“I’ll Never Forget It for as Long as I Live”
Linnie Mae Randle, Buell Frazier’s sister, was at her kitchen sink when she glanced out the window at 7:15 Friday morning, November 22. She saw Oswald walk across the street toward her house, carrying a long package parallel to his body. He held one end of the brown-paper-wrapped object tucked under his armpit, and the other end did not quite touch the ground. Randle later recalled it appeared to contain something heavy.1 He went to Buell’s car, opened the right rear door, and laid the package across the backseat. Then he walked to the kitchen window and stared at Linnie Mae until she called out to her brother that he was waiting for his ride.2
“That was the first time he had ever done that,” recalled Frazier, who always drove the one block to pick Oswald up at Ruth Paine’s home. “He never came up to our house before.”3 When Frazier got into the car, he noticed the package and asked what it was. “Those are the curtain rods,” Oswald said. “He had never lied to me before so I never did have any reason to doubt his word,” said Frazier.4 When they arrived at the Book Depository, Frazier parked the car in the employee lot behind the warehouse. Usually, they went in together, but on that morning, though they were early, Oswald quickly left the car and walked ahead. Frazier watched him enter the Depository, carrying the package next to his body.*
Other employees noticed that Oswald did not follow his normal routine of immediately going to the domino room and reading the day-old newspapers.5 Later that morning, between 9:30 and 10:00, he was staring out a first-floor window toward Dealey Plaza, when a co-worker, James “Junior” Jarman, approached him. Oswald asked why crowds were gathering outside, and Jarman told him the President was due by in a couple of hours. When asked if he knew which direction the motorcade would take, Jarman said the cars were expected to pass directly in front of the Depository. “Oh, I see,” said Oswald.6
On the sixth floor of the Depository, five men were laying a plywood floor. The sixth floor was a 96-foot-by-96-foot open storage space, only broken by support posts and stacks of books scattered about. On the south side of the floor, seven large double windows looked directly over Elm Street and Dealey Plaza. On the opposite north end, there were two adjoining elevators and a staircase.7 At 11:40 one of the workers, Bonnie Ray Williams, spotted Oswald on the east side of that floor, near the windows overlooking Dealey Plaza.8 About five minutes later, the crew broke for lunch. They got in the two elevators and raced each other to the first floor.9 “I came downstairs, and I discovered I left my cigarettes in my jacket pocket upstairs,” recalled Charles Givens, “and I took my elevator back upstairs to get my jacket with my cigarettes in it. When I got back upstairs, he [Oswald] was on the sixth floor … in that vicinity … toward the window up front where the shots were fired from.… I was getting ready to get on the elevator, and I say, ‘Boy, are you going downstairs?’ I say, ‘It’s near lunch time.’ He said, ‘No, sir.’”10 Givens did not see anyone else on the sixth floor.11* Other co-workers, including Billy Lovelady, Jack Dougherty, Danny Arce, and Bonnie Ray Williams, remembered Oswald remained upstairs when they took the elevators down.12
Now all alone, Oswald had enough time to assemble the Carcano and move cartons of books to form a sniper’s nest in the southeast corner. That corner had an ideal, unobstructed view of the motorcade route. The cars could be seen as they entered Dealey Plaza on Main Street, turned right onto Houston Street, and headed toward the Depository. In front of the building, the motorcade turned left, providing a clear view from the window as the cars moved toward the Stemmons Freeway entrance. † The sniper’s nest was not difficult to construct. Because of the laying of the new floor, workers had moved many of the book cartons, weighing up to fifty pounds each, to the sides of the room.13 An assortment of boxes were used to hide his position. It protected the sniper from being observed by anyone who wandered onto the sixth floor.14 Boxes were also arranged as a brace upon which the rifle would rest when shot.‡ The rifle assembly was probably next. An FBI agent, in his first attempt, put the Carcano together, using only a dime as a tool, in less than six minutes, and in under two minutes with a screwdriver.15
Many have tried hard to prove Oswald was not on the sixth floor at this time, relying on his protestations, after his arrest and during his police interrogation, that he had been in the first-floor lunch room with “Junior” Jarman, and had gone to the second floor to buy a Coke near the time of the assassination.16 Carolyn Arnold, a secretary to the Depository’s vice-president, waited fifteen years before telling Anthony Summers in 1978 that at 12:15 she entered the second-floor lunch room and saw Oswald sitting in one of the booths.* “He was alone as usual and appeared to be having lunch,” Arnold said.17 Her interview with Summers was the first time she ever publicly told the story about seeing Oswald in the lunch room.18 But Arnold had given two different FBI statements shortly after the assassination. In one, she said she “could not be sure” but might have caught a fleeting glimpse of Oswald in the first-floor hallway, and in the second statement said she did not see him at all.19† Arnold told Summers the FBI misquoted her, though she had signed her statement as correct.20 Four other women worked with Arnold and watched the motorcade with her that day. They support her original statements and not the story she told fifteen years later. Virgie Rachley and Betty Dragoo accompanied her when she left the second floor at 12:15. They did not see Oswald in the lunch room.21
More important, contemporaneous statements of other workers who were in both lunch rooms say Oswald was in neither. Junior Jarman, with whom Oswald claimed to have had lunch, denied even seeing him during his lunch break.22 Troy West was inside the first-floor domino room eating lunch from 12:00 to nearly 12:30 and did not see Oswald during that half hour.23 Danny Arce and Jack Dougherty ate in the first-floor room up to 12:15 and said there was no sign of him. Charles Givens also visited the domino room but did not see Oswald.24 Joe Molina and Mrs. Robert Reid both ate in the second-floor lunch room and were there at 12:15, when Carolyn Arnold claimed Oswald was there, but neither saw him.25 Billy Lovelady went to both lunch rooms after 12:00 and did not see him either.26
There was actually one Book Depository employee on the sixth floor near noon, but since he did not see anyone, arguments have been made that Oswald was not there. Nineteen-year-old Bonnie Ray Williams returned to the sixth floor to eat his lunch and see whether any other workers had gathered to watch the motorcade. He ate some fried chicken and had a bottle of soda, which he said took “5, 10, maybe 12 minutes.”27 Williams said that while there, he sat in front of the fourth window, some forty feet from the sniper’s nest.28 The books in the southeast corner, however, were “stacked so high” that he “could not possibly see anything …”29 The day after the assassination he told the FBI he left by 12:05 and went to the fifth floor, where he found two friends, Junior Jarman and Harold Norman.* They remained there to watch the motorcade.
While reliable testimony from the Depository places Oswald, alone, on the sixth floor by noon, witnesses in Dealey Plaza also confirmed there was a man in the sniper’s-nest window. There is some confusion, however, because some witnesses say they saw one, and sometimes two, men before the shooting who did not look like Oswald.
Ruby Henderson saw two men on the upper floors of the Depository. Summers points out that one of them had dark hair and complexion and might have been Mexican.30 Summers does not inform the reader that in her FBI statement, Henderson said the men could have been “Mexican, but [also] could have been Negro,” and she was not certain of what floor they were on.31 On the fifth floor, directly below Oswald’s sniper’s nest, were three young black men—Bonnie Ray Williams, Junior Jarman, and Harold Norman—looking out the windows. Her FBI statement indicates that Henderson saw two of those three young men on a high floor. She was not describing the sixth floor.
