by Jim Marrs
Not long after this encounter with the FBI, Carr’s home was raided by more than a dozen Dallas policemen and detectives armed with a search warrant. Claiming they were looking for “stolen articles,” they ransacked Carr’s home while holding him and his wife at gunpoint. Carr and his wife were taken to jail but later released. The day after the police raid, Carr received an anonymous phone call advising him to “get out of Texas.”
Carr finally moved to Montana to avoid harassment, but there he found dynamite in his car on one occasion and was shot at on another.
After testifying in the Clay Shaw trial in New Orleans, Carr was attacked by two men in Atlanta. Although stabbed in the back and left arm, Carr managed to fatally shoot one of his assailants. After turning himself in, Carr was not indicted by an Atlanta grand jury.
Carr was not the only assassination witness to later claim they were victims of a pattern of intimidation. Acquilla Clemons, who saw two men at the scene of the Tippit slaying, said a man with a gun came to her home and told her to keep quiet. Ed Hoffman, who saw two men with a rifle behind the picket fence on the Grassy Knoll at the time of the assassination, was warned by an FBI agent not to tell what he saw “or you might get killed.”
A relative of Depository superintendent Roy Truly recently told researchers that due to intimidation by federal authorities, Truly was fearful until his death. Truly’s wife, Mildred, refused to discuss the assassination—even with family members.
Sandy Speaker, the supervisor of Warren Commission star witness Howard Brennan, would not discuss the assassination until recently, after getting a phone call from his friend and coworker A. J. Millican. Speaker said he got a call from Millican early in 1964. Millican was almost in tears and told him never to talk about the assassination. Millican said he had just received an anonymous call threatening not only his life, but the lives of his wife and her sister. He said the caller told him to warn Speaker to keep his mouth shut.
Speaker told this author:
That call really shook me up because Millican was a former boxing champ of the Pacific fleet. He was a scrapper, a fighter. But he was obviously scared to death. I also got a call. And I still don’t understand how they got my name because I was never interviewed by the FBI, the Secret Service, the police or anyone. They must be pretty powerful to have found out about me.
Whispered rumors, anonymous phone calls, and freakish “accidents” combined to create a tangible aura of fear in Dallas in the weeks following the assassination. Some of that fear lingered for decades.
Mysterious Secret Service Men
One of the most puzzling aspects of the post-assassination confusion involved encounters between Dealey Plaza witnesses and “Secret Service” agents.
The most notable incident was recounted by Dallas policeman Joe M. Smith. Smith had run into the parking lot atop the Grassy Knoll after a woman had told him, “They’re shooting the president from the bushes!” While searching through the parked cars, he encountered a man who displayed Secret Service identification. Smith told author Anthony Summers:
The man, this character, produces credentials from his hip pocket which showed him to be Secret Service. I have seen those credentials before, and they satisfied me. . . . So, I immediately accepted that and let him go and continued our search around the cars.
Malcolm Summers was one of the bystanders who followed police up the Grassy Knoll immediately after the shooting. He said:
I ran across Elm Street to run up there toward that knoll. And we were stopped by a man in a suit and he had an overcoat over his arm. I saw a gun under that overcoat. And his comment was, “Don’t y’all come up here any further, you could get shot . . . or killed.”
The Secret Service subsequently asserted that none of their agents on duty that day were anywhere near Dealey Plaza either before or just after the assassination. All were either riding in the motorcade or at the Trade Mart.
In retrospect, Smith doubted the legitimacy of the man he encountered. In 1963, Secret Service agents, like their FBI counterparts, wore crew cuts, dark suits, and narrow ties.
Smith described the man thusly:
He looked like an auto mechanic. He had on a sports shirt and sports pants. But he had dirty fingernails, it looked like, and hands that looked like auto mechanic’s hands. And, afterwards, it didn’t ring true for the Secret Service. . . . At the time we were so pressed for time and we were searching. And he had produced correct identification and we just overlooked the thing. I should have checked the man closer, but at the time, I didn’t snap on it.
