Zapruder’s Stepchildren:
The Most Fascinating People in J.F.K. Assassination Lore
by Paul Fecteau
The following material was written and posted in December of 2005. For updates and more fascinating people visit the Yahoo Group Zapruder’s Stepchildren.
Contents:
Shirley Martin
Karyn Kupcinet
Richard Randolph Carr
James Tague
Dr. George Bakeman
Introduction: The Landscape of Conspiracy
When I was in the sixth grade, I picked up my Aunt Laurel’s copy of Six Seconds in Dallas. Thirty-odd years later, I have yet to close the book, so to speak.
The motivation for my ongoing interest, and for that of researchers who have put in a lot more hours than I have, comes of high stakes: If our government played a role in the murder of the President, we do not live in a democracy.
Before my encounter with Dr. Thompson’s book, I believed that, in fact, I lived in the best of all possible democracies and believed so with a fervor possible only in young boys and devotees of the Fox News Channel. The notion of a conspiracy in Dallas challenged my worldview, as did my Aunt Laurel who listened to the Beatles which pretty much made her a hippie in the eyes of the rest of the family.
A second reason I began reading about the assassination that day and am still doing so has to do with the irresistible lure of the conspiracy landscape.
The unknown was not a concept I associated with history, yet it popped up at every turn in Thompson’s book. In deed, he even included a list of “Unanswered Questions.” I found particularly compelling Unanswered Question 1: Who was the “umbrella man”? I would go on to discover the study of the assassination populated by many such mystery figures--"the babushka lady” and “badge man.” This lexicon eventually filtered into pop culture through shows like The X-Files.
As the years go by, however, I find myself more interested in people who have names.
The stories of every-day Dallas citizens caught up in the controversy captivate me. I am fascinated by “amateur” researchers who turn their garages into archives. These people, far flung, many of their stories tragic, are the subject of this writing.
On November 22, Abraham Zapruder made a special trip back home to get his 8-mm home movie camera, and his family still feels the windfall. For many others, a place in history has not been so lucrative. The entries that follow are not meant as compensation for such inequity, but they do serve as a tip of the cap to these individuals whose stories have so interested me.
Sources:
Thompson, Josiah. Six Seconds in Dallas: A Micro-Study of the Kennedy Assassination. New York: Random House, 1967.
Shirley Martin
If you have an interest in the assassination of President Kennedy, Vincent Bugliosi has a warning for you. The famed prosecutor whose book on the assassination is six years overdue said in a recent TV documentary that study of the assassination will hijack your life. Perhaps his comments can be dismissed as a product of his antipathy toward conspiracy theories--he would prefer people leave the topic alone in favor of the government’s original official explanation (i.e. that of the Warren Commission, not the HSCA’s findings). On the other hand, cautionary comments about obsession come from conspiracy theorists as well as lone nutters. In a documentary included among the DVD special features on Stone’s J.F.K., Wallace Milam remarks, “There is probably something inherently unhealthy psychologically about knowing more about a day twenty-eight years ago than you know about yesterday.”
In February of 1964, a young Oklahoma housewife loaded up her four children and the family dog and drove to Dallas. After tracing Oswald’s alleged escape route, she began tracking down and talking to witnesses, eventually sharing tape recordings of her interviews with other researchers. Shirley Martin was a first-generation Buff.
Calvin Trillin’s 1967 New Yorker piece, “The Buffs,” portrays Martin as an idealist with rolled-up sleeves. She admits, “I’m deeply disturbed when I see something done an injustice to--Lee Harvey Oswald, a little dog, children in Vietnam , it doesn’t make any difference.” She adored the President who had been killed and worried about what she saw as the nation’s dangerous rightward slide. Instead of mourning and fretting, she went to work. When last we see her in Trillin’s article, she and her husband have adopted an infant Native American boy, and Martin occupies her time helping a charity that brings napalm-burned Vietnamese children to the U.S. for medical treatment.
Some sources, however, indicate she did not escape the labyrinth of assassination study unscathed. In Thomas Mallon’s book on Ruth Paine, Martin comes across as a sympathetic but tragic figure. Mallon reports that Martin continues to research the assassination--daily--despite the fact that it contributed to the break-up of her marriage. A chilling image of obsession-gone-paranoia turns up when Ruth Paine reflects on Martin: “I think her life came apart [. . .] her daughter was struck as a pedestrian and killed, and I think she thought it was part of the plot” (p. 125).
