I am putting up this scathing attack of the Prayer Man hypothesis by Richard Gilbride on the Deep Politics forum. He repeatedly asks whether Sean Murphy actually believes the nonsense. And it is insane because Prayer Man looks nothing like Oswald and is dressed nothing like Oswald. Doesn't it start there? Note that he put up a link to the Darnell film that is now defunct, so I replaced it with another link that is active. But, I don't know why he put it at all because the Prayer Man clip is not in the Darnell film. It's like with the Lovelady clip, which is supposed to be from the Martin film, but we can't find it in any copy of the Martin film. And keep this in mind, Backes: you stupid shit: I PERSONALLY COMMUNICATED WITH GARY MACK ABOUT THIS, ASKING HIM WHETHER THE SIXTH FLOOR MUSEUM HAS A COPY OF THE MARTIN FILM THAT INCLUDES THE LOVELADY CLIP, AND HE SAID NO. I ASKED HIM WHETHER ONE EXISTS ANYWHERE, AND HE SAID: NOT THAT HE KNOWS OF. Note also that I am much cynical than Mr. Gilbride. I think the whole purpose of the Prayer Man hypothesis is to distract from the fact of Oswald being the Altgens Doorman.
And I have sent a synopsis of the height argument, with the relevant photos & diagrams, to Megan Bryant, the Director of Collections at the Sixth Floor Museum. Along with a strong recommendation that a digital scan of the Darnell film not be made- not without first presenting a substantive argument that overcomes the Doyle height argument.
When Sean Murphy formulated his hypothesis that PrayerMan was Oswald, he neglected to make a height analysis. And when eliminating other building employees and strangers as possible candidates, he failed to consider that the witnesses could have been mistaken, or forgotten- about where they stood, about whether any strangers were there, about whether any workers from neighboring buildings may have been on the TSBD landing.
And there are two incontrovertible facts in Weigman's film which completely devastate Murphy's hypothesis.
1) The film shows an apparent drinking motion, from a coffee or a Coke. This motion requires about a foot and a half of clearance from the alcove's west wall.
2) The vertical border-strip of the entranceway's glass partition is seen just behind PrayerMan's east shoulder (the viewer's right). Anyone's shoulders are about one foot in width. Weigman filmed at approximately 30 degrees to the TSBD landing (Darnell filmed at almost exactly 20 degrees). And so the natural body proportion sets a constraint as to where PrayerMan can possibly be standing- he absolutely has to be within the shaded area on the Location in Weigman diagram. Even with a much broader angle estimated for Weigman, PrayerMan still has to be situated well forward on the landing.
Situated at the front- and not in the corner- means we get a near one-to-one correspondence between the heights of PrayerMan and Wesley Frazier in the Darnell film. They are nearly equidistant from the camera, and only a 1% or so correction needs to be made for perspective.
Darnell's Camera Car 3 was about "70 feet from the closest point of the building" (Pictures of the Pain, p. 424) and so about 75 feet from Frazier, and 76.5 feet from PrayerMan. I measure their respective heights on my Darnell blowup as 5.2 and 4.4 cm. Since Frazier was 72.25 inches tall, PrayerMan calculates to (72.25)(76.5/75)(4.4/5.2) = 5' 2 1/2", to a reasonable approximation. Nowhere near the height of Oswald, and typical of the height of a woman
There is zero chance that PrayerMan is Oswald. Don't you think Sean Murphy realizes this?
Don't you understand, that if he truly believed he was correct about PrayerMan, Sean would be passionately involved in the effort at getting a Darnell film-scan achieved?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRnD1AIYC0s
My next 2 posts, immediately following, are scathing critiques of this fantasist, which are long overdue. With the PrayerMan boondoggle he pulls off a trifecta of self-will run riot.
The PrayerMan debacle fooled several dozen researchers, a false scent that filled their hours with nonsensical judgments. In the end it was a waste of their time, and a waste of time for those obliged to debunk this mullarkey.
And this is not the only major-league boneheaded hypothesis put forth by the fantasist Sean Murphy. And the circumstance that he's gained so many devoted followers reflects poorly on the JFK research community- it's full of gullible pseudoscholars, prone to a mob mentality, lacking in critical thinking skills.
And the cult surrounding his boneheaded detective-work has grown so megalomaniac, that it's now become politically incorrect to even dare criticize Sean Murphy's ideas. Such criticism will get you censored by the EdForum moderators, to whom political correctness is more pertinent than truth. Your posts will get deleted and posting privileges suspended. In my case, accentuating the obvious- that Sean Murphy has alcohol-abuse issues- earned me a suspension of 47 days and counting.
I remind the reader that this is a murder investigation. That hard-nosed detective work is called for. That if you are more concerned with potentially offending someone's feelings than with discerning the truth, you belong with the liberal snowflakes who lost the last election.
Sean wasted many man-years of researchers' lives with his erroneous hypotheses. He has successfully splintered the community, doing more damage than a CIA disinformation specialist could have ever hoped to accomplish. My guess is that he knows full well the mess that he's made. It would help if he owned up to it. All it takes is a simple apology and admission that he was wrong. We all get things wrong. But Sean continues to hide in the shadows, unable to face the holy hell he's wrought. Unable to let go of the adulation from his fellow megalomaniacs.
