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]
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