In addition to Smith and Summers, GI Gordon Arnold also encountered a man who claimed to be with the Secret Service just moments before the assassination. Arnold said he was walking behind the wooden picket fence on top of the Grassy Knoll when he was approached by a man who told him he was with the Secret Service and that Arnold could not stay behind the fence. Moments later, Arnold said shots came from behind the fence.
Sam Holland, who was standing with two Dallas policemen and other railroad workers on the Triple Underpass, told the Warren Commission that “a plainclothes detective or FBI agent or something like that” was helping the police guard the railroad bridge. Holland told a Commission attorney, “There were two city policemen and one man in plainclothes. I didn’t talk to him. I talked to the city policemen.”
Holland said after hearing shots and seeing a white puff of smoke come from behind the wooden picket fence, he and others ran to the Grassy Knoll. He later said that while they found no one behind the picket fence, “somebody had been standing there for a long period. I guess if you could count them, about a hundred foot tracks [were] in that little spot, and also mud on the bumper of [a] station wagon.”
Constable Seymour Weitzman, who had rushed behind the picket fence, met men he believed were Secret Service. Warren Commission lawyer Joseph Ball asked Weitzman if there were others with him behind the fence. Weitzman replied:
Yes sir; other officers, Secret Service as well, and somebody started, there was something red in the street and I went back over the wall and somebody brought me a piece of what he thought to be a firecracker and it turned out to be, I believe, I wouldn’t quote this, but I turned it over to one of the Secret Service men and I told them it should go to the lab because it looked to me like human bone. I later found out it was supposedly a portion of the President’s skull.
It is not certain whether the proper authorities ever investigated this particular piece of bone. There is no mention of it in official reports, although Commission Document 1269 is titled “Location of Photos of a Bone Specimen.” This document, however, is still classified.
Dallas police sergeant D. V. Harkness also encountered Secret Service men where none officially were supposed to be. Harkness told the Warren Commission that he ran to the rear of the Texas School Book Depository moments after the shooting and “there were some Secret Service agents there.” Harkness told a commission lawyer, “Didn’t get them identified. They told me they are Secret Service.”
In later years Harkness told the Dallas Morning News that the men were dressed in suits and “were all armed.” He told the newspaper, “[I] assumed they were with the Presidential party.”
Dallas Secret Service agent in charge Forrest V. Sorrels was the only Secret Service agent to return to the scene of the assassination within an hour or so. Sorrels said he walked through a rear door of the Texas School Book Depository without showing any identification. His arrival was too late to have been that of one of the men Harkness encountered.
In 1978 Sorrels, then retired, was asked by a Dallas newsman to comment on the stories of bogus Secret Service agents in Dealey Plaza. Sorrels said, “[I’m] not answering any questions about this thing. I gave all my testimony in Washington and I don’t put out anything else. As far as I’m concerned, that’s a closed incident.”
Another odd incident involving Secret Service agents who may have been bogus occurred within an hour of the assassination in t
he small town of Ferris, located just south of Dallas. Two high school students, Billy V. James and Ronnie Witherspoon, witnessed a speeding car being stopped by local police on Interstate 45. The students stopped to watch because they thought “we may have been witnessing the arrest of the assassins.” However, according to the students, the men in the stopped car told police they were Secret Service agents “in a hurry to get to New Orleans to investigate something in connection with the assassination.” James said the police believed the men and allowed them to go on without being ticketed. No Secret Service agent reported leaving Dallas for New Orleans that day and the identity of the men in the car remains a mystery.
Incredibly, even the accused assassin apparently had an encounter with one of these bogus agents.
