Duke Lane

As for Duke's "explanations," it is fun to speculate, but he does have a tendency to go off on tangents and if you can say something in one sentence he'll make it a few paragraphs.

Well, no argument there: "taciturn" is not a word often applied to me!

As Duke puts it, "... One could come to the conclusion, based on some comments, that the shooter(s) could have shot right out in the open with impunity because "they had everything covered from the get go" and would simply state that what everyone saw wasn't what happened, that there was no need to ensure his or their own anonymity. A lookout? Bah! That would be for rinky dink amateurs! Those who killed Kennedy were all-knowing and all-seeing, why would they worry about getting caught? They'd simply have been spirited away, their very existence denied, no matter who or how many saw them. The plot was that good. What was I thinking?!?"

But that's exactly what did happen - I don't see any mahem [sic] on the Sixth Floor after the shooting. The shooter didn't run anywhere, especially down the steps, where he would have bumped into Dougherty, the two secretaries and Truly and Baker. Whatever happened, and whereever they went, it does seem like they simply dissapeared.

I think I'd rather speculate - and involve humans - than postulate a scenario in which things happened by will, without planning, without coordination, unassisted and unobserved by a person or persons unknown who had the good fortune to be able to "simply disappear" afterward.

One could easily conclude that Peter Graves, Rod Serling and Gene Rodenberry were the real masterminds behind the assassination, or that events in Dealey Plaza were not only stranger than we imagine, but stranger than we can imagine!

I tend to think that the scenario I drew is more credible than disappearing all-knowing killers, who, incidentally, were able to maintain their cloak of invisibility during the entire time Bonnie Ray Williams and Jack Dougherty were on the sixth floor, including the time Bonnie Ray was supposedly alone there to within two or three minutes of the shooting, which in turn was two or three minutes after the parade was scheduled to pass the TSBD.

If Hank and Junior didn't go upstairs until after they'd heard that the motorcade was on Main Street, and Bonnie Ray didn't come down from the sixth floor to the fifth until after Hank and Junior had gotten to the fifth floor front windows (as each of them testified), and if Jack was working on the fifth and sixth floors during the lunch hour that he normally did not work during, then later in the direct path of the assassin's supposed escape, I find it a much easier conclusion to reach that all of them were aware of the shooters' presence - and lied about it - than that the shooters were able to pull some sort of "disappearing act" or time everything so precisely that nobody had a chance to see them.

If those things are true and the shooter was Oswald, then there was no reason to lie about it, and indeed, the simplest solution would have been for each of them to say that that they'd seen Oswald doing the things he was purported to do.

Since they didn't, we are left to conclude that that nobody wanted to admit they saw, and thus incriminate, the dead Oswald; or that despite their proximities to the locations and events that apparently took place, they saw nothing because there was nothing to see; or that they saw things that they didn't admit to and weren't going to talk about ... because the actual fact is that human beings cannot "simply disappear."

So it makes perfect sense to postulate that the killers acted with utter impunity because they knew both that they'd never be seen or caught, and that even if they were, they'd be turned loose in favor of the patsy's capture. They didn't need anyone on the inside because they knew everything that was going on inside the TSBD (and accomplices are only for amateurs anyway), and anyone who saw them would never say so, but if they happened to, it would never be recorded, and even if they were identified or captured, they'd never actually be "caught" because of their cloaks of invisibility and, should those fail, the fact that everybody was in on it.

... While suggesting that anyone aided and abetted is clearly nonsensical.

... Disappointing to see so few researchers commenting on mr D.Lane's posts. I am sure I am not the only one that find them fascinating. For instance, which else explanations is out there to the movements/statements of Bonnie Ray or Jack D.?,- just to mention two.

It is endlessly more fascinating to further analyze that which has been discussed in depth many times before, and much easier to fixate on what couldn't have been than what else must therefore have been. Proving as we might that Oswald didn't do it moves us no farther forward toward discerning who did do it. I imagine a "Close to Home" cartoon panel with two Sherlock Holmesian detectives closely examining some clue with a magnifying glass while oblivious to the murderous mayhem that rages around them.

I don't put too much credence in anybody being a "lookout," as that would be a pretty rinky dink operation, when I think they had everything covered from the get go. Oswald was going to be the patsy no matter what happened, even if he had an alibi or there was proof of conspiracy.

... Thanks to Duke Lane's analysis of the activites of Jack D. at the crucial time we can now see that either

1) he saw LHO go down the stairs and lied - can't believe he would do that if he wasn't involved himself - if he is = conspiracy (maybe he was the shooter!)

2) He saw no-one - so shooters on the 6th Floor were still there until after he took the lift to the first floor - therefore shooter is NOT Oswald

3) He was involved as a lookout for the shooter(s) = conspiracy

Big question is, given the importance of his tesimony and his location at the crucial time........what the hell were the Warren Commission doing? He was the crucial witness, unless he lied about where he was and what he did.

One could come to the conclusion, based on some comments, that the shooter(s) could have shot right out in the open with impunity because "they had everything covered from the get go" and would simply state that what everyone saw wasn't what happened, that there was no need to ensure his or their own anonymity. A lookout? Bah! That would be for rinky dink amateurs! Those who killed Kennedy were all-knowing and all-seeing, why would they worry about getting caught? They'd simply have been spirited away, their very existence denied, no matter who or how many saw them. The plot was that good. What was I thinking?!?

Jack had the advantage, if you will, of being "slow." If you asked a question that he answered with a non-sequitur ("Where were you, Jack?" ... "I'm pretty sure it was after lunch. I ate lunch on the first floor"), it could be - and was - written off as being a part of his "condition." Some went so far as to call him "retarded," while Roy Truly characterized him as having what we might call "issues" today, but "average intelligence for the [mindless?] work he was doing," to wit:

Truly apparently went farther in describing Jack to the Secret Service, as noted in their report of January 8, 1964, that as Dougherty was being questioned by them, he

"Especially confused since the assassination." Really? Why would that be? He couldn't have been shaken up, traumatized as it were, because he neither saw nor heard nor experienced anything other than a search of the building in which he worked. He didn't know there were gunshots; he said he thought he heard a backfire. Oswald didn't run into him after the shooting, and he never even saw Oswald despite being "ten feet west of the west elevator," directly in Oswald's supposed path. Life, according to what Jack told everyone, was just plain hunky-dory and he simply went about his business "getting some stock" until the cops came into the building.

Then what, he went into shock? After cops asked him where Truly was and he took them to him upstairs, the events overcame his fragile "emotional makeup," he got "flustered," and remained that way ever since? Or perhaps had slightly selective memory or - worse - might've come unravelled under more intense questioning and said things he shouldn't have and upset the neat little applecart of Oswald's sole guilt? What if he couldn't remember what it was he was supposed to say, or what he wasn't supposed to know?

He's "retarded," he's "confused," he's an imbecile who couldn't tell you the right time of day or where he's standing right now. Oh, okay, well then, I guess we don't need to question him since he'd probably get it wrong anyway. Well, hey, thanks for your time, Jack, you can go now.

Can you hear that collective sigh of relief somewhere? Whew! They think he's an idiot. They won't ask him questions. And Truly - if he was involved - wasn't a worry since the man had chutzpah and wasn't likely to screw up: heck, he even told the FBI where to get off when they came along saying that they wanted to fingerprint the employees. "The hell you say! Maybe some of them, but not all of them, and I'll tell you which ones to do." The FBI acquiesced. And everyone left Jack alone.

Given the scenario I've laid out and allowing for its validity, is it any wonder that Jack became "especially confused after the assassination?" Or, for that matter, is it any great surprise that Truly would give this testimony:

Yeah ... like maybe they felt that they were out of danger?

Here's a snippet about the freight elevator that I'd forgotten Truly had made:

Of course, Truly had only minutes before (3H229) remarked about the "commotion" he and Baker were making in the enclosed stairwell: asked how he explained the freight elevator not being on the fifth floor when he and Baker had gotten there shortly after he'd seen the bottoms of both elevators on the fifth floor when looking up the elevator shaft, Truly said that he "didn't know," and speculated that "I think one of my boys was getting stock off the fifth floor on the back side, and probably moved the elevator at the time somewheres between the time we were running upstairs. And I would not have remembered that. I mean I wouldn't have really heard that, with the commotion we were making running up the enclosed stairwell."

Despite that, Truly ruled out the possibility of the elevator having gone up to the sixth or seventh floor "because I think I would have heard or seen it coming downstairs when I got on the fifth floor elevator, on the east side." Perhaps so, but that would only be if the elevator was running and not stopped, right? Although he is never asked the obvious question why he didn't remark about the missing elevator to Baker (who thought, even if Truly didn't, that there was a killer in the building), he did volunteer that "as we [he and Baker] started up from the fifth floor, you could see the top of it [the freight elevator] at an angle," yet despite claiming to have seen the top of the freight elevator - that is, below him on the fourth floor - Truly claimed that he "could not say" whether or not the freight elevator was on the sixth floor when he and Baker had passed there.

Are we lacking in some consistency here? Where was opposing counsel when we really needed one here? Oh yeah: there was no need for one! On cross:

As William Whaley said on another occasion in another context, "a good defense lawyer could take me apart." Truly might well have found himself in a similar bind if anyone had been and adversary to his answers.

