FBI Records, J. Edgar Hoover/FBI Investigation, Richard Cox, Ron's Missing Person File

For Valentine’s Day: a delectable assortment of corrections, observations, and juicy tidbits on the Ron Tammen case

Happy Valentine’s Day, a day of celebration for the oligarchs of candy making, flower arranging, teddy bear stuffing, and the manufacture of paper doilies. A day when Americans of all stripes—young and old, short and tall, single and buddied-up—are pressured into dipping into whatever leftover savings they have from the holidays to shower the objects of their affection with, um, more objects…preferably of the pink and frilly variety. Call me cynical, but what if, instead of shelling out more cash in a mandatory declaration of love for someone, we just did some really kind deeds for them…plus anyone else who happens to be in their vicinity? What if, instead of giving that one special person a box of assorted chocolate goodies that will last a moment on their lips and a lifetime on their hips, we treated them to goodies of a different type—something for their brains to chew on for a while? What if we treated them to new knowledge?

And so, dear reader, in honor of St. Valentine, Patron Saint of “affianced couples, bee keepers, engaged couples, epilepsy, fainting, greetings, happy marriages, love, lovers, plague, travellers, and young people,” I’ll be treating you to an assortment of brand new bits of information concerning Ronald Tammen’s case that I haven’t disclosed to anyone yet. Some are big, some are small, some are deliciously decadent, while others could be likened to those weird maple cream-filled ones, which I suppose is better than nothing. But I think all are important in some way. So go ahead—indulge!

Goodie #1: I was wrong about Ron’s two missing person numbers…but only partly.

Back in November 2022, I wrote a blog post about Ron Tammen having two missing person numbers—one that I believed was assigned in 1953 and the other in 1973. I came to this conclusion when I discovered on page one of Ron’s FBI documents the words “MP #17699 Posted 6-2-53,” followed by the letters “Jh.” I knew that Ron’s missing person case number was 79-31966 (79 is the classification number for missing persons), so I figured that this other missing person number—#17699, minus the 79—had been assigned to him on day one, in 1953, and that, for whatever reason, the FBI had found reason to retire it at some point. I also claimed rather boldly that the new number had been assigned in 1973, after the Cincinnati Field Office had sent in the man from Welco Industries’ fingerprints and asked them to compare them to Ron’s prints.

Well, it turns out that my inference was incorrect about MP #17699. I learned this when I found that Richard Cox, who’d disappeared from West Point Academy on January 14, 1950, had been given an MP# too—#13550—even though his actual missing person case number was 79-23729. Interestingly, Cox’s MP# and Ron’s MP# had had been written by the same person—a person with impeccable penmanship whose initials appeared to be Jh.

I then consulted some old issues of the Law Enforcement Bulletin, the FBI’s publication for law enforcement officers around the country, and found that all those sad missing faces had MP numbers too. Apparently, that was a thing that the FBI did for missing persons. They’d assign a missing person number when the Identification Division’s Posting Section posted the notice for law enforcement. But the case number—the one that starts with the 79—was reserved for when the missing person documents were filed in the FBI’s Central Records System.

Here are a couple examples:

So I got that part wrong, and I hate when that happens. I’m very sorry for the error.

Here’s what I don’t think I got wrong: Ron’s missing person case number—79-31966—falls chronologically within the same timeframe as people who went missing in the early 1970s. Specifically, his number falls between Don L. Ray, who disappeared in December 1972, and Ronnie Durall York, who disappeared in January 1975. (You can find the list on my blog post.) Granted, there are some inconsistencies in the case numbers, especially three cases that fall immediately after York’s. I think those discrepancies may have something to do with when a person had been reported to the FBI as missing. I don’t know. But, by all appearances, the Cincinnati Field Office didn’t have access to Ron’s missing person case number when they wrote up their report on May 9, 1973, which they absolutely should have. Instead, they referenced his Selective Service violation number, a case that had been dismissed in 1955. Therefore, even if the number that I thought was Ron’s first missing person case number is incorrect, I still think Ron’s missing person case had been assigned a number that had been retired before the Cincinnati Field Office had contacted FBI Headquarters in May 1973…or perhaps he’d never even had a missing person case number until 1973, which would be even weirder.

Goodie #2: Do you remember the misleading photo that a Cincinnati paper had published in April 1953 identifying some jock in a West Point sweatshirt as Richard Cox? I recently learned something else that’s intriguing about that photo.

This past Halloween, I posted a write-up on a photo that had been published in the Cincinnati Times-Star FAMILY Magazine that was supposed to be Richard Cox. It’s definitely not him. In my write-up, I concluded that, by April 1953, when the Cincinnati paper published Gilson Wright’s story, the search for Cox had been called off by the U.S. Army and the FBI for over three months, and, for whatever reason, someone in the press office of the Army and/or West Point had decided to send a doctored photo of the wrong guy.

Recently, I found that the Associated Press had published the same doctored photo as early as March 1950. That seems really early.

What could it mean?

I suppose it could mean that 1) It really is Richard Cox and he was just having a bad hair day, not to mention a bizarro face day (it’s not him, so I’m ruling this one out from the get go); 2) the Cincinnati newspaper had acquired its photo from the Associated Press and just neglected to credit them (also a no, since the AP would have demanded credit, and besides, it’s just good journalistic protocol); or 3) the aforementioned press officer had sent the misleading photo to the AP sometime before March 18, 1950 (the dateline of the accompanying article), at a time when every person who was working the case in the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division, West Point Academy, and the FBI would have looked at that photo and known instantly that it was definitely NOT Richard Cox.

Here’s what’s strange about the photo: the AP wire service already had a perfectly great photo of Cox in his military uniform which they’d published shortly after he’d disappeared. The Cleveland Plain Dealer had published the AP’s accurately identified Cox photo on February 6, 1950. A month later, the AP opted to go with a more casual photo of a guy in a West Point sweatshirt who looked nothing like Richard Cox.

Goodie #3: Even though FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had instructed his agents to call off their search for Richard Cox in January 1953, the FBI was keeping track of him well into the 1970s.

As I announced on August 30, 2024, Richard Cox, who, like Ron, was missing, had been added to the FBI’s Security Index at some point. We know this because we can see the phrase “see index” written on his FBI document from January 31, 1950. To be added to the Security Index meant that the FBI considered you somehow dangerous or a threat to national security and they were tracking your whereabouts every six months or so. That would be especially hard to do if the person had, in fact, vanished.

Recently, when I reexamined the handwriting of Richard Cox’s “see index” and I compared it to other people’s “see index” notations, I found one that looks remarkably similar to Cox’s. As it so happens, I’m quite sure that it was written by the same person who wrote the phrase on one of Charles McCullar’s documents in 1976.

Here’s Richard Cox’s:

And here’s Charles McCullar’s:

I’m aware that people often worked for 20 or 25 years with the FBI, but there’s no way that I can see the same person making nearly identical marks on documents for that length of time. People change. They move to other jobs. If he (I’m guessing it was a he) is anything like me, his handwriting would have deteriorated over time—certainly after 10 or 15 years. But the “see index” notation on Richard’s and Charles’ docs practically look as if they were written on the same day. That tells me that Richard Cox continued to hold an interest for the FBI well into the 1970s despite the fact that the FBI’s search for him had been terminated by J. Edgar Hoover in 1953.

J. Edgar Hoover discontinued their search for Richard Cox on January 14, 1953.

It’s important to remember that, after 1971, the Security Index had been renamed the Administrative Index, though its purpose was pretty much the same as before: keeping tabs on the people they perceived to be subversives. I also happen to think that, except for using a lowercase i instead of the capital I above, the handwriting on Richard Cox’s and Charles McCullar’s documents look a lot like the handwriting on Ron’s and Hank Greenspun’s docs, not to mention Tom Peasner’s.

Goodie #4: I’m pretty sure I now know what the first phrase says at the bottom lefthand corner of Ron’s 5-9-73 missing person document.

During the Walking Tour Afterparty in October 2024, we played a game that involved figuring out what certain words said on Ron’s FBI document from 5-9-73. Only one person ventured some guesses (shoutout to whereaboutsstillunknown!) and during various quiet moments since that party, I’ve sat staring at those inscrutable letters, which have defiantly stared right back at me.

The phrase that I’ve finally figured out is “Not ____ matter” with four letters occupying the space between Not and matter. Whereabouts and I agreed that the last three letters are FPS, and I thought the first letter was an O, indicating an office within an agency perhaps. Now I see that it’s not an O, but an L, as in “Not LFPS matter.” At the FBI, LFPS stands for the Latent Finger Print Section, which makes sense, since the stamp that’s scribbled over on that same document is LFP. I’d mentioned on that same post that I thought it was odd that they’d send Ron’s docs to the Latent Fingerprint folks, since they had a perfectly fine set of ten prints from when Ron was fingerprinted in the second grade. So it appears that the Latent Fingerprint folks thought it was odd too.

I think the first phrase is “Not LFPS matter.” Not sure what the rest says but I’ll keep staring.

Goodie #5: Major Hughes, the guy who fast-tracked Louis Jolyon West’s move from Lackland Air Force Base to the University of Oklahoma, was an actual guy, and not a pseudonym for Sidney Gottlieb, as I’d theorized.

In my blog post from August 2023, I discussed how Louis Jolyon West had been lamenting his situation at Lackland Air Force Base because he’d felt that his immediate boss at the base would seriously impede his work on Project Artichoke. But, according to a letter from Brigadier General H.H. Twitchell to West in September 1954, it was the problem-solving skills of a man referred to as Major Hughes who greased the wheels so that West could transition out of Lackland that December, 1 ½ years earlier than what he’d originally been obligated to.

I’d theorized that Major Hughes might have been a pseudonym for Sidney Gottlieb, since we know that Gottlieb had a fondness for pseudonyms (see Joseph Scheider, Joseph Schneider, and Sherman Grifford), but it appears I was wrong about that too.

In his book “A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments,” H.P. Albarelli, Jr., has included a whole chapter on a mysterious guy named Allan F. Hughes. As Albarelli describes, Allan Hughes was formerly with the Army Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) and was an expert in electronic surveillance and interrogation. He worked for Sidney Gottlieb’s Technical Services Staff from 1953 to 1955, and, in fact, he was one of the persons in attendance at the 1953 cabin retreat in which Frank Olson was given LSD. (The itinerary posted on the Frank Olson Project website lists A. Hughes as one of the participants.) From what I can tell, no one has said outright that “Major Hughes” is in fact “Allan F. Hughes,” or vice versa, but it does seem probable. (If you know of a website, article, podcast, or anything else that makes that claim, please let me know.) Needless to say, I’ll be looking more into Allan Hughes, as he seemed to run in the same circles as James W. McCord, who, as we’ve discussed many times on this blog, has FBI documents with the same scribbles and stamps as Ron Tammen.

If Allan F. Hughes turns out to be Major Hughes, we can state definitively that Major Hughes is not Sidney Gottlieb’s pseudonym since both men attended the cabin retreat where LSD was given to Frank Olson.

