by Barry Ernest
The smoke, he added, traveled out about twenty feet from the fence and was located slightly behind a large tree on the knoll. Holland said he had been shown private and unpublished pictures that “confirm the presence of smoke coming from the knoll.” He refused to discuss that tidbit further.
“How do you know it was smoke?” I questioned. I sensed the hawks drawing closer.
“I don’t know what else it could have been. I’ve heard some people say that it was steam from a pipe that runs behind the fence. But there is no steam pipe back there. The only steam pipe is at the end of the underpass there, which is far from the corner of the wooden fence where I saw the smoke.
“Me and some others ran around behind the fence and I made my way up to that corner, and when I got there, I saw footprints and cigarette butts on the ground in the exact [his emphasis] spot where I had seen the smoke come from.”
“Were the footprints and cigarettes fresh, do you think?”
“It had rained that morning,” Holland said, “and those cigarette butts were all dry. I looked close at them. And there were quite a few of them there.”
Holland said the footprints he saw were the only ones along the entire length of the fence. “It appeared as if whoever was behind there had been there for a while and was pacing back and forth like a caged animal. There was the same kind of mud on the bumper of the car parked there and it looked like someone had been standing on it to look over the fence.”
“Let’s say there was someone there,” I said. “How could that person get away so quickly?”
“It would have been very easy to jump into the trunk of one of those parked cars and be driven away later,” Holland speculated.6
At this point, I grabbed a piece of paper and drew an L shape to depict the fence. I asked Holland to put an X where he had seen the smoke. The mark he drew was, he said, about ten feet back from the corner on the long part of the L. He had me draw a line representing the bumper where he saw the muddy footprints. He said that vehicle was the third car in from the corner and was a “Pontiac station wagon, sandy or light brown in color, with a luggage rack.” A white Chevrolet sat on one side of the station wagon, he said, and the muddy footprints on the ground seemed to come from the corner of the fence and pass between those two cars on their way into the parking lot beyond.
Holland admitted he rarely granted interviews, because he had been misquoted so often. “It started with the Warren Commission, which misused what I had told them in their Report. Then I wasn’t too pleased with the way Mark Lane handled my interview. And that program for CBS [“CBS News Inquiry: ‘The Warren Report,’” broadcast in June 1967] was very biased, especially concerning the statements I made. They only used certain parts of what I said and that didn’t provide the whole story.”
I assured him of my care. I showed him my notes, which he carefully read.
“Are you writing a book?” he asked.
“No. I took notes only for my own memory.”
He laughed. “You’re too young to worry about that.”
As we walked out of the hotel, I asked Holland if he would mind retracing his steps for me from the underpass to the knoll. He paused, then said he was very busy, but if I ever got to Dallas another time, I should give him a call.
That evening I stood with my elbows on the cement wall on the Triple Underpass, trying to visualize what Holland must have seen. The compactness of Dealey Plaza, and his position above and in front of the oncoming motorcade, certainly had given him a unique view. Kennedy was shot right in front of him, then the car sped underneath. The grassy knoll was within his peripheral vision, to the left.
I walked the short distance to the knoll. Peering over the fence ten feet from the corner, I was again struck by the closeness of Elm Street. It would have been an easy shot.
Someone could have stood right here and gone virtually unnoticed. It was the perfect location.
Something at this exact spot definitely drew the attention of many on November 22. Were they all wrong?
A Startled Man
One of the leads Penn Jones provided to me was Carroll Jarnagin, a Dallas attorney who claimed he had seen Oswald in Jack Ruby’s Carousel Club not long before the assassination.7 An Oswald/Ruby tie-in was a popular theory. Many claimed to have seen the two together. Some critics thought Oswald was on his way to Ruby’s nearby apartment when Tippit stopped him.
My phone calls to Jarnagin went unanswered. So I decided to visit his office at 511 North Akard Street in the midtown section of Dallas. I expected to find a typically busy legal practice. But when I opened the door, I walked into an eight-foot by eight-foot room. A few feet ahead was a single chair for visitors. To my left, a startled man rose from a small metal desk so quickly that his chair slammed into the wall inches behind. Jarnagin was working out of a broom closet.
Jarnagin was a frail person and of average height. Probably in his early forties, he wore glasses and a business suit. He smiled as I entered. He then offered me his hand, no doubt expecting me to be another—maybe his only—client. As he sat back down, I told him the nature of my visit. Would he mind answering a few questions?
The smile left his face more quickly than it would have taken to traverse his meager office. He motioned for me to sit down as he reached for a cigarette.
I settled into his only other chair. Minutes of silence drifted by. “I don’t want to talk about it,” he finally said.8
I told him I only wanted to know what it was that made him so sure the man he saw was Oswald. He refused to answer. Instead, he nervously puffed on one cigarette, then another, and another. The guy was making me uneasy.
After ten minutes of this, I got up to leave. Jarnagin motioned for me to sit again. He apologized for his silence, saying he had already provided the FBI with a full statement. That agency had disbelieved him, he said, labeling it a case of “misidentification.”
“And that is the way I’m going to accept it,” he added. He stared at me intensely. Then he averted his eyes, as if it was me giving him the creeps.
Hoping to break the ice, I said it was Penn Jones who had mentioned his name. He immediately asked how many deaths had occurred to witnesses up to that point. I told him Jones had the number pegged at forty-five.
“I don’t want to be number forty-six,” he muttered.
That was when it hit me. Jarnagin wasn’t toying with me. He wasn’t playing games. He was scared.
“Well, if I make you uncomfortable . . . ” I said.
He did nothing to stop me from leaving this time.
Jones told me there were people in Dallas who would be afraid to talk. I had just met one of them.
“But Boxes Don’t Move”
Carolyn Walther told the FBI on December 4, 1963, that shortly before the presidential motorcade entered Dealey Plaza, she saw two men in either the fourth- or fifth-floor, southeast-corner window of the Texas School Book Depository.9
She was not interviewed by the Warren Commission.
“I fully expected to be questioned by them,” Mrs. Walther told me in a phone conversation. “I guess they weren’t interested in what I had to say.”10
She and a co-worker were standing on the east side of Houston Street about five minutes before the assassination when she began looking around at the crowd and to her right, toward the Depository. When she moved her eyes upward, she noticed a man holding a rifle and gazing south down Houston. She told the FBI the man was “on either the fourth or fifth floor” and she was “positive this window was not as high as the sixth floor.”
“But I now know it was the sixth floor,” she told me that day.
Mrs. Walther explained to me she initially thought and thus told authorities that the man with the rifle was on the “fourth or fifth floor because I just wasn’t sure which it was at the time.” But she said she clearly remembers that this man was on the floor directly above where “two colored men were hanging out a window looking at the motorcade.” Her reference most lik
ely was to Harold Norman and Bonnie Ray Williams, who were in fact watching from the fifth-floor window of the Depository. This would have put the man with the rifle on the sixth floor, in the window from where the Warren Report said the shots originated.11
She described that man as having light hair and wearing a white shirt.
“Next to the man with a rifle and in the same window was another man. I could only see him from about his waist up to his shoulders and never got a good look at his face. But there was definitely another man there.”
That second man was wearing “a brown suit coat.” Could she have been looking at the brown cardboard boxes that were stacked in that window?
“That’s what the FBI accused me of doing,” she answered. “But boxes don’t move on their own, do they?”
Her point was taken. “Did you report this to anyone, a nearby policeman, your friend?”
“No, I didn’t say anything. I thought this man was a guard or something and that they had guards everywhere. And just after I saw these two, someone yelled, ‘Here they come,’ and the president turned the corner and I stopped looking at the two men.”
Mrs. Walther said she “heard four shots, and right after the last shot I saw this police officer drop his motorcycle and immediately run into the Depository.” This would have been Marrion Baker.
She described the sounds as having a definite pause between the first and second shots. Then the second and third shot sounded as if they were fired “at the same time.” After that there was another slight pause, and then she heard a fourth shot.
She moved across Houston and looked down Elm in the direction of the motorcade. She saw two children lying on the grass on the knoll and, thinking they may be injured, walked that way.12
“There was mass confusion and chaos in Dealey Plaza. Everyone seemed to be running to get up behind the fence and into the railroad yards.”
Along the way, she recognized a bystander.
“And I passed Abraham Zapruder, who I knew from working in the same building. He said, ‘Kennedy is dead.’ He [Zapruder] took his finger and pointed to his forehead, shook his own head, and said, ‘They got him in the forehead, from the front.’”
“From the front? Those were his exact words to you?” I asked.
“He said, ‘from the front.’” I could hear sobbing on the other end. Mrs. Walther had begun to cry.
“It’s not you,” she assured me. “It’s just that it still affects me when I think back on it. I know what I saw and I know what I heard. And it’s not what the government is telling us how it happened.”
I apologized for the bother, thanked her for her time, and hung up.
Like Arnold Rowland, who was standing near her, Carolyn Walther had seen two men in the window. This type of independent corroboration shouldn’t have been overlooked. It should have been fully investigated.
Why hadn’t it?
Time Tests of My Own
I was standing where Oswald took his last conscious breath, the basement of the Dallas Police Department. Two days after the assassination—on a Sunday morning—Oswald was led through here, like a sheep to slaughter. He was flanked by Dallas police officers, ironically being moved to what was intended to be safer housing in the county jail.
Seeing the accused assassin and, so he would later say, wanting to spare the Kennedy family a return trip for Oswald’s trial, Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby made his move. He burst forward through the crowd and fired the revolver he had been carrying for his own protection. The bullet entered Oswald’s abdomen. He died at Parkland Hospital, without saying a word.
Like in Dealey Plaza, everything was much closer, much tighter here than pictures and film suggested. To my left was the vehicle ramp Ruby was said to have walked down. To my right, an identical ramp led up the opposite way, onto Commerce Street. In front of me in this rather dismal underground parking garage were numerous police cars, and in the far wall straight ahead was a door to a stairway leading up to the first-floor lobby.
The media had swarmed all over this constricted area that day. It wouldn’t have taken many bodies to label it overcrowded. Why had Oswald been escorted into that madness?
An hour drifted by before I decided to walk back to Dealey Plaza.
At Kent State, I had spent many hours studying Oswald’s timeline from the Depository to the Texas Theatre. Today, I did it in person. Stopwatch in hand, I began by walking east from the front entrance of the Depository to the corner of Elm and Murphy streets, where Oswald boarded a bus.
Still on Elm but now between Poydras and Lamar, where Oswald left the stalled vehicle, I followed his footsteps for two blocks south along Lamar to the Greyhound Bus Terminal, coincidentally where Kenneth Cody worked and where Oswald met taxi driver William Whaley. At the bus terminal, I hailed a cab and asked to be taken to the 700 block of Beckley Avenue. From Beckley and Neely, I walked back three blocks to Oswald’s 1026 North Beckley rooming house. The single-level home, with its distinctive arched roof over the entryway, looked exactly as it did in 1963.
Curiously, a wooden sign stuck in a front yard that was barren of grass advertised a Bedroom for Rent. I knocked on the front door, figuring I’d get to examine the interior under the pretense of inquiring about the room. No one answered.
To the left of the door were three windows. Looking through them, I made out the communal living-room area of the house, where tenants could watch a television and where the landlady, Earlene Roberts, had been when Oswald came in that day. I also tried to peek into Oswald’s former room, but someone had placed heavy curtains over the windows.
