Jim,
My apologies if you have been offended by my harsh language, but nothing concerning you has been written in spite, and this is no time to worry about being polite. I would be just as ferocious with Larry Hancock, but have been denied that opportunity by that Bolshevik Murphyite, James Gordon.
There is a cancer on the body politic of the research community- Murphyism- and it has metastasized right into its brain. And at this critical juncture an intervention is called for, in order to prevent widespread and lasting insanity.
My Depository research has made much progress since 2009's
The Elevator Escape Theory that I sent you, and it does not seem to me that you have familiarized yourself with my 2015 essay
Inside Job. It behooves you to study pp. 26-36,
Eternal Return: The Lunchroom Encounter Re-examined, at
http://www.jfkinsidejob.com; there you will find a tightly-knit argument against the hypothesis that the lunchroom incident was a hoax. And that argument is even more tightly-wrapped today in 2017, and I have recently laid out its bullet-points in the current thread you started.
Early in that thread you made a bogus appeal to authority, Hancock et al., to help justify your endorsement of Bart Kamp's essay. And you were eerily reminiscent of Arlen Specter, when he explained that "These are honorable men. They wouldn't lie to you." What special qualifications do Hancock et al. have to recommend for us what to believe as regards the lunchroom incident? The sum total of their qualifications on that is next to nothing.
Doyle called you out as regards Kamp's pimping of the PrayerMan theory, and shortly thereafter got suspended. Because you had insisted that Kamp was just trying to show us "whether or not [Oswald] was on the 1st floor eating his lunch as the motorcade went by". But with Kamp you get a two-fer - believe the gobbledygook about PrayerMan, you have a better chance of falling for the gobbedygook about the lunchroom hoax. That strategy had been successful in 1963, suspecting that Oswald killed Tippit so he must have killed JFK. And you are
kidding yourself if you think that you had nothing to do with Doyle's suspension. That episode of friction was simply the straw that broke the camel's back, and one of the thug moderators here stepped in to silence him and save you the embarrassment of being shown to have so obviously been deceiving yourself.
You have been off the beam with your reads on Baker (like a quarterback reads) and that is not going to correct itself overnight. I cited two examples in the lunchroom thread. I've also seen you ballyhoo his interview in
First Day Evidence a couple of times, and reproduce that here:
"The man who said he was the building superintendent was outside and met me at the door and went in with me. Shortly after I entered the building I confronted Oswald. The man who identified himself as the superintendent said that Oswald was all right, that he was employed there.
We left Oswald there, and the supervisor showed me the way upstairs. We couldn't get anyone to send the freight elevator down. In giving the place a quick check, I found nothing that seemed out of the ordinary, so I started back to see what had happened. Not knowing for sure what had happened, I was limited in what I could legally do."
This interview with Sheriff Jim Bowles, apparently during the mid-70's, gives us
nothing damning about the actual sequence of events. Baker may have interjected the statement about the freight elevators as an afterthought, realizing that he'd forgotten to include it and that Bowles was familiar with the story anyways. Or he may have simply remembered it haphazardly due to the elapsed years, or recounted it haphazardly since he'd done it enough times. I am not required to know the correct answer as to why Baker jumbled the sequence of events- only to be reasonable about it. This interview is just another nothing-burger.
Item by item, unable to see the forest for the trees, the Murphyites leap right off the cliff, jumping to the conclusion that the item should be interpreted as indicative of a hoax- that the lunchroom event was totally make-believe. Without considering that there was a more mundane explanation for every step of the way, for this was a dirty murder investigated by a dirty police department, where there was bound to be tons of ambiguity. And the hoaxers have to drastically contort evidence in order to make it fit into their scenario.
Right off the top of my head- they have no justification for contending that Truly & Baker lingered in the front lobby; they completely invert Carolyn Arnold's story, contending that she lied to Earl Golz; they have to discombobulate Holmes' testimony, or invent some fiction to discredit him; the mini-conspiracy required to sustain the hoax is stupidly large.
This fruitless, plastic tree of a hypothesis will not yield anything better than Ira Trantham's 1978 HSCA statement, which tells us:
"By this time they were joined by Jerry Hill and he and Hill went inside. Hill continued upstairs and an officer W.H. Denham (#7140 DPD) approached him with a prisoner. Advised this suspect had been observed "acting suspiciously" on the third floor without a reasonable explanation for being up there."
But when you doublecheck this against Trantham's report in the 1964 Decker Exhibit (XIX p. 517) and film footage of Larry Florer's arrest, you may safely conclude that Trantham's 1978 memory was a completely mangled mess.
All the voluminous searches through the Mary Ferrell Archives have not produced anything that better correlates to the hoax hypothesis. And the chances are next to nil that anything similar will turn up in the documents yet-to-be-released. This was a clunker of a hypothesis, and it's time for its proponents to admit defeat. By the way, that Dictabelt containing Truly's deletion is about Jack Dougherty, since it was right in the middle of a characterization of Dougherty that the solitary deletion occurred.
I am Sean Murphy's harshest critic, but where is the respect shown by those who treat him like Quetzalcoatl? Doesn't that more resemble the respect shown by trained seals? Where is my disrespect in providing him with scholarly feedback? Is that not, in this business, the highest form of respect? It is because it's grown way out of control, to cult status- which is unhealthy in itself, in the extreme- that I must tear into him with restrained ferocity. Murphyism has a very close parallel with the pandemonium created by
The Sorceror's Apprentice in the 1940 Disney classic
Fantasia.
******************************************************
This part of the battle has been won. For we can now state, with a very high degree of certainty, that
during the shooting Oswald was in the 2nd-floor lunchroom. This is perhaps the most critical puzzle piece to that House of Mystery we know as the Texas School Book Depository. What a remarkable achievement if the research community could all get on the same page about this and unite around that one simple fact.
The losers in this long struggle- to ascertain Oswald's whereabouts, while the assassination was in progress- should take consolation in the knowledge that their role in opposition has helped hew
this selfsame cornerstone that we lay into the foundation of the conspiracy community. And they need to let go of their belief systems, which have been a process arrived at over time, and that process of letting go also takes time.
Those beliefs only add to the haystack of misinformation which surrounds this JFK case, and they will not survive passage into the future- not to 2025, nor 2020, nor even much beyond the coming winter of 2018.
Not on my watch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3LFML_pxlY