Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  “Well, it’s all over now,” the suspect says in a tone of resignation. In a flash, the man cocks his left fist and slugs McDonald between the eyes, knocking his cap off and forcing him backward into the seats. McDonald quickly recovers and swings back as they topple into the seats, McDonald shouting out, “I’ve got him,” though they end up with the man on top of McDonald.559

  Officers Hutson, Walker, and Hawkins rush in from the other side. Nick McDonald is trying to push the suspect off, but he’s holding Nick down with his left hand and reaching for something in his waistband with the other hand. Hutson, in the row behind, reaches over the seats, wraps his right arm around the suspect’s neck and yanks him back until he’s stretched over the top of the seat. Officer Walker grabs the suspect’s left arm and struggles to hold on to it. McDonald jumps forward and grabs the man’s right hand, which is trying to pull a revolver out of his beltline. For a second or two, McDonald keeps the suspect from getting the gun out, but then it springs free.

  “Look out! He’s got a gun!” someone yells.

  McDonald, on the receiving end of the barrel, quickly grabs the cylinder of the revolver with his left hand to keep it from turning and firing a bullet. The suspect thrashes as the gun waves in McDonald’s direction.560

  The officers are in a frenzy, a half-dozen hands desperately trying to get the damn gun out of the man’s hand.

  “Let go of the gun!” a cop commands.

  “I can’t,” the suspect says.561

  Punches fly as an officer slams the butt of a shotgun against the back of the suspect’s head. McDonald gets his right hand on the butt of the pistol and starts to rip it out of the man’s hand. Just before he jerks it free, McDonald hears what he believes to be the snap of the hammer and feels a sting to the fleshy web of skin between his thumb and forefinger. The gun continues across his left cheek, leaving behind a four-inch scratch, from which blood trickles.562

  Captain Westbrook can’t quite see what’s happening. “Has somebody got the gun?” he yells out. McDonald holds the gun out toward the aisle, where Detective Bob Carroll grabs it, saying, “I’ve got it!”563

  Officer Walker pulls the suspect’s left arm around and Officer Hawkins snaps handcuffs on him.

  “Don’t hit me anymore. I am not resisting arrest!” the suspect shouts, loud enough for nearby patrons to hear him. “I want to complain of police brutality!”

  Captain Westbrook, who’s just heard Mrs. Markham tell him how Tippit’s killer shot him down like a dog, at point-blank range, can’t believe the gall of the man. Westbrook pushes his way into the aisle in front of the suspect and looks him right in the face—less than ten inches away.

  “What’s your name?” Westbrook asks.

  The suspect is silent.

  “Get him out of here!” Westbrook shouts above the commotion.564

  The officers on the suspect’s right start to pull him toward the center aisle, but the officers on the left are pulling in the opposite direction—inadvertently stretching the gunman between them.

  “They’re violating my civil rights!” the suspect screams.

  FBI agent Robert M. Barrett, standing nearby, can only shake his head. They’re not violating anything, he thinks to himself. Barrett has been observing the police actions since his arrival at the Book Depository nearly an hour ago. As the FBI agent who handles civil rights violations, Barrett knows that he’ll have to write a report on what he’s just witnessed.565

  A WFAA-TV cameraman is in the lobby filming the suspect as police hustle him toward the front entrance. The suspect uses the opportunity to berate the police as he passes: “I want my lawyer. I know my rights. Typical police brutality. Why are you doing this to me?”566

  Julia Postal, though safe in her box office, is shaking. She’s never seen a mob like the one on the sidewalk in front of the theater. Since police stormed into the theater, word has spread among the crowd that they’ve cornered the president’s killer. Few know that a police officer was shot nearby—not even Mrs. Postal.567

  The doors to the theater are slammed open as a wedge of officers bursts into the sunlight. The suspect shuts up quickly when he sees the size of the crowd on the sidewalk in front of the theater—maybe a hundred people. A half-dozen uniformed officers and several deputy sheriffs are doing their best to prevent a lynching by holding the crowd back and clearing a passage to an unmarked police car at curbside, but the crowd is ugly.

  “That’s him!” they shout as he comes into view. “Murderer! Kill the son of a bitch! Hang him! Give him to us, we’ll kill him!”

