Oswald in the doorway: the blog of the Oswald Innocence Campaign, by Ralph Cinque

This concerns Judyth Baker and a claim she made in her interview with David Pakman. She said that she was the one who made that phone call to the TSBD asking for Lee Harvey Oswald and identifying him as the "janitor."  

We need to look at that closely, but first, be aware that for a long time, I have observed a pattern about Judyth, and that is that she likes to claim that she was connected to just about everything that Oswald did. 

For example: take Oswald's unique brown shirt, which he wore in the doorway and was still wearing when he was arrested. Judyth claims that she bought it for him brand-new on Canal Street in New Orleans, even though by all indications, it was a very old, tattered and torn shirt. So, how could he have worn it out so quickly? It's steamy hot in New Orleans all summer long, so if she gave it to him new that summer, I don't see how he could have started wearing that long-sleeved, woven shirt until he got back to Dallas and the weather cooled. And that would have been October at the earliest. So, how could it have been worn out by November? Even if he wore it every day it would not have worn out that fast. 

Plus, how could he have worn it in New Orleans at all under any circumstances? Remember: he was married to Marina, and they were living together at the time- in New Orleans. He was going home every evening to Marina. She knew what shirts he had. So, where would he say he got it? That he bought it? Himself? But, they were dirt-poor. Wouldn't that be hard to justify, especially since it wasn't even the right season for such a shirt? 

His ID bracelet? Don't you know? Judyth gave it to him in New Orleans. It was a gift from her. But again: Oswald was married and living with his wife at the time. So, how could he suddenly start wearing an engraved ID bracelet that another woman gave to him? And, remember that he spent the night before the assassination with his wife, and he slept with her. They were separated at the time but not to the point of not sleeping together. In fact, that very night he begged her to move to Dallas to be with him and reunite their family. It seems that he poured his heart out to her. Would he have done that wearing the ID bracelet that another woman gave to him? Do you really think he was that stupid? There is no way that Judyth gave him that bracelet.  

The FBI telex warning of an assassination attempt? Oswald sent it and only told Judyth about it. Of course, that telex has numerous credibility problems, particularly the fact that it was reportedly sent from FBI headquarters in Washington from the FBI Director to all the FBI field offices. And, Oswald couldn't fake a thing like that because telexes were and still are legal documents in which the identities of the sender and recipient are certified. So, he couldn't just walk into a telex office and say, "I want to send a telex pretending to be the FBI Director to all the field offices of the FBI." They would not have let him do it. Furthermore, you should remember that there was no telex. There was just a guy, a night watchman, who claimed 5 years after the assassination that there had been a telex.  So, HE made-up the telex from memory five years after he supposedly saw it, and that is the only telex that exists. The only telex is a fabricated telex. 

And why would Oswald instruct the field offices to start questioning "racial and hate groups" throughout the country if he knew exactly who was plotting to kill JFK? So, even the content of the supposed telex makes no sense from Oswald's perspective. 

Oswald's ability to speak Russian? He learned it with Judyth using flash cards in New Orleans. The fact that he already spoke it fluently and communicated exclusively in Russian to his wife doesn't matter. The first thing that Oswald did upon returning to the US was to seek work as a Russian interpreter or translator. He didn't find a job, but he did impress people in the White Russian community of Dallas with his Russian fluency. He spoke it; he wrote it; and he read it. He even read the Russian classics in Russian. He was way past the flash card stage, and there is no chance he was doing that in New Orleans.   

But, according to Judyth, it's always her. Everything relates to her. She was at the center of all things Oswald, according to her. 

And now she claims that she was the woman who made the call to the Book Depository asking for Oswald and identifying him as the "janitor," as reported in the FBI memo. Judyth mistakenly claims that it was put in the Warren Report, but it is an FBI memo dated November 27, 1963. Here it is, and I thank Larry Rivera for providing it.  

In 1963, long distance calls were very expensive, and there was no direct dialing. You had to go through an operator. And in this case, it was person to person, so it was definitely mediated through an operator. You would start by calling your local operator, by dialing 0. That got you to a local operator. Then your local operator would transfer you to a special long-distance operator. Then, the long-distance operator would have to route your call to the destination. It was a mechanical process, and it took some time. But typically, the routing would be as direct as possible. For one thing, it was more economical; and for two, it meant better reception. In those days, the farther the distance and the more circuitous the routing, the worse the reception. 

So, would a woman in Florida who was calling Dallas be put through to an operator in Covington, Lousiana? Covington is a small town that even today has less than 10,000 people, and you know how much the population has grown. So, why would they route it through there from Florida? 

