Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy (6 page)

He was riding six cars behind Kennedy and filming as the motorcade
moved through Dealey Plaza.

In a 1977 article, Atkins said the car he was in had just turned onto
Houston Street and was facing the Texas School Book Depository, and

.. . Kennedy's car had just made the left turn heading toward the
freeway entrance. Although I did not look up at the building, I could
hear everything quite clearly. . . . The shots came from below and off
to the right side from where I was [the location of the Grassy Knoll]... .
I never thought the shots came from above. They did not sound like
shots coming from anything higher than street level.

After returning to Washington on Air Force Two, Atkins assembled his
film into a movie he entitled The Last Two Davs. That film was described
as "terribly damaging to the Warren Commission finding that Lee Harvey
Oswald was the lone assassin." Perhaps this explains why neither Atkins's
testimony nor his film were studied by either of the federal panels investigating the assassination. Atkins said in 1977: "It's something I've always
wondered about. Why didn't they ask me what I knew? I not only was on
the White House staff, I was then, and still am, a photographer with a
pretty keen visual sense."

Obviously, the federal authorities didn't want to hear from a man with
a "keen visual sense" and strong credentials who might have told them
things they did not want to hear.

But if the stories of the motorcade witnesses differed from the later
official version of the assassination, that was nothing compared to the
stories to come from the crowd of bystanders.

I saw a man fire from behind the wooden fence.

-Assassination witness Jean Hill

The crowd of witnesses along the motorcade route through Dealey Plaza
saw many things that differed from the later official version.

Even before the motorcade arrived, men with rifles were seen by people
in downtown Dallas.

Shortly before noon, Phillip B. Hathaway and coworker John Lawrence
were walking on Akard Street toward Main to get an observation spot for
the motorcade when Hathaway saw a man carrying a rifle in a gun case.
He described the man as very tall, six-foot-five or more, weighing about 250 pounds and thick in the chest. The man was in his early thirties with
"dirty blond hair worn in a crewcut" and was wearing a gray business
suit. Hathaway said the case was made of leather and cloth and was not
limp, but obviously contained .a rifle.

He remarked to Lawrence that it must be a Secret Service man.

Lawrence also saw the big blond man, but did not see the rifle due to
the growing crowd around them. Lawrence said the man gave him the
impression of being "a professional football player."

This same man may have been seen later that day by Ernest Jay Owens,
who told sheriff's officers the afternoon of the assassination that he was
driving on Wood Street near Good-Lattimer Expressway when he saw a
white male of "heavy build" carrying a "foreign-made rifle" out of a
parking lot. Owens said the man was bare headed and wearing a dark
colored suit.

Once Oswald was captured and proclaimed the assassination suspect,
there was no effort to investigate these stories further.

A similar-and more ominous-incident involved Julia Ann Mercer.
Mercer, then twenty-three years old, later told authorities that shortly
before 11 A.M. the day of the assassination she was driving a rented white
Valiant west on Elm Street just past the point where Kennedy was killed
about two hours later. Just after passing through the Triple Underpass, she
found her traffic lane blocked by a green Ford pickup truck.

While waiting for the truck to move, she saw a young man get out of the
truck, walk to a long tool compartment along the side, and remove a long
paper bag. She could see the outlines of a rifle in the bag. The man then
walked up on the Grassy Knoll carrying the package and was lost to her
sight. She described this man as in his late twenties or early thirties,
wearing a gray jacket, brown pants, a plaid shirt, and some sort of wool
stocking cap with a tassel on it. Mercer said as she pulled alongside the
truck, she locked eyes with the driver, whom she described as heavily built
with a round face and light brown hair.

She said during this time, she saw three Dallas policemen standing by a
motorcycle on the underpass talking. In Warren Commission Document
205, a policeman did tell of seeing the truck, but believed that it had broken
down.

