Sunday, January 10, 2021
Jim Garrison listed Thomas Beckham twice in his leads memo from November 1967. Here is the first:
This is the only reference I have seen to Charles Spiesel identifying Beckham as being at the party in which Ferrie and Shaw discussed the assassination. There is no other memo that says this - it may well have been destroyed.
See my earlier blog post on Garrison's files.
In one of my earlier posts, I showed that Thomas Beckham was identified as being in Clinton with Shaw and Ferrie. Garrison's men were always showing the same group of photos to people - and this is why I think Beckham kept on being identified.
You can see that anonymous letter here.
Here is the second Beckham mention in the leads memo:
As we have earlier written, Beckham was a con man. He dressed up as a priest to get people to donate money - he had a life-long habit of forging University diplomas and professional certifications.
What I find interesting above is the mention of the "scar on his [Oswald's] left cheek." Was Beckham impersonating Oswald? Here is a Garrison notation on Beckham's rap sheet:
Garrison documents are full of memos mentioning scars on people's cheek. Have a look at this document related to the Bolton Ford incident*:
Garrison mentions this on pages 57-58 in his book, On The Trail Of The Assassins, He then adds:
"After Lee Harvey Oswald returned to New Orleans and began handing out pro-Castro leaflets, this man with the scar was always present on the edge of the crowd. It is standing operating procedure for an intelligent agent engaged in a provocative activity to have a nearby bodyguard to protect him against a violent reaction from the crowd. It seems probably that this man with the scar was Oswald's bodyguard because of the regularity of his presence - invariably on the outer edge of the scene and invariably wearing sunglasses. The sunglasses were large, but they could not conceal the vertical scar that ran up through this man's left eyebrow. We learned of his consistent attendance from our questioning of persons present at the leaflet handout, many of whom we had identified from our copies of the news photos."
A footnote claims that "these witness statements were also stolen."
There is also a notation on the document above that says "double LHO."
Here's an article from the New York Times that describes a Garrison lead. Note the last three paragraphs:
And, here is what I believe is the underlying memo for that lead:
Garrison's men were always on the look out for men with scars. Here is one such memo:
*The Bolton Ford Incident is probably just mistaken identity. The "Oswald' who supposedly came in to buy trucks was never identified as Lee Harvey - the Oswald we know was in the Soviet Union at the time. The assistant manager of Bolton Ford, Oscar Deslatte, could not identify Lee Harvey Oswald as the person who came into the dealership. And, Deslatte denied the whole story when he talked to Garrison. This incident has become a staple for the second Oswald theory.