The Girl on the Stairs

by Barry Ernest

  When it comes to the JFK assassination, America is lost in guesses and garbage. America is lost in the mumbo jumbo that authors compose, publishers relish, and readers devour. America is lost.

  A long time ago, I asked my mentor how one goes about digging out truths in a junk pile such as this. Truth is a tough nut in any area, especially here, he told me. It requires hard work, long hours, and verification from existing evidence and sources.

  “What if all of that evidence is not available?” I asked.

  He smiled in the knowing way he always did. “Then you find it,” he answered.

  The truth is out there, somewhere. I realize that now. It is being held by those who have no reason to be untruthful.

  But I still have a bit of unfinished business.

  In 1967, after I was roped into this, my friend Terry kept asking me if I still believed the Warren Report. I always hedged his question back then and have not seen or heard from him since our final day together in Washington. But I can answer you now, Terry, wherever you may be, for whatever any of this is worth.

  No, Terry. I no longer believe the Warren Report.

  Why the change? he would probably ask.

  Well, I would answer, because I’ve reached four conclusions. Number one, the assassination did not happen the way the government says it did. Forget for a moment that vital evidence at the crime scene—the boxes surrounding the “sniper’s nest,” the three rifle hulls found on the floor, even the murder weapon itself—was disturbed and handled by inattentive police officers in disregard of proper forensic practices. Forget for a moment that upon discovery, the so-called “magic bullet” was not preserved as it should have been, thereby rendering its surface useless for blood and tissue sampling. Forget that the autopsy doctors were not qualified for authoritative examination of gunshot wounds, that records routinely made under similar circumstances were in this case absent or incorrect, and that the victim’s brain was not dissected, even though the cause of death was a gunshot wound to the head.

  Forget too the lack of fingerprints, the timing problems, what the films show, and what the witnesses claim they saw. Forget the absence of nitrates in paraffin tests performed on Oswald’s cheek, the altered documents, the missing this and the missing that. Forget what he said and what she said.

  Forget it all and think about just one thing. Why was there such haste on the part of the government to shut this investigation down? Why, on the very afternoon of the assassination and in the face of so much early evidence pointing toward conspiracy, was a single person fingered for the crime with such zeal, before any of that contrary evidence—whether it was right or wrong—had even been examined?7 If nothing else convinces me that something here is all wrong, it is the urgency with which the government tried to convince us that everything was all right.

  Number two, those responsible for writing the Warren Report knew it was wrong when they wrote it. There was an agenda on the Commission’s part, an immediate and unchanging urgency to reach a predetermined conclusion. The reader will recall that as early as January 11, 1964, in a “Tentative Outline” distributed by Earl Warren to the other Commission members, Section II was titled, “Lee Harvey Oswald as the Assassin of President Kennedy.” This was little more than a month after the Commission was formed to investigate the murder and three weeks before hearings to examine any evidence linking Oswald to the crime had even begun.

  As a result of that rush to judgment—for what else can it honestly be called?—contrary evidence was overlooked. Questions that should have been asked were not. Routine follow-ups were never made.

  If a layman can recognize such failings, why couldn’t they? Smart men like those sitting on the Warren Commission do not make these kinds of errors.

  Number three, the assassination was beyond the capabilities of one man. There is nothing, not a shred of evidence, that shows that Oswald had the rifle competency he is credited with possessing. And multiple attempts to duplicate Oswald’s alleged feat by far more talented riflemen than he have consistently failed. Efforts to prove his prowess have shown bullets fired into plywood, fiberboard, wood blocks, Styrofoam and a host of similar building products, human cadavers, dead goats, live goats and who knows how many innocent farm animals, gelatin blocks, water barrels, tubes of cotton, light bulbs, watermelons, grapefruit, pumpkins, and no doubt a large assortment of other suitable fruits and vegetables.

  Posits abound to make it somehow work. A faulty telescopic sight that impeded FBI rifle experts testing the assassination weapon was instead deemed an “advantage” to Oswald; or, in lieu of that, he didn’t use the damaged telescopic sight at all but relied on the end-of-the-barrel iron sights, not only for better accuracy but now to gain speed to overcome the problem that was discovered concerning the timing of the shots; or, in lieu of that, he lengthened that timeframe by shooting at the president through the old oak tree; or, in lieu of that, he wrapped the weapon’s sling around his arm for more efficiency; or, in lieu of that, he didn’t use the sling at all because, without it, he could reload the weapon faster.

  The medical and physical evidence, under close examination, simply does not support the single-assassin, single-bullet scenario as proposed by the Warren Report. Not a single witness to the crime has described the assassination as occurring the way the Warren Report concluded it happened. We are left then with nothing but speculations, theories, conjectures, guesstimates, and beliefs.

  Finally, number four, solving the mystery of who shot John Kennedy is beyond the capabilities of a private citizen. Studying this case has led me down a most unsettling path. Yet Victoria Adams turned out to be the beacon at the end of that road. And I would be remiss if I didn’t seek some degree of closure in my investigation of her. Once again, I’ve arrived at four conclusions.

  Number one, the Warren Report is wrong about Miss Adams; she did come down the stairs when she said she did.