... Of course a more accurate simulation for an assassin escaping via the stairs immediately afterward would have taken the time for Truly to reach the 2nd Floor landing.......not Baker and subtracted approximately 10 seconds (see SS re-enactment portion of the film above, "LHO" enters the 2nd Floor and opens vestibule door - I estimate about 10 seconds for the door to close).

Also, no mention was made of the assassin taking time to avoid the bumbling Dougherty on the 5th Floor (or 6th) landing. Credit to Duke Lane for his writings on the movement and observations (or lack of) on the upper floors at the time of the shooting.

Thoughts anyone?

My point is that the entire re-enactment scenario is moot because it didn't happen, and didn't need to happen. It was only necessary to prove that the sole suspect could have done what was claimed ... and if they'd looked farther than their noses, they'd have found other suspects.

Here's how I see it having gone down, based on extensive analysis of people's movements inside and outside the TSBD from about 11:30 onward (three unpublished segments I call The Great Elevator Shuffle, The Three Blind Mice, and The Invisible Man):

After everyone, including Oswald, had come downstairs by noon, the men grabbed - and in most cases ate - their lunches before heading outside by around 12:10. After everyone had gone out, Bonnie Ray Williams emerged from the wash room after doing what he referred to in his testimony as "washing up." One might assume that this meant quickly washing his hands, but based upon the testimony of the other men about what they'd done before going outside, and the fact that they'd gone outside by the time Bonnie Ray was done "washing up," it follows that Bonnie Ray was in the wash room for about 10 to 15 minutes.

He said that he, Billy Lovelady and Danny Arce were supposed to meet upstairs to watch the parade. Lovelady testified that he'd gone up to the second floor to get a coke before going outside, while Arce said that he'd eaten in the domino room, met up with Junior Jarman in the main part of the floor and had gone outside with Junior. Danny is the only person who claimed to have seen Jack Dougherty during the lunch break, also eating in the domino room.

If Jack was in there - it's difficult to reconcile that nobody else saw this "great big husky fellow" (Roy Truly's description of Jack) in that small room - it was the last anyone saw of him until after the shooting. Jack said that he didn't go outside because there were too many people and he "couldn't have seen anything" even if he'd "wanted to," an odd observation for someone who was apparently quite large. Instead, despite the fact that he "always" took "the full lunch hour," Jack uncharacteristically and inexplicably "went back to work ... getting some stock" while virtually everyone else who worked there went outside to wait for the parade (or, in a few cases, went to lunch).

I believe - though obviously can't prove - that when most of his co-workers went outside, Jack went to the other side of the building, let someone in the back door, stepped across the threshold, and took them upstairs in the freight elevator, which was directly across the way from the door; it would only take a second to do.

It appears, based on the evidence, that Oswald was the last to ride the elevator down because it was gone from the first floor after Hank Norman had gotten back downstairs on the passenger elevator after going upstairs to retrieve his cigarettes at a few minutes before noon. Since Oswald had asked Hank to make sure the gate to the freight elevator was closed when he got back downstairs, Hank suspected that Oswald had pushed the button to see if it was operating while Hank was still on the elevator.

Oswald's clipboard was later found directly opposite the freight elevator with three orders on it, as if he'd left it there to come back to after lunch was over. A few minutes later, at "just about noontime," Eddie Piper saw Oswald on the first floor; presumably, Oswald would have ridden the elevator down just as he'd said he'd intended to.

Bonnie Ray gathered his lunch from the now-empty domino room and, thinking that Lovelady and Arce had already gone upstairs, went over to the freight elevator, which he found was not there. Rather than wait for it to come back down after calling for it, he instead took the passenger elevator upstairs, perhaps thinking that nobody would need to use it since they were all out waiting for the parade; parked as it was on the first floor, nobody on any of the upper floors could have used it to come down either, so no harm done: if anyone else wanted to go upstairs, they could have used the freight elevator later.

When Bonnie Ray got to the sixth floor, I believe that either he stumbled onto Jack and his cohorts with guns, or else that he'd gotten up to the sixth floor before they did and they found him there when they came up from the fifth floor where the freight elevator had been left.

I don't believe that Jack was ever intended to be a shooter, but rather simply the "inside man" who was familiar with the building, could guide the doers in and out, and act as a lookout in case anyone happened to come along. This might have included listening for the elevators: Bonnie Ray made a point of testifying that the very same elevator he was on could be heard "if you were listening for the boss" to come up, that the "hand pedal" of the passenger elevator thumped into place when the elevator was stopped.

If Jack and company were already on the sixth floor, it's possible that Jack heard it when Bonnie Ray got to the sixth floor. It may have been that Jack had gone too far away from the elevators to prevent Bonnie Ray from getting off, or possibly Bonnie Ray saw something that he shouldn't have right after getting off the elevator. If so, he couldn't be allowed to go back downstairs: he damned sure wasn't going anywhere before the deed was done.

If they hadn't yet gone upstairs from the fifth floor, then Bonnie Ray was already within feet of the "sniper's nest" when they came up. It's also possible that, 10 or 15 minutes before the motorcade was schedule to come by (at 12:25), they weren't paying close attention to the sounds of the elevator - i.e., they weren't "listening for the boss" or anyone else - and didn't realize that it was above them when they went up the stairs, or that someone was already on the floor when they saw Bonnie Ray eating his lunch.

I wouldn't be surprised if Bonnie Ray was made to stand there while the doer(s) talked about how "Oswald" was going to be killing Bonnie Ray as he escaped after shooting the President, and I think - as I said earlier - that it was Bonnie Ray who Amos Euins saw from down on the street (Amos was particular in saying that he hadn't claimed to have seen a "white man" up there, but that the man he saw had a "white spot" on his head as if he might've been bald). Jack may well have been the guy that someone else saw - Arnold Rowland? - standing in a "parade rest" position with a gun, a position that would've been natural to Jack, who had spent WWII pulling guard duty at an Indiana Army base: was he "guarding" Bonnie Ray?

And that might've been the plan - clearly, Bonnie Ray couldn't have been shot before the President since it would've attracted attention - until Jack heard the other elevator running again.

Hank and Junior had been outside in front of the TSBD when word went around (or they heard over a nearby police radio) that the motorcade was on Main Street. They went inside and found both elevators gone from the first floor, called the freight elevator back down, and rode it to the fifth floor. While they hadn't seen anything, they were dangerously close to the action upstairs and could easily have impeded a later escape, or even taken the elevator back down, potentially cutting off a means of escape. Their arrival may have saved Bonnie Ray's life.

At this point, Jack took Bonnie Ray down to the fifth floor to join the other two "boys," as I'm sure the doers might've called them, and all may have been told that, if they valued their lives and those of their families, they'd never breathe a word about what they would soon witness. Jack's position "ten feet west of the west elevator" was a logical place to be to prevent any of them from attempting to leave either using the elevators or the stairs. Claiming not to have seen Jack there may well have been the men's "alibi" for Jack that he was "never there, we didn't see him, no sir."

When the shooting was done, there was no hurry to leave since anyone searching the building would've had to have come up the stairs to get to them because both elevators were on the fifth floor, the freight elevator now with its gate open, preventing it from being operated remotely (they also did not have to get to the second floor in time to meet Officer Baker). The gun was stashed and they made their way down the stairs to the fifth floor.

By the time they got there, Truly may have already begun ringing the bell and yelling up the shaft to whomever was apparently using the elevator; it's also possible that this was a pre-arranged signal alerting the men above that the search was on (ringing it twice to indicate that two of them were on the way up, or a bunch of times to indicate a larger number?).

As Baker and Truly made a commotion coming up the stairs, their noise would have masked the operation of the freight elevator which, rather than risk passing the ascending men, was simply moved up to the sixth or seventh floor, where it would be out of sight. When Baker and Truly got to the fifth floor, Truly noticed the freight elevator not being where he'd seen it before, but didn't say anything to Officer Baker about it. Even though Truly claimed that his perception was that the shots had not been fired from his building, it is still odd that he did not mention the missing elevator to the officer, who did think the shots came from there. It had been there only a minute or two before and now was gone, yet Truly said nothing. Baker, being unfamiliar with the building and not having looked up the elevator shaft to see where the elevators were, likely didn't notice the elevator "missing;" no such excuse can be made for Truly.

Instead, Truly drew Baker around to the east elevator which, according to Truly, had a solid metal back. As they rode up, bypassing the sixth floor and extending the operation of the elevator and its attendant noise two floors to the seventh, Jack and the man (or men) rode the freight elevator down.

They did not all ride it down all the way, if any of them did: Jack claimed that he'd asked Eddie Piper on the first if he'd heard the "noise" (a strange thing to ask someone - "hey, did you hear a car backfire a few minutes ago?" - if he'd really thought they were backfires, as if anyone would have been paying attention to them. It would, however, be something seemingly smart to ask to deflect attention from himself), but Piper did not corroborate that. Truly said that he had a dim memory of Jack working on the fifth floor when he and Baker were on their way back down from the roof, but if so, it's odd that Baker didn't confront Jack as well.

From the descriptions of the first law enforcement officers into the building after Baker, it is as likely as not (if not more so) that Jack did, in fact, ride the elevator down, but he would not have brought anyone else down with him, especially if they weren't "regulars" in the building ... and even if they were, their arrival from the upper floors may have drawn notice and remarks ... and testimony. Instead, they'd have gotten off at around the fourth floor - rode down two floors while Baker and Truly rode up two floors at about the same rate of speed, the operating noises of one elevator covered by those of the other - or possibly the third or fifth.

