The Girl on the Stairs

by Barry Ernest

Three hours and a dozen magazines later, I was finally escorted by the secretary through the hallways to Decker’s private sanctum. Weisberg was right about the doors, despite the delay in their opening.

  Decker was not the person I had imagined. I had read that as a younger man, he had been a tough cop, very opinionated and very courageous. At times and while unarmed himself, he was able to convince criminals to throw down their weapons by the authority of his voice alone.2

  But as he lifted himself up from behind his large desk to greet me, I noticed he had become frail after seventy years of life. His handshake was weak. He had moved beyond those Wild West ways.

  He motioned me to a nearby seat. He studied me momentarily from behind thick lenses in his spectacles. I was, in his eyes, like the suspect of a crime not yet committed.

  Another man sat silently in the shadows behind me in the corner of the office. He was not introduced. I could feel his eyes crawling up my back.

  “What can I do for you?” Decker finally asked. “I only have a few moments.”3 The ground rules had been set.

  I explained that I was doing research, as a student, into the JFK assassination and that I had a few simple questions. His only reply was a nod, indicating that he understood and was expecting me to go on without prompting. I decided to ease into it, even though my time was limited.

  “Why did you direct your men to the grassy-knoll area when the shots were first fired?”4

  He smiled slightly. He had heard that one many times. “A mistake” was all he said.

  “I don’t understand what you mean,” I answered.

  “Police Chief Curry was telling his men to go there. So did I, based on his initial response. But obviously, we both were wrong. The shots didn’t come from there, did they?”5

  He was still smiling, so I took his question to be rhetorical.

  “Did you place a deputy by the name of Harry Weatherford on the roof of the County Records Building with a rifle during the assassination?” This was another of Penn Jones’ ideas. He had accused Weatherford— had actually written editorials about it—of firing on the president from that rooftop position. Jones’ source for that scenario was none other than Deputy Sheriff Roger Craig, who claimed that Weatherford let slip his rooftop location and that Decker had placed him there, for security reasons.

  “No,” Decker replied.

  “But Roger Craig said you did.”

  “Roger Craig is a liar.” It sounded spiteful, but Decker said it in a gentle manner, still with that sly smile on his face.

  “You do not believe anything Craig has said?”

  “Nothing.”

  It was obvious Decker had heard this line of questioning before too. He seemed to be humoring me with his succinct responses. It was time for what Weisberg had sent me here for in the first place.

  “I know you have some personal papers or files regarding your end of the investigation into the president’s assassination,” I began, with all the casualness I could muster. “I wonder if I might be able to set up a time to examine them, maybe to read them and take some notes.”

  The smile immediately left Decker’s face. He shot a glance toward the man in the corner. I was tempted to look around but didn’t, figuring I’d feel the guy’s hands around my neck soon enough.

  Apparently, this was a new question, possibly from somewhere out in deep left field. Decker hesitated before replying. “I turned everything I had over to the Warren Commission.”

  When Weisberg first asked me to interview Decker, I spent some time reviewing the nintey-two pages of documents submitted by the sheriff to the Commission and printed in the twenty-six volumes.6 The majority were voluntary statements that witnesses had made to members of the Sheriff’s Office. Some were supplemental statements filed by deputies in which they reported their own locations at the time of the shooting and what they did immediately after.

  Included also was a nine-page statement by Decker himself, describing in his words what actions he took on that day, plus copies of two interviews of the sheriff conducted by the FBI. The content of those interviews concerned Decker’s unsuccessful attempt at transferring Oswald from the city to the county jail on the Sunday morning after the assassination.

  Was what the Warren Commission published all that Decker had in his possession? Wouldn’t the sheriff, whose own office figured prominently in the early stages of the investigation and whose deputies were present during many of the key moments that later became controversial, have had more? Weisberg thought so.

  And so I persisted. “You are saying that all of your personal files and papers, working files and notes, everything that you kept during your involvement in the investigation, every bit of that was turned over to the Warren Commission?”