When she was finally able to change lanes, Mercer drove on toward Fort
Worth, stopping at the halfway point of the Dallas-Fort Worth Toll Road
(now Interstate 30) to have breakfast. While eating, she told her experience to some policemen, commenting, "The Secret Service is not very
secret. "

Later, as she drove on to Fort Worth, she was stopped by the policemen, who informed her of the assassination and took her back to Dallas for
questioning. She was held for several hours and questioned by both local
and federal authorities, although no one showed her a badge or identified
himself.

Early the next morning, FBI men came to her home and took her back
to the Dallas Sheriff's Office where she was shown some photographs of
various men. She picked out two as the men she had seen in the truck the
day before. Turning one photo over, she read the name, "Jack Ruby."
During the TV coverage of the Oswald shooting the next day, Mercer
claims she again recognized Ruby as the man driving the truck and that
Oswald resembled the man carrying the rifle.

Oswald's mother also claimed to have been shown a picture of Ruby
prior to the Sunday shooting of her son.

Mercer later claimed that her story concerning the truck and its occupants was twisted and changed by both the FBI and the Dallas Sheriff's
Office.

Mercer's experience may have been partly corroborated by another
Dallasite, Julius Hardie, who told The Dallas Morning News years later
that on the morning of November 22, he saw three men on top of the
Triple Underpass carrying longarms, although he could not tell if they
were rifles or shotguns. Hardie said he reported the incident to the FBI,
but no such report has been made public.

As the motorcade arrived in Dealey Plaza, it passed almost twenty
sheriff's deputies standing at the intersection of Main and Houston in front
of the Sheriff's Office.

The deputies almost unanimously agreed they thought the shots came
from the railroad yards located just behind the Grassy Knoll.

They all began running in that direction even before Decker's radio
order to "... saturate the area of the park, railroad and all buildings . .."
arrived.

Deputy L. C. Smith, in a report made that day, told a story that was
typical of the deputies' experiences:

I was standing in front of the Sheriff's Office on Main Street and
watched the President and his party drive by. Just a few seconds later, I
heard the first shot, which I thought was a backfire, then the second
shot and third shot rang out. I knew that this was gun shots and
everyone else did also. I ran as fast as I could to Elm Street just west of
Houston and I heard a woman unknown to me say the President was
shot in the head and the shots came from the fence on the north side of
Elm. I went at [once] behind the fence and searched also in the parking
area. Then came . . . word the shot was thought to have come from the
Texas School Book Depository . . .

Supporting the deputies stories was W. W. Mabra, then a county bailiff.
Mabra, too, was on the corner of Main and Houston:

.. . so close to the President that I could almost have reached out and
touched him. Then I heard the first shot. I thought it was a backfire. People ran toward the knoll. Some said they saw smoke there. I thought
at first the shot may have come from there.

Across Main Street from the deputies and Mabra stood Dallas County
surveyor Robert H. West, who watched the presidential limousine move
slowly toward the Triple Underpass. He heard one small report "similar to
a motorcycle backfire" then three like "rifle fire." He said the shots came
from the "northwest quadrant of Dealey Plaza (the area of the picket fence
on the Grassy Knoll. " West later participated in reconstructions of the
assassination for both Life magazine and the FBI, which convinced him the
crime could not have been the work of one man.

Mr. and Mrs. Arnold Rowland were both high-school students who had
come to town to see the President. They were standing on Houston Street
near Decker's office, the west side of which faces Dealey Plaza. Both of
the Rowlands believed the shots came from down near the Triple Underpass despite the fact that fifteen minutes before the motorcade arrived they
had remarked about seeing two men, one with a rifle and telescopic sight,
on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. Arnold Rowland
had assumed the men were part of the Secret Service protection.

He said the man with the rifle was in the far west window of the
Depository's sixth floor while the other man, described as an elderly
Negro with thin hair wearing a plaid shirt, was seen in the easternmost
window (the so-called "sniper's nest" window). Rowland said he lost
sight of the man with the rifle as the motorcade approached, but again saw
the black man just before Kennedy arrived.

