Accused JFK assassin’s pilot hid from police at SLU
This week marks the 59th anniversary of the Kennedy Assassination. Whether a lone nut, innocent patsy, or co-conspirator, Lee Harvey Oswald and his connections to southeast Louisiana in the summer of 1963 are fascinating.
Earlier this month, Covington’s English Tea Room invited me to speak to a small group concerning Carnal Knowledge, my upcoming book detailing those connections, and others throughout the state. That group discussion got me thinking I should share some of that information in this column.
On March 1, 1967, New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison arrested and charged Kentwood-born, Hammond-native Clay Shaw with conspiring to assassinate President John F. Kennedy. According to Garrison, Shaw worked closely with accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald and David Ferrie, a former Eastern Airlines pilot and self-proclaimed private investigator.
As the first shots struck President Kennedy on November 22, 1963, David Ferrie sat in a New Orleans courtroom. Next to him sat the defendant, his employer, a Jefferson Parish business owner named Carlos Marcello.
After Marcello’s acquittal, Ferrie picked up two teenagers and drove to Texas. While his friends ice-skated, Ferrie stood at the rink payphone, making and answering calls avoiding the long-distance tolls he would have paid in New Orleans. Instead, Ferrie told the FBI the calls were to potential investors in a business venture. He planned to open his own ice-skating rink in New Orleans.
Ferrie told investigators from the New Orleans District Attorney’s Office the trip was a hunting expedition. He said the trio was “hunting wild geese.”
In 2007, Alvin Beauboeuf, one of Ferrie’s traveling companions that day, told a New Orleans magazine reporter that Ferrie made the trip and phone calls for Carlos Marcello. Beauboeuf said he did not know whom Ferrie called or why, but he believed the calls had nothing to do with the assassination of the president.
In 1963, Ferrie explained to the FBI what happened after he left the skating rink. He said that following the trip to Texas, Alvin Beauboeuf and Melvin Coffey stopped in Alexandria to visit Coffey’s parents. There, he called Marcello Attorney G. Wray Gill, who told him the police were looking for him with questions about the assassination. So Gill instructed him to drop the teenagers back in New Orleans and lie low while Gill gathered more information.
On the morning of November 24, 1963, Southeastern Louisiana University Student Frank Chalona, Jr. awoke to a stranger sleeping beside him in Holloway-Smith Hall, the men’s dormitory.
Chalona described the event to Jim Garrison in 1967:
“His back was to me so that I couldn’t see his face. He was sleeping fully clothed with his hat on, and his hair looked odd. My roommate, Thomas Compton, said the man had gone bald and pasted theatrical hair below the point where his hat met his head. After he’d left, my roommate told me the guy’s name was Dave and that he had been Lee Harvey Oswald’s instructor in the Civil Air Patrol.”
During his 1969 trial, Clay Shaw denied knowing both Lee Harvey Oswald and David Ferrie. Still, according to recently released government files, the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation knew otherwise.
Director J. Edgar Hoover never shared that information with Garrison.
On March 16, 1967, Hammond resident Carroll S. Thomas called the FBI and described himself as a friend of Clay Shaw. The FBI report reads:
“Carroll S. Thomas, the owner of Thomas Funeral Homes, Incorporated, 300 South Cherry Street, Hammond, Louisiana, advised that he was a close personal friend of Clay Shaw. Thomas also stated that he knew David Ferrie through Shaw. Thomas advised that he did not feel that Clay Shaw had been involved in a plot to kill President Kennedy.”
The FBI kept that information to themselves until October 2017, when the Assassination Records Review Board forced the release of files containing Thomas’ statement.
“Clay Shaw ate at Hi-Ho all the time.” Terrel “Foots” McCrory told me in 1982. “He bought his mother’s groceries next door, at the Sunflower, and then he’d get food to go. A nice guy. I enjoyed talking to him.”
“That Ferrie’s been here, too.” Hi-Ho Barbecue’s Celeste Alexander added. “But I never saw them together. That Ferrie always came with a kid from the college. He never bought a sandwich. He’d get a sauce bun and put chips and mustard between the bread. Nasty.”
