JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (107 page)

The assassination of President Kennedy continued to suck innocent people into its whirlwind. One was a man who was kind enough to pick up a hitchhiker in Dallas. He was then caught up in darkness for the rest of his life.

Ralph Leon Yates was a refrigeration mechanic for the Texas Butcher Supply Company in Dallas, making his rounds to meat outlets on Wednesday, November 20, 1963. At 10:30 a.m. Ralph Yates was driving on the R. L. Thornton Expressway. He noticed a man hitchhiking in Oak Cliff near the Beckley Avenue entrance to the expressway. Yates stopped to pick up the man.

When the hitchhiker got into Yates’s pickup truck, he was carrying what Yates described later, in a statement to the FBI, as “a package wrapped in brown wrapping paper about 4 feet to 4 1/2 feet long.”
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Yates told the man he could put the package in the back of the pickup. The man said the package had curtain rods in it, and he would rather carry it with him in the cab of the truck.
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Yates mentioned to the man that people were getting excited about the president’s upcoming visit. He had broached a subject the man was eager to talk about. The man had a remarkable sense, as seen later, of what would become the government’s case against Lee Harvey Oswald. The man also looked so much like Oswald that he was in effect his double. Or was he actually Oswald?

As cited by the FBI, Ralph Yates recalled the hitchhiker’s comments: “Yates stated the man then asked Yates if he thought a person could assassinate the President. Yates replied that he guessed such a thing could be possible. The man then asked Yates if it could be done from the top of a building or out of a window, high up, and Yates said he guessed this was possible if one had a good rifle with a scope and was a good shot.

“Yates advised about this time the man pulled out a picture which showed a man with a rifle and asked Yates if he thought the President could be killed with a gun like that one. Yates said he was driving and did not look at the picture but indicated to the man that he guessed so.

“Yates said that the man then asked if he knew the President’s route for the parade in Dallas and Yates replied that he did not know the route but that it had been in the paper. He said the man then said that he had misunderstood him and that actually he had asked Yates if he thought that the President would change his route. Yates said he replied that he doubted it unless they might for safety reasons.”
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The hitchhiker asked to be let off along Houston Street. Yates dropped him off at Elm and Houston, the stoplight by the Texas School Book Depository. He last saw the man carrying his package of “curtain rods” across Elm Street—perhaps into the Book Depository.
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When Ralph Yates returned to his workplace at the Texas Butcher Supply Company, he told his co-worker, Dempsey Jones, about his strange conversation with the man he picked up in Oak Cliff and dropped off at Elm and Houston who was carrying the package. Dempsey Jones thereby became a supporting witness to Yates’s account. He confirmed in an FBI interview that it was before President Kennedy was assassinated that Yates described picking up the hitchhiker, “who discussed the fact with him that one could be in a building and shoot the President as he, the President, passed by.”
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After Yates saw the pictures in the media of Lee Harvey Oswald, he said the man he gave the ride to was “identical with Oswald.”
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However, the FBI was not happy with the statement Ralph Leon Yates volunteered to them on November 26, repeated at the FBI’s request on December 10, and repeated yet again at their further requests on January 3 and 4, 1964, finally during an FBI polygraph examination. Although Yates’s statement seemed to be a thorough incrimination of the now dead Oswald, once again—as in other “Oswald” appearances—it proved too much for the government’s case, even placing that case in jeopardy. As the FBI would make clear, the witness wasn’t wanted. They kept recalling him only in order to discredit his story.

What was so unacceptable about Ralph Yates’s testimony?

In terms of the hitchhiker’s looks, itinerary, and comments, he was either Lee Harvey Oswald or a well-informed double. The Beckley Avenue entrance to the Thornton Expressway was on the same street as Oswald’s rooming house, located at 1026 North Beckley. The man looking like Oswald had hitched a ride from the vicinity of Oswald’s rooming house to the location of Oswald’s workplace, the Texas School Book Depository.

The man’s comments were, like “Oswald’s” behavior in the series of self-incriminating incidents we have already seen, an obvious attempt to draw attention to himself as a potential presidential assassin.

Most significant in this instance was the package in brown wrapping paper that the man insisted on keeping with him in the cab, which he said contained “curtain rods.” The package of “curtain rods” carried by Yates’s hitchhiker corresponds to Oswald’s notorious cover story in the
Warren Report
for sneaking his rifle into the Book Depository.

As the
Warren Report
describes this incident, it was on Thursday, November 21, that Lee Oswald asked his co-worker, Buell Wesley Frazier, if he could ride home with him that afternoon. Frazier lived in Irving half a block from Ruth Paine’s house, where Oswald’s wife, Marina, and their two daughters were then staying. Frazier asked Oswald why he wanted to ride with him on Thursday rather than Friday, when Lee normally went to the Paine household to stay with his family over the weekend. Lee’s answer reportedly was: “I’m going home to get some curtain rods . . . [to] put in an apartment.”
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According to Frazier and his sister, Linnie Mae Randle, the next morning Oswald brought a brown paper package “about 2’ long”
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with him when he rode in Frazier’s car back to the Book Depository. Frazier told the Warren Commission that when he asked Oswald what was in the package, he replied, “Curtain rods.”
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Despite the fact that the package Frazier and Randle claimed they saw was too small to hold even a rifle that was broken down, and although no one else saw Oswald with any package at all that morning, the Warren Commission concluded that Oswald must have used such a ruse to smuggle his rifle from Ruth Paine’s garage into the Depository Building. In the
Warren Report
, the “curtain rod story” is the critical lie that supposedly enabled Oswald to carry secretly the weapon he then used to murder the president.
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What, then, are we to make of Ralph Yates’s Oswald-like hitchhiker who prophetically acted out the “curtain rod story” two days before Lee Oswald reportedly reenacted it, in his ride with Buell Wesley Frazier to the Texas School Book Depository the morning of November 22?

