“The lights all went out,” and the elevators stopped while JFK was murdered. Shelley and Lovelady were near the bottom of the back staircase, by the electrical panel... and Vickie Adams saw them ... until everyone's story changed...

[Paul Jolliffe]

Jim,

A nice summary of John's arguments in favor of a suspect on the McWatters bus and Whaley taxi.

A couple of minor points:

I seriously doubt that Mary Bledsoe actually boarded the McWatters bus downtown in time to see our "Oswald" board. That's not the way either Roy Milton Jones or Cecil McWatters remembered it. Both Jones and McWatters had her boarding after the bus had cleared Dealey Plaza - long after the "Oswald" person had exited. Here is McWatters' relevant testimony:

Mr. BALL - Didn't some lady say something? 
Mr. McWATTERS - Well, yes, sir. 
Now, as we got on out on Marsalis, along about it was either Edgemont or Vermont, I believe it was Vermont Street, there was a lady who was fixing to cross the intersection and I stopped and asked her if she was going to catch the bus into town from the opposite direction, and she said that she was and I told her that we was off schedule, that the other bus had done went into town, and I asked her did she care to just ride on to the end of the line and come back and she wouldn't have to stand there and wait, and she was getting on, and I asked her had she heard the news of the President being shot, at the time that was all I knew about it, and she said, "No, what are you--you are just kidding me." 
I said, "No, I really am not kidding you." I said, "It is the truth from all the reliable sources that we have come in contact with," and this teenage boy sitting on the side, I said "Well, now, if you think I am kidding you," I said, "Ask this gentleman sitting over here," and he kind of, I don't know whether it was a grinning or smile or whatever expression it was, and she said, "I know you are kidding now, because he laughed or grinned or made some remark to that effect." 
And I just told her no it wasn't no kidding matter, but that was part of the conversation that was said at that time. "

Jim, this lady can only be Bledsoe, because the conversation between McWatters, Bledsoe and Jones mirrors perfectly, yet Jones and McWatters both said she got on after "Oswald" left!

That's why Bledsoe's description of what shirt "Oswald" was wearing was bizarre - she was describing how  "Oswald's" shirt looked after he had been forcibly removed from the Texas Theater - but she never saw him that day!

The Secret Service put her up to it because neither McWatters nor Jones could identify "Oswald" as the man who boarded the westbound bus somewhere around Griffin Street. This is not to say that our "Oswald" didn't get on that bus - he did - but that neither of the men could say so for sure.

I think William Whaley was telling the truth about our "Oswald" riding in his taxi - but it wasn't to "Neches" Street. "Oswald" rode to Beckley and Neely. Why did he get out there? Because he clearly suspected that something had gone wrong, and he was starting to "wing it." (The cops who picked him up at 1026 N. Beckley got him back in line and took him to the Texas Theater, but I think "Oswald" had started to go off the reservation for a few minutes.) "Oswald" got off the McWatters bus (just in time to avoid the sudden police search) and instead of being intercepted by Tippit, waiting at the GLOCO station overlooking the Houston Street viaduct, he took that weird roundabout route to 1026 N. Beckley.

Anyway, here's Whaley explaining the cab ride. Note the drop off point - just three blocks from that strange address 214 W. Neely - a place in which  "Oswald" vehemently denied ever living.

 

 

[Tony Krome]

14 hours ago, Jim Hargrove said:

Naysayers forget that Oswald rented one of 3 bedrooms in her home and she saw him on a daily basis only 5 weeks before the assassination.

According to Mary Bledsoe, the man that rented her room showed her a picture of a girl and a baby;

Bledsoe: And talking about him, you know, just getting to know him, and--but, "here is a picture of my wife, and picture of the girl, and the baby." And I said, "Oh, she has got a baby, hasn't she?" And he said, "Yes."

[Jim Hargrove]

Tony,

Let’s be clear here. “Oswald” left Mrs. Bledsoe’s and moved to the N. Beckley rooming house on October 14, six days before Marina gave birth to Rachel on Oct. 20.  About that, Bledsoe testified that when she first met “Oswald” he showed her a picture of his wife and baby—one baby (emphasis added by me).

And then we got inside the house and he had a thing where this---pictures of his wife and baby, and he said he was in the Marine Corps, and I tried to be nice to him, and so, he paid me $7, and….

When the relationship soured days later, Bledsoe told him to leave and testified as follows:

Mrs. BLEDSOE - Not going to rent to you any more. He said, "Give me back my money." Now, $2.
I said, "Well, I don't have it."
So, he left Saturday morning and, in the meantime, I think his wife was going to have a baby---- 
Mr. BALL - How did you know that? 
Mrs. BLEDSOE - Well, I found---I read it in the papers. 

