Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  Whom did this man look like?

  “The person that I saw looked a lot like…Jack Ruby.”

  Question: “Do you think he was, in fact, Jack Ruby?”

  “That, I don’t know,” she said.11

  By 1986, she was convinced it was Ruby, telling an interviewer, “Of course, I didn’t know who Jack Ruby was at the time. But when I saw Ruby on television, when he shot Oswald, I called to my daughter to look, and said ‘This is the man I saw run that day.’”12

  Mrs. Hill testified that “quite a lot of people” had made “an awful lot of fun” of her over her observations that day, including her husband, and she was “real tired of it.” But she concluded her testimony by saying, “You are not proud to say it, but I think it was part of history and I was glad I was there…because I got publicity…I think my children will be interested to know…someday that I was in it someway.”13

  In her Warren Commission testimony in 1964, when Hill was asked why she thought the shots came from the grassy knoll area, she said, “That was just my idea where they were coming from.” She made no reference at all to seeing any man firing a weapon from behind the picket fence.14 As indicated, she testified expressly that she “never saw a weapon during the whole time, in anyone’s hand.” In fact, at 3:16 p.m. on the day of the assassination, Hill was interviewed by a WBAP newsman (believed to be either Jimmy Darnell or Floyd Bright). When asked, “Did you see the person who fired the—?” Hill answered, “No, I didn’t see any person fire the weapon.”15 But twenty-six years later, in 1989, Hill told conspiracy theorist Jim Marrs that “I saw a man fire from behind the wooden fence [on the grassy knoll]. I saw a puff of smoke and some sort of movement on the grassy knoll where he was.”16 In a February 20, 1989, television interview, she further embroidered her story by saying she saw a “flash of light” in the area behind the stockade fence where some conspiracy theorists claim the “Badge Man” (see later text) was firing.17 By 1992, writing in the third person in her book, she says, “It was a sight that was destined to haunt her for the rest of her life: a muzzle flash, a puff of smoke, and the shadowy figure of a man holding a rifle, barely visible above the wooden fence at the top of the knoll, still in the very act of murdering the president of the United States.”18

  In her book, Hill said she was puzzled as to why she wasn’t called as a witness in the London trial, and wondered ominously, and conspiratorially, “Had pressure been applied from some covert source to stifle [my] story? Had that pressure somehow reached all the way across the Atlantic ocean?” Hill writes in her book that since the docu-trial’s producers had already promised, in writing, to pay for all of her (and a guest of her’s) expenses to London, she threatened, through an attorney son-in-law, to sue if they didn’t live up to their agreement, and she and her mother had an all-expense-paid trip to London for two weeks. However, she was “ordered” by the producers “to stay completely away” from the courtroom.19

  Although it would not be too easy to have any less credibility than Mrs. Hill, conspiracy buffs, in their desperation, have elevated her to an iconic stature, Hill being one of the very brightest stars in the conspiracy theory constellation. Oliver Stone, in his movie JFK, treated the Hill character with utmost seriousness, and her Dealey Plaza observations are cited and accepted without criticism in virtually all the major conspiracy books on the assassination. To hell with the official record, even, as indicated, Mrs. Hill’s own husband. We know a credible witness when we see one, the buffs in effect are saying.

  Another favorite of the conspiracy theorists who would fall in a general way under the category of “grassy knoll” witness is a former Dallas police officer named Tom Tilson. Gerry Spence called him as a witness at the London trial, and after my having interviewed Tilson no fewer than four times over the phone in May and June of 1986, and cross-examining him at the trial, my feeling about Tilson, at least in 1986, was that he was somewhat pathetic and a good-old boy who was more confused than anything else. However, I’m probably being too charitable in my assessment of him,* because his story is so obviously silly and false on its face that one has to wonder whether it was an intentional fabrication on his part, back in 1978, the first time I’m aware he told it.

  On August 20, 1978, fifteen years after the assassination, Tilson told Dallas Morning News reporter Earl Golz that on November 22, 1963, he had taken the day off from his job as a Dallas police officer, and as he was driving downtown with his daughter, Judy, to pick up another daughter who was watching the presidential motorcade, he heard on his police radio that Kennedy had been shot. While he was driving east on Commerce approaching the Triple Underpass, he told Golz, “I saw all these people running to the scene of the shooting…but here’s one guy coming from the railroad tracks. He came down that grassy slope on the westside of the triple underpass [not the “grassy knoll,” which is to the east of the Triple Underpass, but an embankment to the west of it], on the Elm Street side. He had a car parked there, a black car. And he threw something in the backseat and went around the front hurriedly and got in the car and took off…I said ‘That doesn’t make sense. Everybody running to the scene and one person running from it.’” Tilson told Golz he pursued the car on to the Dallas–Fort Worth Turnpike but the car eventually eluded him. He described the man as being about five feet nine inches tall and weighing 185 to 190 pounds, and told Golz he telephoned the Dallas Police Homicide and Robbery Bureau that day and gave the bureau the license plate number (which he had his daughter write down) and a description of the driver and car, “but they never contacted me or did anything about it.” Golz writes, “City police radio logs for that day do not reflect any alert for the vehicle that Tilson says he pursued.” Tilson said he didn’t keep the paper on which his daughter had written the license plate number.20