There are other witnesses who claim they not only saw two men, either in the Depository or in Dealey Plaza, but that the men also had a rifle. Julia Ann Mercer said she was caught in a traffic jam at Dealey on the morning of the motorcade and noticed two men in a green Ford pickup. One took a gun case from the rear of the truck and then disappeared into the grassy knoll.32 She later identified the truck’s driver as Jack Ruby, and said Oswald was the man with the rifle.33 However, subsequent investigation revealed that the truck, which had stalled, belonged to a local construction company; it had three men inside, and they did take tools from the rear of the truck to fix it.34 They were under constant surveillance by three Dallas policemen, and all of them left when another truck arrived to push the stalled vehicle away.*
In 1978, a Dallas newspaperman encountered the second witness to claim there were two men connected to a rifle in Dealey Plaza. John Powell said he was a prisoner on the sixth floor of the Dallas County Jail, one of the buildings on Houston Street southeast of the Depository, on November 22, 1963.35 According to Summers, the cell provided “an ideal vantage point for observations of the famous Depository window.”36 Powell insisted that “quite a few” prisoners watched two men in the sniper’snest window “fooling with the scope” on a high-powered rifle. Summers charged that “during the Warren inquiry, an official failed to respond to a specific reminder that observers in the County Jail had had a perfect view and should be questioned.”37
But a December 15, 1964, FBI memo reported the results of just such an inquiry. There had been accusations that “seventeen witnesses to the assassination in [the] hospital ward of Dallas County Jail [were] never interviewed.”38 There were several large cells that overlooked Dealey Plaza. One was the jail’s mental ward. While it provided a view of the motorcade, the FBI’s investigation showed the Book Depository “was not visible from this cell area.” A second large cell was reserved for those given a three-day sentence for “driving while intoxicated [DWI].” The FBI found there were “no DWI prisoners in this particular cell at the time of the assassination.”39* The corner of the jail that overlooked the Depository had an iron-mesh grid and the windows were extremely dirty, making any view “Very distorted” and almost “impossible” to see.40 It was the hospital ward and it also contained an overflow of mental patients. The FBI concluded the original source of the jailhouse information was “completely unreliable,” having been arrested on several occasions “in the past on lunacy charges.” It had “no confidence whatsoever in any information furnished by him.”41
The third person who claimed to see at least two men with a gun was Arnold Rowland, who testified to the Warren Commission that he saw one man in the far left corner window of the sixth floor (opposite from the sniper’s nest) at 12:15. The gunman was reportedly standing at military parade rest with a high-powered rifle across his chest.42 Then Rowland claimed to see an “elderly Negro” man on the same floor, this time on the other side of the building, in the sniper’s nest.43 But Rowland had previously given seven statements to the Dallas police and FBI and never mentioned the black man.44 Rowland’s wife, who was with him at the time of the assassination, did not see either man, nor did he tell her that he had seen a black man.45 Immediately after the shooting, Rowland told policeman F. M. Turner and Secret Service agent Forrest Sorrels that he saw a single young white male, with brown hair, holding a rifle.46 The rest of his testimony is riddled with inaccuracies. Rowland claimed that there were women and children on the nearby Triple Underpass (there were none);47 that the crowds started to laugh after the first shot (no one else reported such a reaction);48 and that fifty police converged instantly on the grassy knoll after the shots (there were initially two).49 According to his wife, Rowland lied under oath about a series of small but telling issues, ranging from graduating from high school, to his grades, to the job he held, even to what he claimed he did on the morning of the assassination.50 “I know there weren’t any other people on that floor looking out the windows that could be seen from the outside,” Mrs. Rowland insisted under oath.51 When asked, “Do you feel you can rely on everything that your husband says?” she replied, “At times my husband is prone to exaggerate. Does that answer it?”52*
The final witness who claimed to have seen two men with a gun is Carolyn Walther. Walther limited her sighting to the third, fourth, or fifth floor but “positively” not the sixth. She claimed one man had his arms extended and was holding a machine gun outside the window, for all to see. Walther also said a second man, with another gun, stood directly behind the first one.53 But Carolyn Walther was not alone when she watched the motorcade from her vantage point. A friend, Pearl Springer, was with her and did not notice any gunmen.54 Nor did Walther ever mention a word to Springer about seeing anyone with a rifle, later claiming, “I just forgot all about it.”55 Fifteen minutes after the assassination, Walther returned to work, still keeping her remarkable story to herself.56†
However, there is consistent testimony from other witnesses in Dealey Plaza who saw a man in the sniper’s-nest window before the assassination. Robert Edwards and Ronald Fischer, a college student and a county auditor respectively, were at the corner of Houston and Elm, directly in front of the Depository. Just before the motorcade arrived, Edwards glanced at the building and saw a man in the southeast corner of the sixth floor.57 He nudged Fischer, who looked up and also saw the man. Fischer said, “There were boxes and cases stacked all the way from the bottom to the top and from the left to the right behind him.… It looked like there was space for a man to walk through there between the window and the boxes.”58 The man was staring down Elm Street, the path of what would be the line of rifle fire in just a few minutes. “He was just staring out the window,” Fischer told the author. “Everyone else was in a good mood with the President coming, but he seemed different, and that’s why I stared at him and remembered him later.”59 The figure both men described sounded remarkably like Oswald—white, twenty-two to twenty-four years of age, light complexion, slender, medium-brown hair, and wearing a white T-shirt under a light-colored shirt.60*
Some twelve minutes before the motorcade arrived, a man had an epileptic seizure in Dealey Plaza and an ambulance took him to Parkland Hospital. He never registered at Parkland, and as a result, the suspicion arose that the seizure was a staged distraction that allowed a team of assassins to take their positions unnoticed by the crowd. Such conjecture ignores that the FBI located the man on May 26, 1964. He was Jerry Belknap, an epileptic who had suffered seizures since childhood and had evidence he had paid the $12.50 ambulance charge. He left Parkland without registering because he felt better when given water and an aspirin, and there was such a rush of people at the emergency room, he realized he was not going to be quickly treated.61
After Belknap was removed from Dealey, the police quickly cleared away the small knot of people that had formed around the scene, and the crowd returned to its festive waiting for the arrival of the President. The large Hertz sign on top of the Depository showed 12:29 when the first car of the presidential motorcade made the turn from Main Street onto Houston and proceeded toward the Depository. It was a security car and included Dallas police chief Jesse Curry, Sheriff Bill Decker, and the local chief of the Secret Service, Forrest Sorrels. Two car lengths behind was the presidential limousine. The driver was the oldest man in the White House security detail, William Greer. Next to him in the front seat was another Secret Service agent, Roy Kellerman. In the car’s fold-down jump seats were Texas governor John Connally and his wife, Nellie. In the rear bench seat were President Kennedy and the First Lady, Jacqueline. As the President and his staff had requested, the plastic bubble top was off, leaving the car as an open convertible, and no Secret Service men rode on the running boards attached to the rear. The motorcycle escort was limited to four, and kept at a comfortable distance from the limousine. A 1956 Cadillac convertible filled with Secret Service agents and presidential aides followed JFK’s car. The Vice-President’s car, with Mrs. Johnson, Texas senator Ralph Yarborough, and some Secret Service agents, was next in line. The remainder of the motorcade included local dignitaries, some press cars, and finally two buses, one for VIPs and one for additional press.
The crowd surged forward as the President passed along Houston Street. The limousine slowed considerably to navigate the 120-degree left turn onto Elm, directly in front of the Depository. Agent Forrest Sorrels, in the car ahead of the President, looked at his watch. It was almost 12:30. He radioed the Trade Mart, “We’ll be there in five minutes.” In the car behind the President, Agent Emory Roberts independently radioed the Trade Mart, “Halfback to Base. Five minutes to destination.” Jackie Kennedy, dressed in a pink wool two-piece suit, with a pillbox hat, was hot under the unfiltered midday sun. After the car had turned onto Elm, she saw the Triple Underpass just a couple of hundred yards away, and thought “it would be cool under that tunnel.”62 Compared to the mobs that had thronged the downtown streets, the crowds had thinned through the plaza. Mrs. Connally turned to the Kennedys and said, “Mr. President, you can’t say that Dallas doesn’t love you.” The President said, “No, you certainly can’t.” It was 12:30 on the Hertz sign atop the Book Depository.
Most people did not realize the first loud crack was gunfire. Some thought it was a firecracker or a backfire from a police motorcycle. By the second shot, many realized it was too loud to be anything but gunfire. The President’s arms jerked up into a locked position level with his neck. Governor Connally pushed back into his jump seat and then fell over into his wife’s arms. Seeing his own shirt covered with blood, the Governor shouted, “My God, they are going to kill us all!” The President, strapped into a brace for his bad back, remained propped upright, his head lolling slightly to the left.
The Secret Service agents were slow to react, although some had turned to look at the source of the noise, the Book Depository. Jacqueline Kennedy leaned toward her husband, looking at him quizzically. Incredibly, Greer, sensing something was wrong in the back of the car, slowed the vehicle to almost a standstill and turned in his seat to see what had happened. As he turned, there was a stomach-wrenching sound, as if a grapefruit had been struck with a baseball bat. The final bullet tore off the right side of the President’s head, sending a red mist of blood, brain tissue, and skull fragments upward and to the front. As he fell partially across the backseat and toward the floor, Jacqueline began climbing out the rear and onto the trunk. Secret Service agent Clint Hill, riding in the backup car, responded rapidly, running to reach the car just in time to mount the rear bumper and push her back inside. At that moment Greer slammed on the accelerator, and the President’s car sped out of Dealey Plaza.*
Witnesses later described the scene that followed as “pandemonium” and “chaos.” Some threw themselves on the ground to avoid the gunfire; others screamed or began running. A motorcycle policeman escorting the presidential limousine, Bobby Hargis, “didn’t know” where the shots came from, but felt it was either the “railroad overpass or … the Texas Book Depository.”63 He stopped his cycle and ran toward the end of the wooden stockade fence on the grassy knoll near the Triple Underpass. Many in the crowd followed him, running—strangely—into the area where the gunman might be instead of away from danger.
Because of the ensuing bedlam, Dealey Plaza produced a mass of contradictory statements from scores of witnesses. In even the simplest auto accident, eyewitnesses almost invariably present different, and sometimes completely conflicting, accounts.* There was ample reason for confusion at Dealey. The crowds had concentrated on the presidential motorcade, a mesmerizing event for many. They were not expecting rifle shots over a few seconds, and to complicate matters, the plaza is an echo chamber. In the turmoil that followed, it is little wonder that witnesses standing next to each other often heard and saw things differently. Resolving every conflicting account is impossible. However, the statements can be sifted for internal inconsistencies and judged for credibility. Testimony closer to the event must be given greater weight than changes or additions made years later, when the witness’s own memory is often muddied or influenced by television programs, films, books, and discussions with others. Danny Arce, one of Oswald’s co-workers and a witness at Dealey, summarized the difficulty: “I have read and heard so many things, it mixes together. You don’t know if it’s your own memory or it’s somebody else’s. We all read a lot of things, and sometimes inadvertently adopt things we hear from others. It’s hard to separate the two, and can get real confusing trying to figure out what you remember without having your memory colored by everything that has come out.”64
Yet just as any jury must decide which witnesses are most credible, the same can be done with the seemingly intractable morass at Dealey.