Now here, with more context, is the quote you posted above.  Note that in answer to Jenner’s question about “a picture of his wife and child,” she answered affirmatively.

Mrs. BLEDSOE - And so, that give me a lead, something to talk about, and I said, "Well, what kind of work do you do? "Oh, I do electronics," he said, and I said, "Well, there is some good jobs because you are young, and you can get a good job a young man like you."
And then went on. Then something about him being in the Marines, and I said, "Well, that is wonderful. My son was in the Navy." And talking about him, you know, just getting to know him, and--but, "here is a picture of my wife, and picture of the girl, and the baby." And I said, "Oh, she has got a baby, hasn't she?" And he said, "Yes."
And everything he said, I had to pull it out of him to talk about something for him to say what it was. 
Mr. JENNER - But, he volunteered the picture of his wife and child? 
Mrs. BLEDSOE - Yes; he did that. Showed me that picture. 

Whether Bledsoe was coached to put LHO on McWatters’ bus or not, your quote alone hardly impeaches her, though Paul J’s analysis may.  I’d be the last person to say there was no chicanery from the authorities in this case.

Nevertheless, the totality of the evidence for the bus and taxi ride is simply overwhelming, and much of it unfolded in large part just hours after the assassination. I understand that the idea that brown shirted Oswald took the bus and taxi ride while white-shirted Oswald left in a Nash Rambler is difficult for researchers to accept, but that doesn’t make the trainload of evidence for the bus and taxi ride go away.

[Tony Krome]

So when Bledsoe testified "And I said, "Oh, she has got a baby, hasn't she?" , she didn't and could not have said that in early October.

She also could not have seen the hole in the right elbow of Oswald's shirt on the bus if he later changed shirts, yet she testified to that too.

She is also the only witness that I know of that has described Oswald as a maniac with a distorted face. How did McWatters miss that?

 

[Jim Hargrove]

June Oswald was born in Feb. 1962, making her less than 2 years old when Bledsoe and Harvey Oswald met.  Sounds like a baby to me.

As for the shirt and maniacal expression, no doubt Bledsoe was playing to the cameras. 

[Tony Krome]

4 hours ago, Jim Hargrove said:

As for the shirt and maniacal expression, no doubt Bledsoe was playing to the cameras. 

No cameras at the hearing while she was under oath.

 

More concerns about 621 Marsalis;

No evidence that Oswald was there, even the October page of the calendar was ripped out.

Nothing from another boy who was in a back room at the time;

"I had one boy on the back. He never saw him" 

Then we are expected to believe Oswald roamed around Oak Cliff with a dufflebag, clothes hanging off coat hangers, and a wrapped up clock, while hoping to find a room to rent.

With so many sightings of Oswald look-alikes in 1963, you are convinced Bledsoe, who glanced at a man with a "distorted face", managed to positively ID Oswald.

And lastly, below is how Bledsoe described Oswald one day in October;

"Had a white shirt and white tie and white---white trousers, and looked very nice."

 

[Jim Hargrove]

That’s pretty funny, Tony.  I have to admit the “Man in the White Suit” look really doesn’t match my image of our patsy.

But Harvey Oswald’s whereabouts for the weeks prior to the assassination have been under a microscope for more than half a century, and no one knows this data better than John Armstrong….

Harvey checked out of the YMCA on October 4th, spent the nights of the 4th, 5th, and 6th at Ruth Paine’s house, and then moved into one of Mrs. Bledsoe’s bedrooms at 621 N. Marsalis on Oct. 7th.  He used her phone (WH 2-1985) to call Marina and tell her had had rented a room.  He gave Marina the WH 2-1985 number, and Marina subsequently contacted him there to tell him that R.L. Adams from the Texas Employment Commission was trying to contact him.  Mrs. Bledsoe let him make other calls from her phone looking for a job.

If you have any evidence that contradicts this timeline, both John and I would LOVE to hear about it. We want to get these details right, which isn't made much easier by the bang-up investigation our tax dollars funded.

[Paul Jolliffe]

2 hours ago, Jim Hargrove said:

That’s pretty funny, Tony.  I have to admit the “Man in the White Suit” look really doesn’t match my image of our patsy.

But Harvey Oswald’s whereabouts for the weeks prior to the assassination have been under a microscope for more than half a century, and no one knows this data better than John Armstrong….

Harvey checked out of the YMCA on October 4th, spent the nights of the 4th, 5th, and 6th at Ruth Paine’s house, and then moved into one of Mrs. Bledsoe’s bedrooms at 621 N. Marsalis on Oct. 7th.  He used her phone (WH 2-1985) to call Marina and tell her had had rented a room.  He gave Marina the WH 2-1985 number, and Marina subsequently contacted him there to tell him that R.L. Adams from the Texas Employment Commission was trying to contact him.  Mrs. Bledsoe let him make other calls from her phone looking for a job.

