“Instead of coming with us,” she complained, “you just go someplace to shoot.”
“It’s none of your business,” he snapped. “I’m going anyway.” The bus was coming, and he ran to catch it.
“Don’t bother to come home at all,” she shouted. “I won’t be waiting for you. I hope the police catch you there.”1131
No one knows exactly where Oswald went, but Trinity River is the most likely place. The river cuts through Dallas from the northwest to the southeast and is bounded by high levees on both sides. Certain stretches of the levees were popular with gun owners for shooting practice, using them as safe backstops for their bullets. The bus that Marina saw Lee get on had a Love Field sign on its front, and at one point she told the Warren Commission that Lee told her when he returned that evening that he had practiced at Love Field,1132 but at another point in her testimony she was less sure about Love Field.1133 The FBI checked the whole area out and found that part of the route of the Love Field bus lay along the Trinity River, and Oswald could have gotten off the bus at West Commerce and Beckley and easily gotten down into the sandy riverbed—if there was any water there it would have been restricted to a narrow channel down the middle of the bed. But the FBI could find no area at Love Field itself or immediately adjacent thereto that would have been suitable for rifle practice.1134
Lee checked out of work between 5:00 and 5:30 p.m. during the first week of April, his last week of work, and sundown was around 6:45 p.m., so he didn’t have too much time to take the bus home, get his rifle, and take the bus to his practice site.1135 But he didn’t have to do much. To “sight in” a rifle all one has to do is fire several rounds to determine how far off the target the bullets are hitting and then adjust the iron or telescopic sight to accommodate for “windage”—horizontal error—and “elevation”—vertical error. Marines were expected to sight in their rifles with just three shots. Oswald also needed some time and a few shots to get a feel for the carbine’s bolt action and trigger pull and to get used to the telescopic sight, since there’s no evidence he had any experience with that. One of the Marine Corps’ top marksmen, Master Sergeant James A. Zahm, told the Warren Commission that an ex-marine like Oswald could easily have done all he needed to do with just ten shots.1136
During the last days of March and that first week of April, Marina knew something troubling was on Lee’s mind because he talked in his sleep a lot during that time. She had no idea what he said, since he spoke in English, but he seemed so distressed that she felt she had to wake him, sometimes as often as twice a night.1137
On Saturday, April 6, Lee’s last day on the job at Jaggers, he worked until 5:30, a full day. The only one there who was sorry to see him go was Dennis Ofstein, who had made a special effort to befriend Lee. He didn’t know Oswald had been fired until that last day. Oswald was calm enough about it, though rueful. He had liked the work. Ofstein tried to be helpful, named some of the other firms around Dallas that did similar work and suggested that Oswald try to find jobs there. Lee laughed and said if he couldn’t find work in Dallas, he could always go back to Russia. Ofstein hoped they might continue to see each other, perhaps socially with their wives, and he got the number of Oswald’s post office box. About a week later he wrote to propose that they all get together, on a Saturday evening, but he never got a reply and never saw Oswald again.1138
The next day, Sunday, April 7, Oswald left his Neely apartment with his rifle.1139 No one knows what he did on that day, but what he eventually told Marina is probably true: he told her he went out to Turtle Creek and secreted the rifle in the isolated, wooded area by the railroad tracks he had photographed a month earlier, a spot about a half mile from General Walker’s house.1140 It is equally probable that he spent the rest of the time watching Walker’s house and exploring the neighborhood for useful escape routes.
