Bernice Moore

Thank you John Ritchson.......

B

the "profit motive" has lead to many who for a price will tell you how the body of JFK was kidnapped and altered, or how mythological multiple assassins and the CIA/SS/FBI/Anti-Castro Cubans/Pro-Castro Cubans/etc; etc; etc; accomplished the feat of assassinating JFK and thereafter removing all factual evidence of such involvement.

The body of JFK was kidnapped and altered, and there were multiple assassins.

This information is provided as a public service and is free of charge. There is no profit motive. There is no copyright and everyone is free to take it or leave it.

Ron

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Exactly..Ron........

and if anyone has not studied nor read enough to not know the

difference then please do so ,read and learn...

B....

IMO

John Dolva stated....

""As far as I understand this forum is not intended as a """market for the sale or promotion of publications.""

Wrong ,John, and these are far from being the only books ever mentioned on this Forum, far , far from it...

Tom Purvis wrote...

""Unfortunately, there continues to be"""""""" those who are attempting to profit from this event in history, """""""""and the "profit motive" has lead to many who for a price will tell you how the body of JFK was kidnapped and altered, or how mythological multiple assassins and the CIA/SS/FBI/Anti-Castro Cubans/Pro-Castro Cubans/etc; etc; etc; accomplished the feat of assassinating JFK and thereafter removing all factual evidence of such involvement.""

Way wrong on this one Tom.....

Dr.J.Fetzer stated.....

""Purvis was attacking a book he had never even read, as I suspect is also the case here; © I don't care if anyone buys these books or not, but if they are interested in what happened to JFK, then I cannot imagine how they could begin to grasp the full dimensions of the cover-up without studying them; and (d) """""""neither I nor any of my contributors make a dime from the sales of these books, royalties from which are recycled to support additional assassination research.""""""""" We, alas!, do not have the financial and political resources of the United States' government at hand to support our efforts. We must do the best we can with the resources at our disposal""

If anyone wants to do something to help research along...and or to further their studies by information from qualified studies, by the likes of Dr.Mantik...and not someone who is perhaps guessing because of their own preconceived or

preinstructed theory..and or who hasn't read them.....then by all means pick these books up at your local book store, or borrow from your Library....if you cannot afford them..

Do yourself a favor, and do read them for yourself, not because anyone tells to do so or not to, or that there may be a profit....and since when are best sellers in the research world... and their profits not passed along to the author, BUT NOT KEPT IN THIS CASE.....do you honestly think that other author's of other subjects ....J.K. Rowling's for instance, passes along all profits from hers, or any other author....very few if any,I am sure. They are in the business of making a profit.....BUT NOT KEPT as I have said in this case....

How many other authors do the same....anyone know ?? Can anyone mention,any other books that are sold in the research world, where all the profits are recycled back into such...I really would like to know if anyone has any information about such...????

Get a grip....you xxxxe disturbers are becoming extremely tiresome, and there are some on this Forum....you have so much to say in regards to just about all, and comment in just about every thread, some do, and yet preach, that they know nothing they are only here to learn.. .and they continually make their snide remarks.in passing...Gives us a break....the members here are extremely intelligent people, you continually insult them..by thinking they do not see.....Give it up...

This has been an advetisement.....so sue me.....

B.....

Tom, Bernice, Christopher & all forum members interested:

I just want to post a few thoughts regarding this entire issue and then I wont waste more of anyone's time since my thinking may be out of line with that of the forum in general.

There are several issues which I think are important to mention.

1) For many years I have believed and stated vociferously that I think that money and power and its acquisition were The Force behind both the Coup and the cover up. I believe this as much or more than I believe anything regarding this case.

2) However I believe the actual motivation and source of the "real" money and power was not in New Orleans. This is not to say that there are NO connections.

3) I feel that the pursuit of similar tangental issues such as this is what has kept this investigation bogged down for these past 42 years.

4) I do not believe that LHO was involved except in the periphery of the plot and was at the very most "A" shooter and even then not a killer.

5) I believe that most of the actual "participants" (not neccessarily the planners) considered themselves to be true patriots.

6) I believe the path that Tom is following may be interesting to some people, but does not lead to the solution of this case. I therefore consider it chatter.

There are many other things that I am at issue with but the point which I intended has probably been made.

Tom also states such things as how Oswald "skirted the net of having been fully recognized and thoroughly investigated by the FBI and others".

How did Oz "skirt" an intelligence net? He defected to Russia. He went to the US Embassy in Moscow and advertised that he wanted to relinquish his U.S. citizenship. He stated at the embassy that he intended to share with the USSR military secrets which he posessed that included the Top Secret U2 project. When later he was ready to return to the U.S. with his Russian wife, he was able to do so with a U.S, govt. loan. It is stated by the U.S. intelligence agencies after all of the above had occurred, that he was not even debriefed.

I cannot imagine following anyone's line of reasoning who states that he believes that Oswald "skirted" U.S. Intel.

These are the reasons that I "skirt" the line of reasoning set forth by Tom. Tho consequences and possible coincidences when aligned with some actual facts and occurrances, may be interesting to some, I do not feel that they in any way make a case that is worthy of my consideration.

Thanks for your patience.

Charlie Black

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Hi Charles:

Though I agree in general with your post...and you and others may not agree

and some do not....for instance....

In relation to the two ,Harvey and Lee, the research into his family, and childhood of which there is relatively little known...that does not somehow conflict...and in many occurances, does not "gel" as it should..also in the two Marguerites area of research, some information in what Tom has been posting may help some to uncover new information..and some are working on this area...

...

Whether you agree or disagree with a members personal beliefs in all, or whether he or she has an agenda as some call it....I have learned one thing, and that is to "never shoot the messenger"..on occasion, a lead is given or picked up, that could possibley produce results.....and that is what we should be after....you take their research and do you own within ...it may provide a lead.....nothing has been written in stone in this case, as too much has been dissasembled, I shall call it....for too many years...we know the old we must persevere with anything that is possibley new....IMO...

Just some thoughts....

Thanks...B

""For this reason, I believe that the forum hosts might want to add a disclaimer, something to the effect that the posts by members of the forum reflect the opinions of the respective members doing the posting, and do not necessarily reflect those of the hosts themselves or the hosting organization. While such a disclaimer might not absolve the forum hosts in all legal jurisdictions or all situations, it would send a clear message of intent, i.e., it it not the intent of this forum or its hosts to intentional slander or libel anyone, living or dead, real or imagined.

While this might not dissuade the most militant folks with an agenda, it might discourage others who become momentarily offended from taking what would amount to unnecessary legal action.""

Well said Mark.....

Such as below....in some areas....

http://www.jfklancerforum.com/

Thankyou Tom, for your information..

I have now copied all your posts and will study them and see if I can connect anything. This all does become more than confusing..

Have you any opinion at all, that you would like to express of the two Oswald

theory, and if so, that there may be a possibility of there being two Marguerites.

In Robert and John Pics testimony, she is always regarded as

Mrs Oswald, and never Mother. But most importantly when brought up on the screen side by side, and as you work your way through them , and compare ,they did not have the same addresses as children, did not attend the same schools, did not take holidays ,at the same time nor were in the same locations, and yet, there were two brothers, but another brother also it seems at times in another location, in some areas.??..The brothers testimony attests to these facts...they certainly do not comply with each others,there are a great differences,and this only makes all that much more confusing when trying to make any sense in this area.

I know that Robert has stated he has nothing more to say on all this, but yes I would appreciate his address, nothing ventured.....as they say...

We do have many photos, but of the family they are non existant...in most cases.....So I do hope that whomever is on the search has much luck, with his venture..and can afford them..

As you say seems odd, I fully agree, much of this appears odd, the further you get into all..

Many thanks for the come back, appreciated.

B

As Mark has stated ""I could neither vouch for your innocence OR guilt, and that any claims against you were based upon the Sprague account of what Turner said, and not from my own investigation or any subsequent information which turned up here on the forum.""

When all this began, and the first question arose, re the Sprague account of what Turner had said in his book..and the first accusation was made..I asked what I thought was a simple question, when were we going to see the evidence to prove such...I was assured, that no accusation had been made, that it simply was a question, words to that effect.....but as we all have seen many weeks later, there

were many accusations that followed.....to the point of threatening to sue....get a hold of yourselves ...all..

And Charles wrote

""Tim's penchant for making grandiose assertions without supporting evidence has damaged his credibility with a great number of people here, and it would be a shame were he disbelieved by those people [myself included] on the one occasion when proof for his assertions might actually exist.""

Tim of this you are extremely guilty....so two wrongs did not make a right.....and it

all grew out of hand...

Stephen wrote

""Tim, this posturing is getting tiresome, most of the good people here have not accused you of anything, and that includes me. So I take exception at being told off by yourself. Get a grip man..""

and Tim what do you do, but blame the many, the most......Perhaps two lessons

have been learned, do not jump to conclusions, and do not make statements nor any that could be interpreted as accusations, without proof.....and if so, for heavens sake mention that it is simply your opinion....

The most solid thought I have read on all this, in weeks, has been that Larry will speak to Mr.Turner, and clear this matter up.....But will it smooth over the hard

feelings ??

And Shanet get the heck back on here, so you got dinged, so what ?we all have at one time or another....Recall the weekend that you and the other Tim ran around on three different threads from Friday till Sunday and gave Harry and myself such a hard time, over his Walker information, and his little $5.00 CD, that he had mentioned ,his information was available on, through the JFK Research Forum from Rich..and yet at the same time Larry's book was being advertised on here for $40.00 yet that was o.k. ??

He didn't leave, I didn't leave, we took your games and your crap ,been there done that before...you have to learn to take it as well as give it out...sometimes we are wrong, and have to admit it, sometimes we are right, and that makes up for it, this is not a popularity contest...hard but it happens to all..Now Harry is regarded as the man with the info, as he has always been with some, he has always been true and blue, his story has never changed ,never veered.......and now you, as well as all, have seen some of the information and all that Walker was involved in, ruddy amazing, and now Shanet of late till you left, you have been one of his best atta boys....

In this research world we all have to eat some crow, or go through the fire, as they say, if we are serious..if not ,you do not last..that is the way it is..

Now could Larry please post soon ,whatever information he does receive from Mr. Turner, and Tim could you get off the grandstand, and stop blaming the most for

your own actions, or any......just cease... your actions previously did lead up to a lot of this, and was the cause...and could we get back to work.....enough resources have been wasted, this is suppose to be a JFK research Forum, anything else, like the Republican Party Youth, or whatever, go to the History area and post it there, and stop mucking all up for those that simply are not in the least interested...get it off the board....if it does not pertain to the assassination........IMO....

Enough already.....ten times over....

Thanks B.....

Thanks Adam, for all your information.....

B..

Hi Tom:

Would you have anything on the Covington/Metairie Oswald's ,or any photographs of any of the Claverie sisters. ..I may have missed such if you have posted anything pertaining to this information in earlier threads.

Also the original William Oswald - the father of Robert Lee Oswald senior? he was, I have read....Austro-Hungarian and originally lived in Covington (where much of the Oswald family still resides today). His estate was burned down during the anti-German sentiment going on in WW1 (even though Robert Lee Oswald served in the Army in that war). He ran the SOUTHERN ELECTRIC COMPANY and was an associate of Thomas Edison. Oswald helped to light up New Orleans and became a staunch Republican supporter of Marcus "Mark Dollar" Hanna (who was known as "the President maker"). Many felt Hanna helped engineer the presidential assassination by a "disillusioned Trotskyite".

If you have any information on the above it would be greatly appreciated

....fascinating connections..... thanks....

B...

9 viii. CLAUDE BARNES CAPEHART, born October 15, 1924 in CASTLE, OKFUSKEE COUNTY, OKLAHOMA; died January 03, 1989 in PAHRUMP, NEVADA COUNTY, NEVADA. He married ROBERTA ??.

http://www.jenforum.com/capehart/messages/155.html

B......

6. Claude Barnes Capehart

One researcher inquired whether a Claude Barnes Capehart was ever an employee, directly or indirectly, under any name, whether on salary or contract, of the CIA, or a company, business, agency, or other entity operated by the CIA. The HSCA was interested in Capehart, who claimed to have been in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963, as a CIA employee. The CIA granted Review Board staff full access to its records on Capehart.

CIA records state that Capehart worked for two different private business contractors on U.S. government classified projects, but the records the Review Board examined do not show that CIA ever employed him as an officer, staffer, asset, or source. The records indicate that at least one of the private contractors for whom Capehart worked, Global Marine, Inc., did have CIA contracts. The records further indicate that a background investigation was run on Capehart in August and September 1973, so that he could work on those contracts as a crane operator/driller from October 30, 1973 to July 9, 1975. As part of his work with Global Marine Inc., Capehart signed secrecy agreements with CIA in October 1973 and January 1975.

The CIA holds two files on CapehartÑan Office of Security File and a medical file. The CIA processed its Office of Security file as part of the segregated collection. The medical file, not part of CIA's segregated collection, concerns an accident which occurred on one of the construction sites, and the Review Board did not believe it was relevant. The medical file does not contain any information on or evidence of any possible psychological problems. The CIA reported that it has never had an Office of Personnel file or a 201 file on Capehart.

There is no evidence in either the Office of Security file or the medical file to suggest that Capehart worked for the CIA on any additional contracts nor in any capacity, direct or indirect, other than as the employee of a private contractor, Global Marine, Inc., working on CIA contracts. There is no evidence in the files that the Review Board saw to suggest that CIA ever assigned him a pseudonym or that he used another name. Finally, there is no information in the records to support Capehart's allegations concerning the Kennedy assassination nor to confirm his whereabouts during the relevant time period.

http://www.fullgrowth.com/John_F_Kennedy_F...ction_4_05.html

OPINION

TASHIMA, Circuit Judge:

Invoking the Freedom of Information Act, 5 U.S.C.S 552 et seq. ("FOIA"), plaintiff-appellant David Minier ("Minier") requested defendant-appellee Central Intelligence Agency (the "CIA") to disclose whether Claude Barnes Capehart

("Capehart"), acting as a CIA agent, was involved in a CIA plot to assassinate President John F. Kennedy. The CIA, relying on certain exemptions to the FOIA, refused to confirm or deny Capehart's alleged employment with the CIA. The district court granted summary judgment for the CIA, and Minier appeals.

We have jurisdiction under 28 U.S.C. S 1291. Because the CIA is exempted from disclosing agent names under the plain language of 50 U.S.C. SS 403g and 403-3©(5), we affirm.

BACKGROUND

Certain historical facts are unassailable, while others are constantly subject to attack and, ultimately, remain shrouded in mystery and confusion. Both types of facts surround the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. We know beyond dispute, that on November 22, 1963, President Kennedy was tragically shot and killed while traveling through the streets of Dallas, Texas. We also know that a single individual, Lee Harvey Oswald, was arrested and portrayed to the public as the sole assassin. Over the past thirty years, however, many people have debated the accuracy of the sole assassin theory, positing that one individual could not have accomplished the task alone. Although many conspiracy theories have been generated through the years, the most infamous theory alleges CIA involvement in the assassination.1 In June, 1975, the Rockefeller Commission, established by President Ford, released a report finding "no credible evidence of any CIA involvement." H.R.Rep. No. 625(II), 102d Cong., 2d Sess. 10 (1992) (quoting Report to the President by the Comm'n on CIA Activities within the U.S., June 1975, at 269). As this case reveals, however, concerns about the role the CIA played in the Kennedy assassination have not yet been laid to rest.

Capehart, who died in 1989, claimed to have been a CIA agent involved in the assassination of President Kennedy. In February, 1992, Minier made a FOIA request of the CIA to determine whether the CIA had ever employed Capehart, directly or indirectly. In March, 1992, the CIA denied the request based on its policy never to "confirm nor deny the past or present affiliation of individuals with the CIA."

In April, 1992, Minier administratively appealed this decision within the CIA. The CIA responded that there would be a delay in the consideration of his appeal because of a backlog of 400 earlier filed appeals. In June, 1994, Minier expanded his original request to include all records of the "activities, assignments, actions and whereabouts of Claude Barnes Capehart during the month of November, 1963." In October, 1994, the CIA denied Minier's appeal. Relying on Exemptions 1 and 3 of FOIA, 5 U.S.C. SS 552(Bs(1 and 3), the CIA concluded that to confirm or deny a relationship between the CIA and Capehart would jeopardize national security and compromise CIA sources and methods.

