Dr. Mary’s Monkey Read online

  I attended Jesuit High School from 1966 to 1969. During this time, New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison was investigating the assassination of President Kennedy. This investigation culminated in the trial of New Orleans businessman Clay Shaw in early 1969. The amount of press coverage this received in New Orleans was staggering. And much of this was a contrived media smog, aggressively negative toward Garrison. The national press had been particularly vicious, with anti-Garrison articles like “Jolly Green Giant in Wonderland.”1 They basically claimed that the New Orleans District Attorney had completely lost his marbles, was recklessly prosecuting homosexuals for spite, and suffered from paranoid delusions of grandeur.

  Garrison, in turn, appeared on national television and stated in unambiguous language that a faction within the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency had murdered the President of the United States. Gesturing to the camera, he waved sworn statements from witnesses who claimed that their testimony to the Warren Commission had been altered to distort important information. If that was not enough, he went further, reminding the American people that the order to hide the hard evidence (Kennedy’s x-rays and the autopsy photos) from the American people came directly from the Oval Office in the White House. Garrison said bluntly that there had been a “coup d’etat” right here in the United States and that the press had ignored it.

  This was a difficult time for people whose families were connected to the Garrison investigation. Several of my close friends had family members involved, and I saw their dilemma first hand. The basic situation was this: If Kennedy’s murder had been planned in New Orleans, then something should be done about it. Many people supported Garrison’s efforts. He was, after all, a legally-elected law enforcement official investigating a murder within his jurisdiction.

  On the other hand, Garrison was investigating some sensitive issues and some very important people. On the national front, he had discovered the U.S. government’s secret war against Cuba, uncovering in the process that elements of the CIA were involved with the Mafia and were trying to kill Castro. (Today we know that this is true, since it was established beyond any reasonable doubt in 1975 by the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee, but back in the 1960s it was political heresy.) On the local front, Garrison was investigating, and in some cases arresting, some of New Orleans’ most prominent citizens.

  For example, Clay Shaw, whom Garrison arrested and charged with conspiring to murder John Kennedy, was former General Manager of the International Trade Mart, one of the city’s most important business institutions. Garrison claimed that Shaw had personally been associated with Lee Harvey Oswald and had helped Kennedy’s killers by setting up Oswald to take the fall for Kennedy’s death. Shaw, of course, claimed he never knew Oswald and had never worked for the CIA. (Today, both Shaw’s association with Oswald and his association with the CIA have been established.2 But at the time both Shaw and the CIA denied it.)

  Particularly baffling was Garrison’s inability to get the press on his side, especially the local press. The whole situation was very confusing, even embarrassing at times. Garrison was under a gag order. We all waited for the trial. On Sunday, March 1, 1969, the jury acquitted Clay Shaw of all charges in less than one hour. Everyone was stunned. After two solid years of heavy publicity and waiting for the evidence to come out in the trial, it seemed like it should have taken more than one hour for the jury to decide the verdict. What was going on? Was Garrison really crazy as his critics claimed, or had he been successfully shut down by forces inside the federal government?

  In the days following the announcement of the “not guilty” verdict, I went to school as usual. There was a remarkable silence. From Monday morning to Friday afternoon, I did not hear the names Kennedy, Garrison, or Shaw once from any student or teacher! Then on Friday afternoon all that changed.

  In one of my classes there was a student named Nicky. His father was Dr. Nicolas Chetta, the Coroner of Orleans Parish (an officer known as the Medical Examiner in many locales) who was involved with Garrison’s investigation. Dr. Chetta was somewhat of a local celebrity for us. Not only was he an elected politician whose name was frequently in the press, but he was the team physician for our football team. Once he even took our class on a memorable field trip to the city morgue.

  Nicky, the son, was well liked. He was a friendly, modest, boy-next-door who was well-intentioned and sincere. He did not strive for any “star” position and certainly did not trade on his father’s reputation. I never knew anybody that did not like him. He and I were friends, but we were not what you would call “close.” We went to the same school, lived in the same neighborhood, and both had fathers who were doctors.

  So, I was sitting in class at Jesuit High School in early March of 1969. The lesson finished early, and the teacher asked the class if anyone had any thoughts on the Clay Shaw verdict.

  Nicky erupted, saying in a loud, tense voice that Garrison had gotten a raw deal.” We all knew Nicky to be quiet and even-keeled. This outburst seemed quite out of character. But we all respected his sincerity. We knew who his father was, and we all saw the same ridiculous news coverage night after night. We were all confused, and we wanted to hear what he had to say. No one counterattacked. The room was quiet. We waited to see what would happen next. The teacher said patiently, “What do you mean?”

