by R. G. Belsky
In another part of the sixth floor, there was an exhibit of pictures and home movies collected from many of those who had been in Dealey Plaza on that day. People who wanted to record Kennedy’s visit—and instead wound up recording history.
The most famous of these was the home video known as the Zapruder tape. Abraham Zapruder had brought his video camera to Dealey Plaza that day to record the president’s motorcade through the streets of Dallas. He captured in horrifying frame-by-frame detail those last forty-five seconds of the young president’s life.
I’d seen the Zapruder film before, of course. Most people have. Or snippets of it, anyway. But of all the cameras that day in Dealey Plaza, his was the only one that captured the presidential motorcade from the moment it made the turn onto Elm Street, made its way past the Texas School Book Depository, and then recorded the shots that killed Kennedy. And watching it in its entirety now, in the building where the history of the world had changed that day, made it seem even more moving and powerful and sad than ever.
First, you saw the joy and the anticipation of the president’s visit. Much of Dallas had turned out to greet JFK. They lined the streets of the city, holding signs welcoming him and Jackie, cheering them and waving. “Well, Mr. President, you can’t say Dallas doesn’t love you,” Nellie Connally, who was sitting in the front seat of the presidential limousine with her husband, Texas governor John Connally, had said shortly before the shots rang out.
The motorcade—without the bubble top on the limousine so Kennedy could greet the crowd—moved slowly, fatally slowly, past the Book Depository and the grassy knoll area. Then, the gunfire. When the first bullet hits the president, you see him grab at his throat. Jackie turns to look at him. It’s clear on the film that something is wrong, but no one is sure what happened at that point. At almost the same time as President Kennedy clutched his throat, John Connally was hit in the front seat. This was the so-called magic bullet. According to the Warren Commission Report, it exited Kennedy’s throat and then hit Connally in at least three places, seeming to change direction at several points. Connally turns and then yells in pain, his face in anguish on the Zapruder film. “My God, they’re going to kill us all,” he screamed out, his wife would recall afterward.
For a second or two, there is nothing. Just the president clutching his throat, Jackie looking over at him, Connally wounded in the front seat—until the last shot rang out. That’s the one that blew Kennedy’s head off. Even now, all these years later, watching it on this grainy old color film, it’s hard to take. Secret Service agent Clint Hill jumps on the back of the presidential limousine and we see the famous picture of Jackie Kennedy crawling onto the back of the car to help him get aboard. But it was too late. Even the first lady knew this. “They’ve killed Jack,” she is supposed to have said, cradling her husband in her arms. “I have his brains in my hands.”
When the Zapruder film was over, I played it again. And again. There were options to watch it in slow motion and in freeze frames. I did all that too. I took detailed notes as I watched. But no matter how many times I watched it, I still had questions about what I was seeing on the screen.
I walked over to the reception desk for the museum and asked a young woman there if she could help me. She did have answers for a few of my questions, but she admitted that she had just started working at the museum and wasn’t as much of an expert on Kennedy assassination details as were others who worked there.
“Eric knows more about the Zapruder film than anyone,” she said. “He could tell you everything you want to know.”
“Can I talk to him?”
“Oh, Eric’s not here now.”
“When will he be back?”
“Soon, I hope,” she grinned.
I looked through some of the other exhibits. There was lots of film from the assassination and the days afterward. The scene at Parkland Memorial Hospital where the president was declared dead. The police discovery of a rifle on the sixth floor of the Book Depository. Oswald being led through the Dallas police station and telling reporters, “I didn’t kill anyone . . . I’m just a patsy.” And finally the scene in the basement of the police station on the Sunday morning after the assassination when Jack Ruby fatally shot Oswald, silencing him forever and setting in motion all the conspiracy scenarios that exist to this day. I watched that scene over and over again too. Oswald being led out of the elevator, then through the basement of the station toward a waiting armored car. Oswald looking over toward Ruby just before the shooting. (Did he recognize Ruby? Did he suddenly realize what was about to happen?) Then you saw Jack Ruby, wearing a black hat and holding a gun in his hand, shooting Oswald before being swarmed over and arrested by Dallas police.
As I wandered back through the museum, I passed by a couple in their sixties watching the Zapruder tape. They watched in stunned silence, then horror, and finally in tears as the young president was cut down in front of their eyes.
I decided to interview them. They said they had been in college then, just like my father. They told me how Kennedy had inspired them with his talk of a new generation and the Peace Corps and the idea that being a politician was a noble thing and how they really believed back then that they could help change the world. And how that had all changed forever in those six seconds in Dallas.
They began to cry again.
I felt like crying too.
Not because of Kennedy’s assassination. That had happened a long time ago, before I was even born, and nothing could change that. No, I was crying for myself. I’d come here looking for a story. I had a story. Sort of. But not the one I wanted.
