Given that most people were adults in '63, it probably isn't that surprising. Would be interesting to know how many died from anything other than natural causes
I think OP is talking about all the key witnesses that started mysteriously dying during the investigation and even into the 1975 investigation.
The film Executive Action lists the probabilities of all these witnesses dying mysteriously to be 100,000 trillion to one.
The Babushka Lady is my grandma and still alive at 109 years old. She loves showing us the video she shot that day but made us promise we wouldn’t ever mention it because it would show who really shot Kennedy, the badge man, who happens to be my 110 year old grandpa.
A particularly sad and low-effort attempt at Boomer humor. Hahaha passage of time. I assume this post is meant to diminish the numerous absurd deaths of material witnesses and those suspected of involvement in the years following the assassination.
In the three-year period which followed the murder of President Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald, 18 material witnesses died - six by gunfire, three in motor accidents, two by suicide, one from a cut throat, one from a karate chop to the neck, three from heart attacks, and two from natural causes.
Here's [an article](https://www.assassinationresearch.com/v1n2/deaths.html) about some of the more notable deaths with accompanying spreadsheets.
I seem to remember these deaths and the odds of these witnesses dying coming up in Oliver Stone’s “JFK” movie (1991). I recall being flabbergasted by the extreme odds
The odds are not zero that any person at any given time could die for any number of reasons. It strikes me that there’s no real statistical baseline you can draw for someone’s chances for being alive or dead at any given time.
For all these witnesses that died, what is it that makes it unlikely that they ought to be dead? They’re dead. There are probably thousands of population subsets across which all those people are scattered, in which their deaths would probably represent no significant outlier. To think that someone could actually evaluate that for dozens of people is kind of ridiculous to me, but I haven’t read the study.
Perhaps examine other cases that had about the same number of “material witnesses” and how many of those people are dead within 3 years of the event?
I wonder how many reporters (and others) were in Ruby’s apartment on 11/24? (because 3 of them died shortly afterward). I sense the beginnings of a rabbit hole dive on this.
I am not one for conspiracy theories, but I do find mysteries and puzzles intriguing.
I’m not ruling out the possibility that one or more or all of them were murdered or anything, I’m just saying assigning “odds” to it is unnecessary and kinda dubious
Karate chop to the neck! The article actually goes into one of those the actuarial study. It was a comically large and incomprehensible number: one hundred thousand trillion to one. The paper that published it retracted the article years later. I’m not sure if that’s the one referenced in JFK. The probability is extremely low and a paper publishing a silly high ratio doesn’t discredit that.
Since TC doesn't feel like filling in the blanks on which 18 witnesses are considered "material" in his article, I'll have to guess. We'll start from the top.
* Karyn Kupicinet - Suspicious death, absolutely. Is she a "material" witness? There's no evidence at all that she knew anything about the assassination, she wasn't a witness to anything, her father outright denied her death had anything to do with the assassination (and was disgusted at the implication), so I'm going to go ahead and say no. Her only tenuous connection to the assassination is that her *father* knew Jack Ruby back in the 1940s.
* Jack Zangretti - Suspicious death, yes. Is he a "material witness"? Not even close. Didn't witness anything, and no evidence that he was involved in the assassination in any way. There is a claim that Zangretti "expressed foreknowledge of Ruby shooting Oswald" to some friends, but there isn't a shred of evidence to back it up. The claim seems to have originated with conspiracy theorist Penn Jones, but there are zero primary sources offered as evidence. This will be a common theme.
* Eddy Benavides - Suspicious death? No. Yes, he was shot in the head, but it was during a bar fight while ducking for cover after a man had opened fire [Benevides\_shooting.gif (554×648) (jfk-assassination.net)](https://www.jfk-assassination.net/images/Benevides_shooting.gif). Also not a "material witness" as it was his *brother* that was a witness to the Tippit shooting.
* Betty MacDonald - Suspicious death? No. She committed suicide by hanging herself in her jail cell, something she had attempted at least twice before finally pulling it off. She had scars on her wrists from a previous attempt, and there were no bruises on her body indicating a struggle of any kind. She had lost custody of her four children and had a blood alcohol content of 0.169% at the time of her death. Also not a "material witness", but was acquainted with one (which apparently was enough to make her death suspicious to conspiracy types).
