Dr. Mary's Monkey: How the Unsolved Murder of a Doctor, a Secret Laboratory in New Orleans and Cancer-Causing Monkey Viruses Are Linked to Lee Harvey Oswald, the JFK Assassination and Emerging Global Epidemics

0 0 1 2 13 TrineDay 1 1 14 14.0 Mobi ISBN 978-1-937584-99-3

Print ISBN 978-1-937584-59-7

1. Kennedy, John F. (John Fitzgerald), 1917-1963—Assassination. 2. Oswald, Lee Harvey. 3. Poliomyelitis vaccine—Contamination—History—Popular works. 4. Political Corruption—United States. 1. Title 364.1’524—dc20

FIRST EDITION

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Dedicated to my father:

Edward T. Haslam, M. D.

1915-1971

Commander, United States Navy

Professor of Orthopedic Surgery

Tulane University, New Orleans

A doctor committed to upholding medical ethics.

Publisher's Preface

By Kris Millegan

To the 2014 Hardcover Edition of DR. MARY’S MONKEY

This revised edition of Dr. Mary’s Monkey is a culmination of over two decades of work, and I am proud to be its publisher. We hope that this sturdy binding and hard cover will last for many years and will provide an impetus for libraries and collectors around the world to add it to their permanent collections. While this book is about the past and how it affects the present, it is also for the future, so that generations yet to come will have the ability to read about the origins of the plagues that afflict us and them.

The public health problems addressed in Dr. Mary’s Monkey have not gone away; in fact, they have gotten worse and are sure to be with us for years to come. The Cancer Epidemic which Ed Haslam first talked about in 1995 has grown substantially and has killed over 15,000,000 people in the U.S. since he first coined the term. And, of course, AIDS is still killing millions of people around the world.

When Ed Haslam self-published this story as Mary, Ferrie and the Monkey Virus in 1995, he shook the JFK research community with an alarming new perspective on the JFK assassination, one centered on the unsolved murder of Dr. Mary Sherman in New Orleans and the specter of a undisclosed biological weapon. As the acclaimed JFK assassination author Jim Marrs said, Haslam opened a whole new can of worms. Reading that book was the first time I ever encountered the term Cancer Epidemic, and I had never pondered how a bio-weapon might have fit into the matrix around JFK’s murder or its cover-up. What he had to say was definitely new.

So when Haslam contacted me about publishing his book, I jumped at the opportunity. I knew it was a bold, credible, iconoclastic story that tangled the country’s medical elite with powerful political forces and the top echelon of organized crime, all around a biological weapon that haunted the JFK assassination. But I had no idea that the story would mushroom the way that it did.

My first glimpse of this broader horizon came from the testimony of Judyth Vary Baker about her contact with Lee Harvey Oswald in the summer of 1963. This detailed account not only supported what Haslam had said; it expanded upon it. When Haslam brought her testimony to TrineDay’s attention, we added three new chapters to his book: The Witness, Judyth’s Story and The Perfect Patsy. It was at this point we re-titled his book as Dr. Mary’s Monkey and released it in 2007.

Next, when TrineDay acquired the rights to publish Judyth Vary Baker’s story, Me & Lee, we asked Ed Haslam to be part of the editorial team and to go through Judyth’s story with a fine-toothed comb to build a timeline reflecting everything that happened in her life that was relevant to either cancer or Oswald. He did. This activity enabled him to dig deeper into Judyth’s relationship with Lee Harvey Oswald and to understand their roles in the process of developing the bio-weapon under the direction of Drs. Alton Ochsner, Sr. and Mary Sherman. There he gained new insights and started to fit the pieces of evidence into a precise timeline which helped unravel their mysterious trips to Clinton and Jackson, Louisiana where they tested the bio-weapon on one or more prisoners.

By this point, Ed Haslam’s research had entered a new phase: People were bringing him information, like FBI documents, NOPD police reports, newspaper articles and the crime-scene photos. Some knew the actual players in his book, and others knew how to find people he needed to talk to. All of this expanded his understanding of what he had already written and started his research into related areas. Then he assembled the pieces of this new puzzle.

