Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy (11 page)

Jack Dougherty, another Depository employee whose Warren Commission testimony appears somewhat incoherent, nevertheless said: "Yes, I
saw [Oswald] when he first came in the door . . . [Commission attorney
Joseph Ball asked, "Did he have anything in his hands or arms?"] Well,
not that I could see of."

Many Depository employees saw Oswald that morning. He appeared to
be carrying on normal work duties, particularly on the sixth floor where he
was assigned that day.

Frazier said he didn't notice Oswald after noon. He told the Warren
Commission that as the presidential motorcade approached, he joined other
Depository employees who were standing on the steps of the building
facing Elm.

Minutes before the presidential motorcade arrived an odd incident occurred that has puzzled researchers for years.

About 12:15 P.M., a young man described as wearing green Army
fatigues collapsed at 100 N. Houston, near the front door of the Texas
School Book Depository. He apparently suffered some sort of seizure.
Dallas policeman D. V. Harkness radioed the police dispatcher to send an
ambulance to that location at 12:18 P.M. Radio logs showed that the
ambulance, after picking up the victim, radioed, "We are enroute to
Parkland." However, Parkland never recorded a patient registering at this
time, and the entire incident seemed forgotten.

Despite the timing and proximity to the assassination, there is no
mention of this incident in the Warren Commission Report and the FBI
didn't get around to investigating until May 1964.

And this investigation took place only after a former employee of
O'Neal Funeral Home called the Bureau's Dallas office to report the
incident, adding the patient "disappeared" after arriving at Parkland.
Apparently more curious about the incident than the FBI, this caller stated
he "felt it possible that this incident may have been planned to distract
attention from the shooting that was to follow."

The FBI detailed their investigation of the matter in Commission Document 1245, which was not included in the Warren Report or its twenty-six
volumes.

Agents contacted the ambulance driver, Aubrey Rike, who said he had picked up a man "who was conscious and only slightly injured with a
facial laceration." Rike added that in the confusion at Parkland, this man
had simply walked off. Rike also said a Secret Service agent at Parkland
told him to remain there "because they might need [his ambulance] to
move the President to another location."

On May 26, Bureau agents located the "victim" after finding his name
in O'Neal records. Jerry B. Belknap had paid his $12.50 ambulance
charge back on December 2, 1963. Based on a later FBI report and an
interview with Belknap by assassination researcher Jerry D. Rose, the
following story came to light.

Belknap said he had suffered from seizures since being struck by a car
while getting off a school bus as a child. He was standing near the
Depository when he stepped back from the crowd and lost consciousness.
He said the next thing he knew a policeman was standing over him.

Once at Parkland, he was sitting on a small table and, after asking for
attention, was told to lie down. He said that a short time later there was a
great rush of people who went into a different section of the emergency room.

He said a male attendant finally brought him some water and an aspirin,
but that, after realizing that he was not going to get immediate treatment,
he walked out without registering.

Outside, Belknap caught a bus back downtown, where he first learned
of the assassination.

Intriguingly, Belknap told Rose that he had been interviewed by both
Dallas police and the FBI within days of the assassination, months before
the FBI's reported investigation in May 1964. He commented that the two
police agencies apparently distrusted each other and both asked him the
same questions. Asked about the June 1964 FBI report concerning him,
Belknap offered the explanation that perhaps an agent had called him on
the phone and simply confirmed the results of the earlier interview.
Belknap also stated in 1983 that an investigator from "some committee in
Washington" had contacted him within the past few years. However, if
this investigator was with the House Select Committee on Assassinations,
there is no reference to him in its report or attendant volumes.

Belknap died in 1986.

The entire "seizure" episode is strange and full of contradictions and
coincidence-Belknap even reported seeing Jack Ruby once "acting like a
bigshot" and he said he lost consciousness while the FBI report said he didn't.

Researchers view the incident as either a strangely convenient coincidence or as some as-yet-undiscovered plot to distract police and bystanders
while assassins moved into position just prior to Kennedy's arrival in
Dealey Plaza.

All agree that the incident deserves further investigation, particularly in
light of the fact that the ambulance drivers who reportedly took Belknap to
Parkland-Rike and Dennis McGuire-were the same ones who, while at Parkland Hospital, loaded Kennedy's body into their ambulance for the
return trip to Love Field that fateful afternoon.

At the time of the shooting, even persons within the Depository believed
the shots came from elsewhere.

Steven F. Wilson was vice president of a school textbook-publishing
company and had an office on the third floor of the Depository. Wilson
told the FBI he watched the motorcade go by from a closed third-floor
window but lost sight of the President when he "became obscured by some
trees which are on Elm Street." He further stated:

In a matter of ten seconds or less . . . I heard three shots . .. there was
a greater space of time between the second and third shots than between
the first and second. The three shots were fired within a matter of less
than five seconds. The shots sounded to me like rifle shots. At that
time, it seemed like the shots came from the west end of the building or
from the colonnade located on Elm Street across from the west end of
our building [the pergola on the Grassy Knoll]. The shots really did not
sound like they came from above me.

Mrs. Elsie Dorman, who worked for Scott-Foresman Co. in the Depository, was in her fourth-floor office filming the presidential motorcade as it
passed below. With her were fellow workers Dorothy Ann Garner, Victoria Adams, and Sandra Styles. Garner told the FBI: "I thought at the time
the shots or reports came from a point to the west of the building."