Paine’s account may or may not be accurate. In 2004, a woman named Teresa Smith posted to John Simkin’s assassination forum identifying herself as Shirley Martin’s daughter. She included no mention of family tragedies; in fact, she offered the good news that her “mother is living and reasonably well.”
It would be great to get the real story from Martin herself. Smith reports, however, that her mother remains “wary of the anti-critics (after bad experiences with the likes of Larry Schiller etc).” She refers to Schiller and Richard Warren Lewis’s 1967 paperback The Scavengers and Critics of the Warren Commission which ridiculed the Buffs. Martin’s attitude is entirely warranted as the tone of that work survives in writers like Gerald Posner who refers to the Buffs as “amateur sleuths [ . . .] many of whom were [Gasp!] admitted leftists” (p. 410).
Thus, it would seem that not only the risk of obsession faces you as a would-be researcher, but you have to be prepared to be either dismissed or treated condescendingly--I’m not sure which is worse. Bugliosi didn’t warn us about either.
Sources:
“Beyond J.F.K.: The Question of Conspiracy.” J.F.K.: Director’s Cut Two-Disc Special Edition. Warner Brothers, 1991.
“J.F.K.: Beyond the Magic Bullet.” The Discovery Channel, 2003.
Mallon, Thomas. Mrs. Paine’s Garage and the Murder of John F. Kennedy. New York: Pantheon, 2002.
Posner, Gerald. Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK. New York: Random House, 1993.
Smith Teresa. Online Posting. The Education Forum. <http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=692>
Trillin, Calvin. “The Buffs.” The New Yorker June 1967: 41 -71. < http://karws.gso.uri.edu/JFK/the_critics/The_Buffs--Trillin.html>.
The material above was written and posted in December of 2005. For updates and more fascinating people visit the Yahoo Group Zapruder’s Stepchildren.
Karyn Kupcinet
Two men occupy a booth at the Pacific Dining Car in L.A. The younger one appears gaunt and steely-eyed behind reading glasses. The older man has graying hair, a gray mustache, and a weariness that also somehow seems gray. The two men talk of murder. They glance about the restaurant occasionally as if expecting someone.
The scene better written might open a James Ellroy hardboiled crime novel. In fact, the bespectacled man is Ellroy himself, and his guest is retired Sheriff’s Homicide Sergeant Bill Stoner. The third party who arrives does not fit so well with the rough-edged atmosphere.
Kari Kupcinet, a pretty actress in her twenties, greets them with an ebullient burst of gratitude. Her conversation continues with a contagious energy marked by heartfelt peaks and valleys. She talks of murder.
Stoner opens a file . . . .
In 1961, Karyn Kupcinet was a pretty actress in her twenties. She had left her famous family in Chicago and moved to Los Angeles. She had guest starred on several T.V. shows, including Perry Mason, and appeared in a Jerry Lewis film called The Ladies Man. She had a promising future.
Some might label her situation typical for a young and beautiful actress: she was talented and all screwed up. She was also, however, smart enough to sense the menace in the Hollywood merry-go-round. Unfortunately, she did not get off in time.
At least that’s the portrait of her offered in James Ellroy’s 1998 article “Glamour Jungle.” He doesn’t mention the theories about the connection between Karyn Kupcinet’s murder and President Kennedy’s assassination. He need not. Her story, particularly told in such fearless prose, stands on its own.
In present context, of course, the J.F.K. link must be addressed: Karyn Kupcinet leads off the list of so-called “mystery deaths” befalling those who may have had information about a conspiracy. Her place there evidently originated with pioneering conspiracy theorist Penn Jones, Jr., and a wire story about a bizarre phone call.
A telephone operator reported that twenty minutes before the assassination, an agitated female, probably coming through due to a crossed circuit, foretold that the President would be killed. The signal came from fifty miles north of Los Angeles. Eight days later, friends found Karyn Kupcinet dead, and the coroner ruled murder by strangulation.
