A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination (38 page)

Belin found it disappointing, but sadly understandable, that Brennan had not told the truth. At about the time of his testimony in Washington, newspapers around the country were reporting an appalling story about the murder that month of a New York City woman, Kitty Genovese, who was stabbed to death in her home in the borough of Queens—an attack supposedly overheard by thirty-eight people, none of whom did anything to respond to her pleas for help.
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“In an age in which people in New York offer no help as a woman is murdered … perhaps it is to be expected that a person, fearing some sort of communist conspiracy, would not come forth and immediately identify the man who killed the President of the United States,” Belin wrote later.

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Belin needed to make sense of the confusing testimony from other, seemingly credible witnesses who believed the rifle shots did not come from the book depository but instead from the so-called grassy knoll in front of the president’s limousine. The most compelling testimony about a possible grassy-knoll assassin came from Sterling M. Holland, a supervisor for the Union Terminal Railroad, who was inspecting signals on the highway overpass ahead of the motorcade. He said he had been watching the motorcade, trying to catch a glimpse of Kennedy, when he heard gunfire and saw the president slump over. Turning his head to the left toward the grassy knoll, Holland saw a “puff of smoke” that “came out about 6 or 8 feet above the ground” under a group of trees. He said he then ran toward the area and saw twelve to fifteen policemen and plainclothes there who were looking “for empty shells,” suggesting the gunman had been there.

Holland’s statement was taken in Dallas in early April by Sam Stern, who had traveled to Texas to assist with witness interviews. Stern was so excited by what Holland was telling him—and the clear suggestion of a second gunman—that the young lawyer excused himself from the interview room for a moment to track down Belin, who was also in Dallas.

Holland’s testimony was “gripping,” Stern said later. “The puff of smoke? What did it mean?” Belin, however, was unimpressed. “Oh yeah,” he said dismissively. “We know all about that.”

Stern was annoyed that this seemingly important witness might be ignored, but he bowed to what was, by then, Belin’s much more detailed knowledge of what had happened in Dealey Plaza. Long afterward, Stern said that Holland’s testimony still nagged at him, and he wondered if it should have been given more attention. “Nobody was taking it seriously,” he said. In the years after the assassination, Holland’s testimony would be seized upon by conspiracy theorists as proof that the commission had ignored a key witness.

Belin said later that he had always understood the potential significance of Holland’s account but that, in the end, the railroad supervisor fell into the category of honest, but mistaken, witnesses. As Belin knew, no physical evidence—spent cartridges or anything else—was ever found in the grassy knoll. And it seemed impossible to imagine that a gunman could have fired off rifle shots from there without anyone seeing him clearly; several spectators had been standing in the grassy knoll as the motorcade passed.

*

Belin and Ball were also trying to sort out problems involving another potentially key witness—Helen Markham, the waitress at the Eatwell restaurant who had witnessed Tippit’s murder. Unlike Domingo Benavides, Markham had been taken to a police lineup within hours of the policeman’s death, and she identified Oswald as his killer.

If Howard Brennan was the commission’s most important witness in demonstrating Oswald’s guilt, Markham would be remembered as “the most controversial,” Belin said. Questions about her credibility would dog the investigation for months. When Markham arrived in Washington to give testimony, she was in a state of near panic at her sudden celebrity. Mark Lane had stepped up his public attacks on her credibility, claiming that he had interviewed her and that she had backed away from identifying Oswald as Tippit’s killer. The commission needed to determine what, if anything, she had actually told Lane and why she might have changed her story.

The chief justice tried to put Markham at ease as she arrived in the commission’s offices and took a seat in the conference room. Warren “seemed almost like a scholarly minister as he looked and smiled” toward Markham, Belin remembered. Warren passed a handwritten note to Congressman Ford: “This witness is likely to be hysterical.”

Markham admitted that she was rattled: “I am very shook up.”

