Vickie Adams Interview

[Bill Fite]

One of the most interesting interviews I've heard.  

She's extremely well-spoken.

Link to Black Op Radio Interview

[James DiEugenio]

She was quite articulate I thought.

I had never heard her do a live interview before.

[Cory Santos]

Cue wc supporters attacking her with nonsense.    Wait for it they can’t help.   

Edited December 29, 2023 by Cory Santos

[Bill Fite]

3 hours ago, Cory Santos said:

Cue wc supporters attacking her with nonsense.    Wait for it they can’t help.   

Her interview left no doubt as to the approach / purpose of the WC.

[David Von Pein]

Thank you, Bill Fite, for posting the link to the 1966 interview with assassination witness Victoria Adams.

Adams, of course, is a witness that a lot of conspiracy theorists love to prop up as "proof" that Lee Harvey Oswald could not possibly have gone down the back stairs of the Book Depository just after the assassination due to the fact that Miss Adams did not see or hear anyone on those stairs when she and Sandra Styles used them to descend from the 4th floor to the 1st floor very shortly after JFK was shot on 11/22/63.

But the notion that the entire case against Lee Oswald should be flushed down the toilet merely due to the estimated timeline of events as described by Vickie Adams is a very silly notion indeed....as I talk about in great detail on my webpage LINKED HERE.

I think the most interesting thing that is heard in the 1966 interview with Adams is when she talks about the three mistakes that were made by the Warren Commission during the time she was providing her testimony to the Commission in April of 1964. And the three errors that Adams mentions are things that are completely innocuous and relatively unimportant in nature, with none of the three items dealing with any substantive matters at all.

And yet, to hear many conspiracy theorists tell it, Victoria Adams was one of the many witnesses who has said she had key portions of her published testimony "altered" or "changed" by the Warren Commission.

But if that had truly been the case, then why on Earth wouldn't she have said something to Mark Lane and Mort Sahl about that very important fact during her fairly lengthy 1966 interview when she starts talking about the various things that the Commission got wrong in her published testimony?

But instead of raking the Commission over hot coals for "altering" or "eliminating" some of the things she had actually said during her testimony, she didn't say a single word in her 1966 interview about the Warren Commission altering anything that anyone could possibly consider to be of great value or substance whatsoever. She talked only about three very unimportant things that the Commission stenographer got wrong, which are things that I would classify as merely "typos" and nothing more than that.

After hearing Vickie Adams' total silence in 1966 when it comes to certain parts of her WC testimony allegedly being "altered" before it was publicly published (relating specifically to Bill Shelley and Billy Lovelady), it makes me wonder if this rarely-heard 1966 interview with Victoria Adams has inadvertently debunked (at least in part) yet another conspiracy-flavored myth that has endured for decades. That being: the "Altered Testimony" myth (at least with respect to Vickie Adams' testimony specifically, at any rate).

And we must keep in mind when listening to Adams speak in the '66 interview that she most certainly doesn't come across as a fan or a supporter of the Warren Commission in any way whatsoever.

Therefore, I think it's also quite obvious that her complete silence about any alleged "Shelley/Lovelady alterations" during the interview was not brought about as a result of Miss Adams being frightened of what might happen to her if she dared speak out in a negative manner about Earl Warren's Commission.
 

[Tony Krome]

Interesting about the self-closing heavy doors that are heard easily on the stairway.

[David Von Pein]

8 minutes ago, Tony Krome said:

Interesting about the self-closing heavy doors that are heard easily on the stairway.

See one of those stairway doors in action in the cued-up video clip below (which is from a TV movie that was filmed inside the TSBD itself in 1978):

 

[Tony Krome]

12 minutes ago, David Von Pein said:

See one of those stairway doors in action

Thanks! Now I'm going to be up late watching the movie.

[David Von Pein]

24 minutes ago, Tony Krome said:

Thanks! Now I'm going to be up late watching the movie [1978's "Ruby And Oswald"].

It's actually a very good movie (accuracy-wise), with very few mistakes. Some 1978 cars are shown on the street in a couple of scenes, and the Hertz sign atop the TSBD says "Fords" instead of "Chevrolets". But those aren't really things I would regard as mistakes, because they couldn't really be corrected within the type of TV Movie budget they had to work with.

Also please note that the real Jim Leavelle is handcuffed to Oswald (Frederic Forrest) in the film.

 

Edited December 29, 2023 by David Von Pein

[K K Lane]

David:

I agree with you that the three corrections to the transcript that Ms. Adams identified were innocuous.   The double-hearsay account of a doctor changing "50%" of his testimony is also of little evidentiary value in proving WC shenanigans with testimony transcription especially since the implication is that the doctor's testimony was transcribed correctly but that the changes were prompted by the doctor for reputation protection.

OTOH Ms. Adams' personal account of the WC's unofficial shaping of testimony prior to any official recorded interview is credible and shows the WC violating all norms of sound investigatory procedure (about 17 minutes into the video).

[Bill Fite]

1 hour ago, K K Lane said:

OTOH Ms. Adams' personal account of the WC's unofficial shaping of testimony prior to any official recorded interview is credible and shows the WC violating all norms of sound investigatory procedure (about 17 minutes into the video).

+1

[Roger Odisio]

2 hours ago, Bill Fite said:

+1

Uhoh.  The main point of Barry Ernest's The Girl On the Stairs is that Adams and Styles did *not* see Shelley and Lovelady when she and Styles reached the first floor.  S&L weren't there yet. Adams indicated to Ernest that the passage in her testimony about seeing them did not even sound like her.  Notice how she often inserted "sir" in her answers. There was no "sir" in that passage.

 

Thus, the WC presumably inserted her saying she saw S&L in order to discredit the timing of her descent. by claiming she came down a couple of minutes after Oswald. Not interviewing Styles and the women's supervisor, Dorothy Garner, who would have corroborated Adams' timing  made it easier for WC staff to discredit her..

 

Typewritten testimony was easy to change but not the stenotype of the interview.  So  Ernest contacted NARA to get the stenotypes.  They are missing, he was told, and so were the stenotypes of the testimony of S&L, who were interviewed the same day as Adams.  Surely that implies there was something to hide.  

 

Several months ago Greg Parker expressed skepticism about Ernest's telling of Adams' story.  He said Sean Murphy had been skeptical too and Murphy had talked to Adams several times about her story, including Styles' initial reluctance to go along with it.  I'm not sure how those conversations ended. My conversation with Parker pretty much ended when I pointed out the stenotypes of the three testimonies had gone missing.    

 

Several months ago Pat Speer and I went round and round on the question of Oswald and the steps.  I believe Oswald was not on the 6th floor and did not come down the steps. Pat pretty much agrees.  He thinks Adams and Styles *did* come down the steps when they said and didn't see or hear Oswald, but reaches his conclusion for a different reason.  They did see S&L,  he says, because those two lied about how soon they returned to the first floor after the murder.  The central lie Pat sees in all of this was the timing of S&L to the first floor claimed by the WR.

 

Now comes Adams, almost 40 years before talking to Ernest, saying she *did* see S&L on the first floor.  Casually, at the end of the segment. Lane and Sahl obviously did not understand the significance of what Adams said.

 

How important is this discrepancy?

 

For me, of the women on the 4th floor, Dorothy Garner has always been the more important witness. She stayed behind on the 4th floor while Adams and Styles went down the steps. She corroborated Adams estimate of the timing of their descent.

 

More importantly she was still on the 4th floor when Truly and a cop, presumably Baker, reached there. *Without seeing or hearing Oswald*. This is besides the fact that the WR made no attempt to explain how Oswald came down those steps without anyone on the intervening floors saying they saw him.  Garner's account is devastating.

 

Which, knowing what Garner would say, is why she was not asked to testify.

 

So what to make of this latest surfacing of an Adams interview?  Does anyone have a line to Ernest?  I wonder what he thinks.

 

One thing is clear.  Without Adams' testimony there is still ample evidence to establish Oswald did not come down those stairs as the WR claimed.

 

 

[Tony Krome]

1 hour ago, Roger Odisio said:

More importantly she (Garner) was still on the 4th floor when Truly and a cop, presumably Baker, reached there.

Adams also bought up Baker and Truly in this interview. Seemed to back up what she said others had suggested in that Baker & Truly did not enter the building immediately.

[James DiEugenio]

Roger:

If you turn to Sylvia Meagher's book, on page 72 you will see that there is no dichotomy.

The key point is the timing.

"After the last shot, she and Sandra Styles immediately ran down the back stairs to the first floor, where she saw Lovelady and Shelley standing near the elevator."

As Meagher so acutely points out the problem is the whole rigamarole the Commission tried to insert about the dynamic duo running over to the tracks first.  As Sylvia shows , this was obviously inserted later, and she proves how and why. (p. 73)

[Tony Krome]

48 minutes ago, James DiEugenio said:

As Meagher so acutely points out the problem is the whole rigamarole the Commission tried to insert about the dynamic duo running over to the tracks first.  As Sylvia shows , this was obviously inserted later, and she proves how and why. (p. 73)

Just re-read that. She says that the initial Shelley/Lovelady reports are consistent with Adams. Now I'm wondering why those guys rushed to the freight elevators.