by Jim Marrs
Overlooking Dealey Plaza at its northeast corner is the seven-story redbrick building that in 1963 housed the Texas School Book Depository. It had little to do with Texas public schools.
The Depository was a private company that acted as an agent for a number of book publishers, furnishing office space and providing warehousing, inventorying, and shipping.
School systems would place orders with the publishers for textbooks and the publishers would send the orders along to the Depository, where about a half dozen young men acted as order fillers—locating and collecting the books as per each order.
On November 22, 1963, one of these order fillers was Lee Harvey Oswald.
Oswald and his wife, Marina, had separated at the time he left for New Orleans in the spring of 1963. They reunited in that Louisiana city, but in September, it was decided that since Marina was about to have a baby, she would return to Texas with a friend, Ruth Paine, while Oswald continued his activities—which reportedly included a trip to Mexico City.
When Oswald arrived back in Dallas on October 3, Marina was living in Irving, a suburban city west of Dallas. She was staying in the home of Michael and Ruth Paine—they, too, were separated at the time—and over the weekend of October 12–13, Oswald had arrived there to visit. During this weekend, Mrs. Paine said she gave Oswald, who had no driver’s license, a driving lesson in her car.
About a week before, Oswald allegedly had returned from his trip to Mexico City. However, there continues to be much controversy concerning this journey.
On Monday, October 14, Mrs. Paine drove Oswald to Dallas, where he rented a room at 1026 N. Beckley Avenue from Mrs. A. C. Johnson for $8 a week. Oswald had filled out applications at the Texas Employment Commission and reportedly was looking for work.
That same day, Mrs. Paine mentioned Oswald—and the fact that he needed work because his wife was about to have another baby—to neighbors, including Mrs. Linnie Mae Randle. Mrs. Randle mentioned that Wesley Frazier, a younger brother who lived with her, worked at the Texas School Book Depository and that a job might be available there. Marina Oswald, who was present at this gathering, reportedly urged Mrs. Paine to check into the job possibility. Mrs. Paine agreed and called Depository superintendent Roy Truly that very day.
Before the Warren Commission, Truly recalled getting a call from a woman in Irving who said she knew a man whose wife was going to have a baby and needed a job. Truly agreed to talk with the man.
Mrs. Paine mentioned her call to Oswald later that evening and the next day, October 15, Oswald interviewed with Truly for the job. Oswald began working as temporary help the next day. Truly said the fall was their busiest time of year. Plus more hands were needed as the flooring on the sixth floor was being torn up and replaced. Truly told the commission:
Actually, [it was] the end of our fall rush—if it hadn’t existed a week or two longer [than usual], or if we had not been using some of our regular boys putting down this plywood, we would not have had any need for Lee Oswald at that time, which is a tragic thing for me to think about.
Oswald was paid $1.25 an hour to fill book orders. Once shown the procedures, he worked on his own. Truly described Oswald as “a bit above average” as an employee. Coworkers said Oswald was pleasant enough but kept mostly to himself.
During his first week at work, Oswald got acquainted with Frazier and soon asked Frazier to drive him to Irving to visit his family. Frazier, who had only started working at the Depository the month before, said he was eager to make friends in Dallas. So Frazier agreed and, in fact, gave Oswald a ride to Irving every weekend prior to the assassination—except one when Oswald told Frazier he was staying in Dallas to take a driving test.
On Sunday, November 17, Marina Oswald had Mrs. Paine call a Dallas telephone number Oswald had given her. When she asked for Lee Oswald, Mrs. Paine was told there was nobody there by that name. The next day, Oswald called the Paine home and angrily told Marina he was using a fictitious name at the Beckley Avenue address and not to call him there.
