by Barry Ernest
“How can you be so sure of the time?”
“Well, I was watching the news on television and for some reason the announcer turned and looked at the clock and said the time was ‘six minutes after one,’” Mrs. Higgins explained. “He said it just like that, ‘six minutes after one.’ And you know how you always do, you hear the time and you automatically check your own watch. So I just looked up at the clock on my television to verify the time and it said 1:06. At that point I heard the shots.”
“Are you positive of the time?”
“Yes, I am. I’d bet my life on it.”
“Do you know what this means, then?” I persisted.
Mrs. Higgins looked at her husband and then back at me but said nothing. She knew.
“And the man you saw running away,” I said. “What did he look like?”
Mrs. Higgins got noticeably upset and asked if I was writing a book. I assured her I was in Dallas only to satisfy my own curiosity. She remained quiet.
“Can you describe him in any way, tell me anything about him? Any description?” Finally, I asked, “Was that man Lee Oswald?”
Mrs. Higgins stared at me, not harshly, but more like my mother used to when she was trying to make a point. “He definitely was not the man they showed on television,” she answered with a sigh. “Is that what you wanted to hear?”
It was, as long as it was the truth. I thanked Mrs. Higgins for her time and trouble.
“Be careful,” she told me on my way out her front door.
My friend was still puttering around his car as I approached. He said he was heading toward downtown Dallas and would be happy to give me a ride back to the bus stop again, if I wanted. It was nearly an hour since my last walk. I was ready to try again.
Stopwatch poised, I pressed the start button for the third time. On this attempt, I walked noticeably faster, often at a trot. Like before, I encountered very little traffic at the intersections and did not have to alter my stride. But this one took its toll: by the time I reached my now-familiar destination, I had broken into a sweat. I was breathing heavily. My time was eleven minutes, fifty-eight seconds. I had proven it could be done.
But didn’t Helen Markham say the man she saw was walking, not running, along Tenth Street? Didn’t she describe that man as being calm, cool, and collected, not suffering the effects of a rapid hike?
Anyway, after a breather, I clicked on the stopwatch again and followed the path from the murder scene to the Texas Theatre, at 231 West Jefferson Boulevard. Along the way, I duplicated what Oswald did to discard his jacket, and I paused briefly at a storefront, something the fleeing suspect also did.
According to the Commission’s watch, Tippit was killed at 1:16 and Oswald arrived at the theatre at 1:40. There was no explanation why the trip from the officer’s slaying to the theatre, a distance of only six-tenths of a mile, took Oswald twenty-four minutes, when he had just completed nine-tenths of a mile in twelve.
The trip to the theatre took me ten minutes, walking the entire way.
I wanted to examine the interior of the theatre, so I purchased a ticket to The Dirty Dozen and went inside.19 Immediately, I entered the lobby. Stairs to the balcony led up from there. And when my eyes became adjusted to the darkness, I sat down in the area where Oswald had been.
Pacifist, the ticket clerk must have thought when I left only moments later.
Back in the waning sunlight, I now strolled around the corner and behind the building, where I located a set of back doors. It was from here that arresting officer M. N. McDonald made his debut onto the theatre stage.
It was here that, according to Penn Jones, other Dallas policemen lay in wait, hoping to quiet Oswald for good when he fled out the back of the building.
For me, this was the culminating moment. I had read so much of Oswald’s movements in the one-hour, twenty-minute period between assassination and arrest. I had analyzed it to death, so to speak, but only on paper. Now, I had seen it, walked it, felt it, experienced every foot of it. I may have failed to do it at Kent State, but on this project, I had clearly done my homework.
I was beat after more than a week of going nonstop. I had learned much. Yet now, on my last night in Dallas, I seemed to have more questions than when I’d arrived.
“No matter what your opinions, please don’t give up on this,” Penn Jones told me when I called to thank him and say goodbye.20 I would miss him.
