Faster Than a Dallas Bullet and A New York Minute
By Mike Marino
The world is an intricate tapestry of myth and reality. The weave has become so intertwined with one another, it's hard to tell where one begins and the other leaves off. The lines are blurred, creating a cacophony of theories of conspiracy, that in theory sound plausible to those who see things past the other side of the reality looking glass, through rainbow colored conspiracy glasses!
Truth be known, the truth will never be known. The cloud and shroud of time hide the clues, and the asteroid of time obliterates everything tangible about them, smashing them to smitereens to disappear, in a puff and a poof of magic, as did the dinosaurs. "The earth is flat" theorists turned out to be as flat as a Steinbeck tortilla, while the heretical knights of the Round Earth concept were accepted only after years of burning blasphemers at the Papal stake with the religious ferver of a Texas steak BBQ after a victory on the field at a high school Friday night football game.
One of the foremost mysteries of murder that tweaks the pysche with a sexy display of forensic foreplay, is the identity of that surgical maestro of Londons foggy backstreets, and twist of the knife, turn of the century media darling, Jack the Ripper. Mr. Ripper had a proclivity for piercing and piecing out prostitutes, then disappearing into the shroud of fog into a lair of cobblestone alleys, eventually making his way into the labyrinth of legend where he, or perhaps, she, remains today. It could be a she. She's are quite capable of violence and brutality just as he's are. Was he/she a member of the Royal Family, inbred blueblood and all, or a surgeon with ties to the Royal academy, with skills so adept that slicing and dicing was merely a way of keeping in shape for the operating table by opening up live victims to a vicious vivisection. The ladies of the night worst nightmare, the night tripper known as the Ripper.
Billy the Kid...the chili pepper hot salsa wild child of a wilder west, and New Mexico's best kept secret, is a six-gun legend. His legacy is larger than a flying saucer in the skies over Roswell and just as divisive. The bare stage of the smokey cantina is set. Drunks, bad whiskey and worse, desert bad asses drink, swear and spit as the purple curtain opens, the crowd goes wild with approving applause and they can’t get enough of the outlandish outlawry of Billy T. Kid, the James Dean of the wild west, firing off mirthful salvos from a pearl handled six shooter with silver city bullets packed lethally with equal measure of angst and lead. The Lincoln War Regulator without a cause, unchecked and unbalanced, left handed, right handed, got to hand it to ya…guns blasting away with the ferocity and velocity of Mr. Gatlings gun..letting loose an orgasmic ejaculation of hot lead and death.
Was Billy gunned down at Fort Sumner? Buried there? Shot in the back, unarmed, or did he live out his days as Brushy Bill in Texas to witness the 20th Century? When attempts to dig up the remains of said Mr. Bonney at Fort Sumner, and compare the DNA with that taken from his known mother, who is buried in Silver City, New Mexico, the legal tug of war of yea vs. nay to the experiment was as heated as a wranglers rodeo. The forces against it knew, that if it was determined to not be the remains of Billy, the tourist bonanza would dry up faster than a played out vein of silver in Nevada.
Fact..somebody was shot at Fort Sumner. Was it Billy? No. It's the lack of evidence, and not the preponderance that leads me to that conclusion. In the old west, before cable and the internet, people would show up at hangings in town that had the air of frivolity of a hoe-down, and make a day of it, just as they would picnic on the hillsides over a raging civil war battle. In the old west, when the "bad guy" was killed, the local yokels, and certainly the doer of the deed would pose with the body to show off "lookie whut I done!" A photo op unexcelled that most politicians today would die for.
Look at the Dalton Gang...laid out in a row, robbed of clothing. buttons, etc, and today thetr are painted replicas of the bodies laying out that tourists today, lay down next to them for photo opportunities. Well, at least one person I know rather well.
