Bill Alexander dies

[Joseph McBride]

http://www.dallasnews.com/obituary-headl...-at-95.ece

Dallas Morning News obit link above. I posted on Facebook about Alexander:

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  Joseph McBride "People down here are probably more patriotic than your Eastern liberal types, and they've demonstrated that. There are a lot of people that strictly do not like Yankees. And as far as anybody giving a particular rat's ass about John Kennedy getting his ass wiped in Dallas, who cares? A goddamn Yankee comes off down here and gets killed, for whatever reason, big deal!" -- Bill Alexander in Larry Sneed's NO MORE SILENCE
  
  
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I interviewed Alexander and his boss, DA Henry Wade, for my book INTO THE NIGHTMARE. Alexander was an unhinged character who was mixed up in the Dallas events in suspicious ways. Wade was ambivalent about Alexander, saying that "Bill was inclined to make wild statements" and adding with cynical admiration, "He probably was the best one to prosecute a weak murder case." On the Ruby trial, Wade told me that Alexander didn't do his "homework," so the DA himself had to step in to help. Then Wade had to fire him over his statement that Earl Warren should be hanged. This Dallas Morning News article is a shameful whitewash of this unsavory (to put it mildly) figure.

[Drew Phipps]

I had just started to put together some things on Bill Alexander. He was the guy that drafted the original complaint stating that Oswald's actions were part of a communist conspiracy. He was everywhere that day; he was at the Texas Theatre when Oswald was arrested, he went to Oswald's boarding house, and Ruth Paine's house... I'm gonna see if I can't put together a timeline of his actions on that day.

[Albert Doyle]

And as far as anybody giving a particular rat's ass about John Kennedy getting his ass wiped in Dallas, who cares? A goddamn Yankee comes off down here and gets killed, for whatever reason, big deal!" -- Bill Alexander in Larry Sneed's NO MORE SILENCE

Why do people stay silent? The above probably has a lot to do with it.

[Tracy Riddle]

He was also involved in ransacking Joe Molina's house and terrorizing his family in the middle of the night, as a potential suspect in the assassination.
Posner: "[William] Alexander participated in a midnight raid [11/22/1963] on the house of J.R. Molina...a Communist who was on the Dallas police's intelligence watch list, and it was originally thought he might be connected to Oswald. 'We did a deluxe search job on Molina's house,' recalls Alexander. 'He was polite and very scared. But there was nothing between him and Oswald.' Earlier than night, Alexander decided to 'shake things up a bit' and spoke to a friend at the Philadelphia Inquirer, Joe Goulden, and told him that he intended to indict Oswald for killing the President 'in furtherance of a Communist conspiracy.' As he told the author, 'The Inquirer got 200,000 papers on the street before Wade called me up and screamed, 'What the hell are you trying to do, start World War III?'...Shortly after the Inquirer incident, Alexander and two local reporters concocted a story that Oswald had been FBI informer S-179 and had been paid $200 a month. Lonnie Hudkins...printed the story...'I never much liked the federals,' Alexander says. 'I figured it was as good a way as any to keep them out of my way having to run down that phony story.'" (Case Closed 348)

Ruby defense attorney/author Elmer Gertz described him: "There were eighty people in the [Dallas District Attorney's] office in 1963...and it would be hard to find a more dedicated, indelicate, lieutenant than...'Bill' Alexander....If Alexander had been elected to the U.S. Presidency--God forbid!--he would have signed treaties and public documents 'Bill.' He was Bill even to those whose lives he was intent on taking--in a legal way, of course. The gun which he carried was a symbol to him of the strength of the law...For years Ruby had regarded Alexander as his friend; Alexander did not deny it, but friendship did not deter him in the least from his grim task. He was determined to 'fry' his friend, and to that end he would devote his shrewd, resourceful, and remorseless mind...Whether or not Alexander mourned the assassination of the President, he could not resist a typical crack when a St. Patrick's Day parade was held in 1964 on the street of the President's death, 'Don't you think we're pushing our luck a little having another parade for an Irishman around here?' In the same manner he described his political philosophy as being 'just to the left of Little Orphan Annie and just to the right of the John Birchers.'"

In 1977 Alexander stated "There is still a real possibility that Oswald was on his way to meet an accomplice at the time of the Tippit murder. I led the Dallas investigation of that aspect of the case and was never satisfied on that point." "One of the questions that I would like to have answered is why Oswald was where he was when he shot Tippit...Along with the police, we measured the route, all the conceivable routes he could have taken to that place; we interrogated bus drivers, we checked the cab-company records, but we still do not know how he got to where he was...Was he supposed to meet someone?...If you look at Oswald's behavior, he made very few non-purposeful motions, very seldom did he do anything that did not serve a purpose to him." "Oswald's movements did not add up then, and they don't add up now. No way. Certainly he may have had accomplices." "I was amazed that a person so young would have had the self-control he had [under questioning]. It was almost as if he had been rehearsed, or programmed, to meet the situation that he found himself in..." (Anthony Summers interviews 12/1977, 8/1978)

James Hosty recalled how "Vince Drain told me a story about how Alexander, in front of his son, shot the boy's dog dead to get a point across. Alexander was feared, not respected, by others...he got too chummy with the local police. He was always out riding shotgun in the patrol cars and executing search warrants with them. In the off-hours, he was out boozing it up with the cops as well." Alexander was a "frequent drinking customer" at the Carousel. Though he had assured Ruby that statements he made during his initial interrogation would be "off the record," Alexander used them in the trial anyway. (Assignment Oswald 125)

[Albert Doyle]

There's was never a snowball's chance in hell of JFK's murder ever being investigated in Dallas.