Goodie #6: I’ve learned a little more about the numbers written in the upper righthand corner of State Department and FBI documents, including someone else who received a 10.

On November 22, 2024, I blogged about the number 10 that sits in the upper righthand corner of ten pages of Ron’s FBI docs, and we discussed how another person sporting the 10 was Frank Sturgis, of CIA fame among others. Today, I’d like to share a few additional updates about the numbering system and another person who shares the number 10:

FD-217
Recently, I’ve found several documents in which the term “FD-217” is written adjacent to the number in the upper righthand corner, usually in the same handwriting. FD-217 is an FBI form and, although it has a benign-sounding title: Notification of Bureau File Number, I’m wondering if perhaps it’s the source of the number in the righthand corner. Unfortunately, I can’t find this form anywhere online, whether completed or blank. Also, I’ve found no other forms that are cited near the upper-corner numbers, so it seems important. I’ve submitted a FOIA request for this form to see if I can learn anything more about the numbering system. In the meantime, here are a few of the documents in which someone has written FD-217 near the various numbers.

A mark that Ron has in common with the redacted case

In the above report dated 8-29-74, which has a redacted title, someone’s initials (I presume) appear next to the 4 and the FD-217. Those initials look like Lei or maybe it’s a Lu with a dot over the u. It’s hard to tell. Guess who else has one of those Lei/Lu-dot things near his 10? Ron. This is the first time I’ve ever seen another one of those marks other than Ron’s.

Page one of Ron’s FBI docs — note the Lei/Lu with a dot that seems to match the redacted doc above

Other documents carrying 10s

Frank Teruggi
Two FBI documents that carry 10s in the right corner are those of Frank Teruggi, a former Peace Corps volunteer and journalist who became an activist in support of Latin American revolutionaries. Teruggi was murdered by Augusto Pinochet’s military in Chile in 1973, though, in 1999, it was disclosed by the State Department that “U.S. intelligence may have played an unfortunate role.” I’ll keep looking for 10s and will let you know whenever I find more.

Goodie #7: TBA

I have a seventh goodie that I was planning on sharing with you, but I’m seeking someone’s OK first. So, stay tuned. I’ll post it separately as soon as I’m able.

[UPDATE: You can read the seventh goodie here!]

I guess that’ll do it for now. Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone!

**************************

2-15-2025

ADDENDUM:

You guys? I believe I’ve found another FBI document that has FD-217 written near the upper-corner number, which is an 8. This is an important one. The document’s subject is Marina Oswald and it’s dated July 25, 1962. That’s one month after she’d arrived in the United States with Lee and their daughter. It’s not perfectly written. The F appears to be backwards, or maybe it’s written in cursive. The left arm of the D is invisible except for a dot, and the 2 has been cut off as well. But I’m seeing FD217…are you?

Credit: Thanks to the Mary Ferrell Foundation for making this document available. The letters and numbers are difficult to make out, but I believe there’s an F (backwards or cursive), a capital D, and a 17 at the end. I believe the smudgy mark that looks like an equal sign is a 2 that’s been cut off.

Here it is blown up. See the dot in the left arm of where a capital D would be? Also, I think the two parallel horizontal lines are part of a 2 that’s been cut off.

CIA, Richard Cox

The imposter

Why did a press officer for the military send a fake photo of Richard Cox to a Cincinnati newspaper in 1953?

It’s Halloween, a day when people often saunter by the ol’ blog site to learn of any recent developments concerning Ron Tammen’s case. On that front, I’m still deep diving into Ron’s FBI documents and focusing on a couple scribbles that someone had made, but I’m not yet ready to share what I’ve found. So let’s talk a little bit about Richard Cox instead.

As I’m sure you know by now, Richard Cox was another college-aged guy from Ohio who disappeared three years earlier than Ron. Although he disappeared from a different school—he was a cadet at the United States Military Academy in West Point, NY—I’ve wondered if the two cases might be related.

I’m not the only one who’s entertained that idea. On May 5, 1953, the Cincinnati Times-Star FAMILY Magazine published an article about Tammen’s case, and the article discussed Cox’s case too. The reporter was Gilson Wright, a journalism professor at Miami University who’d made extra money serving as an on-call correspondent (aka a stringer) for newspapers in the region. As we’ve discussed many times before, I’m not a huge fan of his reporting on Tammen, since I feel that he was being intentionally misled by university administrators who didn’t want certain details to get out about Tammen’s case.

As you’ll soon see, apparently university administrators weren’t the only ones who were intentionally misleading Gilson Wright.

The article the newspaper ran concerned three college students with Ohio ties who’d disappeared after being spotted in the vicinity of their respective dorms at their respective universities: Ron Tammen, Richard Cox, and Ruth Baumgardner. I’m not going to discuss their individual cases here today. You can look them up online.

Here’s what we will be discussing: the photo that was published of Richard Cox. It’s not him. It’s not even close.

The source of the photo would have ostensibly been a press officer for the West Point Military Academy or the U.S. Army—I don’t know which. I can conclude this because that’s how things were done before the internet. If a newspaper was publishing an article about someone and they wanted an accompanying head shot, they’d contact the person’s affiliated organization and ask their press office to please send them one. But instead of sending the photo that had been published widely at the time of Cox’s disappearance, which was this…

…someone opted to send this:

The photo that appeared in the May 5, 1953, Cincinnati Times-Star FAMILY Magazine depicting Richard Colvin Cox; Used with permission

I have questions.

My first question has to do with every reference to Cox in the article. They never got his name right. In the photo caption and elsewhere, Gilson Wright or an editor misidentified Richard Cox to be William Cox, which was bad enough. But then Wright referred to Richard Cox as “Cadet William Scott” in paragraph 3 of the article, which was even worse. So my question is…how did that happen? (No, I’m serious. How?)

Another question I have is who the poor guy was who was being misidentified as Richard Cox, or rather William Cox, by his own alma mater. His sweatshirt tells me that he was probably a jock. Judging by the size of his neck and a nose that may have been broken a long time ago, I’m going to guess that he was a wrestler or football player.

I’ve been going through past issues of West Point’s yearbook, the Howitzer, and, although I’ve found a student who somewhat resembles our guy, it’s really too tough to say. I feel this way because I don’t have a lot of faith in that photo. Of the three photos in the article, the “Cox” photo stands out as the weirdest. Ron and Ruth look normal, but Cox’s photo looks as if it’s been doctored—as if his outline had been traced and carefully cut out of another photo and placed on a white background. Why do that when you have a perfectly great photo of the real Cox in his prestigious Whites? His other features look strange too. Did they darken William’s eyes and futz with his hairline? He almost looks more like a drawing than a real person.

One thing I can say with confidence is that I’ve found someone in the 1949 Howitzer who is wearing the same sweatshirt as the one that William is wearing, so I think William graduated around the same time that Richard Cox disappeared.

Someone from the 1949 Howitzer was wearing the same sweatshirt that “William” Cox wore in the photo that was published May 5, 1953; although this person was a soccer player, this wasn’t their uniform. I think the sweatshirts could be worn by anyone, especially athletes.

If someone should recognize this person, please let me know. As I’ve said, I have a hypothesis, and I may check in with that person’s family members to see if I’m right. I’ll keep you posted.

My third question is the most important one: why would a press officer send the wrong photo of Richard Cox to a reputable Ohio newspaper? By 1953, Richard had been missing for three years. Surely, they had to know they’d sent the wrong guy.

I have a theory on that question too. My theory is that the Army already knew what had happened to Richard Cox by then and they didn’t want to remind people what he looked like. In the book Oblivion, by Harry J. Maihafer, the author contends that Richard Cox was working for the CIA after he disappeared. Imagine if they’d published his photo in the paper and two weeks later, his cover was blown by a well-meaning family from Cincinnati who happened to be vacationing in Florida or some such place.

One piece of evidence we have to back up this hypothesis is that on January 14, 1953, three years to the day after Richard Cox disappeared, J. Edgar Hoover had sent an urgent Teletype to the special agent in charge of the New York Field Office. The teletype said that the FBI was to discontinue their search for Richard C. Cox because the Army had “WITHDRAWN REQUEST FOR FURTHER BUASSIST” [i.e., Bureau assistance].

If the Army was calling off the FBI in January of 1953, what’s a self-respecting PR flack for the Army or the Military Academy going to do when Gilson Wright gives them a jingle four months later and asks them for a nice photo of the guy in question?

I dunno—maybe start rummaging through the supply drawer looking for an X-ACTO knife? That’s just a theory too.

***********

Sending a big shout-out and thank you to The Miami Student journalists/podcasters Taylor Powers and Sarah Kennel, who have featured the Ron Tammen story on their podcast Bizarre Butler County. We covered a lot of territory in our discussion, including some of the new stuff. Give it a listen!

FBI Records, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Records, J. Edgar Hoover/FBI Investigation, Richard Cox, Ron's Missing Person File

Walking tour stop #2: An unapologetic communist who was an obvious contender for the Security Index didn’t make it on the list. Guess who it was.

We’re still talking about the FBI Security Index, as denoted by the “See index” notation in the left margin of page one of both Ronald Tammen’s and Richard Cox’s case files.

The first page of Ron Tammen’s missing person documents. “See index” is written in the left margin. Click on image for a closer view.

The first page of Richard Cox’s file. “See index” is clearly visible in the left margin. Click on image for a closer view.

Being on the Security Index meant that the FBI and Department of Justice considered you to be a dangerous person—someone who needed to be rounded up and incarcerated in the event of a national emergency, which was a term that was left up to everyone’s imaginations. (I’m thinking bursting powerlines, people running amok in the streets, every other building on fire…that sort of thing. But that’s just my idea of a national emergency. The FBI and DOJ may have a different view.)

As far as we know, the FBI had no idea where Ron Tammen and Richard Cox were. Why would our nation’s lead law enforcement agency jump to the conclusion that either of them was dangerous? And incidentally, if a person is missing, how would the FBI even go about rounding them up?

As it turns out, it’s probably not so surprising that Cox made it to the Security Index, since he was considered a deserter and fugitive from the Army, even as a cadet at West Point, and, for this reason, he was breaking the law. But Tammen? Good heavens. Not in a million years would one of his friends or family members have ever called him dangerous.

Today I’m going to announce someone who wasn’t on the Security Index who probably should have been, at least based on the FBI’s and DOJ’s criteria. One of the main reasons for the Security Index was for the FBI to keep track of communists and other subversives to prevent their wreaking havoc during our aforementioned national emergency. So keeping that in mind, would you be surprised to learn that:

Lee Harvey Oswald wasn’t on the FBI’s Security Index at the time of JFK’s assassination on November 22, 1963.

For real. Lee Harvey Oswald, who’d defected to the Soviet Union in November 1959, who’d changed his mind and returned to the States with his Russian wife Marina and baby daughter in June 1962, who’d made headlines in New Orleans in August 1963 while advocating for the pro-Castro organization Fair Play for Cuba Committee—Lee Harvey Oswald wasn’t considered communist enough to get his name onto the FBI’s Security Index. What’s more, according to government records, he’d taken a bus to Mexico City in late September 1963 and had stopped in to visit both the Soviet Embassy and the Cuban Consulate. Again, no red flags.

I’m pretty sure that the FBI caught some heat for that.

Immediately after the assassination, James H. Gale, who’d headed up the FBI’s Inspection Division at that time, conducted an evaluation of the investigative deficiencies leading up to JFK’s assassination. Oswald’s not making it to the Security Index was at the top of his list of oversights. He also said that they should have interviewed Marina in the months before the assassination, which they had not done. He told the House Select Committee on Assassinations as much in 1978 as well. You can read his December 10, 1963, report and 1978 HSCA testimony on this website. (See Vol. III of the HSCA hearings.)

But here’s the rub—and I’m not sure this has ever been said out loud ever before: Lee Harvey Oswald had indeed been on the Security Index at an earlier point in his past. I’m truly, truly serious. It was in November 1959 at the time of his defection to the Soviet Union. Here’s the document, dated November 9, 1959, where you can see the words “See index” in the left margin.

Lee Harvey Oswald was included on the FBI Security Index in November 1959 as he was defecting to the Soviet Union. Click on image for a closer view.

What this means is that officials at the FBI and DOJ must have changed their minds about Oswald’s Security Index designation somewhere along the way.

As further proof of the FBI’s mindset, on September 10, 1963—shortly before Oswald’s trip to Mexico City—an FBI report was written on both Lee and Marina by the Dallas Field Office. Lee’s report is clean—all of the available options regarding the Security Index are free of checkmarks. He isn’t on it.

Lee Harvey Oswald was not included on the Security Index in September 1963. Click on image for a closer view.

But Marina? Oh, there’s definitely a checkmark—more like the number 1—next to the line “The Bureau is requested to make the appropriate changes in the Security Index at the Seat of Government.” (The Seat of Government is FBI lingo for its headquarters in DC.)

Marina Oswald is included on the Security index in September 1963. Click on image for a closer view.

There’s also a date beneath the number 1, which was July 24. The year isn’t visible, but I know what it was—it was 1962. I know this because of the below document, dated the very next day, in which Marina is the subject.

Marina Oswald is on the Security Index on July 25, 1962. Click on image for a closer view.

To summarize, Marina Oswald was added to the Security Index—or her designation was somehow changed—on July 24, 1962. And in a document written about her on July 25, 1962, the words “See index” appear in the lefthand margin. The words are smeary, possibly as if there was an attempt to erase them, but the “d” and slash of the “x” in the word index are unmistakable.

So you see, the issue was more nuanced than what James Gale had described to his bosses at the FBI in 1963 as well as to the HSCA in 1978. Lee Harvey Oswald had been on the Security Index, but he’d been taken off sometime between November 1959 and September 1963. In addition, his wife Marina had also been on the Security Index, ostensibly at the time of JFK’s assassination, though it’s possible that she’d been removed by then.

But for James Gale to say all of that? Yikes. That would have sounded way worse than just telling them that the FBI agents didn’t feel Oswald had met the criteria and, in hindsight, they should have interviewed Marina.

I mean, think of the follow-up questions.

Coming: When was Ron Tammen added to the Security Index?

Cincinnati Field Office, FBI Records, J. Edgar Hoover/FBI Investigation, Richard Cox, Ron's Missing Person File

The official Ronald Tammen FBI doc walking tour —stop #1: Guess who else was listed on the FBI’s Security Index?

OK, I think I’m ready. I’ve been reading and reading and OMG perusing so many FBI documents like crazy and comparing them to Ron Tammen’s missing person records, trying to make sense of it all. And even though I don’t have the end-all, be-all answer for us as to what it all means (and I don’t), I think I have enough information to share with you to get this conversation going.

Plus, if I don’t spill some of this now, I’m going to forget it. I swear I will.

So here’s what’s going to happen: over the next several…let’s say weeks…I’m going to pop into your inbox every once in a while with an announcement. Do NOT plan your days around these announcements. That’s way too much pressure. They will be appearing at random times of the day, when I’m feeling at my creative best, which obviously can vary. One thing is certain: it will NOT be before I’ve fed Herbie his breakfast and had my coffee, so nothing before 8 a.m. Eastern time. Cool? Cool.

The announcement will be something to the tune of “I think blibbidy blah,” and then I’ll be providing documentation in the form of scribbles on FBI records as to why I think that. Or I may not phrase it so tentatively. I might state outright that “I’m 100 percent positive that so-and-so did such-and-such,” and that’ll be pretty much it.

In essence: I’ll be saying something and then showing you the documentation, and then we’ll all get on with our day. Some announcements will be illuminating, others will be confounding, while others may make you go “meh.” But make no mistake: all announcements will be very, very short.

Before I make the first announcement, I need to thank two people, without whom we could never conduct this exercise. They are: 1) the anonymous caller who called in a tip to the FBI’s Cincinnati Field Office in April 1973, saying that they felt Ron Tammen was working at Welco Industries in Blue Ash, Ohio. Thank you, anonymous caller!! Though some might consider you a snitch or a tattletale, I think of you as a patriot and a hero! If not for you, Ron’s missing person documents probably wouldn’t have been retrieved from their hiding place in the Missing Person File Room, and passed around from one division to the next, gathering a bunch of new stamps and jottings in the process. And 2) John Edgar Hoover. Without your legendarily iron-fisted style of micro-management in which anyone having to do with a case had to initial the memos and scrawl in other coded messages, we wouldn’t be privy to details concerning who saw Ron’s missing person documents and what they did with them. Thank you, Edgar!!

And now, the announcement that is stop #1 on our tour:

Richard Cox was on the FBI’s Security Index too.

The words “see Index” written in the left margin tell us that Richard Colvin Cox, who went missing from West Point Academy in January 1950, was listed in the FBI’s Security Index in addition to Ron Tammen. If you don’t know who Richard Cox is or what the Security Index is, you can run a search on my blog to catch up. I consider it a big deal that two missing persons who the FBI ostensibly had no idea where they were made it onto their Security Index.

(Coming next: So Richard Cox and Ronald Tammen were both on the FBI’s Security Index. Guess who WASN’T on the list.)

FBI Records, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Records, J. Edgar Hoover/FBI Investigation, Richard Cox, Ron's Missing Person File

Mini bonus post: Were Richard Cox’s FBI documents kept in the Identification Division’s ‘missing person file room’ too?

Considering how similar the Ron Tammen and Richard Cox disappearances seemed to be, one question that may have crossed your minds at some point is: were Richard Cox’s missing person documents handled the same way as Ron Tammen’s? In other words, were some of Cox’s documents stamped “Return to Ident Missing Person File Room” too?

Also, you may recall that other Tammen documents had been stamped “Retain permanently in Ident jacket #358-406-B”—Ron’s fingerprint jacket—before they were “removed from Ident files” in June 1973. Was there a phrase on Cox’s documents to “Retain permanently in Ident jacket” too? We know the FBI had Cox’s fingerprints on file because of his Army ties, so he should have had a fingerprint jacket too.

To the best of my knowledge, the answer is “no” to both questions.

I know that some of you aren’t convinced that there was a missing person file room per se. But even so…the FBI seemed to be treating the two cases differently, even though there were distinct similarities between them and they’d occurred only three years apart.

Admittedly, I’ve been eyeballing hundreds of pages today and there’s a chance I may have missed something.

And so…I’ve decided to post all of Richard Cox’s FBI documents on this website. I could be wrong, but I don’t think the FBI’s files on Cox have ever been posted in their (supposed) entirety online before. Feel free to explore them at your leisure. There’s quite a bit there and some of it makes for fascinating reading. Also, if you do spot either of the above phrases, or anything else of interest, please let me know. You can find the three CDs’ worth of documents at the bottom of the home page, in the same area as the other documents I’ve posted.

Lastly, if their estimate is still on target, I should be hearing from the Department of Justice by early February regarding my appeal concerning Richard Cox’s Additional Record Sheets. It would be a huge deal if they rule in my favor. I don’t think anyone has ever requested—and received—Additional Record Sheets from the FBI before. Fingers crossed.

FBI Records, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Records, Richard Cox

Lies, deceit, and why I’ve come to believe that Ron Tammen’s story is bigger than we realize

Today, I want to discuss lies, a topic on which I’ve become somewhat of an expert. It’s not that I myself do much lying, other than the usual stuff everyone lies about. You know, like when you say that you like someone’s haircut when you really don’t or when you tell someone that you’re too busy to attend some function, when you’re not. We’re not talking about those kinds of lies. We’re also not talking about the little half-truths that people tell online. You know, like when a commenter on a blog post isn’t on the up and up about who they are. Truth be told, even the pretenders have asked some great questions or made some valid points. Whether you’re real or fake, you’ve probably contributed to the greater good in some way, so no harm, no foul.

No, we’re talking about the bigger lies. Like when someone who knows something useful about Ron Tammen’s case tells you something that’s 100 percent not true. Or when someone chooses not to tell you something that they know is pertinent to the question at hand. Or when someone says or does something to purposely steer you in the wrong direction or to stop you cold from whatever you’re currently investigating.

Before I get into the most recent example in which I’ve been intentionally deceived during this investigation, I need to tell you about a lie I once told. I do this out of a great deal of shame and embarrassment, but, as you’ll soon see, I’m telling this story because it illustrates an important point. I’ve kept this lie to myself since I was in the sixth grade. Only one person has heard this story, and that’s my running partner, and I only told her just recently. My sister and brother have never heard this story before, and neither has my husband—current or ex. Thank God, both of my parents are gone, so they’ll never have to know.

My lie has to do with the science fair. As I said, I was in the sixth grade, and, for my project that year, I was growing plants under fluorescent lights. As much as I like and respect science now, I didn’t really understand it then. I didn’t “get” the whole scientific method, and how you first need to come up with a question and then figure out how you can answer that question by designing an experiment. I was just growing plants under lights, and the only reason I chose that project was it also happened to be my dad’s hobby at the time. (My dad always played a major role in helping us choose our science fair project.) I titled my project “Moon Farming,” and I felt that it demonstrated how society could exist on the moon through artificial lighting. I did all the work and wrote up a report, and I felt pretty well prepared on the big day when I’d soon be standing in front of my project and explaining it to a judge.

Before I left for school, my sister, who is four years older, wished me luck, and then she passed along some sisterly intel: the judges don’t like it if you spend a lot of money on a project. She wasn’t telling me to lie, just to tread carefully around the money issue. Besides, I had no idea if my fluorescent lights cost a lot—my father had paid for them. But good to know. I thanked her and went on my way.

What do you think? Is moon farming feasible? Photo by NASA on Unsplash

Sure enough, as I was explaining my project to the judge, she asked me about the cost of the lights. “Oh, there was no cost,” I lied to the judge. “No?” she asked. “We already had those lights,” I lied again, as if we had a stockpile of fluorescent lights in some corner of the house, waiting to be put to use. She gave me a “good” on my project, which I think was one notch up from “fair” which was another notch up from “poor.” Her stated reason: “It doesn’t seem possible.”

