The JFK 100

Did Rose Cherami predict the JFK assassination? Who was Rose Cherami? Here are the facts.

Rose Cherami was a 41-year-old drug addict and prostitute who was picked up on Highway 190 near Eunice, Louisiana, on November 20, 1963 -- two days before the Kennedy assassination -- by Lt. Francis Frugé of the Louisiana State Police.⁽¹⁾ Cherami allegedly told Frugé that John F. Kennedy would shortly be killed.⁽²⁾

When Cherami began acting violently, it was determined she was suffering from narcotics withdrawal. She was taken to the East Louisiana State Hospital, a mental hospital, in nearby Jackson, where she was confined for several days.⁽³⁾

The woman known to assassination
researchers as "Rose Cheramie" [sic]

During her confinement, and prior to the time JFK was shot in Dallas, Cherami supposedly spoke of the impending assassination.⁽⁴⁾ After Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald, Cherami reportedly claimed that she had worked for Ruby as a stripper, that she knew both Ruby and Oswald, and that the two men were "bed partners" who "had been shacking up for years."⁽⁵⁾

According to a 1967 statement by Lt. Frugé, Cherami declined to repeat her story to the FBI.⁽⁶⁾ She was killed when struck by a car on September 4, 1965, apparently while hitchhiking, near Gladewater, Texas.⁽⁷⁾

Among conspiracy theorists, the story has been considered quite credible since 1979, when an account by investigator Patricia Orr was published by the House Select Committee reviewing the JFK assassination (HSCA). This account was based primarily on the HSCA depositions of Francis Frugé and Victor Weiss, a doctor at the Jackson hospital.

The problem is that in accounts given by Frugé and Weiss to the New Orleans District Attorney's Office over a decade earlier, in 1967, there is no mention whatsoever of Cherami having made any statements about the assassination prior to the time it occurred.

On the contrary, several 1967 accounts by Frugé state only that, following Cherami's November 26 release from the Jackson hospital, Cherami informed Frugé that she had worked for Ruby, that Ruby and Oswald had been in Ruby's club together, and that the two were "good friends" and "bed partners."⁽⁸⁾

In 1967, Dr. Victor Weiss recalled speaking to Cherami in 1963, but stated he couldn't remember whether she had spoken of the assassination before or after it occurred.⁽⁹⁾ He would later testify to the HSCA that he had not even been introduced to Cherami until November 25th -- three days after the assassination.⁽¹⁰⁾

New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison's office conducted numerous interviews with East State Louisiana Hospital personnel, but couldn't come up with a single first-hand witness who heard Rose Cherami predict the assassination.⁽¹¹⁾

Would Cherami have made a credible witness in the first place? It was never verified that she had ever worked for Jack Ruby, or that she was acquainted with either Ruby or Lee Harvey Oswald.⁽¹²⁾ She claimed that she had been one of Ruby's strippers, but she was 41 years old and quite haggard. (See her 1964 mug shot, above.) And her claim that Ruby and Oswald were "bed partners" who "had been shacking up for years" hardly speaks well for her credibility.

It also should be noted that in her short life, Rose Cherami was arrested over fifty times in ten different states for charges including larceny, auto theft, possession of narcotics, driving under the influence of narcotics, driving while intoxicated, prostitution, arson, vagrancy, drunk and disorderly behavior, and still other charges. She committed at least one documented suicide attempt, in 1947, was "believed to be insane" at that time, and was ruled "criminally insane" in 1961. She was institutionalized several times, with "psychotic" and "psychopathic" behavior noted. On several occasions she attempted to become a criminal informant, she was turned away because her information turned out to be false.⁽¹³⁾

Yet this is the "witness" with which Oliver Stone leads off his movie about the John F. Kennedy assassination.

NOTES:

1. Frank Meloche, Memorandum to Jim Garrison, March 13, 1967. (Throughout her life, Cherami gave a variety of dates as her ostensible date of birth. October 23, 1923, is the date of birth entered on her death certificate.) According to JFK's script, Cherami was thrown from a car by "two Cuban males," which implies that Cherami's associates were Cuban exiles linked to the assassination conspiracy detailed later in the movie. But in March 1967, Francis Frugé said that Cherami was "suppose[d] to have been thrown from a vehicle by two white males," while Frugé would tell the HSCA in 1978 that Cherami "related to me that she was coming from Florida to Dallas with men who were Italians or resembled Italians. [Emphasis added.] They had stopped at this lounge . . . and they'd had a few drinks and had gotten into an argument or something. The manager of the lounge threw her out and she got on the road and hitchhiked to catch a ride, and this is when she got hit by a vehicle." (House Select Committee Hearings Vol. X, p. 201.) Frugé said that Cherami told him "that the two men traveling with her from Miami were going to Dallas to kill the President. For her part, Cheramie [sic] was to obtain $8,000 from an unidentified source in Dallas and proceed to Houston with the two men to complete a drug deal." (HSCA Hearings Vol. X, pp. 201-02.) The lounge where Cherami and her companions reportedly stopped was called the Silver Slipper. Lounge owner Mac Manual allegedly told Frugé in 1967 "that Cheramie [sic] had come in with two men who the owner knew as pimps engaged in the business of hauling prostitutes in from Florida." (HSCA Hearings Vol. X, p. 202.) According to Frugé's 1978 HSCA testimony, Manual identified photographs of two of Jim Garrison's suspects, Sergio Arcacha Smith and Emilio Santana, as the two men, although neither man had anything to do with prostitution. Sergio Arcacha Smith was considered a suspect by Garrison primarily because he had once run an office to raise funds for anti-Castro activist groups out of a building whose address was later used by Lee Harvey Oswald on a pro-Castro leaflet (although Arcacha had moved out and left New Orleans over a year before Oswald arrived from Dallas). He was living and working in Houston, Texas, at the time of the Cherami incident, and his employer told Garrison's men that Arcacha was at work regularly that week and was with him the day of the assassination; he could hardly have been driving prostitutes from Miami to Dallas (a distance of 1300 miles) as Frugé would have us believe, much less "going to Dallas to kill the President." Emilio Santana was considered a suspect primarily because he was Cuban and had once lived near Alvin Beauboeuf, an associate of Garrison suspect David Ferrie. Jim Garrison believed strongly in what he called "The Propinquity Factor" -- his theory that one could identify conspirators because they often lived near one another.