“The assassination is very broad, lots of names, lots of sub-events,” he continued. “Focus on just one area and find out all you can about it.”
It was late, and I knew I should have been in bed. My early-morning flight loomed just ahead. But in a last-ditch effort, I placed a call to Charles Brehm. I felt that Brehm, the closest witness to Kennedy when the fatal head shot hit its mark, could provide some insight.
At 11 P.M., he finally answered. He had just returned from a party, something I detected from the slur in his speech. He agreed to talk anyway.
Brehm and his five-year-old son were standing in the grass on the south side of Elm Street, almost directly across from Abraham Zapruder’s camera position on the knoll. In Rush to Judgment, he was quoted as saying it was the second shot, not the third and final one, that caused Kennedy’s head to explode.21
He also said that a portion of the president’s skull flew to the rear and left of the automobile and toward the curb near where he was standing.
Brehm began with a detailed and vivid description of what he had witnessed.22 He said that when the first shot was fired, the presidential limousine was slightly to his right, coming toward him down Elm. The car had slowed, nearly coming to a halt.
Immediately after it passed where he and his son were standing, a second shot rang out, he said. This was the one that struck the president in the head and caused “a piece of Kennedy’s skull to fly back toward me.” At this point, Brehm was “only ten feet from the vehicle.”
“The car then sped up and the third shot missed completely.”
The timing of the shots, according to Brehm, was the same as what others recalled: a pause of about three seconds between the first and second shots and the third shot “close to the second.”
Surprisingly, Brehm had not been questioned by the Commission.23
I mentioned to him that some witnesses believed that more than three shots had been fired, and there was evidence of at least one missed shot. Brehm instantly became upset, severely criticizing conspiracy advocates, even accusing me of being one. Then he challenged me to meet him in Dealey Plaza “in no more than ten minutes.”
It was a rare opportunity, too good to pass up even at this late hour.
It was nearly midnight when I saw a man approaching me, two children in tow. Brehm, in his early forties, politely introduced himself. His son, who was now ten, and daughter accompanied him. Nice children, I thought, until they both said, in unison, that I was “wasting my time” in Dallas.
I wondered where this opinion originated, the son having been only five when he saw the assassination and the daughter not a witness at all.
I assured the trio I was only seeking some truth.
Brehm led me to the exact spot where he had been standing on November 22. He then directed my eyesight to the sixth floor of the Depository and the close proximity of cars that continued to whiz by on Elm. He focused my attention on where the presidential car had been when he saw Kennedy’s head explode.
Much of his anger, he explained, was due to Mark Lane. “He took my statements out of context and added a different meaning to them. Lane used my statement that a piece of the president’s skull ‘flew to the left’ and that it ‘came toward me’ to imply that that shot had been fired from the knoll. I did not say that a shot came from there.”
“But what you said about the piece of skull and how it moved toward you was correct, am I right?” I asked.
“Yes,” Brehm admitted. “I did make those statements.”
Still standing where Brehm had frozen me,
I gazed at where he said Kennedy’s car was positioned for the fatal head shot. In a direct line from there was the corner of the picket fence on the knoll. “What of the witnesses who claim they saw smoke from up there?” I pointed.
Brehm paused, gathering energy. “Come on over to my house,” he bellowed, “and my wife will cook you a Mexican dinner that’ll make you see smoke!”
I respectfully declined. His children snickered.
When I asked about the controversy concerning whether Kennedy’s throat wound was one of entrance or exit, Brehm suddenly ripped open his buttoned shirt and challenged me to identify which of the wounds that he received “in the war” indicated a bullet’s entry.
I respectfully declined. His children snickered.
“Why don’t you think you were questioned by the Warren Commission?” I asked. “Could it have been because you said the skull fragment moved back and towards you, perhaps in contradiction to a shot from behind?”
“What difference does that make?” Brehm asked in return. “I figure they didn’t need my testimony since the case was locked up anyway.” With this, Brehm gathered his children and began to walk away. He had had enough.
