James Worrell: Fact or Fiction?

[Ed LeDoux]

James Worrell wants you to believe he didn't think twice about a shooting, ..involving the motorcade with JFK, he said he witnesses..., once home safely by bus from near his Mother's work (?did he need bus fare from her?) 

Once on the bus from near his mom's job didn't he go to the school... and what... rides the school bus the rest of the way... pretending to come home "from school" 

Did his mum know he hadn't been in class since October or was he still taking the bus to school...just not attending classes...giving impression he was.

I wish Duke had a better interview with her. She could have had some explanations that might of helped her son's legacy. As it was her patent defense of her late son didn't sway myself.

What did Mom know and when did she know it. 

Did James not say anything at all till the next day?

Would he need a one off excuse for skipping class that day?

A side note if he got to Love Field so early how bad would his view be.

Perhaps he was in a spot right on the fence line... but JFK and Jackie go farther down to shake hands.

In this scenario it's improbable Dicky Worrell is getting through crowd to an awaiting Dallas Transit bus in time to Dealey Plaza. 

Steve Thomas, that nails Worrell's location as Worrell pointed out on CE 359 the car pictured at curb was in the way of Worrell's mark. 

I get a feeling as though Worrell, if he was there, tells everyone what happened and says 'watch the news mommy.'

Here is his written statement 

https://linksharing.samsungcloud.com/gjmUc9eELz3m

Of note is rarely seen page two.

Worrell stated he sees a man running from TSBD opposite him. Then takes a bus home.

It's what he crossed out that isn't shared 

What did he do when he got home?

https://linksharing.samsungcloud.com/dfzgXnKEvf0j

Cheers!

Ed

Edited September 28, 2021 by Ed LeDoux
Punctuation clarity

[Donald Willis]

On 3/26/2006 at 12:20 PM, Duke Lane said:

The following is submitted for the consideration and critique of forum members. It is the first installment of a several-part examination of the actions and statements of James Richard Worrell, Jr., as related to Dallas Police, area news sources, and the Warren Commission, among others.

This installment examines Worrell's stated actions prior to his arrival in Dealey Plaza on Friday, November 22, 1963. Later submissions will look at the assassination and its immediate aftermath as described by young Worrell, focusing on material from publicly available sources. A final installment will detail additional information developed independently by this writer in recent weeks (including after this installment is posted).

Your comments are greatly appreciated.

[Edits below in red]

________________________________________

 

JAMES WORRELL: Fact or Fiction?

Part I

©2006 M. Duke Lane

 

 

On the morning of November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy awoke in a hotel in downtown Fort Worth. About 30 miles away, a 20-year-old high school senior prepared to leave home to see the 35th President of the United States during his trip to Dallas. The following day, Saturday, November 23, the young man contacted police and made the following statement:

 

 

Yesterday afternoon at approximately 12:30 pm I was standing on the sidewalk against a building on the corner of Elm and Houston Streets watching the motorcade of the President. I heard a loud noise like a fire cracker or gun shots. I looked arond to see where the noise came from. I looked up and saw the barrel of a rifle sticking out of a window over my head about 5 or 6 stories up. While I was looking at the gun it was fired again. I looked back at Mr. Kennedy and he was slumping over. I got scared and ran from the location. While I was running I heard the gun fire two more times. I ran from Elm Street to Pacific Avenue on Houston. When I was about 100 yards from the building, I stopped to get my breath and looked back at the building. I saw a w/m, 5'8" to 5'10", dark hair, average weight for height, dark shirt or jacket open down front, no hat, didn't have anything in his hands, come out of the building and run in the opposite direction from me. I then caught a bus to my home.

(

CE363

)

The sworn statement of James Worrell is important because it establishes the possible existance of someone in the Texas School Book Depository (TSBD) who fled the scene of the President's murder just moments after the shots were fired. While Worrell initially identified the man as having been Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin, based on photos and news coverage, in the end he allowed that, despite any resemblance he may have thought, he was unable to identify the fleeing man and had only seen him from the rear.

