Penn Jones and the Thomas Merton Death Cover-Up

In the late spring of 1969 Penn Jones, Jr., traveled to Thailand, purportedly to investigate Thomas Merton’s death. John Howard Griffin, a friend of Merton who had been chosen to write Merton’s authorized biography, later wrote to John Moffitt, the poetry editor of the Jesuit America magazine who had shared the cottage where Merton died in Thailand, to inform him that Jones had photographed the room where Merton had died, and a Hitachi fan was there, just like the one that was lying across Merton in the photograph taken by the witness Fr. Celestine Say.

Jones also traveled to the Philippines where he met with Fr. Say and Fr. Bernardo Perez. Say later wrote to Moffitt that Jones implied to him during that visit that he suspected that there was a strong possibility that Merton had been murdered and that it could be related to the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Kennedy (He didn’t say which Kennedy.).

Griffin, famous for his book, Black Like Me, and Jones were close friends who lived only 12 miles apart in Texas. Jones owned a small newspaper in Midlothian. He was a professional journalist, best known as a pioneer John F. Kennedy assassination “conspiracy theorist.” Jones wrote Forgive My Grief, a four volume critical review of the Warren Commission Report on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Griffin wrote the preface of Volume One in 1966.

Jones also co-edited The Continuing Inquiry newsletter with Gary Mack, the curator of the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza. The museum, as the name implies, is on the sixth floor of the former Texas School Book Depository where Lee Harvey Oswald is said to have been positioned when he shot President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, according to the Warren Commission Report and its virtually unanimous advocates in the press.

Griffin had been a contributor to The Continuing Inquiry, and he once wrote about the FBI’s influence over Catholic Church leaders, Cardinal Spellman of New York in particular.

James W. Douglass, author of JFK and the Unspeakable, mentioned the Penn Jones “investigation” of Merton’s death in the published version of his keynote address to the International Thomas Merton Society meeting on June 13, 1997. In that version Douglass said that he had posed the question of Merton’s death to Roberto Bonazzi, the biographer of John Howard Griffin and also a friend of Penn Jones. Bonazzi responded that Jones had gone to Bangkok and investigated Merton’s death, and he had found no evidence of murder. Curiously, though, in his actual oral presentation, he addressed Merton’s death only in response to a question, and then he spoke of the suspicions of foul play raised by Andrew Young in his book, An Easy Burden.

We asked Bonazzi by email about this Jones investigation of Merton’s death. Bonazzi told us that Griffin believed that when Jones went to Bangkok and investigated Merton’s death and came up with nothing, that had settled the matter that the death was an accident. But after Jones returned from Thailand, he apparently wrote nothing at all about Merton’s death. Bonazzi knew of nothing that Jones had written on the subject, and we have been unable to find anything, either.

Douglass may have been naïve to accept the second-hand word of Jones. The Jones investigation of Merton’s death raises many questions. If Griffin thought it proved Merton’s death was an accident, how so?

Who paid for Jones’s trip to Asia? It was very expensive in 1969 to fly to Thailand and the Philippines. * What could Jones possibly have hoped to find by traveling to Thailand and visiting Merton’s room six months later?

If Jones had obtained the official death certificate and doctor’s certificate while he was in Thailand, he might have accomplished something. He could have learned, for instance, that these documents falsely stated that Merton’s body was taken to the hospital for an autopsy in accordance with the law. He would have also seen that none of them concluded that Merton had died from an accident, but from heart failure. But those documents had been given to Fr. Rembert Weakland, who presided over the monastic conference where Merton had died, and they had also been mailed to Abbot Flavian Burns of Merton’s home Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky. Jones, therefore, did not have to travel all the way to Thailand to obtain them. Jones might have obtained the original Thai police report and investigative records, but there is no indication that he did. It looks, rather, as if the expert JFK assassination researcher failed to obtain even the most basic official Thai documents on Merton’s death. If Jones, the journalist, interviewed any witnesses other than Say, he said nothing about it.

Celestine Say, A Threat to the Cover-Up?

Jones told Say that he strongly suspected Merton was murdered. Then Jones told Griffin that he found no evidence of murder. What changed his mind? There is something very peculiar about Jones traveling all the way to the Philippines for apparently no other purpose than to tell Say that he suspected that there was a good possibility Merton had been murdered.

It looks very much like Jones’s primary purpose in traveling to Asia was not to nose around the crime scene but, rather, to learn whether Say represented any sort of a threat to the cover-up. Griffin told Moffitt that Say had given more information to his investigator than he did to either of them in his letters. Considering how much Say revealed in his letters this is an intriguing statement. And for some reason Griffin didn’t tell Moffitt the name of his investigator.

In a later letter, Griffin wrote to Moffitt that Say had spoken to his investigator. We know from Say that Jones visited him in the Philippines. Griffin said only that “his investigator” visited Say in the Philippines. Jones reported to Griffin that he had seen a Hitachi fan in the room where Merton died. Jones and the investigator both reported to Griffin, so there is hardly any doubt that they are the same person. Nailing the matter down further, in a later short note to Moffitt, Griffin revealed that Jones was that investigator. He just never said that this was the same person who interviewed Say in the Philippines. In that note, by the way, Griffin related from his investigator that, contrary to the assertion of the dubious witness who should have been treated as a suspect, Fr. François de Grunne, who had said that they had all been removed because of the danger that they had been shown to represent, all of the Hitachi fans were still in place at the Thai retreat center.

It is interesting that Jones would tell Say that he believed that Merton was assassinated since Jones was working for Griffin. Griffin was always quick to reject the possibility of assassination. It looks very much like Jones was trying to draw Say out to confide in him any opinion or knowledge that he might have that could cause trouble for the cover-up.

Penn Jones Resembles Chris Ruddy

The existence of agents who offer false opposition to nefarious or odious actions by the government is hardly an unknown phenomenon. Penetrating the leadership of an enemy is part of the CIA’s admitted tradecraft. If the enemy happens to be American citizens who suspect the CIA of domestic skulduggery, it follows that they would use the technique on them, as well. From the JFK assassination to 9/11 to the case of a number of the highest profile alternative media government critics, suspicions of such supposed fake opposition abounds.

The experience of both authors with one such person in the Vincent Foster case carries us beyond mere suspicion. We speak of the former reporter for the New York Post, the Pittsburgh Tribune Review and current editor of Newsmax, Christopher Ruddy. Ruddy gained prominence as virtually the only reporter in the country to look into the Foster death critically.

Both David Martin and Hugh Turley, the latter in particular, gave a great deal of their time in assisting Ruddy when he came to the Washington, DC, area. He almost always stayed at Turley’s house, and since he never rented a car, Turley would always pick him up at Washington’s National Airport when he flew in from New York on the Delta Shuttle and drive him around for his appointments.

Ruddy was also responsible for Martin beginning work on what became the six-part online article, “America’s Dreyfus Affair, the Case of the Death of Vincent Foster,” after Martin had told Ruddy of some similarities that he had seen in the two cases. At the time, the mainstream media dismissed Ruddy as a wild-eyed conspiracy theorist. He was even a guest on CBS’s 60 Minutes where, to the average viewer, he appeared to be humiliated by Mike Wallace.

Now he has disavowed his previous hard-hitting work, leaving a lot of explaining to do, like all of the evidence of foul play that he presented in his book, The Strange Death of Vincent Foster. But his newfound “respectability” has served him well. As a big contributor to the Clinton Foundation, he has become very close to this power couple that at one time everyone thought he was out to get. He is also eagerly sought out for interviews by the mainstream press to offer his insights and wisdom on major affairs of the day. His opinions are particularly valued because he is a friend of fellow New York native and West Palm Beach, Florida, resident, President Donald Trump, and is thought to be an informal adviser.

What could be responsible for Ruddy’s transformation? Actually, it is very clear that he is the same Christopher Ruddy that he always was. As an independent truth seeker he was just playing a role. Some things he accomplished in that role were to monopolize and personify the opposition to the government and the mainstream press, to discover what the genuine independent truth seekers were up to, and to determine where those perpetuating the cover-up might encounter problems that needed to be addressed.

Penn Jones, Jr., went through a similar apparent “mellowing” process, from being one of the first journalists to dig up evidence that appeared to contradict the Warren Commission’s two-lone-crazed-gunmen (Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby) conclusion to working with Gary Mack at the Sixth Floor Museum. As far as transformations go, Mack’s was the more Ruddy-like of the two. A Dallas television journalist, Mack started out as a “conspiracy theorist” in the JFK assassination case, but by the time he died in 2015 at the age of 68, he had come around so far to the side of the government that he merited a glowing obituary in The New York Times.

Jones never went quite so far as Mack, and we might be accused of tarring him with guilt by association. After all, we once worked closely with Christopher Ruddy. But as soon as we figured out what Ruddy was about, we put as much distance between him and ourselves as possible. Jones, on the other hand, got closer to Mack after Mack had really dropped all pretense of being an independent seeker of truth in the JFK case. Also, like John Howard Griffin and Christopher Ruddy, and unlike the current authors, they were both professional American journalists.

Returning to Jones’s early 1969 Asian odyssey, if there were precipitating events causing Jones’s handler Griffin to send him off to the Philippines, they might have begun with an article published in the Philippines based on the accounts of Say and Fr. Bernardo Perez. That article raised doubts about the Thai police conclusion of death due to heart failure, because there had been no autopsy and Merton had no history of a heart condition. Then Say sent what had to be an alarming March 1969 letter to Abbot Flavian with the photograph he had taken of the body and asking about the autopsy results. The following month Perez wrote a long article for the Philippine Free Press that called Merton’s death “absurd” if it was indeed caused by electrocution. These events surely would have made Griffin curious to learn if Say and Perez suspected Merton had been murdered.

If there were reasons for Say and Perez to be suspicious they needed to be addressed. As Griffin told Moffitt, he had a responsibility to dispel the suspicions or resolve the contradictions. Jones would report back to Griffin, probably much to Griffin’s relief, that Say and Perez did not suspect murder.

Say informed Moffitt about the visit from Jones and told him it just seemed too far-fetched that Merton was murdered and that it was connected to the Kennedy and King assassinations. Say told Moffitt that he believed that Merton’s death was caused by a heart attack or electrocution.

Say only asked about the autopsy because he wanted to know if there was any clarification of whether the death was the result of a heart attack or of electrocution. One monk had told Say that he “practically killed [Merton] for not coming to his rescue earlier.” Say felt regret that he had not been able to save Merton. If he had known for certain that Merton had died of a heart attack, it might have eased his conscience.

Say probably never imagined that Merton was already dead when Say got to the cottage and that the crime scene had been quickly and neatly arranged. It had apparently not occurred to him that an autopsy might have found additional wounds not consistent with an accident or a heart attack, such as the wound in the back of Merton’s head, unmentioned by the police, that authorized biographer Michael Mott says had “bled considerably.” Perhaps it was fortunate that Say was not suspicious. If Say had suspected that Merton was murdered it might have been unwise—even dangerous—to share his suspicions with Jones.

As noted, we have found no evidence that Jones ever did anything in the wake of Merton’s death that is worthy of being called any sort of an investigation. There is only the unwarranted inference made by Roberto Bonazzi and second hand by James Douglass that if Jones, the JFK researcher, found no evidence of murder that alone “proves” that Merton’s death was an accident.

Few people ever suspect journalists would act as agents to cover up state-sponsored secret assassinations. One of the few people who was astute enough in 1968 to have suspected such things would have been Thomas Merton.

* Phillip Nelson, who has written two books on the John F. Kennedy assassination makes these further observations in his review of The Martyrdom of Thomas Merton: “That sudden trip, in and of itself, is most curious, considering that Jones was not a wealthy man and most reports indicated that he ran his weekly newspaper on a very small budget. 

“Among Penn Jones’ other close friends or associates [besides Gary Mack] were Hugh Aynesworth, a Dallas reporter and strong supporter of the Warren Commission’s most ludicrous findings, and many other similarly-deluded researchers including Dave Perry, also a close associate of Gary Mack, who tried, unconvincingly, to discredit Dr. Charles Crenshaw’s testimony about having received a telephone call from the new president Lyndon Johnson while attempting to save Lee Harvey Oswald’s life.  Jones was also similarly connected to Bud Fensterwald, who many truth-seeking researchers believe was a CIA operative.  Another associate of Jones was Gordon McLendon, a Dallas-based wealthy owner of major radio stations in some of the largest cities in the country, whom many researchers have connected to CIA operative David Atlee Phillips and wealthy oilman (and suspected financier behind JFK’s assassination) Clint Murchison and Bobby Baker, Lyndon Johnson’s conduit to Mafiosi throughout the country.  McLendon had also known and associated with Jack Ruby.

“Moreover, Jones was also very closely connected to Mary Ferrell, whom researcher Harrison Edward Livingstone described at length in his 1993 book Killing the Truth: Deceit and Deception in the JFK Case. Livingstone summarized his opinions (with which many other long-time researchers agree) by calling her the “gatekeeper” and the head of a “sophisticated private intelligence operation . . . a de facto secret society in Texas, run by powerful people there, to protect the name and reputation of Texas and to protect those who were involved in the murder of John Kennedy.” [Livingstone, pp. 386–396].”

December 10, 2018

Adapted from Chapter 18 of The Martyrdom of Thomas Merton: An Investigation by Hugh Turley and David Martin.

Home Page Column Column 5 Archive Contact