“He Looks Like a Maniac”
Oswald had little time for planning, perhaps not much more than twenty-four hours. He had to decide how to slip the gun into the Depository and where to take a sniper’s position. His lack of preparation is evident by the fact he only had four bullets with him, though the rifle’s clip could hold six. They were all he had left from his last practice session, and he evidently did not have time on Thursday, November 21, to buy more.
Having never before seen a presidential motorcade, Oswald had little idea of what to expect for security, but knew it would be a far more difficult task than taking aim at the retired General Walker. He could not be sure whether the President would have the bubble top on the car,* or if Secret Service agents would ride on the rear of the limousine partially blocking his view. Lookouts might be posted in tall buildings, perhaps even in the Depository, and he could not be certain of finding a deserted floor or area from which to shoot. Yet if he found it impossible to shoot at the President, he could probably abort his plan and return with the rifle to the Paines’. It was not a suicide mission. Oswald also wanted to escape, although he probably had not planned much beyond getting away from the Depository before the police sealed the area.
After firing the final shot, he slipped through the narrow gap he had created between the cartons of books. He hurried around the boxes stacked on the sixth floor, toward the rear staircase. Next to the stairs, Oswald dropped the rifle into an opening between several large boxes. It hid the gun from view unless someone stood almost directly over the boxes and peered down. Oswald rapidly descended the stairs until he heard the sound of footsteps running up. He ducked off at the second floor, and dashed into the adjoining lunch room. But suddenly a voice called out, and when he turned, he was face to face with a Dallas policeman with a drawn revolver.*
Marrion Baker was a motorcycle policeman riding in the motorcade about one-half block behind the President’s car. Baker had just returned from deer hunting, and he recognized the first shot as coming from “a high-powered rifle … and it sounded high …”1 He looked up to where he thought the shots came from, the Book Depository, and saw a flock of pigeons fly off the building. Baker immediately raced his cycle 200 feet and jumped off in front of the Depository’s steps and in another 45 feet he was inside the building. He yelled for directions to the stairs or elevator, and the building manager, Roy Truly, rushed him through a pair of swinging doors to the closest elevator. Truly kept pressing the down button and screaming, “Bring that elevator down here!” but nothing happened.† Truly said, “Let’s take the stairs.” They sprinted to the nearest staircase, that in the rear of the building, and started up, with Baker behind Truly. When Baker reached the second floor, “I was kind of scanning the rooms,” he recalled. “I happened to see him through this window in this door. I don’t know how come I saw him, but I had a glimpse of him coming down there.… I could see him, he was walking away from me … [and] I hollered at him at that time and said, ‘Come here.’” Baker recalled that Oswald was moving as fast as he was and was “hurrying” through a second door, which would have let him enter the office and conference area where Baker could not have seen him.2
Oswald walked back to Baker. Truly, who had started up to the third floor, returned. “Do you know this man, does he work here?” Baker asked Truly. Oswald did not say a word. According to Baker, “He did not change his expression one bit.”3 When Truly said yes, Baker immediately turned and continued upstairs. It was not until he went to police headquarters later that afternoon that he realized he had encountered the suspect within minutes of the last shot.*
Oswald was now left in the empty lunch room, and almost instantly he must have thought of the alibi he later used after his arrest—that he was eating lunch during the shooting. He went to the soda machine and purchased a Coke as he decided how to leave the Depository. He could return to the staircase Baker had just run up and leave from the rear of the building, or he could continue from the lunch room, past the offices, and down another staircase out the front of the Depository.† His choice to leave by the front was propitious. Immediately after the shots, two construction workers, George Rackley and James Romack, volunteered to help the police by keeping a watch on the rear exit. During the five minutes they were there, before they were replaced by police units, no one left from that exit.4 The building’s front was not covered for at least ten minutes, and possibly longer.5
On his way past the second-floor offices, Oswald ran into another Depository worker, Mrs. Robert Reid. She had panicked after the shots and ran into the building to her office. In her own reconstruction of her actions after the assassination, Reid returned to the office area in just under two minutes, which would dovetail perfectly with Baker and Truly’s encounter with Oswald thirty seconds earlier. She saw Oswald just after he left the lunch room where Officer Baker had confronted him, and he was walking toward the front stairs.6 “I met him by the time I passed my desk several feet,” she recalled, “and I told him, ‘Oh, the President has been shot, but maybe they didn’t hit him.’ He mumbled something to me, I kept walking, he did, too. I didn’t pay any attention to what he said …”7 Reid noticed the full bottle of Coke, and thought Oswald seemed calm. Although she considered it “a little strange” that he should be wandering in the second-floor offices just moments after the assassination, she soon forgot about him.
He was outside the Depository less than three minutes after he fired the final shot, and for the first time he saw the pandemonium he had created. His actions after that are unquestionably those of someone in flight. After his arrest, he maintained that when he learned of the shooting, his immediate thought was there would be no more work for the day, so he simply went home. Although politics was his favorite subject, he was not interested, apparently, in whether the President had been hit or if the assassin had been caught. Instead, he headed for his rooming house.
Oswald could have taken either of two buses, one that would drop him off right at his address, the Beckley line, or one that would let him off several blocks away, the Marsalis line. Both buses had stops near the Book Depository, but neither was in sight when he stepped outside. Waiting for a bus at Dealey Plaza was too risky, so he began walking east on Elm Street, away from the Depository, to find a bus.* Near the corner of St. Paul and Elm, a Marsalis bus pulled up. The Beckley bus was not in view.8 The driver, Cecil McWatters, remembered Oswald because he pounded on the door in the middle of the block in order to board. There were only five other passengers. In a remarkable coincidence, one of the five was Mary Bledsoe, the landlady who had rented a room to him for one week and then refused to allow him to stay further. She was sitting in the right front seat when he boarded. “Oswald got on,” she recalled. “He looks like a maniac. His sleeve was out here [indicating]. His shirt was undone … he was dirty … he looked so bad in his face, his face was so distorted.”9
Bledsoe looked away because she did not want to make eye contact or speak with him. Just after he boarded, the traffic became heavy, and the number of incoming sirens increased. A couple of minutes passed. The traffic came to a standstill. The driver of the car in front of the bus got out and walked back to inform McWatters that the reason for the delay was that “the President has been shot.”10 He said it loud enough for all on the bus to hear.11 At that announcement, Oswald stood up, asked for a transfer, and got off the bus.†
Two blocks away, at the Greyhound bus station, taxi driver William Whaley was waiting for his next fare when Oswald approached.