  Then Nicky started talking. He held the class spellbound for fifteen minutes with information about the investigation, much of which had either not been revealed to the press or which they had basically ignored. We all listened carefully. His points included:

  that someone, presumably the FBI or the CIA, had bugged Garrison’s office and conference rooms, had stolen and/ or photocopied his files concerning Clay Shaw, and had turned them over to Shaw’s attorneys;

  that all of Garrison’s extradition requests for witnesses from other states had been turned down, as had all of his requests to subpoena former federal officials, preventing him from assembling the pieces of his puzzle in a court of law;

  that an ex-airline pilot named David Ferrie and a former high-ranking FBI official named Guy Banister had been training anti-Castro Cubans for paramilitary assaults against Cuba at a secret training camp across Lake Pontchartrain; and

  that Ferrie and Banister had stolen weapons for this operation from a company in Houma, Louisiana which was operating as a CIA front. Nicky said he couldn’t pronounce the name of the company but said that the name “looked German, but sounded French.” (It turns out that he was referring to the Schlumberger Tool Company pronounced locally “Slum-ber-jay.”)

  Someone asked Nicky why we had not heard all this in the press.3 It was a fair question. We had all been taught that the press was the “Watchdog of Government.” How could they have overlooked these obvious and important points. Nicky paused and repeated Garrison’s favorite saying: “Treason never prospers, for if it prospers, none dare call it treason.” This was just the sort of riddle that made it hard for the public to understand what Garrison was up to.

  Then Nicky turned his attention to David Ferrie and started talking about him in more detail. (Today Ferrie is considered a central character in several assassination theories, but back then he had been little more than a blip on the television screen during the first year of Garrison’s investigation.) His sudden death on the eve of his arrest for conspiracy to murder the President was considered by many to be a very suspicious coincidence, even though his death had officially been ruled to be from “natural causes.”

  Ferrie was an unusual man in many respects. Professionally, he was a pilot. Politically, he was a notorious right-wing extremist.4 Personally, he was completely bald from head to toe, and was a homosexual who favored teenage boys. Ferrie’s bizarre appearance and personal history was one of the things that earned six-foot six-inch Jim Garrison the nickname “Jolly Green Giant,” because “he put fruits and nuts in the can.” Ferrie died several days after Garrison’s investigation was made public. Garrison, who was about to arrest Ferr
ie for conspiring to murder President Kennedy, thought that either Ferrie had been murdered to silence him or that Ferrie had silenced himself. But it was the Coroner’s job, not the District Attorney’s, to rule on the cause of death. Dr. Chetta, Nicky’s father, was the Coroner, and said that he found no evidence of foul play. Therefore, he ruled that Ferrie died of natural causes (a ruptured blood vessel in the brain), and noted that Ferrie had been under enormous stress.

  Nicky continued: Ferrie had known Lee Harvey Oswald when he was a cadet at the Civil Air Patrol and had been seen with him that summer. Ferrie’s role in the assassination was as a get-away pilot. He reportedly spent the two weeks before the assassination at Mafia boss Carlos Marcello’s hunting camp across the Mississippi River. He may have been flying people and supplies around to position them for the assassination.

  Now all this seemed pretty wild, but it got even wilder. Nicky said that the day they announced Ferrie’s death, Bobby Kennedy had called his house to discuss the cause of death with his father.5 A murmur shot through the room. Nicky countered by saying he had answered the phone himself. Thinking it was a prank, he hung up on the then-Senator. But Kennedy called back. This time Nicky’s father answered the phone himself.

  Then Nicky started talking about Ferrie’s apartment, which his father had seen the day Ferrie died. Ferrie lived alone. But in his closets they had found both women’s clothing and priest’s robes. They also found a small medical laboratory with a dozen mice in cages which he used for medical experiments. His medical equipment included microscopes, syringes, surgical tools, and a medical library. When they talked to Ferrie’s other landlords, they were told of a full-scale laboratory in his apartment with thousands of mice in cages. It seemed clear that he was inducing cancer in the mice! Ferrie claimed that he was looking for a cure for cancer, but Garrison’s investigators thought that he was trying to figure out a way to use cancer as an assassination weapon, presumably against Castro and his followers. Nicky added, almost as an aside, that Garrison’s investigative team thought that this may have been how Jack Ruby died, murdered by induced cancer to silence him.

  By this point, you could have heard a pin drop in the room. Back in 1969, we (and presumably the public) were taught that cancer was “a spontaneous disease,” meaning it could not be created, transferred, caught or induced. Words like “carcinogenic” and “cancer-causing chemicals” were not yet part of the popular American vocabulary. Viral cancers were not discussed. The idea of “inducing cancer” was very strange indeed, and, scientifically, we (the students) considered it somewhere between “questionable” and “impossible.”

  A student asked, “How could they induce cancer?” The question was sincere, but doubting. I remember hoping, for both Nicky’s sake and Garrison’s, that the answer made some kind of common sense. Garrison’s case already looked like Mardi Gras to the rest of the country. It did not need another bald, right-wing, counter-revolutionary, contraband pilot wearing a wig and a dress and saying the Catholic mass in Latin. And this particular claim, about inducing cancer, was not only out of John Q. Public’s experience, it was also over the edge of what we understood to be scientific reality. Nicky sensed the doubt. You could see he felt it. He remained calm. Slowly and cautiously, he said that they had been “injecting mice with monkey viruses.”