  “All of it,” Decker replied.

  “What about any files you had containing photographs taken by sheriff’s deputies, or photos you may have acquired from witnesses? Were they also turned over to the Commission?”

  “Yes, they went to Washington too.”

  “Did you keep copies?”

  Decker stared hard at me, expressionless, now realizing what direction I was headed in. He glanced at his watch. “I’m really rather busy this afternoon and I’ve extended what little I had available,” he said. “I’m afraid we’ll have to end this here.”7

  I could do nothing other than thank him for his time. He came around from behind his desk and offered his limp hand again. Then he showed me to the door and told me to have a nice time while in town, as if I were a tourist admiring the city’s sights.

  The man in the corner moved only his eyes as he watched me leave.

  Sorry, Harold. I failed.

  “It Was Oswald”

  It wasn’t much better when I knocked at another office. The response I got was meek. “Come in.”

  When I did, Carroll Jarnagin glanced up from his desk with a smile. His pleasantness left when he recognized who had entered.

  “Remember me?”

  He reached into his desk drawer and quickly removed and opened a pack of cigarettes, extracting and then igniting a cigarette. I certainly brought out a most unhealthy reaction in this guy.

  He waved his free hand toward the chair, indicating I should sit. Jarnagin had done nothing to redecorate the place. It smelled and looked the same as it had when I was here last, five months ago.

  “I remember you,” he said.8 He proceeded to tell me my name, where I was from, and the exact date and time of our previous meeting. He brought forth details of my past I had not remembered telling him during the idle chatter I apparently had lapsed into while we had talked last March. Then he gave me a verbatim recitation of the questions I had asked him back then, and the answers he had provided, all without benefit of notes.

  The man had total recall.

  “So,” I began, “can I get you to talk a bit about seeing Oswald at the Carousel Club?”

  Jarnagin returned to his shell, puffing profusely on what seemed like an endless supply of cancer sticks.

  “How many deaths now?” he suddenly blurted out.

  “What?”

  “How many deaths of witnesses does Jones show now?”

  “I don’t really know,” I said honestly. “I haven’t been in touch with him yet.”

  “I’m sure it’s higher than the forty-five you mentioned the last time you were here.”

  I had forgotten the number.

  As usual, Jarnagin refused to answer my questions. He even declined my idea of simply nodding yes or no in lieu of a verbal response. After fifteen minutes of this nonsense, I got up to leave. Jarnagin raised his index finger and coughed out a plea.

  “Wait,” he gasped. “Please sit down.” He studied me a bit longer, then broke his silence.

  “It was Oswald I saw that night at the club.”

  I asked how he could be so sure. Was his eyesight as sharp as his memory?

  He said he was able to see the man distinctly, since Oswald occupied the booth next
to where Jarnagin was sitting, and based on the tantalizing conversation he heard, the attorney had begun to pay close attention. That was on October 4, 1963. When Oswald’s picture appeared on television and in the papers nearly seven weeks later, Jarnagin said he immediately recognized him as the man he had seen with Ruby.

  “Were there any other witnesses to what was being said?” I asked.

  “I was accompanied by a young woman,” he answered. “Her name was Shirley Mauldin, but she denies it now.”9

  Jarnagin said much of the conversation he overheard centered on a plot by Chicago gangsters to eliminate Kennedy. The plot was successful, he felt, because of Ruby’s connections to organized crime.

  “You’re not writing a book, am I right?” he asked.

  “No,” I said. “I’m here strictly for my own curiosity.”

  “Good,” he said, “because I’m afraid that if I talk publicly about it, they will get me too.” Jarnagin was concerned for his life because of a previous incident. During Jack Ruby’s trial in early 1964, Jarnagin said he was awakened in the middle of the night by a car idling just outside his bedroom window. As he drew the curtains aside to investigate, he noticed a hose attached to the exhaust pipe of the vehicle. The hose snaked its way over to the air-conditioning unit he had running in his window.

