Associated Press photographer James Altgens snapped a picture seconds after President John F. 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.
Asked where he thought the shots came from, Lovelady replied, “Right there around that concrete little deal on that knoll.” Lovelady, along with fellow Depository employees, joined the throng of people rushing toward the Grassy Knoll, but said a short time later he returned to the Depository, entering through a back door unchallenged.
William Shelley, Depository manager and Oswald’s immediate supervisor, acknowledged that Lovelady was on the steps of the building when Kennedy passed by. He told the Warren Commission he heard “something sounded like it was a firecracker and a slight pause and then two more a little bit closer together.” He too said the shots sounded like they came from west of the Depository.
Additionally, Wesley Frazier and a Depository clerk, Sarah Stanton, both signed statements averring they were with Shelley and Lovelady on the Depository steps at the time of the shooting.
That should have been the end of questions concerning the identity of the man in the doorway. However, on February 29, 1964, the FBI interviewed Lovelady and photographed him wearing a short-sleeved shirt with vertical stripes, totally unlike the dark, mottled long-sleeved shirt worn by the man in the Altgens picture.
Later Lovelady explained the discrepancies in the shirts by telling CBS News, “Well, when the FBI took [my picture] in the shirt, I told them it wasn’t the same shirt.”
The shirt Lovelady was wearing that day—and subsequently tried to sell for a large sum of money—was a broad plaid, which he said was buttoned at the neck. The man in the doorway photo appears to be wearing a dark mottled shirt open to the navel with a white T-shirt underneath, exactly what Oswald was wearing when arrested less than an hour and a half later.
And even Dallas police chief Jesse Curry seemed to continue to question the identity of the man in the doorway. In his 1969 book, Curry compared photos of the doorway man with Oswald and merely commented, “The Warren Commission attempted to prove that the man was Billy N. Lovelady who worked at the depository.”
The House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) considered this issue in depth. They had anthropologists study the features of the man in the photograph and the committee received photographic analyses of the man’s shirt. The committee concluded “that it is highly improbable that the man in the doorway was Oswald and highly probable that he was Lovelady.” But this probability did not end the controversy. Skeptics noted that the HSCA Report never mentioned that the man in the doorway wore his shirt open to the navel. Pictures of Lovelady taken that day showed his shirt buttoned to the neck.
Most researchers today accept that Lovelady was the man in the doorway. Museum curator and archivist Richard B. Trask, in his monumental 1994 book on assassination photographic evidence, Pictures of the Pain, wrote about reenactment photos of Lovelady shot on the Depository steps in 1971. He noted, “At a distance of eight years from the original event, it was still readily evident that Lovelady was one and the same in both the 1963 and 1971 photos.”
But the controversy continued when in 2013 researchers with the Oswald Innocence Campaign claimed the Altgens photo, particularly the area within the Depository doorway, had been altered. As will be seen, this is not the only allegation of photographic alteration in the assassination case. However, these researchers focus primarily on the clothing worn by both Oswald and Lovelady. David Wrone pointed out that the collars of the two shirts “furl” differently, with Oswald’s assuming the look of a false lapel. They said by proving that the man in the doorway could not be Lovelady, it appeared by default that it was Oswald.
Adding to the controversy, in 2007 the Assassination Records Review Board released handwritten notes by Dallas Police homicide captain Will Fritz made during his initial interrogation of Oswald on the day of the assassination. Fritz noted Oswald told him he had gone “to 1st floor [and] had lunch” and then was “out with Bill Shelley in front.” Oswald said it was Shelley, his immediate boss, who told him to go home, as there would be no more work that day, although Shelley denied even seeing Oswald any time after the shooting. Most Depository employees indeed had left the building by about 2 p.m. after being told there would be no more work that day. Shelley also made it clear that after the shooting he and Lovelady moved toward the railroad tracks and finally reentered the Depository through the rear door. So if Oswald did indeed encounter Shelley, it would have had to be prior to or during the assassination and not afterward.
“The ‘Doorman’ was Oswald, and there is no doubt about it,” argued Ralph Cinque, administrator of the Oswald Innocence Campaign website. “He is wearing Oswald’s clothes—to a tee. He has got Oswald’s build and even Oswald’s mannerisms. And the whole case for Lovelady never made a lick of sense, relying as it does on phony pictures, phony movies, and, in a word: lies.”
Since Lovelady said he was sitting on the steps and the man in the photo is standing, peering around the edge of the front-door alcove, and since the FBI did such a dismal job of proving it was Lovelady, coupled with claims of alterations to the Altgens photo, suspicion still lingers about the identity of the man in the doorway.
