Crossfire

by Jim Marrs

  Ball interrupted. “Afterwards did a good many people come up there on this high ground at the tower?” he asked, before Bowers could tell what caught his attention on the knoll.

  In a later filmed interview, Bowers did describe what caught his eye. He stated:

  At the time of the shooting, in the vicinity of where the two men I have described were, there was a flash of light or . . . something I could not identify . . . some unusual occurrence—a flash of light or smoke or something which caused me to feel that something out of the ordinary had occurred there.

  Bowers said after the shooting, “a large number of people” converged on the parking lot behind the picket fence, including “between fifty and a hundred policemen within a maximum of five minutes.” He added, “[Police] sealed off the area and I held off the trains until they could be examined, and there were some transients taken [off] at least one train.”

  One witness who may have encountered one or more of the men Bowers saw behind the picket fence was Gordon Arnold, who never testified to either of the federal panels investigating the assassination. On the day of the assassination, Arnold was a twenty-two-year-old soldier who had just arrived back in Dallas after Army training. He went downtown to have lunch when he decided to take movies of the president. Parking his car near Bowers’s railroad tower, Arnold took his movie camera and walked toward the Triple Underpass. He told this author:

  I was walking along behind this picket fence when a man in a light-colored suit came up to me and said I shouldn’t be up there. I was young and cocky and I said, “Why not?” And he showed me a badge and said he was with the Secret Service and that he didn’t want anyone up there. I said all right and started walking back along the fence. I could feel that he was following me and we had a few more words. I walked around to the front of the fence and found a little mound of dirt to stand on to see the motorcade. . . . Just after the car turned onto Elm and started toward me, a shot went off from over my left shoulder. I felt the bullet, rather than heard it, and it went right past my left ear. . . . I had just gotten out of basic training. In my mind live ammunition was being fired. It was being fired over my head. And I hit the dirt. I buried my head in the ground and I heard several other shots, but I couldn’t see anything because I had my face in the dirt. [His prone position under the trees on the knoll may explain why Arnold did not appear in photographs taken of the knoll at that time.] I heard two shots and then there was a blend. For a single-bolt action [rifle], he had to have been firing darn good because I don’t think anybody could fire that rapid a bolt action. . . . The next thing I knew, someone was kicking my butt and telling me to get up. It was a policeman. And I told him to go jump in the river. And then this other guy—a policeman—comes up with a gun. I don’t recall if it was a shotgun or what. And he was crying and that thing was waving back and forth. I felt threatened. One of them asked me if I had taken any film and I said yes. He told me to give him my film, so I tossed him my camera. I said you can have everything, just point that gun somewhere else. He opened it, pulled out the film, and then threw the camera back to me. All I wanted to do was get out of there. The gun and the guy crying was enough to unnerve me.

  Arnold ran straight back to his car and drove out of the parking area unchallenged. Two days later, Arnold reported to duty at Fort Wainwright in Alaska and he did not return for several years.

  Arnold’s presence on the Grassy Knoll has been questioned by some researchers because he doesn’t appear in photographs taken that day. His position well under the overhanging trees on the knoll left him in deep shadow. He was seen, however, by at least one person in the presidential motorcade. Former senator Ralph Yarborough, who was riding in the same car as Vice President Johnson, confirmed Arnold’s position in 1978 when he told the Dallas Morning News:

  Immediately on the firing of the first shot I saw the man you interviewed [Arnold] throw himself on the ground. He was down within a second of the time the shot was fired and I thought to myself, “There’s a combat veteran who knows how to act when weapons start firing.”

  Arnold, later an investigator for the Dallas Department of Consumer Affairs, did not give his name to authorities and was never questioned by either the Warren Commission or the House Select Committee on Assassinations, although his account of the assassination appeared in the July 27, 1978, edition of the Dallas Morning News.

  Corroboration of Arnold’s story may have come in 1982 with discovery of a figure in the background of a snapshot made at the instant of the fatal head shot to Kennedy by a woman standing on the south curb on Elm Street.

  The Badge Man

  Mary Moorman took a now well-known Polaroid picture just as Kennedy was struck in the head. She sold her rights to the photo that day to United Press International for $600. The photo was never examined or printed by the Warren Commission, but it was published widely in newspapers and magazines after the assassination.

  For years, researchers pored over the Moorman picture looking for evidence of a Grassy Knoll gunman. Despite some tantalizingly blurry objects discovered along the top of the west leg of the picket fence, no credible photo of a gunman was found.

  The House Select Committee on Assassinations did study the picture, but found it had badly faded and “was of quite poor quality.” However, because of acoustical evidence indicating a shot from the Grassy Knoll, the committee recommended “this particular photograph should be reexamined.”

  Then, in 1982, Texas researchers Gary Mack, now curator of the Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas, and Jack White, who died in 2012, began studying the Moorman photo in light of Gordon Arnold’s experience. After obtaining a clear slide made from an original, good-quality copy of Moorman’s photo, they began studying the bushy area east from the corner of the fence. It was here they discovered what appeared to be two figures. Interestingly, the figures appear in the same general area that the House committee’s acoustical tests indicated shots were fired from, though the sound experts located a shot west of the corner of the fence, while the figures are north of the corner.