Worrell's statement eventually led to his being called to Washington DC in March 1964 to testify before the Warren Commission. Before embarking on the trip (together with assassination witnesses Amos Euins, Arnold Rowland and Dallas Times Herald photographer Bob Jackson), Worrell gave an interview to Times Herald staff writer Darwin Payne in which he'd added a new twist to his story that he was to expand upon four days later: "It was so coincidental," Worrell told Payne. "I had gone to Love Field to see the President but it was too crowded. I cam[e] downtown and just happened to pick that place" in front of the TSBD to stand and watch the parade.

If nothing else did or could have, that addition to his story alone raises questions to his credibility. It caught Arlen Specter's attention to the extent that he asked Worrell, "Are you sure you were at Love Field when the President arrived there?" Worrell replied "oh, yes," and Specter conceded the point before continuing his questioning. A thorough examination of Worrell's statements - under oath and otherwise - is therefore warranted, and shall here be compared and contrasted with others' recollections of the events to which Worrell testified.

THE ITINERARY

James Richard Worrell, Jr., testified on Tuesday, March 10, 1964 before the Warren Commission in its offices located at 200 Maryland Avenue NE at Washington DC. Asked to state his whereabouts and actions leading up to his witnessing the assassination of John F Kennedy in downtown Dallas, he described how he had woken up that morning and waited for his mother and sister to leave their home at 13510 Winterhaven Drive in the Dallas suburb of Farmers Branch before embarking on the trip that eventually culminated in his visit to the nation's capital.

Worrell stated that he'd hitchhiked (about nine miles) to Love Field, and arrived there sometime around 9:00 a.m. He "messed around" until the President arrived and, not being able to see him very well - "I just saw him get off the plane and I figure that I wasn't going to see him good, so I was going to get a better place to see him" (emphasis added) - Worrell decided to catch a bus downtown where he hoped for a better vantage point.

He left Love Field before the motorcade's departure and travelled "so far on the bus ... as far as, I don't know where the bus stops, anyway I got close to [Dealey Plaza] and walked the rest of the way." He estimated that he arrived downtown at "about 10, 10:30, 10:45, something around there. There weren't many people standing around there then," he explained. The presidential motorcade, he said, arrived "an hour; an hour and a half" later.

Leaving aside the bad math that "an hour; and hour and a half" before the JFK arrived in Dealey Plaza at 12:30 was not "about 10, 10:30, 10:45, something around there," Air Force One did not land at Love Field until 11:37, so it is clearly not possible for Worrell to have seen the plane land and been at Dealey Plaza so far in advance of the motorcade's arrival there. In fact, he could not have been in Dealey Plaza any more than just a few minutes before, but the fact remain that he could have been in both places.

In the early 1960s, bus service was provided by the Dallas Transit Company, which later became the Dallas Area Rapid Transit system (DART). Over the years and through the successive purchases and reorganizations of the company, all copies of the bus schedules for 1963 have been lost or destroyed, and nobody contacted by this author has kept copies among their personal memorabilia, so it is not possible to determine the exact schedule of busses from Love Field to downtown that day through "official" means.

A bus still follows the same route today - with an added jog to a new terminal building - as the bus that Worrell would have had to take to make his rendezvous with Fate. In 2006, bus route #39 takes 42 minutes to travel this distance over the same streets as it did in 1963. Long-time employees and retirees of DART and its predecessor companies have, however, consistently remarked that busses ran more frequently and carried more passengers than they do today ... and the vehicles themselves were larger then than they are now.

(A case in point is the route from Oak Cliff to downtown, taken by Helen Markham to and from work: according to Commission Document 630h, the bus stopped at Jefferson Boulevard and Patton Street every ten minutes on weekdays; today, it comes by only once every 45 minutes.)

The general concensus regarding the Love Field-to-downtown bus is that it probably ran every ten minutes on weekdays, and certainly no less frequently than once every 15 minutes. It also probably took less time - about 30 minutes - to arrive downtown since traffic was not as heavy as it is today.