This expanded 2014 edition presents startling new material acquired since the 2007 publication of the paperback edition. Material which has never been published before includes:

the horrific crime-scene photos which show the destruction to Mary Sherman’s body caused by an extremely powerful force,

a memo from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover ordering his agents not to investigate the Mary Sherman murder,

statements from neighbors who lived in Mary Sherman’s apartment complex and who saw Lee Oswald coming and going from an apartment in their complex,

Oswald’s employment time cards initialed by Judyth Vary Baker, omitted from Warren Commission documents,

a phone call to discuss the Mary Sherman murder from a NOPD homicide detective who investigated it,

claims that a doctor from Ochsner Clinic murdered Mary Sherman,

new facts about the man who called the police to Mary Sherman’s apartment, and his connections to Lee Harvey Oswald,

attempts to pry a single redacted name from Mary Sherman’s address book from both the FBI and Department of Justice,

a new NOPD Burglary Report which shows exactly when Mary Sherman’s apartment had been burglarized, and gives us clues as to why and what was really stolen, and

a CIA document clearly stating that they have no intention of telling the public what they really did between 1959 and 1964 (the timeframe of Dr. Mary’s Monkey).

All of the above points are discussed in more detail by Haslam in his important new Introduction and Afterword. And some new documents have been added.

I hope that this book expands your understanding of the world you live in. It’s why we publish.

Sincerely,

Kris Millegan

Publisher

Trine Day Press

June 21, 2014

Dr. Mary’s Monkey

CONTENTS

Publisher's Foreword: By Kris Millegan

Foreword: by Jim Marrs

Introduction: 2014 Edition

Prologue: The Warning

1: The Pirate

2: The Classroom

3: Jimbo

4: College Daze

5: A Bishop in His Heart

6: Mary, Mary

7: The Cure for Communism

8: Dr. O

9: The Treatise

10: The Fire

11: The Machine

12: That Other Epidemic

13: The Witness

14: The Teacher

15: Judyth’s Story

Epilogue: The Perfect Patsy

Afterword: 2014 Edition

Documents

Bibliography

Index

How the Unsolved Murder of a Doctor, a Secret Laboratory in New Orleans and Cancer-Causing Monkey Viruses are Linked to Lee Harvey Oswald, the JFK Assassination and Emerging Global Epidemics

FOREWORD

By Jim Marrs

There is nothing new to learn about the assassination of JFK.

WORDS LIKE THESE HAVE BE COME ALMOST a mantra among sanctimonious media pundits and complacent publishers. The problem is that they’re not true.

In this book, Ed Haslam takes our knowledge of the dark underpinnings of the 1960s to a new level by offering a whole new look at events surrounding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. He focuses on activities in New Orleans during 1963, reaching far beyond Lee Harvey Oswald’s leafleting or his contacts with anti-Castro Cubans, government agents and mobsters.

Anyone who has seen the Oliver Stone film JFK or has read one of the many books on the assassination knows of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison’s ill-fated prosecution of International Trade Mart Director Clay Shaw.

We know of Guy Banister, the ex-FBI agent who was connected to the CIA, anti-Castro Cubans and the accused assassin Oswald. We know of David Ferrie, a defrocked priest who was connected to the Mafia, the CIA and Oswald.

Shaw was able to successfully argue that he had never met Ferrie or Oswald. Today, we know that claim is simply untrue.

It is now well-accepted that officials within the federal government of the United States of America took steps to effectively block and derail Garrison’s probe. It seemed the New Orleans investigation was at an end.

But what if all that activity in New Orleans had nothing to do with the assassination? What if there was some other reason for sabotaging Garrison’s investigation?

After all, there is not one hard piece of evidence linking the Shaw-Ferrie axis to the events in Dealey Plaza. Ferrie, the man connected to Oswald, the Mob and the CIA, never got closer to Dallas than a Houston phone booth, and there was never any serious accusation that Clay Shaw went to Dallas.

Could there have been a deeper secret reason why the Garrison investigation had to be shut off? And could that reason have had more to do with contaminated polio vaccines and the secrecy of a deadly biological weapon experiment than any plotting against President Kennedy?

In his 1995 book Mary, Ferrie & the Monkey Virus, Haslam opened a whole new can of worms when he revealed the medical experiments that had taken place in David Ferrie’s apartment in 1963.