Luke Mooney had been at the Sheriff's office at Main & Houston and had run up the grassy knoll and into the rail yards where he spent "a couple minutes" looking into cars before being dispatched to the rear of the building. Seeing someone securing(?) the back gates, he went inside and got into the freight elevator (corroboration of Jack's having come down?) and, while another sheriff's deputy started upstairs on foot, he rode it, together with one of the women who worked in the TSBD and wanted to go to the second floor, up to that level where the woman got off.

For some reason (someone cutting the elevator power?), Mooney wasn't able to get the elevator to work, so he got off and started up the stairs where he soon encountered two "officers in plain clothes, like me" coming down the stairs, presumably (to Mooney) after having searched the upper floors. If there were indeed cops or sheriff's deputies in the TSBD after Baker but before Luke Mooney became the first officer to go out onto the sixth floor, they filed no reports and have never been identified. My bet is that, if they were really cops, they simply joined in the activities in the building with other cops; if not, they could have been mistaken for cops by others, just as Mooney had done. Depending upon who had been "guarding" the back gate - also never identified - it's possible that the men Mooney saw simply walked out the back and started "searching" until they were out of sight, or even taken that man into "custody" and took him away as an apparent suspect.

A fanciful story? Perhaps, but it's backed up by evidence and testimony, just not any that directly addresses the situation ... but if it was as I've suggested, who'd have expected it to come out? The more amazing thing, though, is that this suspicious set of circumstances was right in front of everyone's nose and either nobody noticed ... or someone decided not to follow it up.

The preceding also has not yet reached the status of being "lore," but flattery is always gratefully accepted!!

Further to the above, here is the northwest corner of the fifth floor as diagrammed and shown in CE487, "Texas School Book Depository – Diagram of Fifth Floor," at 17H204 (link to MFF), with the "scale in feet" cut-and-pasted to show the distance at, from and between the west elevator and the staircase:

Here is what Bonnie Ray Williams had to say about this area:

Without benefit of the scale being placed as near to the elevators and stairwell as the above diagram has it, we can see that Bonnie Ray did a fairly accurate job of placing the end of the "wall of boxes" as being "maybe 5 feet, even more than that, past the stairway." He went on to say, however, that the west elevator was plainly visible:

The east elevator - that is, the door into it - was around a wall and facing away from where he'd been, so he wouldn't have been able to see it "exactly," but he made no equivocation about the west freight elevator where Jack Dougherty was, supposedly (or presumably) loading stock onto the elevator with the door open, thus preventing the elevator from operating when Roy Truly attempted to call it down to the first floor before he and Officer Baker started up the stairs.

According to Truly's testimony, the bottoms of both elevators could be seen together at the fifth floor; the freight elevator would not respond because the gate was open, and the east passenger elevator did not operate with someone inside of it. Jack Dougherty was "ten feet west of the west elevator" with its doors open, yet he did not respond to the bell that Roy Truly said that he'd rung twice and yelled up the shaft "real loud" to get someone's attention to "turn loose the elevator:"

... Yet Jack, who apparently did not leave the space behind the "wall of boxes" since the three men didn't see him and who was "ten feet west of the west elevator," did not respond to either the bell or Truly's yelling. If the WC version of events is correct - which it cannot be - then Oswald had already run past Jack and was well on his way to the second floor by the time these events occurred, yet Jack did not see or hear him run by. Given the small confines of the area, is it even remotely possible that he did not either see or hear Oswald, or not hear either the bell or Truly's yell? When there was the opportunity

Bonnie Ray Williams, Hank Norman, Junior Jarman and Roy Truly were all deposed before the WC at Washington on March 24, 1964. When the opportunity later arose to clarify these questions with Jack Dougherty at Dallas 15 days later on April 8, Jack was not asked if he'd heard Truly's calls or the bell. Is it reasonable to presume that, given the purpose for which the bell was installed - to alert someone using the elevator that someone wanted to use it and to close the gate so they could - that Jack, who was so near to the elevator in a confined space, did not hear it?

Yet Jack did not "turn loose the elevator."

In the time it took to run up one flight of stairs to reach the second floor lunchroom, Oswald - according to the Report - had already entered the door and been inside long enough for the doors - the one from the stairwell and the one into the lunchroom - to have closed completely or nearly completely after running across the sixth floor, hiding his rifle, moving quickly past Jack within a few feet of him, and gone down three more flights of steps and through the doors.

After the lunchroom encounter, Baker and Truly continued up the stairs with Truly in the lead and Baker stopping briefly at each floor to look around. In testimony, David Belin ascertained if Truly saw the elevator at the second floor ("no, sir"), third ("no, sir") or fourth floors ("no, I am sure not"). By the time they reached the fifth floor, however,

Since both elevators had been on the fifth floor when Truly had been on the first and both rang the bell and yelled up the shaft, but the west elevator had departed the fifth floor, had not been on any of the intervening floors, and had apparently not passed by Truly and Baker as they ascended the stairs ("I didn't notice it anywheres up there. I wasn't really looking for it, however," Truly testified), Belin explored this question with Truly:

If one were looking for proof that the WC considered nobody other than Oswald as a possible suspect, there's your smoking gun. When faced with a distinct means of escape by someone other than Oswald and previously unknown, counsel accepted without question Truly's explanation that "one of my boys" was on the upper floors of the TSBD during the lunch hour when nobody else was working and who was unseen by any of the three men that, by the point this had come up on the afternoon of March 24, had already been deposed and sworn to having seen nobody else on the fifth or sixth floors, working or otherwise.

Furthermore, once Truly explained that he "wouldn't really have heard" the elevator descending while he and Baker were running up the stairs making a "commotion," Belin elicited a non-sequitur from Truly that he explored no further and didn't ask about the contradiction in Truly's testimony:

Truly said that he'd seen Jack on the fifth floor after he and Baker had gone to the seventh floor on the passenger elevator and come back down to the fifth floor. Belin clarified that, when Truly had first gotten to the fifth floor, the west elevator was gone and Truly didn't know who'd been on the fifth floor prior to that in order to move the west elevator. His "best guess," however, that it was Jack Dougherty was good enough.

Belin did not attempt to ascertain why, since he and Baker had gone upstairs in search of a possible shooter (regardless of whether Truly believed the shots had come from the building or not), he did not call the missing freight elevator to Baker's attention. Nor was it apparently considered (what with the bird in hand ... and dead) that if it was not Truly's "best guess" of Jack Dougherty operating the elevator, who was operating it instead (or even if it was, who could have been in the elevator with him)?

One must wonder what lines of investigation might have been opened (or not) if Jack hadn't admitted to having been on the fifth floor at the time of the shooting, and taking the elevator downstairs shortly afterward. Nobody testified to having seen Jack once the lunch break started other than Danny Arce, who said that Jack had eaten lunch in the domino while Danny was there and before everyone had gone outside to watch the parade around 12:10, and only Jack's word that he'd been "getting some stock" on both the fifth and sixth floors yet had inexplicably not seen or heard "anyone at all" - not Oswald nor Williams nor Norman nor Jarman - at any time while up there or while "ten feet west of the west elevator" at the time of the shooting, immediately afterward when the three black men "moved rather fast ... at a trotting pace" 100 feet from the southeast windows to the west side of the building, or when Oswald supposedly ran down from the sixth floor to meet Baker and Truly from a minute to a minute-and-a-half from the time of the shooting.

Nor did the three black men claim to have seen Jack at any time from before the shooting until after Baker and Truly had gotten onto the east elevator - after the west elevator had departed - which even was witnessed by at least Bonnie Ray Williams:

In light of the above, one must wonder if Bonnie Ray's exaggeration about an "elephant" was intended to emphasize his inability to see something that he actually could and did see, or at the very least was aware of. For, if Bonnie Ray was on the sixth floor within 15-20 feet of the sniper's nest until after 12:26 (as it certainly appears that he was), how could he have not seen Oswald (if Oswald was there) or any of the activity claimed to have been seen by witnesses on the ground in the minutes leading up to the shooting.

The dust in Williams' hair seen after the shooting while on the fifth floor, coupled with the time he must've been upstairs, could also lead one to wonder whether the dust had a different origin than speculated and that he was the man with the "white spot" in his hairline seen by Amos Euins ... and if he was, then there is no question that Bonnie Ray saw much more than he claimed to have seen, and knew the identities of the killer(s) who, in any case, was not Oswald because, if it were, Bonnie Ray had no reason not to say so.

I guess I thought Duke's explanation of what happened during that critical time was part of Education Forum lore, and that no acknowledgement of the author was even necessary.

The important thing is that, as you have suggested, even if you did believe the ridiculous story that Oswald brought the weapon in under the auspices of it being "curtain rods", it doesn't matter because you can't place him on the sixth floor at the time of the shooting.

Despite Bill's I'm-sure-well-intentioned suggestion to the contrary, I was hardly upset, possibly flattered, and certainly surprised: I never thought anyone even paid any attention to it - much less kept a copy of it! - since nobody ever remarked on it, good, bad or indifferent.

It's not "Education Forum lore" to the best of my knowledge, at least not yet. I'm glad you liked it well enough to use it since it is quite original and, in all my reading on this topic, yet to be suggested by anyone else. In some people's eyes, that would mean it's not worth considering now if nobody else has already, or that if it's not "part of the lore," then it must've been discarded as a theory.

