The Girl on the Stairs

by Barry Ernest

  Coupled with the four or five minutes she said she spent outside the building, that meant she would have been near the front entrance to the Depository approximately six or seven minutes after the assassination, or about 12:36 or 12:37.

  Miss Adams testified that when she arrived there, she saw fellow employees Avery Davis and Joe Molina. Molina and Mrs. Davis told the FBI they remained outside the Depository for only a short while before going back inside.17 If Miss Adams saw those two, she would have had to get to the front entrance before they reentered the building.

  Even more interesting was what Miss Adams said she heard when she arrived at the front steps. A police radio was squawking out a broadcast that the shots may have come from the second or fourth floor of the Depository. Those words startled her, she said, because she had been standing behind an open fourth-floor window.

  One has only to check a transcript of the police radio log printed in the twenty-six volumes to find this intriguing notation: “We have information the shots came from the fifth or fourth floor of the book Depository Store.”18 That broadcast was made at 12:38 P.M.

  That was the transmission Miss Adams heard. No other police broadcast either before or after 12:38 mentions the fourth floor.

  Although the Commission gave the impression of indifference to Miss Adams and the timing of her trek down the stairs—failing to conduct the necessary tests, failing to interview others who easily could have resolved the matter, dismissing her words in such a cavalier way—she did generate some behind-the-scenes concern. In his internal memorandum listing things to be done in his assigned area of investigation, David Belin wrote that he planned to “pin down” the timing of Miss Adams’ descent. Then, less than three weeks before the Warren Report was publicly issued in September 1964, Commission staffer Wesley Liebeler played devil’s advocate. He wrote a controversial and stinging twenty-six-page memorandum, taking jabs at the evidence used to tie Oswald to the crime.

  One of his swipes involved the way the Commission had handled Miss Adams. “After two paragraphs of excellent analysis I am convinced that Victoria Adams either came down the stairs before or after Oswald did and it is clear that that is so because we know that Oswald came down the stairs and not the elevator,” Liebeler wrote. “I still do not understand, however, how the fact that Victoria Adams came down the stairs before or after Oswald did show that Oswald came down the stairs. If the idea is to show that Adams was not on the stairway when Oswald was, I am not convinced by the analysis or speculation in these two paragraphs. Furthermore, if that is the idea it is not clearly set forth.”19

  Liebeler then offered a revision he thought might clarify the point. “How about a first sentence like: ‘Victoria Adams testified that she came down the stairway, within about 1 minute after the shots, from the fourth floor to the first floor where she encountered two Depository employees—Bill Shelley and Billy Lovelady. If Miss Adams was on the stairway at that time, the question is raised as to why she did not see Oswald.’”20

  That was in fact the key question. It was the one I personally wanted to ask. But after two trips to Dallas, I was no closer to finding the woman who could help me answer it.

  CHAPTER 13

  September 1966-August 1975

  It was while living in California that Miss Adams decided to go back to school and acquire a degree in general education. She graduated with high honors. Then she elected to move into the real-estate field. She worked full time while continuing her undergraduate studies at night. Eventually, she would graduate summa cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in business administration.

  It had taken a lot of hard work and personal sacrifice, but she had finally pulled herself up.

  It was not quite as easy to shake the memories of Dallas, however. Thoughts of what she had witnessed in Dealey Plaza still haunted her.

  One day, while wandering along the bookshelves of a local public library, she spied a set of the twenty-six volumes. Curiosity prevailed once again. Turning to the sixth volume, she read the words she had offered—what was it now, some two or three years ago?—to that visiting Commission lawyer.

  She could not believe what she saw.

  She remembered being given the opportunity in Dallas to make corrections to any spelling or grammatical errors she found in her official testimony. In fact, someone had hand-delivered a copy of it right to her office, just for that very purpose. A wordsmith and nitpicker with the English language, she had found several typographical mistakes and had made the necessary changes.

  She now discovered that each one of the errors had gone uncorrected. The mistakes left standing, she now realized, made her look stupid.