In July, 1994, before the CIA acted on his appeal, Minier filed this action to compel the CIA to release the requested information.2 In August, 1994, Minier filed a motion for a Vaughn index. 3 The magistrate judge denied the motion, concluding that the parties' legal arguments would not be aided by an index of CIA documents pertaining to Capehart.

The CIA thereafter sought summary judgment. The CIA submitted a declaration in support of its motion ("CIA declaration"), which explained that protection of the identities of CIA personnel is necessary for the development, maintenance and protection of secret contacts both in the United States and abroad. The district court granted the CIA's motion for summary judgment and denied Minier's motion for reconsideration of the magistrate's denial of a Vaughn index. The district court concluded: (1) the information was properly exempted under both Exemptions 1 and 3; (2) there was no evidence of CIA bad faith; and (3) a Vaughn index would not aid Minier's ability to contest the applicability of the exemptions. This appeal followed.

DISCUSSION

I. Standard of Review

Ordinarily, we review summary judgments de novo. In FOIA cases, because of their unique nature, we have adopted a two-step standard of review. Schiffer v. FBI, 78 F.3d 1405, 1408 (9th Cir. 1996).

Unlike the typical summary judgment analysis, in a FOIA case, we do not ask whether there is a genuine issue of material fact, because the facts are rarely in dispute. Id. at 1409. We must first determine whether the district court had an adequate factual basis upon which to base its decision. Painting Indus. of Hawaii Market Recovery Fund v. United States Dep't of the Air Force, 26 F.3d 1479, 1482 (9th Cir. 1994). If so, the district court's conclusion of an exemption's applicability is reviewed de novo. Schiffer, 78 F.3d at 1409.

II. Exemption 3 of FOIA

http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getc...case&no=9515475

Hi All:

I would like to make a suggestion here...

As Dixie has stated there are some of us who have spent 5 to 7 years almost ,on the Judyth story along with others.....who have also...

We did not jump to any conclusions nor have we come to those without first reading all....and doing our own research....go to the alts, before you jump in with the I believe or I do not believe, and do your own research...spend some time with such and then come to your own honest conclusions...don't believe anyone..but go back to the beginning to get all of the information...

I am amazed by some people who presume to know so much and appear to know so very little in this regard....people who speak up for Judyth at times,and others who do so after relying on what others have stated....and some, who have even posted on the web, that even though they know very little about the story or have not read much, they believe her ,it's not Judyth it's her story ,the information we should be regarding..not her personally, nor her personal life.....that we should be interested in.....and there are others who seem to think that being involved with her through emails, and others perhaps through some telephone calls, or both and have become involved with her in her personal life, and or replying on a Forum to her in a post makes them knowedgable about her story and the information related in it....There are many who have had tough lives out there who were in some way involved in all this, that life should not come into the picture in anyway..not in the research.....we have disregarded their private lives, we must do so with hers...some cannot....it seems....they hear a sad story and their sympathy gets in the way....sounds hard, I know but when it comes to the assassination that is the way it must be..IMO..this is not a game, at least I do not regard it as such...

Being involved as above....does not make a knowledgable person out of anyone.....nor what others tell you about any of her information...there has been much dissension over her changing story...through the years...nor does reading a few posts or some of the information and then coming to a quick conclusion that they do not believe her....I thought this was all about research, and not the I thinks...??...None of these is a winning combination..and is not research..IMO...

Look for her posts, going back to Sept 98, on the alts...I believe it is when it all began....her posts, not what others stated, only her information she has given....and there are many other sites as well that she has posted to over those years....you will have to search......Then study it and see for yourself, how the story grew and was added to...the twists and turns...do not rely on what other people say do you own ....

As for lowering our standards, no way, the first researchers did not lower theirs, thank goodness, if they had we would not have the information we have today,IMO.. that is not even a suggestion....that is almost an insult to them after the nearly 42 years some have put into all this and others many years..that is the lazy way..... it is called perseverence, and hard work....there is no easy way....If you want to know then you must do your own, not rely on anyone to do so for you, and hand it all to you.....it is at times hard work, and can be extremely frustrating, but if we want to know the truth then there is only one way to find such...they never gave up and we must not......you must read and continually do so...if you are serious about the Assassination of J.F.Kennedy....and what followed...

You all have the right to believe what you choose to and in any story you want, that is entirely up to you....you all the have the right to your opinion as I have mine...

Until the book is released, if and when and it could be sooner than later...there really isn't much to discuss, other than the what ifs again..but it is up to you..

What if any role did Judyth play in all this,? one day we will know positively when the book is produced that long promised book.....but no LHO time cards,no newspaper stories about winning any awards, no documents in relation to someone else, or any government programs that we know about and no unsubstaniated memories will do it....there must be hard evdience and documentation, we expect it from others in their books and in other studies of the assassination, and we have received such......and I expect no less in Judyths...book....

IMO B...

Quote:

""Again - patently untrue. The two men involved NEVER met with Sewell. They dealt with a salesman named Oscar Deslatte. And Deslatte, as far as I can tell, has never said the name "Lee Oswald " was mentioned - only "Oswald".

Since LHO was in the USSR at the time, the simplest, most logical explanation is that it was a different Oswald. LHO was not short of relatives in NO with that name. I'll go with it being one of them. ""

Re this above truck information a little further....

When Deslatte contacted the FBI after the assassination...he gave them the carbon copy of the old purchase form... this was only released to all in 1979.......it contained more than the name of Oswald.... the "Joseph Moore" who had introduced himself as such, earlier, and then ask that the name of "Oswald" be used, on the form...well...the reason could have been, and hidden from all, till 79, that even...though Oswald is not the most unusual name.

On the copy of the form was the name of the anti-Castro group that was intending to buy the trucks, and that name was.....

"Friends of Democratic Cuba".....and in 1961 one of the leading men of that group was Guy Bannister, former top FBI agent, still involved in undercover work...and the man as identified as using Oswald in the suspect "Fair Play for Cuba Operation"....in the summer of 63.....

So it came full circle, and implies that the Anti-Castro organization may have been using Oswald's identity as far back as 1961.....and also don't forget that the possible usage of his ID, goes back to Hoover, Head of the FBI..... in 1960.....

Deleted.....

Antti:

I think you repeated my last post. Did you intend to add something?

Allan

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

****************

Hi Allan:

Do you think that Robert will ever release the autopsy photos...?? I was just wondering what or whom would cause him to renege at the last moment ....about handing them over....to the lawyers....

Thanks

B

Directly across from Hill and Moorman, was Bill and Gayle Newman....and their two sons..Directly below the Grassy Knoll...West of the Stemmons Sign..

Newman told the Sheriff's Officers, that afternoon....Nov.22/63

"We were standing at the edge of the curb looking at the (president's) car as it was coming toward us and all of a sudden there was a noise ,apparently a gunshot.

......By(the) time he was directly in front of us .......he was hit on the side of the head......Then we fell down on the grass as it seemed we were directly in the path of fire....I thought the shot had come from the garden directly behind me, there was an elevation from where I was as I was right on the curb. I do not recall looking at the Texas School Book Depository. I looked back in the vicinity of the garden."

Nov.22/63....On TV, interviewed that afternoon...When asked where the shots had come from ,Newman responds..".back up on the .uh....knoll."

In an affidavit signed the day of the assassination , Emmett J Hudson, one of the groundskeepers of the Grassy Knoll..standing on the steps.....stated specifically as to where the shots came from..He stated ..."The shots that I heard definitely came from behind and above me..?"

.........

Near the Newmans was

Cheryl McKinnon:

who later became a reporter for the San Diego Star News..wrote..in 1983.

""On Nov, 22,1963..I stood, along with hundreds of others ,on the Grassy Knoll in Dealey Plaza,waiting for just one thing ..a chance to see, even for just a moment, that magical person, the President John F Kennedy and Mrs. Kennedy ......As a journalism major in school, my plans were to write about my experiences as a class project ....As we stood watching the motorcade turn onto Elm Street ,I tried to grasp every tiny detail of both President Kennedy and Mrs Kennedy ..."How happy they looked."...I thought..Suddenly three shots in rapid succession rang out. Myself and dozens of others standing near by turned in horror toward the back of the Grassy Knoll where it seemed the sounds has originated. Puffs of white smoke still hung in the air in small patches, But no one was visible..........I tried to maintain the faith in my government .I have read the Warren Commission Report in it's entirety and dozens of other books as well....I am sorry the only thing that I am sure of today is that at least two shots fired that day in Dealey Plaza came from behind where I stood on the knoll, not from the Book Depository ...I have never quite had the same faith and trust in those that lead us as I did before"".

B..

Before we get too far afield on this photo...

There is documentary evidence that Ferrie was guest trainer with the Moisant unit from June to September 1955. Oswald joined that unit on July 27, 1955, cadet serial 084965. Several people, some who testified before HSCA and several I have talked to, recall Ferrie and Oswald in that unit at that time.

The cadet commander who kept the rolls still has a partial list of those on that SARCAP exercise, dated Sunday August 7, 1955. Oswald is listed as present.

I also have a hi-res TIFF scan of the original picture. When blown up, there is much more detail than in a JPG or scan from print. None of the anomalies seem present in the TIFF scan.

For these and other reasons, I am inclined to believe that this is a legit photo. Just my opinion, not looking to start a debate.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Stephen:

Any chance of you scanning your TIFF from the original and posting for us to have a look...if possible..

Also, though we know he was in the cadets does not mean there hasn't been hanky panky with this photo.

Thanks B....

John : Andy..

Could you please delete the second double post, there is no delete so that I can not fix it......?? I posted it the first time and got an error page, managed to get it back, and tried again....and got a double post out of it...??.blah 

Thanks.B

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

******************************

Here are the last few lines as it was too long a post......

51 Witnesses:

A.J. Millican was on the knoll as the shots flew, and he heard eight shots that came in three flurries. This corresponds remarkably with the almost universal agreement of newspaper reports of November 22 that the shots seemed to come from an automatic weapon. Millican also supports our views in another important respect. He heard the shots as coming from two different directions, from the TSBDB and the grassy knoll. (XIX, 486) We take leave of our witnesses with a last look at how they were treated on this question by the Commission's staff. Emmet Hudson, employee of the Dallas Parks Department, was sitting halfway down the steps that climb the grassy knoll, when the motorcade passed. Right after the first shot, he lay down on the ground. "The shots that I heard definitely came from behind and above me," he swore in an affidavit made the same day. (XIX), 481.

He repeated this in July, 1964, to the unsatisfied assistant counsel for the Commission, Wesley Liebeler. And the questioning turned:

Mr. Liebeler. But are you quite sure in your own mind that the shots came from the rear of the President's car and above it, is that correct?

Mr. Hudson. Yes ...

Mr. Liebeler. Did you have any idea that they might have come from the Texas School Book Depository Building?

Mr. Hudson. Well, it sounded like it was high, you know, from above and kind of behind like ---- in other words, to the left.

Mr. Liebeler. And that would have fit in with the Texas School Book Depository, wouldn't it?

Mr. Hudson. Yes.

Mr. Liebeler. Did you look up there and see if you could see anybody?

Mr. Hudson. No, sir; I didn't. I never thought about look up that way, to tell you the truth about it. (VII, 564)

The Commission, failing to change the memories of witnesses, dismisses them with a wave of the hand. "No credible evidence," says its Report, "suggests that the shots were fired from the railroad bridge over the Triple Underpass, the nearby railroad yards or any place other than the Texas School Book Depository" (W, 61).

No credible evidence! It is clear how the Commission reached this absurd conclusion. Once it was committed to the thesis that there could be only one assassin and no accomplices, it readily accepted the clues pointing to Lee Oswald in the TSBDB. Now that the assassin and his place were identified, it became "incredible" that any other assassin or any other source of shots could exist. Ergo, any evidence that there was another assassin and another shot source is not "credible."

In what other murder case would the testimony of 51 sworn and many other unheard witnesses be dismissed so cavalierly as "no credible evidence"?

We submit, on the contrary, that the earwitness evidence is quite credible. Taken together with the ballistic and medical evidence analyzed by Mr. Salandria, it is not only credible; it is convincing. There was at least one other assassin firing at President Kennedy from the vicinity of the grassy knoll.

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John

Could you please delete the second double post, there is no delete so that I can not fix it......?? I posted it the first time and got an error page, managed to get it back, and tried again....and got a double post out of it...??

Thanks.B

Lee, while you seem to believe that the films have all been faked, I'm having trouble going that far.  Who knows, maybe in another year?  A year ago I wouldn't have believed a lot of the stuff I now know to be facts, e.g. that the government turned an autopsy photo sideways in order to prove that Oswald was the only shooter.

And Jack, I specifically remember reading interviews with Sitzman and Bill Newman where they make it quite clear the sounds they heard did not come from behind the fence. I believe Mary Woodward has said the same. Hudson's testimony is confusing and can be read a number of ways. While the sound's coming from behind the fence would make my "diversion man" theory worka lot better, and this would also help the badge man theory, the sounds seem to have come from elsewhere, further back.

The HSCA analysis of how shots are heard in Dealey concluded that a shot fired from the fence would have been incredibly obvious to anyone nearby. (Even so, the HSCA concluded a shot was fired from there.) I tend to trust this report because it says a lot of other things that are VERY damaging to the lone-nut theory.  It says the shots from the sniper's nest should have been readily identifiable as well, which leads me to suspect loud sounds DID come from somewhere else.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Last November in Dallas I spoke at length with Bill Newman.

I specifically asked him where the shots originated. His answer:

"I was directly in the line of fire. The shots came FROM BEHIND

ME, from behind the wooden fence."

The first time I ever spoke to him in the late 80s HE SAID EXACTLY

THE SAME THING.

I do not know where you heard him say anything different.

Jack

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

******************************************

Note: The following article was originally published in 1965. It contained the following blurb on the author: "Harold Feldman is a freelance writer and translator. He has published extensively in psychoanalytical journals, especially on the psychology of assassins. He, together with attorney Vincent Salandria, spent some time in Dallas, conducting their own investigation of the Kennedy assassination. His 'Oswald and the FBI' appeared in The Nation."

The original article also had this dedication: "To Shirley Martin of Hominy, Oklahoma, who was paid homage by the attorneys of the Warren Commission in being called in scorn, 'a self-appointed investigator.'"

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Fifty-one Witnesses: The Grassy Knoll

by Harold Feldman

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"There is no evidence of a second man, of other shots, of other guns."

Congressman Gerald R. Ford

(Life magazine, October 2, 1964)

The human ear does not provide the best evidence in a murder case. But its perceptions are evidence not to be despised or dismissed, especially when the case is the murder of a President and more than half of all recorded witnesses agree.

What follows is the result of a survey of the 121 witnesses to the assassination of President Kennedy whose statements are registered in the twenty-six volumes appended to the Warren Report.[1] On the question of where the shots that killed the President came from, 38 could give no clear opinion and 32 thought they came from the Texas School Book Depository Building (TSBDB). Fifty-one held the shots sounded as if the came from west of the Depository, the area of the grassy knoll on Elm Street, the area directly on the right of the President's car when the bullets struck.

Tague and the Echoes

We begin by conceding what the President's Commission says it found, namely, that a man on the sixth floor of the TSBDB fired a rifle at the Presidential limousine that Friday noon. The fact that a third man, besides President Kennedy and Governor Connally, was a casualty of those crucial seconds forces us to ask, however, whether there was not one or more other riflemen firing at the motorcade from a different direction.

For James Thomas Tague stopped on Commerce Street near the Triple Underpass and was standing about 270 feet to the left of the President's car when he felt a sharp sting on his cheek. A deputy sheriff nearby, seeing blood on Tague's cheek, searched the immediate area and found a fresh bullet mark on the south curb of Main Street a few feet away. Tague was hit during the very seconds that he witnessed the murder of the President.

It is difficult to conceive of a sharpshooter aiming at the President from the TSBDB on Elm Street and striking so far afield of his target. It is highly possible, though, that the bullet which hit Tague was fired from the area that Tague himself thought was the source of fire: the grassy knoll on the north side of Elm Street. A marksman stationed there need not have taken faulty aim to miss the President and hit Tague.