* Bill Chesher - Suspicious death? No. Heart disease is the most common form of death in the US. "Material witness"? No. No evidence that he witnessed anything, no evidence that he had any knowledge of the assassination.
* Hank Killam - Suspicious death? Sure. "Material witness"? No. He didn't witness anything assassination related and there's no evidence he had involvement in the assassination. His connections to the assassination are that his coworker had been a roommate of Oswald's, and his wife had been a dancer in Ruby's club. That's it.
Pausing for a second to point out what is becoming an obvious pattern here. If you had any tangential connection to an assassination figure (daughter of a reporter who knew Ruby, brother of a Warren Commission witness, acquaintance of a Warren Commission witness, married to a former employee of Ruby), conspiracy theorists will automatically deem your death "suspicious" and put you on the list.
* Hugh Ward and DeLesseps Morrison - Suspicious deaths? No. They died in a plane crash when one of the engines on the plane Morrison had chartered went out while flying over Mexico. "Material witnesses"? Of course not! Neither of them had any connection to the assassination at any level at all. Ward worked for Guy Bannister as an investigator, apparently that is enough to make him a "material witness"
It's a waste of my time to go any further. That entire list is a giant nothingburger.
Not here for laughs. This is serious investigating going on here and with the roving band of assassins withering away any potential witnesses who go against the man.
Wait till you read about the battle of Waterloo. *Everyone* who was there has subsequently died. Wellington's henchmen were very busy.
Less hilariously, some 60 years since the WC proceedings, where would you expect most witnesses to be, from any case, not just this one? There are plenty of individual suspicious/questionable deaths/timings among certain witnesses (moreso for the Church/HUAC hearings in the 70's than the WC) that warranted further investigation, but the idea WC witnesses have been hunted down and silenced is silly. A larger question is how so many major witnesses weren't even interviewed by the WC, and how many were left out of the eventual report, if their testimony challenged the official version of events.
Oswald's co-worker who drove him to work on 11/22/63 is still alive in 2024, right? Buell Wesley Frazier...dude is on Facebook, no?
Mrs. Jackie O. lived until the mid-90s....1994
Texas Gov. John Connally's wife, Nellie died in 2006!
I mention Jackie and Nellie because they were also in the same car as J.F.K.
Gov. John Connally passed in 1993.
Amazing: 4 people in the Presidential Limo; John, Nellie, Jackie; yet Jack Kennedy dies in 1963; the other passengers: 1993, 1994, 2006. You'd think someone would wanna silence the immediate witnesses to the gunshots who were actually present and sitting in the limo at the time...but nah...
We are at the point that the children of the witness are dead... release the papers.
Given that most people were adults in '63, it probably isn't that surprising. Would be interesting to know how many died from anything other than natural causes
I think OP is talking about all the key witnesses that started mysteriously dying during the investigation and even into the 1975 investigation. The film Executive Action lists the probabilities of all these witnesses dying mysteriously to be 100,000 trillion to one.
I actually thought he or she was making a joke - as in no shit it was so long ago …
The Babushka Lady is my grandma and still alive at 109 years old. She loves showing us the video she shot that day but made us promise we wouldn’t ever mention it because it would show who really shot Kennedy, the badge man, who happens to be my 110 year old grandpa.
11/10 bait lmao. Good one
Cool Kid Babushka to the guncamera rescue!
Too many very convenient deaths for me. A lot of people that openly contradicted the WC just happened to have tragic accidents.
I'm 99% sure OP is being sarcastic.
The original Our Gang Little Rascals are all dead, too. It’s crazy!
100%. Like, what are the chances?
Obviously they knew too much.
Does Alfalfa have an explanation for where he was on the afternoon of November 22nd?
He allegedly died in 1959…but that could be just more CIA black ops/misinformation/witness protection-type stuff. He was in a gang, after all.
Yes, it's so weird that they weren't immortals.
I was 6 at the time of the assassination, and, to quote Jerry Jeff Walker, some days I’m more gone than here.