He was one of the first to bring to the public the now well-documented story of how the polio vaccines of the 1950s was adulterated with a cancer-causing virus derived from monkey glands. Federal certification officers were aware of the possibility of the polio vaccine being defective but were pressured into approving the vaccine by powerful medical interests, including Dr. Alton Ochsner of New Orleans.

Once the magnitude of the cancer-causing viruses in the polio vaccines became known, a massive covert effort was undertaken in an attempt to find a cure or preventative. All this was clandestine work, very hush-hush. No one wanted the American public to know that the polio vaccines inoculated into millions of our citizens were contaminated with dangerous monkey viruses, perhaps causing the cancer epidemic of recent years.

But then the story took an even darker turn: the CIA began to take an interest in the work. After all, this was a time when documented efforts were under way to find a subtle way of assassinating Fidel Castro. Military and intelligence eyes sparkled at the prospect of somehow injecting Castro with cancer. His death would appear natural, and there would be no accusations from the Soviet Union.

But what was Oswald’s role in all this activity? The evidence of Oswald’s intelligence work for the U.S. Government is overwhelming. Did he become involved in a biological weapons experiment so monstrous that its secret had to be maintained at all costs?

Diligent researchers know that Oswald was playing intelligence games in New Orleans in the summer of 1963. One day he was handing out pro-Castro literature on street corners, some of it stamped with the same address as Banister’s antiCastro office at 544 Camp Street. Another day, Oswald was offering his services to anti-Castro militant Carlos Bringuier. Oswald’s duplicity resulted in what appeared to authorities as a staged fight between Oswald and Bringuier on a New Orleans street.

Oswald was arrested for disturbing the peace. While in jail, he did not ask to see a lawyer but instead someone from the FBI. Despite being outside normal business hours, FBI Agent John Quigley arrived and spent more than an hour with Oswald, who commenced to detail his activities since arriving in New Orleans, almost as though he was making a report to superiors. Yet Oswald made no public mention of David Ferrie or his work at Ferrie’s cancer lab.

According to information gathered by Haslam, Oswald also was much more closely connected to his uncle, Charles Dutz Murret, and New Orleans crime lord Carlos Marcello than previously suspected.

But Haslam’s primary focus is on the strange and horrible death of Dr. Mary Sherman, whose charred body was found in her home in July 1964. She had been stabbed multiple times. Her body exhibited the effects of extreme scorching and heat, yet there was only superficial fire damage to her bed and home.

He also delves into Oswald’s work with Ferrie in the covert cancer lab and its fatal results. His research provides a plausible explanation for the caged white mice reported in Ferrie’s apartment, Oswald’s missing time at the Reily Coffee Company, and for the never fully understood trip to Clinton, LA, by Oswald, Ferrie and Shaw.

Readers of Haslam’s previous book, Mary, Ferrie & the Monkey Virus, will recall the author’s suspicion that Dr. Sherman’s death may have been the result of an accident involving a linear particle accelerator used in the cancer research. In this updated account, Haslam lays out strong evidence that just such a device was in use on the U.S. Public Health Service Hospital grounds near Tulane in the 1960s.

His previous work was embraced by the late Mary Ferrell, that indefatigable Dallas JFK assassination researcher. When asked her opinion of Haslam’s research, Mary replied, Based on what we know today, I think it’s totally accurate.

In this new volume, Haslam brings the one thing missing from his earlier work — a living witness.

The importance of this new testimony was summed up by consummate conspiracy debunker John McAdams, who stated, If Judyth Vary Baker is telling the truth, it will change the way we think about the Kennedy assassination.

Ed Haslam’s research may indeed change the way we think about the assassination, about Lee Harvey Oswald and about the greatest health scandal in history.

The tragic assassination of President John F. Kennedy may come to be seen as a mere bump in the road of a series of national scandals and conspiracies which have plagued the United States right up to today.

JIM MARRS, SPRING 2007

Introduction

2014 Edition

Fast Forward

One day I was doing a radio interview on the Louisiana Radio Network in Baton Rouge. Toward the end of the interview, host Jim Engster took some listener calls, and one caller asked an interesting question: Had I ever heard about the woman who was a neighbor of Dr. Mary Sherman in the Patio Apartments, and who had seen Lee Oswald there? Yes, I had, and recalled her name on the air: Victoria Hawes. He agreed.

