In any complex operation that requires a large-scale cover-up, unwanted information, and even highly damaging information, will often slip out here and there. This is what happened when Deputy Sheriff Luke Mooney testified before the Warren Commission (WC).
The WC established that Mooney was the first law enforcement officer to go to the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository (TSBD) after the shooting, and that Mooney was the officer who discovered the sixth-floor “sniper’s nest.” Mooney headed up the stairs from the second floor to the sixth floor at no later than 12:50. No federal or local law enforcement officers were on any of the upper floors of the building between 12:35 and 1:10.
Not realizing the implications of what he was about to say, Mooney dropped the bombshell during his WC testimony that on his way up the stairs from the second floor to the sixth floor, he encountered two men in plain clothes coming down the stairs (3 H 284). Mooney did not recognize them, but he said he assumed they were fellow deputy sheriffs in plain clothes.
The two men on the stairs could not have been law enforcement officers of any kind (and they could not have been William Shelley and Billy Lovelady). They may well have been the same two men whom Officer D. V. Harkness encountered minutes later on the TSBD’s north loading dock by the rear door. The men falsely told Harkness they were Secret Service agents, so he did not question them (6 H 312; Dallas Morning News, August 27, 1978; Sylvia Meagher, Accessories After the Fact, p. 26; Henry Hurt, Reasonable Doubt, pp. 110-111). Of course, they could not have been Secret Service agents. The HSCA established that no Secret Service agents were in Dealey Plaza after the motorcade left the plaza.
The two men on the stairs were likely the men who were moving boxes around in the sixth-floor window within two minutes of the shooting. The HSCA’s photographic experts established that two photos taken of the sniper’s window, one taken moments after the shooting and the other taken about two minutes later, show that someone was rearranging boxes in the window during this timeframe (6 HSCA 109-115; 4 HSCA 422-423).
Obviously, Oswald could not have been in the sniper’s nest during that time, so he could not have been rearranging boxes in that time span. He would have had to be hiding the rifle and then running down the stairs rapidly enough to get beyond the second-floor foyer door allegedly to be seen by Officer Marrion Baker 75-90 seconds after the shooting.
For an exhaustive analysis of the photographic evidence that boxes were being rearranged in the sniper’s nest within two minutes of the shooting, see Barry Krusch’s detailed chapter on the subject in his book Impossible: The Case Against Lee Harvey Oswald, Volume Three (pp. 28-69).
We can pin down the timing of Mooney’s movements with a high degree of certainty. When Mooney found the sniper’s nest, he leaned out the sniper’s window at 1:00 to yell down to Captain Will Fritz and told him he had found the TSBD gunman’s location and to get crime lab people to the sixth floor. About 10 minutes later, Lt. J. C. Day and Detective R. L. Studebaker arrived on the sixth floor. Before this occurred, Mooney briefly scanned the sixth floor, then went to the seventh floor, then got two other law enforcement officers to come with him back to the sixth floor. Given Mooney’s movements before he yelled out the window to Fritz, he must have been heading up the stairs to the sixth floor no later than 12:50, and more likely several minutes earlier.
You might be wondering how the WC counsel who was questioning Mooney, Joseph Ball, reacted when Mooney dropped the bombshell about encountering two plain clothes deputy sheriffs heading down the stairs. Incredibly, Ball ignored the information and asked no questions about the two men, and the WC made no effort to determine the identity of the two men.
And, not surprisingly, WC apologists have virtually ignored Mooney’s bombshell disclosure.