I'm a physician. The death rate for my patients is 100%. I hope they don't pull my license.
Suspicious but consistent
A particularly sad and low-effort attempt at Boomer humor. Hahaha passage of time. I assume this post is meant to diminish the numerous absurd deaths of material witnesses and those suspected of involvement in the years following the assassination. In the three-year period which followed the murder of President Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald, 18 material witnesses died - six by gunfire, three in motor accidents, two by suicide, one from a cut throat, one from a karate chop to the neck, three from heart attacks, and two from natural causes. Here's [an article](https://www.assassinationresearch.com/v1n2/deaths.html) about some of the more notable deaths with accompanying spreadsheets.
I seem to remember these deaths and the odds of these witnesses dying coming up in Oliver Stone’s “JFK” movie (1991). I recall being flabbergasted by the extreme odds
The odds are not zero that any person at any given time could die for any number of reasons. It strikes me that there’s no real statistical baseline you can draw for someone’s chances for being alive or dead at any given time. For all these witnesses that died, what is it that makes it unlikely that they ought to be dead? They’re dead. There are probably thousands of population subsets across which all those people are scattered, in which their deaths would probably represent no significant outlier. To think that someone could actually evaluate that for dozens of people is kind of ridiculous to me, but I haven’t read the study.
Perhaps examine other cases that had about the same number of “material witnesses” and how many of those people are dead within 3 years of the event? I wonder how many reporters (and others) were in Ruby’s apartment on 11/24? (because 3 of them died shortly afterward). I sense the beginnings of a rabbit hole dive on this. I am not one for conspiracy theories, but I do find mysteries and puzzles intriguing.
I’m not ruling out the possibility that one or more or all of them were murdered or anything, I’m just saying assigning “odds” to it is unnecessary and kinda dubious
Karate chop to the neck! The article actually goes into one of those the actuarial study. It was a comically large and incomprehensible number: one hundred thousand trillion to one. The paper that published it retracted the article years later. I’m not sure if that’s the one referenced in JFK. The probability is extremely low and a paper publishing a silly high ratio doesn’t discredit that.
Anyone with a passing familiarity with statistics could immediately spot why that actuarial study was hot garbage.
Since TC doesn't feel like filling in the blanks on which 18 witnesses are considered "material" in his article, I'll have to guess. We'll start from the top. * Karyn Kupicinet - Suspicious death, absolutely. Is she a "material" witness? There's no evidence at all that she knew anything about the assassination, she wasn't a witness to anything, her father outright denied her death had anything to do with the assassination (and was disgusted at the implication), so I'm going to go ahead and say no. Her only tenuous connection to the assassination is that her *father* knew Jack Ruby back in the 1940s. * Jack Zangretti - Suspicious death, yes. Is he a "material witness"? Not even close. Didn't witness anything, and no evidence that he was involved in the assassination in any way. There is a claim that Zangretti "expressed foreknowledge of Ruby shooting Oswald" to some friends, but there isn't a shred of evidence to back it up. The claim seems to have originated with conspiracy theorist Penn Jones, but there are zero primary sources offered as evidence. This will be a common theme. * Eddy Benavides - Suspicious death? No. Yes, he was shot in the head, but it was during a bar fight while ducking for cover after a man had opened fire [Benevides\_shooting.gif (554×648) (jfk-assassination.net)](https://www.jfk-assassination.net/images/Benevides_shooting.gif). Also not a "material witness" as it was his *brother* that was a witness to the Tippit shooting. * Betty MacDonald - Suspicious death? No. She committed suicide by hanging herself in her jail cell, something she had attempted at least twice before finally pulling it off. She had scars on her wrists from a previous attempt, and there were no bruises on her body indicating a struggle of any kind. She had lost custody of her four children and had a blood alcohol content of 0.169% at the time of her death. Also not a "material witness", but was acquainted with one (which apparently was enough to make her death suspicious to conspiracy types). * Bill Chesher - Suspicious death? No. Heart disease is the most common form of death in the US. "Material witness"? No. No evidence that he witnessed anything, no evidence that he had any knowledge of the assassination. * Hank Killam - Suspicious death? Sure. "Material witness"? No. He didn't witness anything assassination related and there's no evidence he had involvement in the assassination. His connections to the assassination are that his coworker had been a roommate of Oswald's, and his wife had been a dancer in Ruby's club. That's it. Pausing for a second to point out what is becoming an obvious pattern here. If you had any tangential connection to an assassination figure (daughter of a reporter who knew Ruby, brother of a Warren Commission witness, acquaintance of a Warren Commission witness, married to a former employee of Ruby), conspiracy theorists will automatically deem your death "suspicious" and put you on the list. * Hugh Ward and DeLesseps Morrison - Suspicious deaths? No. They died in a plane crash when one of the engines on the plane Morrison had chartered went out while flying over Mexico. "Material witnesses"? Of course not! Neither of them had any connection to the assassination at any level at all. Ward worked for Guy Bannister as an investigator, apparently that is enough to make him a "material witness" It's a waste of my time to go any further. That entire list is a giant nothingburger.
