WHERE
WAS OSWALD FROM 11:50 to 12:35 P.M.
ON THE DAY OF THE ASSASSINATION?
Michael T. Griffith
1998
@All Rights Reserved
Gerald Posner follows the WC in placing
Oswald on the sixth floor of the
Yet, it is common knowledge among
assassination researchers that when Givens was initially questioned, he
mentioned nothing about seeing Oswald on the sixth floor after everyone else
had left. In fact, Givens, who had a police record involving narcotics,
originally told the authorities he saw Oswald reading a newspaper on the first floor at 11:50 (14:75). Two other
TSBD workers likewise put Oswald on the first floor from 11:50 to 12:00
(17:68). And, Book Depository employee Bonnie Ray Williams told the WC that he
ate lunch on the sixth floor from around noon until 12:15, perhaps even until
12:20, and that he saw no one else on the
floor. This was, at the most, just fifteen minutes before the President's
motorcade passed in front of the Depository. Even if Williams left the sixth
floor at 12:15, Oswald still would not have had enough time to construct the
sniper's nest, reassemble the Carcano rifle, and arrange the supposed gun-rest
boxes before the motorcade arrived (and, keep in mind, too, that the motorcade
was scheduled to pass the TSBD at 12:25, and Oswald would have had no way of
knowing that it was going to be five minutes late).
In response to this evidence, Posner observes
that Williams "told the FBI he left [the sixth floor] by 12:05 and went to
the fifth floor" (6:228)--end of discussion.
This brings us to a crucial flaw in Posner's
arguments. Posner attempts to discredit several witnesses whose testimony
contradicts the lone-gunman scenario by citing differences between their FBI or
Dallas police depositions and their statements to the WC, or between accounts
they provided in later years and their earlier testimony. Yet, as Posner must
know, numerous witnesses subsequently insisted that federal
agents or the
For the most part, Posner summarily
dismisses the recollections of witnesses with evidence of conspiracy if they
did not speak up immediately or shortly after the shooting. But nearly all
researchers would agree that this is not a sound criterion for rejecting
testimony relating to the assassination. Many witnesses who had information
favoring Oswald or contradicting the single-assassin story were afraid to go
public with what they knew because of the charged anti-Oswald atmosphere at the
time. Some conspiracy witnesses weren't aware of the significance of what they
had seen until after the WC published its report, and, faced with the nearly
universal acceptance the report initially enjoyed, they chose to remain silent
for fear of being ridiculed. In addition, several witnesses later said they
were hesitant to come forward because they knew that other witnesses had died
under strange circumstances or had been murdered.
Now, let us revisit the statements made by
Bonnie Ray Williams. First of all, when the WC asked Williams about his FBI
statement, he denied telling the FBI that he left the sixth floor at 12:05
(4:103). And, when the Commission asked Williams to give an approximate time
for his departure from the sixth floor, he said he left at around 12:20
(4:103). Former WC member Gerald Ford said Williams left the sixth floor
"just minutes before the Presidential motorcade reached the corner of
Oswald allegedly told the police that he ate
lunch in the domino room on the first floor (which was often used as a
lunchroom by employees), and that he went upstairs to the second-floor lunchroom
to buy a Coke and had just finished getting the Coke from the soda machine when
Officer Marrion Baker approached him and asked him to identify himself. Three
witnesses, Eddie Piper, Bill Shelley, and Charles Givens, reported seeing
Oswald on the first floor between 11:50 and 12:00 (19 H 499; 6 H 383; 7 H 390;
CD 5; 14:76-77). There is other evidence that supports Oswald's story, as Summers explains:
Under
interrogation, Oswald insisted he had followed his workmates down to eat [from
the fifth floor, where he and others had been working that morning]. He said he
ate a snack in the first- floor lunchroom [the domino room] alone but that he
remembered two black employees walking through the room while he was there.
Oswald believed one of them was a colleague known as "Junior" and
said he would recognize the other man although he could not recall his name. He
did say the second man was "short." There were two rooms in the Book
Depository where workers had lunch, the "domino room" on the first
floor and the lunchroom proper on the second floor. There was indeed a worker
named "Junior" Jarman, and he spent his
lunch break largely in the company of another black man called Harold Norman.