If you have any evidence that contradicts this timeline, both John and I would LOVE to hear about it. We want to get these details right, which isn't made much easier by the bang-up investigation our tax dollars funded.

Jim,

I am with you on this one: I think it is more likely than not that "Oswald" rented a room from Mary Bledsoe for a few days in early October, 1963. 

But Tony's point about Bledsoe's dubious identification of "Oswald" on the McWatters bus is valid, too. As I pointed out earlier, both McWatters and Roy Milton Jones made it clear that Mary  Bledsoe did not board the bus until AFTER "Oswald" had departed - so she could not possibly have identified him on the bus!

The Secret Service put her up to that because neither McWatters nor Jones could positively identify the man who boarded the bus on Elm near Griifin as "Oswald". They did not rule him out, they did not say it wasn't him, their vague descriptions do not preclude him, merely that they simply could not say much about the man who rode on the bus for only a few blocks before exiting.

Why did the Secret Service want to firm up "Oswald" on the bus?

Simply to quash the Roger Craig identification of  a different LHO leaving Dealey Plaza via the station wagon. 

So, "Oswald" really did rent a room from Bledsoe in October,  but Bledsoe did not see "Oswald" on McWatters bus in November. She was put up to that. 

In short, I believe both Tony and Jim have some truth to their comments.

[Sandy Larsen]

Thanks Paul and Jim for the info on Stuart Reed. I find it very curious he'd go out of his way to give up the negatives to the FBI like that.

 

Edited May 5, 2019 by Sandy Larsen

[Jim Hargrove]

Sandy,

All by himself, Stuart Reed is proof of the plot to frame “LHO.”  Do you disagree?

Paul J,

Thanks, and I take your misgivings seriously about Bledsoe’s story.  Even assuming you’re right, though, of all the outrages in this case it’s hard to get worked up about this one because it seems pretty clear that “Oswald” DID ride on the bus as well as in the taxi.  Unless we believe Stuart Reed just magically took those two photos of the bus, and that the Dallas Police planted the bus transfer and forced McWatters to identify it as his own less less than six hours after JFK was murdered. McW may not have remembered Oswald very well, and why should he?  He's a Big City bus driver, fer cryin' out loud.  But McW sure as heck knew his own transfer punch.

And McWatters did seem to remember that Harvey Oswald was pretty small.  If I’m recalling properly, he said he picked him out of the lineup because he was the smallest guy in it.

From what evidence we have of the interrogations, Harvey Oswald freely admitted that he took the bus and taxi rides. Interesting, though, that he seemed to think it was Ruth Paine’s car that Craig and the others said the white-shirted Oswald got into.)

Obviously, this is hard for many people to accept, because understanding how good the evidence is for the bus and taxi ride as well as the the Nash Rambler, it’s hard to see another explanation other than the one we think is true.  “Cognitive dissonance” or something?  That was all part of the plan, I’ll bet.

How else can we explain all those impossible but nonetheless exquisitely detailed sightings on Oct. 3-4, 1963 in and around Alice, Texas?

 

[Tony Krome]

52 minutes ago, Jim Hargrove said:

From what evidence we have of the interrogations, Harvey Oswald freely admitted that he took the bus and taxi rides. Interesting, though, that he seemed to think it was Ruth Paine’s car that Craig and the others said the white-shirted Oswald got into.)

So you have the brown shirted Oswald contributing information as to how the white shirted Oswald left the area.

How was brown shirted Oswald aware of any station wagon, regardless of who it belonged to, when he was catching the 12:36 bus 7 blocks away?

[Tony Krome]

13 hours ago, Jim Hargrove said:

If you have any evidence that contradicts this timeline, both John and I would LOVE to hear about it. We want to get these details right, which isn't made much easier by the bang-up investigation our tax dollars funded.

I would like to contribute some common sense;

Bledsoe: "about an hour my son came home, and I told him and he immediately called the police and told them, because we wanted to do all we could"

According to Bledsoe, on the afternoon of the 22nd, Porter Lee Bledsoe wanted to do the the right thing and provide crucial information to police. This information, presumably, would have comprised his mother's sighting of her ex-tenant (Oswald) on an Elm St bus, minutes after the assassination.

Police response, no rush: How's Saturday night sound for your mum to make a statement? (more than 24 hours later .... 7pm)

In the meantime, Porter informs mum of the impending police interview. What is the only physical evidence of Oswald's stay at Marsalis? Oswald's name, "Lee Oswald" that he wrote on the October page of a 12 month calendar.

So what does Porter "wanted to do all we could" Bledsoe do? Rip the October page from the Calendar and dispose of it. Now when did he do this?

