Dr. Dewhurst’s Tattoo Man and Snuff Films
This post can be considered Part Three of the series Dennis Kaufman’s Photo Chicanery
Dennis Kaufman’s Photo Chicanery – Part One
Dennis Kaufman’s Photo Chicanery – Part Two
Dr. Stephen Dewhurst decided to share a few words with the members and readers of Dennis Kaufman’s message board. It was rather obvious that some of his comments were directed to me and this blog. I have extracted the relevant passages from his rather lengthy diatribe, and placed them here. Of course, had Dr. Dewhurst addressed this blog personally, Dennis would have cut him out of the loop and thus made his access to the FBI’s investigation a little more difficult. However, I want to be sure that the other side of the story is heard, as well as mine. I am not one of those that "shouts down" the opposition, On the contrary, I have given every opportunity for the other side to present their case. I have provided links to their online material, invited them for interviews, allowed them to guest post at ZodiacKillerTRUTH.com, allowed them access to the comment sections and forums, and I am willing to work with them in any reasonable means to insure fairness. You see, they simply will not participate in any forum where their claims are cross-examined. I think that says a lot about their character, but more importantly –it says a lot about their claims and allegations. They just can’t stand up to scrutiny and they know it. The following quotes are from Dr. Dewhursts post on Dennis Kaufman’s message board. The commentary is mine.
Rick seems to have revealed the identity of the "Tattoo Man", and it seems that his information may in fact be correct. Rick states that Mr Noel died in a drunken fall from a railway bridge (supposedly about 15 feet).
I can confirm that this is indeed true information.
I have seen all of the pictures of this man from the negatives Dennis found in Jack’s stuff, and it seems quite clear that the individual in the pictures did not die from a fall alone. He is lying next to a railroad track, and he has been brutally beaten on both the front and back of his body. His face is smashed, seemingly from being head-slammed, face-first, into the rocks of the rail bed. A scattered area of blood is visible some distance from the body, where it looks like his face was pounded into the rocks. If the Port Huron police looked at these photos and this victims injuries, and concluded that he died from a 15-foot fall, then they need to get their eyes examined.
I guess Dewhurst can tell a lot more from a photograph than the investigators and medical examiner, who had access to the actual body and scene of the accident. Dewhurst makes a lot of assumptions from a single photograph. We find that this is a pattern.
The story that some family member just happened along with a camera, not knowing what happened, and then calmly and systematically took pictures of the body before calling the police, smells pretty suspicious to me. The body in the photos is fresh and fairly pink, and the individual looks to have been dead for only a few minutes when the photos were taken. It seems pretty unlikely that someone just happened upon the body so soon after death without hearing or seeing what happened. I’m not buying the "nobody knows what happened" statement, and I think somebody knows a lot more than they are admitting about this event, which looks like a homicide to me.
It is not unusual for people to take photographs. I’m sure whoever took them knew that once the police arrived, their chance would be gone. At the time, they may have been wondering what had happened themselves and may have been trying to gather evidence for their own investigation. Of course, this explanation isn’t sensational, so it must be wrong. Here again, Dewhurst continues to make judgments from a single photograph. I imagine that if you fall from a bridge onto a hard surface, it’s going to look like murder. Accidents can cause a lot of bodily trauma. We do not know if Mr. Shaw fell directly to the ground, or if he struck anything on the way down. We simply don;t have enough information from this photograph to make a secondary judgment.
(Note: Richard Larsen has left a comment wherein he claims that the photos were taken by police. It is unknown how they came into the family’s possession.)
One other thing I find a little weird: Mr Noel died in January in Michigan. The clothes on the Tattoo Man do not look like winter clothes. The ground around him, and the background, do not look like winter in Michigan to me. The records for that month do show warmer than normal conditions, but something just doesn’t look right.
Dewhurst said it himself: "warmer than normal conditions." Perhaps Mr. Dewhurst has been too long in Arizona. Take a look at people in the winter. You often find people under-dressed for the weather. As far as that goes, look how many people wear jackets in the summer. Toboggans also seem to be a fad. This isn’t the 1950s. People don’t dress accordingly anymore. They wear what they have. They wear what they like. As far as "winter in Michigan," again, Dewhurst is making judgments from a single photograph which is bound by the limitations of it’s view.
Also, while there seems no clear link between Jack Tarrance and Mr Noel’s death, the fact that these negatives were found in Jack’s possessions raises questions about why he had them, and how he got them.
It was his Dennis’s half sister who is in the picture. Where’s the big mystery? Again, we have sensationalism instead of simple logic.
Think about it: put 1000 random people in a room, and ask "everyone raise your hand who has original photographic negatives of a murdered dead body in your house", how many do you think would raise their hands?