I had read about Victoria Hawes in Farewell to Justice, a book by Joan Mellen about Jim Garrison’s investigation into the JFK assassination. Mellen had reported (p. 50) that in the summer of 1963, Victoria, 21, was a young stay-at-home mother living in the Patio Apartments when she heard a knock on her apartment door. As she approached the sliding glass door, she recognized the person on the other side of the clear barrier. It was a young man who had gone to Jr. High School with her older sister; his name was Lee Oswald, 23. Victoria opened the door and greeted Lee by name and reminded him that her sister had known him years before. Lee said that he was looking for Juan Valdez¹ and was wondering if he was at home. Victoria explained that Juan actually lived in the apartment next door. Lee listened, thanked Victoria, and then went on his way to find Juan’s apartment.

Then came a mind-boggling revelation: Victoria said that Lee Oswald visited Juan Valdez’s apartment upon numerous occasions that summer, and when he did, there was always a curious activity that she could hear coming from the apartment. The toilet was flushing over-and-over again, more than twenty times in a row. What was going on?

After I recapped the above information for the radio show’s audience, the caller said that he was related by marriage to Victoria Hawes’s ex-husband and that, if I was interested in talking to him, he would put me in touch. Eager to find out more about this curious tale of the flushing toilets, I accepted the offer.

Within days, I had spoken separately by phone to both Victoria Hawes and her ex-husband Owen Hawes. Both confirmed that they had been married and lived in the Patio Apartments in the summer of 1963, but they had moved out before Mary Sherman was murdered. Both knew Juan Valdez because they lived next door to him on the second floor. Juan’s apartment was closest to St. Charles Ave. on the downtown side of the courtyard. Since they lived next door, they had frequent casual contact with Juan, both adding that they had seen him talking to Mary Sherman on her balcony at the rear of the Patio on several occasions.

The bedroom of the Hawes’ apartment shared a common wall with Juan Valdez’s bathroom. This meant that the pipes for Juan’s bathroom were inside the wall of their bedroom, near the headboard of their bed. So every time Juan flushed the toilet, they could hear the water running through the pipes in the wall. Given this situation, they could not help but notice something unusual happening that summer. At night, they would hear Juan’s toilet flushing twenty to thirty times in a row, as if disposing of something. I asked if this happened on more than one occasion, and both confirmed it was a night-after-night occurrence for a month or so. Whatever was being flushed, there was a lot of it.

Since it was Victoria who knew Lee from earlier days and who was home all day, she was the one who noticed Lee coming and going from Juan’s apartment on a fairly regular basis. Since this was before the JFK assassination, Lee’s name conveyed no special importance to someone who did not already know him, and she did not mention his name to her husband Owen. A young married woman also might not want her often-absent husband to worry that she was regularly encountering a young man whom she knew previously.

Owen Hawes, however, had independently seen so many strange things involving Juan Valdez that his suspicions were raised to a remarkable level. Things like NOPD officers coming and going out of Juan’s apartment in the middle of the night, and Juan coming over to the Hawes’ apartment and asking to use their telephone so that he could call Cuba and Miami, and having packages delivered to their address, claiming that they contained orchids which might perish in the heat.²

It was a more innocent time, and we were more naive, Owen said to me in a somber moment of reflection. The net of all of this was that Owen’s concern over Juan Valdez’s behavior became so acute that he wrote a letter to the FBI to report that behavior as suspicious, suggesting that they investigate Valdez. According to Owen, the FBI ignored his warning, and the man who was helping Lee Oswald dispose of something under highly suspicious circumstances was not investigated. The question remains: What were they flushing down Juan Valdez’s toilet?

In Me and Lee,³ Judyth Vary Baker explains how she and Lee would kill mice in David Ferrie’s apartment, cut out the tumors, grind them up in a blender, put the puree into test tubes, and prep slides to be examined by microscope. Judyth would then transport these materials to Mary Sherman’s apartment for her review. By August, Dr. Alton Ochsner, who was directing their project, continuously ramped up the count of mice to be killed from 50 mice-per-day to 500 mice-per-day. Therefore, the quantity of biological material being brought to Mary Sherman’s apartment increased dramatically. It is my conclusion that the toilets were flushed in Juan Valdez’s apartment because Lee and Juan were disposing of the cancerous biological material from Mary Sherman’s apartment.