This was simply a museum, a historic landmark. That was all it was. I’d come looking for answers to what was happening in New York City, but there were none. At least none that I could see. I’m not sure what I was looking for, but I sure hadn’t found it.
And I feared I was wasting my time here in Dallas chasing ghosts while Carrie Bratten was back in New York working on the real story.
Chapter 21
MY MOOD DIDN’T improve at all when I checked in with the office.
“Hey, stuff’s happening here,” Carrie told me excitedly on the phone.
She said the cops had found a receipt in Shawn Kennedy’s apartment that had put her on the Bowery a few days before her death. That gave her a possible connection with Harold Daniels, the dead guy on the Bowery. It was a few blocks away from where his body was found, but he was a transient who moved around the entire neighborhood. So it was possible that their paths had somehow crossed that day. That still didn’t explain why they both turned up dead. But it was something, and the police were pursuing the angle to see if they could find any witnesses who could put the two of them together at any point.
“The Kennedy woman was a photographer,” Carrie pointed out. “What if she was taking pictures down on the Bowery that day she was there? What if one of them was a picture of Daniels? What if that picture showed something someone didn’t want anyone else to see?”
“You’re kind of reaching there,” I said, even though the same thought had crossed my mind.
“It’s just a theory.”
She’d gotten autopsy results on Kennedy and Daniels. They pretty much confirmed what we already knew, but they added a few new details.
Kennedy had been shot twice at relatively close range—no more than a few feet away—by someone with a .40 caliber Glock pistol. The first shot hit her in the back, which indicated she was fleeing from her assailant. The second shot appeared to have been fired into her chest when she was down on the ground. She may have already been dead at that point. The bottom line was it appeared she knew she was in danger, tried to run, and was shot from behind.
Daniels died of stab wounds. The weapon was identified as a knife with a six-inch blade, which the cops said was the kind of knife many people on the Bowery carried—either for protection or to use on some
one else. Daniels’s blood alcohol level at time of his death was somewhere around 0.25, which indicated he was pretty much dead drunk and probably unconscious. Based on that and the pattern of blood from the wounds and lack of any defensive-looking wounds on him, the autopsy report concluded he had been asleep or unconscious at the time of his death. Probably never even aware of what was happening to him.
It all made for an interesting story, but Carrie saved her biggest update for last.
“I got an interview with Daniels’s ex-wife,” she said. “I tracked her down to Lodi, New Jersey, where she still lives with their four kids. She told me all about the guy’s descent from a hardworking family guy to a homeless street person. How the unemployment and the alcohol and the drug addictions changed him from the man she married into a total stranger. She said she hadn’t heard from him in two years, and she’d assumed that he might already be dead. Because she knew it was inevitable. But she still cried. Can you believe that? And I got a picture from her of Daniels in happier times—all dressed up in a suit with a couple of the kids for some school event. It’s real exclusive stuff, Gil. Marilyn says they’re going to put it on the front page.”
Carrie had done everything right, of course. Everything I would have done on the story if I had been there. Instead, I was sitting here twelve hundred miles away from the crime scene in Dallas spinning my wheels.
“How are you doing there?” she asked me now.
“I’m working on some leads.”
“Tell me about them.”
“Hey, I gotta go,” I said. “Lots of stuff is happening here too. I’ll fill you in later.”
My original plan had been to start at the Book Depository and then work my way through all of the historical spots that played such a key role in the events that day in Dallas. As I’d told Staley, I figured it would make a good color piece to detail this stuff all over again in the context of the new Kennedy murders and the revelation of the book written by Oswald’s never-before-known son. But the truth is I’d hoped for more. Hoped for some lead, some clue that could help me make sense out of everything that was happening now. And maybe, just maybe, I would figure out how it all tied in with the assassination that happened so long ago.
But now, after my visit to the museum, I realized that I was just looking for a needle in a haystack, a needle that had been there for a very long time and that I wasn’t even sure existed.
I started by visiting the grassy knoll. The place where—according to pretty much every conspiracy theory out there—another gunman, or more than one gunman, lay in ambush in the trees or behind the picket fence to fire on the approaching motorcade. Many people at the scene said they thought they heard shots coming from there, which soon led to the grassy knoll assassination scenarios. I’d heard about the grassy knoll all my life. It was a piece of history. But in real life it didn’t seem that historical at all. It just seemed . . . well, ordinary.
I stood there looking onto Elm Street, where the motorcade had passed by. It had been filled with people that day, people who came to see the president, people who witnessed history. This was the spot where, according to virtually every conspiracy theory you listened to, someone else—marksmen with high-powered weapons, probably—had been firing at Kennedy and the motorcade. The grassy knoll was supposed to be the secret assassins’ nest where the conspirators actually shot Kennedy. The key to solving the assassination. But it didn’t look like an assassins’ nest now. It just looked like a grassy area with a clump of trees. On the street in front of me, traffic moved steadily, the occupants of the vehicles seemingly unaware of or indifferent to the historical impact of their route.
