The Girl on the Stairs

by Barry Ernest

  Liebeler: How could you tell that?

  Hudson: Well, just the sound of it.

  Liebeler: You heard it come from sort of behind the motorcade and then above?

  Hudson: Yes; I don’t know if you have ever laid down close to the ground, you know, when you heard the reports coming, but it’s a whole lot plainer than it is when you are standing up in the air.20

  Suddenly, the source of gunfire was no longer behind and above Hudson but behind and above the motorcade.

  Liebeler: After you heard these three shots and saw the President get hit in the head, you turned around and you ran up on the little knoll there and you got away.

  Hudson: Yes.

  Liebeler: While you were standing there, did you ever look up towards the railroad tracks there where they went across the triple underpass?

  Hudson: No, sir; while I was laying there I didn’t—I was looking down towards Elm Street.

  Liebeler: So, you never looked up towards the railroad tracks that went across the underpass?

  Hudson: No, sir.

  Liebeler: But you are quite sure in your own mind that the shots came from the rear of the President’s car and above it; is that correct?

  Hudson: Yes.

  Liebeler: Did you have any idea that they might have come from the Texas School Book Depository Building?

  Hudson: Well, it sounded like it was high, you know, from above and kind of behind like—in other words, to the left.

  Liebeler: And that would have fit in with the Texas School Book Depository, wouldn’t it?

  Hudson: Yes.

  Liebeler: Did you look up there and see if you could see anybody?

  Hudson: No, sir; I didn’t. I never thought about looking up that way, to tell you the truth about it.21

  Notwithstanding Liebeler’s leading comment as to where the shots “would have fit in,” it seemed clear Hudson had changed his initial thinking about the direction of the shots.

  With all that in mind, I approached Hudson that morning in hopes he would clarify this very point. As with most other witnesses, the assassination had made an indelible impression on his memory.

  “Can you spare a moment to show me where you were standing that day?” I asked, after explaining how I knew him.22

  Hudson seemed to relish the opportunity for a break. He mopped his wet forehead with his handkerchief and slowly walked over to the steps leading up the knoll. He stopped exactly where the Moorman photograph showed him standing. He told me of the excitement of seeing the president, then the horror of watching as Kennedy’s skull exploded a mere sixty feet in front of him.

  When I inquired about the shots, he repeated what he had said to the Commission: they sounded as if they came from above, behind, and to the left.

  “Above, behind, and to the left of what?” I asked.

  “Above and behind the motorcade, and to the left of me,” Hudson replied.

  “But on the day of the assassination, you signed an affidavit that said the shots seemed to come from above and behind you. You said, ‘Behind and above me.’ And in your FBI interview, you said you felt the shots came from over your head.”

  Hudson remained silent.

  “You said you heard three shots,” I continued. “Would you tell me about them?”

  “Well, there were definitely three that I heard,” he explained. “But one of them was a bit unusual.”

  “What do you mean, ‘unusual’?”

  “Well, it sounded different from the others. It was louder, sharper, cleaner than the others. And two of them was close together, like, bang . . . bang, bang.”

  “Is that what you told the Commission lawyer?”

  Hudson gave me a knowing smile. I’m sure he sensed by now that I already knew what he had told the Commission: that the three shots had been evenly spaced.23

  “I stand by what I just said,” he replied.

  “So, during your testimony you clarified your earlier statements to say you felt the shots were actually coming from above and behind the president’s car. Does that mean from the Depository?”

  “No, but that is what the Commission wanted me to say,” Hudson answered quickly.

  “The Commission wanted you to say?”

  “I never said it was from the Depository building,” Hudson explained. “All I said was ‘behind, above, and to the left.’ That lawyer put those other words in there. He said something about what I was saying would include the Depository, wouldn’t it? And I said, ‘Right, it would include it.’ But I never said they actually came from that building.”

  “And you got the impression the lawyer for some reason wanted you to say the shots came from the Depository?”