  And why did it say at the end of her testimony that she waived her right to review her testimony when that is not what had happened? She did review her statement. She did make corrections, even if it had been for naught.

  There was that Shelley and Lovelady stuff again too. Not only had there been a reference made to them in the Warren Report—saying that she had seen them on the first floor—but now words to the same effect were mysteriously in her own testimony. She was quoted in her testimony as saying to those two men, “The president has been shot.”

  She thought back, long and hard, but she was certain neither Shelley nor Lovelady were on the first floor when she arrived there. There was a guy—a black guy standing near the elevators—to whom she had made that comment as she and Sandra Styles ran out the back door. But Shelley and Lovelady? No, that just wasn’t right.

  Why were they saying she talked with two men who weren’t there?

  She didn’t even recall seeing the Shelley/Lovelady passage in the copy of the testimony she had been given to review back in Dallas that day.

  What was going on here?

  Her husband by now had become an avid reader of all things assassination. He convinced her that she should remain quiet about her background. Too many people were dying. It would be much safer.

  That attitude changed when Mark Lane came to town.

  Miss Adams had not read Lane’s book. But she had heard of him. So she and her husband decided to attend a lecture Lane was giving at the Hotel del Coronado. Her husband thought she should introduce herself to Lane afterward.

  At that meeting, Lane seemed nice, interested, and apologetic that he hadn’t found her early enough to include her story in his video version of Rush to Judgment. Yet Lane was concerned only with her sighting of the man she thought had been Jack Ruby, not her trip down the stairs—or even when it had occurred. He showed her a picture of Ruby standing in Dealey Plaza and told her the government had purposely cropped that picture so that only a part of him could be seen in the photograph.

  Miss Adams could not figure out why that was so important.

  Then he invited her to accompany him onto the Mort Sahl television show in Los Angeles. Sahl had a fascination with the assassination, Lane said, and would be interested in hearing her story.

  Miss Adams felt somewhat safe, enough so to reason that this perhaps was her opportunity. This was her chance to rid herself of the spirits that had haunted her for all these years, to finally square things with the truth, to tell it like it really was. And so she agreed.

  On camera a few weeks later, she went through the story one more time: how she left the window after the shots were fired, how she heard no one on the stairs; how she thought she saw Ruby in the crowds. But Lane and Sahl were concerned only with the latter and why Ruby happened to be where he said he wasn’t. They didn’t want to know about anything else, constantly interrupting her and bringing her back to Ruby.

  She couldn’t wait to get off the show. Meeting them both had not impressed Miss Adams. They didn’t want her story; neither did the government. She vowed to not let herself fall into a trap like this ever again.

  And so, she simply stopped talking.

  CHAPTER 14

  August 1968-March 1969

  The first thing I noticed as Gary Schoener approached was that he
still suffered the effects of the mugging he had endured in a Minneapolis alley months earlier. He walked with a slight limp, his one eye remained puffy, and his face was bruised and scarred. He otherwise looked like the academic he was: elbow patches on his sport coat and hair that hid his ears and touched his shirt collar.

  Schoener was at home in Philadelphia, recuperating. Despite what others were saying, he felt there was no connection between the attack on him and the publicity his assassination research was generating.

  I, on the other hand, was spending my first month of active duty in the naval yards there. We decided to finally get together one evening to discuss our mutual interest.

  He gave me a pile of documents to examine, rattled off a list of areas that I should continue researching, and suggested I visit Vincent Salandria, a local attorney. But he knew nothing of the whereabouts of Victoria Adams.

  He listened intently as I detailed my search for her. You’ll find her one day, he told me, if you keep trying. I wasn’t so sure.

  I admired Schoener a great deal. He was intelligent, detail oriented, careful in his analysis, and caring enough to gently correct me when I made errors of fact during our conversations. He certainly was not a “kook,” as many Commission critics were being labeled.