On Thursday morning, November 21, Oswald reportedly asked Frazier to drive him to Irving after work because he wanted to get some curtain rods to put in his Beckley Avenue apartment. According to this curtain rod story—only Frazier and his sister claimed to have seen Oswald with a package and their descriptions were inconsistent and vague—the next morning Frazier’s sister saw Oswald place a paper-wrapped package in Frazier’s car and Frazier noticed the packet as the pair drove to work. Frazier later said Oswald told him it was the curtain rods. Oswald also said he would not be riding back to Irving as usual, but he gave no explanation. Frazier said once at the Depository, Oswald got out of the car and walked ahead into the building carrying his package with one end cupped in his right hand and the other tucked under his right arm, parallel to his body. Most researchers who have studied the Mannlicher-Carcano (technically merely a Carcano carbine) state that, even disassembled, the barrel is too long to carry in this position.
When Frazier entered the building, he could not see Oswald and never knew what became of the package. Many researchers believe the curtain rod story was concocted by authorities later in an attempt to explain how Oswald got a rifle into the Depository. Some researchers suspect Frazier, who could have been charged with being an accessory to the assassination, was susceptible to being coached by authorities. Furthermore, photographs made of Oswald’s Beckley Avenue room that weekend clearly show curtains in place, obviating any need for curtain rods. When questioned by the authorities on what he had taken into the Depository, Oswald denied the curtain rod story, saying he only carried his lunch to work.
Jack Dougherty, another Depository employee whose Warren Commission testimony appears somewhat incoherent, nevertheless said, “Yes, I saw [Oswald] when he first came in the door.” Commission attorney Joseph Ball asked, “Did he have anything in his hands or arms?” “Well, not that I could see of,” was the response.
Many Depository employees saw Oswald that morning. He appeared to be carrying on normal work duties, particularly on the sixth floor, where he was assigned that day.
Frazier said he never saw Oswald after noon. He told the Warren Commission that as the presidential motorcade approached, he joined other Depository employees who were standing on the steps of the building facing Elm.
Minutes before the presidential motorcade arrived, an odd incident occurred that has puzzled researchers for years.
The Distracting Seizure
About 12:15 p.m., a young man described as wearing green Army fatigues collapsed at 100 N. Houston, near the front door of the Texas School Book Depository. He apparently suffered some sort of seizure. Dallas policeman D. V. Harkness radioed the police dispatcher to send an ambulance to that location at 12:18 p.m. Radio logs showed that the ambulance, after picking up the victim, radioed, “We are en route to Parkland.” However, Parkland never recorded a patient registering at this time, and the entire incident seemed forgotten.
Despite the suspicious timing and proximity to the assassination, there is no mention of this incident in the Warren Commission Report and the FBI didn’t get around to investigating it until May 1964.
And this investigation took place only after a former employee of O’Neal Funeral Home, apparently more curious about the incident than the FBI, called the bureau’s Dallas office to report the incident, adding the patient “disappeared” after arriving at Parkland. The O’Neal caller stated he “felt it possible that this incident may have been planned to distract attention from the shooting that was to follow.”
The FBI detailed their investigation of the matter in Commission Document 1245, which was not included in the Warren Report or its twenty-six volumes.
Agents contacted the ambulance driver, Aubrey Rike, who said he had picked up a man “who was conscious and only slightly injured with a facial laceration.” Rike added that in the confusion at Parkland, this man had simply walked off. Rike also said a Secret Service agent at Parkland told him to remain t
here “because they might need [his ambulance] to move the President to another location.” It was Rike who later helped load the president’s body into his ambulance for the sad return to Love Field.
On May 26, Bureau agents located the “victim” after finding his name in O’Neal records. Jerry B. Belknap had paid his $12.50 ambulance charge back on December 2, 1963. Based on a later FBI report and an interview with Belknap by assassination researcher Jerry D. Rose, the following story came to light: Belknap said he had suffered from seizures since being struck by a car while getting off a school bus as a child. He was standing near the Depository when he stepped back from the crowd and lost consciousness. He said the next thing he knew, a policeman was standing over him.