James Tague was not called to Washington for questioning by the Commission. Instead, eight months after the assassination, his deposition was taken in Dallas by Wesley J. Liebeler, assistant counsel of the Commission. The interrogation about the source of the shot is worth quoting from at some length.

Mr. Liebeler. ... Did you have any idea where these shots came from, when you heard them ringing out?

Mr. Tague. Yes; I thought they were coming from my left.

Mr. Liebeler. Immediately to your left or toward the back? Of course now we have other evidence that would indicate that the shots did come from the Texas School Book Depository but see if we can disregard that and determine just what you heard when the shots were fired in the first place.

Mr. Tague. To recall everything is almost impossible. Just an impression is all I recall, is the fact that my first impression that up by the, whatever you call the monument or whatever it was ...

Mr. Liebeler. Your impression of where the shots came from was much the result of the activity near No. 7?

Mr. Tague. Not when I heard the shots.

Mr. Liebeler. You thought that they had come from the area between Nos. 7 and 6?

Mr. Tague. I believe they came from up in here.

Mr. Liebeler. Back in area "C"?

Mr. Tague. Right.

Mr. Liebeler. Behind the concrete monument here between Nos. 5 and 7 toward the general area of "C"?

Mr. Tague. Yes. (VII 556-7)

Area "C" and No. 7 with its concrete monument, is the grassy knoll. indicated as such on the Commission's map. Attorneys whom we asked to review the interrogation of Tague all agreed that the Commission's counsel asked leading questions, tried to steer Tague's answers, and even became argumentative. All in all, the motions of a badgering, suggestive prosecutor rather than an impartial inquirer.

Mr. Liebeler. Do you think that it is consistent with what you heard and saw that day that the shots could have come from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository?

Mr. Tague. Yes.

Mr. Liebeler. There was in fact a considerable echo in that area?

Mr. Tague. There was no echo from where I stood. I was asked this question before and there was no echo. (VII, 557)

Tague stuck to his guns. Admitting for all he knew that the shots could have come from the TSBDB, he insisted on his clear memory that they came from the vicinity of the concrete monument.

The reference to echoes is significant. To help reduce this great preponderance of witnesses who favored a murder source other than the one it wished to prove, the Commission frequently tried to bring witnesses to admit that it was not the sound of shots they heard but their echoes.

An echo of course is a reflected sound that reaches a hearer a very short time after the originating sound. But if echoes influenced the witnesses at the assassination scene, it is clear that those who thought the shots came from the TSBDB would be more likely to be misled than those who thought the sounds came from the grassy knoll. The Depository was the last tall building of the Dallas business district as the motorcade moved west. The surfaces of buildings like this produce stronger echoes than would a low, convex slope covered by a rug-like grassy surface.

On the basis of auditory testimony alone from 51 witnesses (and we grant that such testimony in a case like this can never be, by itself, convincing or conclusive) we must agree that the grassy knoll which approaches the famous Triple Underpass on the northwest side of Elm Street would be the most likely source of most of the bullets fired at the motorcade that day. Mr. Vincent J. Salandria has recently outlined the ballistic and medical probabilities of such a trajectory.[2] However, we stress that the two sources of bullets are not mutually exclusive. The chief weakness of the Warren Report was its absolute refusal to consider seriously any other source of shots besides the TSBDB, even though such a source is indicated by the largest number of direct witnesses.

Let us review these witnesses.

"The Best View"

When the assassin opened fire, the Presidential limousine had just passed the steps which lead to the concrete monument on the grassy knoll.

Assuming a single rifleman firing from the TSBDB, let us ask again the question which Allen Dulles asked during a meeting of the Commission. Which participants in the motorcade had "the best view of the assassination"? Dulles suggested this answer:

It must have been the third or fourth or fifth car in the motorcade that was right opposite the window at the time the assassin put the rifle well out of the window and shot ... Whatever it was, the car that was right opposite the window and going in this direction at the time must have been the fourth or fifth car --- the car which had the best view of the assassination. (IV, 332)

Yes, at the time the shots rang out, the third, fourth, and fifth cars of the motorcade had just turned or were turning left from Houston Street into Elm Street, at a speed of five to ten miles an hour, with the block-long TSBDB looming on their right. They were riding the center lane of a three-lane, one-way street. Nothing obstructed their view of its upper stories.

Twelve of the twenty persons in these three cars were Secret Service agents, and the Warren Report tells us that "Secret Service agents riding in the motorcade were trained to scan buildings as part of their general observation of the crowd of spectators." Moreover, the Report marks the TSBDB as one of "the most obvious points of possible ambush along the route in Dallas." (W, 448)

Now the most striking aspect of the individual reports made by the Secret Service drivers and passengers of these three cars is certainly this: that having a better view of the TSBDB at the time of the assassination than anyone else in the motorcade, not one, writing memoranda within hours or days of the event or testifying about it months afterward, not one pointed to the TSBDB as the source of the shots as they heard them.

Some of them say the shots came from the "right rear" with no suggestion of an elevation. In most cases, there is no more definite indication than that. William Greer, driving the President's car, for instance, thought the noise came from the right rear but felt they were the backfiring of motorcycles. Glen Bennett only says that, after hearing the shots, "we peered toward the rear and particularly the right side of the area" (XVIII, 760). John Ready noted:

At about 12:30 p.m. I heard what sounded like firecrackers going off from my post on the right front running board ... It appeared that the shots came from my right-rear side. (XVIII, 750)

The driver of car #4, Texas Highway Patrolman Hurchel Jacks, was the only person in that car who had any opinion at all on the source of the shots, and he could say no more than that they sounded as if they came from the right and rear of the car. In car #5, Jerry Kivett says he looked "in the direction of the noise, which was to my right rear," but adds that although he reached for his gun, he did not draw it "for I could not tell where the shots were coming from." (XVIII, 778) Warren Taylor is the only other Secret Service agent in these three cars who describes the sound as "coming from my right rear" and he too is no more specific.

When we drew up a chart enumerating the witnesses and their perceptions we included anyone riding in these three cars who gave "right rear" as the source of the shots among those who thought the shots came from the vicinity of the TSBDB. Our final figures, therefore, give possible critics of our findings all benefit of the doubt.

Reviewing the same three cars, we see that George Hickey, Jr., offers no opinion on the question but observes that "the President was slumped to the left" after being hit, and later "it seemed as if the right side of his head was hit" (XVIII, 765). This suggests a source almost directly to the right; but is too inconclusive. Clinton Hill is just as vague. Noting that "I heard noise from my right rear," he goes on to contrast this first shot with the second which "was right, but I cannot say for sure that it rear" (II, 138, 144). Hill's remark reminds us of Salandria's view that the bullets probably came from both the knoll and the Depository.

Samuel Kinney, like Hickey, sees a shot strike Kennedy on the right side of the head, sees him fall to the left, but gives no opinion about where the shots came from (XVIII 731) . William McIntyre says "None of us [in car #3] could determine the origin of the shots" (XVIII, 747). Emory Roberts saw what looked like "a small explosion on the right side of the President's head." His conclusion: "I could not determine from what direction the shots came, but felt they had come from the right side" (XVIII, 734, 739) .

Riding the right front seat of the Vice-Presidential car, Rufus Youngblood had no opinion on the source of the shots (XVIII, 767-8). The driver of car #5, Texas Highway Patrolman Joe Rich, likewise had no opinion (XVIII, 800).

Of the Secret Service personnel in the three cars with "the best view," only two make any specific notes about the source of the shots, and what they say adds up to the grassy knoll. Paul E. Landis, Jr., riding the rear right running board of car #3, wrote:

My immediate thought was that the President could not possibly be alive after being hit like he was. I still am not certain from which direction the second shot came, but my reaction at the time was the shot came from somewhere towards the front right-hand side of the road.

I did not notice anyone on the overpass, and I scanned the area to the right of and below the overpass where the terrain sloped toward the road on which we were traveling. (XVIII, 755)

Thomas L Johns, in the right rear seat of car #5, only says that:

On the right-hand side of the motorcade from the street, a grassy area sloped upward to a small 2 or 3-foot concrete wall with sidewalk area. When the shots sounded, I was looking to the right and saw a man standing and then being thrown or hit to the ground, and this together with the shots made the situation appear dangerous to me. (XVIII, 774)

The other passengers of the cars, which Allen Dulles thought provided the best view of an assassin firing from the TSBDB, offer little more enlightenment. Lyndon Johnson wrote that it was impossible for him to tell the direction of the explosions (V 562).

Alone of all those in the three cars, Lady Bird Johnson suggests the Depository. Telling her story into a tape-recorder, she said, "It seemed to me to come from the right, above my shoulder, from a building" (V 565). Senator Yarborough's statement that all the shots "came from my right rear" (VII 440) made in July 1964 should be coupled with his comments, reported in the Texas Observer, that he smelled gunpowder as the car drove away through the underpass.

As for the aide to Kennedy and Johnson in the strategic cars, Ken O'Donnell pointed to the right rear but admitted that "my reaction in part is reconstruction" (VII 448), and Clifton Carter made no judgment on the question. Riding next to O'Donnell in car #5, David Powers remembered that:

My first impression was that the shots came from the right and overhead but I also had a fleeting impression that the noise appeared to come from the front in the area of the triple underpass. (VII 473)

The most comfortable defender of the Warren Report will not fail to perceive the strange meaning of this roll call. Riding at a crawl alongside of the TSBDB, the last tall building on the motorcade route --- and most of the passengers aware of a duty to scan tall building on the way --- not one (with the possible exception of Mrs. Johnson) thought that the Depository was the assassin's firing nest or saw anything suspicious in that area. Not one mentioned the Depository as a possible or probable source of the shot. Three passengers indicated that the shots sounded as if they came from the vicinity of the grassy knoll.

Perhaps, for this point and also for future reference, we should recall the elementary principal of sound location. As a general rule one can locate a sound upward or downward, front or rear, only when the hearing is supported by other knowledge and experience. Right and left locations, on the other hand, are discriminated more reliably by the cars because sound in those directions will normally be stronger in one ear while the other ear is in an auditory shadow cast by the head.

It follows that the remarks of the drivers and passengers in the three strategic witness cars are, in general, inconclusive but more valid in their indication of shot sources to the right than in their perception of a source to the rear.

The Man in the Window

As Kennedy's car rode toward the Triple Underpass, someone was standing at the extreme southeast window of the sixth floor of the TSBDB. He had a rifle in hand. When was seen some minutes before the assassination, his gaze was not directed at the approaching motorcade but rigidly fixed down Elm Street toward the Triple Underpass.

So much we can reconstruct from the testimony of nine witnesses (none of them officers of the law).

We are at once faced with many questions. For instance, why would a man, who intends to shoot a rifle westward toward the underpass, choose the window on Elm Street farthest from his target? Why didn't he take his place at the extreme southwest window where his view would not be blocked a crucial part of the way by an oak tree that was in full leaf that November? The onlookers at the heavy traffic corner of Elm and Houston, which he overlooked, were still numerous enough to be called a crowd while the bystanders west of the building were few and scattered. If he had chosen the western position he would have been more than a hundred feet closer to the stairway by which he is said to have escaped. At our present state of knowledge we can only ask and wonder about such questions. All that we can sat with any degree of certainty is that a man with a rifle was seen in the southeast window facing Elm Street.

Mrs. Earle Cabell, wife of the then Mayor of Dallas, saw "something" in the window. Malcolm 0. Couch, Dallas news-cameraman, didn't see anyone there but saw about a foot of the rifle as it was being withdrawn into the window. Robert Hill Jackson, staff photographer for The Dallas Times-Herald, also saw the rifle, about half of it, as someone drew it back into the building after the last shot exploded. He too could not see the person who held it. (We will return presently to these three witnesses.)

Two schoolboys and a steamfitter saw and heard the Depository rifle in action. James Worrell, Jr., age 20, playing hooky from school that day, stood in front of the TSBDB and after the first shot looked up He then saw the rifle fire twice. He did not report what he saw to the police until the next day (II, 200).

Fifteen-year-old Amos Lee Euins happened to look up at the sixth floor window across the street from where he was standing and saw someone there fire a rifle. Amos ducked behind the little fountain at the peristyle nearby and peered upward in time to see a man fire again. "I could see his hand," he told the Warren Commission, "and I could see his other hand on the trigger and one hand was on the barrel thing." (V, 204) The police and FBI wrote an affidavit for him which he signed. It said that he saw a white man up there but Amos absolutely denied to the Commission that he ever could have described the man on the sixth floor in any way.

Star witness of the Commission was undoubtedly Howard Leslie Brennan who was working at the time fabricating pipe in the yards just behind the Depository. After lunch he went to Elm and Houston and perched himself on the retaining wall of the pool at the Dealey Plaza entrance, wearing the hard helmet that identifies him in photographs of the scene. He says he saw "this one man" come and leave the sixth floor window a couple of times before the shooting. After the second shot Brennan looked up again, "and this man that I saw previous was aiming for his last shot." The gunman then drew back "and maybe paused for another second as though to sure himself that he hit his mark, then he disappeared" (III, 143-4). Brennan went on to describe the rifleman in remarkable detail for a view at such a distance.

Two others saw the man in the window but did not see him fire. Ronald Fischer stood with a friend at the southwest corner of Elm and Houston and, minutes before the motorcade came by, pointed to the figure at the window. It surprised Fischer that a man looking out of a sixth floor window there should not be looking in the direction of the motorcade but towards the underpass. (VI, 193)

On the east side of Houston near Elm, waiting for the President to pass, were Arnold Rowland and his wife. They were talking about how the Secret Service protects the President of the United States when Arnold happened to see the man in the sixth floor window of the TSBDB. "He was standing and holding a rifle ... the thought came to us that it is a security agent," Arnold told the Commission in Washington. Mrs. Rowland looked up but could not see the man nor the rifle.

There are two remarkable elements in Arnold Rowland's testimony. At the same time he saw another man in the southwest window of the sixth floor, a post we have already suggested would have been a wiser sniping position. And ... on hearing the shots that killed Kennedy and wounded Connally, Rowland thought they came from the grassy knoll!

After the second explosion, "Well," he told the Commission almost apologetically, "I began looking, I didn't look at the building mainly, and a practically any of the police offices that were there then will tell you the echo effect was such that it sounded like it came from the railroad yards. That is where I looked, that is where all the policemen, everyone, converged on the railroads."

Arlen Specter, assistant counsel for the Commission, asked Rowland, "Why did you not look back at the Texas School Book Depository Building in view of the fact that you had seen a man with a rifle up there earlier in the day?" And the young man replied, "I don't remember. It was mostly due to the confusion, and then the fact that it sounded like it came from this area 'C' and that all the officers, enforcement officers were converging on that area and I just didn't pay any attention to it at that time." (II, 169-81)

Ronald Fischer, questioned in Dallas in April 1964 by David W. Belin, had a similar problem. His friend Robert Edwards thought the shots "seemed to come from that building there" (XIX, 473), but Fischer testified that "they appeared to be coming from just west of the School Book Depository Building" (VI, 193-6).

The words "railroad yards," used again and again in the testimony, require explanation. There are railroad terminals and yards running behind the TSBDB that extend along the north side of the grassy knoll and connect to the railroad overpass that crosses Elm, Main, and Commerce Streets. Mrs. Rowland, in her deposition, makes clear which railroad yard area was the center of witness attention that day. She and her husband ran, she says, to "the colonnade over on the north side of Elm Street" (VI, 184).

Mrs. Cabell, in motorcade car #7, thought the shots came from the TSBDB but "was acutely aware of the odor of gunpowder" (VII 486-7), which is not likely to have been perceptible from a source high up and inside a building. She noticed the odor after all the shots were fired and therefore possibly when car #7 was turning down hill into Elm Street, approaching the knoll where Senator Yarborough, too, began to smell gunpowder. Congressman Roberts and Mr. Donald Baker, too, noted the smell of gunpowder at about the same location. TV- newsman Couch did not associate the sound of the shot with the building where he had seen the rifle. He remembered seeing blood on the walkway that leads to the southwest corner of the TSBDB and people "pointing back around those shrubs around that west corner" (VI, 157-60) .