How many shots were fired at Dealey Plaza? And from what direction? Estimates at the scene ranged from one to eight shots. However, on this issue, there was more agreement than on any other postassassination matter. Of the nearly two hundred witnesses who expressed an opinion on the number of shots whose testimony or statements are in the National Archives or the twenty-six Warren Commission volumes, over 88 percent heard three shots.65* Almost 7 percent heard only two or fewer shots, and fewer than 5 percent heard four or more. Although almost every conspiracy theory that proposes more than one assassin relies on there having been four or more shots, the writers seldom disclose that fewer than one in twenty witnesses heard that many.
While the consistency of opinion on the number of shots is persuasive, the echo patterns in Dealey make locating the direction of the shots more difficult, and the witness statements reflect that. The House Select Committee reviewed more than 178 witness statements and found that 44 percent of the witnesses could not determine where the shots came from. Of the remainder, the largest block, 28 percent, thought the shots came from the Book Depository, 12 percent pinpointed the grassy knoll, and 17 percent believed the shots originated elsewhere (one even thinking they came from within the President’s car). And significantly, only four witnesses, 2 percent, thought they came from more than one location.66†
The last figure, 2 percent, is a critical blow to most conspiracy theories, since those who charge there was a second gunman usually place the additional shooter in front and to the right of the President’s car, on the grassy knoll. But even these writers acknowledge that most of the shots came from the rear. They insist only that the fatal head shot came from the front. However, only four of 178 witnesses heard shots from more than one location. According to Dr. David Green, an acoustics expert retained by the House Select Committee, it was “hard to believe a rifle was fired from the knoll,” since a separate shot from there would have been easy to “localize.”67 Instead, the fact that any witnesses described all the shots as coming from the grassy knoll, when there is incontrovertible evidence that at least two came from the rear, indicates they were just completely fooled by the acoustics at Dealey.
However, the conspiracy critics often manipulate the witness statements to make the Depository seem a less popular choice. Josiah Thompson, author of the best-selling Six Seconds in Dallas, is cited by many as saying that 52 percent of the witnesses selected the grassy knoll, 39 percent the Depository, and some 6 percent said both directions.68 The author reviewed Thompson’s work witness by witness and discovered substantive errors. In his “Master List of Assassination Witnesses,” Thompson puts witnesses such as Amos Euins, Mrs. Robert Reid, Tom C. Dillard, Jack E. Dougherty, Victoria Adams, Mrs. John Connally, J. W. Foster, Roy Kellerman, James Underwood, and Emmet Hudson in either the undecided or grassy knoll column. Yet, all of them actually described the shots as coming from the vicinity of the Book Depository. For instance, J. W. Foster said the shots originated from “the corner of Elm and Houston.” Thompson does not remind the reader that the building at that corner is the Depository. Unless the witness named the Depository, Thompson does not place him in that category. He also lists James Underwood as uncommitted since he said the shots came from “overhead”—but omitted his next sentence, in which he explained that “overhead” meant “the Texas School Book Depository.”69 In other instances Thompson incorrectly puts witnesses in the grassy knoll column. He lists Bobby Hargis, the motorcycle policeman who was the first to run toward the grassy knoll, as saying the shots were from there, when he actually testified: “There wasn’t any way in the world I could tell where they were coming from.”70 Abraham Zapruder, William Shelley, and James Tague are similar examples of witnesses confused by the acoustics in Dealey.*
Those who study the plaza are not surprised by its unusual echo characteristics.71 A number of witnesses reported “reverberation” or sounds that “bounced off the buildings.”72 Others said that sounds were “reflected by the underpass and therefore came back,” or that the concrete underpass caused a “concussion” of noises.73 The worst confluence of echoes affected those witnesses close to the grassy knoll. Abraham Zapruder, the Dallas dressmaker who took the home movie of the assassination, stood atop a concrete divider wall on top of the knoll. “There was too much reverberation,” he said. “There was an echo which gave me a sound all over.”74 Lee Bowers was in the second story of a railroad signal tower, 130 feet behind the grassy knoll. He could not tell whether the shots came from the Triple Underpass or the Book Depository. He had worked in that area for more than ten years and knew that echo patterns made it impossible to pinpoint the direction of sounds.75 Roy Truly, Oswald’s supervisor, was standing across the street from the Depository, but said the echo confused him so he believed the gunfire originated from the grassy knoll.76
Yet if the overwhelming ear-witness testimony is that only three shots were fired, why did the House Select Committee conclude in 1979 there was a 95 percent certainty that a fourth shot was fired from the grassy knoll, and therefore there was a conspiracy involving a second gunman?
The committee agreed there were three shots from the rear (the Depository), and that two of those struck President Kennedy and Governor Connally.* It based its conclusion that there was a fourth shot on the analysis of a static-filled dictabelt recording of both Dallas police channels in operation on November 22. Channel One was for normal police business, and Channel Two for traffic concerned with the motorcade. A police motorcycle had its radio switch stuck in the “on” position for over five minutes around the time of the assassination.77 All the sounds within the range of that open microphone were inadvertently recorded. The committee speculated that if the open mike was in Dealey Plaza, it might have recorded the shots.
Yet there are no sounds of gunfire, or even what could be remotely construed as popping sounds, on the dictabelt recordings. The absence of any sounds of gunshots seemed to show the mike was not in Dealey Plaza* Still, sound experts searched for inaudible “impulse patterns,” claiming that such patterns could indicate gunfire, and they found several unusual ones.78 Then an “acoustical reconstruction” was done at Dealey on August 20, 1978, with a Carcano fired from both the Depository and the grassy knoll. The “impulses” created at the reenactment were then compared to those on the original dictabelt recording. The Select Committee’s first experts—Bolt, Beranek and Newman—concluded there was a 50 percent chance of a fourth shot, acoustically located at the grassy knoll.79 The committee then turned the dictabelt and sound reenactment over to Mark Weiss and Ernest Aschkenasy, of Queens College, for further study. Weiss and Aschkenasy eventually upped the probability to 95 percent. All that was needed to wrap up the scientific breakthrough was “proof” that the open mike was in Dealey Plaza. On December 29, 1978, two days before the committee was scheduled to finish its work, H. B. McLain, an ex-Dallas policeman who was riding to the left rear of Vice-President Johnson’s car, testified that his mike was often stuck in the open position, but he did not know if it got stuck that day.80 That was enough for the final report to conclude that McLain’s cycle had the open mike.
However, it was not long after the report was issued that the Select Committee’s rushed work began unraveling. First, when McLain returned to Dallas, he finally heard a copy of the dictabelt recording. “I asked them [the Select Committee] the night before I testified if I could hear the tape,” he told the author, “and they said, ‘No, you don’t need to hear that.’ They knew that if I heard that tape I wouldn’t testify for them, because I would immediately know that wasn’t my cycle. If they had wanted truthful answers they would have played the tape for me first.”81 McLain was adamant once he heard the tape, because immediately after the shots were fired at Dealey, he had raced off on his motorcycle and accompanied the President’s car at high speed to Parkland Hospital.82 The sirens on the Dallas police cycles were footactivated, and the faster the cycle traveled, the louder the siren was. Yet on the dictabelt recording there are no sirens, except nearly two minutes after the supposed shooting, when a siren approaches the vehicle with the open mike and then passes it.83 If the open mike had been on McLain’s cycle, a siren should be heard on the recording from almost immediately after the shots until the arrival at Parkland. Trying to fit McLain into its acoustics conclusion, the committee then suggested he might have sat in Dealey Plaza for two minutes after the shots, forgot to turn on his siren, then raced to catch up with the motorcade, but then fallen back.84 But that does not fit the photographic or eyewitness testimony about McLain’s actions.* Also missing from the tape, if it was stuck open in Dealey Plaza, is any crowd noise. “The crowds were surging forward,” says McLain. “They were screaming, hollering, hanging from lampposts. People kept running forward, and we had to run the bikes toward them to push them back. The noise was so great that I had trouble hearing my radio.”85 Instead of crowd noise on the tape, there is the sound of someone softly whistling nearby, and then the single toll of a bell, which was nowhere near Dealey. Finally, when McLain’s cycle was speeding toward Parkland, the dictabelt recording reveals the engine on the cycle in question is idling, not racing.86 Dallas sheriff Jim Bowles has been relentless in pursuing many of the questions unresolved by the Select Committee, and he determined the open mike was on a motorcycle stationed at the Trade Mart, where the President’s luncheon reception was scheduled.87*
If the open microphone was not in Dealey Plaza, it could not have recorded the sounds of the assassination. However, even worse news was due the House Select Committee’s acoustics conclusion. In one of the most unusual turns in the case, in July 1979, Steve Barber, a rock drummer living in a small Ohio town, purchased an adult magazine, Gallery, which included a plastic insert recording of the dictabelt evidence. “I just played this thing to death,” said Barber, “just trying to hear the gunshots and hear for myself what they really said was 95 percent evidence of conspiracy.”88 Barber heard something all the highly paid experts missed. At the point on the tape where the experts decided there were four shots over a six-second period, Barber heard the barely audible words “Hold everything secure …” That matched with “Hold everything secure until the homicide and other investigators can get there …”—words spoken by Sheriff Bill Decker, in the lead motorcade car, on police Channel Two. The Decker transmission had crossed over to Channel One. But Decker spoke those words nearly one minute after the assassination, when he was instructing his officers what to do at Dealey Plaza. If the cross-talk Barber discovered was correct, it meant the Select Committee’s experts had picked up sound impulses of “bullet shots” one minute after the actual assassination.