Once again, this is not a murder. The situation has been explained ad nauseum.
I believe there is more to this story, and that the final act has yet to be played on this. The most important point for me, however, is that these pictures are not important at all in the real case against Jack Tarrance. The FBI has in no way based their case on these photos. I was there when they looked them over, in July of 2008, and it did arouse their curiosity. Ironically, the comment was made by the FBI that "with that tattoo, somebody is going to recognize him". But, they viewed these pictures as circumstantial evidence at best, until the victim was identified and could somehow be tied to Jack. They have the same basic attitude about the "snuff film", too.
These pictures have nothing to do with the case against Jack Tarrance, because that case only really exists in the imagination. There is an investigation into the Zodiac case, and Tarrance is being investigated as part of that. However, no official source has ever confirmed any connection between Tarrance and the Zodiac Killer. Now that we know that the tattoo picture is not an unidentified man, and is not a murder victim, how is it even circumstantial evidence? It’s just a photo of a guy that fell from a bridge. The guy happened to be the boyfriend of Dennis’s sister . That’s it. Out of this non-issue, Kaufman and Dewhurst have built up a lot of hoopla. The photo was not a "snuff photo."
The whole issue of the film, how I came into possession of it, and why I developed and interpreted it myself is a complex one. I’ll put a more complete description of these events in my book.
Cough…
But, I will say that the FBI knew when I got the film. I called them before I developed it, asking what they wanted me to do. They did not call me back. They had ample opportunity to demand that I turn over to them, which I probably would have done, but they did not.
Understandably –since the first three rolls given to them turned out to be family photos. That’s what happens when you cry "wolf."
Many of you have probably seen the interview I did with CBS-13 on this topic, and it is disturbing stuff.
It is disturbing. it’s disturbing to see so much made out of so little. It’s disturbing to see the truth stretched to sell a story. It’s disturbing that there has been no follow-up explaining that the "gruesome murder photo" was no such thing. Disturbing. Very disturbing.
I readily admit that many of the pictures are very "murky" and subject to interpretation. I have over 25 years of experience in aerial photo interpretation and image processing, and I have taught 20 or so courses involving those topics during my teaching career. We use a lot of imagery in forestry.
The next time Dewhurst is flying high above the forest, perhaps he can spot a dead body. There are a lot of them out there. But, when it comes to the photos, I think someone has been looking too hard.
Even so, it took me almost 2 weeks after I developed the film to realize what I was looking at. There are 2 victims on the film. The 2nd victim I have tentatively identified as Rose Lena Cole, who disappeared in 1973. Dennis and I have notified the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and her next of kin. We told them what we were going to do, which was to turn the film over to the FBI for confirmation. The film was developed in February, 2009, and we dropped it off at the FBI office in Sacramento in late March. The FBI has the negatives, digitally-enhanced prints I made from those negatives, and hand-sketched tracings of what I saw in the images. I am 99% sure that the young woman in the film is Rose Cole.
For those not familiar with Rose Cole, her death has been alleged by many to be connected to the Synanon cult. A court had ordered her to appear in the program. Shorty after that order, she disappeared.
The pictures of the little boy (who Rick seemed to imply was one of his children wearing fake blood, or maybe he didn’t) appears on the same roll of film, before Rose Cole. Assuming I am correct in my identification of Rose, and since the type of film we are discussing (110-format Kodacolor C-41 process) was not marketed until 1972, the pictures of the little boy must have been taken no earlier than 1972, but before mid-1973, when Rose was declared missing.
That boy is not the same boy that Rick says is his –Dr. Dewhurst is confused. That type of film was made for decades after 1972. It is still commercially available to this day. It was used rather widely in the 1980s. The photos cannot be dated to 1972 to 1973, especially on the flimsy allegation that a blurry blotch was a missing woman. Remember, Dewhurst says it took him almost two weeks to reach that conclusion. That, to me, indicates the image was not very clear.
He looks to be 5-7 years old at the time. Rick’s children were born much later than that. Dennis has stated that the photos do not look like any of the children in his extended family, and he knows what Rick’s children look like.
No one is saying that is Rick’s child. The boy is smiling. Why would a boy who is about to be strangled be smiling? Why does the photo look like a normal photo of a little boy? Could it be because that’s what it is? No. That’s just too boring. These pictures have to be something evil.
Dennis and I met with the FBI in late May of 2009, and at that time I explained how I got the film, how I processed it, and my interpretations of the pictures. The material has been forwarded to the Special Photographic Section of the FBI for analysis, but as of this time neither I nor Dennis have heard what their conclusions are.
No big announcement?
I used the term "snuff film" in my CBS-13 interview specifically as a dig at the FBI, since they had earlier informed me that they had never encountered a real "snuff film": what had been represented as such in other cases had been proven to be fakes. I am quite interested, of course, in what they say about this film: I think they may have to stop telling people that.
