About 7:15 on the morning of November 22, Linnie Mae Randle was standing by her kitchen sink when, through the window, she saw Lee coming from the Paines’ house carrying a long brown package. She opened her back door a bit to see what he was doing. He walked up to her brother’s car, opened the right rear door, and put the package on the back seat. Mrs. Randle went back to the sink, looked up a moment later, and there, staring in at her through the window, was Lee. Startled, she called to her brother, Wesley Frazier, that Lee was waiting for his ride.1
The two men climbed in the car and started off. As they were going out the drive, Frazier glanced in the rear and noticed a long brown package extending halfway across the back seat. He asked Lee what it was, and Lee mumbled something about curtain rods. “Oh, yes,” said Frazier. “You said you were going to get some yesterday.”2
The two men drove into Dallas, and Frazier parked the car in a lot two blocks from the depository building. They usually walked from the lot together, but this morning Lee got out of the car first, picked up the package, and walked to the building ahead of Frazier.
At 8:00 A.M. Roy Truly, superintendent of the Texas School Book Depository, and William Shelley, Lee’s supervisor, arrived at the building. Both noticed that Lee was already at work.3 Charles Douglas Givens, who waited each morning for Lee to finish reading in the domino room before going in to read the papers himself, noticed that Lee did not go to the domino room that day.4
Lee went about his job of filling orders, and sometime between 9:30 and 10:00, he and another order filler, James (“Junior”) Jarman, were on the first floor in a room filled with bins. Lee was at the window, Jarman joined him, and Lee asked what the people were gathering on the corner for. Jarman, who had only just found out himself, said that the president was supposed to pass by. Lee asked Jarman if he knew which way the president was coming.
“I told him, yes. He [would] probably come down Main and turn on Houston and then back again on Elm.”
“Oh, I see,” Lee said and went back to filling orders.5 The turn from Houston into Elm would bring the presidential motorcade directly in front of the southeast corner of the Book Depository Building.
President Kennedy’s plane, Air Force One, landed at Love Field at 11:40 that morning. Vice President Johnson, whose plane had landed a few moments before, was there with Mrs. Johnson to greet President and Mrs. Kennedy and Governor and Mrs. Connally after their brief flight from Fort Worth. There was a welcoming ceremony before the Kennedys boarded the presidential limousine for the drive through Dallas. The limousine was a specially designed Lincoln convertible equipped with a bubble top. But the weather was clear, and the president had asked to have the bubble removed. He sat in the right rear seat with Mrs. Kennedy at his left. Governor and Mrs. Connally rode in jump seats in front of the Kennedys. The presidential party was due at the Trade Mart for lunch at 12:30.
At the book depository, Charles Douglas Givens, Bonnie Ray Williams, and three other men were laying a new plywood floor on the sixth floor of the building. At 11:40 A.M. Williams saw Lee on the east side of the sixth floor but paid no attention to what he was doing.6 There were Scott-Foresman books on that floor, and he could have been filling orders.7
At 11:45 or 11:50 the five men who were laying the floor broke for lunch. They headed for the west, or rear, side of the building, got on the freight elevators, and raced each other to the ground floor. On the way down they saw Lee standing by the fifth-floor gate.8
Once he was on the ground floor, Givens realized that he had left his jacket, with his cigarettes in it, on the sixth floor. He rode back up and once again saw Lee. He was on the sixth floor now, not the fifth, and instead of being on the northwest side of the building, where Givens had seen him at the elevator gate, he was walking toward the elevators from the southeast corner, the corner overlooking the route the presidential motorcade was scheduled to take. Lee was carrying his clipboard, but he did not have any books in his hand, and he did not appear to be filling orders.9 The time was 11:55.
The men who were laying the new floor had moved a lot of heavy cartons from the west to the east side of the sixth floor. The southeast corner window, in particular, was totally shielded from view because cartons had been stacked around it in a crescent.10 Lee appeared to be coming from that window.
“Boy, are you going downstairs? It’s near lunchtime,” said Givens.
“No, sir,” Lee said. “And when you get downstairs, close the elevator gate.”11 The elevator was automatic and would operate only if the gate was closed.
“Okay,” said Givens and rode the elevator down.
There was a good deal of excitement about the motorcade among the men at the book depository. In order to watch, a lot of them took their sandwiches outside and ate in front of the building. Harold Norman and “Junior” Jarman went outside but then decided that they would get a better view from inside. They went to the rear of the building and took an elevator to the fifth floor. Meanwhile, Bonnie Ray Williams had eaten his lunch—chicken, Fritos, and a bottle of Dr. Pepper—by the third or fourth set of windows on the south side of the sixth floor. He could see nothing to the east of him because the cartons were stacked up so high.12 But he thought there was nobody there, and he wanted someone to watch the motorcade with. He went down a flight of stairs and found Norman and Jarman in the southeast corner windows of the fifth floor. He took a position at a window near theirs. The time was 12:20 P.M.