NOPD Detective suspects Juan Valdez in Sherman murder

Several years before my conversations with the Haweses, a man named Frank Hayward had called me at home. Frank was one of the NOPD homicide detectives who investigated the Mary Sherman murder. I had written about him in my first book. After reading it, he wanted to discuss the Mary Sherman murder with me. He was friendly and complimentary about my research, and said with a tinge of regret in his voice, In those days, we were not focused on forensics the way they are today. Back then, motive was more important.

Frank went on to add that he had solved 104 of the 107 homicide cases assigned to him by the NOPD. From this, I concluded that the real point of his phone call was to make sure that I knew he was a competent homicide investigator, and not some flake. He also reminded me that in 1963, before he became a detective, he was a patrolman working the Canal Street beat on foot, and that he and his partner had arrested Lee Harvey Oswald during a street incident on August 9th. Indeed, I later found Hayward’s name on Oswald’s arrest record.

Once Frank was comfortable talking to me, he finally confided that he had wanted to arrest Juan Valdez for Mary Sherman’s murder. There was just something about him that did not add up, Hayward said, but we did not have sufficient evidence to make the charge stick, and you can’t arrest someone on a hunch. Frank said that he was mystified by all of the phone calls that he got from a wide spectrum of law enforcement agencies (FBI, Justice Department, Louisiana State Police, etc.) who called him repeatedly to inquire about any progress investigating the Mary Sherman murder.

Frank had since passed away, but I remembered his comments about Valdez clearly. I mentioned these comments to Owen Hawes as we spoke, reminding him that it was Juan Valdez who said that he had smelled the smoke from Mary Sherman’s fire from a heating vent. Then Owen dropped his next bombshell: There was no central air in the Patio Apartments. Owen was an engineer experienced in building design and construction; he said that the Patio Apartments had only window units located on the outer wall, and no central system at all, not even for heating. I was getting the picture. Valdez’s apartment was the closest to St. Charles Ave. and Mary’s apartment was the farthest from St. Charles, and there were no central air ducts. Juan Valdez was, therefore, the least likely person in the complex to smell the smoke from Mary Sherman’s fire, unless he had been roaming around the courtyard of the Patio Apartments at 4:00 a.m for some reason. Maybe Juan Valdez knew more about what happened to Mary Sherman than he admitted.

Owen Hawes then said that his own name was mentioned in the police report about the burglary of Mary Sherman’s apartment that happened months before her murder. Owen was concerned that the report falsely stated that Owen had noticed Sherman’s apartment door ajar and had contacted Mary’s friend Carolyn Talley about it. Owen had done neither of these things, and suspected that Juan Valdez had used his name when questioned by the police.

I was aware of the burglary, but had not been able to pin a date on it. The newspapers said it was six months earlier than her July murder, which would have placed it in January 1964. I asked Owen how he knew his name was in the Burglary Report, and he told me that he had a copy of the document. He offered to send it to me, and I accepted. What I found astounded me! Had I realized the importance of this document, I would have been looking for it vigorously. But I didn’t; I was lucky. It was handed to me because of our conversation about Juan Valdez. The date of the burglary thundered at me: August 31, 1963. It was a date that I knew well.

August 31, 1963:

Lee drives Judyth to Jackson; Mary Flies to London.

Judyth Vary Baker was the young cancer researcher whose specialized skills were needed to weaponize cancer for a bio-weapon, and she was the one who transported the product of their cancer research to Mary Sherman’s apartment for her review. I had extracted what facts I could about Judyth’s story from her ill-fated 2006 book called Lee Harvey Oswald: The True Story of the Accused Assassin of President John F. Kennedy by his Lover, which was withdrawn after only 85 copies were printed. But even then, this August 31, 1963 date meant nothing to me. It was only after my publisher acquired the rights to Judyth’s memoir and asked me to build a timeline for the second draft that I started paying closer attention to the dates.