  The flying wedge just keeps moving, pushing the suspect toward the waiting squad car, its back door open. The suspect complains that the handcuffs are too tight. Detective Paul Bentley, on the suspect’s left, cigar stub firmly clenched between his teeth, isn’t too sympathetic, thinking to himself that Oswald was in much better shape than Tippit was. He reaches back and tightens the cuffs even more. They’re actually a little loose, he later recalls, and he doesn’t want to take any chances.568

  An officer squeezes into the box office to use the phone. Mrs. Postal hears him say, “I think we have got our man on both accounts.”

  “What two accounts?” Postal asks as he hangs up.

  The shootings of both the president and Officer Tippit, the officer tells her. Mrs. Postal is shocked. She knew J. D. Tippit. He had worked part-time at the theater on Friday and Saturday nights a number of years ago.569

  1:52 p.m.

  Police push the suspect into the backseat of the four-door sedan, where he’s sandwiched between Officer C. T. Walker on the right and Detective Paul Bentley on the left. Three officers pile into the front seat, Detective Kenneth E. Lyons on the right, Sergeant Gerald Hill in the middle, and the driver, Detective Bob Carroll. As Carroll slides behind the steering wheel, he hands a .38 caliber snub-nosed revolver to Hill.

  “Is this yours?” Hill asks.

  “No, it’s the suspect’s,” Carroll replies.

  Hill snaps the cylinder open and sees that it’s fully loaded. He grabs the radio transmitter as the car pulls away from the curb.570 “Suspect on the shooting of the police officer is apprehended. En route to the station,” he announces.

  “Ten-four. At the Texas Theater?” the dispatcher asks.

  “Caught him on the lower floor of the Texas Theater after a fight,” Hill confirms.571

  The suspect is asked his name, but the guy is dead silent.

  “Where do you live?” someone asks. Again, nothing.

  “Why don’t you see if he has any identification?” Hill asks Bentley.

  The detective reaches down and feels the suspect’s left hip pocket. There’s a wallet in it. As Bentley pulls it out, the suspect breaks his silence.

  “What is this all about? I know my rights. I don’t know why you are treating me like this. Why am I being arrested? The only thing I’ve done is carry a pistol in a movie,” he says.572

  One of the cops turns to the suspect. “Sir, you’ve done a lot more. You have killed a policeman.”

  “Police officer been killed?” the suspect asks innocently.

  The cops remain silent, as the squad car rolls along.

  “I hear they burn for murder,” the suspect adds.

  “You might find out,” Officer Walker replies.

  “Well, they say it just takes a second to die,” the suspect answers coolly.573

  Detective Bentley flips through the billfold and finds a library card.

  “Lee Oswald,” Bentley calls out from the backseat. In a moment, Bentley thumbs across another name in the wallet—A. J. Hidell. He asks the prisoner which of the two names is his real name, but Oswald is silent.

  “I guess we’re going to have to wait until we get to the station to find out who he really is,” someone remarks.

  One thing they all notice is that Lee Harvey Oswald is showing absolutely no emotion.574

  1:55 p.m.

  FBI special agent Gordon Shanklin telephones Al
an Belmont in Washington again.

  “Dallas police have captured the man who is believed to have shot the policeman,” he tells Belmont, “and police think he may be the man who killed the president. They’re en route to police headquarters right now. I’ll report as soon as I have the facts.”

  Belmont prepares a Teletype and takes it in to FBI Director Hoover.575

  1:58 p.m.

  As the unmarked squad car carrying Lee Oswald pulls into the basement garage of City Hall, a gray stone structure in downtown Dallas where police headquarters are located, Sergeant Hill tells Oswald that there will be reporters, photographers, and cameramen waiting there, but he doesn’t have to speak to them. They will hold him in such a way that he can turn his head down and away from the cameras.

  “Why should I hide my face?” Oswald responds. “I haven’t done anything to be ashamed of.”576

  The arresting officers form their wedge around the suspect and rush him into the building. Sure enough, photographers and cameramen are there to film the event. The officers take Oswald to a waiting elevator for the ride up to the Homicide and Robbery Bureau on the third floor.577

  2:00 p.m.

  At the sheriff’s office, Dallas Morning News reporter Harry McCormick, sidetracked in his quest to locate Secret Service agent Forrest Sorrels, telephones his office to report that he’s heard a man was captured at the Texas Theater. The paper already has the news. He hangs up the telephone and spots his initial quarry, Agent Sorrels, standing in a nearby office.578

  “Forrest, I have something over here you ought to know about,” McCormick tells him.

  “What have you got?” Sorrels says.

  “I have a man who got pictures of this whole thing,” McCormick answers.

  “Let’s go see him,” Sorrels replies.

  The two men make there way over to the Dal-Tex Building, directly across the street from the Book Depository, and up to the office of dress manufacturer Abraham Zapruder. There are already a few magazine and newspaper representatives there, McCormick’s worst fear. Zapruder is a basket case. His business partner, Erwin Schwartz, stands nearby, unable to help.

  “I don’t know how in the world I managed to take those pictures,” Zapruder whimpers. “I was down there taking the thing and—my God, I saw the man’s brains come out of his head.”579

  “Mr. Zapruder, I wonder if it would be possible for us to get a copy of those films,” Sorrels asks politely. “Please understand that it would be strictly for the official use of the Secret Service.”

  Zapruder was already expecting to sell the film for as high a price as he could get, and agreed to Sorrels’s request with the understanding that it not be shown or given to any newspapers or magazines. McCormick, ever mindful of a scoop for his paper, suggested that the Dallas Morning News, just three blocks away, might be able to develop the film for them. The men agree and Zapruder removes the camera from a small office safe, where he put it upon his return to the office. Sorrels, McCormick, Zapruder, and Schwartz hurry down to the street below, where the Secret Service agent commandeers a Dallas police car.

  “Take us to the Dallas Morning News building immediately,” Sorrels says.580

  Back at the Book Depository, crime-lab technicians are focused on completing the evidence-gathering process. It will be several more hours before they finish dusting the stacks of boxes in the sniper’s nest for fingerprints, and combing the sixth floor for possible additional evidence. Word passes quickly that the suspect in the murder of Officer J. D. Tippit has been arrested in Oak Cliff, but no name is given. Captain Fritz, still concentrating on the murder of Kennedy, instructs Detectives Sims and Boyd to come with him, he wants to go out to Irving and check on this missing employee named Oswald. The three men head downstairs and are out in front of the Depository when an officer tells Captain Fritz that Sheriff Decker would like to see him at his office, and he proceeds to Decker’s office a block away at the corner of Main and Houston for a conference.581

  2:02 p.m.

  Homicide detective C. W. Brown is taking an affidavit from Book Depository foreman Bill Shelley in a small interrogation room inside the Homicide and Robbery office when the arresting officers bring Oswald in. Mr. Shelley looks up at the man in custody and remarks to Detective Brown, “He works for us. I’m his supervisor.”582

  Detectives Richard S. Stovall and Guy F. Rose begin to question Oswald in the interrogation room as Brown takes Shelley to another room to complete Shelley’s affidavit. When they ask him his name, Oswald replies, “Hidell.” Finding two identifications in his billfold, one card saying Hidell and the other Lee Oswald, Rose asks him which of the two is his correct name and Oswald replies, “You find out,” but later gives the officers his real name.583

  In the outer office, Sergeant Hill is showing Oswald’s pistol to newsmen. In a corner, Detective Brown finishes taking the statement from Bill Shelley. The telephone rings. It’s Captain Fritz calling from the sheriff’s office. Brown tells him that the officers just brought in a suspect for the shooting of the police officer and how Mr. Shelley identified him as an employee of the Book Depository. Fritz says, “I’ll be right up in a few minutes.”584

  The third-floor hallway at police headquarters is beginning to fill with a flood of reporters from newspapers, television, radio, and the wire services. UPI cub reporter Wilborn Hampton had been out at Parkland, where he felt the situation was chaotic. As he ran across the front lawn of Parkland Hospital to nearby Harry Hines Boulevard, hoping his car, which he had abandoned alongside the road because of the clogged traffic, hadn’t been towed away, he paused and leaned on a live oak tree, crying, “He’s dead, he’s really dead.” He then continued on to his car, which was still there. When he arrived at City Hall, he took his press card out of his wallet, ready to show it to anyone who challenges him, but security was so lax no one does. He quickly sees on the third floor that it’s not merely chaotic, like Parkland, it’s pandemonium, and so crowded he is virtually unable to move. It’s as if, he thinks, someone had ordered a fire drill and told everyone in the building to show up at this one place.585

  Less than a half hour after the shooting of the president—twenty-six minutes after the first news moved on the wires of United Press International—68 percent of all adults in the United States, about seventy-five million people, had heard about it. That percentage rises steadily through the afternoon, particularly after the president’s death, until it reaches an astounding 99.8 percent. This is the story of the century and it’s being followed around the world. Reporters and correspondents are already catching planes that will eventually bring them, in the next few hours, to as close as they can get to the tiny hallway outside room 317—Homicide and Robbery Bureau, Dallas Police Department, Dallas, Texas.586

  2:04 p.m.

