Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  Even assuming the two witnesses, Worrell and Carr, saw what they said they saw, and even if we make the further assumption they saw the same man, the fact remains that running out of the Book Depository Building or running up or down any of the streets in Dealey Plaza right after the assassination, when absolute chaos reigned, would not seem to be abnormal behavior. And if anyone involved in the assassination were to have run out the back door of the Book Depository Building (the north side of the building), one would think the normal direction he would have taken for his escape would be to go north on Houston, where virtually no one was, not south toward Elm Street, where all of law enforcement had congregated.

  Since that time, Carr has changed his story as well as added substantially to it. In New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison’s unsuccessful prosecution of Clay Shaw in 1969 for conspiring to murder Kennedy (see conspiracy section), Garrison called Carr to the stand. But he had a problem. Garrison couldn’t have Carr testify he saw the man on the top floor (the seventh floor), since no one saw anyone on that floor, and he couldn’t say the sixth floor, because Oswald was there. So the very accommodating Carr now said the man he saw in the window was really on “the fifth floor of the School Book Depository” Building, totally contradicting what he told the FBI in 1964, which was that he couldn’t see, from his vantage point, any of the floors beneath the seventh floor. And now the man was “at the third window” from Houston, having apparently moved not only two stories down from where Carr saw him on November 22, 1963, but also one window over. Carr further embroidered his statement to the FBI by testifying in New Orleans that while the man was walking fast, “every once in a while he would look over his shoulder as if he was being followed.”

  Then Carr added something completely new: “Immediately after the shooting,” he told Garrison and the Shaw jury, he saw “three men that emerged from behind the School Book Depository.” (How he saw them when he told the FBI in 1964 that he could not see anything beneath the seventh floor is not known.) One of the three men, Carr testified, was “real dark-complected” and the three got into a Rambler station wagon driven by the dark-complected man and sped north on Houston. This new version of the story by Carr corroborated, for Garrison, the story of Roger Craig (see later text), who testified for Garrison that he saw Oswald running out of the Book Depository Building and getting into a “Rambler station wagon” driven by a “dark-complected” man. The problem with fabricated stories is that inconsistencies frequently occur. As opposed to the truth, which is compatible with its environment, falsehoods, as Daniel Webster said, not only disagree with truths, but usually quarrel among themselves. As we shall see, Craig’s Rambler was going west on Elm; Carr’s, north on Houston. Craig’s Rambler drove off from Dealey Plaza fifteen minutes after the assassination; Carr’s, immediately after. Moreover, there were only two people (Oswald and driver) in Craig’s Rambler, three in Carr’s Rambler. But we’ll get to Craig later. As for Carr, we know he made up the story about “three men speeding away in the Rambler” because in his first interview with the FBI on January 4, 1964, and in the three-and-a-half-page comprehensive signed statement he gave the bureau on February 1, 1964, he mentioned no such thing.

  Carr came up with yet another story at the Shaw trial. He told the FBI in 1964 that he heard three shots and they seemed to be coming from the Triple Underpass area. But in New Orleans, he testified he heard four shots and “the last three” came from—you guessed right—behind the picket fence at the top of the grassy knoll. How could he tell? Listen to this. From his position almost two hundred yards away (close to two football fields) he saw that one of the three bullets “knocked a bunch of grass up…and you could tell from the way it knocked it up that the bullet came from this direction (pointing to a photomap of the picket fence on the grassy knoll).”31

  Now for the somewhat funny part. Though Carr has no credibility and no one in authority is in the least bit interested in what he has to say, apparently the conspirators who murdered Kennedy are still terrified that the authorities might listen to him one day, and according to him, they have been trying to intimidate and even murder him for years, all to no avail. Carr told conspiracy theorist Gary Shaw in 1975 that when FBI agents interviewed him and he told them the man he saw in the Book Depository Building window wasn’t Oswald (the FBI report of the interview, as indicated earlier, only says that Carr described the man as a “white male” and described the way he was dressed, not that Carr said the man was not Oswald), one of the agents said to him, “If you didn’t see Lee Harvey Oswald in the School Book Depository with a rifle, you didn’t witness it.” When Carr persisted that the man wasn’t Oswald, the agent said to him, “You better keep your mouth shut.” Not long after, he told Shaw, his home was raided by more than a dozen Dallas policemen and detectives armed with a search warrant looking for “stolen articles.” They ransacked his home, he said, while holding him and his wife at gunpoint. The day after the police raid, Carr said he received an anonymous phone call advising him to “get out of Texas.” Carr heeded the warning and left for Montana, but the Kennedy assassination conspirators apparently pursued him there. One day, he found dynamite in his car. Another time, before he was scheduled to testify in the Clay Shaw trial, someone fired a shot at him, trying to murder him. He added that after the Shaw trial he was in Atlanta when he was attacked by two men who stabbed him in the back and left arm, and he says he fatally shot one of his assailants.32

  Obviously, the conspirators found it easy to eliminate President Kennedy, but they never could find a way to eliminate the person they feared the most, the dreaded Richard Randolph Carr.

  Another enduring conspiracy favorite, Julia Ann Mercer, really had a handle on what “went down” (law enforcement jargon) on the day of the assassination, trying to put Jean Hill, Tom Tilson, and others to shame. On the afternoon of the assassination the twenty-three-year-old gave a notarized statement to the Dallas County Sheriff’s Department that as her car approached the Stemmons Freeway overpass on Elm Street (in a subsequent statement she said the time was around 11:00 a.m.) on November 22, 1963, her passage was blocked by a green Ford pickup truck parked with “one or two wheels up on the curb” on the right side of Elm. The hood of the truck, which had the words “Air Conditioning” printed on the driver’s side, was open. She said, “A man was sitting under the wheel of the car and slouched over the wheel.” (I defy any student of the English language to explain, from these words, the position the man was in.) Another man, at the back of the truck, “reached over the tailgate and took out…what appeared to be a gun case.” She said the man then “walked across the grass and up the grassy hill.” Apparently, Miss Mercer’s grassy knoll assassin needed an hour and a half (11:00 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.) to set himself up behind the picket fence. All of this evidently took place in broad daylight in the virtual presence, she said, of “three policemen standing talking near a motorcycle on the bridge just west of me.”33 And since the approach to the Stemmons Freeway overpass is close to a hundred yards from the top of the grassy knoll, Mercer’s gunman had quite a long walk carrying a gun case in front of potential witnesses, something I would think he would want to avoid.

  Mark Lane, in his book Rush to Judgment, writes that “the truck was parked illegally and blocked traffic while a man carried what appeared to be a rifle case up a grassy slope in the presence of Dallas Police Officers.” (“At that very spot later that same day,” Lane assures his readers, “the President was shot and killed.”)34 But why presidential assassins, hired by the CIA or mob or anyone else, would deliberately draw attention to themselves by parking illegally and blocking traffic on a busy street in the presence of three Dallas police officers as well as lay witnesses like Miss Mercer is not known. Of course, conspiracy theorists never let common sense get in the way of their hallucinatory theories.

  On December 9, 1963, Dallas police officer Joe E. Murphy, whose assignment for the motorcade was on the Stemmons Freeway overpass above Elm Street just
west of the Triple Underpass, told the FBI that around “10:30 to 10:40 a.m.” on the day of the assassination, a green pickup truck stalled on Elm Street. He ascertained that it belonged to a construction company working on the First National Bank Building at Elm and Akard in Dallas. The FBI report reads, “There were three construction men in this truck, and [Murphy] took one to the bank building to obtain another truck in order to assist in moving the stalled one.” Murphy said the other two men remained with the pickup truck in the company of “two other officers” Murphy was working with. “Shortly prior to the arrival of the motorcade, the man [Murphy] had taken to the bank building returned with a second truck, and all three of the men left with the two trucks, one pushing the other…Murphy further stated that it was probable that one of these men had taken something from the rear of this truck in an effort to start it. He stated these persons were under observation all during the period they were stalled on Elm Street because the officers wanted the truck moved prior to the arrival of the motorcade, and it would have been impossible for any of them to have had anything to do with the assassination of President Kennedy.”35 Forrest V. Sorrels, special agent in charge of the Secret Service’s Dallas office, told the Warren Commission that he learned a truck “had stalled down there on Elm Street and I…found out that [it] had gone dead.” Sorrels said the truck “apparently belonged to some construction company, and that a police officer had come down there and they had gone to the construction company and gotten somebody to come down and get the [truck] out of the way.”36

  If we went no further, to believe Mercer’s story would stretch credulity beyond all tolerable boundaries, but the very creative Miss Mercer was determined not to let well enough alone. Adopting the motto “Anything she [Jean Hill] can do, I can do better,” in a 1983 interview with conspiracy-leaning author Henry Hurt she said she told the FBI that the two men she had seen were—yes, you guessed right—Jack Ruby and Lee Harvey Oswald. “Ruby, she said, was the driver, and Oswald the man with the rifle.”37*

  One of the most bizarre stories that has emerged in assassination literature comes from a respected conspiracy theorist (there is such a species, though rare), the aforementioned Gary Mack. The former program director of radio station KFJZ in Fort Worth, Mack, since 1994, has been the curator at the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza.38 Although Mack, who has been an assassination researcher since 1975, tends to believe in a conspiracy, he is respected by both sides in the debate, and as opposed to 95 percent of his colleagues, you can engage in a spirited give-and-take exchange with him with neither side becoming incoherent.

  As indicated earlier, the photo of the presidential limousine taken by Dealey Plaza spectator Mary Moorman at almost the precise moment of the shot to the president’s head, the second of two photographs she took with her Polaroid camera that day,39 corresponds approximately to frame 315 of the Zapruder film. We know the president was shot in the head at frame 313—when we see the explosion in the head—or somewhere between 312 and 313, and each frame of the Zapruder film represents about one-eighteenth of a second; therefore, she took her photo about one-ninth of a second after the president was hit—virtually contemporaneous with the head shot. “My picture, when I took it,” Moorman told ABC’s Bill Lord on the afternoon of the assassination, “was at the same instant that the President was hit, and that does show in my picture…It shows the President, he, uh, slumped. Jackie Kennedy was leaning towards him to see, I guess.”40

  The background of the subject photo picks up the area of the grassy knoll around the eastern part of the stockade fence and the retaining wall to the east of the fence. But the image of the retaining wall area is so blurred that enlarging the photo and seeking to enhance it at the Rochester Institute of Technology “produced no significant increase in detail and no evidence of any human form.” And since the “fence region of the photograph was of even poorer quality than the retaining wall area, no enhancement” was even attempted.41 Mack says the HSCA was dealing with the original Moorman photo, but it had deteriorated. But around 1983, he came into possession of an eight-by-ten-inch UPI print of Moorman’s photo taken after the shooting on the day of the assassination, and it was in good condition. Mack says that in an area of the photo different from where most conspiracy theorists place the grassy knoll assassin (which is behind the picket fence, eight to ten feet west of the southeast corner of the fence)—behind the fence but about sixteen feet north from the southeast corner*—can be seen a man who “appears to be dressed in a manner that’s certainly consistent with a police uniform.”42

  In the 1988 British Television Production The Men Who Killed Kennedy, Mack spoke about the origin of the “Badge Man” theory. He said that in studying the Moorman photo he saw an image behind the stockade fence that looked like “eyes and ears and forehead and hair. And little by little the pieces of the image started to make sense to me. And that’s when I first called Jack [White, someone, Mack says, who is “knowledgeable about photography and dark room technique”]. And with his photographic work doing the blowups we could see more and more detail. And at one point we realized this fellow was probably wearing a police uniform, or close enough to what the Dallas police were wearing to pass as a police officer.” Mack and White would later identify a “shining object” in the Moorman photo image as being the badge on the figure’s police uniform—hence, the birth of the “Badge Man” in conspiracy theorist mythology as being the grassy knoll assassin.

  But there’s so much more to the story. In the British television production, Jack White also claims that the Moorman photo shows “another image standing directly behind the Badge Man. This appears to be a person in a hard hat and a white T-shirt.” It’s obviously just a matter of time before White will be able to tell us the color of the two men’s eyes, the condition of their teeth, and perhaps, someday, the number of hairs on their heads. White and Mack call this second man the “Back Up Man,” and say the Back Up Man was not in a uniform of any kind.43

  Remember that the Moorman photo was taken at almost the precise moment of the shot to the president’s head. So for the Badge Man to have fired the fatal shot, not only would the badge he was supposedly wearing have to have been high up on his body (perhaps attached to his neck) so that it was visible behind the five-foot fence, but also the Badge Man would have to have been standing up tall, his head far above the top of the fence, at the time he shot Kennedy, for the badge to have been seen in the photo. And if that’s the case, then he wasn’t stooped down so his head was on a line with the rifle barrel and sight, which most likely would have been resting on the top of the fence for stability and accuracy. This makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it? With respect to the rifle the Badge Man would have had to have had if he fired at the president, Mack said he has “never been able to see any rifle” in the Badge Man’s hands,44 but added that was “because the smoke and/or flash in front of it obscured it from my view. I’ve also noted that specific area seems to also be in shadow.”

  “The so-called Badge Man image, if legitimate, would have to be of a man who is standing a considerable distance behind the stockade fence,” says Dale Myers, a computer graphics expert. “I used a computer model of Dealey Plaza to duplicate Mary Moorman’s position at the time she took the photograph that allegedly shows the Badge Man image. Using that position and placing a computer model of an average size man at the fence line where Badge Man is alleged to have stood reveals that the Badge Man image is too small to be a man standing at the fence line. In order to get the computer model to match the size of the Badge Man image, the model, to be as small as the Badge Man image, would have to be placed 32 feet behind the fence line and 4.5 feet off the ground. Other photographs taken at the time of the assassination show a Coke bottle sitting on the wall of the pergola between Moorman and the so-called Badge Man position. The Badge Man image is more than likely a distortion of this Coke bottle.”45

  As if the Badge Man firing at Kennedy from behind the stockade fence is not fantastic
enough, Mack, White, and a few other conspiracy theorists have tried to bolster and connect the Badge Man with an even more bizarre story. In 1978, fifteen years after the assassination (not too long, after all, just a little longer than the Second World War, Vietnam War, and the Korean War all put together), one Gordon Arnold came from behind the curtains and appeared for the first time on the conspiracy stage. Arnold says that at the time of the assassination he was a twenty-two-year-old soldier home on leave. He told reporter Earl Golz of the Dallas Morning News that minutes before the motorcade came by, he was moving toward the railroad overpass to film the motorcade when “this guy walked towards me and said I shouldn’t be up there.” When he challenged the man’s authority, he said the man “showed me a badge and said he was with the Secret Service.” As we’ve seen, several people said that after the shooting they confronted men who indicated or said they were Secret Service agents. Now, for the first and only time on record we have someone (someone, to repeat, who materialized fifteen long years after the assassination) who says he met someone before the shooting who said he was a Secret Service agent.