Helen was born in Kansas City, the daughter of Harry S Banta and Lydia Gookins. Harry was the son of Ira Banta who had married Helen Swartwout - Swartwout being the link to the Vincent lines.
Helen Grace had a fairly, normal, life?
She was a music teacher who received her degree from the Warnsburg College in Missouri. Apparently teaching didn't come without its difficulties.
She was so young that there were rumors that she was dating her students. It wasn't true, but an easy rumor to start given that she was very beautiful; so beautiful that she won Miss Kansas City in 1925!
(Perhaps this was a county or school contest as I couldn't find a Miss Kansas for 1925 and she would have been 15 at the time.)
Although homemaking became her focus, she did play the piano for a game show on KRLD-TV called 'Questions that Count', a Christian trivia show during the 1950s.
Helen met and married a Harry D Holmes in 1934 at Missouri. He was the son of H Davis Holmes and Margaret 'Edith' Powers and was born in Oklahoma.
Harry's life started out easy enough - playing in fields and taking odd jobs such as working in a bakery, a factory, and he was a lamplighter at one point.
But events would transpire to put him front and center and forever linked to the assassination, or rather, the conspiracies surrounding the assassination of John F Kennedy.
He began working for the postal service and was going to school part-time to become a dentist but Pearl Harbor changed the trajectory of his life.
Whatever it was about his demeanor or character, he was encouraged to become a Postal Inspector. Once accepted, he was sent to Louisiana before landing in Dallas, Texas around 1948.On that tragic day in 1963, our Inspector Holmes witnessed the assassination through binoculars but didn't see Oswald. Our Inspector Holmes found a piece of JFK's skull on the sidewalk and discarded it rather than turning it over. Our Inspector Holmes was one of the first officers to interview Oswald, not the FBI. And more. That's his story!
Did he hinder or help the process? He did drop the ball if one believes everything on the internet but in my humble opinion, most of it reads like a man caught up in the chaos of ground zero and perhaps tried too hard.
Regardless............he was there!
I am sure that he and his family were never the same again - like the country.
Interrogation of Holmes - PDF download
Holmes Testimony 2 Apr 1964
Holmes Testimony 23 Jul 1964
Four Faces of Harry D Holmes
'No More Silence' by Larry A Sneed
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