by Barry Ernest
The other was from my government. I was now classified 1-A. My college deferment was done, and I had become qualified for active military service.
CHAPTER 6
July 1966
Victoria Elizabeth Adams had simply had enough. The FBI, the Secret Service, the Dallas Police, the David Belins . . . it had finally dawned on her what all the fuss was really about and why she was asked over and over again about exactly when she made that seemingly innocent trip down the back staircase. Oswald had escaped from the sixth floor right after the shooting by running down the back stairs—the same stairs she had been on.
And she had seen and heard no one. Why was that?
When the Scott Foresman Company offered her a transfer to its home office in Chicago, Miss Adams jumped at the chance. She had no family in Dallas, and while she had friends at her job, when work was done, everyone seemed to go his or her separate way. There was no after-hours socializing. Plus, she was in a dead-end position there, and Dallas had too many bad memories. She needed a fresh start.
Yet the memories went with her, packed somewhat neatly in her mind.
Of course, she was aware of the growing number of books and theories about the assassination. She refused to read them. She had been there. She had seen it. She knew what had happened.
But it kept nagging at her, and in Chicago one lazy afternoon, she decided to read what the government had written about her—for the first time, belatedly. She picked up the library’s copy of the Warren Report. She was shocked by its words.
The Report was calling her wrong, branding her a liar in her statements, or at the least portraying her as being naively mistaken about when she ran down the stairs, claiming it was much later than she had said. But she had been there. She knew when it had happened. It was not her who was wrong.
And what was all that business about her seeing Shelley and Lovelady on the first floor? Where had that come from? She had seen a black guy standing there, yes, that was true. She remembered asking him if the president had been shot. He was the one who never responded.
But Shelley and Lovelady? No, they were not there. She was sure of that. Why then did they write that she had seen them when she hadn’t?
Suddenly, she saw her government in a different way. It was not the honest body of people devoted to the common good, as she had been taught to believe. Now, it was this faceless conglomeration of far-off individuals intent on twisting the truth to placate a public craving closure. She became even more frightened.
Things weren’t right at her job in Chicago either. She was getting bored and she wanted more from it, desperately seeking to be a saleswoman instead of languishing as the executive secretary to the vice president of sales. She was told no. She asked if the company would provide her with funds to attend college at night to prepare her for advancement. She was told no.
Once again, she had reached a plateau. She was getting older, with not a whole lot to show for it. She needed a change. She thought of fleeing town . . . once again.
During her stay in Chicago, Miss Adams met and then married a man who lived in the suburbs. This became the opening for her to quit her job with Scott Foresman and move with her husband to San Diego, where she went into a completely new line of work. She found herself traveling farther and farther away from the memories of Dallas. And that was—good.
CHAPTER 7
March 1968
After getting kicked out of Kent State, I sorely missed the twenty-six volumes of Commission testimony and evidence. The library in my hometown of Altoona, Pennsylvania, didn’t have a set. Bookstore managers gave me incredulous looks when I asked about ordering them.
“Why would anyone want something like that?” they asked me. I was at a loss.
And so I waded through the writings of the pioneers of JFK assassination literature: Mark Lane, Edward Epstein, Harold Weisberg, Josiah Thompson, Sylvia Meagher, Richard Popkin. By now, many writers were offering their own explanations, viewing Oswald as a fall guy, dupe, or scapegoat; Oswald as a KGB, FBI, or CIA agent run amok; or Oswald as the original Manchurian Candidate. Then came the oddity of Jim Garrison, a New Orleans district attorney who publically claimed he had “solved” this most famous of cases with the arrest of a prominent business owner in that city named Clay Shaw.
The media seemed full of theories. What I needed were more definitive answers. That is how I ended up standing on Elm Street in Dallas on a cold and rainy March morning. My eyes instinctively went to the infamous sixth-floor window, looming high above me, in the Texas School Book Depository.