The next day, my teacher, a male who was in serious need of some sensitivity training, was leading the class in a debriefing over how everything had transpired with our science projects. When I remarked that I felt the judge’s reason for my “good” seemed a little unfair, my teacher told me—in front of the whole class—that the reason for my mediocre evaluation was because I’d lied about the lights. He said that I’d told the judge that we’d already had the lights when, on Day 1 in my report, I’d described removing the lights from the box they came in to set up my moon farm. I was mortified and embarrassed and probably a little miffed at myself for incorporating that level of detail into my report. (Judging by the wordcount of some of my blogposts, my love for detail hasn’t waned.) To save face, I had to lie again—because that’s what lies demand that we do—repeating that our family already had the lights in our possession when I began my project. It was a horrible, shameful moment in my young life, but perhaps it was also the turning point in which I became the avid truthteller who stands before you today.

It also illustrates why I love archival documents so much. That first entry in my report—one that I’d probably written months before and then forgotten about—told the truth about the fluorescent lights, not the 11-year-old girl who’d done all the watering and measuring but who, in her mind, had a motive to deceive. If a human being and a document are at odds about something that happened, I’ll side with the document pretty much every time.

In the university’s case, I’m still trying to get to the bottom of their recent actions concerning the interview someone conducted with Carl Knox’s secretary. Do I feel in my gut that I’m being misled? I do. But I’m not ready to say outright that a cover-up that started in 1953 is ongoing. I’m still trying to find documents that might lead us to the answer, either way. Nevertheless, I’ve also decided to do most of my musing offline from here on out. When I finally track down the person who conducted the interview—and, trust me, I’m giving it all I’ve got—I’ll need to be able to promise anonymity to him or her should they request it. If I were to continue writing about every new development in real time, that promise would be harder to keep as the list of possible candidates would shrink. Therefore, mum’s going to be the word for now.

Instead, I want to talk about our friends at the FBI and the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the lengths to which they’ve gone to twist the truth about what they have on Tammen. Because when you think about it, the university may have any number of possible explanations for its behavior, not the least of which is that they may honestly have no idea where that piece of paper in the Ghosts and Legends folder came from. The CIA, if given its druthers, would never disclose anything to the public, as evidenced by the praline recipe that was classified for 50 years. It’s the FBI’s actions over everyone else’s that have brought me to the point where I think the Ronald Tammen story is a lot bigger than Ronald Tammen.

My saga begins with my most recent FOIA requests to the FBI. Lately, I’ve been requesting copies of various people’s Additional Record Sheets, the jotted-down records explaining actions taken on someone’s criminal fingerprints when the FBI’s Identification Division was still using its manual system. The most relevant of these FOIA requests concerns Richard Colvin Cox. In 1950, Cox, a sophomore cadet from Mansfield, Ohio, disappeared from the United States Military Academy at West Point in a similar fashion to Tammen. As readers of this blog know, the two cases possess several interesting parallels, and I’ve wondered if they might be related. (For the fun of it, I’m also seeking the Additional Record Sheets for Lee Harvey Oswald, James Earl Ray, and Charles Manson, who have also been potentially tied to the CIA and/or MKULTRA. I mean, how cool would it be if we could put to rest all the lingering questions pertaining to those cases as we await the final word on Tammen’s psychology professor? We’re multi-taskers, y’all!)

On April 14, I submitted my FOIA request on Cox, and on April 21, I received the FBI’s response. It was eerily familiar-sounding—only a slight variation to the response I’d received when I submitted my request for Ronald Tammen’s Additional Record Sheets: Sorry, per your settlement agreement, you can’t ask us about Richard Colvin Cox ever again.

“Ummm…I beg your pardon?” thought I.

via GIPHY

To refresh your memories, in 2011, I’d submitted a separate FOIA request with the FBI seeking everything they had on Richard Cox’s case. At first, they sent me 24 pages, and I accepted them with gratitude and waltzed away. (I know. I should have appealed. I was new at this, you guys!) Two years later, after reading the book Oblivion and a series on Cox written by Mansfield News Journal reporter Jim Underwood, I discovered that I’d been shorted that first time by at least 1200 pages. I submitted a new request, asking for the documents that they’d received. Soon thereafter, I received three CDs with, by my count, over 1600 pages on them. (Always appeal.)

But make no mistake: I’d never requested any documents on Richard Cox for my lawsuit, and I hadn’t requested them for my settlement either. Why was the FBI tying the two cases together?

I consulted my old lawsuit emails, the bone-dry exchanges between my lawyer and the DOJ attorney as they discussed the terms of my lawsuit and a possible settlement. The moment in question happened during the month of March in 2013. We hadn’t even decided to settle at that point—we were just entertaining the possibility.

Here’s the setting: two Washington, D.C., lawyers are in discussions regarding the FBI’s recent discovery of a new Tammen-related report (the name of which I’m not permitted to say out loud) that no one other than law enforcement generally has access to. The DOJ attorney has suggested that, if I choose to settle, I might be able to get my hands on a portion of that report.

In another corner of the city, on a Sunday afternoon, I electronically submit my totally unrelated and completely separate FOIA request on Richard Cox to the FBI. The day is March 3rd, overcast with a high of 43 degrees. There’s no sign of precipitation, unless we’re talking about how my right to submit a FOIA request soon precipitated the DOJ to put the screws to yours truly.

As you may know, I love a good timeline, and this one doesn’t disappoint:

Sunday, March 3, 2013: I submit my second FOIA request on Richard Cox.

Saturday, March 23, 2013: I hadn’t received an acknowledgement from the FBI regarding my new FOIA request, which I generally receive within a day or two. I send them a friendly email reminder.

March 27, 2013—the following Wednesday: Three working days after I’d sent that nudgy email to the FBI’s FOIA office, it’s now in the hands of the DOJ’s attorney. I mean, what could be the downside of having your name so well-known around the FBI’s FOIA office that they immediately fast track your separate, unrelated FOIA request to their parent agency’s lawyers?

12:41 p.m.: In advance of a pending deadline in which the DOJ attorney needs to submit a status report on my Tammen lawsuit to the judge, she writes to my attorney. In the first line of her email she says this:

“Re the status report – To this point, 3000 pages have been found on Cox and rolling releases are commencing, with the 1^st release to go out on 3/28/13 (about 500 pages with some 6 and 7(c) redactions). I will put this information in a status report and file it on Monday, if it’s ok with you.”

The DOJ attorney raises the issue of Richard Cox with my lawyer: A) as if my lawyer had any clue regarding what in the blue blazes she was talking about, and B) as if Cox is some household name—no need to even say which Cox. You know, good ol’ Cox, that ol’ hellraiser rapscallion Cox with the 3000 pages. She then informs my lawyer that she’s going to be wallpapering my home with those 3000 pages in rolling releases. Lastly, and ever so surreptitiously, she says that she plans to talk about the 3000 pages in the status report to the judge, which she’ll file Monday “if it’s ok with you.”

At 12:45 p.m., my attorney forwards her email to me and asks me to think about it. He also lets me know that he’ll be out of the office Thursday and Friday due to a death in his family.

At 7:41 p.m., I respond to my attorney. I was still working full-time then, and as a personal rule, I attended to lawsuit-related matters during my off hours. I responded with a short list of comments and questions, including this: “The Richard Cox request is totally unrelated to the Tammen request…is it strange that my request went straight to the lawyer, or is that how they usually handle these matters?”

At 8:25 p.m., my lawyer tells me that he’ll give me an analysis of my questions next week.

OK by me. Honestly, I didn’t know what the DOJ attorney was up to. I was happy to be getting the Cox documents in an expedited manner, albeit two years late. But I felt uncomfortable with the sudden flurry of activity on Cox, when I wanted my lawsuit to be focused on Tammen. Still, we had until Monday to figure things out before the DOJ attorney submitted her status update to the judge on my Tammen lawsuit. Or so I thought from her email.

But no, we didn’t. Turns out, she’d already filed her update to the judge at 5:30 p.m. the same day. I didn’t even have time to make my commute home when she’d already sent the update to the judge. If it wasn’t due till Monday, what was her hurry?

Here’s what she wrote in her status update:

“Defendant reports on behalf of the parties that approximately 3000 pages of documents have been located in connection with one aspect of the case and a rolling release of approximately 500 pages, with redactions, will commence on March 28, 2013.” (She accidentally left out the part about the pages being responsive to another FOIA request I’d submitted in 2011. Also, it was more like 1600 pages by my count, but why split hairs.)

Let’s look at it another way: The previous weekend, I’d nudged the FBI to send me an acknowledgement of my FOIA request for some documents I should have received in 2011, and three working days later, a judge is being told of their existence and how I will be receiving them in rolling releases. Talk about customer service!

The following week, I sent my lawyer a detailed email letting him know that I was concerned about her actions and the motives behind them. I wrote:

“Is XXXX trying to make the FBI look super responsive to my Tammen request by handing over 3000 pages on a different case that I just requested last month? And how does she know that it’s related? What if I happen to be writing two books? I just don’t want the judge to rule in favor of her because of this potentially unrelated case.”

“I reread the complaint and you are right,” he said. He also said that he’d get back to me, though I have no record of whether he did or not. I also don’t know if he’d given her the OK to submit that status update. It wasn’t like him to do so without my OK, and I certainly didn’t approve it.

If you’re thinking that she outwitted me, and I should give up, don’t be sure. Why not? Documents.

In her March 27 email to my lawyer, the first paragraph led with the phrase “Re the status report,” at which point she discussed the 3000 Cox pages. But status reports aren’t settlements, as she makes clear in her second paragraph. That paragraph led with this phrase: “Re possible settlement, not to be included in the status report” (bolded type hers). She then proceeded to negotiate with my lawyer by offering me a portion of the report not to be named—the narrative—“if you are willing to dismiss the action.” Again, surreptitiously, she added this sentence: “Of course, if we agree to settle the case, the rolling releases on Cox will continue until concluded.”

Look, it’s obvious what the DOJ’s lawyer was up to. She was trying her mightiest to link the 3000 pages on Richard Cox to the settlement agreement. But she can’t. Why?

There were only two things that my lawyer and I had requested through our settlement: a written declaration that spelled out their search for Tammen-related records as well as the narrative from the report that shall not be named. Unless I signed the settlement agreement, I wouldn’t be getting diddly squat from them. On January 29, 2014, I signed the settlement agreement, and on February 7, 2014, I received the declaration and the narrative.

Meanwhile, the FOIA office was busily sending me their rolling releases of Richard Cox documents, beginning March 28, 2013, and, cleverly enough, ending January 29, 2014, the same date on which I signed the settlement.

You have to wonder why a DOJ lawyer would be so deceptive in her dealings with a nobody like me. Why the rush to add the “3000 pages” verbiage to her status update to a sitting judge? I’d grown used to seeing their previous status updates which did little more than request an extension. Also, why did she feel the need to preemptively strike against both the Tammen and Cox cases at one time? I never mentioned Ronald Tammen in any of my FOIA requests on Richard Cox. Do they indeed know of a connection “with one aspect of the case” as she’d informed the judge?

