Audie L. Murphy Memorial Website Message Boards

I think it is entirely possible that a gun could have been shoulder-harnessed, pocketed, or bagged and moved through an airport onto an awaiting plane. I can't recall any kind of screening until 2001. I believe there was an existing law which prohibited any arms being carried aboard, except under certain conditions, such as by licensed Federal Air Marshals.

As you mentioned to me in an email, Christie, there was no gun found in the wreckage or on Audie's body after the crash. You pointed out that maybe it was lost in the brush and the search and rescue party never located it.

But I find it odd that someone took time to steal his wallet. Someone obviously rifled through his pockets after the disaster. I don't believe the wallet came loose or was torn loose from his pants.

Likewise, I think the gun would have been discovered if he even had one on the plane. Its odd that one was never found - especially since he was in the habit of carrying one.

Moreover, there have been a gazillion people on that mountainside since the disaster. Surely one of them would have found the gun if it was lost in the scrub.

If Audie had a gun before the flight began, it was either later stolen along with his wallet after the crash or the gun was taken from Audie BEFORE the flight even began.

If the gun was taken before the flight, who would have done such a thing and why? How could they have convinced Audie to give it up? Could he have been forced to give it up? Could there have been something sinister going on?

Here's another question ... did the mob benefit by having any other people on that flight killed?

If the people on that flight had mob connections, is there a chance that any of these other passengers had an FBI file?

Hmmmmmm ... now there's a really good question. Filing for a copy of the passenger's FBI file under the freedom of information act could be VERY revealling. I'll bet Graham never thought to do that.

If that plane or any of those other passengers ... or all of them... are in any way connected to the mob, then the accident has moved beyond the boundaries of an accident and it becomes a conspiracy.

What if one of those redacted FBI pages in Audie's file (or one of the pages in a passenger's or one of the mobster's files) said something about a contract being put on Audie's life because he was scheduled to testify in October '71 against the mob?

Is it unreasonable to think that the mob would put a hit out on someone that was going to testify against them? What if someone on that plane strong-armed Audie onto the plane? What if the people who strong armed Audie onto the plane didn't know that the plane was scheduled for a crash? When the plane crashed, all the major witnesses are gone. Very tidy.

Maybe Audie wasn't strong armed. Maybe he just got on board with everyone else and the contract was still carried out. Maybe there was no weapon to be lost so it was never found. Maybe the weapon was there but was lost in the scrub and is still there. Either way, a conspiracy is still possible.

Of course, the mob would never do anything like this. This kind of scenario is far beyond anything they have ever done or would ever do. For this reason, Graham gets a "bye" and we should forget this.

I know that thunderstorms are hard to arrange ... even by the mob. But maybe the thunderstorm was a lucky break. Maybe the accident would have happened in good weather too. After all, a lot of plane crashes have happened during good weather.

Sounds really crazy but I think my questions are good ones. And even if I am TOTALLY wrong, at least raising the questions and doing the research it takes to eliminate the mob connection is something that any decent researcher should and would do.

Last thought: if Audie was an undercover informant for the FBI and the mob found out which resulted in a his arranged death, Audie would be seen as a hero of even greater proportions than he already is AND it would be front page headlines even today ... but only if the information came out.

Of course, if it did come out, Graham might have to take another sabatical so he could write another book.

_________________
Richard L. Rodgers
Webmaster
Audie Murphy Memorial Website

Christie,
You Bet, most definitely, as far as boarding a plane, any plane, commercial or private, carrying a
concealed loaded weapon on your body, or if you so chose, in your luggage !!!! NO PROBLEM !!!
Did it many times prior to 9/11. Even in the late 90's, when they had x ray technology to view
the cargo going on board a commercial plane.... Shirley Jean.

Richard,
All of your questions and suppositions are very good ones. They are questions that the NTSB
should have asked and maybe didn't !!! Maybe they were told by the FBI or someone rather high
in government to "Stand Down", and not ask the obvious !!!! As I have stated before, EVERYONE
ON BOARD THAT PLANE had ties to the MOB. Maybe even Graham was told when writing his
book, DO NOT WRITE about any suspicions you might have concerning the accident if you know
what is good for you !!!! In today's day and age you never know. And as you have stated Richard,
it was common knowledge for Audie to always carry a personal handgun. Yet none was reported
as being found. And his wallet was stolen, obviously, someone, or several someone's had control
of the accident scene, with which to stage it however they wanted to. Just my thoughts. Shirley Jean.

I am doing some digging on the passengers and the crash. There just isn't enough data on the latter, I feel, to make a case for anything but an accident at the moment, although there are some interesting anomalies, like the confusion about whether Murphy was on the AeroCommander or on a Cessna that went missing around the same time, but eventually turned up ok.

