by Barry Ernest
A block away, actors were gearing up for their “world premiere” of a stage play called The Life and Death of John F. Kennedy, in which the young president “reveals his innermost feelings and thoughts, and finally watches his own death,” according to a mass-produced handout. It went on, “Both funny and moving, this work is a remarkable addition to the Kennedy legend.”
The Kennedy legend? I wondered. I decided to forgo this cultural highlight. Nor would I pay for yet another vendor’s offering—“the opportunity of a lifetime,” as the driver announced to onlookers—a slow ride down Elm Street in an open-top black limousine, sitting just as Kennedy did in his final moments.
Dealey Plaza had transformed itself into an out-of-towner’s dream, a major and apparently profitable fixture of the now-fashionable West End Historic District of Dallas. It had become a circus.
On this sunny Sunday, “Smitty’s” was selling hot dogs to the hungry from a sidewalk meat wagon. A fast-talking sales kid was peddling four-dollar copies of JFK News, a tabloid dealing with the lore of this land. Guided walking tours that were guaranteed to “stimulate” and “rivet” the paying customer, or so the hosts promised, were starting to assemble.
And some guy was standing behind a card table, charts on tripods surrounding him, as he conversed with a half-dozen onlookers. As I approached, I recognized him as Robert Groden. He had been the one who supplied the Zapruder film to Geraldo Rivera. Groden had also served as a photographic analyst for the HSCA.
Now he was peddling his books from a street corner.
Groden and Weisberg once had been friends. That ended when Groden took sides with Oliver Stone and helped the producer while JFK—The Movie was being filmed in Dallas. The two had not been on speaking terms since 1993, when Weisberg wrote Groden, criticizing his relationship with Stone and saying of the producer, “The man and truth cannot even be in the same room at the same time.”1
“Hi. I’m a friend of Harold Weisberg,” I said to Groden when he was finally alone.
Groden was momentarily taken aback, but then smiled and politely asked about Weisberg’s health. “I heard he has been quite ill,” he said.2
We chatted for a bit about the mundane, then I asked him why he chose to spend Sundays selling his books along Elm Street in Dealey Plaza.
“I do it to keep the issue alive,” he replied. “I’m here every weekend, weather permitting.”
Groden was selling a thirty-eight-page highly condensed version of his twenty-five-dollar-plus book, The Killing of a President, for a mere five dollars a copy. This shortened account was labeled the “Dealey Plaza Memorial Edition.” While I had been walking around earlier, I noticed a woman named Diane Allen hawking the same pamphlet from a table on the grassy knoll. She was listed as a coauthor, so I asked Groden about her.
“Diane helped me with it,” he said, with a sneer in her direction and contempt in his voice. “But she stole my photo collection in the process.”
When I asked why, if he knew this, he didn’t go to the police, he responded, “The Dallas Police won’t do anything for me.”3
As we were talking, a young couple approached and inquired about Groden’s earlier comments to them concerning an observable bullet mark made by a shot that apparently had missed Kennedy.
“See it now before it’s gone forever,” Groden told them while pointing to a distant sewer cover two-thirds of the way down the left side of Elm. He then pocketed the money the two gave him for a copy of his pamphlet. This place had turned into a virtual sideshow.
“And where did that shot come from?” I asked, after the tourists had walked away.
“The roof of the Records Building,” he answered.
“You’re sure?”
“Indeed. The angle proves it.”
“Was that the one fired by Harry Weatherford?” I asked, echoing a belief of Penn Jones, with whom Groden had become good friends after he had relocated to Dallas from New York.
“I believe it was him,” he said. “I don’t know it, but I believe it. It was an awfully poor shot regardless.”
Near the end of our brief chat, a Dallas Police cruiser slowly pulled up and came to rest on the side street about fifty feet away. The sole officer inside began watching us.
“Stick around a minute, can you?” Groden whispered to me.
In a moment, the officer eased out of the car and made his way down Elm to where Groden and I were standing. He was a giant.
“Look what you’re doing to the grass,” he blurted out, dragging his foot along the trampled ground, flattened and muddy under Groden’s feet.
Groden immediately apologized and moved himself and his table to the concrete sidewalk. “Is this ok?” he inquired. He had suddenly become timid.
The officer said nothing, instead turning the solid black lenses of his sunglasses in my direction. Not knowing if he actually had me in his sights or was just looking at the surrounding landscape, I smiled slightly and nodded my head, feeling as I had when Roger Craig was pulled over by Dallas’s finest.
“Better,” he snorted.
He stood around for a while, his presence scaring others from coming near. Apparently they too were familiar with the bad-cop theories. Then he got back into his patrol car and left.
“I’ve been arrested several times for being here,” Groden explained. “Probably would have been again if you weren’t around.”
Groden suggested we talk privately at a later time. I told him where I was staying, and he promised to call. I never heard from him. The last I saw of Groden was when he beeped the horn of his van and waved as he drove toward the Triple Underpass about an hour later, the thinning crowds apparently putting an end to his book sales.4
As usual, my evenings in Dallas were spent roaming around and sitting in Dealey Plaza. There was something about this place, as the day wound down and the lights popped on in the surrounding city, that allowed me to better reflect on things and see them more clearly. Even the occasional shrill and initially startling blasts of an air horn to scare nesting sparrows from the trees did not diminish the feeling.
As I sat at the base of the colonnade where Zapruder had once stood, a huckster walked up with his overpriced tabloid and began his spiel about how, if I really wanted to know the truth about what happened here, I needed to buy his paper. “See this?” he asked, leafing through his product and excitedly explaining the story behind several of the more controversial pictures inside. “The shots came from everywhere, even the trees.”
Then he turned to the famous James Altgens photograph, the one depicting the person many thought was Oswald standing on the Depository’s front steps. He thrust the page into my face. “Who is that man?” he asked.
I had had enough. “That man is Billy Lovelady,” I replied.
“Oh . . . you’ve heard this already, huh?”
“You might say that.”
Sorry, buddy, no sale.
CHAPTER 23
June 1999
Prior to this trip to Dallas, I had met with Weisberg and told him of my plans. He suggested I get in touch with Gary Mack, a well-known researcher and an archivist at the new Sixth Floor Museum. I wrote to Mack, using Weisberg’s name as a reference, telling him of my upcoming visit, and seeking information regarding Victoria Adams, Sandra Styles, or Dorothy Ann Garner.
I also inquired about Kenneth Cody, the bus driver whose name appeared in Oswald’s notebook and a man I had made nervous, and vice versa, many years ago.
Mack replied shortly after, saying he could be of no help with any of the three women I had mentioned. “I never spoke with them and know nothing of their whereabouts, ” he wrote.1 But he did provide me with the name and address of Joe Cody, the nephew of Kenneth and a retired Dallas police officer. I decided to write Joe a letter.
“He [Kenneth] died about 15 years ago,” Joe replied a week later. “We all believe that the reason for my uncle’s name and telephone number in Oswald’s effects is that my uncle owned a duplex in the v
icinity where Oswald lived and he might possibly wanted to rent it. My uncle had his name on a sign in front of the duplex exactly like Oswald had it written in his notes.”2
Strangely, Oswald had not included Kenneth’s name. All that had appeared in his notes was a telephone number.
Coincidentally, Joe Cody had been good friends with Jack Ruby. In fact, Joe’s name had been jotted down in a notebook kept for Ruby at his Carousel Club.
So Kenneth Cody’s number was in Lee Oswald’s notebook; Joe Cody’s name was in Ruby’s. Ruby kills Oswald. . . . Nothing in this case seemed too strange anymore.
“I knew Jack Ruby well since the day he moved to Dallas,” Cody wrote. “If you come to Dallas I will tell you a lot about Ruby.”3
And that is how, the morning after my encounter with Groden, I found myself driving to DeSoto, a little bedroom community about fifteen miles south of Dallas where Cody and his wife owned a nicely kept and furnished ranch house. He gave me a quick tour before sitting down for a taped interview.