Couch's fellow-passenger in car #8 Jackson, was asked:

Mr. Specter. Mr. Jackson, at the time you heard the first shot, did you have any reaction or impression from the sound itself as to the source of the shot point of origin?

Mr. Jackson. No sir, I didn't. It did sound like it came from ahead of us or from that general vicinity but I could not tell whether it was high up or on the ground.

Mr. Specter. When you say that general vicinity, what vicinity did you mean?

Mr. Jackson. We were sure it came from ahead of us which would be in a northerly direction, northwesterly direction. It did sound as though it came from somewhere around the head of the motorcade. (II, 162)

The policeman at the TSBDB comer whom Howard Brennan accosted right after the shot, showed no sign that he suspected anything inside the building. Brennan told him that the 30 to 50 policemen and deputies swarming over the grassy knoll and into the railroad yards "were searching in the wrong direction for the man that did the shooting" (III, 145).

An uneasy fact: Brennan is said to have told a policeman what he saw at the 6th floor window of the TSBDB within three minutes of the assassination. A search-call for the assassin is supposed to have been issued on the basis of Brennan's description. But no control and concerted search of the Depository in general was begun for almost a half-hour, and even then the sixth floor got no special attention in the search orders.

The First Cars

Let us continue our review of the motorcade. The Commission tells us that "passengers in the first few cars of the motorcade had the impression that the shots came from the rear and from the right, the general direction of the Texas School Book Depository (W, 61). This is not true.

Car #2 was the death car. About 100 feet ahead of it was the lead car of the motorcade. Not one of the drivers or passengers of these two cars indicated in any way that the TSBDB was the source of the shots.

Mrs. Kennedy offered no opinion at all on the shots and indeed the noise sounded to her like motorcycles backfiring on the left (V, 180). Governor Connally guessed that the shots came from back over his right shoulder at an elevation and declined to be more specific. At the first shot, he said, he turned right and saw "nothing of any significance except just people on the grass slope" (IV 12-S). His wife Nellie added, "Well, I had no thought of whether they were high or low or where. They just came from the right; sounded like they were to my right" (IV, 149).

VIP's and Secret Service agents gave their testimony months after the event, when every force of suggestion from officials and newspapers pointed to the TSBDB as the post of an unaided sniper. That they insisted on their original recollection under these conditions is a tribute to these men and women.

William Greer, the Special Agent driving the President's limousine, could give no opinion on the direction of the shots. Beside him rode Roy H. Kellerman, an agent with more than 20 years experience in the Secret Service. He told the Commission that he had no reaction about the height of the explosions. But he did turn immediately to his right after he heard one shot.

Mr. Specter. What was the reason for your reacting to your right?

Mr. Kellerman. That was the direction that I heard this noise, pop. (II, 74)

In the lead car rode two Secret Service men, Winston G. Lawson of the White House Detail, responsible for planning many details of the motorcade, and Forrest V. Sorrels, in charge of the Dallas office. Lawson looked back at the President's car continually in order to regulate the speed of the procession. When he heard the shots (car #1 was almost at the Triple Underpass when he heard them) he was positive that they came from the rear of his car, and when he saw an agent standing up with an automatic weapon in his hand in car #3, Lawson's first thought was that the shots came from that gun. (IV, 352-3)

Sorrels remembered scanning the Depository as his car turned the corner, but he saw "no activity, no one moving around that I saw at all." As soon as he heard the shots, he "turned around to look up on this terrace part there, because the sound sounded like it came from the back and up in that direction." He had to repeat this for the Commission's assistant counsel, Samuel A. Stern.

And, as I said, the noise from the shots sounded like they may have come back up or the terrace there ... But the reports seemed to be so loud that it sounded like to me --- in other words, that my first thought, somebody up on the terrace, and that is the reason I looked there.

Mr. Stern then drew him out of the area of evidence into the area of conforming opinion in order to evoke the right words from his witness:

Mr. Stern. Do you have any reason to believe that the shots could not have come from the Book Depository Building?

Mr. Sorrels. No, sir.

Mr. Stern. Would shots from the Book Depository Building have been consistent with your hearing of the shots?

Mr. Sorrels. Yes, they would have. (VII, 345-7)

There were two other major participants in the day's events who rode in the lead car: the chief of police of Dallas and the sheriff of Dallas County.

Police Chief Jesse Curry was driving the lead car. In his deposition, taken 4/15/1964, he said:

I heard a sharp report. We were near the railroad yards at this time, and I didn't now --- I didn't know exactly where this report came from, whether it was above us or where, but this followed by two more reports (XII, 28).

The week after this deposition, he was in Washington testifying at great length before the Commission --- but not a word more does he add and not a question is he asked about the way he heard the shots. What we do learn is that, before he ordered motorcycle officer Chaney to lead the car to Parkland Hospital:

"I said over the radio, I said: 'Get someone up in the railroad yard and check.'" (IV, 161)

Bill Decker, also riding the lead car, had been sheriff of Dallas County since 1949. The first time any member of the Commission's staff interviewed him was on 4/16/1964, in Dallas. At that time he was not asked a thing about the assassination itself, even though he himself introduced the subject. In an undated memo, presumably written within day after Kennedy's death, Decker had no opinion on the direction of the shots or their origin. "When I heard the shots," he does remark, "I noted motorcycle officers coming off their cycles and running up the embankment on Dealey Plaza" (XIX, 458). Since Dealey Plaza proper has no embankment he can only have been referring to the grassy knoll on his right.

The Decker-Curry Radio Mystery

Here we come to a collateral puzzle. For Sheriff Decker writes in his undated memorandum:

We moved out immediately at which time I took the microphone and requested the DPD Dispatcher 521 to advise my Station 5-Radioroom to notify all officers in my department to immediately get over to the area where shooting occurred and saturate the area of the park, railroad and all buildings ...

The words "and all buildings" are either deceiving or decisive. For we have never found any record that any building beside the TSBDB was searched after the assassination, and the radio calls registered in the official log at the time show calls to order men up to the railroad yards but none ordering men to the TSBDB or any other building.

Who then ordered the TSBDB to be searched? And when?

All the newspapers carried the story of how a motorcycle policeman, Marrion L. Baker, parked his vehicle on Houston Street near Elm, charged into the TSBDB just 15 seconds after the last shot, and drew his gun on Lee Oswald on the second floor before proceeding to the roof with TSBDB superintendent Roy Truly. But the stories did not say (1) that Mr. Baker made his determination that shots were coming from the Depository while he was riding at the end of the motorcade, that is, before entering Houston Street from Main Street, that is, from distance greater than any other witness; and (2) that after checking the roof with Mr. Truly, they descended to the ground floor by elevator and, passing the fourth floor, saw Inspector J. Herbert Sawyer of the Dallas Police (III, 261).

Now, mind you, neither Baker nor Sawyer had spoken with Brennan, Euins, Worrell or any other eyewitness before entering the TSBDB. Baker was there because that is where he thought the shot were coming from, and Sawyer was there because, he says, a message came over his radio ordering him there.

Inspector Sawyer was in his car parked on Ervay and Main Streets during the assassination. Too far away to hear the shots, he naturally saw nothing of the area's reaction to them. This is what he told assistant Counsel D. W. Belin on 4/8/1964 in Dallas:

Mr. Sawyer. ... I heard Sheriff Decker come on the radio and tell the dispatcher to put all of his men over to, and I thought he said Texas School Book Depository but at least that was the overall gist of the conversation. That is what I gathered. He may not have said Texas School Book Depository but the Texas School Book Depository was mentioned in the broadcasts that were made at the time.

Mr. Belin. Was this on Channel 1 or Channel 2, if you remember?

Mr. Sawyer. Channel 2, I am sure.

Mr. Belin. Did Sheriff Decker have any particular call number at all, or not, in your police number system?

Mr. Sawyer. No, I was wondering why he come on our radio but then I think that he was with Chief Curry and probably using that radio.

Mr. Belin. All right, in any event, a call was made from Chief Curry's car?

Mr. Sawyer. Well this I don't know either. I don't know what car it was made from, but I think it was Sheriff Decker talking. I could recognize his voice, yes.

Mr. Belin. What did you do then?

Mr. Sawyer. Then I went on down to the Texas Book Depository. (VI, 316-7)

Summed up, this means that the inspector hurried down to the TSBDB on an order issued by an unidentified source at an uncertain location, an order which was not directed to him nor made by his superior officer but by a voice which he only supposed to be the sheriff coming over the wrong radio channel; an order, finally, which evidently did not mention the TSBDB.

A mystery certainly, but one not scrutinized too closely by the Commission. The only orders issued on the radio by Curry ant Decker at the time were calls to get men over to the Triple Underpass and the railroad yards (I, 319). At least that is what the log shows.

We must assume then that neither Curry nor Decker were responsible for Sawyer's presence on the fourth floor of the TSBDB as Baker and Truly were descending in the elevator. In fact, Curry was asked by Allen Dulles whether he had ever told the newspapers that he had been the one who sent out the radio order to surround the Depository.

Mr. Curry. I didn't do that, sir. That was one of my inspectors, I believe, that gave that order. I was riding in the Presidential parade and approximately a hundred feet, I guess, ahead of the President's car, and when we heard this first report I couldn't tell exactly where it was coming from ... I thought at first that perhaps this was a railroad torpedo, it was a sharp crack." (IV, 160-1)

What Curry implies here is that some other inspector made an unauthorized radio order that was never logged, or that Sawyer acted on his own responsibility and covered his action by referring to an alleged radio order.

The situation proves even trickier. Because, if The New York Times of 11/24/1963 is to be believed, it is Curry who is not telling the truth. Reporting a November 23 press conference with the Chief of Police the Times had this to say:

Moments after the fatal shot was fired at President Kennedy at 12:30 PM yesterday, Chief Curry said he radioed in instructions that the Texas School Book Depository Building be surrounded and searched ... Chief Curry said he could tell from the sound of the three shots that they had come from the book company's building.

We must note that the records of the Chief's press conference do not show such a statement. Furthermore, this is a report about a man who, in his deposition and testimony, had denied that he had any opinion about the direction of the shots except for a general suspicion about the railroad yards to his right. If the Times report is true, then (1) Curry lied to the Commission, and (2) the official log of radio dispatches has been expurgated, or censored.

In this connection Forrest Sorrels, riding in the lead car with Decker ant Curry, has a significant recollection:

... the chief [Curry] took his microphone and told them to alert the hospital and said 'Surround the building'. He didn't say what building. He just said, 'Surround the building'. And by that time we had gotten almost in under the underpass, and the President's car had come up and was almost abreast of us. (VII, 345)

Deputies and Police

An impressive feature of the Kennedy murder case is the large number of witnesses who are on familiar terms with firearms. Very few of the eyewitnesses could have had their testimony impeached on the ground that they could not properly evaluate the sounds they heard. And the great majority of the eyewitnesses say that the assassin of President Kennedy seemed to be firing from the grassy knoll.

The Warren Report faces this difficulty in its typical manner, a style which led Murray Kempton, a friendly critic, to observe that it presented no more than "the case for the prosecution."

The Report says:

When the shots were fired, many people near the Depository believed that the shots came from the railroad bridge over the Triple Underpass or from the area to the west of the Depository. In the hectic moments after the assassination many spectators ran in the general direction of the Triple Underpass or the railroad yards northwest of the building. Some were running toward the place from which the sound of the rifle fire appeared to come, others were fleeing the scene of the shooting. (W, 71)

It require a patient culling of the 26 volumes appended to the Report to learn that here and elsewhere the Report is a not unskillful deception. We would not learn from the Report itself, for example, that the "many people" were in fact most people, the overwhelming majority. We are drawn to a picture of bystanders rushing westward of the TSBDB, "some" to find the assassin, "others" to escape him. But we are not told that practically none of the witnesses belonged to the second category, and that the "some" who looked for the assassin in the vicinity of the grassy knoll included almost every deputy sheriff on duty in the area that day and most of the policemen.

The list of witnesses for the grassy knoll as a sniper's post is decreased because the Warren Report and its appendices contain no evidence from many persons who are mentioned and quoted in the reports of other witnesses and in newspaper accounts. We have found ten deputies of the sheriff's office who were on assignment at the assassination scene who were not called on for evidence. Most of them would, probably, have felt and reacted like the twenty recorded deputies. Of these twenty, only one decided the shots came from the TSBDB, three gave no opinion, and sixteen thought this assassin had fired from the area of the grassy knoll.

The only deputy sheriff who pointed to the TSBDB did not say where he thought the shots came from. John Wiseman merely told us in his memo of 11/23/63 that he talked to Marilyn Sitzman and an unnamed man who thought the shots came from the Depository (XIX, 535-6).

Eugene Boone's testimony is doubly interesting. He not only ran towards the knoll and then the freight yards as soon as he heard the shots; he is also the deputy who found a rifle on the sixth floor of the TSBDB almost an hour later, and identified it as a 7.65 Mauser. (XIX, 507; VII, 105-9). This rifle, which soon became a 6.5 Mannlicher-Carcano, was also identified by deputy constable Seymour Weitzman as a Mauser.

Weitzman, like most of the other deputies, was standing at the corner of Main and Houston when he heard the shots. He ran toward the President's car and climbed over a wall in "the monument section," looking for the assassin (VII, 106). Roger Craig, too, on hearing the first shot, ran until he reached "the terrace on Elm Street" and then the railroad yards (XIX, 524.). Harold Elkins was more explicit:

I immediately ran to the area from which it sounded like the shots had been fired. This is an area between the railroad and the Texas School Book Depository which is east of the railroad. (XIX, 540)

"Lummie" Lewis, A. D. McCurley, Luke Mooney, and W. W. Mabra all heard the shots the same way and ran to search the grassy knoll and the freight yard. (XIX, 526, 514, 541, 528)

"Why did you go over to the railroad yard?" the Commission's assistant counsel, Joseph Ball, asked Mooney. "Well," said Mr. Mooney a bit hesitantly, "that was --- from the echo of the shots, we thought they came from that direction." Then he added a note to the Decker-Curry mystery. After "a few seconds" of search, Mooney said, "we had orders to cover the Texas Depository Building" --- and the orders "were referred to us by the sheriff Mr. Bill Decker." (III, 283)

The shots sent Deputy Sheriff J. L. Oxford running toward the underpass (XIX, 530). L. C. Smith's reaction to the shots was to climb the fence behind the knoll and search the parking lot (XIX, 516). Deputy I. C. Todd ran to the railroad tracks, as did Ralph Walters and radio officer Jack Watson (XIX, 543, 505-6, 522). Harry Weatherford tells much the same story: "I thought to myself that this was a rifle and I started towards the corner when I heard the third report ... By this time I was running toward the railroad yards where the sound seemed to come from." (XIX, 502)

Deputy Sheriff Eddy Raymond Walthers (known as "Buddy") took an active part in many phases of the investigation and gave evidence in Dallas and Washington. The story of his initial reactions to Kennedy's murder as told in July 1964 is much the same as his memorandum written on November 22. He heard three shots, ran across Dealey Plaza until he reached the parking are behind the now-familiar "concrete structure on the knoll (VII, 544-6). It was later, while looking for bullet traces, that he came across James Tague, the man with the bloody cheek, whose slight wound was to give the Commission as much trouble as any other inflicted that day.

Among the policemen near the scene, we find wider variety of opinion and reaction, perhaps because they were distributed all along the route of the motorcade and not concentrated near one corner as were the deputy sheriffs. Four policemen indicated the Depository as the source, four could make no definite opinion, four indicated the gray knoll area.

The evidence of Patrolman Baker has already been noted. The officer to whom Brennan spoke, Welcome Eugene Barnett, was stopping traffic for the motorcade at Elm and Houston. He thought the second shot sounded high and looked up at the TSBDB across the street. When the third shot exploded, "I decided it had to be on top of that building. To me it is the only place the sound could be coming from." He also remarked that he was the only officer around who seemed to react to the shots as he did (VII, 541-2). It is noteworthy that neither Baker, Sawyer nor Barnett took any decisive action to seal off the building.

J. W. Foster, assigned to the Triple Overpass, thought the shots "came from back in toward the corner of Elm and Houston Street." He ran to the Depository where he bumped into Inspector Sawyer (VI, 251-2). Earle Brown, on duty at the Stemmons Freeway overpass, also believed the shots came from the TSBDB, but he was struck by the smell of gunpowder near the overpass (VI, 233-4).

