Rowland was taken inside the sheriff’s office that same afternoon, where he gave a notarized affidavit that reiterated what he had told Turner and Sorrels, except that now the man was holding the rifle at the military position of “parade rest,” but again made no reference to seeing a second man.113 In two separate FBI interviews on the day of the assassination and the following day, Rowland told the FBI essentially the same story, again not referring to a second man.114 On November 24, Rowland gave a signed statement to the FBI. He said he only saw the man “momentarily” on the sixth floor, and this time he was once again back to holding the rifle at “port arms.” Again, there was no reference to seeing anyone else in the window, or anywhere else on the sixth floor.115
Three and a half months later, in his March 10, 1964, testimony before the Warren Commission, Rowland repeated the essence of his previous statements about the man with the rifle he claims he saw around 12:15 p.m. He definitely was holding the “high-powered” rifle, he said, at “port arms,” not parade rest, either one of which would be a laughably inappropriate way to hold a rifle for a man about to kill the president. But the devil was in the details he added and his additional observations.* Unbelievably, even though he told the FBI he only saw the man “momentarily” (indeed, he told the Commission that he told his wife about the sighting of the man immediately after he saw him, and when she looked up the man was already “gone from our vision”), he gave the Commission incredible details. The man had “dark hair” that was “well-combed or close cut,” was a “light Latin or Caucasian,” had on a “very light-colored shirt” that was “open at the collar” and (get this) “unbuttoned about halfway,” was wearing “a polo shirt under” the shirt, and was wearing “dark slacks or blue jeans.” Rowland didn’t mention the state of the man’s shoeshine, but only because he couldn’t see more than “six inches below his waist.” This was not looney bird time. This clearly was fabrication time. “There was nothing dark on the man’s face, no mustache,” Rowland testified, but he allowed that “there could have been a scar, if it hadn’t been a dark scar.”
Rowland now added, for the first time that has been recorded in any statement of his, that on the same floor the man with a rifle was on, he saw, around five minutes before the shooting, an elderly “colored man…hanging out the window…that they said the shots were fired from,” the “southeast corner” of the building, and that on the floor directly below the colored man, he saw “two Negro women” (obviously, the two black men, Harold Norman and Bonnie Ray Williams) looking out adjacent windows.116 But when his wife was asked by Warren Commission counsel if her husband “ever told you that he had seen anyone else on the sixth floor other than this man with the gun,” she responded, “No, sir.”
“Has he ever told you that he told anyone else that he saw anyone else on the sixth floor?”
“No, sir.”117
It was obvious that Rowland had no credibility left to squander, but Rowland tried hard to prove this conclusion wrong in the remainder of his testimony. He said he saw “three women” and a “couple of boys” on the freeway overpass (though we know from the testimony of several witnesses that neither were there), and that “all the officers…50, maybe more” converged on the railroad yards behind the picket fence right after the shooting118 (again, we know this is not true).
