Read Reclaiming History Online
Authors: Vincent Bugliosi
In the Kennedy assassination, those who subscribe to the theory of Oswald’s innocence have struggled mightily to find supposed evidence of his innocence. And they have failed miserably. As opposed to so many guilty defendants who offer legitimate (though ultimately not persuasive) evidence of their innocence, one would have to be magnanimous to characterize anything that Oswald said or did as meaningful evidence of his innocence. Surely his denial of guilt does not rise to the dignity of being legitimate evidence of innocence. Whether Oswald was guilty or innocent, we could expect the same, identical denial of guilt from him. I mean, if a man possesses the extraordinary immorality to murder the president of the United States, surely he would possess the infinitely lesser immorality of denying having done so.
And certainly the fact that “no one saw” Oswald shoot Kennedy, as conspiracy theorists love to point out, is not affirmative evidence of his innocence. Indeed, in the vast majority of premeditated murders (as this one obviously was), as opposed to killings where the intent to kill was formed on the spur of the moment, there are no eyewitnesses, yet convictions are obtained every day based on circumstantial evidence. And I’ve never seen a case with anywhere near as much circumstantial evidence of guilt as there is against Oswald in the Kennedy case. In murder cases I prosecuted where defense counsel would argue that there were no eyewitnesses to his client committing the murder with which he was charged, after pointing out that there rarely are eyewitnesses to a premeditated murder, I’d say, “Certainly, counsel isn’t suggesting that if a man commits a murder where there are no eyewitnesses, he is home free. It’s not quite that easy, ladies and gentlemen of the jury. And when you come back into this courtroom with your verdict of guilty, you are going to tell this defendant,” I’d say with a sudden, staccato loudness, “
it’s not quite that easy
!”
What evidence has been offered as proof of Oswald’s innocence? You’ll recall that Oswald told police shortly after his arrest that at the time of the assassination he was eating his lunch—a cheese sandwich and an apple
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—in the first-floor lunchroom. At some point, according to Oswald, he went up to the second-floor lunchroom to get a Coke. It was there that he was stopped by Officer Marrion Baker, who had dashed into the Depository believing that shots had been fired from the building.
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According to the critics, Oswald had descended from the sixth floor to the first floor—apparently via the staircase, since by all accounts no one bothered to close the west elevator gate on the first floor, as Oswald had requested so he could summon the elevator to eat lunch.
*
Critics cite the testimony of William Shelley and Eddie Piper as being supportive of Oswald’s story.
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However, as you’ll see, neither Piper’s nor Shelley’s testimony puts Oswald on the first floor
after
he was seen and heard on the fifth and sixth floors shortly before noon. In fact, their testimony only adds additional support to the conclusion that Oswald
remained
on the upper floors of the Depository, obviously preparing to shoot Kennedy.
To elaborate in more depth on what was touched upon earlier, William Shelley testified that he encountered Oswald on the first floor at about 11:50 a.m., after he descended for lunch from the sixth floor, where he had been supervising a six-man crew laying new flooring.
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Piper claims he saw Oswald on the first floor around noon,
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though he probably saw Oswald on the first floor around the same time Shelley did. I say that not just because Givens saw Oswald ostensibly dallying on the
sixth
floor shortly before noon, but because Piper’s testimony linked the time of his conversation with Oswald to the time just before lunch.
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And we know that virtually all of the Depository employees
broke early for lunch
on the day of the assassination, beginning with Shelley
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in anticipation of watching the president’s motorcade pass their building. In fact, it may very well have been Shelley’s appearance on the first floor that triggered Piper’s remark to Oswald, “It’s about lunch time. I believe I’ll go have lunch.”
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We also know, from a signed affidavit Piper gave the Dallas Sheriff Department the day after the assassination, that Oswald responded to him, “I’m going
up
to eat.”
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Two weeks later, Piper told the Secret Service that Oswald had said, “I’m going up to eat lunch.”
