Raymond Broshears
Subject: Re: Broshears Nails Ferrie
Date: 21 Dec 1998 00:00:00 GMT
Message-ID: <19981220234258.06087.00001105@ng-ft1.aol.com>
Jeff wrote:
>Raymond Broshears in the Man Who Knew Too Much, to paraphrase, said
>Ferrie told him there were 4 shooters. One fired from the storm drain
Since it is axiomatic of high-profile cases that sometimes people come forward to make untrue claims, it is sometimes necessary to test those claims and try to put them in a context of known facts.
When I first obtained Broshears' staements, I was struck by the fact that there is almost no verifyable information in them. I next noted some apparent contra-indications in them.
1) Broshears claims to have been Ferrie's roommate for a long period, during which Ferrie actually had another roommate, who does not recall ever meeting Broshears.
2) None of Ferrie's acknowledged friends ever remembers meeting or hearing about Broshears.
3) The things Ferrie allegedly told Broshears are completely the opposite of what he told his friends, and opposite of what he said in all statements to law-enforcement officers.
Feeling some doubt about the accuracy of Broshears statements, I phoned him several years ago and spoke with him for nearly an hour. He claimed things that I knew to be untrue (such as that Ferrie was a non-smoker), he failed to recognize the names of Ferrie's closest friends, he knew nothing at all about Ferrie's employers during those years, and he showed complete unfamiliarity with the layout of Ferrie's apartment, and with the city of New Orleans. I came away with the feeling that Broshears story was almost certainly untrue. Why, I don't know.
oo
David