The Girl on the Stairs

by Barry Ernest

  She told me about the night she was startled to find Dallas police officer James Leavelle standing at her front doorstep. The date was February 17, 1964.

  “One time, a detective from the Dallas police came to my apartment, showed his badge and asked to talk with me. I asked him why he needed to talk with me since I had already given my testimony to the Dallas police. ‘Oh,’ he responded, ‘the records were all burned in a fire we had and we have to interview everyone again.’3 Because the Dallas Police Department had been much maligned in the weeks following the assassination, I guess nothing surprised me. But that did. So I once again said the same thing, which at that point felt like ad nauseam.”

  The officer’s sudden appearance that evening was strange too because Ms. Adams had only the day before moved to this location, a new apartment. She had not yet notified anyone—not her boss, associates in her office, or even the post office—of her change of address. The apartment was even rented in her roommate’s name.

  Under those circumstances, Ms. Adams became nervous about how the police had found her and, in hindsight, figures she must somehow have been followed.

  “I never felt like I was a key player in the drama, just a player. Maybe I was key and didn’t know it. Maybe the government had already decided to reach a conclusion they wanted to reach and didn’t bother with some girl on the fourth floor. And I sure didn’t mind that.

  “The whole thing was a pretty frightening ordeal and a devastating time to everyone. I had never witnessed anything like that and the horror of watching TV those days was awful. Seeing a real live murder occur before my eyes on TV was horrifying. And then there was always that niggling fear in the back of my mind that maybe why they were sending so many people to talk with me was they thought I knew something or someone that was involved.

  “I was afraid of the implication of that.

  “I was a young girl making about $400 a month at that time and I couldn’t hire an attorney to help me if somehow the government decided I was involved more than I was. I had no adult to turn to. I was also concerned that I might be called to testify before the Warren Commission itself. I had no money to make such a trip. I had no income except from my job.”

  Ms. Adams was not summoned to Washington. She did, however, end up being questioned by Commission attorney David Belin in Dallas.

  “When I gave my deposition to the Warren Commission attorney, he was another of those patronizing types,” she remarked.

  “When I went into the office he was using, he did not stand up, as was the custom in the South when a woman entered the room. He stayed seated. Then he told me he was going to ask me some questions and he wanted me to answer them without elaboration. So he went through all of the questions he had.

  “I answered.

  “He told me that all my answers and his questions were ‘off the record,’ and that he would invite a court reporter in to take my actual deposition and I was to answer exactly what I said to him—no variations. During the informal part, he leaned back in his chair, crossed his arms and looked at me straight. . . . ‘Now Miss Adams, don’t you think you could be wrong? Memory is a funny thing and tricks some people.’

  “I looked him straight in the eye and said, ‘I could be, but I’m not wrong. I know what I saw, what I did and what I heard.’

  “He told me at the end of his questioning he would ask me if I had anything to add that I hadn’t mentioned up to then. I was supposed to say, ‘No,’ as I had in the initial session. But I didn’t.

  “As I started speaking, he looked startled, especially when I talked about seeing Jack Ruby on the corner across the street from the Depository building.

  “He ended the session, thanked me for my time and I left. That was the last contact I had with anyone regarding the events.”

  A transcript of her testimony was later delivered to her office for her review, she said. Ms. Adams made several spelling corrections and changed a few other inaccuracies. Not a single one of those corrections appeared in her final testimony printed in the twenty-six volumes. A self-admitted “word person,” Ms. Adams said she was disturbed by the errors left standing.

  “Perhaps the reason that bothered me is I saw it as just one more attempt at minimization of my credibility. You can imagine I felt stupid and like a fool when I read the book [the Warren Report] when it came out. The echoes of that attorney’s words haunted me, ‘Now, Miss Adams, don’t you think you could be wrong?’

  “They made me wrong, because they literally wanted to hang the murder on someone and do it quickly to stop the truth from being known, whatever the truth really was.

  “Apparently the Warren Commission didn’t think [what I told them] was true. Or if they did, they managed to make it appear wrong. What I said was true. I said it so many times I got tired of saying it. Quite frankly I didn’t even know it was important to anything. I was just a young girl interested in what was going on and worried that something terrible had happened. I wanted to know and I couldn’t know if I was standing around in some office talking with others who didn’t know. Even today, looking back, I am amazed that it was important.

  “But obviously it was.”

  CHAPTER 28

  February 4-9, 2002

  Gradually, the official inquiries stopped.

  “When that Dallas detective lied to me [about the fire], I knew something wasn’t right,” Ms. Adams said. “I knew when John O’Connor didn’t respond to my letter, something wasn’t right. I knew when Ruby killed Oswald that something wasn’t right. But the faith loss actually hit its finality when my testimony was discounted and I knew someone was trying to fit a puzzle together with lots of pieces from some other puzzle they had and create a story they wanted the public to believe.

  “I felt like a fool, an idiot whose credibility would be challenged from that point on. To me, who I was was more important than what I did. At that point, both who I was was being denied, as well as what I did. I had been disparaged and felt ridiculed and minimized. This truly shook me to my core.