Since no one else but Arnold Rowland claimed to see a man holding a rifle on the west side of the sixth floor of the Book Depository Building, and since there is no physical evidence that Kennedy was shot from a window on the west side of the building (e.g., no cartridge cases were on the floor), and certainly no evidence at all that Oswald had any accomplice helping him that day, there appear to be several possible explanations of what happened here. Rowland may have seen Oswald himself holding the rifle, around fifteen minutes before the shooting, on the west side of the sixth floor. Another possibility is that Rowland was simply mistaken as to what he thought he saw. This would be consistent with the well-known phenomenon that whenever there are multiple witnesses to an event, almost invariably there is very wide divergence as to what people think they saw. But if I were to guess, I’d say that Rowland made the story up for his wife, and then later ran with it, exaggerating and embroidering his yarn along the way. Rowland said that just prior to his alleged sighting of the man in the window, he and his wife “were discussing…the different security precautions. I mean, it was a very important person who was coming and we were aware of the policemen around everywhere, and especially in positions where they would be able to watch crowds…We had seen in the movies before where they had security men up in windows…with rifles.”119 His wife, Barbara, confirms this conversation.120 Further support that Rowland may have made his sighting up is that it doesn’t ring true—that he immediately told his wife of his sighting, but when she looked up shortly thereafter, the man who had been holding his rifle at port arms, no less, suddenly vanished, her husband telling her “the man had moved back.”121 True, his wife was nearsighted and she wasn’t wearing her glasses at the time, but she said she “saw the window plainly, and I saw some people…looking out of some other windows.”122
Was Rowland the type of person to make a story up? Though he was only eighteen, he had already caused people who knew him to conclude he was not truthful. The assistant principal at his Dallas high school told the FBI that he had learned from his contact with Rowland that Rowland “would not hesitate to fabricate a story.”123 And the dean of the technical high school he had earlier attended told the FBI that from her dealings with him she “determined he could not be trusted and would not tell the truth regarding any matter.”124 As to Rowland’s exaggerating and embroidering the story as he told it to subsequent people, we’ve seen that he conducted his own self-immolation on this point, even his wife telling the Warren Commission he was “prone to exaggerate,” though she was quick to add that his exaggerations were usually “not concerned with anything other than himself. They are usually to boost his ego…that he is really smarter than he is or that he is a better salesman than he is, something like that.”125
Another Dealey Plaza witness quoted often by conspiracy theorists is Carolyn Walther. She told the FBI on December 5, 1963, that from her vantage point on the east side of Houston near Elm, within a minute before the shooting she saw a man standing in the southeasternmost window of either the fourth or the fifth floor of the Book Depository Building. (She said she was “positive” the window wasn’t as high as the sixth floor.) The man was leaning out the window holding a weapon that looked like a machine gun. He had blond or light brown hair. In the same window, to the left of this man, she saw a portion of another man in a brown suit coat. She could not see his head and she gave no description of him.126 Walther repeated her story to “the investigators” for a 1967 book127 and in 1978 to the Dallas Morning News.128
Apart from the fact that we know from photographs and testimony that the fourth-floor window was closed and the fifth-floor window occupied by identified Book Depository employees (James Jarman, Bonnie Ray Williams and Harold Norman, one of whom, Norman, can be seen leaning out the window in the Robert Hughes film, and undoubtedly is the person whom Walther saw), there is another very serious problem with Walther’s statement. She was watching the motorcade with her friend, Pearl Springer, who told the FBI that not only didn’t she see any armed man standing in the window, but much more importantly, Walther, after the shooting, did not mention to her anything about seeing any man in the window holding a rifle, machine gun, or any other type of weapon.129 Apparently Walther never considered her observation important enough to waste a breath on. I understand.
The last witness in this category is John Powell. Powell told Earl Golz of the Dallas Morning News in 1978, fifteen years after the assassination, that on the day of the assassination he was an inmate in the county jail (at the corner of Houston and Main) and that several minutes before the shooting he and others in his cell on the sixth floor of the jail saw two men in the sniper’
s nest window who were “fooling with” the scope of a rifle. (In other words, Oswald didn’t need a second gunman firing a second rifle from the window, but he did need someone there to hold his hand, tinker with the scope of his rifle, or what have you.) Powell, seventeen at the time and in jail for three days on charges of vagrancy and disturbing the peace, told Golz, “Quite a few of us saw [the two men].” The two men “looked darker” than whites and seemed to be in “work clothes.” There’s no reference in Golz’s article that Powell had ever spoken to the authorities. Indeed, the opposite is suggested when Powell told Golz, “I didn’t tell very many people.”130
The Golz article, coupled with the allegation in Anthony Summer’s book, Conspiracy, two years later that the jail cells provided “an ideal vantage point for observation of the famous Depository window,”131 created a new stir in the conspiracy community.
