Robert Wilfred Easterling
was born at Hattiesburg, Mississippi, on 30th June, 1926. After dropping
out of high school he joined a rodeo and obtained the nickname Cowboy.
Easterling eventually became
involved in criminal activity. In the 1950s he became a safecracker
and helped run an interstate car-theft operation. He was arrested
and convicted of burglary and bootlegging and spent some time in prison.
He later admitted that he got away with the most serious of his crimes,
the placing of a bomb on a National Airlines plane as part of an insurance
fraud scheme. Easterling also confessed to killing a man who became
aware of this crime.
Easterling was arrested
in 1964 and charged with safebreaking in Hagerstown, Maryland and
Durham, North Carolina. Found guilty, he was sentenced to five years
in the Louisiana State Penitentiary. After his release he moved to
Mexico City. In 1974 Easterling was committed to a mental institution.
The following year he got in touch with the Federal
Bureau of Investigation about his knowledge of the assassination
of John
F. Kennedy.
Although interviewed by the Secret Service several times between 1974
and 1982, Easterling felt his story was not being fully investigated.
He therefore contacted the journalist, Henry
Hurt.
Easterling told Hurt that
he had been recruited by Manuel Rivera to drive Lee
Harvey Oswald from
Dallas on the day of the assassination. Easterling claimed that David
Ferrie, Jack
Ruby
and Clay
Shaw had been involved in this conspiracy. So also were unnamed
members of the Texas oil industry. Easterling also told Hurt that
Rivera had been the gunman who killed Kennedy. Rivera used a 7-mm
Czech-made automatic rather than the Mannlicher-Carcano
that had been planted in the Texas Book Depository to implicate Oswald.
Easterling decided not
to take part in this conspiracy to kill John
F. Kennedy
and instead fled to Jackson, Mississippi. On 21st November, 1963,
Easterling informed the FBI in Washington
of the plot. He was told they knew of the conspiracy. The FBI agent
told him: "We know all about it. We're going to catch them red-handed."
You're in too deep. You're going to get killed."
Easterling's story appeared
in Hurt's book, Reasonable Doubt: An Investigation
into the Assassination of John F. Kennedy (1986).
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