On today’s episode, I’m speaking with Ed Haslam, a researcher and author of Dr. Mary's Monkey: How the Unsolved Murder of a Doctor, a Secret Laboratory in New Orleans and Cancer-Causing Monkey Viruses Are Linked to Lee Harvey Oswald, the JFK Assassination and Emerging Global Epidemics. This incredible saga teems with murder, conspiracy and a host of connections between people that you might not think were related. Some of the topics we broach include the murder of Dr. Mary Sherman, how the polio vaccine is likely related to the current cancer epidemic, how the issues concerning the polio vaccine led to the framing of Lee Harvey Oswald for the murder of John F. Kennedy, and how the Cuban missile crisis fits in.

Ed’s interest in the topic was piqued by his father’s profession. The senior Haslam taught orthopedic surgery at Tulane Medical School in New Orleans and was a colleague of Dr. Mary Sherman, whose murder in 1964 affected the Haslam family. Ed asked his father as a child if he could have a pet monkey, and his father said no, explaining that monkeys carried dangerous diseases, a fact that Ed later researched further in his efforts to piece together the circumstances surrounding Dr. Sherman’s suspicious death.

Here are some of the topics you’ll hear about in the podcast:

8:35 The gruesome details of Dr. Sherman’s death were rife with inconsistencies, including the fact that her arm and ribcage were burnt to the point of disintegration, a fact that was never released to the media.

15:12  Sarah Stewart, a researcher at the National Cancer Institute, and Bernice Eddy, an epidemiologist with the National Institutes of Health, discovered that polyomavirus, a component of the first polio vaccines that was derived from the monkeys whose kidneys the vaccine was grown on, was responsible for causing cancer in humans.

23:00  Dr. Alton Oschner, a major stockholder at Cutter Laboratories, one of the labs producing the polio vaccine, inoculated his grandchildren with the vaccine in an effort to prove its safety. Within 48 hours, his grandson was dead and his granddaughter was infected with polio.

32:32  A lab was set up on federal property in New Orleans at a national public health hospital. The goal was that the dangerous monkey virus would be radiated to make it benign. The machine used was a linear particle accelerator, which is the machine Ed believes was used to burn Dr. Sherman’s arm and ribcage at the time of her death.

41:49  The CIA and the Mafia worked together to find a way to kill Fidel Castro following the Cuban missile crisis. They decided to try to weaponize the monkey virus project to design bio-warfare against Castro, leading the project in a new direction. In the meantime, a teenager from Florida, Judyth Vary Baker, was conducting high-quality cancer research at her home lab. She was brought onto the team and trained at the Roswell Park Cancer Research Institute so she could perform secret research.

52:37  Lee Harvey Oswald was hired to protect Judy during her stay in New Orleans. The two began cover jobs at the Riley Coffee Company. The two would later end up falling in love and having an affair.

59:35  In order to test the biological weapons being created, the medical research team took “volunteers” from death row at Angola Penitentiary and brought them to be experimented on at East Louisiana State Mental Hospital in Jackson, Louisiana.