  “Definitely,” Hudson answered. “He didn’t come out and say that, but you could tell by his tone and the way he asked his questions. I said they sounded like they came from above, behind, and to the left. We were off the record so many times on this . . . and other things.24 He’s the one who brought up the Depository. They could’ve come from there, I don’t know, but I never said they did.”

  “Could a shot have come from the picket fence?” I ventured.

  “I don’t know,” Hudson replied, after a pause. “I really don’t. There was so much excitement and it all happened so fast, I’m just not sure.”

  I nodded my head and met his gaze.

  “I’m getting old, son,” he said, resignedly. “Almost retired now. I don’t need all this.” He smiled at me for a long moment and stared hard into my eyes, as if trying to convey something telepathically. Then he ambled off to continue his simple job, and his quiet life.

  As I sat on the knoll pondering Hudson’s words, I heard my name called from the sidewalk below. It was Holland. He was alone, his bodyguards either having the day off or no longer deemed necessary.

  We walked to the top of the Triple Underpass. He positioned me at the exact spot he stood that warm November day. He had a commanding panorama: the motorcade coming directly at him, the Depository looming behind, the picket fence and grassy knoll to his immediate left. He had a box seat for sure.

  Holland said he watched as the wounded president passed directly beneath him into the Triple Underpass. He had seen a puff of smoke on the knoll when Kennedy was shot in the head. He was curious. So he turned in that direction—to his left—and ran from the bridge, around the corner to his right, and onto the knoll, working his way behind the fence line.

  I asked if he would reconstruct his actions for me. He agreed, and I set my stopwatch, following his every move.

  Within seconds, at a sprint, he had reached the westernmost end of the picket fence, a position that offered a view of the parking area atop the knoll. He then deliberately slowed down, trying to duplicate the amount of extra time it had taken him to circumvent the large volume of cars parked in that lot on the day of the assassination.

  In just under a minute, we had reached the corner of the fence where Holland said he had seen smoke. I noticed during our entire reenactment that Holland had kept his eyes glued to his final destination. I asked if he had done the same thing on November 22.

  “I did,” he replied. “As soon as I could get a full view of that corner, my eyes were on it.”25

  “What did you see?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “No one was there, so I started scanning over the cars and railroad yards beyond. No one was there either. Then as I got closer to the corner, the policemen started piling in and all the spectators came running up.”26

  “As quickly as you got here,” I asked, “don’t you find it surprising that no one was around?”

  “Not really,” he answered. “It just means whoever it was got away quickly, perhaps by blending in with the crowd, but more likely, by being hidden in one of these cars.”

  “And they did so without leaving a single piece of physical evidence?”

  “There weren’t any fingerprints or shells that I know of, if that’s what you’re talking about,” he said. “But someone had been
here.”

  He marked off about a five-foot area directly behind the fence and slightly west of the corner. This, he said, was where he found numerous footprints in the soft mud, and the remains of recently smoked cigarettes. “Someone had been here,” Holland repeated. “Do you know of anyone in everything you’ve read so far who has come forward to say they witnessed the assassination from behind this fence?”

  I stared over the fence to the street below, lost in thought. The lines all seemed to converge here: Holland, Miller, and others looking from the underpass; Lee Bowers staring from where he was on duty in the railroad tower above and behind this fence, seeing two men at this precise spot; Mary Moorman’s camera, capturing what appeared to be someone’s head peeking over the fence as Kennedy was hit in the foreground; the mass of people who ran here after the shooting.27 In there too was Emmett Hudson.

  Holland briefly broke the spell, saying something about being late for work. I heard myself thanking him.28

  Was it all just coincidence?

  Deputy Sheriff Roger Craig

  As he walked into the lobby that Sunday, I recognized him instantly, despite his casual attire. Roger Craig refused to talk with me in the hotel. In fact, he wanted out of the city limits of Dallas . . . ASAP. Therefore, we’d have to take a ride.

