Bill
Hunter worked as a reporter for the Long
Beach Independent Press Telegram. He was involved in the
investigation of the killing of President John
F. Kennedy.
On 24th November,
1963, Hunter and Jim Koethe of the Dallas
Times Herald interviewed George
Senator. Also there was the attorney Tom
Howard. Earlier that day Senator and Howard had both visited Jack
Ruby
in jail. That evening Senator
arranged for Koethe, Hunter and Howard to search Ruby's apartment.
It is not known what the
journalists found but on 23rd April 1964,
Hunter was shot dead by Creighton Wiggins, a policeman in the pressroom
of a Long Beach police station. Wiggins initially claimed that his
gun fired when he dropped it and tried to pick it up. In court this
was discovered that this was impossible and it was decided that Hunter
had been murdered. Wiggins finally admitted he was playing a game
of quick draw with his fellow officer. The other officer, Errol F.
Greenleaf, testified he had his back turned when the shooting took
place. In January 1965, both were convicted and sentenced to three
years probation.
Jim
Koethe decided to write a book about the assassination of Kennedy.
However, he died on 21st September, 1964. It seems that a man broke
into his Dallas apartment and killed him by a karate chop to the throat.
Tom Howard died of a heart-attack, aged
48, in March, 1965.
Open
Debate on the Kennedy Assassination
Forum Debate on the Bill Hunter, Jim Koethe and Tom Howard meeting
Forum Debate on Watergate
(1)
Penn
Jones, Jr, Disappearing Witnesses included in The Rebel
(22nd November, 1983)
Shortly after dark on Sunday night, November 24, 1963,
after Ruby had killed Lee Harvey Oswald, a meeting took place in Jack
Ruby's apartment in Oak Cliff, a suburb of Dallas, Texas. Five persons
were present. George Senator and Attorney Tom Howard were present
and having a drink in the apartment when two newsmen arrived. The
newsmen were Bill Hunter of the Long Beach California Press Telegram
and Jim Koethe of the Dallas Times Herald. Attorney C.A. Droby
of Dallas arranged the meeting for the two newsmen, Jim Martin, a
close friend of George Senator's, was also present at the apartment
meeting. This writer asked Martin if he thought it was unusual for
Senator to forget the meeting while testifying in Washington on April
22, 1964, since Bill Hunter, who was a newsman present at the meeting,
was shot to death that very night. Martin grinned and said: "Oh,
you're looking for a conspiracy."
I
nodded yes and he grinned and said, "You will never find it."
I asked soberly, "Never
find it, or not there?"
He added soberly, "Not
there."
Bill Hunter, a native of
Dallas and an award-winning newsman in Long Beach, was on duty and
reading a book in the police station called the "Public Safety
Building." Two policemen going off duty came into the press room,
and one policeman shot Hunter through the heart at a range officially
ruled to be "no more than three feet." The policeman said
he dropped his gun, and it fired as he picked it up, but the angle
of the bullet caused him to change his story. He finally said he was
playing a game of quick draw with his fellow officer. The other officer
testified he had his back turned when the shooting took place.
Hunter, who covered the
assassination for his paper, the Long Beach Press Telegram
had written:
"Within minutes of
Ruby's execution of Oswald, before the eyes of millions watching television,
at least two Dallas attorneys appeared to talk with him."
Hunter was quoting Tom
Howard who died of a heart attack in Dallas a few months after Hunter's
own death. Lawyer Tom Howard was observed acting strangely to his
friends two days before his death. Howard was taken to the hospital
by a "friend" according to the newspapers. No autopsy was
performed.
Dallas Times Herald
reporter Jim Koethe was killed by a karate chop to the throat just
as he emerged from a shower in his apartment on Sept. 21, 1964. His
murderer was not indicted.
What went on in that significant
meeting in Ruby's and Senator's apartment?
Few are left to tell. There
is no one in authority to ask the question, since the Warren Commission
has made its final report, and the House Select Committee has closed
its investigation.
