by Barry Ernest
Victoria Adams was described as “jovial” and “blue eyed” while at St. Anne’s Parish
PELICAN PUBLISHING COMPANY
Gretna 2013
Copyright © 2012, 2013
By Barry Ernest
All rights reserved
First Pelican edition, 2013
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The word “Pelican” and the depiction of a pelican are
trademarks of Pelican Publishing Company, Inc., and are
registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ernest, Barry.
The girl on the stairs : the search for a missing witness to the JFK assassination / Barry Ernest ; foreword by David S. Lifton.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4556-1783-8 (hardcover : alkaline paper) — ISBN 978-1-4556-1793-7 (e-book) 1. Kennedy, John F. (John Fitzgerald), 1917-1963—Assassination. 2. Adams, Victoria Elizabeth. 3. Witnesses—Texas—Dallas—Biography. 4. Missing persons—Texas—Dallas—Biography. 5. Official secrets—United States—Case studies. I. Title.
E842.9.E76 2013
973.922092—dc23
2012047607
Printed in the United States of America
Published by Pelican Publishing Company, Inc.
1000 Burmaster Street, Gretna, Louisiana 70053
For my parents, who always encouraged me to seek the truth.
And for Patty, Jason, and Lisa, who put up with me as I tried.
“The truth which makes men free is for the most part the truth which men prefer not to hear.”
Herbert Sebastian Agar
“The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie—deliberate, contrived, and dishonest, but the myth—persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Belief in myths allows the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.”
John F. Kennedy
Yale University Commencement Address
June 11, 1962
Contents
Foreword
Acknowledgments
Prologue November 22, 1963
Chapter 1 February 1967
Chapter 2 March 1964
Chapter 3 February 1967
Chapter 4 February 1967
Chapter 5 March-June 1967
Chapter 6 July 1966
Chapter 7 March 1968
Chapter 8 March 1968
Chapter 9 April 1968
Chapter 10 July 1968
Chapter 11 July 1968
Chapter 12 August 1968
Chapter 13 September 1966-August 1975
Chapter 14 August 1968-March 1969
Chapter 15 April-December 1969
Chapter 16 January 1970-February 1981
Chapter 17 February 1981-October 1998
Chapter 18 January 1991-March 1994
Chapter 19 April 1994-April 1999
Chapter 20 May-June 1999
Chapter 21 May-September 1999
Chapter 22 October 1999
Chapter 23 June 1999
Chapter 24 February 2-3, 2002
Chapter 25 January 2000-February 2002
Chapter 26 February 3, 2002
Chapter 27 February 3, 2002
Chapter 28 February 4-9, 2002
Chapter 29 February 10-12, 2002
Chapter 30 February 13, 2002
Chapter 31 September 18-November 15, 2007
Chapter 32 June 2011
Epilogue Yesterday
Appendix 1 Testimony of Miss Victoria Elizabeth Adams
Appendix 2 Relevant Testimony of Billy Nolan Lovelady
Appendix 3 Relevant Testimony of William H. Shelley
Appendix 4 The Martha Joe Stroud Letter
Notes
Foreword
Anyone who has ever become interested in the John F. Kennedy assassination probably starts with the idea that pursuing the truth is going to be relatively easy and then, in stages, learns that finding “the truth” and “answers” is more complicated than he or she ever really thought. Indeed, the Kennedy assassination is akin to a maze, and as with any maze, not all paths lead to the center—whatever “the center” really is. I am one who journeyed down that path, and Barry Ernest, whom I have known for decades, is another.
In my case, the “inciting incident”—to use screenwriter lingo—occurred when, as a close student of the Warren Commission Report, I was shown evidence that President Kennedy’s head appeared to snap violently backward in response to the fatal shot, something unmentioned in the Report but obvious on the Zapruder film. Any U.S. citizen could telephone the U.S. National Archives, make an appointment, and then travel to Washington, D.C. for a private viewing of the motion picture, but of course, only a handful of people did that.1 Especially because I lived in Los Angeles, pursuing my master’s at UCLA, what I examined was the rather poor black-and-white reproductions of 158 frames of the Zapruder film that appeared as Warren Commission Exhibit 885 in volume 18 of the Warren Commission’s 26 volumes.
