Reclaiming History (50 page)

Acceding to his boss’s request, Fritz steps into his office, where Oswald sits under the watchful eye of two detectives. “Take him on down to the assembly room,” Fritz tells them, then orders the rest of his men to go down as part of a security detail. Oswald says nothing, sensing that this isn’t going to be just another lineup.
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A
few minutes later they bring Oswald out of homicide into the narrow, crowded corridor, and Jack Ruby, standing in the hallway right outside of Fritz’s office, and with a loaded revolver in his right trouser pocket, finds himself within two to three feet of the man he now hates for killing the president, but the thought of shooting Oswald never enters his mind. Strangely, though he despises Oswald, he thinks Oswald is good-looking and resembles actor Paul Newman.
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Learning they are taking Oswald down to the assembly room in the basement (next to the show-up room), Ruby follows. He feels perfectly free in what he is doing, with no one asking him any questions. As crowded as the assembly room is, he manages to get in and stand on top of a table to the rear, his back to the wall.
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An FBI agent returns to the office where Robert Oswald is being questioned by another agent.

“Robert,” he says, “you might as well know now. They are charging your brother with the president’s death.”
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Robert sags in his chair and shakes his head. He realizes that there is not much more he can do tonight and starts for his hotel. For eleven hours he’s managed to keep his emotions reasonably in check, but now, as he walks along the quiet streets of downtown Dallas, his body suddenly begins to tremble until he is sobbing. Not yet thirty years old, Robert feels like an aged and decrepit man. He stifles his emotions by the time he reaches the hotel lobby and returns to his room. In the dark, he lies awake unable to sleep.
⁹⁹⁷

I
n the offices of Klein’s Sporting Goods in Chicago, general operating manager Mitchell Scibor paws through invoices with company vice president William Waldman. The FBI agents nearby wait patiently as Scibor and Waldman search for a record of having received a Mannlicher-Carcano rifle, serial number C2766, from Crescent Firearms Company of New York. After a little more than an hour of searching, they uncover an invoice dated February 7, 1963,
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for a shipment of one hundred, six-shot, model 91TS 6.5-millimeter Mannlicher-Carcano rifles from Crescent Firearms, packed in ten cartons, ten rifles to a carton, at a unit cost of $8.50. Attached to the invoice are ten memo pages indicating the serial numbers of the rifles in each case.

Waldman quickly looks over the list of serial numbers. There it is—carton number 3376 had a rifle with serial number C2766.
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“There’s no question about it,” Waldman tells the FBI agents. “We handled this rifle.”

Klein’s records show the rifle in question arrived on its loading dock on February 21, 1963,
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was unpacked the following day,
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and assigned control number VC-836,
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a number used by Klein’s to track the history of the gun while it’s in their possession.

“Is there any way to tell who it was sold to?” an FBI agent asks.

“Yes,” Waldman says, “the next move will be to hunt through microfilm records of our mail-order customers until we find this serial number. It’s going to take some time because there is no specific order of filing.”
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Waldman and Scibor move over to two microfilm reading machines and begin the tedious task of looking through hundreds of microfilmed mail-order receipts for the customer who ordered the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle with serial number C2766 found on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository.
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12:10 a.m.

The assembly room at Dallas police headquarters is so crowded with newsmen and cameras that by the time Captain Fritz gets downstairs, Fritz, Oswald’s chief interrogator, can’t even get in the room as the crowd had jammed clear back out into the hall. Inside, rival reporters jostle for what they hope will be the best position to get a picture or a statement from the prisoner. For any newsman worth his salt, this is the center of the universe. Those at the back of the room can barely hear Chief Curry trying to explain the ground rules over the clamor. “If anything goes wrong with his being down here, if there’s a rush up here, he’s immediately going out and that’s it. Now, do we understand each other?”
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A chorus of voices answers, “Yes! Right! Yes!” until it disintegrates into a wall of incomprehensible sound. Curry shuffles his way back into the hallway as the newsmen crane their necks in the direction of the doorway. The homicide detectives in the Stetson hats appear first and then, suddenly, there is Oswald, sandwiched between them as they inch their way toward the front of the stage.
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A huge, bulky, pool television camera from Dallas CBS affiliate KRLD-TV is mounted on a tripod near the doorway, its four-inch barrel lens trained on Oswald’s face. A late-night national audience (only NBC has stopped coverage) holds its collective breath as it gets its first really good look at the man accused of murdering the president of the United States. A flock of flashbulbs pop from dozens of still cameras as police come to a stop near the center of the front of the stage.

