by Jim Marrs
The two Dallas motorcycle officers riding to the left rear of the limousine, Bobby W. Hargis and B. J. Martin, were splattered by blood and brain matter. Martin, who had looked to his right after the first shots, later found bloodstains on the left side of his helmet. Hargis, who was riding nearest the limousine about six to eight feet from the left rear fender, saw Kennedy’s head explode and was hit by bits of flesh and bone with such impact that he told reporters he initially thought he had been shot.
Presidential assistant David Powers was riding with Secret Service agents in the car directly behind the president. From this vantage point, he described the entire assassination:
I commented to Ken O’Donnell that it was 12:30 and we would only be about five minutes late when we arrived at the Trade Mart. Shortly thereafter the first shot went off and it sounded to me as if it were a firecracker. I noticed then that the President moved quite far to his left after the shot from the extreme right hand side where he had been sitting. There was a second shot and Governor Connally disappeared from sight and then there was a third shot which took off the top of the President’s head and had the sickening sound of a grapefruit splattering against the side of a wall. The total time between the first and third shots was about five or six seconds. My first impression was that the shots came from the right and overhead but I also had a fleeting impression that the noise appeared to come from the front in the area of the Triple Underpass. This may have resulted from my feeling, when I looked forward toward the overpass, that we might have ridden into an ambush.
Several persons in the motorcade smelled gunpowder as the cars swept through the lower end of Dealey Plaza.
Mrs. Earle Cabell, wife of the Dallas mayor, was riding in an open convertible six cars back from the motorcade’s lead car. At the opening shots, the car in which she was riding was passing the Depository building. She told the Warren Commission she jerked her head up on hearing the first shot because “I heard the direction from which the shot came.” Looking up, she saw an object projecting from one of the top windows of the Depository building. She said,
I jerked my head up and I saw something in that window and I turned around to say to Earle, “Earle, it is a shot,” and before I got the words out . . . the second two shots rang out. . . . I was acutely aware of the odor of gunpowder. I was aware that the motorcade stopped dead still. There was no question about that.
Mrs. Cabell was riding beside congressman Ray Roberts. She said he acknowledged smelling gunpowder too.
Senator Ralph Yarborough also smelled gunpowder as the car carrying him and Lyndon Johnson drove through the plaza. Yarborough, a former Army infantry officer and an avid hunter, also failed to recognize the sound of the first shot. He told this author:
I thought, “Was that a bomb thrown?” and then the other shots were fired. And the motorcade, which had slowed to a stop, took off. A second or two later, I smelled gunpowder. I always thought that was strange because, being familiar with firearms, I never could see how I could smell the powder from a rifle high in that building.
It does seem strange that people would smell powder from a shot fired more than sixty feet in the air and behind them. However, it’s not so strange, if a shot were fired on top of the Grassy Knoll less than twelve feet in elevation with a breeze from the north to carry smoke to street level.
Over the years, an argument has continued over whether the presidential limousine actually stopped. There is no doubt that it slowed, as in the Orville Nix film, the brake lights can been seen coming on after the first shot. Secret Service agent Clint Hill in the follow-up car stepped down and ran for the president’s car. He was grabbing for the rear handhold when it began to accelerate.
Witness Jean Hill supported Mrs. Connally by stating the limousine slowed to a stop and even pulled over into the left-hand lane, although the Zapruder film shows no such movement. Based on the reported speed of Zapruder’s camera, the Warren Commission determined that the limousine slowed to 11.2 miles per hour and “maintained this average speed . . . immediately preceding the shot which struck the President in the head.”
Senator Yarborough may have gotten closest to the truth of the matter when he explained to this author, “Look, you toss a ball into the air. At one point it stops going up and starts coming down. Did it stop?”
One of the strangest omissions in the subsequent investigation by federal authorities concerns a Navy commander who was assigned to film major events involving President Kennedy. In early 1963, Thomas Atkins was assigned as an official photographer for the Kennedy White House. As such, he traveled to Texas with Kennedy and was photographing the motorcade with a quality camera, a 16 mm Arriflex S. He was riding six cars behind Kennedy and filming as the motorcade moved through Dealey Plaza.
In a 1977 article, Atkins said the car he was in had just turned onto Houston Street and was facing the Texas School Book Depository:
Kennedy’s car had just made the left turn heading toward the freeway entrance. Although I did not look up at the building, I could hear everything quite clearly. . . . The shots came from below and off to the right side from where I was [the location of the Grassy Knoll]. . . . I never thought the shots came from above. They did not sound like shots coming from anything higher than street level.
After returning to Washington on Air Force Two, Atkins assembled his footage into a movie he titled The Last Two Days. He described the film as “terribly damaging to the Warren Commission finding that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin.” Perhaps this explains why neither Atkins’s testimony nor his film was studied by either of the federal panels investigating the assassination. Atkins said in 1977, “It’s something I’ve always wondered about. Why didn’t they ask me what I knew? I not only was on the White House staff, I was then, and still am, a photographer with a pretty keen visual sense.”
