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The NBC JFK Assassination films of Dave Wiegman & Jimmy Darnell

I should have posted this a day or so ago, but work and travel prevented me from doing this.

A few days ago James DiEugenio of Kennedys & King contacted me asking whether I could provide him with whatever I had on the Prayer Man films (shot by NBC’s Dave Wiegman and WBAP’s Jimmy Darnell) and which are being kept by NBC under lock and key.

I shared what I knew, but that did not reduce my utter amazement when DiEugenio sent me the link of a Fox News video featuring  Jesse Watters interviewing Anna Paulina Luna

View the segment HERE.

Luna mentions tape, but it should be a 16 mm celluloid film. NBC has used low quality tape tranfers for media usage.

Nor were these films unseen or kept secret, the film was shared in 1964.

Plus it was included with the JFK film by Oliver Stone when the documentary Beyond JFK: The Question of Conspiracy was released.

The Wiegman film has been used in many documentaries, it has been freely available. Death in Dealey Plaza being one of them.

The films are not secret, the Sixth Floor Museum released a first genreation copy in August 2024.

That the orginal 16mm films need to stored at NARA instead of at NBC HQ is a given and from there on the best possible high res scans need to be made.

Following that deblurring needs to be pursued. AI could help with that, and until then the lone nutters and conspiracy theorists waste everyone’s time with their beliefs, thoughts and utter speculation. Your opinions are worthless.

This week there will be a hearing, the films may get some more attention then as well.

I am cautiously optimistic about all this.

Will we get the cherry on top?

JFKA Records Releases Mar 18-21

JFKA Records Releases Mar 18-21

  Donald Trump did what he said he would do after backtracking during his first run.

Speculation was rife and not one person was on the money. My hopes on seeing something really relevatory were slim, due to the area of interest I operate in. In the ten years that I have dug into documents I have barely come across CIA documentation that was pertinent to Oswald’s last 48 hours.

But this batch needed checking out.

At this point, after checking a resepctable amount of records these past few days, I can say that with these PDFs:

  • No OCR is implemented (how much longer would that take?).
  • Other than its actual rif number there is no date, description or from which agency it is coming from. I find it hard to accept that this batch of such important documents does not have an index of some sort. However people like Rex Bradford have been hard at work on amending that. The files can now also be searched at the Mary Ferrell Archive.
  • Certain docs miss RIF Coversheets.
  • Some docs are very hard to read. Then again so did a fair few of Malcolm Blunt’s archive when I scanned them in.
  • I am surprised by the amount of documents that have no bearing on the John F Kennedy assassination. There are some intelligence files on operations with names in them that have no bearing and should have been classed NBR (not believed relevant).
  • HSCA staffers renumerations, really?
  • Who is Manuel Marti, of which there are several records, and what is his relevance?
  • There are MLK documents inside this batch.
  • There are records that had (partial) redactions that have been lifted, but there are still some records with its redactions intact. I found about half a dozen of them.
  • I have not come across any George Joannides files.

Any finds then? Slim pickings to be honest.

Amos Lee Euins arrest report from 1970. And the point of keeping this locked up for 60 odd years is what exactly?

James W Bookhout, various documents that have little or no bearing on his work that weekend.

Larry Florer, again I ask why keep this biographical data under wraps that long?

Mary Hall a statement for the HSCA I had not known of before.

FM Turner.

Joe Molina (many pages missing btw)

I shall add more findings as I go along.

 

Not a lot to be honest, then again I did not expect much. This collection is much better suited for uncle Malcolm’s interest.

I for one am more hopeful of seeing something of importance in the 2,400 FBI files that have been discovered.

The only question right now is when will they be shared?

Dealey Plaza UK 30th Anniversary Seminar

My attendance at the last Dealey Plaza UK Seminar at The Abode in Canterbury in Oct. 2024 was solely as a spectator and I have to say that I enjoyed myself immensely 5th & 6th October. No pressure of putting a presentation together just kick back and view what some of my compadres had to say.

Yours truly with Scott Reid and Johnny Cairns.