“Down in front! Down in front!” the unfortunate newsmen in the back of the room shout in frustration. A crush of reporters are only inches from Oswald, a semicircle of handheld microphones thrust forward toward the suspect’s face in eager anticipation of his first words. The noise level dips as Oswald responds to a question he has picked out of the din.

“I was questioned by a judge without legal representation,” he says in his peculiarly dry, Texas-tinged boy’s voice, before being drowned out by a torrent of frustrated voices.

“Louder! Down in front, down, down!” reporters holler.

Oswald stops for a moment and purses his lips, a habit that gives him a prissy, dogmatic air. When the noise subsides a little, he starts again.

“Well, I was questioned by a judge; however, I protested at that time that I was not allowed legal representation…”

“Hey! Down! Down!” a chorus of back-of-the-room voices again shouts at the men blocking their view. Several finally give up complaining and begin dragging metal chairs into position on which to stand for a better vantage point. The sound of clanking metal only helps to drown out Oswald’s weak voice.

“…during that…ah…that…ah…very short and sweet hearing. Ah, I really don’t know what this situation is about. Nobody has told me anything except that I am accused of…ah…of…ah…murdering a policeman. [Oswald has not yet been arraigned for the murder of Kennedy and is unaware that he has been charged with Kennedy’s murder.] I know nothing more than that and I do request…ah…someone to come forward…ah…to give me legal assistance.”

“Did you kill the president?”

“No, I have not been charged with that. In fact, nobody has said that to me yet. The first thing I heard about it was when the newspaper reporters in the hall…,” Oswald’s voice cracks nervously, “…asked me that question.”

“You
have
been charged,” a reporter in the front tells him.

“Sir?” Oswald says, somewhat confused, looking at the reporter kneeling in front of him.

“You have been charged,” the reporter repeats.

Oswald purses his lips, then a look of astonishment crosses his face, but he says nothing.

“Nobody said
what
? We can’t hear you back here,” someone complains from the back of the room.

The jostling continues unabated and Curry decides he’s seen enough.

“Okay, men,” Curry says to the two detectives flanking Oswald. “Okay.”

The men in the Stetson hats turn and begin pushing Oswald slowly toward the exit as reporters kneeling in the front continue their verbal assault.

“What did you do in Russia?”

Oswald ignores the first question.

“How did you hurt your eye?” another reporter asks.

Oswald moves along in silence. The reporter asks again.

“Oswald, how did you hurt your eye?”

Oswald leans toward the microphone.

“A policeman hit me,” he whines.

After just six minutes, it is over. Newsmen in the back of the room plead for someone up front to fill them in on what Oswald had said during his brief moments in front of the cameras.
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Exiting the assembly room, Detectives Sims and Boyd lead Oswald into the basement jail office, where they encounter Deputy Chief George L. Lumpkin and Sergeant Wilson F. Warren. Entering the jail elevator, the four men take Oswald up to the fourth-floor jail office, where he is searched once again and also booked, nearly eleven hours after his arrest.
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He is then taken to his fifth-floor jail cell.

The jail cell that Deputy Chief Lumpkin, who is in charge of jail security, has assigned Oswald isolates him from other prisoners. It’s a maximum-security cell, number F-2, on the fifth floor. The maximum-security area is a group of three cells away from the rest of the units, with lockable doors that open into a narrow corridor, which itself has another lockable door that is controlled from a master control panel. Lumpkin orders Oswald to be placed in the middle cell, the two cells on either side kept empty. It is virtually impossible for any other prisoners to see or talk with him.

Oswald is ordered to strip to his underwear, and his belt and other potentially harmful personal effects are taken from him. His clothes and effects are shoved into a paper bag for retrieval the next time he’s removed from the cell. The jail guard leads Oswald through the first heavily barred door. It bolts behind them. Four bare lightbulbs, screened in wire, hang in the small hallway. The jailer opens the middle cell, Oswald steps inside, and the door shuts behind him with a loud metal clang.