The National Academy of Sciences appointed a distinguished panel of twelve scientists to study the Select Committee’s acoustics work. Dubbed the Ramsey Panel, after its chairman, Professor Norman Ramsey of Harvard, it concluded in 1982 that the committee’s work was “seriously flawed”89 and that Barber’s analysis was correct.90 Moreover, the Ramsey Panel, in a ninety-six-page report, blasted the Select Committee’s conclusions about a grassy-knoll shooter and a fourth shot, saying there were “serious errors” in its work and there “was no acoustic basis” for such a claim.91†
While the Select Committee failed to establish the number of shots at Dealey Plaza scientifically, it also missed other sources of information that could have helped it determine the correct number. Three critical ear-witnesses were Oswald’s young co-workers Bonnie Ray Williams, Junior Jarman, and Harold Norman. During the assassination, they were on the southeast corner of the fifth floor, under the sniper’s nest. Since the flooring was being replaced on the sixth floor, there was only a thin plywood covering, with cracks in the planks allowing some light between the floors.92 Sounds passed easily. While they were watching the motorcade below from three separate windows, they heard the first rifle shot. It sounded like an explosion.93 Bonnie Ray Williams said the shots were “loud.… [It] sounded like it was right in the building … it even shook the building, the side we were on. Cement fell on my head.”94 Junior Jarman heard the explosions and ran over to his two friends. It was Harold Norman, directly under the sniper’s nest, who heard the most important sounds. “When the first shot came, I heard boom, then click-click, boom, click-click, boom,” he says. “I could hear the sound of the click [the bolt action], I could hear the sound of the shells hitting the floor, I could hear everything. Three shots. No doubt in my mind.”95 Norman shouted to his friends, “It’s coming right over our heads!” “No bullshit!” Williams shouted back.96 Before anyone discovered Oswald’s Carcano on the sixth floor, Norman had correctly described a bolt-action rifle being fired directly over his head.* Robert Jackson and Malcolm Couch, news photographers, looked up at the Depository during the last shot. They noticed two of the young black men on the fifth floor straining to look at the window above.97
The final piece of the acoustical puzzle over the number of shots fired at Dealey Plaza is available now in the confirmation of a story that has long been rumored in Dallas. Since the assassination, local media gossip had it that a journalist had recorded the sounds of Dealey on November 22 and that later the recording was accidentally erased. The author finally located the reporter, Travis Linn, now a professor of journalism. He had always declined previous interviews because “I didn’t want to be the subject of twenty thousand telephone calls.” But despite his reluctance, he finally agreed to tell, for the first time publicly, the story of the only sound recording known to have been made of the assassination.
“I was a reporter for WFAA radio [there is also a WFAA-TV], which was an ABC and NBC affiliate,” says Linn. “As we were making our plans for the day, I was scheduled to go to the Trade Mart, where I was supposed to do radio pool on the speech. I asked one of the TV guys, A. J. L’Hoste, if he would take one of our portable tape recorders up to Dealey Plaza, as he was going up there, and I asked him to set it down on top of a column near the reflective pool at the corner of Houston and Elm [across the street from the Depository]. It would get the natural sound of the motorcade going by. I was at the Trade Mart when the shooting occurred, and after, I was on the air from there, basically repeating what I heard from my own station into the microphone for six other stations for ABC. Finally, we shut down after Kennedy’s death had been announced, and I caught a ride up to Dealey. I remembered that I had asked L’Hoste to set up the recorder, but he was gone. And I looked around and found the tape [recorder] on top of one of those pedestals. You couldn’t really even see it, as the pedestals are tall, the tape recorder is pretty small, and you would have to look for it. And no one was looking for anything there after the pandemonium of the shooting.”98
Linn said the German-manufactured recorder was a battery-driven professional unit. It was an early version of a cassette recorder, which had to be rewound manually with a crank. In order to play it on the air, it had to be transferred to a reel-to-reel tape machine.
“So I took it back to the station and dubbed it onto reel-to-reel,” he says, “in our beeper room, which is where we took in phone reports and production. And while I was in the process of dubbing it, I was called by my news director to go out, with a TV guy, to Lee Harvey Oswald’s apartment. So I yelled, ‘Don’t erase that tape.’ When I got back, the tape had been erased. The way it worked is you got the cassettes, and after you dubbed out of those little cartridges, you then bulk-erased the cartridges and went on to another assignment. And the reel-to-reel was not bulk-erased, but had been recorded over with so many incoming feeds that you could not find anything but little snatches of crowd noises.”
When asked if he heard the sounds of shots on the tape when he first played it back, Linn had no hesitation. “When I was dubbing it, I did hear three shots. I can tell you without any doubt that there were three shots and they were rifle shots. I know rifles and pistols. There is no question about those sounds. They were huge over the crowd noise. You’ve heard a rifle. A rifle fired in that square makes quite a noise. The first two, my recollection is, were closer together, and there was a slightly longer pause until the third one, as if the guy hurried his shots, and then said, ‘No, I am going to aim this time.’”99
Asked why he had never come forward, Linn said, “Others knew about it at the station. But I was the only one that heard the shots. That’s why I figured, ‘Let’s just forget about it.’ In those days after the assassination, the stories were coming in so quick, just bang, bang, bang, that there was no time to think about it. You just don’t have time to do thumbsuckers and think of what might have been. I knew within a week that if I had it, that it was very important. But I didn’t have it, so what could I do?”*
Of the hundreds of witnesses at Dealey Plaza, did any see the assassin fire the shots? There were a good many witnesses who saw the actual shooter, or the rifle itself, and in every instance they identified the same location—the southeast corner of the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. Robert Jackson, a Dallas Times Herald photographer, was riding in the motorcade in an open convertible, with four other reporters. They were about one block behind the President’s car. During the time the shots were being fired, Jackson and the other reporters began looking around the Plaza for the source, and he glanced up to the top of the Depository. Their car was only twenty-five feet from the front of the building.100 “I noticed two Negro men in a window straining to see directly above them, and my eyes followed right on up to the window above them and I saw the rifle … approximately half of the weapon … and just as I looked at it, it was drawn fairly slowly back into the building …”101 Jackson said the rifle was pointing down Elm Street, where the President had just been shot, and he also noticed the wall of boxes in the window, “enough to hide a man.”102
Malcolm Couch, a cameraman, was in the same car as Jackson. “After the third shot,” Couch recalled, “Bob Jackson, who was as I recall on my right, yelled something like, ‘Look up in the window! There’s the rifle!’ And I remember glancing up to a window on the far right, which at the time impressed me as the sixth or seventh floor, and seeing about a foot of a rifle being—the barrel brought into the window.”103 Couch also noticed the rifle was pointed down Elm Street.
James Crawford, a deputy district court clerk, was standing on the corner across the street from the Depository and not far from Jackson and Couch’s car. He also looked around when the shots rang out. “As the third report was sounded,” he said, “I looked up and from the far east corner of the sixth floor I saw a movement in the only window that was open on that floor.”104 Crawford turned to his friend Mary Ann Mitchell and said the shots had come from that corner window. He caught a quick glimpse of a “profile, somewhat from the waist up” and noticed something white (likely Oswald’s T-shirt), as well as one of the boxes of the sniper’s nest. He found a deputy sheriff, Allan Sweatt, and told him to “have the men search the boxes directly behind this window that was open on the sixth floor—the window in the far east corner.”105
Mrs. Earle Cabell, the wife of the Dallas mayor, was four cars behind the President’s in an open convertible. As the shots echoed through the plaza, she was facing the Depository. “Because I heard the direction from which the shot came, I just jerked my head up,” she remembered. “I saw a projection out of those windows … on the sixth floor.”106 Immediately after, she smelled gunpowder.*
Standing on the sidewalk in front of the Depository was James Worrell, a nineteen-year-old student. The first shot was loud and sounded like it came from over his head, instinctively making him raise his head and look over his body at a ninety-degree angle. “I looked up like that,” he said, “just straight up.… I saw the rifle, about six inches of it. I saw about four inches of the barrel … but it had a long stock and … I saw about two inches [of the stock].”107† Worrell looked up after the first shot. He saw something few others did, the rifle actually fire, “what you might call a little flash of fire and then smoke.”108 The gun was “pointing right down at the motorcade.”
Another witness who had a clear view of the sniper’s nest was fifteen-year-old Amos Lee Euins. He was small for his age, and someone had lifted him atop a concrete pedestal by the reflecting pool across the street from the Depository. “I could see everything,” he says.109 “I saw what I thought was a pipe,” Euins told the author. “I saw it ahead of time. It looked like a dark metal pipe hanging from the window, and it was an old building, so I figured, ‘Hey, it’s got a pipe hanging off it.’ I never realized it was a gun until the shooting started.”110 Then he jumped off the pedestal and looked up at the sixth-floor window. He saw “the rifle laying across in his hand, and I could see his hand on the trigger part.”111 After the third shot, Euins remembered the sniper “pulled the gun back in the window.” While he could not describe the shooter, he ran to a policeman and told him what he saw.