“May I have the cab?” Oswald asked.
Oswald told him to go to 500 North Beckley, which was several blocks away from his rooming house. “The police cars, the sirens was going, running crisscrossing everywhere,” recalled Whaley, “just a big uproar in that end of town and I said, ‘What the hell. I wonder what the hell is the uproar?’ And he never said anything. So … I never said anything more to him.”
At Oswald’s direction, Whaley dropped him off in the 700 block of North Beckley, a walk of five minutes to his rooming house. Around 1:00 P.M., Earlene Roberts, the housekeeper at 1026 North Beckley, was trying to adjust the reception on the television after a neighbor told her the President had been shot. “I couldn’t get the picture and he come in and I just looked up and I said, ‘Oh, you are in a hurry.’ He never said a thing, not nothing.”13 Roberts said he was “walking pretty fast—he was all but running” into his room.14 Though it was too warm for a jacket, he took one to hide the revolver he had tucked into the waistband of his pants. He zipped the jacket as he rushed out of the house a couple of minutes later.*
While Oswald made good his escape, law enforcement swarmed into Dealey Plaza. Outside the Depository, some witnesses later claimed they ran into Secret Service agents. Since there were no Secret Service agents at Dealey until 1:00 P.M., when Forrest Sorrels returned from Parkland Hospital, could that mean that somebody was impersonating Secret Service agents, indicating a conspiracy? Most of the witnesses later admitted they were mistaken.15 And immediately after the assassination, different groups of law enforcement officials (most of them having been there to watch the motorcade from nearby government buildings) spread out in Dealey—they included Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) agents, postal inspectors, officers from the Special Service Bureau of the Dallas Police, county sheriffs, IRS agents, and even an Army Intelligence agent.*
Initially, the police had searched the empty cars in the lot behind the grassy knoll, but they found no evidence of a shooter.16 Soon, eyewitnesses led the police to focus on the Depository. By 12:45, the building was sealed and a floor-to-floor search had begun.
At 1:12, almost forty-five minutes after the assassination, deputy sheriff Luke Mooney squeezed between two tall stacks of boxes on the sixth floor. “I had to turn myself sideways to get in there—that is when I saw the expended shells and the boxes that were stacked up, looked to be a rest for the weapon.… There was a very slight crease in the box, where the rifle could have lain—at the same angle that the shots were fired from.”17 Mooney looked out the window and yelled for Sheriff Decker and Captain Will Fritz of homicide. Lt. Carl Day, chief of the Dallas Police crime scene search unit, photographed the three bullet shells in their original position.18 Then he dusted them at the scene for fingerprints, but found none.† “That’s routine,” says Day. “You can handle them and still not leave a mark.”19 The three empty shells were turned over to the FBI the next day. Ballistics tests later determined they were fired from Oswald’s rifle, to the exclusion of any other gun.20
Day also dusted the windowsills in the sniper’s nest. “All the woodwork there was cracking and had a bad paint job,” he recalls. “You can just tell sometimes that a surface won’t have a print. There were none. You couldn’t put a print on there if you tried.”21 But he had more success with the boxes that comprised the sniper’s nest. He expected to find many prints on them. “These things were being moved around all the time, so I thought we might get the shooter’s prints mixed in with the workers’ in the building,” Day told the author. “But there was one print that I knew was fresh and important the moment it came up. At the window the assassin fired from, there were two stacked boxes, one on the floor and the other stacked on top, and that is apparently what he aimed from. A little behind that was a carton of books. That position is where he would have sat and looked out the window. It was plenty heavy enough to support him. When we used metallic powder on that box, toward the top of the corner, was a distinct palm print—right where it looked like he had been leaning his hand as he waited for the motorcade. He might have been a little nervous, because as he leaned his hand there, the oil or moisture in his hand left a very clear, unsmudged print. Usually, you can’t get a print that good from cardboard, but he had been sitting there long enough to leave a real fine one. We knew we had a real good print, but we didn’t know whether we would match it up to anyone.”22 That print was positively identified as Oswald’s left palm.23
There was another identifiable Oswald palm print and one from his right index finger on the boxes in that area.24 However, Day considers the other Oswald prints on the boxes less important. “He could have gotten those while moving the boxes around during his job,” he says. “But the palm print was different. It wasn’t at a place you would grab if you were moving it, it was real fresh, and it was just in the right spot if you had been sitting on top of that box looking out the window.”25
Ten minutes after the shells were found, Deputy Sheriff Eugene Boone and Deputy Constable Seymour Weitzman were near the northwest corner of the sixth floor when they spotted the rifle, hidden between boxes only three feet from the rear stairwell.26 No one touched it until Lt. Day arrived. Day could immediately estimate the chances for recovery of prints, and it was poor. “I looked down between the boxes and saw the rifle had a well-worn leather strap. I knew there could be no fingerprints on that strap, so I picked the gun up by that. The stock was pretty porous and weather-worn, so there was little chance of any prints there. Before pulling the bolt back, I satisfied myself there were no prints on the little metal lever. Then I held the gun while Captain Fritz pulled the bolt, and a live round fell out. There were no more shells in the magazine.”27*
Before Day left the Depository, a homemade brown paper sack, with a three-inch-wide strip of tape around the right corner, was found in the rear of the sniper’s nest. Because of its shape, Day immediately thought it might be the bag used to carry the rifle.28 Although he did not find prints on it when he dusted it with metallic powder, the FBI later subjected it to silver nitrate and discovered Oswald’s fingerprint and palm print, the only ones on the bag.29 Most important, the palm print was of Oswald’s right hand and was near the bottom of the bag, which concurred with how Buell Frazier and his sister, Linnie Mae Randle, testified he carried the package.30†
