Son Of Dallas Cop Says Dad Was 1 Of 3 Who Shot Kennedy

(Part 1 – The first Ricky White News Story)
NOV. 22, 1963: ANOTHER STORY BLURS THE FACTS
SON OF DALLAS COP SAYS DAD WAS 1 OF 3 WHO SHOT KENNEDY
By Andrew Likakis
In another bizarre twist to a mystery that has haunted Americans for
more than a quarter century, the son of a former Dallas police officer
plans to tell the world that his father was one of the assassins of
President John F. Kennedy.

Ricky White, a 29-year-old, unemployed oil equipment salesman in
Midland, says he “had no conception of ever, ever giving this story out”
but decided to do so after FBI agents began asking questions in May 1988.

“I’m telling you a story that has touched me, not only others, and I
feel uncomfortable just telling it to strangers,” White said during a
recent interview with the Austin American-Statesman.

Monday in Dallas, White is scheduled to show reports material
implicating his father, Roscoe Anthony White, in the 1963 assassination.

It suggests that White, who died in 1971, was a member of an assassination
team of three shooters, that he fired two of the three bullets that killed
the president, and that he also killed Dallas police officer J. D. Tippit
during the manhunt for Lee Harvey Oswald.

Among the material: a rifle with telescopic sight that uses the same
kind of ammunition as Oswald’s gun; records showing that Oswald and White
served together in the Marines; three faded messages that appear to be
decoded orders to kill someone in Dallas in November 1963; and a son’s
recollections of his father’s incriminating diary – a document that is
missing.

The press conference is being sponsored by two private groups – the JFK
Assassination Information Centre of Dallas and the Assassination Archives
and Research Centre of Washington – and some Midland Businessmen.

The possibility of Ricky White’s story being a hoax – a falsehood
concocted either by Ricky or his father – has not been dismissed by the
people urging him to publicly talk about the matter. During the last 27
years, many private researchers have claimed to have found evidence of a
conspiracy, only to be proved wrong or deceitful.

Bernard Fensterwald, executive director of the Assassination Archives
and Research Centre, says if there was a conspiracy, Ricky White may have
the key. “I think it’s our best shot,” he says, “and we better take it.”
J. Gary Shaw, co-director of the JFK Assassination Information Centre,
says he hopes White’s story will result in an investigation of the
assassination by Texas authorities. Two Washington-based probes – the
Warren Commission in 1963-64 and the House Select Committee on
Assassinations in 1976-78 failed to resolve the enigma of the Kennedy
shooting, Shaw maintains.

As with previous conspiracy theories, White’s story is tantalizing, the
evidence intriguing. Yet, as with other theories, it raises more questions
than it answers — such as: Who issued the orders to the so-called
assassination team? Why was the assassination ordered against Kennedy?
And why is Ricky White telling this story now?
AN OSWALD CONNECTION
Using clues discovered in his father’s effects and relying on available
government records, Ricky White says he has determined that Roscoe White
and Lee Harvey Oswald probably met in 1957. Ricky White’s mother, Geneva,
is gravely ill and unable to be interviewed, family members say.

According to Military records, both White and Oswald were among a
contingent of U.S. Marines, who boarded the USS Bexar in San Diego that
year for the 22-day trip to Yokosuka, Japan.

In its final report, the Warren Commission published a photo of Oswald
with other Marines in the Philippines. All but one of the Marines was
squatting on the ground. Ricky White says his father claimed to have been
the standing Marine and claimed to have become acquainted with Oswald in
Japan and the Philippines.

Military records show that Roscoe White took frequent unexplained trips
in the Pacific, and Ricky White says that his father’s diary described
those as secret intelligence assignments.

It has been established in previous investigations that Oswald was
discharged in 1959 and defected to the Soviet Union. He returned to the
United States in mid-1962, settling first in Fort Worth with his
Russian-born wife, then moving to Dallas a short time later.

Military records show Roscoe White was discharged in late 1962, joining
his wife and two young sons in Paris, Texas. Ricky White says that shortly
thereafter, his father moved the family to Dallas and took a job as an
insurance salesman.