I’ve appealed the FBI’s decision on my recent FOIA request. Here’s a taste of the mood I was in:

“To play these games makes a sham of the FOIA process, and showcases how derisively the FBI treats ordinary taxpaying citizens who are trying to seek the truth. It certainly makes this ordinary taxpaying citizen wonder what it is the FBI doesn’t want me to see.”

I’ll keep you posted.

*********************

Have you been living with a lie since grade school that you need to get off your chest? How about a science fair project story that’s hilarious? We want to hear from you!

CIA, FBI Records, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Records, Gay in the Fifties, Richard Cox, Ron's Sexuality

Was the CIA secretly recruiting gay men in the 1950s?

In the book Oblivion, which delves into the Richard Cox disappearance, the authors have suggested that (spoiler alert!) Richard Cox may have been gay or bisexual and that the CIA recruited him in 1950 for that reason. We’ve already discussed how Ronald Tammen’s 1953 disappearance draws a number of parallels to Cox’s disappearance, and I’ve also provided evidence that helps support the theory that Tammen may have been gay. So it begs the question: Was the CIA furtively recruiting gay men in the early 1950s, for whatever reason, and if so, were Tammen and Cox two of their more visible recruits representing the great state of Ohio?

Before I proceed with today’s post I need to state this caveat as clearly as possible: I can’t fathom the totality of the CIA’s operations back in the height of the Cold War. If the agency had an interest in hiring members of the gay or lesbian community for intelligence work, it has done an excellent job of keeping that detail a secret, in addition to its underlying reasons for doing so. What I’m presenting here is one scenario that has received a small amount of publicity. However, in no way do I intend to imply that, if Tammen or Cox were gay and recruited by the CIA, they would have been utilized in this way. I’m only asking if the CIA was hiring gay individuals when no one else in the federal government was doing so and presenting some supporting evidence.

With that caveat firmly in mind, let’s talk about spies and sex and the use of sex by spies for the sole purpose of sexy spying. Anyone who’s seen a James Bond film can understand how sex can be used as a tactical weapon in the world of espionage. Sexpionage, as some call it, works like this: someone on an organization’s payroll sets up a steamy little “honey trap” to entice an opposing target to swap his or her government’s secrets for sex. Or a late-night tryst might provide an opportunity for a spy to rifle through a high-level diplomat’s suitcase after drugging his daiquiri. Or there’s also the potential for blackmail. Sex makes a person vulnerable and if there’s one thing that people in the intelligence biz absolutely love 💕, it’s intelligence sources who are vulnerable.

As you can imagine, the sex lives of spies is a subject that the CIA doesn’t care to talk about. As this December 9, 2010, article from Slate states, “The Central Intelligence Agency doesn’t comment on whether its agents use their sexuality to obtain information, but current and former intelligence officials say it does happen occasionally.” (That quoted sentence used to link to an article from the April 17, 2007, issue of Harper’s Magazine, called “Sex and the CIA,” to back up its latter claim. Alas, if you click on it, you’ll see that the link no longer works, and the article is also nowhere to be found on the Harper’s website. Welcome to the world of intelligence research! HOWEVER, thanks to one of our own astute researchers and Wayback Machine, we can now provide a link to it on this site.🔥)

“Few national secrets have been more carefully guarded, but the CIA has provided kings, presidents, potentates and magistrates with female companionship,” wrote famed journalist Jack Anderson in his syndicated column in June 1976. “On a lower level, girls have been made available to defectors and the CIA’s own agents.”

According to the Anderson article, the CIA’s “sex shop” was run by its Office of Security. Sometimes the diplomat was in the know about the CIA’s role in that evening’s fix-up, however, other times, the agency made its arrangements more clandestinely, for the purpose of spying.

Wrote Anderson, “…the agency has used prostitutes to lure foreign diplomats into love traps where their sexual antics were filmed through one-way mirrors. The film was later used to blackmail the foreigners into becoming informants.”

If the CIA was employing women to pursue intelligence sources who were straight, wouldn’t they also employ men to target those who happened to be gay? The CIA often claimed that the Soviets wouldn’t hesitate to use the latter tactic on us, particularly for its blackmail potential, and, as a result, they supposedly felt that people who were gay or lesbian would be a risk to national security. (By the way, this logic only seems to make sense if the person were closeted and afraid of being outed.) But, if the Soviets were doing it, wouldn’t we have used the tactic too? Doesn’t the CIA generally consider turnabout to be fair play? (Asking for a friend…)

On the other hand, as you may recall, Executive Order 10450 was signed by President Eisenhower on April 27, 1953, thus introducing a policy against hiring federal civil servants who were gay, lesbian, or bisexual. What’s more, the Lavender Scare began even earlier than that, in the late 1940s, and by 1950, the government’s zeal for discriminating against people who were gay or lesbian picked up steam courtesy of the despicable Senator Joseph McCarthy. But since when does the CIA follow what everyone else is doing? I would think that, if the cloak and dagger crowd believed it was in their best interest to recruit gay operatives, then that’s what they’d do.

The public record doesn’t support this theory, however. Here’s what’s on record regarding the federal hiring policy of LGBT individuals, both in general and at the CIA specifically:

In the 1960s, gay rights organizations such as the Mattachine Society of Washington, cofounded by renowned activist Frank Kameny and Jack Nichols, began filing lawsuits to challenge the across-the-board firings of gay and lesbian federal employees simply because of their sexual orientation.
In 1969, the federal Civil Service Commission (CSC) lost a court case in which a NASA employee named Clifford Norton sued CSC chair John Macy for having been terminated after he was arrested for a gay liaison in D.C.’s Lafayette Square during non-working hours. The court ruled that “the Civil Service Commission has neither the expertise nor the requisite anointment to make or enforce absolute moral judgments …,” and, consequently, it had no right to fire someone for being gay or lesbian, though it took four more years before changes were fully implemented government-wide. While the ruling applied to some federal agencies, it didn’t apply to all of them. According to the 2015 book Hoover’s War on Gays, by Douglas M. Charles, “For agencies outside CSC coverage, political appointees, or those engaged in national security work, however—such as the FBI, CIA, National Security Agency (NSA), and military—antigay employment discrimination continued unabated.”

On August 2, 1995, President Clinton signed Executive Order 12968, which ended the ban on security clearances for gay employees, and which enabled a paradigm shift in the area of protections for LGBT hires within the intelligence community. Additional protections were enacted in subsequent years, though the Trump administration has reversed earlier actions pertaining to federal contractors and transgender workers.
In 1996, the CIA created a group called ANGLE, which stands for Agency Network for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Officers and Allies, and which has produced a 43-minute documentary about the transition that has taken place within the agency. Nevertheless, change came slowly for the folks in Langley, VA, as is also described in this 2015 article in the Daily Beast.
Sometime around 2011 or 2012 (sources vary), the CIA began publicizing the fact that it was actively recruiting LGBT individuals.

To sum things up: the CIA had a policy against the hiring of members of the LGBT community until the mid-1990s; the culture began to evolve after that, albeit slowly; and then around 2011 or 2012, their doors were flung wide open and they were actively recruiting. This doesn’t exactly mesh with the running thesis I’m investigating, but that’s their story and they’re sticking with it.

Fact-checking Oblivion: Was Richard Cox gay?

In the spring of 2014, I drove to Mansfield, Ohio, Richard Cox’s hometown, in hopes of meeting with one of Cox’s sisters to discuss the similarities between his and Tammen’s cases. Although Cox’s sister wasn’t available for a sit-down, she put me in touch with a family friend, whose overriding objective was to shoot down the book’s premise. For an uncomfortable 20 minutes or so, the man insisted to me that the book was “garbage,” “trash,” and that there was no evidence to back up its claims that Cox was gay and was recruited by the CIA. “There isn’t a shred of truth to it,” he said.

I’m not going to say here whether or not I think Richard Cox was gay. I didn’t know Richard Cox. The family friend, who also didn’t know Cox, was adamant that he wasn’t. I’m just going to share several FBI documents that may have led some people to infer that Richard Cox might have been gay or bisexual or, at the very least, experimenting. A lot has been redacted, and I’ve been unsuccessful in getting the whited-out details released, but I think you can get the gist of things from the surrounding verbiage.

The documents I’m about to share have to do with an incident that took place in April 1948 in New York City between Cox and a former soldier identified as Victor Wolf, from Detroit. The two met at Tony Pastor’s, a gay-friendly bar in Greenwich Village. Later that night, Cox visited Wolf’s room at the Hotel Dixie on 42nd Street and stayed the night. (Judging by this website, the hotel’s boasting of “700 rooms, each with bath and radio” leads me to think that we’re not talking spacious suites here.)

The following passage was part of a report from the FBI’s New York office in a document dated May 26, 1950. This redaction-free synopsis (from this point on, referred to as “item A”) helps us validate key details in subsequent passages.

The next three passages were included in a document dated July 13, 1951 created by the Detroit office of the FBI.

Background: Sometime in late June or early July 1951, the FBI interviewed Wolf’s landlords, Mr. and Mrs. A. R. Keith, of Detroit. Despite the redactions, we know they’re talking about Wolf because the address (1798 Field) is the same as that included in item A. One wonders what the Keiths had discovered about Wolf and his roommate that led them to immediately ask them to move out of their home. In the second paragraph, two informants from Detroit said that both BLANK and BLANK are known BLANKETY BLANKS. I’m sure that the first two blanks are referring to Wolf and his roommate. As for what they were “known” to be, one can only wonder about that as well.

Background: Included below is a three-page statement dated July 7, 1951, and signed by Victor Wolf concerning his interactions with Richard Cox. Again, despite the redactions, we know that it’s Wolf’s statement, thanks to item A, which describes the timeframe and locations of their liaison in New York. The third paragraph of page one says that Cox, Wolf, and “another soldier” had met up at Tony Pastor’s bar, which Wolf describes as “having a reputation of being BLANK.” Later that night, Cox showed up at Wolf’s hotel room and Wolf told him he could spend the night with Wolf and BLANK. Wolf was later awakened by something—a whole paragraph’s worth of BLANKING—that, to this day, the FBI deems too confidential or of such a delicate nature that it needs to protect the public from such details, 70 years after-the-fact.

As for next steps, the author of the FBI memo had suggested that the following lead needed to be checked out by the New York office regarding the “Subject,” Richard Cox.

Evidence that the CIA was recruiting gay men

If you were to contact the CIA (and I have) and ask them if they used to recruit gay men in the 1950s (and I did), they would likely tell you that they wouldn’t be addressing that question (and they didn’t). However, I’ve found several small clues over the years that deem it at least plausible that the CIA was knowingly hiring gay men back then, for whatever reason, regardless of what the agency’s official stance was at the time.

Clue #1: The CIA was modeled after Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, which had been employing gay spies for decades.