During the excitement of the moment, Rowland said he neglected to
mention the black man when he talked to authorities in the Sheriff's
Office. However, he said the next day FBI agents came to his home and
got him to sign a statement. He recalled: At that time I told them I did see
the Negro man there and they told me it didn't have any bearing or such on
the case right then. In fact, they just the same as told me to forget it now."

Although the agents "didn't seem interested" in Rowland's story of the
two men on the sixth floor, they did attempt to get an identification of the
man with the gun by showing Rowland photos of Oswald. However,
Rowland said: "I just couldn't identify him . . . because I just didn't have
a good enough look at his face."

Rowland's story of seeing two men was corroborated to the Warren
Commission by Deputy Sheriff Roger D. Craig. Craig said Rowland told
him about seeing two men pacing the Depository approximately ten minutes after the assassination as Craig interviewed Rowland in Dealey Plaza.

The two men also were seen by Mrs. Carolyn Walther, who worked in a
dress factory in the Dal-Tex Building.

About noon, she and another employee joined the crowd on the east side
of Houston just south of Elm to watch the motorcade. Years later she
recalled:

I had gone out on the street at about twenty after twelve to get a look at
the President when he came by. While I waited, I glanced up at the
Depository building. There were two men in the corner window on the
fourth or fifth floor. One man was wearing a white shirt and had blond
or light brown hair. This man had the window open. His hands were
extended outside the window. He held a rifle with the barrel pointed
downward. I thought he was some kind of guard. In the same window,
right near him, was a man in a brown suit coat. Then the President's car
came by. I heard a gunshot. People ran. Like a fool I just stood there. I
saw people down. I walked toward them, with the thought they maybe
were hurt and I could help them. People were running toward the
Grassy Knoll. A woman cried out, "They shot him!" In all, I heard
four shots.

Steelworker Richard Randolph Carr, who was working on the seventh
floor of the new Dallas Courthouse (then under construction at the intersection of Commerce and Houston), also reported seeing a man wearing a
brown coat. Carr said minutes before the motorcade arrived he saw a
heavyset man wearing a hat, horn-rimmed glasses, and tan sportcoat
standing in a sixth-floor window of the Depository. After the shooting,
Carr saw the man walking on Commerce Street.

Ruby Henderson, standing across the street from the Depository, also
saw two men on an upper floor of the building. While she was uncertain if
it was the sixth floor, she saw no one above the pair. She described the
shorter of the men as having a dark complexion, possibly even a Negro,
and wearing a white shirt. The shorter man was wearing a dark shirt.

The story of two men on the sixth floor of the Depository moments
before the shooting has since been bolstered by two films made that day.
One, an 8 mm home movie made by Robert Hughes, who was standing at
the intersection of Main and Houston, shows the front of the Depository
just as Kennedy's limousine passes the building turning onto Elm. The
film shows movement in both the corner window of the sixth floor and the
window next to it. Deep within the Warren Commission exhibits is an FBI
report acknowledging receipt of Hughes's film. In another FBI document,
it is claimed that the figure in the second window from the corner was
simply a stack of boxes. No reference is made to movement.

In 1975, CBS television asked Itek Corporation to look again at the
Hughes film. The company concluded that there were no moving images
in the double window next to the sixth-floor corner window, a conclusion
that is still disputed by various photographic experts.

And in late 1978, a second movie surfaced that supports the two-men
allegation. This film, taken by Charles L. Bronson, who was standing only
a few feet west of Hughes, also shows the sixth-floor corner windows of
the Depository just moments before the Kennedy motorcade passed. Bronson's film was viewed in 1963 by an FBI agent who reported that it
"failed to show the building from which the shots were fired," thus
relegating the film to obscurity. It was rediscovered in 1978 when the film
was mentioned in declassified FBI documents and was obtained by The
Dallas Morning News.

The newspaper commissioned Robert Groden, who served as staff consultant on photographic evidence for the House Select Committee on
Assassinations, to study the film. Groden told the newspaper: