Judyth A. Vary Baker is a Florida woman who claims to have had an affair with Lee Harvey Oswald in New Orleans in the summer of 1963. She also claims involvement in a wide-ranging conspiracy to kill John F. Kennedy, which included the CIA and a number of people traditionally associated with JFK assassination lore. Various contradictions and inaccuracies in her claims have been noted, and they are not widely believed.

Baker claims to have been a top science student involved in a plot in New Orleans along with Oswald and David Ferrie to develop a biological weapon with which to assassinate the Cuban premier, Fidel Castro. She says that she had an intense sexual affair with Oswald at the time. She says the plot failed because the plotters could not make contact with an agent who was supposed to deliver the cocktail of viruses and carcinogens to Castro in Cuba, so the plotters decided to kill United States President instead.

Early life

Judyth Anne Vary Baker was born May 15, 1943 in South Bend, Indiana to Donald William and Glorianne Whiting Vary. She has a sister named Lynda. She was raised a Christian, but was briefly an atheist in the early Sixties before turning on to God again in 1966.

The saga begins

Judyth's story begins when she was a student at Manatee High School in Bradenton, Florida with her sister. Among fellow students who remember her, opinion is about evenly split between remembering her as "intelligent" and remembering her as "weird," but by the age of 15, Judyth achieved a reputation as a science whiz kid, having come up with a way to extract magnesium from seawater. She appears to have been an excellent science student.

Her real passion, though, was cancer research. She started to conduct "cancer research" with mice. Col. Philip Doyle set up a special lab for Judyth at her high school and introduced her in 1958 to CIA asset Dr. Canute Michaelson, who provided financial support for her initial work and was engaged in bioweapons research. She received a fair amount of recognition for her academic prowess, attending national workshops for science students.

Her appearance at an international science fair brought her to the attention of other medical figures with military or intelligence backgrounds, as well as top officials of the American Cancer Society: Dr. Harold Diehl and Dr. Alton Ochsner (of the famed Ochsner Cancer Clinic in New Orleans). Ochsner was to become Judyth's principal behind-the-scenes mentor through her late teen years.

More cancer research

Judyth's lab was soon expanded and she received research materials from doctors at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, Eli Lilly, Oak Ridge, et al. As of September 2, 1960, Dr. David Jacobus at Walter Reed was supplying her with chemicals and promising more.

She was forced to take a loyalty oath and, while still in high school, was required to learn conversational Russian at a local junior college from a Dr. Concevitch who sent her letters in yellow mailing envelopes. She still does not know why she had to learn it. She did know that Michaelson had somehow targeted her for future intelligence use.

Her work came to the attention of Florida Senator George Smathers, a close friend of JFK's, who encouraged her to write to the President and volunteer to put her talents to work in the service of her country. She soon got a reply from the White House. While not very dramatic, she soon received fresh supplies, as Sen. Smathers told her she would.

Killers and the women who love them

The interesting time in her life was the summer of 1963, when she was in New Orleans. It was there that she began a torrid sexual affair with Lee Harvey Oswald, in spite of having been recently married on May 2, 1963 to Robert Allison Baker III, a student and future petroleum geologist who was working for an oil company. What brought Judyth and Lee together was a plot, centered in New Orleans, to produce a bioweapon for the purpose of killing Fidel Castro. The plotters got them both cover jobs at the Reily Coffee Company while they were carrying on an affair and trying to produce a 'cocktail' to administer to Castro. The 'cocktail' would include both a virus designed to knock out Castro's immune system, and cancer cells that would infect him and cause his death.

Other participants in the plot included David Ferrie – every conspiracy author's favorite suspect – and Dr. Mary Sherman, a physician at the Oschner Clinic . The research was done in the apartments of Ferrie and Sherman.

Oswald's famous trip to Mexico City was for the purpose of delivering the poison 'cocktail' to an agent who would see to it that it got into Cuba and was administered to Castro. Oswald made it to Mexico City, but unfortunately the agent never arrived to claim the materials, and the plotters decided to kill John Kennedy instead.