MAN WITH TWO NAMES
Ricky White says that two months ago he found several faded messages in
a military weapons canister in the attic of Geneva White’s parents home in
Paris. Ricky believes the messages to be decoded cables in which Mandarin,
a name he says his father was known by, was told his next assignment would
be “to eliminate a National Security threat to worldwide peace” in Houston,
Austin, or Dallas.

Another message from the same source – “C. Bowers” of “Navy
Intelligence” – identified Dallas as the destination and provided White
with a list of contacts. It stated White had a “place hidden within the
department.” The message was dated September 1963 – the same month that
Geneva White began a brief stint as a cocktail hostess at Jack Ruby’s
Carousel Club in Dallas. Ruby fatally shot Oswald two days after the
Kennedy assassination.

Dallas police records show that on Oct. 7, 1963, Roscoe White joined
the department as a photographer and clerk. He did not become a patrol
officer until 1964. A staff member in the police personnel department said
recently that White’s file contains no job references.

Ricky White says his father’s diary referred to several trips made
during this period to a remote area in the foothills near Van Horn, Texas.

There, Roscoe White and several others practised shooting at moving
targets, Ricky White says. Although he was younger than 3 years old, Ricky
White says he has vague memories of being taken to Van Horn.

“My impression was they (others at the Van Horn camp) had been working
with my father in the military,” Ricky White says, “because they had known
each other well when this took place.”
A FOOTLOCKER AND DIARY
Ricky White says that, after his grandfather died in 1982, he was given
his father’s footlocker, which had been stored in the grandfather’s house
in Paris.

The locker contained military memorabilia, a Marine uniform, a safe
deposit box key and a black leather-bound diary with gold trim that
detailed Roscoe White’s life.

As he and his mother read the diary, Ricky White says they found
passages that implicated Roscoe White in the Kennedy assassination.

“My mother and I cried together,” he says, “because it hurt very deeply
to learn what I know now. It hurt so much because the man I had known
couldn’t have fired those shots. It took this investigation to be able to
learn it’s true. And my family’s given a part of themselves to tell the
story.”
From the diary he says he learned the significance of the hunting rifle
his father gave him: a 7.65mm Mauser with telescopic sight, an Argentine
rifle that shoots round-nose, elongated bullets – projectiles that closely
resemble those of a Mannlicher-Carcano, an Italian rifle that Oswald was
accused of using.

After reading the diary, White says he was convinced his father was one
of three assassins who fired six shots from Mauser rifles into the
president’s open top limousine in Dealey Plaza.

Roscoe White shot from behind a fence atop a grassy knoll to the right
and front of the limousine, his son says. Two other marksmen were in the
Texas School Book Depository and Records buildings behind the vehicle.

Three shots struck Kennedy; a fourth wounded Texas Gov. John Connally.

Ricky White says the two shots that his father fired both struck
Kennedy: the first in the throat; the second, and last of the shots fired,
in the head.

Oswald, Ricky White says, knew of the plot, but did not fire a shot.

He had been instructed to bring his rifle to the Book Depository, where he
worked, and to build a sniper’s nest of book boxes near the sixth floor
window, from which he was accused of firing all the fatal shots, Ricky
White says.

Ricky White says the diary referred to the other shooters only by code
names: Sol in the Records building; and Lebanon in the Texas School Book
Depository. The diary indicated each of the three riflemen was accompanied
by an assistant who disassembled the rifles after the shooting and carried
them out of the area, Ricky White says.

According to the diary, Ricky White says, his father was to escape with
Oswald by riding to Red Bird Airport in South Dallas in a city police car
driven by a friend and fellow officer who did not know what was happening.

That officer, Ricky White says, was J. D. Tippit, who was shot to death at
10th Street and Patton Avenue in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas about 45
minutes after Kennedy was shot. Oswald was seen running from the scene of
that shooting.

Ricky White says his father wrote that, as they drove south, the
unsuspecting officer began to realize what White and Oswald were involved
in. Oswald panicked and jumped from the car. When the officer insisted on
“turning in” White, White got out of the car and shot the officer, Ricky
White says.

“I killed an officer at 10th and Patton,” Ricky White quotes the diary
as saying.