Three motorcycle policemen in the motorcade provided excellent directional evidence. B. J. Martin, riding at the left rear side of the death car, heard shots but "couldn't tell just where they were coming from." When he arrived at Parkland Hospital, however, he noticed blood and flesh particles on his motorcycle windshield, the left side of his helmet, and the left shoulder of his uniform (VI, 291).

Besides Martin and just alongside of Mrs. Kennedy rode Bobby Hargiss. "At the time," he testified, "there was something in my head that said that they probably could have been coming from the railroad overpass, because I thought since I had got splattered with blood --- I was just a little back and left of --- a little back and left of Mrs. Kennedy but I didn't know." His second choice was the TSBDB (VI, 294-5).

Clyde Haygood was described in the world press that Friday and Saturday because, after the shots were fired, he tried to jump the north curb of Elm Street with his motorcycle and, failing, parked it on the street and ran to the knoll looking for any sign of the assassin (VI, 297-9). Joe Marshall Smith had his back to the Depository on Elm Street when the shots rang out. "I didn't know where the shots came from," he said, but ran "to an area immediately behind the concrete structure" and checked the bushes and all the cars in the parking lot behind the knoll. (VII, 533-6)

Another Patrolman Smith, Edgar Leon Smith, Jr., stood on the east curb of Houston Street about 150 feet from the TSBDB. He guessed the first two shots were firecrackers but, after the third shot, he drew his pistol and ran down Elm Street.

Mr. Liebeler. You thought the shot came from this little concrete structure up behind No. 7?

Mr. Smith. Yes, sir.

But experience leads us to expect that the Commission's counsel will not be content with such direct reply.

Mr. Liebeler. Is what you heard that day consistent with the proposition that the shots came from the School Book Depository Building?

Mr. Smith. They could have come from there and they could not --- I just don't know. (VII, 568-9)

As for the grassy knoll, Patrolman Smith humbly insisted, "It just looked like a good place for them to come from and I guess that's the reason I ran down there."

Smith shows how close to unanimous that impression was among law enforcement officers on the spot. The job of examining people and things around and behind the knoll became difficult, he says, because there were so many police and deputies milling around there.

Depository Personnel

Jack Faulkner, sheriff's deputy, noted in a memo of 11/22/1963 that he helped search the TSBDB and that "when we got down to the third floor, we talked to office workers who told us they were looking out of the third floor window when the shots were fired from the street near the concrete arcade." (CIX 511)

We may never know who these office girls were. There is no other record of what they heard and saw, and the Commission found no time for following such leads. A police report of the same day mentions interviews of TSBDB employees Shearion Simmons, Jeanie Holt and Stella Jacobs, but doesn't tell what they said. (XIX, 526) Perhaps they are the ones who indicated the grassy knoll to Deputy Faulkner. As it is, we cannot include them in our reckoning of witnesses.

Another eyewitness whom we must exclude from our poll calculation for the same reason is perhaps one of the most important. He is Ochus V. Campbell, vice-president of the TSBDB.

We know that he was watching when President Kennedy was killed. We know he ran toward the grassy knoll afterward. The Dallas Times-Herald of 11/22/1963 quotes him as saying he raced back into the building and saw Oswald in a small storage area on the ground floor. But he prepared no affidavit, gave no deposition, and was never interrogated by the Commission as far as the record shows.

Mrs. Robert Reid was standing beside him and Superintendent Roy Truly as the motorcade passed right by them and the shots rang out. "And I turned to Mr. Campbell," she testified in Washington, "and I said, 'Oh, my goodness, I am afraid those came from our building.' But Mr. Campbell, he said, "Oh, Mrs. Reid, no, it came from the grassy area down this way.'" (III, 273-4)

Confining our list of witnesses to those whose evidence was published by the Commission itself, we find a total of 19 TSBDB employees, of whom we classify five as having no opinion on the direction of shots, six feeling they came from the building, and eight in favor of the grassy knoll as the firing site.

Of signal importance are Bonnie Ray Williams, Harold Norman, and James Jarman Jr. Bonnie Ray says it seemed at first like everyone was going to watch the motorcade from the sixth floor. He heard Billy Lovelady and Danny Arce say they would watch from there, so that is where he went to eat his lunch. His were the famous chicken bones that appeared in every newspaper in the United States as evidence that the assassin had lain in wait for his prey for hours.

Nobody came up to join Williams, though, so he went down to the fifth floor and squatted at the southeast windows between Harold Norman and James Jarmen, Jr., to watch. Down below, from car #8, Tom Dillard of The Dallas Morning News took their pictures.

Jarman had no opinion about the source of the shots. He did notice some debris that had presumably fallen on Bonnie Ray's head from the ceiling above (III, 204). Williams is clear: the rifle report "shook the building --- the side we were on. Cement fell on my head" (III, 175). Norman too thought the shots came from above them. "I could also hear something sounded like the shell hulls hitting the floor and the ejecting of the rifle, it sounded as though it was two to me" (III, 191). But his two friends did not hear that.

None of them said anything about going to the sixth floor to look or about notifying anyone. Instead they all ran down to the west side of the fifth floor and looked out from there. Why? "Since everyone was running, you know, to the west side of the building, towards the railroad tracks, we assumed maybe somebody was down there," Williams said. (III, 175)

Jack E. Dougherty also says he was on the fifth floor when he heard the shots and "it sounded like it came from overhead somewhere" (VI, 379). In other important respects, however, his testimony is very confusing. He says, for instance, that he ate lunch and went back to work on the sixth floor at about 12:40 p.m. and then went down to the fifth floor "to get some stock" when he heard the shots.

On the second floor, Geneva Hine was taking care of the phone for the girls who had gone out to see the President. When she heard the shots, she felt the building vibrate so much, she was sure "they came from inside the building" (VI, 395). On the other hand, Victoria Adams, watching from a fourth floor window with three friends, reported that the shots "sounded like a firecracker or a cannon at a football game, it seemed as if it came from right below rather than from the left above." She also noted that a tree blocked her view of the President for a while, the same tree which we are convinced must have blocked the assassin's view of his target for some crucial seconds. (VI, 388-90)

Eddie Piper, the janitor, stood at a first floor window as the President passed and, the day after, swore that "the shots seemed to me like they came from up inside the building" (XIX, 499). Three months later he told the Commission's counsel that he could not tell where they had come from (VI, 385). The mail wrapper, Troy West, was also on the first floor, but he did not hear any shots (VI, 361).

The only other witness who was in the building at the time was Doris Burns, who followed the motorcade from several places on the third floor. She heard only one shot, while she was facing east, and "it sounded to me as if it came toward my back" (VI, 399). We have classified this statement as too vague.

Let us repeat, we believe that a rifleman was posted on the TSBDB sixth floor and that he fired at least one shot, perhaps more. But who can fail to be impressed with the indication from every group of witnesses that some shots were fired from the vicinity of the grassy knoll? This is not the impression of panicky onlookers but of trained policemen, deputy sheriffs, Secret Service agents, and most of the bystanders. Most of Lee Oswald's fellow-workers of the TSBDB who saw the motorcade thought the shots came from the knoll.

"I thought they came from the railroad tracks to the west of the Texas School Book Depository," said Danny Arce (VI, 365). Near Arce in front of the building stood Wesley Frazier, who testified with a touch of shame:

Well, to be frank with you, I thought it come from down there, you know, where that underpass is. There is a series, quite a few number, of them railroad tracks running together and from where I was standing it sounded like it was coming from down the railroad tracks there. (II, 234)

Billy Lovelady, whose resemblance to Lee Oswald gave rise to some not altogether solved problem of photo identification, was sure the shots sounded "right there around that concrete little deal on the knoll" (VI, 338). His foreman, Bill Shelley, also standing on the Depository steps, agreed. The sound "came from the west," he said repeatedly (VI, 329). Joe R. Molina (who lost his job as credit manager at the TSBDB, apparently because he was falsely suspected of Communist connections, and was even pilloried in the press as a possible accomplice of the assassin), too, was on the front steps when the tragedy occurred and he too heard the bullets as coming from the west (VI, 371).

The Depository Superintendent, Roy Truly, also heard the explosions "from west of the building" (III, 221). His bookkeeper, Virgie Rachley (now Mrs. Donald Baker), was given quite a grilling eight months later because her opinion on the source of the shots had not changed. After several tries to elicit the proper answer from this spunky young woman who swore she heard the shots coming from somewhere near the Triple Underpass, Assistant Counsel Liebeler tried a new tack:

Mr. Liebeler. Now, you have subsequently heard, I'm sure, and from reading in the newspapers and one thing and another, that it appears that the shots actually came from the Texas School Book Depository Building; is that right?

Mrs. Baker. Yes.

Mr. Liebeler. Does that seem possible to you in view of what you heard at the time?

Mrs. Baker. Well, I guess it might have been the wind, but to me it didn't.

Mr. Liebeler. The sounds you heard at the time did not appear to come from the Texas School Book Depository Building?

Mrs. Baker. No, sir. (VII, 509-11).

Some Other Bystanders

The witnesses who remain to be considered were random bystanders. Of these, four thought the shots came from the TSBDB, seven were unable to form an opinion, and 13 thought they came from the grassy knoll area.

Phillip Willis screamed when he heard the shots, hoping a policeman would hear him and order the Depository surrounded, but the officers he saw were running towards the knoll, "evidently thinking it came from that direction" (VII, 496-7). James Crawford looked up after the third report and saw a movement in the "only window that was open" on the sixth floor. "If those were shots," he told his neighbor, "they came from that window." (VI, 173) Charles Hester too turned at once towards the TSBDB after the shots, and it was he who got office Wiseman to go there. Another witness speaking for the TSBDB as the source was an experienced elk hunter, James E. Romack, and he testified to the assassin's prowess:

Mr. Belin. You heard those rifle shots, and you think you could shoot your rifle accurately as fast as you heard those shots.

Mr. Romack. I don't, wouldn't think that I would be that good a shot; no, sir. (VI, 280).

Unmentioned and unquestioned by the Commission was Charles Brehm who declared that the shots seemed to come from in front of or beside the President (Dallas Times-Herald, 11/22/63). Brehm noted that the President did not slump forward as he would have if the shots had come from the rear.

Unmentioned and unquestioned by the Commission were four newspaper women, Mary Woodward, Maggie Brown, Aurelia Lorenzo and Ann Donaldson, who were on the grassy knoll watching the motorcade and heard "a horrible, ear-shattering noise coming from behind us and a little to the right" (Dallas Morning News, 11/23/63). Perhaps there were many others in this category. Because the Commission took no official notice of them, we have not included such persons in our accounting.

Another witness, Garland G. Slack, was questioned by the Commission at length but not about what he saw as he watched the President's car ride by. His testimony, published in Vol. X, 378 ff., is exclusively concerned with his alleged encounters with Lee Oswald at the Sports Drome riflerange a short time before. Slack's brief affidavit does not say where he thought the assassin was firing from.

Abraham Zapruder took motion pictures of the assassination. He was standing on a concrete abutment on the grassy knoll when the shots exploded. "I also thought it came from back of me," he told the Commission (VII, 572). Another man looking on from the grassy knoll, William Newman, fell on the grass when he heard the shots, "as it seemed that we were in the direct path of fire ... I thought the shots had come from the garden directly behind me (XIX, 490). He swore to an affidavit but was never questioned by the Commission or its counsel.

Austin Miller was watching from the Triple Underpass when he heard shots. HE immediately looked "toward the --- there is a little plaza sitting on the hill. I looked over there to see if anything was there, who threw the firecracker or whatever it was ..." (VI, 225). In his affidavit of 11/22/1963, he also swore that "I saw something which I thought was smoke or steam coming from a group of trees north of Elm off the Railroad tracks" (XIX, 485).

Smoke on the grassy knoll was also reported by S.M. Holland, a signal supervisor for the Union Terminal Railroad, who thought the shots came from the same place:

A puff of smoke came out about 6 or 8 feet above the ground right out from under those trees. And at just about this location from where I was standing you could see that puff of smoke, like someone had thrown a firecracker, or something out, and that is just about the way it sounded ... I definitely saw the puff of smoke and heard the report from under those trees. (VI, 243-4)

And as if to pinpoint his description, he added, "The puff of smoke I saw definitely came from behind the arcade to the trees."

Right after the assassination, a schoolteacher, Jean Hill, saw a man running from just west of the TSBDB toward the railroad tracks. "I just thought at the time --- that's the man who did it ... at that time I didn't realize that the shots were coming from the building. I frankly thought they were coming from the knoll" (VI, 211-2).

Space forbids our quoting from all the witnesses, but three more should suffice to fix in our minds the basic problems raised by our survey.

The 70-year-old electrician for Union Terminal, Frank Reilly, saw the assassination from the overpass between Main and Elm Streets:

Mr. Ball. Where did they seem to come from; what direction?

Mr. Reilly. It seemed to me like they come out of the tree.

Mr. Ball. What trees?

Mr. Reilly. On the north side of Elm Street at the corner up there ... Well, it's at that park where all the shrubs is up there --- it's to the north of Elm Street --- up the slope. (VI, 230)

In other words, the grassy knoll.

A.J. Millican was on the knoll as the shots flew, and he heard eight shots that came in three flurries. This corresponds remarkably with the almost universal agreement of newspaper reports of November 22 that the shots seemed to come from an automatic weapon. Millican also supports our views in another important respect. He heard the shots as coming from two different directions, from the TSBDB and

Lee, while you seem to believe that the films have all been faked, I'm having trouble going that far.  Who knows, maybe in another year?  A year ago I wouldn't have believed a lot of the stuff I now know to be facts, e.g. that the government turned an autopsy photo sideways in order to prove that Oswald was the only shooter.

And Jack, I specifically remember reading interviews with Sitzman and Bill Newman where they make it quite clear the sounds they heard did not come from behind the fence. I believe Mary Woodward has said the same. Hudson's testimony is confusing and can be read a number of ways. While the sound's coming from behind the fence would make my "diversion man" theory worka lot better, and this would also help the badge man theory, the sounds seem to have come from elsewhere, further back.

The HSCA analysis of how shots are heard in Dealey concluded that a shot fired from the fence would have been incredibly obvious to anyone nearby. (Even so, the HSCA concluded a shot was fired from there.) I tend to trust this report because it says a lot of other things that are VERY damaging to the lone-nut theory.  It says the shots from the sniper's nest should have been readily identifiable as well, which leads me to suspect loud sounds DID come from somewhere else.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Last November in Dallas I spoke at length with Bill Newman.

I specifically asked him where the shots originated. His answer:

"I was directly in the line of fire. The shots came FROM BEHIND

ME, from behind the wooden fence."

The first time I ever spoke to him in the late 80s HE SAID EXACTLY

THE SAME THING.

I do not know where you heard him say anything different.

Jack

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

******************************************

Note: The following article was originally published in 1965. It contained the following blurb on the author: "Harold Feldman is a freelance writer and translator. He has published extensively in psychoanalytical journals, especially on the psychology of assassins. He, together with attorney Vincent Salandria, spent some time in Dallas, conducting their own investigation of the Kennedy assassination. His 'Oswald and the FBI' appeared in The Nation."

The original article also had this dedication: "To Shirley Martin of Hominy, Oklahoma, who was paid homage by the attorneys of the Warren Commission in being called in scorn, 'a self-appointed investigator.'"

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Fifty-one Witnesses: The Grassy Knoll

by Harold Feldman

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"There is no evidence of a second man, of other shots, of other guns."

Congressman Gerald R. Ford

(Life magazine, October 2, 1964)

The human ear does not provide the best evidence in a murder case. But its perceptions are evidence not to be despised or dismissed, especially when the case is the murder of a President and more than half of all recorded witnesses agree.

What follows is the result of a survey of the 121 witnesses to the assassination of President Kennedy whose statements are registered in the twenty-six volumes appended to the Warren Report.[1] On the question of where the shots that killed the President came from, 38 could give no clear opinion and 32 thought they came from the Texas School Book Depository Building (TSBDB). Fifty-one held the shots sounded as if the came from west of the Depository, the area of the grassy knoll on Elm Street, the area directly on the right of the President's car when the bullets struck.