Next door were the Dal-Tex and County Records buildings, then Elm Street made its lazy S curve down into the three tunnels of the Triple Underpass. The picket fence on the grassy knoll looked mysterious on this dreary morning. But it was real. I was actually here.
Cars must have been passing. People must have been walking by. The sounds and smells of Dallas surely must have been sweeping across this expanse. But I was oblivious to everything, entranced by this landmark. It was only Eugene Aldredge, tugging hard on my arm, who finally brought me back.
“Come on,” he was saying. “I’ll show you the bullet mark.”1
Aldredge was not a witness to the assassination. He had learned through the local media of a mark on the sidewalk near the Depository that possibly had been caused by a missed shot. He alerted the FBI to all this, but he said the agency had done little.
I had read about Aldredge in one of my books. After writing him for more details, a lengthy correspondence ensued. Now he had become my self-appointed guide through Dealey Plaza, the parklike section of town where Kennedy was murdered.
We made our way down the gradually descending sidewalk on the north side of Elm, moving toward the Triple Underpass. I lagged behind, spellbound. Suddenly, he stopped and pointed to the ground.
There, in line with the center of the plaza and the westernmost portion of the Depository, nearly perpendicular to Elm Street and certainly not in a position it should have been if it was fired from the sixth floor, was a rather long gouge in the sidewalk. It still appeared fresh in comparison to the aged color and texture of the surrounding cement. The mark was smooth sided, sloping in then out of the concrete. It was about a quarter-inch in width for most of its length. It did indeed look like a bullet mark.
Moments later, when it began to rain harder, we were off to Midlothian, a suburb of Dallas and home of newspaperman and author Penn Jones, Jr. His forte was the strange and mysterious deaths of witnesses or those connected in some way with the assassination. His list of victims included Rose Cheramie, an employee of Jack Ruby, who said two days before the president’s murder that Kennedy would be killed in Dallas (she died of an unsolved hit-and-run accident); Lee Bowers, who observed two men behind the stockade fence on the grassy knoll moments before the assassination (he died in a one-car accident); Robert Perrin, who saw Ruby at a meeting to discuss illegally running guns into Cuba (he died of an apparent suicide); James Worrell, who saw a man run from the rear of the Depository building moments after the assassination (he died of a motorcycle accident); William Whaley, the cabdriver who took Oswald to his rooming house after the assassination (he died of an auto accident). I was familiar with Jones’ name and his unusual ideas from various magazine articles, but I had been unable to find his books anywhere.
Thirty minutes later, we arrived in Midlothian, the so-called Cement Capital of Texas. It didn’t take long to find the offices of the weekly Midlothian Mirror on Avenue F. Jones owned the newspaper. He also wrote its editorials. As we entered, I spied him talking to a customer.
The building smelled of newsprint and ink. Linotype machines sat in the background. All the desks were cluttered with copies of the Mirror. On the wall hung several pictures of John Kennedy. Nearby were two posters, one of Batman and one of Robin. A plaque revealed that Jones had won the Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award for Courage in Journalism in 1963. He had written editorials back then that were highly critical of the John
Birch Society. Not long after, someone firebombed his newspaper office during the night. No one was caught or claimed responsibility for the act.
Jones, at fifty-three, was a short man with glasses and close-cropped hair. He seemed scrappy, a man who, if involved in a fight, would be right in there and throwing punches long before his opponent would look down to find him. He was pure Texas, in his clothing, his accent, and his language. And he was generous with his time, inviting us to his home only a few blocks away, where he felt we would be more comfortable. I liked him immediately.
Jones was genuinely interested in my fascination with the subject and my motives for coming to Dallas. He labeled me a “young student” of the case. He thought my naiveté might prove beneficial with some witnesses. He also felt it might benefit him.
“Would you like to do a little work for me while you’re in town?” he asked. “I’m too well known locally.”2
I had only come to buy his books.
He told me of a strange notation Oswald had written in his notebook.3 As was his meticulous custom, Oswald wrote a name or address next to each telephone number he jotted down. But with one—FR 55591—there were no details. It stood conspicuously alone.
