Crossfire Page 5

  Steelworker Richard Randolph Carr, who was working on the seventh floor of the new Dallas Courthouse, then under construction at the intersection of Commerce and Houston, also reported seeing a man wearing a brown coat. Carr said minutes before the motorcade arrived he saw a heavyset man wearing a hat, horn-rimmed glasses, and tan sport coat standing in a sixth-floor window of the Depository. After the shooting, Carr saw the man walking along Commerce Street.

  Ruby Henderson, standing across Elm Street from the Depository, also saw two men on an upper floor of the building. While she was uncertain whether it was the sixth floor, she saw no one above the pair. She described the shorter of the men as having a dark complexion, possibly even African American, and wearing a white shirt. The shorter man was wearing a dark shirt. This pair may have been Depository employees James Jarman and Harold Norman, who watched the motorcade from the fifth-floor window just below the so-called sniper’s nest.

  Today, such stories of two men on the sixth floor of the Depository moments before the shooting has since been bolstered by two films made that day. One, an 8 mm home movie made by Robert Hughes, who was standing at the intersection of Main and Houston, shows the front of the Depository just as Kennedy’s limousine passes the building turning onto Elm. The film shows movement in both the corner window of the sixth floor and the window next to it. Deep within the Warren Commission exhibits is an FBI report acknowledging receipt of Hughes’s film. In another FBI document, it is claimed that the figure in the second window from the corner was simply a stack of boxes. No reference is made to movement.

  In 1975, CBS television asked Itek Corporation to look again at the Hughes film. The company concluded that there were no moving images in the double window next to the sixth-floor corner window, a conclusion that is still disputed by various photographic experts.

  But in late 1978, a second movie surfaced that supports the two-man allegation. This film, taken by Charles L. Bronson, who was standing only a few feet west of Hughes, also shows the sixth-floor corner windows of the Depository just moments before the Kennedy motorcade passed. Bronson’s film was viewed in 1963 by an FBI agent who reported that it “failed to show the building from which the shots were fired,” thus relegating the film to obscurity. It was rediscovered in 1978 when the film was mentioned in declassified FBI documents and was obtained by the Dallas Morning News.

  The newspaper commissioned Robert Groden, who served as staff consultant on photographic evidence for the House Select Committee on Assassinations, to study the film. Groden told the newspaper:

  There is no question that there is movement. And, I’m sure, given time and money, a computer could probably clarify the images a bit more. . . . You can actually see one figure walking back and forth hurriedly. I think what was happening there is the sniper’s nest was actually being completed just prior to the shots being fired.

  The House committee studied the Bronson film further and, while acknowledging movement in the second window, stated it was “more likely . . . a random photographic artifact than human movement.” However, the committee did recommend that the film be analyzed further. There is no evidence such further study was conducted.

  Another witness to the pair of men in the Depository was an inmate of the Dallas County Jail, located just across the street to the east of the Depository. Several prisoners were in a sixth-floor cell on a level with the sixth-floor Depository window.

  Oddly, none of the jail inmates was ever identified or sought by federal investigators despite their excellent vantage point. However, one of the inmates, John L. Powell, who was in a sixth-floor cell opposite the Book Depository, told the Dallas Morning News in 1978 that the prisoners saw two men, one with a rifle, in the sixth-floor window of the Depository prior to the motorcade’s arrival. Powell even stated he could see them so clearly he saw one “fooling with the scope” on the gun. “Quite a few of us saw ‘em. Everybody was trying to watch the parade and all that. We were looking across the street because it was directly straight across. The first thing I thought is, it was security guards. . . . I remember the guys,” he said, adding the pair were wearing “kind of brownish looking or duller clothes . . . like work clothes.” He also stated “maybe more than half” of the forty inmates in his holding cell were looking across to the Book Depository.