While many researchers today are ready to concede that the man may have been Lovelady, there is a growing resistance to this admission. And the stakes are high. If it can ever be conclusively demonstrated that the man in the Depository doorway is Lee Oswald, the case for his committing the crime six floors above completely falls apart.
But if the man in the doorway was not Oswald, then where was he? Was he on the sixth floor firing the Carcano, just as two federal panels have concluded?
Despite the years of confident statements by federal authorities, no one has unquestionably placed Oswald on the sixth floor at the time of the shooting.
In later years Dallas police chief Jesse Curry admitted to newsmen, “We don’t have any proof that Oswald fired the rifle, and never did. Nobody’s yet been able to put him in that building with a gun in his hand.”
When asked where he was at the time of the shooting, Oswald told Dallas police he was eating lunch on the first floor of the Depository in what was called the “domino room” at the time of the assassination, and there is some evidence to back up his statement.
Bonnie Ray Williams was one of the Depository workers who were laying plywood flooring on the sixth floor that day. During the elevator race to the first floor a few minutes before noon, Williams said, he heard Oswald call, “Guys, how about an elevator?” from either the fifth or sixth floor. Oswald also apparently asked them to send an elevator back up to him.
Williams told the Warren Commission he thought the others planned to gather on the sixth floor to watch the motorcade, so he returned there with his lunch, consisting of chicken, bread, and a bag of chips in a brown paper sack along with a soft drink. Williams said he sat on some boxes near a window facing out onto Elm Street and ate his lunch. He said he saw no one else on the sixth floor, which was one large open area. However, he noted stacks of book cartons here and there. Becoming impatient because no other workers had joined him, Williams threw down the remains of his lunch and left the sixth floor at “approximately 12:20.” Since the presidential motorcade was running approximately five minutes late, this means there was no one in the sixth-floor window at the time Kennedy should have arrived in the street below. In a January 14, 1964, FBI report, agents quoted Williams as saying he left the sixth floor after about three minutes. However, Williams denied ever saying that and it is reasonable that he couldn’t have eaten his lunch in only three minutes.
At the time, the news media made a great deal of comment about the chicken bones and lunch sack found on the sixth floor. Many people thought this proved that a cold and calculating assassin had patiently eaten his lunch while waiting for Kennedy to arrive.
Going down one of the elevators, Williams saw two other workers, Harold Norman and James Jarman, on the fifth floor and joined them to watch the motorcade. Williams and Norman were captured in a photograph taken that day as they leaned out of the fifth-floor window directly below the famous sixth-floor “sniper’s” window to view the president.
Williams told the Warren Commission:
After the President’s car had passed my window . . . [there] was a loud shot—first I thought they were saluting the President, somebody—even maybe a motorcycle backfire. The first shot—[then] there was two shots rather close together. The second and the third shot was closer together then the first shot . . . well, the first shot—I really did not pay any attention to it, because I did not know what was happening. The second shot, it sounded like it was right in the building . . . it even shook the building, the side we were on. Cement fell on my head. . . . Harold was sitting next to me and he said it came from right over our head. . . . My exact words were, “No bullshit?” And we jumped up. . . . I think Jarman, he—I think he moved before any of us. He moved towards us, and he said, “Man, someone is shooting at the President.” And I think I said again, “No bullshit?” . . . Then we all kind of got excited. . . . But, we all decided we would run down to the west side of the building. . . . We saw policemen and people running, scared, running—there are some tracks on the west side of the building, railroad tracks. They were running towards that way. And we thought . . . we know the shots came from practically over our head. But . . . we assumed maybe somebody was down there.
Norman said he and Jarman had eaten lunch in the domino room on the first floor, then walked out the front door where they saw other Depository employees, including Lovelady, sitting on the steps.
As the motorcade approached, they took an elevator to the fifth floor and got seated in a southeast corner window, where they were joined by Williams moments later. Norman said he heard three loud shots and “I could also hear something sounded like shell hulls hitting the floor.” Later he said he even heard the sound of the bolt working on a rifle above them.
After the three men ran to the west window and saw police combing the railroad yards, Norman said, he and Jarman tried to leave the Depository but were turned back by police officers.
Jarman told the same story but said he didn’t hear the shells hit the floor or hear the sound of the rifle bolt. He did say that when the three men ran to the Depository’s west window, “I saw policemen and the secret agents, the FBI men, searching the boxcar yard and the passenger train and things like that.”
One thing that has always puzzled assassination researchers is Williams’s statement of being on the sixth floor until “approximately 12:20,” then Norman’s claim of hearing ejecting shell casings and the working of the rifle bolt.
It has been established that the plywood floor in the Depository was thin and full of cracks, which could account for the plaster dust that fell on Williams’s head. It could also account for Norman’s hearing shell casings hit the floor and even the working of the rifle bolt—except that apparently none of the three men on the floor below heard anyone moving above them.