I think you need to stop telling people that.
Oh, by the way, not all of the pictures were shown on CBS-13, some were too graphic. Also, those who are trying to do an in-depth analysis using screen captures from the CBS-13 video are working with 3rd generation material, originating from poor quality negatives scanned using consumer-grade equipment.
It was good enough for you to make your claims, but, not good enough for me to call "bullshit?"
The negatives are really the only "data" suitable for sophisticated analysis, and that is what the FBI has now. I did only basic image enhancements on it before turning it over to the FBI. More sophisticated equipment than my HP flatbed scanner are needed to try and get the most out of the deteriorated film.
You didn’t wait for the sophisticated enhancements to make your allegations that these are "snuff films." Sort of a double standard, here, isn’t there?
I could have spent more time working on this stuff, but I found the work very disturbing, and having that stuff (yes, original photographic negatives of what I think are murdered dead bodies) in my home bothered me. No, I will not give my digital scans of the negatives to anyone, since if they are what I think they are they are child pornography. Yes, I told that to CBS-13 before they broadcast them. We’ll just have to wait for the FBI.
If only you would have waited for the FBI before you went to the press. But, that wouldn’t have made such a nice story, would it?
…the behavior of the FBI has changed substantially since about the beginning of June, 2009, and I suspect that was around that time that they finally decided that Jack was really the Zodiac.
Or maybe, they’re just getting fed up.
I don’t think it was the "snuff film", I think it is something else.
Me, too.
Since then, they have acted like they are working an active case, and they are much less talkative. In October, 2008, I asked them if they had any doubt that it was Jack. The answer was "Of course I have doubts."
So do I.
But then, we were only talking about a guy who was dead, and who would therefore never be prosecuted. So, there was no particular reason for them not be forthcoming with Dennis and I. Now, they seem much more reticent to talk about it. I take this as significant, although frustrating for those of us who are anxious for closure.
So, you are reasoning that since they don’t want to talk to you about your contributions that they are onto something big. I love the logic employed here. it’s highly optimistic.
Those of you who are anxiously awaiting the "big announcement" (that includes me) will have to wait a while longer, I fear.
Cough…
Ironically, the longer it goes before the FBI makes their conclusions publicly known, the more likely it is that they think they can make a case against somebody who is still alive, and who can be prosecuted for a crime. If they ever give up on prosecuting anyone, then I think they will somehow make their conclusions public quite quickly. I hope. They may decide to go ahead and say something anyway, but that is up to them, and I am not holding my breath waiting for it.
Me, neither.
All of this could take a long time. Another quote from my meetings with the FBI: when I asked them how long this was going to take, the response was "It’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon." They are in no hurry, and they will not be rushed by me, or by Dennis, or by anyone else. They also have many other things to do, and an old case like this is not a high priority compared to current kidnappings and terrorist threats. They work on it when they have the time. But they do work on it.
Someone can’t take a hint.
I have thought for a while that there is a covert disinformation campaign aimed at Dennis, run by some person or group who is intent on keeping Dennis from being proven right.
Well, of course. If you’re going to hang with the conspiracy crowd, you need to buy into the conspiracy. The only thing preventing Dennis from being proven right is the lack of real evidence to back up his claims.
Some of the odd events which have happened over the last 18 months lead me to believe that the people behind them are propaganda professionals, who know the disinformation business very well.
Michael Jackson died on the day of Dennis’s press conference. Is Dewhurst saying Jackson’s doctor is part of a campaign to undermine Dennis? Deborah Perez is on someone’s payroll? What is Dewhurst saying? Could h be the least bit specific with these wild accusations? I don’t think he can. It’s much more effective if you’re vague, that way no one can prove that you’re full of it.
Whether this is a private investigator somewhere, or an evil public relations specialist, or maybe even some active or retired members of military or police intelligence organizations, I do not know.
Bwaaa Haaa Haaaa??? Dr. Dewhurst, are you listening to yourself?
But a few of the dirty tricks which have been played have been very well done, and lead me to believe that they are the work of professionals.
But, of course. Really! It doesn’t take a professional to discredit Dennis Kaufman. As an amateur, I think I’ve done quite well over the years.
When it is considered who might fit this description, and what their motives might be, it leads to some suspicions as to who these people might be, and who is behind them. I leave it to your imagination. Of course, maybe I’m just paranoid, but there is a saying I am rather fond of: "It’s only paranoia if it’s not true."
There’s a saying (by Twain) I’m rather fond of: "You cannot depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus."
Dennis Kaufman’s Photo Chicanery – Part One
Dennis Kaufman’s Photo Chicanery – Part Two
Related posts:
