The Girl on the Stairs

by Barry Ernest

  That same firm had been responsible for analyzing a tape recording made during the Kent State shootings. BBN was able to determine from that study precisely which National Guardsman was the first to fire his rifle that day. BBN also was selected to assist in the examination of Watergate tapes made by President Nixon.

  Under supervision by Dr. James E. Barger, BBN’s chief scientist, Mack’s efforts were confirmed. Preliminary analysis indicated there were six instances of impulses on the tape that might be attributable to recorded gunshots. Barger recommended onsite testing.

  Just as the Warren Commission had done fourteen years earlier, the Committee closed traffic to Dealey Plaza on August 20, 1978, as riflemen in the Depository and on the knoll fired live rounds into sandbags placed on Elm Street. Four target locations had been set up based on the Zapruder film. Thirty-six microphone positions spaced eighteen feet apart along the motorcade route recorded the sounds of 432 test shots. The objective was to see if any of these shooting patterns matched the pattern thought to be that of gunshots on the police tape.

  Barger testified before the Committee on September 11 that although pattern matches did occur, the question remained whether the impulses on the police tape represented gunfire or some other noise. Barger could therefore only estimate that there was a fifty-fifty chance one of those impulses represented a shot from the grassy knoll.35

  Realizing its importance, the Committee sought further analysis of the tape from two independent experts who had been recommended by the Acoustical Society of America. Prof. Mark Weiss and his assistant, Ernest Aschkenasy, were asked to refine Dr. Barger’s work. Three months later, Weiss provided his results: “It is our conclusion that as a result of very careful analysis, it appears that with a probability of 95 percent or better, there was indeed a shot fired from the grassy knoll.”36

  His words had the effect of a lightning bolt.

  Analysis indicated that four shots had been fired. The first originated from the Depository at 47 seconds past 12:30 P.M. Only 1.6 seconds later, a second shot was fired from the same building. Then 5.9 seconds elapsed before a third shot took place, this one from a position near the corner of the fence on the grassy knoll. A mere half-second later, a fourth shot occurred, again from the Depository.

  Four shots indicated conspiracy. The 1.6-second gap between the first and second shots, compared with earlier FBI tests showing at least 2.3 seconds were necessary to fire two shots from Oswald’s rifle, meant another shooter may have been in the Depository. The half-second between the third and fourth shots coincided with statements by numerous witnesses that two shots took place almost simultaneously.

  Ironically, the sequence of shots based on the tape recording was precisely how S. M. Holland had described it to me in 1968.

  Scientific study of the tape revealed that the motorcycle with the stuck microphone was about 120 feet behind the presidential limousine during the shooting. The two-wheeler was moving at eleven miles per hour, the speed of the motorcade. Analysis of photographs revealed the rider to be Officer H. B. McLain.37

  Weiss told the Committee his work had been thorough. He and his partner had taken into consideration such variables as temperature and humidity, whether architectural changes had occurred between the date of the assassination and when the acoustical tests were performed, and possible distortions from either the transmitting microphone on the motorcycle or the recording machine at police headquarters. Even the windshield on the motorcycle and its effect at altering echoes of sound waves was factored into the analysis.

  Weiss: Now, if there is any weakness in the results of our analysis, it has to be in some consideration that has escaped us entirely, and that, contrary to anything I can imagine, would have significant impact on the measurements we have made. We, in fact, in performing this work, made every single measurement there many times, each of us made the measurements on the map, checked the results of the other fellow’s measurement, checked the calculations out many times, and just to be sure that there were no errors that had crept in and then propagated through this analysis. Otherwise, I really cannot see a basis for finding significant fault with the acoustical analysis as described.

  [HSCA] Chairman [Louis] Stokes: Then as a scientist, you are comfortable with the statement to this Committee that beyond a reasonable doubt, and to a degree of 95 percent or better, there were four shots in Dealey Plaza?

  Weiss: Well, I would agree with that, with the somewhat clarification, that since our work concentrated primarily on the third shot, the one from the grassy knoll area, I would imply for the moment, limit the statement to that, with a, again, a confidence level of 95 percent or higher, which I guess if I were a lawyer, I might well express as beyond a reasonable doubt, that shot took place.38

  A Shot from the Knoll?

  Weiss and Aschkenasy were, of course, questioned extensively by the Committee. They were granite. They reiterated that the four impulses were definitely gunshots and could not have been confused, for instance, with backfire from a passing vehicle, firecrackers, two cars colliding in a nearby parking lot, or a train going by in the railroad yards behind the knoll. When asked about abnormalities in other police conversations being heard during the gunshots, the scientists said audible clicks indicated others had been attempting to communicate at the same time. Also heard on the tape were the eerie and morbid sounds of a carillon, a bell not present in Dealey Plaza. The conversations by other officers located either in or outside Dealey Plaza, one of whom may have been near the ringing bell, could have resulted in the “crossover” sounds, Aschkenasy explained.

