of that in court. (He said Oswald couldn't meet the registration requirements.) “Someone else told me that too,” she replied.
²⁰

Apparently, someone had second thoughts about the Oswald-signed-the-register story. Henry Earl Palmer is deceased and the register has not survived—the current registrar of voters, barber Edwin Lea McGehee, recently stated that his files contain no such book.
*

The last jolt came straight from Dischler's notes and it, too, strikes at the heart of the Clinton story. At Shaw's trial, Corrie Collins described
one
man, Lee Harvey Oswald, stepping out of the black Cadillac. That isn't what he said to Frugé and Dischler. According to Dischler's notes, Collins told them that “two casually dressed men got out of [the black] car” and went to the registrar's office.
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Collins believed they “got in line.” One of them, he said, was possibly wearing “blue jeans,” the other was “in white.”

The question is: who were the two men—one in blue jeans, the other in white—Collins saw exit the car? And what was their role in the Clinton scenario?

Collins told Frugé and Dischler that he knew one of them, and his name may have been “Morgan.” But Morgan's first name is unclear. In her notes Dischler mentioned both Estus Morgan, who died in a car accident in 1966, and “Zip” Morgan, a local resident who operated a hardware business; she also indicated that the man may not have been “a Morgan.”
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The man Collins described as wearing “white” Dischler managed to definitely identify. He was “Winslow Foster,” an employee at the hospital.
²³
Shortly after Dischler recorded that in her steno pad, Garrison took her and Frugé off the case, in effect burying the Foster–Morgan lead for twenty-seven years, until I began pursuing it in 1994. What I discovered indicates that the second man Corrie Collins saw exit the car was, indeed, Estus Morgan.

I began my search with Winslow Foster. From his employment records, I learned that Foster, a WWII veteran born in Eudora, Arkansas, was forty-eight years old in 1963; he worked at the hospital eleven years and left the area in 1969. Eventually, I located two people in the Clinton–Jackson region who knew Foster, and another (now residing in Mississippi) who linked him to Estus Morgan. One said Foster was living in Sondheimer, Louisiana, when he died sometime in the 1970s. He recalled Foster as a husky five feet eleven inches, 240 pounds, with a fair complexion and sandy hair. The other said Foster was unmarried and called him “a country boy” and “a good man.” Both remarked on Foster's work at the hospital—he was an attendant in the alcoholic ward. I asked one of them what sort of clothes Foster wore and he said that because of Foster's job he “had to wear white.”
²⁴