Obviously, the federal authorities didn’t want to hear from a man with a “keen visual sense” and strong credentials who might have told them things they did not want to hear.
But if the stories of the motorcade witnesses differed from the later official version of the assassination, it was nothing compared to the stories to come from the crowd of bystanders.
The Crowd
The crowd of witnesses along the motorcade route through Dealey Plaza saw many things that differed from the later official version. Even before the motorcade arrived, men with rifles were seen by people in downtown Dallas.
Shortly before noon, Phillip B. Hathaway and coworker John Lawrence were walking on Akard Street toward Main to get an observation spot for the motorcade when Hathaway saw a man carrying a rifle in a gun case. He described the man as very tall, six-foot-five or more, weighing about 250 pounds and thick in the chest. The man was in his early thirties with “dirty blond hair worn in a crew-cut” and was wearing a gray business suit. Hathaway said the case was made of leather and cloth and was not limp, but obviously contained a rifle. He remarked to Lawrence that it must be a Secret Service man.
This same man may have been seen later that day by Ernest Jay Owens, who told sheriff’s officers the afternoon of the assassination that he was driving on Wood Street near Good-Lattimer Expressway when he saw a white male of “heavy build” carrying a “foreign-made rifle” out of a parking lot. Owens said the man was bareheaded and wearing a dark suit.
Once Oswald was captured and proclaimed the assassination suspect, there was no effort to investigate these stories further.
A similar—but even more ominous—incident involved Julia Ann Mercer. Mercer, then twenty-three years old, later told authorities that shortly before 11 a.m. the day of the assassination she was driving a rented white Valiant west on Elm Street just past the point where Kennedy was killed about two hours later. Just after passing through the Triple Underpass, she found her traffic lane blocked by a green Ford pickup truck containing two men..
While waiting for the truck to move, she saw a young man get out of the passenger side of the truck, walk to
a long tool compartment along the side, and remove a long paper bag. She could see the outline of a rifle in the bag. The man then walked up on the Grassy Knoll carrying the package and was lost to her sight. She described this man as in his late twenties or early thirties, wearing a gray jacket, brown pants, a plaid shirt, and some sort of wool stocking cap with a tassel on it. Mercer said as she pulled alongside the truck, she locked eyes with the driver, whom she described as heavily built with a round face and light brown hair.
She said during this time, she saw three Dallas policemen standing by a motorcycle on the underpass talking. In Warren Commission Document 205, a policeman did tell of seeing the truck, but believed that it had broken down.
When she was finally able to change lanes, Mercer drove on toward Fort Worth, stopping at the halfway point of the Dallas–Fort Worth Toll Road (now Interstate 30) to have breakfast. While eating, she spoke of her experience, commenting, “The Secret Service is not very secret.” As she drove on to Fort Worth, she was pulled over by policemen, who informed her of the assassination and took her back to Dallas for questioning. Apparently persons in the restaurant had informed authorities of her comments and presence at the assassination site. She was held for several hours and questioned by both local and federal authorities, although no one showed her a badge or identified himself.
Early the next morning, FBI men came to her home and took her back to the Dallas County Sheriff’s Office, where she was shown some photographs of various men. She picked out two as the men she had seen in the truck the day before. Turning one photo over, she read the name “Jack Ruby.” All this transpired prior to Ruby’s well-publicized shooting of Lee Oswald the next day.
During the TV coverage of the Oswald shooting, Mercer claims, she again recognized Ruby as the man driving the truck and that Oswald resembled the man carrying the rifle. Oswald’s mother also claimed to have been shown a picture of Ruby prior to the Sunday shooting of her son.
Mercer later claimed that her story concerning the truck and its occupants was twisted and changed by both the FBI and the Dallas County Sheriff’s Office. For example, according to her sheriff’s department statement of November 22, she stated that a sign on the side of the pickup truck carried the words AIR CONDITIONING, a claim she later denied. This one seemingly small change in her testimony sent investigators on a fruitless search for a truck with such a sign and later served to discredit her account. Furthermore, Mercer was able to convince New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison that her notarized signature on the sheriff’s report was forged. After telling her story to Garrison in the late 1960s, Mercer apparently realized how her account disrupted the official lone-nut story and she became inaccessible to the public.
Mercer’s experience may have been partly corroborated by another Dallasite, Julius Hardie, who told the Dallas Morning News years later that on the morning of November 22, he saw three men on top of the Triple Underpass carrying long arms, although he could not tell if they were rifles or shotguns. Hardie said he reported the incident to the FBI, but no such report has been made public.
As the motorcade arrived in Dealey Plaza, it passed almost twenty sheriff’s deputies standing at the intersection of Main and Houston in front of the sheriff’s office. They had gathered upon the sheriff’s orders earlier that day but Sheriff Decker told them he had received a call from Washington advising him and his men to stand down and not participate in the motorcade’s security.
In affidavits, the deputies almost unanimously agreed they thought the shots came from the railroad yards located just behind the Grassy Knoll. They all began running in that direction even before Decker’s radio order to “saturate the area of the park, railroad and all buildings” was given.
