The committee did obtain evidence that military intelligence personnel may have identified themselves as Secret Service agents or that they might have been misidentified as such. Robert E. Jones, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who in 1963 was commanding officer of the military intelligence region that encompassed Texas, told the committee that from 8 to 12 military intelligence personnel in plainclothes were assigned to Dallas to provide supplemental security for the President’s visit. He indicated that these agents had identification credentials and, if questioned, would most likely have stated that they were on detail to the Secret Service. The Committee sought to identify these agents so that they could be questioned. The Department of Defense, however, reported that a search of its files showed ‘no records…indicating any Department of Defense Protective Services in Dallas.’ The committee was unable to resolve the contradiction.
Roger Craig
As Sheriff Decker had ordered, Deputy Roger Craig had been standing alongside other deputies in front of the courthouse at 505 Main Street. After the president’s limousine had passed and made the turn from Main to Houston and then slowed almost to a stop to make the 120-degree turn onto Elm Street, he heard the first shot. He quickly ran across Houston toward the plaza and heard two more shots. For ten minutes, he scanned the area for evidence until at 12:40 p.m., he heard a shrill whistle from the opposite side of Elm Street. In his testimony to the Warren Commission, he described what he saw next:52
About this time I heard a shrill whistle and I turned around and saw a white male running down the hill from the direction of the Texas School Book Depository Building and I saw what I think was a light colored Rambler station wagon with luggage rack on top pull over to the curb and this subject who had come running down the hill get into this car. The man driving this station wagon was a dark complected white male. I tried to get across Elm street to stop the car and talk with subjects, but the traffic was so heavy I could not make it. I reported this incident at once to a Secret Service officer, whose name I do not know, then I left this area and went at once to the building and assisted in the search of the building. Later that afternoon, I heard that the city had a suspect in custody and I called and reported the information about the suspect running down the hill and getting into a car to Captain Fritz and indentified the subject they had in custody as being the same person I saw running down this hill and get into the station wagon and leave the scene.
In his unpublished memoir To Kill a President (available on the Internet at a number of sites), he also wrote that he immediately noticed this because of the incongruity of seeing two men in an obvious hurry attempting to flee the scene, in contrast to the fact that everyone else was running toward it. He also stated that he regretted not getting the idenitity of the “Secret Service” man to whom he reported the incident who seemed interested only in the part about the Rambler wagon. Since the Secret Service denied having any agents in Dealey Plaza at that point, it seems clear that this man had been stationed there in advance by the conspirators for no purpose other than reassuring eyewitnesses that everything was under control by the appropriate authorities when in fact it was being administered by the conspirators.
Craig saw the man who had run down the hill and gotten into the car a few hours later in the office of Captain Will Fritz. It was the recently arrested Lee Harvey Oswald. When Fritz told Oswald that Officer Craig had seen him enter a car on Elm Street after the assassination, Oswald replied, “That station wagon belongs to Mrs. Paine … Don’t try to tie her into this. She had nothing to do with it.”53 It was that comment that indicates it was the real Oswald, not his look-alike, who Craig had seen minutes after the assassination. Oswald then said, “Everybody will know who I am now,”54 as if his “cover” in the intelligence community had been blown, a real bummer in his mind (yet portrayed by Warren Commission investigators as exactly opposite the real feeling he had experienced; instead it was made to seem as though he were bragging about his newfound notoriety).
Between Deputy Craig’s sighting of Oswald the first time on Elm Street and the second time in Fritz’s office, he had become involved in the search of the Texas School Book Depository and was with Seymour Weitzman when a rifle was found on the sixth floor of the Texas Book Depository by Deputy Sheriff Eugene Boone. As previously noted, the other officers were later forced to recant their sworn statements that the rifle was a Mauser; Craig’s refusal to do so would eventually cost him his job, his family, and his life. Although Roger Craig was interviewed by Assistant Counsel David W. Belin for the Warren Commission, he “was disturbed by Belin’s habit of turning off the tape recorder at key points in the questioning … Craig said his testimony had been changed in fourteen places, even apart from critical omissions. Several of the changes seemed designed especially to keep Craig’s descriptions of the station wagon and its driver from serving as bases for their identification.”55
Julia Ann Mercer
About 11:00 a.m., Julia Ann Mercer was stalled in traffic on Elm Street, just beyond the triple underpass, a few hundred yards from where the white X in the street marks the spot where JFK was shot in the head. She noticed a green pickup truck parked such that its right side was on top of the curb to her right. As she watched, a man walked to the back of the truck, reached into the bed, and pulled out a rifle case wrapped in paper. She didn’t immediately recognize the driver; they had eye contact as she inched past the truck. Three days later, when she saw his picture on television and in newspapers, it was Jack Ruby, the man who killed Oswald, whom she recognized as the same man she had seen Friday morning in the truck.
