Lilah Smith, Joe Tonahill's granddaughter, has joined the forum. Hopefully she will be willing to answer questions about her grandfather.

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=3057

John Simkins' SPARTACUS file on Joe Tonahill:

Joe H. Tonahill was born in 1914. He attended the University of Texas before becoming a lawyer in Jasper, Texas. A former wrestler, Tonahill was six feet four and weighed over 300 pounds. His father-in-law, was Howard W. Smith, a right-wing congressman from Virginia, who had played an important role in blocking legislation instigated by John F. Kennedy.

In November, 1963, he was employed by Jack Ruby as his attorney and worked with Melvin Belli on defending him against the charge of murdering Lee Harvey Oswald. It was Tonahill who arranged for Dorothy Kilgallen to have a private meeting with Ruby. According to Tonahill, Kilgallen had a closer relationship with Ruby than other writers who attended the trail.

Tonahill also told Seth Kantor that "Ruby could have been used" by others to kill Oswald. He added: "It wouldn't have been any problem to reach in and get Ruby to do something like this, through the power of suggestion, through innuendo, without Ruby even realizing it." Tonahill also believed that the Dallas Police Department was involved in this conspiracy: "the police had to be in on it because of the strange coincidence in the timing of their arrivals - first Ruby; then Oswald soon after."

[end spartacus file]

My first question for Ms. (Tonahill) Smith:

Was there any grounds for the rumor of a previous relationship between Jack Ruby and Lee Harvey Oswald? What was this relationship? Were they intimate? This is the sort of "unspeakable abomination" that in 1963 could easily have motivated one man to kill another. We now know that homoerotic relationships in the masculine world were far more common than publicly acknowledged in the past..........

I also have a couple of questions for Lilah.

Did your grandfather believe the defense used was appropirate ie - did your grandfather believe that Ruby really did have psychomotor epilepsy, or is his reported statement to Seth Kantor a more accurate summary of his beliefs - that is that Ruby was susceptible to the power of suggestion?

Did your grandfather ever mention why Dr Joly West was brought in to examine and treat Ruby (reportedly with hypnosis and injections) and whose idea it was to bring him in?

cheers,

I should point out that Lisa Pease denied posting comments about John H. Tonahill on alt.assassination.jfk. She claims that someone was impersonating her. However, this is what the messages said:

Date: 2002-02-19 18:54:16 PST

Mr. Tonahill was associate counsel to Melvin Belli for the defense of Jack Ruby on murder charges.

The obits are useless to this group for two reasons. First, a one-hour video interview of Mr. Tonahill is available for viewing at Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas. That's the closest school of higher education to Jasper, the town where Mr. Tonahill practiced when he defended Ruby and when he did the interview in 1998. The interview focused on the murder trial. Mr. Tonahill illustrated his client's bumbling quality, using as an example the fact that he was dumb enough to feature obviously pregnant strippers at the Carousel Club. When the attorney opined that nobody would enlist such a man in a political conspiracy, the interviewer stopped pressing for secrets. He stuck to FBI documents declassified at the National Archives.

The second reason people should ignore the facts that Mr. Tonahill died at XYZ o'clock at such-and-such a place is that his daughter Rebecca wants people to listen to her. She has seen the Beaumont University interview and claims her father evaded key issues on it, issues he addressed with family and legal colleagues.

Rebecca Tonahill, who works as a publicist for the Houston Rockets basketball team, the new Houston Texans footballers and other teams, says her father possessed the bullet that killed Lee Oswald until the day her father died four months ago. The first time she learned this was several hours after the death when a legal colleague of his told her. She's trying to get the bullet, but none of her siblings share her interest.

Most of Rebecca's other revelations concern Candy Barr. First, Candy served time in Huntsville Prison for gambling and drug possession in the 1950s. While she was locked up her boyfriend Mickey Cohen enlisted Melvin Belli and Joe Tonahill to appeal her sentence. They did successfully. This was during the Eisenhower era.

Next, Rebecca claims that Ms. Barr, drug-free for forty years, lives today "near a lake in West Texas." Rebecca says Candy still keeps quiet about the organized crime involvement of Belli, Tonahill and Jack Ruby because she fears Tonahill. Belli's death in 1996 got enough television publicity that Candy probably learned of it, but the absence of Tonahill's name on network or cable TV immediately after his death means that Candy fears he is alive. So, you wonder, maybe Rebecca plans to tell Candy to spill the beans now. Rebecca wants to, but she doesn't have an address for the retired stripper. She depends on the following person for a connection to Candy:

Skip Hollandsworth, editor of Texas Monthly. He is a respected award-winning journalist who has written about many topics besides Oswald and Ruby. He did a terrific piece on Andrea Yates. You can see his impressive resume at the following place:

<http://www.texasmonthly.com/mag/issues/authors/skiphollandsworth.php>
http://www.texasmonthly.com/mag/issues/aut...llandsworth.php


Date: 2002-02-20 22:33:47 PST

Final update to the other posts about Joe Tonahill, Rebecca Tonahill and Candy Barr.

Rebecca talked by phone with Candy Barr last night for the first time in many years.

Candy lives in Edna, Texas. That's a crossroads near the city of Victoria, which is halfway between Houston and Corpus Christi.

Rebecca has Candy's phone and address. So does Skip Hollandsworth, head writer for the Texas Monthly.