No such photos, or hoopla exists over the death of the Kid. No photos. No souvenirs. No documentation except the word of a guy who would be sheriff and had grand political plans on his mind,.Pat Garrett. Garrett was the old west equivalent of the modern day bushwhacker and blowhard George Bush. In fact, supposedly, Billy was unarmed adn not carrying when gunned down, so in effect, had no weapons of mass destruction on him at the time. If Garrett wanted to take credit for gunning down an unarmed man..then he's a pussy, pure and simple, and nobody would hire him as a bouncer at a simple bordello let alone a sheriff.
. The west has it's share of hidden treasure in the form of "tall tales" and mythology. the real question is how did a guy with the Moniker of "Sundance" get away without getting shot in a testesterone High Nooner? The name Sundance was akin to Twinkletoes in those days, not withstanding it was the name of a small mountain town in Wyoming that is one of my favorite "tourista" hideouts...my favoirte vacation "hole in the wall!"
In addition to the origin and the terminus of Mr. Kid, you also have those who doubt Jesse James was the actual person shot that day in St. Joe, Mo..and of course, whatever happened to Butch and Sundance..shot down in Boliva by the federales, or snuck back in the US to die as old men in Wyoming or some such rectangular state in the plains, both high and low? Later on it would be the corpse discourse over John Dillinger shot outside the Biograph in Chicago by a lady in an orange dress, yes, orange, yet referred to as the "Lady in Red" must have been the over effect of the marquee changing the hue. Many say it was not the dapper Dillinger laying out in the morgue on the slab but an imposter...it's always an imposter...always! How much can you rent an imposter for to fake your death in the wild west and the wilder westside of Chicago in the age of the gansta?
Come fly with me might have been a phrase right out of Amelia Earharts songbook but instead her disappearance from the very face of the earth and the ceiling of the skies that made her legend. Not legend enough to end up on a t-shirt but a womens rights advocacy from the start. Female pilot extraordinaire, darling of the deep blue skies, close and fast friend of young Shirley Temple as Shirley swished, sashshayed and tap danced her way with Bo Jangles on the silver screen to the mountain tops of Switzerland as Heidi in pigtails.Amelia disappeared somewhere over the Pacific Ocean in pre-war, pre-Pearl 1937 and rumour has it she crash landed on an island in Japanese controlled waters, (fast becoming the "enemy" at the time) island and that's all she wrote...unless like Jonah and the Whale she was swallowed whole by Godzilla! Except Godzilla didn't come to nuclear life until 1955...so who's to say..maybe the atomic lizard itself should be investigated about that and the whole Raymond Burr episode..more on that in another article..devastating information revealed about their relationship, believe me. This was no farm animal thing either!
Roswell...1949 Good Golly, Miss Goddard! Sci-fi hi-fi so high saucers from outer spaced, stonehenged, stoned age and crashing just outside of Roswell with a klaatu, barada, nicto thud, loaded with debris and Michael Rennie-gades who now become the alienated of the alien nation – born in lunarcy, and cloaked in secrecy with lunar cretin secretions giving birth to bug eyes, anal probers and wild eyed UFO’gists! Ray Harryhausen silver discs from plan nine from outer space with spaced out little green men from a pissed off angry red planet. Strange how all this started in the post WWII years when the desert was used for experimental aircraft, much as it was used to develope the atomic bomb...bomb time...countdown to nuclear Armaggedon...kaboom! The Nazi's had experimental spherical aircraft, rocketry was no longer a Hitlerian fantasy but reality and the jet engine was developed way ahead of George Jetson.
Strange how these visitors from space came to earth to study humankind and picked remote trailer park laden area's of southwest desert desolation and not the bright lights of Broadway! Times Square with choreographed Venusians doing high kicks in fishnet while belting out Mermanesque show tunes...funnier still is the Stealth Bomber now employed and key to the military arsenal...talk about a flying saucer! They sure didn't develop that in the suburbs of Topeka, Kansas. UFO doesn't necessarily mean aliens from space. A UFO is an unidentified flying object..hell it could be from Poughkeepsie for Christ sake. Just look to Area 51 for answers, and pray there is not an Area 52 and 51 is just covering for it, to throw us off the lunar lunacy track.
