If you take a dive down the rabbit hole that is the assassination of President
John F. Kennedy, one of the first things you'll notice is just how
much information there is to digest. There are over one hundred disputed issues.
Each one of those topics has its own cast of characters. Some of those
witnesses present important testimony that paints the accused assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, as
the lone gunman, while others provide arguments that are either in defense of Oswald
or they are in support of there being additional people involved or a conspiracy.
Out of all of these witness stories, the one that's always the most surprising
and disturbing to me is the story of Ralph Leon Yates. This is not
a famous story, it's not one that people bring up a lot, but
it was just so shocking to me when I read it that it affected me,
and it's part of the reason that I went down this rabbit hole of
the JFK assassination. Yates picked up a hitchhiker on the Wednesday before the assassination
on the highway near Oswald's rooming house. Now, this hitchhiker that Yates picked
up asked him for a ride to work, and on the drive there,
the hitchhiker started talking about President Kennedy coming into town soon and asking if Yates
thought it was possible that someone could kill Kennedy up from a tall building.
A pretty weird question to ask just a few days before the assassination. On
top of that, this hitchhiker has a brown paper sack with him and he
tells Yates that he has curtain rides in the sack. So Yates then drops
this hitchhiker off at the place where he works and get this, it's the
Texas school Book Depository building. Later that day, Yates told a coworker about
the interaction that he had with this hitchhiker, and a few days later,
after the president had been killed, Yates saw Oswald on TV and believed that
Oswald was a dead ringer for the hitchhiker that he had picked up on Wednesday.
Yeates then came forward to the authorities about what he had seen, thinking
that he gave Oswald a ride two days earlier. But it turns out that
Oswald was already working in the school book Depository on that Wednesday, and he
had been there all morning. We know this from the time cards when he
punched in and out, so it wasn't possible that Yates could have picked up
the real Lee Harvey Oswald. But still, after being given multiple light detector
tests by the FBI, Yates passed each one, and after three interviews,
the director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover himself personally ordered Yates to
be retested on the polygraph machine again. When Yates again passed the light detector
test, the FBI agent has told him that they didn't think he was lying,
but because Yeates believes something that could not be true, that he had
picked up the real Oswald, he would need to be involuntarily committed to an
insane asylum. So the FBI sends this father of five to Woodlawn Hospital for
the mentally ill, permanently ruining his life. The story of Ralph Yates has
a lot of common elements with other points of the assassination. First, there's
the argument defending the Warren report. Since it's proven by his time card that
Oswald was in the building, we know for sure that Yeates did not pick
up Oswald. Second, you've got the conspiracy intrigue. It obviously seems like
this hitchhiker, who Yeates says looked just like Oswald, is trying to impersonate
Oswald. He mentions all these things that Oswald would have said in theory right.
He talks about could you kill the president? From high up. Yates
picks him up near Oswald's rooming house on the Highway. He's got a paperbag
that he says has curtain rods in it. He then gets dropped off literally
at the Texas school book Depository. It's crazy. If Yeates just saw some
random guy, why on earth would j Edgar Hoover personally care about it that
much. In the end, you either have to be okay with the cognitive
dissonance of what happens, since there is a lot of evidence that points to
Oswald and maybe this is just a weird anomaly, or the other path is
to wonder why there was an Oswald look alike in the first place and what
that could mean for the overall case if what Yates is saying is true,
Ralph Yeates, like so many other disputed areas of the JFK assassination, is
an opportunity for different people to make different inferences. Now, whether you shrug
this story off, or you point to it as evidence of a conspiracy,
is really based on your own life experience and your own worldview, And in
large part the inferences that you're able to draw are based on your answer to
a very uncomfortable question, is it even possible that a motivated group of people
could have perpetrated the crime of the century to kill the President of the United
States of America and get away with it? In Dallas, Texas, three
shots were fired at President Kennedy's motorcade in downtown Dallas. The first reports say
that President Kennedy has been seriously wounded by this chewing the flash apparently official President
Kennedy's guy Central standard, I don't know dollars this morning the man of monthly
charge Assination along mission as this is Solving JFK a podcast about the JFK assassination.
I'm your host, Matt Crumpton, and over the next few months,
I'll be your guide to analyzing the many pieces of conflicting evidence in the JFK
assassination. What really happened was JFK killed by Oswald alone, as the Warren
Report says, or does the evidence point somewhere else? Perhaps no other case
in American history has been studied and argued about more than the assassination of John
F. Kennedy. Today, people think about JFK assassination research in terms of
conspiracy theorists versus Oswald did it alone Warren Report defenders. But if the Warren
Commission was wrong and there was some other scenario than Lee Harvey Oswald killing the
president and Officer Tippett alone, then that means that the crime of the century
is currently an unsolved homicide. While the Warren Commission concluded in nineteen sixty four
that Lee Harvey Oswald did act alone, most people are not aware that the
United States Congress, through the House Select Committee on Assassinations, reopened the JFK
case and concluded in nineteen seventy eight that Lee Harvey Oswald was the shooter,
just as the Warren Report had said, but that there was also likely another
shot fired from the front by an unknown person. This means that the most
current official government story is that it is an unsolved conspiracy, and that rings
true with the view of the American public as well. In a weird way,
the JFK assassination is one of the few topics that still brings people together
across ideological lines. According to a five thirty eight survey, the existence of
multiple shooters in the JFK assassination is a belief held by fifty nine percent of
Democrats, sixty one percent of Republicans, and seventy percent of independence. Of
course, public opinion is not the same thing as conclusive evidence, and there
are legions of Warren Report defenders out there to provide counter evidence to each claim
by Warren Report critics. People like Gerald Posner, Vincent Bugliosi, Bill O'Reilly,
and a lot of people who go hard on comment sections in John F.
