The Girl on the Stairs

by Barry Ernest

  “It was an older rifle,” he said. “It could still shoot, but it wouldn’t hold prints. There was no telling how long any of those prints had been on there. My job was to identify whose they were—not when they were put on.”

  I asked how the Dallas Police reacted to the FBI’s intrusion.

  “Some in the department were upset the way the FBI handled it, but it didn’t affect me. You have to remember that it was really our crime—at that time it wasn’t a federal crime to murder the president.”

  Day said the rifle was returned to Dallas on Sunday as part of “the condition of us releasing it to the FBI.” Three or four days later, he added, the FBI took everything, including the palm print Day had lifted from that weapon. Up until that point, he said, the print had remained in a box, undisturbed.

  “There were just too many cooks in the kitchen,” Day commented, referring to the multiple agencies—FBI, Secret Service, Dallas Police, and sheriff’s office—who wove their individual ways through the investigation and the evidence that weekend. The result, he summarized, was confusion, a lot of misinformation, and incomplete details being released to the public.

  The Doorway Man

  Thirty years earlier, I had spoken by phone with Carolyn Walther. She had told the FBI she witnessed a man with a rifle leaning out a Depository window while a second man stood beside him. The Warren Commission ignored her.

  I happened to see her name in the phone directory and decided to touch base. When she answered the phone, it was hard not to notice the advanced age in her voice. I explained who I was, and how I had made her cry three decades earlier.

  She remembered.

  “I have but one question to ask, if you don’t mind,” I said.

  “I may or may not answer,” she replied with a sigh. “I’m so tired of it.”12

  “After all these years,” I asked carefully, “after thirty-six years, do you still stand by your statement of seeing a man with a gun and another man standing next to him in the Depository?”

  “Yes, I do,” she answered quickly. “Why wouldn’t I? I know what I saw and nothing can change that.”

  After some coaxing, she recounted her story once again. The details she provided matched up exactly with what she had told the FBI, and what she had told me those many years ago. I asked if she had kept up with the subject. She replied that she had read a handful of books but became upset when several described her as being a liar.13

  “I’m not a liar,” she said. “I know what I saw. And it’s the truth.”

  Early the next morning, after forking over six bucks and being offered an audio tour in my choice of seven different languages, I was among six others who boarded the highly polished elevator. Our destination was the sixth floor of the former Texas School Book Depository. I was on my way to what Roy Truly had denied me years ago. And I was obligated to pay for the privilege.

  As the doors opened on arrival, I was greeted by a wave of emotions, good and bad. Emerging onto this most famous of all warehouse floors, I had, in a small way, reached a goal that had hung above me since day one.

  The appearance, of course, was different now. The once dusty, messy, and dark book-storage area had turned into the clean, organized, and well-lit Sixth Floor Museum. The massive support posts were there, just as they had been when Oswald worked the floor. He probably glanced up at the black 6 on the post just outside the two freight elevators that remained against the back wall. The elevators had been inoperative for a long while but retained the original wood-slat gates, their smoothness a testament to decades of duty. How many times had Oswald touched them? How many times had he walked—or run—by where I now stood?

  The floor was new, raised for public safety several inches above the original gapped and splintered boards beneath. Overhead, the huge, exposed wooden beams and the accompanying pipes had been left untouched. Between the beams, one could see the underside of the diagonally laid boards of the seventh floor, now used to store the old rooftop Hertz sign.

  The once-mazelike layout of boxes holding school textbooks, the mainstay of this former business, had disappeared, replaced by another mazelike array of partition walls dividing the open floor into small display areas. Each area was named for its related subject matter and informed the uninformed of what had happened here. I could hear in the distance the voice of John Kennedy, echoing from a looped videotape.

  I did not stop to listen. I was on my way directly to the southeast corner window.

  My stomach churned. This display area was called “The Perch.” Behind protective Plexiglas, I saw what could only be an educated guess as to how it looked when the shots were fired.14 The original wood-plank flooring was visible beneath the simulated stacks of “Scott Foresman” book cartons. One carton had been carefully crafted to hide a camera that broadcasts continuous peeks out this window on the Internet.

  Who had stood here that day? Was it Oswald? Or was it someone else?

  Based on the imposed limits, the best I could do for a reenactment was crouch behind a set of windows a few feet to the right of “The Perch” and stare down into Dealey Plaza. I could imagine the parade going by and the cheering crowds and the feelings of excitement. And the first thought that hit me was why, why in the world would Oswald wait until the presidential limousine turned the corner onto Elm to shoot his victim?

  It is a dilemma one can only experience from this vantage point: the shot he failed to take as the car approached the building on Houston Street; Kennedy, clearly vulnerable, as he looked straight ahead toward the assassin; the target getting closer and closer, looming larger and larger in the murderous rifle sights. This seemed so much easier and more likely than when the president’s car traveled down Elm away from the shooter, with his head bobbling right to left. It didn’t make sense, unless perhaps crossfire had been planned.

  There was one place left to see. Over in the northwest corner of the building was another encased area, this one depicting where the rifle was discovered. Against the wall hung a black sign with white letters reading, “Stairway.”

  It was the sixth-floor entrance to the old wooden staircase. Was this really the start of Oswald’s famed descent?

  Back on the first floor, I inquired whether Gary Mack was available. I remembered Mack from several television documentaries. He was once a critic of the Warren Report but, in Robert Groden’s estimation, had “gone to the other side” when he became curator of the Sixth Floor Museum.

  He came up from below to greet me, then showed me the way to his nicely remodeled offices in the basement of the Depository. Coincidentally, he had been cueing up some related film on his computer. He showed me one of particular interest.

  It was the movie shot by Elsie Dorman from the fourth-floor window of the Depository. She had been filming the event with her husband’s camera, shooting out the open window as Victoria Adams and Sandra Styles stood beside her. I was watching the assassination through Miss Adams’ eyes.

  Kennedy was seconds from death as his car approached on Houston Street. The vehicle swung wide and turned left directly below, the camera giving a bird’s-eye view down into the limousine. Its occupants were not centered in the frame. Owing to the photographer’s inexperience, the images fluttered about rapidly. The film abruptly ended as the car entered Elm and became obscured behind tree limbs.15

  Mack agreed to chat a bit. He began by telling me a story about Billy Lovelady and the never-ending confusion over whether it was Lovelady or Oswald on the Depository’s front steps in James Altgens’ photograph. “Back in the late seventies, I was hosting on occasion a Sunday-night talk show on the Kennedy assassination on one of the very popular stations in Dallas, and one of Billy’s friends—personal friends, not from the Depository but a neighbor or something like that—listened to the shows and at the end of one of them, he called and, because we had been talking about Lovelady, said, ‘If you’d like to interview Billy I’d be happy to set it up for you. Normally he doesn’t do these things, but yo
u seem like reasonable folks.’16

  “So, within a few days we were on the phone, not recorded unfortunately. He was living in Aurora, Colorado, at the time, which I think is where he was when he died.17 He told me that the shirt that he was wearing that day was purchased for him by his wife at a local Goodwill here in Dallas for fifty-nine cents, and he still had it—would never part with it. He’d been offered a lot of money for it—would not part with it for anything. He was fully aware of the controversy; he just thought it was kind of silly because not only was he the guy on the steps but all of his coworkers were on the steps, they all knew him, they all knew Lee, and they all were all saying, ‘That was Billy. I know both guys.’

  “He told me a funny story. He said he didn’t know Oswald well at all—in fact, most of the guys didn’t because he [Oswald] was relatively new—but they all recognized the physical similarities, and a couple of the guys purposely called Billy ‘Lee’ and Lee ‘Billy,’ just to tease them. He said, ‘Oswald got a kick out of it. He thought it was funny, but I didn’t. I didn’t like it.’”

  The shirt on the man in the doorway was open partway down the chest, just as was the shirt Oswald wore following his arrest. Buttons apparently missing from Lovelady’s shirt were shown missing from Oswald’s as well. Wasn’t Mack curious about that?

  “Well, yes and no,” he answered. “This happens to be one of my areas of great interest. The pictures of Oswald after the arrest, of course, are after the struggle [with police officers in the Texas Theatre] when some buttons were torn, so pictures of him under arrest don’t show the shirt the way it was at the time of the assassination.

  “Most researchers have heard the name Robert Groden. No question that he is a pro-conspiracy guy. Groden did something that no one else was able to do when he worked for the House Assassinations Committee. He and I have been acquainted since ’77 or ’78. Groden got access to the original negative of that [Altgens] photograph and he made blowups of that for the House Committee and the photo panel and the photo panel couldn’t really tell the pattern of the shirt either, so they made their own blowups and again, they were not able to make the image clear enough to be able to tell. The negative went back to Groden and he tried a different technique and he had a name for it. He called it ‘variable density cynexing.’ I have no idea what the hell that means. But he claimed it was a technique that was able to ‘strengthen the contrast,’ that is what he said, so that he could see the pattern in the shirt. And of course when you are looking at a black-and-white reproduction of a colored object, the tonal value tends to shift; you’re not really sure what you’re looking at. Once he had a clear blowup, where he could see the pattern, then he compared it with black-and-white blowups from two color home movies, and in black and white, the patterns were clearly the same. Now the shirt [Lovelady’s] is actually a red and blue and white. It’s just [that] the way it turns out in black and white can be confusing, so if you’re not a photographer and you don’t have that background, people don’t think of these things. Robert Groden used to be on record as saying, ‘That was Oswald in the doorway’ until he did the work using the original materials, and he’s been saying for twenty-one years now, ‘It’s Lovelady.’ The Committee even flew Groden and a Committee member to Denver to meet Lovelady. Groden even took his own pictures of Lovelady wearing the shirt and those are published in the [HSCA] volumes too.18 So, as far as I’m concerned, that’s one of the stories that’s been put to rest.”

  Except for the Dealey Plaza hucksters, I thought.

  Billy Lovelady was incessantly hounded by the media and the critics due to confusion over the doorway man.

