KAISER: They wanted me to try to prove a connection between David Ferrie and Lee Oswald in the summer of ’63. There’d been dozens of reports of the two men being seen together. For example, Guy Banister’s secretary claimed Lee had worked out of Banister’s office with Ferrie and Banister. But after exhaustive work, I found that nearly all those reports either had been discredited, were unprovable, or came from unreliable witnesses.
STONE: We desperately needed that link. I’d studied Ferrie and Oswald like a goddamned biographer—especially Lee, all the way from childhood—but I couldn’t find it. Lee always had difficulty in school. When he was twelve years old, his mother moved him from New Orleans up to the Bronx to live with his half brother. He caused havoc there and had to be psychologically evaluated. A reformatory psychiatrist described Lee as immersed in a “vivid fantasy life, turning around the topics of omnipotence and power, through which he tries to compensate for his present shortcomings and frustrations.” She diagnosed a “personality pattern disturbance with schizoid features and passive-aggressive tendencies” and recommended continued treatment. Needless to say, he never got it. Mama took him straight back home to New Orleans.
KAISER: Which eventually delivered him into the grasp of David Ferrie. I started looking into Ferrie’s life as a favor, but the more I did, the more the case began to consume me. The only provable link between Ferrie and Oswald dated to 1955 and ’56, when Oswald was sixteen and a member of the Civil Air Patrol at Moisant International Airport. Ferrie had been the commander of that unit for some time. In Case Closed, Gerald Posner wrote that Ferrie and Oswald couldn’t have known each other, because they were never in the CAP unit at the same time—that Ferrie had been removed from his position prior to Oswald’s entry. But the very year Posner’s book was published, a photo surfaced that showed Ferrie and Oswald in a small, relaxed gathering around a CAP cookout fire.
STONE: Ferrie lost his job as CAP chief, for molesting young cadets. We’ve verified that. He was a documented pedophile. Ferrie had initially hoped to be a priest, but he was kicked out of seminary for the same kind of nocturnal recreation—teenage boys. He almost certainly took that CAP job because hundreds of teenage boys came through the program.
ME: You believe Ferrie molested Oswald as a teenager.
STONE: Yes.
KAISER: In 1963, David Ferrie told Jim Garrison that he’d never met Oswald. After being confronted with the Civil Air Patrol link, he backed off and said he simply didn’t remember him. Penn, I’m sure you had plenty of experience with pedophiles in the Houston DA’s office. Do you think a predator like David Ferrie didn’t remember every boy who came through his unit? Especially a vulnerable kid like Oswald? No father, insecure, confused sexuality, so desperate to be different that he’s spouting Marxist theory at sixteen?
ME: Ferrie would have zeroed right in on him, no question. But you don’t have any objective evidence? No witness statements? Nothing?
KAISER: Only deduction. I had to ask myself what kind of relationship could have—or would have, by necessity—remained secret for years. Like you, I’ve worked more murder cases than I can count, and that experience taught me that illicit sex is the one thing people will stay silent about, if they possibly can. Especially molestation of a minor. And remember, this was the 1950s. There were no cell phones, no text messages, no e-mail, none of the crap that traps people nowadays.
STONE: Oswald sure wasn’t going to tell anybody about it. He took a lot of teasing from guys saying he was queer, all the way through the Marine Corps.
KAISER: Neither was Ferrie. The stigma from a homosexual relationship could be lethal back then, even in New Orleans. More telling still, if you look at Oswald’s life after the summer that CAP photo with Ferrie was taken, the kid’s downward spiral really accelerated. He couldn’t do his schoolwork the following fall, and he dropped out of the tenth grade.
ME: Hmm.
KAISER: Trying to emulate his big brother, Lee tried to join the Marines at sixteen, but they turned him down. He then went to work at a dental lab. He remained in New Orleans until the following July, when his mother moved him back to Fort Worth, Texas. Obviously, Ferrie could have been having sexual liaisons with Lee throughout the period prior to this move, or only sporadically, or not at all. We just don’t know. But that next fall, at Arlington Heights High School in Texas, Lee only made it to the end of September before dropping out. Does that not sound like a kid who might have experienced something too big to process? Like an affair with an older man?
ME: It does. But that’s still supposition.
KAISER: I don’t deny it. But tell me it doesn’t feel right.
ME: Look, you’re preaching to the choir here. After my years as a prosecutor, this is the easiest part for me to believe. But you still haven’t sold me that Carlos Marcello would employ this mixed-up kid when it came to a serious crime, much less an assassination.
STONE: It wasn’t Marcello’s idea. It was Ferrie’s. Marcello’s JFK plans had nothing to do with Oswald. But Ferrie was working at the heart of Carlos’s effort to avoid deportation, and that’s what led to Oswald being brought in.