Reclaiming History (292 page)

If, indeed, as Odio testified before the Warren Commission, the visit from the two Cubans and one American took place around 9:00 p.m. on the evening of September 26 or 27, 1963,
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it would clearly appear that Oswald could not have been present. The Warren Commission, as a result of a very thorough and meticulous investigation by the FBI as well as the Secret Service, replete with extensive documentary evidence in addition to eyewitness testimony, proved that he was in Mexico on the evenings of both of these days (see later text).

The FBI investigation concluded that Oswald was in New Orleans from April 24, 1963, when he left Dallas for New Orleans, until at least 8:00 a.m. on September 25, 1963. Ruth Paine and Marina Oswald left Oswald behind when they departed New Orleans for Dallas on September 23.
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On September 24, Oswald went to the office of the Louisiana Division of Employment Security in New Orleans to sign for his Texas unemployment compensation for that week.
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He received $33 per week in unemployment compensation.
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That week’s check, dated September 23, 1963, was picked up by the U.S. Postal Department from the Texas Employment Commission in Austin, Texas, at 5:15 that evening.
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The Warren Commission concluded that the earliest time Oswald could have obtained the Texas check from his post office box in New Orleans was 5:00 a.m. on September 25,1963.
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Although the date Oswald cashed this check at the Winn-Dixie Store in New Orleans is not indicated on the check, it is believed he must have cashed it sometime between 8:00 a.m. (when the store opened for the day) and 1:00 p.m. on September 25. Store records show that the cashier who cashed the check, Mrs. Thelma Fisher, left work at 1:00 p.m. on September 25.
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So Oswald’s presence in New Orleans until at least the morning (8:00 a.m.) of September 25 seems to have been firmly established by the Warren Commission. The Commission noted, however, that “between the morning of September 25th and 2:35 a.m. on September 26th” Oswald’s whereabouts were “not strictly accounted for.”
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The FBI and Secret Service established that the following day, September 26, Oswald, whose ultimate destination was Mexico City, was traveling on Continental Trailways bus number 5133, which left Houston at 2:35 a.m. for Laredo, Texas. The 5133 passengers, en route to Laredo, were transferred to bus number 304 at Corpus Christi, which arrived in Laredo about 1:20 p.m. that day.
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As indicated previously, a young couple from Liverpool, England, Mr. and Mrs. John McFarland, gave an affidavit to the American consulate in Liverpool that they first became aware of Oswald, whom they thereafter recognized from pictures in the newspapers at the time of the assassination, on the Houston-to-Laredo bus “probably about 6:00 a.m., after it became light.”
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After he departed Laredo, Texas, on bus number 516 of the Flecha Roja bus line for Mexico City at 1:45 p.m. on September 26, 1963, witnesses and Mexican immigration records reflect that Oswald crossed the border to Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, sometime before 2:00 p.m. on September 26.
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The reason the exact time of day is not known is that Helio Tuexi Maydon, the Mexican immigration inspector (Maydon worked on September 26 from 6:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m.) who stamped Oswald’s tourist card, FM-8 No. 240085, failed to record the precise time of day.
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Since the evidence is overwhelming that Oswald could not, as Sylvia Odio alleges, have been at her apartment in Dallas on the evenings of either September 26 or 27 (since on the evening of September 26 he was on a bus in Mexico traveling to Mexico City, and on the evening of September 27 he was in Mexico City), can we therefore discard her story as being unfactual? In an infrequently cited second interview with the FBI on September 10, 1964, a month and a half after her Warren Commission testimony, Odio acknowledged that the visit by the three men could possibly have been on Wednesday night, September 25, 1963.
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Although the FBI agents had made every effort possible to confirm Oswald’s whereabouts during the day and evening of September 25, they were unable to do so.
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However, the premise that Oswald visited Odio on the evening of the twenty-fifth creates its own set of problems, though not, as we have seen with the twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh, of a prohibitory nature. The Warren Commission established that the only bus out of Dallas on the evening of September 25 after 9:00 p.m. (the time of the visit, per Odio) that Oswald could have taken and would have enabled him to connect with the Houston bus to Laredo was a Continental Trailways bus departing Dallas at 11:00 p.m. However, that bus, traveling through San Antonio, did not connect with the Houston-to-Laredo bus until 10:35 (in Alice, Texas) on the morning of the twenty-sixth, more than four hours
after
the McFarlands first reported seeing Oswald on their bus.
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Moreover, no tickets were sold during the period September 23–26, 1963, for travel between Dallas and Laredo by the Dallas office of Continental Trailways.
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There is a further problem that circumstantially militates against Oswald being at Odio’s door with his two Cuban friends at around 9:00 on the evening of September 25. Mrs. Estelle Twiford of Houston, Texas, said that one evening “during the week prior to the weekend that my husband flew home to visit me from New Orleans,” she received a telephone call sometime between seven and ten o’clock from Oswald requesting to speak to her husband, Horace. (Estelle and Horace distributed literature in Texas for the Socialist Labor Party, and Horace had routinely mailed Oswald literature in Dallas, and Oswald’s address book contained the name Horace Twiford with Twiford’s address and phone number.)
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As discussed earlier in this book, when Oswald was told that Twiford’s husband, a merchant seaman, was at sea, Oswald said he had hoped to discuss ideas with him for a few hours before he left for Mexico. Horace Twiford was able to fix the week of the Oswald call because he said he had flown home from New Orleans to visit his wife on September 27 (a Friday) and was told by his wife that Oswald had called “during the week preceding my visit home. I had been home on the previous weekend, and neither at that time nor prior thereto had my wife said anything about a call from Oswald.” Since we know Oswald was in New Orleans on September 23 and 24 (see earlier text), and Mexico on September 26 and 27, it appears the call was on the evening of the twenty-fifth. Mrs. Twiford assumed the call from Oswald was a local (Houston) one because, she said, no operator was involved and because of Oswald’s remark that he wanted to “discuss ideas” with her husband “for a few hours.” However, Oswald did not specifically tell her he was in Houston at the time of the call.
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If Oswald, in fact, was in Houston sometime between 7:00 and 10:00 p.m. on the evening of September 25, wanting to meet with Horace Twiford for a few hours, this would essentially rule out his being at Sylvia Odio’s residence at nine o’clock that same evening.

