Judyth Vary was once a promising science student who dreamed of finding a cure for cancer; this exposé is her account of how she strayed from a path of mainstream scholarship at the University of Florida to a life of espionage in New Orleans with Lee Harvey Oswald. In her narrative she offers extensive documentation on how she came to be a cancer expert at such a young age, the personalities who urged her to relocate to New Orleans, and what led to her involvement in the development of a biological weapon that Oswald was to smuggle into Cuba to eliminate Fidel Castro. Details on what she knew of Kennedy’s impending assassination, her conversations with Oswald as late as two days before the killing, and her belief that Oswald was a deep-cover intelligence agent who was framed for an assassination he was actually trying to prevent, are also revealed.
BIOGRAPHY OF JUDYTH VARY BAKER
Judyth Vary Baker (1943 - ) born South Bend, Indiana, is an American artist, writer and poet. Her work in cancer research as a teen and young adult led to later involvement in a biological warfare project aimed to eliminate Cuba's Fidel Castro. In 1963, her decision to protest the use of unwitting prisoners for a dangerous cancer experiment destroyed her cancer research career. Baker's intimate relationship with accused Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, who Baker and others say was involved in the anti-Castro effort, and was framed in a cover-up, has become the subject of documentaries, plays and books since she first spoke out to Sixty Minutes in 1999. Her book Me & Lee: How I came to know, love and lose Lee Harvey Oswald (2010) argues the innocence of Oswald, providing witnesses to Baker's affair with Oswald and documentation of their relationship, which began in New Orleans in April, 1963 and continued until Oswald's last call only two days before the assassination of President Kennedy.
Baker's published poetry includes A Dangerous Thing to Do, When the Clouds came Flying By (children's poems) and individual works. Her paintings, lithographs and computer art are sold worldwide. Due to harassment, threats and hospitalizations due to incidents before and after the History Channel's documentary on her relationship with Oswald (2003: "The Love Affair" Episode 8 in the A & E series The Men Who Killed Kennedy) Baker began living a secluded life in exile in Europe.
A play by playwright Lisa Soland, "The Sniper's Nest" was produced in 2012 featuring Judyth and Lee's relationship. Soland had previously planned to write the play with Oswald as guilty, but after reading Me & Lee, she presented Lee as innocent.
Early Life
Judyth was the oldest child of Donald and Gloria Vary in South Bend, Indiana, on May 15, 1943. She was seriously ill as a young child and was hospitalized for over a year with complications from a ruptured appendix and gangrene. The event gave her a deep interest in science and medicine. She attended St. Mary's School in Niles Michigan, Southside Jr. High School in St. Petersburg, Florida, and Manatee High School in Bradenton, Florida. The Hungarian side of her family heavily influenced Baker with patriotic values due to their strong feelings for relatives who fought in the 1956 Hungarian revolution.
Baker's father, an electrical engineer, and her large extended family recognized the child's genius and encouraged her to develop skills in science and art after Baker spontaneously began to read a telephone book before age three. Baker's excellent memory, creativity and artistic talents meant that by age 8 she was quoting Shakespeare and Jane Austen, keeping the family's financial records, designing ads for her father's TV stores, and singing duets with her younger sister, Lynda, on their father's television station. By the time Baker was 10, she had learned how to put together radios and TV sets. When Baker was introduced to Robert Adler, a TV pioneer in the field, for whom her father worked from time to time in Chicago, she decided she wanted to become a scientist. When her beloved Hungarian grandmother, Anna Hoffer Whiting, passed away from cancer in 1956, Baker was determined to become a cancer research scientist.
Baker Begins Cancer Research Efforts
In Bradenton, Florida, Baker was befriended by Georgianna Watkins, leader of the area's American Cancer Society, who guided her earliest research projects with cancerous fish. Watkins also introduced her to Dr. Alton Ochsner, former President of the American Cancer Society, at the dedication of the Wilson Clinic near Sun City, Florida, who encouraged her efforts.