Today, that book is known as Me & Lee: How I came to know, love, and lose Lee Harvey Oswald by Judyth Vary Baker. I think it is an extremely important book. One of its great accomplishments is that it nails both the dates and the purposes of Oswald’s often overlooked trips to Clinton and Jackson, Louisiana. The first date in this constellation is August 28, 1963, the date that Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King gave his I have a dream speech in Washington, D.C. during the Civil Rights March. Because of this, CORE (the Congress on Racial Equality, a national organization based out of the University of Chicago) had planned voter-registration drives for blacks all across the country, especially in the South, for the following day, August 29, 1963. Highly segregated Clinton, Louisiana was one of those sites targeted by the CORE office in Baton Rouge.⁴

After a summer of killing mice and monkeys with their cancerous cocktail, it was time to test the concoction on a human. Thursday, August 29th was selected as the date, and Clay Shaw drove David Ferrie, Lee Oswald and the bio-weapon to Jackson, Louisiana. There they would need to get past the guards and fences surrounding the East Louisiana State Mental Hospital (a facility for the criminally insane) to inject the bio-weapon into specially selected volunteer prisoners. The logistical problem was that the prisoner(s) who were to be injected were still in nearby Angola Penitentiary and needed to be transferred to the hospital in Jackson for that purpose. Jackson, Louisiana (not to be confused with Jackson, Mississippi) is a tiny town where a black Cadillac might attract unwanted attention to the men transporting the bio-weapon.

Clinton, Louisiana, however, was just down the road from Jackson and was a slightly larger town with a courthouse where cars like black Cadillacs were frequently parked by lawyers, judges and politicians. It was here that Clay Shaw planned to wait for a phone call that said the prisoner had left Angola and was en route to the hospital in Jackson.⁵ Once the prisoner had left, Shaw would proceed to Jackson to rendezvous with the van from Angola so that he could follow it onto the mental hospital grounds, as if his black Cadillac was part of the official convoy from Angola.

What Shaw and company expected to find in Clinton that day was an empty square in front of a small-town courthouse on a hot August afternoon. What they encountered, however, was a crowded square with a bunch of angry whites watching an unwanted black-voter registration drive, with the town’s marshal surveying the scene. So, instead of waiting quietly in the center of a lazy small town in rural Louisiana on a hot August afternoon, they had driven into the center of a hotbed of civil rights activity with everyone watching, as will be discussed in more detail.

Finally, the pay phone rang. Shaw got his call, and the black Cadillac headed to the hospital in Jackson where someone (presumably Ferrie) injected the prisoner(s) with the cancer weapon. Once that was done, Shaw’s team started the long drive back to New Orleans.⁶ Their work in Jackson was finished for the moment, but it would be two days before anyone would be able to tell if the bio-weapon had worked. To find out, a blood test would need to be done 48 hours later. And not just any blood test: a blood titration test. These were exotic tests that only a few people in the country even knew how to perform ... one of these people was Judyth Vary Baker.

Two days later, at 11:00 a.m. on August 31, 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald began driving Judyth Vary Baker from New Orleans to Jackson, Louisiana,⁷ so Judyth could perform the blood tests on the prisoner(s) to confirm that the cancer cocktail had kicked in.⁸ It had. At the end of the day, Lee dropped Judyth off at her house at 1032 Marengo Street at 10:00 p.m. This was the end of Judyth’s involvement with the project, which had proven itself by this time.

The Burglary of Mary Sherman’s Apartment

That same night, around 11:00 p.m., someone pried open the sliding glass door to Mary Sherman’s apartment.⁹ But Mary was not there. Earlier that day, she had flown to London, where she was to stay for a month.¹⁰ The burglar(s) removed thousands of dollars of property from her apartment.

What is clear from reading Me & Lee is that by the end of August 1963, the development phase of the bio-weapon was over. All that remained was to test it on humans, and that involved the 48-hour blood tests that Judyth needed to perform. Before Judyth even tested the patient’s blood for cancer, Mary was headed out of the country. And by the time the day was over, the evidence that might have connected Mary to the project was stolen from her apartment. So what was stolen from Mary’s apartment? And why?

