False Witness (25 page)

The prosecution began this phase of Garrison's case by calling Abraham Zapruder, the dress manufacturer famous for his home movie of the assassination. Garrison had subpoenaed the film, which was then owned by
Life
magazine. Zapruder's testimony paved the way for the trial's most sensational event, the showing of his movie in the courtroom. The other Dealey Plaza witnesses were a mixed lot, some impressive, some not. Ironically, a defense rebuttal witness, Kennedy autopsy pathologist Dr. Pierre Finck, gave the most significant medical testimony. None of this evidence had any bearing on the charge against Clay Shaw.

Dymond made that point when he objected to the entire Dallas line of inquiry. The events there, he said, were irrelevant “as to what happened here.” Despite past rulings to the contrary and as expected, Judge Haggerty sided with the prosecution and the trial of the Warren Report was officially sanctioned.
*
Props were quickly unveiled: a mockup of Dealey Plaza, an aerial photograph, and a survey plat for topography. Jim Garrison made his third appearance in the courtroom for the occasion, remaining about thirty minutes. Handling this segment of the prosecution's case were Asst. D.A.'s Alvin Oser, with a crew cut and ringing delivery, and large, baby-faced William Alford.

Abraham Zapruder, balding, wearing glasses, and displaying a gentle
manner, told of standing on a concrete abutment next to the grassy knoll filming the motorcade as the presidential limousine approached. Zapruder heard a shot. The president “grabbed himself with his hands towards his chest or throat and leaned towards Jackie,” Zapruder said. Then he heard another shot. “I saw the head practically open up,” Zapruder stated (showing his emotion), “and blood and many more things, whatever it was, brains, just came out of his head.” He stopped his camera, began walking around and crying out, “They killed him! They killed him!”
²

This harrowing testimony was nothing compared to the film. Today most everyone has seen it; many possess their own copies, but in 1969, except for the Warren Commission, its staff, and a few others, only a handful of journalists and researchers had viewed the print at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. In terms of long-range influence, other than the jury's verdict, this public screening was the most important moment of the proceedings.
³

Clay Shaw now became a spectator at his own trial. He, the attorneys, the press, and the audience all shifted to the jury side of the room, lining the walls in order to view the screen. In the darkened courtroom “the only sound was the subdued clatter of the projector,” one reporter wrote. The film, he noted, clearly showed “Kennedy slumping forward and clutching his throat after he was hit for the first time. Seconds later, his head appears to snap backward as the bullet's impact causes it to virtually explode in a spray of blood and tissue . . . the intent audience gasped as the fatal shot destroyed the president's head.”
⁴
The prosecution ran the film four more times that afternoon.
*
Before the trial concluded, it was shown nine more, always over Dymond's objection. For the defense, the film was more than grisly and unforgettable. They feared its impact would move the jury to exact retribution from the only target available, the defendant. Irvin Dymond labeled that Thursday afternoon their
darkest hour
.
⁵

Over the next five days, the prosecution called two FBI agents, a photographic lab supervisor, a pathologist, as well as a batch of people present
at Dealey Plaza when the shots were fired. Dymond, laying the groundwork for an appeal, objected to the testimony of each on the grounds of irrelevancy to the issues in this case and, overruled each time, reserved a bill of exception, a litany also repeated for each of the many exhibits the state introduced.

The co-worker who drove Oswald to work the day of the assassination said Oswald carried a package into the building that morning, assumed to be the dismantled Mannlicher-Carcano rifle. Oswald told him the package contained “curtain rods.” FBI photographic expert Lyndal Shaneyfelt took the stand and the film was shown four times outside the presence of the jury and again after the jurors came back. On cross-examination Dymond posed the question the prosecution had avoided. “My impression,” Shaneyfelt replied (referring to the bullet that struck the president in the head), “is the shot came from the rear.” The brain matter, he noted, was “going in a forward motion.” And he indicated he had found no evidence that either of the shots that hit the president came from any direction other than the rear. The headline in that day's
States-Item
blared the news: JFK S
HOT FROM
R
EAR
, FBI E
XPERT
T
ESTIFIES
.
⁶
The prosecution immediately scrapped its plans to call Shaneyfelt's colleague, Robert Frazier, and the defense added him to its witness list.

Wilma Bond, Philip Willis, and Mary Moorman took the stand to tell about the photographs they took that showed the grassy knoll and the reaction of the crowd. Some ran toward it. A former railroad company employee on the triple overpass described seeing “a puff of smoke” coming from under the trees on the knoll. Later, on the rail behind the picket fence, he noticed “muddy footprints.”
*
William Eugene Newman, Jr., one of several witnesses who thought the shots came from the knoll, was standing at the curb to the president's right. He saw President Kennedy's “ear flying off.”
^†
A Dallas motorcycle policeman riding behind the presidential limousine said he and his motorcycle
were splattered with “red splotches” and “grey matter” (consistent with human blood and tissue). A former Dallas deputy sheriff claimed that after the shooting he saw Oswald jump into a “light green Rambler station wagon” and later heard Oswald say the car belonged to Mrs. Paine.
*
A construction worker said he saw three men leaving the Texas School Book Depository and two of them entered a Rambler Station Wagon; the FBI, he claimed, warned him to keep his mouth shut.
^†
A woman standing on Houston near Elm observed two men in another Dealey Plaza building and one of them, she said, was “holding a gun.”
⁷

Reporter David Snyder sat in the courtroom day after day listening to this testimony and “wondering what the hell it had to do with Clay Shaw.” The defendant wondered, too. Shaw found it “fascinating” but couldn't see where he “fit in.” He didn't. That was one of the fundamental flaws in Garrison's case.

Dr. John Nichols, an assistant professor of pathology at the University of Kansas, who had studied the Zapruder film, took the stand and prompted another showing of it. Nichols testified that the president and Governor Connally appeared to be reacting to a separate “stimulus.”
^‡
Nichols also found the Zapruder film “compatible” with the gunshot wound to the head coming “from the front.” (After a one-day recess for the Mardi Gras Rex Parade, court reconvened with Dr. Nichols still on the stand.) If the president had been struck in the rear of the head, Nichols said, his movement would have been forward.
^§
On cross, Dymond pointed out that Nichols's testimony was more about photography than forensic pathology. By asking Nichols to describe the steps in an autopsy, Dymond emphasized that this testimony was based solely on the Zapruder film.
⁸

The prosecution returned to its New Orleans scenario in the person of Mrs. Jessie Parker, a black former hostess in the Eastern Airlines VIP room at New Orleans International Airport. She claimed that on December 14, 1966, she saw Clay Shaw sign the name “Clay Bertrand” in the guest book. The prosecution offered no theory to explain why Shaw, if he had conspired to murder the president using this alias, would have continued to use it afterwards. The signature appeared on the last line of a page, where it could have been added at any time by anyone.
⁹

On the heels of the VIP lounge book signature, a plus for the prosecution, Alcock concluded his case with a spectacular defeat from Judge Haggerty. It involved the strange episode of Police Officer Aloysius J. Habighorst and Shaw's fingerprint card. Habighorst fingerprinted Shaw the night of his arrest and filled out the card. He claimed Shaw had admitted using the alias, “Clay Bertrand.” It was then typed on the card, and Shaw signed it. Shaw said he had signed a blank card, which meant the alias was filled in afterwards. The state naturally wanted to present the card and Habighorst's testimony to the jury. But because Garrison had allowed the matter to be widely publicized six months earlier,
*
admissibility was now in question. The matter was argued outside the presence of the jury.
¹⁰

Officer Habighorst testified that he obtained the information directly from Shaw. But three other police officers gave testimony inconsistent with Habighorst's. The sergeant assigned to guard Shaw was one of them. He was within a few feet of Shaw and heard no question about aliases asked. Two of Shaw's attorneys—Edward Wegmann and Salvatore Panzeca—then Shaw himself took the stand and hotly refuted Habighorst's story.
^11
†