Once at Parkland, he was sitting on a small table and, after asking for attention, was told to lie down. He said that a short time later there was a great rush of people who went into a different section of the emergency room. This was the Kennedy party with the stricken president.
Belknap said a male attendant finally brought him some water and an aspirin but that, after realizing that he was not going to get immediate treatment, he walked out without registering. Amazingly, his exit was accomplished under the noses of security agents who were locking down the hospital. Outside, Belknap caught a bus back downtown, where he first learned of the assassination.
Intriguingly, Belknap told Rose that he had been interviewed by both Dallas police and the FBI within days of the assassination, months before the FBI’s reported investigation in May 1964. He commented that the two police agencies apparently distrusted each other and both asked him the same questions. Asked about the June 1964 FBI report concerning him, Belknap offered the explanation that perhaps an agent had called him on the phone and simply confirmed the results of the earlier interview. Belknap also stated in 1983 that an investigator from “some committee in Washington” had contacted him within the past few years. However, if this investigator was with the House Select Committee on Assassinations, there is no reference to him in its report or attendant volumes.
Belknap died in 1986.
The entire “seizure” episode is strange and full of contradictions and coincidence—Belknap even reported seeing Jack Ruby once “acting like a big shot.” Belknap also said he lost consciousness at the scene, while the FBI report said he didn’t.
Researchers view the incident as either a strangely convenient coincidence or as some as-yet-undiscovered plot to distract police and bystanders while assassins moved into position just prior to Kennedy’s arrival in Dealey Plaza.
Ambulance driver Rike, who died in April 2010, told this author he felt the incident was suspicious because he personally had been summoned to that same location on false calls several times in the days leading up to the assassination. In fact, there may have been more than a dozen such fake calls, a fact not immediately noticed as they were spaced over separate shifts of drivers. All requested an ambulance be sent to the corner of Elm and Houston. “We would get these calls for service and I would run up there to the area by the School Book Depository but there would be no one there. This happened up to twelve times in the two weeks preceding the assassination,” said Rike. “It seemed like someone was timing how long it took for an ambulance to get there.” Rike pointed out that the Kennedy motorcade was running about five minutes late, which meant if it had been on time, it would have arrived at Elm and Houston simultaneously with his ambulance. Speculation was that this would have congested the intersection, causing the Kennedy limousine to stop, making the president a stationary target.
Researchers agree the incident deserves further investigation, particularly in light of the fact that Rike and Dennis McGuire, the ambulance drivers who took Belknap to Parkland, remained there to load Kennedy’s body for the return trip to Love Field that fateful afternoon.
One Depository employee who felt strongly that shots had originated from within the building was Geneva L. Hine, who operated the Depository’s credit desk on the second floor. She told the Warren Commission she had seen President Kennedy before and offered to answer the telephones while some of the office women could go outside to view the motorcade. By herself, Hine watched the president’s car turn from Houston onto Elm. Suddenly, she said, she heard three shots that “sounded like cannon shots, they were so terrific.” They caused the building to shake and appeared to come from within the building, she said.
But the most curious aspect to Hine’s statement was the cause of her leaving the telephones and venturing to the window. “I was alone until the lights all went out and the phones became dead because the motorcade was coming near us and no one was calling so I got up and thought I could see it from the east window in our office.”
The lights all went out and the phones went dead just as Kennedy’s motorcade approached the Depository? There was no other blackout in any other part of Dallas. This most suspicious happenstance did not prompt any follow-up questions from Commission attorneys Joseph A. Ball and Samuel A. Stern, who merely went on to ask Hine what she saw out the window.
At the time of the shooting, most persons within the Depository believed the shots came from elsewhere.
