Update on David Copeland

After catching a brief glimpse into the life of the Torbitt Document's alleged author, David G. Copeland in a previous post, we now turn to the document itself, written under an alias as early as 1970, describing the "cabal" which worked together to kill President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963.

In the "About the Author" section of the Torbitt Document, Copeland told us that he prosecuted criminal cases during 1949, 1950, and part of 1951, but the only details he furnished were that this occurred:

"in the southwestern part of the United States ...  where professional Mexican assassins have been used to commit political murder. He has also participated in the trial of cases in the southwest involving gunrunning activities through Mexico to Cuba, both before Castro was successful and after Castro succeeded and became the subject of overthrow by gunrunners from the southwest."

To the above, he added:

Close relatives of the gambling syndicate members have used the legal services of Torbitt in complicated cases involving tracing of financial dealings of organized crime in Texas and their foreign connecting links."

Certain other tidbits of information we have learned without help from his book. For example, a son, Kippie, born in Waco during his first marriage, died before his third birthday in 1953. Between then and January 1960, when he married Jayne Baker, a divorce occurred.

About Copeland, however, through newspapers we learn that in 1962 as head of the campaign for liberal candidate Don H. Yarborough (no relation to the U.S. Senator, Ralph Yarborough), he organized a group called Texans for a Two-Party Texas following the primary elections, attempting to force conservative Democrats into the Republican Party. This group would unwittingly make it possible for George H.W. Bush to be elected as a Congressman in Texas.


Copeland knew, or thought he knew, facts proving that LBJ and Governor John B. Connally had been involved in the murder of President Kennedy, and he campaigned repeatedly after 1963 for their more liberal opponents, in 1968 calling LBJ's war on poverty a political gimmick.

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The cogent questions, phrased in Watergate-ese, are: What did Copeland know, and how did he know it? Was he told by an insider, or did he simply make conclusions based on a combination of stories he heard and his own research?

We know from our research into his background that Copeland was married to Aline, a teacher, while living in Fort Worth (Tarrant County) in 1946, according to this page from the City Directory that year:

Click image to enlarge.

He was a student, perhaps in law school at Texas Wesleyan School of Law, which was located a few blocks from their residence. Seven miles to the west was the bomber-making plant where Aline had worked during the war before obtaining her teaching position at the junior high school. Nevertheless, he says in his self-published manuscript that he had a law degree from the University of Texas at Austin. The manuscript also claimed to be "an enlargement of a working paper furnished to Torbitt by two agents -- one with the Customs Department and the other with the Narcotics Bureau. This is wholly at odds with what Jim Marrs claimed in his book about who Copeland's federal sources were.

The Fort Worth Bomber Plant

In attempting to discover who the two agents were, we have gone back through Copeland's life to review where he was at certain times in order to determine with whom he was in contact. For example, the plant where Aline Copeland worked while her husband was a student would become an important tool leading up to the NASA space program.

Tarrant Field Airdrome originated in 1941 and became Fort Worth Army Air Field on January 2, 1942. The site of the base was originally selected in 1941 as a Consolidated Vultee factory for the production of B-24 bombers. A separate contract was let for a landing field, Tarrant Field, to be built to support the aircraft factory. The construction of an air force base on the east side of Tarrant Field was authorized after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and Tarrant Field Airdrome was assigned to the Army Air Forces Flying Training Command in July 1942.

The base became one of the first B-24 transition schools to begin operation. After more than 4,000 students were trained in B-24s at the base, its mission was changed to B-24 transition because of the nearness to the Consolidated factory. In 1945 the mission was changed from B-24 to B-29 aircraft training. The base was assigned to the newly formed Strategic Air Command in March of 1946.

Consolidated Vultee Aircraft Corporation was formed by a merger of Consolidated Aircraft Corporation, founded by Reuben H. Fleet in 1923 in Buffalo, New York, and Vultee Aircraft, a California airplane builder. [The timeline of corporations is set out at the Aerospace Legacy Foundation website.] In Texas it operated a mile-long facility, known locally as the Bomber Plant, built in 1942 on 563 acres on the west side of what is now Carswell Air Force Base at Fort Worth. The company used the site to fulfill contracts for planes it had no room to build at its San Diego factory and produced more than 3,000 B-24s, as well as C-87 cargo planes there.

Vultee Aircraft, based in Downey, California, had acquired the assets of Consolidated Aircraft Corporation, which had been dissolved in bankruptcy, and became Consolidated Vultee Aircraft, commonly known as Convair for short. Between 1942 and 1948 the Vultee Field division of Convair was awarded government contracts that gave it a step ahead in designing long-range missile weapons systems for the military. Project MX-774 would study a subsonic, jet engine cruise missile and a rocket-powered supersonic ballistic missile.

Vultee's engineers in California focused on the ballistic missile concept, taking data about the German V-2 rocket with plans to build a guided missile that would carry power equipment allowing it to travel outside the atmosphere of the earth--described as a "streamlined" version of the German V-2. The Downey/San Diego plant, which was designated North American Aviation by 1949, was headquarters for the Fort Worth plant, where Copeland's first wife Aline had been employed during the war years. A 1952 classified document, released in 2009, indicates that beginning in December 1948 the North American Aviation plant in Downey had been working on a project to construct a low power research reactor "to produce plutonium at low cost." In some of the reports of the file, reference was made to a thorium converter reactor, graphite-moderated reactors and the Hanford Cooperative Program. Persons in charge on various reports included G. M. Inman, T. Fahrner, E. E. Motta, R. L. Stoker, C. Malmstrom, H. P. Yockey, R.L. Carter, W.E. Parkins, C. Starr and others, many if not all part of the Manhattan Project headed by Robert Oppenheimer.

We do know that Aline Copeland returned to Waco before her second marriage and that she was apparently working at James Connally AFB, a bombardier and navigator flight training center between 1951 and 1962--the most likely place for Aline to have met and marry an Air Force officer who had been a prisoner of war in Germany during WWII.  An officer by that same name was Communications Officer for the 601st Aircraft Control and Warning Squadron at the radar work site, "Gunpost," in Rothwesten, Germany in 1959. Nothing could be found on where Aline and Campbell met, or on whether that Major Campbell was in fact married to an exceptionally attractive German woman named Erika Horn, mentioned at the 601st ACWS website.

If anyone has any other information about how all these details came together, please comment below.