31-03-2013, 05:46 PM
Quote: On January 2, 1964, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover sent a teletype marked "URGENT" to Dallas Special Agent in Charge J. Gordon Shanklin on Ralph Leon Yates. Hoover noted that a previous FBI investigation into whether Yates may have been at his company at the same time he said he picked up the Oswald-like hitchhiker provided insufficient evidence "to completely discredit Yates' story." Hoover therefore ordered the Dallas FBI office to "reinterview Yates with polygraph," the instrument more commonly known as a "lie detector."
On January 4 in another "URGENT" teletype, Shanklin reported back to Hoover on Yates's polygraph examination that day: "Results of test were .inconclusive as Yates responded to neither relevant or control type questions." Because his lie-detector test was inconclusive, Yates had still not been discredited. But there was more to come.
During his final, January 4 trip to the FBI office, Ralph Yates was accompanied by his wife, Dorothy. He had asked her to come with him. In an interview forty-two years later, she told me what happened next to her husband. After he completed his (inconclusive) lie-detector test, she said, the FBI told him he needed to go immediately to Woodlawn Hospital, the Dallas hospital for the mentally ill. He drove there with Dorothy. He was admitted that evening as a psychiatric patient. From that point on, he spent the remaining eleven years of his life as a patient in and out of mental health hospitals.
A crucial transition in the psychic health of Ralph Yates seems to have occurred at the FBI office on January 4, 1964. Something the FBI said after Ralph's polygraph test puzzled and disturbed Dorothy:
"They told me that he was telling the truth [according to the polygraph machine], but that basically he had convinced himself that he was telling the truth. So that's how it came out. He strongly believed it, so it came out that way."
According to what the FBI told Dorothy Yates, the data that registered on the polygraph machine, as then read in the normal way by the polygraph examiner, showed that Ralph Yates was telling the truth. His test was officially recorded as "inconclusive" (meaning the examiner wasn't sure if Yates was telling the truth) only because J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI had decided what the truth had to be for Yates. The FBI-defined truth was that Yates had not picked up the Oswald-like hitchhiker with the "curtain rods" package, because for the FBI there could be no such hitchhiker. Therefore Ralph Leon Yates, by being so definitive (as shown by his polygraph chart) In knowing that he did precisely thatpicked up a nonexistent hitchhikercould only have lost touch with reality. What for any other polygraphed person would serve as proof of truth-telling was, in the case of Yates, proof only of an illusory divorce from reality. The wrenching but undeniable truth for Yates, that he helped a man he thought was the president's assassin deliver what could have been his weapon to the Book Depository, was what compelled him to contact the FBI in the first place. Now he was being told his experience was nothing but an illusion. The FBI said so. Because of Yates's unswerving, polygraphed conviction to the contrary, that he knew what really happened, J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI knew what they had to do. They told him to report at once to a psychiatric hospital.
Exactly what happened to Ralph Yates in the following days as a patient at Woodlawn Hospital, Dorothy Yates did not witness and does not know.
She does know that early one morning about a week later, Ralph broke out of Woodlawn. At 4:00 A.M. she opened the front door of their house to find Ralph standing barefoot on the steps in his white hospital cIothes. Snow was swirling around him. Ralph told Dorothy he had escaped from the mental institution. He said he tied sheets together and climbed down from a window. He had then stolen a car and driven home.
Ralph was tormented by fear in a way Dorothy would see repeated for years. He told his wife someone was trying to kill them and their children because of what he knew about Oswald. She quickly bundled up their five sleepy children, the oldest of whom was six. Ralph drove his family away from their house in the stolen car. Within a few hours, Dorothy was more alarmed by her husband's frantic efforts to evade their murder at every turn than she was by any unidentified killers. She returned the car and reported his whereabouts to the Woodlawn Hospital authorities.
Ralph was picked up and returned to Woodlawn. He was soon transferred to Terrell State Hospital, a psychiatric facility about thirty miles east of Dallas, where he lived for eight years. He was then transferred to the Veterans Hospital in Waco for a year and a half, and finally to Rusk State Hospital for the final year and a half of his life. While a patient at all three hospitals, he spent intermittent periods of from one to three months at home with his wife and children. He was never able to work again.
In the course of Ralph's psychiatric treatment, Dorothy said, he was given the tranquilizing drugs Thorazine and Stelazine to the point where "they made him walk around like a zombie." He learned to resist the process. Just as Abraham Bolden had done in the Springfield Penitentiary psychiatric unit, Ralph faked swallowing the pills.
More difficult to avoid were the shock treatments. He received over forty of them. The impact of the shock treatments on his long-range memory was, his wife said, "evidently nothing, because he didn't forget what he was there for," his encounter with the hitchhiker he had dropped off at Elm and Houston.
Ralph told Dorothy, "I don't know if they're trying to make me forget what's happened, or what. But I'm always going to say those things happened."
To the end of his life Ralph held on to the truth of his experience with the hitchhiker carrying the curtain rods. "He never backed down," Dorothy said.
Ralph died at Rusk State Hospital on September 3, 1975, from congestive heart failure. He was thirty-nine years old.
Over three decades later, Dorothy continues to ponder her husband's stubborn adherence to a strange story that in effect made him a prisoner in mental hospitals, took him away from a family he loved, and impoverished all of them. He was haunted by an experience he couldn't forget, for which he then suffered the rest of his life because of his unwillingness to recant it. Other relatives and friends dismissed Ralph's account of the Oswald-like hitchhiker with the curtain rods package as pure fantasy.