(2)
David Welsh, Ramparts (November, 1966)
Hunter covered the Kennedy assassination more or less
on a lark. He was a police reporter for the Long Beach paper and a
good one, with a knack for getting along with cops. He drank with
them, played cards with them in the press room-- he was a sharp and
lucky player - and they would often call him at home when a story
broke. Hunter was a big man, described by friends as rough, jovial,
"very physical," with an attractive wife and three children.
There was no real need
for the Long Beach paper to send a reporter to Dallas, but Hunter,
who grew up there, managed to promote a free trip for himself with
the city desk. In Dallas he ran into Jim Koethe, with whom he had
worked in Wichita Falls, Texas. Koethe asked him to come along to
the meeting in Ruby's apartment; they arrived to find Senator and
Tom Howard having a drink.
Bill Hunter was killed
just after midnight on the morning of April 23, 1964 - only a few
hours after George Senator testified before Warren Commission counsel
that he "could not recall" the meeting in Ruby's apartment.
Hunter was seated at his desk in the press room of the Long Beach
public safety building when detective Creighton Wiggins Jr. and his
partner burst into the room. A single bullet fired from Wiggins' gun
struck Hunter in the heart, killing him almost instantly. The mystery
novel he was reading, entitled Stop This Man!, slipped blood-spattered
from his fingers.
Wiggins' story underwent
several changes. His final version was that he and his partner had
been playing cops and robbers with guns drawn when his gun started
to slip from his hand and went off. The two officers were convicted
of involuntary manslaughter. Sentnece was suspended. There were so
many contradictions in Wiggins' testimony that Bill Shelton, Hunter's
city editor and old friend from Texas, is "still not satisfied"
with the official verdict. He declines to comment about any possible
connection between Hunter's death and the Kennedy assassination. "But
I'd believe anything," he says. It is a curious footnote that
Shelton's brother Keith was among the majority of Dallas newspapermen
who found it expedient to leave their jobs after covering the assassination.
Keith was president of the Dallas Press Club and gave up a promising
career as political columnist for the Times-Herald to settle in a
small north Texas town. One reporter who was asked to resign put it
this way: "It looks like a studied effort to remove all the knowledgeable
newsmen who covered the assassination."
(3)
Bill Sloan, JFK: Breaking the Silence (1993)
At approximately 2 a.m. on the morning of April 23, 1964,
Hunter was sitting at his desk in the press room of the Long Beach
police station and reading a mystery novel entitled Stop This Man,
when two detectives - both of whom were later described as "friends"
of Hunter - came into the room.
Initially,
there was considerable confusion over exactly what happened next.
One officer was first quoted as saying he dropped his gun, causing
it to discharge as it struck the floor. Later, he changed his story
to say that he and the other detective were engaged in "horseplay"
with their loaded weapons when the tragedy occurred.
Whatever the case, a single
shot suddenly rang out, striking Hunter where he sat. An autopsy later
showed that the .38-caliber bullet plowed straight through Hunter's
heart.
He died instantly, without
ever moving or saying a word.
"My boss called me
at 2 a.m. and told me Bill Hunter had been shot," Bill Shelton
recalls. "He wasn't satisfied with the story that the cop had
dropped his gun, and as it turned out, that wasn't what happened at
all."
The newspaper charged police
with covering up the facts in the case, which Long Beach Police Chief
William Mooney vigorously denied. Detectives Creighton Wiggins, Jr.,
and Errol F. Greenleaf were relieved of their duties and subsequently
charged with involuntary manslaughter. In January 1965, both were
convicted and given identical three-year probated sentences.
Two weeks after the shooting,
in a letter of resignation to his chief, Detective Wiggins wrote:
"It is a tragic thing that this must come about in this manner,
for I have lost a wonderful friend in Bill Hunter and so have all
the police officers of the department... he was truly the policeman's
friend."
While Hunter's death made
sensational headlines in California, it was scarcely noted 2,000 miles
away in Dallas. Jim Koethe surely mourned his friend, but if he connected
Hunter's death in any way with their visit to Ruby's apartment five
months earlier, he didn't mention it to any of his acquaintances at
the Times-Herald.
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