  “Let me tell you a story,” Mack continued. “And this is why he quit talking to people. It was so bad that there was a night in Dallas when, and I forget what the noise was that startled him, but something startled him in the bedroom—he had been asleep—and he sat up in bed and a flash went off in the room. Someone actually had gotten into the house and either rigged up something in the room or had a flash at the window to get a picture. That’s how bad it had gotten; that’s when he stopped talking. He was scared. That’s the phrase he told me. He didn’t have any personal confrontations with people—he said, ‘Sometimes I’d talk to them and sometimes I wouldn’t depending on whether they sounded normal or not.’ He said, ‘That was it when that happened. I was scared for my wife and my kid.’”

  I asked Mack how accurate were the museum’s depictions of the sniper’s nest and where the rifle was found.

  “Best we can do,” he replied.

  Mack also said the sixth-floor entrance to the wooden staircase was as it appeared originally. I told him the story of how I climbed those stairs to the second-floor lunchroom, unbeknownst to Roy Truly. He laughed and said I had been lucky to get away with it, since Truly was always very particular about whom he allowed into the building after the assassination.

  That evening, I sat in my customary spot in Dealey Plaza, watching the tourists and the wandering pitchmen. I thought of how far I had traveled since Terry had asked me why I believed the Warren Report, now more than thirty years ago. I had come to this rather mystical place called Dallas and stood behind the window from where the Warren Commission said the shots originated; behind the fence where the House Select Committee placed a second shooter; and in the middle of Elm Street, where a white-painted X marks for sightseers the exact spot of the final horror. Was it from a convergence of bullets? There was certainly a convergence of theories.

  The next morning as I left town for the long ride home, I did something I always wanted to do. I pointed my car into the center lane of Elm and slowed to a crawl as I drove through Dealey Plaza, past the former Depository, over the X in the street, alongside the grassy knoll and the gawking tourists, and on into the darkness of the Triple Underpass. A chill ran down my back. I stared into the rearview mirror until I could see the spot no longer.

  All I had to do now was try to explain this on paper.

  CHAPTER 24

  February 2-3, 2002

  She sat quietly in her chair on that cool Saturday evening, mystified by the single line in the e-mail that had popped up on her computer screen.

  “Are you the Vickie Adams who graduated from Presentation High School in San Francisco and once worked in Dallas, Texas?” It was signed, “Larry Roberge.”

  The name meant nothing to her. Who is this person who writes me out of the blue, and how does he know about me? she wondered. He couldn’t be a former classmate. Presentation was an all-girls’ school. And she hadn’t known any Roberges in Dallas, or anywhere else for that matter.

  She clicked the Reply button. “Yes, I am,” she typed. “But I don’t recognize this name. Who are you?”

  There was no response the rest of the night.

  When she awoke the next morning, another strange e-mail awaited her. This one was from somebody in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania—she remembered the place well—who told her Mr. Roberge was a friend who was following a lead. This latest missive asked if she was the Victoria Adams who had once worked for Scott Foresman and was a witness to the Kennedy assassination.

  She froze.

  “For the sake of this email,” the mystery writer continued, “I will assume that you are that person.”

  As she went deeper into this electronic dispatch, determining its author to be a man, she became more and more intrigued by his tale of the lengths he had gone to in order to find a woman named Victoria Adams—to find her. He said he was writing a book, intending to focus on what she had witnessed, on what she had said and done so many years before, and on his seemingly unquenchable desire to hear her story, firsthand.

  In a way, she was flattered.

  “All the while,” he wrote, “it has been your testimony, the sincerity of what you said during it, and the absence of further information about what you witnessed, that for some reason has fascinated and consumed me the most.”

  She read on, about his years of research, his trips to Dall
as and Washington, his efforts to find truth in a sea of deception. He sounds honest, she thought—candid, forthright, if a bit verbose and perhaps melodramatic. But she had heard it all before.

  They had wanted the truth from her back then, or so she thought. They had wanted her to tell them about what she did and what she saw, in her own words, sparing no details. She had done that, on numerous occasions.

  Then they had called her a liar.

  A long time ago, she had promised herself not to make that mistake again. But somehow, this seemed different. He wanted her help to right this wrong. He wanted to hear her side firsthand. He wanted her absolute truths.

  She was swayed by those words. Was this the chance she had always wanted?

  “You cannot imagine,” she read on, “the excitement I felt when I first learned my search for Miss Adams may be over, nor the uncommon nervousness I have felt while writing this email to you, nor the anticipation and fear of what you may say in response as I now click the ‘Send’ button.”

  Her memories flashed before her. She had kept them bottled up for so long now, a mute testament to her past. She had stood at the precipice of no longer giving a damn about what had happened in Dallas that day, a city far away in more ways than one.

  The truth had been told before, and she had told it. Why bother again?

  It would be quite simple. She could write back and say she was not, after all, the one he was looking for. But that would be a lie. And she didn’t lie.

  Better yet, she could simply press the Delete key and end it right here. Based on the brick walls he said he already had hit in his search for her, that alternative could easily be perceived as just one more goose chase, one more wrong number, one more dead end.

  But she began to type.

  CHAPTER 25

  January 2000-February 2002

  It was my son who had convinced me to buy a computer for the writing job ahead. Little did I realize what else that gizmo could do.