  Weiss stated:

  But there are a number of times where you do hear other voices coming on, other people communicating, sometimes very distorted sounds of the voices, sometimes quite clear and intelligible, and it is all during the time that this one transmitter has been on. In fact, as you go on in time past the point at which the shots occur, the ability of other transmitters to come into the channel becomes increasingly—it occurs more frequently. You hear more people coming in. You hear comments to the effect that somebody has his microphone button stuck, and it is all audible and understandable so there are indeed several transmitters being received simultaneously during that period, and therefore it could very well have been that there was another motorcycle who happened to key on at just that point in time and picked up the sound of a bell.39

  Could the sounds of gunfire have come from anywhere other than Dealey Plaza? The only other possibility, Aschkenasy said, was if those sounds were created at a site with exact replication of everything in and surrounding the real Dealey Plaza. “That is the only way it can come out,” he emphasized.40

  Aschkenasy assured everyone both he and Weiss “were totally independent of the Committee.”41 They had no preconceived notions about what they would find, they were not coerced or influenced in any way by any members of the Committee, and when they first sat down to listen to the tape, they felt “somebody has got to be kidding; this can’t be gunshots.”42

  Aschkenasy continued:

  If I may say just one line, it’s that the numbers could not be refuted. That was our problem. The numbers just came back again and again the same way, pointing only in one direction, as to what these findings were. There just didn’t seem to be any way to make those numbers go away, no matter how hard we tried. It was not a question of interpretation of the numbers; it was a question of what the analysis yielded, the mechanical analysis . . . and it all just came out the same way.43

  Dr. James Barger of BBN, who months earlier gave a knoll shot a fifty-fifty possibility, was called back. After further review, Barger judged “the likelihood of there having been a gun shot from that knoll and received at that point now to be about 95 percent or possibly better.”44

  When asked if he was confident the tape contained the sound of gunfire, Barger replied unhesitatingly, “Quite confident, yes.”45

  As if this were not startling enough, the public hearings were brought
to a close on December 28 with a cinematic coup de grace: another televised showing of the Zapruder film. This time, the film had a dubbed soundtrack of gunfire, timed to occur at the precise moments indicated on the Dallas Police tape.

  Before the lights were dimmed in the Committee room, Chief Counsel G. Robert Blakey announced to those seated both there and in their homes that the film they were about to see “may be offensive to people of special sensitivity.”46 He was right. There had, in a way, been a false serenity to the earlier silence of the original Zapruder film. Now, with audio, the scene became all too real.

  The sounds of four gunshots reverberating in Dealey Plaza matched perfectly with the reactions of Kennedy and Connally, the president’s head snapping backward at the exact moment of the third and fourth shots, one determined by experts to have come from the knoll. Visually, at least, it now made sense.

  With this bombshell in place, the Committee reexamined its previous medical and ballistics evidence, trying hard to make sense of it all. In the end, it came up with a new scenario for history, a second government version of how President Kennedy had been killed.

  It placed Oswald in the window, alone. It said he fired the first shot, missing Kennedy entirely and failing even to hit the vehicle in which his target rode. It said he fired the second shot only 1.6 seconds later. The Committee made that assertion based on new testing showing the gun actually could be re-fired that fast if the shooter relied on the iron sights at the end of the barrel to key in on his mark rather than the telescopic sight. It had no way of knowing, of course, but it presumed Oswald did just that.

  This second shot hit both Kennedy and Connally, going on to become the single bullet of “single-bullet theory” fame.

  Then a third shot came from the knoll. It missed everybody. The Committee did not discuss this close-range incompetence or the possible identity of the shooter. It conceded, however, that Oswald and the knoll shooter had to know each other, since the chances were “extremely remote” that two strangers would unknowingly choose the same location at the same time on the same day to shoot the president of the United States.47

  A half-second later, Oswald fired the fourth and final bullet, snuffing the breath out of Kennedy.

  Because it had reached the end of its federally funded life, the Committee recommended that the U.S. Justice Department pick up the trail and seek out the identity of the elusive grassy-knoll shooter.

  In the years that followed, the Committee’s controversial conclusions underwent serious scrutiny and severe criticism. One of the oddest twists occurred in 1979 when a musician named Steve Barber bought an adult magazine that, as part of that month’s featured highlights, had a recording of the Dallas Police tape included on a plastic insert. After listening to it, Barber somehow detected something the Committee’s experts had missed.

  He heard Sheriff Bill Decker. Decker was talking on a separate police channel from the motorcade’s lead car, telling his men, “Hold everything secure.” He uttered those words approximately one minute after the assassination, raising the question of how his voice could appear as “cross-talk” on the tape at the same time the impulses of shots were being recorded in Dealey Plaza some sixty seconds earlier.