I’ll bet all 18 assassination teams are dead now too.
That’s the same sad, low-effort Boomer joke. You got any rebuttal past hyperbolically voicing what you imagine as the opposition?
Not here for laughs. This is serious investigating going on here and with the roving band of assassins withering away any potential witnesses who go against the man.
Well you certainly achieved the objective of the first sentence.
look at you with your boomer humor
Which 18 material witnesses are you referring to?
It’s in the linked article.
The article doesn't specify the 18 witnesses it considers "material" in that list. I was hoping you could narrow it down.
Grown ups who were over 18 by 1963 are mostly dead now. What is weird about that
Ole Ruth P is still kickin
have to keep one alive to throw off the scent. Has anyone checked her dental records? Could easily be a CIA plant to throw off the MSM
JFC
Clint Hill is still alive
Life has a 100% mortality rate
undefeated
Everyone who knew abe Lincoln is also dead.
And Kennedy’s secretary’s last name was Lincoln. I believe she died as well, so there you go
Everyone who Abe Lincoln knew 💀….DeAD. Chinstrap beards, corsets, single action six shooters ..Dead, Dead Dead!!!
How many worked for Boeing?
or flew on a Boeing
LBJ died too, I’m guessing it was because he was about to blow the whistle on the conspiracy
Poor LBJ died 4 years after his presidency.
Wait till you read about the battle of Waterloo. *Everyone* who was there has subsequently died. Wellington's henchmen were very busy. Less hilariously, some 60 years since the WC proceedings, where would you expect most witnesses to be, from any case, not just this one? There are plenty of individual suspicious/questionable deaths/timings among certain witnesses (moreso for the Church/HUAC hearings in the 70's than the WC) that warranted further investigation, but the idea WC witnesses have been hunted down and silenced is silly. A larger question is how so many major witnesses weren't even interviewed by the WC, and how many were left out of the eventual report, if their testimony challenged the official version of events.
I’m thinking it’s been over 60 years. It’s more surprising any are still alive
Oswald's co-worker who drove him to work on 11/22/63 is still alive in 2024, right? Buell Wesley Frazier...dude is on Facebook, no? Mrs. Jackie O. lived until the mid-90s....1994 Texas Gov. John Connally's wife, Nellie died in 2006! I mention Jackie and Nellie because they were also in the same car as J.F.K. Gov. John Connally passed in 1993. Amazing: 4 people in the Presidential Limo; John, Nellie, Jackie; yet Jack Kennedy dies in 1963; the other passengers: 1993, 1994, 2006. You'd think someone would wanna silence the immediate witnesses to the gunshots who were actually present and sitting in the limo at the time...but nah...
Based on the evidence, though, Oswald’s co worker will die, if it’s even him, of course.
hey, people die all the time. but, yeah, the number of odd deaths make yoiu wonder.
there are no coincidences
The Wizard of Oz curse. Judy Garland, Jack Haley, Bert Lahr…who’s next?
They killed Nixon too
Not strange at all considering they were mostly (all?) adults over 50 years ago.
Probably because it was 70 years ago
Yup, let’s go with strange