Secret Service inspector Thomas J. Kelley was one of several officials who interrogated Lee Harvey Oswald on the Sunday morning he was shot by Ruby. In his report of that interview, Kelley wrote:
[Oswald] asked me whether I was an FBI agent and I said that I was not, that I was a member of the Secret Service. He said when he was standing in front of the Textbook Building [Texas School Book Depository] and about to leave it, a young, crew-cut man rushed up to him and said he was from the Secret Service, showed a book of identification, and asked him where the phone was. Oswald said he pointed toward the pay phone in the building and that he saw the man actually go to the phone before he left.
It is significant that Oswald mentioned a “book of identification,” as this accurately described the folding leather badge holder used by government agents. In later years, the theory was advanced that Oswald had merely mistaken a news reporter for an agent. Kelley’s report dispels this notion, as news reporters merely carried press cards.
In fact, when the sixth-floor museum of the assassination opened in 1989, a taped tour of the exhibit was narrated by newsman Pierce Allman, who claimed to have been the reporter Oswald encountered. Amazingly, two other newsmen, Robert McNeil and Bill Moyers, also said they were told after the assassination that while looking for a telephone they had encountered Lee Oswald. Apparently none of these newsmen had any direct memory of this incident but said government agents planted the story in their mind by telling them months after the assassination they had encountered the accused assassin.
It seems incredible that the suspected killer of the president not only took the time to help someone he believed to be a Secret Service agent, but then stood around to watch him get to the telephone. It is claimed that less than an hour later, Oswald shot down a Dallas policeman who merely stopped him far from downtown in South Oak Cliff.
Considering the number of people claiming to have encountered agents in Dealey Plaza, it appears that Oswald may well have been correct in his identification of a Secret Service agent or someone posing as one.
But perhaps the strangest—and most ominous—incident involving the Secret Service happened to witness Jean Hill, who was standing beside her friend Mary Moorman on the south side of Elm Street at the moment Kennedy was killed. Moorman fell to the ground at the sound of the shooting, but Hill remained standing and watchful.
After seeing both a man fire from behind the wooden picket fence and a suspicious man rapidly walking west in front of the Depository, Hill ran across Elm Street and began to run up the Grassy Knoll. Hill told this author, “I don’t know what I would have done if I had caught them, but I knew something terrible had happened and somebody had to do something.”
As she ran up the Grassy Knoll, her attention was drawn to a “trail of blood in the grass just to the right of the steps.” Thinking that “our guys had shot back and we got one of them,” she followed the red droplets until she discovered they belonged to a snow cone—flavored ice packed in a cup. Someone had dropped a red-colored one that day on the Grassy Knoll.
After the distraction of the snow cone, Hill continued her run up the Grassy Knoll, but had wasted valuable seconds. She looked in vain for either the suspicious man behind the fence or the man she saw by the Depository. She recalled, “All I saw in that parking area were railroad workers and police.”
Walking to the west of the Texas School Book Depository, Hill said, she encountered two men who identified themselves as Secret Service agents. She told interviewers in Texas:
I was looking around but I couldn’t see anything, when these two guys came up behind me. One of them said, “You’re coming with us,” and I replied, “Oh, no I’m not. I don’t know you.” “I said you’re coming with us,” one of them said and then put this horrible grip on my shoulder. I can still feel the pain when I think about it. I tried to tell them, “I have to go back and find my friend Mary.” But then the other guy put a grip on my other shoulder and they began hustling me past the front of the Depository. “Keep smiling and keep walking,” one of them kept telling me. They marched me across the plaza and into a building. We entered from the south side and I think it was the sheriff’s office. They took me to a little office upstairs and they wouldn’t let me out of this room. It was all such a shock. There was a lot of tension and it was like a lot of it was focused on this one area. The two men that grabbed me never showed me any identification but, after we got to this little room, some men came in who were Secret Service. They began to ask me a lot of questions. One man told me they had been watching Mary and I out of the window. He asked me, “Did you see a bullet hit at your feet?” I told him I didn’t realize that one had struck near my feet. “Then, why did you jump back up on the curb?” he asked me and I told him how I had started to run at the President’s car but thought better of it. Then I heard some booming sounds and it startled me and I jumped back on the curb by Mary. I guess they were up there the whole time and watched the whole thing. Then they sent those two guys to come and get me. I mean, I wasn’t too hard to find that day—wearing that red raincoat.