If you’re remotely interested in the world of espionage, you’ll know that one of the most notorious spies during the Cold War was Kim Philby, a handsome and sophisticated Cambridge-educated man who charmed a lot of people, including the CIA’s James Jesus Angleton. Angleton had studied under Philby. He developed his intelligence chops under him in London when Philby was with Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, known as MI6, and Angleton was with the fledgling CIA. The trouble was, Philby also happened to be spying for the Soviets for many years and Angleton had handed him a lot of state secrets and contacts when Philby was serving in Washington as a liaison between MI6 and the CIA and FBI. Philby eventually defected to the Soviet Union, as did fellow KGB spies Guy Burgess, who was openly gay, and Don Maclean, who was bisexual. Phillip Knightley, an esteemed journalist who had interviewed Philby at length for his definitive book, contends in this 1997 piece that Britain has had a long history of gay spies and, moreover, that spying is a natural fit for someone who is gay. In addition, Jefferson Morely, who wrote an acclaimed recent biography on Angleton, has hypothesized that the relationship between Angleton and Philby may have been a lot closer than just that of mentor and mentee.

Clue #2: Jack Anderson said so (sort of).

I’ve already cited the 1976 news article by Jack Anderson that brought to light several sex operations overseen by the CIA. An article that he’d published a year earlier had gone into greater detail concerning the CIA’s love nests that were being used for blackmail purposes on the East and West Coasts. In the last paragraph, Anderson said this:

“To stage the shows, both male and female prostitutes with a variety of sexual skills were used. The CIA possibly got the idea from the Russians, who have long used sex blackmail to entrap Westerners into spying for them.”

Although Anderson doesn’t mention anything about the entrapped being gay, the fact that male prostitutes were used tells me that that’s what he was referring to, since most foreign diplomats would have been male.

Clue #3: Former CIA employee Victor Marchetti said so.

Victor Marchetti, who passed away this past October, was a former Soviet-military specialist and executive assistant to the deputy director of the CIA. Over time, he had become disillusioned with the agency’s actions and one of its most outspoken critics. He’s most famous for coauthoring a 1974 nonfiction book with John D. Marks, formerly of the State Department, titled The C.I.A. and the Cult of Intelligence, which entangled him in a drawn-out legal battle with his former employer.

In a September 1982 Reuters article, Marchetti is quoted in the following snippet:

“Soviet intelligence agents routinely cruise gay bars seeking candidates for blackmail who could be coopted as spies, a spokesman for the CIA, another agency which is concerned about possible espionage, said.

“Former CIA official Victor Marchetti said in a separate interview that the United States employed similar techniques not only against Communists but in order to extract information from officials of allied governments who were ‘closet’ homosexuals.

“The CIA declined to comment on Mr. Marchetti’s statement.”

Clue #4: Allen Dulles was told by his mistress of OSS’s need to penetrate an underground gay network during WWII.

In her book, Autobiography of a Spy, author Mary Bancroft shared an experience she had while she was the mistress of spy master and future CIA Director Allen Dulles during WWII. Dulles was with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), forerunner to the CIA, in Zurich, and had been using Bancroft to obtain information from various sources. While in this role, she felt it her duty to inform Dulles, who was ten years older than she and utterly naïve about the subject, about an underground gay network among the “Foreign Offices of England, Switzerland, Greece, and our own State Department and through which information traveled even more rapidly than by the channels of the Catholic Church and various Jewish organizations.” She recalled how “a colleague of my generation had told me how essential it was for us to tap this homosexual underground by having, as he put it, ‘Washington send us a guy with a pretty behind.’” Bancroft doesn’t say if Washington responded after she conveyed this request to Dulles, however, if people in intelligence were aware of the benefits of gay operatives in the 1940s, I can’t imagine what would have changed their minds by the 1950s.

Clue #5: Former CIA Director Roscoe Hillenkoetter admitted as much to Congress.

On July 14, 1950, Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter, then-director of Central Intelligence, testified before Congress regarding his views of whether a person who was gay was considered to be a risk to national security. His answer was a resounding yes, and he emphasized that a gay employee needed to be “weeded out of government employment wherever he is found.” His final sentence is a doozy: “The failure to do this can only result in placing a dagger in the hands of our enemies and their intelligence services, and the point of that dagger would lie at the heart of our national security.”

However strong that statement was, and however homophobic his views are throughout the rest of his statement, he actually does a 180 in a couple places and shares that it wouldn’t be so bad after all, and may actually be beneficial, to have a gay person on his intelligence squad. On page 25 of his typed comments, he says this: “…while this agency will never employ a homosexual on its rolls, it might conceivably be necessary, and in the past has actually been valuable, to use known homosexuals as agents in the field.” (bold added)

In addition, on pages 35 and 36, he says: “In one case in which were were [sic] interested abroad in the early months of this year, we found what I believe to represent a Soviet intelligence operation, and we believe that our task will be made considerably easier by the appearance in the area of a known homosexual who we think will be extremely helpful in this particular case.” (bold added)

[You can read his full statement here. But be prepared: it’s, um, a wee bit vile.]

Hillenkoetter statement 07-14-1950 pp 1-38 Download

Granted, the above evidence isn’t much to go on, but, at the very least, it doesn’t rule out the argument that the CIA may have recruited gay men back in Tammen’s and Cox’s day for some purpose that it deemed useful to our country’s service, despite its official policy. I’ll close with these two thoughts:

Executive Order 10450 was signed eight days after Tammen disappeared, at which time, it would have likely been extremely difficult for a person who was gay to obtain a security clearance. Could the CIA have recruited Ron the week prior to get his name on the books before the E.O. went into effect?

Also, some have wondered why the CIA would have had any interest in recruiting a student from quaint little Miami University in rural southwest Ohio, be he gay or straight. Didn’t they have a hefty supply of Ivy Leaguers to choose from on the East Coast? But those doubters probably aren’t aware that the first director of Central Intelligence was a Miami graduate. His name was Sidney W. Souers, and he was born in Dayton. Just saying.

2008 Butler County Cold Case Investigation, Carl Knox Investigation, J. Edgar Hoover/FBI Investigation, Miami University, Oxford PD Investigation, Potential Tammen Sightings, Richard Cox, The Investigations, University Faculty and Administrators

A dead body in Georgia

(and other perfectly good clues that were ignored by investigators)

: Photo credit: Matthias Zomer at Pexels (cropped image)

By now, I think you should have a pretty good indication of how (in my opinion) the city of Oxford, Ohio, and Miami University conducted their investigations into Tammen’s disappearance. I’ll say it here plainly, just so there’s no confusion: They did a really bad job.

Time and again, investigators would lament in the news about what few clues they had to go on after Tammen disappeared. Sure, they’d received some early tips about several area hitchhikers and an apartment dweller in Cincinnati, but none of those panned out. Then, Clara Spivey came forward with her alleged late-night Ron sighting in Seven Mile, and they finally felt as if they had a true lead. (In response to one reader’s request, we’ll be discussing Mrs. Spivey’s story in more detail in another post that I’m planning for Tuesday, November 6. You’ll have a chance to vote on whether you believe the person who appeared at her door was Ron or not.**)

After Mrs. Spivey’s call in late June 1953, investigators hit another dry spell clue-wise, which supposedly lasted 20 long years. In 1973, the drought ended, at least for the interested public, when reporter Joe Cella revealed that Ronald Tammen had visited Dr. Garret Boone’s office five months before he disappeared to have his blood type tested. We also learned that university officials had already known about the doctor’s visit shortly after Tammen went missing. They just didn’t view it as a clue.

So, Mrs. Spivey’s story? Definite clue.

Dr. Boone’s? Not so much.

When it came to determining whether something was a potential clue or not, these guys were (again, my opinion) clueless.

We’ve already covered some additional details about Tammen’s disappearance that I would categorize as clues. Some of the most significant ones include:

Song practiceRon is alleged to have been to song practice at the Delt house the night he disappeared and had walked back to the dorms with two other guys at around 10:30 p.m. If true, Ron disappeared more than two hours later than what was widely reported.
The fightRon allegedly had a fight with his younger brother Richard in the third-floor bathroom of Fisher Hall the night he disappeared.
The woman from HamiltonRon was supposedly seen seated in a car with a woman from Hamilton for a long time and then driving away with her late that night.
The psych bookRon had been reported reading his psychology book the afternoon that he disappeared, and his psychology book was left open on his desk, even though he’d dropped his psychology course earlier that semester.
The things in Ron’s backgroundRon Tammen might have had “things in his background” that were consistent with his having experienced dissociation (amnesia).
The dead fish
Ron likely hadn’t slept in his bed at least one night, and possibly two, before his disappearance. We know this because Dick Titus had put the fish in Ron’s bed after class on Saturday or perhaps even Friday.

All of the above (and probably more) were known by university officials and Oxford police. If they viewed these details as clues, they chose not to make them public. But from what I can tell, they didn’t do much more than the most perfunctory of probes either. In particular, they could have pursued the rumor about the woman from Hamilton more enthusiastically, enlisting the news media for help. The Journal-News could have run the headline “Tammen allegedly last seen in car with woman from Hamilton,” and the accompanying article could have closed with “Anyone with information is asked to call this number.” But, nah.

And, let’s not forget Heber Hiram (H.H.) Stephenson, the housing official who swore up and down that he’d seen Tammen sitting in a hotel restaurant with a small group of men in Wellsville, NY, on Wednesday, August 5, 1953. Stephenson had shared this information with university officials immediately upon his return—the next day, he said—and we see the cryptic “H.H.S., Aug. 5, 1953, Wellsville, New York” in Knox’s notes to confirm that a conversation had indeed taken place. Again, if it hadn’t been for Joe Cella revealing the detail in 1976, we probably wouldn’t be talking about it now.

HHS Note

So I have to ask: If the potential sighting by Mrs. Spivey was such a promising clue back on June 29, 1953, when it was first reported in the news, why wouldn’t H.H. Stephenson’s potential sighting have been considered just as promising when he reported it on August 6, about five weeks later? Hi Stephenson knew Ron. Clara Spivey didn’t.

And I have to follow with this question: Did university officials even think to alert the FBI about Stephenson’s story? On May 26, 1953, the FBI had a missing person file on Tammen, and roughly one week earlier, Carl Knox had informed Tammen’s parents that the FBI had been attending faculty conferences. Also, by July 27, 1953, Ron was listed as delinquent for his draft board physical, and therefore, in violation of the Selective Service Act. Carl Knox should have called them—immediately—and reported that an acquaintance of Ronald Tammen’s was quite sure he’d spotted him at a hotel restaurant in Wellsville, NY, the previous day. The FBI could have summoned their Buffalo office to check things out, and the Buffalo agents, in turn, could have shown the proprietor Ron’s picture and asked if anyone had seen him. They could have checked the hotel’s registry for the names of the young men. They could have asked if anyone had spoken with them, and if so, why were they there? Where were they going? Heck, if Knox had told them soon enough, the FBI could have possibly even dusted the lookalike’s chair for fingerprints, or, if he’d stayed overnight, the furniture in his room. But judging from the Stephenson quote in Joe Cella’s article, he was never approached again. Here’s what he told Cella: “I was under the impression all these years that my story was generally known by everyone, since Dr. Knox knew about it and was handling the investigation for the university. I am amazed to hear that this information was not known until now.” There’s nothing in the FBI files to indicate such a report was called in either.

