BIOGRAPHY
THIS LEW ROCKWELL INTERVIEW GIVES AN ACCURATE PICTURE OF JUDYTH'S LIFE (if you wish to share it with others!)
JUDYTH VARY BAKER Judyth Vary Baker (1943– ) born South Bend, Indiana, is an American artist, writer and poet. Her work in cancer research as a teen and young adult led to later involvement in a biological warfare project aimed to eliminate Cuba's Fidel Castro. In 1963, her decision to protest the use of unwitting prisoners for a dangerous cancer experiment destroyed her cancer research career. Baker's intimate relationship with accused Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, who Baker and others say was involved in the anti-Castro effort, and was framed in a cover-up, has become the subject of documentaries, plays and books since she first spoke out to Sixty Minutes in 1999. Her book Me & Lee: How I came to know, love and lose Lee Harvey Oswald (2010) argues the innocence of Oswald, providing witnesses to Baker's affair with Oswald and documentation of their relationship, which began in New Orleans in April, 1963 and continued until Oswald's last call only two days before the assassination of President Kennedy.<p>Baker's published poetry includes A Dangerous Thing to Do, When the Clouds came Flying By (children's poems) and individual works. Her paintings, lithographs and computer art are sold worldwide. Due to harassment, threats and hospitalizations due to incidents before and after the History Channel's documentary on her relationship with Oswald (2003: "The Love Affair" Episode 8 in the A & E series The Men Who Killed Kennedy) Baker began living a secluded life in exile in Europe.</p><p>A play by playwright Lisa Soland, "The Sniper's Nest" was produced in 2012 featuring Judyth and Lee's relationship. Soland had previously planned to write the play with Oswald as guilty, but after reading Me & Lee, she presented Lee as innocent.</p><p> </p><p>EARLY LIFE</p><p>Judyth was the oldest child of Donald and Gloria Vary in South Bend, Indiana, on May 15, 1943. She was seriously ill as a young child and was hospitalized for over a year with complications from a ruptured appendix and gangrene. The event gave her a deep interest in science and medicine. She attended St. Mary's School in Niles Michigan, Southside Jr. High School in St. Petersburg, Florida, and Manatee High School in Bradenton, Florida. The Hungarian side of her family heavily influenced Baker with patriotic values due to their strong feelings for relatives who fought in the 1956 Hungarian revolution.</p><p>Baker's father, an electrical engineer, and her large extended family recognized the child's genius and encouraged her to develop skills in science and art after Baker spontaneously began to read a telephone book before age three. Baker's excellent memory, creativity and artistic talents meant that by age 8 she was quoting Shakespeare and Jane Austen, keeping the family's financial records, designing ads for her father's TV stores, and singing duets with her younger sister, Lynda, on their father's television station. By the time Baker was 10, she had learned how to put together radios and TV sets. When Baker was introduced to Robert Adler, a TV pioneer in the field, for whom her father worked from time to time in Chicago, she decided she wanted to become a scientist. When her beloved Hungarian grandmother, Anna Hoffer Whiting, passed away from cancer in 1956, Baker was determined to become a cancer research scientist.</p><p> </p><p>BEGINS CANCER RESEARCH EFFORTS</p><p>In Bradenton, Florida, Baker was befriended by Georgianna Watkins, leader of the area's American Cancer Society, who guided her earliest research projects with cancerous fish. Watkins also introduced her to Dr. Alton Ochsner, former President of the American Cancer Society, at the dedication of the Wilson Clinic near Sun City, Florida, who encouraged her efforts.</p><p>On October 17, 1958, Baker was introduced by her biology teacher to Dr. Canute Michaelson, a high-ranking Norwegian geneticist and radiobiologist with CIA ties who had served as a double agent against Hitler. Michaelson's exploits as a spy fascinated her. After Baker expressed her desire to become a cancer research scientist, Michaelson provided Baker with equipment and contacts. Two local doctors, who soon after would begin studying radiation and cancer at Oak Ridge, under the eye of the CIA, next began advising Baker in the early stages of her research.