It probably would have gone from Florida to Atlanta and then on to Dallas. Why go through Covington, Louisiana? I don't think there is any chance of that. Plus, the caller didn't have the phone number, so the Operator in Covington had to call Information in Dallas to get the number. But, why would a woman in Florida who didn't even have the phone number she wanted in Dallas be routed to an operator in Covington, Louisiana in the first place? It doesn't make sense.

Judyth claims that she and Lee decided to designate him as the "janitor" because her first two initials are "JA" as in Judyth Anne. But please consider how unlikely that is as a mental process going forward. By that I mean that it's one thing to do it going backwards, meaning that if Judyth found out that someone called him referring to him as the "janitor" that she would recognize her initials at the start of the word. But, going forward? Are we supposed to believe that one of them actually came up with that idea from scratch? To refer to him as the "janitor" just because the first two letters of that word matched her initials? Seriously? Do you realize how unlikely that is?

Try it yourself with your initials. I couldn't possibly do it with my initials because my middle name is Christopher, and there are no words starting with "rc". There used to be an RC cola when I was a kid, so I guess I could say I was the RC delivery man. But, the idea that anyone's mind would work that way is preposterous. Oswald couldn't do it with his initials, which were LH.  Most people's initials consist of consonants, not vowels, so they can't do it. There are a few exceptions. For instance, if your name is Thomas Henry, you could say that you are a think tank administrator or perhaps a theater owner, or even a thoracic surgeon. But, there aren't too many like that. So, why accept that anyone's mind would ever think of doing such a thing?

Judyth didn't think of it. She came up with it, but, she didn't come up with it before; she came up with it after. She saw the association afterwards.  She saw the FBI memo. She saw the word "janitor". And that's when the "ja" matching her initials jumped out at her. It didn't happen before. It couldn't have happened before. You'd have to be a savant to think of it before. 

And why didn't she have the phone number? If they went as far as planning such a scheme for her to call that way, wouldn't he have told her the phone number? He had been working there since October 16, so a little over a month. Wouldn't he have provided her the number by then?  

The whole idea is preposterous. If Judyth was calling the TSBD wanting to talk to Oswald, why would she be concerned about the secretary who answered the phone hearing her name? She didn't even have to give her full name. She could have just said "Judy". And if she didn't want to give her name at all, why wouldn't just say that she was a friend of his from Florida? Why refer to him as the janitor? And why assume that the secretary would inform Oswald of it? 

"Hey, Lee! This woman called for you, and guess what? She actually referred to you as the janitor here. Can you believe it?"

How could you count on that happening such that Lee would know that Judyth was the one who called? You couldn't count on it. You wouldn't. Nobody would. 

Was he going to ask her: "By the way, by any chance, did the woman think I was the janitor here? Did she refer to me that way?" 

To avoid giving her name, Judyth could have just said that she was his cousin, or his former neighbor, or his former co-worker, or his lab partner back in high school, his pen-pal, or any number of other things. The idea that she would signal him by telling a secretary that he was the "janitor" there is too preposterous to even consider. It is beyond preposterous. It is totally wacky.   

Judyth is just working backwards from that memo and turning it into a fit to herself, which is something that she often does. It's her whole modus operandi, and she has bamboozled a lot of people that way. 

Are you starting to get the picture now of how Judyth's mind works? And frankly, it's scary. It's scary because she has been doing it for so long that she may now believe the fantasies she creates in her mind. It's like she is "in character" all the time. She has created this past life, this fantasy world, this make-believe world of having had a life with Lee Harvey Oswald, and now she lives it 24/7. That is really what is going on here.

Does it matter? Yes, it does.  It matters if JFK truth matters. 

One thing is for certain: you can't expect to replace the official story of the JFK assassination, which is false, with another story that is also false. And Judyth's story is most definitely false. It's just that it is false in a different way. And, it is doing a lot of damage to the cause. In fact, I think it is doing more damage to the cause of JFK truth than anything else. It's much more damaging than what the lone-nutters do. And I mean all of them put together. 

So, I advise everyone to just drop it. Just walk away from it.

Regrettably, Nigel Turner put Judyth in Chapter 8 of his film, The Men Who Killed Kennedy without doing due diligence. A major television network was scheduled to do a special on Judyth and her relationship with Oswald. But, before filming began, they decided to do the due diligence. So, they hired attorney and JFK researcher Carol Hewitt (who, like Judyth, is from Florida) to conduct a background investigation on her. Carol soon reported to the television producers that, in her opinion, Judyth's story about knowing and having a relationship with Oswald was a total fraud. The television network suspended it and ended contact with Judyth. True story.