Although it is not known whether law enforcement ever spoke to John Powell, the entire allegation of inmates at the Dallas county jail witnessing the assassination was investigated by the Dallas sheriff’s office and the FBI in November and December of 1964. The allegation was made to the FBI on December 11, 1964, by one Fay Leon Blunt, who wasn’t even incarcerated in the jail at the time of the assassination but claimed there were seventeen witnesses to the assassination who were in the hospital ward on the fifth floor of the jail, and none had been interviewed. The FBI contacted Sheriff Bill Decker on December 14 about the allegation and Decker told them a “thorough investigation [was] conducted at the County Jail immediately subsequent to the assassination and no witnesses to same [were] located among the inmates.” This, of course, would include not only the fifth floor, where the seventeen witnesses allegedly were, but also the sixth floor, where Powell claims he and others were. The search by the sheriff’s office for witnesses to the assassination at the jail would seem to have been an automatic one, and therefore appears to be a clear refutation of Powell’s story, one that he, Powell, saw fit to keep secret from the media and the authorities for fifteen years. The Powell allegation is not only silly on its face (someone apparently helping Oswald with the telescopic sight), but he is the only Dealey Plaza “witness” to have made it.
As far as Blunt’s allegation about the fifth floor is concerned, Ernest Holman, the Dallas County chief jailer, took the FBI on a tour of the jail on December 14, 1964, and pointed out that the hospital section of the jail on the fifth floor had three cells. One cell was for mental inmates, and the windows from this cell allowed a view of the motorcade, but the sniper’s nest window, per the FBI report, “is not visible from this cell area.” Another cell area in the hospital section was “only used on weekends by persons serving three day sentences for ‘Driving While Intoxicated’ charges” and there were “no DWI prisoners in this particular cell at the time of the assassination.” The third cell in the hospital section did have a view of the sniper’s nest window, but the FBI report said the cell window “is very dirty and is backed by an iron mesh type grid guard.” The view from this window is “very distorted” and Holman told the FBI he believed it would be “impossible to identify anyone” from this window. The FBI report said that “Holman and Chief Identification Officer James H. Kitching advised that Fay Leon Blunt…is well known to them as a person completely unreliable who has been arrested on several occasions in the past on lunacy charges.”132
More than the eyewitness testimony already discussed, conspiracy theorists rank Oswald’s second-floor lunchroom encounter with Dallas police officer Marrion L. Baker near the very top of the list of reasons to believe Oswald didn’t kill Kennedy. According to the critics, Oswald couldn’t possibly have gotten from the sixth-floor sniper’s nest to the second-floor lunchroom in the ninety-second time frame estimated by the Warren Commission. Howard Roffman, who offered a critical analysis of Oswald’s and Baker’s movements in his book Presumed Guilty, wrote, “Thus, Oswald had an alibi. Had he been the sixth floor gunman, he would have arrived at the lunchroom at least five seconds after Baker did, probably more…[Therefore] Oswald could not have been the assassin.”133 Once again, however, the critics have exaggerated and misrepresented the circumstances surrounding this encounter in their curious zeal to exonerate Oswald of the crime he so obviously committed.
You’ll recall that Officer Baker was one of the motorcycle escorts riding in the motorcade approximately two hundred feet behind the president’s car. Baker had just turned onto Houston Street and was heading north toward the Depository when the shooting started. His immediate thought (though later proved incorrect) was that the shots were being fired from the roof of the Book Depository directly ahead of him. Racing his motorcycle to the front entrance, Baker dashed into the building and together with building superintendent Roy Truly ran to the freight elevators at the back of the building. After a brief delay (trying unsuccessfully to bring an elevator down by remote control so they could ascend to the upper floors), they ran up the nearby staircase. As Baker rounded the second-floor landing, he caught a glimpse of someone walking away from him in the vestibule leading to the second-floor lunchroom. Baker approached the lunchroom door, pistol drawn, and spotted Oswald, now inside the lunchroom, continuing to walk away from him. “He was in the center of the room walking away from me,” Baker testified at the London trial.134
When Warren Commission counsel asked Baker if, when he saw Oswald, Oswald was “carrying anything in his hands,” Baker answered, “He had nothing at that time.” Oswald’s statement to Captain Fritz that he “was on the second floor drinking a Coca-Cola when the officer came in”135 became so famous and written about that Officer Baker himself would later have to catch himself for buying into it. In a September 23, 1964, handwritten statement he gave to the FBI, he wrote, “I saw a man standing in the lunchroom drinking a coke.” He immediately crossed out the words “drinking a coke” and placed his initials above the words crossed out.136 Conspiracy theorists were quick to pounce on this as evidence that Oswald was in fact drinking a Coke when Baker confronted him, and Baker, like everyone else in the world, was trying to cover up the truth in the assassination and falsely implicate Oswald. But Baker’s credibility in this matter couldn’t be any better. After all, if he were trying to implicate Oswald he obviously would never have told the Warren Commission that Oswald was calm and collected when he, Baker, first confronted Oswald.
