Oswald Talked by Mary La Fontaine

Author:Mary La Fontaine
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing

In the area of Ruby's motivation (as distinct from his premeditation) we are clearly on more speculative grounds. Yet even here the mists have cleared somewhat, with the recent discovery of a long-overlooked document suggesting that Ruby was not a mere gunrunning profiteer but a man privy to a much deeper level of insider knowledge.

One spring Saturday afternoon in 1993, idly rolling through a microfilm of FBI documents in the Dallas Public Library as she waited for her daughter Eugenia to complete work on a research project (a noxious way for a school mom to spend her time, Eugenia thought), Mary slowed down and backed up when she noticed an item she'd never heard of before.

In an FBI report filed under the category "Jack Ruby," a fascinating, perhaps crucial, detail emerged. The report, buried in the hundred thousand or so pages mostly available on non-indexed microfilm, wasn't released until 1977 and to Mary's knowledge had never been cited in any of the books written about the assassination, or about Ruby in particular. (She'd read almost all of them by now.) Dated February 2, 1964, the document had been dictated January 31 of that year by Special Agent Estes G. Coleman at Lake City, Arkansas, and supplemented with information gathered by another agent, Alfred E. Neeley of the Dallas office.

"Mr. John Basinger, minister, First Baptist Church, Lake City, Arkansas, furnished the following information concerning his brother, Rex Harding Basinger," the report began. It would go on to provide an account strikingly similar, on superficial points at least, to the Elrod story. Once again, there would be two brothers, one of whom would end up in a Dallas jail, and who following his release would relate a strange tale to the stay-at-home brother concerning a run-in with a famous assassination principal. And again, the FBI would deny the jailed brother's story.

According to the document, Rex Basinger, forty-five, who claimed to have worked in Denver as a cab driver and police informant prior to showing up in Texas, "was arrested at Parkland Hospital, Dallas, December 14, 1963, on a charge of vagrancy." (Rex Basinger's arrest report, still available in the records division of the DPD, confirms the date and circumstances.) He was then "released by the Police Department to the same hospital on December 17."80

A little over a month later, on January 21, 1964, Rex showed up at the doorstep of his older brother John in Arkansas, and brought the Baptist preacher up to date on his whereabouts for the last several years. He told him of his days in Denver driving a taxi and being an amateur narc, and how he'd decided to leave town in December 1963, after someone had taken a couple of shots at him. Rex went on to describe a still more curious event that had happened after he arrived in Dallas and got himself arrested. He was put in the same jail block with Jack Ruby, the notorious killer of Lee Harvey Oswald, he told John. And that wasn't all.

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