Tague and the Echoes

We begin by conceding what the President's Commission says it found, namely, that a man on the sixth floor of the TSBDB fired a rifle at the Presidential limousine that Friday noon. The fact that a third man, besides President Kennedy and Governor Connally, was a casualty of those crucial seconds forces us to ask, however, whether there was not one or more other riflemen firing at the motorcade from a different direction.

For James Thomas Tague stopped on Commerce Street near the Triple Underpass and was standing about 270 feet to the left of the President's car when he felt a sharp sting on his cheek. A deputy sheriff nearby, seeing blood on Tague's cheek, searched the immediate area and found a fresh bullet mark on the south curb of Main Street a few feet away. Tague was hit during the very seconds that he witnessed the murder of the President.

It is difficult to conceive of a sharpshooter aiming at the President from the TSBDB on Elm Street and striking so far afield of his target. It is highly possible, though, that the bullet which hit Tague was fired from the area that Tague himself thought was the source of fire: the grassy knoll on the north side of Elm Street. A marksman stationed there need not have taken faulty aim to miss the President and hit Tague.

James Tague was not called to Washington for questioning by the Commission. Instead, eight months after the assassination, his deposition was taken in Dallas by Wesley J. Liebeler, assistant counsel of the Commission. The interrogation about the source of the shot is worth quoting from at some length.

Mr. Liebeler. ... Did you have any idea where these shots came from, when you heard them ringing out?

Mr. Tague. Yes; I thought they were coming from my left.

Mr. Liebeler. Immediately to your left or toward the back? Of course now we have other evidence that would indicate that the shots did come from the Texas School Book Depository but see if we can disregard that and determine just what you heard when the shots were fired in the first place.

Mr. Tague. To recall everything is almost impossible. Just an impression is all I recall, is the fact that my first impression that up by the, whatever you call the monument or whatever it was ...

Mr. Liebeler. Your impression of where the shots came from was much the result of the activity near No. 7?

Mr. Tague. Not when I heard the shots.

Mr. Liebeler. You thought that they had come from the area between Nos. 7 and 6?

Mr. Tague. I believe they came from up in here.

Mr. Liebeler. Back in area "C"?

Mr. Tague. Right.

Mr. Liebeler. Behind the concrete monument here between Nos. 5 and 7 toward the general area of "C"?

Mr. Tague. Yes. (VII 556-7)

Area "C" and No. 7 with its concrete monument, is the grassy knoll. indicated as such on the Commission's map. Attorneys whom we asked to review the interrogation of Tague all agreed that the Commission's counsel asked leading questions, tried to steer Tague's answers, and even became argumentative. All in all, the motions of a badgering, suggestive prosecutor rather than an impartial inquirer.

Mr. Liebeler. Do you think that it is consistent with what you heard and saw that day that the shots could have come from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository?

Mr. Tague. Yes.

Mr. Liebeler. There was in fact a considerable echo in that area?

Mr. Tague. There was no echo from where I stood. I was asked this question before and there was no echo. (VII, 557)

Tague stuck to his guns. Admitting for all he knew that the shots could have come from the TSBDB, he insisted on his clear memory that they came from the vicinity of the concrete monument.

The reference to echoes is significant. To help reduce this great preponderance of witnesses who favored a murder source other than the one it wished to prove, the Commission frequently tried to bring witnesses to admit that it was not the sound of shots they heard but their echoes.

An echo of course is a reflected sound that reaches a hearer a very short time after the originating sound. But if echoes influenced the witnesses at the assassination scene, it is clear that those who thought the shots came from the TSBDB would be more likely to be misled than those who thought the sounds came from the grassy knoll. The Depository was the last tall building of the Dallas business district as the motorcade moved west. The surfaces of buildings like this produce stronger echoes than would a low, convex slope covered by a rug-like grassy surface.

On the basis of auditory testimony alone from 51 witnesses (and we grant that such testimony in a case like this can never be, by itself, convincing or conclusive) we must agree that the grassy knoll which approaches the famous Triple Underpass on the northwest side of Elm Street would be the most likely source of most of the bullets fired at the motorcade that day. Mr. Vincent J. Salandria has recently outlined the ballistic and medical probabilities of such a trajectory.[2] However, we stress that the two sources of bullets are not mutually exclusive. The chief weakness of the Warren Report was its absolute refusal to consider seriously any other source of shots besides the TSBDB, even though such a source is indicated by the largest number of direct witnesses.

Let us review these witnesses.

"The Best View"

When the assassin opened fire, the Presidential limousine had just passed the steps which lead to the concrete monument on the grassy knoll.

Assuming a single rifleman firing from the TSBDB, let us ask again the question which Allen Dulles asked during a meeting of the Commission. Which participants in the motorcade had "the best view of the assassination"? Dulles suggested this answer:

It must have been the third or fourth or fifth car in the motorcade that was right opposite the window at the time the assassin put the rifle well out of the window and shot ... Whatever it was, the car that was right opposite the window and going in this direction at the time must have been the fourth or fifth car --- the car which had the best view of the assassination. (IV, 332)

Yes, at the time the shots rang out, the third, fourth, and fifth cars of the motorcade had just turned or were turning left from Houston Street into Elm Street, at a speed of five to ten miles an hour, with the block-long TSBDB looming on their right. They were riding the center lane of a three-lane, one-way street. Nothing obstructed their view of its upper stories.

Twelve of the twenty persons in these three cars were Secret Service agents, and the Warren Report tells us that "Secret Service agents riding in the motorcade were trained to scan buildings as part of their general observation of the crowd of spectators." Moreover, the Report marks the TSBDB as one of "the most obvious points of possible ambush along the route in Dallas." (W, 448)

Now the most striking aspect of the individual reports made by the Secret Service drivers and passengers of these three cars is certainly this: that having a better view of the TSBDB at the time of the assassination than anyone else in the motorcade, not one, writing memoranda within hours or days of the event or testifying about it months afterward, not one pointed to the TSBDB as the source of the shots as they heard them.

Some of them say the shots came from the "right rear" with no suggestion of an elevation. In most cases, there is no more definite indication than that. William Greer, driving the President's car, for instance, thought the noise came from the right rear but felt they were the backfiring of motorcycles. Glen Bennett only says that, after hearing the shots, "we peered toward the rear and particularly the right side of the area" (XVIII, 760). John Ready noted:

At about 12:30 p.m. I heard what sounded like firecrackers going off from my post on the right front running board ... It appeared that the shots came from my right-rear side. (XVIII, 750)

The driver of car #4, Texas Highway Patrolman Hurchel Jacks, was the only person in that car who had any opinion at all on the source of the shots, and he could say no more than that they sounded as if they came from the right and rear of the car. In car #5, Jerry Kivett says he looked "in the direction of the noise, which was to my right rear," but adds that although he reached for his gun, he did not draw it "for I could not tell where the shots were coming from." (XVIII, 778) Warren Taylor is the only other Secret Service agent in these three cars who describes the sound as "coming from my right rear" and he too is no more specific.

When we drew up a chart enumerating the witnesses and their perceptions we included anyone riding in these three cars who gave "right rear" as the source of the shots among those who thought the shots came from the vicinity of the TSBDB. Our final figures, therefore, give possible critics of our findings all benefit of the doubt.

Reviewing the same three cars, we see that George Hickey, Jr., offers no opinion on the question but observes that "the President was slumped to the left" after being hit, and later "it seemed as if the right side of his head was hit" (XVIII, 765). This suggests a source almost directly to the right; but is too inconclusive. Clinton Hill is just as vague. Noting that "I heard noise from my right rear," he goes on to contrast this first shot with the second which "was right, but I cannot say for sure that it rear" (II, 138, 144). Hill's remark reminds us of Salandria's view that the bullets probably came from both the knoll and the Depository.

Samuel Kinney, like Hickey, sees a shot strike Kennedy on the right side of the head, sees him fall to the left, but gives no opinion about where the shots came from (XVIII 731) . William McIntyre says "None of us [in car #3] could determine the origin of the shots" (XVIII, 747). Emory Roberts saw what looked like "a small explosion on the right side of the President's head." His conclusion: "I could not determine from what direction the shots came, but felt they had come from the right side" (XVIII, 734, 739) .

Riding the right front seat of the Vice-Presidential car, Rufus Youngblood had no opinion on the source of the shots (XVIII, 767-8). The driver of car #5, Texas Highway Patrolman Joe Rich, likewise had no opinion (XVIII, 800).

Of the Secret Service personnel in the three cars with "the best view," only two make any specific notes about the source of the shots, and what they say adds up to the grassy knoll. Paul E. Landis, Jr., riding the rear right running board of car #3, wrote:

My immediate thought was that the President could not possibly be alive after being hit like he was. I still am not certain from which direction the second shot came, but my reaction at the time was the shot came from somewhere towards the front right-hand side of the road.

I did not notice anyone on the overpass, and I scanned the area to the right of and below the overpass where the terrain sloped toward the road on which we were traveling. (XVIII, 755)

Thomas L Johns, in the right rear seat of car #5, only says that:

On the right-hand side of the motorcade from the street, a grassy area sloped upward to a small 2 or 3-foot concrete wall with sidewalk area. When the shots sounded, I was looking to the right and saw a man standing and then being thrown or hit to the ground, and this together with the shots made the situation appear dangerous to me. (XVIII, 774)

The other passengers of the cars, which Allen Dulles thought provided the best view of an assassin firing from the TSBDB, offer little more enlightenment. Lyndon Johnson wrote that it was impossible for him to tell the direction of the explosions (V 562).

Alone of all those in the three cars, Lady Bird Johnson suggests the Depository. Telling her story into a tape-recorder, she said, "It seemed to me to come from the right, above my shoulder, from a building" (V 565). Senator Yarborough's statement that all the shots "came from my right rear" (VII 440) made in July 1964 should be coupled with his comments, reported in the Texas Observer, that he smelled gunpowder as the car drove away through the underpass.

As for the aide to Kennedy and Johnson in the strategic cars, Ken O'Donnell pointed to the right rear but admitted that "my reaction in part is reconstruction" (VII 448), and Clifton Carter made no judgment on the question. Riding next to O'Donnell in car #5, David Powers remembered that:

My first impression was that the shots came from the right and overhead but I also had a fleeting impression that the noise appeared to come from the front in the area of the triple underpass. (VII 473)

The most comfortable defender of the Warren Report will not fail to perceive the strange meaning of this roll call. Riding at a crawl alongside of the TSBDB, the last tall building on the motorcade route --- and most of the passengers aware of a duty to scan tall building on the way --- not one (with the possible exception of Mrs. Johnson) thought that the Depository was the assassin's firing nest or saw anything suspicious in that area. Not one mentioned the Depository as a possible or probable source of the shot. Three passengers indicated that the shots sounded as if they came from the vicinity of the grassy knoll.

Perhaps, for this point and also for future reference, we should recall the elementary principal of sound location. As a general rule one can locate a sound upward or downward, front or rear, only when the hearing is supported by other knowledge and experience. Right and left locations, on the other hand, are discriminated more reliably by the cars because sound in those directions will normally be stronger in one ear while the other ear is in an auditory shadow cast by the head.

It follows that the remarks of the drivers and passengers in the three strategic witness cars are, in general, inconclusive but more valid in their indication of shot sources to the right than in their perception of a source to the rear.

The Man in the Window

As Kennedy's car rode toward the Triple Underpass, someone was standing at the extreme southeast window of the sixth floor of the TSBDB. He had a rifle in hand. When was seen some minutes before the assassination, his gaze was not directed at the approaching motorcade but rigidly fixed down Elm Street toward the Triple Underpass.

So much we can reconstruct from the testimony of nine witnesses (none of them officers of the law).

We are at once faced with many questions. For instance, why would a man, who intends to shoot a rifle westward toward the underpass, choose the window on Elm Street farthest from his target? Why didn't he take his place at the extreme southwest window where his view would not be blocked a crucial part of the way by an oak tree that was in full leaf that November? The onlookers at the heavy traffic corner of Elm and Houston, which he overlooked, were still numerous enough to be called a crowd while the bystanders west of the building were few and scattered. If he had chosen the western position he would have been more than a hundred feet closer to the stairway by which he is said to have escaped. At our present state of knowledge we can only ask and wonder about such questions. All that we can sat with any degree of certainty is that a man with a rifle was seen in the southeast window facing Elm Street.

Mrs. Earle Cabell, wife of the then Mayor of Dallas, saw "something" in the window. Malcolm 0. Couch, Dallas news-cameraman, didn't see anyone there but saw about a foot of the rifle as it was being withdrawn into the window. Robert Hill Jackson, staff photographer for The Dallas Times-Herald, also saw the rifle, about half of it, as someone drew it back into the building after the last shot exploded. He too could not see the person who held it. (We will return presently to these three witnesses.)

Two schoolboys and a steamfitter saw and heard the Depository rifle in action. James Worrell, Jr., age 20, playing hooky from school that day, stood in front of the TSBDB and after the first shot looked up He then saw the rifle fire twice. He did not report what he saw to the police until the next day (II, 200).

Fifteen-year-old Amos Lee Euins happened to look up at the sixth floor window across the street from where he was standing and saw someone there fire a rifle. Amos ducked behind the little fountain at the peristyle nearby and peered upward in time to see a man fire again. "I could see his hand," he told the Warren Commission, "and I could see his other hand on the trigger and one hand was on the barrel thing." (V, 204) The police and FBI wrote an affidavit for him which he signed. It said that he saw a white man up there but Amos absolutely denied to the Commission that he ever could have described the man on the sixth floor in any way.

Star witness of the Commission was undoubtedly Howard Leslie Brennan who was working at the time fabricating pipe in the yards just behind the Depository. After lunch he went to Elm and Houston and perched himself on the retaining wall of the pool at the Dealey Plaza entrance, wearing the hard helmet that identifies him in photographs of the scene. He says he saw "this one man" come and leave the sixth floor window a couple of times before the shooting. After the second shot Brennan looked up again, "and this man that I saw previous was aiming for his last shot." The gunman then drew back "and maybe paused for another second as though to sure himself that he hit his mark, then he disappeared" (III, 143-4). Brennan went on to describe the rifleman in remarkable detail for a view at such a distance.

Two others saw the man in the window but did not see him fire. Ronald Fischer stood with a friend at the southwest corner of Elm and Houston and, minutes before the motorcade came by, pointed to the figure at the window. It surprised Fischer that a man looking out of a sixth floor window there should not be looking in the direction of the motorcade but towards the underpass. (VI, 193)

On the east side of Houston near Elm, waiting for the President to pass, were Arnold Rowland and his wife. They were talking about how the Secret Service protects the President of the United States when Arnold happened to see the man in the sixth floor window of the TSBDB. "He was standing and holding a rifle ... the thought came to us that it is a security agent," Arnold told the Commission in Washington. Mrs. Rowland looked up but could not see the man nor the rifle.

There are two remarkable elements in Arnold Rowland's testimony. At the same time he saw another man in the southwest window of the sixth floor, a post we have already suggested would have been a wiser sniping position. And ... on hearing the shots that killed Kennedy and wounded Connally, Rowland thought they came from the grassy knoll!

After the second explosion, "Well," he told the Commission almost apologetically, "I began looking, I didn't look at the building mainly, and a practically any of the police offices that were there then will tell you the echo effect was such that it sounded like it came from the railroad yards. That is where I looked, that is where all the policemen, everyone, converged on the railroads."

Arlen Specter, assistant counsel for the Commission, asked Rowland, "Why did you not look back at the Texas School Book Depository Building in view of the fact that you had seen a man with a rifle up there earlier in the day?" And the young man replied, "I don't remember. It was mostly due to the confusion, and then the fact that it sounded like it came from this area 'C' and that all the officers, enforcement officers were converging on that area and I just didn't pay any attention to it at that time." (II, 169-81)

Ronald Fischer, questioned in Dallas in April 1964 by David W. Belin, had a similar problem. His friend Robert Edwards thought the shots "seemed to come from that building there" (XIX, 473), but Fischer testified that "they appeared to be coming from just west of the School Book Depository Building" (VI, 193-6).

The words "railroad yards," used again and again in the testimony, require explanation. There are railroad terminals and yards running behind the TSBDB that extend along the north side of the grassy knoll and connect to the railroad overpass that crosses Elm, Main, and Commerce Streets. Mrs. Rowland, in her deposition, makes clear which railroad yard area was the center of witness attention that day. She and her husband ran, she says, to "the colonnade over on the north side of Elm Street" (VI, 184).