Ray Marcus, one of the “first generation” JFK researchers, lived in West Los Angeles, and it was he who showed me those, in March 1965. Having recently graduated from Cornell’s School of Engineering Physics (class of ’62), and having had some six years of physics courses by that point, I was astounded. Until then, I believed the Warren Report, more or less. But after that demonstration, I wrote in Best Evidence, “For me, confronting the head-snap evidence was an almost revolutionary experience. For the first time, I looked at an official government pronouncement and said: ‘No, I don’t believe that.’”2 In fact, my immediate response was, “That’s impossible! Oswald was supposedly firing from behind. So he certainly couldn’t have fired that shot—i.e., the fatal shot.” Then came some elementary “political” questions. How could the attorneys on the Warren Commission—many of them young men who had gone to the best colleges and law schools and had access to this film—have watched it and believed that Lee Harvey Oswald was the assassin? Or, being more specific: how could they believe that he had fired the fatal shot? Indeed, how could anyone believe that Oswald was President Kennedy’s assassin, if the film of the assassination showed he was struck fatally from the front? Moreover, if there was some explanation, why wasn’t the matter investigated at the time of the Warren Commission inquiry? Why wasn’t there a section in the Warren Report discussing the backward snap of President Kennedy’s head? Was it possible the legal staff of the Warren Commission hadn’t noticed?
In December 1965, still believing that I was privy to something that, for some reason, the Warren Commission had not “noticed,” I had the opportunity to pose this question directly to one of the most important members of the Commission: former CIA director Allen Dulles.
During World War II, Dulles had joined the Office of Strategic Services and served as the OSS chief in Bern, Switzerland. He negotiated an early surrender of German forces in Italy. All of this made it into the American press and, says the official biography of Allen Dulles on the CIA Web site, “Dulles became famous in America as a spymaster and wartime cloak-and-dagger hero.”
But Dulles was not that much of a hero to President Kennedy. He was one of those who “sold” Kennedy on the idea of the Bay of Pigs invasion as a way of overthrowing Castro. Kennedy fired Allen Dulles after the Bay of Pigs (mid-April 1961), and his next big venture into public service was when President Johnson appointed him to the Warren Commission (November 29, 1963). A year after the Warren Report was released (in September 1964), Dulles apparently was seeking to earn some extra money and went on the lecture circuit. That resulted in Dulles appearing at UCLA in December 1965 and being paid a princely sum for
making a few speeches, and then meeting with students in an informal, coffee-klatch atmosphere.
So that’s how I came to meet him. In fact, I had a rather heated confrontation with him, one that lasted some fifteen minutes (at least) and took place in front of about fifty UCLA students on December 7, 1965, at the Sierra Lounge, the main lounge of Hedrick Hall, one of the major UCLA dormitories. Allen Dulles was then seventy-two; I was twenty-six and dressed in my best suit, looking very “establishment.” But what I had to say was not “establishment” at all. I had arranged with the student organizer to meet with Dulles in front of the assembled audience when he made this scheduled appearance at Hedrick Hall, and that’s exactly what I did.
I was seated on a sofa with Dulles in the spacious lounge, and it began mildly enough. When I noted that the Warren Report had said there was no conspiracy, he corrected me. “Wasn’t it,” asked Dulles, punctuating the air with his finger as he spoke, “we have found no evidence of conspiracy?” I proceeded to bring up the eyewitness and earwitness evidence that one or more shots had been fired from the grassy knoll. Our debate then quickly escalated. When I brought up the fact that a number of witnesses reported smoke rising from behind some bushes on the grassy knoll, he chortled. “Do you think someone was smoking back there?”