2. House Select Committee Hearings Vol. X, p. 201.

3. Frank Meloche, Memorandum to Jim Garrison, March 13, 1967.

4. House Select Committee Hearings Vol. X, pp. 200-01.

5. Had seen Ruby and Oswald together: Frank Meloche, Memorandum to Jim Garrison, March 13, 1967. Had worked for Ruby as a stripper, Ruby and Oswald "bed partners": Lt. Francis Frugé, Memorandum to Jim Garrison, April 4, 1967. Ruby and Oswald "had been shacking up for years": HSCA Hearings, Vol. X, p. 202 (from Frugé's HSCA deposition).

6. Frank Meloche, Memorandum to Jim Garrison, March 13, 1967.

7. Frank Meloche, Memorandum to Jim Garrison, March 13, 1967.

8. Frank Meloche, Memorandum to Jim Garrison, March 13, 1967. Lt. Francis Frugé, Memorandum to Jim Garrison, April 4, 1967.

9. Frank Meloche, Memorandum to Jim Garrison, March 13, 1967.

10. House Select Committee Hearings Vol. X, p. 200. Weiss testified that it was not he, but rather an associate, a Dr. Bowers, who had heard Cherami discuss the assassination of JFK prior to its occurrence. Dr. Don Bowers's name was known to Jim Garrison's investigators in 1967, but there is no evidence that the NODA or the HSCA sought to interview him. According to a 2010 e-mail from Jim DiEugenio to researcher Robert Harris, Bowers was located by researcher Robert Dorff, and contradicted Weiss's 1978 testimony, indicating that Weiss had told him about Rose Cherami. I sent Mr. Dorff a message via Facebook on January 26, 2012, seeking to verify DiEugenio's statement; to date, he has not responded.

11. This does not stop author Jim DiEugenio from citing several hearsay accounts as evidence of such foreknowledge, even when such accounts are easily debunked. For example, DiEugenio cites a Madison Capital Times report that Louisiana State University intern Wayne Owen and several others "were told of the plot [by Cherami] in advance of the assassination." (Jim DiEugenio, "Rose Cheramie [sic]: How She Predicted the JFK Assassination," Probe, Vol. 6, No, 5, July-August 1999.) However, the New Orleans Times-Picayune of February 3, 1968, clarifies that Owen and his fellow students had simply, at a later date, heard a hearsay account of the Cherami story from an unnamed professor of theirs at LSU Medical School. DiEugenio also claims that several "witnesses" reported that Cherami was watching television with some nurses, and "during the telecast moments before Kennedy was shot Rose Cheramie [sic] stated to them, ‘This is when it is going to happen’ and at that moment Kennedy was assassinated. The nurses, in turn, told others of Cheramie’s [sic] prognostication." DiEugenio is incorrect in citing "witnesses," however; the source of his information is third-hand hearsay -- a rumor -- reported to a New Orleans District Attorney's Office investigator four years later. (As DiEugenio acknowledges, there was no live television coverage of the Dallas motorcade or the assassination.)

Author Joan Mellen, a personal friend of Jim Garrison, presents an even more sensational version of the "This is when it is going to happen" story, complete with partially fabricated dialogue:

 

On Friday, November 22nd, at twenty minutes before noon, Rose was watching television in the hospital recreation area. Scenes in Dallas flashed on the screen. President Kennedy was on his way.

"Somebody's got to do something!" Rose shouted. "They're going to kill the president!" No one paid any attention. The motorcade pulled into view. "Watch!" Rose cried out. "This is when it's going to happen! They're going to get him at the underpass!"

"POW!" Rose yelled as the shots rang out. (Joan Mellen, A Farewell to Justice: Jim Garrison, JFK's Assassination, and the Case That Should Have Changed History [Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2005], p. 206.)

 

In similarly imaginative fashion, Mellen goes on to claim that "Rose Cheramie's [sic] death certificate reads 'bullet hole in the head . . ." (Mellen, p. 207.) Cherami's death certificate says no such thing; it lists the immediate cause of death as "Tramautic Head wound with Subdural & subarachnoid & Petechial Hemorrhage to the brain caused by being struck by auto." An autopsy was performed. (Certificate of Death, Melba Christine Marcades [a.k.a. Rose Cherami], State of Texas, State File No. 10903, September 11, 1965.)

12. In his Memorandum to Jim Garrison of April 4, 1967, Frugé claimed he had verified that Cherami had worked for Ruby, but there is no evidence to this effect, and there is no evidence that either the New Orleans District Attorney's Office (in 1967) or the House Select Committee (in 1978) requested or obtained such evidence.

13. Dave Reitzes, "Impeaching Clinton, Part Two: Jackson."