Dr. Mary’s Monkey Read online

  DR. MARY’s MONKEY: HOW THE UNSOLVED MURDER OF A DOCTOR, A SECRET LABORATORY IN NEW ORLEANS AND CANCER-CAUSING MONKEY VIRUSES ARE LINKED TO LEE HARVEY OSWALD, THE JFK ASSASSINATION AND EMERGING GLOBAL EPIDEMICS

  Copyright © 2007 Edward T. Haslam. All rights reserved.

  Book layout and cover by Ed Bishop

  TrineDay

  PO Box 577

  Walterville, OR 97489

  1-800-556-2012

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  [email protected]

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2006911309

  Haslam, Edward T.

  Dr. Mary’s Monkey: How the Unsolved Murder of a Doctor, a Secret Laboratory in New Orleans and Cancer-Causing Monkey Viruses are Linked to Lee Harvey Oswald, the JFK Assassination and Emerging Global Epidemics / Edward T. Haslam ; with forward by Jim Marrs — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Epub ISBN 978-1-936296-65-1

  Mobi ISBN 978-1-936296-66-8

  Print ISBN 978-0-9777953-0-6 (acid-free paper)

  1. Kennedy, John F. (John Fitzgerald), 1917-1963—Assassination. 2. Oswald, Lee Harvey. 3. Poliomyelitis vaccine—Contamination—History—Popular works. 4. Political Corruption—United States. 1. Title 364.1’524—dc20

  FIRST EDITION

  10 9 8 7 6 5

  Printed in the USA

  Distribution to the Trade by:

  Independent Publishers Group (IPG)

  814 North Franklin Street

  Chicago, Illinois 60610

  312.337.0747

  www.ipgbook.com

  Dedicated to my father:

  Edward T. Haslam, M. D.

  1915-1971

  Commander, United States Navy

  Professor of Orthopedic Surgery

  Tulane University, New Orleans

  A doctor committed to upholding medical ethics.

  Dr. Mary’s Monkey

  CONTENTS

  Foreword: by Jim Marrs

  Prologue: The Warning

  1: The Pirate

  2: The Classroom

  3: Jimbo

  4: College Daze

  5: A Bishop in His Heart

  6: Mary, Mary

  7: The Cure for Communism

  8: Dr. O

  9: The Treatise

  10: The Fire

  11: The Machine

  12: That Other Epidemic

  13: The Witness

  14: The Teacher

  Appendix: Judyth’s Story

  Epilogue: The Perfect Patsy

  Documents

  Bibliography

  Index

  How the Unsolved Murder of a Doctor, a Secret Laboratory in New Orleans and Cancer-Causing Monkey Viruses are Linked to Lee Harvey Oswald, the JFK Assassination and Emerging Global Epidemics

  FOREWORD

  By Jim Marrs

  There is nothing new to learn about the assassination of JFK.

  WORDS LIKE THESE HAVE BE COME ALMOST a mantra among sanctimonious media pundits and complacent publishers. The problem is that they’re not true.

  In this book, Ed Haslam takes our knowledge of the dark underpinnings of the 1960s to a new level by offering a whole new look at events surrounding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. He focuses on activities in New Orleans during 1963, reaching far beyond Lee Harvey Oswald’s leafleting or his contacts with anti-Castro Cubans, government agents and mobsters.

  Anyone who has seen the Oliver Stone film JFK or has read one of the many books on the assassination knows of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison’s ill-fated prosecution of International Trade Mart Director Clay Shaw.

  We know of Guy Banister, the ex-FBI agent who was connected to the CIA, anti-Castro Cubans and the accused assassin Oswald. We know of David Ferrie, a defrocked priest who was connected to the Mafia, the CIA and Oswald.

  Shaw was able to successfully argue that he had never met Ferrie or Oswald. Today, we know that claim is simply untrue.

  It is now well-accepted that officials within the federal government of the United States of America took steps to effectively block and derail Garrison’s probe. It seemed the New Orleans investigation was at an end.

  But what if all that activity in New Orleans had nothing to do with the assassination? What if there was some other reason for sabotaging Garrison’s investigation?

  After all, there is not one hard piece of evidence linking the Shaw-Ferrie axis to the events in Dealey Plaza. Ferrie, the man connected to Oswald, the Mob and the CIA, never got closer to Dallas than a Houston phone booth, and there was never any serious accusation that Clay Shaw went to Dallas.

  Could there have been a deeper secret reason why the Garrison investigation had to be shut off? And could that reason have had more to do with contaminated polio vaccines and the secrecy of a deadly biological weapon experiment than any plotting against President Kennedy?

  In his 1995 book Mary, Ferrie & the Monkey Virus, Haslam opened a whole new can of worms when he revealed the medical experiments that had taken place in David Ferrie’s apartment in 1963.

  He was one of the first to bring to the public the now well-documented story of how the polio vaccines of the 1950s was adulterated with a cancer-causing virus derived from monkey glands. Federal certification officers were aware of the possibility of the polio vaccine being defective but were pressured into approving the vaccine by powerful medical interests, including Dr. Alton Ochsner of New Orleans.

  Once the magnitude of the cancer-causing viruses in the polio vaccines became known, a massive covert effort was undertaken in an attempt to find a cure or preventative. All this was clandestine work, very hush-hush. No one wanted the American public to know that the polio vaccines inoculated into millions of our citizens were contaminated with dangerous monkey viruses, perhaps causing the cancer epidemic of recent years.

  But then the story took an even darker turn: the CIA began to take an interest in the work. After all, this was a time when documented efforts were under way to find a subtle way of assassinating Fidel Castro. Military and intelligence eyes sparkled at the prospect of somehow injecting Castro with cancer. His death would appear natural, and there would be no accusations from the Soviet Union.

  But what was Oswald’s role in all this activity? The evidence of Oswald’s intelligence work for the U.S. Government is overwhelming. Did he become involved in a biological weapons experiment so monstrous that its secret had to be maintained at all costs?

  Diligent researchers know that Oswald was playing intelligence games in New Orleans in the summer of 1963. One day he was handing out pro-Castro literature on street corners, some of it stamped with the same address as Banister’s antiCastro office at 544 Camp Street. Another day, Oswald was offering his services to anti-Castro militant Carlos Bringuier. Oswald’s duplicity resulted in what appeared to authorities as a staged fight between Oswald and Bringuier on a New Orleans street.

  Oswald was arrested for disturbing the peace. While in jail, he did not ask to see a lawyer but instead someone from the FBI. Despite being outside normal business hours, FBI Agent John Quigley arrived and spent more than an hour with Oswald, who commenced to detail his activities since arriving in New Orleans, almost as though he was making a report to superiors. Yet Oswald made no public mention of David Ferrie or his work at Ferrie’s cancer lab.

  According to information gathered by Haslam, Oswald also was much more closely connected to his uncle, Charles “Dutz” Murret, and New Orleans crime lord Carlos Marcello than previously suspected.

  But Haslam’s primary focus is on the strange and horrible death of Dr. Mary Sherman, whose charred body was found in her home in July 1964. She had been stabbed multiple times. Her body exhibited the effects of extreme scorching and heat, yet t
here was only superficial fire damage to her bed and home.

  He also delves into Oswald’s work with Ferrie in the covert cancer lab and its fatal results. His research provides a plausible explanation for the caged white mice reported in Ferrie’s apartment, Oswald’s missing time at the Reily Coffee Company, and for the never fully understood trip to Clinton, LA, by Oswald, Ferrie and Shaw.

  Readers of Haslam’s previous book, Mary, Ferrie & the Monkey Virus, will recall the author’s suspicion that Dr. Sherman’s death may have been the result of an accident involving a linear particle accelerator used in the cancer research. In this updated account, Haslam lays out strong evidence that just such a device was in use on the U.S. Public Health Service Hospital grounds near Tulane in the 1960s.