Initially, Day and others thought the soda bottle and chicken remains left by Bonnie Ray Williams might have belonged to the assassin. Day took this physical evidence back to his crime-scene laboratory. Not everything was available that day—Oswald’s clipboard was not found on the sixth floor, near the stairwell, until December 2. The three orders attached to the clipboard were all dated November 22, the day of the assassination.31
By the time Day left for the lab, the police, with Roy Truly, had gathered every one of the Depository’s employees on the first floor. The only one not accounted for was Lee Oswald. The police were not sure whether the assassin merely used the Depository or whether he was an employee. As a result, while they searched there, they also continued to look around Dealey Plaza. Over an hour after the assassination, three men were found inside a railway car several blocks away. They were photographed as they were taken into custody. Later dubbed “the three tramps,” they became a mainstay of conspiracy speculation. It was suspicious the police did not take their names, and the men seemed too well dressed to be hoboes. Over the years, everything from computer enhancements to anthropological studies were used to find out who they were. Some labeled Watergate burglars Frank Sturgis and E. Howard Hunt as two of the tramps. The tallest one was identified as Charles Harrelson, a convicted contract murderer.32 Some self-proclaimed adventurers, like Chauncey Holt, have confessed to being one of the tramps, and spun long tales about their purported roles in the assassination. But in February 1992, researchers discovered that Dallas police files released in 1989 showed that three tramps had indeed been booked on November 22, 1963. The records identified the suspects as Harold Doyle, Gus Abrams, and John Gedney. Two of the men, Gedney and Doyle, were still alive, and it turned out they were real tramps who had been to the local rescue mission the night before the assassination and were sleeping in the railroad car when the police arrested them.33 The men had no connection to the events at Dealey, and the conspiracy press suddenly and quietly abandoned the issue.
While the hunt for the assassin was under way at Dealey, Oswald had left his rooming house. When Earlene Roberts last saw him, he was at a bus stop across the street. Evidently seeing no buses in sight, he walked further into Oak Cliff. Near 1:15, Dallas patrolman J. D. Tippit, having been ordered to drive into Oak Cliff at 12:45 from his outlying area, saw Oswald walking briskly ahead of him, east along Tenth Street.34* The description of the presidential assassin had been broadcast four times within thirty minutes. Tippit, a ten-year veteran, decided to stop Oswald. He pulled his patrol car to the curb behind Oswald and called him over.35† Oswald turned around and walked back to the car. He leaned close toward the passenger side, exchanging some words through the open vent window. Whatever he said did not satisfy Tippit, who then got out of the car and started to walk around the front toward Oswald. Tippit did not first call in on his radio that he had stopped someone, nor did he draw his gun upon exiting the car. According to Dallas police procedures, this indicated that he was merely suspicious, but not positive he had found a suspect.36
As Tippit reached the front left tire, Oswald whipped out his revolver and began shooting. Tippit was killed instantly. Oswald then began running back toward Patton Avenue, emptying shells from the revolver along the way.‡
Helen Markham, standing on a street corner only half a block away, was on her way to catch a bus when she saw Oswald murder Tippit. After the shots, Oswald trotted back toward her and she began screaming. “When he saw me, he looked at me, stared at me,” she recalled. “I put my hands over my face …”37 She was traumatized by the scene and had to be given smelling salts at the police station before she could enter the lineup room.38 There, she quickly selected Oswald.39*
Virginia Davis and her sister-in-law, Barbara Davis, were inside their home on the corner of Tenth and Patton when they heard the shots. They went to the front of the house, opened the door and the screen to see what happened, and saw Oswald cutting across the corner of their lawn, pulling and shaking the shells from his gun. Virginia watched Oswald look at Markham, who was yelling and pointing toward him, “and [then he] looked at me and then smiled and went around the corner.”40 Barbara Davis heard Markham’s piercing screams: “He shot him. He is dead. Call the police.”41 Virginia and Barbara Davis both picked Oswald that same night from a police lineup.42
William Scoggins, a Dallas taxi driver, was eating his lunch in his cab, parked less than half a block away. After he heard the shots, he looked up in time to see Tippit fall, and then hid behind the rear of his taxi as Oswald ran toward him.43 “He never did look at me,” recalled Scoggins. “He looked back over his left shoulder … as he went by.… I could see his face, his features, everything plain, you see.… I heard him mutter something like, ‘poor damn cop,’ or ‘poor dumb cop,’ but anyway, he muttered that twice.”44 Scoggins also picked Oswald from a police lineup that night.45
Perhaps the closest witness to the shooting was Domingo Benavides, who was driving a pickup truck. He estimated he was only fifteen feet from Tippit’s car when the officer was shot.46 He saw Tippit fall over after the first shots and then watched Oswald leave the scene emptying his gun. “I saw him—I mean really got a good view of the man after the bullets were fired …”47*
After Oswald cut across the Davises’ front yard, he went down Patton Avenue one block to Jefferson Avenue. While briskly moving along Patton, he passed near two used-car lots. There, seven people either came outside or to the windows when they heard the shots. Ted Callaway stepped onto the street in enough time to see Oswald run past taxi driver Scoggins, holding the pistol in his right hand, in “what we used to say in the Marine Corps [was] in a raised pistol position.”48 Oswald’s elbow was bent and the pistol was pointed up in the air. “I hollered, ‘Hey, man, what the hell is going on?’” said Callaway. “He slowed his pace, almost halted for a minute. And he said something to me, which I could not understand. And then kind of shrugged his shoulders, and kept on going.”49 Callaway ran back in the direction from which Oswald had come, and discovering Tippit had been murdered, he grabbed the officer’s revolver and had Scoggins drive him around Oak Cliff, searching for the shooter. They did not find him. That night Callaway, however, saw him again. He identified Oswald in a police lineup—“When he came out, I knew him.”50 Sam Guinyard, another worker at the same car lot, picked Oswald from a lineup that same day.51
