Who Really Killed Kennedy?: 50 Years Later: Stunning New Revelations About the JFK Assassination (16 page)

Mr. Belin
: About how long did Officer Baker stand there with Lee Harvey Oswald after you saw them?

Mr. Truly
: He left immediately after I told him—after he asked me, does this man work here. I said, yes. The officer left him immediately.

Mr. Belin
: Did you hear Lee Harvey Oswald say anything?

Mr. Truly
: Not a thing.

Mr. Belin
: Did you see any expression on his face? Or weren’t you paying attention?

Mr. Truly
. He didn’t seem to be excited or overly afraid or anything. He might have been a bit startled, like I might have been if somebody confronted me. But I cannot recall any change in expression of any kind.
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Mrs. Robert Reid, a clerical supervisor with an office on the second floor of the Texas School Book Depository Building was the next person to see Oswald. Mrs. Reid had been standing in the street in front of the depository as the motorcade went by. After the shooting, she ran back into the building and went directly to her office.

Mr. Belin
: You went into your office?

Mrs. Reid
: Yes, sir.

Mr. Belin
: And then what did you do?

Mrs. Reid
: Well, I kept walking and I looked up and Oswald was coming to the back of the office. I met him by the time I passed my desk several feet and I told him, I said, “Oh, the President has been shot, but maybe they didn’t hit him.”

He mumbled something to me, I kept walking, he did, too. I didn’t pay any attention to what he said because I had no thoughts of anything of him having any connection with it at all because he was very calm. He had gotten a Coke and was holding it in his hands and I guess the reason it impressed me seeing him in there I thought it was a little strange that one of the warehouse boys would be up in the office at that time, not that he had done anything wrong. The only time I had seen him in the office was to come and get change and he already had his Coke in hand so he didn’t come for change and I dismissed him. I didn’t think anything else.
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Mrs. Reid further testified that Oswald’s expression was calm and that he was moving “at a very slow pace.”
¹⁹²

Oswald, in his first police interview with Dallas Police Department Captain Will Fritz, explained he left the Texas School Book Depository by the front door. He stated that as he was leaving, two men intercepted him at the front door, identified themselves as Secret Service agents, and asked for the location of a telephone. Pierce Allman, a newsman with
WFAA-TV in Dallas telephoned the news of the shooting from a phone in the book depository, after a man he could not identify directed him and one of his fellow workers, Terry Ford, to a telephone. Dallas Police did not question Allman regarding whether the man in the book depository who directed him to a telephone was Oswald. Shown pictures of Oswald by the Secret Service, Allman could not state for certain whether Oswald was the person at the book depository he asked for a phone. All Allman could remember was that the man helping him was a white male.
¹⁹³

William Manchester, in his 1967 bestselling book,
The Death of a President
, identifies then-NBC reporter Robert MacNeil as the person Oswald paused to direct to a telephone, some three minutes after the first shot was fired, as Oswald left the book depository by the front entrance.
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MacNeil, who was on his first presidential reporting assignment, had stopped the press bus to get out, once he realized there was a shooting. After running on top of the grassy knoll to look over the concrete barrier at the top of the triple underpass to see into the railroad yard, MacNeil did run to the book depository and did ask someone at the entrance for a phone. MacNeil saw Oswald several times at the jail but he reported nothing clicked in his mind to recognize him. Oswald said the man who asked for the phone was a young blond crew cut Secret Service man, a description to which MacNeil admits fitting at the time. “Well, I was young, blond, short hair, grey suit, press badge,” MacNeil admitted later. “And so Manchester says in the book that Oswald mistook me for a Secret Service man. All of that is intriguing. But what intrigues me more is the unconscious activity of having a little daydream that then programmed me unconsciously to do what I actually did when the shots were fired—that is to stop the bus, get out, and chase.”
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What is even more intriguing is how Lee Harvey Oswald could have fired three shots from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository in a span of ten seconds beginning at approximately 12:30 p.m. local time, then manage to hide his rifle between boxes on the other side of the building away from his sniper’s nest in the northwest corner window, and run down four flights of stairs—from the sixth floor to the second-floor lunchroom—only to remain calm, cool, and collected, as a Dallas motorcycle policeman with a drawn weapon, accompanied by the building manager, stopped him for questioning. How could Oswald have done this, plus strolling into
Mrs. Reid’s office, with a soft drink in hand that he just purchased from the lunch room vending machine, all in the span of three or four minutes? Then, Oswald walked quietly out the front door, pausing to give directions to what he thought were Secret Service agents as to where they could find a telephone to use inside the building. What nerves of steel it would take after having just assassinated the president of the United States to hang around the building long enough to drink a soda and simply stroll through the building, exiting through the front door. Rather than rushing out of the building through the back exit to escape law enforcement who could be rushing in to seal off the building, he took his time.

The eye-witness testimony of Oswald’s behavior in the minutes immediately following the assassination suggest instead that Oswald was either in the second-floor lunchroom or on his way there when the shooting actually happened. In the thousands of pages of sworn testimony the Warren Commission took, there is no testimony whatsoever from anyone who worked in the Texas School Book Depository on November 22, 1963, who claims to have seen Oswald on the sixth floor at the time of the shooting. The truth is, no one in the Texas School Book Depository that day who saw Oswald in the building in the immediate aftermath of the shooting thought to finger him as a suspect.

Victoria Elizabeth Adams, a twenty-two-year-old employee of textbook publisher Scott Foresman watched the JFK motorcade from the fourth floor of the Texas School Book Depository as it passed by. After seeing the fatal head shot, Adams and her coworker Sandra Styles ran to the stairwell and raced down the stairs to the first floor, determined to get out the back of the building to see what they could find in the railroad yard behind the fence on the grassy knoll. The key aspect of her testimony was that the stairway Adams took was the same stairway Lee Harvey Oswald would have had to have taken to get from the sixth floor to the lunch-room where he was found by Baker and Truly. Yet, Adams testified she saw and heard nobody else on the stairs at that time. She estimated the time between hearing the shots and leaving the window to head for the stairway was between fifteen and twenty seconds. She estimated it took
less than a minute to run down the stairs from the fourth floor to the first floor. The problem was that Adams did not see Lee Harvey Oswald passing her on the stairs; see testified she did not hear anyone else on the stairs when she was running down.
¹⁹⁶

Investigative reporter Barry Ernest describes in his book,
The Girl on the Stairs,
his thirty-five-year search to find and interview Victoria Adams.
¹⁹⁷
When he finally found her in 2002, Adams repeated for him her story in person. She explained how various government officials, including the Dallas Police Department, had harassed her over her testimony. She produced for Ernest a 1964 letter her attorney had written to J. Lee Rankin, the chief counsel for the Warren Commission, complaining that someone had made changes in her deposition, altering her meaning. She explained to Ernest that she left Dallas after the assassination because she was seeking to disappear. “Remember, though I was a very young woman at the time (twenty-two years old) and believed in my government,” she told Ernest. “Because of the strange circumstances and discounting of my statements, my multiple questioning by various government agencies and the Warren Commission’s conclusions, I lost my starry-eyed beliefs in the integrity of our government. And I was scared, too. I was a young lady alone with no family or friend support at the time.”
¹⁹⁸
Reviewing with Ernest her testimony as printed in the Warren Commission volumes, Adams insisted her testimony as printed had been altered. “The freight elevator had not moved, and I did not see anyone on the stairs,” she insisted to Ernest.
¹⁹⁹
When Ernest asked her why the Warren Commission never called Sandra Styles to testify, Adams speculated, “Looking backwards I think they didn’t want to corroborate any evidence.”
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Yet, the record is clear. There is no photograph showing Lee Harvey Oswald on the sixth floor during the JFK shooting, and there is no testimony from anyone who worked in the building to suggest that he was there either. The Warren Commission dismissed Victoria Adams, saying she must have come down the stairs later than she estimated—enough later that Oswald had already passed by.
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But absent this strained explanation, the evidence points to the conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald was in the lunchroom of the Texas School Book Depository when JFK was assassinated, not on the sixth floor in the “sniper’s nest” where the Warren Commission insisted he had to have been.