Carolyn Walther
A few minutes before the arrival of the president’s motorcade, Carolyn Walther, standing across Elm Street from the TSBD building at the corner with Houston Street, looked up at the upper floors of the building, and focused on a light-brown-haired man in a white shirt who was leaning out of one of the southeast corner windows. What caught her attention was that he was also holding a rifle, pointed down toward the street as he looked down Houston Street from where the motorcade was about to emerge.56
Moreover, the scene became ever more mysterious when she noticed another man lingering in the background. She couldn’t see his head behind the closed and dirty glass of the double-sashes, which were in the upper position. Only through the open window could she see him, wearing a brown suit coat, standing behind the man with the rifle.57
James Richard Worrell Jr.
Standing directly across the street from Carolyn Walther, directly in front of the TSBD, James Worrell Jr. was looking down Houston Street the entire time that the procession was making its way toward the intersection. He had no reason to look back and upward to the building until he heard the first shot. Just as the vice presidential auto was coming into the Elm Street intersection, he heard the shot and turned immediately to look up and saw the barrel of a rifle protruding from the window, firing toward the president’s car. He was too close to the building to be able to see inside; he looked back toward the car and saw the president slumping down in the seat. He was shocked, and his immediate reaction was to run up the street, but he stated that he heard at least four shots. He looked back and saw a man in a sport coat running out the back of the TSBD, his coat opening and flapping in the breeze. He did not follow him because he was so terrified that he felt he had to get out of the area.58
S. M. Holland
At his Warren Commission deposition, S. M. Holland testified that he viewed the motorcade from the railroad bridge overlooking Elm Street and that during the assassination, he heard four reports, three of which sounded like they came from “the upper part of the street,” toward the Texas School Book Depository, but one of which (either the third or the fourth) came “from under those trees” on the grassy knoll. When he looked toward the knoll area, he said, “A puff of smoke came out about six or eight feet above the ground right out from under those trees … like someone had thrown a firecracker, or something out, and that is just a
bout the way it sounded. It wasn’t as loud as the previous reports or shots.” It was “just like somebody had thrown a firecracker and left a little puff of smoke there; it was just laying there,” he told investigator Josiah Thompson two years later. “It was a white smoke; it wasn’t a black smoke or like a black powder. It was like a puff of a cigarette, but it was about nine feet off the ground.”59 Seconds later, the odor of burnt gunpowder permeated the air around the grassy knoll, as reported by numerous witnesses as we will shortly see. Holland then ran “around the end of this overpass, behind the fence to see if I could see anyone up there behind the fence … Of course, this was this sea of cars in there and … I ran on up to the corner of this fence behind the building. By the time I got there, there were 12 or 15 policemen and plainclothesmen, and we looked for empty shells around there for quite a while.”
There was another thing that Holland saw which he found very suspicious even though he couldn’t find anyone on the Warren Commission who felt there was anything at all odd about it. He testified that behind the fence, at what he estimated to be the same location as the place where he had seen the puff of smoke rise into the air, “there was a station wagon backed up toward the fence, about the third car down, and a spot, I’d say 3 foot by 2 foot, looked to me like somebody had been standing there for a long period … and also mud upon the bumper of that station wagon… . [It looked] like someone had been standing there for a long time … It was muddy, and if you could have counted them, I imagine it would have been a hundred tracks just in that one location… . [There was] Mud on the bumper in two spots… . as if someone had cleaned their foot, or stood up on the bumper to see over the fence… . Because, you couldn’t very well see over it standing down in the mud, or standing on the ground.”60
Holland also told author Thompson that the first, second, and fourth shots had a similar sound to them while “the third shot was not so loud; it was like it came from a .38 pistol, compared with a high-powered rifle.” The third and fourth shots, he said, were nearly simultaneous. Holland believed that the third shot was fired from behind the stockade fence on the knoll, from the point where the puff of smoke originated. He took Thompson to the location where he saw the smoke, behind the stockade fence.61 Holland’s supervisor Richard C. Dodd confirmed much of what he said and added that “there were tracks and cigarette butts laying where someone had been standing on the bumper looking over the fence.”62
Richard Randolph Carr
High overhead, in the sixth floor of the new courthouse building under construction at the time, Richard Randolph Carr saw a man on the top floor looking out of the second window from the southeast corner of the TSBD, whom he later described as a “heavyset individual” who was wearing a hat, a tan sport coat, and horn-rimmed glasses. Moments later, he heard what he thought was a car backfire, or a firecracker, followed by two other similar sounds in quick succession. He thought the sounds were coming from the triple overpass or grassy knoll areas and looked that direction to see people falling to the ground. He quickly ran down the stairs and out onto Houston Street where he saw the man he had just seen in the window now running toward him but repeatedly looking backward, over his shoulder. He continued watching the man run as he turned on Commerce Street and walked down to Record Street, getting into a Rambler station wagon parked on that street. He saw that the driver was a young dark-skinned man, possibly either a “Negro” or Latino, and the car proceeded north on Record Street to Elm Street where it went one and half blocks before it was spotted next by Deputy Roger Craig and four other witnesses as it stopped to pick up the other passenger.63
Four Other Witnesses to the Rambler Scene
Helen Forrest was on Elm Street near the grassy knoll and said that she “saw a man suddenly run from the rear of the Depository building, down the incline, and then enter a Rambler station wagon.” She was also certain that it was Oswald, saying, “If it wasn’t Oswald it was his identical twin.”64
James Pennington was near Helen Forrest and corroborated her account.65
Marvin C. Robinson had to jam his brakes on his Cadillac to avoid hitting the Rambler when it suddenly stopped in front of him.66
Roy Cooper, an employee of Robinson, was driving in back of his boss and witnessed the near accident and saw the man who looked like Oswald jump into the backseat before the Rambler roared off toward Oak Cliff where J. D. Tippit would soon be killed.67
Mary Moorman
Mary Moorman was with her friend Jean Hill near the curb opposite the grassy knoll when the motorcade began its way down Elm Street. Mary had taken four or five Polaroid pictures as the limousine came closer and closer to them, handing each one to Jean to process as she prepared and shot the next photo. By the time they finished, all of the prints except one had been given to Jean. Because of what happened before their eyes, Mary had kept the last one; she later processed it herself after Jean ran to the other side of the street and up the knoll looking for a shooter. The last photograph was taken directly toward the grassy knoll just as the final shot was made, capturing the shooter, dressed as a police officer, another man standing behind him to the right, and a third man in front of the stockade fence, Army Corporal Gordon Arnold, identifiable by his army cap. This photograph was arguably one of the two most important photos taken of the assassination. However, the Warren Commission successfully avoided publishing it or interviewing Ms. Moorman.
