Tom O’Neill explores (in Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties) the curious case of Jimmy Shaver:
After midnight on July 4, 1954, a three-year-old girl named Chere Jo Horton disappeared outside the Lackland Air Force Base, where Jolly West was stationed. Horton’s parents had left her in the parking lot outside a bar; she played with her brother while they had a drink inside. When they noticed her missing, they formed a search party.
Within an hour of Horton’s disappearance, the party came upon a car with her underwear hanging from the door. They heard shouting nearby. Two construction workers had been napping in a nearby gravel pit when a Lackland airman wandered out of the darkness. He was shirtless, covered in blood and scratches. Making no attempt to escape, he let the search party walk him to the edge of the highway. Bystanders described him as “dazed” and “trance-like.”
“What’s going on here?” he asked. He didn’t seem drunk, but he couldn’t say where he was, how he’d gotten there, or whose blood was all over him. Meanwhile, the search party found Horton’s body in the gravel pit. Her neck was broken, her legs had been torn open, and she’d been raped. Deputies arrested the man.
His name was Jimmy Shaver. At twenty-nine, he was recently remarried, with two children, no criminal record, no history of violence. He’d been at the same bar Horton had been abducted from, but he’d left with a friend, who told police that neither of them was drunk, though Shaver seemed high on something. Before deputies could take Shaver to the county jail, a constable from another precinct arrived with orders from military police to assume custody of him.
Around four that morning, an air force marshal questioned Shaver and two doctors examined him, agreeing he wasn’t drunk. One later testified that he “was not normal… he was very composed outside, which I did not expect him to be under these circumstances.” He was released to the county jail and booked for rape and murder.
Investigators interrogated Shaver through the morning. When his wife came to visit, he didn’t recognize her. He gave his first statement at 10: 30 a.m., adamant that another man was responsible: he could summon an image of a stranger with blond hair and tattoos. After the air force marshal returned to the jailhouse, however, Shaver signed a second statement taking full responsibility. Though he still didn’t remember anything, he reasoned that he must have done it.
Two months later, in September, Shaver’s memories still hadn’t returned. The base hospital commander told Jolly West to perform an evaluation: was he legally sane at the time of the murder? Shaver spent the next two weeks under West’s supervision, subject to copious psychological tests. They returned to the scene of the crime, trying to jog his memory. Later, West hypnotized Shaver and gave him an injection of sodium pentothal, “truth serum,” to see if he could clear his amnesia.
While Shaver was under—with West injecting more truth serum to “deepen the trance”—Shaver recalled the events of that night. He confessed to killing Horton. She’d brought out repressed memories of his cousin, “Beth Rainboat,” who’d sexually abused him as a child. Shaver had started drinking at home that night when he “had visions of God, who whispered into his ear to seek out and kill the evil girl Beth.” (This “Beth” was never sought for questioning.) At the trial, West argued that Shaver’s truth-serum confession was more valid than any other. And West was testifying for the defense—they’d hoped he could get an acquittal on temporary insanity.
Instead, West’s testimony helped the prosecution. Here was a psychiatric expert who believed wholeheartedly that Shaver had committed the crime, and who’d gotten him to admit it in colorful detail. While West maintained that the airman had suffered a bout of temporary insanity, he also said that Shaver was “quite sane now.” In the courtroom, he didn’t look that way. One newspaper account said he “sat through the strenuous sessions like a man in a trance,” saying nothing, never rising to stretch or smoke, though he was a known chain-smoker. “Some believe it’s an act,” the paper said, “others believe his demeanor is real.” West often treated Lackland airmen for neurological disorders. During the trial, it came out that Shaver had suffered from migraines so debilitating that he’d dunk his head in a bucket of ice water when he felt one coming on. He sought regular treatment, and the air force had recommended him for a two-year experimental program. The doctor who’d attempted to recruit him was never named.
Shaver’s medical history was scrutinized at trial, but little mention was made of the base hospital where West had conducted his MKULTRA experiments on unwitting patients. On the stand, West said he’d never gotten around to seeing whether Shaver had been treated there. I checked—Lackland officials told me there was no record of him in their master index of patients. But, curiously, all the records for patients in 1954 had been maintained, with one exception: the file for last names beginning with “Sa” through “St” had vanished.
Articles and court testimony described Shaver’s mental state just as West had described his experiments the previous summer: amnesias and trance states, a man violating his moral code with no memory of doing so. And West had written that he planned to experiment on Lackland airmen for projects that “must eventually be put to test in practical trials in the field.”
This was all the more difficult to ignore after I got the transcript of Shaver’s truth-serum interview. West had used leading questions to walk the entranced Shaver through the crime. “Tell me about when you took your clothes off, Jimmy,” he said. And trying to prove that Shaver had repressed memories: “Jimmy, do you remember when something like this happened before?” Or: “After you took her clothes off what did you do?”
“I never did take her clothes off,” Shaver said.
The interview was divided into thirds. The middle third, for some reason, wasn’t recorded. When the record picked up, the transcript said, “Shaver is crying. He has been confronted with all the facts repeatedly.”
West asked, “Now you remember it all, don’t you, Jimmy?”
“Yes, sir,” Shaver replied.
For West, this seems to have been business as usual, but it left an indelible mark on the psychiatrists who worked with him. One of them, Gilbert Rose, was so baffled by the Shaver case that he went on to write a play about it. When I reached Rose by phone in 2002, he said Shaver still haunted him.
“In my fifty years in the profession,” he said of the truth-serum interview, “that was the most dramatic moment ever—when he clapped his hands to his face and remembered killing the girl.” But Rose was shocked when I told him that West had hypnotized Shaver in addition to giving him sodium pentothal. After I read Rose citations from articles, reports, and the transcript, he seemed to accept it, but he was adamant that West had never said anything—hypnotism was not part of the protocol.
He’d also never known how West had found out about the case right away.
“We were involved from the first day,” Rose recalled. “Jolly phoned me the morning of the murder,” Rose said, giving me flashbacks to Shahrokh Hatami’s memory of Reeve Whitson. “He initiated it.”
West may have shielded himself from scrutiny, but he made only a minimal effort to exonerate Shaver. The airman was found guilty. Though an appeals court ruled that he’d had an unfair trial, he was convicted again in the retrial. In 1958, on his thirty-third birthday, he was executed by the electric chair. He maintained his innocence the whole time.
Interviews under hypnosis are known to create all sorts of “amazing discoveries” fitting desires of the hypnotist involved. Ranging from Freud’s theology of butts to the subject remembering he is a reincarnated king of land so obscure the details are not verifiable.
This alone would smell even without information gone missing.
So, a loud case, yet no great diligence from the lawyers.
Terrifying that Jimmy Shaver’s “handlers” were willing to sacrifice an innocent child, and condemn her to a brutal death, in order to run a live field test of their mind control program.
Another Dave says:
Well, maybe.
On the other hand, Shaver barely could walk, then “confessed” only under hypnosis and drugs, and even then retracted. It’s still possible he was framed.
To cover whom? Who knows. But then, let’s remember that the next infamous and weird-ass CIA gig (in 80’s) was with the “Finders”:
The Finders’ Keepers
I mean, it could be entirely coincidental, but as the saying goes, «once an accident, twice a trend…».