I don’t think that they [the Warren Commission] or me or anyone else is always absolutely sure of everything that might have motivated Oswald or others that could have been involved [in the JFK assassination]. But he [Lee Harvey Oswald] was quite a mysterious fellow, and he did have connections that bore examination.

—President Lyndon Baines Johnson,
CBS REPORTS INQUIRY: “The American Assassins, Part II
,” 1975
²⁰²

O
N NOVEMBER 22, 1963,
within the first hour after the JFK assassination, Dallas Police Department patrolman J. D. Tippit was gunned down in the Oak Cliff section of the city. The Warren Commission identified Lee Harvey Oswald as the murderer. Then, on Sunday, November 24, 1963, two days after the JFK assassination, Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby gunned down Lee Harvey Oswald in the basement of Dallas Police headquarters adjacent to Dealey Plaza, on Houston and Main Streets in downtown Dallas, a distance of only about two blocks from where JFK was murdered.
The Warren Commission concluded these were independent events, with no prior connections between Oswald, Tippit, and Ruby. “Investigation has disclosed no evidence that Officer J. D. Tippit was acquainted with either Ruby or Oswald,” the Warren Commission Report declared emphatically.
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The Warren Commission concluded that Oswald shot Tippit to avoid being taken into custody. According to the Warren Commission’s version of events, approximately 1:15 p.m. on the day of the assassination, Tippit was cruising east on 10th Street in Oak Cliff, just past the intersection of 10th and Patton, when he saw someone walking whom he considered suspicious. “About 100 feet past the intersection Tippit stopped a man walking east along the south side of Patton,” the Warren Commission Report wrote, assuming Tippit must have heard the description of the suspect broadcast over police radio immediately after the assassination. “The man’s general description was similar to the one broadcast over the police radio. Tippit stopped the man and called him to his car. He approached the car and apparently exchanged words with Tippit through the right front or vent window. Tippit got out and started to walk around the front of the car.” This is where the Warren Commission assumes Oswald shot Tippit before Tippit could draw his weapon on Oswald. “As Tippit reached the left front wheel the man pulled out a revolver and fired several shots. Four bullets hit Tippit and killed him instantly. The gunman started back toward Patton Avenue, ejecting the empty cartridge cases before reloading with fresh bullets.”
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While the Warren Commission did not draw any conclusions regarding why Ruby killed Oswald, the Commission explained Ruby’s actions by the emotional distress Ruby felt over Kennedy’s assassination. “[Ruby] maintained that he had killed Oswald in a temporary fit of depression and rage over the President’s death,” the Warren Commission Report noted.
²⁰⁵
The Commission was unequivocal that no connection existed between Ruby and Oswald prior to the shooting. “No direct or indirect relationship between Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby has been discovered by the Commission nor has it been able to find any credible evidence that either knew the other, although a thorough investigation was made of the many rumors and speculations of such a relationship,” the Commission concluded. As far as the Warren Commission was concerned,
Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby, and Dallas policeman J.D. Tippit had nothing to do with one another prior to the assassination. “After careful investigation the Commission has found no credible evidence either that Ruby and Officer Tippit, who was killed by Oswald, knew each other or that Oswald and Tippit knew each other.”
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Extensive research over the fifty years since the JFK assassination has called into question the assumption that Oswald, Tippit, and Ruby were all independent actors with no connections among or between them. To begin with, Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby both lived within blocks of the Oak Hill location, 10th and Patton, where officer J. D. Tippit was gunned down.
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