Prior to 2001, my exposure to and interest in "conspiracy theory issues" was not significant. In late 2001, I bought a videotape of the movie "JFK," which I'd recalled having seen a few minutes of when it was on cable years before. Some years after this, I bought a first edition of the Warren Report I found at a local shop. In the Summer of 2005, after I got a computer the previous Christmas, I read through ajweberman's online version of Coup D'Etat in America until my head was spinning with names of Cubans and could go no further. (I regrettably donated $25 without knowing what an anti-Muslim bigot weberman would be, and wrote him a message of thanks, mentioning that I'd written a book; he responded in very large typeface, all caps and no punctuation, "WHATS YOUR BOOK ABOUT" )
In early 2006, I read an article by John Hunt on Robert F. Kennedy's head wounds and joined the JFK Lancer Forum at that time. Shortly afterward, I read Pat Speer's online presentation (then under construction) and we briefly corresponded by email. When I mentioned I had more of a history than "conspiracy" background, and that Lancer was constrictive in being overwhelmingly all-JFK, he suggested I check out The Education Forum as there was more variety and discussions went on with authors and participants in historical events. I found The Education Forum particularly attractive as it had a great many subject areas (outside of conspiracy issues) where I felt more at home.
About this same time (early in 2006), Larry Hancock posted at the Lancer Forum asking for help in research he was doing on Robert Kennedy's assassination. I transcribed and emailed him some brief excerpts from 2 books I owned (Curt Gentry's biography of J. Edgar Hoover and Jeff Shesol's Mutual Contempt, a study of Lyndon Johnson and Robert Kennedy's relationship). These were fairly insignificant (Hoover broke the news to RFK of President Kennedy's assassination with his first words being, "I have news for you"), but at the time it seemed like I may have been the only one to respond. The next thing I knew, I was heavily involved in researching the case, having access to the local library's copies of William Klaber and Phil Melanson's Shadow Play and Dan Moldea's The Killing of Robert F. Kennedy.
I visited the FBI's website and downloaded what was purported to be the FBI "Summary" report on the case. In describing it to Larry in an email, he wrote back asking if I had found what he called the long-lost Kranz Report. Since I had no idea what "the Kranz Report" was, much less that it was "long-lost," I was able to confirm that it was indeed an official report from the mid-1970s made by Thomas F. Kranz, serving as Special Counsel to the Los Angeles County District Attorney's office, and that apparently the FBI thought it suitable enough to be represented as "their" report on the case. Larry then sent me rough drafts of 6 chapters he'd written, which he later proposed to be intended as a monograph, and which eventually wound up as the 6 essays of "Incomplete Justice" posted at the Mary Ferrell website. My main contribution to these were the Kranz Report excerpts of what was then Chapter 4 (and became the Part 5 essay, "Mind Games") and some editing/proofreading/rewriting of that chapter and particularly Chapter 1.
One of Larry's original theses was to investigate and develop information posed in Carl Wernerhoff's article on the identity of "the girl in the polka dot dress." Wernerhoff proposed that the woman was Kathy Ainsworth, an Alabama schoolteacher by day whose real passion lay in her role as member of Sam Bowers' White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi, a clandestine militantly violent organization formed in 1964. Ainsworth had died in a July 1968 shootout with police en route to a bombing mission with her partner, Thomas Tarrants III, who survived though seriously wounded himself. While disagreeing with Wernerhoff's arguments that this was part of a conspiracy involving the Anti-Defamation League, Larry considered it a possibility that Ainsworth could have been the girl in the polka dot dress because she fit the physical description of an attractive petite woman with a nice figure, and particularly because Tarrants himself had gone to California in early 1968 to meet with (and possibly obtain weaponry from) the Far Right group led by the Rev. Dr. Wesley Swift.
Larry eventually said he found information indicating that Ainsworth was not in California at the time of Robert Kennedy's murder, but in the meantime my interest had been piqued by the lack of information available on Wesley Swift. In looking at books at the local library, I found a few that mentioned him in the indexes, but in each case the references had the same basic minimal information. I found more in internet searches, and wound up spending a great deal of time reading and listening to Swift's sermons at a website dedicated to making his brand of inspiration available to the general public. In poring through these, I found an interesting coincidence in the chronology of his sermons, something which could theoretically be incriminating (depending on the development of more information), potentially pointing to a larger plan involving the elimination of Martin Luther King, Jr. as well as Robert Kennedy.