  Although several books quote Tilson as telling Golz in the August 1978 interview that if the man he pursued “wasn’t Jack Ruby, it was someone who was his twin brother,”21 the name Ruby isn’t even mentioned in that interview. However, Tilson was just getting warmed up. Six days later, he told essentially the same story to investigators for the HSCA, adding the man was “slipping and sliding down” the embankment, and because of the speed of his movement, the man rammed against the side of the “dark” car he got into. Also, if the man he pursued wasn’t Ruby, he looked enough like Ruby to be his “twin.”22

  At the trial in London, Tilson elaborated on his story and became even more certain it was Ruby. On direct examination by Spence, he said that Ruby “had a Silver Spur Dance Hall on my beat” and therefore he knew Ruby very well because he saw him “just about every day.” He said he got a good look at the driver because he “pulled up beside [his] car.” But since his daughter was with him and he feared she might get shot, he said to himself, “It’s not worth it,” whereupon he took the first exit off the turnpike and called homicide with his information. He said the man looked “exactly like [Ruby]…If it wasn’t Ruby, it was a twin brother.”

  Leaving aside the fact that we know where Jack Ruby was at the time of the assassination (see “Four Days in November” section); that a photo of the specific area where Tilson claimed the black car was parked (west of the Triple Underpass on the north side of Elm), and taken at the very time Tilson said he saw the car, reveals no car of any kind or color parked there; and that Dallas police radio logs (examined in detail throughout the years by a great number of people) do not contain any record on November 22, 1963, of Tilson’s call, there are a host of other problems with Tilson’s story. He told Golz that the reason the Dallas Homicide and Robbery Bureau didn’t pay any attention to the information he phoned in was that “homicide was that way. If you didn’t have a big white hat on, they didn’t even want you in the office…They didn’t want to have to look for anybody else and they didn’t even want to know about it really.” In other words, according to Tilson, on the day of the assassination, Dallas homicide detectives weren’t interested in finding out who murdered the presiden
t, and under no circumstances did they want to even consider information about the president’s murder if it came from someone who didn’t wear a “big white hat,” referring to a Stetson, which, as indicated earlier, only Dallas homicide detectives on the force were allowed to wear.

  On cross-examination in London, these were just a few of the points I made:

  Question: “When you pursued this man in your car, you told me [in pretrial interviews] that he did not drive fast at all. Is that correct?”

  Answer: “That’s right. He didn’t drive fast…No hurry.”

  Question: “In fact, he drove at the minimum speed without getting a ticket on the turnpike, forty-five miles an hour, is that right?”

  Answer: “That’s right.”

  (I then brought out before the jury that although Tilson was now testifying that the driver of the car was driving relatively slowly, and he, Tilson, gave up the chase, in a December 31, 1978, interview with Golz, he said he “chased the speeding car” and told Golz in the August 20, 1978, interview that the driver of the car had eluded him. At the trial he denied telling Golz the latter.)

  On direct examination Spence had sought to bolster Tilson’s credibility by establishing that he had been a Dallas police officer since 1946 and had received four awards for outstanding police work. On cross-examination I said to Tilson that the president of the United States had just been assassinated, and he, a well-decorated police officer, called homicide and reported seeing a man running from the scene of the murder, get in a car, and drive off, and he gave homicide the license plate number of the car, “and you’re telling this jury, Tom, that they weren’t interested?”

  Answer: “They probably thought just like I did. Who would use their own car and their own license number to kill a president of the United States?”

  Question: “You never once called Dallas homicide to find out, did you, Tom, whether they had followed up on what you had given them?”

  Answer: “No. I didn’t dare go into the office. I didn’t have a wide [Stetson] hat.”

  Then I started having a little fun with Tilson:

  Question: “So the fellow you saw running away, whom you believe to be Jack Ruby, you feel that he is the one who killed the president?”

  Answer: “He’s the killer.”

  Question: “Well, by putting two and two together, then, you feel, that not only did Ruby kill President Kennedy, but when Oswald was getting credit for it, Ruby killed Oswald, too.”

  Answer: “Looks like it, doesn’t it.”

  The Court: “Alright, alright.”

  I asked Tilson why, if he believed the man he pursued was Ruby, didn’t he give Dallas homicide Ruby’s name when he called them with his information? Unbelievably, Tilson answered, “Well, I couldn’t. Somebody might go get Jack Ruby and he might not have been guilty.” (Translation: Never pursue any suspect to a crime because there’s always a chance the suspect might not be guilty.)

  Question: “Well, now, Jack used to give you free drinks at his club, is that right?”

  Answer: “When I was off.”

  Question: “You weren’t trying to protect him, were you?”

  Answer: “Oh, no.”

  Question: “Later on TV you saw that Oswald was arrested for the murder of the president, right?”

  Answer: “Correct.”

  Question: “Didn’t you say to yourself, hey, they’ve got the wrong guy. They should pick up Jack?”