  I didn’t question his judgment; I merely slid into the front seat of his car. Craig got behind the wheel, started the engine, and furtively looked into the rearview mirror. Then he scanned the front as if expecting something—or someone—to suddenly pop up.

  What had I gotten myself into now?

  Thirty minutes later, after a cat-and-mouse ride through the city and who knows how many suburbs, we pulled up in front of a nice home on a quiet, treelined street. It was his sister’s. We would be safe here, he said. Safe from what? I wondered.

  Sis apparently had advance warning. She wasn’t surprised as we entered the front door unannounced. She offered me a fleeting hello as she hurried out of the room, not to be seen again that afternoon.

  Craig and I ended up at the kitchen table. I pulled out my tape recorder.

  The first thing I wanted was an explanation for the secretiveness. Craig said he was “not well liked anymore” by many members of the Dallas Police and Sheriff’s departments. He was, in their eyes, a traitor. He had to be cautious.29

  “My troubles,” he emphasized, “really started about the latter part of 1965, when my name came out in several books critical of the Warren Commission. The newspaper reporters and various people had come down and wanted to talk to me, and [Sheriff Bill] Decker gave me strict orders not to talk to anybody about it, to keep my mouth shut.”

  His problems with Decker involved “just little petty things that didn’t amount to anything,” Craig said. “And [on] July 4, 1967, he fired me.”

  Three months later, at the urging of Penn Jones, Craig was in New Orleans helping Jim Garrison. He returned to Dallas in late October.

  “On the first day of November, I got a call from a friend of mine who was a nightclub owner,” Craig said. The friend wanted to meet Craig in east Dallas at nine that morning. “So I went to the location and waited till about 10 or 10:15 and he finally showed up.”

  Craig said two vehicles followed him to the meeting site.

  “The so-called friend of mine arrived and we went over and had coffee at a coffee shop just across the street from his club. One of the men [tailing Craig] followed us into the café and when we got ready to leave, he got up and left before us. We walked outside—this was about 10:30—and we walked to the corner and the light was red against us, so we couldn’t cross. And I stepped down from the curb and into the street and as I stepped down my friend fell on the ground and then a shot rang out from behind. I didn’t look around. I just got in my car and drove off.”

  What I really wanted to know about was Oswald’s “escape.”

  “In regards to Oswald getting into the light green Rambler station wagon, I guess it was about twelve to fifteen minutes after the first shot was fired. Oswald came running down the grassy knoll from the direction of the School Book Depository, and there was a light green Rambler station wagon coming west on Elm Street, driven by a dark-complected Latin American, wearing a tan jacket. Oswald whistled and the car pulled over to the curb, stopped, Oswald got in it, and the two of them drove off west on Elm Street.

  “I attempted to stop the car, but due to the traffic, I couldn’t get across the street.” At its closest point, Craig said the car was seven or eight feet away from him.

  Several hours later that day, Craig stated he saw Oswald again. “Approximately 5 P.M. . . . I went to Captain Fritz’s office to identify the suspect as the one I saw enter the Rambler station wagon. Captain Fritz and myself entered the room. Oswald was sitting behind the desk to our right. Fritz said, ‘Is this the man?’ pointing to Oswald. And I replied it was. And Fritz, directing his question to Oswald, said, ‘This man,’ pointing to me, ‘saw you leave the building.’ Oswald replied to Fritz, ‘I told you people I did.’ Fritz, trying to calm Oswald down, said to him, ‘Now take it easy, son. We’re just trying to find out what happened. What about the car?’

  “Now Fritz distinctly said ‘car,’ at which time Oswald became very excited and replied, ‘That station wagon belongs to Mrs. Paine—don’t try to drag her into this.’30 And then he very disgustedly sat back in his chair and said, ‘Everybody will know who I am now.’ And that was the end of my conversation with Will Fritz and Lee Harvey Oswald.”

  I asked Craig if he was sure the running man was Oswald.