Less than a half hour later, Oswald was arrested in the Texas Theatre
on West Jefferson Boulevard in Oak Cliff. He had a .38- calibre revolver
police said was the murder weapon. Murder charges against Oswald in
connection with Tippit’s death were filed before he was charged with
Kennedy’s death. Whether the revolver found in Oswald’s possession was
actually the weapon that killed Tippit has been a matter of dispute in
several government investigations.

Ricky White says that shortly after the assassination, his father sent
the family to Paris and that he and other members of the assassination team
used a “hideaway house” in Dripping Springs.

He says that, among his father’s effects, he found a third decoded
message, dated December 1963, that advised his father to “stay within
department, witnesses have eyes, ears and mouths….The men+will be in to
cover up all misleading evidence soon.”
That same month President Lyndon Johnson named Chief Justice Earl
Warren to head a commission to investigate the assassination. The Warren
Commission concluded in September 1964 that Oswald acted alone in killing
both Kennedy and Tippit.

Police records show that on Oct. 19, 1965, Roscoe White quit the Dallas
Police Department and became manager of a Dallas area drug store. During
the next six years, he switched jobs several times, finally working as a
foreman at M&M Equipment Co., in East Dallas.

FAMILY TROUBLE AND DEATH
By early 1970, Roscoe and Geneva White were a deeply troubled couple
and sought help, said the Rev. Jack Shaw, their Baptist minister in Dallas.

During a recent interview with the American-Statesman, Shaw said Roscoe
White told him at the time that he and his family were “in danger.” White
confessed to leading “a double life,” the minister says, “and I knew
something was not right, something strange was going on.”
Shaw says that within the last two years he tape recorded a number of
counselling sessions with Geneva White about her recollection of what she
believed to be her former husband’s role in assassinations. Shaw, who is
very guarded in talking about the case, says Ricky White has only a small
portion of the full story, which he says “will knock your eyes out.”
Shaw says he met with the Whites several times in 1970-71, but the
Kennedy assassination was not mentioned. In 1971, Roscoe White was fatally
injured in an explosive fire at M&M Equipment. Before White died, Shaw
talked with him in the hospital. He recalls White saying he didn’t think
the fire was an accident – that he had seen a man running away just before
the fire.

After the funeral, Geneva White moved her family back to Paris. There,
about four years later, the White home was burglarized and some of Roscoe
White’s personal possessions were taken, Ricky White says.

Police captured the two burglars and returned the possessions which
included some of Roscoe White’s photos – among them a shot taken by Marina
Oswald of her husband Lee Harvey Oswald holding a rifle in the back yard of
their Dallas home in 1963. For nearly 15 years after the assassination only
two such photos were known. Roscoe White’s became the third. In its final
report, the House Special Committee on Assassinations identified the photo
as coming from the family of a former Dallas policeman. According to Ricky
White and an investigator for the House committee, Geneva White had
contacted the FBI after the burglary. The FBI informed the committee of
the existence of the photo. The matter was not pursued because committee
investigators didn’t know about White’s past relationship with Oswald or
Geneva White’s brief employment at Jack Ruby’s Carousel Club.

OTHERS FIND OUT
Until he discovered the footlocker, Ricky White says he didn’t think
much about his father or the Kennedy assassination. He grew up in Dallas
and Paris, where he went to school, got married and moved to Midland where
he and his wife have two children. There he took a job selling oil field
equipment.

As shocking as the diary was to Ricky White and his mother, Ricky says
it was the safe deposit box key that was to draw others into the Roscoe
White story.

Thinking his father might have left money or valuables in a deposit
box, Ricky White tried to find a bank that would recognize the key. By 1988
he was so frustrated in his attempts that he turned to Midland District
Attorney Al Schorre for help.

Schorre says he and his chief investigator, J. D. Lucky, failed to find
the bank.

Schorre and Lucky say they repeatedly asked to see Roscoe White’s diary
after Ricky White mentioned it, but that he told them a relative in the
Lubbock area had it. Ricky White says he may have told Schorre the diary
was somewhere else but that he had always kept it in his possession.

Finally, Schorre, who lacked authority to demand the diary, called the
FBI.