  Answer: “No. Not until Jack shot him. When Jack shot Oswald, [I said,] ‘I’ll be. I’ll be durned. That’s old Ruby, alright.’”23

  In the introduction to this book, I spoke, among many other things, of the meaningful contribution the trial in London had made to the study of the assassination in that both pro–and anti–Warren Commission witnesses were cross-examined. I also spoke of how a reader would have no way of knowing if the author of a book on the assassination were conveying something worthy of belief unless the reader had access to the official record, which few have. With this in mind (and this is just one typical example among hundreds of others), and knowing what you now know about the Tilson story, picture an innocent reader dealing with Jim Garrison’s take on Tilson in his number-one New York Times best-selling book on the assassination, On the Trail of the Assassins: “Tom Tilson, an off-duty police officer, had heard about the shooting over his radio…As he drove near the overpass, he saw a man ‘slipping and sliding’ down the slope west of the overpass…This was the only man Officer Tilson could see running away from the shooting, so he watched him. The man came down against the side of a car parked there, threw something in the backseat, then jumped in the front seat and took off at high speed. Tilson followed the car in a wild chase. When he got close enough, he called out the license number and the make and model of the car to his daughter riding with him. She wrote the information down, and after the car got away, he called it in to the Dallas Homicide Squad. But there was no response from homicide. Officer Tilson never heard another word about the suspect he had chased.” Period. Nothing more. The reader would think Tilson was a completely credible witness.24

  The distortions, omissions, lies, and nonsense have continued for well over forty years.

  The Tilson experience is simply illustrative of something at the heart of the conspiracy culture, something that provides its oxygen: the uncritical acceptance, at face value, of any statement made by anyone that in any way supports the conspiracy position. Examples of erroneous statements about the case that turn out to be untrue once they are challenged are countless and ongoing. Just one quick one before we move on: Early on, New Orleans DA Jim Garrison alleged that Kennedy was killed as a result of a homosexual conspiracy involving David Ferrie (who was homosexual), Oswald (who Garrison said was a “switch-hitter”), and Jack Ruby. And indeed, one Leona Kirilenko told the FBI a month after the assassination that she worked at Ruby’s Carousel Club for about two weeks in 1957, and that it was “common knowledge” at the club that Ruby was a “queen” whose male “girlfriend” was named Carmen. But when the FBI reinterviewed her and told her that Ruby didn’t even start operating the Carousel Club until early in 1960, she conceded she had been in error and had confused Ruby with someone at another club she had worked at who was very similar in appearance to Ruby.25 Absent the FBI’s going back to reinterview Kirilenko, her false declaration about Ruby (whether Ruby was, in fact, a homosexual or not, is irrelevant) would have been, as the New York University Law Review put it, “an acceptable part of the historical record, there to lurk and mislead tomorrow’s historians.”26 Multiply Kirilenko’s original statement by a thousand to get an idea of the enormous amount of misinformation peddled as fact in books, articles, and radio and TV shows, and movies for conspiracy theorists to use with their particular brand of mischief.

  Then there’s the story of Richard Randolph Carr, which ultimately becomes funny. But first, the serious part. In 1964, Carr told the FBI that at the time of the shooting in Dealey Plaza he was seeking employment at the construction of a new courthouse at the corner of Houston and Commerce streets in Dallas. When told that the foreman was on the ninth floor, he started walking up the stairway. “As I reached a point at approximately the sixth floor of the building framework, I looked toward the Texas School Book Depository Building…and at that time I observed [almost two hundred yards away] a man looking out of a window on the top floor” of the building. Carr said he was “a heavyset individual, who was wearing a hat, a tan sport coat, and horn-rimmed glasses” and was located “in the second window over from Houston Street.” Carr told the FBI that from his vantage point he could not see the lower floors and entrance of the Book Depository Building, that he could “only see the top floor and roof” of the building. (The top floor is the seventh floor, a floor above where we know Oswald was.)

  After he heard the shots, he immediately proceeded down the stairway of the building, and when he got out on the street near Houston and Commerce, he said, “I saw a man whom I believe was id
entical with the man I had earlier seen looking out of the window.” Carr went on to say that the man walked very fast south on Houston Street to Commerce, then walked east on Commerce to Record Street, where he got into a car driven by a “young Negro.” The car drove north out of sight.27 James Worrell Jr., a Dealey Plaza witness, testified before the Warren Commission that after he heard the shots, he got frightened and started running north on Houston. When he stopped to get his breath, he turned around. “I was there approximately three minutes,” Worrell testified, “before I saw this man come out the back door” of the Book Depository Building, though, he said, “I am not positive,” just “pretty sure” that’s where he first saw the man.* The man proceeded to run south on Houston toward Elm. Conspiracy theorists have long maintained this was the same man Raymond Carr saw walking very fast south on Houston. But apart from the fact that Worrell’s man was running and Carr’s man was walking (albeit, very fast), the description by Worrell and Carr of the man each saw varies quite a bit. Worrell’s man weighed between 155 and 165, Carr’s was “heavyset.” Worrell’s man never had a hat on, Carr’s was wearing a hat. Worrell’s man was wearing a sports jacket “dark in color,” Carr’s a “tan sport coat.”28

  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.”29 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.”30