The following Guard clipping is courtesy of Nancy Baxter and Tony Vittoria. Note concerning the tragic death of Ann McDuffee Barton: Anns daughter, Andrea Barton (first married Gene Floyd of Salado), was one of my late wife Lindas best friends and was bridesmaid at our wedding. Andrea and Linda were babysitting Andreas baby brother Duffy when the fatal crash on Ramsey Mountain occurred. I wont go into details out of respect for the Barton family, but I do not believe there was any conspiracy involved concerning the accident. July 31 2014 by Larry Stroud, Guard Associate Editor When country music great Jim Reeves and his piano player/road manager Dean Manuel flew out of the Batesville Airport 50 years ago today on their way back to Nashville, Tennessee, they had no idea it was their last ride — or that five decades later, the tragedy that cost them their lives would be suspected by some as having connections to the JFK assassination the previous fall. President John F. Kennedy was shot dead in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, with the U.S. government afterward backing the commission that ruled Lee Harvey Oswald, the alleged assassin, acted alone and that the man who shot and killed Oswald two days later, nightclub owner Jack Ruby, also acted alone. Called the Warren Commission, it also ruled that Oswald and Ruby previously did not know each other. The case file was then sealed, for 100 years, by then-President Lyndon Baines Johnson, who was also suspected by many of having a part in the assassination plot (several conspiracy theorists through the years have made that clear). M anuel was originally from Jamestown, and he and Reeves had flown to Batesville from Nashville with Reeves as the pilot to look at some land that Reeves was considering buying. The country music singer had turned into an international star and his records were selling in the millions. But the night before the Kennedy assassination Reeves and his band, the Blue Boys, were in Dallas. The next night they were all in San Antonio despite high security travel restrictions in Dallas. For whatever reason, Reeves had visited Ruby’s nightclub while in Dallas. Also Reeves often landed at military installations — something that other people normally were not allowed to do but which Reeves did frequently, said Larry Jordan, author of the 662-page “Jim Reeves: His Untold Story,” published in 2011. At Batesville, Reeves and Manuel were taken to the American Motor Inn on St. Louis St., where McDonald’s is now, then traveled to the home of George and Ethel Parks at Jamestown, where they ate supper and visited. The Parkses were Manuel’s aunt and uncle. They visited, then returned to the motor inn and went to look at the land the next day — that fateful July 31 — with a real estate agent. Reeves was interested in two parcels of land, Jordan said: A property on Jamestown Mountain that belonged to or had belonged to Manuel’s father, Dockie Dean, and an area near the edge of Cleburne County where Piney Log, Grassy and Salado creeks came together. The late Vernon “Farmer” Inman of Jamestown, who had been playmates with Manuel when they were in grade school, said for Jordan’s book that Reeves had in mind buying that property, damming up the water, building cabins along the edge and turning it into a resort spot. Inman said his understanding is that he was to be hired as manager if that happened. Reeves and the Realtor did not come to any agreement that day. Afterward, while they were in the Concord area, Reeves and Manual attempted to visit another famous musician – harmonica virtuoso Wayne Raney, who had a huge hit some years earlier with “Why Don’t You Haul Off And Love Me.” Raney was not at his Rimrock Records home/business but was elsewhere on the property, so the two waited for awhile, chatted with Raney’s son Zyndall and were served sandwiches by Mrs. Raney and then left. When they arrived back at the Parks house, Reeves called the Walnut Ridge Airport for a weather update, then decided to leave. Mrs. Parks tried to get them to stay another night because of a thundercloud she could see, but Jim replied that he had urgent business and needed to return to Nashville. “So, they hurried out to the airport so quickly Dean left behind his shaving kit,” Jordan said. After the tragic crash, someone from the motor inn sent the shaving kit to Manuel’s wife, Barbara, who was usually called “Bobbi.” At the airport, while the plane was being fueled, Sandra Mann, Ann McDuffee Barton and possibly others were ins ide the airport store/cafe when Manuel came in, bought a couple of snacks for he and Reeves to eat on the way home, and accepted his payment. The plane went down in a thunderstorm near the Nashville airport. Jordan said he thought all along something was not right about the plane crash, but he cannot definitively say it was sabotaged. Too many pieces of Federal Aviation Administration paperwork were missing that are normally available to investigators; and it took 42 hours for searchers to find the plane’s wreckage when there were eyewitness accounts as to where it went down, which he said means the searchers were misdirected. In addition, a usually no-nonsense government official stood by and let the crowd that arrived when the wreckage was found, instead of keeping them back, “contaminate” the site. Then, all the official investigation papers disappeared. Jordan acknowledged the mysteries in his book. But then in 2013, a book titled “Hit List: An In-Depth Investigation into the Mysterious Deaths of Witnesses to the JFK Assassination” quoted Jordan’s own book in support of the Reeves-JFK alleged connection. “The Jim Reeves plane crash was written about in ‘Hit List’ by Richard Belzer and David Wayne that was on the Best Seller list,” said Jordan. “They devote an entire chapter in their book to it.” Batesville is mentioned in the book and has been mentioned in several other publications, such as international magazine articles in connection with today’s anniversary of the crash. And the conspiracy theory gets even closer to home. “Hit List” mentions the death of one of the young women who helped watch the airport and its store/cafe. She died in an auto accident in the curve on Ramsey Hill after Manuel and Reeves’ visit to Batesville. Jordan feels Reeves may have known something by accident. He had a photographic memory; perhaps he had seen Oswald and Ruby together in the nightclub. When he saw Oswald’s face on TV the night JFK was killed he talked to friends about seeing Oswald several times in Dallas at ballrooms over the past few months. Barton may have seen something suspicious around the plane Reeves had rented for the Batesville trip, so she was forced into an accident. Her relatives said evidence on the highway and her vehicle made it appear that she had been deliberately run off the road. Jordan said perhaps the plane crash was pilot error, as had been assumed. But things are so mysterious concerning it that he asked Bill Larson, an experienced pilot who helped teach Reeves to fly and who had flown the same aircraft the previous day, “What would be the easiest way to sabotage such an airplane?” “I would just drop two hard-boiled eggs in the fuel tank,” Larson told him. The eggs would sink to the bottom, no one would see them, and when the fuel started getting a little low, the engine would cut out. Jordan is not saying that happened. But he’s suspicious enough, or cautious enough, to think that with all Reeves’ military clearance and widespread travel, usually separately from the band, Reeves could even have been a courier for some agency or group. The crowd at the Reeves crash site was misdirected long enough for others to look for and find a briefcase, for instance, if there had been one on board. “Jim was good friends with Ted Staples (of Texas),” Jordan said Monday. “Ted told me Jim would land at military airports (all the time).” Jordan has uncovered some “fascinating details of the plane crash” himself, including a video of the crash site taken by an individual and kept back for many years. He has posted some of that footage on YouTube and also has produced 170 tracks of Jim Reeves music that is available as well as hard copies and e-copies of his Jim Reeves book. “I still feel there are things we don’t know (about Reeves’ and Manuel’s trip to Batesville). I feel there are people around Batesville that know important stuff that they may not even realize they know,” Jordan said.
Posted on: Tue, 05 Aug 2014 23:22:21 +0000
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