by Barry Ernest
The implication was that Baker saw Oswald just as Oswald hurried through this door. The Report made the same inference when it stated Baker “intended to continue around to his left toward the stairway going up but through the window in the door he caught a fleeting glimpse of a man walking in the vestibule toward the lunchroom.”13
As I opened that door, I now noticed the small vestibule inside. I also found that once inside the door, I had to quickly bear left to actually enter the lunchroom. From Baker’s perspective at the top of the stairs, a person on the other side of the door would be visible through the door’s window for only a split second before that person moved left and was out of sight. The Report confirmed this, saying, “If the man had passed from the vestibule into the lunchroom, Baker could not have seen him.”14
Therefore, Baker must have spotted Oswald precisely as Oswald opened the door and entered the vestibule but before he moved left toward the lunchroom and out of Baker’s line of vision. This presented problems.
The door had an automatic closing mechanism that, once opened, caused it to move slowly back to a shut position. I tested it several times and found it took a full three seconds to become completely closed. If Baker saw Oswald just inside that door, then the door should still have been in the process of closing, unless Oswald stood there waiting for the door to shut before turning left into the lunchroom. Assuming he kept walking, three seconds was more than enough time for him to move out of Baker’s sight.
When Baker testified, he told the Commission he wasn’t sure if Oswald had even used that door. All he felt safe in saying was he caught “a glance at him” and “this door might have been, you know, closing and almost shut at that time.”15
It was Truly, several seconds ahead of Baker in the race up the stairs, who told the Commission he saw no one when he reached the second floor.16 And he told me the same thing, adding that he remembered the door to the vestibule being shut, completely.
If that door already was closed as Truly passed in advance of the policeman, why would Oswald stand stationary behind it until Baker appeared?
As I confirmed on site, Baker could also have spotted Oswald along the same line of sight if Oswald had been farther back in the vestibule, not just inside the door.
During his testimony, when it was suggested that Baker had seen Oswald in the front part of the vestibule, meaning near the automatic door, he clarified those words, saying, “Well, to me it was the back of it.”17 This was odd, though, for if Oswald had entered through this door and been at the back part of the vestibule, it would mean he already had walked past the lunchroom entrance and then inexplicably retraced his steps back to the lunchroom.
Perhaps Oswald had entered that vestibule from another direction. Snooping around more, I discovered a hallway that led out of the vestibule at the “back” portion, where Baker thought he could have spotted Oswald. When I followed that hallway, it led me to the front of the building, then down a flight of stairs to the first floor, ending up just inside the main entrance to the Depository. In other words, the hallway provided access to the second-floor lunchroom from the first floor. In fact, it was the same hallway Miss Adams had taken on her return to the fourth floor after her venture outside.
Could Oswald have used this hallway to get to the lunchroom? But that would have meant he wasn’t on the sixth floor.
Officer Baker had initially introduced that very same idea when he was asked during his testimony if the back stairs provided the only access to the lunchroom. Baker casually mentioned the hallway leading to the first floor. But he discounted the idea of Oswald coming from that direction since, according to Baker, “he had no business in there.”18
Why not?
Oswald told police that he was on the first floor eating lunch during the assassination and that he went up to the lunchroom for a drink. Could he have been telling the truth?
Could Baker have seen Oswald as he entered the “back” of the vestibule from the hallway? That too would explain why Truly did not see him and why he did not observe the door in motion. Yet if this scenario were correct, it would mean Oswald wasn’t the assassin.
Back on the first floor, I walked into Truly’s office to thank him for allowing me to roam around. I asked him if the second-floor lunchroom looked now as it had in November 1963, and specifically if the automatic door leading to the lunchroom was the same.
He gave me a quizzical look but didn’t pursue it. “The lunchroom,” he said, “is unchanged. So is the door.”
I hadn’t forgotten about Miss Adams, though. Before I left the Depository, I rode the elevator near the front entrance to the fourth-floor offices of the Scott Foresman Company. From what I had covertly found in the lunchroom and hallway, Victoria Adams’ claim of hearing nothing and seeing no one on the stairs suddenly took on added meaning.
“Miss Adams no longer works for us,” a receptionist curtly said. “She left no forwarding address.”
With her, it was only the beginning.
On the Witness Trail
The bus dispatcher was right. When I arrived at the terminal at 5:15 the next morning, Cody was already there. He was standing near the open door to his bus, checking some paperwork on a clipboard.
I stood back a bit and watched as he moved about the vehicle, opening the baggage compartments and making everything ready. Why in the world did Penn Jones believe that a man like this, a bus driver of all things, had been recruited to fly a presidential assassin out of Dallas? Still, there had to be a reason why Oswald had jotted down his telephone number.
Cody began to sweep dirt from the steps leading into his bus. I took a deep breath, hitched up my pants, and slowly moved forward. As I walked up, I did a quick run-through of how I would start. I knew I had to be calm, courteous, inoffensive. I’d have to immediately put him at ease—make him willing to talk with me and confide the darkest secrets that apparently only he knew.
“Why was your telephone number in Oswald’s notebook?” I blurted out.19 It was a wonderful start.