I don't think Murph expected any real trouble on that particular trip, because he tried to invite Scott Turner (who lived in Atlanta) along, but Turner was out of town. Now, he did bring friends along for "backup" sometimes, as in the dog trainer incident, but they were usually boxers, bouncers, ex-military. People who could look after themselves. Turner, from the pictures I've seen, was smaller than Mr. 5'10"-in-cowboy-boots Murphy, and does not, let's say, look threatening.

I too got in touch with Don Graham. We corresponded and initially I found him very helpful.
The last time I emailed him was when he replied to correspondence I had sent him about Raymond Prater.
----------------------------------------------------------
RAYMOND AUSTIN PRATER
Austin Prater. Raised at Bonny Oaks Children’s Home near Chattanooga. Graduated from Washington & Lee in 1947 Virginia. Opened his law practice in Chattanooga in Feb, 1950
Raymond was later secretly chosen by U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy to screen the jury pool for the trial of Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa. The first Hoffa trial in Nashville ended in a mistrial because of jury tampering. A second trial was held in Chattanooga where Hoffa was convicted and sent to jail.

Raymond was lawyer and legal advisor to WWII hero and movie star Audie Murphy. Raymond died in a small plane crash with Audie Murphy.
At the time of Murphy’s death Murphy had gone to press saying that he had information that would see Jimmy Hoffa released from prison. Makes sense that Murphy would have such information given how close he was to Raymond Prater.

Prater’s knowledge of the Hoffa case would also be a reason to have him killed.

---------------------------------------------------

Don had never heard of Raymond Prater but became was very receptive to the above information when I passed it on.
His last email to me was.

‘I had never heard of Raymond Prater. Now I’m intrigued. As soon as I get time I’ll look into it.

I never heard from Don again.
As to his book “No Name on the Bullet’ what do you want. Anyone who attempts to write about Audie Murphy is in a no win situation. To catch Audie is like trying to catch smoke.
If you are interested I have more to say on the message board
under Larry Winters introduction in General Topics.

Gary Day

You are right. Audie is very difficult to pin down. I hope that the FBI file, which I am sure can answer a lot of questions, will some day be reviewed and more of the redacted portions will be revealed to the public.

We are very interested in your thoughts too. We hope you will continue to post. Also, I am glad your account is now functioning!

_________________
Richard L. Rodgers
Webmaster
Audie Murphy Memorial Website

Gary: a belated welcome! I think I might have said hi to your post in the other thread, but I ended up rambling all over the place and deleting that post, so....

You make some good points here and in the other thread. I have a couple of things to say in response.

Prater: there is some confusion about what he was doing on that fateful trip. A lot of news sources describe him as Murphy's legal advisor, but his hometown paper, the Chattanooga Times, says he was representing Modular Properties, the outfit Murphy was looking to invest in and whose plant they were all supposed to inspect. He may well have been friendly with Murph or helped him with legal matters, because his background makes him sound like Murphy's kind of people: semi-orphaned, ex-Army with time in combat, fellow Democrat. Interestingly, he seems to have been pretty meticulous about checking in with his family; Prater's wife was one of the first to become worried about the plane's fate when she didn't hear from him.

On the not-an-accident thing: there's certainly not a lack of people with motive, but there is a lack of evidence of method. Shirleyjean speculated about altimeter tampering up-thread, but that's problematic to my mind, because it seems to require a pilot who's not good with instruments (like Butler), who ignores the altimeter during the initial startup, and then becomes dependent on it sometime during the flight. That is, it requires a pilot like the one the flight had, starting out in good weather where he didn't need the altimeter, and then finding himself in unforecast bad weather, where he does need it. Not to be sarcastic but I'd like to see a theory of howdunnit that doesn't require the perpetrators to have magic weather control powers.

EDIT: I guess I owe Don Graham an apology, with regard to him glossing over that bit in the TIMES obit. Looking at Murphy's FBI file, it seems like the Los Angeles DA's office was referring to the Buccieri case when it described him as a "source of intelligence" on the mafia, and Don Graham certainly covered that at some length, though he is perhaps unfair (or uninformed) in ending the story by saying that Murphy "couldn't deliver" Buccieri. The FBI certainly seemed to regard this whole affair as a fruitful line of investigation, and the DA's office was all lined up to prosecute three or four REDACTED someones but decided to close the case when their key witness (Murphy) died.

I am a 3rd of the way through the book and he seems to just be telling a story, there is not much quoting or citing.

Also he tells a lot about the specific day that Audie Murphy was born, the weather, what was in the local paper that day as well as information around it, including Audie Murphy's being 18 when he entered the army, except the date is incorrect, well the year is incorrect.

Some things do seem to be from people who must have known Audie Murphy, but some is clearly conjecture.
Historians use conjecture all of the time, but they say it is conjecture.

A lot things ring true, but I am confused about what I can trust I what I can't, you know what I mean?

addie

He does have end notes in the back, though it can take a bit of shuffling back and to figure out what his source for a given topic, or whether it's even someone willing to speak on the record, which isn't always the case.