  The next night I took a bus to the street Salandria lived on, not far from center city. The sidewalk was crowded by fashionable red-brick townhomes that seemed connected in an endless chain, and I began searching for numbers on doors. When I came to the one that was penciled on my slip of paper, I walked up the steps and knocked.

  There was no answer. As I turned to leave, I noticed a man watching me from under a neighboring tree against which the dog he was walking was relieving himself. Unaccustomed I’m sure to seeing someone in a sailor suit standing on any of these doorsteps, he asked if he could be of assistance. I told him I was looking for Vince Salandria’s residence. I had found it, he informed me, but he knew for a fact the homeowner had stepped out.

  “Are you a friend of his?” the man inquired.

  I told him I wouldn’t know Salandria if I saw him standing on the sidewalk.1 “A friend of mine actually recommended I stop by and visit.”

  “And would that friend of yours be Gary Schoener?” I must have been looking at him with narrowed eyes by now, for he laughed slightly and said, “I’m Vince Salandria. Nowadays, you can never be too sure.”2

  I tagged along as he and his dog meandered through the neighborhood streets. He continued his questioning, only now not as double-edged. He was curious about my background, whom I had interviewed, and what areas I was researching. He spoke favorably of Weisberg and Jones and seemed especially fascinated when I brought up my interviews with Roger Craig, Carroll Jarnagin, and S. M. Holland.

  But he knew nothing of the whereabouts of Victoria Adams.

  In his book-lined study an hour later, we drank iced teas and discussed his work. He said he had no doubt that Kennedy was eliminated as the result of a very sophisticated conspiracy and cover-up and that elements of our own government were involved. An event like this was not unusual in other countries, he continued, but was foreign on American soil.

  This country, he emphasized, was no longer controlled by the populace but, rather, by the elite.

  Salandria was different from Weisberg and Jones. He was dogmatic and unrelenting. He had made up his mind already, and he had no time for those who disagreed. And he was vitriolic about Arlen Specter, another Philadelphia lawyer. Specter served on the Warren Commission staff and was credited with originating the highly controversial “single-bullet” theory.

  As I left at 1 A.M., Salandria handed me a stack of reprints of magazine articles he had written. He wanted me to read them, then return to discuss what I thought. I assured him I would.

  But I never got the chance.

  In one of his earlier letters, Weisberg informed me of his long and frustrating search for President Kennedy’s official death certificate. He couldn’t find it at the National Archives, and he felt that its absence was suspicious. Since the autopsy on Kennedy had been performed at the Bethesda Naval Hospital, Weisberg thought the certificate might be on file there. Since I was in the navy, he believed I’d have better luck finding out.

  It was all I needed to pursue this, his latest assignment.

  I too inquired at the Archives. I was told the document could not be found and was not listed in the official index of available papers. Next, I wrote to offices of the navy in the Department of Defense and to the Bethesda Naval Hospital.

  I turned up nothing.

  Those letters raised a few feathers on lapel clusters, however. Word of what I had done was passed through military channels.

  One afternoon several weeks later, I was summoned to the Office of Personnel. A captain handed me copies of the letters I had sent to the DOD and Bethesda. When I admitted they were mine, I was told my behavior was “inappropriate” for a member of the armed services.

  My face got red.

  The captain was more interested in my nose. Keep it, he said, out of something that is none of my business. It would be in my best interests, he advised, to cease such efforts—immediately!

  And by the way, he continued, my stay in Philadelphia was being cut short. My orders had been expedited. I would be leaving the next morning for an aircraft carrier berthed in Portsmouth, Virginia. The meeting was over.

  “Possibly you’d better have a different extra-curricular activity for a while,” Weisberg wrote when I updated him.3 Thanks, Harold.

  By the fall of 1968, the underground network of fellow researchers was spreading. There were Salandria in Pennsylvania, Schoener in Minnesota, Weisberg in Maryland, and Jones in Texas. I was corresponding too with a young UCLA graduate student named David Lifton, who was part of the grapevine and was seeking my help in the Archives.