Mrs. Cabell, in motorcade car #7, thought the shots came from the TSBDB but "was acutely aware of the odor of gunpowder" (VII 486-7), which is not likely to have been perceptible from a source high up and inside a building. She noticed the odor after all the shots were fired and therefore possibly when car #7 was turning down hill into Elm Street, approaching the knoll where Senator Yarborough, too, began to smell gunpowder. Congressman Roberts and Mr. Donald Baker, too, noted the smell of gunpowder at about the same location. TV- newsman Couch did not associate the sound of the shot with the building where he had seen the rifle. He remembered seeing blood on the walkway that leads to the southwest corner of the TSBDB and people "pointing back around those shrubs around that west corner" (VI, 157-60) .

Couch's fellow-passenger in car #8 Jackson, was asked:

Mr. Specter. Mr. Jackson, at the time you heard the first shot, did you have any reaction or impression from the sound itself as to the source of the shot point of origin?

Mr. Jackson. No sir, I didn't. It did sound like it came from ahead of us or from that general vicinity but I could not tell whether it was high up or on the ground.

Mr. Specter. When you say that general vicinity, what vicinity did you mean?

Mr. Jackson. We were sure it came from ahead of us which would be in a northerly direction, northwesterly direction. It did sound as though it came from somewhere around the head of the motorcade. (II, 162)

The policeman at the TSBDB comer whom Howard Brennan accosted right after the shot, showed no sign that he suspected anything inside the building. Brennan told him that the 30 to 50 policemen and deputies swarming over the grassy knoll and into the railroad yards "were searching in the wrong direction for the man that did the shooting" (III, 145).

An uneasy fact: Brennan is said to have told a policeman what he saw at the 6th floor window of the TSBDB within three minutes of the assassination. A search-call for the assassin is supposed to have been issued on the basis of Brennan's description. But no control and concerted search of the Depository in general was begun for almost a half-hour, and even then the sixth floor got no special attention in the search orders.

The First Cars

Let us continue our review of the motorcade. The Commission tells us that "passengers in the first few cars of the motorcade had the impression that the shots came from the rear and from the right, the general direction of the Texas School Book Depository (W, 61). This is not true.

Car #2 was the death car. About 100 feet ahead of it was the lead car of the motorcade. Not one of the drivers or passengers of these two cars indicated in any way that the TSBDB was the source of the shots.

Mrs. Kennedy offered no opinion at all on the shots and indeed the noise sounded to her like motorcycles backfiring on the left (V, 180). Governor Connally guessed that the shots came from back over his right shoulder at an elevation and declined to be more specific. At the first shot, he said, he turned right and saw "nothing of any significance except just people on the grass slope" (IV 12-S). His wife Nellie added, "Well, I had no thought of whether they were high or low or where. They just came from the right; sounded like they were to my right" (IV, 149).

VIP's and Secret Service agents gave their testimony months after the event, when every force of suggestion from officials and newspapers pointed to the TSBDB as the post of an unaided sniper. That they insisted on their original recollection under these conditions is a tribute to these men and women.

William Greer, the Special Agent driving the President's limousine, could give no opinion on the direction of the shots. Beside him rode Roy H. Kellerman, an agent with more than 20 years experience in the Secret Service. He told the Commission that he had no reaction about the height of the explosions. But he did turn immediately to his right after he heard one shot.

Mr. Specter. What was the reason for your reacting to your right?

Mr. Kellerman. That was the direction that I heard this noise, pop. (II, 74)

In the lead car rode two Secret Service men, Winston G. Lawson of the White House Detail, responsible for planning many details of the motorcade, and Forrest V. Sorrels, in charge of the Dallas office. Lawson looked back at the President's car continually in order to regulate the speed of the procession. When he heard the shots (car #1 was almost at the Triple Underpass when he heard them) he was positive that they came from the rear of his car, and when he saw an agent standing up with an automatic weapon in his hand in car #3, Lawson's first thought was that the shots came from that gun. (IV, 352-3)

Sorrels remembered scanning the Depository as his car turned the corner, but he saw "no activity, no one moving around that I saw at all." As soon as he heard the shots, he "turned around to look up on this terrace part there, because the sound sounded like it came from the back and up in that direction." He had to repeat this for the Commission's assistant counsel, Samuel A. Stern.

And, as I said, the noise from the shots sounded like they may have come back up or the terrace there ... But the reports seemed to be so loud that it sounded like to me --- in other words, that my first thought, somebody up on the terrace, and that is the reason I looked there.

Mr. Stern then drew him out of the area of evidence into the area of conforming opinion in order to evoke the right words from his witness:

Mr. Stern. Do you have any reason to believe that the shots could not have come from the Book Depository Building?

Mr. Sorrels. No, sir.

Mr. Stern. Would shots from the Book Depository Building have been consistent with your hearing of the shots?

Mr. Sorrels. Yes, they would have. (VII, 345-7)

There were two other major participants in the day's events who rode in the lead car: the chief of police of Dallas and the sheriff of Dallas County.

Police Chief Jesse Curry was driving the lead car. In his deposition, taken 4/15/1964, he said:

I heard a sharp report. We were near the railroad yards at this time, and I didn't now --- I didn't know exactly where this report came from, whether it was above us or where, but this followed by two more reports (XII, 28).

The week after this deposition, he was in Washington testifying at great length before the Commission --- but not a word more does he add and not a question is he asked about the way he heard the shots. What we do learn is that, before he ordered motorcycle officer Chaney to lead the car to Parkland Hospital:

"I said over the radio, I said: 'Get someone up in the railroad yard and check.'" (IV, 161)

Bill Decker, also riding the lead car, had been sheriff of Dallas County since 1949. The first time any member of the Commission's staff interviewed him was on 4/16/1964, in Dallas. At that time he was not asked a thing about the assassination itself, even though he himself introduced the subject. In an undated memo, presumably written within day after Kennedy's death, Decker had no opinion on the direction of the shots or their origin. "When I heard the shots," he does remark, "I noted motorcycle officers coming off their cycles and running up the embankment on Dealey Plaza" (XIX, 458). Since Dealey Plaza proper has no embankment he can only have been referring to the grassy knoll on his right.

The Decker-Curry Radio Mystery

Here we come to a collateral puzzle. For Sheriff Decker writes in his undated memorandum:

We moved out immediately at which time I took the microphone and requested the DPD Dispatcher 521 to advise my Station 5-Radioroom to notify all officers in my department to immediately get over to the area where shooting occurred and saturate the area of the park, railroad and all buildings ...

The words "and all buildings" are either deceiving or decisive. For we have never found any record that any building beside the TSBDB was searched after the assassination, and the radio calls registered in the official log at the time show calls to order men up to the railroad yards but none ordering men to the TSBDB or any other building.

Who then ordered the TSBDB to be searched? And when?

All the newspapers carried the story of how a motorcycle policeman, Marrion L. Baker, parked his vehicle on Houston Street near Elm, charged into the TSBDB just 15 seconds after the last shot, and drew his gun on Lee Oswald on the second floor before proceeding to the roof with TSBDB superintendent Roy Truly. But the stories did not say (1) that Mr. Baker made his determination that shots were coming from the Depository while he was riding at the end of the motorcade, that is, before entering Houston Street from Main Street, that is, from distance greater than any other witness; and (2) that after checking the roof with Mr. Truly, they descended to the ground floor by elevator and, passing the fourth floor, saw Inspector J. Herbert Sawyer of the Dallas Police (III, 261).

Now, mind you, neither Baker nor Sawyer had spoken with Brennan, Euins, Worrell or any other eyewitness before entering the TSBDB. Baker was there because that is where he thought the shot were coming from, and Sawyer was there because, he says, a message came over his radio ordering him there.

Inspector Sawyer was in his car parked on Ervay and Main Streets during the assassination. Too far away to hear the shots, he naturally saw nothing of the area's reaction to them. This is what he told assistant Counsel D. W. Belin on 4/8/1964 in Dallas:

Mr. Sawyer. ... I heard Sheriff Decker come on the radio and tell the dispatcher to put all of his men over to, and I thought he said Texas School Book Depository but at least that was the overall gist of the conversation. That is what I gathered. He may not have said Texas School Book Depository but the Texas School Book Depository was mentioned in the broadcasts that were made at the time.

Mr. Belin. Was this on Channel 1 or Channel 2, if you remember?

Mr. Sawyer. Channel 2, I am sure.

Mr. Belin. Did Sheriff Decker have any particular call number at all, or not, in your police number system?

Mr. Sawyer. No, I was wondering why he come on our radio but then I think that he was with Chief Curry and probably using that radio.

Mr. Belin. All right, in any event, a call was made from Chief Curry's car?

Mr. Sawyer. Well this I don't know either. I don't know what car it was made from, but I think it was Sheriff Decker talking. I could recognize his voice, yes.

Mr. Belin. What did you do then?

Mr. Sawyer. Then I went on down to the Texas Book Depository. (VI, 316-7)

Summed up, this means that the inspector hurried down to the TSBDB on an order issued by an unidentified source at an uncertain location, an order which was not directed to him nor made by his superior officer but by a voice which he only supposed to be the sheriff coming over the wrong radio channel; an order, finally, which evidently did not mention the TSBDB.

A mystery certainly, but one not scrutinized too closely by the Commission. The only orders issued on the radio by Curry ant Decker at the time were calls to get men over to the Triple Underpass and the railroad yards (I, 319). At least that is what the log shows.

We must assume then that neither Curry nor Decker were responsible for Sawyer's presence on the fourth floor of the TSBDB as Baker and Truly were descending in the elevator. In fact, Curry was asked by Allen Dulles whether he had ever told the newspapers that he had been the one who sent out the radio order to surround the Depository.

Mr. Curry. I didn't do that, sir. That was one of my inspectors, I believe, that gave that order. I was riding in the Presidential parade and approximately a hundred feet, I guess, ahead of the President's car, and when we heard this first report I couldn't tell exactly where it was coming from ... I thought at first that perhaps this was a railroad torpedo, it was a sharp crack." (IV, 160-1)

What Curry implies here is that some other inspector made an unauthorized radio order that was never logged, or that Sawyer acted on his own responsibility and covered his action by referring to an alleged radio order.

The situation proves even trickier. Because, if The New York Times of 11/24/1963 is to be believed, it is Curry who is not telling the truth. Reporting a November 23 press conference with the Chief of Police the Times had this to say:

Moments after the fatal shot was fired at President Kennedy at 12:30 PM yesterday, Chief Curry said he radioed in instructions that the Texas School Book Depository Building be surrounded and searched ... Chief Curry said he could tell from the sound of the three shots that they had come from the book company's building.

We must note that the records of the Chief's press conference do not show such a statement. Furthermore, this is a report about a man who, in his deposition and testimony, had denied that he had any opinion about the direction of the shots except for a general suspicion about the railroad yards to his right. If the Times report is true, then (1) Curry lied to the Commission, and (2) the official log of radio dispatches has been expurgated, or censored.

In this connection Forrest Sorrels, riding in the lead car with Decker ant Curry, has a significant recollection:

... the chief [Curry] took his microphone and told them to alert the hospital and said 'Surround the building'. He didn't say what building. He just said, 'Surround the building'. And by that time we had gotten almost in under the underpass, and the President's car had come up and was almost abreast of us. (VII, 345)

Deputies and Police

An impressive feature of the Kennedy murder case is the large number of witnesses who are on familiar terms with firearms. Very few of the eyewitnesses could have had their testimony impeached on the ground that they could not properly evaluate the sounds they heard. And the great majority of the eyewitnesses say that the assassin of President Kennedy seemed to be firing from the grassy knoll.

The Warren Report faces this difficulty in its typical manner, a style which led Murray Kempton, a friendly critic, to observe that it presented no more than "the case for the prosecution."

The Report says:

When the shots were fired, many people near the Depository believed that the shots came from the railroad bridge over the Triple Underpass or from the area to the west of the Depository. In the hectic moments after the assassination many spectators ran in the general direction of the Triple Underpass or the railroad yards northwest of the building. Some were running toward the place from which the sound of the rifle fire appeared to come, others were fleeing the scene of the shooting. (W, 71)

It require a patient culling of the 26 volumes appended to the Report to learn that here and elsewhere the Report is a not unskillful deception. We would not learn from the Report itself, for example, that the "many people" were in fact most people, the overwhelming majority. We are drawn to a picture of bystanders rushing westward of the TSBDB, "some" to find the assassin, "others" to escape him. But we are not told that practically none of the witnesses belonged to the second category, and that the "some" who looked for the assassin in the vicinity of the grassy knoll included almost every deputy sheriff on duty in the area that day and most of the policemen.

The list of witnesses for the grassy knoll as a sniper's post is decreased because the Warren Report and its appendices contain no evidence from many persons who are mentioned and quoted in the reports of other witnesses and in newspaper accounts. We have found ten deputies of the sheriff's office who were on assignment at the assassination scene who were not called on for evidence. Most of them would, probably, have felt and reacted like the twenty recorded deputies. Of these twenty, only one decided the shots came from the TSBDB, three gave no opinion, and sixteen thought this assassin had fired from the area of the grassy knoll.

The only deputy sheriff who pointed to the TSBDB did not say where he thought the shots came from. John Wiseman merely told us in his memo of 11/23/63 that he talked to Marilyn Sitzman and an unnamed man who thought the shots came from the Depository (XIX, 535-6).

Eugene Boone's testimony is doubly interesting. He not only ran towards the knoll and then the freight yards as soon as he heard the shots; he is also the deputy who found a rifle on the sixth floor of the TSBDB almost an hour later, and identified it as a 7.65 Mauser. (XIX, 507; VII, 105-9). This rifle, which soon became a 6.5 Mannlicher-Carcano, was also identified by deputy constable Seymour Weitzman as a Mauser.

Weitzman, like most of the other deputies, was standing at the corner of Main and Houston when he heard the shots. He ran toward the President's car and climbed over a wall in "the monument section," looking for the assassin (VII, 106). Roger Craig, too, on hearing the first shot, ran until he reached "the terrace on Elm Street" and then the railroad yards (XIX, 524.). Harold Elkins was more explicit:

I immediately ran to the area from which it sounded like the shots had been fired. This is an area between the railroad and the Texas School Book Depository which is east of the railroad. (XIX, 540)

"Lummie" Lewis, A. D. McCurley, Luke Mooney, and W. W. Mabra all heard the shots the same way and ran to search the grassy knoll and the freight yard. (XIX, 526, 514, 541, 528)

"Why did you go over to the railroad yard?" the Commission's assistant counsel, Joseph Ball, asked Mooney. "Well," said Mr. Mooney a bit hesitantly, "that was --- from the echo of the shots, we thought they came from that direction." Then he added a note to the Decker-Curry mystery. After "a few seconds" of search, Mooney said, "we had orders to cover the Texas Depository Building" --- and the orders "were referred to us by the sheriff Mr. Bill Decker." (III, 283)

The shots sent Deputy Sheriff J. L. Oxford running toward the underpass (XIX, 530). L. C. Smith's reaction to the shots was to climb the fence behind the knoll and search the parking lot (XIX, 516). Deputy I. C. Todd ran to the railroad tracks, as did Ralph Walters and radio officer Jack Watson (XIX, 543, 505-6, 522). Harry Weatherford tells much the same story: "I thought to myself that this was a rifle and I started towards the corner when I heard the third report ... By this time I was running toward the railroad yards where the sound seemed to come from." (XIX, 502)

Deputy Sheriff Eddy Raymond Walthers (known as "Buddy") took an active part in many phases of the investigation and gave evidence in Dallas and Washington. The story of his initial reactions to Kennedy's murder as told in July 1964 is much the same as his memorandum written on November 22. He heard three shots, ran across Dealey Plaza until he reached the parking are behind the now-familiar "concrete structure on the knoll (VII, 544-6). It was later, while looking for bullet traces, that he came across James Tague, the man with the bloody cheek, whose slight wound was to give the Commission as much trouble as any other inflicted that day.