His primary issue, IMO, is that he sees Murphy as this tough, wild guy, very much the outlaw in spirit if not in literal fact, and relies heavily on people like Spec McClure and John Huston, who also see Murphy that way. He doesn't outright deny that Murphy had a kinder and more sensitive side, but he tends to gloss over it or dismiss stories that seem to support the idea of it. He also tends to omit things that are contextually interesting or important. For instance, he quotes one of Murph's actor friends as saying that Murphy once dumped a pail of snakes into another friend's room. This is all he says about it, when mentioning it as part of a list of outrageous or dangerous Audie Murphy pranks. But I stumbled across an excerpt another book about Murphy on google books, quoting an interview with the same actor friend, saying that both Murphy and the victim of the snake prank thought it was hilarious. There's a lot of omissions like that from NNOTB, and they add up.

Similarly, there's a couple of cases, very late in Murphy's life, where he was basically campaigning for the pardon of some pretty unpleasant people. We don't have a clear handle on his motives for doing that, and a couple of Dr. Graham's major sources on these topics are people who have a political axe to grind and seem to be kind of bashing on Murph because he's handy, so to speak.

Generally when reading NNOTB, the important thing to do is keep this search function on this forum handy, and see if there's any additional discussion here about the relevant topics. It's also worth asking: "Could the person being quoted possibly know this for real?" and "What are this person's motives for saying this?" There are a couple of cases in the book where the quoted party sounds frankly envious of Murph for one thing or another.

Another thing that Larryann and I talked about a lot was his "consistency." (Hey, I remember that word. ) We agreed that is was a good test for deciding on the validity of a source or statement. The man had this profound integrity, and because of that, his behavior was always consistent. So, when you read something that worries you, just ask yourself, "Would the man I'm coming to know have likely done that?"

Ann

_________________
"He endured the shame of being sent home a living trophy to the blood and death of too many friends"
A Myth in Action: The Heroic Life of Audie Murphy
http://www.annjoiner.com

Christie and Ann thank you both, you have given me things to keep in mind while I read the book.
Some of those references, given in the back, now that I know to look there seem pretty good, others you never know because I read an interview online, with John Huston and he said Audie Murphy did not drink, smoke, gamble, or womanize, describing him as such a straight arrow.
I will give you drinking and smoking, but it just shows, friends can be a bad source of information as well as people one has had a falling out with, sometimes. lol

addie

Of the many problems with the book, I think the one thing that I found the most annoying was that Graham draws many conclusions, of his own, based on his very questionable sources (no offense to Enquirer readers) and these conclusions of his are both, very bad, amateur psychology and pretty darn condecending, oh and some are just confusing because they do not make sense.

Also one thing he does, which is intersting, is quote verbatim, paragraphs and pages from other books, as though he needed filler or something, I don't know, but page after page of, TO HELL AND BACK, is in here, for instance.

Not that there is no value, but you have to be a little careful.
I bet this guy is good at fiction the book does flow quite smoothly.

addie

...Oh no!

If it was not just stolen--
In a conspiracy scenerio, what would be the benefit of removing Murphy's gun after the crash?
And removing it, somehow beforehand does not make sense for a plane crash, you cannot make a plane not crash by shooting it. Well, you could shoot a suicidal pilot so they wont crash the plane, I guess.

You probably can still carry a gun on charter flights.
Murphy would not put his gun in luggage, he would not be seperated from it, he seems to have not been willing to ever go without one. In story after story, he always carried a gun.

Someone going through a persons pockets when the person is so badly burned as to be nearly unrecognizable sounds very ghoulish.

Addie: agreed that the "looting" for lack of a better word was a ghoulish thing to do. As far as the gun goes, it's not implausible that it got lost in the wreckage, and I don't think anyone would have had any reason to believe it had been "taken" if the wallet hadn't been. What threw me about the gun was that one of the Research Foundation newsletters, talking about the recovery of the wallet, mentioned that the "derringer" Murphy was carrying was still lost and they hoped that if it had been taken by the same party as the wallet, that it would be returned also. A derringer is a very small, short-range weapon, useful mostly because it's easy to conceal, and I was mildly surprised that Murphy-who usually carried .45 or .38 revolvers-would bother with something like that. It seemed to imply that he was expecting to be checked for weapons at some point on the business trip, more thoroughly than usual. Not necessarily important, just odd.

I lean towards the view that the crash probably was just a crash, but the business trip involved would have looked dodgy if examined closely. Murphy did business with alot of odd people in the last years of his life, partly because his financial situation didn't allow him a lot of room to be choosy, and possibly also because it was useful for his police-related work.

I am just guessing from what he sounds like to me, but Audie would not have taken a small, hideable gun to sneak past a search at an airport. He felt he needed to carry a weapon and he felt intitled to carry one and would argue/prove that, to any official who tred to take his weapon.
Unless my thinking is too black and white here.

Someone must have it, just to have it. Like the guy who stole the Mona Lisa just to possess it. He did not want to sell it or anything, so it might never have turned up if the police had not found it.