Silvia Odio

Silvia Odio del Torro (born 1937) is a Cuban-American woman who provided testimony to the Warren Commission investigating the assassination of John F. Kennedy that Lee Harvey Oswald was one of three strangers who visited her Dallas, Texas apartment in September 1963 to solicit money for the anti-Castro group JURE.

Background Odio was born in Havana, Cuba in 1937, and she remained in Cuba until 1960. She was one of ten children born to Amador and Sarah Odio. Her brother Cesar was a city manager for Miami, Florida for 11 years.

Warren Commission testimony and investigation On July 22, 1964, Odio provided testimony to Wesley J. Liebeler, assistant counsel of the President's Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy (known informally as the Warren Commission), at the U.S. Post Office and Courthouse in Dallas. The committee's report summarized the Warren Commission's findings regarding the Odio incident and stated that general counsel J. Lee Rankin did not receive portions of the FBI's investigation until after the commission's final report had been published.

According to the HSCA, Howard and Seymour denied having met Odio, and Hall later retracted his statement that the three of them had met Odio. The suspicious nature of Loran Hall's confession to the FBI, while substituting William Seymour's name with that of Lee Harvey Oswald, and then the final retraction of his entire confession, was not further explored by the HSCA.

Odio was interviewed by the HSCA, as were her family, her psychiatrist, Hall, Seymour, Larry Howard and the FBI agent who had interviewed Hall.

The HSCA reported that it was "inclined to believe Silvia Odio" and that at least one of the men resembled Oswald. The HSCA did not agree with the Warren Commission that Oswald could not have been in Dallas during the time period specified in Odio's allegations and reported the most likely dates for the encounter to be September 25, 26 or 27, 1963. The committee stated that Oswald's actions and values were consistent with one who would favor the Castro regime, and speculated that Oswald may have associated with anti-Castro activists to implicate movements such as JURE in the assassination or for some unrelated reason.

The HSCA concluded that "it was unable to reach firm conclusions as to the meaning or significance of the Odio incident to the President's assassination."

Silvia Odio, Loran Hall and Harry Dean Harry Dean, a writer and volunteer FBI informant in Chicago and Southern California, claimed that the two Latinos were actually two of his closest freedom-fighter friends, Cuban-American Loran Hall and Mexican-American Larry Howard. Dean said that Hall regularly used his war name of Lorenzo while Howard's war name was Alonzo.

Dean wrote in his 1990 book Crosstrails that he and the group's leader Guy Gabaldon would solicit cash, medical supplies and paramilitary donations from Southern California members of the John Birch Society and store them in Gabaldon's garage. Dean would then help Hall and Howard load their trailer so that they could drive across the country delivering the donations to anti-Castro paramilitary groups. Dean alleged that Gabaldon issued instructions to Hall and Howard to drive Lee Harvey Oswald from New Orleans to Mexico, and that Loran made a detour to the home of Odio at 8 p.m., most likely on September 26, 1963.