Reclaiming History (210 page)

With respect to the running man, there are two strong inferences, going in opposite directions, on the issue of whether or not Craig should be believed. With over two hundred people, including many police officers, milling about on Elm Street after the shooting, one would assume that a significant number of them—I would think at an absolute minimum, ten—would have seen what Craig claims he saw. Yet, of all the police officers who should have seen this, including his fellow deputy, Lemmy Lewis,
†
only Craig reported seeing what Craig claims to have seen. On the other hand, two people, not afoot in Dealey Plaza but passing through in cars,
did
, indeed, support Craig’s story. And if what Craig said he saw didn’t happen, how is it possible that
anyone at all
(assuming they are not connected in some way with Craig, of which there’s no evidence) would say they saw essentially the same thing Craig says he saw? It would seem there’s a greater improbability of the second thing happening than the first, and this is why I give the benefit of the doubt to Craig here.

Marvin C. Robinson told the FBI on November 23, the day after the assassination, that at sometime “between 12:30 and 1:00 p.m.” the previous day he was driving westbound on Elm Street. After crossing the intersection of Elm and Houston, “a light-colored Nash station wagon” suddenly appeared before him. The vehicle stopped and a “white male came down the grass-covered incline between the [School Book Depository] building and the street and entered the station wagon.” The station wagon then proceeded westbound on Elm. Robinson said he did not “pay any particular attention” to the person who entered the station wagon and told the FBI he would be unable to identify him.
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Roy Cooper told the FBI the day after the assassination that he was driving behind Marvin Robinson, his boss, in his car, when he saw a “white male somewhere between 20 and 30 years of age wave at a Nash Rambler station wagon, light colored, as it pulled out…real fast in front of the Cadillac driven” by his boss. Cooper could not see who was driving the station wagon and could not give any further description of the man who got into it.
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Although Robinson and Cooper did not say the man running was Oswald, they did corroborate the essence of Craig’s story.

As far as Craig’s observation that about fourteen or fifteen minutes after the shooting in Dealey Plaza he saw Oswald get in the Rambler, either this was a sincere mistake on his part or he deliberately lied to magnify his importance in this historic event. In any case, we can be certain he was wrong because we already know where Oswald was at the time: Just two minutes after the last shot was fired, a Book Depository employee, Mrs. Robert Reid, saw Oswald on the second floor of the building walking toward the front stairway leading out of the building. Then, within minutes after the shooting, Oswald boarded a bus seven blocks from the Book Depository Building, and two blocks later the driver issued a bus transfer to him, which was found on his person after his arrest. A former landlady of Oswald’s was on the bus at the time and positively identified him. Getting off the bus, he picked up a cab another two blocks away and was driven to within a few blocks of his home. The cabdriver also positively identified Oswald. Not that Oswald’s word, by itself, should be given any credibility at all, but during his interrogation, even he confirmed the bus and cab rides (right down to some of the details told by the bus and cab drivers) as the transportation he used to get home from the Book Depository Building on the day of the assassination. Fourteen to fifteen minutes after the assassination, then, Oswald was far away from the Book Depository Building.

With respect to Craig’s alleged encounter with Fritz and Oswald in Fritz’s office, the high probability is that Craig lied about it. T. L. Baker, one of the three Dallas Police Department lieutenants who were assistants to Captain Fritz, confirmed to me that it was he whom Craig called in the late afternoon of November 22 with his information about the running man. Baker said that when Craig, who Baker said was in plainclothes, thereafter came to the Homicide and Robbery Bureau, “I met him at the door and took him into my office, where he sat down. I knocked on Captain Fritz’s door, the captain stepped out, and I told him what Craig had told me, and he told me, ‘We already know how he [Oswald] left. Thank him [Craig] for coming down.’ I told Craig this and walked back to the door with him.”

Baker said that he did not know Craig and didn’t see him again. When I asked Baker if he had any opinion on whether Craig had made up his story about the running man, he said, “I don’t know about this because I wasn’t there, but I know he made up the story about being in Captain Fritz’s office. He didn’t enter the room. I’m absolutely positive about that.”
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Captain Fritz, in an affidavit to the Warren Commission, confirmed the essence of Baker’s version of events. He said, “I do remember a man coming into my outer office and I remember one of my officers calling me outside the door of my private office. I talked to this man for a minute or two, and he started telling me a story about seeing Oswald leaving the building. I don’t remember all the things that this man said, but I turned him over to Lieutenant Baker who talked to him.”
⁵⁴

Baker told me, “Everything was hectic at that time and the captain was incorrect here about talking to Craig. He simply forgot. He was confusing my telling him what Craig said with Craig having told it to him. He never spoke to Craig.”
⁵⁵

And in his Warren Commission testimony, counsel asked Fritz, “Now this man…has stated that he came to your office and Oswald was in your office, and you asked him to look at Oswald and tell you whether or not this was the man he saw, and he says that in your presence he identified Oswald as the man that he had seen run across this lawn and get into the white Rambler sedan. Do you remember that?”

Fritz: “If he saw him [Oswald] he looked through that glass and saw him from the outside because I am sure of one thing, that I didn’t bring him into the office with Oswald.”

Counsel: “You are sure you didn’t?”

Fritz: “I am sure of that. I feel positive of that. I would remember that. I am sure.”

Counsel: “He also says that in that office…after he had said ‘that is the man,’ that Oswald got up from his chair and slammed his hand on the table and said, ‘Now everybody will know who I am.’ Did that ever occur in your presence?”

Fritz: “If it did, I never saw anything like that. No, sir. No, sir.”

Counsel: “That didn’t occur?”

Fritz: “No, sir. It didn’t. That man is not telling a true story if that is what he said.”
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A further indication that Craig made up the encounter inside Fritz’s office was that Oswald’s alleged remark, “Don’t try to tie her [Ruth Paine] into this. She had nothing to do with it,” and particularly his alleged assertion, “Everybody will know who I am now,” together almost constitute an implied confession to Kennedy’s murder by Oswald, which is totally inconsistent with Oswald’s repeated remarks after his arrest, some captured on television film, that he was innocent and didn’t know anything about what happened. It should be noted further that if, indeed, Oswald said what Craig claimed he did, why would Fritz deny it if it actually happened? The alleged remarks could only serve to bolster Fritz’s case against Oswald, not weaken it.

Dallas police detective Elmer Boyd knew Craig, and told me when I asked him about Craig’s reputation for truthfulness, “Well, I could tell you a few stories, but I won’t. Let’s just say he had a tendency to exaggerate.”
⁵⁷

But assuming the running-man incident Craig reported did take place, which, in view of existing, albeit limited corroborative evidence, is a reasonably fair assumption, we have to ask ourselves, What significance does it have? My view is very little. I say that for several reasons. One is the very time the event occurred, assuming, again, that it did. Though not impossible, it is highly improbable that anyone running from the direction of the Book Depository Building a
quarter of an hour
after the shooting (recall that Craig said it was “fourteen or fifteen minutes” after) would have been the shooter of the president, or a second gunman. If he had successfully avoided detection (despite the fact that swarms of law enforcement personnel almost immediately converged on the Book Depository Building and surrounding area) for that very considerable period of time, why would he suddenly choose to draw attention to himself by running away and letting out a shrill whistle to his accomplice in the getaway car rather than casually walking into, and getting lost among, the crowd? It doesn’t make too much sense.

Second, it’s hard to pull off the biggest murder ever without leaving not one speck of evidence of your existence. As we have seen, there is much evidence putting Oswald and the murder weapon at the sniper’s nest window. Yet no one saw this second gunman or accomplice before or during the shooting, and there’s no evidence that any other rifle or cartridge case from said rifle was found anywhere in Dealey Plaza, much less the Book Depository Building, after the shooting. So unless the man Craig said he saw running had taken his rifle and any cartridge case or cases with him (and Craig never reported that the man was carrying a rifle or anything else), this man would seem to have been a benign figure. Finally, as we have seen, the vast majority of witnesses that day only heard three shots. And as we know, three cartridge casings, all ejected from Oswald’s rifle alone, were found beneath the window on the sixth floor of the Book Depository Building, where we know Oswald was. So even if Craig’s mysterious running man had intended to shoot Kennedy that day, he in fact didn’t fire any weapon at Kennedy, and would have been running, if at all, for some other reason, not because of having physically participated in the crime of the century.