A major portion of his renowned PrayerMan thread- Oswald Leaving the TSBD?- was devoted to the proposition that Truly & Baker ascended via the west freight elevator rather than the corner stairwell. An imaginative proposition that falls apart completely upon inspection. This is fully critiqued in my 1st lunchroom essay- The Lunchroom Incident- A Short Proof and Long Explanation.
Briefly, in order for Murphy's fantasy to be true, 1) Baker has to concoct two lies in his afternoon's affidavit- that the elevator was "hung several floors up" and that he encountered a man on the "3rd or 4th floor" 2) During the 4 o'clock hour Fritz co-opts Baker into this risky double-lie, because he's had an uncharacteristic loss of confidence after just one interrogation session with Oswald and needs a suspect, any suspect 3) Dougherty took the stairs down from the 5th upon reacting to a shot (the elevator method was implied by his affidavits & testimony) and inexplicably missed noticing the assassins fleeing via the east elevator- and subsequently lied in his testimony by claiming to take the west elevator down, so as to cover for Truly 4) a US Attorney's letter discovered 47 years after the assassination has to be interpreted contrary to common sense- "after Miss Adams went downstairs she (Miss Garner) saw Mr. Truly and the policeman come up" - via the elevator, according to Murphy, and not via the stairs- that Adams had just used, whose timing on the stairs relative to Oswald's was being discussed.
Murphy's proposition has had few, if any, adherents since this disassembly. And this proposition was a direct outgrowth of an even deeper fantasy- and I refer here to his hypothesis that the lunchroom incident was a hoax.
This lunchroom issue was discussed in great depth a year ago in the EdForum threads Great New Movie Spells Out the Case for Oswald as PrayerMan and One Last Thing Before XMas Eve: 2nd Floor Lunchroom Encounter and the critique remains the same. And Bart Kamp ignored this in his award-winning essay.
1) Every single item of lunchroom-related evidence has a mundane explanation that supports the incident's reality.
2) WC 3076, the Sept. 23rd affidavit, shows that 6 months after his testimony Baker was still confused about the TSBD floor layout, giving a strong likelihood that he was confused about it in his 1st-day affidavit.
3) The 1964 filmed interview and 1986 filmed testimony contain no tangible indication that a monstrous lie about the lunchroom incident is being put forth, nor is there any indication that Baker was excessively anxious when being questioned by Bugliosi.
4) The will-call counter bump, a superfluous incident that serves no ostensible purpose in a contrived hoax narrative, is a telltale indicator that the dozen other points of correspondence in the Truly/Baker testimonies (at the elevator & in the lunchroom) actually happened.
5) The Kent Biffle story about Oswald being seen in a 1st-floor storage room has not one whit of corroboration, and almost certainly is garbled hearsay.
6) The Stroud document, coupled with a fact-based understanding of their timelines, places Adams & Styles on the stairs during the same timeframe that Truly & Baker are ascending the stairs from the elevator area. And the men had to have been in the lunchroom when the ladies passed.
And so we have an aggregate in the evidentiary record that supports the incident and not the hoax. Were there one issue only (such as interpretations of WC 3076) the hoaxers would have a debate. But there are several issues, and the fruitlesness of this school of thought is revealed by what is required to sustain it, and what it has produced:
The hoax requires a mini-conspiracy involving Truly, Baker, James Bookhout, Jeraldean Reid, James Leavelle, David Belin, and anyone else "in the know" in the DPD, FBI and Warren Commission. All of this to sustain a theory that has produced but one palpable result:
Baker's "4th floor man" vanished into thin air. This is the only tangible lead produced by this school of thought in 10-plus years. The same result as the theory that Space Aliens Abducted the Assassin. The other leads, fragile Murphyisms, are laughable- Tan Jacket Man and Ira Trantham's HSCA statement.
I invite the hoax adherents to look up Baker's children and grandchildren, show them the evidence (pro and con) and explain to them why Baker chose to participate in a hoax- a make-believe story- deeply pertinent to the murder of President Kennedy. And then sit down with a couple of Dallas cops and detectives to really drive your case home. Show the pro and con.
Hoaxers don't get it, that there was funny business going on with the elevators while Truly & Baker were on the ground floor and climbing the stairs. This is why Truly deflected attention onto Oswald in the lunchroom. And he never mentioned the elevators to the press. On top of that, power to the elevators was cut during the early minutes of the police search. And this was not mentioned in the press, nor even the Warren Report.
This hack theory- an attempted reconstruction of President Kennedy's diabolical murder- is perpetuated mainly by the bully drunkards at the ROKC forum- hooligan pseudoscholars to whom sophistry and wishful thinking outweigh any skills in math, science or Aristotelean logic. Managed by a 9th-grade dropout who spent way too many years in the bar-room, under the illusion that ethanol-laced beverages help the mind think more clearly. Ethanol. a gasoline additive, and the active ingredient in beer, wine and hard liquor.
Only an appearance by Sean Murphy himself, an admission that he's dead wrong, can rectify this hopelessly splintered situation, and I'm not holding my breath.
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