Kennedy assassination Facebook groups believe that Oswald acted alone and it's not even a
close call. The news media also continues to reinforce the notion that the Warren
Report has proven to be correct. My audacious goal is to uncover the objective
truth about the assassination of John F. Kennedy to the maximum extent possible.
And the first big question we must answer is was the Warren Report right that
Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone? All right, so let's talk about the name
of this podcast. Solving JFK. I received a well deserved many backlash on
JFK Assassination Twitter. When I dropped the name of this podcast, I get
it. It sounds like I'm saying, hey, everybody, I've solved the
JFK assassination finally, and now we have the definitive truth. But that's not
what I mean at all. I chose Solving JFK for a title because I
viewed the case as a puzzle to be solved by anyone who's interested, not
just me, And if you're listening to this podcast, we are all actively
looking for the corner pieces at this point. My objective, like many before
me, is to find the truth. Now, almost every book that I've
come across in the JFK assassination literature is either a conspiracy book or a lone
Gunman Warren Report defender book. These authors have a position on all the disputed
issues, and they want to sell their position to you. Now, of
course, this makes a lot of sense. Many of these authors have spent
their whole lives reviewing the evidence, and they believe that they have the case
solved for sure, So why should they waste their time establishing facts that don't
support their theory of the case. My lack of knowledge about the JFK case
is actually an asset in a way, because I'm willing to start from square
one without a doubt. There are generations of JFK researchers who came before me,
and thousands of people alive today who know way more about the JFK assassination
than I will ever know. Now. Where my approach is different from all
these experts is that I'm not deciding to make a case for or against conspiracy
from the outset. I'm merely analyzed and comparing the arguments of each side to
see who's most plausible on each little disputed issue. In my opinion, I
don't know all the answers in advance. This is a journey where I'm gonna
follow the evidence wherever it leads. The other unique thing I'm trying out is
the idea of crowdsourcing information for the podcast. This case has so many tangents
to travel down and so many different paths that we can explore that there's really
no way to get it right by myself. That's why I'm going to be
asking what I got wrong and what information I left out that's relevant each week.
You can email Solving Jfkpodcast at gmail dot Com at the end of each
episode, and before we make our ultimate conclusions at the end of the season,
we'll do a rebuttal episode or two to correct anything that I got wrong
or address anything that needs to be addressed. Now, having said all of
that and the interest of total transparency, my interest in this case was stoked
by thinking that there was a conspiracy but not being able to figure it out.
I can't just turn off the doubts that I have about the war On
report, but I can objectively review the record and consider all of the arguments
about every issue with an open mind. So while I haven't solved the jfk
assassination, I really would like to, and I'm going to try with this
podcast, and I hope you'll help me. I've been interested in the jfk
assassination since the first time I heard about it. What drew me in was
the vivid and terrifying Zappruter film showing Kennedy's head explode, combined with Oswald being
shot two days later by Jack Ruby. It just didn't add up. So
it was no surprise that as a student teacher, when given the opportunity to
dive into an American history subject, I chose the JFK assassination. At that
time, I concluded that the Warren Report, at a minimum had serious problems,
but there were just too many competing theories for who did it, if
not Oswald as the loan Nut. It was overwhelming. Cuba, Russia,
anti Castro Cubans, the mafia, the military, Lyndon Johnson, Texas Oil,
the FBI, secret Service, the CIA. That's ten theories right there.
I walked away from the several books I had read at the time,
thinking that the assassination would never be solved. It was just too complicated,
too many witnesses, too many experts, too many secret Service agents and Dallas
police officers to keep up with, and most of all, too many potential
bad guy conspirators. I gave up my shallow inquiry into the JFK assassination after
that week of student teaching in the spring of two thousand and four. I
was going to law school and trying to start a life, and I didn't
have time to read thousands of pages about a true crime that may or may
not have been solved. Besides, there were professional journalists whose job it was
to find out what really happened. I was sure that eventually some intrepid reporter
would break the real story. Then three years later, when I was finishing
law school, I read a Rolling Stone story about a deathbed confession by a
former CIA agent who was infamous for being one of the Watergate burglars, E
Howard Hunt. According to Hunt, the chief conspirators of the assassination were Lyndon
Johnson, at least four specific CIA officials, and the leader of a group
of Cuban exiles. Now, there are many people who believe that Hunt's confession
is self serving and unreliable, and will dive deeper into examining what he said
if our examination of the Dallas evidence does not point to Oswald alone. But
I was struck by the fact that this man Hunt, who was indisputably a
CIA agent for his entire career, was saying the assassination of JFK was a
conspiracy at the highest levels of government. Now, deathbeak confession or not,
I wondered what would motivate Hunt to say such a thing if it was not
true. In the final days of his life. What kind of person decides
to leave this world with a momentous lie. The Hunt story was very intriguing,
and my interest in the case was once again stoked. But I didn't
get around to following up at the time because I was lost in the exhaustion
of studying for the bar exam. Solving JFK would have to wait. In
twenty seventeen, when President Trump gave the green light to release most but not
all, of the JFK records, I was back in the game. As
the new records came out, I dove in and tried to see what I
could learn, which led me down a path of reading every credible JFK assassination
book. I could find both conspiracy and loan gunment theories. Then, during
the pandemic, I had more time to organize my research and go even deeper.
Surely there must be a discoverable objective truth I could find by immersing myself
in the facts of the case and using the skills I learned as an attorney
to help assess whether Oswald acted alone as the Warren Commission claimed. Next time
on Solving JFK, We're going to take a look at all the government investigations
into the assassination of President Kennedy. Did the Warren Report get it right?
Was Lee Harvey Oswald the Lone Gunman. Official President Kennedy died. Thanks for
listening. For more information about the show, visit Solving jfkpodcast