Warren Reynolds was on the far side of Jefferson Avenue in a car lot he owned and had an excellent view from the porch of his office. When he looked outside after hearing shots fired, “I saw this man coming down the street with the gun in his hand, swinging it just like he was running,” said Reynolds. “He turned the corner of Patton and Jefferson, going west, and put the gun in his pants and took off, walking.”52 After watching Oswald cut through a gas station, Reynolds futilely searched the parked cars in the rear of the station to see whether he had hidden under any of them.53 Reynolds had “no question” the man he saw was Oswald.54*
Others who saw Oswald flee the Tippit scene, such as William Arthur Smith and B. M. Patterson, positively identified him from photographs.55 Jack R. Tatum was driving through the intersection of Patton and East Tenth Street when the shooting took place. Although he had a “very good look” at the killer, and had “no question whatsoever” that it was Oswald (he later saw him on television), he did not make himself available to the Dallas Police. Tatum told his story for the first time to investigators for the House Select Committee on Assassinations.56 A high-ranking Dallas police official who was a member of the force in 1963 told the author there was another witness who had positively identified Oswald as the shooter but was never publicly identified. Evidently, the man was married and had been at a house in Oak Cliff visiting his mistress for an afternoon tryst. When he heard the shots, he pulled aside the curtains and got, according to the policeman, “a good, long look at the killer.” Although he had no doubt about his identification, the police decided not to use him since they thought they had enough other solid eyewitness evidence of the murder, and the man pleaded that they not involve him, to avoid embarrassing publicity.*
Beyond the eyewitnesses, Oswald left other telling evidence at the scene. Dashing through the gas station across from Reynolds’s car lot, he dropped his light-beige jacket. It was retrieved by Captain W. R. Westbrook, under the rear of one of the parked cars.57 Earlene Roberts saw him put on a jacket when he left the rooming house around 1:00 P.M. All of the Tippit murder eyewitnesses described the shooter with a jacket, and when arrested before 2:00, Oswald had no jacket. As is typical with eyewitness testimony, though all who were asked identified the jacket when it was shown to them during their Warren Commission testimony, each remembered it slightly differently. Markham, Scoggins, and Barbara Davis thought the jacket (Warren Commission exhibit 162) was a little too light.58 Callaway thought it needed more tan.59 William Smith, Virginia Davis, Benavides, and Guinyard said the Commission exhibit was exactly like the one they saw in the rear of the gas station.60 However, the critical testimony came from Marina Oswald. She said her husband only owned two jackets. His dark-blue one was found at the School Book Depository, and she identified the jacket found in the gas station as the other one.61 She even thought he had worn it to the Paines’ house the night before the assassination.62*
Oswald also left behind critical ballistics evidence. Benavides and Virginia and Barbara Davis found four shells that Oswald had emptied from his gun while escaping.63 These shells were matched, to the exclusion of any other gun, to Oswald’s revolver, which he had with him when captured just blocks away.64 His pistol was a .38 caliber, rechambered, by the company he purchased it from, to handle .38 special ammunition, a better bullet than .38 regular ammo. However, that presented unique problems to the ballistics experts when they tried to match the four slugs recovered from Tippit’s body. According to ballistics expert Joseph Nicol, “This means that the bullet, instead of touching on all surfaces as it goes down the barrel, actually wobbles a little bit. As a consequence, it is difficult to have it strike the same places every time that it goes through the barrel, so that the match on the projectiles was extremely difficult.”65 On three of the bullets, the best the experts could conclude was that the bullets had the same characteristics as Oswald’s revolver, but they could not isolate them only to that gun.66 However, a fourth bullet had enough unique characteristics that it was matched to his revolver to the exclusion of all others.67†
Critics are understandably anxious to deflect attention from the eyewitness, ballistics, and physical evidence in the Tippit murder. They instead delve into Tippit’s personal life and charge he was having an affair with a married woman and insinuate the murder was connected to that. Henry Hurt writes, “Was Tippit a player in a plot that called for him to execute Oswald? Was Tippit’s job thwarted when Oswald turned the tables and killed him first? Was Tippit to play a role in the Oswald getaway, only to change his mind at the last minute? Was Tippit a pawn in a plot, and was he supposed to be killed after he killed Oswald? Did Tippit have complex personal problems that might have led to his murder by someone completely unrelated to the assassination case?”68 Others, like John Davis, in his book about a mafia conspiracy to kill JFK, deal with the Tippit murder in only a single sentence in an almost seven-hundred-page book: “Eight minutes later, Dallas Police Officer J. D. Tippit, who was ordered to patrol the area Oswald was now in, was shot dead by someone, perhaps by Oswald, perhaps by someone else.”69
The Tippit murder is key to understanding Oswald’s depth of desperation and recklessness after the Kennedy assassination. The confrontation with Tippit also led indirectly to his arrest. After running through the gas station, he headed west on Jefferson Avenue. Within a few minutes, police squad cars were speeding east on Jefferson toward the site of the Tippit murder. Oswald heard the sirens and ducked into the foyer of Hardy’s Shoe Store. Johnny Calvin Brewer, the store’s manager, was listening to radio reports about JFK’s death when he “looked up and saw the man enter the lobby.”70 It was fifteen feet from the sidewalk to the store’s front door, and Oswald came inside the shielded area and turned his back toward the street. Brewer looked at him because “his hair was sort of messed up and [he] looked like [he] had been running, and he looked scared, and he looked funny.… He was standing there staring.”71 After the police cars passed, Brewer watched Oswald walk outside, look over his shoulder toward the disappearing squad cars, and then head further west along Jefferson. Brewer, who thought he “looked suspicious,” followed him.
