Who Really Killed Kennedy?: 50 Years Later: Stunning New Revelations About the JFK Assassination (23 page)

Rose Cherami, or Cheramie, was one of some thirty aliases used by Melba Christine Marcades, born Melba Christine Youngblood. She was a thirty-four-year-old drug and substance abuser with a long list of prostitution and other arrests since she turned eighteen. She had worked as a B-girl for Jack Ruby in his Carousel Club in Dallas and had been mainlining heroin for nine years. According to a Louisiana State Police report in mid-November 1963, she worked “as a dope runner for Jack Ruby,” and had “worked in the night club for Ruby and that she was forced to go to Florida with another man whom she did not name to pick up a shipment of dope to take back to Dallas and that she didn’t want to do this thing but she had a young child and that they would hurt her child if she didn’t.”
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She was thrown out of a brothel after a quarrel ensued with the two men participating in the dope run. A staff report compiled by the House Special Committee on Assassinations reported Cheramie had taken her last injection of heroin around 2:00 pm on Nov. 20, 1963.
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Lt. Francis Fruge of the Louisiana State Police was the first to interview Cheramie at Moosa Memorial Hospital in Eunice, Louisiana. Because the hospital was a private hospital and Cheramie had no funds or insurance, Fruge placed Cheramie in the Eunice City Jail. Fruge then
called Dr. Derouin, a local doctor from the coroner’s office, who administered a sedative to calm her from the effects of drug withdrawal.
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Dr. Derouin made the decision to commit her to the state hospital in Jackson, Louisiana. On route to the hospital in Jackson, Cheramie talked to Fruge. According to a deposition Fruge gave the House Select Committee on Assassinations, Cheramie told him that “she was coming from Florida to Dallas with two men who were Italians or resembled Italians. They stopped at this lounge … and they’d had a few drinks and got into an argument or something. The manager of the lounge threw her out and she got on the road and hitchhiked to catch a ride, and this is when she got hit by a vehicle.”
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Fruge said the lounge was a house of prostitution called the Silver Slipper. He told the committee that he asked Cheramie what she was going to do in Dallas: “She said she was going to, number one, pick up some money, pick up her baby, and kill Kennedy.”
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Fruge claimed Cheramie was lucid making these statements. He had her admitted to the hospital late on November 20, 1963. With further investigation, Fruge found Cheramie’s farfetched story had a basis in fact. Fruge tracked down the owner of the Silver Slipper Lounge, Mr. Mac Manual, who told him Cheramie had come into the bar with two men who were pimps engaged in the business of hauling prostitutes in from Florida. When Cheramie became intoxicated and rowdy, one of these men supposedly “slapped her around” and threw her outside.
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Fruge further claimed he showed the owner of the Silver Slipper bar a stack of mug shots from which the bar owner identified a Cuban exile named Sergio Aracha Smith as one of Cheramie’s traveling companions. Assassination researchers have identified Aracha Smith as an anti-Castro refugee who was active in 1961 as head of the New Orleans Cuban Revolutionary Front. At that time, Aracha Smith befriended anti-Castro activist and commercial pilot David Ferrie, a shadowy New Orleans figure who figured prominently in the investigation of New Orleans prosecutor Jim Garrison. In the investigation of the Cheramie case, there is a suggestion Louisiana state police found diagrams of the sewer system in Dealey Plaza among the contents of Aracha Smith’s apartment in Dallas. Increasingly, assassination researchers have concluded Aracha Smith must be listed among the Cuban exiles that are strongly suspected of having played an operational role in the JFK assassination.
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After the assassination, Fruge immediately called the hospital and told them not to release Cheramie until he had a chance to speak with her. The following morning, Cheramie told Fruge the two men traveling with her from Miami were going to Dallas to assassinate the president. Cheramie claimed her role was to obtain $8,000 from an unidentified source in Dallas, who was evidently holding her child, and proceed to Houston with the two men to complete a drug deal. Reservations had been made at the Rice Hotel in Houston. She said the trio was to meet a seaman who was bringing in eight kilos of heroin to Galveston by boat. From Galveston, once the drug transaction was completed, the trio expected to head to Mexico. Fruge took Cheramie into custody after customs chief in Galveston verified the scheduled docking of the boat and the name of the seaman. During a flight from Houston, according to Fruge, Cheramie noticed a newspaper with headlines suggesting investigators were trying to establish a link between Ruby and Oswald. According to the deposition Fruge gave the House Select Committee, Cheramie laughed at the newspaper article. She explained to Fruge that she had worked for Ruby, or Pinky as she knew him, at his nightclub in Dallas, and she claimed Ruby and Oswald “had been shacking up for years” as homosexual lovers. Fruge had his superior call Captain Will Frit of the Dallas Police Department with this information, only to find Fritz responded that he was not interested. Other reports indicated that at the state hospital on November 22, 1963, several nurses were watching television with Cheramie when she again predicted the JFK assassination. According to the hospital witnesses, “during the telecast moments before Kennedy was shot Rose Cheramie stated to them, ‘This is when it is going to happen’ and at that moment Kennedy was assassinated. The nurses in turn, told others of Cheramie’s prognostication.” Dr. Victor Weis, a psychiatrist at the hospital, also confirmed that Cheramie told him she knew both Ruby and Oswald and had seen them sitting together on several different occasions in Ruby’s club.
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The word spread throughout the state hospital that Cheramie had predicted the JFK assassination and amazingly Cheramie even predicted the involvement of her former boss Jack Ruby. Dr. Wayne Owen, who had been interning from LSU, later told the
Madison Capital Times
that Cheramie had warned him and other interns that the plot involved a man named Jack Rubenstein. Owen said he and the other interns shrugged it
off at the time but were shocked when they saw Ruby kill Oswald and found out that Jack Ruby was born Jack Rubenstein.
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While there remain many unanswered questions about Rose Cheramie’s strange story, the public record fully attests to her knowledge of the JFK assassination plot in Dallas, as well as her testimony that Ruby and Oswald knew each other before the event.

