Shreveport, Louisiana

Shreveport is a city in northwestern Louisiana, the commercial center of the oil country that runs into East Texas and southern Arkansas.

The Hunts

H.L. Hunt married Frania Tye in Florida in 1925 under the name Franklin Hunt, while married to Lyda Bunker Hunt. They lived in Shreveport and then in Dallas and had four children. Hunt Oil Company kept an office in the city. In 1940 Ruth Ray, of Idabel, Oklahoma, came to Shreveport to find work, became a legal secretary at Blanchard, Goldstein, Walker and O'Quinn, and went to Hunt Oil when the partner Claude O'Quinn did. Hunt said he first noticed her waiting for a bus outside the office. She left in the fall of 1942 and bore his son Ray in New York the next April. In the first years of the Second World War Hunt had two employees move his son Hassie from Dallas to Shreveport to Jackson, Mississippi, "changing draft boards with each move."¹²

On November 11, 1975, the fiftieth anniversary of the Florida wedding, Frania Tye Lee sued Hunt's estate in the federal court in Shreveport, claiming a wife's share. At the trial in January 1978 Ray Hunt, as executor, acknowledged from the witness stand that his father was the father of her children. Margaret Hunt Hill waited in a motel, and Ruth Hunt stayed in Dallas on the advice of lawyers who feared she would be asked about the birth of her own children.¹³

Southern Research

The Southern Research Company, Inc., a private detective firm, was chartered in Shreveport on December 2, 1958, and still operates there. A credit report of 1960 in a CIA security file describes its New Orleans branch, managed by Joseph Oster, a former associate of Guy Banister, as the office of a firm "whose home office is in Shreveport." That branch investigated David Ferrie for Eastern Air Lines in 1962 and 1963. In 1996 the Shreveport company's president, Thomas Ostendorff, gave its Ferrie file, number 11-N-224, to the Assassination Records Review Board.⁴