Norman, who was indeed "short," said later he ate in the domino room
between 12:00 and 12:15 p.m., and indeed he thought "there was someone
else in there," though he couldn't remember who. At about 12:15, Jarman
walked over to the domino room, and together the two black men left the
building for a few minutes. Between 12:20 and 12:25--just before the
assassination--they strolled through the first floor once more, on the way
upstairs to watch the motorcade from a window. If Oswald was not indeed on the
first floor at some stage, he demonstrated almost psychic powers by describing
two men--out of a staff of 75--who were actually there. (14:76)
Bill Lovelady, Danny Arce, and Bonnie Ray
Williams, like Oswald, had been working upstairs that morning. All three told
the Commission that Oswald was anxious for them to send the elevator back up to
him when it was time for lunch, and one of them specified that Oswald said he
would be coming downstairs. A few minutes later, Bill Shelley and Charles
Givens saw Oswald on the first floor, at around 11:50. Then, ten minutes later,
Eddie Piper also saw Oswald on the first floor. Moreover, as mentioned,
Williams began eating his lunch on the sixth floor at right around noon and
didn't leave the floor until around 12:15 or 12:20. Since Oswald was seen by
Piper on the first floor at noon, and since Williams was on the sixth floor at
noon to eat his lunch, the only time
Oswald could have gone up to the sniper's nest was after Williams left the
sixth floor to go down to the fifth floor at 12:15 or 12:20. The motorcade
was scheduled to pass in front of the TSBD at 12:25. As it turned out, the
motorcade was running five minutes late, but Oswald could not have known that.
Arriving at the sniper's window at 12:16 at the earliest, Oswald would have
been hard-pressed to build (or finish building) the sniper's nest,
arrange the boxes next to the window as a gun rest, and then reassemble
the rifle. One witness, Arnold Rowland, insisted he saw a man with a rifle (an assembled rifle) on the sixth floor at
12:15 or 12:16, and Rowland said nothing about seeing any boxes being moved in
the sniper's nest.
If Oswald was at the sniper's nest on the
sixth floor at the time of the shooting, then how is it he was seen by the
building manager and a pistol-waving police officer less than 90 seconds
afterwards on the second floor,
standing in the lunchroom with a Coke in his hand, giving every appearance of
being perfectly calm and relaxed? (The manager was Roy Truly and the policeman
was Officer Marrion Baker.)
Jim Moore and other lone-gunman theorists
assume that Oswald bought the Coke after the encounter with the manager and the
policeman (3:53). However, the available evidence indicates Oswald purchased
the Coke before the second-floor encounter (5: 50-52). Oswald had no reason to
lie about when he bought the Coke. When he mentioned the Coke-buying during his
questioning, he did so in passing, and he could not have known the important
role the timing of this detail would subsequently play in the investigation. I
agree with what David Lifton has said on this subject:
The original news
accounts said that when Baker first saw Oswald, the latter was drinking a Coke.
This seemingly minor fact was crucial, because if Oswald had time to operate
the machine, open the bottle, and drink some soda, that would mean he was on
the second floor even earlier than the Commission's reconstructions allowed. In
a signed statement Officer Baker was asked to make in September 1964, at the
tail-end of the investigation, he wrote: "I saw a man standing in the
lunchroom drinking a coke." A line was drawn through "drinking a
coke," and Baker initialed the corrected version. [
During a radio program on December 23, 1966,
Albert Jenner, a former senior WC counsel, said that when Baker saw Oswald in
the lunchroom, Oswald was holding a Coke in his hand. Said
Jenner, "the first man this policeman saw, was Oswald with a bottle of
Coke" (17:226). The fact that Oswald was holding a Coke when Baker
confronted him in the lunchroom was one of the details that Chief Jesse Curry
of the
Oswald simply could not have made it to the
second floor without first being seen by Roy Truly, who was running ahead of
Patrolman Baker. The
The WC's own reenactments of Officer Baker's
encounter with Oswald indicated that it occurred no more than 75 seconds after
the shots were fired. There is no way Oswald could have done everything the
Commission said he did and still have made it to the lunchroom in time to be
seen by Baker and without being seen by Truly. Additionally, we should keep in
mind that the men watching the motorcade from fifth-floor windows beneath the
sniper's nest said they heard no movement above them after the shots were
fired, and they were separated from the nest only by thin plywood floor
boarding that had cracks between the planks. One of them said he could hear a
rifle bolt operating and shells hitting the floor above them during the
shooting--yet, again, these men heard no movement above them after the shots
were fired. This report accords with the finding that boxes were being moved in
the sniper's window within two minutes of the assassination (see below); it
also agrees with the eyewitness account of a law clerk from a nearby building
who said she saw a man in the sixth-floor window about four to five minutes
after the shots were fired. The law clerk was a woman named Lillian Mooneyham.
