Newspaper accounts indicate several hit men operated around southeast Kentucky back in the eighties.
Specifically, these hit men were allegedly hired to murder Dennis Patrick, a (supposedly) lowly Whitley County, Kentucky court clerk with a mere net worth of $60,000. Patrick claims he has no idea why anyone would want to murder him. (1)
A 1997 court document from the Kentucky Court of Appeals shows Ray Speicher brought suit against Dennis Patrick for unauthorized check transactions totaling over $300,000 between the years 1982 and 1985 while they were 50-50 business partners in Whitley County Oil.
Around the same time, Patrick discovered Speicher had transferred $4 million worth of oil leases to a James E. Josey of Fort Worth TX. (Did anyone question how Patrick, a man with a supposed net worth of $60,000 had a fifty percent share of $4 million of oil assets?)
According to the March 1989 newspaper account:
Several months after the transfers, federal agents arrested Henry Patrick Talley…and charged him with conspiring to kill Patrick.
The newspaper does not indicate how this information about Talley came to light. It does say he pled guilty and confessed Josey hired him to kill Patrick and his wife.
Three months later, a man named Burson is arrested after two tear gas attempts on the Patrick home. He pleads guilty to firebombing the Patrick home, and again, Josey is named as the man who paid him to do the job.
Then yet again, Josey and another man, Anthony Tricomi, are recorded by federal agents, yep, you guessed it, discussing how to kill Patrick.(3)
There is no record of any Anthony Tricomi in the Federal Bureau of Prison website. Burson is listed as “not in FOB custody” with an unknown release date. A Henry Talley was released in 1991.
Where were Tricomi and Burson when the three women, Betty Carnes, Jennifer Bailey and Greta Henson were murdered?
Dennis Patrick’s incredible luck with Bill Clinton’s Buddy
It seemed 1985 was a bad year for Dennis Patrick. Except he happened to have an incredible stroke of financial luck that summer. A friend recommended he open a brokerage account at Lasater and Co. under the name of his business, Patrick and Associates. Patrick allegedly did not act on the recommendation, only to be informed a month later by that same friend that he opened an account in Patrick’s name anyways, putting the money up himself. Amazingly, the account had already netted a hefty $20,000 profit.(1)
To be a circuit clerk of courts, oilman and businessman, Patrick begins to appear (or play) very dumb at this point:
He says he believed Lasater and Co. when they reassured him there was no risk of loss.
He says he believed them when they assured him he would make up to $20,000 a week.
He was not concerned in the least that someone had opened up an account in his name without his knowledge or permission.
He says a few months later Lasater and Co. sent him trading records he did not understand.
The Dan Lasater Dennis Patrick claims he didn’t know
Bill Clinton established the Arkansas Development Finance Authority as governor of Arkansas, primarily to issue tax free bonds that funded low interest loans to “projects from housing to business development.”(5) The author of “The Octopus: Secret Government and the Death of Danny Casolaro” states
The ADFA primarily served two masters: the Stephens, Inc. investment bank that received seventy-eight percent of ADFA’s underwriting fees and sales of housing and industrial bonds…and Clinton crony Dan Lasater, whose Lasater and Company firm underwrote $664 million in municipal bond issues after the creation of the ADFA.(8)
Essentially, Dan Lasater, Dennis Patrick’s broker (that he claimed he didn’t know) poured enough money in Bill Clinton’s gubernatorial campaign that when Clinton was re-elected (after a term out of office) Lasater’s firm received fifteen percent of the state’s bond underwriting business, whereas before Clinton’s election, they received none.(4)
According to the Congressional Record Volume 140 Number 86,
While he was reportedly under investigation by the Arkansas State Police for drug dealing, President Clinton and the Government of Arkansas gave him [Lasater] $664 million in bonds to sell for the State, which garnered him $1.6 million in commissions.(7)
Suit was eventually filed against Dan Lasater for mail, wire and securities fraud. His unauthorized T-bonds, futures, trades, and high risk activities with several savings and loans were part of the disaster that ended in the billion dollar bankruptcy for hundreds of savings and loans. Lasater was finally arrested for cocaine and cocaine trafficking; he was sent to prison in 1987.
In the meantime, Dennis Patrick had $50 million of trades ran through his brokerage account at Lasater and Co, he claims without his knowledge. (1) At the same time, people are supposedly trying to kill him.
Weapons, Drugs and Murder…Oh my!
The first company to receive a “tax free low interest bond issue through Clinton’s ADFA was Park-On-Meter” (1):
Mr. Reed claims Park-On-Meter made weapons parts as a subcontractor for Iver Johnson’s Firearms, of Jacksonville, Arkansas. It was this company which, by Mr. Reed’s account, was the primary contractor for building the untraceable weapons components.
But Park-On-Meter’s interest was not only in untraceable weapons. In “Phoenix Rising: The Rise and Fall of the American Republic” author Donald Lett Jr. states:
It was later exposed that the company wasn’t even making parking meters, but rather was building retrofit nose cone parts that were being shipped to Mena [Arkansas] in order to smuggle cocaine in the country. (6)
So Dennis Patrick’s broker, whom he supposedly did not know, where he had an account opened without his knowledge, and $50 million worth of trades ran through said account, was involved with the ADFA that had ties to illegal weapons manufacture and drug smuggling. A lowly Whitley County Kentucky circuit court clerk. Doing business with a firm with ties to possible illegal weapons manufacture and documented drug trafficking.