One thing arguing against everything Craig said is his overall lack of credibility. In his 1971 unpublished book manuscript, “When They Kill a President,” he unwittingly lays out his own brief for being a highly paranoid, unbalanced person. He strongly suggests that Sheriff Bill Decker, with the full knowledge of the FBI, was a part of the conspiracy to kill Kennedy. The motive? Decker and most of his deputies hated Kennedy, in large part because he “was a Catholic.” Craig alleges that Warren Commission assistant counsel David Belin changed his (Craig’s) testimony before the Commission “fourteen times” in the published volumes. He also wants the reader to believe that after he was fired by the sheriff’s office in July of 1967 (“because of a disturbance growing out of personal matters, according to the Dallas Sheriff’s personnel officer”),
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he started being followed everywhere. When he arrived in New Orleans in late 1967 after volunteering to help New Orleans DA Jim Garrison
*
in Garrison’s prosecution of Clay Shaw, “four men followed” him around town. He writes, “Upon returning to Dallas…I was picked up by another ‘tail.’ I was followed constantly. My wife could not even go to the grocery store without being followed. Sometimes they would go so far as to pull up next to her and make sure she saw them talking on their two-way radios. [He doesn’t say why the people were following his wife, or him, everywhere.] They would also park across from my house and sit for hours.”

He claimed that on November 1, 1967, in Dallas, someone shot at him, and “the hair just above my left ear parted.” Unable to hold down a job and in failing health, he was eventually befriended by Penn Jones, the architect of the “mysterious deaths” theory, who provided a home for Craig and his family on his property near Dallas. But strangers continued to follow him. “One day,” he writes, “after being followed by this truck for several days…the driver stuck a revolver out the window and was about to fire, when another car pulled up behind me and he withdrew the pistol.” He also said he got threatening calls in the middle of the night reminding him, “You have a family.” He claims that on October 27, 1970, when he turned his car’s ignition on, his car exploded, causing severe injuries.
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Craig’s unpublished manuscript was dated 1971. But he told others that the attempts on his life continued: being run off the road in West Texas in 1972, causing him to break his back, and being shot in his left shoulder in January of 1975. All in all, according to Craig, there were five unsuccessful attempts on his life.
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The conspiracy theorists who have accepted Craig’s entire story without qualification hint darkly that Craig did not commit suicide as reported, but was murdered on May 15, 1975, in Dallas because of what he says he saw on the day of the assassination. One example among many: “At the age of 39, Roger Craig, suffering from the stress of the constant back pains he endured and the financial pressures he encountered because of finding it difficult to get work, succumbed,
they said
, and committed suicide.
They said
.”
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Even the more scholarly conspiracy theorists like David E. Scheim have implicitly bought into the possibility of the Craig murder scenario. Scheim quotes a source for the proposition that it was the mob who was out to kill Craig.
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The Dallas Police Department and coroner’s office both concluded that Craig, who in 1960 was named the Dallas County Sheriff’s Department’s officer of the year by the Dallas Traffic Commission, shot himself to death with his own rifle inside the home he shared with his father. He left a suicide note that said in part, “I am tired of all this pain.” His father, who found Craig’s body in a back bedroom when he came in from mowing the lawn, told police that his son had been taking painkillers because of injuries received in an auto accident two years earlier, and just that week had received notice from the Social Security Administration that he had been turned down for benefits. Dallas police detective Robert Garcia said that the gunshot wound to Craig’s upper chest was “self-inflicted,” and Craig’s .22 caliber rifle was by his side.
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But if we’re to believe the clear implications of the conspiracy theorists like Matthew Smith, the conspirators (CIA, mob, etc.) were apparently trying to kill Craig, eventually doing so. Apart from the absurdity that these high-powered conspirators, who could kill the president on their first attempt and get away with it, found it almost impossible to kill the completely unprotected but apparently Rasputin-like Craig, finally succeeding only after an eight-year effort, why would they want to kill him anyway? To silence him? He had
already
told his story to the authorities, many times over. So what could possibly be achieved?