Dr. Mary’s Monkey Read online

  The condition of the apartment did not support the idea of a violent crime:

  It appeared that no scuffle took place inside of said bedroom, and nothing appeared to be disarranged in the bedroom or throughout the apartment.

  Soot covered the apartment and made fingerprinting nearly impossible. Part of one print was recovered from the sherry bottle near her bed. Two burnt wooden matches were found on the cedar chest. From the soot prints, the detectives were sure these matches were there prior to the fire, though no other wooden matches of any kind could be found within the apartment, the inference being that the murderer must have brought the matches.

  Sam Moran, the investigator from the Coroner’s office who later erroneously told the press that the front door had been forced open and that the burglar had unsuccessfully tried to open the jewelry box, arrived, looked around, and then left with Mary’s jewelry box, purse, check book and other personal items, including thirteen keys on a key ring found in the kitchen.

  At the morgue, the autopsy was performed by Dr. Samuels, a pathologist, who told police (1) the victim died prior to the fire, (2) the victim had not been raped, and (3) the victim was dead before the laceration to the labia minora was inflicted. When the Coroner’s officials examined the clothing piled on Dr. Sherman’s body, they noted, “Most of the clothes were still neatly folded when placed on top of the body.” The criminologist observed that these clothes were composed of a synthetic material which would ignite into a fame at 500 degrees Fahrenheit. At lower temperatures they would have only smoldered.

  Back at the apartment, police removed approximately forty items, including two passports, two address books, one pair of white gloves with “apparent blood stains” found in the laundry hamper in the bathroom, and a copy of “Our Marriage Vows.”

  When Dr. Sherman’s car was found, they searched a 350-foot radius of the car, and recovered numerous items common to women’s handbags, none of which could be proved to be Dr. Sherman’s. The key to her car, however, had been thrown over a nearby wall, and was found separately by a neighbor.

  The remainder of the report (the 11/3/64 section) takes a bizarre turn. You recall the 150 professional associates and social acquaintances that the press said the police had interviewed concerning the murder? Look what we find instead!

  Seven percent of the homicide report discussed John, a “Peeping Tom” who had ogled a twenty-six-year-old woman in Dr. Sherman’s apartment complex six months earlier. He had since moved across town. His activities on the evening of July 20 were accounted for and supported by credible witnesses. The report clearly stated where he was employed, at a local vending machine company. The objective of this section seems to be to imply that sex crimes did occur in Mary’s neighborhood.

  Twenty percent of the report discussed Jane, a young woman from New Jersey with short red hair and toreador pants, who walked past Sherman’s building around midnight, apparently on her way to a lesbian rendezvous in the French Quarter. The girl stopped in to see the night watchman across the street from Mary’s apartment so she could make a phone call. She had nothing to do with the case, but the report clearly said where she was employed, at a theater on Canal Street. The objective of this section seems to be to point out that lesbians did live in (or at least walk through) Mary’s neighborhood.

  Ten percent of the report discussed Max, a social acquaintance of Mary Sherman. He was an author, and Max was his pen name. He suffered from arthritis and walked with a cane. Max only knew Mary for a year and had not seen her in nine months. She used to stop by and discuss the theatre and literature with him. Due to his fondness for her, Max became depressed after one of her visits and wrote her a letter asking her not to return. Max described her as a “lesbian who lived in grand fashion.” When the police asked Max how he knew she was a lesbian, he said he “had known a lesbian once in Venice,” but “he did not concern himself with such matters.” Speaking in a “very dramatic” voice to Detective Hayward, Max called her death a “delegated suicide.” He said, “she seemed to be torn within herself; that there was something bothering her; that was destroying her,” and if the investigators “would wait, it would be disclosed because this would be the ‘grand finale’ Mary Sherman would want.”

  One has to wonder how much of Max’s description was based upon his own depression rather than on Mary’s. We know that Max was self-employed as an author. The objective of this section seems to be to show that at least one of the 150 people interviewed called her a lesbian, though his grounds for doing so are admittedly weak.