But the person who saw more that day in Dealey Plaza than any other witness was construction worker Howard Brennan. He was sitting on top of a four-foot-high retaining wall on the corner of Houston and Elm, directly across the street from the School Book Depository (Brennan is visible in the Zapruder film—he was just over 100 feet from the window).112 When he arrived at that corner, he checked his watch and it was 12:18. The first time he noticed a man in the southeast corner of the sixth floor was several minutes later. He guessed he was five feet eight to five feet ten inches tall, white, slender, with dark-brown hair, and between twenty-five and thirty-five years of age.113 “As I looked at the man,” said Brennan, “it struck me how unsmiling and calm he was. He didn’t seem to feel one bit of excitement. His face was almost expressionless.… He seemed preoccupied.”114
After the motorcade passed by Brennan’s corner, the first shot rang out. He, like many others, thought it was a backfire. “I looked up then at the Texas School Book Depository Building,” he recalled. “What I saw made my blood run cold. Poised in the corner window of the sixth floor was the same young man I had noticed several times before the motorcade arrived. There was one difference—this time he held a rifle in his hands, pointing toward the Presidential car. He steadied the rifle against the cornice and while he moved quickly, he didn’t seem to be in any kind of panic. All this happened in the matter of a second or two. Then came the sickening sound of a second shot.… I wanted to cry, I wanted to scream, but I couldn’t utter a sound.”115 A woman next to him screamed when she realized the noises were rifle fire. Brennan’s eyes locked on the solitary figure steadying his rifle for the final shot. “He was aiming again and I wanted to pray, to beg God to somehow make him miss the target … what I was seeing, the sight became so fixed in my mind that I’ll never forget it for as long as I live.… Then another shot rang out.”116 Brennan hit the ground, afraid there would be more gunfire. The President’s car started to speed away. He looked up at the window a final time. “To my amazement the man still stood there in the window. He didn’t appear to be rushed. There was no particular emotion visible on his face except for a slight smirk. It was a look of satisfaction, as if he had accomplished what he set out to do.… [Then] he simply moved away from the window until he disappeared from my line of vision.”117
Brennan said the “last thing I wanted to do was to get involved.” But he noticed “that it appeared to me that they [the police] were searching in the wrong direction for the man that did the shooting.”118 Despite his reluctance, he went to a uniformed policeman in front of the Depository and told him what he saw. The policeman left for a few minutes and returned with Dallas police inspector Herbert Sawyer. Brennan repeated his story, and Sawyer walked to a nearby car and reported the first description of the suspect. At 12:45, only fifteen minutes after the assassination, the Dallas police dispatcher broke across Channel One: “Attention all squads—attention all squads. At Elm and Houston reported to be an unknown white male, approximately thirty, slender build, height five feet ten inches, 165 pounds—reported to be armed with what is believed to be a 30-caliber rifle … no further description or information at this time.”119*
Because Brennan is so specific in his descriptions, the critics go to extensive efforts to discredit him. On the same night of the assassination, at a lineup, Brennan said about Oswald, “He looks like the man, but I can’t say for sure.”120 Since he could not positively identify him, did that mean he did not get a very good look at the shooter? Not at all. Brennan could have picked Oswald from the lineup, but did not do so because he feared others might be involved in the assassination, and if word leaked that he was the only one who could identify the trigger man, his life would be in danger.121 The FBI had already given him a twenty-four-hour guard (which continued for three weeks), heightening his concern. He thought about moving his family out of the area. Besides the danger, Brennan thought “since they already had the man for murder, that he wasn’t going to be set free to escape and get out of the country immediately, and I could very easily … get in touch with them [the FBI] to see that the man didn’t get loose.”122
“But with all fairness,” he told the Warren Commission, “I could have positively identified the man.” He said he saw the assassin as well as he saw the three men on the fifth floor, and he identified them as they came out the Depository within a half hour of the assassination.123 “I knew I could never forget the face I had seen in the window on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository,” Brennan said.124
The last point on which the critics try to disparage Brennan’s credibility is his eyesight. Mark Lane started the attack in his 1966 Rush to Judgment, when he wrote, “Perhaps poor eyesight accounted for Brennan’s inability to identify the men at the window … he was not wearing glasses when he glanced up at the sixth-floor window .…”125 Marrs says, “Much later, it was determined that Brennan had poor eyesight …”126 Robert Sam Anson goes one step further, charging that the Warren Commission “purposely excluded” the information about the “nearsighted Howard Brennan …”127 But any who read Brennan’s testimony to the Warren Commission would have discovered he was in fact farsighted.128 Although his eyes were later damaged in a sandblasting accident after the assassination, he said, “On that day my vision was perfect.” Brennan said his eyesight for anything at a distance was “extraordinary,” allowing him when in a car to read license plates of other cars from a couple of hundred feet. He fervently believed God had placed him in the position to witness the assassination because of “my gift of super-eyesight.”129
But what did other witnesses report seeing in Dealey Plaza, and is there any evidence of a second gunman? Some reported “some commotion,” or “a puff of smoke” near the grassy knoll, but not one witness gave a contemporaneous statement about a second gunman at Dealey. However, since that day, new witnesses have stepped forward, sometimes years later, claiming to have seen the real assassin. Some people have actually confessed to being the phantom grassy-knoll shooter. While many reports can be dismissed out of hand (such as the man who identified Frank Sinatra’s drummer as the second shooter), the major witnesses for a conspiracy deserve scrutiny.
Jean Hill was standing on the southern side of Elm Street as President Kennedy’s car passed. She was with her friend Mary Moorman, who snapped a Polaroid of the rear of the President’s car almost at the moment of the fatal head shot.* Over the years, she has become one of the chief witnesses used by critics to establish the presence of a grassy-knoll shooter. Cited in books and articles, and the author of her own book, The Last Dissenting Witness, Hill is a frequent television guest and speaker at assassination symposia. Oliver Stone gave her character a prominent role in JFK. But what did she originally say that day, and how has her story changed over the years?
On the day of the assassination, she gave a statement to the sheriff’s office and signed it as correct.130 She said: “Just as Mary Moorman started to take a picture we were looking at the President and Jackie in the back seat and they were looking at a little dog between them.” Hill elaborated later to say it was a “white, fluffy dog.” When she discovered there was no dog in the President’s car, she claimed to be confused by the white roses (they were actually red). She later dropped the dog from her story.
In her November 22 statement, she also said the President looked at her when he was first shot, but then later changed that to say she jumped to the edge of the street and yelled, “Hey, we want to take your picture,” and that is why JFK looked over.131 The Zapruder home movie shows Hill never moved or said a word as the President passed, and she was not even looking at him when he was first shot. Hill said Jackie shouted, “My God, he has been shot!” Jackie and the car’s four other occupants deny she said anything. Although Hill claimed she scrutinized the car’s passengers, she did not know Mrs. Connally was in the car, actually on the side nearest to her.132
According to Hill, there were two shots, then a pause, and “three or four more shots rang out …”133 She testified that the first three shots were from a bolt-action, and the remainder might have been from an automatic.134 On the day of the assassination, she told the sheriff’s department that she saw “some men in plain clothes shooting back …” No one returned gunfire. In her original written statement, she saw a “man [near the Depository] running toward the monument” on the other side of the plaza, and started running after him. Over the years that portion of her story has dramatically changed. She soon said that when she chased the man, her attention was drawn “to a trail of blood in the grass.”135 She followed it in the belief that the man had been shot by a policeman, but it turned out to be drops left by a Sno-Cone, flavored crushed ice.136 Later, she told a reporter that the man looked like Jack Ruby, but backed off the Ruby identification because “quite a few people,” including her husband, made fun of her testimony.137
Although she considered the man near the Depository suspicious, she admitted she “never saw a weapon the whole time.” She told the Warren Commission, “When I ran across the street, the first motorcycle that was right behind [the President’s car] nearly hit me,” and she explained how she dashed across the road, past the motorcade traffic, to chase the stranger.138 Summers writes, “Hill had run impetuously across the road, dodging between the cars while the motorcade was still going by. She was ahead of the field in the parking lot …”139 In one version, Hill claims she lost sight of the man as he ran over the railroad tracks.140 However, another Dealey witness, Wilma Bond, was behind and to the east of Hill, and took a series of still photographs that day. While they show a crowd climbing the small incline leading to the fence on the grassy knoll, just minutes after the shooting, Jean Hill is still either sitting or standing next to Mary Moorman. In one of the photos, the rear of a large bus at the tail end of the motorcade is passing under the Triple Underpass. That means that most of the motorcade had left Dealey Plaza, yet Hill was still in her original position and had not yet taken a step to cross the road to chase the character as she described.
In her original statement, Hill said when she got to the grassy knoll, the police were turning people back, so she returned to Mary Moorman. There was “Mr. Featherstone of the Times Herald,” and “he brought us to the press room down at the Sheriff’s office and ask us to stay.”141 However, she later radically departed from that story and alleged she encountered two men impersonating Secret Service agents. She told Jim Marrs, “I was looking around but I couldn’t see anything, when these two guys came up behind me. One of them said, ‘You’re coming with us,’ and I replied, ‘Oh, no I’m not. I don’t know you.’ ‘I said you’re coming with us,’ one of them said and then put this horrible grip on my shoulder. I can still feel the pain when I think about it. I tried to tell them, ‘I have to go back and find my friend Mary.’ But then the other guy put a grip on my other shoulder and they began hustling me past the front of the Depository. ‘Keep smiling and keep walking,’ one of them kept telling me. They marched me across the Plaza and into a building. They took me into a little office upstairs and they wouldn’t let me out of this room.”142 Featherstone confirmed he was the person who escorted Hill and Moorman to the sheriff’s office, just as Hill said in her original statement.