Last night on the phone Candy refused to entertain any negative ideas about Rebecca's father Joe, even though Rebecca is angry upon discovering that her father hid millions of dollars from his children and his father-in-law, a powerful U.S. congressman. That politician, Howard Smith, financed the many medical opinions Joe Tonahill and Melvin Belli obtained on short notice during the Jack Ruby trial. During and after Rep. Smith's lifetime, Joe cheated on his daughter at least a few times. One mistress now lives in Jasper, Texas off a trust fund Joe provided for her. Joe also encouraged this woman to get an unlisted phone number so Rebecca can't ask her where the millions of dollars are. Rebecca and her father were not on speaking terms during the last five years of his life.

If all of the above sounds like "Pick A Little, Talk A Little" from the Broadway and Hollywood musical "The Music Man" that was popular during JFK's presidency, won't you admit it's better than the crap about Rose Cheramie? Candy Barr may have used drugs in the 1950s and early 1960s, but at least she was smart enough to get financial backing from Mickey Cohen instead of getting arrested for automobile theft as Cheramie was.

Today I reminded Rebecca that anyone can find her father's name in the 1967 New York Times index book and then read an article about him owing more than half a million dollars to the IRS. She provided details that you won't find in the New York Times or any book that features Tonahill. Rebecca says that when the IRS hit him in 1967, he contacted President Lyndon Johnson, who was happy with the job Joe had done at the Ruby trial three years earlier. LBJ referred him to seven lawyers who arranged for Joe to pay only the interest and penalties on the six-figure debt. Joe didn't have to pay these lawyers. Possibly LBJ did. Joe was five years LBJ's junior.

In closing I will remind people that during a strike that shut down five out of six New York City newspapers in 1965, the White House announced that Dallas district attorney Henry Wade would get appointed to a federal judgeship. The Washington Post gave it one paragraph. I haven't checked Texas newspapers on microfilm. Of course, Henry Wade remained in his district attorney post until 1992. Shortly before he retired he granted a video interview that was never broadcast but is available at the Conspiracy Museum in Dallas for 35 dollars.On it he repeats his support of the Warren Report. The picture quality is bad. Remember that Wade pronounced Oswald guilty on network TV when Oswald was alive in the police station.

Date: 2002-02-20 09:01:14 PST

Here are two updates to yesterday's post about Candy Barr (alive), Rebecca Tonahill (alive), Joe Tonahill (gone) and Melvin Belli (gone).

Rebecca said by telephone yesterday that the bullet Jack Ruby fired into Oswald now belongs to an Austin attorney named Richard Hile. He's her brother-in-law and the son-in-law of Joe Tonahill.

The Georgia-based researcher born in 1979 who has proof that Melvin Belli defended her brother on petit larcenty charges in 1989 is named Carrie Gallagher. She says Belli told her then that he didn't believe the Warren Commission Report and that there had been a conspiracy.

Belli's dishonesty in many cases besides Jack Ruby's is well-known among San Francisco lawyers, many of whom worked for him or with him as recently as 1996, the end of his life. As for Tonahill's credibility, my other post explains his reliance on the big bucks of his father-in-law Howard Smith (chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Rules Committee) to finance the many medical opinions he and Belli obtained for the Ruby defense. Rebecca has added the following details.

She was the only one of Joe Tonahill's offspring to question his honesty, prompting him to cut off most of her inheritance. In the 1970s Joe blocked her receiving a stipend from her grandfather Howard, whose Estate was worth half a billion dollars. Rebecca's siblings (including the one in Austin whose husband Richard owns the forgotten bullet) have gotten some money since Joe died four months ago, but even they are puzzled by the disappearance of 200 million dollars they knew Daddy had at the end of his life. Daddy's lawyer friend Buddy Low tells them the 200 million is in an offshore oil account. Add to this the 1967 New York Times article about Joe cheating the IRS out of hundreds of thousands. Anyone can find it at the library.

Put these things together and it's easy to accept Rebecca Tonahill's claim that her father Joe always supported the Warren Commission Report when he talked on camera and to print reporters, but he said very different things to lawyer colleagues and his family. To them he talked of the gullible Jack Ruby believing Mickey Cohen's statement that Belli and Tonahill would either get him acquitted or sprung from jail soon. Ruby knew that these lawyers had sprung Candy Barr from Huntsville Prison under Cohen's orders during the Eisenhower era.

In 2001 the Dallas Morning News ran two articles about a reunion of Jack Ruby's strippers and other acquaintances in a Dallas hotel. Hugh Aynesworth (1960s Newsweek reporter) was there, but Candy Barr wasn't. Reports that she has written memoirs are false. Somebody needs to interview her at her West Texas home, and there is no mystery about how to contact Texas Monthly writer Skip Hollandsworth to get Candy's address. Here is Skip's telephone: (214) 373 - 6201. There should be no problem with me posting this. Skip has published JFK articles in Texas Monthly, but he's never entered this group.

.

Lilah-
I am Carrie Gallagher (Driscoll). I am the Georgia based researcher mentioned in your information on your Grandfather. I am curious about who your source was with my relationship to Mr. Belli. I do not remember giving any interviews to anyone after the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in November of 2000. A friend of mine ran my name on the net as a joke and she pulled this up. I was a little baffled. I was just hoping you could shed some light on the subject.



Thanks!!!!!


Carrie