Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy by Jim Marrs Read Free Book Online Page B

noon, she and another employee joined the crowd on the east side
of Houston just south of Elm to watch the motorcade. Years later she
recalled:

    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.
    Steelworker Richard Randolph Carr, who was working on the seventh
floor of the new Dallas Courthouse (then under construction at the intersection of Commerce and Houston), also reported seeing a man wearing a
brown coat. Carr said minutes before the motorcade arrived he saw a
heavyset man wearing a hat, horn-rimmed glasses, and tan sportcoat
standing in a sixth-floor window of the Depository. After the shooting,
Carr saw the man walking on Commerce Street.
    Ruby Henderson, standing across the street from the Depository, also
saw two men on an upper floor of the building. While she was uncertain if
it was the sixth floor, she saw no one above the pair. She described the
shorter of the men as having a dark complexion, possibly even a Negro,
and wearing a white shirt. The shorter man was wearing a dark shirt.
    The story of two men on the sixth floor of the Depository moments
before the shooting has since been bolstered by two films made that day.
One, an 8 mm home movie made by Robert Hughes, who was standing at
the intersection of Main and Houston, shows the front of the Depository
just as Kennedy's limousine passes the building turning onto Elm. The
film shows movement in both the corner window of the sixth floor and the
window next to it. Deep within the Warren Commission exhibits is an FBI
report acknowledging receipt of Hughes's film. In another FBI document,
it is claimed that the figure in the second window from the corner was
simply a stack of boxes. No reference is made to movement.
    In 1975, CBS television asked Itek Corporation to look again at the
Hughes film. The company concluded that there were no moving images
in the double window next to the sixth-floor corner window, a conclusion
that is still disputed by various photographic experts.
    And in late 1978, a second movie surfaced that supports the two-men
allegation. This film, taken by Charles L. Bronson, who was standing only
a few feet west of Hughes, also shows the sixth-floor corner windows of
the Depository just moments before the Kennedy motorcade passed. Bronson's film was viewed in 1963 by an FBI agent who reported that it
"failed to show the building from which the shots were fired," thus
relegating the film to obscurity. It was rediscovered in 1978 when the film
was mentioned in declassified FBI documents and was obtained by The
Dallas Morning News.

    The newspaper commissioned Robert Groden, who served as staff consultant on photographic evidence for the House Select Committee on
Assassinations, to study the film. Groden told the newspaper:
    There is no question that there is movement. And, I'm sure, given time
and money, a computer could probably clarify the images a bit more
... You can actually see one figure walking back and forth hurriedly. I
think what was happening there is the sniper's nest was actually being
completed just prior to the shots being fired.
    The House Assassinations Committee studied the Bronson film further
and,