Mary S. Sherman

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Mary Stults Sherman (April 21, 1913 - July 21, 1964) was a prominent orthopedic surgeon in New Orleans who was murdered in a still unsolved mystery. A professor of clinical orthopedics at Tulane University, Sherman was stabbed in the heart, arm, leg, and stomach. Her mattress had been set afire, but investigators determined that the massive burns inflicted upon her could not have come from the smoking mattress. There was a small fire in her apartment and smoke, but her death was caused by her severed arm. There were hack marks made from a butcher knife on her torso. Her shocking death occurred on the day that the Warren Commission arrived in New Orleans to obtain testimony about the assassination the previous autumn of U.S. President John F. Kennedy.

Sherman was born in Evanston, Illinois, to Walter Allen Stults and the former Monica Graham. She graduated from Evanston Township High School and attended the Institute de Mme Collnot in Paris, France. She obtained her bachelor of arts degree from Northwestern University in Evanston in 1934. She received a master of arts degree in 1935 from the University of Chicago. From 1935-1936, Sherman was an instructor at the University of Illinois French Institute in Paris.

In 1943, she obtained a medical degree from the University of Chicago. She interned at Bob Roberts Hospital at the University of Chicago. In 1947, she was appointed assistant professor of orthopedic surgery at Billings Hospital, also affiliated with the University of Chicago. In 1952, she relocated to New Orleans to become director of the bone pathology laboratory at The Ochsner Clinic Medical Foundation, a creation of the renowned surgeon Dr. Alton Ochsner. The next year she began her terminal position as associate professor at Tulane Medical School. A noted cancer researcher, she was also the senior visiting surgeon in orthopedics at Charity Hospital in New Orleans. She was a member of the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons and a fellow of the American College of Surgeons. She was also a member of Phi Beta Kappa.

In 1999, Judyth A. Vary Baker (born 1943), an Indiana native who grew up in Florida, claimed to have interned under Dr. Sherman in 1963. She privately revealed her involvement in an anti-Castro conspiracy to individuals outside her family and to CBS's Sixty Minutes investigators. Baker asserted she had been, at first against her wishes, recruited by both Dr. Ochsner and Dr. Sherman into a "get-Castro" project that had the backing of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Mafia in New Orleans. Ochsner also had apparently close ties to the Republicans U.S. Vice President and U.S. President Richard M. Nixon and later Louisiana Governor David C. Treen.

Judyth Baker claims that she came to New Orleans in April 1963, a month before her twentieth birthday. There, she allegedly met Lee Harvey Oswald, who introduced her, she maintained, to David Ferrie, an associate of Dr. Sherman's. In time, Baker became a participant in the anti-Castro plotting. At the same time, Oswald and Baker, who both had unhappy marriages, became romantically involved. Oswald supposedly became linked to the project in part to be near Baker, whom he intended to marry after he divorced his Russian-born wife, Maria.

How any of these claims may or may not have connected to Dr. Sherman's murder is unresolved.

Dr. Sherman was cremated. In 1995, Edward T. Haslam, a reporter who knew Sherman, Oschner, and Ferrie, published Mary, Ferrie & the Monkey Virus : The Story of an Underground Medical Laboratory.