JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (93 page)

The fleeing man identified later as Oswald was seen finally by Johnny Calvin Brewer, manager of Hardy’s Shoestore, located a few doors east of the Texas Theater. After spotting the man acting suspiciously in the recessed area in front of his store, Brewer went outside. He saw the man ducking into the theater up the block. The ticket-seller, Julia Postal, confirmed to Brewer that the man had not bought a ticket. She called the police.
[427]

However, the man who shot Tippit, fled the murder scene, sneaked into the Texas Theater just before 1:45 p.m., and was identified as Lee Harvey Oswald, posed another bi-location problem. Oswald once again seemed to be in two places at the same time.

According to Warren H. “Butch” Burroughs, the concession stand operator at the Texas Theater, Lee Harvey Oswald entered the theater sometime between 1:00 and 1:07 p.m., several minutes before Officer Tippit was slain seven blocks away.
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If true, Butch Burroughs’s observation would eliminate Oswald as a candidate for Tippet’s murder. Perhaps for that reason, Burroughs was asked by a Warren Commission attorney the apparently straightforward question, “Did you see [Oswald] come in the theater?” and answered honestly, “No, sir; I didn’t.”
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What someone reading this testimony would not know is that Butch Burroughs was unable to see anyone enter the theater from where he was standing at his concession stand, unless that person came into the area where he was working. As he explained to me in an interview, there was a partition between his concession stand and the front door. Someone could enter the theater, go directly up a flight of stairs to the balcony, and not be seen from the concession stand.
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That, Burroughs said, is what Oswald apparently did. However, Burroughs still knew Oswald had come into the theater “between 1:00 and 1:07 p.m.” because he saw him inside the theater soon after that. As he told me, he sold popcorn to Oswald at 1:15 p.m.
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—information that the Warren Commission did not solicit from him in his testimony. When Oswald bought his popcorn at 1:15 p.m., this was exactly the same time the
Warren Report
said Officer Tippit was being shot to death
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—evidently by someone else.

Butch Burroughs was not alone in noticing Oswald in the Texas Theater by then. The man who would soon be identified as the president’s assassin drew the attention of several moviegoers because of his odd behavior.

Edging into a row of seats in the right rear section of the ground floor, Oswald had squeezed in front of eighteen-year-old Jack Davis. He then sat down in the seat right next to him. Because there were fewer than twenty people in the entire nine-hundred-seat theater, Davis wondered why the man chose such close proximity to him. Whatever the reason, the man didn’t stay there long. Oswald (as Davis would later identify him) got up quickly, moved across the aisle, and sat down next to someone else in the almost deserted theater. In a few moments, he stood up again and walked out to the lobby.
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Davis thought it obvious Oswald was looking for someone.
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Yet it must have been someone he didn’t know personally. He sat next to each new person just long enough to receive a prearranged signal, in the absence of which he moved on to another possible contact.

Back out in the lobby at 1:15 p.m., Oswald then bought popcorn from Butch Burroughs at the concession stand.
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Burroughs told author Jim Marrs and myself that he saw Oswald go back in the ground floor of the theater and sit next to a pregnant woman
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—in another apparently fruitless effort to find his contact. Several minutes later, “the pregnant woman got up and went to the ladies washroom,” Burroughs said. He “heard the restroom door close just shortly before Dallas police came rushing into the theater.”
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Jack Davis said it may have been “twenty minutes or so” after Oswald returned from the lobby (when Burroughs saw Oswald sit by the pregnant woman) that the house lights came on and the police rushed in.
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The police arrested Oswald in a curious way. They entered the theater from the front and back, blocking all exits and surrounding Oswald. Officer M. N. McDonald and three other officers came in from behind the movie screen. With the theater lights on, McDonald scanned the audience.
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Johnny Brewer, who had seen the man who looked like Oswald duck into the theater, showed McDonald where the man was sitting—in the third row from the rear of the ground floor.
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With the suspect identified and located, McDonald and an accompanying officer, instead of apprehending the man in the rear of the theater, began searching people between him and them.
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As the police proceeded slowly toward Oswald, it was almost as if they were provoking the suspected police-killer to break away from his seat. His attempt to escape would have given Tippit’s enraged fellow officers an excuse to shoot him.
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When McDonald finally reached his suspect in the third row from the back, Oswald stood up and pulled out his pistol. While he struggled with McDonald and the other officers who had converged on the scene, they heard the snap of the hammer on his gun misfiring.
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However, Oswald, instead of being shot to death on the spot, was wrestled into submission by the police and placed under arrest. The police hustled him out to a squad car. They drove him to Dallas Police Headquarters in City Hall.

Butch Burroughs, who witnessed Oswald’s arrest, startled me in his interview by saying he saw a second arrest occur in the Texas Theater only “three or four minutes later.”
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He said the Dallas Police then arrested “an Oswald lookalike.” Burroughs said the second man “looked almost like Oswald, like he was his brother or something.”
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When I questioned the comparison by asking, “Could you see the second man as well as you could see Oswald?” he said, “Yes, I could see both of them. They looked alike.”
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After the officers half-carried and half-dragged Oswald to the police car in front of the theater, within a space of three or four minutes, Burroughs saw the second Oswald placed under arrest and handcuffed. The Oswald look-alike, however, was taken by police not out the front but out the back of the theater.
[447]

What happened next we can learn from another neglected witness, Bernard Haire.
[448]

Bernard J. Haire was the owner of Bernie’s Hobby House, just two doors east of the Texas Theater. Haire went outside his store when he saw police cars congregating in front of the theater.
[449]
When he couldn’t see what was happening because of the crowd, he went back through his store into the alley out back. It, too, was full of police cars, but there were fewer spectators. Haire walked up the alley. When he stopped opposite the rear door of the theater, he witnessed what he would think for decades was the arrest of Lee Harvey Oswald.

