This at least gives me pause about the LN narrative

[John Corbett]

Is it astounding unreliability "minutes apart" or is it something more mysterious or even sinister? If two eyewitnesses describe an Airbus and a Huey, is witness unreliability a plausible explanation? Lest we forget, these accounts are bookended by Truly saying a white t-shirt with nothing in his hands and Bledsoe saying a brown shirt with a hole in the elbow. "Witness unreliability" is always an easy way out, but sometimes it just isn't plausible. I don't see it as plausible here. One plausible explanation is that Reid fabricated her account, but this would not eliminate Truly. Surely, we would expect Baker to remember the encounter more clearly than Truly. Just one of them genuine Harvey and Lee mysteries, it seems to me (Lee was in the white t-shirt, in case you're keeping score).

But wait, my fellow CTers: I put on my tinfoil thinking cap while outside feeding my menagerie of feral kitties and had the following epiphany. WHAT IF Reid was not off on WHAT she saw but WHEN she saw it? What if she saw Oswald, coke in hand and clad in the white t-shirt he typically wore while working, exiting the lunchroom BEFORE the JFKA! She either conflated the time or fabricated to make the encounter after the JFKA! Pure speculation, except that it might bolster Oswald's alibi and would solve the evidential mystery as to why Baker and Reid seemingly saw two differently clad Oswalds. Nice, no? You're welcome.

If you think eyewitness unreliability is not a factor in these divergent accounts of what Oswald was wearing, then give us a scenario in which all the various witnesses could have correctly described what Oswald was wearing. In lieu of such a scenario, I will continue to chalk up these varying descriptions as evidence of eyewitness reliability. Don't forget to include what Whaley described (a dark shirt with white spots on it, according to my AI). Then there is Earlene Roberts who might have been the best witness because she said she didn't remember what color shirt Oswald was wearing or whether she had ever seen him wearing the jacket he left with. She also answered that she didn't remember to a number of questions. I wish more of these witnesses had simply said they didn't remember instead of confusing the issue by pretending they did.

PS. Oswald has no alibi. He was in the 6th floor sniper's nest at 12:30 firing the shots that killed JFK. That is a mortal lock.

[Jarrett Smith]

If you think eyewitness unreliability is not a factor in these divergent accounts of what Oswald was wearing, then give us a scenario in which all the various witnesses could have correctly described what Oswald was wearing. In lieu of such a scenario, I will continue to chalk up these varying descriptions as evidence of eyewitness reliability. Don't forget to include what Whaley described (a dark shirt with white spots on it, according to my AI). Then there is Earlene Roberts who might have been the best witness because she said she didn't remember what color shirt Oswald was wearing or whether she had ever seen him wearing the jacket he left with. She also answered that she didn't remember to a number of questions. I wish more of these witnesses had simply said they didn't remember instead of confusing the issue by pretending they did.

PS. Oswald has no alibi. He was in the 6th floor sniper's nest at 12:30 firing the shots that killed JFK. That is a mortal lock.

There is no iron clad proof Oswald was there at 12:30, even Chief Curry conceded that.

[Zeon Mason]

What gives me pause is that Hosty note about Oswald going out front to watch the parade.

Prayerman looked like a discovery until he became a woman , so the   Hosty.note has more or less bern dismissed by LNs to be just  a story Oswald made up .

None the less, it’s worth considering the Domino room was were Oswald was at about 12:23 because he picked out Norman and Jarman out of all the set of TSBD employees he could have selected. That’s about the time Norman and Jarman came back into TSBD via the back loading dock door, and they would have passed by the Domino room on their way to get to the west freight elevator.

I’m suspicious of Will Fritz early scribbles of his interrogation of Oswald, especially due to the absence of an attorney or stenographer or  a recording which Fritz could have easily made since the FBI did have tape recorders.

So the Fritz scribbled note reference to the 2 “negro” could have been Oswald saying he was in the Domino room when he saw Norman and Jarman come back into the TSBD by the back door. Then Oswald went out to the front LOBBY to watch the parade. An FBI report has Carolyn Arnold stating she looked  back at the entrance of TSBD at about 12:25 and thinks she saw Oswald thru the glass wall in the lobby.

If Fritz was is under pressure by LBJ himself that “Oswald is our man” it’s not unreasonable to suspect that Fritz would have excluded details from Oswald statements that would give Oswald an alibi.

Fritz, the guy who disturbs the SN by picking up shells BEFORE they were photographed and comes back later and places MC shells (or throws them per Tom Aleya) back down on the floor.

And that’s just a couple of things. There’s about 20 others things I could list that should give pause , but LNs dismiss these things because the WC report is good enough for them apparently even with chain of custody problems and contradictory statements of where and when items were found.