In one of the most intriguing studies conducted on the JFK assassination, researcher John Armstrong has argued that “Lee Harvey Oswald” was a case of double identity created by the intelligence community from the time Oswald was thirteen years old. “One boy, named by some as Harvey Lee Oswald, was from New York,” Armstrong wrote. “And another boy, Lee Harvey Oswald, was born in New Orleans and grew up in Texas.”
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Armstrong argued that Lee Oswald was the tall southern boy who moved to New York in 1952 and “was teased by his classmates for his southern accent and for wearing jeans.” While Harvey Oswald was in New Orleans and “was teased by his New Orleans classmates for his New York accent.”
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Armstrong’s argument is that two different people were using the name “Lee Harvey Oswald.” Here is the crux of Armstrong’s analysis:

Two young boys, Lee Harvey Oswald and an eastern European refuge who spoke Russian and was given the name “Harvey Oswald,” were selected by the CIA for inclusion in a super-secret project known as MK-ULTRA. The plan was to merge the identity of a Russian-speaking refugee with that of American born Lee Harvey Oswald over a period of many years. If the merging of the identities was successful the CIA could then place a native Russian-speaking young man, with an American identity, in the Soviet Union as a spy.

The young man known to the world as “Lee Harvey Oswald” successfully “defected” to the Soviet Union in 1959 and returned to the United States with a Russian wife in 1962. A year and a half later this young man was set-up as the “patsy” in an elaborate scheme engineered by career CIA officials to assassinate John F. Kennedy.