So if Oswald was just a patsy who was either already in the lunchroom or had entered from a direction that he could not have reached after escaping from the sixth floor, what did happen up there? Isn't that the important question? We've been over the whole deal about how the official story "can't" be the real story, so what is the real story?

The gist to it is that Bonnie Ray Williams was most certainly on the sixth floor until some time after it was announced over DPD radio that the motorcade was on Main Street, which would have been 12:22 at the earliest or 12:26 at the latest, plus the time it took for Hank Norman and Junior Jarman to go from out in front of the TSBD up to the fifth floor, and then Williams to have gone down to meet them.

That being so, and presuming the killer(s) not waiting until the last possible moment to get into the window(s) on the sixth floor - certainly, they'd want to have been there and prepared earlier than the motorcade's scheduled arrival five minutes before it ultimately got there - it's a near certainty that Bonnie Ray would've seen whoever was up there.

If that "whoever" was Oswald, and Oswald being dead only 48 hours later and therefore being no threat to Bonnie Ray or his family, why wouldn't Bonnie Ray simply have said "yup, it was Oswald all right, saw him there myself" ... other than that whoever he saw was someone else who did pose a threat to him?

(In fact, even if Bonnie Ray had seen someone else up there, it would've been so much simpler if he'd just lied and said that he'd seen Oswald with the gun upstairs: in the face of an actual eyewitness, the murder would've been "solved" and "substantiated" long ago. Instead we got someone who "left" before any shooter(s) got to the sixth floor and consequently screwed up his story several times trying to get his lies straight and who ultimately ended up "telling the truth" by way of omission.)

A full and complete reconstruction taking account of everyone that we know to have been on the upper floors of the TSBD and what we know to have occurred exonerates Oswald from having been either "the" or even "a" shooter; what he may or may not have known about others being there is beyond our ability to know.

We would acknowledge that the only persons to have said that they were upstairs prior to the shooting were Bonnie Ray Williams, Hank Norman, Junior Jarman and Jack Dougherty. Bonnie Ray said that he'd gone upstairs after he'd "washed up" and he'd seen that everybody else he wanted to be with was gone from the first floor, and that he'd ridden the east passenger elevator - the one that required someone to be in it to operate - to the sixth floor where he remained (regardless of the various estimates he'd made about how long he'd been there) until he heard someone else downstairs. He then took the passenger elevator down to the fifth floor.

Hank and Junior testified that they'd been out in front of the building until they'd heard that the motorcade was "on Main Street" at either 12:22 or 12:26, at which point they walked around rather than through the building, up Houston and around by the tracks and in the west freight doors. They checked the passenger elevator; it wasn't on the first floor, so they took the freight elevator to the fifth floor where they got off, closing the gate behind them so the elevator could be used by others if needed. They went over to the south windows, presumably making some noise in doing so, where Bonnie Ray joined them afterward.

Jack Dougherty was on both the fifth and sixth floors "getting some stock" - a phrase he used repeatedly - but claimed to have seen nobody. At the time of the shooting, when he said he heard "one" sound which he "thought was a backfire," he was standing "ten feet west of the west elevator," that is, in between the stairs going up to the sixth floor and the stairs going down to the fourth floor, presumably - according to his description - loading the orders he'd filled onto the elevator. But was he?

Later, Roy Truly would testify that both elevators were on the fifth floor as he looked up the shaft before he and Officer Baker started up the stairs. Bonnie Ray had ridden the passenger elevator down from the sixth to the fifth, and Hank and Junior had ridden the freight elevator up to the fifth; all is in accord so far. The passenger elevator couldn't be called down because of how it operated; the freight elevator also couldn't be, but only because of its gate being opened.

If Jack was "ten feet west of the west elevator" at the time of the shooting, he was only 90 feet away from where Hank and Junior and Bonnie Ray all ran together across the front of the building to the west windows overlooking the railroad yard, which they then opened. Presumably, in their apparent excitement, they did not do so stealthily or silently.

While a "wall of boxes" may have hidden Jack from the three men, it would not have kept the noise they made from reaching Jack's ears or necessarily from him seeing them at one point or another. Yet the men claimed not to be aware of Jack's presence, and he claimed not to be aware of theirs. Moreover, while standing "ten feet west of the west elevator," he would also have been directly in the path of "the fleeing assassin" since was there prior to the shooting, at the time he heard the "backfire," and he didn't leave the fifth floor until after Truly had seen the elevators both on the fifth floor, which was only moments before the lunchroom encounter with Oswald.

How did Oswald run down from the sixth floor without being seen or heard by Dougherty - if not actually bowling him over - when Jack was working right in the supposed escape path, other than that Oswald didn't run down from the sixth floor past the freight elevator in front of which Jack was working? Recall that if he'd left that area, he'd have no longer been behind the "wall of boxes" shielding him from the black men's sight (and presumably them from his), and given the open space of the fifth floor, he'd have been more likely aware of their presence than they of his, presuming that they weren't aware of his being there all along.

While Bill's comments about the re-enactment and other aspects of Baker's sighting of Oswald (and Truly's failure to have noticed him or the "electronically" - pneumatically? - closing door even despite his familiarity with the building) are all valid, they address the question of Oswald's "escape" without also noting that Oswald would supposedly have run down the stairs, passing right by Jack Dougherty unseen, from the sixth to the second floor before Jack even left the front of the elevator!

Why not? What is it that everyone's missed about this whole episode for so long? Why is it that, because Dougherty was described (possibly self-servingly) as "retarded" and wasn't necessarily the sharpest knife in the drawer, he is presumed to have no knowledge of nor part in what took place upstairs?

Can we acknowledge that, since Jack said that he didn't go anywhere else from "ten feet west of the west elevator" from the time he heard the "backfire" till he rode the elevator downstairs (which only could have been after Baker and Truly started up the stairs and therefore after "Oswald ran downstairs"), that he absolutely must have seen and heard Oswald's escape, or else Oswald didn't "escape" or otherwise descend from the sixth floor after the shooting?

Can we also acknowledge that, if he didn't run past Jack standing "ten feet west of the west elevator" that the entire "re-enactment" is moot and no longer worth considering except as a means to "prove" that Oswald "could've done it?"

With the need to get Oswald from the sixth to the second floor in time for the encounter with Baker obviated, there is no longer any "need" to have the sixth floor vacated in any amount of time shorter than the time it would have taken someone to have gotten up five flights of stairs without use of the elevators. Let's then consider what other very possible if not very highly likely scenarios that there might be to accomplish what was clearly accomplished if Oswald wasn't on the sixth floor and didn't shoot the President. The evidence is there; what could they be?

Arthur Conan Doyle wrote in The Beryl Coronet what has become something of an axiom: "Whenever you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."

While it may not have been impossible for Oswald to have run from the sniper's nest to the second floor, ditching his gun along the way, and be in the position he was in - and the doors in the fully closed position "behind" him - it is impossible for someone to have run by or through someone else standing "ten feet west of the west elevator" when the staircase was itself only fifteen feet west of the west elevator - that is, passing within five feet - without being seen nor heard while in a rush for what might well amount to one's life.

If, then, Oswald didn't do it, how was it accomplished? I spelled out one scenario, at least in part and briefly; does anyone else have another? Or is it not important?

Dan, I lay no claim to such expertise in RFK's murder as I might in JFK's (or rather, as others may ascribe to me!), but cannot help but add my own two cents' worth of questions and comments to this thread.

The first curiosity is how and if the LA County Coroner (Dr. Thomas Noguchi, as I remember) had gotten it so wrong in his "excellent autopsy" and its corresponding trajectory analysis of the shots that killed RFK. The trajectory, along with tattooing, seems to point toward an origin below and to the right of RFK at a steep upward angle. If Sirhan was in front of RFK at all times, even pressed up against a steam table while continuing to shoot, how did he manage to make the shots that Noguchi described?

Lamar Waldron and Thom Hartmann cite your 1995 work The Killing of Robert F. Kennedy (pp. 93, 312 and 313) as follows:

The only explanation that accounted for how Sirhan could have fired the fatal shot was offered by Dan Moldea, who wasn't a witness but [who] developed his teory in the 1990s after years of research. Moldea speculated that the witnesses saw only the first shot and, in the panic that followed, didn't realize that Bobby had been pushed (by the crowd behindhim) closer to Sirhan – who, in this scenario, fired as Bobby turned away from him. However, with all those witnesses in a corridor that was little more than six feet wide, no one there reported seeing that happen.

You note here (above):

Indeed, no one saw the muzzle of Sirhan's .22 get that close--but no one saw the Senator get shot either. All of the eyewitness testimony is based on Sirhan's location, relative to Senator Kennedy's, at the moment of the first shot--which, I believe, missed the Senator and struck Paul Schrade, who was standing several feet in back of him. Therefore, in my opinion, the issue of muzzle distance for that first shot is moot. After the shooting started, the crime scene became chaotic. The eyewitnesses were busy covering up and falling all over each other. Yet, we know from Noguchi's excellent autopsy--not from any of the eyewitnesses--that the Senator was hit three times by contact or near-contact shots, along with a fourth shot that went harmlessly through the shoulder pad of his suit jacket.

and

... [it is a mistake] to characterize "the people at the crime scene, including Senator Kennedy and the other five victims, as being stick figures, standing tall and upright throughout the incident. Many of us failed to consider realistically the kinetic movement of the crowd, that everyone in that room must have been in motion after the first or second shot."

and finally,

... Proving that there was a second shooter is now central to everything he believes about this case. But he's not going to find one--because there wasn't one. ... with regard to your belief that Sirhan participated in a conspiracy, you certainly can't prove anything. But don't feel badly--no one else can either. As you already know, it's not what we believe to be true, rather it's what we can prove to be true.[emphasis added]

Does it not follow that you cannot prove that Sirhan was the lone gunman based upon your beliefs about what occurred and when, since there is no apparent (or firm) corroboration of the explanation ascribed to you? Indeed, lacking the proof as to RFK was, in fact, "pushed ... closer to Sirhan" or even that "after the shooting started, the crime scene became chaotic," considering "realistically the movement of the crowd, that everyone in that room must have been in motion after the first or second shot" ... that without those things being true, the evidence is that Kennedy was shot from behind whether or not we can identify the shooter that evidence otherwise does prove existed.