  When blown up, the figures are detectable even by untrained observers. One police official even commented that one man seemed to be wearing “shooter’s glasses.” The main figure has been dubbed “badge man” because he appears to be wearing a dark shirt with a semicircular patch on the left shoulder and a bright shiny object on his left chest—the exact configuration of a Dallas police uniform.

  Although the “badge man’s” hairline, eyes, left ear, and jaw are visible, his mouth and neck are obscured by a bright spot—apparently the smoke or muzzle flash from a rifle he is holding in the classic rifle-firing position.

  After analyzing the photographic blowup as well as making reenactment photos in Dealey Plaza, Mack and White felt the “badge man” and perhaps even a companion were standing behind the wooden picket fence about fifteen feet north from the corner. This places the figure just to the left of Gordon Arnold’s position and to the right and rear of Abraham Zapruder.

  In the 1980s, Mack and White tried unsuccessfully to interest a major news organization in financing a scientific analysis of the “badge man” photo. Finally, a national tabloid agreed to have the blowup studied. White and a representative from the newsmagazine flew to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where the photo was subjected to sophisticated computer enhancement. They were told that, without question, the photo showed a man firing a rifle.

  The next day, however, the chairman of the MIT department involved suddenly gave all materials back to them and, with no explanation, told them the school would no longer participate in any study of the photo.

  The “badge man” blowup was included in The Men Who Killed Kennedy, a British television documentary by Nigel Turner produced in 1988. In this program, “badge man” was identified as a professional Corsican assassin named Lucien Sarti. This documentary, which was nominated for awards in Britain and shown to millions of people around the world, was not aired in the United States
until the early 1990s when it was purchased by the Arts & Entertainment Company and shown on its History Channel after being broken into a series of programs slated to be shown each November until the fiftieth anniversary in 2013.

  One of these programs, aired in 2003, “The Guilty Men,” implicated Lyndon B. Johnson in the JFK assassination and was thus roundly criticized by surviving Johnson associates, including his wife, Lady Bird Johnson, who died in 2007. Also among the critics was the last surviving member of the Warren Commission and the only appointed US president, Gerald R. Ford. After this group threatened legal action, the History Channel had three historians review the offending program. These eminent Establishment historians included Robert Dallek, a retired history professor at Boston University who since 1996 was a visiting professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin; Stanley Kutler, a Guggenheim Fellow and history professor best known for his lawsuit against the National Archives that resulted in the release of President Nixon’s Watergate tapes; and Thomas Surgue, a graduate of Columbia University and King’s College, Cambridge, receiving grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Brookings Institution, and the American Philosophical Society, among others. Although some of the persons interviewed for the programs in question said they and their material had never been questioned, this Establishment panel concluded the offending program was not credible and should not have been aired. After offering a public apology, the History Channel withdrew the program from distribution.

  Also withdrawn without any explanation were two other programs, the one on Corsican assassin Lucien Sarti and the other dealing with Judyth Vary Baker, who claimed to have been with Lee Oswald in New Orleans, both working for elements within the US government.

  The “badge man” has been largely ignored in assassination literature and documentaries. In a 2008 documentary on the Discovery Channel titled JFK: Inside the Target Car, Gary Mack stated there was no one behind the wooden picket fence, apparently forgetting that he was instrumental in making public the “badge man” analysis. He also misdirected the audience to the long stretch of fence rather than the shorter one, the location of the figure in the photograph.

  But the cumulative evidence indicating that the “badge man” may indeed have been the Grassy Knoll gunman is supported by the following accounts:

  —Gordon Arnold’s story of hearing a shot come from his left rear.

  —Zapruder’s testimony that shots came from his right rear.

  —Bowers’s testimony that he saw a flash of light and smoke near two men wearing uniforms near the east end of the fence.

  —The House Select Committee on Assassinations, which placed at least one shot within ten feet of the fence corner (although on the west leg).

  —Jean Hill, who said she saw smoke and movement north of the fence corner at the moment of the head shot.

  —Sam Holland and others who told of finding muddy footprints, cigarette butts, and mud on a car bumper behind the picket fence minutes after the shots were fired.

  —Numerous witnesses who ran behind the fence but said they saw only railroad workers and policemen there.

  —The testimony of Emmett Hudson, Constable Weitzman, and Officer Smith, all of whom saw policemen on the knoll when there were none officially accounted for in that area.

  All in all, the photographic blowup of these figures on the knoll may be the most important evidence yet confirming the existence of assassins on the Grassy Knoll. In any other case, if there was a photograph of a shooter behind the fence, two separate acoustical studies confirming at least one shot from behind the fence and a large number of witnesses who said a shot came from behind the fence, anyone arguing that no shots were fired from behind the fence would be considered an idiot. But this is the Kennedy assassination and some continue to say the deed was committed only by Lee Oswald firing from the sixth floor of the Depository.