However, instead of using their sophisticated bioweapon concoction on him, they decided to simply shoot him. Oswald, who liked Kennedy, was an unwilling participant in the plot, but never defected nor told the authorities about the plan. He was in Dealey Plaza as a shooter, but intentionally missed Kennedy, although other shooters, of course, killed the President. Lee and Judyth had planned to meet in Mexico should he make it out okay, but he never made it, dying November 24, 1963.

Judyth has completed her own article on this subject, "Judyth Vary Baker and the Exoneration of Lee Harvey Oswald," in addition to an article (based on the last chapter of her upcoming book) called "Before the Silence Came: Lee's Last Telephone Calls."

Aftermath

In 1964, before omerta was applied to the participants in the JFK/Castro matter, Judyth published a story collection called Her Way and Other Science Fiction Stories. The title story, originally called "Her Story," was co-written with Lee Oswald. Judyth had always been interested in writing, particularly poetry and screenwriting. The rest is best described in her essay, "My Boring Life," published [- here].

In 1965, she received an AA at the University of Florida while living in Gainesville with her husband. By the next year, however, she was living in and around Houston, participating in various things. She then moved to the mountains of Saltillo, Mexico.

She has written many novels, including one called "Six Foot Seven," written in 1967, which focuses on Oswald, his friend Gerry Patrick Hemming (the title is a reference to his height), and her feelings of betrayal at the whole JFK/Castro matter. She wrote it while in the Saltillo mountains and had many additional adventures while there.

In 1968, she had her first child, Susan. She ended up having four more children (Josiah, James, John, and Sarah). In the midst of parenthood, however, she was still mixed up in old entanglements to the man who nearly hit Castro and killed JFK. In 1973, she was named as a consultant to the Ochsner Lung Cancer Research Laboratory Fund in New Orleans, though it is unclear whether she actually served in that capacity or was named in that capacity to keep her mouth shut.

By 1986, she was cutting through personal problems and attending the University of Houston, where she graduated that year with a BS in anthropology. This degree led to a lifelong interest in archaeology and anthropology. The next year, she divorced Robert Baker, left entanglements he had set her up with, and moved temporarily to Norway.

It was now 1996 when she caught up with herself. She had gotten far and accomplished much more than is put here or even in her essay. Only three or four years before had she been running several companies, including the Living History Corporation (a for-profit corporation situated in the state of Florida, dissolved in 1991), the American Genome Society (a not-for-profit corporation situated in the state of Florida, with a Louisiana address, which solicited donations that were anywhere from $25 to $100), and the American Cream Puppy Breeders' Association (linked with her new dog breed, the American Cream Dog), not to mention running a magazine of creative writing at about the same time and editing for a college magazine. She moved back to the US and back to Florida to be closer to her sisters and parents. She attended the University of Central Florida and graduated with an MA in creative writing and linguistics. She then felt like moving again and wound up back in a familiar place that opened old wounds: New Orleans.

She needed a job and soon found a welcome one as an instructor at Southwestern University in Lafayette, Louisiana. No sooner had she gotten there than she published another short story collection, A Place When the Sun Goes Down. She was also running many things out of her office at La Griffin Hall on university grounds.

We have to explain here that though she wasn't exactly keeping out of the public eye, she also wasn't using her real (or known) name either. She published at various times under the name Marianne Whiting or Judyth Avary Baker or even as Avary Baker.

In 1999, she completed a book about her relationship with Oswald called From Dallas With Love: Lee Harvey Oswald and Judyth Vary -- Their Love. She first came forward by posting an ambiguous review of a book about JFK-related things by Ed Haslam at Amazon.com under the name "Avary Baker." Then she and her supporters took to the newsgroups. In 2002, due to real or imagined threats, she moved to the Netherlands. However, due to many complications, critics, and online boos, she has had to postpone publication of her book until 2005. One year ago, she presented her story in a segment of the History Channel series "The Men Who Killed Kennedy." Currently, she is in an unknown location, having relocated after another series of threats.

Only time will tell if she is accurate.

External links

• "Judyth's Story" by Jim Phelps, a sympathetic account of Baker's claims.
• Skeptical evaluation of Baker's claims by John McAdams , with copies of several primary sources from previous drafts of her book (now mostly out of date).

---

See also: Lee Harvey Oswald, Alton Ochsner