And it appeared twice, once on the next to last page in his notebook and again on the last page. It may have been one of the final things Oswald wrote in his life.
Jones discovered that the number belonged to Kenneth Cody, a bus driver for Continental Trailways in Dallas.4 “But Cody refuses to speak with me on the phone,” he explained. “I thought of approaching him in the bus terminal, but I’m too well known in this area. He’d never talk to me. You may get to at least ask him a few questions.”
“What do you think his involvement is?” I asked.
“I think he has a pilot’s license and was supposed to fly one or more of the assassins out of Dallas that day.”
And I was expected to talk with this guy?
When I agreed to do my best, Jones gave me copies of his two books, Forgive My Grief I5 and Forgive My Grief II,6 as compensation. I told him I was also looking for the twenty-six volumes. He said he had squirreled away two sets and would sell me one. I quickly wrote a check for seventy-six dollars, and he agreed to ship them to my home.
Alone and back in Dallas that evening, I was drawn once again to Dealey Plaza. Striking on this second visit was how compact everything was, the buildings and surrounding grounds being much closer to each other than pictures suggested.
I took my time with it now, absorbing the nuances. As the day drew to a close and traffic lessened, this tract of land was overpowering, solemn, almost haunting.
I stood on the Triple Underpass, where witness S. M. Holland had gazed on the presidential motorcade as it directly approached him. I looked to my left at the grassy knoll, then made my way there, retracing Holland’s steps as he went behind the picket fence following the shooting. I felt uneasy, standing at the corner of the fence where many critics said a gunman had fired the fatal shot.
It was, indeed, a perfect hiding place. Low-growth trees planted in front of the five-foot-high fence would have obscured anyone standing there. Behind was nothing but a small parking area and an open expanse of railroad yards.
And it was close, surprisingly close. From there to where Kennedy received his fatal wound was a mere ninety-five feet.
I climbed the pedestal that Abraham Zapruder had stood on as he unwittingly filmed the murder. I sat where Howard Brennan had sat and stared at the Depository’s sixth-floor window. I walked across Houston Street and turned to look at the sixth floor from where Arnold Rowland and his wife had stood.
I tried my best to imagine how it must have felt to see President Kennedy, one moment waving and the next mortally wounded, from the spots where witnesses Charles Brehm, Jean Hill, and Mary Moorman watched. And I looked back to the Depository, especially its front entrance, from the location where James Altgens took his photograph that many said showed Oswald standing in the crowd as Kennedy passed.
These were all people I had read about. And now I was here.
Only darkness forced me to leave.
Snooping on the Second Floor
The sun was just coming up the next morning as I entered the Continental Trailways bus terminal. A dispatcher told me Kenneth Cody was off duty that day, but I could catch him the next before his 6 A.M. run to Shreveport. So I was off to the Depository to talk with whomever I could find there, hopefully Victoria Adams, the main reason for this trip.
In one of his letters, Eugene Aldredge told me he once tried but was refused admittance to the sixth floor of that building. He was a local, though. I was a “young student” from far-off Pennsylvania.
“It doesn’t matter where you’re from,” Roy Truly emphasized to me. “Only employees are allowed on the sixth-floor.”7
“Are you hiring?” I teased. Truly’s stern face broke into a smile. The humor worked, for he invited me into his first-floor office.
Still the building’s manager, Truly consented to a rare interview. He took me back five years.
He had been standing outside when the motorcade passed. Truly “distinctly heard three shots,” he said, and then accompanied “a running” police officer, Marrion Baker, into the Depository. The officer was looking for a way to the roof, Truly said. The freight elevators weren’t available, so both began climbing the wooden stairs in the northwest corner of the first floor.