Ball, who led the questioning, tried to calm her down. “Take it easy,” he said. “This is a very informal little conference here.” He led her through the events of a hardscrabble life—she was divorced, with five children to support—before asking her to describe what she had seen on the afternoon of November 22. She described Tippit’s death as cold-blooded murder, with Oswald pulling the trigger of his pistol seconds after the officer stepped from his police car. After pumping the shots into the officer’s head and chest, Oswald stared straight toward her, Markham recalled. “He looked wild,” she said. “I put my hands over my face and closed my eyes, because I knew he was going to kill me. I couldn’t scream, I couldn’t holler. I froze.” But instead of turning his gun on Markham and other witnesses who would be able to identify him, Oswald simply “trotted” away.

Markham said she ran to Tippit’s side and listened as he tried—and failed—to utter some final words as blood pooled around him on the street. Later that afternoon, she identified Oswald in the lineup. “I would know that man anywhere,” she said later. “I know I would.”

Ball turned to the question of Lane, asking whether she had talked to him and why she would back away from any of her account. She denied that she had ever talked to anyone she knew as Mark Lane or that she had claimed to anyone that Tippit’s shooter was “short, heavy and with bushy hair,” as Lane had insisted. Since November, she said, she had been interviewed by a reporter from
Life
magazine, which published some of her comments, and by a man who represented himself as a French journalist and who spoke with an accent. She could not recall the Frenchman’s name, but she said he had a “dark” complexion and a medium build and wore “horn-rimmed glasses”—a physical description that might match Lane’s.

Could Lane have impersonated a French reporter? Norman Redlich, who was watching the testimony, left the room and found two newspaper photographs of Lane, which were then shown to Markham. “I have never seen this man in my life,” she insisted. Ball and Belin were baffled, since Lane had given sworn testimony that he had talked to Markham. Lane might be duplicitous, Belin said, but he found it difficult to imagine that Lane would lie outright to the commission and risk a perjury charge.
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The conflicts between Markham’s account and Lane’s would not be resolved for several more weeks, with the credibility of both of them damaged in the process.

It gnawed at Belin then and for years to come, he said. At least six credible eyewitnesses, other than Markham, had identified Oswald as Tippit’s killer. That included Benavides, the witness Belin had tracked down himself. Increasingly, Belin thought of Tippit’s murder as the “Rosetta Stone” of the Kennedy assassination—the event that explained everything else, since it proved that Oswald was capable of murder, and since he had no reason to kill Tippit other than to flee from police searching for the president’s assassin. And yet Lane and his growing army of conspiracy theorists were able to convince gullible audiences that the entire case against Oswald was a sham because a single “flighty” witness like Helen Markham might have confused her words in a telephone conversation she said she could not remember.

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Understanding the crime scene in Dealey Plaza would never be so easy. Although Belin was certain that Oswald had acted alone in killing Tippit, he continued to suspect that Oswald might not have acted alone in gunning down the president. Belin was convinced that the bullets aimed at Kennedy’s limousine had all come from behind, ruling out a shot from the grassy knoll or some other location in front of the motorcade; but given the confusion about the ballistics and the conflicting witness testimony, he asked how the commission could rule out the possibility that Oswald had been joined in the book depository by an accomplice. Could another gunman have been positioned somewhere else behind the motorcade? Belin had joined the commission believing there had been a conspiracy to kill Kennedy, and he was still eager to expose one. Beginning in January, Mel Eisenberg, Redlich’s deputy, organized staff viewings of the Zapruder film. Eisenberg and several others, including Belin and Specter, watched the same sickening images hour after hour, analyzing the film frame by frame.

In late February,
Life
magazine finally, and reluctantly, agreed to provide the commission with the original film it had purchased from Abraham Zapruder. Up until then, the staff had depended on copies of the film made by the Secret Service and the FBI. The original film was far clearer and had “considerably more detail than any of the copies we had,” Belin recalled.
Life
also agreed to provide the commission with 35mm color slides of each frame. Belin was excited by the opportunity to see the original film; it was his best hope of demonstrating a conspiracy, possibly by showing that Oswald did not have enough time to fire all the shots that hit Kennedy and Connally.

Zapruder’s Bell & Howell home-movie camera was in the custody of the FBI, and the bureau’s technicians determined that it operated at a speed of 18.3 frames per second. That calculation enabled the bureau to determine the average speed of Kennedy’s limousine through Dealey Plaza—11.2 miles per hour. The FBI then matched the limousine’s speed against the results of tests to determine how quickly a gunman could fire off shots from Oswald’s Mannlicher-Carcano rifle. The tests showed that the minimum time needed to fire “two successive well-timed shots” from the rifle would be 2.3 seconds—equivalent to 42 frames of the Zapruder film. The FBI insisted that its evidence proved that Kennedy and Connally had been hit by separate bullets. So if Belin and his colleagues could prove from the Zapruder film that shots had been fired at the motorcade less than two and a quarter seconds apart, they would have proof of two gunmen at Dealey Plaza.

For several days over the course of the late winter and early spring, the staff lawyers sat in a conference room with Lyndal Shaneyfelt, a former newspaper photographer who was now the FBI’s principal photography analyst. Together they watched the Zapruder film hundreds of times. The images haunted Belin for the rest of his life, he said. “I would wake up in the middle of the night seeing the president waving to the crowds and then, within a few seconds, seeing the fatal shot and the head of the president jerk and then slump over.”

Shaneyfelt numbered every frame of the film. The most disturbing image, marked as frame No. 313, captured the moment when the president was shot in the head and the bloody mist rose over the limousine. Two identifiable fragments of that bullet, which appeared to be Oswald’s third and final shot, were found inside the limousine. The other shots seemed to pose the bigger mystery. From the film, it was possible to determine that the first shot to strike Kennedy—the bullet that hit him in the upper back or lower neck—landed sometime between frames 210 and 224; it was not possible to be more precise, since Zapruder’s view was obstructed by a freeway sign during that period. (Beginning at frame 225, when Kennedy became visible again, he was clearly hit, because his hands were moving toward his throat.)

Shaneyfelt and the staff lawyers agreed that Connally was almost certainly hit sometime between frames 207 and 225, given the location of his wounds and his position in the limousine. An analysis of the medical evidence about Connally, matched up against the location of his body at other moments, showed that the very latest he could have been struck by a bullet was frame 240.

The remaining math was not so complicated, Belin realized. Assuming the FBI and Secret Service were right, the first and third bullets hit Kennedy and the second hit Connally. So if the president was hit for the first time no earlier than frame 210 and Connally was hit no later than frame 240, there were a maximum of 30 frames of film between the two shots, or less than two seconds. That would not have been enough time for Oswald to fire both shots. And that, Belin thought, meant that he might have the answer he had been searching for—there was at least one more gunman in Dealey Plaza.

27

THE OFFICES OF THE COMMISSION

WASHINGTON, DC

MARCH 1964

Arlen Specter faced an extraordinary workload. He had as much to do as any of the young lawyers on the staff and—after the abrupt disappearance of his senior partner, Frank Adams—probably more. “When will I get to see my family again?” he asked his colleagues, only half in jest. Of the ninety-three witnesses who gave formal testimony to the commission in Washington, twenty-eight were Specter’s responsibility. He took the testimony of most of the government officials and others who rode in the motorcade in Dallas, and of virtually all the doctors and medical personnel from Parkland Hospital and from the autopsy room at Bethesda. Specter was responsible for understanding the smallest details of what his witnesses described, and the transcripts of the witness testimony show that he was consistently well prepared.

He also continued to impress his colleagues with his willingness to stand up to the chief justice and Rankin. Not that he always got his way: he had recommended that when commissioners began to take witness testimony in Washington, they start with the people who were physically closest to the president in the motorcade. The logical leadoff witness, Specter argued, was the president’s widow: “Jacqueline Kennedy would have made an appropriate beginning,” since no one had been closer to the president, physically or otherwise, at the moment of his death.

In the first weeks of the investigation, Specter had prepared a list of ninety questions he wanted to ask the former First Lady. He divided them into seven categories, beginning with “Events of November 22, 1963, Preceding the Assassination.” He thought she should be asked about every element of her husband’s murder, including what she remembered of his facial expressions after the first bullet pierced his throat. Question 31: “What reaction, if any, did President Kennedy have after the first shot?” He also wanted to resolve a lingering mystery about why Mrs. Kennedy had tried to climb onto the trunk of the limousine after the shots rang out. “That question is of historical interest and has caused some speculation,” Specter wrote to Rankin, offering several possible explanations for what she did, including the possibility that she was simply trying to escape “the tragedy and danger in the car.”