Oswald’s twelve-by-twelve-foot cell has four bunk beds inside, the upper two made of metal, the lower two of wood, a stainless-steel sink, a toilet, and a water fountain. Bars that cross overhead give the cell a sense of a cage.
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Oswald flops onto a bunk while two guards take up residence right outside the cell as part of an around-the-clock vigil, a suicide watch. Chief Lumpkin is taking no chances with the prime suspect.
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12:19 a.m.

After Oswald was taken from the assembly room, some of the press boys had run out to make deadlines. Others stuck around to interview District Attorney Henry Wade, hoping to pick up something juicy for their morning papers.

Wade’s concern is to make sure he doesn’t prejudice the rights of the accused to a fair trial. His real problem this night is his lack of knowledge about the investigation. He’d been briefed only once, little more than an hour ago. And then, only on the basics of the case.

Wade tells the reporters that Oswald has been “formally charged…with both killing Officer Tippit and John F. Kennedy. He’s been taken before the judge and advised of his rights.” (Oswald, in fact, had not yet at this point been taken before any judge on the Kennedy charge, arraigned, and advised of his rights.)

“Can you tell [us] any of the evidence against him so far, sir?”

“No,” Wade replies. “We are still working on the evidence…”

“Do you have a good case?”

“I figure we have sufficient evidence to convict him,” Wade answers.

“Are there any indications that this was an organized plot,” a reporter inquires, “or was it just one man?”

“There’s no one else but him,” Wade says, adding, “so far.”

Someone, again, asks a question about the evidence gathered so far.

“Well, there is a lot of physical evidence that was gathered,” Wade says, “including the gun, that is on its way by air force jet to the FBI crime lab in Washington. It will be back here tomorrow. There are some other things that’s going to delay this [until] probably the middle of next week before it’s presented to the grand jury.”

“Do you have witnesses to use against him in the killing of President Kennedy?”

“We have approximately fifteen witnesses,” Wade answers.

“Who identified him as the killer of the president?”

“I didn’t say that,” Wade corrects.

A reporter asks to clarify whether he’s talking about fifteen witnesses in the murder of the police officer or the president.

“Both,” Wade replies.

The question of motive is raised.

“Well, he was a member of the movement—,” Wade grapples for the word, “—the Free Cuba movement—”

“What’s the make of the rifle, sir?”

“It’s a Mauser, I believe,” Wade answers erroneously.

“Does the suspect deny the shootings?”

“Yes,” Wade says, “he denies them both.”

“Are you through questioning him?” someone asks.

“No, we have further questioning to do. We will probably let him sleep and talk to him in the morning.” It’s very late, and Wade is wondering when the questions will end.
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12:35 a.m.

Oswald has been in his cell less than ten minutes when Sergeant Warren opens the door and tells him to put on his clothes. Lieutenant Karl P. Knight of the Identification Bureau is there to see that Oswald is taken to the fourth floor to be photographed and fingerprinted.

“I
have
been fingerprinted,” Oswald protests.

Knight knew that Oswald was referring to prints taken of him around 9:00 p.m. to compare with the latent prints discovered on the rifle and cardboard boxes found on the sixth floor. Now that felony charges had been filed against him, Knight needs something a little more permanent for the Dallas police files. As part of standard procedure, copies of these new prints will be sent to the FBI to find out if the prisoner is wanted elsewhere.
*
Sergeant Wilson F. Warren and jail assistant Tommy V. Todd take Oswald downstairs to the Identification Bureau to be processed. Knight and Captain Doughty see that another set of fingerprints is made and mug shots—front and profile—are taken. Oswald is arrogant and irritable. He drags his fingers across the inkpad, until a cop takes each digit one by one and rolls and prints them properly. When they ask him to sign his name at the bottom of the fingerprint card, Oswald refuses. His thumb print is added to indicate that his fingerprints had been taken and placed in police files. They finish the formalities in about thirty-five minutes, and the sullen Oswald is taken back to his fifth-floor jail cell.
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