Ricky White says three agents came to his house and asked him to answer
questions in their Midland office. He says he took his father’s effects
with him and the FBI made copies of all the items except the diary. He
says after several hours of questioning he returned home with all his
father’s effects.

Later that same day, White says, FBI agent Tom Farris came to his house
to retrieve a notebook he had inadvertently left in the box of Roscoe
White’s effects. White says he became aware that the diary was missing
three or four days later.

“I never said that the (FBI agents) took it,” he says. “I am just
saying he was the last one to leave that box.” Agent Farris, who is in the
Midland FBI office, transferred inquiries about the diary to his
supervisor, Tom Kirspel. Kirspel would neither confirm nor deny that the
agents had seen a diary.

White says he never asked the FBI if it had the missing diary because
he was “scared” of the agents who called at his house. “I don’t want to
have anything to do with the FBI,” he says.

Ricky White says FBI agent Ron Butler told him in 1988 that the FBI had
determined that Roscoe White was at a crime scene in far Northeast Dallas
at the time Kennedy was shot. Butler declined to comment on any
conversations with Ricky White.

QUESTION OF AUTHENTICITY
Shaw, the director of the JFK Assassination Information Centre in
Dallas, says Ricky White has passed both a polygraph test and a voice
stress analysis and passed both tests “with flying colours.”
However, the authenticity of the messages Ricky White says he found is
undetermined.

Office of Naval Intelligence spokesman John Wanat says the agency
cannot determine whether the messages came from authentic ONI cables
without the coded cables.

“What they have there is really nothing that we can narrow down as far
as who may have generated it or if it’s legitimate or whether it’s
something that was fabricated,” Wanat said after viewing texts of the
messages.

John Stockwell, former chief of the Central Intelligence Agency’s
Angola Task Force in Washington, D.C. has seen the messages and sees a “90
to 95 percent probability” that they are genuine. However, he says he
cannot discount the possibility the messages are part of “an elaborate
hoax.”
“I’ve measured it against my own readings and consultations with
researchers of the Kennedy thing,” says Stockwell, who ended a 12- year CIA
career in 1976 after being accused of violating his secrecy agreement with
the agency. “I can’t see anything in what they have found and what the
young man (Ricky White) is saying that is implausible in terms of what our
best knowledge of the assassination is now. It all could very well be
true, and I would put it at a high probability that it is true.”
Bob Inman vehemently disagrees. After reading copies of the text,
Inman, former naval intelligence director (1974-76) and CIA deputy director
(1981-82), says the messages were not ONI- generated. None of the
three-digit code names in the heading of the messages means anything, he
says.

“My reaction is that it’s a forgery of some kind or invalid,” Inman
says. “There is not anything about this format that I have ever seen
before. That’s not the way messages were set up in those days at all.”
Less is known about what Ricky White says is a witness elimination list
that he found in the canister. Ricky White says there were 28 witnesses on
the list, news clippings of each victim and accompanied in some cases by
his father’s writing.

“Ricky White’s story is no less logical than what we have been led to
believe in 27 years.” says Fensterwald. “If just anyone came out of the
woodwork and said, ‘I shot John Kennedy,’ I would be exceedingly cautious
about it. But if someone who was in the Marine Corps with Oswald, whose
wife worked for Jack Ruby and who knew the Tippit family, crawls out of the
woodwork and says I was involved in it, that doesn’t stretch my credulity
at all.

“It does, however, need a lot more investigation by some official body
with power to subpoena witnesses. I don’t think private citizens can carry
it much further.”
PREVIOUS INQUIRIES ON ASSASSINATION
The assassination of President John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963, in
Dallas was investigated by two government bodies:
The Warren Commission, headed by Chief Justice Earl Warren, concluded
after a nine-month investigation in 1964 that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting
alone, fired two shots from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book
Depository, killing President John F. Kennedy and wounding Texas Gov. John
Connally.

The report conclusions left many skeptics. Since bullets passed
through the victims and shattered, investigators were not able to match the
rifling on the bullets to the marks that would have been caused by Oswald’s
rifle.