Jones connected the dots. He drew a line from the origin of the mysterious phone call to the apartment where the young actress was slain. He made the connection because of their fifty-mile proximity. Jones drew another line from Karyn to her father.
Mention the name “Kup” to a native Chicagoan and expect to get an earful of tales from the city’s golden era. Irv Kupcinet earned the nickname “Mr. Chicago” as he penned “Kup’s Column” for the Chicago Sun-Times, hosted talk shows on local T.V., and announced Bears games. His career stretched back into the 30’s and into every aspect of the city’s culture. He gained the admiration and trust of people on the streets, in the penthouses, and in City Hall. The Chicago mob overlapped all three spheres, and Kup didn’t discriminate. “He treated them in his usual manner,” notes Carol Felsenthal, “a ‘Hi, buddy,’ a slap on the back, and an expectation that they, like anyone else, would be a source of tips [for Kup’s Column]” (p. 5). It is, then, obvious--and perhaps unremarkable--that Kup knew Jack Ruby.
Jones and later conspiracy theorists suggest that Karyn learned of the impending assassination from her father. She made the phone call in a desperate attempt to save the President. The mob silenced her.
John McAdams has a write-up on his Kennedy Assassination Home Page that offers a compelling critique of this scenario. Despite sober correctives like McAdams’s and the sheer level of conjecture involved in connecting her murder to the assassination, Karyn Kupcinet’s name continues to appear atop the list of suspicious deaths printed in books and scrolled on documentaries.
Some researchers who do not think she made the phone call still wonder if the actress was murdered to send a message to her father. A ‘blogger known as “Witness” reports that Irv Kupcinet contacted Chicago gangster “Red” Dorfman and asked a few too many questions about Ruby shooting Oswald. The murder of his daughter would ultimately dissuade Kup from any further investigation.
Another wrinkle rolls Karyn into the scandal surrounding L.B.J. aide Bobby Baker by tying her to Mary Jo Kopechne based on the claim that the two women attended Wellesley together. They did not. Karyn did attend Pine Manor Junior College, then in Wellesley, Massachusetts, and would later pad her resume with references to Wellesley, but it is unclear if she ever met Kopechne.
Irv Kupcinet would not be happy with the way his daughter’s name continues to circulate in such contexts. When on the heels of Stone’s J.F.K.The Today Show did a segment on the mystery deaths and listed Karyn as the first, Kup used his column to excoriate them.
His granddaughter Kari does not feel that kind of pain when she hears her aunt mentioned as part of a Kennedy conspiracy cover-up. She tends to laugh. Above all, she is glad that Karyn’s murder has not been forgotten, for she has nursed over the years a sense of deep connection to her aunt. Karyn’s ghost, one can tell, is never far from Kari.
Kari grew up in L.A., always wanted to be an actress, and heard constantly from her grandmother Essee, “You’re just like Cookie.” Cookie was the family’s nickname for Karyn.
Despite these parallels, Kari did not begin chasing her aunt’s ghost until she turned 17 and stumbled upon the Film Academy’s Karyn Kupcinet file. She wound up in Chicago where her grandparents turned her loose with the twelve boxes of their daughter’s belongings they kept.
Kari saw obvious parallels between herself and her aunt. These continued to grow as she took a role in 1991 on The Young and the Restless and found herself in the same shallow Hollywood milieu that had driven her aunt to despair. As Ellroy puts it, “She caught the psychic-twin bit full-on [. . .] She got stone fucking obsessed” (p. 90).
Kari’s story, however, has a happy ending because she learned from Karyn’s. Based upon the misery she found in her aunt’s diaries, Kari made changes in her own life. Again in Ellroy’s words, “She put down her bad L.A. habits” (p. 92).
She has, in fact, gone on to become a successful business woman in Chicago. Her latest venture is a lingerie and erotica store just for women called G Boutique. (Yes, they have a Web site: http://www.boutiqueg.com/).
Reflecting today on Karyn’s role in her life, Kari admits, “I was completely obsessed for a long time, but not nuts, just younger then.” Although she has made her peace with Karyn’s ghost, her nights are still occasionally troubled by the unanswered question of what befell the beloved aunt whom fate never let her meet.
The mystery explains her entrance into the Pacific Dining Car to meet with a veteran detective and famous writer. The two offer her the chance to review her aunt’s cold case file. Kari jumps at it.