  By the time the president’s body is ready to be moved from Parkland Hospital, the row over the state of Texas’s jurisdiction over the body has turned into a major imbroglio. Medical examiner Dr. Earl F. Rose refuses to listen to the pleading of Dr. Kemp Clark, the head of neurosurgery, who sides with the presidential party, or to the advice of Dallas district attorney Henry Wade, who advised him by phone to give it up. Tempers are at the melting point. Kennedy’s men have had about all of Dallas law they can stand. Rose sees the casket bearing the president’s body being pushed out of Trauma Room One, Mrs. Kennedy at its side. The medical examiner blocks the way with his own body, his hand flying up like a traffic cop. “We are removing it,” Admiral Burkley says, enraged. “This is the president of the United States and there should be some consideration in an event like this.”

  “We can’t release anything!” Rose screams. “A violent death requires a postmortem! There’s a law here. We’re going to enforce it.”

  A crush of forty sweating men are clustered around the wide doorway as curses fly back and forth. One of them looks like he might belt the medical examiner at any moment.

  Admiral Burkley, in an attempt to calm everyone down, info
rms the conclave that a justice of the peace has arrived and has the power to overrule the medical examiner. Theron Ward, a young justice of the peace for the Third Precinct of Dallas County, makes his way down the corridor. Too timid to buck the medical examiner, the young justice tells them there is nothing he can do.

  “In a homicide case, it’s my duty to order an autopsy,” Ward says in a tone much too weak for Dr. Rose’s pleasure. “It shouldn’t take more than three hours.”

  Special Agent Kellerman tells Ward there must be something inside of him that tells him it wouldn’t be right to put Mrs. Kennedy and all of the president’s people through any further agony in Texas, but Ward can only say, “I can’t help you out.”

  Ken O’Donnell pleads with him, “Can’t you make an exception for President Kennedy?”

  Incredibly, Ward tells him, “It’s just another homicide case as far as I’m concerned.”

  O’Donnell’s response is instantaneous. “Go fuck yourself,” he yells. “We’re leaving!”

  A policeman next to Rose points to the medical examiner and the justice of the peace and says to the president’s men, “These two guys say you can’t go.”

  “Move aside,” shouts Larry O’Brien, moving toward the officer.

  “Get the hell out of the way,” O’Donnell hollers. “We’re not staying here three hours or three minutes. We’re leaving now! Wheel it out!” he orders.

  The Secret Service men shoulder their way into the patrolman, who wisely capitulates. Rose, overpowered by circumstance, steps out of the way as the casket is wheeled toward the emergency exit, Mrs. Kennedy hurrying alongside, her fingertips touching the bronze finish.

  As they move out toward the waiting hearse, Justice Theron Ward dashes to the nurses station and telephones District Attorney Wade and is stunned to hear him say the same thing he told Earl Rose earlier—he has no objection whatsoever to the removal of the president’s body.587

  2:14 p.m.

  By the time Jackie Kennedy and the president’s men arrive at Love Field with his body in the casket, Secret Service agent Lem Johns, assistant special agent in charge of LBJ’s security detail, and the air crew have removed the last two rows of seats from the rear port-side section of the plane,* the small area located directly behind the presidential cabin and to the front of the rear galley (kitchen). There is now room on the port side for the casket to rest on the floor, but no one thought to arrange for a hydraulic lift. Kennedy’s men—O’Donnell, Powers, and O’Brien—and the Secret Service agents, all unwilling, for Jackie’s sake, to delay the departure, even by as little as the few minutes it would take to fetch a forklift, proceed to carry the heavy bulk by hand up the steep steps of the plane. Since none of them know that such a casket comes with a device that automatically pins it to the floor of the hearse, and a catch that releases the lock, they manage to rip a piece of trim from a hinge and the top of a handle housing as they remove it from the hearse. They struggle with the appallingly heavy bronze casket, which, they learn, is actually wider than the steps of the ramp to the rear entrance. As they shuffle the casket the last few feet, Ken O’Donnell keeps checking over his shoulder for police cars, half expecting the Dallas County medical examiner to roar up waving an injunction.588