After asking some questions of his own, Judge Haggerty rejected the fingerprint card evidence. Shaw's constitutional rights, he said, had been violated twice.
^‡
But Haggerty had heard enough to be moved to express himself further. “So even if Officer Habighorst is telling the
truth,” Haggerty said, “and I doubt it very seriously . . .” Alcock leaped to his feet. “Are you passing on the credibility of the state's witnesses,” he demanded, his voice trembling with outrage, “in front of the press and the world?” “The jury is not hearing it,” Haggerty replied, “That is the main thing. The whole world can hear it. I do not believe Officer Habighorst.” Then he said it again. “I do not believe him.”
¹²

S
TATE IS
S
TUNNED BY
J
UDGE'S
R
ULING
, read the headline in a local newspaper. The state was not alone. Everyone was stunned, not by the ruling but the remark. Alcock immediately moved for a mistrial, which Haggerty immediately denied. Alcock said he would appeal to the Louisiana Supreme Court. That was fine with Haggerty, who adjourned court to await the Supreme Court's decision. He announced it the next morning. Denied. And Haggerty refused to reconsider his own decision. “I will not change my mind,” he told Alcock.

The jury was brought in. Haggerty instructed the prosecution to call its next witness. Alcock “dramatically,” by one account, “intoned the words, ‘The state rests.' ”

No one expected it. Everyone was waiting for the big disclosure that Garrison had to have up his sleeve. He had, after all,
solved
the case. For many who had believed in him, reality began seeping in. Yet the faithful still flocked to his side and the general sentiment among the media covering the trial who were sympathetic to Shaw remained extremely pessimistic. This was, after all, New Orleans.

Dymond quickly asked for a directed verdict of acquittal, claiming the state had failed to prove a prima facie case. Alcock objected and Judge Haggerty adjourned court to read Perry Russo's transcript before ruling. The courtroom was packed in the morning when Haggerty, without explanation, denied the motion, triggering applause and a few soft “yeas” from the spectators. One reporter attributed the outburst to people who didn't want the entertainment to end. Jim Garrison received the news in the judge's chambers and left immediately afterwards, saying, “I have no reaction. I have no nervous system anymore.” “I am still confident I will be vindicated,” Shaw told reporters.
¹³

After a five-minute recess, the jury was brought in and the defense began its presentation.

The first witness was Marina Oswald Porter, the pretty, blue-eyed
Russian wife of the accused assassin who provided something for both sides. She and her friend Ruth Paine both testified that Lee Harvey Oswald was beardless and always neat and clean. He was nothing like the dirty, unkempt “Leon Oswald” Russo described. Both women also said that Ruth Paine's station wagon was parked outside her house in a Dallas suburb (where Marina was living) when the president was shot. As for the Clinton witnesses, Marina said neither she nor Oswald could drive a car. She had never been to Clinton, nor had he to her knowledge and she had never known him to use the name “Harvey Oswald.” Until the trial she had never heard of Clay Shaw, Clay or Clem Bertrand, or Perry Russo. She didn't recognize the photographs of David Ferrie, and had never seen Clay Shaw until
today
.

On cross-examination she acknowledged that Oswald told her he had fired at General Edwin Walker, though she could not remember when it happened.
*
For awhile after Oswald lost his job at the Reily Coffee Company in New Orleans, he pretended he still was going to work and she admitted she had no idea where he went instead. But he was away from home only one night, she said, when he was in jail after his arrest in the leaflet-scuffling incident.

A business colleague of Clay Shaw and Shaw's secretary described his unusually heavy work load during the time he was allegedly seen in Clinton. Shaw was away from the office only one day, visiting his parents. Both said Shaw never wore a hat, as claimed by one of the Clinton witnesses, nor tight pants, as described by Perry Russo. Both also indicated his trip to the West Coast (prior to the assassination) was to fulfill a speaking engagement in Oregon.