As a result, I became even more involved in researching the Far Right, and Larry evidently became more and more focused on investigating the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. At his suggestion, I read Jack Nelson's Terror in the Night, learning more of the background to what he'd been talking about regarding Tarrants and Ainsworth. I also read William Pepper's tome on Dr. King's murder and we agreed that there were any number of problems with it. Sometime after this, Larry suggested to Stuart Wexler, Pat Speer and me that although Gerald Posner's book on President Kennedy's assassination was terrible, Posner's book on Martin Luther King, Jr.'s murder should be considered required reading. (It followed, for instance, a chronological order in contrast to William Pepper's book.) So I read the incurious Posner's book and even began taking notes on it.
At this time I was unemployed and soon came to the realization that I was devoting far too much time to "conspiracy research" when I should be finding a job. So I advised Larry that I'd decided to drop out of further research and assistance. This decision was made easier by a couple of "internal matters" that had come up. After devoting so much time and energy investigating Robert Kennedy's murder, I was not thrilled about having to learn a whole new case even though what I'd found and even argued led naturally toward investigating the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr. I was just in no mood or position to learn a whole new cast of characters and details about a different case.
More importantly, I had become increasingly concerned by what seemed to me equivocal and puzzling responses in email discussions I was having with Larry. He had always been somewhat absent-minded and more or less a complete stranger to the spell-check phenomenon, which was certainly harmless and kind of quaint (routinely spelling Kranz as Krantz, for instance). But taking what was at that time the most significant example, I had transcribed some information on Ku Klux Klan activities in North Carolina from Michael and Judy Ann Newton's The Klan: An Encyclopedia and sent it to him, noting that (according to Jack Nelson) Tom Tarrants had stayed at a safehouse in Franklin, North Carolina when he went underground.
In early 2006, I read an article by John Hunt on Robert F. Kennedy's head wounds and joined the JFK Lancer Forum at that time. Shortly afterward, I read Pat Speer's online presentation (then under construction) and we briefly corresponded by email. When I mentioned I had more of a history than "conspiracy" background, and that Lancer was constrictive in being overwhelmingly all-JFK, he suggested I check out The Education Forum as there was more variety and discussions went on with authors and participants in historical events. I found The Education Forum particularly attractive as it had a great many subject areas (outside of conspiracy issues) where I felt more at home.
About this same time (early in 2006), Larry Hancock posted at the Lancer Forum asking for help in research he was doing on Robert Kennedy's assassination. I transcribed and emailed him some brief excerpts from 2 books I owned (Curt Gentry's biography of J. Edgar Hoover and Jeff Shesol's Mutual Contempt, a study of Lyndon Johnson and Robert Kennedy's relationship). These were fairly insignificant (Hoover broke the news to RFK of President Kennedy's assassination with his first words being, "I have news for you"), but at the time it seemed like I may have been the only one to respond. The next thing I knew, I was heavily involved in researching the case, having access to the local library's copies of William Klaber and Phil Melanson's Shadow Play and Dan Moldea's The Killing of Robert F. Kennedy.
I visited the FBI's website and downloaded what was purported to be the FBI "Summary" report on the case. In describing it to Larry in an email, he wrote back asking if I had found what he called the long-lost Kranz Report. Since I had no idea what "the Kranz Report" was, much less that it was "long-lost," I was able to confirm that it was indeed an official report from the mid-1970s made by Thomas F. Kranz, serving as Special Counsel to the Los Angeles County District Attorney's office, and that apparently the FBI thought it suitable enough to be represented as "their" report on the case. Larry then sent me rough drafts of 6 chapters he'd written, which he later proposed to be intended as a monograph, and which eventually wound up as the 6 essays of "Incomplete Justice" posted at the Mary Ferrell website. My main contribution to these were the Kranz Report excerpts of what was then Chapter 4 (and became the Part 5 essay, "Mind Games") and some editing/proofreading/rewriting of that chapter and particularly Chapter 1.
One of Larry's original theses was to investigate and develop information posed in Carl Wernerhoff's article on the identity of "the girl in the polka dot dress." Wernerhoff proposed that the woman was Kathy Ainsworth, an Alabama schoolteacher by day whose real passion lay in her role as member of Sam Bowers' White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi, a clandestine militantly violent organization formed in 1964. Ainsworth had died in a July 1968 shootout with police en route to a bombing mission with her partner, Thomas Tarrants III, who survived though seriously wounded himself. While disagreeing with Wernerhoff's arguments that this was part of a conspiracy involving the Anti-Defamation League, Larry considered it a possibility that Ainsworth could have been the girl in the polka dot dress because she fit the physical description of an attractive petite woman with a nice figure, and particularly because Tarrants himself had gone to California in early 1968 to meet with (and possibly obtain weaponry from) the Far Right group led by the Rev. Dr. Wesley Swift.
Larry eventually said he found information indicating that Ainsworth was not in California at the time of Robert Kennedy's murder, but in the meantime my interest had been piqued by the lack of information available on Wesley Swift. In looking at books at the local library, I found a few that mentioned him in the indexes, but in each case the references had the same basic minimal information. I found more in internet searches, and wound up spending a great deal of time reading and listening to Swift's sermons at a website dedicated to making his brand of inspiration available to the general public. In poring through these, I found an interesting coincidence in the chronology of his sermons, something which could theoretically be incriminating (depending on the development of more information), potentially pointing to a larger plan involving the elimination of Martin Luther King, Jr. as well as Robert Kennedy.
As a result, I became even more involved in researching the Far Right, and Larry evidently became more and more focused on investigating the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. At his suggestion, I read Jack Nelson's Terror in the Night, learning more of the background to what he'd been talking about regarding Tarrants and Ainsworth. I also read William Pepper's tome on Dr. King's murder and we agreed that there were any number of problems with it. Sometime after this, Larry suggested to Stuart Wexler, Pat Speer and me that although Gerald Posner's book on President Kennedy's assassination was terrible, Posner's book on Martin Luther King, Jr.'s murder should be considered required reading. (It followed, for instance, a chronological order in contrast to William Pepper's book.) So I read the incurious Posner's book and even began taking notes on it.
At this time I was unemployed and soon came to the realization that I was devoting far too much time to "conspiracy research" when I should be finding a job. So I advised Larry that I'd decided to drop out of further research and assistance. This decision was made easier by a couple of "internal matters" that had come up. After devoting so much time and energy investigating Robert Kennedy's murder, I was not thrilled about having to learn a whole new case even though what I'd found and even argued led naturally toward investigating the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr. I was just in no mood or position to learn a whole new cast of characters and details about a different case.
More importantly, I had become increasingly concerned by what seemed to me equivocal and puzzling responses in email discussions I was having with Larry. He had always been somewhat absent-minded and more or less a complete stranger to the spell-check phenomenon, which was certainly harmless and kind of quaint (routinely spelling Kranz as Krantz, for instance). But taking what was at that time the most significant example, I had transcribed some information on Ku Klux Klan activities in North Carolina from Michael and Judy Ann Newton's The Klan: An Encyclopedia and sent it to him, noting that (according to Jack Nelson) Tom Tarrants had stayed at a safehouse in Franklin, North Carolina when he went underground.
Larry responded by saying first that "we" had contacted Tarrants, and Tarrants would no longer talk about the life he had prior to his being saved by Jesus ("we" presumably being himself and Stuart Wexler, with whom I've never communicated). Larry then mused about how Tarrants, "from Florida and having moved to Mississippi would make contacts in NC or be 'introduced' to NC." In order to reply, it was necessary to quote his entire email with my comments and corrections in brackets; after "from Florida" I wrote, "[Tarrants was a native of Mobile, Alabama and probably got his young start in that milieu, through connections to those responsible for the 63 church bombing in Birmingham, many of whom were connected to Mobile]."
I concluded this reply with two typically windy paragraphs setting out my perspective on things, with some frustration apparent. Since Larry had closed by also musing about Sam Bowers and potential connections to North Carolina being "mysterious," and had commented that Bowers seemed to be such a loner with his White Knights organization being in competition with older Klan organizations, I began by saying that I felt the Newtons' Klan Encyclopedia was essential for further research. "Having been exposed to much of this for awhile now, I see far more connections than questionable or mysterious disconnects." I said that Bowers was no loner except possibly in the sense of his private life, but rather a committed racist leader
I concluded this reply with two typically windy paragraphs setting out my perspective on things, with some frustration apparent. Since Larry had closed by also musing about Sam Bowers and potential connections to North Carolina being "mysterious," and had commented that Bowers seemed to be such a loner with his White Knights organization being in competition with older Klan organizations, I began by saying that I felt the Newtons' Klan Encyclopedia was essential for further research. "Having been exposed to much of this for awhile now, I see far more connections than questionable or mysterious disconnects." I said that Bowers was no loner except possibly in the sense of his private life, but rather a committed racist leader
"in touch with other more prominent or noticeable such leaders.... And if you see how many 'splits' and factions and name-changes, etc, etc, etc there were among these various groups, you might be kind of skeptical about the 'competition' among them. They all had identical ultimate and even immediate goals, and one way to throw inquiring minds off the trail was to give the appearance of competition and splits. Keith Gilbert was with Richard G. Butler at the Aryan Nations compound in Idaho, but they had a split, so Gilbert set up his own group A FEW MILES DOWN THE ROAD.... It’s far more likely (to me, anyway) that Bowers' White Knights was and was understood as an effective clandestine real-action force that 'got things done' while the more public Klan served as a helpful smokescreen (the Klan as an agglomeration of redneck bigots who were not to be taken seriously).
"As far as North Carolina is concerned, as suggested in the Klan encyclopedia entries I sent you..., there were all kinds of Klan groups and Klan fronts ('civic' associations, sportsmans clubs, etc, etc) all over North Carolina -- far too many to try and list every one of them separately. North Carolina would seem to have been the perfect place to go if you wanted to hide out. See the attached map for some idea of where there might have been a good spot to look, if you were using the entries I sent...as some guide.... So if there was a sustained 2-year bombing campaign centered in Salisbury from 65 to early 67 and broken up by the Feds, followed later that year by a big bombing campaign in Mississippi, that alongside the indications of financial backing from 'prominent Lenoir County businessmen' and the overt support of a prominent businessman like Woodrow Lynch hardly makes any of it all that mysterious at all. Unless, of course, we assume that the geographical distances (between North Carolina and Mississippi, for instance) make connections implausible. But I don’t know why anyone would do that.........."
In retrospect I recognize that I might have made more out of this type of thing than was warranted, and it's entirely possible that I was being humored at that point, in a kind sort of way, as I was still trying to be involved with Top Researchers who had the means and experience to do things like file FOIA requests, interview people, and so on, none of which I was ever in any financial position to do. But in any event I did at that time drop out of further active research assistance.
A few months later, Larry contacted me to advise that his RFK essays were being published online at the Mary Ferrell website and thought I might be interested in taking part in discussions on the case at the Lancer Forum. I did so, and we found that we were largely talking to each other (with the exception of a couple of people who were interested in the subject) and I mentioned we might as well have been continuing the private email discussions we'd been having for a couple of years. I was also disappointed to find that apart from sourcing of footnotes, Larry had done hardly any "polishing" of the essays as they were generally verbatim to the original drafts he had sent me, complete with misspellings, typos, awkward phrasing, and so on. And I recalled that the late Tim Carroll had expressed criticism of the first editions of Larry's Someone Would Have Talked over the same matters. I guess different people have different attitudes on this sort of thing, but I would think if someone wanted to put information presumed to be important "out in public" to be read and taken seriously, they might take more care in the actual writing of the thing.
About the only positive thing to come of all this was that I got to meet and fall in love with the one person who's brought some happiness into my life. But that was yet another thing that apparently was not meant to be. In the course of our relationship I traveled to her homeland to be with her and to walk and walk and walk and walk all over its capital city. (This was more to do with getting to the buses to go visit her in her part of town and to find things like a hammer and a toilet plunger than with any love of walking on my part.) In the course of this, at one point I got the opportunity to (as I thought) finally liberate myself from involvement in the Conspiracy Research Community when I found myself sitting in an internet cafe in Kavaklıdere and wrote a post in The Education Forum advising a well-known turd of a fellow that I intended to shit on his face if I ever saw it in real life.
That was in the Spring of 2010, but about a year before this I had been contacted by Larry Hancock who informed me that his and Stuart Wexler's book on the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. was in the process of being published, at that time titled "Seeking Armageddon" (to the best of my recollection, maybe it was "Chasing Armageddon"). It was either then or maybe sometime in 2011 that Larry asked for the website address for the Wesley Swift sermons (for the book's sourcing). But in any event, it was in that Winter 2009 email that Larry informed me that he and "Stu" had developed information about a violent clandestine Far Right organization that appeared to be highly important in their investigation of the case. I had to start my email reply with, "I assume we're still talking about the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan?"
