Reclaiming History (166 page)

Marina could not. She lay awake, in panic, wondering what on earth she could do. Under Soviet law she had a duty to inform the police immediately—in fact, if witnesses didn’t, that made them accomplices to the crime. She had no way of knowing that the criminal justice system in America was different, so different, in fact, that Lee could prevent her from even testifying against him because he was her husband. She was terrified. She did not know what to do. She did nothing.
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A
t nine o’clock on the night of April 10, 1963, General Walker was seated at his desk in the rear of his residence bending over his 1962 income tax return, due in just five days. Most of the lights in the house were on, although he was alone, as he was most nights—unlike the daytime, when the rented house was often full of political aides and colleagues. The shades were up, windows closed—that afternoon the temperature had broken all records for April 10, ninety-nine degrees, and Walker had the air-conditioning on. Suddenly, he was startled by a blast and sharp crack right over his head to the left of where he was sitting. At first he thought one of the neighborhood kids had tossed a firecracker through the window. They often played in the alley out there and in the parking lot of the Mormon Church next door, but he immediately saw that the window screens were intact. Puzzled, he got up, walked around his desk, and looked back at where he had been sitting. There was a bullet hole in the wall not more than three or four inches from where his head had been. He dashed upstairs to get his pistol.

As he ran back down the stairs at the front of the house, he caught a glimpse through a rear window of a car leaving the driveway of the church and turning left onto Turtle Creek Boulevard. All he really saw were the taillights. It was dark and his view was blocked by the branches of a tree. It could have been a getaway car—the timing was about right, as the alley that ran behind his house turned into the parking lot behind the church and continued between his house and the church until it reached the boulevard.