  Monkey viruses! The room groaned. I rolled my eyes and dropped my forehead into my hand. Why did it have to be monkey viruses? Garrison was already misunderstood because his plot was stranger than jazz — too complex, too subtle, and too bizarre for the American TV audience. Why couldn’t it have been something simpler, like injecting rats with radiation. Cancer from plutonium! The public might follow that. But cancer from monkey viruses? The rest of the country would never buy it. The very words conjured up a dark collage of alienating images — diseases imported from tropical jungles in the bellies of insects and mixed with monkey heads boiled in voodoo rituals on the edge of the Louisiana swamp at midnight. It was all “so New Orleans.”

  You could feel that everyone in the room wanted to believe Nicky, but it was hard to know what to say. Then somebody said, “I don’t get it. How could a monkey virus cause cancer?” Nicky said he didn’t understand that part either. My brain was about to bust, but I wasn’t about to bring Tulane into the conversation.

  Then another student blurted out that there was a “kid” down at Tulane Medical School who was dying from the total collapse of his immune system. They couldn’t figure out what was causing it. They gave him every antibiotic they had and nothing worked. He would get better for a while, and then he would get worse. While this comment was interesting, it sounded “off the wall.” Two thoughts raced through my head. First, what did the uncontrollable collapse of an immune system have to do with our discussion about monkey viruses? And I also said to myself, I’m obviously not the only student at Jesuit that has a family member working at Tulane Medical School. I was certain that this was “insider information.” It was the first time I had ever heard it. (But not the last!)

  Then another student jumped into the exchange: “That means they were developing a biological weapon! What happens if it escapes into the human population?”

  The room fell to a new level of silence. Let’s call it fear. No one breathed. The Jesuits drilled social responsibility into us until it came out of our ears. Everybody knew that developing a biological weapon was high taboo. Twenty teenagers sat in dead silence pondering this mind-boggling question for a moment that hung like an hour. Then the bell rang.

  In a routine voice, the teacher thanked Nicky for sharing his thoughts and dismissed the class. As I gathered my books together, I turned to the student next to me and made that nervous remark:, “Well, 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.”

  I left the class and went back to my homeroom. I didn’t talk to anyone else for the rest of the day. All I could think about were the monkey viruses, and I wasn’t about to try to explain that to anyone.

  When I got home that afternoon, I put my books away and called to my mother who was in the other end of the house. I said, “Do you have time for some useless information?” These were code words we frequently used for discussing things of interest. “Useless information” was one step above gossip. It could be anything from a new scientific theory about how the dinosaurs died, to speculation on who was going to get indicted next in the growing grain scandal. Her voice rang back down the hall. She would be right there.

  When she came into the room, I told her that Dr. Chetta’s son was in one of my classes and that he told us an amazing story about Garrison’s investigation. “Oh, yes,” she said. “I know who he is.” I recapped Nicky’s comments and ploughed through the stories of Ferrie’s wigs, his dresses, and his religious vestments. She listened attentively, acknowledging each point as I went, but exhibiting no surprise whatsoever. Frankly, I was expecting a little bit more of a reaction, but New Orleans is a very tolerant place. If the transvestite stuff didn’t get a reaction out of her, I was sure the medical stuff would. So I told her about the medical experiments and the laboratory with the thousands of white mice and waited for a response. Nothing. She was unfazed. I was getting frustrated. So I told her about the monkey viruses, expecting it to fall on her like a bombshell, like it had on me. Still nothing.

  “But Mom,” I said in an exasperated and serious tone, “weren’t they researching monkey viruses down at Tulane Medical School? Do you think there could be a connection?”

  “Well,” she said, “one of the doctors from Tulane was involved in that lab.”

  Now, I was stunned. “Wait a second,” I countered and tried to get my bearings. “Are you telling me that a professor from Tulane Medical School was involved in David Ferrie’s underground medical laboratory? The one with the thousands of mice?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said matter-of-factly. “Everybody down at the medical school wa
s talking about it. It was in that Playboy interview with Garrison that you had around here a couple of years ago. I took it to Boston with me that Christmas to see your sister.”

  “Who was the doctor?” I muttered. I could barely get the question out.

  “Her name was Mary Sherman. Daddy knew her. He had a lot of respect for her. I think she was a pathologist. You know, she was more of a researcher than a physician. A cancer researcher, I think.”

  “What happened to her?” I asked, resigning myself to the fact that some terrible fate must have befallen her.

  “She was killed. Murdered. A terrible thing. Slashed with a knife, dismembered, and set on fire. It looked like a sexual killing, you know. But the grapevine said that whoever killed her knew what they were doing with a knife ... maybe they even had a high level of medical knowledge, just judging by the way the cuts were done. What a terrible way to go!”

  “Did they figure out who did it?” I queried hopefully.

  “No. The investigation was shut down all of a sudden. It was all very hush-hush, like it had been shut down from above. But they think she knew her murderer and probably let them into her apartment.”

  “You said Daddy knew her?”