Of the all the people surrounding the assassination of President Kennedy, few are more mysterious and enigmatic than David William Ferrie of New Orleans. Author Judyth Vary Baker knew David Ferrie personally and worked with him in a covert project in New Orleans during the summer of 1963, and this book examines his strange and puzzling behavior both before and after the assassination. At the time of the assassination, Ferrie was a 45-year-old New Orleans resident who was acquainted with some of the most notorious names linked to the assassination: Lee Oswald, Clay Shaw, Guy Banister, Jack Ruby, and Carlos Marcello. He possessed assorted talents and eccentricities: he was at one time a senior pilot with Eastern Airlines until he was fired for homosexual activity on the job; he was also a hypnotist; a serious researcher of the origins of cancer; an amateur psychologist; and a victim of a strange disease, alopecia, which made all of his body void of hair. His odd lifestyle was embellished with an equally bizarre appearance featuring a red toupee and false eyebrows. This is the first book focused solely on David Ferrie and his alleged involvement in the conspiracy to assassinate President John F. Kennedy.

What a long, strange trip it was. Through the night after JFK was assassinated, a quirky New Orleans man named David Ferrie drove from the Big Easy, rain beating on his windshield, to a deserted ice skating rink in Houston, arriving at three fifteen in the morning. After nervously making several payphone calls then and the next day from the rink, Ferrie turned around and headed home, where he was immediately arrested for conspiring to murder the president. Why? And why, thirty-nine months later, on the verge of being rearrested for the same crime, did he suddenly and suspiciously die? A Ferrie Tale paints a picture of the life of this complex man—commercial pilot, amateur Catholic priest, weekend scientist, hypnotist, detective, pianist, practicing psychologist, criminal. Appearing throughout the mosaic of his improbable story are the likes of mobster Carlos Marcello, Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby, a crafty Cuban exile named Sergio Arcacha Smith, cancer researcher Dr. Mary Sherman, DA Jim Garrison. Strippers. Gamblers. Popping in and out is an unlikely trio bound together by their tangled connections to JFK—Frank Sinatra, Chicago kingpin Sam Giancana, and JFK girlfriend Judith Campbell. The seductive and decadent city of New Orleans, the most unique and operatic city in America, provides the beat to this tale. Over time New Orleans’s citizens have been suffused with an amuse-yourself attitude—sometimes reasonable, sometimes not—that affected events in Ferrie’s life. “In this town,” as Ferrie was wont to say, “the craziest things make perfect sense.” David Ferrie was a conflicted figure who would’ve been remarkable even had he not been involved in a plot to assassinate President Kennedy. But his long tumble into this plot made him, as Orleans Parish DA Garrison publicly announced, “one of history’s most important individuals.”

What a long, strange trip it was. Through the night after JFK was assassinated, a quirky New Orleans man named David Ferrie drove from the Big Easy, rain beating on his windshield, to a deserted ice skating rink in Houston, arriving at three fifteen in the morning. After nervously making several payphone calls then and the next day from the rink, Ferrie turned around and headed home, where he was immediately arrested for conspiring to murder the president. Why? And why, thirty-nine months later, on the verge of being rearrested for the same crime, did he suddenly and suspiciously die? A Ferrie Tale paints a picture of the life of this complex man—commercial pilot, amateur Catholic priest, weekend scientist, hypnotist, detective, pianist, practicing psychologist, criminal. Appearing throughout the mosaic of his improbable story are the likes of mobster Carlos Marcello, Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby, a crafty Cuban exile named Sergio Arcacha Smith, cancer researcher Dr. Mary Sherman, DA Jim Garrison. Strippers. Gamblers. Popping in and out is an unlikely trio bound together by their tangled connections to JFK—Frank Sinatra, Chicago kingpin Sam Giancana, and JFK girlfriend Judith Campbell. The seductive and decadent city of New Orleans, the most unique and operatic city in America, provides the beat to this tale. Over time New Orleans’s citizens have been suffused with an amuse-yourself attitude—sometimes reasonable, sometimes not—that affected events in Ferrie’s life. “In this town,” as Ferrie was wont to say, “the craziest things make perfect sense.” David Ferrie was a conflicted figure who would’ve been remarkable even had he not been involved in a plot to assassinate President Kennedy. But his long tumble into this plot made him, as Orleans Parish DA Garrison publicly announced, “one of history’s most important individuals.”

This new updated edition is not only hard cover for long life, but it contains an additional 25 pages of revelations from the author including documents from the FBI, CIA, CDC, and NOPD, plus the actual crime scene photos of the Mary Sherman murder. You'll see why we say this is the "Hottest cold case in America." The 1964 murder of a nationally known cancer researcher sets the stage for this gripping exposÉ of medical professionals enmeshed in covert government operations over the course of three decades. Following a trail of police records, FBI files, cancer statistics, and medical journals, this revealing book presents evidence of a web of medical secret-keeping that began with the handling of evidence in the JFK assassination and continued apace, sweeping doctors into cover-ups of cancer outbreaks, contaminated polio vaccine, the arrival of the AIDS virus, and biological weapon research using infected monkeys.

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.

Bugliosi, brilliant prosecutor and bestselling author, is perhaps the only man in America capable of "prosecuting" Lee Harvey Oswald for the murder of John F. Kennedy. His book is a narrative compendium of fact, ballistic evidence, and, above all, common sense.