Just over fifty yards from the shoe store, Oswald stopped near the front of the Texas Theater. Julia Postal, the ticket clerk, remembered he came “flying around the corner” and had “a panicked look on his face.”72 She turned away for a moment and he ducked inside the theater, past the concession clerk, William “Butch” Burroughs, who did not see him enter.73* Brewer ran to Postal and asked if the man who had just dashed into the theater had bought a ticket. She turned around, expecting to see Oswald, and then realized he had sneaked inside when she was distracted.74 Brewer quickly checked both exits and found they were still locked, meaning Oswald was in the theater. Brewer tried to spot him inside but could not in the dark.75 At that point, Postal, who had heard a radio report about the President’s assassination, told Brewer, “I don’t know if this is the man they want in there, but he is running from them for some reason. I am going to call the police, and you and Butch go get on each of the exit doors and stay there.”76 When she called the police, the dispatcher wanted to know why she thought it might be the suspect. She described him. “And he said, ‘Well, it fits the description,’” recalled Postal, “and I said I hadn’t heard the description.” Just after 1:45 P.M., over police Channel One, the dispatcher announced: “Have information a suspect just went in the Texas Theater on West Jefferson.”77*
When the police entered the rear of the theater, they encountered Johnny Brewer, and at first thought he might be the suspect. Realizing quickly he was not, the police turned up the lights and asked Brewer if he could spot the suspect. “And I or two or three other officers walked out on the stage and I pointed him out …”78†
After the theater scuffle, in which Oswald unsuccessfully tried to shoot another policeman, he was arrested, hustled into a patrol car, and driven back to the downtown jail. The arresting officers took him into the office of Captain Will Fritz, the chief of homicide. When Fritz arrived he walked over to two homicide detectives, Gus Rose and Richard Stovall, and told them to proceed to 2515 Fifth Street in Irving and “pick up a man named Lee Oswald.” Officer Gerald Hill, standing nearby, asked “why he wanted him, and he said, ‘Well, he was employed down at the Book Depository and he had not been present for a roll call of the employees.’ And we said, ‘Captain, we will save you a trip … because there he sits.’ And with that, we relinquished our prisoner to the homicide and robbery bureau …”79
It was nearly 3:00 when Ruth Paine heard heavy knocking at the front door. “I went to the door,” she recalled. Six men were standing on her front porch. “They announced themselves as from the Sheriff’s office and the Dallas Police.… I said nothing. I think I just dropped my jaw. And the man in front said by way of explanation, ‘We have Lee Oswald in custody. He is charged with shooting an officer.’ This was the first I had any idea that Lee might be in trouble with the police or in any way involved in the day’s events.”80
Ruth and Marina had been watching the local television coverage of the President’s visit when an announcer broke in with the news that shots had been fired at the motorcade. A half hour later, while Marina was outside hanging up laundry, Ruth told her the shots had come from the School Book Depository.81 Marina’s “heart went to the bottom,” but she did not say anything.82 Ruth had no thought that Lee was involved, but instead was excited that he worked at the same building from which the shots came, and that he probably could give them a “first-hand” account of the day’s events.83 But Marina was horrified at the news, and feared that Lee might be involved. At her first opportunity away from Ruth, she sneaked into the garage and found the East German blanket in which Oswald kept the rifle wrapped. When she saw it lying on the floor, she was relieved, believing the rifle was still inside. She watched television with Ruth until the announcement came that the President had died. Ruth walked about the house crying. Marina did not cry but sat silently on the sofa, still concerned about Lee.84
The police did not have a warrant, but Ruth allowed them to enter the house. Ruth and Marina accompanied one of them into the garage. “The officer asked me … did Lee Oswald have any weapons or guns,” Ruth recalled. “I said no, and translated the question to Marina, and she said yes; that she had seen a portion of it [the rifle]—and looked into—she indicated the blanket roll on the floor.”85 Ruth, who was standing on the blanket, immediately backed away and the policeman picked it up. It hung limp in his hand. Marina turned ashen. “Then, of course, I already knew that it was Lee,” said Marina.86
At the Dallas Police crime lab, Lt. Carl Day had found partial prints near the trigger guard and at the main barrel of the rifle. “There were some looping impressions,” Day told the author, and “incidentally, it later turned out that Oswald had looping impressions as opposed to arches or whorls. But there was not enough to positively identify them as his.”87 Then Day moved to the wooden stock. “Down toward the end of the stock, there was a print partially developed,” he recalls, “and I could see it running back up under the stock. So I lifted the gun out of the stock. When I dusted that print, it developed. I kept looking at it as it did not stand out real good—it wasn’t a great print. So I took the tape and lifted that print off as best I could. It lifted off pretty well, considering it was a dim print.”88 That print was of Oswald’s right palm.89
Day then prepared to take pictures of the stock, using reflected light and time exposures. But before he could finish, he was told the FBI was sending an agent to collect the rifle and to take it to FBI headquarters in Washington for further tests. “So I put the gun back in the stock,” Day says. “I had my orders and I didn’t do anything else to it. Around 11:30, the FBI came, Agent [Vince] Drain, and I gave him the gun. I told Vince, ‘Here’s a print right here,’ and I pointed to it. I didn’t give him that lifted print on the tape. They said give him the gun, and that’s what I gave him. The gun had our powder all over it by then, and I know I wouldn’t have liked to receive it in that condition once somebody else had started their work on it. It should have stayed with us.”90
Day had so completely lifted the palm print that the FBI, in its November 24 examination of the rifle, did not find any evidence of it.91 Although at least five Dallas police crime lab detectives saw the palm print before it was sent to the FBI, the public did not know that Oswald’s print had been found on the rifle until Dallas district attorney Henry Wade told a reporter in an evening press conference on November 24.92 The FBI then examined Day’s lifted print and confirmed it was Oswald’s when it discovered that irregularities in the lift corresponded exactly with imperfections on the rifle barrel.93
The print was important, because it was the first piece of direct physical evidence that placed the rifle in Oswald’s hands. But the failure of the FBI to find a print in its initial examination has led to accusations that the Dallas police must have concocted the evidence in order to close the case against Oswald.94 Oliver Stone, in JFK, created a scene that showed an unidentified man placing the gun into Oswald’s dead hand to obtain a print. Such charges are ignorant of the chain of evidence, of how Day maintained the rifle under lock and key from the moment it was found on the sixth floor until it was turned over to the FBI. But to add to the conspiracy grist, FBI agent Drain claimed that Day never told him about the print when he picked up the gun.95 J. Edgar Hoover was furious that his vaunted FBI laboratory failed to pick up any trace of one of the most critical prints in the case. Federal agents closely questioned Day about how he lifted the print.
“I respect the FBI,” says Day. “I know I told him [Drain]. Now, I don’t know if he heard me or paid any attention to me or what. I know what happened. People who claim there was a planted print don’t know anything about fingerprinting. You can’t even place a print on something from a card, and that’s all we had on the first night, when I lifted that print. After lifting the palm print, I could still see traces on the stock with my reflective light. I can’t guarantee it was still there when it got to the FBI office. They either overlooked it or it wasn’t good enough to see by the time that gun arrived there. We found that print doing solid police work, and nothing anybody says can change that fact.”96
In 1993, R. W. “Rusty” Livingston, a former Dallas detective assigned to the police’s Crime Scene Search division, published a book titled JFK: First Day Evidence. Livingston’s book included significant new evidence, which he had in his personal possession, and which had never been seen by the FBI, the Warren Commission, or the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Some of the most important material was four photographs of the partial fingerprints found on the MannlicherCarcano’s trigger guard. Since the Livingston photos were different from the ones previously used by investigators for comparison, Public Television’s Frontline program had several fingerprint experts examine the newly discovered evidence. Captain Jerry Powdrill, of the Monroe, Louisiana, police department, focused on the clearest of Livingston’s four photos. Powdrill found three matching points of identity between the trigger guard prints and Oswald’s fingerprints (those taken upon his arrest in New Orleans in August 1963). That was not enough for a positive identification, since law enforcement requires between six and ten matching points. A former FBI fingerprint expert studied the Livingston photos and agreed with Powdrill that they were inconclusive. However, the third expert, Vincent Scalice, made a breakthrough using photo enhancements. Scalice, who had been the fingerprint expert for the House Select Committee on Assassinations, made his own photos of the Livingston prints, at different exposures ranging from light to medium to dark. Studying the varying degrees of contrast between the photos, Scalice identified eighteen matching points between the trigger guard prints and Oswald’s fingerprint card. “I have no doubt this is a major breakthrough,” Scalice told the author. “For the first time we can say that the developed latent prints on the trigger guard are those of Oswald’s right middle finger and right ring finger.”
* The bubble top was not bulletproof, but it might have deflected the bullets’ trajectory, or the sun’s reflection could have obscured his target.
* There is a question whether Oswald could have gone downstairs immediately after the assassination, since other Depository workers, including the three men on the fifth floor—Jarman, Williams, and Norman—as well as two fourth-floor office workers, Sandra Styles and Victoria Adams, also ran down the stairs and did not see him. But Oswald immediately took the staircase, whereas the three men admitted they stayed upstairs for ten to fifteen minutes after the shooting (WC Vol. III, p. 182). As for Styles and Adams, although they thought they came down quickly, they actually did not arrive on the first floor until at least four to five minutes after the third shot. The critical testimony is from Victoria Adams, who said that when she got to the first floor, she saw Billy Lovelady and William Shelley. Those two men, by their own testimony, did not return to the Depository for some five minutes after the shooting (see WC Vol. VI, pp. 331, 339, 389).
† Truly later decided that Oswald might have left the elevator’s wooden grate open on the sixth floor so the car could not be operated.
* Baker claimed he encountered Oswald less than two minutes after the assassination, and for some it is difficult to imagine how Oswald could have crossed the sixth floor and been on the second, not out of breath, in such a short time. The Warren Commission did a reconstruction. Officer Baker recreated Oswald’s actions (including hiding the rifle) and in two tests made it to the second-floor lunch room, in “normal walking,” in 1 minute and 18 seconds, and in a “fast walk” in 1 minute and 14 seconds (WC Vol. III, p. 254). A Secret Service agent, John Howlett, also completed Oswald’s route in the necessary time. Neither Baker nor Howlett was out of breath when he reached the spot where Oswald had been stopped (WC Vol. VII, p. 592).
† The front staircase, leading to the Elm Street door of the Depository, did not reach the sixth floor. When Oswald had left the sixth floor he could only descend one staircase, the rear one.
* Some thought it peculiar that Oswald walked away from the Depository only to get onto a bus that would come back past the Depository. But Oswald had little choice, since to catch the bus beyond the Depository he would have had to walk a longer distance and through Dealey Plaza.
† The transfer was found on him after his arrest. Every Dallas bus driver has a distinctive paper punch that marks the approximate time of issuance. As a result, after retrieving the transfer, the police quickly knew not only the bus driver but also the time Oswald had taken the bus.
‡ Oswald later admitted it was the first time he had ever taken a taxi. Such an extraordinary departure from normal routine also indicates he was in flight. Before the taxi left the station, an elderly woman approached and asked Whaley to call her another cab. Oswald offered her that cab, apparently in the belief that it would be easier for him just to take another one than to wait for Whaley to help the woman. At the last moment, she must have decided it was also easier just to find another taxi, and she left the cab to Oswald.