  Carbon-monoxide gas was filling his room.

  Whoever had set up the contraption must have discovered he was awake, Jarnagin said, because seconds later the car sped away, dragging the hose behind it.

  The next morning, Jarnagin found an empty can of ether sitting outside the window. He discovered that it too had been poured into his air-conditioning fan. Had he not been awakened, he would have been overcome by the combined fumes.

  Fortunately, the only consequence was a three-day headache.

  Did he associate the attempt on his life with what he had seen at the Carousel Club?

  “Most definitely,” he replied. “I have absolutely no other reason for why it occurred.”

  “And you never told any of this to the Warren Commission?”

  “They never contacted me,” Jarnagin answered. “I notified the FBI right after the assassination about what I had seen and heard at Ruby’s club, but I guess they weren’t interested either. Other than Penn Jones, you’re the only person I’ve really talked to.”

  On December 5, 1963, Jarnagin sent the FBI an eight-page statement of his encounter. It ended up in the twenty-six volumes.10 Even though the Commission refused to question Jarnagin, it was still interested in what he had to say.

  On June 8, 1964, the Commission asked Dallas District Attorney Henry Wade if he remembered the name of an attorney he had previously met who claimed to have seen Oswald and Ruby together.

  Wade: That, I can’t think of his name, some of you all may know it, but he is a lawyer there in Dallas.11 . . .

  [Commission General Counsel J. Lee] Rankin: Is the lawyer that you referred to . . . Carroll Jarnegan [sic]?

  Wade: Carroll Jarnegan is his name; yes sir.12

  Wade said he met Jarnagin while prosecuting Ruby for Oswald’s murder. He described him as one of “some 8 to 10 witnesses” who came forward with information about a possible connection between the two.13 According to Wade, Jarnagin had approached him with an offer to serve as a witness during the trial.

  Wade: He told me this is what happened, and I said, “I can’t put you on the stand without I am satisfied you are telling the truth because,” I said, “We have got a good case here, and if they prove we are putting a lying witness on the stand, we might hurt us,” and I said, “The only thing I know to do I won’t put you on the stand but to take a polygraph to see if you are telling the truth or not.”

  He said, “I would be glad to.” . . .

  This was during the trial actually, and then when the man called me he took a lie detector. There was no truth in it. That he was in the place. He was in the place, in Ruby’s Carousel, but that none of this conversation took place.14 . . .

  Rankin: You found that was not anything you could rely on.

  Wade: I didn’t use him as a witness and after giving him the polygraph I was satisfied that he was imagining it. I think he was sincere, I don’t think he was trying—I don’t think he was trying to be a hero or anything. I think he really thought about it so much I think he thought that it happened, but the polygraph indicated otherwise.15

  I asked Jarnagin why he chose to talk to the district attorney if he feared for his life.

  “I thought I could help,” Jarnagin replied. “And the attempt on my life did not occur until after I had offered my information to Henry Wade.”

  “And the polygraph test?” I asked. “Wade told the Commission it showed you were not telling the truth.”

  Jarnagin shrugged. “What can I say? The polygraph is notoriously unreliable . . . and I was very nervous. I was aware of how the government was describing the relationship between Ruby and Oswald, and I knew different.”

  Suddenly, Jarnagin went mute, perhaps sensing he had said enough, or too much. I decided to leave after one final question.

  “How do you know, in all honesty and with such certainty, without any doubt at all, that the man you saw talking with Jack Ruby that night was Lee Oswald? Could you possibly have been mistaken?”

  The attorney took a final, long puff on his cigarette, then slowly snuffed out what remained of it in the ashtray. He leaned back in his chair, clasped his hands behind his head, and, without expression, looked me squarely in the eyes for what seemed like several minutes.

  “It was Oswald,” he answered. “I know it was him.”

