JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (99 page)

What Dennis David says was on Bill Pitzer’s film contradicts not only the Warren Report but also the increasingly challenged official photographs and X-rays of the autopsy, as well as the questionable testimony of Drs. Humes, Boswell, and Finck. If David is right, the Pitzer film and photographs would constitute powerful evidence of a systematic government cover-up of the gunshot wounds. Pitzer himself would be a critical witness to the process whereby he either took or obtained the government-incriminating movie and photographs of the president’s body.

Bill Pitzer was shot to death on October 29, 1966. His body was discovered at 7:50 p.m. on the floor of the TV production studio of the National Naval Medical Center, Pitzer’s working area. The estimated time of his death was approximately 4:00 p.m.
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As an FBI teletype reported early the next morning, the victim was found dead with a gunshot wound in his head and a thirty-eight caliber revolver lying close to his body.
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Pitzer’s body was found lying face down “with the head extending under the lower rung of two aluminum step ladders which were leaning against a foundation post.”
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Following a joint investigation by the Naval Investigative Service (NIS) and the FBI, the Navy ruled that Bill Pitzer had committed suicide.
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The members of his family were certain that he had not.

The Navy investigative board’s verdict of suicide rested on its claim that Pitzer “was experiencing marital difficulty and was intimately associated with another woman.”
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Bill Pitzer’s friends and family resisted the board’s theory of suicide and Pitzer’s supposed motivation, both of which contradicted their knowledge of the man.
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Dennis David had “a gut feeling” that Pitzer would not have committed suicide: “He had been through too many stressful situations in his life. Second world war—he had been in and out of Vietnam for various and sundry reasons . . . you know, he was not a weak personality type, or type of person who would ever run into anything he couldn’t handle . . .”
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The Navy’s claim that Pitzer had an ultimately fatal affair was based on “an unsigned, undated summary report of two interviews [with an unnamed woman] conducted by unnamed NIS agents.”
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The obscurity of the investigation, whose interviews were kept secret and inaccessible until they had been “routinely destroyed,”
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made it impossible to scrutinize the Navy’s allegation of the character defect that presumably caused Pitzer’s suicide. If Pitzer was instead killed by government forces, the Navy was adding to that crime its assassination of his character.

Bill Pitzer had been about to leave the military for a new career, whose promise implied peril. Four days before he died, Pitzer told a colleague he was ready to submit his retirement letter to the Navy.
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He had confided in Dennis David that he “had some very lucrative offers from a couple of the national networks like ABC, CBS, to go to work for them.” David thought the offers were connected with Pitzer’s assassination film.
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Joyce Pitzer, his widow, said that on the Saturday he was shot Bill had gone to his office to write a speech he was scheduled to deliver the next Wednesday at Montgomery Junior College, a nearby campus where he was enthused about a job offer to teach educational television.
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Bill Pitzer was on the verge of an exciting new vocation drawing on his television skills. At the same time, once he retired from the Navy, his opportunity to broadcast his film on Kennedy’s wounds represented a threat to the forces covering up the assassination.

When Dennis David was asked why he suspected Bill Pitzer had been assassinated, he said, “I think it was because, with him retiring, they—and I don’t know who they are—were afraid that he would take these pictures that he and I had seen, these 35-millimeter [slides] and the 16-millimeter film, that he would take them [with him]. And if he went to work for a major studio, that they would use them, or he would have them aired.

“That would really have blown some people out of the water, if that would have transpired.”
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Bill Pitzer’s film of John F. Kennedy’s body has never been found. One investigator hypothesized that Pitzer had stored the film in his TV production studio’s false ceiling. The upright ladder under which his head was found after his death was seen as a clue. It could have been the means by which Pitzer, or an assassin, climbed up to retrieve the film from its hiding place the final afternoon of Pitzer’s life. He was then shot to death, and the film vanished.
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Joyce Pitzer believed strongly her husband’s death was no suicide. However, she was pressured into silence by Navy intelligence officials who came to her home after Bill’s death. “They told me,” she said, “not to talk to anyone . . . the Navy intelligence [people] were here, and—at the house, and everything—and for twenty-five years, I did not really discuss it.”
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When in 1995 at the age of eighty, Mrs. Pitzer described the Navy’s pressure on her, she was still afraid that if she questioned her husband’s death, “my [Navy] compensation might be stopped.”
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The man to whom Joyce Pitzer revealed this fear was Retired Army Special Forces lieutenant colonel Daniel Marvin. He had phoned her with shocking news. In August 1965, Marvin told her, the CIA had asked him as an elite Special Forces officer, a Green Beret, to assassinate her husband, an assignment he then refused but that someone else apparently accepted.
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A government plot that Bill Pitzer’s family and friends had long feared was the cause of his death was now finally being filled in, three decades later, by a man who almost participated in it.

Colonel Daniel Marvin told a story that has subsequently caused him to be dismissed by skeptics, denounced and expelled by the Special Forces Association of retired soldiers, and begged by his family to retreat into silence. Yet, as a born-again Christian, Marvin has insisted on the need to repent of his covert-action past, partly by acknowledging to Joyce Pitzer—and to the American public—how close he came to assassinating her husband.

Dan Marvin was an ironic candidate to assassinate a JFK witness. Marvin had volunteered for the Special Forces on November 22, 1963. It was “out of my respect for President Kennedy,” he said, “and because of his respect for the U.S. Army’s Special Forces.”
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The curriculum that Marvin then followed at the Special Warfare School, Fort Bragg, North Carolina, included, he said, “training not only in guerrilla warfare, but also in assassination and terrorism. I believed that extreme measures were sometimes necessary ‘in the interests of national security.’”
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For their top-secret training in assassinations, Dan Marvin and his Green Beret classmates were taken, he said, “to a different building that had a double barbed-wire fence, surrounded by guard dogs.”