Back on the sidewalk, I found the bus stop where Mrs. Roberts said Oswald briefly waited after leaving his room. From that stop, I turned back to look at the rooming house. I had an unobstructed line of sight directly to the living-room windows. The landlady clearly could have seen her tenant standing there.
It was, according to the Report, about nine-tenths of a mile from this point to where Tippit was killed.13 Bus schedules for the area of the rooming house did not conform to the time or direction of Oswald’s movements, so the Commission assumed he walked from there. The government gave Oswald twelve minutes to get to the scene of the Tippit murder.14 I clicked my stopwatch.15
The path as shown by the Report proceeded due south along Beckley Avenue for five blocks to Davis Street, where it turned east for a short block, then went diagonally on Crawford Avenue for three blocks. It then turned left onto Tenth Street. Another block in an easterly direction on Tenth brought me to the intersection of Patton Avenue. Just 100 feet ahead was where the shooting had taken place.16
I walked at a steady and “brisk pace,” just as the Report presumed Oswald had done.17 I was taller than Oswald, so my stride was probably a bit wider. Traffic was minimal on this lazy Saturday afternoon, and I was not delayed at any crossroads.
My time was thirteen minutes, twenty-one seconds. It had taken me a full minute and twenty-one seconds longer than what the Commission had calculated for Oswald. It was obviously going to take me more than a “brisk” walk to duplicate his pace.
When I clicked off the stopwatch, I noticed a young man underneath the hood of a car nearby. He was watching me closely. As I began to jot down some notes, he came over and asked what I was doing. When I told him, he graciously offered to drive me back to my starting point so I could try it a second time.
Back at the bus stop, I pressed the stopwatch again. On this attempt, I stepped up the pace, walking faster and occasionally breaking into a slow run. My time was twelve minutes, forty-six seconds. I was getting closer.
My chauffeur was at his car again. I walked over and asked him if he knew anyone still living in the neighborhood who had been a witness to the Tippit murder. He pointed to a house directly across the street from where the officer had been gunned down. Ask for Mrs. Higgins, he said.
Like many of the older homes in that neighborhood, the house at 417 East Tenth Street had been sectioned off into several
apartments. I found Mr. and Mrs. Donald R. Higgins, co-managers, in Apartment B, which faced the scene of the crime. Mrs. Higgins came to the door at once but refused to talk with me when I mentioned my intent.
“Oh, let the young fella in,” I heard a man say behind her. “He looks innocent enough.” The voice belonged to Donald Higgins, who was seated in a reclining chair in the living room.
Mrs. Higgins had not been called to testify before the Warren Commission. She said neither the FBI nor the Dallas Police questioned her either. “Only some college kids came by shortly afterwards.”18
I asked her what she remembered about that day.
“All I’ll tell you is that I was sitting right there [pointing to where her husband now sat], watching the news about the assassination when I heard the shots outside. It was a warm day and the front door was open.”
“How many shots did you hear?”
“I clearly remember three shots, but there could have been one or two more. Two seemed close together and there seemed to be a pause before the final one.”
After the shots, Mrs. Higgins said she heard screaming and immediately jumped up and ran to the front door. She saw a police officer lying in the street slightly in front of the driver’s side of the vehicle, and a man with a pistol in his right hand was moving in the direction of Patton Avenue, off to her right. “That’s all I know,” Mrs. Higgins added. So far, it sounded just as the Report had described it.
“Could you put a time to when you heard the shots?” I asked.
Mrs. Higgins glanced at her husband, who looked at me and then nodded to his wife. “Well, it doesn’t fit with what they are saying,” she said.
“I understand,” I offered. “How much is it off?”
She hesitated again. “Well, it was 1:06.”
This was considerably earlier than the 1:16 P.M. time that the Report said the shooting took place. If she was accurate, my efforts to duplicate Oswald’s walk were moot. There is no way he could have left his rooming house at 1:03 and arrived here by foot at 1:06.