Reclaiming History (179 page)

Oswald appears to have spent one more night in the empty apartment on Magazine Street. On Tuesday, September 24, he filed a change-of-address card at the post office to redirect mail from his New Orleans post office box to Ruth’s address in Irving, Texas, and Oswald’s box was closed on September 26.
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That evening, Tuesday, Lee’s next-door neighbor, Eric Rogers, saw him leave the apartment in a hurry with two cloth suitcases, one large, the other small, run across the street, and catch a bus at the bus stop headed for downtown.
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In a December 11, 1963, interview with the FBI, the bus driver recalled picking up a passenger one evening around September 24 near Lee’s apartment with two suitcases who asked what was the best bus to take to the Greyhound bus terminal, but he was unable to describe the individual or identify Lee as the passenger. He did recall seeing a station wagon parked in front of the apartment where Oswald lived for one or two days (presumably Ruth Paine’s) “several months ago.”
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Where Oswald spent Tuesday night is unknown. The Warren Commission concluded that “he probably returned to the apartment to sleep after checking his luggage at [the] bus station, or spent the night at an inexpensive hotel or rooming house.”
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(But in the possibility that Oswald did not return to his Magazine apartment on the night of September 24, 1963, on September 8 and 9, 1964, the FBI checked with the owners, managers, or desk clerks of forty-one inexpensive hotels located in the vicinity of the Continental Trailways bus depot, Greyhound bus depot, and main U.S. Post Office in New Orleans, as well as the YMCA and Baptist Rescue Mission, and the name Lee Harvey Oswald did not show up on any of the hotel registers or those of the YMCA and Baptist Mission for the night of September 24, 1963.)
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The only reason why Oswald would have to go through the trouble of making a separate trip to check his bags at the bus station would be if he wanted to conceal from his landlord the fact that he was skipping out on his rent, so he left after dark hoping the Garners wouldn’t see him, and if they saw him the next day leaving the apartment, he wouldn’t be carrying any baggage. But they didn’t see him the next day. Moreover, this reasoning falls when his neighbor testified that he saw Oswald leave with his baggage in the early evening. “It was kind of daylight. You could see.”
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It is therefore likely that if Oswald left New Orleans by bus, he spent the night in the bus station to save money.

Oswald’s thirty-three-dollar weekly unemployment check arrived at the main post office in New Orleans sometime between 6:15 and 6:40 on the evening of September 24, well after the post office substation (Lafayette Square) where Oswald had a box had closed to the public, which occurred at 5:45 p.m.
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The FBI determined that the earliest possible time Oswald could have obtained this check from his post office box was “subsequent to 5:00 AM on September 25, 1963.”
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And we know that sometime after 8:00 on Wednesday morning, September 25, he cashed his thirty-three-dollar check at the Winn-Dixie Store near his apartment—somewhat oddly, since it was quite a distance back to his old neighborhood and he had cashed checks nearer to the post office before.
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He couldn’t have been eager to be spotted in the old neighborhood either—that same day his landlord discovered that the apartment was empty and there was no sign of Oswald, who still owed a couple of weeks’ rent.
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I
t has never been conclusively established precisely when Oswald left New Orleans, what route he took from New Orleans to the Mexican border, or even what mode of transportation he took out of New Orleans. All of this will be discussed in considerable depth in the Sylvia Odio part of the conspiracy section of this book. What follows is only one of several reasonable scenarios: that Oswald left New Orleans on Wednesday, September 25, probably on Continental Trailways. One Trailways bus, 5121, departed New Orleans at 12:20 p.m. and arrived in Houston at 10:50 p.m.
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Sometime—many believe that evening while Oswald was in Houston—he called Horace Twiford, a Houston member of the Socialist Labor Party who had received Oswald’s name from the party’s headquarters in New York in July and had sent Oswald the Labor Day issue of the party’s publication, the
Weekly People
.