Following the assassination the FBI and Warren Commission collected and pieced together background information from the Russian-speaking refugee and the American born Lee Harvey Oswald
that was used to create a fictionalized person we know as “Lee Harvey Oswald.” Two days after the assassination of President Kennedy the Russian-speaking refugee, Harvey Oswald, was shot and killed by Dallas night-club owner/CIA gunrunner, Jack Ruby. American born Lee Oswald was, and may still be, very much alive.
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Armstrong further describes that Harvey Oswald and Lee Oswald were two distinct people with two very distinct personalities: “‘Harvey’ was the Russian speaking, Communist-promoting Oswald—the person killed by Jack Ruby. People’s descriptions of ‘Lee Harvey Oswald’ often vary widely with respect to eye color, height, weight, hair color, and physical characteristics. Lee often got drunk, got into fights and never spoke or read Russian or supported communism. Harvey rarely drank, was never known to get into a fight; he spoke, read, and wrote Russian, and supported communism. The character profiles of these two people, as described by dozens of witnesses, are quite different and distinct.”
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Armstrong further argued the double identity was key to intelligence efforts to set up the composite “Lee Harvey Oswald” as the patsy responsible for shooting JFK. “In late October and early November [1963], someone matching the description of Lee Oswald was used again and again to set up Harvey Oswald as ‘the patsy,’” Armstrong wrote. “In late October, an Oswald drove to the Sports Drome rifle range where he practiced shooting. On October 31, an Oswald applied for a job at the multistory Statler Hilton in downtown Dallas. On November 1, an Oswald purchased ammunition at Morgan’s Gun Shop. On November 4, an Oswald visited Dial Ryder’s gun shop to have a scope mounted on his rifle—even though Mr. Davis had sighted in Oswald’s scope, at the Sports Drome Rifle Range a month earlier.”
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In a convincing manner, Armstrong wrote a one-thousand-page book published with a comprehensive CD-ROM of backup photographs and other documenting material, going through Oswald’s life history, demonstrating many instances where biographical discrepancies almost demand a concept of double identity to be explained.
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Armstrong’s argument is that Oswald was not created by the Mafia, the Cubans, the Russians, or the Dallas Police, but instead Lee Harvey Oswald was a creation of the CIA, years before the assassination.

Armstrong’s theory does help explain a lot of inconsistent Oswald descriptions and sightings, such as the sworn testimony of Dallas County
Sheriff’s Department officer Roger Craig to the Warren Commission. On April 1, 1965, Craig testified that about fifteen minutes after the JFK shooting, he heard someone whistle and he looked up to see a man running down the grassy knoll by the Texas School Book Depository, trying to catch up with a Nash Rambler station wagon that was stopped along Elm Street waiting for the man. Craig testified the driver of the car struck him “as being a colored male,” whom he described as “very dark complected, had real dark short hair, and was wearing a thin white-looking jacket—uh, it looked like the short windbreaker type, you know, because it was real thin and had the collar that came out the shoulder (indicating with hands) like that—a short jacket.”
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Craig tried to get across the street to question the subjects, but the traffic was too heavy, so he could not make it before the car pulled away.
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Yet many questions remain unanswered, including whether or not the two Oswalds were aware of each other, or whether the CIA manipulated each to believe he was the only Oswald. Even Armostrong’s book is insufficient to sort out all the complications involved in a two-Oswald double-identity theory. Importantly, Armstrong pointed out the use of doubles has traditionally offered the intelligence community endless opportunities for deception. Armstrong also admits prying apart the two lives creates a story that becomes very difficult, if not impossible to follow, with twists that are hard to comprehend and results that may seem bizarre at best.

The JFK assassination record contains many documented but inconsistent or conflicting stories of who exactly Lee Harvey Oswald was, stretching back at least to 1956 when Lee Harvey Oswald joined the marines. We have already seen the difficulty of reconciling how Lee Harvey Oswald could have been seen at the Tip Top Record Store on the morning of the assassination when credible witnesses also testify that Oswald spent the night before the assassination with his wife at the Paine residence in Irving, Texas, and was driven to work that morning at the Texas School Book Depository building by Mrs. Paine’s neighbor Buell Wesley Frazier. It would be easy to argue the identification of Lee Harvey Oswald at the Tip Top Record Store as a case of mistaken identity, except the massive JFK record compiled in the fifty years since the assassination have scores of similar conflicts in sorting out the complex and often contradictory Lee Harvey Oswald life story.

Later, around 5:00 or 5:30 p.m., Craig was invited to Dallas Police Capt. Will Fritz’s office to see the suspect who had been apprehended for the murder of Dallas police officer Tippit. Seeing Oswald, Craig gave a positive identification that Oswald was the man he had seen running down the grassy knoll to get into the Nash Rambler being driven by the dark-complected man. Evidently, Craig was already headed well along the path of assuming that the person who killed Tippit might also have been the person who killed JFK.

On hearing Craig’s comment, Fritz asked Oswald, “What about this station wagon?” According to Craig’s testimony, Oswald, on hearing how this discussion was proceeding, interrupted and said to Craig pointedly, “That station wagon belongs to Ruth Paine. Don’t try to tie her into this. She has nothing to do with it.” As noted earlier, at the time of the JFK assassination, Marina Oswald, Lee Harvey Oswald’s wife, was rooming with Ruth Paine in Irving, Texas, a suburb within the greater Dallas metropolitan area.