The NOPD made a list of the items stolen, but I don’t have that detailed list. The attached list of stolen property was filed separately.¹¹ What I do have is Type and value of property stolen or recovered:

Currency and Negotiable $ 35.00 Jewelry and Precious Metals $ 350.00 Furs $ 350.00 Miscellaneous $ 1,760.00 Total $ 2,495.00

These are 1963 dollars. In current value over $12,000 of Miscellaneous items had been stolen! That’s 71% of the total! How unusual! In an effort to make sense out of this, I contacted Judyth Vary Baker, who had been in Mary’s apartment in 1963, and I asked her what had she seen in Mary’s apartment that could have been worth that much money. Judyth sent me back a list of laboratory equipment, including an expensive oil-immersion microscope and a rotating wheel that held test tubes, with their current prices that added up to $12,000. I think it is safe to say that Mary’s medical equipment was the target of the burglary.

All of Mary’s medical equipment had been removed from her apartment. A heavyset Cuban-looking man had been seen near the scene. The net effect was that evidence connecting Mary Sherman to the bio-weapon plot had been sanitized. Neither Judyth nor Mary could expose Dr. Ochsner’s involvement without the evidence, and the evidence was now gone.¹²

Edward T. Haslam, Spring 2014

1. Valdez is also spelled Valdes and Valadez in various documents.

2. This detail of Juan Valdez using Victoria Hawes’s address for deliveries might explain why Lee knocked on her door looking for Valdez. In Me & Lee, Judyth Vary Baker discusses Lee rifling through people’s mail looking for information.

3. Baker, Judyth Vary, Me & Lee: How I came to know, love, and lose Lee Harvey Oswald (Walterville, OR: TrineDay, 2010).

4. The date of the Clinton incident has been argued about for years, but the obvious question was never asked. Did the African-American voter registration drive intentionally follow up the next day on Dr. Martin Luther King’s I have a dream speech. An obvious means of resolving the matter would have been to ask CORE (the Congress On Racial Equality) in Baton Rouge for the date of their voter registration drive in Clinton, Louisiana. In 2011, I figured out that Rev. Ben Cox had been head of CORE in Baton Rouge in 1963. I found his address in Jackson, TN, and sent him a letter. His wife told me that he had recently passed away. An obvious source for obtaining important information had been neglected for years. I was too late.

5. Without cell phones in 1963, they waited near a pay phone.

6. Jackson and Clinton are 3 to 4 hours from New Orleans. There and back is 7 to 8 hours of driving, not to mention the time needed to conduct their business there. Going there was an all-day affair.

7. Lee said he had something to do earlier in the morning, necessitating their rather late starting time. Might that something else have been driving Mary Sherman to the airport?

8. Details of this can be found in Judyth’s book Me & Lee.

9. NOPD, Report of Burglary Offenses, Item # I-13812-63, dated 9-27-63.

10. This is why the Burglary Report is dated almost one month after the actual burglary.

11. Here are the NOPD file numbers for the items stolen from Mary Sherman’s apartment: B-11098-55, J(or O)-3372-55, and B-3588-56.

12. The day before, August 30, 1963, Judyth had written a protest to Dr. Alton Ochsner, Sr. claiming that exposing people to lethal substances without their consent was unethical. See Me & Lee. The result was that Ochsner became furious and banished Judyth from medicine. Ochsner knew the type of trouble that a public exposure of their experiments would cause. He may have been the person who arranged for Mary’s apartment to be burglarized in order to destroy the evidence.

PROLOGUE

The Warning

ON ONE LEVEL THIS BOOK is a cold-case investigation into the 1964 murder of Dr. Mary Sherman in New Orleans — a murder which remains unsolved and is remembered as one of the most mysterious ever committed in a city that has known so much mystery and so many murders. But there is more to this story than murder and mystery.

Understanding the death of this one woman unravels much of our nation’s secret history. It illuminates the darkness. It connects great medical disasters of our time to important political events of the day. It unveils the contamination of hundreds of millions of doses of the polio vaccine with dozens of monkey viruses. It spotlights the epidemic of soft tissue cancers that swept our country. And it exposes dangerous secret experiments which used radiation to mutate cancer-causing monkey viruses. It connects leaders of American medicine to the accused assassin of the President of the United States. This one murder helps us understand why we have been lied to with such conviction for so many years — and why those lies are likely to continue.

But this is not a murder mystery: fascinating perhaps, but hardly entertainment. For me, writing this book was difficult, stressful and dangerous. What began as an investigation into this single murder morphed into consideration of