New Orleans Grand Jury Transcripts Digitalized

 New Orleans Grand Jury Transcripts Digitalized 

One of the main problems in JFK research today is the fact that there is no legal venue to take new evidence or witness testimony, except the court of public opinion, as the Landis episode shows. I made a COPA Conference presentation in Dallas over a decade ago calling for the empanelment of a JFK Grand Jury that would be able to receive evidence and witnesses, as a Grand Jury is the first stop before a murder trial, and the only Grand Jury established for the JFK assassination was empaneled by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison and it did take some amazing testimony. 

So amazing in fact that Garrison's successor Harry Connick, Sr. ordered the transcripts destroyed. 

I awarded the first JFK Elizabeth Ray Award for Historic Preservation to Gary Raymond, for preserving the NO Grand Jury transcripts, and to Andrews Air Force Base janitor Charles Chuck Holmes for salvaging the Andrews Log for 11/22/63, finding it in the trash and to both men for turning over what they saved to the Assassinations Records Review Board (ARRB). 

Elizabeth Ray was the custodian of the Walt Whitman House in Camden, N.J., my hometown, when the race riots of the late 60s and 70s engulfed the city. During such nights of rioting, Ray stood in front of the house she cared for and swung a broomstick at any rioter who came near her, thus preserving the Whitman House and a few nearby buildings that now stand out in a neighborhood of vacant lots. So I named the historic preservation award after her. 

Grand Jury records are normally routinely destroyed after they either indict someone or refuse to indict someone, or the prosecutor refuses to indict, but the New Orleans Grand Jury records are most certainly historic JFK assassination records that the man Harry Conack, Sr. ordered to destroy them instead preserved them. He turned them over to a media friend Richard Angelico, who arranged for them to be given to the ARRB, who refused Connock's order to return them to be destroyed. 

We all know what happened, as David Ferrie and Guy Banister died, and only Clay Shaw was left standing when Garrison got around to indictments, and he was found not-guilty by a jury. But the Grand Jury records include many witnesses that were not called to testify at the trial, and the transcripts of their testimony is extremely important. 

When the ARRB passed on these records to the National Archives and released to the public, the Assassination Archives and Research Center (AARC) made scanned PDF copies of each page, and some testimony ran into the hundreds of pages, and they are posted on line. But you have to click each page to continue reading and it gets tiresome, but now Michael Capass from JFKAssassinationBoards.net  [ Home | JFK Boards ] has digitalized 48 of the transcripts so they can be read more easily read. 

[  Index of Grand Jury Transcripts | JFK Boards ]

While there are a lot of big names here - Dean Andrews, Layton Martins, Perry Russo, Mark Lane, Harold Weisberg, William Turner, Kerry Thornley, Marina Oswald, Ruth Paine, Lee Crisman, et al., that people will be interested in what they had to say, one name stands out for me - Thomas Beckham. 

Now that's not a familiar name to most JFK assassination buffs, but Beckham was a former Marine who had a bolt action rifle he liked to cold cock and shoot without bullets, and as an associate of Guy Bannister he was in on the Houma Bunker raid. That raid to obtain arms, explosives and ammunition from a bunker on the former Houma Navy base, is portrayed in Oliver Stone's JFK movie. 

It included  David Ferrie, Sergio Aracha Smith, Gordon Novel, Novel's beauty queen wife, Thomas Beckham and a few Cubans, who used a laundry truck supplied by one of the Cubans that some say can be seen in photos of Dealey Plaza at the time of the assassination. It was the Houma Bunker raid that convinced me that these Big Easy Bozos did not pull off the clean and precise military style ambush at Dealey Plaza. 

Who takes their wife along on a mission? Novel did. And Beckham, on the ride back to Bannister's office, where they stashed the goods, threw lit sticks of dynamite out the window, thinking that was funny. 

But Beckham caught my attention when Garrison reported that he had a pass to get on a Strategic Air Command (SAC) Air Force base, that he explained away by saying he obtained it from his business partner, a Colonel Lowry. 

When he testified before the Grand Jury - he also testified before the HSCA, Beckham was asked about the pass and said it was for "Alford, AFB," though that must have been a typing-spelling mistake because there is no Alford AFB. I believe he was referring to Olffutt AF base in Nebraska. 

But its hard to believe Col. Lowry would give Beckham a pass to a base in Nebraska when he was in Louisiana. Was there a SAC base near New Orleans in 1963? Or was it Barksdale, La., where the head of the New Orleans Secret Service office was at the time of the assassination? 

Lowry, Beckham explained, tried to help him by becoming a partner in a used Thrift Shop, though that didn't explain why he had to go on to the base. 

At one point the Grand Jury almost became a runaway grand jury when the jurors themselves began to ask the witness questions, but when Garrison's lawyer asked Beckham about Colonel Lowry, all he said was Lowry was "the operations officer of the planning division of SAC," and pilot of Silver Dollar-Looking Glass - a command and control plane.

When pressed for details, Beckham said that "it's a long story," and the lawyer questioning him said, never mind.. 

But it is important, as the Silver Dollar-Looking Glass Command and Control Plane was over Dallas at the very time of the assassination - as is demonstrated in this article by Larry Haapanen and Alan Rogers. 

[ Kennedy Assassination Chronicles, Volume 8, Issue 2 ]

In any case, Beckham is only one example, the guy I want to know more about and he's in these New Orleans Grand Jury transcripts, and we have Michael Capass to thank for digitalizing them and making them more easy to read. 

And it's a shame we don't have an active Grand Jury today where witnesses and evidence can be presented, especially in regards to the destruction and theft of records from the Archives. 

To comment on this story: Billkelly3@gmail.com