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Originally posted by Skywatcher2011
What a camper! If this was Call of Duty: Black Ops, that would have been a great camping spot in the map!
The next big break in the case came when the Dallas City Council voted to release all city records having to do with the assassination. Journalist Mary La Fontaine, who was looking through the recently released records, happened to look at a list of records released earlier in 1989. There she found the arrest records that showed the tramps to be:
Harold Doyle
View his arrest record.
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John Forrester Gedney
View his arrest record.
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Gus W. Abrams
View his arrest record.
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Were these fellows in fact the three tramps?
Ray and Mary LaFontaine, working for the tabloid TV program "A Current Affair," set out to find Harold Doyle, whose address was listed on the arrest record as Red Jacket, West Virginia. The trail led from West Virginia to Amarillo, Texas, where the LaFontaines found one of Doyle's former neighbors who remembered him talking about his arrest in Dallas. Doyle was finally located in Klamath Falls, Oregon. He told his story on camera (embedded video), and was also questioned by the FBI.
The FBI and private researchers sought the other two tramps. Gedney was located in Melbourne, Florida, serving as a municipal officer, a respected member of the community who had not spoken about former life as a vagabond until interviewed by researcher Billy Cox, and by the FBI. Both Doyle and Gedney told the same story of spending the night before the assassination at a rescue mission. According to Oliver Revell of the Dallas FBI office:
Both commented that they had gotten fresh clothes, showered, shaved and had a meal. They headed back to the railroad yard when they heard all the commotion and sirens and everything, and they asked what happened. They were told the president had been shot.
See The Washington Post, March 4, 1992, and Dateline Dallas, Winter, 1993.
brams, the oldest of the tramps, was deceased. But researcher Kenneth Formet interviewed his sister, with whom he had lived the last 15 years of his life. She remembered his vagabond days, saying "he was always on the go hopping trains and drinking wine." When shown a picture of the Dealey Plaza tramps she responded "Yep, that's my Bill!" (Dateline Dallas, Winter, 1993)
Thus one of the greatest of assassination mysteries sprang from one of the most mundane Dealey Plaza realities. Three hobos swept up in the dragnet produced by the assassination were arrested and released. Suspicious of authority and fearful of being blamed, they remained quiet about their identities until the surviving two were tracked down almost 30 years later. Never objectively "mysterious" they only seemed that way because the absence of information left room for wild speculation. Thus the tramps are a metaphor for all the broader "mysteries" of the JFK murder case.
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