Truly told me he was ahead of the policeman by “several feet” when, on his way up to the third floor, he noticed Baker was no longer behind him. Returning to the second-floor landing, Truly found Baker in the lunchroom. He had his gun drawn and pointed “at close range and directly at the stomach area” of Lee Oswald, who was standing in the lunchroom. When Truly identified Oswald as an employee, Baker holstered his gun and he and Truly continued their ascent to the roof.
“How quickly did Officer Baker enter the building?” I asked.
“Very quickly,” Truly responded. “We were actually pushing people out of the way.”8
“And once you two were inside the building, how quickly did you move from the front entrance to the elevators and up the stairs to the second floor?”
“We were hustling, that’s for sure. I led the way ’cause I knew the layout, but we were moving fast. Much faster than the time tests we did for the Warren Commission.”
I then asked Truly if anyone or any motion caught his attention as he emerged onto the second floor ahead of Baker. Specifically, was the door leading to the lunchroom closed?
This was an important point. The door was pneumatically operated. Once opened, it took several seconds for it to close completely. I was curious about whether it may have been in the process of closing, an indication that a fleeing Oswald had just used it.
“I didn’t notice anyone or anything,” he said. “And as I recall it that day, the lunchroom door had to be closed, or I would have noticed it moving.”
“Was Oswald holding a bottle of Coke or did he have anything in his hands?”
Truly gave me a sly smile. This too was a key point. For Oswald to be holding a soda, he would have had to arrive in the lunchroom earlier than the Warren Report concluded. Since he was on an extremely tight schedule already, the additional seconds required for the purchase of a Coke from a machine spelled trouble. Curiously, Officer Baker initially submitted a report that noted Oswald held a Coke in his hand, but the policeman later changed his mind to say Oswald was empty handed.9
“I know this is important,” Truly said. “But I can’t recall one way or the other. He may have been, or he may not have been. I just don’t know.”
“How did Oswald appear as the officer was pointing his gun at him?”
“That’s the strangest part,” Truly replied. “Here’s a man who just shot the president of the United States, and he was as calm and collected as anyone I’d ever seen. I didn’t see any fear in him.”
Truly, who had hired Oswald in October 1963 as a tempora
ry order filler, told me Oswald was a quiet person who kept to himself and had always displayed good manners and respect.
“Do you think he shot the president?” I asked.
Truly said nothing. He gave me only a furtive smile, raised eyebrows, and a slightly cocked head.
“Are you sure I can’t get up to the sixth floor?” I pleaded once more.
“Not even CBS was allowed to film from up there,” he answered.
But Truly did relent a bit and agreed to let me look around the first floor. I began by nonchalantly walking toward the back of the building along its east wall. I was heading for the Domino Room, an employees’ lounge where Oswald said he had been eating lunch when the assassination occurred.
Turning left, I passed the back door where Oswald entered on the morning of the shooting. Then there were two large freight elevators with wooden gates. In the far northwest corner, I found the old wooden stairs that Truly and Baker had hurriedly climbed to the second floor.
Other than a man talking on a telephone that hung from the wall next to the stairway, no one else was around. When he finished his conversation and left, I ambled over to the stairs, peeked up the dark passageway, casually glanced around to ensure no one was watching me, and then started up them.
I expected to get caught at any moment, arrested for trespassing, and sent straight to jail. But I kept going anyway.
The stairs were old and narrow, the front edges of the treads worn by heavy use. They were very creaky. Every step I took created squeaks and cracks so loud I was sure the noise would summon Truly from the opposite corner of the building and get me roughly thrown out.
But no one reacted, and I ended up emerging onto the second floor.
As I stood there for a moment, I noticed that slightly ahead of me and to my left was the door leading to the lunchroom where Baker confronted Oswald.10 Baker testified that when he reached the second-floor landing, he happened to gaze through a small window in that door at a vestibule and caught a “sudden glimpse” of a man, “and it looked to me like he was going away from me.”11 Suspicious, he ran over, flung open the door, and confronted Oswald, who by now had walked some twenty feet beyond into the adjacent lunchroom.12