Bill Simpich: The Lumpkin-Gannaway Network – Chapter 1 (2019 – Originally published on the Education Forum)

The introduction gave a little background of the suspicious acts of the other four members of the Lumpkin-Gannaway network:  Dallas police officers Pinky Westbrook, Jerry Hill, Kenneth Croy, and George Butler.

I will begin this analysis with ten bullet points on the real (or imagined?) sins of George Lumpkin and Pat Gannaway.  This is very much a work in progress.

I consider Lumpkin and Gannaway part of a small group that includes

* DPD personnel chief William Westbrook (who allegedly worked with the CIA),

* Sergeant Jerry Hill (a former police reporter),

* Reserve sergeant Kenneth Croy, (who allegedly “found” the Tippit wallet at his death scene and never reported it, and was suspected by the WC as assisting Jack Ruby in getting in position to shoot Oswald) and

* Lt. George Butler (Gannaway’s partner for many years – who interviewed Jack Ruby at length back in 1950 and testified about it to the corruption investigations  years later to the Kefauver Committee – Harold Weisberg and others believe Butler gave the order to bring down Oswald prematurely before the escort vehicle was in place, also aiding Ruby in getting in position to shoot Oswald)

All six of these men are now deceased, but their friends and families can and should be interviewed.

These men should all be treated as suspects – there are small groups like this I can identify at another time – identifying their roles puts together an important building block of the JFK investigation.

1.  Both Lumpkin and Gannaway were high-ranking DPD officials that were also members of Army Intelligence.  Both men were present at the meeting reviewing the entire operational plan for the motorcade conducted in Curry’s office on 11/21/63.  Both men played central roles in the events that resulted in Oswald being named as a suspect in the moments before his capture at the Texas Theatre.  Lt. George Butler – who was Gannaway’s partner for many years – was the one in charge of the downtown jail at the time of the transfer of Oswald when he was shot by Jack Ruby.

2.  Lumpkin was in the pilot car, 3 minutes ahead of the motorcade.  It made a suspicious stop – talking to a policeman, unreported in any of the police affidavits – right in front of the book depository in the moments before the assassination.   (21 WH 579; Scott, p. 273)

3.  In the moments after the assassination, Lumpkin ordered the sealing of the book depository.  (21 WH 580). This “sealing” proved to be very ineffective, as not all the doors were covered.  (need source).   Herbert Sawyer, the officer allegedly watching the doors after the “sealing”, was the one who called in at 12:44 and  got the radio call going that an unknown white man  of nondescript build had told him that the shooter was “Slender white male about 30, five feet ten, 165”.  Sawyer was with the Special Services Bureau – his boss was Gannaway.  Sawyer was accused of corruption a few years after and resigned in disgrace.

4.  Jerry Hill went to work for Westbrook in the personnel division just weeks before 11/22/63.  Between the two men, they had access to all the personnel files. Westbrook was the decision-maker on hiring, firing, discipline, and Internal Affairs.  Neither man had any business being at a crime scene – but Jerry Hill was one of the two men credited with finding the shells on the sixth floor and is photographed leaning out the window for the crime scene unit to come upstairs.  The official report indicates that homicide officers found the shells in the TSBD – when in fact it was Jerry Hill and/or Luke Mooney.

5. “(Deputy Chief) Lumpkin (see Peter Dale Scott – Deep Politics, p. 274)  then instructed Revill to organize his team against the east wall…and make a systematic search…a member of Revill’s searching party…found the rifle.”

Why was Lumpkin making these various decisions.  Because Lumpkin was head of the Service Division, which included George Doughty’s Identification Bureau (this unit got the tip at 3:15 pm that there were cards in Oswald’s wallet identifying him as “Alek Hidell” – the rifle was mail ordered in the name of Hidell), Fingerprint Section, Crime Scene Search Section, HQ Section, Warrant Section, Property Bureau and the Records Bureau.  Lumpkin controlled the entire crime scene process and the subsequent processing – in other words, he controlled the evidence.