Hill said she was kept in the room for some time before rejoining Mary Moorman in a downstairs office. There were other assassination witnesses in the office, such as Charles Brehm and others who signed sheriff’s depositions that day.
A Dallas newspaperman Moorman and Hill initially believed to be a federal agent took all of the photographs Moorman had taken of the motorcade. Later that day three of the six snapshots were returned, and federal authorities returned the rest, but only after several weeks. The backgrounds on two of the returned photographs were mutilated.
Dallas police chief Jesse Curry summed up the import of a man with Secret Service identification when he told author Anthony Summers:
Certainly the suspicion would point to the man as being involved, some way or other, in the shooting, since he was in the area immediately adjacent to where the shots were—and the fact that he had a badge that purported him to be Secret Service would make it seem all the more suspicious.
The House Select Committee on Assassinations briefly looked into the matter of men with Secret Service identification but came up with no real solution.
After establishing that “Except for Dallas Agent-in-Charge Sorrels, who helped police search the Texas School Book Depository, no [Secret Service] agent was in the vicinity of the stockade fence or inside the book depository on the day of the assassination,” the committee wrote off most of the sightings as people mistaking plainclothes police for agents.
However, the committee could not dismiss Officer Smith’s story so lightly. FBI agent James Hosty, who was named in Oswald’s notebook and who destroyed Oswald’s warning note, told the committee that Smith may have encountered a treasury agent named Frank Ellsworth. When deposed by the committee, Ellsworth denied the allegation.
Despite its inability to determine who was carrying Secret Service identification on the Grassy Knoll on November 22, 1963, the committee nevertheless concluded, “[We] found no evidence of Secret Service complicity in the assassination.”
However, if Jean Hill’s account is true, either men posing as federal agents were using offices in the Dallas County sheriff’s building minutes after the assa
ssination or genuine federal agents were monitoring the tragedy from an upper-story window.
One portion of Jean Hill’s account that seemed unbelievable was her identification of the man she saw in front of the Depository as Jack Ruby. However, this story appears to have some corroboration.
First, recall the story of Julia Ann Mercer, who identified a man sitting in a truck just west of the Triple Underpass about an hour before the assassination as Jack Ruby. Also recall that both Mercer and Oswald’s mother, Marguerite, said authorities showed them photographs of Jack Ruby before Ruby killed Oswald.
Then there is the Warren Commission testimony of Depository employee Victoria Adams, who said she and a coworker saw a man at the intersection of Elm and Houston minutes after the assassination “questioning people as if he were a police officer.” She told the Commission that the man “looked very similar” to the photos of Jack Ruby broadcast after the Oswald slaying. Her companion, Avery Davis, was never asked for her opinion.
Malcolm O. Couch, a television cameraman for WFAA-TV in Dallas, also supported the idea that Ruby was in Dealey Plaza when he told the Warren Commission that another newsman, Wes Wise (who later became mayor of Dallas), had seen Ruby walking around the side of the Texas School Book Depository moments after the shooting. However, Couch was forced to admit his story was just “hearsay” by Commission lawyers who then declined to call Wes Wise to clarify the issue.
An FBI report from December 1963 gave the account of Lucy Lopez, who had been in Dallas visiting her daughter. They had joined others watching the motorcade from a window in the Dal-Tex Building when they recognized Jack Ruby walking back and forth outside the book depository. The women were acquainted with Ruby and also knew Oswald, who they recalled had once eaten with them at a nearby restaurant. Lopez told the FBI the women saw Ruby hand Oswald a pistol before walking off but were afraid to talk to the authorities.
