Jim Koethe
worked as a reporter for the Dallas Times
Herald. He was involved in the investigation of the killing
of President John
F. Kennedy.
On 24th November,
1963, Koethe and Bill Hunter of the
Long Beach Press Telegram 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, Bill
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 John
F. 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)
Bill Sloan, JFK: Breaking the Silence (1993)
In light of the strange, unsettling sequence of events
that unfolded over the next ten months, some independent assassination
researchers have put heavy emphasis on the assumption that Koethe
and Hunter were in the apartment before police had a chance to search
it. Clearly, this would have heightened the chance of the two reporters
finding something while there and could only make an intriguing tale
even more so.
Unfortunately, however, it simply isn't true.
In reality, homicide detective
Gus Rose arrived at Ruby's apartment at about 2 p.m. that Sunday .
. . accompanied by two other Dallas officers and armed with a search
warrant issued by Justice of the Peace Joe Brown, Jr.
"I showed the manager
the warrant and she let us right in," Rose recalled in an October
1992 interview. "We were there for about an hour and a half,
and we searched the place thoroughly." . . . According to Rose,
the search failed to turn up anything of significance . . .
"We collected a few
notes and telephone numbers that had been written on pads, but that
was about all we took. Once we were finished, we just locked the place
back up and left again."
"If Rose was there
in the afternoon, he was there long before we were," Droby concludes.
"I just never realized it because nothing was messed up."
(3)
David Welsh, Ramparts (November, 1966)
The body of the young Dallas reporter was found swathed
in a blanket on the floor of his bachelor apartment on September 21,
1964. Police said the cause of death was asphyxiation from a broken
bone at the base of the neck - apparently the result of a karate chop.
Robbery appeared to be
the motive, although Koethe's parents believe he was killed for other
reasons. Whoever ransacked his apartment, they point out, was careful
to remove his notes for a book he was preparing, in collaboration
with two other journalists, on the Kennedy assassination.
Within a week a 22-year-old
ex-con from Alabama named Larry Earl Reno was picked up selling Koethe's
personal effects and held on suspicion of murder.
Reno's lawyers were Mike
Barclay and the ubiquitous Jim Martin, both friends of Ruby roomie
George Senator. Martin and Senator, one recalls, were with Koethe
at that enigmatic meeting on November 24, 1963. When the Reno case
came before the grand jury, District Attorney Henry Wade secretly
instructed the jurors not to indict - an extraordinary move for a
chief prosecuting officer with as strong a case as he had. The grand
jury returned a no-bill.
Reno, however, remained
in jail on a previous charge. When they finally sprang him, in January
1965, he was re-arrested within a month for the robbery of a hotel.
This time the prosecution, led by a one-time law partner of Martin's
had no qualms about getting an indictment, and a conviction. Reno
was sentenced to life for the hotel robbery. At the trial his lawyers
called no witnesses in his defense.
(4)
Gary
Richard Schoener, Fair
Play Magazine, A
Legacy of Fear (May,
2000)
Jim Koethe was a reporter actively researching the assassination and
collecting data, possibly in preparation for the writing of a book.
Shortly before the publication of the Warren Report, on September
11, 1964, he was found dead on the floor of his apartment. The cause
of death was asphyxiation due to a broken neck bone, the result of
strangulation or of a blow to the neck. The apparent motive was robbery,
the apartment was ransacked, and a 22 year old ex-con named Larry
Earl Reno was arrested within a week when he was caught selling Koethe's
personal effects. Reno was not indicted, although shortly afterwards
he was imprisoned for another offense. Koethe's notes never showed
up and there is no way of knowing if they contained anything of substance.
Koethe was one of the few
reporters to visit Jack Ruby's apartment the evening Ruby shot Oswald.
Another reporter who was there that night, Bill Hunter, was later
to be shot to death in a California police station. His death was
ruled to be accidental, the result of a police officer who was just
horsing around pointing a loaded gun at him and pulling the trigger.
The officer was allegedly a friend of his.
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