Lee Harvey Oswald in custody.

Meanwhile, several workers in the building saw Oswald on the first floor before the President passed by. Oswald’s direct supervisor says that he was there around a quarter to noon. Eddie Piper says he saw Oswald there at noon. Secretary Carolyn Arnold said she was him around 12:15 pm. Arnold says that the Warren Commission tried to cast doubt on when she saw Oswald, but she maintains the time was 12:15. So if Oswald was on the 1st floor at the time Arnold said, he would have had to have gotten from the first to the 6th floor after 12:20 or later without Williams seeing him to then get to the sniper’s nest and put together his gun all within about 5 minutes or less. An FBI weapons expert states that it would take at least 6 minutes to put together the gun without a screw driver, none was found. Plus there would be great pressure to act quickly which could have slowed him down since the President was actually supposed to have passed the building by 12:25.

Dorothy Garner’s testimony makes it impossible to place Oswald in the sniper’s nest at the time of the shooting. According to an interview with Kennedy investigator Barry Ernst, she was on the 4th floor in the school book depository at the time of the assassination. After the shots ended, she immediately followed two women out of the office and stood on the 4th floor platform of the stairwell while the others walked down the steps and left the building. She stayed there until she saw Policeman Marrion Baker and Building Superintendent Roy Truly run up the steps from the second floor. Baker was in the motorcade passing the building after the shots. He ran into the building and up the stairs to reach the roof where he thought the shots came from. When he and Truly got to the 2nd floor lunchroom, they saw Oswald inside and, after seeing his very calm demeanor, had no reason to believe he was the shooter and continued upstairs. If Oswald had been in the sniper’s nest, he would have had to run downstairs to the second floor before Officer Baker and Truly saw him. Since Garner was still on the 4th floor landing, she would have had to have seen and heard Oswald coming down stairs before she saw Baker coming up. She did not experience either. The Warren Commission interviewed Garner but did not put her testimony in their official report. It obviously did not fit in with their pre-determined conclusion that Oswald shot Kennedy from the 6th floor. What if Oswald took the elevator? Per Officer Baker’s testimony I found on a Marquette University website, he states that before going up the stairs, he and Truly tried using the elevator. They looked up the elevator shaft and saw both elevators stationary on the 5th floor. Truly hit the button to call them down, but neither moved. They finally took the stairs. Since the elevators were stuck on the 5th floor, Oswald must have taken the stairs to get to the 2nd floor, if he was indeed coming from the 6th floor. He more likely took the steps from the 1st floor to the 2nd floor at the front of the building since he was seen on the 1st floor before the shooting.

After he left the building, Oswald, per the Warren Commission, shot and killed Police Officer Tippet on the way to a movie theatre where he was arrested by police. Witness testimony at the crime scene also contradicts this. Supposedly Tippet stopped Oswald as he walked down the street because he matched a very vague description of the killer put out on his radio. But several eyewitnesses say that the shooter did not look like Oswald, not by a long shot. According to Mrs Acquilla Clemons, as quoted in the book “Hit List” by Richard Belzer and David Wayne, who was sitting on her porch and saw the crime right in front of her house, there were two men near the police car and the man with the gun was heavy-set, not like Oswald. This testimony was ignored by the Commission. In fact, she was intimidated to change her story, as were others whose stories did not match what the Commission wanted. Witnesses also said that Tippet spoke to the man for a minute or so before he was shot. They said their conversation was quite friendly, with the man speaking to Tippet through the lowered passenger window of the police car before he shot him. This did not look like an interrogation.

After Oswald took a cab home to his rooming house, his housekeeper Earlene Roberts testifies that she observed him waiting at a bus stop nearby at 1:04 pm. The buses were scheduled to go in the opposite direction from where Tippet stopped the man a mile away. Oswald would not have had enough time to walk to where Tippet was, talk to him for a minute or so, and then shoot him by 1:08 pm, the estimated time of the shooting. Also, police have testified that the gun used at the crime scene was an automatic, but Oswald had a revolver at the theatre.

Part 3 about MLK coming next week.