by Barry Ernest
Since the shortest length of the disassembled rifle measured 34.8 inches, the two-foot estimates of both Frazier and Mrs. Randle posed problems.
“The Commission,” the Warren Report eventually concluded, “has weighed the visual recollection of Frazier and Mrs. Randle against the evidence here presented that the bag Oswald carried contained the assassination weapon and has concluded that Frazier and Randle are mistaken as to the length of the bag.”15
Apparently mistaken as well was Depository employee Jack E. Dougherty. He testified that he saw Oswald enter the back door of the building that morning. He said he saw nothing in Oswald’s hands, despite the Commission’s persistence along this line:
Ball: Do you recall him [Oswald] having anything in his hand?
Dougherty: Well, I didn’t see anything, if he did.
Ball: Did you pay enough attention to him, you think, that you would remember whether he did or didn’t?
Dougherty: Well, I believe I can—yes, sir—I’ll put it this way; I didn’t see anything in his hands at the time.
Ball: In other words, your memory is definite on that, is it?
Dougherty: Yes, sir.
Ball: In other words, you would say positively he had nothing in his hands?
Dougherty: I would say that—yes sir.
Ball: Or are you guessing?
Dougherty: I don’t think so.16
Other than Howard Brennan, who was seated outside the Depository, the Commission could find no one within that building who saw Oswald on the sixth floor at 12:30 P.M., the time of the shooting. The Warren Report said Brennan, who became a “star” witness as a result, “made a positive identification of Oswald as being the person at the window.”17 On November 22, Brennan told sheriff’s deputies that the man he saw was in his early thirties and weighed between 165 and 175 pounds.18 In his Commission testimony four months later, he repeated that same description, adding that the man was about five feet ten inches tall and was wearing “light colored clothes, more of a khaki color.”19
Oswald, however, was twenty-four, five feet nine inches tall, 132 pounds, and wearing a dark-brown shirt and dark trousers.
Brennan also was unable to pick Oswald out of a police lineup. His testimony states that he told Dallas police, “I could not make a positive identification.”20 Why then did the Report turn around and say that he had?
The closest the Commission could come to putting Oswald in the sniper’s window was the testimony of Charles D. Givens, who said he observed Oswald on the sixth floor at 11:55 A.M.21 Although the Report stated nobody saw Oswald after this time, it ignored two other witnesses, Eddie Piper and William H. Shelley, who both said they observed Oswald around noon, a half-hour before the assassination, on the first floor.
Ball: Was that the last time you saw him [Oswald]?
Piper: Just at 12 o’clock.
Ball: Where were you at 12 o’clock?
Piper: Down on the first floor.22
Shelley also noticed Oswald slightly earlier on the same floor.
Ball: Did you see him [Oswald] from time to time during the day?
Shelley: I am sure I did. I do remember seeing him when I came down to eat lunch about 10 to 12.23
The Commission also discounted the testimony of eighteen-year-old Arnold Rowland, who was standing in Dealey Plaza and claimed he saw two men on the sixth floor at 12:15.24 The Report claimed he lacked credibility because he once fibbed about his high-school grades25 and also because he supposedly never told his tale of seeing two men to anyone prior to his appearance before the Commission.
Yet he had told his tale, according to Deputy Sheriff Roger D. Craig. Craig testified he talked with Rowland ten minutes after the assassination, “and the boy said he saw two men on the—uh—sixth floor of the Book Depository Building over there.”26
If little was known about Oswald’s whereabouts in the half-hour prior to the assassination, there was plenty discovered about him starting moments after. The Report concluded that within ninety seconds of the final shot, Oswald made his way across the cluttered sixth floor27 to the northwest corner, where he hid his rifle under several boxes. He then descended four flights of stairs to the second-floor lunchroom.28
A Dallas policeman confronted him there. Officer Marrion L. Baker told the Commission he was on his motorcycle facing the Depository when the shots were fired. He dismounted and ran into the building, he said, when “all these pigeons began to fly up” from the roof of the building.29 Baker said his intention was “to go all the way to the top where I thought the shots had come from.”30
He and building superintendent Roy S. Truly began running up the back stairs of the Depository. As Baker emerged onto the second floor, he glanced through a small window in a nearby door and “caught a glimpse of this man walking away.”31 Revolver in hand, Baker flung open the door. He called to the man, who then “turned and walked right straight back to me.”32 It was Lee Oswald.
