The “mysterious deaths”

The House committee’s staff said the “mysterious deaths” idea first reached a national audience through the promotional campaign for the film Executive Action. Its advertising said 18 material witnesses had died in three years: six by gunfire, three in car accidents, two by suicide, one from a cut throat, one from a karate chop, three from heart attacks and two from natural causes. It said an actuary for the Sunday Times of London had put the odds against that at “100,000 trillion to 1.” [1]

The source was a Sunday Times story of 26 February 1967. Its chart listed 19 people; the actuary’s figure was for 15 of them. [1]

The House committee wrote to the paper on 25 April 1978. On 19 May its legal manager, Antony Whitaker, replied that the figure was “based on a careless journalistic mistake and should not have been published.” The paper had asked its actuary the odds that 15 named people out of the whole U.S. population would die in that period, when the real question was about people connected to the case. “We asked him the wrong question,” he wrote. [1]

The committee asked three actuarial firms whether a valid study could be done. They concluded it could not, because there was no way to define the group the people belonged to. So staff examined the deaths individually. [1]

The list included Congressman Hale Boggs, railroad worker Lee Bowers, columnist Dorothy Kilgallen, Earlene Roberts, manager of Oswald’s rooming house, who died at 61 of acute heart failure, and the mob figures Sam Giancana and John Roselli, on whom the committee was briefed by the Justice Department. George de Mohrenschildt was investigated separately. [1]

Hess testified that the evidence “does not establish anything about the nature of these deaths which would indicate that the deaths were in some manner, either direct or peripheral, caused by the assassination.” Asked if the deaths were statistically significant, she said no. [1]

A CIA memorandum of 19 July 1967 opens by quoting Ramparts magazine, June 1967: that Gary Underhill left Washington the day after the assassination, told friends in New Jersey that “a small clique within the CIA was responsible,” and was found shot dead less than six months later; the coroner ruled suicide. The magazine said he was shot behind the left ear though right-handed. [1]

The memo then sets out what CIA files held. Underhill was born in Brooklyn on 7 August 1915, went to Harvard, worked as a Life photographer from 1938 to 1942, and served in military intelligence from 1943 to May 1946. In 1949 the CIA’s Contacts Division considered using him as a contact on a limited basis, not to receive anything above confidential. He died on 8 May 1964. [1]

The memo also covers Samuel Cummings, a CIA staff employee from December 1950 who in August 1954 became principal agent of the “CIA-owned companies known as International Armament Corporation and Interarmco Ltd.” The record had been public, with redactions, since 2022. [1][2]