Delphine Roberts has been discussed on this newsgroup recently. I thought I would post Posner's treatment of her, from CASE CLOSED, pp. 139-141. --------------------------------------------------------------- The House Select Committee on Assassinations, however, reexamined the issue in the late 1970s. Two witnesses now told the Select Committee they saw Oswald at 544 Camp Street with Banister. One was Jack Martin, a former private investigator who sometimes worked with Banister. . . . The second witness was Guy Banister's former secretary, Delphine Roberts. In one interview, she told the committee that Oswald had never visited 544 Camp, but in a subsequent one she said he had been in Banister's office several times. The Select Committee concluded that because of the contradictions in Roberts's statements "and lack of independent corroboration . . . the reliability of her statements could not be determined. . . . " Anthony Summers interviewed Roberts in 1978, and she told him a different, and wilder, story than the one she gave to the Select Committee. Roberts said that Oswald had come to 544 Camp Street and she interviewed him to become "one of Banister's agents," that he maintained an office on the floor above them, and that he often visited privately with Banister. Summers interviewed Roberts's daughter, also named Delphine, who claimed she used an upstairs room for photographic work. She said that Oswald kept his pro-Castro pamphlets in an office at 544 Camp and he came there often and knew Banister. Many subsequent conspiracy writers, as well as Oliver Stone in the film JFK, have relied heavily on these statements. The author located both Delphine Roberts and her daughter in New Orleans. The mother is still a rabid anti-Communist and racist who rails against the U.N. Charter and "niggers." She says, "Jesse Jackson is a satan in the skin of a human" and contends that every Japanese "should have been wiped off the face of the earth." She claims to be related to the "king and queen of Wales [sic] and Mary Queen of Scots," as well as "being one of the very few, since the beginning of the world, who has ever read the sacred scrolls that God himself wrote and gave to the ancient Hebrews for placing in the Ark of the Covenant.... I think I have been the last person to see them." Roberts asserts there was "Communist involvement" in the JFK assassination, talks vaguely of a dead pigeon being brought to her by a stranger, which was then sent off to JFK as a threat, and claims she is writing a book about the assassination, "although it will also tell the story of the Creation." She warmly remembers that she first met Guy Banister when she was demonstrating in downtown New Orleans "for states' rights, and against the niggers," with a Confederate flag draped behind her. She said she not only became Banister's secretary but his mistress as well. As for Anthony Summers, Delphine Roberts admits, "I didn't tell him all the truth." She claims the only reason she told him the story she did was that Summers, then shooting a television documentary, paid her money. Roberts, who lives with her daughter, survives on welfare. "He [Summers] said our information wasn't worth much," she says. "He did give us $500 eventually, and they did take us to dinner. We did enjoy the dinner." John Lanne, a former Banister friend and attorney, acknowledges that Roberts refused to speak to Summers unless she was paid. As unreliable as Delphine Roberts is regarding the Oswald/544 Camp Street issue, her daughter spins an equally untenable tale. She told the author that Oswald did not have an office at 544 Camp, but rather that "he lived there, had an apartment there, for two or three months." Oswald came to 544 Camp at night and left every morning, she said, during the same period that Marina said he was never away from their house for a single evening (except his overnight stay in jail). She also says she met Oswald's mother and that "she was lovely." Marguerite lived in Texas during 1963. When Oswald finally abandoned his "apartment," Delphine claimed he left behind "boxes and boxes of pamphlets, everything, just everything." [FOOTNOTE] Anthony Summers told the author that he had met with Delphine Roberts at John Lanne's office. There, Lanne, whom Summers "thought to be fairly mad, certainly odd," pulled a pistol from his desk, waved it in the air, and told Summers he could not interview his client, Delphine. Summers drove Delphine home from that meeting, and during the ride, "she suddenly, more or less, broke up, put her hands to her face, and said, 'Mr. Summers, look, why should I bottle this up?'" She then told him the story he wrote in his book. Following that discussion, Summers told Roberts that he wanted to do an interview for television. He says that "several days later, at the urging of her daughter, Delphine Jr., a big fat lady, she agreed to do the interview not for $500, but if I rightly recall, for $250 to $300." Summers says, "Just so you know, the general tariff I make is that I do not pay people to do interviews for the book, ever, but I do regard television interviews as a different thing" (Interview with Anthony Summers, May 31, 1993). ------------------------------------------------------------------