He quickly looked up from his work. “What?” he asked. “Who the hell are you?”
“I’m sorry.” I told him I was a bit nervous, then introduced myself. I explained I was from Pennsylvania—far away—and was here doing some research.
Cody did not respond.
“I noticed your telephone number in Lee Oswald’s address book and I was just curious if you knew him?”
He had that if-looks-could-kill stare. “Never met him. Never talked with him. You know,” he continued, “I’ve been asked that question a lot. If there was anything on me, don’t you think the FBI would have picked it up a long time ago?”
“Then why do you feel Oswald wrote your number down?” I said.
“I have no idea. Maybe it’s because I had some land for sale out in Oak Cliff.” Like Oswald, Cody lived in that suburb.
“Did you ever receive a call about your property from someone named Oswald?”
“Not that I know of,” Cody replied. By now, he had moved into the driver’s seat of his bus. I followed him inside. He quickly pulled the lever that shut the doors behind me, the clamor loud in my ears and the doors missing me by only inches. He clearly was not pleased.
I asked if he knew Jack Ruby.
“Nope.”
I asked if he had a pilot’s license or knew how to fly a plane.
“Nope.”
“Where were you at the time of the assassination?” In hindsight, I realized that query could easily have sent him over the edge. Fortunately, it didn’t.
“At my home,” he said.
“Can you tell me a little about the property you had for sale?” I inquired. “Was it a house or an apartment or . . . ”
“Listen. I’m busy,” he snapped. “I don’t have time for this.”
He flung open the doors. The fresh air and sudden freedom smelled wonderful. I took the hint and stepped outside, thanking him for his time and trouble, my acknowledgments clipped short as he qui
ckly slammed the doors shut again.
It seemed likely that Cody was telling the truth, and Oswald had merely jotted down that telephone number with the innocent intention of someday inquiring about a property. He had, after all, expressed a desire as late as the eve of the assassination to find a place where he and his wife, Marina, could live together.
At the public library, I searched through 1963 issues of the daily newspapers for a real-estate listing of property being sold or offered for rent by Cody, or with Cody’s telephone number included for inquiries. There was nothing. Maybe Oswald had simply copied the number from a handmade sign posted in Cody’s yard.
I called Jones later that day to bring him up to date on my visit with the bus driver. He expected as little. Then I asked him about Victoria Adams. Jones said he knew nothing about her whereabouts, having given up searching for her a while back when “all the leads went dead.” Interesting choice of words, I thought, from a man focused on expiring witnesses.
I also placed a call to S. M. Holland, a local railroad official, who had been standing on the Triple Underpass when the assassination occurred. He was the one who claimed he saw smoke on the grassy knoll when the fatal shot was fired, and I wanted to ask him about that. His secretary put my call through, and Holland came on the line.
Would he consent to an interview?
Instead of answering that question, he hit me with twenty of his own, about my full name, age, home address, phone number, high school, parents’ occupations. . . . After this barrage, he said he’d call back later and quickly hung up. Perhaps he had misunderstood me and assumed I was applying for a job.
Then the idea hit me that maybe I should take a cab out to 4906 Wenonah. It was the address where Miss Adams testified she lived.
But it was where she once lived. She had moved, and no one knew where.
I had the same luck at the library and various state, county, and city offices. There were no tax records, residency records, employment records—any records on Victoria Adams. I called every Adams listed in the phonebook. Not a one was her, was any relation to her, or had any knowledge about her. It seemed as though Miss Adams had simply disappeared.
CHAPTER 8
March 1968
Penn Jones was quite the character. During my telephone chats and meetings with this crusty editor, he told me about his research. He had at this point compiled a list of forty-five people connected in some way to the assassination who he believed had died under mysterious circumstances.
Jones was a firm believer in conspiracy. He thought that five guns fired at Kennedy, in a textbook case of crossfire. Under his theory, Kennedy was hit four times, and Texas governor John Connally, seated in front of the president, was hit by “at least one different bullet and it appears Connally was probably hit by two bullets.”1
That scenario was 180 degrees from the Warren Report, which concluded Connally’s wounds were caused by only one bullet, which had first passed through Kennedy. Known as the single-bullet theory, it was the crux of the government’s case for a lone assassin.
“We know there were at least two shots that missed,” Jones said. “If your friend [Aldredge] is correct the other day, there’s one. And certainly we know that the bullet that hit the curb by James Tague was a miss.” Tague was standing near the Triple Underpass and was wounded on the cheek when something, perhaps a bullet or bullet fragment, struck a nearby curb.
“If Oswald’s gun was fired at all that day, it was fired simply for evidence and I rather doubt that it was fired. I certainly don’t think it was firing to kill anyone. That rifle is too unreliable; it’s too dangerous; it’s too inaccurate to be used for serious marksmanship. And certainly when you’re shooting at the president, you’re serious about it.”
Jones felt that shots also came from the Dal-Tex Building and the roof of the Dallas County Jail Building. Other snipers were “behind the wooden fence, underneath the trees” on the grassy knoll and in a storm-sewer drain along the north side of Elm Street.