  Penn Jones answered his phone on the first ring. I told him I was back snooping around again and brought him up to date. Then I asked if he knew where I could find Roger Craig.

  “He’s standing right here,” Jones answered. “Let me put him on.”16

  Within seconds, I was talking with the man who was at the center of a controversy over what he had seen on the day of the assassination. I asked for an interview. He covered the mouthpiece, mumbled something, and, in a few moments, came back on the line.

  “Penn says you’re OK,” Craig said, “so how about this Sunday?”

  He agreed to meet me in the lobby of my hotel at noon.

  Then I called Austin Miller. Never summoned as a witness, he was another of those who claimed he observed smoke on the grassy knoll.

  “I have discussed this with so many people,” he told me, moments into our conversation, “and I’m getting very tired of doing so.”17

  After I convinced him I was different, Miller sighed. He said it definitely was smoke he saw “around the trees in the corner of the picket fence on the grassy knoll.”

  “Could it have been steam or some kind of exhaust, as some think?”

  “No,” he firmly replied.

  Miller said he felt that there had been three shots and that he saw the smoke just as he heard the third shot. Like S. M. Holland, Miller said he ran behind the fence on the knoll and up to where he had seen the smoke. He said it took him no more than a minute to get there, and although there were plenty of private cars in the parking lot, he saw no one behind the fence.

  “Did you find any footprints there?”

  Miller was silent. If it weren’t for his steady breathing, I’d have thought he left the phone.

  “Do you have a problem with that question?” Miller remained quiet. His silence was eerie.

  I quickly started telling him that I had spoken to Holland and that he and I may be getting together to retrace Holland’s steps. I invited Miller to accompany us.

  He refused my offer. Then he hung up.

  The Groundskeeper of Dealey Plaza

  When I phoned Holland the next day, he remembered who I was and agreed to meet me on the Triple Underpass during his lunch hour.

  As I stood watching traffic in Dealey Plaza an hour before Holland was to arrive, my attention was drawn to a man in the distance raking the lawn along the s
ide of the grassy knoll. Solitary, he wore the overalls of a gardener and a wide-brimmed hat to ward off the hot rays of the sun. As I made my way closer, his overalls became the uniform of a city worker. I met his eyes and said hello.

  “Are you Emmett Hudson?” I asked.

  He stared at me for a moment, wondering no doubt how a young punk like me would know the name of the groundskeeper of Dealey Plaza.

  “Do I know you?” he answered.

  Hudson revealed in his July 22, 1964, Commission testimony that something strange had happened in Dealey Plaza after the assassination. Certain road signs once positioned along Elm Street had been mysteriously removed or relocated. Critics felt this was deliberately done to make accurate reconstructions of the assassination more difficult, if not impossible.

  Of more interest to me was where this man stood as the shots rang out.

  Hudson was watching from an elevated position on the steps leading from the sidewalk along the north side of Elm Street up to the monument where Zapruder took his famous film. If a shot were fired from the knoll, it would have passed directly over his head.

  In a photograph taken by bystander Mary Moorman, Hudson can be seen standing in the background, overlooking the stricken president. The corner of the picket fence, where Holland and Miller had seen drifting smoke, is directly behind and slightly above Hudson’s left shoulder.

  On November 22, 1963, Hudson submitted a signed affidavit to the Sheriff’s Department. He stated he heard three shots and they “definitely came from behind and above me.”18

  There was the rub. “Behind and above me” implied the knoll.

  The FBI interviewed him again on November 25, at which time “Hudson said the shots sounded as if they were fired over his head and from some position to the left of where he was standing.” The report continued, “In other words, the shots sounded as if they were fired by someone at a position which was behind him, which was above him, and which was to his left.”19

  When Commission attorney Wesley Liebeler questioned him in Dallas on July 22, 1964, Hudson reiterated what he had told the FBI eight months earlier.

  Hudson: And when that third shot rung out and when I was close to the ground—you could tell the shot was coming from above and kind of behind.