On Monday morning, Lee’s first day out of work, he dressed as if for work, left at the usual time, and stayed away all day. He visited the Texas Employment Commission, which had referred him to Jaggers, but this time there were no leads for him.1141 He came home for supper around six and went out again afterwards—Marina assumed he went to the typing class, not knowing he been dropped from the class because of his poor performance. He came home too early if that was where he really was, but she didn’t bother to ask him about it. Nothing else is known about his activities that day, and again it is likely he visited the scene of the crime. If so, he might have seen the hitherto empty Walker residence come back to life, since General Walker returned from Operation Midnight Ride that night, April 8.1142
On Tuesday, Lee didn’t even pretend to go to work. He told Marina it was a holiday and that he was just going to collect his paycheck, but once again he was gone for the whole day. After supper he walked down the street to buy a newspaper and a Dr. Pepper, then sat out on his porch to drink it. He asked Marina to come out and sit with him, chatted amiably with her about news from their friends in the Soviet Union, and insisted she finish his Dr. Pepper. Marina was struck by his friendly demeanor, not that it was anything special in and of itself, but it was so different from his constant, grinding irritability of the past two months.
The morning of Wednesday, April 10, 1963, Lee seemed pensive and sad. He finally told Marina he had been let go at his job. “I don’t know why,” he told her tearfully. “I tried. I liked that work so much. But probably the FBI came and asked about me, and the boss just didn’t want to keep someone the FBI was interested in. When will they leave me alone?”
When he went out later,* he dressed in his gray suit and Marina assumed he would be looking for work.1143
Lee did not come home for supper. At seven Marina cooked something for herself, and then spent an hour or so putting June to bed. By nine o’clock, she began to worry, even though in the past two months she had become used to his unexplained absences. She was aware that Lee was not a social butterfly nor, because he seldom drank, likely to be spending his evenings in a bar somewhere. Then, too, he had been so tense in the past weeks, plagued by bad dreams, restlessness, and a shorter temper than usual. And he was preoccupied. She knew that the loss of his job had been a blow, one that could set a match to the powder keg. Worried, unable to relax, she prowled the apartment.
It was around ten o’clock when she opened the door to Lee’s tiny study. Lying on his desk was a letter handwritten by Lee to her in Russian, with a key on top of it. It read (translated into English without Oswald’s dyslexia):
Here is the key to the post office box which is located in the main post office downtown on Ervay Street, the street where there is a drugstore where you always used to stand. The post office is four blocks from the drugstore on the same street. There you will find our mailbox. I paid for the mailbox last month so you needn’t worry about it.
Send information about what has happened to me to the Embassy [the Soviet Embassy in Washington] and also send newspaper clippings (if there’s anything about me in the papers). I think the Embassy will come quickly to your aid once they know everything.
I paid our rent on the second so don’t worry about it.
I have also paid for the water and gas.
There may be some money from work. They will send it to our post office box. Go to the bank and they will cash it.
You can either throw out my clothing or give it away. Do not keep it. As for my personal papers (both military papers and papers from the factory), I prefer that you keep them.
Certain of my papers are in the small blue suitcase.
My address book is on the table in my study if you need it.
We have friends here and the Red Cross will also help you.
I left you as much money as I could, $60 on the second of the month, and you and Junie can live on $10 a week.
If I am alive and taken prisoner, the city jail is at the end of the bridge we always used to cross when we went to town. (the very beginning of town, after the bridge.)1144
It was eleven-thirty when
Lee finally returned home. Marina immediately showed him the note and asked, “What is the meaning of this?”
He was in something of a panic, sweating, out of breath. “I shot Walker,” he gasped.
“Did you kill him?” Marina asked.
“I don’t know.”
“My God. The police will be here any minute,” Marina exclaimed. “What did you do with the rifle?”
“Buried it.”
Marina was appalled, very frightened, and started to tremble, sure that the police would turn up to lay hands on her husband at any moment. Lee turned on the radio to see if the killing was reported in the late news. It wasn’t. He finally undressed and threw himself down on the bed, where he fell asleep immediately. He slept the whole night through.