Still focused on Oswald’s escape, I inquired about Roger Craig, a deputy sheriff who thought he saw Oswald run from the Depository some fifteen minutes after the shooting and hop into a passing car driven by another man.
“I certainly think that the man who got into the station wagon was Oswald,” Jones declared. “If you go straight down Elm Street, if you go straight across the river from there, about the first street that you take across the river is Beckley [the street where Oswald lived]. So all he did, in my opinion, he drove across the river and turned to the left on Beckley and he’s home in just a few minutes.”
Jones did not believe that Oswald took a cab ride with William Whaley. “If you read his [Whaley’s] testimony, the cabdriver signed his [blank] affidavit . . . and let the police fill it in for him.” Jones chuckled. “I don’t know how much more cooperative they’d want anyone to be and that might have been the reason he was killed later on.”2
“Yes, I think that Earlene Roberts was telling the truth,” Jones said when I asked about Oswald’s landlady. “And I think her testimony was amazing and so damaging there’s a reason they had to keep her hid [sic] until she died. I think [she] was a very important witness and I know of no newspaperman in the world who talked to Earlene Roberts after she gave her testimony. I searched for her for many, many weeks. I bet I spent a total of two months looking for [her]. And I never did find her.
“They hung her with a driving-while-intoxicated conviction and the police had an arm on her then after that. I doubt very much that she was drunk. She had a bad case of diabetes and, hell, you don’t drink when you got a bad case of diabetes.”3
Was it possible that Tippit was in the police car that honked its horn in front of Oswald’s rooming house?
“I certainly say flatly that the police was [sic] completely involved in the assassination,” Jones answered. “Tippit was in East Dallas at the time of the assassination; he was not in South Dallas as was stated by the Warren Commission. I know where he was and I know who he was talking to at the time the assassination took place. The policeman he was talking to headed straight for the Book Depository building while Tippit unexplainably headed towards Oak Cliff.
“I certainly think Tippit was involved. I certainly think he was as big a patsy as Oswald. Whether or not that was him that pulled up in front of the rooming house, I don’t know.
“I think the police car’s visit to the rooming house was important and was not handled adequately at all by the Warren Commission and they knew they were not handling it adequately. The police would come by checking with her [Mrs. Roberts] so frequently that it indicates to me that there was something going on between that house and the police. Certainly they were not coming by for the brief purpose of talking to Earlene Roberts. First place she was sixty, she was fat, she had bad eyesight, she was uneducated.”
What about Tippit’s murder?
“When Domingo Benavides was questioned,” Jones explained, “David Belin asked Domingo what the killer looked like and Domingo said, ‘He looked like you.’ Now Belin didn’t put into the record a description of himself. He did hurriedly put into the record where he was on the day of the assassination. I would much prefer that he had put in his own physical description.”
After failing to identify Oswald, Benavides received threats on his life, and his lookalike brother was fatally shot in the head during a February 1964 barroom brawl.4
Two gunmen were involved in the Tippit slaying, Jones surmised. Oswald, he felt, was nowhere near the Tippit murder scene, having gone directly to the Texas Theatre from his rooming house.
Were They All Wrong?
S. M. Holland apparently had completed his background check. He called my hotel to say he would meet with me after all. His conditions were that it be unrecorded and in a public place. He suggested the lobby of my hotel.
At the appointed time, I was seated on a sofa near the bustle of the revolving doors. I had seen Holland’s picture in several books but w
asn’t sure if I’d recognize him in person. Strangely, he somehow knew me, because he came up from behind, tapped me on the shoulder, and introduced himself.
Holland was a lean man, in his early sixties I guessed, and wore glasses and a brimmed hat. He was nattily attired in a business suit and overcoat. On each side of him stood two big, mean-looking men. They hovered over me like a pair of hawks but were not introduced. Bodyguards, I suspected—as if he needed them with me.
“I know more about you than you do,” he immediately began.5
At my age, what was there to know? I smiled politely and glanced up. The hawks were expressionless.
Holland, a supervisor for the Union Terminal Railroad, said he arrived in Dealey Plaza about noon on November 22 and took up a position on top of the Triple Underpass, above the center of Elm Street. The president was expected to pass directly beneath him. Dallas Police officers were also on the underpass, Holland said, preventing all but railroad employees with credentials from gaining access. He assured me no shots had been fired from there.
As the motorcade approached in the middle lane of Elm, “I heard four shots; the first two sounded like they were behind the president with that shot from the knoll being different from the rest.” When I asked what he meant by “different,” he said it sounded, “I don’t know, just different than the others, like it was a pistol or a different type of rifle or something.”
“The third and fourth shots were very close together, almost at exactly the same second.”
Holland said his eyes were focused directly on Kennedy when the “second, or possibly the third shot,” caused the president’s head to “suddenly lurch backward.” At that moment, he said, his attention was immediately drawn to the left, straight to the far corner of the wooden fence on top of the knoll, from where he felt that shot, the “different” shot, had originated. “And I saw a puff of smoke come out from that corner and it didn’t just hang there but it slowly drifted out under the trees and over the grassy area toward the street below.”