David Ferrie - Death and Aftermath

Death and Aftermath

On February 22, 1967, less than a week after the New Orleans States-Item broke the story of Garrison's investigation, Ferrie was found dead in his apartment. The New Orleans coroner officially reported that the cause of death was an intracranial berry aneurysm.

Two unsigned typed letters were found: The first, found in a pile of papers, was a screed about the justice system, beginning with "To leave this life is, for me, a sweet prospect." The second note was written to Al Beauboeuf, Ferrie's friend. (The coroner's "natural causes" explanation for Ferrie's death contradicts the suicide explanation. Regarding this Garrison said, "I suppose it could just be a weird coincidence that the night Ferrie penned two suicide notes, he died of natural causes." Both notes were undated.) Garrison suspected that Ferrie had been murdered despite Ferrie's notes and the coroner's report to the contrary. The day the newspaper story first ran, Garrison aide Lou Ivon stated that Ferrie telephoned him to say: "You know what this news story does to me, don't you. I'm a dead man. From here on, believe me, I'm a dead man...." On March 1, 1967, Garrison arrested and charged Clay Shaw with conspiring to assassinate President Kennedy.

In 1979, the House Select Committee on Assassinations stated in its Final Report that Oswald — who had been living in New Orleans in the summer of 1963 — had established contact with anti-Castro Cubans and "apparently" with American anti-Castro activist, David Ferrie. The Committee also found "credible and significant" the testimony of six witnesses who placed Oswald and Ferrie in Clinton, Louisiana, in September 1963. One of the witnesses was Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) chairman Corrie Collins. Collins identified a photograph of David Ferrie at the trial of Clay Shaw, saying, "...but the most outstanding thing about him was his eyebrows and his hair. They didn't seem real, in other words, they were unnatural, didn't seem as if they were real hair." A later release of witness statements taken by Garrison's investigators in 1967, unavailable to the HSCA, showed contradictions in the witnesses' testimony given in 1969 and 1978. Collins, for example, when shown a photo of David Ferrie by Garrison investigator Andrew Sciambra in January 1968 and (in Sciambra's words) "said that he remembers seeing this man around Clinton somewhere but can't be sure where or when." Yet later at the Shaw trial he placed Ferrie in the company of Shaw and Oswald.

In 1979, the House Select Committee on Assassinations stated that available records "...lent substantial credence to the possibility that Oswald and Ferrie had been involved in the same C.A.P. unit during the same period of time." Committee investigators found six witnesses who said that Oswald had been present at Civil Air Patrol meetings headed by David Ferrie.

In 1993, the PBS television program Frontline obtained a group photograph, taken eight years before the assassination, that showed Oswald and Ferrie at a cookout with other Civil Air Patrol cadets. However, as Frontline executive producer Michael Sullivan said, "one should be cautious in ascribing its meaning. The photograph does give much support to the eyewitnesses who say they saw Ferrie and Oswald together in the C.A.P., and it makes Ferrie's denials that he ever knew Oswald less credible. But it does not prove that the two men were with each other in 1963, nor that they were involved in a conspiracy to kill the president."

In 1978, William Gaudet, a 20-year CIA informant who had worked out of an office at the International Trade Mart in New Orleans, told investigator Anthony Summers that Ferrie "was with Oswald," although Gaudet did not state where or when, or whether he knew this directly or by hearsay. Gaudet also said, "Another vital person is Sergio Arcacha Smith. I know he knew Oswald and knows more about the Kennedy affair than he ever admitted."

The former Executive Assistant to the Deputy Director of the CIA, Victor Marchetti, has claimed that David Ferrie was connected to the CIA. Marchetti told author Anthony Summers that "...he observed consternation on the part of then CIA Director Richard Helms and other senior officials when Ferrie's name was first publicly linked with the assassination in 1967." Marchetti said that he asked a CIA colleague about this who told him that "Ferrie had been a contract agent to the Agency in the early sixties and had been involved in some of the Cuban activities."

Marchetti's claim, however, is contradicted by secret internal CIA documents that state that the Agency never contacted Ferrie at any time, and that there had been no documented Agency utilization of Ferrie.