So, again, Mrs. Spivey? Clue!

H.H. Stephenson? Better luck next time!

Which brings us to the spring of 1955, two years after Ronald Tammen’s disappearance, when Miami University received yet another potential clue in the Tammen case. Again, by all indications, officials promptly chose to sweep it under the rug.

The clue came in the form of a letter dated May 10, 1955, and addressed to: “Dean of Miami University, Oxford, Ohio.” As vaguely worded as that was, it must have found its way to Carl Knox, who was still dean of men at that time, and several copies can be found in the Tammen materials at University Archives. The letter was signed by Major Delmar Jones, director of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI). Major Jones told of a dead body that had been found near LaFayette, Georgia, on June 24, 1953. The GBI, having received a news clipping about Tammen, was wondering if the body might have been Ron’s.

Here’s what the letter said:

Dear Sir:

A newspaper clipping was turned over to this Bureau several days ago by Mr. Hill Pope, the coroner of Walker County, Georgia. We do not know from whom this clipping came but it has reference to a young man by the name of RONALD TAMMEN, a nineteen year old sophomore who disappeared from your institution approximately two years ago.

Someone had evidently secured knowledge whereby we were trying to identify a badly decomposed body that was found on the outskirts of LaFayette, Georgia, on June 24, 1953.

This investigation is still pending, and we are still endeavoring to ascertain the identification of this body.

It will be appreciated very much if you will give us the full details and complete description of Ronald Tammen so that we may compare them with the identification of the unidentified body.

Your response to this communication will be appreciated very much and we will do everything in our power to assist in locating the subject Ronald Tammen if he should be in our territory.

Yours very truly,

Delmar Jones, Major – Director

GEORGIA BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION

[View a copy of the original.]

Delmar Jones was Georgia’s number one law enforcement official from 1948 to 1962, and not someone to be taken lightly. (In 1962, he was demoted to trooper by the governor for campaigning for the former governor in a primary election, which, I suppose, was a risk he’d been willing to take.) Granted, H.H. Stephenson and Garret Boone weren’t slouches either. But you’d have to think that a letter from Georgia’s version of J. Edgar Hoover would have elicited some sort of response from the university.

I have no idea if Carl Knox or anyone else got back to Major Jones. In Miami’s archives, there are no carbon copies of letters mailed in reply. Perhaps Dean Knox placed a phone call to Major Jones, suggesting that the GBI contact the FBI, although no surviving FOIA documents indicate that contact had been made. (As a side note, Ron’s Selective Service case with the FBI was closed on April 29, 1955, 11 days before the GBI letter was written.) Or maybe officials called Major Jones and provided a full accounting of the case over the phone, but the GBI ruled Ron out for some reason and didn’t follow up with anyone. By all accounts, no one seemed to mention the letter to Joe Cella, Gil Wright, or Murray Seeger, since there are no news reports about a dead body in Georgia being possibly tied to Tammen’s case. I don’t even think the university bothered to tell the Oxford police. When I asked my friend Ralph (not his real name), the former cop who was still with the Oxford PD that year and several years after, he was surprised—stunned, actually—to hear about the letter.

So, once more: Confused guy on Mrs. Spivey’s doorstep on the night Tammen disappeared?

👍👍👍

Dead body found in ditch 400 miles south of Oxford two months later?

👎

Here’s what we can safely assume: no one went to the lengths that officials went to in late 2007 and early 2008 when, on their own, without even initially knowing about Delmar Jones’ letter, the Walker County, Georgia’s, Sheriff’s Office hypothesized that the two cold cases might be related.

It happened like this:

Mike Freeman, the cold case detective for Walker County, was conducting an end-of-the-year review of unsolved cases in his portfolio when his boss, Sheriff Steve Wilson, posed a question to him.

“What about that dead body found in a ravine back in 1953?” Wilson asked him (or something along those lines). Wilson wasn’t around when the dead body was discovered—he was born several years later—but his dad used to tell him about it, and he can point out the location to anyone who asks. To this day, people in the area refer to the site as Dead Man’s Hollow.

: Walker County Sheriff Steve Wilson stands next to the site where the dead body was found in 1953.

Freeman didn’t know anything about the case, but the story intrigued him. The department no longer had a file, so, for starters, he headed to the local library (which, conveniently, is just a few buildings away from the sheriff’s department) and found news articles that ran at the time the body was found. Based on information found in the articles, he learned that an autopsy was conducted by the state medical examiner’s office, which, thankfully, he was able to obtain. [Read the full autopsy report here.]

The details, provided in news accounts and the autopsy, aren’t pretty. The body was found in a highly decomposed state in a wooded ravine off Rogers Road, five miles south of LaFayette, on June 24, 1953. According to Dr. Herman Jones, director of the GBI crime lab (and probably no relation to Delmar, but who really knows?), it was “heavily infested from head to foot with maggots and other worms,” a sure sign that the man had been dead for a while. What was left of his face (which, by that point, was devoid of soft tissue and therefore any recognizable features) was angled upward, toward the sky, and his arms and legs were fully extended, kind of like da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man.

Some features were still discernible. His hair was dark brown to black, his height was 5’9,” and, when he was alive, and still had all of his internal organs and tissues in place, his weight would have been around 150 pounds. He had long arms and long slender fingers from which extended nails that were also long and “apparently well kept,” according to Dr. Jones, who’d conducted the autopsy on the same day the body was found. The decedent’s teeth weren’t as well cared for as his nails. Two lower back molars had large cavities in them and several teeth had been extracted. “No dental work done,” Dr. Jones reported, which could be interpreted to mean that he didn’t have any fillings or crowns. There was no evidence that any of the bones in his body had been broken, either recently or in the past. He was estimated to be between 25 and 30 years of age.

The man was wearing only a white T-shirt, size 38, with four round holes in it, and boxer shorts, size 32, the kind with buttons up the fly and a drawstring around the waist. Two khaki-colored wool socks lay at his feet. One sock lay near where his left foot should have been—it was missing, as were the toes on his right foot—and the other sock lay between his straddled legs. (Dr. Jones blamed an animal for the missing foot.) The shorts and socks were military-issue—U.S. Army. A quarter-inch-wide rubber band encircled each ankle, most likely to blouse the bottom of each pant leg, a common practice of G.I.s so that the full boot shows underneath. As for the man’s boots and pants, they were nowhere to be found, but, based on the items that had been left behind, it was clear that he was probably a soldier. What wasn’t clear was how the man died, though officials presumed it was a homicide. According to the sheriff at that time, the holes in his T-shirt were about the size of .38-caliber bullets, however Dr. Jones found no broken bones or skull damage and no evidence of foreign bodies.

The GBI also conducted an investigation (hence Delmar Jones’ letter), and they exhumed the body a second time after the autopsy for additional analysis, including obtaining fingerprints. The Army conducted an investigation as well. Unfortunately, neither have been able to produce records on the case.

Freeman went on the internet—something they obviously didn’t have in 1953—and searched for missing persons from that year. He immediately discovered the treasure trove of websites discussing the Tammen case (except, alas, for this one, which obviously came later). Freeman noted that both LaFayette and Oxford were on U.S. Route 27, and, in fact, the dead soldier was discovered only about 200 yards away from the highway. If Ron had been hitchhiking to Florida, he thought, it was the best possible route to take, since there was no interstate system back then. Ron’s height, weight, and hair color seemed to be in the ballpark too, and his age wasn’t too far off. Ron wasn’t in the Army, but who’s to say that he didn’t enlist after he left Miami? It was worth a shot.

Freeman contacted Frank Smith, Butler County’s cold case detective at that time, and the two decided to make use of another new technology—DNA testing—to determine if the dead man was Tammen. On February 8, 2008, Freeman, Wilson, and Smith, along with Georgia’s chief medical examiner, GBI’s forensic anthropologist, Walker County’s coroner, members of the media, and curious onlookers witnessed the exhumation of remains buried in an unmarked grave in Lot 206 , Block A, in LaFayette Cemetery. The few bone remnants they obtained were forwarded to the FBI and other facilities for DNA testing. The results would be compared with a DNA sample that had been submitted a couple weeks prior by Tammen’s sister Marcia.

The following June, they got their answer: there was no match. The soldier wasn’t Tammen. It was a big disappointment, but cold case detectives probably get used to these sorts of let-downs. Interestingly, I arrived at the same conclusion in another, more roundabout way. In August 1958, human bones had been found in a gravel pit in Preble County, Ohio, which is about 25 miles north of Oxford. Authorities there had sent bone and teeth samples to Ohio’s Bureau of Identification and Investigation, in New London, for analysis to see if the remains might be Ron’s. (Before DNA testing, dental records were the primary method for identifying unknown victims and they’re still valuable today.)

According to an article in the August 17, 1958, Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Preble County sheriff had said that no dental work had been performed on the teeth that they’d unearthed, though, admittedly, the set was incomplete.

The article continued:

Ronald’s mother, when informed of the find, said that her son had several teeth filled.

“Also, his upper teeth lapped,” she continued, “and he had planned to have them straightened.”

“Furthermore, he had a couple of broken bones that could be identified. When he was three, he got a broken collarbone jumping off a bed. Later, playing football in the street, he broke one of the small bones in one of his hands.”

As you’ll recall, the dead soldier in Georgia appeared to have had no dental work and no evidence of having broken any bones. Plus, there was no mention of an overlap of the front teeth. Based on the fact that Ron had had several fillings plus the overlap plus a couple broken bones, it’s obvious that, even before the DNA test, the person buried in Walker County, Georgia, wasn’t Tammen. The DNA evidence sealed the deal.

Miami and Oxford officials couldn’t have stated the above so unequivocally. In fact, it almost seems as if they’d given up looking for Tammen not long after he disappeared. Did someone in a position of authority tell them to stop their investigation? I wonder.

*******

Oh, and P.S. As for the dead guy in Georgia, could it have been Richard Cox? I wonder about that sometimes too…

**NOTE: For those who prefer to vote early, the Mrs. Spivey post is now up! You can find it here: https://ronaldtammen.com/2018/11/01/a-late-night-knock-at-the-door/.

FBI Records, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Records, J. Edgar Hoover/FBI Investigation, Richard Cox, The Investigations

Did Ronald Tammen cross paths with Richard Colvin Cox?