  “I’m sure you can’t imagine the feelings that coursed through me as I realized the possibilities of what was going on. I must say it was a great relief when I was offered a job at the Scott Foresman home office in Chicago.”

  I asked if she had expressed those fears to others.

  “I never have written or discussed my situation with any researcher or reporter,” she said. “One time about 10 years ago I offered to do it locally with the local newspaper, but there was no interest, so I dropped it. I kept no journals about the event, fearing that whatever I wrote might be stolen and misused. My husband was big into telling me to be quiet. Witnesses disappeared. Witnesses were killed.

  “Perhaps you can imagine the state of mind of a young lady in her 20s who had been frightened about many things. This was one fear she didn’t need. No researcher has ever gotten in touch with me about what I witnessed, at least until now.

  “You’re it.”

  Not long after David Belin questioned her, Ms. Adams moved from Dallas.

  “When Scott Foresman offered me a transfer to their home office, I accepted it and moved the following year in July. I felt there was no place for me to go career-wise in Dallas and the home office offered more opportunity. At the same time I considered myself to be ‘over the hill’ and that my biological clock was rapidly going downhill. I was ready to get married. I did—to a man from a Chicago suburb and we moved to the West Coast. I desperately wanted to be a saleswoman with the company instead of into the editorial stuff. I asked if the company would provide a scholarship for me to be able to attend college at night, since I had no parents and no one else to help me. They said ‘no,’ although they provided scholarships to high school students. I was crushed.

  “By that time I was the executive secretary to the vice president of sales, very efficient and very young. I had again reached my plateau. I left the company in 1966 and moved to San Diego and began working for a couple of surgeons as an o
ffice manager.”

  While living in California and continuing to work part time, Ms. Adams went back to college and acquired a degree in general education, graduating with honors. By 1970, she had her first child. Changing gears again in 1974, she turned her career interests toward real estate, working full time in that profession while continuing to pursue her education at night. She finally graduated summa cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in business administration.

  Still more changes were on the horizon. “A couple of years later my husband and I hit the road and traveled for six years until our money ran out. We returned to ‘real’ life and ‘real’ bills and ‘real’ responsibilities.”

  During that lengthy escape, she turned into a real “gypsy,” as she often described herself. It was no wonder I had been unable to catch up with her.

  During that period, Ms. Adams and her husband lived in a five-wheel trailer along the highways, traversing the country, seeing the sights, and experiencing mostly rural America at ground level. Ironically, part of her travels brought her to my backyard in 1997. She stayed in Pennsylvania for two months, visiting Harrisburg and its restaurants and tourist attractions. For two weeks, she lived only twenty-five miles from my home.

  We could have passed each other, dined at the same eatery, been at the same museum at the same time. Wasn’t that what Larry might consider too much of a coincidence?

  When her journey was done, she returned home to live out her otherwise quiet life, until, that is, I found her.

  I would, of course, quiz her often about her trek down the back staircase. I milked her story for every nuance and detail, initially asking if it were possible that her “clattering in our heels” descent, as she described it, may have drowned out other footsteps.

  “No one else was on those stairs unless they were creeping down on tiptoe.” She was always emphatic about that.

  “We could not have drowned out the sound of other feet by our noise. Whenever anyone was on the stairs you could hear them on any floor. We would have heard someone on the stairs. Absolutely.”

  I inquired too about the timing: how fast it took from when she left the window until she reached the top of the stairs and how fast she descended those stairs to the first floor.

  “I am sorry about this,” she replied, “but I have no concept of how long. Remember, this was all done in the desire to get outside to see what was happening and to get out quickly before someone stopped me, which I thought they might have. If you asked me how many steps there were between floors, for example, I couldn’t answer that either.

  “None of that stuff interested me then nor later, because I really never saw it as relevant. I never really concerned myself with thinking about the implications of timing. I was so interested in getting out that I did the unthinkable—for a woman. I ran out without my purse.”

  Perhaps Ms. Adams had moved so quickly she was down the stairs before Oswald even started his descent.

  “If Oswald was interested in getting away fast, you bet he would have hurried,” she answered. “I was interested in getting to the action, too, but I didn’t speed it up like a shooter would have. Actually what I think happened is that Oswald was where he said he was all the time.”

  Did she mean in the first-floor employees’ lounge?

  Ms. Adams never realized the implications of that thought on November 22. When she talked with investigators, she told them only what she knew: that she had gone down the steps moments after the shooting.

  I asked when it first dawned on her that she should have heard or seen Oswald if the assassin was escaping from above.

  “It was sometime during that week,” she responded. “I am convinced that there was something funny going on, but I don’t hold any more answers to the riddle than you do. Both Sandra and I were very nervous about the whole thing since we knew we had been where the killer reputedly was at approximately the same time. I cannot say much about what I believe happened, but I do suspect that Oswald was never on the sixth floor at the time of the assassination.