  We were freely sharing information, exchanging copies of our personal papers, comparing notes and ideas, and helping each other. There was no competition amongst us; rather just a collective goal of seeking truths. It felt good to be involved.

  The mail mischief was continuing, however, with the occasional letters to and from fellow researchers being opened and crudely resealed during transit. A car had followed me as I walked home from a camera shop after picking up copies of an important photograph uncovered in yet another Weisberg assignment. Even my telephone had been tapped. I picked up the receiver one day and briefly heard a recording of a previous conversation I’d had with Weisberg. Someone had pressed the wrong button.

  If it weren’t for the fact these events were real, I’d have thought I’d slipped into paranoia.

  I was gaining some fame as well. When my hometown paper, the Altoona Mirror, began publishing my letters to the editor about the assassination, I attracted a local following. Invitations to radio talk shows began to arrive.

  The experience was exhilarating, and I did not want to be out of this loop. So when Captain Bligh as much as told me to cease and desist in his Philadelphia office that day, it took me only seconds to reach a decision.

  Damn the torpedoes. My “extracurricular activities” were my business, and I would continue them, even while still in the navy.

  Yet the National Archives was a long haul from Portsmouth, Virginia. So sometimes I’d use the bus to get there. Occasionally I’d travel with shipmates heading in that direction. More often, it was by predawn hitchhiking on northbound I-95. I’d pay to have somebody stand my duty. I’d work double duty just to get the next day off. I’d use up accumulated leave.

  But somehow, someway, I’d get to my destination, if only for a few hours of research. There were secrets hidden in the Archives, and I intended to keep looking for them.

  Birth of a Notion: The Single-Bullet Theory

  The Warren Report concluded that President Kennedy received a nonfatal wound by a bullet that entered the lower portion of the back of his neck, passed through his neck, and exited from just below the Adam’s apple of his throat
. This bullet went on to shatter bones and inflict five additional wounds in Governor Connally before coming to rest in his thigh. From there it popped out and was discovered on a stretcher. The bullet, later known as Commission Exhibit 399, had minimal deformity or loss of substance.

  The timing of the shots based on analysis of the Zapruder film, the fact that only three empty cartridge cases were found on the sixth floor, and the knowledge that one shot missed the president and wounded a bystander made it quite simple. If Oswald was the sole assassin, the first bullet that hit Kennedy had to also cause all of Connally’s wounds.

  Yet there was considerable evidence that the nonfatal wound to Kennedy had actually struck the president lower on his body, in his back rather than his neck.

  The Warren Report placed the wound in the rear of Kennedy’s neck at “approximately 51⁄2 inches (14 centimeters) from the tip of the right shoulder joint and approximately the same distance below the tip of the right mastoid process, the bony point immediately behind the ear.”4

  A head-and-shoulders diagram of Kennedy in the twenty-six volumes clearly places that bullet hole at the base of the neck, slightly to the right of the spinal column.5 An accompanying drawing indicates the bullet took a downward path to exit his throat and hit Connally, as it would have had to do if it had been fired from above and behind the motorcade.6 A lower entrance wound in Kennedy, such as one positioned in his back, would have required an upward path for it to exit at the hole in his neck. But that meant the emerging bullet would likely have missed the other occupants of the car entirely, necessitating a separate shot to the governor.

  An FBI investigative report on January 13, 1964, stated, “Examination of the President’s clothing by the FBI Laboratory disclosed that there was a small hole in the back of his coat and shirt approximately six inches below the top of the collar and two inches to the right of the middle seam of the coat.”7 It went on to say that “minute traces of copper” from the full copper alloy jacket of the penetrating bullet were found “on the fabric surrounding the hole” of both the coat and the shirt.8 A “slit” was found on the front of Kennedy’s shirt just beneath the collar button that “has the characteristics of an exit hole for a projectile,” and a “nick” was discovered on the left side of the knot in the president’s tie, “which possibly was caused by the same projectile as it passed through the shirt.”9