It should be noted that Roy Truly’s testimony is corroborative of Baker’s testimony before the Warren Commission. When Warren Commission counsel asked if Oswald “had anything in either hand,” Truly responded, “I noticed nothing in either hand.”137 Author Gerald Posner is probably correct when he concludes that after Baker and Truly left him, Oswald “was now left in the empty lunchroom, 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.”138 The Warren Commission concluded that the “full bottle of Coca-Cola” Oswald was holding in his hand when Depository employee Mrs. R. A. Reid saw him was “presumably purchased after the encounter with Baker and Truly.”139
On March 20, 1964, the Warren Commission had Baker and Truly repeat their movements as the first step in determining whether Oswald could have descended to the second-floor lunchroom from the sixth floor by the time Baker and Truly arrived.140 Two trial runs were made, beginning with Baker’s position on Houston Street at the time of the first shot and ending at the moment Baker saw Oswald. (It is not clear whether the Commission’s timing ended when Baker first saw Oswald in the vestibule or a moment later in the lunchroom.) Using a stopwatch, the Commission timed Baker’s reconstructed movements at ninety seconds during the first test, and seventy-five seconds during the second.141
That same day, Oswald’s presumed descent from the sixth floor was also reconstructed and timed. Secret Service agent John Howlett, playing the role of Oswald, carried a rifle from the southeast corner of the sixth floor north alon
g the east aisle to the northeast corner of the floor, then west to the top of the northwest corner staircase, near where Oswald’s rifle was found.* He placed the rifle on the floor there, descended the stairs to the second floor, and entered the lunchroom. Again, two test runs were conducted. The first, covering the route from the sixth floor to the lunchroom at a “normal walking” pace, was clocked at seventy-eight seconds. The second test run, at a “fast walk,” took seventy-four seconds.142 In a test the HSCA conducted, running from the sixth floor to the lunchroom, the same or close to what we could have expected Oswald to do, took just forty-six seconds.143
The Warren Report noted that even the minimum (fastest) time it took Baker to reach the second-floor lunchroom (seventy-five seconds) would have put him in the lunchroom just three seconds before Oswald reached it by merely walking at a normal pace (seventy-eight seconds), though the time taken by Baker (and Truly) on November 22 was “probably longer than in the test runs,” in which case Oswald would have had more time to get to the second-floor lunchroom before Baker arrived. For example, the Commission wrote, “No allowance was made for the special conditions which existed on the day of the assassination,” including Baker’s possible delayed reaction to the sound of the shots, his taking time (after parking his motorcycle) to survey the area along Elm Street before entering the building (as he testified he did),* and jostling with the crowd of people on the steps leading to the entrance of the Depository.144 Even Baker acknowledged that his reconstructed times of ninety and seventy-five seconds “would be the minimum, because I am sure that I, you know, it took me a little longer [on the day of the assassination].”145 Just as obviously, we can assume that Oswald would have moved faster than merely a “normal walking pace” or even a “fast walk” from the sniper’s nest to the second floor. Indeed, we would expect him to have run, although when Warren Commission counsel asked Baker if, when he confronted Oswald, Oswald was “out of breath, did he appear to have been running?” Baker answered, “It didn’t appear that to me. He appeared normal, you know.”146 However, running downstairs and running upstairs are two very different things. When I asked Baker at the London trial if he was out of breath himself from his “fast walk” simulation, he said he was not.147 Truly would later say, “He [Oswald] didn’t have to hurry. He just walked down the stairway from the sixth to the second floor.”148
Reclaiming History Page 154