Cody had known Ruby since 1950, meeting him in one of Ruby’s former south Dallas nightclubs. Once they became better acquainted, the two often went ice skating. “He was pretty fair,” Cody said, when I inquired about Ruby’s abilities on the rink.4
Cody was working Burglary and Theft when he saw Oswald the day of the assassination. “They tried to get him [Oswald] into Homicide and they couldn’t so they took him over to Burglary and Theft. They put him into an interrogating room and I’m talking to him and I said, ‘What’s your name?’ He said, ‘Lee Harvey Oswald.’ ‘Where do you work?’ ‘Texas School Book Depository.’ I said, ‘Did you work today?’ He said, ‘Yes.’ So I called an officer in and said, ‘Kill him if he moves.’”
It was Joe Cody who had purchased as a present for Ruby the $62.50 Cobra pistol that the club owner later used to gun down Oswald. Cody said the weapon remained registered in the police officer’s name, which caused him some embarrassment when investigators traced the gun following Ruby’s arrest.
I asked Cody if he felt that his former friend could commit such a murder.
“No, I did not,” he answered. “Oh, I knew he was capable, but I didn’t think he’d go and, you know . . . I never thought Jack Ruby would shoot Lee Oswald.”
Did Ruby ever express admiration for President Kennedy?
“I didn’t even know that he knew who the president of the United States was,” Cody answered. “Now when Kennedy got killed, he was down there at the Burglary and Theft and he was in the hall down there and I said, ‘Get your ass in here, Ruby.’ So I opened the door and let him in so Ruby could conduct his business and wouldn’t have all them people . . . But anyway, we get in there and he [Ruby] said, ‘Aw, wasn’t that terrible?’”
What about the mood of the Dallas Police?
“Here’s the thing: Oswald shot the president, then he went home, changed clothes, and shot Tippit. We got him out of the theatre and brought him down. They’ve got Oswald; they’ve got witnesses; they’ve got a hidden rifle. Friday evening, by eight o’clock at night, we all went home. It was over with, as far as we were concerned.”
When the Warren Report confirmed Oswald as the sole assassin, Cody said it was no surprise to the Dallas Police. “They knew it,” he stated. He added that the police “don’t even pay attention” to the wild theories that continue to surround the assassination.
I then inquired about Kenneth Cody, telling my host of my encounter with him in 1968.
“He was my dad’s younger brother, born in Shamrock, Texas, and he came to Dallas probably in the thirties. Kenneth went to work for the bus company. He’d buy some little houses over there, a duplex, he had two or three of those, and he had a sign in the yard that said, ‘Call Kenneth Cody’ and the phone number, you know, if you want to rent it. And that’s where Oswald got his phone number, and he wrote it down and put it in there. It was just a few blocks from where Oswald lived.”
Cody admitted he talked with his uncle about the matter, but he said Kenneth claimed he did not know Oswald and never received a telephone call from him regarding the property.
I found out too it was Joe Cody, and not Kenneth, who had the private pilot’s license and his own plane, a further clarification to Penn Jones’ theory that Kenneth had aided the escaping shooter or shooters.
Joe told me he never flew assassins out of Dallas that day.
When I left DeSoto hours later, I headed south fifteen miles to Midlothian. The town was much the same as I remembered it: small, slow, a bit dusty, sort of the Mayberry of Texas. The Midlothian Mirror had moved a block away from its old location to a newer and smaller office. Gone were the posters of Batman and Robin and the pictures of John Kennedy. Gone too was the flavor—the gritty character and the smells—it once held.
Still up the street was Penn Jones’ old home, the trees now round and full and much taller. I stepped onto the wooden porch and peeked through drape-free windows into the living room where I had sat and talked often with the former owner. The room was bare now, the house vacant. It was up for sale.