Adams told the Warren Commission:

... we heard a shot, and it was a pause, and then a second shot, and
then a third shot. It sounded like a firecracker or a cannon at a football
game, it seems as if it came from the right below [the area of the Grassy
Knoll] rather than from the left above [the sixth-floor window].

Styles told Bureau agents she could not tell where the shots came from,
but that she and Adams "left the office at this time, went down the back
stairs, and left the building at the back door." Neither she nor Adams
remarked about hearing anyone on the stairs moments after the shooting,
although it was these same stairs that Oswald would have had to descend
in time for his meeting with a Dallas policeman.

Wesley Frazier, who had driven Oswald to work that morning, was on
the front steps of the Depository. He told the Warren Commission of his
experience:

.. . right after he [Kennedy] went by . . . I heard a sound and if you
have ever been around motorcycles you know how they backfire, and so
I thought one of them motorcycles backfired because right before his car came down, now there were several of these motorcycle policemen, and
they took off down toward the underpass down there . . . I heard two
more of the same type, you know, sounds, and by that time people were
running everywhere and falling down and screaming . . . I figured it
was somebody shooting at President Kennedy . . . and from where I
was standing it sounded like it was coming from down [at the] railroad
tracks there. . . . So, we started back into the building and it wasn't but
just a few minutes that there were a lot of police officers and so forth all
over the building there.

Frazier said one of the Depository employees standing by him on the
steps of the building as Kennedy passed by was Billy Lovelady, who was
to become well-known to researchers as "the man in the doorway."

Associated Press photographer James Altgens snapped a picture seconds
after Kennedy was first struck by a bullet. In the background of this photo
a man can be seen standing in the west corner of the Texas School Book
Depository's front doorway.

Soon after the assassination, many people-including his mothersuggested the man in the doorway looked amazingly like Lee Harvey
Oswald. Obviously, if the man in the photo was Oswald, he could not
have been firing a rifle on the sixth floor.

The Warren Commission, based primarily on testimony from Depository
employees, concluded the man in the doorway was Billy Lovelady. After
being interviewed at length by the FBI, Lovelady identified the man in the
photo as himself.

Lovelady, who had worked at the Depository since 1961, was one of the
men assigned to lay plywood flooring on the sixth floor that day. He said
about 11:50 A.M. he and other employees stopped work so they could clean
up before taking their lunch break. Lovelady said the workers took both of
the Depository's two elevators and were racing each other down to ground
level. He recalled hearing Oswald shout to them from the fifth floor to
wait or to send an elevator back for him.

After buying a soft drink, Lovelady told the Warren Commission, he
went out the main door and sat on the steps of the Depository to eat his
lunch with some co-workers. Lovelady said he remained there as the
motorcade passed by, then heard some noises: "I thought it was firecrackers or somebody celebrating the arrival of the President. It didn't occur to
me at first what had happened until this Gloria [Calvary] came running up
to us and told us the President had been shot."

Asked where he thought the shots came from, Lovelady replied: "Right
there around that concrete little deal on that knoll."

In fact, Lovelady, along with his supervisor, joined the throng of people
rushing toward the Grassy Knoll, but a short time later returned to the
Depository, entering though a back door unchallenged.

William Shelley, Depository manager and Oswald's immediate supervisor, acknowledged that Lovelady was on the steps of the building when
Kennedy passed by. He told the Warren Commission he heard "something
sounded like it was a firecracker and a slight pause and then two more a
little bit closer together." He said the shots sounded like they came from
west of the Depository.

Shelley said Gloria Calvary ran up after about a minute and told them
the President had been shot. Shelley and Lovelady both ran across a small
street in front of the Depository to the north curb of Elm, then trotted
down toward the railroad yards where police were converging. However,
after seeing nothing remarkable, Shelley returned to the Depository.

Additionally, Wesley Frazier and a Depository clerk, Sarah Stanton,
both signed statements averring they were with Shelley and Lovelady on
the Depository steps at the time of the shooting.

That should have been the end of questions concerning the identity of
the man in the doorway. However, on February 29, 1964, the FBI
interviewed Lovelady and photographed him wearing a short-sleeved shirt
with vertical stripes, totally unlike the dark, mottled long-sleeved shirt in
the Altgens picture.

Later Lovelady explained the discrepancies in the shirts by telling CBS
News: "Well, when the FBI took [my picture] in the shirt, I told them it
wasn't the same shirt."

The shirt Lovelady was wearing that day-and subsequently tried to sell
for a large sum of money-was a broad plaid, which he said was buttoned
at the neck. The man in the doorway photo appears to be wearing a dark
shirt open to the naval with a white T-shirt underneath, exactly what
Oswald had on when arrested less than an hour and a half later.

And even Dallas police chief Jesse Curry seemed to continue to question
the identity of the man in the doorway. In his 1969 book, Curry compared
photos of the doorway man with Oswald and wrote: "The Warren Commission attempted to prove that the man was Billy N. Lovelady who
worked at the depository."

The House Select Committee on Assassinations considered this issue in
depth. They had anthropologists study the features of the man in the
photograph and were given photographic analyses of the man's shirt. The
Committee concluded: ". . . that it is highly improbable that the man in
the doorway was Oswald and highly probable that he was Lovelady."

However, since Lovelady said he was sitting on the steps and the man in
the photo is standing, peering around the edge of the front door alcoveand since the FBI did such a dismal job of proving it was Lovelady, some
suspicion still lingers about the identity of the man in the doorway. Most
researchers today are ready to concede that the man may have been Lovelady.