Twiford’s wife, Estelle, told Lee that her husband, a merchant seaman, was working aboard the SS
Del Monte
and would not be home for several days. Oswald told her he was a member of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and would have liked to talk with Horace that evening for a few hours before flying to Mexico. Mrs. Twiford took Lee’s name, noted the information about the FPCC, and promised Lee she would tell her husband he had called.
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If Oswald had been in Houston when he called the Twiford residence, he would have had some time to wait there for his connecting bus, Continental Trailways bus number 5133, which left Houston for Laredo, Texas, via Corpus Christi at 2:35 a.m., that is, the next day, September 26. The passengers on that bus, including Oswald, changed to bus number 304 at Corpus Christi at 8:15 in the morning, and that bus arrived in Laredo about 1:20 in the afternoon of the same day.
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We do know Oswald was on the bus that started from Houston, because at some time after six in the morning, with the coming of daylight, a couple of British tourists who would be traveling with Oswald and others all the way to Mexico City, Dr. John B. McFarland and his wife Meryl, who were on their way to Yucatan to study Indian culture, noticed him.
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Oswald crossed the border from Laredo to the Mexican city on the other side, Nuevo Laredo, between 1:30 and 2:00 that afternoon, September 26.
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This was the end of the line for the Continental Trailways bus, and many of their passengers, including Oswald and the McFarlands, boarded bus number 516 of the Flecha Roja (Red Arrow) Bus Line at Nuevo Laredo for the trip to Mexico City, leaving Nuevo Laredo at around 2:15 p.m. on September 26, 1963. The ticket cost Oswald $5.71 (71.40 pesos).
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That is one story of how Lee Oswald made his way from New Orleans to the Mexican border. But is it the correct one? There is another account that places him not in Houston on Wednesday evening, September 25, 1963, on his way to Mexico, but in Dallas the following evening, Thursday, 244 miles away. Sylvia Odio, a beautiful young Cuban refugee living in the Crestwood Apartments in Dallas, was just getting dressed to go to a friend’s house for the evening—her sister Annie had come over to babysit her four young children—when she was reportedly visited at her door by two Latin men and a third man, an American whom Odio later identified as Oswald. Odio thought the visit came no earlier than 9:00 p.m., Thursday, September 26,
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but by then Oswald had already been on a bus bound for Mexico for hours, a fact supported by a number of witnesses and documents. Some have suggested that Odio was confusing Thursday night with Wednesday night, or the American was not Oswald. If it was Oswald, it could only have been if he had been driven on Wednesday all the way from New Orleans to Odio’s apartment in Dallas (which, at 503 miles, would have been around an eight-hour trip in a car traveling a little over 60 mph). From there, Oswald would have had to be driven south about 244 miles to catch the bus in Houston that left for Laredo in the early morning hours (2:35 a.m.) on Thursday, September 26.
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The entire issue, with its considerable implications on the issue of conspiracy, is discussed, as indicated earlier, in depth in the Odio section of the conspiracy part of this book. It is not surprising that this matter has been one of the very most controversial pieces of Lee Harvey Oswald’s story. The Warren Commission decided a little too hastily that Oswald was not one of the three men who visited Sylvia Odio.
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Years later, the HSCA was more receptive to the notion of conspiracy, and did not discount the possibility that he was.
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Neither settled the Odio controversy, which continues to this day.

At the first rest stop after the Flecha Roja bus left the border at Nuevo Laredo on its 750-mile trip to Mexico City, Meryl McFarland, who had been aware of Oswald sitting behind her since early that morning, decided to speak to him. She asked him if he wanted some coffee, and he replied, with typical Oswaldian graciousness, that he preferred to drink his coffee alone. Eventually, however, in spite of his rudeness, they did converse. Meryl had heard him chatting with his seatmate, an elderly gentleman who spoke with a slight northern British accent—Yorkshire, perhaps. She gathered from bits of their conversation that they had not been acquainted since chance threw them together on the crowded, dusty bus.