His uncle, J.O. Smith, who went with him on his first trip to the FBI office, said of his nephew's story, "I really thought that was all just imagination."
His cousin, Ken Smith, remembers Ralph before Kennedy's death as nothing more than "a chain-smoker who watched football games." Once Ralph had what he thought was his Oswald experience, Ken said, he became a man obsessed:
"He wouldn't let it go. He believed it to be true. This consumed Ralph. His thinking didn't go beyond that afterwards. This just totally destroyed his life.
"Ralph blamed himself for Kennedy's assassination. He said, 'I was the reason the President got killed.'
"If he had shut up, his life wouldn't have been so bad'. Everybody thought he was crazy. So he became crazy."
Even Ralph's co-worker and corroborating witness, Dempsey Jones, who confirmed to the FBI that Yates told him at least one day before the assassination about the hitchhiker's talk on shooting the president, was skeptical. As the FBI liked to point out, he added a disclaimer: "[Jonesj said Yates is a big talker who always talks about a lot of foolishness."
Only the FBI knew why Ralph Yates needed to be taken seriously. Not even Yates himself, who had no sense of an Oswald double, understood the significance of what he felt compelled to say for the rest of his life. Only the Federal Bureau of Investigation recognized the importance of his testimony, with the threat it posed to the government's case against Oswald. If evidence surfaced of the Oswald-like hitchhiker, who delivered his "curtain rods" to the Depository two days before the assassination, it would have preempted and brought into question the government-endorsed curtain rods story, as given by Buell Wesley Frazier. Thanks to the bungling redundancy of cover stories, the plot to kill the president was again in danger of exposure.
There were too many Oswalds in view, with too many smuggled rifles, retelling a familiar story to too many witnesses. At least one curtain rods story, and the disposable witness who heard it, had to go. The obvious person to be jettisoned was the hapless Ralph Yates. His stubborn insistence on what he knew he had seen and heard, from the man he had given a ride, had to be squelched.
Ralph Yates then went through eleven years of hell. Yet he could not forget, and would not stop speaking about, what he witnessed when he picked up the man he thought was Lee Harvey Oswald. Without ever understanding the full meaning of the experience he refused to renounce, Ralph Leon Yates was a witness to the unspeakable.
What flies right past Lee is the fact the first paragraph shows FBI DID try to corroborate Yates' trip to Oak Cliff. If you read Dave Martin's description you'll see Hoover specifically told Shanklin that efforts to disprove Yates' presence at the hitch-hiking incident had failed. If you read Hoover's words in correct context they send the message to Shanklin that they are trying to discredit Yates and his story. A good researcher will see that this coloring of the investigation is similar to the FBI transcript of Jones' interview starting with the quote 'Ralph was a big talker who talked a lot of foolishness'. The intent is clearly to discredit Yates and tint the entire interview with doubt. With this in mind there's no doubt that Hoover's instruction to apply a lie detector test is in furtherance of this attempt to discredit Yates.
When Shanklin reported back to Hoover that Yates failed to even respond to test questions and that the results were "inconclusive" he was obviously obeying orders and avoiding reporting what the FBI agents who did the test told Dorothy Yates, that is, that Yates had passed the test and that it showed he was telling the truth. Shanklin is using dirty FBI tactics to try to scuttle the polygraph test by showing it didn't give valid control question results. This is a tactic to discredit the actual test itself because any close examination of it would show Yates was telling the truth. After all, you can't commit someone to a mental institution for inconclusiveness. The FBI clearly told Dorothy that they had to commit Ralph to the asylum because the test conclusively showed he thought he was telling the truth and since the reality of Oswald being at work proved this was impossible therefore Yates was insane by definition. If you're paying attention, the form of the procedure of what they did to Yates tells you he passed the test. But we aren't guessing anyway because Dorothy specifically said the FBI agent told her Ralph passed the test. Or are we now going to attack Dorothy Yates too for the sake of "research standards"?
The FBI wasn't quite dehumanized to Nazi methods when they pulled this evil Gestapo stuff on Yates. It's not entirely possible to drain all your agents of their democratic humanity when doing such evil things. Like in many other cases of FBI telegrams involving the assassination, their corrupted contents didn't quite match what people were saying. What happened with Dorothy Yates is the FBI agent slipped and spoke the truth because he was touched by what they were doing to Dorothy's husband and needed to console her with the truth. As he told Dorothy, Ralph had passed the test. Only a blind researcher would not see this for what it obviously is. Martin then deftly applies the correct and academic conclusions to the story and its evidence.
I like the part about the FBI needed to jettison Yates because he refused to back-down off his story. Martin suggests poor Ralph Yates never realized what he witnessed was all explained by a CIA double trying to frame Oswald, only the plotters got too zealous and became sloppy forgetting they could entrap themselves by having Oswald witnessed at work at the same time they were trying to frame him. Perhaps they bungled because the more important issue was getting the Carcano into the Depository?
I don't see how any researcher could reach around the obvious and try to question Yates' story when any simple analysis shows what he witnessed was obviously true and that he accurately reported it and was murdered for it like many other witnesses. Now that it's fairly obvious that FBI told Dorothy Ralph passed the test I think Lee should try answering the 4 key critical points of Oswald-related evidence argument I made. I think it obviates any need to inappropriately question Yates' polygraph results. I think there's some very good researchers out there, including Lee Farley, however whether by boredom or overzealous research when they start turning against some of the worst and most meaningful victims like Vinson, Pitzer, and Yates, it's really too much. DiEugenio? Well, he's just AWOL again when it counts the most. - What can you do?