Pistol in hand, he went out the back door to see what was going on. Halfway to the alley he turned back and eventually saw that one of the windows of his study was shattered. Somebody had fired at him in the dark from a position to the rear of the house toward the alley. He realized that his right forearm was bleeding from a few slivers of the bullet’s jacket. Later, others would notice plaster debris from the wall in his hair.
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Walker called the police, who turned up shortly in force, a couple of patrolmen followed by a couple of detectives. Two of the officers checked the room on the other side of the wall the bullet had gone through, which was stacked high with pamphlets and literature that Walker used in his political campaigns. Rummaging through the papers, they quickly found a “mushroomed bullet” lying on top of one of the stacks of literature near the hole in the wall.
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The double-window through which the bullet had been fired had a wooden frame running horizontally in the middle of it. The police saw that the bullet had struck the “upper portion” of the “window frame near the center locking device” as it smashed through both the screen and the window, thus deflecting the bullet just enough to save the general’s life. The projectile’s contact with the window frame had stripped away part of its metal jacket, accounting for the splinters of metal in Walker’s arm. When the Dallas detectives went outside to line up the bullet hole in the wall with the damage to the window, the line led to the back fence on the alley. It was latticed, with large, square holes. They even found a “fresh chip” in the wood on the top part of the fence. In lining up the path of the bullet, they concluded that the bullet was fired “from just below the chipped portion of the fence,” the rifleman resting his weapon in the latticework opening below the top of the fence. It was amazing that he had missed his target, not more than forty yards away. Walker, motionless, thoroughly engrossed in his tax return, had been a sitting duck. The sniper, Walker thought, must have been a lousy shot, and one of the policemen said, in awe, “He couldn’t have missed you!” That sounded all right to Walker then, but, as he mulled it over later, he realized that the glare of light from the room would have blurred the horizontal frame of the window, making it all but invisible to the shooter (particularly if he was using a telescopic sight, which would have been focused well beyond the window itself). The shooter might well have been a very good shot indeed, Walker thought, just very unlucky because of the confluence of circumstances.
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T
he next morning, when Marina woke up, Lee was listening to the radio. “I missed,” he told her angrily. He was sure he had taken very good aim, and kept repeating, “It was such an easy shot,” but they were saying that Walker was uninjured. Marina was hugely relieved. He went out and came back a few minutes later with the morning paper, which carried front-page accounts of the incident. He had a good laugh over the fact that the police had misidentified the smashed bullet. “They say I had a .30 caliber bullet when I didn’t at all,” he told Marina. “They got the bullet and the rifle all wrong…What fools.” The papers also reported that a fourteen-year-old neighbor of Walker’s, Walter Kirk Coleman, rushed outside at the sound of the shot and saw two cars, one with one man in it, the other with several, speed away from the church parking lot nearby.
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“Americans are so spoiled,” Oswald sneered, “they always think you have a car. It never occurs to them that you might use your own two legs.”
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Lee was unusually forthcoming with Marina about what he had done and how he had done it. He told her he hadn’t waited to see whether his shot struck home but had taken off running. He said that “several kilometers away” he got on a bus, and indicated that he later got off the bus to hide the weapon, either in the bushes or in the ground, she does not recall which.
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He also told her he had gone to Walker’s residence at some earlier time to shoot him but had returned. “I don’t know why,” she told the Warren Commission, but suggested Lee had told her that on the evening he did shoot at Walker, there were church services nearby and “there were many people there, and it was easier to merge in the crowd and not be noticed,” the inference being that on the earlier occasion he had noticed a sign saying that the church had services on Wednesday evening.
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Marina finally got around to asking Lee the question that had troubled her as soon as she heard Walker’s name. Just who was Walker and why would Lee want to kill him? “He’s a very bad man,” Lee said, “the leader of a fascist organization.” Marina told him he still had no right to try to kill him, but when he responded that “many lives” could have been saved if someone had killed Hitler earlier, she didn’t have a response. Lee told her he had been planning to kill Walker “for two months.”
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Marina was outraged at what Lee had done and threatened him by telling him she intended to keep the letter he had left behind for her on the night he went to kill Walker, which was obviously a very incriminating farewell letter, and if he ever did something “crazy” like this again, she would go to the police and “have the proof in the form” of his letter. She told him that “it was fated that Walker not be killed,” and therefore, he should never “try such a thing again.” He promised her he would not do something like this again.
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On April 13, three days after the bungled shooting,
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Marina saw Oswald thumbing through the blue looseleaf notebook she had seen before. This time she asked him what it was. “My plan,” he told her, handing it to her. It contained all the details—maps, photographs, sketches, bus schedules, pages of notes, some typed, some handwritten, all in English and unintelligible to Marina—of his effort to kill Walker. The snapshots were of Walker’s house. Marina asked him what he meant to do with this book. “Save it as a keepsake,” he told her. “I’ll hide it somewhere.”

“Some keepsake! It’s evidence! For God’s sake Alka, destroy it.”
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He seemed reluctant to do so, but some moments later she found him setting fire to the pages he had written and dropping them one by one into the toilet.
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He destroyed most of the evidence that tied him to the Walker shooting—notes, sketches, and bus schedules—but he saved the pages containing his political philosophy. And, as we know, several photographs he had taken of Walker’s home also survived the burning, as did a piece of evidence that more than anything else tied him to the crime—the handwritten note in Russian he left for Marina in case he did not come home that night.

So deeply shocked was Marina by her husband’s crime and what she imagined to be her shared complicity—according to her understanding of Soviet law—that she told no one about it, not even after the murders of President Kennedy and Officer Tippit and Lee’s own death at the hands of Jack Ruby. She had kept the letter Lee had left for her on the night he went out to shoot Walker as a means of forcing him to behave, but it was not found in the searches of the Oswalds’ possessions at Ruth Paine’s house. Several of Lee’s surveillance photographs of Walker’s place and its environs, which he had made prints of at Jaggers, were found, but the searchers who found them had no idea of their significance. And they overlooked the two Russian books Marina had left in Ruth Paine’s kitchen, a cookbook and a book on child care. Ruth noticed them about a week after the police had carted everything away and turned them over to the Irving Police Department to be delivered to Marina. But the police instead turned the books over to the Secret Service on December 2, 1963, and Lee’s letter of instructions to Marina was found in one of the books, a cookbook titled
Book of Helpful Instructions
.
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Since we know that Oswald attempted to murder General Walker because he confessed to his own wife that he did, nothing further is required to make the point. But in addition to his letter of instructions to Marina, which has survived, and has been confirmed to be in Oswald’s handwriting,
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as well as the photos Oswald took of Walker’s residence, there is some other independent evidence, though not conclusive by itself, connecting Oswald to the attempted murder of Walker.

