The 2nd-Floor Baker/Oswald Encounter Has Been Debunked

[Sandy Larsen]

15 minutes ago, Benjamin Cole said:

But Truly's same-day statement? I think it is an earnest statement.

 

Documents can de fabricated and altered.

 

[Sandy Larsen]

On 10/20/2022 at 10:13 AM, Benjamin Cole said:

I dunno--especially since the LHO-Baker encounter, happening so quickly after the JFKA, is often cited as evidence LHO was not on the sixth floor. 

 

There are some researchers who put up a fuss over the 2nd-floor encounter being fabricated for the very reason you state. I reject what they say because once you add a fallacy to your theory, it can only go downhill from there.

Once you accept that the 2nd-floor encounter was fabricated, it clears up a lot of old, nagging problems.

 

On 10/20/2022 at 10:13 AM, Benjamin Cole said:

https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth337201/

This is Marion Baker's statement, also made on Nov 22. He outlines the LHO encounter, although he thought it had happened on the third or fourth floor.

 

That encounter is almost completely different from the 2nd floor encounter.

When the WC/FBI fabricated the 2nd-floor encounter, they simply altered the 3rd/4th floor one (that you linked to above) to fit their desired narrative. They did the same with Oswald's trip to the 2nd-floor to get a coke. After Oswald got the coke, he went down and had it with his lunch. The WC/FBI changed that to being the encounter with Baker. Which, as I showed in the OP, resulted in Oswald eating lunch after the encounter. That was the smoking gun that betrayed the alteration.

 

[Sandy Larsen]

I'd bet the farm on the 2nd-floor Baker/Oswald encounter being a fabrication. And Truly's first day statement being revised

 

[Benjamin Cole]

1 hour ago, Sandy Larsen said:

 

Documents can de fabricated and altered.

 

Not only that, the FBI did not record interviews, and relied on FBI agent notes. A terrible system. 

The FBI interview, and the DPD interviews of Truly are dated (if I recall) 11/22 and 11/23. 

Yes, they could have been back-dated or altered. And it appears at some affidavits were monkeyed with. 

My take is just IMHO...

[Benjamin Cole]

51 minutes ago, Sandy Larsen said:

I'd bet the farm on the 2nd-floor Baker/Oswald encounter being a fabrication. And Truly's first day statement being revised

 

Your suspicions about the possibility of documents being altered, or even disappearing, are justified, IMHO. 

In this WC investigation, or other government investigations. 

 

[Guest]

5 minutes ago, Benjamin Cole said:

1 hour ago, Sandy Larsen said:

 

Not only that, the FBI did not record interviews, and relied on FBI agent notes. A terrible system. 

Being cynical, such a system actually enables manipulation of statements and truth. If the agent/FBI wished to distort events for whatever reason, they always have the means to do it. The Sandra Cerrano interview after the RFKA springs to mind. 

[Michael Griffith]

19 hours ago, John Deignan said:

A question back on topic-once Truly showed Baker where the stairs were, why did Truly go up the stairs ahead of Baker? Baker has his gun drawn going up the stairs expecting to possibly run into the shooter. Was he going to shoot through Truly?

Truly did go up the stairs ahead of Baker, and this made the Baker-Oswald encounter even more problematic for the WC. Truly told the WC that he had already started up the stairs to the third floor when he noticed that Baker was no longer running behind him. Truly also said there was slightly more distance between him and Baker on the second floor than there was on the first floor.

The WC had no choice but to admit that since Truly was running up the stairs to the third floor when Baker saw Oswald in the lunchroom, Oswald must have entered the vestibule/foyer door before Truly reached the second-floor landing:

        Since the vestibule [foyer] door is only a few feet from the lunchroom door, the man [Oswald] must have entered the vestibule door only a second or two before Baker arrived at the top of the stairwell. Yet he must have entered the vestibule door before Truly reached the top of the stairwell [leading to the second-floor landing], since Truly did not see him. (WCR 151)

But the Commission never explained how Oswald could have done this. If Oswald had gone through the foyer door before Truly reached the top of the second-floor stairs, he would have been several feet beyond the door by the time Baker reached the landing, and thus would not have been visible to Baker through the window. And, if Oswald had entered the door "only a second or two" before Baker reached the top of the stairwell, then Truly could not have missed seeing him. Nor did the Commission explain how Baker could have been the least bit unsure about whether or not Oswald had gone through the foyer door if Baker spotted Oswald right next to the door and if the door was in any kind of motion at the time.

I suspect that Belin realized that it was obvious that Oswald could not have made it from the sniper's nest in time to walk across the second-floor landing and go through the vestibule/foyer door without being seen by Truly while walking toward the door, and that Oswald would have been well beyond the foyer door by the time Baker reached the landing after Truly had begun heading up the stairs to the third floor.

 

 

 

Edited October 22, 2022 by Michael Griffith

[Bill Brown]

23 hours ago, Michael Griffith said:

I think it's fairly clear from the record that the Baker-Oswald encounter occurred. As I've documented in two articles, the encounter is actually strong evidence that Oswald was not on the sixth floor during shooting.

The encounter created all sorts of problems for the Warren Commission. Baker had to retract his initial claim that Oswald was holding a Coke when he approached him in the lunchroom. And, the WC had to brazenly rig their reenactment of Oswald's alleged journey from the sniper's nest to the second-floor lunchroom. 

Also, Baker's insistence regarding the speed of his movement to the TSBD created an impossible time frame for the WC to get Oswald to the lunchroom soon enough to be seen by Baker from the second-floor landing, which is why they had to so markedly rig the sixth-floor-to-second-floor reenactment.

It would have been so much easier to have simply denied that the encounter occurred, but they couldn't do that.

 

 

Baker had to retract his initial claim that Oswald was holding a Coke when he approached him in the lunchroom.

 

There was never an "original claim" that Oswald was "holding a Coke".

 

Baker never said such a thing.

 

[Paul Jolliffe]

On 10/20/2022 at 5:48 PM, Roger Odisio said:

Whoa, Ben.

They had to kill Oswald and fast because they couldn't let him get a lawyer to respond to their clumsy and criminal attempt to frame him.  They certainly couldn't let their non-case go to trial.  IF he knew anything about what they did, they couldn't let him expose that either.

Side note:  Salandria said he watched that first weekend to see if Oswald survived.  If he didn't that would be his first clue as to who did it. 

I agree, Roger.

Harold Weisberg once told me the same thing - namely he claimed he had told his wife before "Oswald" was shot that the case was being "railroaded" (Weisberg's term.)

[David Von Pein]

51 minutes ago, Bill Brown said:

There was never an "original claim" that Oswald was "holding a Coke".

Baker never said such a thing.

Michael G. must be talking about the scratched-out "drinking a Coke" reference that appears in CE3076. But that document wasn't written until September 23, 1964. Plus, it was most certainly not written by Marrion L. Baker himself. More here....

http://jfk-archives.blogspot.com / Oswald, Baker, Truly, And The Coke

 

Edited October 22, 2022 by David Von Pein

[Bill Brown]

23 minutes ago, David Von Pein said:

Michael G. must be talking about the scratched-out "drinking a Coke" reference that appears in CE3076. But that document wasn't written until September 23, 1964. Plus, it was most certainly not written by Marrion L. Baker himself. More here....

http://jfk-archives.blogspot.com / Oswald, Baker, Truly, And The Coke

 

 

That's exactly right, David.

These guys should know better by now.

 

Edited October 22, 2022 by Bill Brown

[Michael Griffith]

10 hours ago, Bill Brown said:

 

Baker had to retract his initial claim that Oswald was holding a Coke when he approached him in the lunchroom.

There was never an "original claim" that Oswald was "holding a Coke".

Baker never said such a thing.

Several early news accounts said that when Baker saw Oswald in the lunchroom, Oswald was holding a Coke in his hand. Where did those news accounts get that information, if not from DPD sources?

In the first statement that Baker wrote directly by himself without the filter of a third party, he initially wrote that Oswald was drinking a Coke when he saw him. Granted, Baker wrote this statement on 9/23/64, but it was the first statement that he himself gave directly. Then, Baker lined out the part about the Coke. 

During a radio program on December 23, 1966, Albert Jenner, a former senior WC counsel, said that when Baker saw Oswald in the lunchroom, Oswald was holding a Coke in his hand. Said Jenner, "the first man this policeman saw, was Oswald with a bottle of Coke" (Sylvia Meager, Accessories After the Fact: The Warren Commission, the Authorities, and the Report, New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967; Vintage Press, 1976., p. 226). My, my, how interesting.

Anyway, the larger point is that the Baker-Oswald encounter was very problematic for the WC. The plotters surely wished it had never occurred, and surely wished they could have suppressed it before it became known and documented. 

 

[David Von Pein]

23 minutes ago, Michael Griffith said:

In the first statement that Baker wrote directly by himself without the filter of a third party, he initially wrote that Oswald was drinking a Coke when he saw him.

But there was most definitely a "third party" involved in that 9/23 statement. The 3rd party was FBI agent Richard J. Burnett, who most certainly wrote the words we see in this document....

http://jfk-archives.blogspot.com/2010/07/oswald-baker-truly-and-coca-cola.html

Edited October 23, 2022 by David Von Pein

[Tony Krome]

9 minutes ago, David Von Pein said:

But there was most definitely a "third party" involved in that 9/23 statement. The 3rd party was FBI agent Richard J. Burnett, who most certainly wrote the words we see in that document....

The FBI hand writes something that didn't happen. Thanks for that.

[David Von Pein]

1 hour ago, Tony Krome said:

The FBI hand writes something that didn't happen. Thanks for that.

Yes. The FBI (Burnett) did precisely that.

From a 2007 discussion:

"By the time that document was written (09/23/64), it was surely common knowledge at the Dallas FBI offices that Lee Oswald was carrying a Coke bottle in the TSBD at some point just after President Kennedy's assassination. Perhaps Burnett, like other people who I think have done the same bit of incorrect "merging", thought that Baker did see LHO with a Coke, and wrote it down as such (and he got the floor number wrong too remember...strange, indeed, if Baker was sitting right there beside him...and stranger still is the question of WHY Baker couldn't pick up a pen and write the whole damn thing himself if he was right there)." -- DVP; May 5, 2007

-----------------------------------------------------------

"Hi David, Good point. If Baker was there, why didn't *he* write out the statement? Without a doubt, the document is in the FBI agent's handwriting. .... The agent imo included the Coke not because Baker said it, but because it was "established myth" by 9/64 and the agent included it as part of the narrative. He probably didn't give it a second thought and neither did Baker when he crossed it out. It wasn't important to them. I'm speculating, sure. But is it more plausible that the coverup crew wanted to hide the Coke story and yet left this document in the record?" -- Jean Davison; January 10, 2010

Edited October 23, 2022 by David Von Pein