“Had it come under that name, could this fellow have gotten it?”
“Nobody got mail out of that box but me, no sir.”
AT ABOUT 10:20 A.M. on Sunday, while Captain Fritz and others conducted their latest interrogation of Oswald, Chief of Police Curry gave a hallway press conference. On Saturday night he had already told reporters the approximate time his men would transport Oswald to the County Jail on Sunday. Now he even revealed what special methods he would employ to keep his prisoner safe from harm.
“Chief, you say that you’re going to take him . . . in an armored car. Have you ever had to do this with another prisoner?
“Not to my knowledge.”
“Is it a commercial-type truck, the kind that banks use?”
“Yes, sir.”
“[The] threats on the prisoner’s life . . . did they come in right through the police switchboard?”
“Yes.”
“Do you have details on all of them?”
“No.”
The reporters wanted to know if the police had discovered any accomplices. Did anyone help Oswald?
“This is the man, we are sure, that murdered . . . assassinated the president.” But Curry did not go so far as to deny the possibility of a conspiracy.
“To say that that there was no other person that had knowledge of what this man might do, I wouldn’t make that statement because there is a possibility that there are people who might have known this man’s thoughts and what he could do, or what he might do.”
But has he confessed? the reporters yearned to know.
“Does he show any signs of breaking—to make a clean breast of this . . . to tell the truth about what happened?”
“No, sir, there is no indication that he is close to telling us anything.”
The journalists kept questioning Curry, but he had nothing more to say.
INSIDE FRITZ’S office, Holmes asked Oswald about a third post-office box, one he rented in Dallas after he moved back to the city from New Orleans. What business did he list on the application? None, Oswald claimed. Then why, Holmes asked, did he state on the rental application that his business was the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and the American Civil Liberties Union?
“Maybe that’s right,” Oswald conceded.
Holmes asked why he did that.
“I don’t know why.”
Fritz asked about Oswald’s involvement with the FPCC, and if he was in contact with its New York office.
“Yes, I wrote to them, and they sent me some Communist literature and a letter signed by Alex Hidell.”
Hidell! That was the name on the card the police found in Lee’s pocket, and the name authorized to receive mail at his New Orleans post-office box. Oswald said he never knew Hidell and never saw him in New Orleans.
Inspector Kelley asked Oswald if he believed in what the FPCC stands for.
“Yes, Cuba should have full diplomatic relations with the United States. There should be free trade with Cuba and freedom for tourists from both countries to travel within each other’s borders.”
Oswald denied that he had moved to Dallas to start an FPCC chapter there. He was telling the truth.
Kelley wondered if Oswald’s motive was connected to Cuba.
Did Oswald think that Cuba would be better off now that President Kennedy was dead?
Oswald said he doubted that the attitude of the U.S. government would change. Lyndon Johnson belonged to the same political party, and, Oswald concluded, “His views would probably be largely the same as President Kennedy.”
Fritz asked the same question Oswald answered on the New Orleans radio shows. “Are you a Communist?”
“No, I am not a Communist. I am a Marxist, but not a Marxist-Leninist.” Oswald said he was a “pure Marxist.”
Fritz had no idea what Oswald was talking about. “What’s the difference?”
“It would take too long to explain,” Oswald said, implying that Fritz lacked the sophistication to understand what he was talking about.
Fritz coaxed him to elaborate.
“Well, a Communist is a Marxist-Leninist, while I am a true Karl Marxist. I’ve read just about everything by or about Karl Marx.” Oswald’s boasts that he was a Marx scholar were absurd.
Oswald said he was an avid reader of Russian literature, “whether it’s Communist or not.”
Secret Service agent Kelley asked if Oswald subscribed to any Russian magazines or newspaper.
“Yes, I subscribe to the Militant. That’s the weekly of the Socialist Party of the United States.”
Oswald had a question for Kelley. “Are you an FBI agent?”
“No, I’m not. I am a member of the Secret Service.”
Oswald revealed when he was standing in front of the Depository, about to leave, a young crew-cut man rushed up and said he was from the Secret Service, showed him a book of identification, and asked where the phone was.
Oswald pointed him toward the pay phone in the building, and he started toward it, and then Oswald left.
Fritz allowed Kelley to continue the questioning. The clock was ticking. Soon Oswald would be gone, taken to the County Jail.
Fritz switched to a subject guaranteed to infuriate Oswald, the circumstances of his parting with the Marine Corps. Fritz said he understood that Oswald had been dishonorably discharged. Oswald cut him off.
“I was discharged honorably.” It was changed later because he attempted to renounce his American citizenship while living in Russia. Because he never changed his citizenship, he wrote a letter to secretary of the Navy John Connally to have this discharge reversed, and after considerable delay, he received a “very respectful” reply in which Connally stated that he had resigned to run for governor of Texas, and that his letter was being referred to the new secretary.
Fritz asked about a map that was found in Oswald’s room at the boardinghouse.
“Lee, we found a map in your room with some marks on it. What can you tell me about those marks? Did you put them on there?”
“My God!” He knew what Fritz was implying, that the map was evidence that he had planned the assassination in advance. “Don’t tell me there’s a mark near where this thing happened?” Oswald remembered that he marked the location of the Texas School Book Depository on the map. But he offered an innocent explanation.
“What about the other marks? I put a number of marks on it. I was looking for work and marked the places where I went for jobs or where I heard there were jobs.”
Fritz was skeptical. He asked why was there an X at the location of the Book Depository.
“Well, I interviewed there for a job, in fact, got the job. Therefore the X.”
This time Oswald spoke the truth. He had used that map to plot out his route when he went from place to place in search of employment. The X that he penned in front of the Depository did not foreshadow the assassination. On November 22, he had already worked there for several weeks. Why would he need to highlight on a map the place where he already had a job?
It was 11:00 A.M. in Dallas. Soon Oswald would be taken to the basement garage of City Hall and driven to the County Jail.
Captain Fritz asked Oswald one more time about the hours preceding the assassination.
Why did he go to Irving to visit his wife on Thursday night instead of Friday, like he normally did?
“I learned that my wife and Mrs. Paine were giving a party for the children, and that they were having in a house full of neighborhood children there [on Friday], and that I just didn’t want to be around at such a time.” So, he went out Thursday night.
What about the next morning, Fritz asked. “Did you bring a sack with you.”
“I did.”
“What was in the sack?”
“My lunch.”
“How big of a sack was it? What was its shape?”
“Oh, I don’t recall, it may have [been] a small sack or a large sack. You don’t always find one that just fits your sandwiches.”
O
swald knew that Wesley and his sister had already told the police all about his large paper bag. He tried to discredit the accuracy of their recollections by creating ambiguity about its size.
Fritz pursued the subject, asking where Oswald put the sack when he got into Frazier’s car.
“In my lap, or possibly in the front seat beside to me, where I always did put it because I don’t want it to get crushed.”
He denied putting any package in the backseat.
Fritz told Oswald that Wesley Frazier says that he brought a long parcel over to his house and put it in the backseat of his car.
“Oh, he must be mistaken, or thinking about some other time when he picked me up.”
Fritz asked Oswald to tell him again where he was in the Depository at the time of the assassination. The detective was curious to see if Oswald would tell the story in the same way he had during a prior interrogation.
Oswald said that when lunchtime came he was working on one of the upper floors with one of the black employees who said “come on let’s eat lunch together.” Oswald told him, “you go ahead, send the elevator back up to me and I will come down just as soon as I am finished.”
But, Oswald explained, before he went down the assassination happened. Then, “when all the commotion started, I just went on downstairs.” He stopped in the second-floor lunchroom to get a Coke, and it was there, Oswald said, that he encountered a policeman. “I went down, and as I started to go out and see what it was all about, a police officer stopped me just before I got to the front door, and started to ask me some questions.”
At that point, “My supervisor told the officer that I am one of the employees . . . so he told me to step aside. Then I just went on in the crowd to see what it was all about.”
Oswald had just committed a huge mistake. On November 22, he told Captain Fritz that during the assassination, he was eating his lunch on the first floor of the Depository and then he went up to the second floor to buy a Coke. Now, two days later, he told a different story. In this new version, Oswald did not go down to the first floor to eat his lunch. Instead, he never ate lunch at all. Now he says the assassination and all the “commotion” happened before he had a chance to go down to the first floor and eat his lunch.
At first, it might sound like a trivial distinction. What difference did it make if Oswald was going up or down to the second floor to buy that Coke? Only this.
Oswald had just confessed that he was not on the first floor of the building when the president was shot. He had shattered his own alibi. Now he said “no” without realizing the significance of what he had just admitted: that he was somewhere else at 12:30 P.M. on November 22, 1963.
During the assassination of President Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald was not on the first floor. He was somewhere else inside the Texas School Book Depository. He was on one of upper floors. And he was alone.
And with that admission, he revealed something else. After the shooting, he did not go up the stairs. He ran down them.
It had taken Fritz almost two days and several rounds of interrogation to get to this moment, but Oswald had slipped up at last. The suspect had placed himself alone on one of the upper floors of the building from which the president was shot. Given several more hours of questioning, Fritz might be able to coax Oswald into making more mistakes and admissions.
Fritz heard a knock on his door. It was Chief of Police Jesse Curry. It was time to transfer the prisoner to the County Jail. “We’ll be through in a few minutes,” Fritz said.
Secret Service agent Forrest Sorrels asked Oswald about the mysterious Alex Hidell.
“I never used the name of Hidell,” Oswald responded.
Fritz asked him if he knew anyone by the name of A. J. Hidell.
“No.”
Oswald also denied ever using that name as an alias.
“No! I never used the name, and I don’t know anyone by that name, and never had heard of that name before.”
Fritz asked again about the fake selective service card bearing Oswald’s photo and A. J. Hidell’s name.
“I’ve told you all I’m going to about that card. You took notes, just read them for yourself, if you want to refresh your memory. You have the card. You know as much about it as I do.” Oswald was vehement on the subject of Hidell. Despite the incriminating evidence of the card he kept in his wallet, he would not admit that he used the name under which he ordered the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle.
It was time to go.
CHAPTER 9
“LEE OSWALD HAS BEEN SHOT!”
The two armored trucks arrived on schedule on the Commerce Street side of City Hall. Assistant Chief of Police Charles Batchelor walked up the inclined loading ramp to the mouth of the garage entrance and selected the best truck, the one with room for two guards to ride with Oswald. Batchelor and the driver decided to leave the vehicle at the top of the ramp with the front end protruding onto the sidewalk. The position was not ideal. Oswald would have to walk through the basement garage and then up the ramp to reach the back of the armored car. But if the truck were backed all the way down the ramp, the steep incline might cause it to stall on the way up the exit ramp.
Captain Fritz told Chief Curry he was ready to bring Oswald down as soon as the seventy policemen in the basement had secured the area. But Fritz opposed the idea of using the armored car. “Chief,” he said, “I don’t think it’s a good thing to try to move him in a money wagon.”
Fritz explained. “We don’t know the driver or anything about the wagon, and it would be clumsy and awkward, and I don’t think it is a good idea at all.”
But Fritz proposed a solution—transfer Oswald in an unmarked car.
Curry agreed. They would use the armored car as decoy. Anyone who tried to get Oswald would find themselves attacking an empty armored car.
Fritz supplied the details. “I’ll transport him in one car, with myself and two detectives, and we’ll have another carload of detectives as backup.” Fritz planned to cut out of the caravan at Main Street, drive west on Main to Houston, then make a right turn to the county jail. The rest of the motorcade would follow a different route.
Fritz still worried about the media circus in the basement.
“You know, Chief,” he said, “we ought to get rid of the television lights and cameramen so they don’t interfere with our getting to the car.”
It would have been a lot easier to protect Oswald if the basement was cleared of everybody but law enforcement officials.
Curry did not like that idea.
“The lights have already been moved back,” Curry told his chief of detectives, “and the media have been moved back in the basement, back of the rail, and the people [outside City Hall] have been moved across the street.”
Detective James Leavelle was worried too. He had suggested to Fritz that they take Oswald out on the first floor and put him in a car on Main Street. In other words, do what no one is expecting. Assign a small contingent of reliable detectives to march Oswald right out the front door.
“That way, we could be in the county jail before they even know we’ve left the [city] jail.”
Fritz wondered if the number of men needed to guard Oswald could be squeezed into the elevator. And he was sure Chief Curry would insist on letting the press see the transfer.
At 11:10 A.M., Fritz prepared Oswald. “Lee, I want you to follow Detective Leavelle when we get downstairs and stay close to him.”
Oswald was dressed in a T-shirt, and Fritz worried that Lee might get cold. The shirt he wore when he shot the president was in the crime lab.
Fritz sent a man to bring some of the clothing the police found at 1026 North Beckley Street in Oswald’s little room. At first Lee asked for what he described as a black “Ivy League” shirt. Then he chose a black sweater. That, he said, might be a little warmer. The tattered garment had several holes. But Oswald cared more about its color than its condition.
Fritz did not object. It was the last small kindness he woul
d offer Oswald. Lee pulled the sweater over his head and pushed his arms through the sleeves. Now he was dressed in all black—top, pants, and shoes—just as he was on the day Marina took that “Hunter of Fascists” photograph in their backyard eight months ago, when he wanted to show that he was “ready for anything.”
At 11:18 A.M., Secret Service agent Sorrels approached Fritz. “Captain, I would not move that man at an announced time. I would take him out at three or four o’clock in the morning, when there’s nobody around.”
It was the last of many warnings not to expose the prisoner to unnecessary danger.
“Chief Curry,” Fritz replied, “has gone along with [the press] and said he wanted to continue going along with them and cooperating with them all he can.”
OUTSIDE ON the street, a pasty-complexioned, unattractive man wearing a dark suit, white shirt, dark tie, dark hat, and dark shoes approached the mouth of the driveway and the armored car parked at the top of the ramp. He slipped through the narrow space between one side of the truck and the wall. No one stopped him. He proceeded down the ramp until he found himself in the basement garage. He mingled with the scrum of journalists and others and melted into the crowd. He did not stand out.
To some people, he looked familiar in a vague way. They had seen him before. Other men in the basement, the ones who knew him, either did not spot him or did not care. This uninvited guest was just one of dozens of well-dressed men waiting for Lee Harvey Oswald.
At 11:19 A.M., Oswald was double-handcuffed in Captain Fritz’s office. One pair secured his hands together. The second pair connected one of his wrists to one of Detective Leavelle’s so that the two men could not be separated, and Oswald could not run and make a break for it. But the handcuff arrangement would also make it hard for Oswald to duck if someone took a shot at him. It was also dangerous for Leavelle.
“Lee, if anybody shoots at you,” the detective joked, “I hope they’re as good a shot as you are.”
“Aw, they ain’t going to be anybody shooting at me, you’re just being melodramatic.”
“Well, if there’s any trouble you know what to do. Hit the floor.”
End of Days Page 23