For two years I was pretty much completely free from involvement and even interest in what was going on in the Conspiracy Research Community. Then in the late Winter of 2012, Larry wrote me an email expressing the hope that I was still using that email address and advising me that his and Stuart Wexler's book on Martin Luther King, Jr. had been published and wondered if I was interested in taking part in forum discussions on the case. So I ventured back to The Education Forum, feeling fairly embarrassed about my last post in it. I found little seemed to have changed other than the fact that the writings of Larry Hancock as well as Bill Kelly now seemed much less beset by typos and spelling errors than previously, and that unfortunately Stephen Turner had dropped completely out of sight shortly after he'd had to edit out the vulgar bits of my last post.
As I began to enter into the Martin Luther King, Jr. discussions, an old friend dropped by, the same turd of a fellow who now had a new interest in a topic area he'd previously been completely absent from (despite years of ample opportunity). At some point I mentioned to him possible connections of the Far Right in Canada to James Earl Ray's activities, and before I got a chance to reply to his typical request for "proof," Larry Hancock replied to my post -- helpfully advising me of some sources where I might "start" if I were interested in learning about this Far Right business.
After a few months of being utterly discouraged and wondering what the hell I'd wasted so much of my time and life for, only to ultimately find that someone I'd had innumerable email exchanges with somehow didn't even recognize me although he himself had invited me to take part in the damned discussions, I came to a decision about what to do to try to make something out of what appeared to be not just nothing but an absurdity of nothing. I had edited and rewritten my study of John the Baptist and hoped at some point to have this published as a second edition, but in the Summer of 2012 I decided to give up on this and just put the damn thing on a blog. This seemed the best thing to do since, having written something, one's main hope is to have it read. And I would be turning 50 in another year and didn't seem to be getting younger, so I had started to think about what was "important" in terms of a "legacy" and being of some use to my fellow human beings. So once I'd made the decision about putting the book on a blog it also occurred to me that I could make all my research files publicly available as well.
The Education Forum seemed the best place to do this, for a number of reasons. The main one was that I had always admired what Andy Walker and John Simkin had done in making an educational and research resource available online. This seemed to me to be "what it's all about" in terms of what I had understood genuine Socialism to be; if the world and its people are ever going to make any progress away from the idolatry of grasping after money and the "collateral" exploitation of other humans in doing it, then there need to be concrete examples of how that might work. So my idea was to stop "hoarding" information in hopes of one day "profiting" from it and instead make it completely and transparently available to others, now and in the future. In certain formulations this is also "the Christian thing to do," as in "give without expecting anything in return."
Before I could get underway with this, I started a new job in the first week of August that required an hour's drive to get to work, and I stayed away from forum involvements as I concentrated on getting settled in to the job. When I returned a few months later, I found that there must have been some controversy as Greg Parker had removed his photo avatar and (seemingly) deleted all his posts at The Education Forum. Curious about this, I did some forum searching going back through a good many threads and posts made during my 2-year absence and found that it involved some serious disagreements some members had with David Lifton, author of Best Evidence, and particularly the alleged protection (from criticism) of Lifton on the part of certain (to me unknown) Education Forum moderators. In this search I also read Richard Sprague's article on Lifton that one of the members had provided a link for, after reading which I agreed that there were legitimate, serious questions to be considered regarding Lifton as any kind of reliable source for anything.
In any event, for the next few months I posted my research files at The Education Forum, beginning with those I had on John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. as these were in the small folders. I had finished with this and was trying to organize what order the Robert Kennedy files should be presented when I once again had to drop out briefly as I moved to a new place in April (in order to cut my drive-time to work in half). So I had no internet for about a month and a half; when I returned to The Education Forum this time, I found that now Lee Farley had removed his avatar photo and also seemingly removed his posts, and I also witnessed something I'd never before seen in the previous 7 years or even thought possible: Robert Charles-Dunne in an angry mood. A fellow named Paul Trejo was in the process of being sliced and diced and roasted over an open fire, having apparently made one too many of the typically thoughtless assertions that he thought helped make for sound argument. I wanted to tell him that while I could admire the bravery of the thing, I couldn't help but think that taking on Robert Charles-Dunne was almost certainly another example of poor judgment.
I believe the foregoing is sufficient background for my experience(s) in the Conspiracy Research Community without going into any rehash of what happened at The Education Forum about a month ago. Some of us decided to do what we believed was the right thing to do, and some of us paid a price for it. If others can in good conscience go on with business as usual, that's on them. I'm only going to resume what I'd been trying to do for the past year (somewhat out of order now and with the occasional diversion of music or whatever else I feel like presenting), and let others make their own decisions about things.