Happy New Year, Good Man followers! Did you know that January 2018 marks the 68th anniversary of another person’s disappearance from his college dorm? That individual is Richard Colvin Cox, from Mansfield, Ohio, who was a sophomore cadet at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, in New York, in 1950, the year he disappeared. On the day he went missing, Cox had been watching a basketball game with roommate Deane Welch, and, on their return to their room in the North Barracks, he took a detour to check his grades. While in that vicinity, Cox ran into an acquaintance who had visited him the previous weekend—a person he’d known in Germany while he was in the Army who supposedly went by the name of George. After a brief conversation, Cox headed back to his room to change into the requisite uniform before going to dinner at the Thayer Hotel with his visitor. At 6:18 p.m., he said a quick goodbye as Welch preceded him out the door, and was never heard from again.

Although the two young men’s stories have their differences, there are plenty of parallels. Here’s a short list:

Personal/Family Characteristics

Both were from Ohio. Tammen was from Maple Heights, a Cleveland suburb, while Cox was from Mansfield, a small town between Cleveland and Columbus.
Both were intelligent and studious.
Both were considered leaders in their class. Tammen was a counselor in Fisher Hall, and Cox was voted by his classmates as the highest-ranking yearling (the term used for sophomores at West Point) in his company.
Their birthdays were only two days apart, though Tammen was five years younger than Cox. Cox was born July 25, 1928, and Tammen was born July 23, 1933.
Both were considered friendly, but private. They tended to keep things to themselves.
Both were handsome with similar smallish builds. Cox was 5’8” and 165 lb.; Tammen was 5’9” and 175 lb.
Both came from families of modest means. Cox’s family owned an insurance agency in Mansfield, however Mr. Cox had passed away when Richard was 10. Tammen’s father worked as a clerk for the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen in Cleveland.

Conditions of Disappearance

Both disappeared while they were sophomores in college.
They disappeared within three years of each other. Cox disappeared Jan. 14, 1950, and Tammen disappeared April 19, 1953.
They disappeared on a weekend—Cox on a Saturday, and Tammen on a Sunday.
They disappeared at the end of the day. Cox disappeared a little after 6:15 p.m., while Tammen disappeared sometime between 8:00 and 10:30 p.m., based on varying accounts of his final moments.
Both young men appeared to be showing signs of stress or inner conflict. Cox sometimes shared that he was growing fed up with West Point, while Tammen had spoken of being “tired lately” and had been seen reading the Bible several times, which was considered out of character.
Both seemed to be in good spirits on the day of their disappearance.
Both walked away with just the clothes on their backs and little money.
Both had supposedly been sighted after-the-fact by people who knew them. Cox was reportedly spotted in March 1952 at a restaurant in the Greyhound bus terminal at 11th Street and New York Avenue, N.W., in Washington, D.C. Ernest Shotwell, a friend of Cox’s from their days at the Stewart Field Prep School in New York, had seen him sitting at a table, and they spoke briefly, though Cox appeared uncomfortable and left shortly thereafter. (The Greyhound building is still there, a curvy, Art Deco blast from the past now bordered on three sides by more modern—and boring—structures.) Tammen was potentially seen in a restaurant in Wellsville, NY, in August 1953, by H. H. Stephenson, the housing administrator at Miami who had given Tammen permission to have a car on campus. Stephenson had walked out of the restaurant without saying anything to the young man.
Both men’s fingerprints were on file with the FBI when they’d disappeared. Tammen’s had been on file since 1941, when he was in the second grade, and Cox’s was on file at least since he’d enlisted in the Army in September 1946.
After committing significant resources and manpower into finding the young men, the FBI ostensibly, failed to solve either case.

IMG_0314 New York Ave terminal — The Greyhound bus terminal, in Washington, D.C., where there had been a potential sighting of Richard Cox in 1952.

Finding the similarities compelling, in June 2011, I submitted a FOIA request to the FBI seeking all documents that they had on the Richard Cox investigation. At that time, I hadn’t yet come to fully appreciate the nuances of FOIA—and by “nuances,” I mean, well, let’s just say that it isn’t an exact science. People at the agency of interest are likely to make judgment calls on a regular basis. Some decisions may hinge on the topic in general, the way a request is phrased, and any number of factors.

With that said, the FBI saw fit to send me 24 pages on the Cox case within the same month of my request. (They told me that they were sending me information that had already been processed for another requester, which is the probable reason behind the quick turnaround.) As with my FOIA documents on Tammen, the amount seemed surprisingly small to me, considering the fact that Cox had been affiliated with the U.S. Army, and the military doesn’t take disappearances from its ranks lightly. Nevertheless, I moved on without submitting an appeal. I had little knowledge of the case at that point and 20-odd pages seemed to be the FBI’s M.O. when it came to men who’d gone missing in the 1950s.

And then I dug deeper. What I found was that two people had done a good deal of digging ahead of me, and they got much, much more from the FBI. One person was James Underwood, who, as a reporter for the Mansfield News Journal, wrote an in-depth investigative series on Cox’s disappearance in 1982. (In 2012, Mr. Underwood appeared on the History Channel’s episode on West Point and the Cox disappearance.) The second person was Marshall Jacobs, a retired Florida teacher who began investigating Cox’s disappearance several years after Underwood. Jacobs eventually collaborated on a book, titled Oblivion, with Harry J. Maihafer, a graduate of West Point. Jacobs had conducted the research, while Maihafer did the writing. In their respective publications, Underwood and Marshall/Maihafer had disclosed that they’d both received thousands of pages from the government—some from the Army, some from the FBI—which provided me with ammunition for a follow-up FOIA request. In 2013, I wrote (in part):

…after reading the attached article from the 8-1-1982 issue of the Mansfield (OH) News Journal, I’d like to make a second FOIA request for FBI Bureau file 79-23729 as well as file #79-25 from the Cleveland field office. I understand that Mr. Underwood and another researcher (Marshall Jacobs, who is now deceased) received more than 1200 pages [I guesstimated] on the Cox disappearance from their FBI FOIA requests, and I would like to receive the same documents they received…

Of course, I realized that it had also been roughly 30 years since they’d submitted their FOIA requests, and a lot of purging can happen in that amount of time. Still, I thought it was worth a try. The one thing I had going for me was that, because Richard Cox had been declared dead by the state of Ohio in 1957, there was no need to provide proof of death or third-party authorization.

With little fanfare, and no apology whatsoever, the Department of Justice (DOJ), the FBI’s parent agency, sent me three CDs with 1631 pages of documents on them—which is a far cry from the original 24 pages the FBI had sent me in 2011, and serves to underscore the oft-repeated advice that one should always appeal his or her FOIA request. Why my Cox FOIA was bumped up all the way to the DOJ, I’m not sure. At the time, we were still in the middle of my FOIA lawsuit on Tammen, and they seemed to be tying the two cases together, even though they’re unrelated. (As for the Army, they’ve been harder to crack than the FBI. So far, they’ve sent me a smattering of documents, though I’m currently following up on one FOIA request.)

Incidentally, I wasn’t re-requesting the Cox files to be a thorn in anyone’s side or because I didn’t have anything better to do. I was trying to locate the source of a certain piece of information that had been mentioned on page 97 of Marshall and Maihafer’s book. What to most readers appeared as a footnote of little consequence seized my attention as if it had been written in blazing, buzzing neon.

Maihafer wrote: “Meanwhile, tips about Cox had continued to come in at the rate of nearly three a day. One report said a man resembling Cox was working at Miami University in Ohio…”

What kind of a crazy coincidence would it be to have one inexplicably missing person turning up in the same tiny university town just prior to someone else going inexplicably missing? What’s more, wouldn’t it be incredible if Richard Cox and Ronald Tammen had actually known one another? The book said that all of the leads turned up nothing. Still, I had to see the documents for myself.

I feel compelled to point out here that the documents I received from the FBI weren’t electronically searchable. They’re PDFs of old, difficult-to-decipher pages that require reading. Lots and lots of reading. On evenings and weekends, and even during a trip to Switzerland, I’d insert one of the CDs into my laptop and, folder by folder, wade through the bureaucratic minutia of names, places, and dates, until I was bored out of my mind, my lower neck muscles were screaming, or both. Periodically, I’d have to reassure myself that this wasn’t a colossal waste of my time. It took months for me to get through them all. As I was nearing the end of the third CD, when I’d just about given up hope, I found the reference to Oxford, Ohio.

The first document to catch my eye was an FBI report recounting a visit to the home of Mr. and Mrs. Curtis Sandage, of Lombard, Illinois, by agent William H. Gray. The report was dated November 21, 1952, and the visit was in response to a letter that Mr. Sandage had written to the Army’s 10th Criminal Investigation Detachment in New York, NY, on August 5, 1952. A few details of the letter were included, such as the fact that the couple had recognized Cox’s photo from a recent article in Life magazine. Although Mr. Gray didn’t specify the date of the magazine, I can tell you that it was the April 14, 1952 issue. The article can be read here (albeit not easily), beginning on page 147.

Gray indicated that the visit yielded no new information, as Mrs. Sandage had “nothing pertinent” to add to what her husband had written in the letter. In the main narrative, however, he also mentioned that the Sandages didn’t know the young man by name, but that both felt sure that “the man they knew was employed in some public or semi-public place such as a restaurant or filling station in Oxford, Ohio and that he wore sport clothing.”

About 20 pages later, I arrived at the letter, which had been reproduced in a summarizing document by the Army and thus the reason that there’s no signature. Here it is:

Page 1:

Page 2:

As the letter states, the Sandages, who were both faculty members at Miami, remember seeing Cox (or someone who looked like Cox) between January and September 1950, before they moved to Illinois. During that same winter and spring, Ronald Tammen was a junior in high school, and, that September, he was just beginning his senior year. If it were Richard Cox and he was pumping gas over the next couple years, when Ronald Tammen was at Miami, I’d think that the chances would have been pretty good that they would have bumped into one another, especially since Tammen was one of the few students with a car on campus during his sophomore year. Those are a lot of “ifs,” I know, but it’s interesting to ponder.

The Sandages have both passed away, however, I contacted a son to find out if he was aware of their potential sighting of Richard Cox. He was interested, but knew nothing about it.

I won’t be discussing Jacobs’ theory regarding what may have happened to Richard Cox in this post. Cox’s family feels strongly that the assertions made in his and Maihafer’s book are untrue, so I’ll be steering clear of that debate for now.

I will say this: Nothing I read in the FBI files indicated that they had followed up on the Oxford sighting after the November 1952 visit to the Sandages’ home. (The pages I’ve received from the Army don’t mention the potential sighting.) That also means that I’ve seen nothing to indicate that the FBI had ruled out whether the person in Oxford might have been Cox.

Although we can’t be sure that the person the Sandages knew in Oxford was Richard Cox, here’s what I come away with as a result of their story:

There’s a chance that Richard Cox and Ronald Tammen may have known one another or perhaps had a common acquaintance.
It’s also possible that their disappearances might have been related to one another.
It’s intriguing how, just five months after their visit with the Sandages to discuss a possible sighting of Richard Cox in Oxford, Ohio, the FBI was brought in to search for Tammen, who happened to disappear from, of all places, Oxford, Ohio. If anyone at the FBI wondered if there was a connection between two high-profile cases of missing college men and the town of Oxford, they didn’t put it in writing.

What does their story tell you?