On October 17, 1958, Baker was introduced by her biology teacher to Dr. Canute Michaelson, a high-ranking Norwegian geneticist and radiobiologist with CIA ties who had served as a double agent against Hitler.[25] Michaelson's exploits as a spy fascinated her. After Baker expressed her desire to become a cancer research scientist, Michaelson provided Baker with equipment and contacts. Two local doctors, who soon after would begin studying radiation and cancer at Oak Ridge,[26] under the eye of the CIA, next began advising Baker in the early stages of her research (see Baker's book, Me & Lee, How I came to know, love and lose Lee Harvey Oswald, for documentation).
Baker's patriotic zeal was further enhanced in high school by friendships with retired military officers, especially her science and physics instructor, Col. Phillip V. Doyle, and by local anti-Castro Cubans, including a close friendship with fellow student Tony Lopez-Fresquet, the oldest son of Castro's first finance minister, Rufo Lopez-Fresquet.[27] After gaining national attention in science fairs for her improvement on a German method to extract magnesium from seawater, she obtained additional support for her work in cancer from Dr. David Jacobus and others at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research. Baker was sent hard-to-get anti-radioactive steroids and instructions on how to use them in her experiments.
Baker's need to use cancerous mice for her anti-cancer experiments prompted her to try to induce cancer in mice as fast as possible. By 1961, Baker, aided by famed Tampa, FL bacteriologist James A. Reyniers, induced lung cancer in weanling mice in record time under primitive lab conditions. Baker was now collecting scholarships and awards, including a placement in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search, and was becoming known across the country as a young prodigy in cancer research.
In March, 1961, at age 17, she became the first high school student to attend the elite Science Writer's Cancer Research Seminar, a 5-day national meeting of science writers and the world's most important cancer research scientists, where her research was inspected by top American Cancer Society (ACS) officials, research scientists, and Nobel Prize winners Dr. Harold Urey and Sir Robert Robinson, who began to mentor her work.[29]
At that time, Baker also met and was befriended by the three doctors credited today with wakening the world to the dangers of smoking: Dr. Harold Diehl (Sr. Vice President of Research for the American Cancer Society), Dr. George Moore (Director of Roswell Park Institute, the first hospital to ban smoking) and Dr. Alton Ochsner (founder of the famed Ochsner Clinic in New Orleans). All three doctors had testified together in lawsuits against the tobacco industry: the fact that Baker had induced lung cancer in mice in record time using concentrated tobacco smoke focused their attention on her work.
Roswell Park Cancer Institute
After Dr. Urey and the doctors examined her lab and records in her high school laboratory, Dr. George Moore invited Baker to spend the summer of 1961 in Moore's own private laboratory at Roswell Park, in Buffalo, New York, the oldest important cancer research center in the United States. There she conducted research on melanoma cancers, learned techniques for handling cancers induced by the Friend virus and the SV40 monkey virus, and helped develop a predecessor of what would become a world-famed RPMI formula for growing cancerous tissues in vitro. For most of that summer Baker also studied radiobiology with Dr. James T. Grace, handling cancer-causing viruses, including the SV40 Monkey virus, as a participant in Roswell Park's national program for science students, then under the direction of Dr. Edwin Mirand.
That same year, Dr. Ochsner, whose anti-communist views were widely known, used funding from right-wing oil baron Clint Murchison and other to establish the Information Council of the Americas (INCA) with Ed Butler as Executive Director. The main objective of the organization was to prevent communist revolutions in Latin America.[33]
By Fall of 1961, Baker was enrolled in the medical technology program at St. Francis College (now St. Francis University)[21]in her home state of Indiana, using a nearby hospital for her more advanced lab work. Assigned to enhance the growth rate of malignant melanoma (at Dr. Alton Ochsner's suggestion, as reported in Baker's local newspapers) the 18-year-old's new research project was well established in only two months.