After a three-year investigation, the House Select Committee on
Assassinations concluded in early 1979 that Oswald fired two shots that
killed Kennedy and wounded Connally. Scientific acoustical evidence
indicated a “high probability” that an unidentified second gunman was
firing from the grassy knoll to the front and right of the presidential
limousine, but missed.

TEXT OF NAVY CABLES
——————————————————————
Navy Int.

Code A MRC
Remark data
1666106
NRC VDC NAC
Dec. 63
Remarks Mandarin: Code G:
Stay within department, witnesses have eyes, ears and mouths. You
(illegible) do of the mix up. The men will be in to cover up all
misleading evidence soon. Stay as planned wait for further orders.

C. Bowers
RE – rifle Code AAA destroy/on/
——————————————————————
Navy Int.

Code A MRC
Remark data
1666106
NRC VDC NAC
(illegible). 63
Remarks Mandarin: Code A
Foreign affairs assignments have been cancelled. The next assignment
is to eliminate a National Security threat to world wide peace. Destination
will be Houston, Austin or Dallas. Contacts are being arranged now. Orders
are subject to change at any time. Reply back if not understood.

C. Bowers
OSHA
RE – rifle Code AAA destroy/on/
——————————————————————
Navy Int.

Code A MRC
Remark data
1666106
Sept. 63
Remarks Mandarin: Code A
Dallas destination chosen. Your place hidden within the department.

Contacts are within this letter. Continue on as planned.

C. Bowers
OSHA
RE – rifle Code AAA destroy/on/
——————————————————————
(Part 2 – The post-press conference follow-up story)
August 7, 1990
DALLAS COP’S SON ROLLS OUT JFK THEORY
MATTOX, CIA, HOLLYWOOD ANSWER CONSPIRACY CLAIM
By Andrew Likakis
The Texas attorney general, a major Hollywood producer and the Central
Intelligence Agency are now being written into the newest chapter in the
never-ending mystery of who assassinated President John F. Kennedy.

A 29-year-old unemployed oil equipment salesman from Midland stood
before scores of reporters in Dallas Monday and implicated his dead father
in the assassination. Soon after, Attorney General Jim Mattox said he’d
gladly review the evidence, and the CIA issued an unheard of denial.

At the same time, the FBI, which had previously refused to comment on
Ricky White’s story, issued a statement in Washington saying agents had
reviewed and dismissed White’s story two years ago.

And, finally, those who believe White’s story is true acknowledge that
last weekend, several of them met in Hollywood with producer/director
Oliver Stone, presumably to discuss movie rights to the White story.

The latest chapter in the Kennedy epic began at a two-hour press
conference in which White said his father, Roscoe Anthony White, joined
the Dallas Police Department in October 1963 with the express intent of
killing Kennedy.

During the press conference called by two assassination research groups
and several Midland businessmen, White and Baptist minister Jack Shaw
talked about incriminating entries in Roscoe White’s missing diary, decoded
cables, and the relationship that Roscoe White and his wife, Geneva, had
with Lee Harvey Oswald, Dallas Officer J. D. Tippit and Jack Ruby.

Based on his own memories, his father’s diary and effects, and the
recollections of his mother, Ricky White told reporters that his father had
been one of three shooters on the day Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas.

Although Officer Tippit was a friend of his father’s, Ricky White says
his father shot Tippit to death in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas about 45
minutes after the assassination, as he and Oswald were trying to get away.

Oswald was later accused of killing Tippit.

During the press conference, White said his father was following orders
to kill Kennedy and that, while he did not know who issued the orders,
three messages found among his father’s effects have coding that might have
come from the Office of Naval Intelligence or, indirectly, the CIA.

CIA RESPONSE: ‘LUDICROUS’
The suggestion of CIA involvement brought a sharp response Monday from
agency spokesman Mark Mansfield in Washington: “These allegations – that
this was done on CIA orders, that this guy worked for us and that CIA had
any role in the assassination of President Kennedy – are ludicrous.”
Roscoe White never worked for the CIA, Mansfield said, adding:
“normally, we never confirm nor deny employment, but these allegations
are so outrageous that we felt it necessary and appropriate to respond.”
Also Monday, the FBI issued a statement saying its agents had
considered the Ricky White story in 1988 and had “determined that this
information is not credible.”
Bernard Fensterwald, executive director of the Assassination Archives
and Research Centre in Washington, said Monday that Mattox will be given
all material that points toward Roscoe White’s involvement in the
assassination.