Failure or inability to identify a second person involved does not negate the possibility or likelihood that one was involved, any more than suggesting possibilities (what I call the "if-then-because" syndrome), however sensible they may seem or be, proves any other scenario. Was it not explained at one time, for example, that JFK was shot in the throat when he turned around in the limo, looking nearly behind him? It fit the theory nicely, but unfortunately turned out not to be fact and therefore not an explanation of a shot in front.

("If-then-because" is shorthand for the predilection of some writers to suggest that "if this occurred, then it is also possible that the other thing occurred, and those things being true, it proves this because of that.")

The through-and-through postulated for JFK's neck/throat stands only to prop up the theory of one gunman from behind, and there is no absolute, scientific proof that the front and rear wounds occurred in one way or another. Noguchi's "excellent autopsy" proves that the shots that hit RFK came from behind him and, absent any known or observed facts to the contrary, likewise proves that someone other than Sirhan inflicted those wounds. Your "speculation" that RFK was "pushed ... closer to Sirhan" and the unobserved suggestion that the "[realistic] kinetic movement" including that those in the room "must have been in motion after the first or second shot," while seemingly explaining Noguchi's observed phenomenon, likewise fails to prove that Sirhan fired those shots.

If the shots came from from RFK's rear and if either Sirhan did not provably somehow get behind RFK, or RKF did not provably get pushed toward Sirhan or did not somehow provably get turned around before getting struck in the back by Sirhan's bullets, then the preponderance of evidence is that there was a second gunman. If, as is said, the bullets could not be provably and solely tied ballistically to Sirhan's gun (or any single gun at all), then that possibility remains viable (or possible proof that it wasn't Sirhan's gun that fired the rear shots).

Even if we accept that Sirhan somehow fired all of the shots and that there were only eight of them, it still does not rule out the possibility of a conspiracy since it is not necessary for more than one person to have performed the ultimate act if there were others who conspired with him in advance of or up to the point of commission. If there was no conspiracy, what then of the polka-dot girl and her compatriot, said to have been seen by several people before knowledge of the claim of seeing her had become common knowledge? Why on earth would she want to be telling people that "we killed him?" She needn't have had any part in pulling the trigger, and even if all she did was accompany Shirhan to shore up his flagging confidence until the deed was done, she would still be part of a "conspiracy" by its definition. A denial by a conspirator that there "were no others involved" does not prove there weren't, any more than other appearances prove that there was.

I might finally note the irony in your statement:

... then, I might consider sitting down with you--as I have with so many others with legitimate credentials--and debate ....

"Irony" in that, even lacking "legitimate credentials" in a field as ballistics, you will dispute those with such credentials over the conclusions they'd drawn, such as the number of bullets and/or bullet holes, and likewise that those who do have such credentials are willing to sit with someone who does not have any to debate those topics. Not only do you seem to think that you're qualified to debate technical issues with those who are qualified in those areas while you are admittedly not, you seem to be conveying that, even despite your own lack of "legitimate credentials" that you are somehow qualified to debate those issues with those who have them, while others similarly lacking in them are not qualified to debate them even with you.

That's an especially curious position for someone who is most often referred to as a "journalist," a profession that has no "credentials" other than the fact of writing something, having it published, and actually getting paid for it. As pointed out by fellow journalist and author Barbie Zelizer in her accepted doctoral thesis, journalism has no trade or professional associations, no minimum education requirements, no continuing education (required or otherwise), no specialties or levels of proficiency, and no testing or licensing or background requirements. If those who have "legitimate credentials" were themselves willing only to discuss or debate with those who have "legitimate credentials" of their own, journalists would be non-existent since nobody'd talk with them!

It all comes down, then, to a layperson laying out theory as fact using "the science of making sense" without resorting to either provable or observed facts in order to "prove" his own beliefs as fact, does it not?

... The proof that Oswald was not there is the fact that none of the four men upstairs who were on the fifth and/or sixth floors said that they had seen him there, which they absolutely must have if he was there. Bonnie Ray Williams was on the sixth floor to within three minutes of the shooting, in a position where he would have seen - and probably did see - whoever was in the "sniper's nest" area. Jack Dougherty was standing "ten feet west of the west elevator" - that is, directly in the path of the fleeing assassin (which scenario was only necessary if Oswald was the shooter having to hurry downstairs to meet Baker & Truly in the second floor lunchroom within 90 seconds) - and was not run over by Oswald as he had to have been.

Some say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery; others say that stealing one idea is plagiarism, while taking more than one idea is 'research.' What will we call the above?

My original post in the thread Inside the Target Car:

I have no particular qualms about the fatal shot - or any or all of them - having come from the 6th floor southeast window. If it could be shown with 100% certainty that this is indeed the case, that does nothing toward proving whose finger was on the trigger.

The proof that Oswald was not there is the fact that none of the four men upstairs who were on the fifth and/or sixth floors said that they had seen him there, which they absolutely must have if he was there. Bonnie Ray Williams was on the sixth floor to within three minutes of the shooting, in a position where he would have seen - and probably did see - whoever was in the "sniper's nest" area. Jack Dougherty was standing "ten feet west of the west elevator" - that is, directly in the path of the fleeing assassin (which scenario was only necessary if Oswald was the shooter having to hurry downstairs to meet Baker & Truly in the second floor lunchroom within 90 seconds) - and was not run over by Oswald as he had to have been.

Hank Norman and Junior Jarman did not go upstairs until after they had heard - either directly from a police radio, or through the word spreading through the crowd - that the Presidential parade was on Main Street. The earliest that could have been was 12:22, or possibly as late as 12:26. They then walked around the TSBD via Houston Street and rode the freight elevator to the fifth floor. Bonnie Ray joined them after they had arrived at the windows, and immediately after he had left the sixth floor.

Both elevators were on the fifth floor, according to the testimony of Roy Truly, who had looked up the shaft and seen the bottoms of both elevators at the same level after entering the building behind Officer Baker, and before the two of them began their ascent by stair. The east-side passenger elevator could only be operated by someone inside the elevator car; the freight elevator, while able to be called from another floor, would not operate if the gate was open. Truly was unable to call either elevator to the first floor, thus indicating that the freight elevator gate was open. When Baker & Truly reached the fifth floor, the freight elevator was gone.

Jack Dougherty himself testified to his location at the time he heard "a backfire," and that he was "getting stock" on both the fifth and sixth floors. Since the only other persons known to be upstairs - the "three blind mice" at the front windows - were away from the elevators. While any could have left the gate open (despite Jarman's testimony that he'd closed it upon exiting), Jack's proximity to the west-side freight elevator - "ten feet west of the west elevator" - his "getting stock," and his admission that he'd ridden the freight elevator downstairs after hearing the "backfire," does more than simply suggest that it was Jack who'd had the elevator gate open.

When Roy Truly saw the elevators upstairs, he not only yelled up for it, but also rang a bell that was used to alert anyone using the elevator that someone else needed it and to make sure the gate was closed. Standing directly beside it, Jack did not react to the bell or Truly's yelling. Whether this was a pre-arranged signal or not, it certainly served to alert anyone upstairs that someone else wanted to use the elevator.

Since Bonnie Ray could've seen Oswald but apparently didn't (he'd have had no fear of retribution from Oswald after the weekend was over, so if he'd seen him he could have said so), and had been upstairs past the time that the parade had been scheduled to go by - meaning that anyone who'd intended to shoot the President would have had to have been in position before the scheduled 12:25 arrival - and Jack did not get run over (or hear or see anything) while standing directly in Oswald's presumed path from the time he'd heard the "backfire" until he'd taken the elevator downstairs after Truly had started upstairs, demonstrates conclusively that Oswald was not upstairs; someone else therefore must have been.

Whoever was upstairs doing the shooting was not constrained by the time needed to meet Officer Baker on the second floor, and thus had nearly all of the time that it took Baker to run inside, wait for the elevator briefly, start upstairs, encounter Oswald, and run up the remaining flights of stairs, stopping to look beyond each landing, before it was necessary to go down ... or possibly up to wait at the sixth floor while Baker & Truly boarded the east elevator (which Truly did not even remark to Baker about its being missing when they got there) and rode it up to the seventh floor, clearing the way for the freight elevator to go down without the chance of encountering Baker on the way.

... And that, my friends, is how it's quite possible that the fatal shot came from the 6th floor southeast window without having been fired by Lee Oswald.

