Oswald Leaving TSBD?

[Michael Griffin]

Martin, I was thinking that it looked like a person taking pictures as well. IMO, he had to get in the shade to do so, because otherwise in the sunlight he would only get glare and would be unable to see what he was attempting to get a picture of. As much as I think that prayerman looks like Oswald and thought we had the smoking gun, I do believe a camera in his hands would remove him from consideration. (that is, of course, if it is a camera that he is holding)

Sure Terry, i was thinking the same.

But on the other hand Sean's and Richard's arguments are convincing.

None of the TSBD employees standind in the doorway reported to have taken pictures and

the left arm of this man is considerable lower in Wiegman.

I would use both arms holding a camera.

I don't know what that white piece in front of his head is in Wiegman...in Darnell it is gone.

Just the arms are noticeable lower.

What is that?

best to you

Martin

Just a thought re the Wiegman.........Assume that Prayer Man is holding a bottle of Coke in his right hand. As Prayer Man proceeds to take a sip from the bottle, he brings it up to his mouth and tilts the bottle back (so that the bottle is almost horizontal as he is taking his sip). The round, light area in front of Prayer Man's lower facial region could be a reflection of light off of the round base of a Coke bottle.

Edited August 30, 2013 by Michael Griffin

[Martin Hinrichs]

Just a thought re the Wiegman.........Assume that Prayer Man is holding a bottle of Coke in his right hand. As Prayer Man proceeds to take a sip from the bottle, he brings it up to his mouth and tilts the bottle back (so that the bottle is almost horizontal as he is taking his sip). The round, light area in front of Prayer Man's lower facial region could be a reflection of light off of the round base of a Coke bottle.

Good argument Michael.

[J. Raymond Carroll]

I don't think so Ray. To my knowledge she used an Alias.

Danke, Martin.

I do not know what forum you refer to, but it occurs to me that the Forum gatekeeper

might have her real name, etc?

[J. Raymond Carroll]

By that time there was several people in the building. Some fifteen minutes later I was checking our employees, and I did not find Lee. I asked Mr. Shelley if he had seen Lee. He said no. I then contacted Chief Lumkin and told him Lee was missing."

Forrest Sorrels was involved. It may be in Sorrels testimony, but I recall from somewhere that Sorrels

asked Truly to see if all his men were accounted for.

I believe it was Sorrels, knowing that Lee had already done an Elvis

and left the building, who initiated the inquiry.

[Ian Kingsbury]

Or a camera lens?

[Richard Hocking]

Here a closeup crop of the Wiegman film:

Superb stuff, Martin.

Looks to me like Prayer Man's right hand is significantly higher than his left here.

Contrast the 'join' in Darnell:

My money is still on a Coca-Cola--taking a swig in Wiegman, return to two-hand clasp by Darnell.

Yes Sean, you are correct. My idea of a camera in his hand is apparently invalid.

Has someone created an overview in map to show all the people in the doorway?

To me it looks like Prayerman was standing directly at the wall but not on the top pedestal.

Most likely one step lower.

When looking closely at the stable Darnell (not Couch as i stated falsely) sequence from me

i see the right glass door being operated. Opended most likely. But thats just a side note.

best to you

Martin

Martin,

I agree with your observation. Prayer Man looks like he is standing one step from the top.

[Mark Haley]

Fascinating thread. From the close up crop above it looks to me like Prayer Man turns as if to head back into the building

At the final frames I think that is his neck your seeing.

[Robert Prudhomme]

By that time there was several people in the building. Some fifteen minutes later I was checking our employees, and I did not find Lee. I asked Mr. Shelley if he had seen Lee. He said no. I then contacted Chief Lumkin and told him Lee was missing."

Forrest Sorrels was involved. It may be in Sorrels testimony, but I recall from somewhere that Sorrels

asked Truly to see if all his men were accounted for.

I believe it was Sorrels, knowing that Lee had already done an Elvis

and left the building, who initiated the inquiry.

Once again, from Bill Shelley's affidavit of 22/11/63:

"After the President's accident (?), I started checking around and I'd missed Lee. I ask Mr. Truly about him and he said he had not seen him."

Don't you find this statement a bit strange, in light of Truly signing an affidavit on 23/11/63 where he not only sees Oswald on the 2nd floor as baker sticks a gun in his stomach, but he also states that it was him asking Shelley if Shelley had seen Oswald. and not Shelley asking Truly if he had seen Oswald? Should Truly not have said, "Oh, we saw him on the 2nd floor. He may still be up there, for all we know."

How would Forrest Sorrels know, at this point, that Oswald had left the TSBD?

[J. Raymond Carroll]

Don't you find this statement a bit strange, in light of Truly signing an affidavit on 23/11/63 where he not only sees Oswald on the 2nd floor as baker sticks a

that it was him asking Shelley if Shelley had seen Oswald. and not Shelley asking Truly if he had seen Oswald? Should Truly not have said, "Oh, we saw him on the 2nd floor. He may still be up there, for all we know."

How would Forrest Sorrels know, at this point, that Oswald had left the TSBD?

I don't see anything strange about the Shelley -Truly confusion.

I've seen it happen a million times.

Sorrels is the guy who chose the ridiculous parade route, so he had to know

what was going down that day

Edited August 31, 2013 by J. Raymond Carroll

[Robert Prudhomme]

Don't you find this statement a bit strange, in light of Truly signing an affidavit on 23/11/63 where he not only sees Oswald on the 2nd floor as baker sticks a

that it was him asking Shelley if Shelley had seen Oswald. and not Shelley asking Truly if he had seen Oswald? Should Truly not have said, "Oh, we saw him on the 2nd floor. He may still be up there, for all we know."

How would Forrest Sorrels know, at this point, that Oswald had left the TSBD?

I don't see anything strange about the Shelley -Truly confusion.

I've seen it happen a million times.

Sorrels is the guy who chose the ridiculous parade route, so he had to know

what was going down that day

I have to disagree with you on this one. Truly supposedly saw Oswald on the 2nd floor only minutes before Shelley asked Truly if he saw Oswald, and Truly can't recall seeing Oswald and seeing Baker pointing a gun at him? Outside of the two "officers" Baker and Truly encountered on the 4th floor, who else did they see?

How does choosing the parade route give Forrest Sorrels the ability to know if Oswald is still in the TSBD?

[Ian Kingsbury]

I have sent Gerda a pm !

[Sean Murphy]

With all due respect to Ray Carroll, could I ask that this recent and rather bizarre string of music-related posts be deleted by the mods as off-topic and distracting?

I was thinking about that myself. Sorry, Ray, but I agree with Sean. Your posts were not about Oswald or the building, but about your favorite Irish songs. If you'd like to start such a thread, please do so on the appropriate section of the forum.

Thanks, Pat.

[Sean Murphy]

Just a thought re the Wiegman.........Assume that Prayer Man is holding a bottle of Coke in his right hand. As Prayer Man proceeds to take a sip from the bottle, he brings it up to his mouth and tilts the bottle back (so that the bottle is almost horizontal as he is taking his sip). The round, light area in front of Prayer Man's lower facial region could be a reflection of light off of the round base of a Coke bottle.

Exactly, Michael, glint off a coke bottle is a very strong possibility.

The fact that Wiegman shows one hand up to the face while the other is still kept raised to chest level is IMO extremely significant, for it suggests

a ) he cannot have been using a camera

b ) he was holding something in both hands.

What I'm seeing is either this--

--or its reverse (i.e. drinking the coke using one hand and holding the sandwich in the other).

Again we must remind ourselves of Fritz's words during his WC testimony:

Mr. FRITZ. He said he was having his lunch. He had a cheese sandwich and a Coca-Cola.

I believe that's exactly what Lee Oswald did tell Fritz he was doing--only he didn't say he was doing it in the second-floor lunchroom, he said he was doing it out front.

If so, then Fritz has just seconds before his comment above committed a major boo-boo:

Mr. FRITZ. Well he told me that he was eating lunch with some of the employees when this happened, and that he saw all the excitement...

He was having his lunch ... he was eating lunch: same timeframe, same claim.

I believe Oswald named one of the "employees" he had been eating lunch with, and it wasn't 'Junior' [Jarman] or the short 'negro' [Norman] (whose names did come up in a different context). It was Bill Shelley.

Edited September 4, 2013 by Sean Murphy

[J. Raymond Carroll]

I believe that's exactly what Lee Oswald did tell Fritz he was doing--only he didn't say he was doing it in the second-floor lunchroom, he said he was doing it out front.

I believe Oswald named one of the "employees" he had been eating lunch with, and it wasn't 'Junior' [Jarman] or the short 'negro' [Norman] (whose names did come up in a different context). It was Bill Shelley.

Are you recommending a faith-based approach by the rest of us, Sean?

Just because you were the genius who discovered Prayer Man

does not mean we should believe everything you believe,

like the perjured testimony of Will Fritz

which was proven false when his notes revealed that Prayer Man told him

that when the president passed by he was

Out with Bill Shelley in front.

I think we have the FBI guys confirming that he said

he was getting a coke on the second floor when the policeman came in.

And I again submit that Prayer Man

is clapping his hands.

Edited August 31, 2013 by J. Raymond Carroll

[Sean Murphy]

Vicki Adams worked on the fourth floor of the TSBD and watched the assassination from a south-facing window on that floor in the company of several colleagues.

She claimed to have run down the back stairs to the first floor with her colleague Sandra Styles, and insisted that she and Sandra had left the fourth floor window within just seconds of the last shot being fired and had gone downstairs immediately.

For many years, conspiracy theorists have pointed to the eyebrow-raising fact that she didn't see or hear Oswald coming down the stairs.

In more recent years however, and in particular since the appearance of Barry Ernest's provocative book The Girl on the Stairs, WC defenders have pointed to a no less eyebrow-raising fact: she didn't see or hear Mr. Truly and a police officer coming up the stairs.

How, these WC defenders have asked, and not without good reason it has to be said, could the two pairs of people have possibly missed each other entirely if Adams and Styles had really hit those rear stairs as quickly as Adams claimed? Does not this prove that Adams was mistaken and must have gone downstairs at some point after Baker and Truly had gone past the fourth floor?

**

This was my own view at one time, for I had had a lengthy telephone conversation with Sandra Styles in 2008.

Sandra told me that her recollection was that she and Vicki had gone downstairs significantly later than Vicki had claimed.

That, I thought, was that. Oliver Stone would have to cut those memorable frames from his next edit of JFK.

**

Then Barry's book came out. In it he gave details of a telephone conversation he had had with Sandra several years earlier (and long before my contact with her). Sandra, he reported, said that she and Vicki had left the front window just as the Presidential limousine was about to enter the triple underpass.

I immediately went on to a couple of JFK assassination research forums and, in so many words, accused Barry of being a xxxx. For Sandra had given me a very different timeline.

**

But something was bothering me.

It was a certain document which Barry had discovered and reproduced in his book--a registered letter, dated 2 June 1964, sent by Martha Joe Stroud, assistant U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Texas, to J. Lee Rankin, WC general counsel:

Miss Garner, Miss Adams' supervisor, stated this morning that after Miss Adams went downstairs she (Miss Garner) saw Mr. Truly and the policeman come up: did not these words offer sensational vindication of Vicki Adams's unwavering claim to have gone downstairs at once?

**

I decided to re-contact Sandra Styles, this time by email, and put to her the information contained in the Stroud document.

She seemed genuinely taken aback, if not nonplussed, by Garner's reported claim.

She then restated several times something that she had said in our original conversation and in the follow-up emails, something that I had heard but not really processed, putting it down to the lady's self-effacing modest personality: she could not rule out the possibility that Vicki's recollection was the more accurate one. Memory, she said, plays funny tricks and all she could tell me at this point was that "logic tells me" that it was later than Vicki said.

She also, for the first time, mentioned that the authorities who interviewed her had told her that the police had not started their search of the TSBD building until some 15-20 minutes (!) after the assassination. This had always bothered her, and seemed to have played a role in fixing her 'memory' of having gone downstairs minutes rather than seconds after the shooting.

**

Vicki Adams's claim was suddenly back in contention, at least for me.

But the Stroud document, even as it supported her timeline, only undermined her story all over again:

for, if Baker and Truly came up on to the fourth floor landing after Adams and Styles left it for the stairs down, how in heaven's name did they all manage to miss one another?

There was, it is true, a tiny window (pun half-intended) in which this could conceivably have happened: Baker and Truly over at the second-floor lunchroom entrance while Adams and Styles are running across the second-floor landing. But it was a tiny and, truth be told, rather ludicrous one--the sound of two women in high heels hurrying down the noisy wooden stairs from three to two, across the landing and then down the stairs from two to one would not have gone unnoticed.

**

In June 2011 Barry Ernest managed to track down Dorothy Garner, the Scott, Foresman & Co. office supervisor mentioned in the Stroud document.

What she told him bears transcribing at length:

Did Miss Adams and Miss Styles leave the window right away, I asked her.

"The girls did," she responded. "I remember them being there and the next thing I knew, they were gone."

They had left "very quickly…within a matter of moments," she added.

What did Mrs. Garner do after that?

"There was this warehouse or storage area behind our office, out by the freight elevators and the rear stairway, and I went out there."

Her move to that area clearly put her into a position where she could have observed activity on the back stairs as well as on the

elevators. But how fast had she arrived there?

Mrs. Garner said she immediately went to this area, following "shortly after…right behind" Miss Adams and Miss Styles. She

couldn't remember exactly why she went out there, other than to say, "probably to get something." Mrs. Garner said she did not actually see "the girls" enter the stairway, though, arriving on the fourth- floor landing seconds after. When I asked how she knew they had gone down, Mrs. Garner said, "I remember hearing them, after they started down. I remember the stairs were very noisy."

Were the freight elevators in operation during this time?

"I don't recall that," she answered. "They were very noisy too!"

Mrs. Garner said she remained at that spot and was alone for a moment before "several came out back from the office to look out those windows there."

Anyone doubting that Barry is giving us a fair rendition of what Ms. Garner told him should consider very carefully what he says happened when he raised the crux question:

Did she remember seeing Roy Truly and a police officer come up the stairs together?

"I could have," she answered, "but there was so much confusion. It was, after all, a few years ago!"

**

It is, I submit, a testament to Barry's honesty as a researcher that he has given us faithfully what must have been for him a hugely anti-climactic answer from Dorothy Garner. After all, the Truly-Baker-coming-up-the-stairs issue was the chief reason for Barry's call to her.

I also submit that Garner's answer, when understood in proper context, is in fact far from anti-climactic.

For had she told Barry that yes, she clearly remembered seeing Truly and Baker coming up the stairs together, then we would be back to square one. How did they not see Baker and Truly while descending, etc.

Garner's 'failure' to confirm what the Stroud document says may be no failure at all.

It may be inviting us to take another look at that document:

Dorothy Garner did indeed see Mr. Truly and the police officer come up.

But can someone please show me where it says she saw them come up the stairs?

Edited September 4, 2013 by Sean Murphy