Reclaiming History (58 page)

As they head out the door, Fritz orders two visitor passes for Oswald’s wife and mother to see Oswald in the fourth-floor jail office.
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1:07 p.m.

Robert Oswald is rather put out that three passes haven’t been arranged so that he too can see his brother. Secret Service agent Mike Howard tells him that he’ll see what he can do about arranging another pass for him. Robert reluctantly agrees to remain behind and let his mother and Marina use the two passes to go up and see Lee.
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The policewoman from the Juvenile Bureau takes care of the babies, and the two women are led through the pack of reporters in the hallway toward the fourth-floor elevators. They are forced to wait momentarily for the next elevator car, giving the reporters a chance to descend on them like hungry vultures. The two women ignore the bushel of questions tossed at them until Marguerite finally caves in and tells them they are going up to see Lee now. The elevator doors finally open and they escape the onslaught of questions, gliding up the elevator shaft to the floor above.
¹¹²⁵
A gaggle of reporters turn their attention to District Attorney Henry Wade, who is leaning against a corridor wall nearby. “Mr. Wade, do you expect to call Mrs. Kennedy or Governor Connally, if he’s able, in this trial as witnesses?”

“We will not, unless it’s absolutely necessary,” Wade tells them, “and at this point I don’t think it’ll be necessary.”

“How soon can we expect a trial?”

“I’d say around the middle of January,” Wade answers.

“Has Mr. Oswald expressed any hatred, ill will, toward President Kennedy or, for that matter, any regret over his death?” a reporter asks.

“He has expressed no regret that I know of,” Wade replies.

“This man, it seems, wasn’t close to anybody,” a reporter interjects. “Have you discovered any close friends in Dallas?”

“No, sir,” Wade replies, agreeing with the reporter that this suggests an introverted personality.

“It’s rumored that perhaps this case would be tried by a military court because, of course, President Kennedy is our commander in chief,” a reporter suggests.

“I don’t know anything about that,” Wade corrects. “We have him charged in the state court and he’s a state prisoner at present.”

“And you will conduct the trial?”

“Yes, sir,” Wade says. “I plan to.”

“And you will ask the capital verdict?”

“We’ll ask the death penalty,” Wade says firmly.

“In how many cases of this type have you been involved, that is, when the death penalty is involved?”

“Since I’ve been district attorney we’ve asked—I’ve asked the death penalty in twenty-four cases,” Wade replies.

“How many times have you obtained it?”

The district attorney looks the reporter in the eye.

“Twenty-three,” he says. Elected district attorney five consecutive times over the last twenty years, Wade is confident that the Oswald case will bring him a twenty-fourth death penalty verdict. Texas juries—Texans, period—are strong believers in capital punishment.
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In a recent Dallas murder case of Wade’s, after a long and impassioned plea by the defense attorney asking the jurors to spare the life of his client, Wade rose and gave one of the shortest summations ever delivered. “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” the DA said, “this boy belongs in the electric chair.” The jury returned a verdict of death after three hours of deliberation.
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1:15 p.m.

Marina and Marguerite Oswald wait nervously in the fourth-floor visiting room to meet Lee for the first time since the murders. The long, narrow room is divided in two by a heavy glass window, one side for visitors, the other for prisoners. Rounded-off plywood wings divide the partition into several cubicles. There are no chairs in the booths, just a wood shelf and a telephone—the only communication across the grimy, dusty glass barrier. It is a stale, claustrophobic room haunted by the thousands of visitors who have crossed its threshold over the years.
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Although Marina has managed to convince herself of Lee’s innocence, the minute she sees him caged in glass, troubled, pitiful, and alone, her confidence deserts her. They pick up the telephones on each side of the barrier.

“Why did you bring that fool with you?” Lee says in Russian, glancing over her shoulder at his mother. “I don’t want to talk to her.”

“She’s your mother,” Marina says. “Of course she came.”

Marina stares at the cuts and bruises on her husband’s face.

“Have they been beating you?” she asks.

“Oh no,” he answers. “They treat me fine. Did you bring Junie and Rachel?”