  So let’s add them up: 7% + 20% + 10% = 37%. These three sections account for thirty-seven percent of the linage in the entire homicide report ... and have absolutely nothing to do with what happened to Mary Sherman between 4:30 P.M. on 7/20/64 and 4:00 A.M. on 7/21/64. Their only purpose appears to be to imply a sexual motive for the killing.

  Since the police were careful to explain where each of these essentially irrelevant people were employed, it is interesting to note that this same homicide report did not say where some principal players were employed. Consider these omissions:

  NAME ROLE IN CASE EMPLOYED BY

  Mary Sherman Victim Ochsner Clinic; Tulane Med. Sch.

  Carolyn Talley Identified Body Tulane Medical School

  Juan Valdez Called police International Trade Mart

  Another person was included in the report because he supposedly helped explain Mary’s movements in the hours before her death. Here comes David Gentry, 4919 Magazine St., who sold Mary an ashtray following her dental appointment the afternoon before her murder. (The dentist’s name, however, was not mentioned.) One has to wonder if the police were aware that Mr. Gentry lived next door to, and was acquainted with, Lee Harvey Oswald, when Oswald lived at 4907 Magazine during the summer of 1963.8 But they could not have anticipated that Gentry would become a grand jury witness in 1967, when he was asked by Jim Garrison’s staff to identify photos of people who attended parties at the residence of Clay Shaw, former Director of the International Trade Mart, employer of Juan Valdez.9

  The only professional associate of Dr. Sherman that is mentioned in the report is Dr. Carolyn Talley, and that was unavoidable because she identified the body for the police, based on shape and hair color. For some reason Talley called Sherman’s apartment at 5:00 A.M. the morning of the murder. No explanation of this phone call was given in the police report. My guess is that Talley, a pediatrician, was going to drive to the Crippled Children’s Hospital across the lake with Dr. Sherman later that morning, and that she called at 5:00 A.M. to give her a wake-up call so they could get an early start and avoid getting stuck in the morning traffic and the July heat.

  IN THE SUMMER OF 1993, a friend sent me a copy of a surprising article recalling the mystery of Mary Sherman’s murder that appeared in a small alternative newspaper in New Orleans. It was entitled “A Matter of Motives.”10

  In this article, journalist Don Lee Keith challenged the lesbian angle: “From the beginning, the investigation followed but a single direction: the pursuit of a killer who was a lesbian. Police operated on the premise that the dead woman was also a lesbian.”

  Unable to find anyone, including gay colleagues who worked with Sherman, who had any knowledge of her sexual preferences before her death, Keith concluded that the lesbian angle was a red herring to draw attention away from the real motive.

  Keith’s article pointed out that the sex-murder rumor was well in place before 9:15 A.M. on July 21, when the autopsy began. Keith also considered the word “mutilation” to be “too strong” for the one centimeter cut on the victim’s labia. Forensically speaking, genital mutilation would suggest the killer was a man, not a woman. Quoting from his article, “Instances in which women have mutilated the genitalia of other women are so rare as to practically be unheard of.”

  When he presented the murder to four medical examiners from other cities, all four said that it was “obviously a case of overkill,” with all but one suggesting t
he fire was an attempt to call attention to the crime scene.

  From my perspective, the most important point in Keith’s article was calling attention to the fact that the police reports omitted the victim’s place of employment. Why would the police not want to tell us the victim ran a cancer laboratory for Dr. Alton Ochsner? All of which was kind of silly, since that information was on the front page of both newspapers. This omission can only have been intentional.

  Keith also observed that Warren Commission investigators started taking their testimony in New Orleans on the morning of July 21, 1964, several hours after Mary Sherman’s murder. Some consider this coincidental timing suspicious, and have speculated that her death may have somehow been related to the Kennedy assassination or to her association with David Ferrie.

  A few JFK assassination researchers have mentioned Mary Sherman in their writings. John Davis, author of Mafia Kingfish, called Mary Sherman “David Ferrie’s closest female friend,”11 and raised the possibility that her death might have been related to Ferrie’s death. But Davis had the date of her death wrong, and thought that she had died shortly after Ferrie in 1967.