</p><p>Baker's patriotic zeal was further enhanced in high school by friendships with retired military officers, especially her science and physics instructor, Col. Phillip V. Doyle, and by local anti-Castro Cubans, including a close friendship with fellow student Tony Lopez-Fresquet, the oldest son of Castro's first finance minister, Rufo Lopez-Fresquet. After gaining national attention in science fairs for her improvement on a German method to extract magnesium from seawater, she obtained additional support for her work in cancer from Dr. David Jacobus and others at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research. Baker was sent hard-to-get anti-radioactive steroids and instructions on how to use them in her experiments.</p><p>Baker's need to use cancerous mice for her anti-cancer experiments prompted her to try to induce cancer in mice as fast as possible. By 1961, Baker, aided by famed Tampa, FL bacteriologist James A. Reyniers, induced lung cancer in weanling mice in record time under primitive lab conditions. Baker was now collecting scholarships and awards, including a placement in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search, and was becoming known across the country as a young prodigy in cancer research.</p><p>In March 1961, at age 17, she became the first high school student to attend the elite Science Writer's Cancer Research Seminar, a 5-day national meeting of science writers and the world's most important cancer research scientists, where her research was inspected by top American Cancer Society (ACS) officials, research scientists, and Nobel Prize winners Dr. Harold Urey and Sir Robert Robinson, who began to mentor her work.</p><p>At that time, Baker also met and was befriended by the three doctors credited today with wakening the world to the dangers of smoking: Dr. Harold Diehl (Sr. Vice President of Research for the American Cancer Society), Dr. George Moore (Director of Roswell Park Institute, the first hospital to ban smoking) and Dr. Alton Ochsner (founder of the famed Ochsner Clinic in New Orleans). All three doctors had testified together in lawsuits against the tobacco industry: the fact that Baker had induced lung cancer in mice in record time using concentrated tobacco smoke focused their attention on her work.</p><p> </p><p>ROSWELL PARK CANCER INSTITUTE</p><p>After Dr. Urey and the doctors examined her lab and records in her high school laboratory, Dr. George Moore invited Baker to spend the summer of 1961 in Moore's own private laboratory at Roswell Park, in Buffalo, New York, the oldest important cancer research center in the United States. There she conducted research on melanoma cancers, learned techniques for handling cancers induced by the Friend virus and the SV40 monkey virus, and helped develop a predecessor of what would become a world-famed RPMI formula for growing cancerous tissues in vitro. For most of that summer Baker also studied radiobiology with Dr. James T. Grace, handling cancer-causing viruses, including the SV40 Monkey virus, as a participant in Roswell Park's national program for science students, then under the direction of Dr. Edwin Mirand.</p><p>That same year, Dr. Ochsner, whose anti-communist views were widely known, used funding from right-wing oil baron Clint Murchison and others to establish the Information Council of the Americas (INCA) with Ed Butler as Executive Director. The main objective of the organization was to prevent communist revolutions in Latin America.</p><p>By Fall of 1961, Baker was enrolled in the medical technology program at St. Francis College (now St. Francis University) in her home state of Indiana, using a nearby hospital for her more advanced lab work. Assigned to enhance the growth rate of malignant melanoma (at Dr. Alton Ochsner's suggestion, as reported in Baker's local newspapers) the 18-year-old's new research project was well established in only two months.</p><p>Baker immediately presented information about her new project to the Indiana Academy of Science, where an abstract of her research was published, titled "Studies on the Increase in vitro of Mitotic Activity and Melanogenesis in the RPMI HA # 5 (7113) Strain Melano." the abstract mentions that her cancer research was continuing at her lab at St. Francis.</p><p>Concurrently, Dr. Alton Ochsner's work in 1961-1962 on melanoma was important enough to be recorded in his official biography: Baker says Ochsner continued to direct her work in melanoma research and encouraged her research in lung cancer, which was Ochsner's specialty.</p>Then things changed dramatically.