How could they have heard shells dropping and a rifle bolt operating and not heard movement above them in the minutes before the shooting? As confirmed by photographs taken at the time and the testimony of witnesses below, someone constructed a “sniper’s nest” of book cartons in the minutes preceding the shooting.
Yet Williams, Norman, and Jarman heard nothing?
Obviously someone was on the sixth floor, but was it Oswald?
The 56-year-old janitor at the Depository, Eddie Piper, told authorities he saw Oswald on the first floor about noon. Oswald, who reportedly never left the sixth floor, told police he had followed the workers down to the first floor and had eaten lunch in the domino room on the Depository’s first floor.
Oswald told interrogators he recalled two black employees walking through the room while he was there. He said he thought one was named “Junior” and the other was short.
Jarman’s nickname was “Junior” and Norman was indeed short. Norman, in Commission testimony, said he ate his lunch in the domino room, adding, “I can’t remember who ate in the . . . domino room with me. . . . I think there was somebody else in there.” But, as happens so often in these interviews, there was no follow-up question as to who else might have been in the domino room.
Jarman told of helping Oswald correct a book order earlier that morning, then talking with him again on the first floor. Then at lunchtime, Jarman said, he bought a soft drink and returned to where he had been sitting by a first-floor window “where Oswald and I was talking.” His testimony is confusing and appears incomplete. It was not helped by any clarifying questions from the Warren Commission attorney. It must be understood that in 1963 Dallas, black citizens were highly suspicious and defensive toward authorities. When confronted by police, not to mention federal officers, they were inclined to tell them whatever they wanted to hear and were easily led in their testimony.
This presents a significant question that could have been asked by any competent defense attorney if Oswald had ever gotten a fair trial. If Oswald was not in the first-floor domino room as he said, how could he have noted the presence of two men and accurately described Norman and Jarman?
Bill Shelley, Oswald’s supervisor, told the Commission he saw Oswald near a telephone on the first floor about ten minutes till noon.
Carolyn Arnold, secretary to the Depository’s vice president, was quoted in an FBI report saying “she thought she caught a fleeting glimpse of Lee Harvey Oswald standing in the [first-floor] hallway” as she left the building to watch the motorcade at about 12:20 p.m. In 1978, Arnold told the Dallas Morning News she saw and recognized Lee Oswald in the second-floor lunchroom as she was leaving the building to watch the motorcade at 12:25 p.m. The Warren Commission claimed no Depository employee saw Oswald after 11:55 a.m. Arnold stated:
I do not recall that he (Oswald) was doing anything. I just recall that he was sitting there . . . in one of the booth seats on the right hand side of the room as you go in. He was alone as usual and appeared to be having lunch. I did not speak to him but I recognized him clearly.
Arnold said she knew Oswald because he would come to her desk on the second floor occasionally and ask for change. He never accepted pennies but only nickels and dimes. The FBI mangled her testimony, reporting only that after she left the depository and stood about thirty feet in front of the building to watch the motorcade, she “thought she caught a fleeting glimpse of Lee Harvey Oswald standing in the hallway” on the first floor. In 1978, after reading over her statements of 1963, she stated she had been misquoted by the FBI. She said:
That is completely foreign to me. [The FBI account] would have forced me to have been turning back around to the building when, in fact, I was trying to watch the parade. Why would I be looking back inside the building? That doesn’t make any sense to me.
In later years, Arnold, who married and became Mrs. Carolyn Johnston, was surprised to learn the FBI had made no mention of her sighting Oswald in the lunchroom.
While it is still possible that Oswald could have raced upstairs in time to be in the “sniper’s” window by 12:30 p.m., recall that newlyweds Arnold and Barbara Rowland saw two men in the sixth-floor window, one with a rifle, at 12:15. This time can be fixed with confidence because Arnold Rowland reported seeing the man with the gun just as a nearby police radio announced that the presidential motorcade was approaching Cedar Springs Road. Police dispatcher’s records showed the motorcade passed Cedar Springs between 12:15 and 12:16 p.m.
The Warren Commission concluded that Oswald stayed on the sixth floor after he was seen by the elevator racers about 11:55 a.m. and remained there to commit the assassination.
As can be seen, there is quite credible evidence that he was exactly where he said he was—in the first-floor break or domino room—at the time of the shooting. The domino room was one short flight of steps to the Depository’s front door, where the Oswald figure was photographed by Altgens.
Oswald then apparently walked to the Depository’s second-floor lunchroom to buy a soft drink. It was there that a Dallas policeman encountered Oswald less than ninety seconds after the final shot was fired in the assassination.
