Jim Bradshaw: What did Rose Cheramie know about JFK's death?

On Nov. 20, 1963, a 31-year-old woman known as Rose Cheramie was found lying next to the road after being hit by a car on U.S. 190 near the Silver Slipper Club in Eunice.

She was apparently quite drunk and had also been using drugs.

That’s why nobody paid much attention to her when she told a state trooper that President John F. Kennedy would be killed in Dallas “within the next couple of days.”

Rose’s real name was Melba Christine Marcades. She told Louisiana State Police Lt. Francis Fruge that she was traveling with two men from Miami to Dallas as part of a ring that hauled drugs to cities across the South.

She said they’d stopped for a drink at the Eunice club, and that the manager threw her out when she got into a drunken argument in the club.

She got back into the car when the men left the club, but the argument broke out again. She said the men threw her out of the moving car and that she was hit by another one.

Fruge testified years later, in 1979, before a congressional Select Committee on Assassinations. He said Rose/Melba had been treated at a private hospital on that night in Eunice and was not badly hurt, so he put her in a jail cell to sober up.

“This arrangement did not last long,” according to the committee report. “The woman began to display severe symptoms of withdrawal.”

Fruge called a doctor to give her a sedative and then drove her to the state mental hospital in Jackson.

He said she seemed to be quite lucid when, during the two-hour drive to the hospital, he asked her what she was going to do in Dallas.

“She said she was going to … pick up some money, pick up her baby, and … kill Kennedy,” Fruge testified.

When she got to the hospital late on November 20, she also told the doctors and nurses that the men she was riding with were going to Dallas to kill the president.

Everybody wrote it off as the ramblings of a psychotic drug addict who was going through withdrawal — until her story came true.

When he got news of the assassination, Fruge immediately called the hospital and told them not to let Rose Cheramie out of their custody.

The administrators assured him that she would be held, but said it would be several days before Rose would be able to answer any questions.

Fruge was there at the first opportunity. She told him that the accused gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, was a friend of Jack Ruby, the Dallas nightclub owner who shot and killed Oswald two days after his arrest.

She said she knew that because she had worked for Ruby, and that she had seen Oswald at Ruby’s club.

Fruge told the story to the Dallas police, but they weren’t interested in talking to Rose.

The only one who took any interest at that time was New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, who’d launched a probe investigating what he thought to be a connection between the assassination and Cuba.

He was interested in her story because the manager of the Silver Slipper said the men she was riding with that night were Cubans who were in the U.S. illegally.

Unfortunately, Rose could not help in that investigation. She was dead.

In the early morning of Sept. 4, 1965, Rose was again the victim of a car accident, this time on a lonely strip of road near Big Sandy, Texas.

The driver of the car that ran over her said that she was lying in the middle of the road and he couldn’t avoid her.

Nobody looked very hard to find out how she came to be sprawled in the road in the first place, even though hospital records indicate that she was operated on for a deep wound on the right side of her head that had all the indications of a bullet wound made at point-blank range.

The congressional committee never got to the bottom of that, but did say “her death prompted renewed speculation about her story. It was noted … that over 50 individuals who had been associated with the investigation of the Kennedy assassination had died within three years of that event.”

The committee concluded that all 50 deaths, including Cheramie, were just coincidence.

You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.