After nearly two years of training at Roswell Park Institute, in laboratories in Indiana, and at the University of Florida, Dr. Ochsner invited Judyth to work with noted cancer specialist Dr. Mary S. Sherman in New Orleans. After this 'summer internship' she was promised early entry into Tulane Medical School. However, she was steered into a biological warfare project aimed to eliminate Cuba's Fidel Castro, directed by Ochsner, whose organization, INCA, was famed for its anti-communist zeal. Author Edward T. Haslam has linked a linear particle accelerator that Baker said was involved in the project to Drs. Ochsner and Sherman, through a detailed study of Dr. Sherman's brutal, unsolved murder on July 21, 1964, the day the Warren Commission came to New Orleans to obtain testimonies. During this same time period, Baker met and fell in love with Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin of President John F. Kennedy. Witnesses and a mass of documentation support Judyth's efforts in what she describes as a crusade "to clear Oswald's name of a crime he didn't commit, and to reveal the cancer treatment industry's crimes. They could have cured cancer decades ago--but that would have ruined their cash cow." Due to death threats as a whistler-blower, Judyth is forced to live overseas, though she returns periodically to continue her crusade. "Everything you've been told about Lee Oswald by the government is false," she states. "Lee actually saved Kennedy's life in Chicago. The full truth is in my book Me & Lee, which has become an underground best seller." A History Channel documentary "The Love Affair" (2003) is available on YouTube. Me & Lee: How I came to know, love and lose Lee Harvey Oswald (Trine day, 2010), and Judyth's new book, David Ferrie: Mafia Pilot (Trine day, 2014), along with her many appearances on TV, radio and Internet have created a following of supporters who, she says "now understand how they've been lied to by the government--and they want justice for John F. Kennedy, for Lee Oswald, and for those who suffer from cancer. I want everybody to know that the government weaponized cancer back in 1963, that the government has patented cures for cancer--but cancer treatment is such a profitable industry that a cure for cancer is always last in line for funding." She states that Oswald was working for the FBI, and had been loaned to the CIA from the Office of Naval Intelligence, to keep watch over the cancer project "that was being developed to kill Castro, whose death by a weaponized form of lung cancer could be called a 'death by natural causes' --because previous methods tried by the CIA had all failed." Oswald's job was to identify pro-Castro spies in New Orleans, and his "pro-Castro activities," Judyth says, "were to make him look like a harmless pro-Castro fool." Judyth joins former Secret Service agent Abraham Bolden in confirming that Oswald was the informant named "Lee" who saved Kennedy's life in Chicago three weeks prior to the assassination. "I spoke of Lee's attempts to save JFK a decade before Abraham's story reached the public,"
In 2003, Judyth was filmed saying Oswald called the operation to kill Kennedy "The Big Event," several years prior to CIA's E. Howard Hunt identifying the CIA operation to kill Kennedy by the same name. For a number of such reasons, Judyth's claims are being more widely supported than when she first spoke out, except by those defending the Warren Commission's conclusions, which Baker calls "an obsolete failure and an odious obstruction of justice for both Kennedy and Oswald."
Judyth says she was ejected from the project to kill Castro because of her ethical objections to use one or more prisoners who had volunteered to test the deadly, SV-40 derived cancer bio-weapon. "They wouldn't have volunteered to be tested for something that would kill them, if it was successful," she states. After she was forced to return to Florida, Judyth was placed in a high-end chemistry laboratory, Peninsular ChemResearch, to temporarily hide her being "blackballed" from cancer research. She was then forced to leave the field altogether. Judyth says she and Oswald kept in touch after her return to Florida, and that they planned to divorce (both had unhappy marriages), but first, Oswald had to deliver the material, after it was successfully tested, to a contact in Mexico City. When the contact failed to show, Oswald suspected that he had been lured to Mexico City. Bitter over being banned from cancer research, and their plans to marry delayed when Oswald was ordered back to Dallas, Judyth was devastated when she saw Oswald shot on live TV. Judyth says Oswald was part of an "abort team" that he described to her only 37 ½ hours before the Kennedy assassination. When Baker told researcher Jim Marrs about the "abort team" in late 1999 or early 2000, at this time only a handful of insiders knew of its existence.
In 2000 Baker was nearly filmed three times by Sixty Minutes in a 14-month investigation that Sixty Minutes' founder, Don Hewitt, said was the most expensive investigation in the history of the program at that time. He stated to C-Span that "the door was slammed in our faces." But then Gerry Hemming, a legendary name in Kennedy assassination research, met Judyth, who gave him "insider information" that impressed him so much that he asked British documentary maker Nigel Turner to film her. "The Love Affair" [Episode 8: "The Men Who Killed Kennedy"] was aired by The History Channel in Nov. 2003, but none of Baker's living witnesses were included. Episode 9 ["The Guilty Men"] quickly generated lawsuit threats from former Pres. Lyndon Johnson's widow, and two former Presidents: all three new episodes [7-8-9] were quickly banned, and The History Channel apologized to the Johnsons. Over the next few years, all of the other segments of The Men Who Killed Kennedy filmed by Turner, aired for over a decade on the History Channel, were also removed. "Mr. Turner has now vanished," Judyth said. "He's obviously been told to shut up. This happens to many brave souls who dare reveal the truth."
In 2012, a 3-act play by noted playwright Lisa Soland ["The Sniper's Nest"], based on Me & Lee, began production in the United States and overseas. In 2014, Me & Lee was issued as an audiobook. Judyth, who has lived mostly overseas since 2003 due to death threats, has been hosted by supporters in nation-wide book tours in 2011, 2012 and 2013. In 2014, she was asked to host and direct The JFK Assassination Conference (held in Dallas/Arlington Nov. 22-23-24), which was financed by numerous donations from supporters.
Judyth's poetry is collected into two books: When the Clouds Came Flying By (for children) and A Dangerous Thing to Do (available on Kindle) She was co-author of a three-act play [Castles in the Sky, with John MacLean] for the Texas regional LDS Sesquicentennial. She also composes music. In 1976, Judyth's name was one of those placed on the Bicentennial Monument in Stafford, TX for civic service. Her oil and mixed-media paintings, logos and lithographs sell worldwide.
Judyth was married to Robert A. Baker, III in Mobile, Alabama in 1963. They had five children between 1968-1978: Baker says David Ferrie "warned me not to speak of what I knew, if I wished to stay alive. I was told to be 'a vanilla girl.'" She thus remained silent for 35 years. Then, when Baker's last child left home Dec. 26, 1998. she began writing a series of letters for her son to publish. "I felt guilty," she says, "after seeing the film 'JFK.' I had promised Lee I would tell his children the truth about him. I had to do it." Since then, Judyth has continued to gain support as researchers meet her and familiarize themselves with her account. Today, Judyth lives in various countries overseas. "I regret that I haven't been able to be a grandma and great-grandma," she says. "Some of my family has not forgiven me for speaking out." Judyth is currently working on three more books - one about Lee Harvey Oswald's writings (Tentative Title: The Mind of Lee Harvey Oswald --Trine Day, 2015) one about her close friend, Lt. Col. Dan Marvin [a green Beret who worked as an assassin for the CIA] and a third book about social systems and linguistics. "I hope to also find time to get some novels and short stories published more widely, too, God willing!" she says. "But first, Lee Oswald's name must be cleared, and we must wake up the public to demand a real cure for cancer that doesn't involve expensive --and often useless-- chemotherapy." Judyth can be contacted on Facebook at "Judyth Baker" or by writing Trine Day Publishers.