Truly verified that Oswald was an employee. Baker and the building superintendent then continued up the stairs. Both Truly and Baker described Oswald as being calm and cool—not out of breath—even though the police officer’s gun was “almost touching him.”33
Oswald was next seen by clerical supervisor Mrs. Robert A. Reid, who said “he was moving at a very slow pace” through her second-floor office area while carrying a bottle of Coke.34
He apparently felt thirsty after his extraordinary morning’s activities. Following his purchase and sighting by Mrs. Reid, he casually walked out of the Depository.
These oddities were suddenly becoming the norm. So did the huge amounts of time I was investing in this. McDonald’s was getting rich from me, and I was burning the oil long past midnight at the sacrifice of sleep. I began to skip classes, reasoning that many of the missed lectures were those that strayed from the syllabus anyway. My assassination reading had become nonstop.
“You’re obsessed!” a concerned Terry announced at our next meeting.
I was indeed. How had that happened?
Escape from the Depository
Oswald left the Depository about “3 minutes after the assassination” and walked seven blocks east on Elm to board a bus heading back, oddly enough, to where he had just come from.35 Suddenly, he is a changed man. No longer is he calm, cool, and collected.
Mary Bledsoe, a former landlady of Oswald’s, happened to be on that bus. She had rented a room to Oswald in September 1963, but after taking an immediate dislike to him, a week later she requested that he leave her premises. When she saw Oswald on the bus, he looked “like a maniac,” Mrs. Bledsoe testified. “His sleeve was out . . . his shirt was undone . . . all the buttons torn off . . . he was dirty . . . I didn’t look at him. That is—I was just—he looked so bad in his face, and his face was so distorted.”36
The Report stated that bus driver Cecil J. McWatters “picked Oswald from the [police] lineup as the man who had boarded the bus.”37 Then it admitted that McWatters’ selection had been made in error, since the witness actually had confused Oswald with another passenger.38 Finally, it simply stated, “McWatters’ recollection alone was too vague to be a basis for placing Oswald on the bus.”39
It did give credence to the words of Mrs. Bledsoe, who didn’t even attend a police lineup. Her identification instead came from an incriminating picture that police had confiscated, which showed Oswald posing while brandishing a gun.40
More convincing, though, was what police said they found in Oswald’s pocket hours later. Stuffed there, according to authorities, was a bus transfer ticket that was traced back to McWatters from the mark used by that driver’s individual punch.41
After leaving the bus when it became stalled in traffic, Oswald walked about two blocks to the Greyhound Bus Station. About to enter a taxi driven by William W. Whaley, he politely offered his ride to an elderly woman, who declined the gentlemanly gesture.42
Whaley told the Commission that Oswald wanted to be taken to 500 North Beckley in Oak
Cliff. The address was about five blocks beyond Oswald’s rooming house. A trip manifest submitted by Whaley verified the destination as “500 North Beckley.”43 Yet when the Commission questioned Whaley a second time a month later, he gave the address as 700 North Beckley, now only three blocks from Oswald’s rooming house.44 The change occurred after Whaley participated in a reconstruction of the cab ride conducted by an agent of the Secret Service.45
Whaley also testified he later picked Oswald from six men in a police lineup. The Report, however, disputed this:
Whaley’s memory of the lineup is inaccurate. There were four men altogether, not six men, in the lineup with Oswald. Whaley said that Oswald was the man under No. 2. Actually, Oswald was under No. 3.46
As Whaley drove away, Oswald walked back to his rooming house. He entered about 1 P.M. Moments later, said landlady Earlene Roberts, “there was a police car stopped and honked” right in front of the rooming house.47 She thought the car’s number was either 106 or 107.48 The Commission found nothing to substantiate that claim.49
Shortly after the police car left, so did Oswald. He now wore a jacket and carried a revolver in his pocket. He had been in his room for about three or four minutes.50
Mrs. Roberts last saw him waiting at a bus stop in front of the rooming house.51 The stop was for busses heading back into downtown Dallas.
He was next sighted nine-tenths of a mile away at Tenth Street and Patton Avenue, scene of police officer J. D. Tippit’s slaying. With no witnesses to Oswald’s movements from the bus stop outside his rooming house to this location, the Report could only guess how he arrived there, suggesting it was by way of a “brisk” walk.52
Near Tenth and Patton, Helen Markham watched as a police car pulled up beside a man on the sidewalk. Tippit conversed with him through a passenger-side window. As Tippit slowly, and without drawing his gun, got out and approached this man, the pedestrian shot the officer several times.
Tippit was killed at about 1:16 P.M.53 Mrs. Markham, according to the Warren Report, “identified Lee Harvey Oswald as the man who shot the policeman.”54 It reinforced that statement by saying, “In testimony before the Commission, Mrs. Markham confirmed her positive identification of Lee Harvey Oswald as the man she saw kill Officer Tippit.”55
But that is not quite the way it happened. During her questioning, she was asked repeatedly—a total of six times by Commission attorney Joseph Ball—whether she recognized anyone in a police lineup she attended shortly after the Tippit slaying. In each case, although Oswald stood in that lineup, she replied no. It was only after Ball offered hints about “a number two man”—a position in the lineup occupied by Oswald—that Mrs. Markham acquiesced and said that was the man she had picked out.56
According to the Warren Report, after throwing the spent shells into nearby bushes Oswald made his way to Jefferson Boulevard, one block away. Witness Warren Reynolds provided a positive identification of Oswald as the man he saw fleeing the scene, gun in hand, “no question about it,” when he was deposed by the Commission in Dallas in July 1964.57 This was in stark contrast to an FBI report made six months earlier, on January 21, 1964, when Reynolds said “he would hesitate to definitely identify Oswald as the individual” he had seen.58 Perhaps his mind was changed when, two days after that January statement, an unknown assailant shot him in the head as he closed his business. Reynolds attributed that act to his being a witness to the events surrounding the Tippit murder.59
Taxi driver William Scoggins was eating lunch in his parked cab when he heard the shots,60 and a man with a revolver “passed within 12 feet” of him.61 “The next day,” according to the Report, “Scoggins viewed a lineup of four persons and identified Oswald as the man whom he had seen the day before at 10th and Patton.”62 Scoggins, however, might have been influenced by a picture of Oswald that he thought he saw in the morning newspaper only hours prior to the lineup.63
The Report also failed to mention that Scoggins made his identification from the same lineup attended by William Whaley, the cabby who took Oswald to his rooming house. Whaley admitted that Oswald was very easy to pick out of the lineup “because he was bawling out the policeman, telling them it wasn’t right to put him in line with these teen-agers and all of that.”64
Domingo Benavides was perhaps the closest to Tippit when the shooting occurred. He was only fifteen feet away.65 When police wanted him to attend a lineup, a nervous Benavides declined. He said he was unsure he could make an identification.66 In a bit of levity from the witness stand, Benavides offered a physical description of the man he saw that fit so perfectly with that of Commission counsel David Belin, the lawyer questioning him, that it prompted Belin to deny on the record that he had been in Dallas that day.67
Benavides described the shooter as being average weight and about five feet ten inches tall, wearing a dark shirt with dark trousers and a light-beige jacket, and having dark, somewhat curly hair. This description matched Oswald, except for the curly hair and the fact that Benavides felt the assailant had “a little bit darker than average” and “a little bit ruddier” complexion.68
After the shooting, several witnesses started following the assailant, who at one point ducked into the parking area behind a gas station. Police later found a discarded jacket there. The Report claimed it was Oswald’s.69
Under closer examination, authorities discovered that the recovered item had “laundry mark 30, and 030 in collar” and “laundry tag B-9738 on bottom of jacket.”70 The FBI questioned Marina Oswald and wrote, “She cannot recall that Oswald ever sent either of these jackets [the one in question plus another one Oswald owned] to any laundry or cleaners anywhere. She said she can recall washing them herself.”71
If it wasn’t Oswald’s jacket, then whose was it?
Johnny Calvin Brewer, a shoe-store manager, noticed a man step into his lobby along Jefferson Boulevard as police cars, sirens sounding, sped past. “His hair was sort of messed up and looked like he had been running, and he looked scared, and he looked funny,” Brewer said.72 Not only did Brewer watch the “funny” man, he also followed him—right to the nearby Texas Theatre, where he said the man ducked into the place without buying a ticket.
Julia Postal, the ticket seller, stated she observed a “panicked” man come around the corner of the theatre entrance but did not see him actually go into the theatre.73 Nor did Warren H. Burroughs see him, even though Burroughs was inside and in charge of taking tickets from patrons as they entered.74 Nevertheless, Mrs. Postal summoned police, who arrived in force and frenzy seconds later.75
Even though Brewer, by now on the theatre’s stage and with the house lights shining brightly, pointed directly at the man he had seen furtively enter the theatre, Patrolman M. N. McDonald decided to forgo an immediate capture. Instead, he conducted a slow search of some of the other “14 or 24” patrons who had entered from the time the theatre opened at 12:45 P.M.76 McDonald displayed remarkable restraint in light of the opportunity of arresting a suspected presidential assassin and cop killer. It was done that way, he testified, “to make sure that I didn’t pass anything or miss anybody.”77
When he finally confronted the man Brewer had been fingering all along, a scuffle ensued and the suspect was handcuffed. He was led out to a police car, past rowdy onlookers who by now had gathered, resembling a lynch mob.78 Lee Harvey Oswald had been nabbed.
There were nights in my dorm when I tossed and turned, thinking about this whole shrouded storyline.
On the morning of his evil deed, the soon-to-be presidential assassin restfully overslept.
The only two who saw him carrying a paper sack, both consistent and corroborated, are deemed mistaken. So too was the Depository employee who saw Oswald enter empty handed.
Arnold Rowland was unreliable because he once exaggerated about his grades in high school; Howard Brennan and Mrs. Markham, notoriously unreliable in their testimony, became star witnesses.
The Commission appeared to give little consideration to t
he Jekyll-and-Hyde routine Oswald pulled from the Depository (where he was calm under an officer’s gun), to the bus (where he looked like a maniac), to the cab (where he had impeccable manners with an elderly woman), to the Tippit murder (where he was described as being both calm and wild looking by the very same witness).
The Commission stimulated a change in William Whaley’s timetable yet failed to be stimulated by the startling words of Earlene Roberts, who said a police car sounded its horn outside the rooming house immediately before Oswald departed.
It neglected to investigate how Oswald got from the rooming house to the Tippit murder; it simply said that he did.
It said the jacket belonged to him yet ignored evidence showing otherwise.
And the Commission commented that it was “satisfied that the lineups were conducted fairly,” despite evidence to the contrary.79
“Still believe the Warren Report?” Terry asked me, once again.
I could not answer that question. Although it was hard to think of the government purposely wanting to deceive the public, I told him I was finding it increasingly difficult to believe it was simply a matter of human error.
But that proved to be my downfall.
In my zeal of research, I had completely overlooked the fast-approaching final exams for the spring term. I muddled my way through them under the delusion they weren’t difficult and that earlier good grades would carry me.
Before leaving the campus, Terry and I met for a last time, promising to write weekly until we could resume our endeavors in the fall.
Several weeks later, two letters appeared in my home mailbox. One diplomatically informed me that because of poor grades, my days at Kent State were over. I had flunked out.