The McFarlands were surprised when Oswald told them of his plan to travel—illegally—to Cuba, where he hoped to meet Fidel Castro in Havana. The couple, from Liverpool, had been in the United States for a year at that time. John had been working as a research fellow at the University Hospital in Jackson, Mississippi, but they had found time to travel a good deal, and they were well aware that Castro was anathema to most Americans. Meryl was surprised that Oswald would so openly advertise his admiration for the Cuban premier. He also told them that he was the secretary of a chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in New Orleans, and that he had started his trip to Mexico City from New Orleans. By the end of the conversation the McFarlands decided that it was better not to have too much to do with him. Meryl definitely didn’t like his attitude. Though it wasn’t the way he dressed—the McFarlands recall Oswald wearing casual slacks, a light pullover, and a zippered jacket—in Meryl’s diary she described him as a “weedy, ratty little man.”
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Pamela Mumford and Patricia Winston boarded the Flecha Roja bus in Monterrey, Mexico, around 7:30 that evening. They too were bound for Mexico City. Though they had grown up in Australia, both had been born in Fiji. Two years earlier they had set out from Australia on a tour of the world and worked as they traveled. After a year in Great Britain they left for the United States as permanent residents under the Fiji Islands’ quota. They had worked for a while in New York to get some money for further travels, Mumford as a legal secretary, Winston as an occupational therapist. After their side trip to Mexico, they were heading to California. Eventually they would return to Australia, but they were taking plenty of time to see as much of the world as possible. Their tickets to Mexico City allowed them to stop at intermediate destinations, and they had just taken a day off to see the city of Monterrey.
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Soon after the bus departed from Monterrey, Oswald came down the aisle to them and started a conversation. He told them he had somehow thought they were Mexican when he first saw them struggling with their heavy luggage to the only open seats in the back of the bus, and, wanting to help them, which he didn’t end up doing, had asked his seatmate how to say in Spanish, “How can I help you?” When he heard them speaking English, he wondered where they were from. He was impressed by the story of their travels and told them he too had traveled a great deal. He had been in Japan while he was in the Marines and regretted that he had never traveled to Australia. He had been to Russia though. They hadn’t, but a friend of their’s had, and they told him about some of her experiences in Moscow. They were curious as to what he had been doing in Russia and whether he had any trouble getting in. He said he had been studying there and lived in an apartment in Moscow. He said he had a hard time getting out of the country. As if he was afraid they might not believe he had been to Russia, he returned to his seat at the front of the bus and came back with his passport to show them the Russian stamps on it—not that the young women were able to read them. But they did see the name Oswald on the passport. He didn’t mention the fact that his wife was from Russia. He didn’t mention his wife at all, but both young women noticed his gold wedding band on his left hand.

Mumford and Winston were not terribly impressed by Lee. After first talking with him on the bus, they referred to Oswald in conversations between themselves by the nickname “Texas.” They noticed that he sat alone at the bus stops, which came at around two-hour intervals, and ate rather too much food—perhaps he could not make himself understood in Spanish and had to order by pointing at the menu.
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Apparently the limited Spanish Lee had learned four years earlier from a squad mate in the Marine Corps had not produced much in the way of results.

The sixth English-speaking passenger, out of nearly forty passengers (plus crying babies and small animals) on the completely full bus, was Lee’s seatmate, the elderly Albert James Osborne, who turns out to have been even more committed to the romance of falsehoods and flightiness than Lee Oswald. Osborne, a self-described itinerant rug-cleaner, gardener, boys’ camp operator, and Baptist preacher, was born in Great Grimsby, Lincolnshire, in England and had migrated to the United States in 1914. Osborne was nearing his seventy-fifth birthday, although he apparently told the McFarlands he was eighty,
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a pointless lie that Lee might have appreciated. No one knows what Osborne told Oswald about himself, if anything, on the long ride to Mexico City, but it is likely that very little of it was true. Osborne lived a nomadic existence in Canada, the southern part of the United States, and Mexico for the past fifty years, having mailing addresses like “Will Call,” “General Delivery,” post office boxes, and hotels, and often staying at the homes of Christian friends who put him up during his many travels. During the summer of 1963 he worked briefly at the Tyler Nursery Company in Tyler, Texas. In the previous twenty-five years, Osborne had spent considerable time doing missionary work in rural Mexico.

Osborne became the eventual subject of a remarkable ninety-five-page FBI report (with its own table of contents and eight-page index) to the Warren Commission investigating his tangled background and true identity. It seems that years earlier Osborne took on a dual identity, known to many people as John Howard Bowen and to others by his real name. This resulted in his being interviewed on several occasions by
different
FBI agents, sometimes as Bowen, other times as Osborne, the bureau believing they were talking to two separate people.
*
“Bowen” and “Osborne” said they knew each other and “each” sent the FBI on fruitless quests to find the other. When the duplicity was becoming obvious, Osborne finally admitted to the FBI that he had been using the alias John H. Bowen off and on since 1916. It was as Bowen that he had taken the bus from Nuevo Laredo to Mexico City on September 26, 1963. (One strong reason for the use of the Bowen alias on this occasion was that Osborne had been deported from Mexico on April 5, 1958, for selling an automobile without paying the import duties, and if discovered under his true name as having entered Mexico illegally, he would have been detained and deported.) Bowen confirmed sitting next to a young man of Oswald’s approximate age and physical appearance on the trip, with one exception. He said that the young man had a dark complexion and was of Mexican or Puerto Rican descent. He did not identify photos of Oswald as the man he sat next to. Moreover, he maintained that there were no other English-speaking fellow passengers on the bus.
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