Baker immediately presented information about her new project to the Indiana Academy of Science, where an abstract of her research was published, titled "Studies on the Increase in vitro of Mitotic Activity and Melanogenesis in the RPMI HA # 5 (7113) Strain Melano." the abstract mentions that her cancer research was continuing at her lab at St. Francis. [30]
Concurrently, Dr. Alton Ochsner's work in 1961-1962 on melanoma was important enough to be recorded in his official biography:[31]Baker says Ochsner continued to direct her work in melanoma research and encouraged her research in lung cancer, which was Ochsner's specialty.[32]
Baker, told she could never have children, found herself deeply influenced by the nuns at St. Francis, some of whom were highly trained in the medical sciences. Baker said, "By then, I had seen a lot of death and suffering due to cancer, and I wanted to dedicate my whole life entirely to fighting cancer, which I couldn't do if I got married." When she earned permission to enter the order of St. Francis on Feb. 2, 1962, with plans to continue her cancer research career as a nun, she was forcibly returned to Florida by her father, where she was confined in their island home and given anti-Catholic literature to read. Her father took her daily to his office to run his business. "He gave me a dollar a day for my work, and even supervised me when we ate lunch at the local restaurant," Baker says. "I felt that God had rejected my offer to serve Him all my life, and now I couldn't even continue my college education." The experience profoundly affected Baker, who lost her faith in God at that time.
University of Florida
By mid-February, 1962, Baker's mother and her aunt, Elsie Vargo, were distressed that Judyth's education was now at a halt. They secretly enrolled her, despite the late date, at The University of Florida after garnering the influence of US Senator George Smathers, who arranged a full scholarship for her there. Computer data was also created to account for her late (and technically llegal) arrival.
Baker's father responded by trying to get her arrested as a runaway. However,
with UF's Dean of Women Marian Brady's help, Baker obtained a writ of emancipation (at that time parents had legal custody of their dependents until age 21). Brady created several cover jobs for Baker to account for funding provided, in fact, by Senator Smathers "even as police outside her office door were demanding entrance," says Baker.
From that time onward, Baker avoided returning home again.
At UF, Baker worked under a special license granted to her sponsors and supervisors to handle irradiated human blood products in the university's Nutrition Lab and in the Department of Nuclear Engineering, where she developed a method to help detect metastatic cancer cells in the bloodstream. By early April, 1963, she was also involved with anti-Castro elements on campus. Baker, no longer interested in becoming a nun, was now dating, and became engaged to Robert A. Baker, III, an English major who, with her encouragement, would enter graduate school studying geology and petroleum engineering. (In 1965, Judyth Baker would receive UF's Phi Beta Kappa Award as UF's Most Creative Undergraduate for her original and outstanding work in the visual arts, writing, journalism, and biological science.)
In mid-April, 1963, Ochsner invited Baker to New Orleans to work in a summer internship under one of the country's foremost bone cancer specialists, Dr. Mary Stultz Sherman, with a promise to be admitted to Tulane Medical School two years early that Fall under a full scholarship with a stipend. Enticed by the offer, Baker immediately accepted. However, she was afraid to tell her fiancé that she would not be returning to Florida. "We would have been separated for a couple of semesters, until he graduated from UF, and I was afraid he'd have second thoughts about getting married," Baker says.
New Orleans
19-year-old Baker arrived in New Orleans two weeks early due to UF's new trimester system, but to her dismay, both Ochsner and Sherman were out of town. Her fiancé, who only knew that Baker had "plans to work" in New Orleans, was not due to arrive until May, at which time an elopement was planned, but in the meantime, Baker needed emergency funds. Unwilling to ask for help from her parents, she began temporary work at a Royal Castle near the airport. This restaurant was then being used by a government surveillance team to spy on the powerful Mafia leader, Carlos Marcello, whose office behind the Town & Country Motel was just next door. Robert Kennedy had forcibly deported Marcello, who had defiantly returned to the US and was now involved in a deportation court case that he would win on November 22nd, the same day Kennedy was shot.
By April 26, Lee Harvey Oswald had met Baker, who in November would be accused of killing President Kennedy. Researchers believe his meeting with Baker was not accidental. Baker says Oswald concluded she was involved in clandestine operations due to the many people she knew who were linked to the CIA, her employment at that particular Royal Castle, her closeness to Ochsner, her knowledge of Dr. Sherman, and a mix-up of names. By the time Oswald realized the truth, the 23-year-old had already introduced Baker to the clandestine side of Ochsner's cancer research project, exposing Dr. Sherman and her friend David W. Ferrie as among the participants.
Baker learned that Oswald was working with former FBI Chicago chief Guy Banister in anti-Castro operations where Oswald eventually posed as pro-Castro to help ferret out pro-Castro spies in New Orleans. After Oswald introduced Baker to Banister, her fears about Oswald, who told her he had been a "defector" to the USSR, were assuaged. She now looked upon Oswald as a hero who had been a successful spy in the USSR. The fact that Oswald had not been arrested upon his return, and his use by Banister, increased her trust in him. Ochsner's secret project, Baker learned, was being spied upon by Oswald, to make sure "the product" as it was called, which would be used to try to kill Castro, remained under CIA control.
After her new husband immediately left town after their marriage without providing contact information, and with Ochsner and Sherman still unavailable, on May 4, 1963 Baker turned to Oswald after she was evicted in the middle of the night due to a police raid from her rented room. Baker told witnesses of her plans to enter Tulane Medical School in New Orleans in the Fall, unaware that she would spend the summer helping to develop a biological weapon using cancer under Ochsner's and Sherman's direction.
Cancer to Be Weaponized
Aided by Sherman's anti-Castro friend David Ferrie, and with the cooperation of the CIA, the New Orleans Project had begun a year earlier after efforts to deal with removing the SV40 monkey virus, a cancer-causing virus, from the polio vaccine were unsuccessful. Ochsner's own grandson had died from the contaminated polio vaccine. Even though officials knew the vaccine carried the SV40 monkey virus, the public was not told: millions of children and adults would receive the contaminated polio vaccines for the next four decades.
Baker said that after several deadly cancers had emerged due to experiments with radiation, the CIA encouraged Ochsner, a rabid anti-communist, to proceed with weaponizing the cancer strains, with the goal to kill Communist Cuba's leader, Fidel Castro, in a manner that could not be connected to any agency or to the U.S. government. Ochsner's patriotism and strong anti-communist stance deeply impressed young Baker. She told Ochsner she was willing to cooperate in the project to eliminate Castro through biological means so "nobody in the U. S. government could be blamed."[34]
In 2008 the CIA officially admitted that at this time many unusual plans and attempts were made to assassinate Castro, some involving biological agents, such as creating a diving suit infected with a deadly fungus, using poisoned cigars, and employing cancer-causing agents such as thallium.[22]In the book Doublecross, about the Giancana Mafia family in Chicago, the public learned that the mafia was aware of these efforts by the CIA, and was also involved in them.
Baker says Lee Harvey Oswald acted as an assistant and courier in the project.
Cover Jobs and a Love Affair
Baker documented how cover jobs were arranged for herself and Oswald, where they spent approximately half their time. Though she was a slow typist, Baker said arrangements were made to hire her as a secretary for former FBI agent William I. Monaghan, Wm. B. Reily Coffe Company's Vice President of Security, Finance and Field Sales. After moving into nearby apartments the same week, Baker and Oswald rode the same bus to and from work together the next eleven weeks. Both Baker and Oswald began their employment on the same day, at a (then) small subsidiary company, Standard Coffee, owned by Reily, where their background reports were laundered and Baker was taught how to handle the Vice President's secretarial duties. A week later, the two new employees were transferred together to Reily's main company. WC documents support these facts.
Baker's initial "J" is legible on five of Oswald's eleven Reily time cards (recently two "J's" were discovered to have been erased from Oswald's Reily Time Cards, on exhibit at the Mary Ferrell Foundation website: however, they can be clearly seen on NARA documents posted years earlier, elsewhere).
On July 19, 1963, an ad to replace Baker was ordered -- the same day Oswald was fired. Baker herself was fired August 9th, the same day Oswald was arrested for handing out flyers in New Orleans. Baker says she was fired prematurely because she was seen with Oswald that day. These events are documented by paycheck stubs, bank deposits, letters and newspaper ads and articles which have been seen by many researchers.
Baker had arrived in New Orleans in April. So did Oswald. She left New Orleans in September: so did Oswald. Both Baker and Oswald were unhappily married, and they eventually commenced a love affair. "I could speak some Russian, and Lee said I resembled his Russian wife," Baker says. "Just as Lee did, I played chess, loved to travel, was deeply interested in religion and politics, and, just as Lee, I loved classical music and was well-read in philosophy, science fiction and Russian novels. My family called me 'Juduffski' because of my fascination with all things Russian. As for Lee, he called me 'Juduffki.' We were immediately attracted to each other."
Several witnesses, such as William "Mac" McCullough (former bouncer and musician linked to Mafia's Marcello and Marino brothers in New Orleans) and Anna Lewis, whose husband, David Lewis, worked with Guy Banister, a former FBI agent long linked to Oswald, have supported Baker's statements about her affair with Oswald. [23] Baker has described Oswald's involvement in other undercover projects in New Orleans and elsewhere. She said Oswald also volunteered to provide technical and courier assistance for the "get-Castro project", as well as functioning as her bodyguard and protector in the city.
Oswald eventually told Baker about his efforts to infiltrate a developing JFK assassination plot, even while fearing that he was being lured into thje ring in order to be positioned to take the blame, since he was a returned (but fake) defector from the USSR and had been assigned to portray himself as pro-Castro. Baker says Oswald confided he realized he was being passed over for advancement "because he wasn't trusted, since he did not return from the USSR in a casket."
Statements made by Oswald's wife, Marina, in the biography Marina and Lee by Priscilla Johnson MacMillan, as well as close readings of witness testimonies - too numerous to mention here -- provide circumstantial evidence that Baker and Oswald planned to divorce and marry in Mexico. One such piece of evidence is the fact that Oswald left his wedding ring behind on the morning of the assassination.
Baker's career in cancer research was cut short when she protested using an unwitting prisoner originally described as a "volunteer" suffering from a terminal form of cancer who turned out to be healthy. Ochsner, furious that Baker had written a note seen by a secretary unfamiliar with the project, informed her that both she and Oswald were "expendable." After being forced to conduct blood tests on one or more such prisoners, Baker was forced to return to Florida with her husband, but she and Oswald nevertheless made plans to re-unite in Mexico after his final assignment in Mexico City.
Instead, Oswald was ordered back to Dallas after all his efforts to hand off the biological weapon were blocked. Oswald was now increasingly suspicious of how he was being handled, despite assurances that Hurricane Flora had been responsible for the aborted attempt against Castro.
When Oswald, who gathered information on an assassination ring first in New Orleans, and then in Dallas, told Baker had been invited to be a shooter (he had posed as anti-Kennedy to allay suspicions) he told her "You may think I'm a good shot, but I'm not that good."
From then on, Baker says, Oswald believed he was a doomed man and even anticipated becoming a patsy. Despite the dangers, he pretended blind obedience, Baker says, and a lot of stupidity, to keep on gathering information, which he passed, when possible, on to the FBI. When they last spoke only 37 ½ hours before the assassination, Baker begged Oswald to run for his life. But Oswald refused, saying, "If I stay, that will be one less bullet aimed at Kennedy" meaning he would be quickly replaced with someone willing to shoot at the President.
"Oswald had to be in the building and to appear apparently ready to take his position on the sixth floor," Baker says, "so he wouldn't be replaced. Lee considered himself a dead man by this time, because if he fled, they'd kill everyone he loved, and eventually track him down, too."
"If he stayed," Baker added, "and didn't shoot, Lee believed there would be enough circumstantial evidence against him to make him a patsy for the crime --which is exactly what happened." Baker noted that "Oswald expected to be shot dead. He was quite intelligent, however, and managed to be taken alive, but the CIA and FBI had to hope he wouldn't tell anybody about his connections to the CIA and FBI. They believed that if he did so, his CIA contacts in the USSR would have been executed." But, Baker adds, "Lee was faithful to his country. He knew what would happen to others if he revealed his true identity as a former spy and an anti-Castro operative borrowed from the ONI for use by the CIA and FBI. He never betrayed those who were risking their lives for us in the USSR."
Oswald, arrested only 69 minutes after the JFK assassination, was immediately charged with two murders--that of Dallas police officer J.D. Tippit, and of President John F. Kennedy. He was next declared the sole assassin - that there was no conspiracy -- only a few hours later by John Edgar Hoover of the FBI, who directed his Dallas FBI agents not to look for anybody else.
Aftermath
After the JFK assassination Baker's promising career as a cancer researcher abruptly ended. Baker states she was told to keep a low profile and stay silent, if she wanted to stay alive.)[36]Baker kept silent about her relationship with Oswald for 36 years after the JFK assassination, fearing retaliation from those she believed responsible for the President's death. However, after seeing the movie [[JFK]] by Oliver Stone, she mustered the courage to come forward with her story. Baker states Oswald was a deep-cover operative for the American government and that he told her he had penetrated a ring in Dallas, Texas that planned to assassinate Kennedy.
Baker has stated that her goal is to exonerate Lee Harvey Oswald from the charge that he was the assassin of John F. Kennedy. Her stance has raised ire among some who are certain that Oswald acted alone in the November, 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy.
Thefts, threats of arrest, and 'accidents' put Baker in the hospital and drove her from the United States into hiding in Europe in 2003 after the documentary "The Love Affair" was filmed. Soon after it aired, the documentary, which was supposed to be shown for ten years, was banned from the History Channel. In 2005, Baker left the EU after all her possessions were stolen and a specious lawsuit was entered against her, returning briefly to the US to teach. In 2007, she was seriously threatened while teaching in Hungary and, after being openly robbed in Budapest and threatened again, she fled to Sweden, where she entered the political asylum system, despite the fact that she was warned that she could not stay permanently. Her family, friends and donors have helped establish safe places for her to live since then, in undisclosed locations inside and outside the EU. She rarely gives interviews.
NOTE: MARTHA ROSE CROW SUDDEENLY DIED SOON AFTER WRITING THIS SECTION OF BAKER'S BIOGRAPHY, WHICH SHE ADAPTED FROM EXTANT SOURCES. SHE HAD IMMEDIATELY RECEIVED THREATS, ALONG WITH BAKER, AFTER SHE POSTED BAKER'S BOOK ON HER BLOG AND WROTE "JUDYTH VARY BAKER IS MY BEST FRIEND." AT ABOUT THE SAME TIME, DR. JAMES FETZER RECEIVED HIS "FIRST DEATH THREAT EVER" IMMEDIATELY AFTER INTERVIEWING BAKER.
MARTHA'S UNTIMELY DEATH BECAME A POLICE CASE DUE TO SUSPICIOUS CIRCUMSTANCES, BUT BECAUSE HER BODY WAS CREMATED (WITHOUT HER FAMILY'S PERMISSION, AS THEY WERE FLYING FROM THE US TO THE NETHERLANDS TO CLAIM THE BODY) NO EVIDENCE OF SUSPECTED POISONING COULD BE FOUND, AND SHE WAS ACCOUNTED AS SUDDENLY DEAD BY A HEART ATTACK - SUPPOSEDLY CAUSED BY THE FLU.
SHE WAS 51 YEARS OLD. THE REST OF THIS BIOGRAPHY WAS WRITTEN BY JUDYTH VARY BAKER FROM MARTHA'S NOTES:
Baker remained with Robert A. Baker, III, publishing poetry and short stories under fictitious names and developing a career as an artist. She obtained her A.A. from UF in 1965 and a B.S. in cultural and medical anthropology from The University of Houston in 1986.
The couple had five children by the time they divorced in 1987, 24 years after leaving New Orleans. "In brief," Baker says, "Robert continued to be absent from my life and the lives of our children." The couple had joined the Mormon Church in 1969, "where Mormon brothers and sisters became the big, extended family I had longed for ever since childhood," Baker added. "Unfortunately, I couldn't reconcile Mormonism with the basic tenets of Christianity, and asked to be excommunicated. For this, Robert never forgave me, and we ended up divorced."