Jean Hill
The witness closest to the presidential limousine, Jean Hill, was standing on the curb opposite the grassy knoll, having sweet-talked a young police officer into letting her and her friend Mary Moorman cross the street so that she could be assured of getting some good photos of the president as well as her boyfriend, who was riding a motorcycle alongside the limousine. She had left her bright red raincoat on well after the sun had come out just so that he would not miss seeing her. Jean had taken them to process the prints, stripping the paper coverings, and then brushing them with a finishing chemical. She then put them into a pocket of her raincoat thinking, incorrectly, that she would have plenty of time to look at them later.68
As the final shots were fired, Jean’s eyes fixed on a sight that would stay with her the rest of her life. “A muzzle flash, a puff of smoke, and the shadowy figure of a man holding a rifle, barely visible above the wooden fence at the top of the knoll, still in the very act of murdering the president of the United States … [then] Jean detected an abrupt flurry of movement to her right, and her eyes darted in that direction, fixing themselves on a point at ground level near the school book depository. Somebody was running. A lone man in a brown coat was running as hard as he could go, past the frozen, motionless figures of the stricken onlookers, straight toward the position of the shadowy gunman holding the rifle.”69 That man looked exactly like the man she would see two days later on live television as he emerged from the shadows with a revolver already held straight out toward Lee Harvey Oswald, a suspect being held in another policeman’s murder as well as for JFK’s assassination, a man named Jack Ruby. “Despite her friend’s shouts to her to hit the ground, she reacted instinctively to find out where the shots were coming from, to see just who was behind the fence shooting at the president, so she ran across the street, up the small hill and around the end of the fence, only to see a uniformed policeman putting a rifle away in some kind of a carrying case. But why, no other policeman had a rifle, why did he have one? And why should he be back here behind the fence?”70 She was then shocked, numb, conflicted, and confused by the sight; after all, this was a policeman, there to protect us, and of course policemen could carry guns.
The next thing she knew, a burly man came up to her, clamped her shoulder tightly, and announced, “Secret Service,” as he briefly flashed a badge of some kind at her before sticking it back in his pocket. When she tried to break free, another plainclothesman gripped her other shoulder and jammed his hand into her coat pocket, grabbing the Polaroid prints she and Mary had just taken. Jean objected strongly, say
ing, “Those are my pictures! Who do you think you are?” The man shoved the pictures into his pocket, saying, “We know who we are, the question is, who are you? That’s what we’re going to find out, so just start walking and keep smiling—just like we are all good friends. Otherwise, you’re in big trouble.” The men then led her across the plaza into the Criminal Courts Building where she was grilled for hours about what she “thought” she saw and was told over and over that she was mistaken, that “you couldn’t have seen any such thing.” The interrogator growled at one point, “If you know what’s good for you, you’ll keep quiet about it. It would be very foolish of you to ever repeat what you’re saying outside of this room.”71
Jean Hill was also videotaped in a number of interviews regarding her experiences and emphasized a number of points that were in direct conflict with the “official story,” including the fact that within fifteen minutes of JFK’s assassination, the alleged Secret Service agent told her that there were only three shots and that she was obviously confused when she maintained that she heard at least four shots, possibly as many as six.72 She was already being warned that she had to change her story to conform to the “three shots” or she might be harmed; “something ‘very bad’ may happen to you if you do not change your story.”73 She also stated that she definitely saw the brake lights on Kennedy’s limousine and that the car had almost stopped completely at the point of the fatal head shot. According to the same film, a total of twenty-eight witnesses agreed that the limo stopped at least momentarily, although this is not reflected in the Zapruder film, which indicates the film was tampered with to avoid this truth from emerging.74 In 1965, J. Edgar Hoover admitted that critical frames in the film were not printed in correct sequence and explained this reversing of the Zapruder frames as a “printing error.”75 The handling of the Zapruder film will be examined more closely in the next chapter.
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