Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy (69 page)

After establishing that "Except for Dallas Agent-in-Charge Sorrels, who
helped police search the Texas School Book Depository, no [Secret Service]
agent was in the vicinity of the stockade fence or inside the book depository on the day of the assassination," the Committee wrote off most of the
sightings as people mistaking plainclothes police for agents.

However, the committee could not dismiss Smith's story so lightly. FBI
agent James Hosty (whose name was in Oswald's notebook and who
destroyed the Oswald note) told the committee that Smith may have encountered a Treasury agent named Frank Ellsworth. When deposed by the
Committee, Ellsworth denied the allegation.

Despite its inability to determine who was carrying Secret Service
identification on the Grassy Knoll on November 22, 1963, the Committee
nevertheless concluded: "[We] found no evidence of Secret Service complicity in the assassination."

However, if Jean Hill's account is true, either men posing as federal
agents were using offices in the Dallas county sheriff's building minutes
after the assassination or genuine federal agents were monitoring the
tragedy from an upper-story window.

Only one portion of Jean Hill's account of the assassination seems
unbelievable-that of identifying the man she saw in front of the Depository as Jack Ruby. However, her story appears to have some corroboration.

First, recall the story of Julia Ann Mercer, who identified a man sitting
in a truck just west of the Triple Underpass about an hour prior to the assassination as Jack Ruby. Also recall that both Mercer and Marguerite
Oswald (Lee's mother) said authorities showed them photographs of Jack
Ruby before Ruby killed Oswald.

Then there is the Warren Commission testimony of Depository employee Victoria Adams, who said she and a co-worker saw a man at the
intersection of Elm and Houston minutes after the assassination "questioning people as if he were a police officer." She told the Commission that
the man "looked very similar" to the photos of Jack Ruby broadcast after
the Oswald slaying. Her companion, Avery Davis, was never asked for her
opinion.

Mal Couch, a television cameraman for WFAA-TV in Dallas, also
supported the idea that Ruby was in Dealey Plaza when he told the Warren
Commission that another newsman, Wes Wise (who later became mayor
of Dallas), had seen Ruby walking around the side of the Texas School
Book Depository moments after the shooting. However, Couch was forced
to admit his story was just "hearsay" by Commission lawyers who then
declined to call Wes Wise to clarify the issue.

Jean Hill said she recognized the man who shot Oswald as being the
same man she saw "walking briskly" in front of the Texas School Book
Depository seconds after the assassination. The man she saw was almost
running in a westward direction toward the Triple Underpass. However,
after gaining the top of the Grassy Knoll, she lost sight of the man.

This story may play a part in the account of one Dallas policeman who
chased a man leaving the area of the Triple Underpass.

On November 22, 1963, Dallas policeman Tom G. Tilson, Jr., had
taken a day off. A friend and fellow policeman. J. D. Tippit, was covering
Tilson's regular beat that day. Three days later Tilson was a pallbearer at
Tippit's funeral.

Tilson, now retired, has told Dallas newsmen of chasing a black car
from the scene of the assassination that day and claims the man in the car
bore a striking resemblance to Jack Ruby.

Tilson and a daughter, Judy, were going downtown to pick up another
daughter who had been watching the presidential motorcade. As Tilson
was turning east on Commerce from Industrial just west of the Triple
Underpass, he said he learned from a police radio monitor he had in his car
that Kennedy had been shot.

Tilson stated:

I saw all these people running to the scene of the shooting. By that
time I had come across under Stemmons. Everybody was jumping out
of their cars and pulling up on the median strip. My daughter Judy noticed the [presidential] limousine come under the Underpass. They
took a right turn onto Stemmons toward Parkland Hospital. Well, the
limousine just sped past [this] car parked on the grass on the north side
of Elm Street near the west side of the underpass. Here's one guy
coming from the railroad tracks. He came down that grassy slope on the
west side of the Triple Underpass, on the Elm Street side. He had [this]
car parked there, a black car. And, he threw something in the back seat
and went around the front hurriedly and got in the car and took off. I
was on Commerce Street right there across from [the car], fixing to go
under the Triple Underpass going into town. I saw all this and I said,
"That doesn't make sense, everybody running to the scene and one
person running from it. That's suspicious as hell." So, I speeded up and
went through the Triple Underpass up to Houston . . . made a left .. .
[came] back on Main . . . and caught up with him because he got
caught on a light. He made a left turn and I made a left turn, going south
on Industrial. I told my daughter to get a pencil and some paper and
write down what I tell you. By this time, we had gotten to the toll road
[formerly the Dallas-Fort Worth Turnpike, now Interstate 301 going
toward Fort Worth. I got the license number and description of the car
and I saw what the man looked like. He was stocky, about five-footnine, weighing 185 to 195 pounds and wearing a dark suit. He looked a
hell of a lot more than just a pattern of Jack Ruby. If that wasn't Jack
Ruby, it was someone who was his twin brother. Or pretty close. You
know how Jack wore an old dark suit all the time? He always wore that
old suit. He had that same old suit on. Anyway, I got the license
number and all and exited off the turnpike and came back and picked up
my other daughter down there at Commerce and Houston. Then I went
to a phone and called in the information on the license number and what
I had seen .. .

