Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy (12 page)

But if the man in the doorway was not Oswald, then where was he'? Was
he on the sixth floor firing the Mannlicher-Carcano just as two federal
panels have concluded?

Despite the years of confident statements by federal authorities, no one
has unquestionably placed Oswald on the sixth floor at the time of the
shooting.

Dallas police chief Jesse Curry in later years admitted to newsmen: "We
don't have any proof that Oswald fired the rifle, and never did. Nobody's
yet-been- able to put him in that building with a gun in his hand."

Oswald told Dallas police he was eating lunch on the first floor of the
Depository in what was called the "domino room" at the time of the
assassination, and there is some evidence to back up his statement.

Bonnie Ray Williams was one of the Depository workers who were
laying plywood flooring on the sixth floor that day. During the elevator
race to the first floor a few minutes before noon, Williams said he heard
Oswald call, "Guys, how about an elevator?" from either the fifth or sixth
floor. Oswald also apparently asked them to send an elevator back up to him.

Williams told the Warren Commission he thought the others planned to
gather on the sixth floor to watch the motorcade, so he returned there with
his lunch, consisting of chicken, bread, and a bag of chips in a brown
paper sack along with a soft drink. Williams said he sat on some boxes
near a window facing out onto Elm street and ate his lunch. He said he
saw no one else on the sixth floor, which was one large open area.
However he noted stacks of book cartons here and there. Becoming
impatient because no other workers had joined him, Williams threw down
the remains of his lunch and left the sixth floor at "approximately 12:20."
In a January 14, 1964, FBI report, agents quoted Williams as saying he
left the sixth floor after about three minutes. However, Williams denied
ever saying that and it is reasonable that he couldn't have eaten his lunch
in only three minutes.

At the time, the news media made a great deal of comment about the
chicken bones and lunch sack found on the sixth floor. Many people
thought this proved that a cold and calculating assassin had patiently eaten
his lunch while waiting for Kennedy to arrive.

Going down one of the elevators, Williams saw two other workers,
Harold Norman and James Jarman, on the fifth floor and joined them to
watch the motorcade. Two of these men were captured in a photograph
taken that day as they leaned out of the fifth-floor window directly below
the famous sixth-floor "sniper's" window to view the President.

Williams told the Warren Commission:

After the President's car had passed my window . . . [there] was a loud
shot-first I thought they were saluting the President, somebody-even
maybe a motorcycle backfire. The first shot-[then] there was two shots rather close together. The second and the third shot was closer together
then the first shot . . . well, the first shot-I really did not pay any
attention to it, because I did not know what was happening. The second
shot, it sounded like it was right in the building . . . it even shook the
building, the side we were on. Cement fell on my head. . . . Harold
was sitting next to me and he said it came from right over our head... .
My exact words were, "No bullshit?" And we jumped up.... I think
Jarman, he-I think he moved before any of us. He moved towards us,
and he said, "Man, someone is shooting at the President." And I think
I said again, "No bullshit?" . . . Then we all kind of got excited... .
But, we all decided we would run down to the west side of the
building. . . . We saw policemen and people running, scared, runningthere are some tracks on the west side of the building, railroad tracks.
They were running towards that way. And we thought . . . we know the
shots came from practically over our head. But . . . we assumed maybe
somebody was down there.

Norman said he and Jarman had eaten lunch in the domino room on the
first floor, then walked out the front door where they saw other Depository
employees, including Lovelady, sitting on the steps.

As the motorcade approached, they took an elevator to the fifth floor
and got seated in a southeast corner window, where they were joined by
Williams moments later. Norman said he heard three loud shots and "I
could also hear something sounded like shell hulls hitting the floor ..."
Later, he said he also had heard the sound of the bolt working on a rifle
above them.

After the three men ran to the west window and saw police combing the
railroad yards, Norman said he and Jarman tried to leave the Depository,
but were turned back by police officers.

Jarman told the same story but said he didn't hear the shells hit the floor
or hear the sound of the rifle bolt. He did say that when the three men ran
to the Depository's west window: ". . . I saw policemen and the secret
agents, the FBI men, searching the boxcar yard and the passenger train and
things like that. "

One thing that has always puzzled assassination researchers is Wil-
liams's statement of being on the sixth floor until "approximately 12:20"
then Norman's claim of hearing ejecting shell casings and the working of
the rifle bolt.

It has been established that the plywood floor in the Depository was thin
and full of cracks, which accounts for the plaster dust that fell on Wil-
liams's head. It could also account for Norman hearing shell casings hit
the floor and even the working of the rifle bolt-except that apparently
none of the three men on the floor below heard anyone moving above
them.

How could they have heard shells dropping and a rifle bolt operating and not heard movement above them in the minutes before the shooting?
As confirmed by photographs taken at the time and the testimony of
witnesses below, someone constructed a "sniper's nest" of book cartons in
the minutes preceding the shooting.

Yet Williams, Norman, and Jarman heard nothing?

Obviously, there was someone on the sixth floor, but was it Oswald?

Oswald told police he had followed the workers down to the first floor
and had eaten lunch in the domino room on the Depository's first floor.

Oswald told interrogators he recalled two black employees walking
through the room while he was there. He said he thought one was named
"Junior" and the other was short.

Jarman's nickname was "Junior" and Norman was indeed short. Norman, in commission testimony, said he ate his lunch in the domino room,
adding: "I can't remember who ate in the . . . domino room with me ... I
think there was somebody else in there ..."

