Debunking debunkers: Mary, Ferrie and Gerald Posner

[Minstrel Boy]

Added to my blog: http://rigorousintuition.blogspot.com/2004/10/mary-ferrie-and-gerald-posner.html

Mary, Ferrie and Gerald Posner

A portrait in miniature of Gerald Posner, patron saint of coincidentalists, regarding the death of oncologist Mary Sherman.

Posner includes the New Orleans' cancer researcher on a "debunking" list of mysterious deaths associated with the JFK assassination, in his lone-nutter's Bible, Case Closed. He writes that Sherman died in 1967 and "had no connection to the case, though she was acquainted with David Ferrie. Marrs says she was 'possibly shot.' According to medical records, she was killed in an accidental fire, and there was no gunshot wound on her body."

Here's what Posner gets right: "there was no gunshot wound on her body."

Here's what Posner gets wrong: everything else.

Even the year of her death: Sherman was killed in 1964, not 1967. To be specific, early the morning of July 21, the day the Warren Commission began taking testimony in New Orleans.

Sherman's murder was the above-the-fold, front page headline of that afternoon's edition of the New Orleans States Item: "Orleans Woman Surgeon Slain By Intruder; Body Set Afire."

From the police Precinct Report of Sherman's death (quoted in Edward Haslam's Mary, Ferrie & the Monkey Virus):

1. Stab wound of the chest, penetrating the heart, hemopericardium and left hemithorax . 2. Multiple stab wounds of the abdomen, with incid wound of the liver. 3. Multiple stab wounds of the left upper extremity and the right leg. 4. Laceration of Labia Minora. 5. Extreme burns of right side of body with complete destruction of right upper extremity and right side of thorax and abdomen.

And from the Homicide Report:

The body was nude; however, there was clothing which had apparently been placed on top of the body, mostly covering the body from just above the pubic area to the neck. Some of the mentioned clothes had been burned completely, while others had been intact, but scorched.

The Coroner's office noted that "most of the clothes were still neatly folded when placed on top of the body." A pair of white gloves with blood stains were found in the laundry hamper. Sherman's security alarm had been turned off, and she'd told neighbors she was expecting an out-of-town visitor.

In 1993, journalist Don Lee Keith presented the case to four medical examiners. In his article "A Matter of Motives," all four say it was "obviously a case of overkill," and three suggest the fire was an attempt to draw attention to the crime scene. The killing remains unsolved to this day.

Okay, so Sherman was murdered. How does she figure in the Kennedy story? Here's New Orleans' DA Jim Garrison, in his 1967 Playboy interview:

David Ferrie had a rather curious hobby in addition to his study of cartridge trajectories: cancer research. He filled his apartment with white mice - at one point he had almost 2,000, and neighbors complained - wrote a medical treatise on the subject and worked with a number of New Orleans doctors on means of inducing cancer in mice. After the assassination, one of these physicians, Dr Mary Sherman, was found hacked to death with a kitchen knife in her New Orleans apartment. Her murder is listed as unsolved.

Haslam's Mary, Ferrie & the Monkey Virus argues that Sherman was recruited by Tulane University's Dr Alton Ochsner - a passionate anti-communist, known CIA asset and friend of Clay Shaw - to work with Ferrie on a biological weapon to use against Castro's Cuba. He speculates that this could be the covert origin of HIV. Haslam's case doesn't rise much above conjecture, but his question lingers: "Why was a prominent cancer researcher involved in an underground medical laboratory with a violent political extremist?"

Now, Sherman's association with Ferrie may have been innocent, and her murder may have been incidental, but a genuine skeptic would not shy from asking Haslam's question, nor try to silence critics of the official story by resorting to deceitful half-truths and outright lies.

The problem with the kind of skeptics who champion the likes of Posner is that they are not skeptics at all. They are debunkers, whose belief system prohibits allowance of anything but lone nuts, dumb luck and coincidence. Conspiracies do not exist, because conspiracies cannot exist. And if a mysterious death appears too mysterious, no problem: "According to medical records, she was killed in an accidental fire."

See? It's as easy as typing.

[CoffeeAnnan]

1. Unless the typing happens to be to question Bush's record.

[glitch]

2. You turn a nice phrase. Very well written, especially the closer. nt

[teryang]

3. Mainstream media "metanarrative"

http://globalresearch.ca/articles/HAS410A.html

Uncommon Sense Conspiracy and other Theories
by Michael Hasty

""I myself was to experience how easily one is taken in by a lying and censored press and radio in a totalitarian state," William Shirer

<But the great irony in the media's rejection of "conspiracy theory" is that the metanarrative requires mainstream news consumers to subscribe to a far less credible "coincidence theory."><snip>

<And the statement by the late CIA director William Colby that the CIA controls "everyone of major significance in the major media" is just the incoherent rambling of a guilt-burdened covert operative with too much blood on his hands. If that statement offers a better explanation of a long, consistent pattern of journalistic failings than the idea that reporters are the victims of the government's "Jedi Mind Tricks"”well, it's only a "coincidence."

Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda minister, once said, "Give me control of the German media, and I can control the German people." It is our generation's misfortune that Goebbels' ideological descendants are now in the White House. It is our generation's responsibility to remove them.>

[seemslikeadream]

4. Two "suicide notes" found in Ferrie's apartment

To leave this life is, for me, a sweet prospect. I find nothing in it that is desirable, and on the other hand everything that is loathsome.
Daily we are propagandized more and more about a rising crime rate. But how do we know it is true? We don't, for we Americans have little or no access to the truth. Today I went to the police headquarters to see these "public records" of this rising crime rate and nearly wound up in jail for my trouble. I was searched, interrogated, verbally abused, had my record checked, and finally threatened. Needless to say, I did not see the "public records."

Still more irking is to hear a superintendent of police, who rose through the ranks (thus proving that zero equals super zero) stating that the solution to the crime problem was tightened and more stringent laws. A somewhat messianic district attorney concurred. Together these men prove themselves utterly unfit for office, just as they proved that an electorate cannot be depended on to pick the right man. The problems of crime rest deep in society. The problems exist in the existence of divorce and the absence of regulations.

No parents would send him child to an amateur for dental work, nor a quack for an appendectomy. Yet what atrocious negligence is permitting other amateurs to raise children. Mere kids are allowed to marry because they have the "urge". How stupid can you get? Every expert tells in detail how children must be cared for physically, emotionally and intellectually. Yet society lets girls and boys, not yet capable of lover begat children who, love-starved, turn to crime for some sort of identification. However, I don't think we will often see a district attorney or a police chief with brains to realize this.

We pay so much attention to the law. I have not figured out the reason. I have watched judges like Cocke at work. The various police and district attorneys and the like get to bend the judge's ear long before the trial. These judges of today deny defendants due process of the law. They permit the court to try the case in chambers, to have district attorneys form their opinions and decisions long before the defense gets a chance. Further, these same judges (and I am afraid it pertains to nearly all of them) then comment, by word, glance, gesture or remark, on the evidence in front of a jury. If the defendant wins, these judges take it as a personal insult.

When I was a boy my father preached that in the "American way of life" you are innocent till proven guilty. No greater lie has been told. The man charged before the court has flat got to prove his innocence. Go witness a criminal trial and watch. The state is supposed to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. If you read decisions of the various courts of appeal and the Supreme Court you discover that truth and falsehood, right and wrong have no place in court. All the state needs is "evidence to support a conviction". If this is justice, then justice be damned.

As researcher Barb Junkkarinen points out, this doesn't really sound like a suicide note at all, but rather like a letter to the editor, editorial, or essay. David Blackburst points out that the letter seems to reflect Ferrie's own legal troubles between August 1961 and late 1962. "He refers in the letter to Judge Cocke, with whom he had difficulties. Ferrie felt that he had been singled out for a shakedown" notes Blackburst.
The next "suicide note," however, does sound like a suicide note:

Dear Al:
When you read this I will be quite dead and no answer will be possible. I wonder how you are going to justify things.

Tell me you treated me as you did because I was the one who always got you in trouble. The police arrest. The strip car charge. The deal at Kohn School. Flying Barragona in the Beech.

Well, I guess that helps ease your conscience, even if it is not the truth. All I can say is that I offered you love, and the best I could. All I got in return in the end was a kick in the teeth. Thus I die alone and unloved.

You would not even straighten out Carol about me, though this started when you were going steady.

I wonder what your last days and hours are going to be like. As you sowed, so shall you reap.

more
http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/death10.htm


David Ferrie
David Ferrie was an odd historical figure caught on the fringes of the JFK assassination in 1963. A former pilot with Eastern Air Lines, he was discharged for homosexual activity. He was also a failed priest, a private investigator, a self-described cancer-cure researcher and inventor. Jim Garrison, former DA and JFK conspiracy-theorist, claimed he was central to the JFK assassination, and drove the getaway car for the real assassins. Later in life, Ferrie lost all of his hair due to alopecia, and made his own wigs out of tufts of miscellaneous hair and glued them on with spirit gum. Which could account for his bizarre appearance. Ferrie was never convicted of any crime, and died in 1967 of a brain aneurism

more
http://www.mugshots.com/Historical/David+Ferrie.htm


Within days of the assassination, an informant had identified Ferrie as an alleged getaway pilot for the assassin(s), but the reports mostly slipped through the cracks and were not extensively investigated. It was only in 1967 that Ferrie became subject to more intense investigation when New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison launched his unfortunate case against local businessman Clay Shaw. Ferrie's death in his apartment on the night of February 21, 1967, remains controversial. < More on Ferrie's Death >

http://www.russianbooks.org/oswald/ferrie.htm