Tilson's story is corroborated by his daughter, now Mrs. Judy Ladner,
although photos taken west of the Triple Underpass at the time do not
show the black car.

Also, Dallas police radio logs for the day do not indicate any alert for
such a car as described by Tilson.

Tilson maintains that he gave the license number and man's description
to the police homicide bureau, "but they never contacted me or did
anything about it." Believing he had done his duty, Tilson threw away the
scrap of paper with the license number on it. It was only much later that he
discovered that his information had been ignored.

Tilson recalled in 1978:

Homicide was that way. If you didn't have one of their big white hats
on, they didn't even want you in the office. Here they were solving this
case . . . here they had arrested a suspect [Oswald] in one day and cleared up the murder of a president in one day . . . They didn't want to
have to look for anybody else and they didn't even want to know about
it really. They wanted to clear up the case.

Tilson was never contacted by either the Warren Commission or the
House Select Committee on Assassinations.

Another story regarding Jack Ruby's possible presence in Dealey Plaza
comes from amateur photographer and assassination witness Phil Willis.
Willis, who knew Jack Ruby by sight at the time of the assassination, still
claims to have seen and photographed Ruby minutes after the shooting,
standing near the front of the Texas School Book Depository.

In publishing Willis's series of assassination photos, the Warren Commission cropped the face of the Ruby figure out of the picture.

Was Jack Ruby at the scene of the assassination`?

The Warren Commission established that Ruby was in the offices of the
Dallas Morning News at the time of the shooting. The Commission stated
that Ruby arrived at the newspaper between 11 and 11:30 A.M. (Some
thirty minutes after the incident at the Triple Underpass involving Julia
Ann Mercer.)

The Commission also determined that Ruby was with newspaper advertising employee Don Campbell until Campbell left for lunch about 12:25
P.M. About 12:45 P.M. Ruby was reportedly seen in the same spot Campbell had left him by another advertising employee, John Newnam. However, Newnam and other newspaper employees said once word came that
Kennedy had been shot (probably no sooner than 12:40 P.M. and from
employees who had been in Dealey Plaza returning to work), "confusion
reigned" in the newspaper offices.

Employee Wanda Walker even today recalls vividly how Ruby sat
quietly in the near-empty newspaper office that noontime. Walker told
researchers in 1986:

The other secretary had gone to lunch and the ad salesmen were all gone
and it was just me and Ruby up there. He was waiting for his regular ad
man. He did an odd thing. I knew who he was, but we had never talked.
But he got up and came over and sat by the desk where I was. It was
like he didn't want to be alone. He said some things but I can't tell you
what they were. Then some people started coming back in and they said
the President had been shot. Jack Ruby got white as a sheet. I mean he
was really shaken up.

Despite Walker's certainty that Ruby remained at the newspaper office
during the time of the assassination, it is possible that Ruby could have
slipped away for a few minutes.

No one was keeping exact times, and the Dallas Morning News offices are only two blocks from Dealey Plaza. It is conceivable that Ruby could
have left the newspaper offices, been in Dealey Plaza and returned unnoticed within the space of ten or fifteen minutes.

In 1964 newsman Seth Kantor reported meeting and talking with Ruby
at Parkland Hospital about 1:30 P.M. on November 22, 1963. This was
supported by radio newsman Roy Stamps, also an acquaintance of Ruby's,
who told this author he saw Ruby enter Parkland about 1:30 P.M. carrying
some equipment for a television crew.

According to the Warren Commission, Ruby "firmly denied going to
Parkland . . . " and "Video tapes of the scene at Parkland do not show
Ruby there . . . " and so the Commission concluded "Kantor probably did
not see Ruby at Parkland Hospital ... "

The House Select Committee on Assassinations, in reviewing the evidence that Ruby was at Parkland Hospital an hour or so after the assassination, concluded: "While the Warren Commission concluded Kantor was
mistaken [about seeing Ruby at Parkland], the Committee determined he
probably was not. "

So, if Ruby lied and the Warren Commission was wrong about Ruby's
presence at Parkland, it is certainly possible that Ruby may have made his
way-no matter how briefly-to the scene of the assassination.

Back in Dealey Plaza, while Sam Holland and other railroad workers
were finding evidence of men waiting behind the picket fence and Jean
Hill was being taken by Secret Service agents to the sheriff's office,
Deputy sheriff Roger Craig thought he saw a suspect flee in a station wagon.

In 1963 Roger Dean Craig was an ambitious young deputy sheriff who
was going places.

Having run away from his Wisconsin home at age twelve, Craig had
received a high-school diploma on his own and had served honorably in
the U.S. Army. By 1959 he had married and taken a job as a sheriff's
deputy in Dallas. Craig already had received four promotions within the
Dallas County Sheriff's Department and in 1960 had been named Officer
of the Year by the Dallas Traffic Commission.

But then came November 22, 1963.

Craig's account of his experiences that day caused considerable problems for the official version of the assassination's aftermath.

He later recounted that about 10:30 A.M. that morning, Sheriff Bill
Decker called plainclothes men, detectives, and warrant men into his
office and told them that President Kennedy was coming to Dallas and that
the motorcade would come down Main Street. According to Craig, Decker
then advised his employees to stand out in front of the building but to take
no part whatsoever in the security of the motorcade.