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Much later, in April of 1964, Piper told the Warren Commission that Oswald said he was “going up or going out” (Piper forgets which).
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In either case, whether he went up to a higher floor in the Depository Building or outside (which there is no evidence of), Oswald apparently didn’t intend to eat lunch
on
the first floor, as he later claimed. That Oswald subsequently
did
go up to the upper floors
after
talking with Piper (and consequently didn’t remain on the first floor, as critics contend) is supported, as we have seen, by four witnesses—Givens, Williams, Lovelady, and Arce—who saw and heard Oswald calling to them from the fifth floor as they descended past him in two elevators on their way down to lunch,
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and by Givens, who saw Oswald minutes later on the sixth floor with a clipboard.
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The Warren Commission critics don’t deny these Oswald sightings. They simply believe that they occurred
before
Piper spoke to Oswald on the first floor and, therefore, are still consistent with the belief that Oswald,
after
he was seen on the fifth and sixth floors, came down to the first floor for lunch. But there is a very good reason to conclude that Oswald was spotted on the fifth and sixth floors
after
the conversation with Piper and not before, and hence, remained on the upper floors.
We know that when Shelley left the sixth floor around 11:50 a.m. or a little earlier to go down to the first floor for lunch, this was before the rest of the work crew did, since he was not part of, nor did he testify about, the elevator descent from the sixth floor that subsequently took place. That means that the sixth-floor work crew was still on the sixth floor, with
one
remaining freight elevator, when Shelley saw Oswald on the first floor. This is an important point because we know that when the sixth-floor work crew broke for lunch a few minutes later, they used
both
elevators. As Danny Arce said, “Me and Bonnie Ray and…I believe it was Billy Lovelady were on the same elevator, and Charles Givens and the other guys were on the
other one
and we were racing down.”
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That means that the elevator Shelley likely used to descend to the first floor had been returned (either manually or by remote control) to the sixth floor during the intervening few minutes. It seems pretty obvious that it was Oswald himself who took the freight elevator back up to the sixth floor after talking with Piper, considering the fact that Oswald was seen on, and heard calling from, the fifth floor shortly thereafter by his coworkers descending past him on their way to lunch.
Once again, the cohesiveness of all of the evidence—Oswald’s statement to Piper (“I’m going
up
to eat lunch”), his presence on the upper floors of the Depository shortly thereafter (as determined by eyewitness testimony and from the movements of the freight elevators), and all of the physical evidence (Oswald’s finger and palm prints in the sniper’s nest, his ownership of murder weapon found on the sixth floor, etc.)—easily overwhelms the allegation that Oswald was eating lunch on the first floor of the Depository at the time of the shooting. Even if Oswald had descended to the first floor to have lunch
after
being seen by his coworkers on the fifth floor, this would obviously not preclude his having a quick lunch and then going up to the sixth floor to await the motorcade. If Harold Norman could be eating lunch on the first floor after 12:00 noon and still be on the fifth floor to hear the shots being fired above him on the sixth floor at 12:30, why couldn’t Oswald have gotten from the first-floor lunchroom to the sixth floor just as quickly?
In addition to citing Piper and Shelley, critics also point to the testimony of James Jarman Jr. and Harold Norman as supportive of Oswald’s claim, in his interrogation by Captain Fritz, that at the time of the assassination he was “having lunch” on the first floor “with some of the colored boys” who worked with him.
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Pressed to name the employees, Oswald said that one of them was called “Junior” and the other was a short man whose name he did not know.
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*
Oswald was undoubtedly referring to James “Junior” Jarman and most likely Harold Norman (who was short and with whom Jarman spent most of his lunch break that day), two of three men who would later watch the motorcade from the fifth floor. Conspiracy theorists are quick to emphasize that both men did, in fact, eat lunch on the first floor.
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Conspiracy
author Anthony Summers writes, “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 seventy five—who were actually there.”
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Of course, Oswald’s claim can hardly be considered psychic given the fact that he undoubtedly was,
at some stage
, on the first floor, being seen there not too long before noon by Shelley and Piper. Also, Oswald could easily and safely have said that Jarman and Norman were also on the first floor at some point during the lunch period. The real question is whether Oswald had lunch
with
Jarman and Norman, as he told Captain Fritz he did, in the first-floor lunchroom.
*
The big problem with Oswald’s story is that when Warren Commission counsel asked Jarman, “After his [Oswald’s] arrest, he stated…that he had had lunch with you. Did you have lunch with him?” Jarman answered, “No, sir, I didn’t.”
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What about Norman? Norman testified that while he was having lunch in the domino room, though he never said Oswald was in the room with him, he did say, “I think there was someone else in there.”
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Summers, like critic Sylvia Meagher, suggests that the “someone else” Norman recalled seeing in the lunchroom after 12:00 noon might have been Oswald.
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But Danny Arce told the Warren Commission that he and Jack Dougherty ate their lunch in the domino room during the period Norman described. In fact, Arce was one of those who joined Norman and Jarman when they walked outside a moment later.
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Obviously, Arce and Dougherty were the “someone else” Norman had referred to. Indeed, at the London trial, after Norman testified he saw Oswald around “10, or ten after 10” in the morning at the first-floor window looking out at Elm Street, I asked him, “Did you see him at any other time that day?”
Norman: “No, sir.”
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So much for Oswald’s claim that he was having lunch in the first-floor lunchroom with Jarman and Norman at the time the president was shot. But that’s not the end of the conspiracy theorists’ arguments that Oswald had an alibi for the time of the shooting.
T
he principle witness whom conspiracy theorists rely on to establish an alibi for Oswald
just prior
to the shootings in Dealey Plaza is Carolyn Arnold. Mrs. Arnold reportedly saw Oswald on one of the lower floors of the Depository at about the same time Dealey Plaza witness Arnold Rowland saw a man with a gun in a sixth-floor window, which of course suggests that someone other than Oswald was waiting to shoot the president.
The twenty-year-old Mrs. Arnold was employed as a secretary at the Book Depository Building. She came into prominence for the first time in 1978, fifteen years after the assassination, when she told the
Dallas Morning News
that around 12:25 p.m. on the day of the assassination, five minutes before the shooting, she left the building to watch the motorcade. On her way out, she claims she saw Oswald in the second-floor lunchroom. “I do not recall that he was doing anything,” she said. “I just recall that he was sitting there…in one of the booth seats on the right hand side of the room as you go in. He was alone as usual and appeared to be having lunch…I recognized him clearly.”
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That same month, Arnold told author Anthony Summers that “she went into the lunchroom on the second floor for a moment” (she was pregnant at the time and had a craving for a glass of water) and saw Oswald there, alone and having lunch. Instead of the 12:25 p.m. time she had given the
Dallas Morning News
, she told Summers she saw Oswald “about a quarter of an hour before the assassination…about 12:15. It may have been slightly later.”
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Why, fifteen years after an alleged incident, Arnold saw fit to give, within the same month, different times to separate interviewers is not known. But that is the least of the problems with Arnold’s story.
Not only is Mrs. Arnold’s 1978 story diametrically opposed to what Oswald told police (he claimed he ate lunch on the
first
floor, not the second floor as Arnold said, then went to the second to get a Coke), but when she was interviewed by the FBI just four days after the assassination, she said she saw Oswald a few minutes before 12:15 p.m., and it wasn’t in the second-floor lunchroom at all. The FBI report reads, “As she was standing in front of the building, she stated she
thought
she caught a fleeting glimpse of Lee Harvey Oswald standing in the hallway between the front door and the double doors leading to the warehouse, located on the
first
floor. She could not be sure that this was Oswald, but she felt it was.”
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So in 1963 she
thinks
she saw Oswald on the first floor, and in 1978 she
knows
she saw him on the second floor. And in 1963 Oswald was standing, whereas in 1978 he was sitting down having lunch.