If Oswald was not the American who visited Odio on the evening of September 25, 26, or 27, 1963, who was? And who were the two Cubans? Based on the description of the three men given by Miss Odio, and the two war names of Leopoldo and possibly Angelo, the Warren Commission had the FBI conduct a far-reaching canvass of the anti-Castro community in the United States to locate them. On September 16, 1964, the FBI located one Loran Eugene Hall in Johnsandale, California. Loran Hall (whose name bears a phonetic resemblance to Odio’s “Leon Oswald”) had been involved in anti-Castro paramilitary activities in Florida. He told the bureau that he, a Mexican-American from East Los Angeles named Lawrence Howard, and William Seymour from Arizona (who, Hall said, resembled Oswald) had visited Odio in Dallas in September of 1963 to solicit funds for the anti-Castro movement.
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The FBI had not completed its investigation of this matter by the time the Warren Report, published on September 24, 1964, was submitted for publication, and the Report informed its readers of this fact.
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Within a week of Hall’s statement, and with the Warren Commission no longer in existence, Howard and Seymour were interviewed by the FBI and denied ever having met Odio. Howard said Hall was a “scatter-brain, unreliable, emotionally disturbed, and an egotistical liar.” On September 20, 1964, Hall himself recanted his story.
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Nonetheless, on October 1, 1964, in Miami, Florida (where Odio had just moved to from Dallas), the FBI showed photos of Hall, Howard, and Seymour to Odio, who said none of them were among the men who had visited her. Her sister Annie was also shown the three photos and she too failed to recognize any of the men.
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Additionally, an examination of the payroll records of the Beach Welding Supplies Company of Miami Beach, Florida, revealed that Seymour, the one who allegedly looked like Oswald, was employed with the company and worked forty-hour weeks during the period September 5 to October 10, 1963.
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The HSCA reinterviewed Hall, Howard, and Seymour, and again searched the anti-Castro community for the three men who had visited Odio, extending their search to even include pro-Castro activists. The search produced three men who may have been in Dallas in September 1963. Photographs of the men were shown to Odio, who could not identify them as the men who had visited her.
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A
ssuming Sylvia Odio is telling the truth, the identity of Leopoldo and Angelo remains unknown to this day. From their appearance, the things they said, their detailed knowledge of Odio’s father, the fact they had the identical petition in their possession that Dallas JURE leader Antonio Alentado had—indeed, from the fact they had Sylvia Odio’s home address—one can reasonably conclude they were, in fact, anti-Castro Cuban exiles. Certainly, no one has suggested they were pro-Castro Cubans, nor is there any evidence to warrant this conclusion.