“They’re downstairs,” Marina says, anxious to talk to Lee about something weighing on her mind. “Alik [Marina’s Russian nickname for Lee], can we talk about anything we like?”

That morning, Marina had tucked two photographs of Lee and his rifle inside one of the shoes she was now wearing. They were there now. She desperately wants to ask him what she should do with them.

“Oh, of course,” he said sarcastically. “We can speak about
absolutely
anything.”

Marina could tell from his tone that he was warning her to say nothing.

“They asked me about the gun,” she says,

“Oh, that’s nothing,” he answers, his voice rising, the words coming quickly.
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Marina can’t bring herself to ask him if he did it. After all, he is her husband.

“I don’t believe that you did that,” she finally manages to say. “Everything will turn out well.”
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“Oh sure,” he says, “there is a lawyer in New York who will help me. You shouldn’t worry. Everything will be fine.”

On the surface, it is the same old Lee, full of bravado. But this time there is something different. This time, the pitch of his voice is higher. There is also fear in his eyes, betraying his guilt. He is telling her everything will turn out all right, but Marina feels that even he does not believe it. Tears start to roll down her cheek.

“Don’t cry,” he says tenderly. “There’s nothing to cry about. Try not to think about it. And if they ask you anything, you have a right not to answer. You have the right to refuse. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” Marina says, wiping the tears away. She looks him in the eye. There are tears in his eyes too, but he’s working hard to hold them back.
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Marguerite doesn’t understand a word they’re saying, since the entire conversation is in Russian. Finally, Marina hands the phone to her.

“Honey, you are so bruised up, your face,” Marguerite says. “What are they doing?”

“Mother, don’t worry,” Lee says. “I got that in a scuffle.”

Marguerite thinks that Lee is simply shielding his mother from the truth about the awful beatings behind the jail walls.

“Is there anything I can do to help you?”

“No, Mother, everything is fine,” Lee replies. “I know my rights. I have already requested to get in touch with an attorney, Mr. Abt. Don’t worry about a thing.”
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Marguerite isn’t about to insult him by asking him whether he shot President Kennedy. She heard him on television saying he didn’t do it and that is enough for her. Eventually she yields the phone back to Marina. Lee again tells Marina not to worry.

“You have friends,” he says. “They’ll help you. If it comes to that, you can ask the Red Cross for help. You mustn’t worry about me. Kiss Junie and Rachel for me.”

“I will,” Marina promises, tears welling up in her eyes.

Two guards enter the room behind him.

“Alka,” Marina says, using a variant of Alik she often used, “remember that I love you.” It was her way of letting him know that he could count on her not to betray him.

“I love you very much,” he says. “Make sure you buy shoes for June.”
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Oswald backs out of the room so that he can look at her until the very last second.

Marina now knows Lee is guilty. She knows that if he were truly innocent, he would be raising the roof about his persecution, the denial of his rights, and the evils of the system, just as he had always done over the slightest perceived transgressions by others. His very docility in his predicament tells her more than he could ever say in words. There is also a certain tranquility about his personality. She remembers how tense he was after the failed attempt to shoot General Walker. Now he is altogether different. There seems to almost be a certain glow of satisfaction. As she watches him leave, it seems he is saying good-bye with his eyes.

The door shuts behind him and Marina starts crying.

Downstairs, the women are forced once again to run the gauntlet of reporters, some of them shouting questions in Russian.

“What did he say? What did your husband say?”

“Leave me alone, it is hard for me now,” Marina wants to cry out. Instead, she maintains a stoical silence.
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1:40 p.m.

Lee Oswald has just been returned to his cell when word comes from the Homicide and Robbery office to let him make any telephone calls he wishes. Assistant jailer Arthur E. Eaves and the patrolman assigned to the suicide watch, Buel T. Beddingfield, take Lee from his cell and lead him over to the telephone, which is in a booth.

“Who do you want to call?” the assistant jailer asks.

“New York City, collect,” Oswald replies.