Dulles became arrogant and sarcastic. After some general discussion, I opened a file folder and took out a sequence of Zapruder frames from volume 18. The photographs showed that, following Zapruder frame 313, which depicted the fatal shot, the president’s head moved rapidly backward toward the rear seat of the car.
Dulles, now very irritated, took the photographs and looked at them closely. “I can’t see a blasted thing here!” he exclaimed. Then he raised his voice and responded, “No, the head does not go back!”
Of course, despite Dulles’s repeated protestations that it does not “go back,” the president’s head does indeed “go back”—violently, and rapidly, after the fatal shot—and the question is why.3 Moreover, in looking at this confrontation decades later, I can only say that I find it shocking, and a bit depressing, that a former head of the CIA could sit there in front of some four dozen students and just lie.
I’m well aware that, with the advent of the Internet, and better imagery, it is possible to argue that the president’s head moves forward for perhaps an inch or two, for a single film frame—an eighteenth of a second in time—but arguing about those subtleties came later, years later. The fact is that, to the naked eye, the head moves violently backward in response to the fatal shot. I have shown the film to many college audiences, and there is a shocked “Oh!” or “Wow!” when that film is projected. Audiences are truly stunned.
As noted by Thomas Stamm, one of the early JFK researchers who saw the film at the National Archives, the president looks as if he is being slammed backward by an invisible baseball bat. Yet none of this was discussed in the Warren Report. And now Allen Dulles, in front of some four dozen UCLA students, was denying the backward motion, denying that it existed at all!
Dulles had seen the film screened multiple times in the offices of the Warren Commission. If I had to trace the path by which I lost my innocence about the government in general—and the Warren Commission in particular—my encounter with Allen Dulles on that night in early December 1965 may have been the starting point.
Barry Ernest did not enter the Kennedy labyrinth at the exact time that I did, but we both entered the maze around the same period—the midsixties. For me, it was in late September 1964, the month the Warren Report was released; for Barry, it was 1967.
From rather early on, Barry became interested in a very simple question: just where was Oswald when the shots were fired? If you believed the Warren Report (which, in the beginning, Barry did indeed believe, just as I did), then Oswald was upstairs in a window of the Texas School Book Depository, firing the shots. After all, that’s where the shells were found. And a rifle was also found, behind some boxes on that floor, in the opposite corner near the elevator.
The problem was (and still is) simply this: about ninety seconds later, Oswald was—indisputably—downstairs, in the second-floor lunchroom, drinking a cola (or at least had just opened a bottle of cola). That was known because that’s when a Dallas Police motorcycle officer (one Marrion Baker) ran into the building and, with building superintendent Roy Truly leading the way and with his gun drawn, started to ascend the stairs. Between the second and third floors, Truly realized the officer was no longer following him, so he went back to the second-floor landing. There he found that Officer Baker had veered off into the lunchroom. Indeed, at that point, there was a very serious confrontation unfolding between Oswald and the police officer with his drawn gun. As noted in the Warren Report: “Truly thought that the officer’s gun at that time appeared to be almost touching the middle portion of Oswald’s body.”4 As I used to say in lectures, what was Officer Baker supposed to do? Say, “Drop that Coke or I’ll shoot!”?
No, that didn’t happen. What happened instead was that Oswald’s supervisor, Roy Truly, who had run into the building with the officer and had entered the room just after Baker did, vouched for Oswald. (Truly said, “He works here,” or some such thing.) The officer left the area and (with Truly) continued climbing the stairs, toward the roof.
Somewhere along the line, according to Truly’s Warren Commission testimony, Baker said: “Be careful. This man will blow your head off.”5 (Baker never explained who “this man” was supposed to be or why he characterized his concern in just that fashion.)
Just as the Zapruder film documents the motion of Kennedy’s head after the fatal shot, news films of the time show Officer Baker dismounting his cycle and then running, with apparent determination, toward the building. He stated in an affidavit he filed later that day: “I heard three shots. I realized these shots were rifle shots and I began to try to figure out where they came from. I decided the shots had come from the building on the northwest corner of Elm and Houston.”