We see in the WC testimony that Bledsoe deemed taking the calendar with her as evidentiary, even though the October page was missing. If that's her way of thinking, it follows that she thought of taking this piece of evidence with her to the police on the 23rd, in order to show them Oswald's name and the dates of his stay.

So do we have any evidence that police viewed the calendar? No. But we can establish that Bledsoe had to refer to the calendar for the dates before her affidavit Saturday night.

Porter Lee Bledsoe was also very aware of the information on the calendar, for it was he who tore it out after knowing his mum referred to it.

We know the Secret Service came out to her house. Were these guys not interested in obtaining the only evidence that showed Oswald was there?

 

[Sandy Larsen]

2 hours ago, Jim Hargrove said:

Sandy,

All by himself, Stuart Reed is proof of the plot to frame “LHO.”  Do you disagree?

Jim,

I'd like to have considerably stronger evidence than that before using the word "proof." Also, I prefer that the evidence make a lot of sense. While creation of a sort of scrapbook of the movements of a patsy is a possible endeavor, it seems quite unnecessary to me and so it doesn't make as much sense as I'd like for my primary evidence. To me this is more along the lines of supporting evidence.

It would be helpful to know if the four photos we have are the only four on the roll of film, or at least were taken in succession. If Reed took numerous photos and the four we have were selected from them (as in "cherry picked"), that would lessen the impact. (I'm not accusing anybody here of cherry picking... it could have been that the FBI who cherry picked those four photos.)

It would also be helpful to know if Reed had intelligence ties.

 

[Sandy Larsen]

1 hour ago, Tony Krome said:

How was brown shirted Oswald aware of any station wagon, regardless of who it belonged to, when he was catching the 12:36 bus 7 blocks away?

 

I'd like to have an explanation for this too. Roger Craig reportedly said that Oswald said he left in Ruth Paine's car.  (This according to Douglass's book.)

 

[Jim Hargrove]

10 hours ago, Tony Krome said:

So you have the brown shirted Oswald contributing information as to how the white shirted Oswald left the area.

How was brown shirted Oswald aware of any station wagon, regardless of who it belonged to, when he was catching the 12:36 bus 7 blocks away?

Good question.  Here's what John wrote about that very issue on my website:

When Craig arrived at the police station he saw Oswald, thru a glass window, sitting in a chair in an office. He told Capt. Fritz this was the man he saw run down the grassy knoll and get into the Nash Rambler. The two men went into the office and confronted Harvey Oswald. Fritz told Oswald, “This man [pointing to Craig] saw you leave.” Oswald replied, “I told you people I did.” Fritz then said, “Take it easy, son—we‘re just trying to find out what happened....What about the car?” Oswald leaned forward on the desk and said, “That station wagon belongs to Mrs. Paine—don‘t try to drag her into this.” Oswald then sat back in his chair and said in a calm, very low voice, “Everybody will know who I am now.”

Oswald heard Capt. Fritz say "car," yet he responded by using the words "station wagon." Why? Even more important was Oswald's statement, "that station wagon belongs to Mrs. Paine." Did Oswald suspect that Mrs. Paine was somehow involved? Oswald knew that Roger Craig didn't see him get into the station wagon. Could Oswald have suspected that Roger Craig saw LEE Oswald getting into a station wagon? And could Oswald also have thought that this station wagon belonged to Mrs. Paine?  Whatever Harvey Oswald was thinking, handcuffed and sitting in Capt. Fritz's office, he could say nothing more--he had already said too much (about Mrs. Paine and the station wagon).

On April 1, 1964 Commission attorney David Belin took testimony from Roger Craig. Craig told the Commission that he saw (LEE) Oswald, wearing a white t-shirt, leave Dealey Plaza in a Nash Rambler station wagon. Belin showed Craig two sets of clothing for identification, each in a separate cardboard box. After Craig identified Oswald's clothing, Belin declined to make Craig's identification part of the Commission's record.

Roger Craig thought that Belin was uninterested in his testimony and said, "He acted like the quicker he got it over with the better." In his autobiography, When They Kill a President, Craig wrote that David Belin changed his testimony 14 times. Craig told the Commission the license plates on the Rambler were NOT the same color as Texas plates, but the Commission omitted the word "NOT" and made it appear as though they were the same color as Texas plates. Craig said the Rambler station wagon was light green but the Commission changed the color to a white station wagon.

NOTE: It is worth noting that light-colored Nash Rambler station wagons, with out of state license plates, were owned by two people whose names are familiar to JFK researchers. A 1962 Rambler Ambassador, 4-door station wagon was owned by Clay Shaw. A 1959 or 1960 light blue or light green Nash Rambler was owned by Lawrence Howard.

 

Bear in mind that the same notes and reports we rely on for Harvey Oswald's statement about Mrs. Paine's station wagon also indicate that he freely admitted to the bus and taxi ride.