“At least my conclusions agree with those of the Commission lawyers,” he muttered over his shoulder, “and also those of Robert Kennedy.”
I ran to catch up, thanking Brehm for his time and trouble and assuring him that his comments had not fallen on deaf ears. Brehm said nothing as he faded into the darkness.
It bothered me that I had been pigeon-holed so swiftly. Perhaps because of unsavory tactics by Lane, he simply became antagonistic with any who sought answers. Perhaps he was upset that, as the closest witness, he wasn’t more in the limelight.
Perhaps he was soused.
Regardless, I thought a lot about him the rest of that night. As the plane took off later that morning from Love Field, I listed an explanatory letter to Brehm as one of the many things I would do in the weeks ahead. Then I finally fell asleep.
CHAPTER 9
April 1968
A mushrooming war in Vietnam, JFK and Martin Luther King murdered, then Bobby—what in the hell was going on from sea to shining sea?
Charles Brehm never replied to my letter. But Terry and I kept writing to each other, exchanging information, news clippings, and questions. I missed our nightly talks.
At least now I had the twenty-six volumes at my fingertips. And at least now I had time to search through them. I had joined the U.S. Naval Reserve—a less-likely group to end up in the war zone—and it was several months until I had to ship out for active duty.
Walther, Higgins, Brehm, Jarnagin, Holland,—the names kept haunting me. How many others were there? Who else should have been questioned but wasn’t? What other clues had been cast aside? It seemed incredible that the Warren Commission—publishers of the 1938 dental records of Jack Ruby’s mother1 and the testimony of a woman whose only relevance was that she knew someone in 1942 who had once babysat an infant Lee Oswald2—did not attach more importance to these overlooked people.
This was particularly odd when other evidence, including Kennedy’s backward head motion and the mass of people who ran to the knoll, so clearly indicated a need for further investigation. Take, for example, Margaret K. Hoover.
When the FBI interviewed her on November 28, 1963, she told agents about her discovery of a discarded piece of paper in her backyard. On that paper were the handwritten words Lee Oswald, Jack Ruby, Rubenstein, and Dallas, Texas.3 The paper also held the name of a nightclub and a six-digit telephone number.
This may not have been unusual, considering the historic events that were then only a week old. The problem was, she had found the paper with those titillating words a month before the assassination, in October 1963.
The FBI quite naturally swarmed over Mrs. Hoover’s residence in Martinsburg, Pennsylvania, only twenty miles from my hometown. Mrs. Hoover’s brother, Robert Steele, had tipped off authorities to his sister’s discovery.4
During her interview, Mrs. Hoover told the FBI she had also found an envelope that held a used Seaboard Airline Railroad Company ticket for a coach seat on a trip that left Miami, Florida on September 25, 1963, arriving in Washington, D.C. the next day. All of the items, she said, were discovered near where trash was routinely burned by the resident of an apartment in the same building where Mrs. Hoover lived. That resident was Dr. Julio Fernandez, a Cuban refugee and a local junior high school Spanish teacher.
Mrs. Hoover furnished the FBI with the actual envelope and ticket stub but, according to the interviewing agent, she was unable to locate the scrap of paper holding the names. She suggested that the FBI contact her daughter, who had also seen the paper.