  “It was Oswald,” he replied. “He was wearing a faded light-blue work shirt and medium-blue work pants, and his hair was very blown. It was a fairly windy day; it was kind of bushy.”31

  After Craig identified the car to several sheriff’s deputies, one of them “went over to Ruth Paine’s house to check it out, and in the driveway was parked a light-green Rambler station wagon, identical to the one I had described,” he said. “And this, of course, was not accepted by the Warren Commission. I don’t know why.”

  Part of the Commission’s problem with Craig stemmed from his claim that both he and Captain Fritz confronted Oswald in Fritz’s office. Fritz denied Craig was present. In a June 9, 1964, signed affidavit submitted to the Commission, Fritz said he recalled a man coming to his outer office on the afternoon of the assassination and “telling me a story about seeing Oswald leaving the building.”32 At the time, according to Fritz, Oswald was seated behind a closed door in his adjacent office.

  But Fritz said he did not remember inviting that man in to take a look at Oswald, a decision hard to imagine in light of the “story” that man had just told.

  “The Commission could not accept important elements of Craig’s testimony,” the Warren Report concluded.33

  According to the Report, Craig may well have seen a man get into a “white Rambler station wagon 15 or 20 minutes after the shooting and travel west on Elm Street, but the Commission concluded that this man was not Lee Harvey Oswald, because of the overwhelming evidence that Oswald was far away from the building by that time.”34

  Craig told me that when he read his testimony in the twenty-six volumes, he discovered it had been “altered and key words have been taken out to make it read different than it should.” He continued, “When [Commission attorney David] Belin interviewed me, he asked me if the car had out-of-state plates or Texas plates. And I said that they were not the same color as Texas plates. And he took the word ‘not’ out, so this completely changes that particular sentence. And what makes this so important is that [at] Ruth Paine’s house, the Rambler station wagon parked in her yard did have out-of-state plates, at that time. And then he changed the color of the car from green to white, changed the color of the man’s jacket driving the car from tan to green, so he just rearranged the car and the jacket, and just several things like that. I believe fourteen times is what I counted in the twenty-six volumes that they had changed my testimony and jus
t by leaving out key words or changing colors and so forth.”

  If true, this was amazing stuff. But was it true?

  “When Belin interrogated me in reference to my testimony, he would ask me certain questions and, whenever an important question would come up, such as a description of clothing or a time element or something that he had to know what my answer was beforehand, he would turn off the recorder and instruct the stenographer to stop taking notes. Then he would ask the question, and if the answer satisfied him, he would turn the recorder back on, instruct the stenographer to start writing again, and he would ask me the same question, and I would answer it. However, while the recorder was off, if the answer did not satisfy him or he wasn’t happy with it, he would turn the recorder back on and instruct the stenographer to start writing again and then he would ask me a completely different question.

  “In my testimony, there is no notation, ‘off the record.’ These were simply done at Belin’s own will. He just took it upon himself apparently, but there’s no notation on there that says, ‘off-the-record conversation’ or ‘off-the-record questions.’”

  A man who seemed to be everywhere, Craig also participated in a search of the sixth floor. He was present when the spent cartridge cases and rifle were found. “The cartridges were found in the southeast corner of the building, approximately five feet from the window,” he explained. “They were lined up uniformly, no more than two and one-half to three inches from each other . . . all facing the same direction.”

  Craig said the neat and consistent positioning indicated to him that the shells had been placed there rather than ejected from a rifle.

  “There also were no black marks around the opening of the cartridges, which is usually left when a cartridge is fired from any kind of weapon. You get powder burns on the edge. There were no powder burns on these cartridges.”

  In the sniper’s nest, the cartons had been arranged to “rest something, such as a rifle, on these boxes and possibly steady yourself,” Craig said. “There were no other boxes directly behind until, oh, for fifteen or twenty feet. Lying in the far east corner was a sack containing some chicken bones.”