  The Justice Department eventually entered the fray when it pulled together twelve distinguished individuals from the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to study the Committee’s acoustical work and check out Barber’s discovery. Called the Ramsey Panel after its chairman, Harvard professor Norman Ramsey, the group ultimately issued a ninety-six-page report confirming Barber’s analysis and condemning the Committee’s. It reached three unanimous conclusions: 1) Weiss, Aschkenasy, and Barger committed “serious errors” in their work. 2) The impulses attributed to gunshots were actually from other unknown sounds recorded a minute after the assassination from an unspecified location other than Dealey Plaza. 3) “Reliable acoustical data” thus negated there being a second gunman.48

  Although the NAS suggested other avenues where still further studies of the police tape could be made, it felt because the evidence against there being a grassy-knoll shooter was so strong that “the results to be expected from such studies would not justify their cost.”49

  Because the NAS was a congressionally chartered agency, critics charged its study with bias and said those who conducted the NAS tests were not qualified acoustic experts. In addition, critics felt the NAS had not conclusively explained how Sheriff Decker’s voice had gotten on the Dallas Police tape in the first place or why other cross-talk also on the tape contradicted the NAS results. Left unanswered too, they said, was how the timing and sequencing of the impulses on the tape matched with other corroborating evidence—the Zapruder film, the three rifle casings in the Depository, the exact location and speed of the suspected motorcycle, the testimony of witnesses—and precisely represented a blueprint of echo patterns unique only to Dealey Plaza.

  Nevertheless, the Justice Department accepted the NAS findings. It refused to look into the matter further. Its huge metal doors in Washington, above which still reads the motto, The Place of Justice is a Hallowed Place, would clang shut as far as President Kennedy’s assassination was concerned.

  Suddenly, America was confronted with two official solutions to the murder.

  I remembered the words of Rep. Richardson Preyer as he questioned J. Lee Rankin about the corner the Warren Commission had been boxed into.

  Preyer: But you were somewhat in the position of asking the FBI to investigate itself, or going to the innkeeper to ask whether the wine was good or not.

  Rankin: Well, back at that time, Congressman, that did not seem so impossible as it might today.

  Preyer: Yes, I think your answer to an earlier question has demonstrated a certain fall from innocence that we have all had since that time. Things are now believable which we would not have thought believable at that time.

  Rankin: That is correct.50

  Indeed, many of us had suffered a “fall from innocence.”

  Like the parlor game where facts of a story are altered the more times it is whispered into the ears of those participating, the layers of disagreement and disparity were gradually obscuring the truth to Kennedy’s death, whatever that truth may have been at the start. Was finding the truth even possible anymore?

  It was at this point that I felt that I’d seen and heard enough. I felt as Terry had those many years ago after seeing the Zapruder film in Washington.

  And then came still another death. Penn Jones would not chronicle this one, for this time it was not a witness to the assassination. It was someone else, someone more important to me.

  He had been the one to provide continual encouragement, the only one who knew me well enough to understand my true motives in all this, the one who pushed me to keep going, keep growing, keep searching for the truth. I watched numbly as my father was put into the ground.

  Mortality suddenly became an issue.

  It was 1981, approaching two decades beyond the assassination. The country had two government-conceded solutions to the crime. No one seemed to care.

  The research community lacked luster, cohesiveness, and the mutual support I had once been proud it possessed, proud actually to be a part of. All that seemed to remain in these days were the pseudo-researchers, who expounded on ridiculous and wild-eyed theories to the crime, branding not only themselves but everyone else as kooks.

  Victoria Adams was lost, my efforts to find her fruitless and wasted. There were no leads. At this point, I had lost my focus, perhaps even my determination.

  Maybe Terry had been right after all. I began to wonder if any of this was really worth it anymore.

  Then, when I stopped wondering, I quit.

  CHAPTER 17

  February 1981-October 1998

  Victoria Adams had settled down. The memories of Dallas—and the fears those memories generated—had all but vanished. Like tossing an extra blanket over the bed on a cold winter’s night, she buried them deep, out of
sight.

  She didn’t even have dreams about that day anymore.

  She was in the Great Northwest now, even farther removed than before. First it was Spokane, then Seattle. She liked this part of the country. It was clean here, safe, even peaceful.

  It was a place where one could establish roots, if one chose. And she did, for nearly a decade.

  She’d stuck it out with her real-estate career too, making the kinds of business decisions that would gain her listings in Who’s Who of American Women and Who’s Who in the World. She had found her niche.

  Then one day she got the urge to move again. Only this time, it was different. No longer was it that sudden impulse to flee; now it was simply a desire to see.

  She was getting older, approaching midlife. She wanted to travel America’s highways, view the country up close and personal, drink in its sights and feast on its diversity. For the next six years, she and her husband did just that and only that. They moved about from coast to coast in a five-wheel trailer. She enjoyed every minute of it.

  She had always wanted to be a writer, getting a taste of it during her high-school years when she worked and wrote for the Monitor, a small Catholic newspaper in San Francisco. Now on the road, she wrote and published a newsletter called Principles in Action. It was a diary of sorts, a chronicle of the people and stories she met and heard along the way.

  Next came the idea of writing a cookbook. The result was a collection of simple but appealing recipes gathered from those who lived beside the blue roads of the land. The title was No More Than 4 Ingredients, and it sold well along the way, providing the extra income that kept this pair of gypsies going.

  She loved seeing her country, traveling through nearly all of the contiguous states. By 1997, she had made her way east to Pennsylvania, where the rolling farmland of the central region appealed to her eyes and the simple lives of the Amish appealed to her sense of balance. She became so enamored with the area that she remained there for several months, living near Harrisburg, the state capital, dining in that city and savoring its surrounding attractions.