As you probably know, I’ve been spending untold hours comparing the stamps and scribbles on the FBI’s JFK, MLK, and RFK records with the markings on Ron’s FBI missing person records. My aim is to see if I can find any similarities among them and hopefully some accompanying clues regarding how Ron spent his adult years, post-disappearance.
Last night, I decided to look up someone who some JFK researchers have theorized was the shooter on the grassy knoll on November 22, 1963. I wanted to see if the FBI had a file on him and, if so, what kinds of marks they’d made all over his records. I could only remember that he was French and that he was supposedly an assassin. I looked up his name online and plugged it into the Mary Farrell Foundation search bar to see what his FBI records looked like.
That man’s name is Jean Rene Souetre.
And wow. There’s quite a lot of info on this person.
Here are a few specifics, which I obtained with special thanks to the exhaustive research conducted by J. Gary Shaw and a couple other sources:
He was born on October 15, 1930, and he died June 18, 2001.
He’d been a captain in the French Army, serving in Algeria from 1955 to 1959.
Soon thereafter, he deserted the French Army and joined an extreme-right-wing group called OAS (Secret Army Organization), which was vehemently opposed to President Charles de Gaulle’s signing of the Evian Accord, thus granting independence to Algeria.
He was reportedly heavily involved in OAS’s assassination attempt on de Gaulle at Petit-Clamart on August 22, 1962.
He ostensibly was thought to have two aliases—Michel Roux and Michel Mertz—though, as it turns out, those names belonged to other individuals.
During the time period of March 4 – March 13, 1964, Monsieur Souetre was on the FBI’s radar in a big way.
The excitement started when the legal attache (Legat) in Paris had contacted the FBI’s New York field office seeking information on Souetre, in addition to his (mistaken) aliases of Roux and Mertz. The Legat had received word that Souetre had been in Fort Worth and Dallas on November 22, 1963, and, 18 hours later, had been expelled from the United States to either Canada or Mexico. Their concern stemmed from the fact that de Gaulle was planning a trip to Mexico in the spring, and they wanted to know why Souetre was expelled and where he was going when he left the United States.
The FBI first tracked down a dentist in Houston named Lawrence Alderson who’d met Souetre when he was in the Army stationed in France in 1953. Since that time, Alderson had traded Christmas cards with Souetre every year, but he hadn’t heard from him for over a year. So no leads there.
It was when the FBI caught up with a man named Leon Gachman, of Fort Worth, that they were able to clear up the confusion. Michel Roux, who was, presumably, a very nice, very non-violent person, was working in a hotel in Paris when Leon was visiting the City of Lights in October 1963. When Michel told Leon of his dreams to open a hotel or restaurant in the United States, Leon magnanimously invited Michel to look him up if and when he came to America. One month later, on November 20, 1963, Michel did just that, and he telephoned Gachman from Houston. Roux arrived in Fort Worth on November 21, and attended classes with Gachman’s son at Texas Christian University on November 22. They’d learned of Kennedy’s assassination when they were eating in a café. Michel went back to Houston, and then, shortly thereafter, to Mexico City to find work until he could secure a visa to live in the United States. That must not have panned out, however, because he soon moved back to Paris to be with his family.
I could be wrong, but based on the documents that have been released, it doesn’t appear that Souetre was in the United States during Kennedy’s assassination. Not only did we learn that, but we also deduced that Lawrence Alderson , D.D.S., could have probably been a little more selective in the choosing of his friends. Also, I mean no disrespect to poor Michel Roux, but wow. His timing for taking a risky leap at career advancement was…not awesome. But it doesn’t matter. None of it matters where we’re concerned. What does matter is that the FBI had thought that French terrorist and assassination plotter Jean Souetre had been in Dallas on November 22, 1963, when they were doing their investigative work in March 1964. The scribbles in the righthand corners on those documents? From the heart.
They gave him 10’s.
Just like Ron’s.
As a reminder, I think that the records with 10s signify that the FBI’s liaison to the Secret Service was cc’d on that document, which likely means that the Secret Service was notified as well. Sometimes there were other numbers, such as 9 and 7. But if there was only one number, it was always number 10.
Who but the Secret Service would want to be alerted if a would-be presidential assassin had been in a country on the Friday that the country’s president had been assassinated?
I can’t think of anyone else.
Here are Souetre’s 10’s:
For comparison, here are Ron’s.
Interested to hear your thoughts.
Thanks to the Mary Ferrell Foundation for making these documents available.