* Conspiracy critics often cite the Warren Commission testimony of Earlene Roberts that she heard a car honk while Oswald was inside the house. When she looked outside, she said she saw a police car. Although she did house cleaning for several police officers, she did not recognize the car, and critics charge the unidentified car was passing a prearranged signal to Oswald. But her account is false. Journalist Hugh Aynesworth interviewed Roberts four times, once on the afternoon of the assassination, and three times during the subsequent few months. In the first two interviews Roberts did not tell of any incident with a police car. Aynesworth says that during the last two interviews she “changed her story dramatically,” recalling different numbers on the supposed police car each time she was questioned. “She could not have seen out to the curb where she claimed the police car had been,” says Aynesworth. “[Although] she had terrible eyesight, she told me specifically that nobody was out there when he [Oswald] ran out.” Dallas police records show no car was in her neighborhood at the time she described.
* The author has reviewed the 1963 badges for the above organizations, and found that several look alike. Any of those law enforcement officials could have been confused with Secret Service, agents. Oswald’s mistaken identification of newsman Robert MacNeil as a Secret Service agent shows the tendency in that pandemonium to judge any plainclothes “official” as Secret Service (HSCA Rpt. pp. 183–84; WC Vol. IV, p. 165; WC Vol. VI, p. 312; WC Vol. VII, p. 19; WC Vol. VII, p. 347; Interview with McDermott, March 7, 1992).
† Some claim the shells were neatly arranged in a row by the window ledge, implying they may have been planted. But the photographs and Mooney’s testimony indicate the shells were found in a random pattern. FBI tests showed that Oswald’s rifle ejected shells at an angle that would have struck the stacked boxes, making their landing pattern unpredictable (WC Vol. III, pp. 401–2). Another shell is indented on the rim, raising doubts that it could have been fired from a rifle in that condition. In experiments by the House Select Committee, rapid firing of the Carcano resulted in some shells being indented in the exact location upon ejection (HSCA Vol. I, pp. 435, 454, 534).
* Seymour Weitzman and Luke Mooney, two Dallas policemen, thought at first glance that the rifle was a 7.65 bolt-action Mauser. Although the officers quickly admitted their mistake, that initial misidentification led to speculation that a different gun was found on the sixth floor and that Oswald’s Carcano was later swapped for the murder weapon. There are considerable similarities between a bolt-action Mauser and a Carcano. Firearms experts say they are easy to confuse without a proper exam (HSCA Vol. I, pp. 446–47; HSCA Vol. VII, p. 372.) Yet Mark Lane devoted an entire chapter trying to portray a simple mistake as evidence of conspiracy (Rush to Judgment, pp. 95–101). Robert Sam Anson wrote that the scope was set for a left-handed person (They’ve Killed the President, p.76). There is no such thing as a left-handed scope, and tests determined that the very slight misalignment on Oswald’s scope may actually have aided him in hitting Kennedy (WC Vol. III, p. 411; HSCA Vol. VII, pp. 371–72). Sylvia Meagher charged that the Carcano had a “hair trigger,” which would have hurt Oswald’s marksmanship (Accessories, p. 102). But the Carcano required three pounds of pull, whereas a hair trigger requires less than sixteen ounces (HSCA Vol. VII, p. 371).
† While fibers discovered in the bag matched those in the blanket with which Oswald kept his rifle wrapped in the Paines’ garage, they were too common to be linked exclusively to that blanket (WC Vol. IV, p. 81). The paper and tape matched those same items maintained at the School Book Depository (WR, pp. 135–36).
* What had been Oswald’s final destination? While no one can be certain, Warren Commission counsel David Belin had a plausible explanation that was in the draft of the Warren Report but did not make it into the final publication. Oswald had walked nearly one mile before Tippit stopped him. At the time, Oswald, who had taken a transfer from the Marsalis bus, was only four blocks away from catching a route 55 bus, due to arrive at 1:40 P.M. That would have taken him to a point on Lancaster Road where a Greyhound was scheduled to leave at 3:30. The southbound Greyhound would have, with connections, gone to Monterrey, Mexico. While he had left Marina $170, almost all their life savings, he had $13.87 on him when arrested, just enough to pay for the trip to Mexico (draft, Chapter 6 of the Warren Report, August 7, 1964).
† Other Dallas police later reported stopping individuals that fit the general description broadcast about the gunman, just as Tippit did with Oswald. It was not an unusual action on the day of the assassination (WC Vol. VII, p. 37).
‡ Could Oswald have physically been at the Tippit scene by 1:15, the time of the shooting? A reconstruction of the time that elapsed since he left the Depository shows it is more than possible. He left Dealey by 12:33. Three reconstructions of walking to the point where he boarded the Marsalis bus averaged six and a half minutes (CE 1987). Bledsoe and the bus driver estimated he was on the bus for three to four minutes before leaving (WC Vol. II, pp. 265, 271). He then took another two minutes before reaching the bus station and Whaley’s cab. That was approaching 12:45. Whaley’s manifest shows he dropped Oswald off in Oak Cliff at 12:45, but that appears too early, and he admitted it was not an accurate record (WC Vol. II, p. 254). Whaley, who had thirty-seven years of taxi experience, claimed he knew every shortcut in the city. He repeated his taxi ride in five and a half minutes, though he believed traffic was actually heavier on the day of reconstruction than on November 22; otherwise, he could have shaved another half minute from the time (WC Vol. VI, pp. 428–29, 434). That placed Oswald in Oak Cliff no later than 12:51 P.M. To walk from where Whaley dropped Oswald off to the boardinghouse at 1026 North Beckley took a maximum of five minutes and forty-five seconds (WC Vol. VI, p. 434). Those who were timed in the reconstruction followed the streets; no one is sure if Oswald, who knew the area, had a shortcut to his room. In any case, he arrived at the rooming house about 12:55 to 12:56, and left again before 1:00. He had fifteen to seventeen minutes to walk nine tenths of a mile to the scene of the Tippit murder, more than enough time (CE 1119-A, p. 158). Witnesses at the scene estimated the shooting occurred anywhere from 1:07 (WC Vol. III, p. 306) to between 1:30 to 2:00 (WC Vol. VI, p. 461). The best way to judge the time is this: The first call reporting the shooting came in to the police at 1:16, when two witnesses, T. F. Bowley and Domingo Benavides, ran to Tippit’s car and called it in over his police radio.