  “I do think the government wanted people to get on with their lives and out of the drama of the assassination and they did what they wanted.

  “And I don’t believe my testimony was ignored. It was discounted, which is entirely different. And even in Sandra’s deposition [to the FBI in March 1964, a copy of which I had sent her], I see there was nothing that suggests they really wanted to know the timing. I actually think the Warren Commission needed to bring an end to the investigation.

  “It is hard to understand that Sandra and I were both young ladies and we weren’t into political things. Instead we were into having fun, meeting young men and making a living. This was really scary for us. If you can put yourself into our shoes, we had high-powered people playing ‘who dun it’ and we were wanting to make sure they knew we didn’t or didn’t have a connection of any kind to anyone who did. That was pretty heady stuff for young women in those days.”

  I specifically asked if she remembered seeing Kennedy when she heard the first shot. “No,” she answered, “because I did not see the limousine at that time. It was under the tree.” As she gazed out the window, she said, the tree was “slightly to my right.”

  I then inquired about the sequence of shots. “As I remember,” she wrote, “there was the first shot and then a pause and then the last two seemed very close together.”

  Ms. Adams told me she occasionally visited the second-floor lunchroom when she worked at the Depository, the scene of the Oswald/Baker/Truly encounter. She always got there, she said, by going down the back stairs.

  Did she happen to notice any activity in or around that lunchroom when she passed by on November 22?

  “I don’t recall noticing anything or anyone on the second floor,” she said. “But, remember, I wasn’t looking for anything in the building. My intent was to get outside as quickly as possible. I can’t answer whether anyone could have been in the lunchroom. If they were they should have been the ones doing the noticing. I mean, here were people running out of the building. For all anyone else knew, we could have been the ones who did it. Do you know what I mean?”

  What about the layout of her office? What did she have to do to get to the top of the fourth-floor staircase?

  “I am certainly not great with distances,” she admitted, “but if I had to take a guess, I believe that from the window to the door I had to reach at the back of the office was no more than 50-70 feet. We had to run around a group of three tables, like banquet tables, and then out the door to the stairway.”

  Then I brought up my discovery of the transmittal letter at the National Archives—the shocker from Martha Joe Stroud stating Dorothy Garner made the startling comment she saw Roy Truly and Officer Marrion Baker arrive on the fourth floor after Victoria Adams had left. When I sent Ms. Adams a copy of that document for her response, she was not excited by the official confirmation.

  “Dorothy merely corroborated what I know I did and when I know I did it.”

  Would Miss Garner have been that perceptive, under the circumstances, to notice such details?

  “Dorothy Garner was the office manager at Scott Foresman and assistant to the regional manager,” Ms. Adams explained. “She was an efficient, no nonsense kind of lady, demanded punctuality and a great job. She basically ran the branch by herself. The male figurehead, Joe Bergen, the regional sales manager, was gone most of the time and Dorothy handled whatever he needed for him, as well as overseeing the office production. Scott Foresman in Dallas was one of four regional offices.

  “Quite frankly she intimidated me and I followed her orders and instructions to a ‘tee,’ because I was both scared of her and respected her. She demanded the best, watched the clock like a hawk and tolerated no nonsense nor talking when she ruled her kingdom.

  “If you can picture an old fashioned prim librarian telling everyone to ‘shush,’ you have an idea of the power and demeanor of Dorothy Garner. Sandra and I were actually pretty nervy to
sneak outside when we did. If I recall correctly, we were actually supposed to be back at work then. In fact, I roamed around outside while Sandra went back inside. I think she was more concerned about obedience than I was, especially in that situation.

  “I remember thinking my job was at risk if I stayed outside, and I would probably get reprimanded by Dorothy Garner, but finding out what was going on was more important than potential repercussions to me in the moment.

  “To my recollection, nothing ever slipped by Mrs. Garner, except us that day. She was extremely detail oriented and was very proud of what she did. She was both feared and respected by the staff.”

  Did Ms. Adams know Lee Oswald?

  “I did know Oswald,” she said.

  “He was an unassuming dock worker at the Depository. I said hello to him whenever I saw him, smiled, and that kind of thing. I never had a conversation with him, however. I didn’t with any of the dock workers, but I knew them by sight. There weren’t that many of us who worked in the Texas School Book Depository.”

  I asked Ms. Adams about the scene in the movie JFK where a frenzied Oswald is shown squeezing between her and Miss Styles on his wild run down to the second-floor lunchroom. It depicts what would have occurred if the Warren Commission’s timing was correct and Miss Adams was telling the truth. Had she seen the film?

  “Yes,” she said. “It’s only a movie. Obviously I knew it was inaccurate, but I wasn’t upset anymore. I think I just had finally accepted that people were going to believe what they wanted to believe, including the film makers and story tellers. But they weren’t there. I was.”

  One day I played devil’s advocate, purposely misquoting a portion of her testimony by saying she had told Belin the shots came from the direction of the grassy knoll. I wanted to see what she’d say.