Finally, Hill was interviewed within half an hour of the assassination by a local Dallas television crew. Asked if she saw anybody or if anything drew her attention, she said, unequivocally, “No.”143 She did not see any guns, flashes of light, or puffs of smoke. However, over the years her story changed to include a grassy-knoll shooter. By 1986, she told Jim Marrs, “I saw a man fire from behind the wooden fence. I saw a puff of smoke and some sort of movement on the grassy knoll where he was.”144 In 1989, she added a “flash of light” to her scenario.145*
Hill now claims that her Warren Commission testimony “was a fabrication from the first line.”146 She charges that in 1964, when Arlen Specter, now a U.S. senator from Pennsylvania and then a staff attorney for the Warren Commission, took her testimony, he threatened her. “He got angrier and angrier and finally told me, ‘Look, we can make you look as crazy as Marguerite Oswald and everybody knows how crazy she is. We could have you put in a mental institution if you don’t cooperate with us.’”147 There is nothing remotely approaching such conduct by Specter in the stenographer’s verbatim transcription of the deposition.
Another witness who is used by the critics to support the claim of a grassy-knoll shooter is Jesse Price. He was on the roof of the Union Terminal Annex, on the southern end of the plaza. Price also signed an affidavit the day of the assassination. Marrs, in Crossfire, refers to Price’s affidavit, and writes, “While sitting on the edge of the building’s roof overlooking the plaza, Price heard shots ‘… from by the … Triple Underpass.’”148 What Price actually said in his affidavit had nothing to do with hearing shots from that location: “The cars had proceeded West on Elm and was [sic] just a short distance from the Tripple [sic] underpass, when I saw Gov. Connelly [sic] slump over.”149 Then Marrs says Price saw a young man, with a white dress shirt, no tie, and khaki-colored pants, running toward the passenger cars on the railroad tracks. According to Marrs, Price saw something in the man’s hand, “which could have been a gun.”150 In his affidavit Price actually said, “He had something in his hand. I couldn’t be sure but it may have been a head piece [a hat].”* Finally, Marrs cites him to establish that there were many rifle shots at Dealey. Marrs quotes Price as saying: “There was a volley of shots, I think five and then much later … another one.” The crucial portion that Marrs omitted with ellipsis points says, “maybe as much as five minutes later.” Realizing that Price would lose all credibility if the reader knew he thought there was a final shot five minutes after the first, Marrs just omitted the offending language. In conclusion, Marrs says, “Price was never called to testify to the Warren Commission,” implying that the Commission wanted to avoid such a witness because it was not seeking the truth about what had happened at Dealey. Judging from Price’s affidavit, the reason he was not called is obvious.
Lee Bowers was stationed in the second story of a railroad signal tower, 130 feet behind the grassy knoll. He had a clear view of the parking lot and the back of the fence from which the supposed second gunman fired. Before the assassination, he saw no unusual activity in the area. Three cars drove into the parking lot between noon and the assassination, looking for a space but, seeing it filled, left.151 Bowers also noted two men behind the fence, some fifteen feet apart, who apparently did not know each other.152 They were standing near the point where the fence met the Triple Underpass, some fifty feet from where critics believe a second gunman fired. Anyone behind the fence becomes a focus of suspicion, but Bowers testified that at least one—and maybe both—was still there when the police arrived after the assassination.153 There has also been import attached to Bowers’s statement that at the time of the assassination “there was some commotion” near the parking area. When asked to define “commotion,” however, he said, “Nothing that I could pinpoint as having happened.”*
Sam Holland, an elderly railway signal supervisor, was standing on top of the Triple Underpass with several other railway workers and a Dallas policeman. He told the Warren Commission, “There was a shot, a report, I don’t know whether it was a shot. I can’t say that. And a puff of smoke came out about 6 or 8 feet above the ground right out from under those trees.”154 Most critics cite Holland’s testimony, saying that “a puff of smoke” is evidence that a shot was fired from the grassy knoll. Yet Holland was not certain the smoke was caused by gunfire. In his affidavit, taken the day of the assassination, he was confused about several issues, thinking that Mrs. Kennedy was trying to climb into the backseat to join her husband, and that a Secret Service agent in the President’s car had “raised up in the seat with a machine gun.”155† Others on the overpass with Holland, such as Frank Reilly, Royce Skelton, and Dallas policeman J. W. Foster, never saw any smoke.156 Yet Edward Jay Epstein, in Inquest, writes, “Five of the witnesses on the overpass said they had also seen smoke rise from the grassy knoll area.”157 Epstein’s citation lists only four names, one of which is Holland. The other three, who were all on the overpass with Holland, do not support the proposition that the smoke resulted from gunfire. James Simmons said he thought the shots came from the Book Depository and that he saw “exhaust fumes” from the embankment.158 Clemon Johnson saw white smoke but told the FBI that it “came from a motorcycle abandoned near the spot by a Dallas policeman.”159 Epstein’s final citation is from Austin Miller, who thought the smoke he saw was “steam.”160
In addition, since modern ammunition is smokeless, it seldom creates even a wisp of smoke.161 Moreover, on the day of the assassination there was a stiff wind blowing north to south, gusting up to twenty miles an hour.162 A puff of smoke would not rise from a rifle and sit stagnantly in the air when the winds were so stiff. Finally, in 1963, there was a steam pipe along the wooden fence near the edge of the Triple Underpass.163 A Dallas policeman, Seymour Weitzman, burned his hands on that pipe when searching there immediately after the shots. If there was smoke, it is most likely that it was either exhaust fumes or steam from the pipe.*
Two witnesses whose testimony indicates there was a grassy-knoll shooter appeared publicly for the first time in 1978. Gordon Arnold identified himself as a twenty-two-year-old soldier home on leave on November 22. According to his story, he ran into men with CIA identifications behind the grassy knoll before the assassination. During the shooting, he was standing only feet in front of the picket fence when a bullet whizzed past his left ear. He knew it was live ammunition being fired directly behind him, and he hit the ground. Arnold, who claimed he had a camera, said that after the assassination two men in police uniforms approached him. One kicked him while another, brandishing a shotgun and crying, confiscated his film. He fled back to Alaska and did not tell his story for fifteen years.164 He soon became a main figure in a documentary that claimed Kennedy was killed by a team of Corsican mercenaries, and his story is repeated in recent books. The problem is that it appears that Arnold was not even at Dealey Plaza on the day of the assassination. People on the grassy knoll near where Arnold says he was are clearly visible in the pictures taken of the knoll. Although Arnold claims he is not visible because he is lying flat on the ground, photo enhancements show no such person.*
Another major witness to appear years after the assassination is Ed Hoffman, a deaf mute, who presents a fascinating tale of multiple gunmen on the grassy knoll. Hoffman said he was on the Stemmons Freeway, some 250 to 300 yards west of the picket fence.165 Unaware that shots had been fired, he claimed to see a man in a suit and tie in the railyard behind the grassy knoll. He was running with a rifle. That gunman then tossed the rifle to a man disguised as a railyard worker and the second man disassembled the rifle, put it into a sack, and walked away.† Hoffman said that when he saw the wounded President speed past in the motorcade, he ran down the grassy incline from the freeway and tried to communicate to a policeman, who did not understand him.166
Although Hoffman did not go public until 1978, he had contacted the FBI in 1967, three and a half years after the assassination, and told a less sensational version. He said he saw two men running from the rear of the Texas School Book Depository, but the FBI concluded he could not have seen them from where he was because a fence west of the Depository blocked his view. He then changed his story to say he saw the men on top of the fence.167 There are additional problems, though, with his story. Dallas policeman Earle Brown, who was stationed as security on a railroad overpass above Stemmons Freeway, said there was no civilian there.168 Three other policemen on three-wheel traffic cycles were near where Hoffman claimed to be. They did not see him.169 Murphy said, “There was no one standing there [on the freeway overpass] prior to the arrival of the motorcade or after the motorcade arrived.” But in addition to questions about whether Ed Hoffman was where he said he was that day, it appears that even if he was there, his view, 750 to 900 feet away, was blocked. Photographs and independent testimony reveal there were four large railway freight cars over the Elm Street tunnel that day, effectively obstructing any view from Stemmons into the rear of the grassy knoll.170 Moreover, in 1963, a large Cutty Sark billboard also filled some of the space between the freeway and the railroad tracks.171 It is almost impossible for Hoffman to have seen what he described.172*
There are other eyewitnesses sometimes used to establish a second gunman at Dealey, but each has even greater credibility problems than the primary witnesses discussed above. Malcolm Summers, who was at Dealey, now says that he ran into a man, wielding a gun that looked like a machine pistol, on the grassy knoll. No one else saw such a figure. In an affidavit given the day after the assassination, Summers said he stayed at Dealey for twenty minutes after the shooting, but did not mention confronting anyone with a gun.173
A deputy sheriff, Roger Craig, said he saw a green Nash Rambler with a luggage rack, with suspicious men inside, drive away from the Depository soon after the assassination. Craig and others concluded it was the Paines’ car (the Paines had a green car, but it was a Chevrolet station wagon). Craig said that back at police headquarters, he entered the room where Captain Will Fritz was questioning Oswald and mentioned the station wagon. According to Craig, Oswald said, “That station wagon belongs to Mrs. Paine.… Don’t try to tie her into this. She had nothing to do with it.”174 But Captain Fritz branded Craig a liar, saying he had never even been inside the interrogation room.†