Steven F. Wilson was vice president of a school textbook–publishing company and had an office on the third floor of the Depository. Wilson told the FBI he watched the motorcade go by from a closed third-floor window but lost sight of the president when he “became obscured by some trees which are on Elm Street.” He further stated:
In a matter of ten seconds or less . . . I heard three shots . . . there was a greater space of time between the second and third shots than between the first and second. The three shots were fired within a matter of less than five seconds. The shots sounded to me like rifle shots. At that time, it seemed like the shots came from the west end of the building or from the colonnade located on Elm Street across from the west end of our building [the pergola on the Grassy Knoll]. The shots really did not sound like they came from above me.
Elsie Dorman, who worked for Scott-Foresman Co., was in her fourth-floor office filming the presidential motorcade as it moved toward her on Houston. The only film made from the Depository, hers was of poor quality and did not capture the assassination. With her were fellow workers Dorothy Ann Garner, Victoria Adams, and Sandra Styles. Garner told the FBI, “I thought at the time the shots or reports came from a point to the west of the building.” Adams told the Warren Commission:
We heard a shot, and it was a pause, and then a second shot, and then a third shot. It sounded like a firecracker or a cannon at a football game, it seems as if it came from the right below [the area of the Grassy Knoll] rather than from the left above [the sixth-floor window].
Styles told Bureau agents she could not tell where the shots came from, but that she and Adams immediately “left the office at this time, went down the back stairs, and left the building at the back door.” Wesley Frazier, who had driven Oswald to work that morning, was on the front steps of the Depository. He told the Warren Commission of his experience:
Right after he [Kennedy] went by . . . I heard a sound and if you have ever been around motorcycles you know how they backfire, and so I thought one of them motorcycles backfired because right before his car came down, now there were several of these motorcycle policemen, and they took off down toward the underpass down there. . . . I heard two more of the same type, you know, sounds, and by that time people were running everywhere and falling down and screaming. . . . I figured it was somebody shooting at President Kennedy . . . and from where I was standing it sounded like it was coming from down [at the] railroad tracks there. . . . So, we started back into the building and it wasn’t but just a few minutes that there were a lot of police officers and so forth all over the building there.
Frazier said one of the Depository employees with him on the steps of the building as Kennedy passed by was Billy Nolan Lovelady, who was to become well-known to researchers as “the man in the doorway.”
The Man in the D
oorway
Associated Press photographer James Altgens snapped a picture seconds after Kennedy was first struck by a bullet. In the background of this photo a man can be seen standing in the west corner of the Texas School Book Depository’s front doorway.
Soon after the assassination, many people—including his mother—suggested the man in the doorway looked amazingly like Lee Harvey Oswald. Obviously, if the man in the photo was Oswald, he could not have been firing a rifle on the sixth floor. Controversy over this issue has continued to roil since the time of the assassination. In 2012 a group of researchers, including McKnight University professor emeritus James H. Fetzer, retired University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point history professor David Wrone, and health specialist Ralph C. Cinque, began an “Oswald Innocence Campaign” based primarily on the photo of the man in the doorway, who they said “clearly evident upon close examination” was Lee Oswald.
The Warren Commission, based primarily on testimony from Depository employees, concluded the man in the doorway was Billy Lovelady. After being interviewed at length by the FBI, Lovelady identified the man in the photo as himself.
Lovelady, who had worked at the Depository since 1961, was one of the men assigned to lay plywood flooring on the sixth floor that day. He said that about 11:50 a.m. he and other employees stopped work so they could clean up before taking their lunch break. Lovelady said the workers took both of the Depository’s two elevators and were racing each other down to ground level. He recalled hearing Oswald shout to them to wait or to send an elevator back for him.
After buying a soft drink, Lovelady told the Warren Commission, he went out the main door and sat on the steps of the Depository to eat his lunch with some coworkers. Lovelady said he remained there as the motorcade passed by, and then heard some noises. “I thought it was firecrackers or somebody celebrating the arrival of the President. It didn’t occur to me at first what had happened until this Gloria [Calvery] came running up to us and told us the President had been shot,” he recalled.