The man who had chronicled the deaths of others had himself died a year earlier of Alzheimer’s. Many had known him, but little would be written about him, save for the glowing obituary in the weekly paper he once owned.
Who would I now share my notes with in the evenings?
The next day I walked over to the Dallas Municipal Archives in the large and architecturally odd looking City Hall building. Its small office was the city’s version of the National Archives. Files maintained by the Dallas Police had recently become available there to researchers.
Yet there was still nothing on Victoria Adams except a copy of her February 17, 1964, interview with Detective James Leavelle.5 There were no reports on Sandra Styles and none on Dorothy Garner, a woman of particular interest due to my recent discovery of the Stroud letter at the National Archives.
Over the next several days, I called every V or VE or Victoria Adams in the phonebook—again. As before, it was a futile effort. I figured it would be. But I did find a listing for Leavelle, Jas R.
Like Cody, James Leavelle had been a colorful Dallas cop. For instance, during his Warren Commission testimony, he described for counsel Joseph Ball how hectic things were at headquarters on the afternoon of the assassination: “If you ever slopped hogs and throw down a pail of slop and saw them rush after it you would understand what that was like up there—about the same situation.”6
Ball was so enamored with the comparison that he suggested to Alfred Goldberg, one of the writers of the Warren Report, that this “colorful extract” from Leavelle’s testimony be included when the Commission critiqued media activities during the assassination weekend.7 Goldberg thought better of it.
Then in 1992, Leavelle, who had been handcuffed to Oswald when Ruby jumped from the crowd, was demonstrating how another officer had grabbed Ruby’s pistol. Forgetting he was using a loaded gun as a prop, Leavelle ended up accidentally shooting the photographer who was there to record the action.8
“You once questioned a witness by the name of Victoria Adams?” I inquired when Leavelle answered the phone that evening in 1999. “Do you remember her?”
He thought for a moment. “No, I don’t recall that name.”9
I summarized her story, mentioning the fact that she claimed to have come down the stairs immediately after the shooting and had heard no one during her descent.
The cobwebs began to clear from his memory. “I vaguely recall interviewing a young woman who said that,” he replied. “But it wasn’t germane to what we were looking for.”
“Wasn’t germane?” I echoed. “What were you looking for?”
“We were preparing for trial,” Leavelle explained, “and if the witness couldn’t provide anything we could use against Oswald, it wasn’t important.”
Miss Adams apparently had not fit the bill.
Carl Day had become a controversial figure over the years. As head of the Dallas Police Crim
e Lab, he was among the first to arrive on the sixth floor and examine the rifle in its hiding place.
Day told me in a telephone conversation that he did not personally find the rifle, but he was called over to view it immediately after its discovery and before anyone had touched it.10 When he first saw the gun, he explained, it was hidden underneath and between several boxes. Scraps of paper covered up much of it. When he took the police photographs, shown in the twenty-six volumes, the paper had been removed to provide a better view of the weapon, he said.11 “I just took the pictures of what I saw at the time.”
Day personally took charge of the weapon after it was lifted from its hiding place. He made a special trip to police headquarters and put it behind lock and key. Then he returned to the Depository.
It was later that afternoon, he said, when he met Roy Truly, who related the story of “running up to the second floor right after the shots” and seeing Oswald “standing at the Coke machine.”
Back at headquarters that evening, Day said he examined the rifle more carefully and discovered a palm print on the protected underside of the gun barrel. The print was later identified as belonging to Lee Oswald.
“This [print] was an old one,” Day admitted. “Fresh ones, you can rub your finger over and it will rub off. Older prints you can rub your finger over and the print will still be there.”
Day said he used powder and tape to lift the print.
By 10:30 P.M., he recalled, he was instructed “from upstairs” to immediately turn the rifle over to the FBI. “It caught me midstream,” he said, but at least he had finished examining the weapon.
Day added he also saw “fragments” of “fresher prints” on the trigger housing of the rifle, but “none were identifiable.”