  In June 1964, Stanley M. Kaufman, one of Jack Ruby’s attorneys, mentioned to Warren Commission assistant counsel Leon D. Hubert, “It might be helpful to the commission to know that there were people in jail who saw the actual killing.” Yet, three months later, the Commission closed shop and nothing was done. “I remember that that did occur and it sort of concerned me at the time as to why—if they were trying to find out all these facts—why they didn’t go up there and talk to all those prisoners,” Kaufman told Dallas reporter Earl Golz in 1978.

  Confirmation of the presence of two men on the sixth floor also might have come from Canadian journalist Norman Similas, who was in Dallas for a bottlers’ convention. It was a trip he would not soon forget. On November 21, Similas photographed and spoke with vice president Lyndon Johnson, who had addressed the convention. Later that evening, Similas visited the Carousel Club and spent more than an hour talking with its owner, Jack Ruby. The next day, Similas strolled over to Dealey Plaza to photograph President Kennedy’s motorcade. He stood on the south side of Elm not ten feet from Kennedy’s car at the time of the first shots. In a report published in the Canadian magazine Liberty, Similas said:

  The Presidential limousine had passed me and slowed down slightly. My camera was directly angled toward the Texas School Book Depository in the background. The picture I took on the curb of Elm Street was trained momentarily on an open, sixth-floor window. The camera lens recorded what I could not possibly have seen at that moment—a rifle barrel extended over the windowsill. When the film was developed later, it showed two figures hovering over it.

  Were there two people in Similas’s photo? No one will ever know for sure. In that same article, he added:

  Upon my return to Toronto, I submitted my developed negatives to a daily newspaper. When they were not used on Monday, November 25, I phoned and asked that they be returned. Later I received a fat cheque in the mail, but the one negative which clearly showed what I believe to be two figures in the window of the assassin’s nest was missing. When I pressed for it, I was told that this negative had somehow become lost. It has never been returned to me.

  Ronald B. Fischer, an auditor for Dallas County, and another county worker, Robert E. Edwards, were standing on the southwest corner of Elm and Houston, directly across the street from the Depository. Less than ten minutes before the motorcade arrived, Edwards commented, “Look at that guy there in that window.” Looking up, Fischer saw the head and shoulders of a man wearing a white T-shirt or possibly a light sport shirt in a southeast corner window. The man was surrounded by boxes and was staring “transfixed,” not toward the approaching motorcade, but in the direction of the Triple Underpass. Less than a minute later the motorcade passed their position and both Fischer and Edwards shifted their attention to the motorcade. Then Fischer heard what he thought was a firecracker followed by sounds he knew to be shots. They seemed to be coming from “just west of the School Book Depository building [the location of the Grassy Knoll].” They both ran toward the Grassy Knoll and forgot the man in the window.

  Hugh W. Betzner Jr. was twenty-two years old on November 22, 1963, and was taking pictures with an old camera near the intersection of Houston and Elm. After taking Kennedy’s picture as he turned in front of the Depository, Betzner ran west into Dealey Plaza following the presidential limousine. In a sheriff’s report that day, Betzner stated:

  I started to wind my film again and I heard a loud noise. I thought this noise was either a firecracker or a car had backfired. I looked up and it seemed like there was another loud noise in a matter of a few seconds. I looked down the street and I could see the President’s car and another one and they looked like the ca
rs were stopped.

  Betzner said he then heard at least two more shots fired and saw the impact in the limousine. The motorcade then sped up and Betzner joined spectators running up the Grassy Knoll toward the wooden picket fence from where he assumed the shots had emanated. Minutes later, he looked across Elm Street and saw “police officers and some men in plain clothes . . . digging around in the dirt as if they were looking for a bullet.”

  Near Betzner was another photographer, Phillip Willis, a World War II veteran, who took a series of pictures considered by many as the most important photos taken of the assassination other than the Zapruder film.

  Willis, along with his wife and two young daughters, was in Dealey Plaza to get pictures of the president and Lyndon Johnson, whom Willis said he knew personally. As the presidential limousine turned onto Elm in front of the Depository, Willis snapped a photo, then ran farther west on Elm. He told the Warren Commission, “Then my next shot . . . in fact, the shot caused me to squeeze the camera shutter, and I got a picture of the President as he was hit with the first shot. So instantaneous, in fact, that the crowd hadn’t had time to react.” Willis said he did not see the effects of the next shots because his two daughters, Linda and Rosemary, were running along Elm and he became concerned for their safety.

  As a retired Air Force major, Willis said he had absolutely no doubt that the shots were from a high-powered rifle and were coming from the direction of the Texas School Book Depository. (An interesting note: Willis was in Hawaii during the attack on Pearl Harbor and captured the sole surviving member of a Japanese midget submarine, thus becoming the first American to take a Japanese prisoner during World War II.)

  Willis’s younger daughter, Rosemary, ran back to her father, saying, “Oh, Daddy, they have shot our president. His whole head blew up and it looked like a red halo.”

  Willis said he took more photographs as “the party [the motorcade] had come to a temporary halt before proceeding on to the underpass.”

  In later years, this author interviewed Willis, who refuted two of the theories to come from federal investigations of the assassination. One, the single-bullet theory of the Warren Commission, states that one shot, identified by the Commission as the first shot, struck both Kennedy and Connally. Willis said, “There is no damn way that one bullet hit both men. That is the most stupid thing they ever stuck to—that one-bullet theory.”

  The House Select Committee on Assassinations, also attempting to deal with the wounds in Kennedy’s back and throat, which do not support a conclusion of one shot from the high rear, theorized that Kennedy may have bent over momentarily while out of the Zapruder camera view and thus received a back wound lower than the throat wound. Willis retorted, “That is not right. I got the nearest, best shot while JFK was behind the [Stemmons Freeway] sign. He was upright and waving to the crowd. A split second later, he was grabbing at his throat.”

  Willis also had a comment after telling of Kennedy falling to the left rear after the fatal head shot: “As many deer as I have shot, I’ve never known one to fall towards me.”

  Although the Warren Commission quoted Willis as saying that he heard three shots, all from the Depository, Willis said:

  I always thought there had to be another shot from somewhere. I have always gone against the one-gunman theory. I always thought there had to have been some help. I saw blood going to the rear and left [of Kennedy]. That doesn’t happen if that bullet came from the Depository [which was behind him].

  Willis added:

  I also got a photo, taken immediately after [the shooting stopped] that shows Ruby standing in front of the Depository building. He was the only person there wearing dark glasses. He was identified by people who knew him and no one else has been able to say it was someone else. Ruby made a big effort to show he was in the Dallas Morning News at the time, but it wouldn’t take five minutes to walk from the News [to Dealey Plaza].

  Interestingly, in publishing Willis’s photo the Warren Commission cropped the picture right through the face of the man Willis claimed was Jack Ruby. In recent years archivist Richard Trask argued that the man in Willis’s photo is not Ruby. However, he failed to mention that Willis knew Ruby before the assassination and recognized him in his photo.

  Linda Willis, who was running along Elm Street with her sister, Rosemary, told this author in 1978, “I very much agree that shots came from somewhere other than the Depository. And where we were standing, we had a good view. So many of the people who have decided they know what happened there weren’t even there. I was, and that’s what makes the difference.” Neither Willis nor his daughters believed the Warren Commission or the later House committee were seriously trying to find out the truth of the assassination.

  Behind Willis, sitting on a concrete retaining wall across the street from the Depository, was forty-five-year-old Howard Leslie Brennan, who was to become the star witness for the Warren Commission. Brennan, who had been working as a pipe fitter on a construction project behind the Depository, had eaten lunch and then taken this position to view the motorcade. It was determined that Brennan was 120 feet from the sixth-floor window. He said he saw a man in an upper floor of the Depository shortly before the motorcade arrived. He described the man as a slender white male in his early thirties wearing “light-colored clothing.” Brennan told the Warren Commission:

  I heard what I thought was a backfire. It ran in my mind that it might be someone throwing firecrackers out of the window of the red brick building [the Depository] and I looked up at the building. I then saw this man I have described in the window and he was taking aim with a high-powered rifle. I could see all of the barrel of the gun. I do not know if it had a scope on it or not. I was looking at the man in this window at the time of the last explosion. Then this man let the gun down to his side and stepped out of sight. He did not seem to be in any hurry. . . . I believe I could identify this man if I ever saw him again.

  Brennan, who immediately rushed into the Depository to tell a policeman what he had seen, apparently was one of the only witnesses to have actually seen a gunman fire from the Depository. However, later that evening Brennan was unable to pick Lee Harvey Oswald out of a police lineup. Much later, it was determined that Brennan had poor eyesight and, in fact, a close examination of the Zapruder film shows that Brennan was not looking up at the time of the shooting but, as expected, was looking toward the president’s car.

  Brennan’s job foreman, Sandy Speaker, told this author:

  They took [Brennan] off for about three weeks. I don’t know if they were Secret Service or FBI, but they were federal people. He came back a nervous wreck and within a year his hair had turned snow white. He wouldn’t talk about [the assassination] after that. He was scared to death. They made him say what they wanted him to say.

  It is noteworthy that the Warren Commission so lacked confidence in Brennan’s testimony that they called him back the same day of his appearance and asked, “Have you ever worked for the Union Terminal Company in Dallas?” and “Did you ever state to anyone that you heard shots from opposite the Texas School Book Depository and saw smoke and paper wadding come out of boxes on a slope below the railroad trestle at the time of the assassination?” When Brennan answered no to both questions, and after going off the record, the Commission lawyer dismissed him.

  However, Brennan’s story of a man firing from the sixth-floor window was supported by a statement to sheriff’s deputies that day by fifteen-year-old Amos Lee Euins. Euins, a schoolboy, was standing near Brennan on the south side of the Elm and Houston Street intersection when he heard a shot. He stated:

  I started looking around and then I looked up in the red brick building. I saw a man in a window with a gun and I saw him shoot twice. He then stepped back behind some boxes. I could tell the gun was a rifle and it sounded like an automatic rifle the way he was shooting.

  Euins then ran west of the Depository, where he found a policeman. He led the cop back to the Depository and told him of seeing a
figure with a “bald spot” firing from an upper window.

  Another witness who saw a gunman in the Depository was L. R. Terry, who was standing across Elm Street near Brennan and Euins. In 1978, Terry told this author:

  I was right across from that book store when Kennedy was shot. I saw a gun come out of there just after I saw Kennedy and Connally go by. I could only see a hand, but I couldn’t tell if [the man] was right-handed or left-handed. He did not have on a white shirt. The parade stopped right in front of the building. There was a man with him. They [investigators] could find out that the man who killed Kennedy had somebody with him. But I don’t know who it is. . . . I just saw the gun barrel and the hand.

  Across the street from Brennan, Euins, and Terry were Texas School Book Depository superintendent Roy Truly and Depository vice president Ochus V. Campbell.

  They had started to go off to lunch about 12:15 p.m. when they saw the crowds and decided to wait and see the presidential motorcade. As the motorcade approached, they were having difficulty seeing over the heads of the crowd, so the two men moved closer to Elm Street and a bit farther west into the plaza. Here they were joined by Mrs. Robert A. Reid, the Depository’s clerical supervisor.

  The presidential limousine made such a tight turn onto Elm (nearly 120 degrees) that Truly stated he thought the right front tire came close to striking the abutment between Elm and the street in front of the Depository. The car nearly stopped, then straightened and moved into the center of three lanes to begin its downward glide into the plaza, they heard an “explosion . . . from west of the building [the Depository].” Truly thought it was a firecracker or toy cannon. He also said he saw the limousine stop for a second or two.

  When Mrs. Reid turned to Campbell and said, “Oh my goodness, I’m afraid those came from our building,” he replied, “Oh, Mrs. Reid, no, it came from the grassy area down this way.”