You can view their presentations at the DPUK website.

This year the group is having its 30th anniversary in the Ashorne Hill, Leamington Spa, Warwickshire from Friday 27th June to Sunday 29th June.

I am going to do two one hour presentations with the first one being on Oswald’s fingerprints and the second one will be the Second Floor Lunchroom Encounter Fugezi.

See you there or wait for the videos to appear at some point.

 

 

Prayer Man: Was That Oswald?

 

Recently I had the pleasure to talk with Bill Raider and Sean Kane on the That’s Enough Outta You! podcast.

I had a great time, thank you very much gentlemen.

 

Out Of The Blank #1714 – Paul Abbott & Bart Kamp

 

Robbie Roberston invited Paul Abbot and yours truly for another chat, most of it about the DPD (Dallas Police Department) and it was great fun to do so. It has been more than 6 months since I did my last chat.

Listen to it HERE

Tom Samoluk (ARRB) on the Will Fritz Interrogation notes

Tom Samoluk (ARRB) on the Will Fritz Interrogation notes

 

The Will Fritz Oswald interrogation notes have always been of huge interest to me and fellow researchers. They were not made public until the ARRB received them from an anonymous donor.

Lethbridge Herald – Nov. 22 1997. Will Fritz interrogation notes.

During one of my chats with Podcaster Robbie Robertson of Out of the Blank he told me that he would have Tom Samoluk of the ARRB on soon. I wanted to see if he could ask him about the above and perhaps Tom Samoluk  could offer some extra information on the Will Fritz interrogation of Lee Harvey Oswald, especially how he got hold of that documentation of the Fritz interrogation notes.

What follows is a transcript of the subject discussed between Robbie Robertson and Tom Samoluk, which comes from this video.

RR: I just got a couple more questions for you, but do you know anything about Fritz’s interrogation of Oswald? That’s a big area for me.

Will Fritz being interviewed in the third floor corridor. of the DPD.

TS: Yeah, that was another interesting chapter because we wanted to find out what records existed from the interrogation. And this has not been written a lot about it. Got some coverage, I think, because we did release these records that I’m going to reference at the time we found them.

But I remember we had written to, I think we found a family member, a surviving family member of Captain Fritz. And it led us to, I believe, a lawyer representing Captain Fritz or Captain Fritz’s family because he was long deceased. And we said what we were seeking, any records that may have survived with a focus on the interrogation, but interested in anything else. And then one day, this is my recollection, at the ARRB headquarters in Washington, I got a packet, like a manila envelope. And if I recall correctly, there was a cover letter from the attorney that we had been dealing with. And he basically said, this is what we found. And the family does not want to be interviewed. The family does not want to talk with anyone, but they freely contribute these records.

And there were handwritten notes. You know, there’s no way of validating at that point, but we believe them to be handwritten notes by Captain Fritz taken during contemporaneous with the interview. The way they were written, I think that that was our record. That was our thought that they were in fact contemporaneous, although they might have been shortly after, but he took notes about the assassination. And we made those available to the media. I forget whether that was 96 or 97. 97. Got some coverage. 97. So I don’t know. Are you familiar with those records? Yeah. There’s probably nothing I can mention to you, Robbie, that you haven’t dealt with. Go ahead, please. Please do. No, but you’ve done great research. Yeah. So those became part of the record, I think.

And I was not directly involved in this, but one of my colleagues on staff, I believe we also got some notes that hosted the FBI agency and hosted the had taken, which was interesting. He was coming out with a book of his own at that time in the mid-90s. And that was kind of a factor in our discussions with him. But my recollection is that the original thought and what people had said was there were no contemporaneous notes with the interrogations of Lee Harvey Oswald. And I think we ended up getting the Fritz and Hostie notes, whether that was everything. Of course, we don’t know. But I think that’s what we found. But we found them. And I remember when I was opening up the file with the Fritz notes, the original notes.

And I was with, one of the analysts was with us who, more directly than me, dealt with the actual original records that we were getting and reviewing from the various federal agencies. So I’m holding, just having opened up the Manila envelope that came in the mail, and I’m holding the records. And we’re reading the cover letter from the attorney and realizing what they are in the original records. And my colleague Kevin says, Tom, I think it’s time for us to put on the white gloves. And we did, because that’s what he was used to, wearing the white gloves, dealing with all those federal records. But so that, it’s another example. That was obviously at the municipal level related to Dallas. But we looked hard for records that we thought would be of interest. And I think we did add to the richness of the, of the assassination record.

Henry Wade (far left), C.W. Brown (black tie and patterned jacket)to the left of Will Fritz who is on the phone inside Room 317 of Robbery and Homicide. Behind FRity, partially visible Richard Sims and David Johnston. Click pic. to enlarge.

RR: How thoroughly did anybody look through Hostie’s notes? Because he said something that wasn’t exposed until Bart Kamp. And this is another theory about Oswald. It’s ‘Prayer Man’. I don’t necessarily buy that, but there is a statement in Hostie’s notes where he talked about getting a Coke for his lunch and then going out to go watch the parade. So that’s a bunch of big obviously conspiracy. I wouldn’t say conspiracy, but it’s one that’s very controversial subject in the Kennedy assassination. There’s photographs of someone that does look like Oswald standing on the front steps. I don’t necessarily go into that because I feel like if you want the public interest, you don’t really have to deal with that because it’s kind of like trying to study specific individuals like Ruth Payne or any of them. You just get lost in kind of the minutia. But do you know why no one really questioned that that was in his notes?

TS: You know, I don’t recall a discussion of that, but certainly Oswald’s movements before the assassination, after the assassination are critically important. And I must say that as Oliver Stone went through in some detail with some witnesses that the Warren Commission didn’t pay attention to, like a lot of things, and any researchers watching this will agree, unfortunately there are a lot of things that leave us scratching our heads. But the investigation that day was botched from the get-go. There were a lot of mistakes made. Granted, it was 1963 and not 2023, but even for 1963, there were a lot of mistakes made by the Dallas police.

It has been a while

Greetings all!

It has been a while since I posted as I did not have much to share and I needed a much needed break from it all. And now I have a few things to share with you. But before I start I wish to thank everyone who bought my book and also took the effort of reviewing it and heaping it with such praise. I am completely chuffed by the overal large postive feedback to it.

A new job, which I started in Jan. this year, was the perfect escape from it all. In early Dec. 2023 I was approached for it and after a trip to Germany I was offered the job within 15 minutes and the first 10 was just about my book. So after all it was good for something!

Although I did look at some things, the work I did is so demanding from a time perspective that pro-activeness wasn’t on the cards at all and it will take some time before I get back into the ring.

But (there is always one) I have started to collect some bits that will be used in an update to the book. But it will be quite a while before I even attempt to do that. I am planning to release a hardback version then and will also insert more photographic media. The print quality of photographs prevented me from doing this last year. Hopefully things will have improved by the time the updated version will be released. Watch this space for further announcements.

Instead I started to work on some technicalities of the Malcolm Blunt archive and I can tel you that in the past month I have been busy using OCR on about 15,000 PDFs to increase ease of searching through the entire set of records. This was the easy part as I could let it do its job in the background.

Next comes grouping the records, renaming and catagorising and rehousing it on a new Google Drive depository which I hope to have completed by the 61st anniversary. It will have a few thousand extra PDFs which have not been shared before. I shall announce its completion of course. I know this is a thankless task, but I wish to complete the whole thing there and then before I can move on. The beauty of doing this huge undertaking is that I end up reveiwing previously scanned documents again and this ‘break’ from all that documentation has enabled me to see further bits that I can use, also for books 2 & 3. Whenever that may be.

Oh yes!!!!!! 

JFK Lancer 2023 Conference

JFK Lancer 2023 Conference

  Below some pictures of the crowd at the JFK Lancer Conference while my presentation was on in Dallas on Nov 19th 2023.

With thanks to Peter Antill for the photographs.

And here is the video of it, added Nov 24th.