The presidential motorcade had left Love Field just before noon, and the procession of cars drove rapidly through the thinly populated outskirts of Dallas. The crowds were large and enthusiastic when the motorcade reached the downtown area. The president’s limousine traveled along Main Street, turned right on Houston, and headed toward the intersection of Houston and Elm Streets. The limousine slowed to about eleven miles an hour as it made the sharp left turn into Elm, directly in front of the southeast corner of the faded, orange-brick Book Depository Building. It then began to move slowly downhill away from the building. The time was 12:30 P.M.
Just then, from their lookouts at the southeast corner windows of the fifth floor, Bonnie Ray Williams and Harold Norman saw the president raise his right hand as if to salute or brush back his hair.13 It was a movement they had seen him make on television. But as he did it, they heard a sound like a shot. “Junior” Jarman and Williams thought it was a motorcycle backfire. Then there was another sound, and out on Dealey Plaza people started dropping to the ground in fright. The president’s car lurched forward, and there was a third sound right after the second. Two of the three men on the fifth floor saw the president slump, or “lean his head,” but they did not see any more.
Bonnie Ray Williams paid no attention to the first shot “because I did not know what was happening.” But he says, “the second shot, it sounded like it was right in the building, the second and third shot. And it sounded—it even shook the building, the side we were on. Cement fell on my head.” The floor above was nothing but bare boards with daylight showing between them, and Norman and Jarman saw dust in Williams’s hair. “You got something on your head,” Norman said. “Yes, man, don’t you brush it out,” Jarman added.14
Because of his location in the southeast corner window of the fifth floor, it was Harold Norman who heard the most. He did not hear anybody move above him, no creaking, no human sound. But what he did hear, with the bare floor only 12 or 14 feet overhead acting as a sounding board, was the bolt action of a rifle clicking three times, and the thump, thump, thump of three expended cartridges dropping to the floor. “Man,” he said to the others, “someone is shooting at the president and it’s coming from right over us. It even shook the building.”15
Jarman said, “We’d better get the hell out of here.”16
All three men knew where the assassin was—he was directly over their heads. None of them was armed. And none of the three wanted to go upstairs for fear of being shot to death. And yet they did a curious thing. They looked out the window and saw everyone, people, policemen, running toward the opposite side of the building where, for some onlookers, the crack of the rifle appeared to have come from. Williams said, “We know the shots came from practically over our head. But since everybody was running, you know, to the west side of the building, towards the railroad tracks, we assumed maybe somebody was down there. And so we all ran that way, the way that the people was running, and we was looking out the window.”17
Lee had stationed himself in the southeast corner window of the sixth floor, barricaded inside the crescent of book cartons. No one had seen him that morning as he carried his brown paper package to the window, removed the rifle, assembled and loaded it. No one saw him toss the empty sack into the corner where it was later found. Nor did anyone see him as he arranged a book carton and two smaller cartons as a gun rest in front of the window.
He sat on another carton and waited until the president’s car came into view. He took aim and fired three quick shots. At the moment of the final, farthest shot, President Kennedy was about 88 yards away. Through Lee’s four-power telescopic sight, he appeared to be only 22 yards away.18 After firing his last shot, Lee moved rapidly from the front to the rear of the sixth floor and crammed the rifle, scope up, on the floor between cartons that were stacked up just before the entrance to the stairway.
A Dallas patrolman, Marrion L. Baker, was on his motorcycle at a point in the motorcade several cars behind the president and was headed straight for the School Book Depository when he heard the first shot. Baker had lately been deer hunting, and he was certain that the shot was from a high-powered rifle. He looked up and saw pigeons scattering from their perches atop the building. He raced his motorcycle to the building, dismounted, and pushed his way to the entrance. There he encountered Roy Truly, who identified himself, and the two men ran for the elevators in back. Finding that both were on an upper floor, they started up the stairs. It was less than two minutes since the last shot had been fired.
When Truly and Baker reached the second-floor landing, Baker caught a glimpse of someone in the lunchroom. Revolver in hand, he rushed to the door and saw a man twenty feet away walking to the far end of the room. The man was empty-handed. Baker ordered him to turn and walk toward him. The man obeyed. He seemed normal and not out of breath. Truly was on his way to the third floor, missed the patrolman, and ran back to see what was delaying him. He found Baker face to face with Lee Oswald, his revolver pointed straight at him. Lee did not look excited; startled, perhaps, but not excited.19
“Do you know this man? Does he work here?” Baker asked.
“Yes,” Truly said.
Baker lowered his revolver, and the two men went on with their search.
