Reclaiming History (208 page)

It should be noted that several days prior to his testimony before the Warren Commission, which was on March 10, 1964, Worrell told the
Dallas Times Herald
the same thing. When James Romack (mentioned earlier in relation to Virgil Hoffman) read this in the March 6, 1964, edition of the
Times Herald
, he called the Dallas office of the FBI that very evening to report that Worrell’s story simply could not be true. Romack, an employee of the Coordinated Transportation Company located a few blocks northeast of the Depository Building, told the FBI that he and a coworker, George Rackley, were standing approximately 110 feet north of the northeast corner of the Depository Building at the time of the shooting. Romack and Rackley had gone there hoping to see the presidential motorcade as it passed the intersection of Houston and Elm. Romack said they had a clear view of the three doors to the rear of the Texas School Book Depository Building, the back door and the two loading dock entrances, and he was “positive that no one came out of this door or the loading dock doors” after the shooting. Indeed, Romack paid particular attention to the rear of the building since he recognized the sounds he heard as gunshots, and when he saw a uniformed police officer running alongside the building, he realized that “someone might come out of the back of the building.” He said he remained in back of the building for some time and did “not believe it is possible that anyone came out of the back door of the building” without his seeing the person. George Rackley, on March 9, 1964, confirmed to FBI agents what Romack had told them and said he “saw no one leave the Texas School Book Depository Building by way of the rear exit.”
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Romack and Rackley not only told the FBI this, but testified under oath before the Warren Commission to this fact. Their observations of the rear of the building, including the back door, continued, they said, for sometime thereafter, Rackley saying “probably ten [minutes],” Romack, “four or five minutes.”
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Even assuming the two witnesses, Worrell and Carr, saw what they said they saw, and even if we make the further assumption they saw the same man, the fact remains that running out of the Book Depository Building or running up or down any of the streets in Dealey Plaza right after the assassination, when absolute chaos reigned, would not seem to be abnormal behavior. And if anyone involved in the assassination were to have run out the back door of the Book Depository Building (the north side of the building), one would think the normal direction he would have taken for his escape would be to go
north
on Houston, where virtually no one was, not south toward Elm Street, where all of law enforcement had congregated.

Since that time, Carr has changed his story as well as added substantially to it. In New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison’s unsuccessful prosecution of Clay Shaw in 1969 for conspiring to murder Kennedy (see conspiracy section), Garrison called Carr to the stand. But he had a problem. Garrison couldn’t have Carr testify he saw the man on the top floor (the seventh floor), since no one saw anyone on that floor, and he couldn’t say the sixth floor, because Oswald was there. So the very accommodating Carr now said the man he saw in the window was really on “the fifth floor of the School Book Depository” Building, totally contradicting what he told the FBI in 1964, which was that he couldn’t see, from his vantage point, any of the floors beneath the seventh floor. And now the man was “at the third window” from Houston, having apparently moved not only two stories down from where Carr saw him on November 22, 1963, but also one window over. Carr further embroidered his statement to the FBI by testifying in New Orleans that while the man was walking fast, “every once in a while he would look over his shoulder as if he was being followed.”

Then Carr added something completely new: “
Immediately
after the shooting,” he told Garrison and the Shaw jury, he saw “three men that emerged from behind the School Book Depository.” (How he saw them when he told the FBI in 1964 that he could not see anything beneath the seventh floor is not known.) One of the three men, Carr testified, was “real dark-complected” and the three got into a Rambler station wagon driven by the dark-complected man and sped north on Houston. This new version of the story by Carr corroborated, for Garrison, the story of Roger Craig (see later text), who testified for Garrison that he saw Oswald running out of the Book Depository Building and getting into a “Rambler station wagon” driven by a “dark-complected” man. The problem with fabricated stories is that inconsistencies frequently occur. As opposed to the truth, which is compatible with its environment, falsehoods, as Daniel Webster said, not only disagree with truths, but usually quarrel among themselves. As we shall see, Craig’s Rambler was going west on Elm; Carr’s, north on Houston. Craig’s Rambler drove off from Dealey Plaza fifteen minutes after the assassination; Carr’s, immediately after. Moreover, there were only two people (Oswald and driver) in Craig’s Rambler, three in Carr’s Rambler. But we’ll get to Craig later. As for Carr, we know he made up the story about “three men speeding away in the Rambler” because in his first interview with the FBI on January 4, 1964, and in the three-and-a-half-page comprehensive signed statement he gave the bureau on February 1, 1964, he mentioned no such thing.

Carr came up with yet another story at the Shaw trial. He told the FBI in 1964 that he heard three shots and they seemed to be coming from the Triple Underpass area. But in New Orleans, he testified he heard four shots and “the last three” came from—you guessed right—
behind the picket fence at the top of the grassy knoll
. How could he tell? Listen to this. From his position almost two hundred yards away (close to two football fields) he saw that one of the three bullets “knocked a bunch of grass up…and you could tell from the way it knocked it up that the bullet came from this direction (pointing to a photomap of the picket fence on the grassy knoll).”
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Now for the somewhat funny part. Though Carr has no credibility and no one in authority is in the least bit interested in what he has to say, apparently the conspirators who murdered Kennedy are still terrified that the authorities might listen to him one day, and according to him, they have been trying to intimidate and even murder him for years, all to no avail. Carr told conspiracy theorist Gary Shaw in 1975 that when FBI agents interviewed him and he told them the man he saw in the Book Depository Building window wasn’t Oswald (the FBI report of the interview, as indicated earlier, only says that Carr described the man as a “white male” and described the way he was dressed, not that Carr said the man was not Oswald), one of the agents said to him, “If you didn’t see Lee Harvey Oswald in the School Book Depository with a rifle, you didn’t witness it.” When Carr persisted that the man wasn’t Oswald, the agent said to him, “You better keep your mouth shut.” Not long after, he told Shaw, his home was raided by more than a dozen Dallas policemen and detectives armed with a search warrant looking for “stolen articles.” They ransacked his home, he said, while holding him and his wife at gunpoint. The day after the police raid, Carr said he received an anonymous phone call advising him to “get out of Texas.” Carr heeded the warning and left for Montana, but the Kennedy assassination conspirators apparently pursued him there. One day, he found dynamite in his car. Another time, before he was scheduled to testify in the Clay Shaw trial, someone fired a shot at him, trying to murder him. He added that after the Shaw trial he was in Atlanta when he was attacked by two men who stabbed him in the back and left arm, and he says he fatally shot one of his assailants.
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Obviously, the conspirators found it easy to eliminate President Kennedy, but they never could find a way to eliminate the person they feared the most, the dreaded Richard Randolph Carr.

A
nother enduring conspiracy favorite, Julia Ann Mercer, really had a handle on what “went down” (law enforcement jargon) on the day of the assassination, trying to put Jean Hill, Tom Tilson, and others to shame. On the afternoon of the assassination the twenty-three-year-old gave a notarized statement to the Dallas County Sheriff’s Department that as her car approached the Stemmons Freeway overpass on Elm Street (in a subsequent statement she said the time was around 11:00 a.m.) on November 22, 1963, her passage was blocked by a green Ford pickup truck parked with “one or two wheels up on the curb” on the right side of Elm. The hood of the truck, which had the words “Air Conditioning” printed on the driver’s side, was open. She said, “A man was sitting under the wheel of the car and slouched over the wheel.” (I defy any student of the English language to explain, from these words, the position the man was in.) Another man, at the back of the truck, “reached over the tailgate and took out…what appeared to be a gun case.” She said the man then “walked across the grass and up the grassy hill.” Apparently, Miss Mercer’s grassy knoll assassin needed an hour and a half (11:00 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.) to set himself up behind the picket fence. All of this evidently took place in broad daylight in the virtual presence, she said, of “three policemen standing talking near a motorcycle on the bridge just west of me.”
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And since the approach to the Stemmons Freeway overpass is close to a hundred yards from the top of the grassy knoll, Mercer’s gunman had quite a long walk carrying a gun case in front of potential witnesses, something I would think he would want to avoid.

Mark Lane, in his book
Rush to Judgment
, writes that “the truck was parked illegally and blocked traffic while a man carried what appeared to be a rifle case up a grassy slope in the presence of Dallas Police Officers.” (“At that very spot later that same day,” Lane assures his readers, “the President was shot and killed.”)
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But why presidential assassins, hired by the CIA or mob or anyone else, would deliberately draw attention to themselves by parking illegally and blocking traffic on a busy street in the presence of three Dallas police officers as well as lay witnesses like Miss Mercer is not known. Of course, conspiracy theorists never let common sense get in the way of their hallucinatory theories.

On December 9, 1963, Dallas police officer Joe E. Murphy, whose assignment for the motorcade was on the Stemmons Freeway overpass above Elm Street just west of the Triple Underpass, told the FBI that around “10:30 to 10:40 a.m.” on the day of the assassination, a green pickup truck stalled on Elm Street. He ascertained that it belonged to a construction company working on the First National Bank Building at Elm and Akard in Dallas. The FBI report reads, “There were three construction men in this truck, and [Murphy] took one to the bank building to obtain another truck in order to assist in moving the stalled one.” Murphy said the other two men remained with the pickup truck in the company of “two other officers” Murphy was working with. “Shortly prior to the arrival of the motorcade, the man [Murphy] had taken to the bank building returned with a second truck, and all three of the men left with the two trucks, one pushing the other…Murphy further stated that it was probable that one of these men had taken something from the rear of this truck in an effort to start it. He stated these persons were under observation all during the period they were stalled on Elm Street because the officers wanted the truck moved prior to the arrival of the motorcade, and it would have been impossible for any of them to have had anything to do with the assassination of President Kennedy.”
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Forrest V. Sorrels, special agent in charge of the Secret Service’s Dallas office, told the Warren Commission that he learned a truck “had stalled down there on Elm Street and I…found out that [it] had gone dead.” Sorrels said the truck “apparently belonged to some construction company, and that a police officer had come down there and they had gone to the construction company and gotten somebody to come down and get the [truck] out of the way.”
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If we went no further, to believe Mercer’s story would stretch credulity beyond all tolerable boundaries, but the very creative Miss Mercer was determined not to let well enough alone. Adopting the motto “Anything she [Jean Hill] can do, I can do better,” in a 1983 interview with conspiracy-leaning author Henry Hurt she said she told the FBI that the two men she had seen were—yes, you guessed right—Jack Ruby and Lee Harvey Oswald. “Ruby, she said, was the driver, and Oswald the man with the rifle.”
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O
ne of the most bizarre stories that has emerged in assassination literature comes from a respected conspiracy theorist (there is such a species, though rare), the aforementioned Gary Mack. The former program director of radio station KFJZ in Fort Worth, Mack, since 1994, has been the curator at the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza.
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Although Mack, who has been an assassination researcher since 1975, tends to believe in a conspiracy, he is respected by both sides in the debate, and as opposed to 95 percent of his colleagues, you can engage in a spirited give-and-take exchange with him with neither side becoming incoherent.

As indicated earlier, the photo of the presidential limousine taken by Dealey Plaza spectator Mary Moorman at almost the precise moment of the shot to the president’s head, the second of two photographs she took with her Polaroid camera that day,
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corresponds approximately to frame 315 of the Zapruder film. We know the president was shot in the head at frame 313—when we see the explosion in the head—or somewhere between 312 and 313, and each frame of the Zapruder film represents about one-eighteenth of a second; therefore, she took her photo about one-ninth of a second
after
the president was hit—virtually contemporaneous with the head shot. “My picture, when I took it,” Moorman told ABC’s Bill Lord on the afternoon of the assassination, “was at the same instant that the President was hit, and that does show in my picture…It shows the President, he, uh, slumped. Jackie Kennedy was leaning towards him to see, I guess.”
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