A Dallas policeman, Tom Tilson, also claimed, fifteen years after the event, to have witnessed a suspicious car leaving Dealey.175 Tilson, who was off duty on the day of the assassination, was in his own car with his daughter, Judy. He said he was near Dealey Plaza when he heard about the shooting on his police monitor. Then he noticed a man walk away from the railroad tracks behind the grassy knoll, throw a package into the backseat of a black car, and drive away. Tilson says he caught up to him when the man stopped for a red light, and then followed him at normal speeds over city streets, onto the DallasFort Worth Turnpike. Eventually, Tilson claims his daughter copied down the black car’s license plate number, and then he turned off the freeway to call the information into the homicide detectives. There are problems with Tilson’s story. About the suspicious man, he said, “If that wasn’t Jack Ruby, it was someone who was his twin brother.”176 More than half a dozen witnesses placed Ruby at the Dallas Morning News building at that very time (see pages 370-73). A photograph taken by Mel McIntire, snapped at almost the precise moment Tilson says he spotted the fleeing man, reveals no car, black or otherwise, in the location Tilson pinpointed.177 Dallas police radio logs for the day do not show any alert for such a car as Tilson described, nor is there any record that he gave a license number or made any such call to the homicide detectives. Finally, Tilson himself acknowledges that his daughter, his only witness, no longer confirms his story.178 He claims to have lost the paper on which his daughter, who was eighteen years old at the time, had supposedly written the car’s license, and she “doesn’t recall” writing down the number.179
Some early eyewitness evidence used to support a conspiracy has been quietly abandoned by the critics and is now discredited. On the day of the assassination, a man near the presidential motorcade opened and closed a black umbrella as the shots rang out. Some, such as Robert Cutler, the publisher of the Grassy Knoll Gazette, said the umbrella contained a poisoned flechette (a small dart) that shot into the President’s throat and neutralized him so a team of five assassins could finish the job.180 Jim Marrs and Oliver Stone believe the “umbrella man” gave a signal to the team of assassins waiting in ambush. However, the House Select Committee located the umbrella man in 1978, after publishing a drawing made from photographs taken that day and asking for public assistance in finding him. Louie Witt did not even know he was the subject of such controversy, still had the same umbrella, and explained he had gone to Dealey to heckle the President with it.181
Photographs taken at Dealey Plaza also showed a man standing next to Witt, and soon there were those who said he appeared to be Cuban and that he seemed to occasionally speak into a walkie-talkie. Witt himself said the man was black, and he never had anything that could be remotely confused with a walkie-talkie. Across the street from Witt was a stocky woman in a long coat and with a scarf tied around her head. Dubbed by conspiracy buffs as the “babushka lady,” she can be seen in other photos taking her own home movie of the motorcade. But she was never identified after the assassination. In 1970, a Texan, Beverly Oliver, stepped forward and said she was the babushka lady and that her film had been confiscated on the day of the assassination by either the Secret Service or the FBI. But some now doubt that Oliver was even in Dealey Plaza. Her story has changed numerous times. She claimed to have used a camera that did not exist in 1963, and later said that before the assassination she met both Jack Ruby and Lee Oswald, when Ruby introduced his friend as “Lee Oswald of the CIA.” Oliver also said she saw David Ferrie at Ruby’s Carousel Club so often that she thought he was the assistant manager. The House Select Committee interviewed her in executive session and decided not to use her as a witness. Still, Jim Marrs devoted substantial space to her story and seemingly accepted her claim of being the babushka lady.
Finally, there is controversy over a picture taken by Associated Press photographer Jim Altgens showing the presidential car just as JFK and Governor Connally reacted to their first wounds. Two of the Secret Service agents in the follow-up car have turned around and are looking toward the Book Depository. In the doorway of the Depository is a crowd of people, and one looks like Oswald. Even Marguerite said it looked like her son. How could he be on the sixth floor shooting the President if he was on the ground floor watching the parade? Yet the real question is why, when the original evidence is considered, this ever became such an important issue. Billy Lovelady, a worker at the Depository, testifying before the Warren Commission, immediately identified himself as the man in the doorway.182 Other co-workers testified they were on the Depository’s steps with Lovelady. When shown the same photograph, Danny Arce, Buell Frazier, Harold Norman, Mrs. Donald Baker, and William Shelley all, without hesitation, identified the man as Lovelady.183 Yet despite the implausibility that it was Oswald, that issue survived until the House Select Committee finally undertook an anthropological photo study and concluded the man in the doorway was indeed Lovelady. But such things die hard. Marrs still only admits that the man in the doorway “may have been Lovelady.”184
Beyond the eyewitnesses already discussed, the author has discovered several people who saw the assassination and have never before testified or told their stories. In the Terminal Annex building on the southern end of Dealey Plaza was the U.S. Post Office. The first and second floors were parcel post, the third mail processing, the fourth letter mail, and the fifth was both the cafeteria and the postal inspectors’ offices. The building’s view across Dealey is unobstructed. No one, apparently, including the Dallas police or the FBI, ever interviewed the employees there to discover what they saw. Dozens witnessed the assassination from the building’s windows. Most are now retired, some deceased, and their memories nearly three decades after the event are not what they would have been within days of the shooting. But their revelations are still pertinent. The six interviewed for this book each remembered hearing three distinct shots, and most important, three of them watched the assassination with a pair of binoculars.185 Because of the angle of their building, they looked at the President’s car directly in line with the grassy knoll. They saw no gunman, no puff of smoke, or any flash of light. One employee, Francine Burrows, had gone to Dealey Plaza to watch the motorcade. She ran across the grass to get closer to the President. In the Zapruder film, she is seen in a beige raincoat, running toward the limousine near the point of the fatal head shot, and has never been identified until now. Burrows was within twenty-five feet of JFK when he was shot and was also looking directly toward the grassy knoll. She saw nothing there. Instead, she remembers three shots, and says, “I was very close to him when he got shot. And I looked up at that window immediately [the southeast corner of the sixth floor of the Depository]. I knew instinctively that’s where the shots came from.” She ran back to her office after the third shot, and said she “was in shock, just in shock—I didn’t want to discuss it, I just wanted to forget it.”186
*Critics claim that Linnie Mae Randle and Buell Frazier described a package too short to contain Oswald’s rifle. Initially, Randle said the package was approximately 27 inches long, and Frazier estimated a little over two feet. The disassembled Carcano is 35 inches long, and the police later found the brown paper bag Oswald had brought into the Depository lying near the corner where three spent rifle shells were discovered (WC Vol. IV, p. 266). The bag was 38 inches long. Both Randle and Frazier said it looked like the same one Oswald carried that morning. The FBI discovered the bag contained microscopic fibers from the blanket with which Oswald kept his rifle wrapped in the Paine garage (WC Vol. IV, pp. 57, 76–80). Frazier later admitted the package could have been longer than he originally thought: “I only glanced at it … hardly paid any attention to it. He had the package parallel to his body, and it’s true it could have extended beyond his body and I wouldn’t have noticed it” (London Weekend Television, “Trial of Lee Harvey Oswald”). Although Oswald claimed to have curtain rods in the bag, none were found at the Depository.
* Some critics cite a February 13, 1964, FBI report that lists an earlier marijuana possession charge by Givens, and the belief that he would alter his story for money, to suggest that he changed his story over several months to place Oswald on the sixth floor shortly after noon. However, Givens had told Dallas police Lt. Jack Revill on the day of the assassination that he had seen Oswald on the sixth floor (WC Vol. V, pp. 35–36).
† Some, like Sylvia Meagher, in Accessories After the Fact, wonder why Oswald did not choose the seventh floor, where, she claimed, “there is an enclosure at the southeast corner that would insure privacy.” However, the corner enclosure had a door with a glass window, so anyone coming up the stairs would see the sniper. Moreover, the windowsills on the seventh floor are considerably higher than on the sixth, making it difficult to fire a rifle from a seated position. Also, the sixth-floor ledge partially obstructs the line of sight from the seventh floor.
‡In the Marine Corps, Oswald’s best rifle scores were in the seated position, with the rifle braced against his legs. Both the boxes and the edge of the window frame provided a brace inside the sniper’s nest, and his improvised sling (adapted from the shoulder strap of an Air Force pistol holster) could be wrapped around his arm to further steady the gun.
* Workers ate lunch in two rooms at the Depository. One was the first-floor domino room, where the warehouse workers ate, and the other, on the second floor, was usually used by office personnel.
† William Shelley and Eddie Piper also thought they saw Oswald on the first floor shortly before noon. But Shelley later admitted he saw him at 11:45 A.M., before others noticed him on the sixth floor. Piper thought he saw Oswald at noon filling orders on the first floor, but he is clearly mistaken as five witnesses had placed Oswald on an upper floor, left behind by the elevators by that time.
*The critics assert Williams did not leave the sixth floor until 12:20. That is because before the Warren Commission, he said it was approximately 12:20 when he left, but when reminded of his original estimate of 12:05, he acknowledged he did not remember the time (WC Vol. III, p. 173).
* The Mercer story was fully discredited by December 9, 1963, just over two weeks after the assassination. However, that did not stop Mark Lane from beginning his book Rush to Judgment with an excerpt from Mercer’s statement. Recent authors who have also cited the Mercer story, unchallenged, include Garrison (1988), Marrs (1989), and Dr. Charles Crenshaw (1992).
* It was understandably empty, because under Texas law, any part of a day served constitutes a full day’s credit for the sentence, and therefore, prisoners serving three-day DWI sentences reported late on Friday night to gain full credit for that day.