* The critics, trying to exonerate Oswald of the Tippit murder, question the accuracy of the witnesses by highlighting any inconsistencies. They claim Markham, who was excitable and at times hysterical, identified Oswald by his clothing and not his face. But when asked if she picked Oswald out of the lineup because of his clothes or face, she said, “Mostly from his face.… I told them I wanted to be sure, and looked at his face, is what I was looking at, mostly is what I looked at, on account of his eyes, the way he looked at me” (WC Vol. III, p. 311).
* Benavides was not taken for a lineup before Oswald was killed on Sunday, November 24. The critics interpret the failure of the police to immediately bring him to a lineup to mean that he “could not identify Oswald as the gunman” (Hurt, p. 145). Sylvia Meagher further adds, “Benavides, the man who had the closest view of the murder, did not identify Oswald … even when he was shown a photograph of Oswald months later during his testimony for the Commission.” Yet in his Warren Commission testimony, Benavides said he recognized Oswald as the shooter from the photos he saw on television (WC Vol. VI, p. 452). CBS newsman Walter Cronkite later asked him whether there was any doubt that Oswald was the shooter. “No, sir, there is no doubt at all,” said Benavides. “I could even tell you how he combed his hair and the clothes he wore and what have you.… You don’t forget things like that” (“The Warren Report,” CBS News, Part III, June 27, 1967).
* Reynolds was shot in the temple by an intruder on January 23, 1964, two days after he first spoke to the FBI. He fully recovered and testified to the Warren Commission six months later. The police suspected the perpetrator was actually a Reynolds acquaintance and rival, Darrell Garner. Some critics suggest that the shooting was connected to the Kennedy case, but no one has given a good explanation for why Reynolds was singled out when more than ten other witnesses who saw and testified to the same thing as he did were left unharmed.
* Those who believe in a conspiracy have searched for conflicting witnesses in the neighborhood, such as cleaning woman Acquilla Clemons, who claimed there was a second man, or even that a car was used in Oswald’s escape. Such statements, usually made years after the shooting, have internal inconsistencies which are so great that some of the witnesses must be questioned for their truthfulness in saying they were even in the neighborhood on that day. There is no credible eyewitness testimony that undercuts the evidence that Oswald was the shooter.
* The jacket had a laundry mark on it, and though Marina could not remember Lee ever having his clothes dry-cleaned, she had no doubt it was his. The FBI was unable to find a local dry cleaner that used that mark, raising the possibility that Oswald had purchased the jacket secondhand, with the laundry mark already in it from another city.
† Of the recovered shells, two were manufactured by Winchester-Western and two by Remington-Peters. Of the four bullets removed from Tippit during the autopsy, three were Winchester-Western and only one was Remington-Peters. That indicated that Oswald likely fired five shots and one missed Tippit, leaving an undiscovered Remington-Peters bullet and a Winchester-Western shell. Eddie Kinsley, an ambulance attendant who took Tippit to the hospital, said that upon unloading the body, he kicked a loose bullet, which had evidently struck a button on Tippit’s uniform, onto the parking lot. The witnesses disagreed over the number of shots (much the same as at Dealey Plaza). Virginia and Barbara Davis heard only two shots, but they were inside their house during the shooting (WC Vol. III, p. 342; WC Vol. VI, p. 456); Guinyard, Markham, and Benavides heard three (WC Vol. III, p. 308; WC Vol. VI, p. 447, WC Vol. VII, p. 396); Scoggins and Tatum said there were four, Reynolds said four to six, and Callaway heard five (WC Vol. III, pp. 325, 352; WC Vol. XI, p. 435; London Weekend Television, testimony of Jack Tatum). Two other ear-witnesses, Jimmy Earl Burt and William Smith, were around the corner from the shooting and each heard six shots (FBI file #100-16601, memo November 16, 1991). When Oswald was arrested he had six bullets in his revolver and five loose ones in his pocket. Eight were Winchester-Western and three were Remington-Peters (WC Vol. III, p. 459).
* Burroughs, who was rejected by the Army because his intelligence score was too low, said in a 1987 interview that Oswald had been in the theater since 1:00 P.M. and had bought popcorn from him. That was before a dozen witnesses saw Oswald kill Tippit, and then Brewer followed him into the theater. When Oswald sneaked into the theater, Brewer and Postal did not even tell Burroughs, because he was too “excitable.”
* Dr. Charles Crenshaw, in Conspiracy of Silence, questions why half a dozen police cars responded to the Texas Theater “all to capture a man suspected of entering the theater without paying” (p. 115). However, from Postal’s testimony it is clear the police thought they might either have the Presidential assassin or Tippit’s murderer in the theater (no one yet knew they were connected). Most critics fail to mention that before rushing the theater, the police had unsuccessfully raided a nearby public library on the mistaken report the suspect was there (WC Vol. III, p. 298; WC Vol. VII, pp. 29, 36–37, 80, 92–93; WC Vol. XI, p. 436; CE 705, WC Vol. XVII, pp. 415–16).
† Robert Sam Anson, in They’ve Killed the President, made the identification of Oswald much more sinister. He wrote that while the police scanned the theater, “a man sitting near the front spoke up quietly. The man the police were looking for, he said, was sitting on the ground floor, in the center, about three rows from the back.” After the arrest, Anson says, “the man in the front row who had fingered him rose from his seat, walked outside, and quietly disappeared.” Anson never informed the reader that the man he found so suspicious was actually Johnny Calvin Brewer.