(1)
Allan
Eaglesham and
R. Robin Palmer, The
Untimely Death of Lieutenant Commander William B. Pitzer
(January 1998)
The
Pitzers rose a little earlier than usual that fall Saturday morning,
29 October 1966. Bill fixed breakfast while Joyce made preparations
in anticipation of a visit from her mother for a few days. Late
morning saw them raking leaves in the yard as their 14-year-old
son Robert washed the car. When, around noon, a neighbor dropped
by to invite the boy to join her in a couple of rounds of golf,
Bill finished polishing the automobile. After lunch, he dropped
Joyce off at the beauty salon for a 1.00 PM appointment, drove over
to the golf course to remind Robert to have a haircut, then stopped
in at work to prepare a lecture he was to deliver at Montgomery
Junior College the following Wednesday. Joyce missed the 3:07 PM
bus, but caught it at 4:07 PM, and was surprised that Bill was not
already home when she arrived there. She called his office, and,
getting no reply, assumed that he was on his way. As time passed,
feeling increasingly uneasy, she called the office again, and again,
his club and the hospital emergency room. At 7:20 PM, she called
the main switchboard at Bill’s place of work: the National
Naval Medical Center (NNMC), Bethesda, Maryland. The duty officer
was alerted. Ensign J.M. Quarles and Security Patrol Officer T.E.
Blue opened the locked door to Pitzer’s television-studio office
at 7:50 PM, and found a body on the floor, the head resting in a
pool of coagulated blood, a revolver lying close by. Death was pronounced
by Medical Officer Lieutenant Commander R.W. Steyn at 8:10 PM, and
identification was made by Captain J.H. Stover and Lt. Cdr. J.G.
Harmeling; the corpse was that of Lt. Cmdr. William B. Pitzer of
the US Navy Medical Service Corps.
(2)
Allan Eaglesham, Interpretations of New Evidence in the
Pitzer Case (April 1998)
Pitzer's
untimely passing (on 29 October 1966, at Bethesda Naval Hospital)
is one of some forty that constitute the "mysterious deaths"
of people directly or indirectly associated with the assassination
of President Kennedy. In their book JFK; The Dead Witnesses
(1995, Consolidated Press International, Tulsa, pp. 40-41), John
Armstrong and Craig Roberts described Pitzer's demise as "one
of the strangest cases of 'suicide' in the history of the Kennedy
assassination." Pitzer is linked to the JFK assassination via
Dennis David, a friend, naval colleague and protégé
of Pitzer's, who maintains that he saw in his mentor's possession
black and white photographs, color slides and, most significantly,
movie film exposed during President Kennedy's autopsy, within a
few days of the assassination. Therefore, if, as the recently released
evidence suggests, William Pitzer did not commit suicide, then the
truth was covered up by two naval investigations and by the FBI,
with far-reaching implications.
A suspicious
aspect of the case is that the Pitzer family was denied the autopsy
report for more than two decades. When eventually it was released
to them in the late 1980s, it revealed that, in conflict with what
Mrs. Pitzer had been told by naval officials, there was no injury
to the deceased's left hand; her request for her husband's wedding
ring had been denied in those terms - she was told that his left
hand was too badly injured to permit removal of that most precious
item. Why would the Navy deny this request? There are two likely
possibilities: they did not have the ring because it had been stolen,
or it was damaged in a way that was inconsistent with the official
ruling of suicide.
With assistance
from lawyer James Lesar, President of the Assassination Archives
and Research Center, author Harrison Livingstone obtained access
to part of the Pitzer autopsy report that describes the bullet wound
to the right temple; the absence of powder burns led Mr. Livingstone
to theorize that the wound was not self-inflicted (High Treason
2, 1992, Carroll & Graf, New York, p. 558). On the other
hand, a gun held tightly to the skin at discharge does not result
in the "tattooing" that is characteristic of a close-range
shot.
Mr. Livingstone
succeeded in obtaining the Navy's Informal Board of Investigation
Report into Pitzer's death. That document deduces suicide on the
basis of the deceased's overwork and personal problems. There is
little reference to, and no discussion of, the physical evidence
gathered and analyzed by the FBI and the Naval Investigative Service
that should have constituted the clear and irrefutable proof that
a career naval officer of exemplary record had taken his own life.