  For a more obvious error, we look at the work of Gerald Posner, who wrote a book called Case Closed, which argued that Oswald was the lone assassin of JFK. Posner ended his book with a chapter called “The Non-Mysterious Mystery Deaths,” to supposedly dismiss a host of ill-conceived theories. There he said,

  Dr. Mary Sherman (house fire) had no connection to the case, though she was acquainted with David Ferrie ... According to the medical records, she was killed in an accidental fire ...12

  An accidental house fire? According to the medical records? Please draw your own conclusions about Posner’s “facts.”

  STILL, DESPITE ALL MY RESEARCH, I did not know how to feel about Mary Sherman.

  Credentials mean little to me. I have seen terrible people carry impressive diplomas and fancy titles, and I have seen great people with neither. The few clues I had about Mary’s personal life told me little. The suicide of her husband and the painting of suffering on her wall told of her emotional hurt. But how did she manifest this? In malice, or charity, or both? Was she a childless, sadomasochistic lesbian witch who tried to become a goddess by developing her own life form? Or was she a deep, sensitive, honest caring physician who struggled to find a cure for cancer? Or was she a non-judgmental scientist who had simply been manipulated into doing things which finally brought about her own demise? I did not know. But I wanted to find out.

  As I studied the 1964 newspaper articles and the police reports, I noticed the name of the maintenance man who had worked in Dr. Sherman’s building. It was Alvin Alcorn, “colored, male, age 51.” He had known Dr. Sherman for twelve years and was one of the last people to see her alive. At 4:00 P.M. he saw her standing on her patio talking to her housekeeper of twelve years, Elmener Peterson, also “colored,” as they insisted on reporting. As Alcorn left, he noticed that Dr. Sherman’s car was in the parking lot as usual, and confirmed such to police once they needed to know. Alvin Alcorn?

  Quite by coincidence, I had met a man named Alvin Alcorn in New Orleans about five years before, but I had no idea at the time he was involved in any way with Mary Sherman. He was an elderly trumpet player who led a New Orleans jazz band called the Alvin Alcorn Group. Alvin frequently played at parties and brunches around town. Not a major celebrity by any means, but a well-known musician. I had heard his name for years. In the 1950s and 1960s Alcorn played so many parties for fraternities and faculty at Tulane that many considered him “the house band.” By the spring of 1987, when we met accidentally at an outdoor function for the New Orleans Museum of Art, he was semi-retired and only played sporadically. His band had just finished performing, but I had missed them. I was waiting outside for my family, and he was walking about in the same area. After a while we started talking. He was warm, sensitive, perceptive, and completely devoid of any sense of “jive.” I knew if this was the same Alvin Alcorn, and if he was still alive, that he could give me a clean read on Mary Sherman, at least the parts he knew about.

  I grabbed my old New Orleans phone book, found his number, and called him. Yes, he was alive, now in his eighties, but still quite alert. I confirmed that he was “Alvin Alcorn the musician,” and reminded him that we had met several years before. When he heard I was calling from Detroit, he insisted on reminiscing about his younger days, touring with the big bands and playing at the Graystone Ball Room in downtown Detroit. Then I changed subjects, and asked him if he had ever been to the Patio Apartments on St. Charles Avenue. Yes, he had, adding he had worked there for a real estate company. Then he paused to consider the curious question. I told him I wanted to come see him when I got to town. He agreed.

  Soon I was in New Orleans and found his house, a small wooden shotgun design on the edge of town. Inside the low iron gate, six cats slept lazily on an old sofa on the porch. One moved away quietly when I entered. I knocked and knocked, but there was no answer. I had walked through fifteen blocks of low-income housing to find the house and was not anxious to walk back empty handed. After five minutes I resigned myself and started to leave.

  As I closed the gate, a faint “Hello” came from the screen door. Alvin was standing at the front door. Bent with age and holding a cane, he softly said, “I was in the back. Come in.” His fragile steps shuffled into the front room. Each step was an effort. He balanced himself with a cane as his slippers slid across the wooden floor three inches at a time. He gestured to the sofa, and I took a seat. He negotiated into position in front of his easy chair and lowered himself into a spot where he was sure to stay for hours. The house, heated like many in New Orleans by open gas flame, was about eighty degrees. The air was stale. He was obviously quite comfortable, but I was about to melt. I figured I’d better start talking while I could. We chatted about his music career. He told his favorite stories in a gentle voice spiced with laughter. Then I asked him if he remembered Mary Sherman.