She learns that Ellroy and several cops who worked the case thought Karyn had not been murdered but that her death resulted from an overdose of prescription pills. The finding that she was strangled came from a coroner with a dubious reputation. A rumor, which he denies, has him joking with a colleague during a subsequent autopsy, “At least I didn’t break the hyoid bone on this one!” (qtd. p. 92).
Kari does not agree with Ellroy’s view. Her suspicions fall on one of the case’s original suspects who is still alive. She also expresses mixed feelings about the tone of Ellroy’s “Glamour Jungle.”
Even so, she remains deeply grateful to James Ellroy for helping her research the case and for the way his interest in it keeps Karyn in the public eye. “I believe he really cares,” she concludes.
Sources:
Ellroy, James. “Glamour Jungle.” Crime Wave. New York: Vintage, 1999.
Felsenthal, Carol. “The Lost World of Kup.” Chicago Magazine June 2004. <http://carolfelsenthal.com/PDFs/TheLostWorldofKup.pdf>.
Kupcinet, Kari. Telephone Interview. 2 January 2006.
McAdams, John. “Dead in the Wake of the Kennedy Assassination: Hollywood Homicide.” Accessed 17 December 2005 <http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/kupcinet.htm>.
Witness. “Karyn Kupcinet and the Bobby Baker Scandal.” Posted 11 Dec. 2005 <http://thecloakofdarkness.blogspot.com/>.
For updates and more fascinating people visit the Yahoo Group Zapruder’s Stepchildren.
Richard Randolph Carr
Was this WWII combat vet and steelworker too tough for the conspirators to take out? He told Cover-Up author J. Gary Shaw how he survived numerous attempts on his life after seeing what he saw in Dealey Plaza.
On the day of the President’s visit to Dallas, construction continued on the new courthouse at the corner of Commerce and Houston. The workers could see the motorcade pass by on their lunch break. One of them was Richard Carr.
He and a pipefitter were on the seventh floor when Carr happened to glance across the plaza and notice a white man standing on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository looking out the third westward window. The guy looked fat, wore a hat and tan sports coat, and had horn-rimmed glasses. Carr assumed the man was a secret service agent.
As the President passed below, Carr, a former Army Ranger, recognized the sound of gunfire. He heard a report that he took to be small arms fire but could not tell where it came from. Seconds later he heard three rifle shots that he thought came from behind the picket fence down Houston Street. He saw bystanders diving to the ground on the Grassy Knoll, further confirming his conclusion about the origin of the shots.
After the President’s limousine had disappeared under the Triple Overpass, Carr noticed three men running from the Book Depository to a Rambler station wagon which was parked facing the wrong way in front of the building. They jumped in so quickly that the car sped away with one door still open.
Carr next spotted the fat man he had seen in the sixth floor window walking hurriedly towards him up Houston Street. The man kept looking nervously back over his shoulder.
Carr reported all this and was visited at his home by two F.B.I. agents. They didn’t seem interested in his description of the fat man. Finally one of them told him, “If you didn’t see Lee Harvey Oswald in the Book Depository, you didn’t witness anything.”
This encounter would not be his last with the authorities. Unfortunately, for the next they brought along a search warrant. A team of Dallas P.D. detectives and officers rifled through Carr’s house for stolen goods and arrested him and his son. When he returned home, the threatening phone calls started. Mostly they said get out of town. He did.
One morning in Montana, where Carr had relocated his family, he discovered three sticks of dynamite wired to the ignition of his car.
Jim Garrison got wind of Carr’s story and sought out his appearance in the Clay Shaw trial. Despite being wheelchair bound at the time from a construction accident, Carr agreed to travel to New Orleans. Fifteen days before the trip, however, someone took a shot at Carr on his front porch. Undeterred, he testified.
Carr wound up living in Atlanta, and his troubles continued. Two knife-wielding men attacked him, and in the scuffle he was stabbed in the back and in the arm. After all he had been through, Carr was just the man to bring a gun to knife fight. He opened fire and killed one of his assailants. A grand jury refused to indict him.
Carr had some peace for awhile, but when the H.S.C.A. got rolling in 1975, the threatening phone calls started again.