It likewise explains the "elderly Negro" (Bonnie Ray with white stuff in his hair) seen by someone on the street, and it's my bet that it was Jack Dougherty both standing at "parade rest" (his WWII service before his release on medical grounds was guarding aircraft on the ground, i.e., sentry duty) and babysitting Bonnie Ray and the boys on the fifth floor to make sure they didn't go downstairs before the shooting was done, as well as how the shooter(s) got out of the building. Luke Mooney saw them on his way upstairs but apparently never realized it.

Well, there's the taped conversation between him and Hoover in which they clearly talk about JFK being shot from the front, with Connally getting in the way of one bullet. Then they turn around and talk about the good case against Oswald. I wouldn't call this discussion a slip, it's too brazen for that. I would call it simply talking about nailing an obvious patsy.

IMO, that speaks more to LBJ's assent to the investigation (or, if you prefer, the cover-up) rather than to his assent to the murder, which is what the previous post suggested ("He had two motives, one being his ruthless lust for power, the other being the urgent need to stay out of prison. And he would be the man in position as president to assure the crime was covered up. I would say he either initiated the plot (as E. Howard Hunt alleged), or gave the green light for it"). There is nothing other than warranted or unwarranted suspicion that LBJ had any motive for the murder of his predecessor in the conversation you're referring to.

As far as motive to assent to a "cover-up," it is Hoover telling Johnson what "the case" was, not the other way around, and not Johnson suggeting to Hoover what Hoover might adopt as a position for the cover-up to succeed. The notion of qui bono is not a basis for determining someone guilty, but merely to consider them a suspect or "person of interest," that is, because a wife gets a murdered husband's insurance settlement is a reason to look at her more closely, but her getting the insurance money is not ipso facto an indicator that she did have him killed.

LBJ falls in the same category as the wife listening to what the investigator is telling her as opposed to being the wife who's suggesting to the cops what to look for and find.

I recently came across a audio tape recording of an early 1990s COPA conference in which Bill Turner encompases what we know happened at Dealey Plaza when he says:

"We know to a fairly good degre of certitude what happened. First of all the motives were piling up. JFK has supposidly withheld air cover during the Bay of Pigs. Motive number one. JFK failed to invade Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October, 1962. Motive number two. JFK promised to withdraw from Vietnam. Motive number three. JFK, at the time he was assassinated, was on a second track, where he was secretely carring on negotiations with Cuba to bring about detante. Motive number four. These motives were piling up to the point they had to assassinate him."

"And I think it's very obvioius, with the compliations of the information that we have today, that the whole thing, the mechanism of it came out of the allegance between the CIA and the web of Cuban exiles and the mafia.

They already had an assassinations apparatus set up for Castro; they switched targets, and they hit Kennedy instead."

The idea that the assassination mechanism used to kill President Kennedy was pre-established and targeted Castro, and then switched to kill Kennedy can be refined even further, and the exact plan to kill Castro that was used to kill Kennedy can be identified, as well as those behind it. - BK

This is exactly the premise behind both Ultimate Sacrifice and Legacy of Secrecy, which dovetail with other things I've often thought and have been working on, and actually have overcome my reticence of any kind of Mafia-did-it theory, which in fairness had mostly only been evolving toward this end all along. Basically, IMHO, Lamar and Thom's works have bridged the gaps of speculation and wrapped things up in a nice, neat, credible package. If they've come short at all, it is only by focusing on the strategic that they've overlooked the tactical: somebody pulled those triggers, and it wasn't anybody in the indices.

Sounds like a good summary. But I think the motives of Lyndon Johnson need to be factored in....

... as I might, too, have thought but for the failure of any snippet of any such thing having been recorded on the WH taping system over five years, which would mean that he was both a consummate actor and never made a slip.

Explanation needed?

Yes, please. I don't follow how it ties into the account of the "man and woman" who pick up "Lee Oswald," from the Lucas B&B in a black 1949 or 1950 Ford and a case of nosey neighbors making a stink about a car owned by another neighbor they apparently didn't like (which reminds me of some people in my homeowners' association!) and the Hunsaker account, which 5818 Belmont relates to.

That story is a little confusing as well. While we hear about the report on the radio about this two-toned car, I can't say that I've ever heard why there was any report on that car. Story has it that the license plate, car, and/or address was tied to a conservative (some would say "right-wing," and he might even have been a "states' rights" guy) and possibly disbarred attorney by the name of Hunsaker.

What made that something of a sensation is that Donald Wayne House had travelled from his home in Ranger, about 100 miles west of Fort Worth (130 miles west of Dallas) to visit an old army buddy or something by the name of Randy Hunsaker. Legend has it that House had driven the distance, gone into downtown after getting turned around (lost), parked in a lot to use a payphone to call said buddy, was unable to connect (bummer!), then returned to his car with the apparent idea of returning home, but was unable to leave downtown because of the parade. (House has made himself singularly unavailable to anyone except Star-Telegram reporters every ten or twenty years or so, so I haven't verified any of this.)

I don't remember everything that the story related - for example, whether House was supposed to have gotten out of the car and watched the parade or not - but the end result of it is that, on his way back west, he stopped at a gas station in Grand Prairie along the old Fort Worth Turnpike (now Interstate 30), and for some reason a woman there called the cops saying he looked suspicious, etc. House ended up being taken into custody in Fort Worth after getting off the highway and along the way to visiting his cousin. The whole of that part of the story is related in my "Cowtown Connection" article, which someone reproduced on this forum.

As to the deal with the two-toned car (a pretty common thing back then; House also had a two-toned Ford as I recall, FWIW) at Belmont and the attorney Hunsaker, like I said, I've never heard anything about the background or the resolution of that chapter of the story. As far as I know, its only modicum of interest is the shared last name of House's buddy and the attorney, and then only because House got "arrested" at the same time as (ahem!) David Atlee Phillips (aka Ken Wilson) in Fort Worth, and of course, House's supposed similiarity in appearance to Oswald.

Absent that non-connection, what else makes it interesting - it wasn't anywhere near the Harlandale "safe house," for instance - and how does it tie in with these black Fords?

THANKS FOR THAT DUKE, IT EXPLAINS A LOT - BK

What do you think it explains, Bill?

... As I've said before, I don't understand why Duke is going to such lengths as investigating Carr's military service in such detail, in order to discredit him as an assassination witness. The quibbling over the color of the Rambler, for instance, is ridiculous. One said green, the other gray. Some shades of green and gray are very similar. Besides, the important thing is that he reported seeing a Rambler, in the same place, and at the same time that several other witnesses, all unknown to each other, reported it. That's much more significant, in my view, than his exact description of the driver or the exact color of the car.

Carr discredited himself; I'm only showing where and how, but let's leave that aside for now.

Roger Craig, on Elm Street, said that a green Rambler drove down Elm Street, honked in front of the TSBD, and someone resembling Oswald raced down the incline and got into the vehicle, which continued west on Elm and out of downtown; it was driven by someone with a dark complexion. Fair enough.

Richard Carr said that he saw a gray Rambler on Record Street just north of Commerce, driven by a Negro, into which a man in a sport coat got into and drove off north on Record Street. Then he changed his mind and saw a gray Rambler parked beside the TSBD into which the man in the sport coat did not get into (two other men he hadn't mentioned before did, however) and the car sped off north on Houston Street while the sport-coated man (who'd previously gotten into the gray Rambler at Record & Commerce) walked south on Houston and "out of sight" (rather than into the gray Rambler).

Somehow you find it "important" that both reported seeing "a" Rambler - a pretty popular car at the time, tho' you're probably too young to know that (and I almost am) - that were not really "in the same place" even if they were within a block or several blocks of each other.

Was the gray Rambler on Record & Commerce "in the same place" as Craig's green Rambler on Elm?

Was the gray Rambler on Record & Commerce, or was it on Houston Street beside the TSBD? When it left speeding north on Houston, was it headed to "the same place" as the green car going west on Elm? How do you know? Because it was a Rambler?

In my opinion, if a man claims to have served in an elite branch of the armed forces in a major campaign in which there were very few survivors, himself among them, and turns out not to have done either, one should not trust the word of such a man if he told you it was daytime at noon.

You may feel otherwise. That's your right.

Remember, James Romack and Pop Rackley were unknown and didn't think they had anything important to contribute until they read in the paper about what someone else claimed to have seen that directly contradicted what they, themselves, had witnessed. What makes you think it's not possible that someone else read something in the paper and added it to "substantiate" what they'd been perhaps telling people?

I don't find it shocking that other people support a correct position; why do you? I do find it shocking that I can take photos showing that a particular location was not visible from another, and people still believe it could have been, or that some improbable special circumstance possibly made it so, and nothing at all (short, possibly of having been there, seen that, which many or most haven't) will dissuade them from their belief, which they cannot even provide any modicum of actual, physical support for. And you don't find that equally shocking?

I'm shocked.

It doesn't matter because it turns out that what I'd heard isn't what the individual had actually said. At least, not including the part about being where Carr actually was, just merely inside the building, unsure if even the same floor. It was just something I'd heard, and I wasn't keen on accepting the dismissal so off-handedly.

In truth, prior to Jack White posting the aerial, I never knew exactly which building building was under construction at the time. Somewhere along the line, I'd also heard mention of the Lawrence Hotel, and thought that might've been it (it is the next building south of the courthouse on Houston). If so, other than the distance factor (which I hadn't yet considered), I didn't see why Carr couldn't have been able to see the TSBD.