*Rowland also claimed that while the gunman was standing fifteen feet back of the window, he could see all of the rifle and two thirds of the man. The author stood at the same spot where the Rowlands were on November 22, some 200 feet from the sixth floor of the Depository. At the angle from which Rowland looked at the building, it is impossible to see inside the sniper’s nest because of the right wall, and also to see anyone more than a few feet behind the window.
† There were also two amateur films shot of the Book Depository within moments of the assassination. Critics interpret shadows on the film as evidence of two men, one in and one adjacent to the sniper’s nest. The films taken by Charles Bronson and Robert Hughes were independently enhanced by the Itek Corporation for CBS, by the House Select Committee on Assassinations, and by public television’s Frontline program. None showed a second person in the sixth-floor windows.
*When Oswald was arrested, he had on a white T-shirt under a rust-brown shirt. But he admitted to the police that he had changed his shirt when he returned to his rooming house after the assassination.
* All or part of the assassination was filmed by dozens of witnesses at Dealey who had 8mm movie or still cameras. But one film is by far the most crucial. Shot by Dallas dressmaker Abraham Zapruder, the 8mm color film followed the President’s car from the moment it made the turn from Houston onto Elm and stayed with it through the entire assassination. Perched on a concrete divider on top of the grassy knoll, Zapruder had an almost unobstructed view of the motorcade. The film is discussed in detail in Chapter 14.
* Human observation can be notoriously unreliable. A vivid example of the pitfall of relying exclusively on eyewitness testimony is that when the ocean liner Titanic sank in 1912, there were nearly seven hundred people on lifeboats watching it go down. The ship was almost nine hundred feet long, three football fields in size, yet the survivors were split as to whether it sank in one or two pieces.
* Josiah Thompson, in his 1967 book Six Seconds in Dallas, did his own tabulation of 190 witnesses, and arrived at 83.4 percent. The author disagrees with Thompson’s reading of several witnesses, and also with his omission of one.
† The figures add to slightly more than 100 percent since they are rounded off to the nearest whole number.
* Despite his errors, Thompson is at least one of the more reasonable critics in his interpretation of the numbers. The author was present at a March 3, 1992, discussion in Texas when researcher Joe West said 76 percent of 290 witnesses at Dealey had selected the grassy knoll as the location for the shots. No one present, in a room of fifty other researchers, challenged his “fact.” Jim Marrs, in Crossfire, writes, “One fact seems inescapable—most of the witnesses in the crowd believed shots came from the Grassy Knoll” (Marrs, p. 39).
* According to the committee, its unidentified grassy knoll assassin, who was much closer to the President than Oswald, fired one shot, and missed not only the President but the rest of the car’s five occupants, and even the limousine itself. The bullet that missed the motorcade never struck any of the spectators directly in its flight path, nor was an extra bullet ever found at Dealey Plaza
*In 1991, the Today show showed a version of the Zapruder home movie of the assassination, supposedly with sounds from the dictabelt superimposed over it. Four loud shots were clearly audible. Today never informed its audience that the four bullet sounds were re-created in a studio and dubbed onto the recording. They do not exist on the original.
* McLain was photographed accompanying Mrs. Kennedy into the hospital.
*Bowles later determined the source of the unusual bell tone on the tape. There was a replica of the Liberty Bell at the Trade Mart, and passersby frequently gave it a rap.
†In an understatement, Anthony Summers only admits that “the acoustics evidence … has had a rough ride since 1979.”
* Many critics ignore the testimony of those three workers because it is so definitive on the number and source of shots. The most Jim Marrs will acknowledge is: “Obviously, there was someone on the sixth floor, but was it Oswald?” Others, like Mark Lane, question why they could hear the bolt action and shells hit the floor but not hear the assassin run across the floor after the shooting. “We were shouting at each other and moving all around,” says Norman, “so after that third shot I don’t think we could have heard anything upstairs.” Also, there is the question of why the three moved to the opposite corner of the building after the shooting. Was it because they thought some shots may have come from that direction, nearer the grassy knoll? “No way,” Norman told the author. “We went over there because we saw people on ground going there, and we were wondering, ‘Where the hell are they going, the guy who shot is right up here.’”
*Linn was not the only one to lose a major story that day. Another was Robert MacNeil, currently of the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour. He was a young NBC reporter covering the President’s trip. After hearing three shots, he jumped from a motorcade car. At first he followed those running toward the grassy knoll, but he soon ran to the nearest building, the Depository. There, he ran into a young man leaving the building and asked, in great agitation, for the telephones, and the man pointed. Oswald later told the Dallas police that as he left the Depository, a young Secret Service agent with a blond crewcut asked him for the telephones. There were no Secret Service agents at Dealey immediately after the assassination. MacNeil had short blond hair, and Oswald must have confused the press badge on his jacket as a Secret Service identification. According to Linn, another journalist to have missed a coup was Ron Reiland, the only reporter who got inside the Texas Theater when Oswald was arrested. He photographed the arrest, but mistakenly shot it with a filter over the lens, and nothing developed. When Reiland walked outside, he pulled the filter off and all those photographs, of the crowd spitting and kicking at Oswald, were overexposed.
* Others near the School Book Depository also thought they smelled gunpowder, including Tom Dillard, a journalist who was in the same convertible with Bob Jackson and Malcolm Couch (WC Vol. VI, p. 165). Some use the testimony of Senator Ralph Yarborough, who said he smelled gunpowder as he drove through Dealey Plaza, to suggest a shot had been fired closer to the grassy knoll. Although a stiff north-south wind did blow the odor of gunpowder further into the plaza, Yarborough was in the Vice-President’s car, two behind the President, and was right in front of the Depository as the shooting began.
† His description of a long wooden stock, with only four inches of barrel exposed at the end of the rifle, exactly describes Oswald’s Carcano.
*The 12:45 identification has been the focus of great controversy. Summers says, “In what today seems an astonishing failure, the Warren inquiry never did establish the source of this description.” But the Commission did settle the issue, despite the best efforts of some to obfuscate it. In his testimony before the Commission, Brennan mistakenly called the plainclothes officer “Sorrels,” the name of a Secret Service agent he met about fifteen minutes after he met Inspector Sawyer (WC Vol. III, p. 145). After the assassination, Sorrels did not return to Dealey until nearly 1:00 P.M., SO Brennan could not have given him the description broadcast at 12:45. Sawyer testified to the Warren Commission that he was the one who received the description and broadcast the first identification of the assassin (WC Vol. VI, pp. 321–23; WC Vol. XXI, Sawyer Exhibit A, p. 392; Brennan, Eyewitness to History, p. 17).
*For many years, Jean Hill’s calling cards bragged she was the “closest witness” to the President at the time of the fatal head shot.
* She pinpointed the shooter at the exact location where some conspiracy buffs believe they have found an image they have dubbed “badgeman.” On Mary Moorman’s badly faded Polaroid, a half-inch-square portion has been enhanced, and although it only shows shadows and trees, some believe they see the outlines of a rifle and a Dallas police uniform—hence the name “badgeman.” Hill is used as the eyewitness confirmation for such a shooter. The author stood at the very spot where a grassy-knoll shooter is supposed to have fired at the President. Although the shooter was purportedly standing on a car bumper, in order to aim over a five-foot fence, he would have been completely exposed at the rear, making it impossible to fire from that location without being seen by witnesses. In addition to more than a dozen who could have seen such a shooter, three witnesses were only a few feet in front of the fence, and they never saw anyone behind the fence.
* Over two years later, Price changed his original statement in an interview with Mark Lane, the most energetic of the early conspiracy buffs, saying that instead of a hat, maybe it was a gun. Price not only added new details about the man he saw, but claimed to Lane that the man ran to the School Book Depository instead of away from it, as he had said in his original affidavit.
* Again, as in the case of Price, Mark Lane talked to Bowers in 1966, and Bowers altered his original testimony, adding “a flash of light.” However, there is some doubt as to whether Bowers saw anything during the assassination. He admitted that thirteen railroad tracks converged on his station, and not only was he busy at the time of the assassination, but immediately after hearing the final shot, he had to throw a “red-on-red” signal, which blocked all trains. In order to perform any of his duties at the control panel, Bowers would have had to have his back turned toward Dealey Plaza (Jim Moore, Conspiracy of One, pp. 32–33; author’s personal observation, March 1992).
† In another car, Secret Service agent Ed Hickey grabbed an AR-15, but no one in the President’s limousine drew a firearm.
*When Oliver Stone filmed JFK he could not find a rifle that emitted enough smoke to be captured on film when fired from the grassy knoll. Finally, he resorted to a props man pumping smoke from a bellows.
* Arnold appeared vindicated when Senator Ralph Yarborough later said he remembered seeing a young man “throw himself on the ground” as soon as the shooting started. However, Yarborough has since clarified that he was referring to Bill Newman, who was at the foot of the grassy knoll with his family and threw himself, his wife, and their two children onto the grass.
† Even those who support Hoffman’s story find it difficult to explain how anyone was able to disassemble the rifle in the railyard when more than a dozen people ran into that exact location less than a minute after the last shot.
* The author drove to the location on Stemmons where Hoffman claimed to be on the day of assassination. Even without the billboard and railroad cars, the foliage between the freeway and the railyard makes it difficult to see very much. Photographs show the foliage was as dense in 1963 as it is today.
† Some have tried to defend Craig by saying he was in the interrogation room, and they produced a photo of him in Captain Fritz’s office, where they say Oswald was interrogated. The picture does not show Craig in the inner office where Oswald was kept, but instead in a separate outer office.