The Warren inquiry rejected Rowland’s comments about a second man, even though a deputy sheriff confirmed that the witness had mentioned the man right after the shooting. When he told FBI agents about the second man, Rowland said, “They told me it didn’t have any bearing or such on the case right then. In fact, they just the same as told me to ‘forget it now.’ … They didn’t seem interested at all. They didn’t pursue this point. They didn’t take it down in the notation as such.”
The Warren Commission Report ignored and omitted altogether statements the FBI took from two other witnesses. These also referred to two men, and the first of them seems to corroborate what Rowland said.
Shortly before the assassination, bystander Ruby Henderson saw two men standing back from a window on one of the upper floors of the Book Depository. Like Rowland, she particularly noticed that one of the men “had dark hair … a darker complexion than the other.” He might have been Mexican, she thought. Henderson had the impression the men were looking out as if “in anticipation of the motorcade.”
Henderson recalled having seen the two men after an ambulance removed a man who had been taken ill. An ambulance had indeed been close by, and the time was routinely logged. The sighting of the two men can therefore be placed as having occurred less than six minutes before the assassination.
The report of another witness, who also observed two men just before the assassination, is even more disquieting. Carolyn Walther noticed two men with a gun in an open window at the extreme right-hand end of the Depository. Though she was unsure that the window was on the sixth floor, photographs and the location of innocent employees in fifth-floor windows establish that she must have been looking at the infamous sniper’s perch. Mrs. Walther said:
I saw this man in a window, and he had a gun in his hands, pointed downwards. The man evidently was in a kneeling position, because his forearms were resting on the windowsill. There was another man standing beside him, but I only saw a portion of his body because he was standing partly up against the window, you know, only halfway in the window; and the window was dirty and I couldn’t see his face, up above, because the window was pushed up. It startled me, then I thought, ‘Well, they probably have guards, possibly in all the buildings,’ so I didn’t say anything.
If Mrs. Walther had sounded the alarm, it would probably have been too late. She had barely noticed the second man when the President’s motorcade swept into view.
No one appears to have bothered to interview another witness, one who had an ideal vantage point from which to observe the sixth-floor window on November 22. John Powell was one of many inmates housed on the sixth floor of the Dallas County Jail, spending three days in custody on minor charges. In the minutes before the assassination, he told friends and family members, he and cellmates saw two men with a gun in the window opposite. So clearly could he see them, he said, that he recalled them “fooling with the scope” on the gun. “Quite a few of us saw them. Everybody was trying to watch the parade… . We were looking across the street because it was directly straight across. The first thing I thought is, it was security guards… .”
Like Ruby Henderson and Arnold Rowland, Powell recalled spontaneously that one of the men appeared to have dark skin.
Though some inmates of the county jail were apparently questioned after the assassination, it is not clear that any official ever spoke with Powell at the time. His story emerged only years later, after a friend contacted a Dallas area newspaper.
The testimonies that referred to two men acting suspiciously were either to be judged mistaken or ignored by the Warren Commission.
There never was serious interest in the possibility that two assassins or more might have lain in wait for the President. For the focus of official interest became, less than five minutes after the shooting, a hunt for just one man.
Two other bystanders, clerks from the county building, noticed a man in the sixth floor just before the shooting. He looked “uncomfortable” as though he was “hiding or something.” To the clerks, he seemed to be looking toward the grassy knoll rather than in the direction from which the President would be arriving.
Then there was Howard Brennan, later to become a star witness for the Warren Commission. He had stood across the road from the Depository and reported having seen a man at the right-hand sixth-floor window both before and during the shooting. After the second shot, said Brennan, “This man I saw previous was aiming for his last shot.” He then drew back “and maybe paused for another second as though to assure himself that he had hit his mark,” before disappearing.
Close by Brennan, a fifteen-year-old schoolboy named Amos Euins also saw a rifle being fired from the famous window. “I could see his hand,” he said later, “and I could see his other hand on the trigger, and one hand on the barrel thing.” Another youth in the crowd, James Worrell, said he looked up after the first shot and saw “six inches” of a rifle barrel sticking out of the window.
Three people traveling in the motorcade, the Mayor’s wife and two photographers, saw part of a rifle protruding from the window—though neither photographer reacted fast enough to take a picture.
Less than five minutes after the shooting, a policeman called in over the radio to say, “A passerby states the shots came from the Texas School Book Depository.” Three employees at the Depository came forward about the same time to say that, while watching the motorcade from a fifth-floor window, they had heard suspicious sounds above them—a clatter like a rifle bolt being operated and what sounded like shells being ejected onto the floor. The police operation gradually became more organized, the Depository was sealed off and a floor-by-floor search begun.
As early as 12:44 p.m., the police radio put out a first description of a suspect in the assassination:
“Attention all squads. The suspect in the shooting at Elm and Houston is supposed to be an unknown white male approximately thirty, 165 pounds, slender build, armed with what is thought to be a 30-30 rifle … no further description at this time.”
The Warren Commission never did establish the source of this description. Its best guess was that it derived from a policeman’s exchange with Brennan, one of the witnesses who reported having seen a man with a gun in the sixth-floor window. Whatever the source, policemen in Dallas now had a lead, however vague, a rough description of somebody to be on the lookout for.