“Police brought a young white man out,” Haire told an interviewer. “The man was dressed in a pullover shirt and slacks. He seemed to be flushed, as if he’d been in a struggle. Police put the man in a police car and drove off.”
[450]

When Haire was told in 1987 that Lee Harvey Oswald had been brought out the
front
of the theater by police, he was shocked.

“I don’t know who I saw arrested,” he said in bewilderment.
[451]

Butch Burroughs and Bernard Haire are complementary witnesses. From their perspectives both inside and outside the Texas Theater, they saw an Oswald double arrested and taken to a police car in the back alley only minutes after the arrest of Lee Harvey Oswald. Burroughs’s and Haire’s independent, converging testimonies provide critical insight into the mechanics of the plot. In a comprehensive intelligence scenario for Kennedy’s and Tippit’s murders, the plan culminated in Oswald’s Friday arrest and Sunday murder (probably a fallback from his being set up to be killed in the Texas Theater by the police).

There is a hint of the second Oswald’s arrest in the Dallas police records.

According to the Dallas Police Department’s official Homicide Report on J. D. Tippit, “Suspect was later arrested
in the balcony
of the Texas theatre at 231 W. Jefferson.”
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Dallas Police detective L. D. Stringfellow also reported to Captain W. P. Gannaway, “Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested
in the balcony
of the Texas Theater.”
[453]

To whom are the Homicide Report and Detective Stringfellow referring? Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested in the orchestra, not the balcony. Are these documents referring to the Dallas Police Department’s second arrest at the Texas Theater that afternoon? Was Butch Burroughs witnessing an arrest of the Oswald look-alike that actually began in the balcony? That would have likely been the double’s hiding place, after he entered the theater without paying, thereby drawing attention to himself and leading the police to the apprehension of his likeness, Lee Harvey Oswald (who was already inside). As Butch Burroughs pointed out, anyone coming in the front of the theater could head immediately up the stairs to the balcony without being seen from the concession stand.

The Oswald double, after having been put in the police car in the alley, must have been driven a short distance and released on higher intelligence orders. Unfortunately for the plotters, he was seen again soon. With the scapegoat, Lee Harvey Oswald, now safely in custody, we can presume that the double was not supposed to be seen again in Dallas—or anywhere else. Had he not been seen, the CIA’s double-Oswald strategy in an Oak Cliff shell game might have eluded independent investigators forever. But thanks to other key witnesses who have emerged, we now have detailed evidence that the double was seen again—not just once but twice.

At 2:00 p.m., as Lee Harvey Oswald sat handcuffed in the back seat of a patrol car boxed in by police officers on his way to jail, Oswald knew what final role had been chosen for him in the assassination scenario. That night, while being led through police headquarters, he would shout out to the press, “I’m just a patsy!”
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Also at about 2:00 p.m., a man identified as Oswald was seen in a car eight blocks away from the Texas Theater, still very much at large and keeping a low profile.
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A sharp-eyed auto mechanic spotted him.

T. F. White was a sixty-year-old, longtime employee of Mack Pate’s Garage in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas. While White worked on an automobile the afternoon of the assassination, he could hear police sirens screaming up and down Davis Street only a block away. He also heard radio reports describing a suspect then thought to be in Oak Cliff.
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The mechanic looked out the open doors of the garage. He watched as a red 1961 Falcon drove into the parking lot of the El Chico restaurant across the street. The Falcon parked in an odd position after going a few feet into the lot. The driver remained seated in the car.
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White said later, “The man in the car appeared to be hiding.”
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White kept his eye on the man in the Falcon.

When Mack Pate returned from his lunch break a few minutes later, T. F. White pointed out to his boss the oddly parked Falcon with its waiting driver who seemed to be hiding. Pate told White to watch the car carefully, reminding him of earlier news reports they had heard about a possible assassination attempt against President Kennedy in Houston the day before involving a red Falcon.
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T. F. White walked across the street to investigate. He halted about ten to fifteen yards from the car. He could see the driver was wearing a white t-shirt.
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The man turned toward White and looked at him full face. White stared back at him. Not wanting to provoke a possible assassin, White began a retreat to the garage. However, he paused, took a scrap of paper from his coveralls pocket, and wrote down the Texas license plate of the car: PP 4537.
[461]

That night, while T. F. White was watching television with his wife, he recognized the Dallas Police Department’s prisoner, Lee Harvey Oswald, as the man he had seen in the red Falcon in El Chico’s parking lot. White was unfazed by what he did not yet know—that at the same time he had seen one Oswald sitting freely in the Falcon, the other Oswald was sitting handcuffed in a Dallas police car on his way to jail. Mrs. White, fearing the encompassing arms of a conspiracy, talked her husband out of reporting his information to the authorities.
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Thus, the Oswald sighted in the parking lot might have escaped history, but for the fact White was confronted by an alert reporter.