  His previous work was embraced by the late Mary Ferrell, that indefatigable Dallas JFK assassination researcher. When asked her opinion of Haslam’s research, Mary replied, “Based on what we know today, I think it’s totally accurate.”

  In this new volume, Haslam brings the one thing missing from his earlier work — a living witness.

  The importance of this new testimony was summed up by consummate conspiracy debunker John McAdams, who stated, “If Judyth Vary Baker is telling the truth, it will change the way we think about the Kennedy assassination.”

  Ed Haslam’s research may indeed change the way we think about the assassination, about Lee Harvey Oswald and about the greatest health scandal in history.

  The tragic assassination of President John F. Kennedy may come to be seen as a mere bump in the road of a series of national scandals and conspiracies which have plagued the United States right up to today.

  JIM MARRS, SPRING 2007

  PROLOGUE

  The Warning

  ON ONE LEVEL THIS BOOK is a cold-case investigation into the 1964 murder of Dr. Mary Sherman in New Orleans — a murder which remains unsolved and is remembered as one of the most mysterious ever committed in a city that has known so much mystery and so many murders. But there is more to this story than murder and mystery.

  Understanding the death of this one woman unravels much of our nation’s secret history. It illuminates the darkness. It connects great medical disasters of our time to important political events of the day. It unveils the contamination of hundreds of millions of doses of the polio vaccine with dozens of monkey viruses. It spotlights the epidemic of soft tissue cancers that swept our country. And it exposes dangerous secret experiments which used radiation to mutate cancer-causing monkey viruses. It connects leaders of American medicine to the accused assassin of the President of the United States. This one murder helps us understand why we have been lied to with such conviction for so many years — and why those lies are likely to continue.

  But this is not a murder mystery: fascinating perhaps, but hardly entertainment. For me, writing this book was difficult, stressful and dangerous. What began as an investigation into this single murder morphed into consideration of epidemics which killed millions of people and which cost billions of dollars. It became an investigation into an underground medical laboratory that was accidentally discovered during an investigation into the JFK assassination — a laboratory which secretly irradiated cancer-causing monkey viruses to develop a biological weapon.

  This story seems to have followed me throughout my life, and its recurring pattern is eerie indeed. Had I realized its importance, I would have paid closer attention. What I do remember are fragments that I pieced together later in life: a name here, an incident there, pieces of a puzzle often separated by years of unrelated distractions. I even remember sitting on Mary Sherman’s lap once as a child. She and my father worked together at Tulane Medical School in New Orleans. They had taken a British doctor out to dinner and then to our family’s home for an after-dinner drink.

  When she died in the summer of 1964, I saw my father cry for the first time. As a Navy doctor during World War II, my father had seen more than his share of burned and broken bodies. Someone (I don’t know who) had asked him to go to the morgue to look at Mary Sherman’s body to get a second opinion on her unusual death. He came home from the morgue that day, fixed himself a drink, sat down in his chair, and cried silently. I wondered what was wrong. My mother told me that a woman he knew from the office had died. It was only later that I learned it was Mary Sherman.

  Seeing my father cry was memorable for me — a once in a lifetime experience. Having spent his career amputating limbs and standing in an Emergency Room making life-or-death decisions about people pulled from mangled vehicles, he was not prone to show much emotion. I mention this incident here because it is important to our story. It is how I learned about the evidence that unraveled the mystery of Mary Sherman’s murder. My father told my mother, and my mother later told me: Mary Sherman’s right arm was missing.

  This key fact in the case was never told to the press. Why not? Can you imagine the O.J. Simpson trial without “the glove”? Why was the press not told the most obvious fact in this case? Who was trying to protect whom? Were there powerful forces controlling the story from the beginning? If so, what did they not want us to know? And why did they not want us to know it?

  That same summer, I overheard my father complain bitterly when he learned about certain activities going on at the U.S. Public Health Service Hospital. His anger and frustration seemed out of character for this deep-keeled man. I remember his words: “We fought wars to keep people from doing things like this.”