Baker as a single parent with four children...[later]earned her M.A. in English, Linguistics and Creative Writing from the University of Central Florida. Later, she would go on to ABD status in English literature and linguistics from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, but would be denied an extension to defend her dissertation after she was injured in 2003, despite a 3.9 GPA and having passed all comps and her oral exam. By then, she was informed, she had become "notorious" due to speaking out about Oswald.
In a well-documented series of threats, harassments and acts of character assassination, such as passing out petitions to get her fired (that event was conducted in Orlando by the son of an FBI employee," Baker notes), she found her fifteen-year-long teaching career destroyed by her decision to speak out.
"[Between 1999 and]... 2007 I had been in and out of five hospitals and confined twice to wheelchairs due to deliberate attempts to shut me up," she says. "I finally had to move overseas. By 2007, after I applied for political asylum, suddenly all my problems ceased. Of course, I was now out of sight and couldn't be interviewed. I didn't even see my own book after it was published, for quite awhile. But I was safe."
---
In 2011, Baker was invited to Toronto by Conspiracy Culture Bookstore, where she received a warm welcome that led to media attention: her story became national news in Canada, but was ignored in the United States.
In 2012, after she received threats not to go to Dallas in 2013, while at the same time her bank account was hacked, with purchases made in Houston and Dallas (Baker was again living in Europe at the time, angry supporters urged her to return to the US despite any dangers, with offers of protection and donations. Trine Day book publisher Kris Millegan soon received $10,000 in donations for the book tour, and in November and December, 2012, Judyth and Millegan toured Vancouver and America's West Coast,ending in Chicago, where former Gov. Jesse Ventura surprised Judyth by traveling from Minnesota to Chicago to endorse her book, Me & Lee, before the press and on Mancow's TV and radio programs.
Notes
While Baker's assertions have aroused controversy among researchers and historians who support the Warren Commission's conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in the killing of former US President John F. Kennedy in 1963, an increasing number of researchers now consider most or all of her story to be credible. Typically, these are researchers who have actually interviewed Baker (who is reclusive) in person, and who have personally examined her evidence files.
Baker retained many items, such as paycheck stubs, bus tickets, letters, newspaper articles, and personal items, which have been closely inspected since 1999 by investigators in the JFK assassination case. [35] Those who have done so almost inevitably become her supporters. Her detractors point to Baker's waiting over three decades before speaking out, and that her failure to alert others to Kennedy's danger should be punished, if she is telling the truth. Baker contends that she would not have been believed, that she would have endangered Oswald's efforts to try to save JFK, and that the only agencies she could report to actually participated in the cover-up, and would have silenced her.
Heated debate on the veracity of Baker's story existed in Internet newsgroups, especially regarding the idea that a bioweapon could have been developed outside a major laboratory under relatively primitive conditions, but Baker says she was chosen to work in the project precisely because she was able to work with deadly cancers under relatively primitive conditions, having done so at her own high school. Even Baker's detractors concede her contemporaneous work with Oswald at Reily, and the fact that her husband was absent most of the summer of 1963, when Baker says she and Oswald had an affair.
Critics now tend to say that while evidence may exist that Baker apparently knew Oswald intimately, based on the statements of live witnesses, work records, and circumstantial evidence, that Oswald would not have confided in her and that it makes no difference what he told her, because he was a pathological liar. Baker replies that Oswald lied just as any other CIA operative had to do, hiding his true activities thereby: she has a list of CIA agents who assert their families never knew what they were doing, using lies to cover up their true activities and aware that if exposed, the CIA, etc. would deny.
Evidence and witness statements supporting Baker concerning her amorous relationship with Oswald and the development of a biological weapon have been assessed, vetted and published since 1999 by researchers such as Edward T. Haslam (Dr. Mary's Monkey, Trine Day, 2007), by author-researcher Jim Marrs (author of Crossfire, on which the film JFK was largely based), by Dutch researcher Wim Dankbaar, by Dutch crime investigator Peter DeVries, by British researcher/producer Nigel Turner (The Men Who Killed Kennedy documentary series), by Harrison Livingstone (author-researcher, co-author of High Treason), by veteran researcher Martin Shackelford, by Dr. James Fetzer, by expert researcher Robert Groden, and by "The Governor" Jesse Ventura, among others.