Marina could not. She lay awake, in panic, wondering what on earth she could do. Under Soviet law she had a duty to inform the police immediately—in fact, if witnesses didn’t, that made them accomplices to the crime. She had no way of knowing that the criminal justice system in America was different, so different, in fact, that Lee could prevent her from even testifying against him because he was her husband. She was terrified. She did not know what to do. She did nothing.1145
At nine o’clock on the night of April 10, 1963, General Walker was seated at his desk in the rear of his residence bending over his 1962 income tax return, due in just five days. Most of the lights in the house were on, although he was alone, as he was most nights—unlike the daytime, when the rented house was often full of political aides and colleagues. The shades were up, windows closed—that afternoon the temperature had broken all records for April 10, ninety-nine degrees, and Walker had the air-conditioning on. Suddenly, he was startled by a blast and sharp crack right over his head to the left of where he was sitting. At first he thought one of the neighborhood kids had tossed a firecracker through the window. They often played in the alley out there and in the parking lot of the Mormon Church next door, but he immediately saw that the window screens were intact. Puzzled, he got up, walked around his desk, and looked back at where he had been sitting. There was a bullet hole in the wall not more than three or four inches from where his head had been. He dashed upstairs to get his pistol.
As he ran back down the stairs at the front of the house, he caught a glimpse through a rear window of a car leaving the driveway of the church and turning left onto Turtle Creek Boulevard. All he really saw were the taillights. It was dark and his view was blocked by the branches of a tree. It could have been a getaway car—the timing was about right, as the alley that ran behind his house turned into the parking lot behind the church and continued between his house and the church until it reached the boulevard.
Pistol in hand, he went out the back door to see what was going on. Halfway to the alley he turned back and eventually saw that one of the windows of his study was shattered. Somebody had fired at him in the dark from a position to the rear of the house toward the alley. He realized that his right forearm was bleeding from a few slivers of the bullet’s jacket. Later, others would notice plaster debris from the wall in his hair.1146
Walker called the police, who turned up shortly in force, a couple of patrolmen followed by a couple of detectives. Two of the officers checked the room on the other side of the wall the bullet had gone through, which was stacked high with pamphlets and literature that Walker used in his political campaigns. Rummaging through the papers, they quickly found a “mushroomed bullet” lying on top of one of the stacks of literature near the hole in the wall.1147
The double-window through which the bullet had been fired had a wooden frame running horizontally in the middle of it. The police saw that the bullet had struck the “upper portion” of the “window frame near the center locking device” as it smashed through both the screen and the window, thus deflecting the bullet just enough to save the general’s life. The projectile’s contact with the window frame had stripped away part of its metal jacket, accounting for the splinters of metal in Walker’s arm. When the Dallas detectives went outside to line up the bullet hole in the wall with the damage to the window, the line led to the back fence on the alley. It was latticed, with large, square holes. They even found a “fresh chip” in the wood on the top part of the fence. In lining up the path of the bullet, they concluded that the bullet was fired “from just below the chipped portion of the fence,” the rifleman resting his weapon in the latticework opening below the top of the fence. It was amazing that he had missed his target, not more than forty yards away. Walker, motionless, thoroughly engrossed in his tax return, had been a sitting duck. The sniper, Walker thought, must have been a lousy shot, and one of the policemen said, in awe, “He couldn’t have missed you!” That sounded all right to Walker then, but, as he mulled it over later, he realized that the glare of light from the room would have blurred the horizontal frame of the window, making it all but invisible to the shooter (particularly if he was using a telescopic sight, which would have been focused well beyond the window itself). The shooter might well have been a very good shot indeed, Walker thought, just very unlucky because of the confluence of circumstances.1148