Margaret Kay Kauffman, also of Martinsburg, confirmed her mother’s statement. She went so far as to detail the precise spot on the paper where the handwritten notations had appeared. Her description matched that given by Steele and Mrs. Hoover. But Mrs. Kauffman remembered more. The name of the nightclub, she thought, was the “Silver Bell or the Silver Slipper.”5
The FBI then interviewed Mrs. Kauffman’s husband, Gerald, who admitted being “very much concerned” about the goings-on regarding his wife and her mother.6 He disclosed that Mrs. Hoover “has been under severe mental stress for many years” as a result of marital difficulties and probably had made up the entire thing. His wife’s corroboration, he said, most likely was done simply to “pacify her mother.” He also suggested that the FBI re-interview his wife after he had a chance to talk with her, so she “could clarify the situation and more accurately describe what she had or had not seen on the paper exhibited to her by her mother, now that she had given it more thought.”7
When the FBI came knocking again, Mrs. Kauffman had indeed “given it more thought.” She changed her story. She now told agents that after “considerable thought,”8 she realized that the names Lee Oswald and Rubenstein were not written on the paper after all. The only thing she now was able to recall seeing was the name Jack Ruby and Dallas, Texas. She was no longer sure about seeing even that.9
After this flip-flop, the FBI wiped its hands of the whole matter and turned it over to the U.S. attorney’s office, which declined to take legal action against the women “due to the emotional instability of the persons involved.”10
The FBI also located Dr. Fernandez. He told agents on November 28, 1963, that he was definitely pro-American and anti-Castro, that while living in Cuba he had been the owner and editor of several magazines and newspapers, that he and his family had left the island in 1960 after becoming disenchanted with the Castro regime, and that when they first entered the United States they lived in Miami.11
He explained that the ticket Mrs. Hoover found was one used by his son to come north from Miami. Other than what he heard in the media, Dr. Fernandez said he knew nothing of Oswald or Ruby and had never been to Dallas.
I wrote Mrs. Hoover a letter the same day I uncovered these details in the twenty-six volumes.
“They told me [the] whole FBI force was in an uproar over my finding that paper,” she responded.12 “To say it upset me is putting it very mildly . . . I had so much fear at first that I only told my brother and my one daughter that saw the paper when I found it.”
Mrs. Hoover said she turned all the material she discovered over to the FBI, including the paper with the names on it. She had no clue why the FBI said she hadn’t done that. “I sure never [her emphasis] could believe Ruby and Oswald did not know each other as they said,” she wrote me, “or their names wouldn’t been on that paper together!”
She also discussed Dr. Fernandez. “He had worked in Washington, D.C. then moved here,” she said, “then later taught in high school here. He also said he had worked at CIA.”
Mrs. Hoover felt guilty about giving his name to the FBI, because his family “was so very nice to me,” she admitted. “I felt they were innocent of the murder, but sure felt they knew something about it. Especially by him being in Washington awh
ile and working for CIA and Florida also.” Curiously, nothing was mentioned in the FBI report of Fernandez once having worked in Washington, let alone in the intelligence community.
In the ensuing weeks, I sent Mrs. Hoover copies of the statements she had made to the FBI. Then suddenly, my letters, follow-up phone calls, and finally knocks on her door all went unanswered. So did my attempts to reach her daughter. Everyone had decided to stop talking.
But that wasn’t the end to the story.
Not long after my conversations with Margaret Hoover, the mailman delivered something strange.
“I am one of a group of independent investigators who has each been working on the case since 1964 and who cooperate occasionally for particular pieces of investigating. We are all cooperating fully with Jim Garrison and helping him in every way possible. . . . ”13
The letter came from the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. Its author was Gary Schoener, a Ph.D. candidate in clinical psychology and a serious researcher of the Kennedy assassination. He said he wrote because of my interest in Mrs. Hoover, whom he too had interviewed. Mrs. Hoover had told him about me.
Schoener offered ideas on what I should do, “since you seem interested in becoming active in investigating the case.” One was to get in touch with Vincent Salandria, a Philadelphia attorney. I had read about Salandria in several magazines. His interest centered on the medical evidence and Commission Exhibit 399. That was the famous “single bullet” credited with inflicting seven wounds to both Kennedy and Connally while remaining virtually pristine in appearance.
Schoener also requested copies of my personal research papers to determine how I could assist the growing number of independent researchers across the country. His letter was an open invitation to join an underground network of likeminded individuals, organized and working toward finding truths. I was flattered and immediately wrote to accept the deal.