  Miss Adams was a model witness, consistent with virtually every detail she provided, from her early police and FBI questioning, through her Commission testimony, and into her lengthy discussions with me forty years later. The only hiccup has been her reference to Shelley and Lovelady, which, despite multiple previous official interviews, never came up until a curious meeting with Jim Leavelle in February 1964, three months after the assassination, and then again two months later during a more formal appearance before David Belin.

  The timing of her trek down the stairs has been corroborated by not one but two other witnesses: Sandra Styles and Dorothy Garner. The June 2, 1964, letter from Martha Joe Stroud to J. Lee Rankin is strong support that Miss Adams descended those stairs when she said she did. It is a document that strangely remained under wraps until only recently. It took the JFK Act to finally pry it loose, but by then, who was left to recognize its significance other than someone obsessively familiar with the circumstances surrounding it?

  Number two, those responsible for writing about Miss Adams in the Report knew that what they were saying was wrong when they wrote it. Again, the Martha Joe Stroud letter provides the proof.

  The significance of these words—“that after Miss Adams went downstairs she (Miss Garner) saw Mr. Truly and the policeman come up”—cannot be overemphasized. Written June 2, three months prior to the Warren Report’s publication, the letter was sent to the general counsel for the Commission, a man who was responsible for every single aspect of the investigation and who was fully aware of Miss Adams’ importance. It was sent at a time when David Belin was actively pursuing this very line of inquiry. Its focus on what Miss Adams had told Belin and what Mrs. Garner was now saying implies more than just a casual interest in both women.

  The Commission therefore knew, in advance, of Miss Adams’ truthfulness. With the Stroud letter, that agency had to know that what was soon to be written about Miss Adams was blatantly wrong.

  I’ll remind the reader that it was Belin who had officially questioned Miss Adams two months earlier. It was Belin who was in charg
e of determining the identity of the assassin. It was Belin who wrote in a February 25, 1964, internal memo, “We should pin down this time sequence of her running down the stairs.” It was Belin who had to know the monumental significance of what Mrs. Garner was quoted as saying in that letter. It was his job to understand what it meant. He had to know that Miss Adams was right or, at the very least, realize that further investigation was necessary.

  And yet he did nothing.

  In 1964, he allowed the Warren Report to say that she was wrong. Nine years later, in his book that asked the public to be the jury in this case, he hid from them what would prove him to be the one who was wrong and instead continued with the distortion that Miss Adams was “mistaken” and came down the stairs later than she thought. Honest men do not make these kinds of errors.

  Number three, evidence indicates that efforts have been made to intentionally make Victoria Adams appear wrong. The reference to Shelley and Lovelady in Miss Adams’ testimony was obviously the cornerstone used by Belin—and ultimately the Warren Commission—to discredit her. That supposed encounter has become the lynchpin cited even today by those who continue to debunk this woman.

  But did that encounter take place?

  The evidence is clear that Miss Adams was correct about when she descended the stairs. She has remained consistent throughout the years with her claim that she arrived on the first floor within a minute after the shooting. Two other women—the one who accompanied her and the other who observed the beginning of her descent—confirm that timing. The Stroud letter validates her as well.

  How then does one explain her seeing Shelley and Lovelady on the first floor when both men were still outside the building?

  It is interesting to note that the only evidence used by the Commission to back up its conclusion that Miss Adams was wrong are the words supposedly expressed by Miss Adams in two contested interviews, words she has steadfastly denied saying.

  Shelley, for instance, did not remember seeing Miss Adams when he returned to the first floor. This is odd, because she supposedly spoke to him, uttering almost the exact same phrase—“the president has been shot”—as did Gloria Calvery, a woman whom Shelley did remember seeing only minutes earlier. In fact, he even described meeting Mrs. Calvery, in his police affidavit on the day of the assassination and then again five months later in his Commission deposition.

  Lovelady’s testimony, on the other hand, strongly suggests he was led into his response that he “saw a girl but I wouldn’t swear to it it’s Vickie.” The Warren Report enriched that comment to read that he “saw a girl on the first floor who he believes was Victoria Adams,” even though that’s hardly what he had said.

  While it may not be uncommon for a lawyer to rehearse questions and answers with a witness, it seems suspicious in this case since the resulting testimony was never presented in open court, where opposing counsel has the opportunity for cross examination. The maneuver instead creates the distinct impression that what ended up on the record are words previously filtered or encouraged, certainly not the hallmark of a fair and objective examination.

  Miss Adams today says she did not see Shelley and Lovelady on the first floor. Neither did coworker Sandra Styles, who knew both men well. Marrion Baker and Roy Truly mentioned nothing about the two men either. If Baker and Truly started up the stairs after Miss Adams and Miss Styles came down them, as the Stroud letter implies, wouldn’t those two have noticed Shelley and Lovelady, who each testified they stayed on the first floor for a while after returning to the building?

  Baker should have spotted them, since he seemed observant and intent on confronting anyone in his path. Truly certainly knew Shelley, as his co-manager, and was very familiar with Lovelady as well.