The next morning, when Marina woke up, Lee was listening to the radio. “I missed,” he told her angrily. He was sure he had taken very good aim, and kept repeating, “It was such an easy shot,” but they were saying that Walker was uninjured. Marina was hugely relieved. He went out and came back a few minutes later with the morning paper, which carried front-page accounts of the incident. He had a good laugh over the fact that the police had misidentified the smashed bullet. “They say I had a .30 caliber bullet when I didn’t at all,” he told Marina. “They got the bullet and the rifle all wrong…What fools.” The papers also reported that a fourteen-year-old neighbor of Walker’s, Walter Kirk Coleman, rushed outside at the sound of the shot and saw two cars, one with one man in it, the other with several, speed away from the church parking lot nearby.* “Americans are so spoiled,” Oswald sneered, “they always think you have a car. It never occurs to them that you might use your own two legs.”1149 Lee was unusually forthcoming with Marina about what he had done and how he had done it. He told her he hadn’t waited to see whether his shot struck home but had taken off running. He said that “several kilometers away” he got on a bus, and indicated that he later got off the bus to hide the weapon, either in the bushes or in the ground, she does not recall which.1150 He also told her he had gone to Walker’s residence at some earlier time to shoot him but had returned. “I don’t know why,” she told the Warren Commission, but suggested Lee had told her that on the evening he did shoot at Walker, there were church services nearby and “there were many people there, and it was easier to merge in the crowd and not be noticed,” the inference being that on the earlier occasion he had noticed a sign saying that the church had services on Wednesday evening.1151
Marina finally got around to asking Lee the question that had troubled her as soon as she heard Walker’s name. Just who was Walker and why would Lee want to kill him? “He’s a very bad man,” Lee said, “the leader of a fascist organization.” Marina told him he still had no right to try to kill him, but when he responded that “many lives” could have been saved if someone had killed Hitler earlier, she didn’t have a response. Lee told her he had been planning to kill Walker “for two months.”1152
Marina was outraged at what Lee had done and threatened him by telling him she intended to keep the letter he had left behind for her on the night he went to kill Walker, which was obviously a very incriminating farewell letter, and if he ever did something “crazy” like this again, she would go to the police and “have the proof in the form” of his letter. She told him that “it was fated that Walker not be killed,” and therefore, he should never “try such a thing again.” He promised her he would not do something like this again.1153
On April 13, three days after the bungled shooting,* Marina saw Oswald thumbing through the blue looseleaf notebook she had seen before. This time she asked him what
it was. “My plan,” he told her, handing it to her. It contained all the details—maps, photographs, sketches, bus schedules, pages of notes, some typed, some handwritten, all in English and unintelligible to Marina—of his effort to kill Walker. The snapshots were of Walker’s house. Marina asked him what he meant to do with this book. “Save it as a keepsake,” he told her. “I’ll hide it somewhere.”
“Some keepsake! It’s evidence! For God’s sake Alka, destroy it.”1154
He seemed reluctant to do so, but some moments later she found him setting fire to the pages he had written and dropping them one by one into the toilet.1155 He destroyed most of the evidence that tied him to the Walker shooting—notes, sketches, and bus schedules—but he saved the pages containing his political philosophy. And, as we know, several photographs he had taken of Walker’s home also survived the burning, as did a piece of evidence that more than anything else tied him to the crime—the handwritten note in Russian he left for Marina in case he did not come home that night.
So deeply shocked was Marina by her husband’s crime and what she imagined to be her shared complicity—according to her understanding of Soviet law—that she told no one about it, not even after the murders of President Kennedy and Officer Tippit and Lee’s own death at the hands of Jack Ruby. She had kept the letter Lee had left for her on the night he went out to shoot Walker as a means of forcing him to behave, but it was not found in the searches of the Oswalds’ possessions at Ruth Paine’s house. Several of Lee’s surveillance photographs of Walker’s place and its environs, which he had made prints of at Jaggers, were found, but the searchers who found them had no idea of their significance. And they overlooked the two Russian books Marina had left in Ruth Paine’s kitchen, a cookbook and a book on child care. Ruth noticed them about a week after the police had carted everything away and turned them over to the Irving Police Department to be delivered to Marina. But the police instead turned the books over to the Secret Service on December 2, 1963, and Lee’s letter of instructions to Marina was found in one of the books, a cookbook titled Book of Helpful Instructions.1156
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