This sketchy history obviously needs details to be both credible and truly compelling. One might ask, above all, the identity of the attacker slain by Carr.
Of course, I wouldn’t be surprised if a tough old boy like Carr is still out there somewhere. I won’t bother trying to call him, though. J. Gary Shaw tells us that Carr no longer answers his phone. Who can blame him?
Sources:
Carr, Richard Randolph. Testimony, State v. Shaw. 19 Feb. 1969. <http://www.jfk-online.com/carrshaw.html>.
Shaw, J. Gary with Larry Ray Harris. Cover Up. Self-Published, 1976.
For updates and more fascinating people visit the Yahoo Group Zapruder’s Stepchildren.
James Tague
Mr. Tague subtitled his book on the assassination A Survivor’s Story but not for the obvious reason. He was, in deed, the only bystander in Dealey Plaza to be injured by the shooting, and like the Governor he survived. Tague’s wound, however, amounted to a small scratch on his cheek made by cement debris thrown when an errant shot struck the curb where he stood. The true wounding of James Tague came as 1964 wore on, and he realized that the F.B.I. was hiding the missed shot from the public and from the Warren Commission. Tague, an Air Force vet, had his trust in the government permanently shaken. His response was not despair but action. What survives in his writing of Truth Withheld: A Survivor’s Story is a citizen’s commitment to democracy.
In his book, Tague relates how he came forward, forcing the F.B.I. and the Commission to acknowledge the missed shot. Unfortunately, this accomplishment hardly assured that the truth about the assassination would be known, for the Commission’s response was the development of the single-bullet theory, and so the story does not end in ’64.
Buttressed by friendships with researchers Mary Ferrell and Harold Weisberg, Tague began to collect books on the assassination. In 1997 during a visit to the National Archives, Tague discovered more details about the mishandling of evidence of the wild shot. His study of the assassination also progressed beyond information related to his own involvement in the case.
In fact, Tague’s book offers a concise overview of the entire assassination, one of the better ones available. His decision not to limit the book to his personal experience might have seemed daunting, but Tague sounds nonplussed by the approach. “The book was easy to write,” he says, “as all I had to do was write down the truth as I knew it.”
Tague still fears, however, that facts are being obscured. Truth Withheld mentions how Gerald Posner misquoted him, and Tague heard first hand about Posner’s selective use of Weisberg’s famed document archive. Despite this, Tague has been shocked to hear reputable experts like Michael Baden “cite Posner as the gospel.” A new book, tentatively titled James T. Tague’s Notes on the Kennedy Assassination, will serve as a corrective to the misinformation. For updates on its availability, check his Web site: http://www.jamestague.com/
Sources:
Tague, James T. Personal E-mail. 4 January 2006 .
---. Truth Withheld: A Survivor’s Story. Dallas : Excel Digital Press, 2003.
Dr. George Bakeman
F.B.I. Special Agents Francis X. O’Neill, Jr., and James W. Sibert attended the autopsy of President Kennedy and filed a report. In it, they list the names of all others present, the bulk of whom waited in adjoining room during the procedure. Following the list of employees from Gawler’s Funeral Home who would eventually prepare the body for burial, the report notes,
Brigidier (sic) General GODFREY McHUGH, Air Force Military Aide to the President, was also present, as was Dr. GEORGE BAKEMAN, U. S. Navy.
General McHugh was in the middle of a distinguished career that would leave him with a list of decorations a mile long. Dr. Bakeman, not so much. In fact, George’s career was so undistinguished that no record of him exists.
In the 1978, the House Select Committee on Assassinations attempted to contact all of those who witnessed the autopsy. With regard to Dr. Bakeman, Volume 7 of the proceedings notes, “The committee could not locate this person.”
Could this mystery come of a simple mistake by O’Neill and Sibert? Could Dr. Bakeman be a spook?
Regardless, the “disappearing doctor” has become my favorite mysterious assassination figure, replacing the “umbrella man” who identified himself as Louis Steven Witt in 1978, explaining that he hadn’t realized anyone was looking for him all those years.
Are you out there, George?
For updates and more fascinating people visit the Yahoo Group Zapruder’s Stepchildren.
Copyright 2005/6 Paul Dee Fecteau