I also received the following in email a few days ago:

The camera view looks toward the Allen building (the new county courthouse), but its angle is downward enough that nothing above the roof of Old Red is visible, i.e., the top of the frame doesn't rise high enough. I understand that you can order photos to be taken by the museum showing this view, tho' I think we've already seen samples validating what Gary said above.

This isn't a huge issue since Carr never claimed to have seen anyone on the sixth floor, but on the seventh (or "top") floor initially, then on the fifth while under oath. As one descends from one floor to the next, however, they would see less, not more, of the upper floors (of either building).

The photos below are views from the seventh floor, successively from the eastern-most window and each set of windows to the west, across the front of the building. You can see which of the upper floors of the courthouse building can be seen from it: the top three in the narrow section and one floor, perhaps 1½ floors, below it. I don't think these are the sixth or seventh floors of the courts building. If not ...?

... one comment : the building (orig. 5 stories, after replaced/rebuilt after a fire in 1901 with a sixth floor, and the seventh floor was added about 1907. So for some time the fifth floor was the top floor, then for some years the sixth floor was the top floor (so the floor below was the fifth), then the top floor became the seventh floor thus the floor below became the sixth floor. ... another one is that in some parts of the world the first floor is the floor above the ground floor, so for such a person the seventh floor may be the sixth floor at the same time.

All true ... except that in 1907, RRC wasn't even born, and when he was, 15 years later, it wasn't anywhere near Dallas, so his presumed knowledge of what was the "top" floor has no bearing on what actually was the "top" floor in 1963. And, unlike "ground" and "first" floors, the "top" floor has no such ambiguity.

one can project (on other photos) along this level building area/streets to identify the floors of the building under construction and see that the floors RRC saw things from where he couldn't have seen some of them. I doubt him, but give a measure of benefit of doubt as well. This (topic) is instructive on many levels, not just the immediate subject matter. Most worthwhile IMO.

Be careful with these leaps of faith: you might be mistaken as being not among the faithful!

Well, that remains to be seen, John. In the time we've been exploring this question (in two or three different threads), there are several discrepancies in his sworn testimony ... unless, of course, you subscribe to the notion that the FBI falsified everything in anticipation of his telling the truth, and of course who are you going to believe: some construction worker or the FBI?

Very interesting hit-thread to discredit a credible witness you have posted here Duke. I'd take any average construction worker, toilet clearner or prostitute over the FBI anyday. The FBI has repeatedly proven themselves to be liars, consealers of the truth, complicit in crime and covorting with criminals, turning a blind eye to others, loosing evidence on purpose, and I could go on. ... The FBI purposely changed testimony and facts; changed spellings of names to protect the guilty; threatened those that saw the truth and worse. To add to that the 'poll' at the front-end of this thread is designed to confuse and confound and make even those who believe Carr look as if they do not. Nice hit thread. anti-bravo. What is your special love of the FBI, inquiring minds want to know.

Am I now or have I ever been a member of the Communist Party? If I've never denounced it, therefore I must support it? Someone might reasonably conclude from some of the quotations in your signature line that you must be anti-American, possibly subversive, and potentially a terrorist. That may have as much truth in it as someone's claim that, because I might disagree with them, I'm a "CIA plant" (the claim has been made).

The last time I checked, most of the FBI is made up of actual people, and most of them American. While I'm certainly aware of Ruby Ridge and Waco and find both deplorable, I don't think Timothy McVeigh's polite little reminder was an appropriate response. Dame Hoover's foibles and follies don't reflect on the average FBI employee, be they agent or clerk. They, like most people, do not operate with a complete single-mindedness. They are generally not thugs. You may disagree.

I - and you - have seen where a son has accused his dead father of being a Presidential assassin. We've seen more than a couple of people claim to be a shooter and have dared prosecutors to prove that they are what they, themselves, say they are. We have more than one person claiming to be "the" shooter on the sixth floor. We have several people claiming to have seen what they could not - physically - have seen, and you'd like to pin it all upon "the lying FBI?"

I don't dispute Hoover's possible complicity; he was, after all, a "hero" of several right-wing groups who thought JFK was a Pinko if not an outright "instrument" of Soviet Russia. Does that mean that each and every FBI investigator was a xxxx when it came to JFK's assassination? I might not even dispute that some of these guys were trying to keep their jobs by keeping The Director happy, but to suggest that anything and everything that came from anyone associated with the FBI was falsified? That they all "threatened" witnesses to change their story, or intimidated them into saying what they, of a mind, all wanted them to say?

Sorry, I don't buy it. If that were the case, why didn't they get Helen Markham to change her time of Tippit's death to something closer to 1:15, or simply change the documents - her affidavit and her testimony - to reflect something closer to what they knew to be the eventual official story? Why didn't they harrass Tom Bowley or permit his "1:10" estimation of Tippit's death to remain on record? Why was there any testimony allowed to stand, unchanged, that suggested anything other than what the official conclusion would be? Since it was so easy for them to make supposed changes in other people's testimony, why didn't they make it all conform to what would eventually be determined, rightly or wrongly?

Since they didn't change all the testimony, one must wonder why they changed only a select portion of it, and not even consistently at that. For all the institutional "smarts" you attribute to them, how come they didn't get it all "right?" Since they did such a shoddy job of getting everyone to fall into line or changing the statements and testimony of those who wouldn't toe the party line, on what basis do you suggest that they changed or falsified any of it? The later claims of those who said they said something else?

Don't you realize that the JFK assassination is an industry in which you can gain notoriety by disclaiming what you'd once said? In which those who claim to be "searching for the truth" can make pleas for "contributions" without even pretending to be a non-profit organization in their corporate filings? You don't wonder at how some people can do what you and I do - and I'm presuming here that you do actual research and are not just a "believer" - with no other visible means of support, and travel the nation to make speeches and hold symposia, staying in nice hotels and going out to fine dinners, without holding forth something that people will "buy into" ... and do?

Instead, you want to tell me that civil servants - even well-paid and well-educated ones - can and do routinely (but not very thoroughly) falsify the record whenever possible, generally all the time? And that the burden of proof of such falsification lies on ... whom? Certainly not the one who makes it: explain to me why so many people signed things that they didn't say. Why Richard Carr read over and made changes to a hand-written statement that was a complete and total lie, yet signed it anyway. Do you know the caliber of weapon the FBI agents held against his head to make him do so?

I don't suspect you can prove it, but I also don't think that you think you have to, sort of like "the tie always goes to the runner:" that anything similarly sinister ever happened is proof enough that it always happens and everybody - especially those dastardly FBI agents - does it, right? All I have to do is say that the statement I signed was in some way, shape or form coerced, and I'm automatically vindicated, right? The truth is anything other than what I put my name to, as long as I claim a federal agent "made me do it."

I don't have a "special love of the FBI," but it does seem that you have a special hatred of them. The twain shall probably never meet. I'm okay with that. The solution to a murder does not come down simply to whom you wish to believe versus what the facts tell you, it is about discerning facts. If Carr's story is not factual, it needs to be consigned to the dust bin. End of story.

I don't hold any strong views on Carr. I don't need his testimony to convince me that there was one or more gunman who killed JFK. It does seem strange to me that you have gone to such lengths to discredit this witness.

If you type in "Richard Randolph Carr" at Google my page on him comes first. I have incorporated your research and provided a link to this discussion.

I don't need his testimony for that, either. I should point out, however, that I had no particular axe to grind against Carr when I started to look into his deal; indeed, I'd actually been looking at disproving someone who (I'd heard) said that he'd been "in the building where Carr was," had "looked out" and not been able to see what Carr had said he'd seen.

In part, I accomplished that, now knowing where Carr had been and knowing that nobody could have been "in the building where Carr was" and been able to see anything, primarily because "where Carr was" has no windows to look out from. Whether or not anyone ever actually made that claim, I don't know, but Carr's inability to have been able to see Houston Street from where he was is firmly established. (Whether everyone agrees with that assessment or not, if they were to go to Dealey Plaza and see for themselves, they'd have no doubts in their mind.)

Some minor points with respect to your Spartacus entry:

In the interest of accuracy, my comments:

It's all just a matter of dealing with facts, although I do certainly admit that I can be something of a pit bull at times!

... Where did you find that info you posted and in which I quoted? I had not read that part before, even though I have tried to research Bertha Cheek for a very long time. I was not aware she was friends with Eva Grant, although I can see that she would most likely, at least know her. I sure didn't knwo about the Carr conversation part of the info though.

I think my mentioning Bertha Cheek may have confused the point; she had nothing to do with any of this, I just confused one name with the other is all.

The two women that Richard Carr and his wife had been visiting were Mary Sue Brown and Elsie Johnson, who were sisters (nee Barnes). When they had moved to Dallas (from somewhere else in Texas not specified), they had each befriended Eva Grant separately, and at least one of them lived with her for a period of time.

Sometime in the '50s, there had been a disagreement between Elsie and Eva over a diamond ring which Eva apparently believed that Elsie had stolen from her (she moved out from Eva's house or apartment the same evening it had gone missing, or that Eva had brought it up to Elsie), but which Elsie said that she thought Eva had never either lost the ring, or maybe had never even had the ring, and was simply making an issue over it for insurance money.

I also recall that Mary Sue had been a singer at one of Eva's clubs, which she thought had actually belonged to Jack. She also worked for Jack's brother Hyman for a time, when he was building ... for some reason, I think it was laundromats, but I could be off base on that; he was building some sort of commercial buildings, anyway. She had also visited Jack at his apartment a time or two. I'm not clear on whether the relationship between either of the girls and the Ruby/Rubenstein brothers continued after Elsie and Eva had their falling-out, or if Mary Sue had any relationship with Eva afterward.

There is no indication of how the girls knew Carr, or if it was his wife that either of them knew, or if either of the Carrs were actualy acquaintences of a third woman who'd been a part of the gathering at the sisters' house around Christmas, when Carr told his story to them.

Elsie apparently became something of an "assassination buff" for at least a short while, at one time "telephonically advising" the FBI that she was taking out a subscription to The Worker, but stating that she was not a Communist, didn't support the Communist Party, etc.

(There was an Elsie Johnson who had also known Michael Paine and had met Ruth once as well. Ruth had an entry in her address book for someone by that name as well, but didn't seem to know her well. It may have been a different Elsie Johnson, though, judging by the address.)

All of this info is among the Commission Documents set, and can be searched on the Mary Ferrell Foundation website.

Gosh, you're absolutely right, Dixie! Now I can't remember Jack's sister's name to save my life!

Anyway, the two women had been friends with Jack's sister.

I bet afterwards he wished he did not take the advice of the FBI.

Well, that remains to be seen, John. In the time we've been exploring this question (in two or three different threads), there are several discrepancies in his sworn testimony ... unless, of course, you subscribe to the notion that the FBI falsified everything in anticipation of his telling the truth, and of course who are you going to believe: some construction worker or the FBI?

It's an interesting thing: Carr brought up the story to two women he was visiting around Christmas 1963 (and who both happened to be friends with Jack Ruby and his sister Bertha Cheek), but if he told anyone else about it, they didn't apparently repeat it. One of the women contacted the FBI after Christmas, and the FBI in turn got in contact with Carr after the first of the year and again about a month later. As he said, Carr was not deposed by the WC nor was any statement he'd given to the FBI published in the volumes.

In sum, then, very few people knew what Richard Carr claimed to have seen which, according to his 1964 FBI statements, wasn't much. He brought the story to light himself in 1967 by contacting Penn Jones and relating the story to him. According to Jones, at least through May 1967, he did not tell anyone other than Jim Garrison about Carr or his story.

It's possible Jones (or someone he'd told later) might've published something between then and February 1969, but lacking that, the question of how any thugs came to know enough about him to track him down to Atlanta and try to beat him up remains an open question. Leaks in Garrison's office? Maybe Carr granted an interview to a newspaper? Either way, since he lived in Dallas at the time, how did someone know to try to beat him up in Atlanta or try to bomb him in Montana?

Given some of the discrepancies in his testimony, not only in terms of what he'd seen in DP (if anything of significance) but possibly also about the elite nature of his WWII US Army service (he claimed to be a Ranger, tho' nobody can find anything to substantiate that, including the Army), lacking a police report of the supposed incident he describes in Atlanta, one could easily succumb to the notion that his testimony was more sensational than factual.

As an apparently minor witness, nobody seems to have tried very hard to challenge his claims then, and nobody's been able to substantiate them now. There is, in any case, no real reason to believe that he was given any kind of "advice" by the FBI other than that we might choose to believe him.

Maybe we'll know more about that in coming weeks ...?

A few points:

1) The obit wasn't "elusive;" I just don't think anyone has ever looked for it before.

2) I'm not going to tell them anything about RRC's service; I want them to tell me. I might say that there's some question about that and ask if they have anything - commendation medals, citations, etc. - that would support that, and also that RRC's name isn't on the RangerRoster, so that if he actually was a Ranger, I can - and will - forward that information to appropriate people to ensure that his name is added to it. I'm a pit bull that way, y'know ... in case you didn't realize I'm a pit bull at all, in any way, about anything!!

3) I doubt if the VFW has any substantive records. But I'm pretty closely associated with the V and many of its officers in many locations including at state and national levels, so don't think I'll have a problem getting info if they ever got it and it's still available. I will look into it.

I've had a few emails with questions, and will try to post a somewhat-comprehensive list of what those might be, whether they be initial or follow-up questions. Let's see what comes to the fore....

Thanks as ever for the input!

Obituary of Richard R. Carr, Inter Mountain News, Monday, August 5, 1996:

An extended obituary followed in the Inter Mountain News, on Tuesday, August 6, 1996:

His being a retired iron worker is a strong suggestion that this is, in fact, the same Richard Randolph Carr we've been discussing. Deceased at 75, he would be approaching his 88th birthday this year.

There are two Walter Hogues listed in Tyler, Texas, one apparently aged 72, 16 years younger than Richard Carr (I don't know why sons would have a different last name unless they were born out of wedlock and he and the mother never married). There are five Richard Hogues listed in Ohio, one being 53 (RRC @ 35), another 73 (RRC @ 15), another 55 (RRC @ 33) and one 69 (RRC @ 19). There is also one Nancy Hogue, whose age might be 85 (RRC @ 2, a prodigy!).

There is also an Elwood N. Sites II in Elkins, aged 51. How the step-children and step-grandchildren are related is unknown; are they Myrtle's kids from a former marriage? It would also appear, based on the extended obit, that the Carrs who also live in Norton, WV, are not Richard's (immediate or close) family.

The Tomblyn Funeral Home is still in business, located ironically enough on Randolph Avenue! Coincidentally, they have also confirmed that the street name they're on is the same as the middle name of the man they cremated in 1996 ... that is, the retired iron worker in these obituaries is indeed Richard Randolph Carr.

His treatment in the VA Hospital as well as his VFW membership (requires active duty service in a theater of war; the American Legion, by contrast, only requires active duty service during a time of conflict without regard to where the service was completed) validates his status as an Army veteran, but unfortunately, none of this verifies his service as a US Army Ranger.

Before moving onto the next step of contacting any of his relatives, perhaps it will be worthwhile to compile questions that we would like to have answered. I will do so for myself and post them here, and hope that we'll have a bit more input before moving forward. Questions should not be confrontational, and pending a first set of responses, they should come from only one person ... and I'm nominating me for that!

What else?

Duke,

On another note: I'm sure the Newspaper will deliver what they said they had on him. I'm just wondering how a letter can take more than 5 days to travel from WV to TX? I recall that packages sent to/from Europe, will normally arrive on the other side of "the puddle" (door to door) in 4-7 days. Hmmm... talk about "snail mail".

I know, Antti. Here it is almost another week later and nothing in today's mail either. University intra-mail (a day's delay?) coupled with President's Day, when the government stood still for a day, and a weekend intervening? Kevin at the West Virginia University Libary archives (304-293-0351), whose staff researched the question, might provide some insight? Maybe they forgot to charge me - or even ask how to charge me! - and as a result haven't sent it yet? I'm as in the dark as you are. It was 8:22 a.m. on February 5 when he called me to tell me it was "on its way." I'm waiting with bated breath!

... The "truth" is as we proclaim it to be whether or not the facts support such a proclamation. If the facts don't support our theory, there's something wrong with the facts, not our theory.

The truth is what YOU believe it to be, not what I believe or tell you to believe.

The truth is simply the truth; it has nothing to do with anyone's interpretation of it. Facts are readily observable by all, regardless of what they believe. "Faith" better fits the definition you've given. Murders may be "solved" by faith, but one would hope suspects aren't turned into convicts by that measure.

Why would I or anyone try to take credit for anything? For discrediting a witness? You can have all the credit in the world for discrediting Carr. He's all yours.

You make it sound like some sort of sin to expose someone who merely claims to have been a witness when in fact they weren't. If not now, then certainly before.

... While Antti and I are debating the fine points, you're just dismissing it all because it doesn't conform to your "gut feel."

I haven't dismissed anything. I thought we were waiting for a newspaper obit for Mr. Carr to see what it says about his military service and possible living relatives?

I am. And when I get it - one has been found - then I'll let everyone know what it says.

I can take it if it can be shown that Carr was never a combat veteran, and will appologize to you if he wasn't, but you should do the same if he was a veteran. Just find an obit.

No, we are waiting to find out if Carr is as he said he was: a US Army Ranger. That he was a veteran, even possibly a combat veteran, is not at issue: we know for an almost certain fact that he was in the Army during WWII, and quite a large number of people saw action without being part of an elite squad. Of course, if we find he was stationed with Jack Dougherty the whole time ...! ;^)

The question is whether he was a Ranger, not if he was either a veteran or even a combat veteran, but a Ranger.

If Carr was not a US Army Ranger where he said he was and with the record he claimed, then he swore under oath to some things that were simply not true. If he was willing to try to impress the court with credentials that he did not have - why not just say he was in Europe from 1942-45? Surely he'd have had plenty of opportunity to hear small-arms fire without having to falsely claim any sort of "elite" status - then it leads one to wonder what else he was willing to exaggerate, embellish or simply concoct from whole cloth. If he was willing to falsely claim something that was not substantive to his testimony, can we be certain that he didn't falsely claim things that were substantive?

And given his earlier (1964 and 1967) accounts, it certainly appears that he did change and embellish and concoct things that people take as truth when very possibly they shouldn't.

I would not have been "wasting my time" if you - who doesn't even consider it important - didn't try to shore up those concoctions as possible truths when it should be clear that they are at least not entirely truthful, and probably not truthful at all. Like the fact that you can't see most of Houston Street east of the TSBD, yet he claims to have seen some very potentially significant things, and there is just no circumventing that fact. That alone should close the argument.