The Dallas police took the slug found at the Walker residence to the Dallas City-County Investigation Laboratory at Parkland Hospital on April 25, 1963, to see if lab technicians could determine the type of gun from which it was fired. Within a few days the lab reported back that it could not do so “because of the battered condition of the bullet.”
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On November 30, 1963, the FBI, thinking there possibly could be a connection between the Kennedy assassination and the Walker shooting, requested the bullet from the Dallas Police Department for examination,
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and the local office of the FBI sent the slug by registered mail to the FBI lab in Washington, D.C., on December 2, 1963.
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Robert Frazier, the FBI firearms expert, testified before the Warren Commission that because of the mutilated condition of the Walker bullet, he was “unable to reach a conclusion” as to whether or not the bullet was fired from Oswald’s Carcano rifle, the one he determined was the weapon that killed President Kennedy. However, he said that “the general rifling characteristics of the rifle 139 [Commission Exhibit No. 139, Oswald’s Carcano] are of the same type as those found on the bullet, [Commission] Exhibit [No.] 573 [Walker slug],” and therefore, at least on this basis, “the bullet could have been fired from the rifle.” The general rifling characteristics on the Walker bullet and the barrel of the Carcano were “four lands and grooves” with a “right” twist. Frazier said the Walker bullet was fired from a Mannlicher-Carcano rifle or one with similar barrel characteristics. Frazier also said the “remaining physical characteristics of this bullet, 573, are the same as Western [Cartridge Company] 6.5mm Mannlicher-Carcano bullets…made for this rifle, 139.”
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Although the bullet was too damaged to find the essential “microscopic characteristics” (markings) to match up with the barrel of Oswald’s Carcano that would enable Frazier to connect the Walker bullet to the Carcano to the exclusion of all other weapons, importantly, Frazier said he found
no
microscopic characteristics on the bullet that would indicate it was
not
fired from the Carcano.
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Joseph D. Nicol, the superintendent of the Illinois Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation, conducted an independent examination of the Walker bullet for the Warren Commission, and went a small step further than the FBI, concluding that he found sufficient markings on the Walker bullet as compared to those test-fired from Oswald’s Carcano to say “that there is a fair probability” that the Walker bullet was fired from Oswald’s Carcano. However, he did not find enough to make “a positive finding.”
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Even before the attempt on Walker’s life, we knew that Oswald was a severely disturbed and dysfunctional human being. With the attempt, we now also know that he was capable of murdering a fellow human being—indeed, didn’t mind doing so, was even excited by it.

O
n Friday, April 12, 1963, the
Dallas Morning News
reported that Walker’s home was under close police surveillance and corrected what it had printed the previous day that “a slight movement by Walker apparently saved his life.” It now reported correctly that the bullet had been deflected by the window frame. “If it hadn’t hit that,” Dallas chief of police Jesse E. Curry said, “it would have hit him right in the head.” Oswald undoubtedly read the paper and also learned, to his relief, that the police had no clues to the identity of the shooter.
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Even so, he did not dare go out to recover the carbine from its hiding place.

That afternoon Oswald again dressed in his best suit and went downtown to the Texas Employment Commission. They still had nothing for him.
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He also filed a claim for unemployment compensation, giving his occupation as “photographer” and describing his departure from Jaggers as a layoff due to lack of work.
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