Mrs. Robert Reid, a clerical supervisor, had watched the motorcade from the front of the building. When she heard the shots, she ran back inside, hoping that none of the employees was going to fall under suspicion. She was entering her office on the second floor when Lee entered from the opposite, or lunchroom side, where there was a Coke machine. He was holding a full bottle of Coca-Cola.
“Oh,” said Mrs. Reid, “the president has been shot, but maybe they didn’t hit him.”
Lee mumbled something in reply, seemingly “very calm.” Both of them kept on walking, and that was the end of the encounter.20
Lee crossed the second floor, walked down the stairs to the ground floor, and left the building by the main entrance. Outside, a crew-cut young man, who Lee thought was from the Secret Service but who may have been Robert MacNeil, a reporter for NBC, dashed up to ask where he could find a telephone. Very calmly, Lee pointed to the building and told the man that he thought he could find a pay phone inside. About three minutes had elapsed since the last shot had been fired.
Lee walked seven short blocks east on Elm Street and boarded a bus that was headed back toward the School Book Depository en route to Oak Cliff. He was spotted immediately by Mrs. Mary Bledsoe, his reluctant landlady during the week of October 7, as he passed her to take a seat in the middle of the bus. Later she said that he looked “like a maniac.” “He looked so bad in the face,” his face was “distorted.” He was dirty, he had a hole in his right shirtsleeve, and the buttons had been torn off his shirt.21
“The president has been shot,” the bus driver said, and the passengers started talking about it. “Hope they don’t shoot us,” someone said. Traffic was in a hopeless snarl, and in four minutes the bus had gone only two blocks. Lee slipped out the front, not neglecting, as he went, to pick up a transfer to another bus bound for Oak Cliff.
He had so far tried two means of escape that he had used after the Walker attempt, his own feet and the bus. Now he tried something else. Four blocks from the place where he left the bus, he went up to a cab that was standing near the Greyhound Station. The driver, William Whaley, was about to get out to buy himself a pack of cigarettes. He later remembered that a man dressed in work clothes approached, asked politely, “May I have this cab?” and, Russian fashion, climbed into the front seat beside him.
Just then an elderly lady stuck her head in the window past the passenger and asked the driver to call her a cab.
Very politely, the passenger started opening the door and said, “I will let you have this one.”
“No,” said the lady, “the driver can call me one.”
The passenger told Whaley he wanted to go to 500 North Beckley. Everything around them was in turmoil, sirens wailing, police cars crisscrossing in all directions. “What the hell,” Whaley said. “I wonder what the hell is the uproar?” The passenger did not volunteer anything. “I figured he was one of these people who don’t like to talk so I never said any more to him.”22
The man left the cab at the corner of Beckley and Neely. He handed the driver $1 for a 95 cent fare, got out, and closed the door. Whaley later identified his passenger as Lee Harvey Oswald.
It was about a six-minute walk, or a five-minute trot, to Lee’s rooming house at 1026 North Beckley. He was going to get his pistol and a jacket. He arrived at 1:00 P.M. “Oh, you are in a hurry,” Mrs. Roberts, the housekeeper, said. She was watching television and wanted to talk about the shooting. But Lee did not answer her. He went straight to his room and stayed there three or four minutes. He picked up his pistol and a jacket and was zipping up the jacket as he went out the front door. Just a few moments before, at Parkland Memorial Hospital, President John F. Kennedy had been pronounced dead of a massive injury to the head.
Back at the book depository, Roy Truly and Patrolman Baker had completed their search. They had looked through every floor except the sixth and had inspected the roof, especially the west side, the direction from which Mr. Truly thought the shots had come.
As they walked back down to the seventh floor, Baker said: “Be careful. This man will blow your head off.”
“I think we are wasting our time up here,” Truly answered. “I don’t believe the shots came from this building.”23 But because of the way he had seen the pigeons scatter, Baker thought they did.
When the two men returned to the first floor, Truly saw policemen in clumps taking down the names of men who worked in the building. He glanced from one group to another and noticed that Lee Oswald was missing. He knew nothing about Oswald—neither that he had been to Russia and had a Russian wife nor that he was a “Marxist.” Lee had told him that he was straight out of the Marine Corps. But Truly had Oswald on his mind because he had seen him just a few minutes before in the lunchroom, and now he was not with the other men.24
Quietly, he turned to Bill Shelley, Oswald’s supervisor, and asked if he had seen him. Shelley glanced from group to group and said no. Truly picked up a phone and called the warehouse where the job application forms were kept. He obtained Oswald’s full name, an accurate physical description, and his telephone number and address at the Paines’.
Truly walked over to a chief of the Dallas Police Department, who was standing a few feet away. “I don’t know if it amounts to anything or not,” he said, “but I have a boy missing over here.”
