by Walt Brown
Aubrey Rike was an ambulance/hearse driver for O'Neal Ambulance Service on November
22, 1963. I had a chance to speak with him (we had met before at ASK, at which
he graciously appeared regularly) at the Plano East Symposium, and he comes across
as an easygoing man who was caught up in the event of a lifetime--yet an event that is still
very clear, strong, and troubling to him, although he adds that he has a number of
assassination books but hasn't read them.
He told me how he had gotten the call to collect an individual having a seizure
in Dealey Plaza (J. Belknap--not called by the Warren Commission), and how he and
his co-attendant, Dennis McGuire, had delivered Belknap to Parkland Hospital. They
were still there when the sirens indicated a sizable number of vehicles were about to enter
Parkland.
The President, it seemed, had also run into medical difficulty in Dealey Plaza.
While the immediate areas of concern at Parkland were bristling with security, and
Rike was unable to see JFK because his upper extremities were covered by Clint Hill's
sports coat, Rike remained at the hospital. One of the first things he learned was that
he--or his ambulance--might be needed to transfer the President to St. Paul's, a
Roman Catholic hospital. Before long, however, the affiliation of the hospital became
a moot point, as the President had been pronounced dead. At that point, Rike's company
delivered a casket to the hospital, and Rike became more closely involved with his
observations of the President.
Upon entering the emergency room, he observed large amounts of blood, plus JFK's
clothes, on the floor. [ed. note: Dr. Malcolm Perry has indicated that he tossed
his sport coat aside upon seeing the President on the emergency gurney.] At the same
time, the President's head had already been wrapped in a sheet, although Rike was able
to observe the front of JFK's neck and took note of what he perceived to be a "sloppy
trach." He was told at the time that there had been a bullet hole there.
He observed Mrs. Kennedy endeavoring to put her ring on the late President, and
was only able to with some help from Rike, who lubricated JFK's finger to make the
passage of the smaller ring easier.
Rike was present for the last rites, although this raises a question in retrospect,
as the priests claimed they were able to put the sacramental oil directly on the
president's forehead, not on a shroud.
Soon thereafter, Rike helped put JFK in the expensive coffin [which would later
be returned to Texas and serve as the burial place for someone else...], and in the
process noted a great deal of blood, a jagged hole, and the ability to feel brain
material--all when holding the back
of the President's head.
JFK was then placed upon a rubber sheet so the blood would not damage the white
satin lining of the expensive coffin. To clear up a confusion, I asked Rike the
"color" of that rubber sheet. He didn't fully grasp my question, so I amplified
it to say that people at Bethesda, hours later, saw
the President in what they perceived to be a "body bag," a dark, rubber bag used to
transport victims of tragedy. I then asked if the "sheet" in Dallas could have been
a source of confusion for the "body bag."
"Oh, no," Rike said. "The sheet was white plastic, with plastic on one side and
a white, rubber material that would grip and stay in place on the other side." That
cleared up a major concern.
Rike then spoke of a "fifteen-minute" custody fight between local officials, eager
to perform the legally mandated autopsy, and federal officials, secret service among
them, eager to get the President back to Washington. He indicated that the event
got so heated that the crucifix that had been attached to the top of the coffin was shaking
around and he, Rike, held on to it so that it would not be shaken loose.
I asked him if he saw any guns drawn during this encounter. He said he did not,
but he did say that he saw one agent (one presumes it was an agent, and not a JFK
aide...) reach into his coat as if to suggest the presence of a weapon there. To
me, this recollection gave credence to Rike's story, as it would have been easy for him to
spin out some fascinating tale involving more guns than the Frito Bandito or the
Russian front in WW II. But he didn't.
He told the audience, at one point, that all of his recollections--expensive coffin,
plastic sheet, damage to rear of JFK's head, were countered by opposite claims stemming
from personnel--either naval technicians or autopsy doctors--at Bethesda, to the point where JFK arrived in a cheap shipping coffin in a body bag and the back of
his head was intact. Rike indicated he could not swear any of that happened, but
he told his listeners that if it did, there was something very wrong with the event.
He was asked why he never came forward, and he gave three interesting answers to
what seemed like a simple question. First, he was called up, from the Marine Reserves,
to be sent to Vietnam, where he was shot down in a helicopter and wounded in action. It's odd, in 1964, as reserves were not being called up either that early or very
often. Second, he said he had received a call during that weekend from federal officers
whose duty station was Dallas, inviting him to come to their offices. He told them he was a busy man, and if they wanted to talk to him, they could come to his
office. Nevertheless, they repeated their offer/demand, and Rike recalls being
told by the FBI, that he, and his co-workers, should "keep our mouth shut or they
would keep it shut for us." Your tax dollars at work...
Lastly, Rike had a final concern that made a posture of silence seem sensible to him.
He told of receiving several "bogus" ambulance calls during the days preceding the
President's motorcade, and the location was usually the corner of Houston and Elm
Streets. In thinking about those "bogus" calls in the days after the assassination, and
combining that with his recollection of picking up "the epileptic" there on November
22, he saw the possibility that perhaps the seizure was part of something much bigger, and that his ambulance, cruising nearby, was supposed to have arrived a few minutes
later, and that the sound of its siren would have drowned out the sounds of the shots.
Food for thought...
Aubrey Rike was exhausted by Sunday morning, and had someone else do his shift
for him. Had he gone to work, his ambulance would have taken Oswald from the DPD
to Parkland.
He's an interesting man to talk with, and I plan to speak to him again. Maybe
that memory can be jogged just a tad with a question or two...maybe even with the
questions the Warren Commission never asked him. Postscript:
I recontacted Rike to clear up the last rites question, and he insisted that he was
present, along with only one priest, when the sacraments were given, and that the
shroud on the President's head was not removed. In our Dallas talk, he had seemed
to place a great deal of faith in the theories advanced in 1980 by David Lifton, and I
asked him in this postscript if he gave any consideration to the possibility that
the photos, not JFK, had been altered. "I sat with the fella that took the photos,"
he told me. "He said the tiles on the floor don't work, as Bethesda had a concrete floor,
and he also had a problem with the metal apparatus that was holding the President's
head, as the one at Bethesda was made of rubber."
More to follow.
Used by permission of the author. All rights reserved. JFK/DPQ
PO Box 174 Hillsdale, NJ 07642