The jailer gets the City Hall operator on the line and tells her that the prisoner would like to call New York City collect. The jailer hands Oswald the phone and overhears Oswald call New York City, then place a local call, after which he is returned to his cell.
¹¹³⁵

I
n Irving, Ruth Paine is out in the front yard with her children. She’s thinking about doing some grocery shopping so that she’ll be prepared to stay home and deal with the press and the police, who’ll no doubt want to ask her questions. She’s about to go inside when Dallas police detectives Rose, Stovall, Adamcik, and Moore arrive with Detective McCabe of the Irving Police Department. The men have a warrant signed by Judge Joe Brown Jr. and want to search the premises again.
¹¹³⁶

She has no objection to the search but doesn’t want to wait for them. They assure her that this time they are looking for something specific—the items Oswald keeps stored in the garage. Mrs. Paine takes them to the garage and shows them where the Oswalds kept their things.
¹¹³⁷

“I want to go to the grocery store,” she says. “I’ll just go and you go ahead and do your searching.”

As Mrs. Paine leaves, the detectives begin pawing through the Oswalds’ effects that they missed in their first search the day before—two seabags, three suitcases, and two cardboard boxes of odds and ends. It doesn’t take long before Detective Rose finds some things Marina would have surely destroyed or hidden had she known they existed.

“Look at this!” he says to the others, waving two negatives and a snapshot showing Oswald, dressed in black, holding a rifle that looks very much like the weapon found on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, the same photo Marina had been hiding from the authorities and trying to give to Marguerite. On Oswald’s hip, a holstered pistol—probably, they assume, the gun he used to shoot Officer Tippit. A moment later, Detective McCabe finds the second snapshot that matches the other negative.
¹¹³⁸

In the same cardboard carton Stovall finds a page torn from a magazine advertising weapons available from Klein’s Sporting Goods in Chicago. One of the offerings is circled. It is for a Mannlicher-Carcano rifle.
¹¹³⁹

That’s not all the detectives find. They turn up some more interesting negatives, shots of a Selective Service card with something on the back of the negative to block out the space where the name would be typed in. Several prints made from the negatives were bundled with them. The resulting prints were, in effect, blank Selective Service cards. The detectives immediately recognized them as identical to the false Selective Service card that Oswald had in his wallet in the name of “Alek James Hidell.”
¹¹⁴⁰

The detectives take their time combing through the rest of the inventory, careful not to overlook anything. It takes two and a half hours to complete the task. When they’re finished, they cart everything off to their car. Mrs. Paine hasn’t returned from her shopping trip, so they flip the latch, lock the front door, and head back toward Dallas City Hall.
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2:05 p.m.

Captain Fritz emerges from the Homicide and Robbery office and wades into the newsmen, Chief Curry at his side. “Captain, can you give us a resume of what you now know concerning the assassination of the president and Mr. Oswald’s role in it?” a television reporter asks.

“There is only one thing that I can tell you,” Fritz replies in his gravely voice, “without going into the evidence before first talking to the district attorney. I can tell you that this case is cinched—that this man killed the president. There’s no question in my mind about it.”

“Well, what is the basis for that statement?” the reporter asks.

“I don’t want to go into the basis,” Fritz says. “In fact, I don’t want to get into the evidence. I just want to tell you that we are convinced beyond any doubt that he did the killing.”

“Was it spur-of-the-moment or a well-planned, long-thought-out plot?”

“I’d rather not discuss that,” Fritz answers, “if you don’t mind, please, thank you.”

The homicide captain brushes the reporters aside and begins making his way toward the stairwell, near the elevators. A trail of reporters follow.

“Will you be moving him today, Captain? Is he going to remain here?”

“He’ll be here today,” Fritz finally answers, “yes, sir.”
¹¹⁴²

2:14 p.m.

Detective Jim Leavelle leads cabdrivers William Whaley and William Scoggins into the show-up room to view Oswald in a lineup. Whaley drove Oswald to his Oak Cliff apartment after the assassination, and Scoggins witnessed the shooting of Officer J. D. Tippit. In a moment they are joined by Detective C. N. Dhority and Assistant District Attorney Bill Alexander.
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