  But the women did see someone there. Miss Adams and Miss Styles independently corroborated each other when they told me they saw a black man near the back elevators on the first floor. That is the person Miss Adams spoke to, she said. Baker and Truly noticed the same man at the same place, Truly going so far as to identify him as being an employee.

  All four of these witnesses, then, observed this lone individual. Substantiation regarding the presence of Shelley and Lovelady, however, is absent.

  If Miss Adams came down the stairs when she said she did, and Shelley and Lovelady remained outside the building for as long as they say they did, what then is the alternative? Could the testimony of Victoria Adams have been altered?

  During my interviews with Miss Adams, she revealed something never before known, something reinforced by the Stroud letter: that she had personally made changes to a transcript of her testimony that was unexpectedly hand delivered to her in Dallas. Until then, I was under the impression, based on what I had read in the Commission’s own evidence, that she had waived her right to do so and therefore had not seen her statement prior to it being sent to Washington.

  A lack of personal review could have opened up the possibility for testimony tampering. However, discovery of the Martha Joe Stroud letter, which listed six corrections Miss Adams had made to her testimony, confirmed that she had in fact seen her statement in advance and had made changes to it.

  My first question was, why would she suddenly have been asked to review her words if she had already declined to do so? This didn’t make sense to me, and it certainly didn’t make sense to her.

  My second question was, shouldn’t those corrections, completed well before the Commission’s publication deadline, have been made to and appeared on the transcript of her testimony sent to the Government Printing Office (GPO) instead of the one I had seen in 1968, the one that showed no corrections at all?

  Based on this confusion, I went back to the National Archives with a request to examine once more the official testimony of Victoria Adams. And now I found something strange. It appears that two versions of Miss Adams’ testimony currently exist: one from 1964 and a second one recently made available.

  Both versions are word-for-word the same. Both contain the concluding line about her relinquishing the opportunity to review her deposition, and both have the questionable references to Shelley and Lovelady. Thus, both versions are identical with her testimony as it appears in the twenty-six volumes.

  Yet there are differences.

  Whereas the earlier version, the transcript I had examined in 1968 and the one sent to the GPO, bore no signature, no corrections, and no notations whatsoever, this later version now has an inked signature as well as inked corrections, all presumably in the handwriting of Miss Adams.8

  If one version was an exact duplicate of the other, the “TOP SECRET” classification label displayed across the top and bottom on each page of both versions should also look the same. But they do not. The lettering of the classification label on the earlier version of her testimony is small, straight, and professional in its script. Lettering on this later version is slanted, often appearing to have been hand stamped, and is in a larger script style.

  The unsigned version supports the official testimony of Miss Adams, where she is quoted as waiving her right to examine her statement. This later version supports the Stroud letter with its list of corrections and apparently represents the “Enclosure” typed at the bottom of that letter. It was not, however, attached to or included with the Stroud letter when I discovered that letter in 1999.

  Whereas the 1964 version was declassified on November 21, 1967, this differing transcription shows an additional declassification stamp, bearing a more recent date of February 9, 2011. Coincidentally, that is two months after existence of the Martha Joe Stroud letter was disclosed for the first time in the self-published edition of The Girl on the Stairs.

  To date, no one has been able to explain why this same document needed declassifying twice, the second official release occurring forty-four years later.

  None of the corrections made by Miss Adams in Dallas appeared in her official Warren Commission testimony. This is strange, since the Commission had sufficient time to make those changes. It
means the unsigned, uncorrected version of her testimony was indeed what was sent to the GPO.

  Why that one? Maybe her corrections were considered inconsequential. But over the years, I have personally examined dozens of other witness transcriptions and seen a variety of seemingly trifling correctional notations made by those witnesses, practically all of which did show up in the final versions printed in the twenty-six volumes.

  Equally unusual is that when the HSCA examined selected portions of Miss Adams’ testimony a dozen years later, one of the pages it reviewed does not display the handwritten corrections that do show up on the same page in the more recent version. This indicates that either the HSCA did not have the corrected version in its possession or the corrected version was not available at that time.9

  Miss Adams told me she did not see the names Shelley and Lovelady in the copy of her testimony she reviewed in Dallas. She said if she had, she would have removed those references.

  How does one thus reconcile the fact that Shelley and Lovelady are mentioned in a transcript signed by Miss Adams? Could their names somehow have been inserted after Miss Adams made her corrections and affixed her signature?10

  Had my college friend Terry suggested such a possibility back in 1968, I would have laughed uncontrollably. No longer does the thought seem so funny.

  With these continuing questions, I next made a more formal request to the National Archives. I described the confusion over what Miss Adams had told me and what appeared in the two varying transcripts of her testimony. I said I hoped to resolve this conflict for the sake of historical accuracy.

  This time, I wanted to see the official stenographer’s tape of her testimony, not simply a typewritten copy made from that tape. I wanted to see precisely what had been taken down by court reporter Helen Laidrich, the only other person present as Belin questioned Miss Adams that day. Such tapes do exist. According to an inventory of JFK records available at the National Archives, they are contained in sixteen boxes under the title “Entry 39: Stenotype Notes of Proceedings.”