  Curiously, no official government agency or major news organization has been willing to either make a serious study of the Moorman photo or present the photo to the general public. Further evidence of what went on behind the picket fence at the moment of the assassination can be found in the little-known story of a crucial witness.

  A Grassy Knoll Witness

  It is strange irony that the one person who apparently witnessed men with guns behind the wooden picket fence on the Grassy Knoll at the time of the Kennedy assassination was unable to tell anyone what he saw. Ed Hoffman of Dallas was deaf since birth and, as is common with that disability, he cannot speak. However, this did not prevent him from attempting to alert authorities to what he saw behind that fence.

  Although Hoffman told his family and friends what he saw at the time and later reported it to the FBI, his story remained unpublicized over the years. Finally, in the summer of 1985, he told his story to this author. It was later substantially confirmed by FBI documents. Ed Hoffman died on March 24, 2010.

  Virgil Edward Hoffman was twenty-six years old on November 22, 1963, and at noontime was driving toward downtown Dallas on the Stemmons Freeway when he noticed numerous people lining the freeway. He suddenly realized that President Kennedy was to motorcade through the city that day, so he stopped his car just north of a railroad bridge across Stemmons and joined the spectators.

  It should be noted that, since all news coverage of the motorcade stopped after the shooting in Dealey Plaza, only someone who was there that day could have known that many people were lining Stemmons to get a glimpse of the president.

  After waiting for a time, Hoffman decided to walk along the shoulder of the freeway to a point where it crossed over Elm Street in hopes of getting a view into Dealey Plaza. From this vantage point, Hoffman was approximately two hundred yards west of the parking lot behind the picket fence at an elevation of about the height of the first floor of the Texas School Book Depository.

  Being unable to hear, he was not aware that Kennedy’s motorcade was passing through the plaza. However, he was aware of movement on the north side of the picket fence. He became aware of a man running west along the back side of the fence wearing a dark suit and a tie. The man was carrying a rifle in his hands. As the man reached a metal-pipe railing at the west end of the fence, he tossed the rifle to a second man standing on the west side of the pipe near the railroad tracks that went south over the Triple Underpass. The second man was wearing light coveralls and a railroad worker’s hat.

  The second man caught the rifle, ducked behind a large railroad switch box—one of two at that site—and knelt down. The man disassembled the rifle, placed it in a soft brown bag (Hoffman’s description matches that of the traditional railroad brakeman’s tool bag), then walked nonchalantly north into the rail yards in the general direction of the railroad tower containing Lee Bowers.

  The man in the suit, meanwhile, had turned and run back along the picket fence until midway, when he stopped and began walking calmly toward the corner of the fence. Hoffman could not see the corner due to cars and overhanging tree branches.

  Unable to hear, Hoffman was at a loss to understand what was happening as he watched these men.

  However, moments later Kennedy’s car came into sight out of the west side of the Triple Underpass. Hoffman saw the president lying on the seat of the blood-splattered car and realized something terrible had occurred.

  As the presidential limousine turned onto the Stemmons access ramp just below his position, Hoffman tried to alert the Secret Service agents to what he had witnessed. He ran down the grassy incline waving his arms and trying to make them understand that he had seen something, when one of the agents in the president’s follow-up car produced a “machine gun,” which he leveled at him. Hoffman stopped and threw up his hands and could only watch helplessly as the motorcade rushed past him onto Stemmons in the mad rush to Parkland Hospital.

  There was no mention at the time of any Secret Service man with a machine gun, yet Hoffman was emphatic that it was an automatic weapon with a pistol grip, carrying handl
e, and clip. It is now known that Secret Service agent George W. Hickey Jr. in the follow-up car did display an AR-15, the civilian model of the M-16 automatic rifle, further corroborating Hoffman’s story.

  Upset over what he had seen, Hoffman looked around for help. He saw a Dallas policeman standing on the railroad bridge crossing Stemmons and he walked toward him waving his arms in an attempt to communicate what he had seen. However, the policeman, unable to understand, simply waved him off. This part of Hoffman’s story also is partially corroborated, since policeman Earle Brown filed a report stating that he was on the Stemmons railroad bridge at the time of the assassination. However, questioned recently about these events, Brown said he has no recollection of seeing Hoffman.

  Unable to get help, Hoffman walked back to his car and drove behind the Texas School Book Depository for several minutes trying to locate the man with the rifle in the brown bag. He was unsuccessful. However, this indicates the total lack of security around the Depository in the chaotic minutes following the assassination. Hoffman was able to drive around in the rail yards behind the Depository for some time and then leave without being stopped or questioned by authorities.

  He then drove to the Dallas FBI office but found no one there except a receptionist. He left his name and address with the FBI. The FBI never responded.

  At the time, Hoffman had a relative at the Dallas police station, and he drove there next, hoping to find some help. However, the station was sealed off and the officer on the door refused to allow him to enter.

  Thwarted in his attempts to tell authorities what he had seen, Hoffman finally went home, where his parents, also deaf and mute, urged him not to become involved.