The instruction they received in the high-security compound gave them a different view of recent history:

“On the John F. Kennedy situation, that was brought to our attention as a classic example of the way to organize a complete program to eliminate a nation’s leader, while pointing the finger at a lone assassin. It involved also the cover-up of the assassination itself. We had considerable detail. They had a mock lay-out of the plaza and that area, and showed where the shooters were, and where the routes were to the hospital . . .

“They had quite a bit of movie, film coverage—it seemed like, thinking back to that time—and some still photos of the Grassy Knoll and places like that. They told us that Oswald was not involved in the shooting at all. He was the patsy. He was the one who was set up.

“We did, myself and a friend of mine, form a very distinct impression that the CIA was involved in Kennedy’s assassination. During the coffee break, we overheard one of the CIA instructors say to the other, ‘Things really did go well in Dealey Plaza, didn’t they?’ Or something to that effect.

“And that just reinforced, or really added to our suspicions. And we really felt, before the end of the training was over, that one of those instructors may have been involved himself in the assassination of John F. Kennedy.”
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Marvin said, as a result of his CIA primer on the Kennedy assassination, he “had to do a lot of re-thinking. And perhaps it’s the way soldiers of fortune are. I don’t know. But I just then convinced myself, as did my friend, that it somehow had to be in the best interests of the United States government that Kennedy was killed. Otherwise, why would our own people have done it?”
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In the first week of August 1965, Colonel Clarence W. Patten, commanding officer of the 6th Special Forces Group, summoned then-captain Dan Marvin to an office in Fort Bragg headquarters. Marvin says Colonel Patten told him to “meet a ‘Company’ man in an area adjacent to headquarters.”
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Marvin has described this meeting, “in the shade of some nearby pine trees,” with “a slender man of about 5’10”:

“Dressed casually in short sleeves, light slacks and sunglasses appropriate for the August heat, he flashed his ID and took me aside. Would I terminate a man who was preparing to give state’s secrets to the enemy—a traitor in the making?”
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Marvin, already trained as an assassin, said he would. He assumed his target would be in Southeast Asia, where he was on orders to go in December 1965.
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Marvin asked the CIA man who the traitor was.

“I was told,” Marvin said, “he was a Navy officer—a Lieutenant Commander William Bruce Pitzer. The agent told me that Pitzer worked at Bethesda Naval Hospital. He said nothing of a link with the JFK autopsy and I just assumed that Pitzer was one of those sorry types that went wrong and was going to sell secrets to our enemy. The job had to be done at Bethesda before the man retired from the Navy.”
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It was only at this point that Dan Marvin refused the trigger role in the plot against Pitzer. He had no objection, he confessed later, to killing Lt. Cdr. Pitzer, so long as the deed were to be done abroad, not in the United States.

According to Marvin, “It was common knowledge in Mafia and CIA circles that Green Berets were tapped by the Company to terminate selected ‘targets’ in foreign countries, whereas the Mafia provided the CIA’s pool of able assassins for hits in the U.S.”
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Marvin’s assassination skills, he had been taught, “would be used overseas—not on our home turf. So—I refused the mission after he’d already told me the guy’s name which is not a good thing.”
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Marvin and the CIA agent parted with the understanding “that the name would be as good as forgotten by me . . .

“The agent then simply turned around and walked over to meet Captain [David] Vanek who was waiting just out of earshot and I headed back to my office. Whether or not that agent offered Vanek [with whom Marvin had taken assassination training] the same mission or whether or not he accepted the mission is only for him to say; I have neither seen him nor heard of him these past twenty-nine years.”
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Dan Marvin began trying to find David Vanek in April 1993. Following his conversion to the Christian faith, Marvin began speaking out against the CIA’s and Special Forces’ training in assassination. He hoped Vanek would corroborate the assassination classes they attended together at Fort Bragg and would help him bring that evil to light.
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Drawing on Army orders for a training assignment that included both Vanek and himself, Marvin provided Vanek’s Army service number in a query to the Veterans Services Directorate of the Army Reserve Personnel Center. For over a year, he got no response.

In the meantime, he was given a shocking revelation.

While watching a documentary on the Kennedy assassination in November 1993, Marvin “suddenly felt extremely ill” when he saw the name of William Bruce Pitzer flash across his screen.
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Pitzer’s name was one in a list of violent deaths linked with the JFK assassination and cover-up. Marvin was transported back to the shade of Fort Bragg pine trees where the CIA man in dark glasses asked him to kill the “traitor,” William Bruce Pitzer, a man “who was preparing to give state’s secrets to the enemy.” Marvin realized the assignment he refused under those trees must have been carried out by someone else. That could have been his Green Beret classmate, David Vanek, to whom the CIA agent had spoken next.

Following the revelation of Pitzer’s death, Marvin redoubled his efforts to find Vanek. After informing the Veterans Services Directorate that he might have to seek the help of members of Congress, Marvin finally received a reply in December 1994. It stated their office had “been unable to identify a service of record for the person concerned.”
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Marvin feared Vanek was dead—that there had been a second murder through a CIA doublecross. He worried that his Green Beret comrade, David Vanek, had not only killed William Pitzer, but that he had been killed in turn and his records obliterated to complete a cover-up.
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