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Jim Braden: Author Peter Noyes And Judge Byrne

Peter Noyes, the investigative reporter who uncovered most of the material regarding Jim Braden (Eugene Brading), is a former classmate and close friend of Judge Matthew Byrne, Jr., the U.S. District Court Judge who presided over the Ellsberg Pentagon Papers trial last year.

As is now well known, Judge Byrne dismissed the case against Ellsberg after he was notified that the White House "Plumbers" had once burglarized the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist.

A short time later, it became known that President Nixon had twice instructed John Ehrlichman to approach Judge Byrne during the course of the Ellsberg trial and offer him the position of Director of the FBI. This offer, which Judge Byrne refused, has been regarded as a potential act of bribery by some critics of President Nixon, and is currently under investigation by the Special Prosecutor's Office.

It has been widely assumed that Nixon's fervent interest in the outcome of the prosecution of Ellsberg may have been the motivation behind his approach to Judge Byrne.

Author Noyes has written of his friend Judge Byrne's involvement in his research on Jim Braden. In 1969, after Noyes had accumulated much of his information regarding the mysterious Braden, he took the information to his friend, Matt Byrne, who was then U.S. Attorney for southern California. Noyes has said that Byrne was very impressed by the information he and another FBI man had gathered. During one of these meetings with the FBI man, told Noyes that the FBI had never before known that Jim Braden - the man arrested at the scene of the assassination in 1963 - was actually Eugene Brading. The FBI man said that the Bureau must have made a big mistake in not tracking down Braden's true identity and police record. The FBI man was nearly incredulous over Noyes' evidence on Braden.

Noyes meanwhile had discovered that Jim Braden had also been in Los Angeles on the night that Robert Kennedy was assassinated in early June of 1968.

Though Noyes couldn't find any significant information regarding any Braden connection to the second Kennedy murder, he and his friend Matt Byrne forwarded the information on Braden to the Special Unit of the LAPD which was investigating the RFK death.