Among the policemen near the scene, we find wider variety of opinion and reaction, perhaps because they were distributed all along the route of the motorcade and not concentrated near one corner as were the deputy sheriffs. Four policemen indicated the Depository as the source, four could make no definite opinion, four indicated the gray knoll area.

The evidence of Patrolman Baker has already been noted. The officer to whom Brennan spoke, Welcome Eugene Barnett, was stopping traffic for the motorcade at Elm and Houston. He thought the second shot sounded high and looked up at the TSBDB across the street. When the third shot exploded, "I decided it had to be on top of that building. To me it is the only place the sound could be coming from." He also remarked that he was the only officer around who seemed to react to the shots as he did (VII, 541-2). It is noteworthy that neither Baker, Sawyer nor Barnett took any decisive action to seal off the building.

J. W. Foster, assigned to the Triple Overpass, thought the shots "came from back in toward the corner of Elm and Houston Street." He ran to the Depository where he bumped into Inspector Sawyer (VI, 251-2). Earle Brown, on duty at the Stemmons Freeway overpass, also believed the shots came from the TSBDB, but he was struck by the smell of gunpowder near the overpass (VI, 233-4).

Three motorcycle policemen in the motorcade provided excellent directional evidence. B. J. Martin, riding at the left rear side of the death car, heard shots but "couldn't tell just where they were coming from." When he arrived at Parkland Hospital, however, he noticed blood and flesh particles on his motorcycle windshield, the left side of his helmet, and the left shoulder of his uniform (VI, 291).

Besides Martin and just alongside of Mrs. Kennedy rode Bobby Hargiss. "At the time," he testified, "there was something in my head that said that they probably could have been coming from the railroad overpass, because I thought since I had got splattered with blood --- I was just a little back and left of --- a little back and left of Mrs. Kennedy but I didn't know." His second choice was the TSBDB (VI, 294-5).

Clyde Haygood was described in the world press that Friday and Saturday because, after the shots were fired, he tried to jump the north curb of Elm Street with his motorcycle and, failing, parked it on the street and ran to the knoll looking for any sign of the assassin (VI, 297-9). Joe Marshall Smith had his back to the Depository on Elm Street when the shots rang out. "I didn't know where the shots came from," he said, but ran "to an area immediately behind the concrete structure" and checked the bushes and all the cars in the parking lot behind the knoll. (VII, 533-6)

Another Patrolman Smith, Edgar Leon Smith, Jr., stood on the east curb of Houston Street about 150 feet from the TSBDB. He guessed the first two shots were firecrackers but, after the third shot, he drew his pistol and ran down Elm Street.

Mr. Liebeler. You thought the shot came from this little concrete structure up behind No. 7?

Mr. Smith. Yes, sir.

But experience leads us to expect that the Commission's counsel will not be content with such direct reply.

Mr. Liebeler. Is what you heard that day consistent with the proposition that the shots came from the School Book Depository Building?

Mr. Smith. They could have come from there and they could not --- I just don't know. (VII, 568-9)

As for the grassy knoll, Patrolman Smith humbly insisted, "It just looked like a good place for them to come from and I guess that's the reason I ran down there."

Smith shows how close to unanimous that impression was among law enforcement officers on the spot. The job of examining people and things around and behind the knoll became difficult, he says, because there were so many police and deputies milling around there.

Depository Personnel

Jack Faulkner, sheriff's deputy, noted in a memo of 11/22/1963 that he helped search the TSBDB and that "when we got down to the third floor, we talked to office workers who told us they were looking out of the third floor window when the shots were fired from the street near the concrete arcade." (CIX 511)

We may never know who these office girls were. There is no other record of what they heard and saw, and the Commission found no time for following such leads. A police report of the same day mentions interviews of TSBDB employees Shearion Simmons, Jeanie Holt and Stella Jacobs, but doesn't tell what they said. (XIX, 526) Perhaps they are the ones who indicated the grassy knoll to Deputy Faulkner. As it is, we cannot include them in our reckoning of witnesses.

Another eyewitness whom we must exclude from our poll calculation for the same reason is perhaps one of the most important. He is Ochus V. Campbell, vice-president of the TSBDB.

We know that he was watching when President Kennedy was killed. We know he ran toward the grassy knoll afterward. The Dallas Times-Herald of 11/22/1963 quotes him as saying he raced back into the building and saw Oswald in a small storage area on the ground floor. But he prepared no affidavit, gave no deposition, and was never interrogated by the Commission as far as the record shows.

Mrs. Robert Reid was standing beside him and Superintendent Roy Truly as the motorcade passed right by them and the shots rang out. "And I turned to Mr. Campbell," she testified in Washington, "and I said, 'Oh, my goodness, I am afraid those came from our building.' But Mr. Campbell, he said, "Oh, Mrs. Reid, no, it came from the grassy area down this way.'" (III, 273-4)

Confining our list of witnesses to those whose evidence was published by the Commission itself, we find a total of 19 TSBDB employees, of whom we classify five as having no opinion on the direction of shots, six feeling they came from the building, and eight in favor of the grassy knoll as the firing site.

Of signal importance are Bonnie Ray Williams, Harold Norman, and James Jarman Jr. Bonnie Ray says it seemed at first like everyone was going to watch the motorcade from the sixth floor. He heard Billy Lovelady and Danny Arce say they would watch from there, so that is where he went to eat his lunch. His were the famous chicken bones that appeared in every newspaper in the United States as evidence that the assassin had lain in wait for his prey for hours.

Nobody came up to join Williams, though, so he went down to the fifth floor and squatted at the southeast windows between Harold Norman and James Jarmen, Jr., to watch. Down below, from car #8, Tom Dillard of The Dallas Morning News took their pictures.

Jarman had no opinion about the source of the shots. He did notice some debris that had presumably fallen on Bonnie Ray's head from the ceiling above (III, 204). Williams is clear: the rifle report "shook the building --- the side we were on. Cement fell on my head" (III, 175). Norman too thought the shots came from above them. "I could also hear something sounded like the shell hulls hitting the floor and the ejecting of the rifle, it sounded as though it was two to me" (III, 191). But his two friends did not hear that.

None of them said anything about going to the sixth floor to look or about notifying anyone. Instead they all ran down to the west side of the fifth floor and looked out from there. Why? "Since everyone was running, you know, to the west side of the building, towards the railroad tracks, we assumed maybe somebody was down there," Williams said. (III, 175)

Jack E. Dougherty also says he was on the fifth floor when he heard the shots and "it sounded like it came from overhead somewhere" (VI, 379). In other important respects, however, his testimony is very confusing. He says, for instance, that he ate lunch and went back to work on the sixth floor at about 12:40 p.m. and then went down to the fifth floor "to get some stock" when he heard the shots.

On the second floor, Geneva Hine was taking care of the phone for the girls who had gone out to see the President. When she heard the shots, she felt the building vibrate so much, she was sure "they came from inside the building" (VI, 395). On the other hand, Victoria Adams, watching from a fourth floor window with three friends, reported that the shots "sounded like a firecracker or a cannon at a football game, it seemed as if it came from right below rather than from the left above." She also noted that a tree blocked her view of the President for a while, the same tree which we are convinced must have blocked the assassin's view of his target for some crucial seconds. (VI, 388-90)

Eddie Piper, the janitor, stood at a first floor window as the President passed and, the day after, swore that "the shots seemed to me like they came from up inside the building" (XIX, 499). Three months later he told the Commission's counsel that he could not tell where they had come from (VI, 385). The mail wrapper, Troy West, was also on the first floor, but he did not hear any shots (VI, 361).

The only other witness who was in the building at the time was Doris Burns, who followed the motorcade from several places on the third floor. She heard only one shot, while she was facing east, and "it sounded to me as if it came toward my back" (VI, 399). We have classified this statement as too vague.

Let us repeat, we believe that a rifleman was posted on the TSBDB sixth floor and that he fired at least one shot, perhaps more. But who can fail to be impressed with the indication from every group of witnesses that some shots were fired from the vicinity of the grassy knoll? This is not the impression of panicky onlookers but of trained policemen, deputy sheriffs, Secret Service agents, and most of the bystanders. Most of Lee Oswald's fellow-workers of the TSBDB who saw the motorcade thought the shots came from the knoll.

"I thought they came from the railroad tracks to the west of the Texas School Book Depository," said Danny Arce (VI, 365). Near Arce in front of the building stood Wesley Frazier, who testified with a touch of shame:

Well, to be frank with you, I thought it come from down there, you know, where that underpass is. There is a series, quite a few number, of them railroad tracks running together and from where I was standing it sounded like it was coming from down the railroad tracks there. (II, 234)

Billy Lovelady, whose resemblance to Lee Oswald gave rise to some not altogether solved problem of photo identification, was sure the shots sounded "right there around that concrete little deal on the knoll" (VI, 338). His foreman, Bill Shelley, also standing on the Depository steps, agreed. The sound "came from the west," he said repeatedly (VI, 329). Joe R. Molina (who lost his job as credit manager at the TSBDB, apparently because he was falsely suspected of Communist connections, and was even pilloried in the press as a possible accomplice of the assassin), too, was on the front steps when the tragedy occurred and he too heard the bullets as coming from the west (VI, 371).

The Depository Superintendent, Roy Truly, also heard the explosions "from west of the building" (III, 221). His bookkeeper, Virgie Rachley (now Mrs. Donald Baker), was given quite a grilling eight months later because her opinion on the source of the shots had not changed. After several tries to elicit the proper answer from this spunky young woman who swore she heard the shots coming from somewhere near the Triple Underpass, Assistant Counsel Liebeler tried a new tack:

Mr. Liebeler. Now, you have subsequently heard, I'm sure, and from reading in the newspapers and one thing and another, that it appears that the shots actually came from the Texas School Book Depository Building; is that right?

Mrs. Baker. Yes.

Mr. Liebeler. Does that seem possible to you in view of what you heard at the time?

Mrs. Baker. Well, I guess it might have been the wind, but to me it didn't.

Mr. Liebeler. The sounds you heard at the time did not appear to come from the Texas School Book Depository Building?

Mrs. Baker. No, sir. (VII, 509-11).

Some Other Bystanders

The witnesses who remain to be considered were random bystanders. Of these, four thought the shots came from the TSBDB, seven were unable to form an opinion, and 13 thought they came from the grassy knoll area.

Phillip Willis screamed when he heard the shots, hoping a policeman would hear him and order the Depository surrounded, but the officers he saw were running towards the knoll, "evidently thinking it came from that direction" (VII, 496-7). James Crawford looked up after the third report and saw a movement in the "only window that was open" on the sixth floor. "If those were shots," he told his neighbor, "they came from that window." (VI, 173) Charles Hester too turned at once towards the TSBDB after the shots, and it was he who got office Wiseman to go there. Another witness speaking for the TSBDB as the source was an experienced elk hunter, James E. Romack, and he testified to the assassin's prowess:

Mr. Belin. You heard those rifle shots, and you think you could shoot your rifle accurately as fast as you heard those shots.

Mr. Romack. I don't, wouldn't think that I would be that good a shot; no, sir. (VI, 280).

Unmentioned and unquestioned by the Commission was Charles Brehm who declared that the shots seemed to come from in front of or beside the President (Dallas Times-Herald, 11/22/63). Brehm noted that the President did not slump forward as he would have if the shots had come from the rear.

Unmentioned and unquestioned by the Commission were four newspaper women, Mary Woodward, Maggie Brown, Aurelia Lorenzo and Ann Donaldson, who were on the grassy knoll watching the motorcade and heard "a horrible, ear-shattering noise coming from behind us and a little to the right" (Dallas Morning News, 11/23/63). Perhaps there were many others in this category. Because the Commission took no official notice of them, we have not included such persons in our accounting.

Another witness, Garland G. Slack, was questioned by the Commission at length but not about what he saw as he watched the President's car ride by. His testimony, published in Vol. X, 378 ff., is exclusively concerned with his alleged encounters with Lee Oswald at the Sports Drome riflerange a short time before. Slack's brief affidavit does not say where he thought the assassin was firing from.

Abraham Zapruder took motion pictures of the assassination. He was standing on a concrete abutment on the grassy knoll when the shots exploded. "I also thought it came from back of me," he told the Commission (VII, 572). Another man looking on from the grassy knoll, William Newman, fell on the grass when he heard the shots, "as it seemed that we were in the direct path of fire ... I thought the shots had come from the garden directly behind me (XIX, 490). He swore to an affidavit but was never questioned by the Commission or its counsel.

Austin Miller was watching from the Triple Underpass when he heard shots. HE immediately looked "toward the --- there is a little plaza sitting on the hill. I looked over there to see if anything was there, who threw the firecracker or whatever it was ..." (VI, 225). In his affidavit of 11/22/1963, he also swore that "I saw something which I thought was smoke or steam coming from a group of trees north of Elm off the Railroad tracks" (XIX, 485).

Smoke on the grassy knoll was also reported by S.M. Holland, a signal supervisor for the Union Terminal Railroad, who thought the shots came from the same place:

A puff of smoke came out about 6 or 8 feet above the ground right out from under those trees. And at just about this location from where I was standing you could see that puff of smoke, like someone had thrown a firecracker, or something out, and that is just about the way it sounded ... I definitely saw the puff of smoke and heard the report from under those trees. (VI, 243-4)

And as if to pinpoint his description, he added, "The puff of smoke I saw definitely came from behind the arcade to the trees."

Right after the assassination, a schoolteacher, Jean Hill, saw a man running from just west of the TSBDB toward the railroad tracks. "I just thought at the time --- that's the man who did it ... at that time I didn't realize that the shots were coming from the building. I frankly thought they were coming from the knoll" (VI, 211-2).

Space forbids our quoting from all the witnesses, but three more should suffice to fix in our minds the basic problems raised by our survey.

The 70-year-old electrician for Union Terminal, Frank Reilly, saw the assassination from the overpass between Main and Elm Streets:

Mr. Ball. Where did they seem to come from; what direction?

Mr. Reilly. It seemed to me like they come out of the tree.

Mr. Ball. What trees?

Mr. Reilly. On the north side of Elm Street at the corner up there ... Well, it's at that park where all the shrubs is up there --- it's to the north of Elm Street --- up the slope. (VI, 230)

In other words, the grassy knoll.

A.J. Millican was on the knoll as the shots flew, and he heard eight shots that came in three flurries. This corresponds remarkably with the almost universal agreement of newspaper reports of November 22 that the shots seemed to come from an automatic weapon. Millican also supports our views in another important respect. He heard the shots as coming from two different directions, from the TSBDB and

Hi Jack,

Also I recall his left wrist is missing whited out, blurred out,or some such...

whatever.....

Thanks...B

I don’t understand how it can be argued that there was no security stripping in the Dallas motorcade. Look at the simple facts, as related in HSCA v. 11. The DPD had meetings on November 18 and 19, where it was agreed to use 18 motorcycles. This would include motorcycles on either side, five at the rear, four immediately ahead, and three to precede the motorcade by two blocks. But at a meeting of the DPD with SS agents Sorrels, Lawson, and David Grant on November 21, the DPD was told that this was too many, the number was cut back, and that JFK did not want motorcycles directly on each side, he wanted the officers to the rear, when in fact JFK had never said any such thing, as SS agents would state years later. 

Quoting the HSCA: “The Secret Service’s alteration of the original Dallas Police Department motorcade deployment plan prevented the use of maximum possible security precautions. Surprisingly, the security measure used in the prior motorcades during the same Texas visit shows that the deployment of motorcycles in Dallas by the Secret Service may have been uniquely insecure.”

This is born out by what occurred only the day before in Houston, as Palamara notes the following in a list of “anomalies” in video clips of the Dallas trip:

“Houston motorcade clip from 11/21/63- shows JFK's limo surrounded by approx. 18 motorcycles !”

http://www.dealeyplazauk.co.uk/Network%20Anomolies.htm

Others can see what they want in all this, but what I see in that lonely limo crawling down Elm Street with nothing but wide open space in front and to either side is security stripping about as flagrant as it gets.

Ron

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Hi Ron:

You may be interested to see these two...Cecil Stoughton photos....taken in Tampa Florida, on Nov.18/63..

Tim: Please note motorcycles at the side of the Limo.......and SS riding on the

back.....

B

Thanks, Bernice!  Can I have another cone?

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If your good.....B....

There is someone who talked with him, and knows the name is Santo....

B