It’s not even known where they were from. The assumption has always been New Orleans, simply because Leopoldo told Odio, “We have just come from New Orleans.” But they could have been from Miami, the headquarters for all of the anti-Castro groups
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and the city where the overwhelming majority of anti-Castro Cubans have always lived. New Orleans may simply have been a city where they had been for awhile, and the city from which they departed on their trip to Dallas. Indeed, although they never expressly said so, Sylvia Odio got the impression from the two Cubans at her door that after Dallas “they were leaving for Puerto Rico
or Miami
.”
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Even if they were from New Orleans, however, we cannot automatically assume that they would have been aware of Oswald’s confrontation with
anti
-Castro Cubans the very previous month, and hence, have known of Oswald’s real identity as being
pro
-Castro and most likely anti-Kennedy. Although there was mention of the confrontation in the media,
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it was a very minor story, and therefore the two Cubans may not have heard the news account. And since the anti-Castro movement was disorganized and fractured, we also cannot assume that word of the minor confrontation would have spread quickly in New Orleans’s anti-Castro community. For instance, Bringuier, who was very active in the anti-Castro movement in New Orleans, didn’t even know that there was an anti-Castro training camp in New Orleans across from Lake Pontchartrain.
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Whether Leopoldo and Angelo were from New Orleans, Miami, or elsewhere, if Leon was in fact Oswald, and they in fact knew he was actually pro-Castro, then the visit to Odio’s house makes little sense. Neither would Leopoldo’s words to Odio the following day. He would know that Castro was the last person in the world Oswald would want to harm.

Although we have seen that the evidence of time and place compels the conclusion that Oswald could not have visited Odio on September 26 or 27, 1963, and most probably did not do so on September 25, there nevertheless are countervailing reasons why we cannot automatically dismiss Odio’s allegations—namely, her credibility and corroborating evidence. As stated, we can infer from the Warren Report (and the fact that the Commission had the FBI conduct an extremely detailed and comprehensive investigation of Odio’s story) that the Warren Commission staff did not write Odio’s story off and believed her to be truthful, though mistaken, in her relation of the events to which she testified. Among others, Wesley Liebeler, who examined her for the Warren Commission, said, “I think [Odio] believes that Oswald was there. I do not think she would lie about something like that.”
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Assistant Counsel W. David Slawson, whose area of investigation for the Warren Commission was the possibility of a conspiracy in the assassination, wrote in his report to the Commission that “Mrs. Odio has been checked out thoroughly through her psychiatrist and friends, and, with one exception—a layman [not identified] who speculates that she may have subconscious tendencies to over-dramatize or exaggerate—the evidence is unanimously favorable, both as to her character and reliability and as to her intelligence.”
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Moreover, the problems that caused Odio to seek psychiatric assistance were not those that could affect her perception or credibility, and Odio was not hallucinatory.
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A Warren Commission staff report noted that “Doctor [Burton] Einspruch [Odio’s psychiatrist] stated that he had great faith in Miss Odio’s story of having met Lee Harvey Oswald,” believing the story to be “completely true.” Einspruch, who had been seeing Odio on the average of once a week since April of 1963, said that while Odio was “given to exaggeration, all the basic facts which she provides are true.” He stated her tendency to exaggerate is that of an emotional type, characteristic of many Latin-American people, and being one of degree rather than basic fact.
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Manolo Ray, who had known Sylvia Odio and her family for years, told the FBI that Odio was an intelligent person of good character who would not have fabricated or been delusional about the incident at her door.
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