At 1:16 p.m., forty-five minutes after the assassination, operators at Dallas police headquarters were startled by a civilian’s voice breaking into official radio traffic. A citizen was relaying news of fresh drama and a second murder:
Citizen: Hello, Police Operator?
Operator: Go ahead, go ahead, Citizen using police radio.
Citizen: We’ve had a shooting out here.
Operator: Where is it at?
Citizen: On Tenth Street.
Operator: What location on Tenth Street?
Citizen: Between Marsalis and Beckley. It’s a police officer. Somebody shot him.
A couple of miles from Dealey Plaza, on a leafy street in the Oak Cliff district, a police officer had indeed been shot. He was patrol-car driver J. D. Tippit, and he was dead. Within four minues, drawing on what witnesses at the scene said, the police broadcast a description of a suspect in this second murder: “A white male approximately thirty, five-eight, slender build, has black hair, a white jacket, a white shirt, and dark trousers.”
As police cars raced to join the hunt for the killer of a fellow officer, two more citizens decided they had something to report. On hearing police sirens wailing, shoe-shop manager Johnny Brewer had looked up to see a young man walk into the entranceway of his shop. “His hair was sort of messed up,” Brewer would recall, “looked like he’d been running.” When the police cars went away, so did the young man.
Brewer left the shop and walked a few doors away to speak to the ticket seller at a movie house, the Texas Theater.
The mysterious young man, they figured, had entered the theater without buying a ticket. They telephoned the police, and fifteen officers arrived within minutes. Patrolman Nick McDonald, who was one of the officers, went around to the theater’s rear entrance.
When the lights came up in the auditorium, shoe-shop manager Brewer pointed to a man sitting near the back. McDonald advanced cautiously through the almost-empty theater, checked a couple of other customers on the way, but kept an eye on the man at the back. When he reached the fellow, a nervous-looking young man, he ordered him to his feet. The man started to rise, brought his hands half up and punched McDonald between the eyes. Then, McDonald told the author, the suspect went for a pistol in his waistband. During a brief scuffle, the gun misfired. Then more officers arrived, and the Dallas police had their prisoner.
A slim young man of twenty-four, he was hustled out of the theater, through a hostile crowd, and into a police car destined for headquarters. Minutes earlier, during the scuffle with McDonald, he had cried, “Well, it’s all over now.”
In so many ways, as America knows to its cost, it was by no means all over. The prisoner was Lee Harvey Oswald.
Chapter 5
Did Oswald Do It?
“He didn’t think there would be any more work done that day.”
—Oswald’s ostensible reason for leaving the scene
of the crime, quoted by Captain Will Fritz,
Dallas Chief of Homicide
The suspected assassin was to be questioned by the Dallas police, the FBI, and the Secret Service for nearly two days—two days in which he steadfastly denied any part in the murder of either President Kennedy or Officer Tippit. As to learning the detail of what he said, the Warren inquiry would rely on retrospective reports written by the chief of the Homicide Bureau, Captain Will Fritz, and the other officers who talked to Oswald.1
Oswald was quite open about his basic background, the outline of a life now well known around the world. He had been born in 1939 in New Orleans, joined the U.S. Marine Corps at the age of seventeen, and then, in 1959, traveled to the Soviet Union.
Behaving like a defector who wanted to become a Soviet citizen, Oswald had stayed in Russia for two and a half years. After marriage to a Soviet wife and the birth of a baby daughter, Oswald returned to the United States and to Texas, where his mother lived.
During 1963, Oswald told the police, he spent several months in New Orleans, where he began to take an active interest in Cuban politics. He admitted having demonstrated in favor of Fidel Castro, and—for his part in an ensuing street incident—having been arrested by New Orleans police. This, said Oswald, was the only time he had been in trouble with the police, and a check proved him right.
The interrogators asked Oswald if he was a Communist, and he replied that he was a Marxist but not a Marxist-Leninist. That was a little too sophisticated for Dallas law-enforcement officers, and Oswald said that would take too long to explain. Of his recent activity, Oswald described how he had looked for work in Dallas and eventually taken a laboring job at the Texas School Book Depository.
On several occasions, as he was escorted around the police station, Oswald faced a barrage of questions from the world’s press. Radio and television microphones recorded his strenuous denial of any involvement in the Kennedy assassination. Asked point-blank, “Did you kill the President?” Oswald replied, “I didn’t shoot anybody, no, sir.” He told the press this more than once. On the last occasion, as he was being dragged away through the seething crowd of reporters, Oswald said, “No, they’re taking me in because of the fact that I lived in the Soviet Union.” As he was hustled away, he almost shrieked, “I’m a patsy!”
If Oswald really was just a fall guy, he had been bewilderingly well framed. Even before his arrest, police were finding evidence that was to prove damning, evidence black enough and copious enough to give any prosecutor a good case. Consider now the facts that would have been used against Oswald if he had come to trial.
Half an hour after the assassination, near the famous sixth-floor Depository window, a sheriff’s deputy had noticed a stack of book cartons. They were stacked high enough to hide a crouching man should a casual observer approach from behind him. There, on the floor, in the narrow space between the boxes and the window, were three empty cartridge cases. A rifle was found soon afterward, by two other officers searching the other end of the sixth floor. From the prosecutor’s point of view, it was to provide the clinching evidence against Oswald.
The gun was a bolt-action rifle with a sling and telescopic sight and was stamped with the serial number C-2766. It was a 6.5-mm Mannlicher-Carcano, a hitherto undistinguished Italian rifle of World War II vintage. There was a live round in the breech ready for firing. The weapon was examined for fingerprints at Dallas police headquarters, then flown to FBI headquarters in Washington. Experts there found some traces of fingerprints on the metal near the trigger, but they were reportedly too incomplete to be identified. Then, four days later, Lieutenant Day of the Dallas police sent the FBI a palm print, which, he said, he had “lifted” from the barrel of the rifle before sending it to Washington, DC. The palm print was firmly identified as that of the right hand of Lee Harvey Oswald.
At dawn on November 23, as Oswald ended his first night in custody, came a discovery that incriminated him even further. In Chicago, the staff of Klein’s Sporting Goods Company, searching through their files at the request of the FBI, came upon the records for the rifle with serial number C-2766. Klein’s, who did a large mail-order business, had sent such a gun on March 20—eight months before the assassination—to a customer called A. Hidell, at P.O. Box 2915, Dallas, Texas. The order form, which Klein’s had received a week earlier, was signed “A. Hidell,” in handwriting.
For the early investigators, the case now seemed effectively broken. The serial number at Klein’s matched the number on the gun found at the Depository, and that gun had borne Oswald’s palm print. The signature “A. Hidell” and the hand-printed part of the order form were firmly identified by government document examiners as Oswald’s handwriting. Dallas police said that Oswald, when arrested, had been carrying a forged identity card, as well as documents in his own name. The forged card bore the name “Alek J. Hidell,” yet the photograph attached was Oswald’s. Dallas P.O. Box 2915 turned out to belong to Lee Oswald.
Nor was that all. In a crevice on the butt of the rifle was a tuft of cotton fibers. These were examined microscopically at the FBI laboratory, which judged them compatible with fibers in the shirt Oswald was wearing when arrested.
Oswald’s wife, Marina, was to testify months later that her husband had owned a rifle. She had seen it, she was to say, in late September, at the house near Dallas where she was then staying. Oswald and his wife were living apart, seeing each other only occasionally, in the months before the assassination. Marina, with her two children, was staying at the house of a friend named Ruth Paine. Many of Oswald’s possessions had been stored in the Paine garage, and it was there that Marina said she had last seen the rifle, wrapped in a blanket. Police saw the blanket during a search of the garage after the assassination. By then there was no rifle, but an FBI examination suggested the blanket had been stretched by hard, protruding objects.
The evidence that the rifle had been stored in the Paine garage, however, was thin. “The fact is,” wrote Commission lawyer Wesley Liebeler in a memo requesting changes to the draft of the Warren Commission Report, “that not one person alive ever saw that rifle in the … garage in such a way that it could be identified as that rifle.” He was ignored.
On the eve of the assassination, Oswald had asked a fellow employee, Buell Frazier, to drive him to Mrs. Paine’s house. Frazier quoted him as saying, “I’m going home to get some curtain rods … to put in an apartment.” Oswald had then stayed the night with his wife and left the next morning before she was up, at 7:15 a.m. He then walked over to Frazier’s house, just a few do
ors away, to get a lift to work. Frazier’s sister noticed that Oswald was now carrying a heavy brown bag, and Frazier asked about it as the two men drove into the city. Oswald said something about “curtain rods,” and Frazier remembered he had mentioned rods the night before. At the Texas School Book Depository, Oswald walked ahead into the building, holding the package tucked under his right armpit.
After the assassination, during their search of the sixth floor, police found a brown paper bag large enough to have contained the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle. It appeared to be homemade. The FBI later found a palm print and fingerprint on the bag, and these matched Oswald’s right palm and his left index finger. Fibers found on the paper were very similar to fibers on the blanket in the Paine garage.
The day after the assassination, again in the garage, police made further dramatic finds. They came up with two photographs, both of Oswald apparently holding a rifle in one hand, two left-wing newspapers in the other, and with a pistol on his hip (see Photo 16). The Warren Commission was to decide that the photograph was authentic. Oswald’s wife, indeed, was to say that she had photographed her husband in this odd pose the previous spring. The background in the pictures was the backyard of the house where the couple had lived at that time. An FBI photographic expert determined that the photographs had been taken with an Imperial Reflex camera believed to have belonged to Oswald. On top of all that, there was the ballistics evidence.
As we have already seen, expert opinion was that the “magic bullet,” found on the afternoon of the assassination at Parkland Hospital, was fired in the Mannlicher-Carcano to the exclusion of all other weapons. The three cartridge cases found at the Depository were also firmly linked with the rifle. The ballistics evidence involved in the policeman’s shooting seemed damning, too. Cases found near the scene of the killing had been fired in the pistol that Oswald had with him when arrested.