She told the FBI that she saw a man standing a few feet back from the sniper's
window four to five minutes after the shooting.
Photos taken of the sixth-floor window less
than two minutes after the shooting show the boxes being rearranged (5:53). This fact was detected by the photographic
experts retained by the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA). I
quote from the HSCA testimony of photographic expert Dr. Robert R. Hunt:
Mr. FITHIAN. I
would like to ask the staff to put up JFK F-153. As I understand it, Doctor,
this is a picture that was taken a few seconds after the shot; is that correct?
Dr. HUNT. I am not
sure until I see the picture. Which one are you referring to?
Mr. FITHIAN. I
believe that is the one of the---TSBD?
Dr. HUNT. Oh, yes,
right. Yes; in answer to your question, that was taken a few seconds after the
last shot was fired. at least that is Dillard's
testimony to the Warren Commission, i believe.
Mr. FITHIAN. Now,
directing your attention to that particular exhibit, the photograph in the area
of the sixth floor window, the open window, there seems to be a change in the
configuration of the boxes. How did the photo panel account for this?
Dr. HUNT. The change in configuration of the boxes with respect to what, with
respect to another window view?
Mr. FITHIAN. No, with respect to other photos that you analyzed.
Dr. HUNT. OK.
Probably the one most pertinent to that would be exhibit which is showing next
to it at the moment--I am not aware of the exhibit number for it--but that
shows the same window, taken
approximately one to two minutes after the first picture which we talked about,
the one taken by Dillard on the right, the one by Powell on the left. You are
correct in perceiving that there is something which we could ascribe to a
change in the configuration of the boxes. For example, the picture on the
right, we see only two boxes, one at the left of the window sill and just a
corner of the one peeping up at the right of the window sill. Whereas, in the picture,
the enlarged picture, for example, on the left, we see not just the two boxes;
you can still see, for example, on the left there is the same small box at the
left, there is the same corner peeping up at the right. But now we have two or
three other boxes, apparently rising up in between them. There are two possible
explanations, I guess, for that, that the panel considered. One is that we are
seeing boxes which are in the room, but because of our perspective, our line of
sight, is different, we are seeing different boxes than were visible in the
other picture. The second explanation is that there has been physically a
movement of the boxes in the room during the time which elapsed between the taking of those pictures.
Mr. FITHIAN. All right. Now there is no way that we can know which it is?
Dr. HUNT. There
are ways of eliminating or narrowing down the possibilities between those two
choices. For example, given the geometry at which you are viewing, and given
the apparent sunlight on the boxes, you could probably guess how far into the
room those boxes do lie. For example, if you look at the two boxes which appear
to have been introduced in the picture on the left, they appear to be in full
sunlight, which means they must not lie too far inside the room because this
was high noon, in November; the sun angle is simply not that low in Dallas at
high noon in November to shine sunlight very deep into the room. So they can
certainly not be too far behind the plane of the window; and that would therefore tend to rule out the
possibility that we are looking at the box which lies in one position in the
room and is simply tended to be viewed in different perspective from two
different viewing points.
Mr. FITHIAN. You
say it rules that out?
Dr. HUNT. It tends
to rule it out, yes. It does not rule it out completely, because we lack what
is usually referred to as the analytical information, from the position of the
two photographers to precisely plot the positions of those boxes by
stereoanalysis techniques.
Mr. FITHIAN. Well, if it generally tends to rule that
out, then it seems this committee would be left with only one conclusion, and
that is, that a box was actually moved.
Dr. HUNT. that would be my only personal conclusion, that
somebody or something moved boxes around in that room during the time of taking
of those two pictures. (4 HSCA 422-423, emphasis added)
Indeed, the Committee's photographic panel
eventually came to the following conclusion: "There is an apparent
rearranging of boxes within 2 minutes after the last shot was fired at
President Kennedy" (6 HSCA 109). The photographic panel went into more
detail in its report:
Examination of
both the Dillard and Powell photographs of the sixth floor windows shows an
open window with deep shadows in the region behind it. The deep shadows
indicate the film was underexposed in these regions; that is, too little light
reached the film or a clear recording of any details in the room behind the
window.
A number of
enhancement processes were applied to the photographs in order to bring out any
details obscured within the underexposed regions. They were as follows:
(1) Photographic
enhancement (using photo-optical and photochemical techniques) of the
underexposed regions of the Dillard photograph undertaken at the Rochester
Institute of Technology (RIT).