Lett continues:
The $100 million a month cocaine operation at Mena continued for over 10 years without one major drug bust. So where was the cocaine coming from? Most, if not all, was tied to the Iran-Contra hostages, drugs and money laundering scandal created by the CIA and George Bush.
A March 1, 1989 newspaper article in the Toledo Blade states the airport in Mena was
…headquarters for a massive drug-dealing, arms-smuggling, and money-laundering operation.
The Blade article says the Mena airport is directly linked to the Medellin cartel. The article also goes on to state:
Sources familiar with the ongoing activities in Mena speculate that the area is one of several places used to ship private aid to the Nicaraguan contras. (10)
To recap, $100 million a month in cocaine was coming into the country from the Medellin cartel (remember Pablo Escobar?) and Patrick’s broker gets busted distributing some of this cocaine. When you consider the amount of trades moving through Patrick’s account at Lasater and Co., it suggests cocaine from the Mena airfield might have ended up in southeast Kentucky… in Whitley County and beyond. I’m starting to understand why the ATF investigated Dennis Patrick for drug trafficking. (1)
Sally Denton, author of The Bluegrass Conspiracy: An Inside Story of Power, Greed, Drugs and Murder asserts there were “some private landing strips in Lexington, Kentucky…” Roger Morris also contends in his book, Partners in Power: The Clintons and Their America that “Mena was the US hub for the smuggling of drugs, weapons, and other contraband from ‘meticulously maintained’ rural airports in six other states: Alabama, Mississppi, Kentucky, Louisiana, Florida and Arizona.”
I have spoken with a former resident of Bell County, Kentucky who was convicted in the 1990s for drug trafficking. Under condition of anonymity, I was told the drugs they and their partner were running, came from Escobar.
Is Dennis Patrick actually in witness protection?
The Hit Men
I began researching this story when I realized the similarities in the Betty Carnes, Jennifer Bailey, and Greta Henson murders. I believe all the murders were hired hits. Then I found the accounts of the hit men like Burson, Tricomi and Talley operating in southeast Kentucky during the same time period. The hit men interested me, especially when I realized at least two of them could have been free and in southeast Kentucky when these women’s murders took place.
Is it inconceivable the murders of Jennifer Bailey, Greta Henson, and Betty Carnes could have been carried out by men like this?
For the record, there is no link between these women’s murder cases and Dennis Patrick that I can find.
What’s important is establishing the presence of hired hit men in southeast Kentucky during this time period helps determine suspects that could have committed these murders. It also provides more reasonable doubt that Delmar Partin is imprisoned for a crime he did not commit.
Interestingly, the prosecutor in Partin’s case, Tom Handy, was acquainted with Dennis Patrick, maybe even friends. They both served as officers in the Fifth District Republican’s Club together. From the Corbin Times-Tribune, February 21, 1977:
Was James E. Josey framed for conspiracy to commit murder?
Another theory is Patrick Dennis could have been so angry with James E. Josey and the transfer of $4 million worth of oil assets that he framed him for conspiracy to commit murder. Where would he find the help to carry out such a plan, if that happened?
Lasater, Patrick’s broker that we are to believe he didn’t know, was obviously no stranger to crime and certainly knew plenty of people with checkered pasts. According to this Washington Post article dated May 2, 1996:
In one of the oddest bits of testimony elicited in months of Whitewater hearings, the senators produced a state police investigator’s decade-old report on a trip Lasater, Thomasson and some associates took to Honduras in which one of the group suggested killing a local official there who was blocking their purchase of a ranch.(8)
Could Lasater have provided the pawns to carry out such a devious plot against Josey? Attempts have been made to contact Josey and Burson for their input in this piece, but have been unsuccessful.
(1) The Economist. “Ghosts of Carelessness Past: The Lasater Affair”. May 1994
(2) Commonwealth of Kentucky, Court of Appeals. 1997-CA-002545-MR
(3) “Victim nets award in murder plot.” Kentucky New Era. March 9, 1989
(4) “The Ethical Snarl Of Hillary Clinton And A Troubled Ally.” Chicago Tribune. Feb. 3, 1994
(5) “Clinton’s Rein on Bonds Linked to Contributions : Politics: Finance authority he controls formed a pool of moneyed elite that’s often tapped for campaign funds.” Los Angeles Times. June 29, l992
(6) Phoenix Rising: The Rise and Fall of the American Republic. Donald Lett, Jr.
(7) Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 86. June 30, 1994
(8) Whitewater panel looks at Clinton ties to Arkansas bond dealer. Schmidt, Susan. Washington Post. May 2, 1996.
(9) The Octopus: Secret Government and the Death of Danny Casolaro. Thomas and Keith. 2004.
(10) “Smugglers use airport as home base.” Anderson, Jack. The Toledo Blade. March 1, 1989.
I can help you fill in the gaps in the story
Interesting article