Thus for Worrell to have alit from the bus at its stop closest to Dealey Plaza, at about the same location as the current West End Terminal at 800 Pacific Avenue just five blocks - 0.2 miles or about five minutes walking distance from Dealey Plaza - in time to witness the assassination, he could have departed Love Field as late as 11:50 that morning and arrived in the plaza five minutes before the motorcade.

If he'd had to orient himself, ask directions, etc. - a distinct possibility, it would seem, since he said that he didn't know where the bus stopped and he'd gotten off (2H191-192) - it could have taken him longer. But Worrell stated that he'd caught the bus before the motorcade had left the airport at 11:50, so he could have caught a bus as early as 11:40 (three minutes after Kennedy was on the ground and Worrell realized he wouldn't be able to see him well), conceivably getting him to Dealey Plaza by about 12:15.

Even arriving then, it would have been well past the point when "there weren't many people standing around there then," as he'd testified. JFK was due at the Trade Mart roughly four miles away at 12:30, and would thus have passed through Dealey Plaza several minutes earlier if the motorcade was on time. Consequently, if Worrell arrived at 12:15 or afterward, almost as many people as would be there already were. If he'd arrived any later, he stood a good chance of missing the motorcade altogether, but not having transportation of his own, he had no control over that and was at the mercy of the bus and traffic.

Not that it has an effect on Worrell's ability to be in both locations to witness all that he'd said he did, one additional possibility that obviates the busses' schedule departure times is ... a curious bus driver.

If a bus was scheduled to leave Love Field at, say, 11:35 - just before JFK landed, theoretically forcing Worrell to wait until at least 11:45 to board a downtown bus - but the driver decided to linger past his scheduled departure time to catch a glimpse of the President (he could alway blame his lateness on security delays or additional traffic, roadblocks or detours, plausible excuses all), Worrell could have caught a bus that normally would already have left the airport, getting him downtown a little earlier than our previous estimates, especially if the driver drove a little faster than usual to make up lost time.

Finally, since Worrell's bus - whichever one he was on and whatever time it was actually scheduled to depart - left Love Field ahead of the motorcade, there is no reason to suspect that its travel was in any way impeded by traffic or police patrols. According to a voluminous 34-page, detailed November 30 Dallas Police "chronological report of events" prepared for Chief Curry (HSCA record #180-1017-10137, file number 003019), the pilot car left Love Field just three minutes ahead of the motorcade; patrol officers assigned to security along the route did not halt traffic until that car arrived, the bus most likely proceeded along its regular route without incident.

There is no doubt that Worrell could not have been at Love Field and seen JFK if he had been downtown either "around 10, 10:30, 10:45" or "an hour; hour and a half" before the motorcade arrived in Dealey Plaza. Nevertheless, given the approximate travel time by bus to reach downtown from Love Field, and absent any documentation showing the departure times and frequency of the busses leaving the airport, it remains possible that James Worrell was, in fact, both at Love Field and in Dealey Plaza, although he may have had to hurry to get to his destination in time.

It must be noted that all of the estimates herein are dependent upon Worrell being in a position to board a bus in a reasonably short period of time. Since we do not know - even if we think we can infer - where he was "at Love Field," we don't know if he was in the midst of the 2000+ throng of onlookers, if he was at the fringe of the crowd, or if he was nowhere near it at all (having been "messing around" and all ... doing what and where?). More information will be forthcoming in later installments as it is available.

[To be continued ....]

Future additions:

Chapter 2 - Downtown at the Depository

Chapter 3 - Aftermath

Chapter 4 - The Periphery

Can't find "Chapter 2: Downtown at the Depository" or Chapter 3: "Afermath"

[Ron Bulman]

Worell is discussed among others in a thread 4-5 years ago about those exiting the TSBD after the shots.  I don't remember the title of it at the moment.  Larry Hancock contributed.