“Just a minute,” the chief said. “We will tell Captain Fritz.”
They took an elevator to the sixth floor, where Captain J. W. Fritz, chief of the homicide bureau of the Dallas Police Department, appeared to be occupied by the stairway. Truly told Fritz that he had a boy missing and handed him the slip of paper on which he had written Oswald’s address in Irving, his telephone number, and description.
“Thank you, Mr. Truly. We will take care of it.”25
Captain Fritz at that moment knew something Mr. Truly did not know. Three empty brass cartridges had been found by the southeast corner window of the sixth floor. And a rifle had been found near the stairway.26
Fritz left the building almost as soon as he heard about the missing man. He drove to City Hall to see if the man had a criminal record. And there he got news that a police officer had been shot.
About 1:00 P.M. Dallas patrolman J. D. Tippit was cruising the Oak Cliff area. Over his police car radio he had heard about the shooting of the president and a description of the suspect, which had been broadcast four times.27 About 1:15, nine-tenths of a mile from the rooming house at 1026 North Beckley, Tippit spotted a man who bore a resemblance to the description. The man was rapidly walking east. Tippit slowed down and drove parallel and very close to the man. The man kept walking. Finally, when the police car was nearly grazing the curb, the man stopped. He leaned into the car, rested his arms on the open window ledge on the far side from Tippit, and the two men exchanged a few words.
The man stepped back. Meanwhile, Tippit opened his door, climbed out slowly, and walked toward the front of the car. He was at the left front wheel when the other man, who was near the windshield on the right, pulled out a revolver and fired. He hit the patrolman four times, and Tippit instantly fell to the ground, dead. His cap skipped a little onto the street. The gunman started away in a trot, ejecting the empty cartridge cases from his pistol and reloading as he went. It was just after 1:16 P.M.
An automobile repairman, Domingo Benavides, was parked in his pickup truck fifteen feet away when he heard three shots, watched Tippet fall to the ground, and saw the gunman empty his gun and toss the shells into some bushes as he jogged away. Benavides went to the fallen patrolman and, using Tippit’s radio, reported the shooting to police headquarters. Several other bystanders had also seen the shooting and the fleeing gunman, and by 1:29 P.M. the police radio noted a similarity between the descriptions of the man who had shot Tippit and the suspect in the Kennedy shooting.
Police cars began to arrive in the area of the Tippit slaying while, eight blocks away, Johnny Calvin Brewer was in his shoe store listening to the radio. The president had been shot, and news now came over the radio that a policeman had been shot in Oak Cliff. Brewer heard sirens approach and, looking up, saw a man duck into the lobby of his store and stand with his back to the street. A police car came close, made a U-turn, and drove off. As the wail of the sirens faded, the man, who looked “scared,” “messed up,” and as if “he had been running,” peered over his shoulder, made sure the police car had gone, then turned into the street and walked a short way to the Texas Theatre. Brewer followed him there. He asked Julia Postal, the cashier, whether she had sold a ticket to the man who had just entered the theater. “No, by golly,” she said. Brewer and the usher checked the exits to make sure that none had been used and then, in the darkness, scanned the audience. They did not see the man they were looking for. Mrs. Postal called the police.
Shortly after 1:45, fifteen police officers converged on the Texas Theatre, alerted that the suspect in the Tippit shooting might be there. Someone turned up the houselights. Accompanied by several policemen, Brewer stepped on the stage and pointed to the man who had ducked in without paying. He was sitting by himself in the orchestra, near the back, close to the right center aisle. Patrolman M. N. McDonald walked slowly up the aisle. He stopped abruptly when he came to the man and told him to get on his feet. The suspect rose, raised his hands, and said, “Well, it is all over now.” He struck McDonald and reached for his own revolver. He was grabbed by two or three officers, and in the scuffle McDonald wrenched the revolver away. The man cursed as the officers handcuffed him. “I protest this police brutality,” he said.
As he was being led from the theater, the man stopped, turned, and shouted so that everyone could hear him, “I am not resisting arrest—I am not resisting arrest.” He was driven to police headquarters and arrived in the basement about 2:00 P.M. There were reporters milling around in case a suspect in the president’s murder should be brought in. He was asked if he would like to cover his face as he was taken inside. “Why should I cover my face?” he replied. “I haven’t done anything to be ashamed of.”
At 2:15 P.M. Captain Will Fritz of the homicide bureau returned to police headquarters from the City Hall office where he had been checking on Lee Oswald, missing from the book depository. He walked up to two of his officers, handed them an address in Irving, and told them to “pick up a man named Lee Oswald.” One of the officers pointed to the man who had just been arrested at the Texas Theatre. “Captain,” he said, “we can save you a trip. There he sits.”28