Had there been no second curtain rod/rifle delivery by Oswald to the Depository, the first as done by the “Oswald” Ralph Yates picked up could have served the
Warren Report
quite well. Oswald could have been portrayed as smuggling the rifle into the Depository on Wednesday, then hiding it on the sixth floor of the building until he used it to shoot the president on Friday. In that version of the story, Yates could have been a valuable witness for the government against an already dead, media-convicted assassin.

However, just as there was once again a problem of too many Oswalds—with one working his regular hours in the Book Depository, while the other was hitchhiking with Yates—so, too, was there a problem of too many curtain rod deliveries to account for one rifle being smuggled into the building. The trail of duplicating curtain rod stories led not to a lone assassin but to an intelligence operation tripping over itself while working overtime to scapegoat Oswald.

Ralph Yates was a stubborn witness to what turned out to be unwanted evidence. On his second trip to the Dallas FBI office on December 10, 1963, he repeated and signed his statement about picking up the hitchhiker with the curtain rods. From his first contact with the FBI, Yates, who had pointed out that he was married with five children, said he “would appreciate not receiving any type of publicity from the fact he was furnishing this information.”
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About that concern he need not have worried. The FBI would make certain his testimony to another Oswald with a second curtain rods story would be buried from public view.

On January 2, 1964, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover sent a teletype marked “URGENT” to Dallas Special Agent in Charge J. Gordon Shanklin on Ralph Leon Yates. Hoover noted that a previous FBI investigation into whether Yates may have been at his company at the same time he said he picked up the Oswald-like hitchhiker provided insufficient evidence “to completely discredit Yates’ story.” Hoover therefore ordered the Dallas FBI office to “reinterview Yates with polygraph,”
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the instrument more commonly known as a “lie detector.”

On January 4 in another “URGENT” teletype, Shanklin reported back to Hoover on Yates’s polygraph examination that day: “Results of test were inconclusive as Yates responded to neither relevant or control type questions.”
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Because his lie-detector test was inconclusive, Yates had still not been discredited. But there was more to come.

During his final, January 4 trip to the FBI office, Ralph Yates was accompanied by his wife, Dorothy. He had asked her to come with him. In an interview forty-two years later, she told me what happened next to her husband. After he completed his (inconclusive) lie-detector test, she said, the FBI told him he needed to go immediately to Woodlawn Hospital, the Dallas hospital for the mentally ill. He drove there with Dorothy. He was admitted that evening as a psychiatric patient. From that point on, he spent the remaining eleven years of his life as a patient in and out of mental health hospitals.
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A crucial transition in the psychic health of Ralph Yates seems to have occurred at the FBI office on January 4, 1964. Something the FBI said after Ralph’s polygraph test puzzled and disturbed Dorothy:

“They told me that he was telling the truth [according to the polygraph machine], but that basically he had convinced himself that he was telling the truth. So that’s how it came out. He strongly believed it, so it came out that way.”
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According to what the FBI told Dorothy Yates, the data that registered on the polygraph machine, as then read in the normal way by the polygraph examiner, showed that Ralph Yates was telling the truth. His test was officially recorded as “inconclusive” (meaning the examiner wasn’t sure if Yates was telling the truth) only because J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI had decided what the truth had to be for Yates. The FBI-defined truth was that Yates had not picked up the Oswald-like hitchhiker with the “curtain rods” package, because for the FBI there could be no such hitchhiker. Therefore Ralph Leon Yates, by being so definitive (as shown by his polygraph chart) in knowing that he did precisely that—picked up a nonexistent hitchhiker—could only
have lost touch with reality. What for any other polygraphed person would serve as proof of truth-telling was, in the case of Yates, proof only of an illusory divorce from reality. The wrenching but undeniable truth for Yates, that he helped a man he thought was the president’s assassin deliver what could have been his weapon to the Book Depository, was what compelled him to contact the FBI in the first place. Now he was being told his experience was nothing but an illusion. The FBI said so. Because of Yates’s unswerving, polygraphed conviction to the contrary, that he knew what really happened, J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI knew what they had to do. They told him to report at once to a psychiatric hospital.

Exactly what happened to Ralph Yates in the following days as a patient at Woodlawn Hospital, Dorothy Yates did not witness and does not know.
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She does know that early one morning about a week later, Ralph broke out of Woodlawn. At 4:00 a.m. she opened the front door of their house to find Ralph standing barefoot on the steps in his white hospital clothes. Snow was swirling around him. Ralph told Dorothy he had escaped from the mental institution. He said he tied sheets together and climbed down from a window. He had then stolen a car and driven home.
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Ralph was tormented by fear in a way Dorothy would see repeated for years. He told his wife someone was trying to kill them and their children because of what he knew about Oswald. She quickly bundled up their five sleepy children, the oldest of whom was six. Ralph drove his family away from their house in the stolen car. Within a few hours, Dorothy was more alarmed by her husband’s frantic efforts to evade their murder at every turn than she was by any unidentified killers. She returned the car and reported his whereabouts to the Woodlawn Hospital authorities.
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Ralph was picked up and returned to Woodlawn. He was soon transferred to Terrell State Hospital, a psychiatric facility about thirty miles east of Dallas, where he lived for eight years. He was then transferred to the Veterans Hospital in Waco for a year and a half, and finally to Rusk State Hospital for the final year and a half of his life. While a patient at all three hospitals, he spent intermittent periods of from one to three months at home with his wife and children. He was never able to work again.