  IN THE SUMMER OF 1964 my father learned something about what had been going on at the USPHS hospital. I do not recall if this was before or after Mary Sherman’s death, but it was around that time. He was particularly insulted by the idea that it was taking place on the grounds of the U.S. Public Health Service Hospital, a facility that was supposed to protect the American public from deadly diseases.

  When he vented his frustration to my mother, she reminded him that there was probably nothing he could do about it “at this point.” His response: “It just that I gave up so much to keep stuff like this from happening.” I have always understood this comment to be about leaving the Navy and ending his admiral-track career. Despite this high price, he remained dedicated to the idea of medical ethics, a commitment he acquired from his father — a bio-chemist, veterinarian, and medical doctor who helped develop the first anthrax vaccine. Thus he was not only not a part of these secret radiation experiments, but was also disturbed to learn about them.

  In the late 1960s, I heard about Mary Sherman’s connection to an underground medical laboratory run by a suspect in the murder of President Kennedy. I was told they were using monkey viruses to create cancer. The possibility of this being used as a biological weapon was clear. The dark specter of unleashing a designer virus on the world haunted me. I even offered a sarcastic comment at the time: “The good news is if there’s a bizarre global epidemic involving cancer and a monkey virus thirty years from now, at least we’ll know where it came from.”

  IN 1971, during what might be described as a deathbed conversation, I confronted my father about Mary Sherman. He was getting ready to go to the hospital. For the first time in his life, he was going as a patient. His cancerous lung was scheduled to be surgically removed in the morning. We both knew that, due to his fragile health, he would probably not survive the surgery. We discussed it. We both realized that this would probably be the last conversation we would ever have with each other. He stoically gave me instructions about caring for my mother. I listened and pondered the strength of this quiet man who had seen so much death in his professional life. I studied the courage with which he faced his own.

  When he finished, I acknowledged his requests and confirmed my willingness to carry out his instructions. Then I said that I had a few questions of my own. Questions that I would never be able to ask him again. Questions that I thought were important for him to answer, so that the truth would not die with him. I asked him to tell me about Mary Sherman and about all that spooky stuff that was going on at t
he U.S. Public Health Service Hospital. “Wasn’t she some kind of cancer expert?” I ventured.

  He shook his head slowly from side to side, to let me know that he would not tell me.

  I persisted. I wanted to know why he would not tell me. Solemnly he said, “There might be repercussions. I have to think about the family first. I have to protect them.”

  “What if I figure it out myself?” I challenged.

  “I’m hardly in a position to stop you,” he said with the casual resignation of a man who never expected to see another football game. Then he collected his thoughts and, in a grave voice, he gave me this warning: “Ed, I need you to listen to me carefully. I will not be able to say this to you again. If you do figure out what happened down there and decide to tell the world what you found, I need you to realize that you will be crossing swords with the most powerful people in our country. And you should think twice before crossing them.”

  THE 1980S USHERED IN THE EPIDEMICS that I had feared in the 1960s. The mainstream scientific community stated that AIDS was caused by the unexplained mutation of a monkey virus. They estimated the date of the mutation to be around 1960. The logical question (who had been mutating monkey viruses around 1960) was not even asked in the press. And, yes, I was concerned about what I had heard in New Orleans. It all sounded so similar. Could there be a connection? And if there was, was there any point in speaking up about it? Trade places with me for a moment: If you were in my shoes, would you have?

  I went to medical libraries and read scientific articles hoping to find facts that would make my fears unfounded. I was anxious to find a flaw in my own argument, which would enable me to walk away from a project that was starting to consume all of my free time. I did not find the flaw, but I did find something else.

  As I poured over the official cancer statistics from the National Cancer Institute, I saw the dimensions of the massive epidemic of soft-tissue cancers that had swept our country. An epidemic that had been all but ignored by our watchdog press. An epidemic that could reasonably be explained by the cancer-causing monkey viruses that had contaminated the polio vaccine of my youth. Whatever I felt my options were prior to that moment, they suddenly narrowed.