Mary's Mosaic: Entering Peter Janney's World of Fantasy

[Tom Scully]

Why do people insist on putting their name on and distributing long intentionally misleading details? Why do it? Who benefits?
The elephant in the community is confirmation bias enabling face saving instead of fact finding.

[URL="https://books.google.com/books?id=OGOCDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT411&lpg=PT411&dq=mary%27s+mosaic+%22faux+truce%22&source=bl&ots=9nc1fwJtfZ&sig=ACfU3U2IjGbEVWexqVNGg1CeX_Xn0AFHgw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjV3qOjyLvjAhWRKM0KHY-wAnYQ6AEwAHoECAAQAQ"]Mary's Mosaic: The CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary ...

[/URL][URL="https://books.google.com/books?id=OGOCDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT411&lpg=PT411&dq=mary%27s+mosaic+%22faux+truce%22&source=bl&ots=9nc1fwJtfZ&sig=ACfU3U2IjGbEVWexqVNGg1CeX_Xn0AFHgw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjV3qOjyLvjAhWRKM0KHY-wAnYQ6AEwAHoECAAQAQ"]https://books.google.com/books?isbn=1510708936
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Peter Janney - 2016 - ‎History

By the end of the deposition, we had reached a kind of "faux truce" where I admitted that it was highly unlikely that Mr. Mitchell had been the actual assassin in ...

Vs....

JUNE 26, 2018 | PETER JANNEY

THE BRILLIANT BLACK WOMAN WHO DEFENDED THE ACCUSED KILLER OF JFK'S MISTRESS, PART 2
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The presence of Lieutenant William L. Mitchell had troubled Dovey Roundtree from the very beginning. What else, Roundtree wondered, might Mitchell add to the information he'd already given? How might he elaborate on what he'd told police the day after the murder? Mitchell had refused to return her phone calls in the months before the trial; she had little to go on.
But whatever he said, whatever claims he might make in his testimony, she feared the jury was certain to believe him, simply because he appeared to be the quintessence of credibility: educated, a retired military officer, and white.
At a murder trial where the innuendo of an attempted sexual assault by a black man upon a white woman had captivated the attention of an entire city, William L. Mitchell indeed presented a formidable threat.
Might the jury even go so far as to overlook the discrepancy in Wiggins's height and weight testimony, given Mitchell's corroboration to police of the clothing description that was nearly identical to what Wiggins had seen? Potentially, this spelled doom for Ray Crump, Roundtree told Leo Damore years later, because Ray had lied on two important counts: his clothing, and his reason for being in the area on the day of the murder. Without testimony from Crump's girlfriend, Vivian, Roundtree still feared the possibility of ruination for her client.
As a witness for the prosecution, Mitchell was a cool customer. He didn't fall into the same traps that had tripped up Henry Wiggins. When asked by Hantman to identify the exhibits of Crump's and Mary Meyer's clothing, Mitchell made certain to say only that they were "similar to the clothes worn by the individual," not the exact clothes he had seen that day.
He described the "Negro male" he had seen following Mary as "about my height, about five feet eight [inches],"74 and then added that he, Mitchell, weighed "about 145 pounds." The reader will recall that this was the precise weight that police recorded for Crump after his arrest on the day of the murder.75
Mitchell was careful to stop short of saying that Ray Crump was the man he had seen. Doing so would have invited a fierce cross-examination from Roundtree, which might have aroused suspicion and damaged Mitchell's testimony. Instead, Mitchell slyly and repeatedly implied that the man he'd seen was indeed Crump. The man he saw, he told the court, "had his hands in the pockets of his jacket when I passed him." He carried "no fishing rod."76
Hantman asked Mitchellif he had seen anyone else on the towpath the day. Mitchell testified that he had twice passed "a couple walking together," as well as a younger runner "about 20" wearing Bermuda shorts.77 The runner in Bermuda shorts was never identified, and he never came forward.
Patrolman Sylvis had already testified about seeing the couple, a point that corroborated Mitchell's account, bolstering his credibility, but Sylvis had obtained no identification and the couple never came forward to police. Aside from his own claim, no one ever substantiated that Mitchell had been on the towpath that day, or any other day.
In spite of Mitchell'scalm demeanor, Roundtree probed for weak spots in his testimony, in which Mitchell reported with military precision his time on the towpath, and approximately when and where he was located at each of several critical points on the line of the murder.
Roundtree focused on another detail that would undermine Mitchell'swell-rehearsed precision: Had he been wearing a watch? Mitchell was forced to concede that he hadn't; he couldn't be entirely certain that the times he gave were exact. He admitted that he had based his accounting of the time he returned to the Pentagon on the "clock in the barbershop of the [Pentagon] basement athletic center," which read "a quarter of one." It was a small but significant detail, again establishing a degree of reasonable doubt about Mitchell's account.
Yet Mitchell's assertion that the man he passed weighed "about 145 pounds" was troubling to the defense. It was too close for comfort, in spite of Mitchell's claim that the man he had seen was "about my height, about five feet eight [inches]," clearly taller than Ray Crump.
The weight match wouldn't be lost on Hantman, who would exploit it for all it was worth, along with one other detail, in his summation. At the end of his testimony, William Mitchell's sheen was still untarnished; he remained a model citizen, and he had delivered precise eyewitness testimony that corroborated the less-than-stellar witness Henry Wiggins, thereby indirectly and ironically resuscitating the Wiggins testimony.
At that point in the proceedings, in the eyes of the jury, it may have still been anyone's case to win.
No Evidence
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Third edition (aka 2nd revision of Peter Janney's book, Mary's Mosaic) Chapter 16

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