6.  Lumpkin’s role in taking Truly to Fritz right after Fritz’s arrival at the TSBD with the story “I don’t know if it means anything, but I’m missing a man – a young fellow named Lee Oswald.”  Truly was clutching a piece of paper he had already obtained from a phone call to “Aiken” at the warehouse for employee files were kept, and wrote down Oswald’s age, height, weight, phone and address from his application form.  (23, 5’9, 150,  BL 31628, 2515 W. 5th Street, Irving)

7.  The Houston Chronicle’s 11/22 report that Oswald was was the only one who couldn’t be accounted for,’  in Truly’s alleged employee roll-call according to Detective Capt. Pat Gannaway.   That night, Gannaway led a group of officers to visit the home of TSBD employee Joseph Molina – who was singled out a long time ago by Communist Party leader and FBI informant William Lowery who was “the Herbert Philbrick of Dallas”.   Molina’s name as a possible suspect got in the papers – and he wound up suing the Dallas police for defamation!

8. Peter Dale Scott wrote in 2010 about “the coincidence that the same the 488th Army Intelligence Reserve unit helped generate the false Marina story, as well as the false Stringfellow report.”    Scott points to a number of false reports about Oswald’s alleged rifle, and specifically reports indicating, falsely, that Marina Oswald presumed Oswald’s rifle in Dallas to be the rifle he owned in Russia.

(Marina’s actual words, before mis-translation, were quite innocuous: “I cannot describe it [the gun] because a rifle to me like all rifles.”)

…The interpreter who first supplied the Marina story, Ilya Mamantov, was selected as the result of a phone call between Deputy Police Chief George Lumpkin and Jack Crichton.   We have already seen that Crichton commanded the 488th; and Lumpkin, in addition to being the Deputy Police Chief, was also a deputy commander of the 488th under Crichton.”

9.  Scott also points to the statement made by “Assistant Chief Don Stringfellow, Intelligence Section, Dallas Police Department, (who) notified 112th INTC [Intelligence] Group, this Headquarters, that information obtained from Oswald revealed he had defected to Cuba in 1959 and is a card-carrying member of Communist Party.  The cable sent on November 22 from the Fourth Army Command in Texas to the U.S. Strike Command at Fort MacDill in Florida, the base poised for a possible retaliatory attack against Cuba.

…Stringfellow’s superior officer, Captain W.P. Gannaway, was a member of Army Intelligence Reserve.   Later Ed Coyle, himself a warrant officer of the 112th Intelligence Group, testified to the Assassinations Records Review Board that all the officers in the DPD’s Intelligence Section were in army intelligence.

Actually they were almost certainly in the 488th Army Intelligence Reserve unit of Dallas: Jack Crichton , the head of the 488th, revealed in an oral history that there were “about a hundred men in that unit and about forty or fifty of them were from the Dallas Police Department.”  (Russ Baker, Family of Secrets, p. 122)

10.  On 2/26/64 – in an effort made to resolve chain of possession of backyard photo – Lumpkin “forgets” he made multiple copies and made them available on November 23 and November 24, but Carl Day tells on him, saying that “24 or more” were placed on a table for law enforcement officers – and “anyone” could have got ahold of them.  This act directly violated a police order issued on November 22 that “photographs (in the JFK case) were to be disseminated only on authority of the Chief’s office.”  Lumpkin was a deputy chief – not the chief.

11. Stringfellow mistakenly identifies Oswald as being arrested in the balcony.   Was this a slip by someone who couldn’t remember what he was and wasn’t supposed to know?  Many have pointed to this as evidence that another man looking like Oswald was apprehended in the balcony and taken out the back door – as witnessed by hobby store owner Bernard Haire – and the man in the balcony was the man who was chased by Johnny Brewer into the theater.

Days later, even the hangdog WC was asking the FBI for info on the “chain of possession” on the backyard photo – apparently sold to Life by Marina and James Martin for $5000…