  “Dr. Sherman,” he corrected me with a look that said he would not tolerate any disrespect to her. The old wound was suddenly open.

  “Yes, Dr. Sherman,” I confirmed, seeing how difficult this was going to be for him.

  “I need to know what she was like?” I said as gently as I could.

  “She was a fine woman, a damn fine woman,” he said without hesitation, challenging anyone to disagree. “Good hearted.” That’s what he meant to say the first time. “She was good to people. Good to me and good to Elmener.” His head shook up and down slowly as he considered his words. Yes, they were the right ones. Then he grew still and gave me a quizzical look, asking me without any words, why, after nearly thirty years, was I asking about Dr. Sherman.

  “I am trying to figure out why anybody would want to kill her.”

  “I don’t know,” he said simply, knowing that he had asked himself the same question and wished he had a better answer. “But I hope you catch the son-of-a-bitch.” There was no hiding the hatred in his voice. He would have gladly beaten the killer with his cane. He told me all I needed to know about Mary Sherman in a few sentences.

  So how does “a damn fine woman” wind up injecting mice with monkey viruses in an underground medical laboratory with a violent political extremist?

  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~

  1 Letter from William Turner (author of Deadly Secrets) to Carol Hewett, April 16, 1994. Turner worked with Jim Garrison’s investigators and reported the opinion of the Garrison camp on Sherman’s apolitical perspective. She was not right-wing.

  2 Sherman’s biography was mostly compounded from several articles which ran in New Orleans’ Times-Picayune and States-Item newspapers, July 21, 1964.

  3 Probate Record, Mary S. Sherman, deceased July 21, 1964, State of Louisiana, New Orleans. The husband is somewhat of an enigma; after her death, friends told investigators that she had told them he had committed suicide during the 1940s, but there is no independent corroboration of this.

  4 Billings H
ospital in Chicago was one of the few hospitals that participated in the covert plutonium experiments of the 1940s and 1950s. Three patients were injected with plu-tonium without their knowledge; Welsome, “The Plutonium Experiments.”

  5 Tumors of the Bone and Soft Tissue, edited by R. Lee Clark, contains two articles by Mary Sherman, “Histogenesis of Bone Tumors” and “Giant Cell Bone Tumor.”

  6 “Cancer Work Slain Doctor’s Main Interest,” New Orleans States-It em, July 21, 1964, s.1 p.1.

  7 Keith, Don Lee “A Matter of Motives,” Gambit, August 3, 1993.

  8 Garrison, “Playboy Interview,” p. 161.

  9 Who was the Juan Valdez that reported the fire in Mary Sherman’s apartment? Researcher Joan Mellen in her book Farewell to Justice said that this same Juan Valdez worked for Clay Shaw at the International Trade Mart. Further, Mellen reports that she was told that Lee Harvey Oswald was well-acquainted with a Cuban named Juan Valdez. Locating a Cuban who knew both Clay Shaw and Lee Oswald, and who lived next to Mary Sherman, might be very important. So New Orleans journalist Don Lee Keith tried to find Juan Valdez to talk to him. Keith told me that he had searched all over the country for Mary Sherman’s neighbor. After interviewing 34 people without success, Keith finally gave up, and questioned whether “Juan Valdez” was really his name.

  But the spelling of Juan Valdez’s name has always been in question and may explain why he had been so difficult to locate. While the newspapers referred to him as “Juan Valdez,” the NOPD Homicide Report used another common variation of Valdez and spelled his name as “Juan Valdes” with an “s” instead of a “z”, and said that he was a 34-year-old male who lived in Apt. E. But maybe both spellings were wrong. Maybe the correct spelling was yet another variation of the common Spanish surname: “Valadez” with an “A” in the middle. We don’t know that answer, but we do note that in 2001 the bulletin of The World Trade Center of New Orleans said that “on October 11, Mr. Juan Valadez, an international security consultant and retired U.S. intelligence officer... made a presentation... for international travelers and businesses.”