(2)
Autoradiographic enhancement of the underexposed regions of the Dillard
photograph at Stanford Research Institute, Inc. (SRI).
(3) Computer
enhancement of the underexposed regions of the Powell photograph at the
In addition, the
Dillard photographs were scanned and digitized for possible computer
enhancement. Nevertheless, no such enhancement was performed because the Panel
decided that the autoradiographic technique had more potential for success.
The photographic
and computer processes made visible details that had been obscured in the
underexposed regions of the photographs. Both the photographic enhancement by
RIT and the autoradiographic enhancement by SRI revealed a feature in the fifth
floor window immediately beneath the sixth floor window. Figure IV-1 (JFK
exhibit F-153) shows one of the. original Dillard
photographs, and figure IV-2 is an autoradiographic enhancement. The detail
revealed by the processing appears to be a circular light fixture hanging from
the ceiling of the fifth floor room, with a light bulb in the center of the
fixture.
In the enhanced
Powell photograph additional details became visible on the boxes in the
windows. (See figure IV-3, JFK exhibit F157.) Nevertheless in neither
photograph did the processing operations reveal any sign of a human face or
form in the open sixth floor or adjoining windows. The Panel concluded that the
light fixture revealed in the fifth window served as a "benchmark"
against which the sixth floor enhancement could be judged. . . .
Although human
faces or forms were not visible in the enhanced photographs, inspection of
figures IV-2 and IV-3 reveals a difference in the boxes visible through the
sixth floor widow. in the Dillard photograph, only two
boxes are immediately visible, one each to the left and right of the window
frame. Nevertheless, the Powell photograph shows several additional boxes.
There are two possible explanations for this difference:
(1) The Powell
photograph may reflect only an apparent change in the boxes; the different
angle from which Powell viewed the depository may have caused a different set
of boxes within the room to be framed within the window;
(2) The boxes were
moved during the time that elapsed between the Dillard and Powell photographs.
Since the precise positions of Dillard and Powell at the time of the
photographs were unknown, it was not possible to calculate precisely the region
within the sixth floor room that would have been visible to each photographer.
In the Dillard photograph, the two to the left and right of the window frame
appear to be in the full light of the Sun, with no shadows cast on them by the
frame of the partially opened window. In the Powell photograph, it also appears
that the boxes are in full sunlight, with no shadow cast on them by the window
frame. A simple trigonometric calculation shows that the two boxes at the left
and right lie approximately 6 inches from the plane of
the window (see appendix A). If full sunlight is falling on the additional
boxes in question in the Powell photograph, they must also lie close to the
plane of the window. For this reason, the
panel concluded that the additional boxes visible in the powell
photograph were moved during the interval between the Dillard and Powell
photographs. (6 HSCA 110-115, emphasis added)
WC defenders cite the claims of Dale Myers,
a private researcher who asserts that the apparent movement of boxes is in
effect an optical illusion. But the photographic panel considered the argument
on which Myers makes this claim--and rejected it.
Oswald could not have been the one moving
the boxes because he was seen on the second floor by Baker and Truly less than
90 seconds after the shots were fired (5:53). So, who was moving the boxes
around less than two minutes after the shooting? Who was the man seen in the
sniper's nest by the law clerk from a nearby building just a few minutes after
the shots were fired? Whoever it was, it could not have been Oswald.
When Oswald was being held at the
Sources
2. Robert Groden and Harrison Edward
Livingstone, High Treason: The
Assassination Of President Kennedy And The New
Evidence Of Conspiracy,
3. Jim Moore, Conspiracy of One,
5. Jim Marrs, Crossfire: The Plot that Killed
6. Gerald Posner, Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald And The Assassination Of
14. Anthony Summers, Conspiracy: The Definitive Book On The Jfk
Assassination, Updated and Expanded Edition,
17. Sylvia Meager, Accessories After The Fact: The
18. David S. Lifton, Best Evidence, Carroll & Graf Edition,
25. David S. Scheim, The Mafia Killed President Kennedy,
32. Report
Of The President's Commission On The Assassination Of
President John F. Kennedy (i.e., the Warren Report),
73. Gerald Ford, with John R. Stiles, Portrait Of The
Assassin,
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Michael
T. Griffith holds a Master’s degree in Theology from The Catholic Distance
University, a Graduate Certificate in Ancient and Classical History from
American Military University, a Bachelor’s degree in Liberal Arts from
Excelsior College, and two Associate in Applied Science degrees from the Community
College of the Air Force. He also holds
an Advanced Certificate of Civil War Studies and a Certificate of Civil War
Studies from