Exactly how Officer Baker “decided” that the shots “had come from the building” is not clear. What is known is that while films show dozens of people in a state of confusion, Officer Baker runs through the crowd, heading for the Texas School Book Depository, and then enters the building, gun drawn. FBI reports paint a picture of an officer who, for some reason, veered off the stairway at the second floor and then, gun drawn as if he was about to face a dangerous adversary, entered the lunchroom.6
Those who watch such shows as Law and Order or CSI might ask: what was Officer Baker’s “probable cause”? A short while later, Baker came up with a more specific rationale for entering the building. He said he saw pigeons flying from its roof, and that’s why he ran so swiftly inside. (He never did explain how his observation of pigeons flying from the roof led him to infer that Oswald was in the lunchroom. Oh well . . . )
But let’s now return to Lee Oswald and his whereabouts at 12:30 P.M., the official version, and how Barry Ernest got drawn into all this.
“Upstairs” to “Downstairs”
Now the problem (as Barry learned rather early on) was that to get from “upstairs” (at the “assassin’s window”) to “downstairs” (at the soda machine), you either had to take an elevator (which Oswald apparently did not do, because the elevators were stuck on an upper floor) or run (if not race) down the stairs.
Another problem came in the form of a witness named Victoria Elizabeth Adams, age twenty-two, who had trained to be a nun, then taught school in Atlanta and then Dallas. On November 22, 1963, Miss Adams was employed as an office service representative by Scott Foresman and Company, a publisher of schoolbooks located on the fourth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. Victoria—aka “Vicki” (often shown as “Vickie”)—was watching the president’s motorcade from a fourth-floor window—the “sixth window from the left,” she said in a signed statement to the FBI on March 23, 1964.7 With her were co-worker Sandra Styles, Dorothy Garner (their supervisor), and Elsie Dorman, who was sit
ting on the floor and attempting to take a motion picture through the raised window with her husband’s camera. Adams said that when the motorcade passed, she heard “three loud reports which I first thought were firecrackers.” But then “when I saw all of the confusion on the street below I knew they must have been shots.” Adams stated—and then testified under oath—that “after the third shot I observed the car carrying President Kennedy speed away.” At that point, she (along with co-worker Sandra Styles) immediately ran down the stairs, all the way to the first floor, and then went out a rear entrance and into the railroad yards. According to Adams, no one else was on the stairs. She didn’t see (or hear) anyone ahead of her, and certainly no one came from behind and “passed her” on the way down.
So that became Barry’s entry point into the maze. In his mind, he had the image of Vicki running down the stairs, and there was no Oswald on those stairs. Yet Oswald, it seemed, must have been on the stairs, if he had been at the sixth-floor “sniper’s nest” and was then observed calmly having a cola on the second floor ninety seconds later.
Years later, Barry set out to find Vicki Adams and talk to her personally. Victoria Adams was “the girl on the stairs,” someone who should have seen Oswald, if he was on those same stairs, at that time. Many years passed, and Barry’s exploration of the Kennedy assassination went through many phases, as he wandered far down one after another of the Warren Commission rabbit holes in his pursuit of this particular question (among others) and in searching for Miss Adams. He indeed finally located (and interviewed) her. Along the way, he learned how the Warren Commission functioned, how it treated witnesses, how it ignored serious leads, how it mischaracterized their evidence—in short, how it failed to do its job properly.
During the same general period, I was having a similar set of experiences, and learning a similar lesson.
The Autopsy
Specifically, a major “point of no return” was reached, for me, on October 23, 1966. The previous summer, I had been hired by Ramparts magazine (in San Francisco) to write about the medical evidence of the assassination. The 30,000-word essay I co-wrote (with Ramparts staff writer Dave Welsh), titled “The Case for Three Assassins,” was subsequently published as a cover story in the January 1967 issue.