Deputy L. C. Smith, in a report made that day, told a story that was typical of the deputies’ experience:
I was standing in front of the Sheriff’s Office on Main Street and watched the President and his party drive by. Just a few seconds later, I heard the first shot, which I thought was a backfire, then the second shot and third shot rang out. I knew that this was gun shots and everyone else did also. I ran as fast as I could to Elm Street just west of Houston and I heard a woman unknown to me say the President was shot in the head and the shots came from the fence on the north side of Elm. I went at [once] behind the fence and searched also in the parking area. Then came . . . word the shot was thought to have come from the Texas School Book Depository.
Supporting the deputy’s stories was W. W. Mabra, then a county bailiff. Mabra, too, was on the corner of Main and Houston,
so close to the President that I could almost have reached out and touched him. Then I heard the first shot. I thought it was a backfire. People ran toward the knoll. Some said they saw smoke there. I thought at first the shot may have come from there.
Across Main Street from the deputies and Mabra stood Dallas County surveyor Robert H. West, who watched the presidential limousine move slowly toward the Triple Underpass. He heard one small report “similar to a motorcycle backfire,” then three like “rifle fire.” He said the shots came from the “northwest quadrant of Dealey Plaza [the area of the picket fence on the Grassy Knoll].” West later participated in reconstructions of the assassination for both Life magazine and the FBI that convinced him the crime could not have been the work of one man.
Arnold and Barbara Rowland, high school students who had been married the past May, had come to town to see the president. They were standing on Houston Street near a driveway between the County Records Building and the sheriff’s office, the west side of which faces Dealey Plaza. Both of the Rowlands believed the shots came from down near the Triple Underpass despite the fact that fifteen minutes before the motorcade arrived they had remarked about seeing two men, one with a rifle and telescopic sight, on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. Arnold Rowland had assumed the men were part of the Secret Service protection.
He said the man with the rifle was in the far west window of the Depository’s sixth floor while the other man, described as an elderly black man with thin hair wearing a plaid shirt, was seen in the easternmost window, the so-called sniper’s nest window. Rowland said he lost sight of the man with the rifle as the motorcade approached, but again saw the black man just before Kennedy arrived.
During the excitement of the moment, Rowland said, he neglected to mention the black man when he talked to authorities in the sheriff’s office. However, he said the next day FBI agents came to his home and got him to sign a statement. He recalled, “At that time I told them I did see the Negro man there and they told me it didn’t have any bearing or such on the case right then. In fact, they just the same as told me to forget it now.”
Although the agents “didn’t seem interested” in Rowland’s story of the two men on the sixth floor, they did attempt to identify the man with the gun by showing Rowland photos of Oswald. However, Rowland said, “I just couldn’t identify him . . . because I just didn’t have a good enough look at his face.” The Warren Commission brushed off Rowland’s testimony after FBI agents assured them that Rowland had mentioned nothing about the black man in his earlier statements. Commission attorney David Belin even maneuvered Mrs. Rowland into stating her husband was “prone to exaggerate.”
But Rowland’s story of seeing two men was corroborated by deputy sheriff Roger D. Craig, who said that Rowland told him about seeing two men pacing in the Depository approximately ten minutes after the assassination. Craig’s statements, like Rowland’s, were discounted by the Commission when federal agents contradicted their testimony.
However, two men also were seen by Mrs. Carolyn Walther, who worked in a dress factory in the Dal-Tex Building. About noon, she and another employee joined the crowd on the east side of Houston just south of Elm to watch the motorcade. Her account was buried in Warren Commission Exhibit 2086 in 1964 but she repeated her story for CBS television on June 25, 1967:
I had gone out on the street at about twenty after twelve
to get a look at the President when he came by. While I waited, I glanced up at the Depository building. There were two men in the corner window on the fourth or fifth floor. One man was wearing a white shirt and had blond or light brown hair. This man had the window open. His hands were extended outside the window. He held a rifle with the barrel pointed downward. I thought he was some kind of guard. In the same window, right near him, was a man in a brown suit coat. Then the President’s car came by. I heard a gunshot. People ran. Like a fool I just stood there. I saw people down. I walked toward them, with the thought they maybe were hurt and I could help them. People were running toward the Grassy Knoll. A woman cried out, “They shot him!” In all, I heard four shots.
In a 1978 interview with Earl Golz of the Dallas Morning News, Carolyn Walther (not to be confused with Deputy Sheriff E. R. “Buddy” Walthers) made these comments:
They (FBI) tried to make me think that what l saw were boxes. Now the boxes are much lighter colored. And this was definitely the shape of a person or part of a person. I never read their report. I talked to them and it seemed like they weren’t very interested. They were going to set out to prove me a liar, and I had no intention of arguing with them and being harassed. I felt like I had told them all I knew. And I had relieved myself of the burden of it. And if they didn’t want to believe it or had some reason not to, well, then, that was all right with me.
