[continued: David Martindale article on "The Bizarre Deaths Following JFK's Murder"]
For example, consider what happened to Warren Reynolds. The day of the assassination, Reynolds was at work in his used car lot in Dallas when someone shot and killed police officer J.D. Tippit. Reynolds heard the shooting and shortly afterward, saw a man running down the street carrying a a revolver.
He pursued the assailant for a block until the man fled out of sight. Within an hour, the Dallas police arrested Lee Harvey Oswald and later charged him with the slayings of both Tippit and Kennedy. Yet two months passed by before Reynolds was finally questioned by the FBI. And although he still recalled the incident, he said he was unable to positively identify Oswald as the man he chased in November.
On January 23, 1964, two days after his FBI interview, Reynolds was shot in the temple with a rifle in a basement on his used car lot. Miraculously, he lived. Since nothing was taken, police ruled out robbery as a motive.
Shortly after the shooting, authorities picked up Darrell Wayne Garner, who admitted he was at the scene at the time of the shooting. He was held on a charge of assault to murder.
Yet on February 5, Nancy Jane Mooney, 23, signed an affidavit saying that Garner couldn't have shot Reynolds, since she was in bed with the suspect at the time of the shooting. On the strength of her alibi and subsequent polygraph test, the charges against Garner were dropped.
Interestingly enough, Mooney told Detective Ramsey of the Dallas police she had once worked as a stripper for Jack Ruby.
On February 13, 1964, just eight days later, Nancy Jane Mooney was arrested for quarreling with her roommate in a parked car and was taken to the Dallas City Jail at 2:45 A.M. Within two hours, she was found dead, her toreador pants wrapped around her neck, her body dangling limply off the floor of her cell.
The coroner ruled her death a suicide. For reasons which remain unclear, the Dallas police never informed either the FBI or the Warren Commission of this bizarre Reynolds-Garner-Mooney chain of events.
Meanwhile, Warren Reynolds, although lucky to be alive, continued to have problems. Three weeks after he was released from the hospital, someone tried to entice his 10-year-old daughter into a car. She refused.
On another occasion, someone went to considerable trouble to tamper with the light fixture on Reynolds' front porch.
These events, coupled with his narrow brush with death, had their effect.
When he finally testified before the Warren Commission in July 1964, Reynolds now was prepared to say what he refused to say in January -- namely that it was Lee Harvey Oswald he saw running past his car lot that day.
Unlike Reynolds, Hank Killam was not an eyewitness to the events in Dallas the day of the assassination. However, his wife Wanda worked in Jack Ruby's club, and Killam had met Ruby on several occasions. He also worked as a housepainter with a man named Jack Carter. And in one of those curious coincidences which surround the Kennedy case, Carter lived at the same rooming house as an employee of the Texas School Book Depository -- an employee named Lee Harvey Oswald.
Following Kennedy's death, Killam became increasingly despondent and downright paranoid. His wife told federal authorities that Hank feared someone was trying to kill him. Running for his life, Hank Killam moved to Pensacola, then to Tampa, and finally back to Pensacola, trying to escape what he called "agents and plotters."
Every time he took a job, he was fired after authorities hounded his employers. By March, he was quoted as saying, "I'm a dead man. I've run as far as I'm going to run."
At 4 A.M. on March 17, 1964, Hank Killam received a phone call at his mother's home. When he hung up the phone, he dressed and went outside. His mother then heard an auto drive off, and she thought it was unusual since her son did not own a car.
Thirty minutes later, two downtown street cleaners heard a loud crash and turned to see a man staggering in front of a broken display window, blood oozing from his neck.
Before the ambulance reached the hospital, Hank Killam bled to death. Although the coroner ruled that Killam's death was a suicide, his wife was openly skeptical.
And little wonder. Few people ever kill themselves jumping through a plate glass window of an empty department store at 4:30 in the morning.
Besides, there was only one cut on Killam's body: a three inch deep laceration of the lower left side of his throat. Hank Killam's jugular vein had been cut.
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