Hollywood has it's share of unsolved mysteries...the sexiest being that of the mysterious murder of the Black Dahlia..whoever she was and whoever killed her. Maybe Jack The Ripper did the time warp again and catalpulted into Film Noir Hollywod for one last dazzling hurrah of murderous rage. O.J Simpson...if it doesn't fit, you must acquit..what was the joke, bad one at that? Oh yeah, OJ, no, no, it's kiss the bride and cut the cake, not the other way around. Natalie Wood...washed up on shore like a piece of celbrity driftwook, and nobody's talking. Strange too how William Holden, boyfriend of Stephanie Powers died tragically too at around the same time.
Gangsterland has mysteries a plenty, the Academy Award for this category goes to an unsolved riddle...James Riddle Hoffa to be exact. The Riddler riddled with bullets from a tommygun? Tommy Knockers? Who the hell knows..he might be buried in the Meadowlonds but truth be known, he's buried in Detroit. Here's the deal.... other truth...nobody, even the dumbest of wiseguys will kill a guy, a well known guy to boot in one city, stuff him in the trunk of a black Caddie...hit the interstate, toll roads and toll booths taken into account, heading across the Ohio, Pennsylvania, et al and bury the body in the Meadowlands in New Jersey. When a guy is rubbed out he's taken care of locally, so whoever made up and jumpstarted that rumor had no knowledge whatsoever of "family rules" and customs.
The film Hoffa, although well acted has a let down of a conclusion, with the Jack-Jimmie character waiting in a car outside a truckstop diner where in reality it was a hoity toity restaurant in Bloomfield Hills called the Machus Red Fox. The mystery is still unsolved but at about the same time, downtown Detroit was going through a renovation phase with the construction of the Ren Cen...the jewel of the Detroit River Front...if you go there to this day, walking the outside perimeter of the "mezzanine" level, the jogging/walking path around the outside, on the eastern side you will find a large concrete hexagonal shaped slab of concrete...on it...is emblazoned a very large "H"...most tell you it means Helicopter as it is a landing pad, but those of us who know better and understand Motor City whimsy, know it stands for Hoffa...
Two Kennedy's and a King...there is so much written, produced, speculated, studied, that it is as convoluted as a ball of fishing twine. Lee Harvey Oswald was never actually convicted of the assasination and was himself gunned down by Jack Ruby, another nefarious creature of the Kennedy assasination shadows, but we know him today as the "assassin" of JFK..not true...or is it? Was it the mob because Bobby had Marcello the head of the New Orleans mob expelled to Guatemala or someplace he was not from, the New Orleans mob by the way, one of the oldest in the country, and he also controlled the Dallas area..and Jack Ruby's strip club...and if the police knew Ruby how did he get into the back room of the cop shop and cops were on either side of Oswald, not surrounding him front and back as they do know with bullet proof vests on the suspect? He wasnt a journalist, but a pimp with a gun..or as Lenny Bruce described him "A Jewish Billy the Kid riding out of the west"
The cops found Oswald with in hours and knew to look in a movie theater. Cops today can't find a donut shop without a GPS and are always on tv asking for "our" help in locating such and such, but those Dallas cops...right on the ball and case closed and suspect killed within days..now that is police work! CIA, Mob, the Industrial Military Complex, or a lone gunmen with an old Italian rifle...The only one whoever really knew, Oswald, was shot dead.
Martin Luther King...the speculation on events that day in Memphis are questioned even by the King Family. How did a redneck uneducated hillbilly figure out to waltz into a primarily black neighborhood (segregated south at the time, so remember that before ya'll get politically correct on me, which won't faze me anyway, because..well I ain't!) Check into a room, and pop off a round to take down King. Then...then..have the brains to have a passport and head on over to jolly olde England when this child of the south had never even been to the vegetable section of the local Piggly Wiggly?
Conspiracy's abound and confound and the answers, not found, probably never will as that adds mystery to life...a life that races past us faster than a bullet through Kennedy's head.