My next stop was the rooming house at 1026 North Beckley Avenue where Oswald had lived at the time. He had gone home that day after the Kennedy shooting, changed his clothes, got a handgun, and left the house hurriedly. No one ever saw where he was going. But his landlady claimed that a Dallas police car pulled up in front of the house and honked several times—like some sort of a signal—and then drove away. The conspiracy buffs had a field day with that one. Of course, no one ever determined if there really was a police car in front of Oswald’s house that day or why they might have honked. But that landlady was long gone. The house was just another tourist stop for JFK assassination buffs now. I visited the intersection of East 10th Street and North Patton Avenue, in the Oak Cliff section of the city about five minutes away. That’s where Police Officer J. D. Tippit was shot to death less than an hour after JFK. There were various theories and scenarios of what happened. But according to the Warren Commission and other official law enforcement findings, Oswald shot Tippit after the police officer got out of his squad car and approached him on the street. Like everything else, the corner of 10th and Patton didn’t look like a place where history had taken place. There were a few cars, a few pedestrians passing by, and that was it. It was just a quiet intersection in Dallas now, nothing else.
After the Tippit shooting, Oswald fled into the Texas Theatre. The movie playing that afternoon was War Heroes. Oswald ran in without paying, which aroused enough suspicion for people at the theater to call police. When the police got there and turned up the theater lights, Oswald was sitting in a back row. Approached by officers, he pulled out the gun, pointed it at them, and yelled, “It’s all over now!” But the gun didn’t go off and he was subdued after a brief struggle and taken to the police station. The theater building itself was still there, but it had closed down in the mid-’90s. There was a movement afoot to turn it into some kind of historical spot like the Book Depository. But for now it just sat there empty.
Finally, I went to the Dallas police station where Oswald had been held for close to forty-eight hours and charged with the murders of Kennedy and Tippit.
By the time I got back to Dealey Plaza, I had a notebook filled with details on the stuff I’d seen. I had enough to write the color scene piece I’d promised Staley, but I wanted more. I looked back up at the Texas Depository. I still hadn’t gotten all my questions answered at the museum. I had plenty of time to file my story. It was a Sunday piece so the News wasn’t going to deal with it until the end of the week. So I went back to the Kennedy museum.
There was a different receptionist on duty at the desk now.
An older woman, in her mid fifties, with gray hair. She had a tag on the front of her blouse that identified her as a museum manager. I asked if she was in charge.
“Oh, I’m in charge,” she said. “I’m also answering the phone. The receptionist who was supposed to work this shift is sick. We’re awfully thin in personnel right now. People calling in sick, people quitting. I’m in charge, all right. I’m in charge of myself.”
I smiled. I didn’t give a damn about her being overworked. But I’d learned how to pretend to care about people like her. It helped open doors and get them to talk about the things I wanted them to talk about. So we chatted for a while about all the stress she was under and how hard it was to find good help.
“I do have some questions about the Zapruder tape,” I said finally. “I watched it here earlier today and then asked the young woman who was here a few questions about it. She didn’t know the answers. But she said someone named Eric probably would. That he was an expert on the Zapruder tape and a lot of other things about the Kennedy assassination.”
“Eric’s not here,” she said.
“When do you think he’ll be back?”
“Eric’s not coming back.”
“He doesn’t work here anymore?”
“He quit.”
“Gee, the woman I talked to before didn’t tell me that. Just that he wasn’t around at the moment.”
“I haven’t told anyone yet. I guess at first I hoped he might show up. But now I realize that’s not going to happen. The damn kid just left me a few weeks ago without any reason or any notice. No apology. No nothing. And, even worse, he took a bunch of stuff from the museum wi
th him.”
“What kind of stuff?”
“Stuff about Lee Harvey Oswald, including a video of him at the Dallas police station just before he was shot. Dammit, we need that material. It’s not easy finding good people you can trust to work for you these days. Eric Mathis just up and left me in the lurch.”
The name sounded familiar. At first, I couldn’t figure out why. And then it hit me.
“Eric’s last name is Mathis?” I asked.
“That’s right.”
Mathis was the real name of Lee Harvey Oswald Jr.
Lee Mathis.
And Lee Mathis had a son named Eric.
“Do you know Eric?” she asked.
“I think I do.”
Chapter 22
ERIC MATHIS HAD begun working at the Sixth Floor Museum a year earlier.
Lee Mathis said his son had gotten very upset and refused to speak to him at about that time when he told him he had changed his name to Lee Harvey Oswald Jr. and was writing a book about his infamous father—the same time that Eric Mathis apparently moved to Dallas and took the job at the Kennedy museum.
Then, a few weeks ago, Mathis sent his son a copy of the manuscript he was working on about the Oswald family connection.