Jarman tells of helping Oswald correct a book order earlier that morning, then talking with him again on the first floor. Then at lunch time,
Jarman said he bought a soft drink and returned to where he had been
sitting by a first-floor window "where Oswald and I was talking." His
testimony is confusing and appears incomplete. It was not helped by any
clarifying questions from the Warren Commission attorney.

But if Oswald was not in the first-floor domino room as he said, how
could he have noted the presence of two men and described Norman and
Jarman?

Bill Shelley, Oswald's supervisor, told the commission he saw Oswald
near a telephone on the first floor about ten minutes till noon.

Carolyn Arnold, secretary to the Depository's vice president, was quoted
in an FBI report saying "she thought she caught a fleeting glimpse of Lee
Harvey Oswald standing in the [first floor] hallway" as she left the
building to watch the motorcade. In 1978, Arnold told the Dallas Morning
News she had been misquoted by the FBI. After reading over her statements of 1963, she stated:

That is completely foreign to me. [The FBI account] would have forced
me to have been turning back around to the building when, in fact, I
was trying to watch the parade. Why would I be looking back inside the
building? That doesn't make any sense to me.

After telling how Oswald had come to her office often for change, she
gave this account of the incident:

About a quarter of an hour before the assassination . . . about 12:15, it
may have been later . . . I went to the lunchroom on the second floor
for a moment ... Oswald was sitting in one of the booth seats on the
right-hand side of the room as you go in. He was alone as usual and appeared to be having lunch. I did not speak to him but I recognized
him clearly.

While it is still possible that Oswald could have raced upstairs in time to
be in the "sniper's" window by 12:30 P.M., recall that the Arnold Rowlands saw two men in the sixth-floor window, one with a rifle, at 12:15.
This time can be fixed with confidence because Rowland reported seeing
the man with the gun just as a nearby police radio announced that the
presidential motorcade was approaching Cedar Springs Road. Police dispatcher's records showed the motorcade passed Cedar Springs between
12:15 and 12:16 P.M.

The Warren Commission concluded that Oswald stayed on the sixth
floor after he was seen by the elevator racers about 11:55 Amt. and
remained there to commit the assassination.

As can be seen, there is quite credible evidence that he was exactly
where he said he was-in the first-floor break or domino room-at the
time of the shooting.

Oswald then apparently walked to the Depository's second-floor lunchroom to buy a soft drink. It was here that a Dallas policeman encountered
Oswald less than ninety seconds after the final shot was fired in the
assassination.

Since at 12:30 P.M. November 22, 1963, the presidential motorcade was
running approximately five minutes behind schedule-probably due to the
two unscheduled stops along the way ordered by Kennedy-it is unbelievable that an assassin would leisurely wait in the Depository domino room
until 12:15 to make his move to the sixth floor.

It is equally unbelievable that, having committed the "crime of the
century" an assassin could make his way down five flights of stairs and be
standing calmly when a policeman rushed into the lunchroom.

Understand that the first floor of the Texas School Book Depository is
slightly above ground level. One entered the building by walking up a
flight of outside steps, then an additional flight of stairs led to the second
floor. It was here that an employees' lunchroom was located to the rear of
the building away from Elm Street.

Dallas motorcycle patrolman Marrion Baker rushed to the Depository
after seeing pigeons fly off the building's roof at the sound of the first
shots. In a later reenactment for the Warren Commission, it took Baker
only fifteen seconds to park his cycle and race up the front steps of the
Depository.

Baker told the Warren Commission: "I had it in mind that the shots
came from the top of this building ... " He continued:

As I entered this lobby there were people going in as I entered. And I
asked . . . where the stairs or elevator was, and this man, Mr. Truly,
spoke up and says to me .. . "I'm the building manager. Follow me,
officer, and I will show you." So we immediately went out through the
second set of doors, and we ran into the swinging door.

Depository superintendent Roy Truly had followed Baker into the building. He quickly went to the building's elevators, but could not bring them
down since someone had left them locked in position on an upper floor.
Truly told the commission:

.. . those elevators . . . were both on the fifth floor, they were both
even. And I tried to get one of them . . . it would have been impossible
for [Oswald] to have come down either one of those elevators after the
assassination. He had to use the stairway as his only way of getting
down-since we did see the elevators in those positions.

Truly yelled, "Bring that elevator down here!" to no avail and Baker
said, "Let's take the stairs." Moving up the stairs trailing Truly, Baker
said he noticed a man walking away from him through a glass window in a
door near the rear second-floor landing. With drawn pistol, Baker confronted the man and ordered him to come to him. In a handwritten report
to the FBI on November 23, Baker stated: "On the second floor where the
lunchroom is located, I saw a man standing in the lunchroom drinking a
Coke." However, the words "drinking a Coke" were scratched out in this
report and there was no reference to the Coke in his Warren Commission
testimony.

Truly said the man, whom he recognized as Oswald, "didn't seem to be
excited or overly afraid. " He told the Warren Commission he noticed
nothing in Oswald's hands, but this was months later, after many discussions with federal authorities.

Baker turned to Truly and asked if the man was an employee and Truly
replied he was. Baker then turned and continued his race for the roof.

Oswald apparently simply sauntered down the steps and out the front
door of the Depository.

Mrs. Robert Reid, clerical supervisor at the Depository, was standing
with Depository officials in front of the building at the time shots were
fired. She then turned and ran into the building to her second-floor office.
She told the Warren Commission: