The Journey 54. Judyth Vary Baker: Lee Harvey Oswald, Innocent Man

Judyth Vary Baker (author of “Me & Lee: How I Came to Know, Love and Lose Lee Harvey Oswald” “David Ferrie: Mafia Pilot,” and many other books) and RA “Kris” Millegan (TrineDay publisher) discuss the two years that Kris spent vetting Judyth’s story, its corroboration by evidence and witnesses, her summer in New Orleans in 1963, where she and Oswald became lovers and he became embroiled in and tried to thwart the plot to assassinate President John F. Kennedy, and why Judyth remained silent for decades and started telling her story about twenty years ago.

K: When I heard about your story from Ed Haslam, I said, “No way. She’d be dead.” They even pulled out a fake Judyth Vary Baker to see what Ed was stumbling across. We started working on your book. It took us two years to go through it and vet everything. You had this amazing amount of documentation from your time in New Orleans.

People would tell me, “She’s just making this all up.” First thing they said was that [your story] was all a lie. Then it was, “Maybe she was a science prodigy but she was never in New Orleans.” Then they said, “Okay, maybe she was in New Orleans and she was working on science but she never knew Lee Harvey Oswald.” And then it would get, “Well, maybe she knew Lee Harvey Oswald but never was his lover,” and blah, de-blah, de-blah.

At the last conference we had in Dallas, I said, “I’m so sick and tired of the attacks on Judyth Vary Baker. Why not take what this lady is saying and work it into looking at the Kennedy assassination?” I was very happy when that attorney [Robert K. Tanenbaum, deputy counsel for the House Select Committee on Assassinations in the 1970s] came to the conference and really read a Riot Act [“Judyth is telling the truth”] and Oliver Stone came and put his arm around you and we found out that some of these yahoos hadn’t even read your book! It’s always gotten me very upset about the way that you’ve been treated. There’s still people taking snipe shots at you. You’ve gone through hell. What has kept you going? I’ve always said it was because you loved Lee.

J: It is. It’s love. Love conquers everything. Imagine loving a child, and they were accused of murdering the president. And they loved the president and had saved the president’s life even once, and had no one to confide in because, if you do, that person could die, and they know that they might die. I went through a lot to get Lee to open up to me.

Lee was a lot more intelligent than they made him out to be, because they want him to look really stupid. I mean, you have to be really stupid to shoot someone from your own office window, right? And then leave the rifle behind for everybody to find. I mean, that’s really stupid. Well, he wasn’t stupid. And he knew what was happening to him.

The last time we talked, if I left, he said that they’d probably find me anyway. And “they’d kill all of you. Am I going to let all of you die?” (I waited many years and then I felt like a coward because Oliver Stone’s film came out. I avoided the film. But the minute the last of my children left, I watched the film.)

When Lee got shot, Dave Ferrie called me and said, “You have to be a vanilla girl. You keep your head down.” When his name got in the papers because of the Garrison investigation [in 1967], he called their office and said, “I’m a dead man. You’ve killed me.” Five days later he was dead. My book, “David Ferrie,” will show you that this was a murder.

[Dave] was a fascinating man. He was always interested in cancer because his mom was dying of it. He was self-taught in many ways. He knew many languages. I know of five that he could speak fluently. He read ancient Greek and Latin, even some Aramaic.

Dave was involved with Dr. Mary Sherman, who was involved with Dr. Alton Ochsner in an increasingly important biological weapon development [to try to kill Fidel Castro of Cuba, who] smoked like a fiend. The doctors I worked with knew [unlike most people at the time] that smoking causes lung cancer in many people. So what if Castro got lung cancer and we really gave it to him? Nobody realized that, yes, we can deliver cancer to people. We were able to do it in the sixties. They started developing something that was really virulent and extremely potent.

Of course I saved [evidence of what I was working on and involved with in 1963]. I didn’t save it because of the Kennedy assassination. I did it because we were developing a cancer bioweapon and I was extremely concerned about what would happen to it afterward. Anyway, I’ve got a lot of more new evidence and witnesses.

K: Once you went out there and started talking, people have come out of the woodwork, people that knew you. I’ve been there. We went to see the lady around Clinton. And she said, “Well, you had to be there. There’s no

[other]

way you could know the stuff that you’re saying.” And I’ve watched other witnesses come out and support your story.

J: Dr. Diehl, Dr. Moore and Dr. Ochsner all went on record that they were just fine injecting live cancer cells into people without telling them.

K: What excuse did they give you for doing that?

J: They said if we develop an understanding of how to make cancer more deadly, we’ll understand how to attack it and kill it. Such a lie. All they did is develop more virulent and dangerous forms of cancer.

K: Ed Haslam lives in Bradenton, Florida.

J: He actually moves to the place that I got started. He got access to all the newspaper articles that my enemies said never existed.

K: We have on video [Don Hewitt], who started “60 Minutes” saying, “We had this gal and we were going to blow the story but it got shut down from above.”

J: “The door was slammed in our faces” is the way that Don Hewitt quoted it. Dan Rather was at the top. He was sent to New Orleans just for a few weeks, just before the Kennedy assassination, to run the CBS bureau there. What was he so good at? He had reported on a hurricane and that was it. And suddenly he becomes a really big important top dog. He gets to see the Zapruder film and tell everybody, “Yes, I saw the president’s head thrown violently forward,” implying a shot from behind. He became like a gatekeeper.

Kris Millegan, you’ve been fighting a giant. And you know what? We’ve cut their toes off. It’s hard to walk without toes.

K: We’ve gone from a situation where people are urinating on Oswald’s grave to the situation where people are honoring Lee Oswald.

J: They’re putting roses on his grave.