RUBY, OSWALD MEETING
In another curious twist to the case, Mattox said late Monday he is
interested in pursing the White story because he was once told by his
mother, a waitress at Campisi’s Egyptian Restaurant in Dallas, that Ruby
frequented the restaurant and that she thought she saw Ruby and Oswald
eating dinner there together once.

The restaurant owner, the late Joe Campisi, testified before the House
Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978 that he didn’t see Oswald in his
eatery, Mattox said.

Mattox said he believes he has jurisdiction in the case, and he would
interview White and his associates “to see what they’ve got and let them
explain it to me.”
“The key to the thing, of course, is, if the FBI acknowledges seeing
the diary,” Mattox said. “The only thing to do is to get a look at the
diary or acknowledgement (by the FBI) that it existed.”
“This is not a solution to the John Kennedy case,” Fensterwald said
after Ricky White told his story. “It’s information we think is important,
and we think it’s true. Even if what is said here today checks out, the
case is not solved. We still don’t know who planned it and paid for it and
basically what the shooting was about. The best we can hope for is to get
out of this an idea of who the actual assassins were.”
It may be difficult for Mattox or anybody else to do much with the case
without the Roscoe White diary, which disappeared in 1988. The leather
bound journal talked about the assassination and the aftermath, said Ricky
White, adding that he and his mother read it.

Roscoe White died of injuries sustained in an explosive fire in 1971.

His widow, Geneva, is critically ill and, according to family members,
unable to be interviewed.

A ‘SILENCED’ WIFE
According to the Rev. Shaw, Geneva White could help an investigation.

Shaw says Roscoe and Geneva White confided in him in 1970-71 when they
were having marital problems. And, he says, Geneva White confided in him
again during the last year, telling him that she was working as a hostess
in Ruby’s Carousel Club when she overheard her husband and Ruby discussing
“the entire plot of the assassination of the President two months before
the shooting.

After the assassination, Shaw says, Geneva White was given electric
shock treatments and kept sedated so she “would be silenced.” Ruby had told
her “in no uncertain terms that if she opened her mouth she was dead and
her children were dead,” Shaw says Geneva White told him.

Shaw says Geneva White told him she confronted her husband after an
organized crime figure approached her in New Orleans in 1971 and told her
to deliver a warning to her husband.

According to Shaw, Geneva White was shown nearly a dozen photographs
and identified the man in New Orleans as Charles Nicoletti, formerly the
number one hitman with the Sam Giancana Mafia family in Chicago. Nicoletti
was executed gangland style in 1977, about a year after Giancana also met
the same fate.

Shaw says that, when she returned to Dallas and told her husband of the
ominous meeting in New Orleans, “he told her everything.”
Shaw says that, as he lay in a hospital dying from burns in 1971 Roscoe
White told him that he had been marked for execution by some of his
underworld associates and that he believed the fire had been deliberately
started to kill him.

A HOLLYWOOD INTEREST
Ricky White said Monday that, since he found his father’s diary, he has
been consumed full-time with trying to find out what role his father played
in the assassination.

He said that for more than a year he has received a “monthly salary”
from the Matsu Corp., which was formed by seven Midland oilmen solely to
help finance Ricky’s investigation into his father’s involvement in the
assassination.

Matsu president Gary Baily said Ricky began receiving financial help
from Matsu on a “day-to-day basis” about six weeks ago after getting just
expense funds for more than a year.

Baily also said Ricky White is negotiating with Hollywood
producer/director Oliver Stone for movie rights to his story. Last
weekend, Ricky White, his wife and Larry Howard of the JFK Assassination
Information Centre in Dallas met in the Los Angeles area with Oliver Stone
and toured Universal Studios.

“Oliver Stone is interested, but no deal has been made,” Baily said.

Matsu so far has spent more than $100,000 on the White project, Baily said.

If any money is generated by the White story, about 74 percent will go to
Ricky White’s family. The rest would go to the Matsu Corp., Baily said.