Before his murder, Kentwood gubernatorial candidate Clyde Johnson described attending a meeting in Baton Rouge. There, he said, Clay Shaw introduced him to Lee Harvey Oswald and a Dallas Strip club owner called Jack.
Jack Ruby killed Oswald shot and killed Oswald in a crowded Dallas police station on November 24, 1963. Ruby died of cancer in January 1967.
David Ferrie died of a brain aneurysm one month later.
During Shaw’s trial, the prosecution brought eight witnesses from Jackson and Clinton, Louisiana, two adjacent rural towns in East Feliciana Parish. The four witnesses from Jackson placed Lee Harvey Oswald in that town during the summer of 1963. The four Clinton witnesses testified that defendant Clay Shaw had driven a black Cadillac to Clinton, and three testified that Lee Harvey Oswald was with him. One witness identified David Ferrie as being with Shaw and Oswald; a second witness more tentatively identified Ferrie.
In 2017, I reconnected with the last surviving Feliciana witness. I first met Edwin McGehee in 1981. In nearly four decades, the story he tells has not changed. The Jackson barber insists he cut Lee Harvey Oswald’s hair in late August or early September 1963.
“But I’m through talking to researchers,” he said. “The last three who’ve interviewed me changed my words to lies. I’m done.”
He said that authors Patricia Lambert and Judyth Baker angered him the most. “They try to write their own history, but we were there. We saw what happened. No one’s going to change that.”
Clay Shaw’s trial began On January 29, 1969, in Orleans Parish Criminal Court and ended on March 1, 1969. The Orleans Parish jury took less than an hour to find the retired trade executive “not guilty.”
Ten years later, the House Select Committee on Assassinations released the results of their investigation. The Committee had interviewed the East Feliciana witnesses and were “inclined to believe” that Oswald had been in Clinton “in the company of David Ferrie, if not Clay Shaw.”
Today, 50 years after his trial, most have forgotten Shaw, but researchers everywhere are still asking questions about David Ferrie.
In 1993, Attorney Gerald Posner insisted Oswald was not in the New Orleans Civil Air Patrol when Ferrie led the group. However, the following year, the PBS television show, Front Line, aired photographs of the two serving together.
In his book on the subject, retired SLU Professor Michael Kurtz reported seeing Oswald and Ferrie together in Mancuso’s Restaurant on Camp Street in New Orleans, along with Carlos Quiroga, a Cuban exile leader.
Witnesses, including Lizzie Hines of Tickfaw, remembered seeing Oswald and Ferrie together at two Cuban Exile training camps in southeast Louisiana. One was near Bayou Lacombe, and another near Bedico Creek, east of Ponchatoula. Still, the most intriguing evidence of their relationship relates to a flight plan filed by David Ferrie in 1963. It rightly lists Ferrie’s red and white 1948 Stinson Voyager. The stated destination is Garland, Texas, with the Dallas airport as an alternate. One of the passengers listed is a known alias of Lee Harvey Oswald, and another bears the last name of a Cuban exile leader.
The four-person crew departed from the Hammond airport on April 8, 1963—one day before Oswald allegedly shot at Texas gubernatorial candidate Edwin Walker at his home in Dallas.
Highland Park Airport—the airport in Garland, Texas—was seven miles from Dealey Plaza, where John F. Kennedy died. But, according to Dallas Researcher Jim Gatewood, the airport’s owner claimed he once had another Ferrie flight plan.
Gatewood reiterated the story this way:
According to John Randy Brodenhead, two FBI agents learned he had a flight plan filed by David Ferrie. The document showed a departure from Garland in a rented twin-engine Apache Piper. Ultimately, according to the plan, the plane would land in Havana, Cuba. However, before the agents returned with a warrant to secure the document, the airport office destroyed the document.
The expected flight date on that plan was November 22, 1963, and the sole passenger was Lee Harvey Oswald.