[Charles Collins]

This episode illustrates why I have little faith in eyewitness accounts. Minutes apart Baker said Oswald was wearing a light brown jacket over some type of white shirt, then Reid said he was wearing a white t-shirt with no jacket or shirt over it. Both were partially right but got important details wrong because they simply didn't take note of what Oswald was wearing at the time. Why would they? This is typical of eyewitnesses. Are we supposed to believe that after his encounter with Baker, Oswald took his tan shirt off, walked past Reid with just the white t-shirt, then put it back on when he got on the bus and was spotted wearing the tan shirt by his former landlady. Or does it make more sense that Baker and Reid sort of got it right and sort of got it wrong. Putting it ALL the evidence together I conclude that Oswald was wearing both the tan shirt and white t-shirt when he shot JFK, with the tan shirt either partially or completely unbuttoned and that is what he was wearing when arrested and at all points in between. I also know that conflicts with what several witnesses along the way said and I don't care.

I will never understand why people put so much faith in eyewitnesses and accept what they tell us as established facts. When I see somebody start and argument with "So-and-so said that......", my reaction is STFU. Prove to me that what so-and-so said was accurate. Without corroboration, preferably by hard evidence and not another so-and-so, I'm just not going to buy it.

Are we supposed to believe that after his encounter with Baker, Oswald took his tan shirt off, walked past Reid with just the white t-shirt, then put it back on when he got on the bus and was spotted wearing the tan shirt by his former landlady.


Why shouldn’t we believe that? It seems to go together with LHO’s apparent behavior when seen running away from the scene near the Patton and 10th street intersection. (Ditching the white jacket so his appearance would be different due to his then wearing the brown shirt and hopefully making him harder to track.) This is also similar to what “The Fugitive” did on TV that LHO reportedly liked to watch. After shots were fired in Dealey Plaza, LHO did literally become a fugitive. That explanation makes perfect sense to me.

[John Corbett]

There is no iron clad proof Oswald was there at 12:30, even Chief Curry conceded that.

That was early in the investigation. Discovery of further evidence and tests on what was found erased all doubt of Oswald's guilt.

[Lance Payette]

I remember some years ago (2019) when Pat Speer – whom I highly respect – surprised me at the Ed Forum with a post to the effect that he thought Oswald was in fact eating lunch in the domino room and was then outside during the JFKA. Even more surprising was that Larry Hancock agreed with him. I wrote an LN-oriented takedown which DVP thought enough of to post on the McAdams forum and has preserved at his exhaustive site: https://jfk-archives.blogspot.com/2019/09/. (The link includes give-and-take with Pat and others, and I didn’t read enough this time to know whether I come off as a snarky dolt, which is entirely possible.) The point being, I can certainly articulate an LN response to Oswald’s alibi if called upon to do so. However, it does give me pause that researchers of the caliber of Pat and Larry (who are much higher caliber than I) take the alibi seriously.

I don’t have the emotional attachment to the LN narrative to just keep saying, “Anything that conflicts with or casts doubt on the LN narrative is simply wrong, case closed, shut up and go away.” As I’ve stated, the JFKA is little more for me than a board (and sometime boring) game, and frankly it’s way more fun to play around with “What if?” than to just keep saying, “Oswald did it” like an LN parrot.

In rereading Ruth Paine’s and Marina Oswald's WC testimony about the visit to Irving on November 21, I was reminded of how utterly ordinary the visit was. Both Ruth and Marina believed Oswald had come to Irving to make peace with Marina after an unpleasant phone conversation a couple of days previously. When Ruth arrived home at 5:30 or so, Oswald was on the front lawn with Marina, playing with June. Dinner and the evening were entirely ordinary. When Ruth went out to the garage to paint blocks at 9, Oswald was already asleep in bed (Marina was not and stayed up with Ruth until 11:30). This was when Ruth said she found the light on – meaning that if Oswald was out in the garage it was before 9, yet no one observed him going out there (and the Paine home was tiny – two bedrooms, one bathroom, roughly 1,250 square feet with a single-car garage). Ruth even mentioned JFK’s visit, to which Oswald laconically replied “Ah, yes.”

Marina said Oswald bent over backwards to make peace. He helped her fold and put away diapers and played with the children out on the street. He said he was lonely and repeatedly asked her to join him in Dallas, promising an apartment and washing machine. He became upset but not angry at her refusal to join him right away. She asked him how she might watch JFK’s speech and he said he didn’t know. She said he had been “disturbed for weeks” before the Walker attempt, but she saw nothing like that on this visit. He usually got up before the alarm went off, but this time he slept until it did. He told her he would return on the weekend. She saw no paper bag.

Ordinary.

Yet Oswald ostensibly unpacked the rifle in the garage (Michael Paine said it was tied together inside the blanket), transferred it to the paper bag, then did something with it and exited with it in the morning. Possible, sure – but he would have taken some pretty big risks that neither Ruth nor Marina saw him taking.

Then we have the paper bag itself. Ostensibly, Oswald constructed this at the wrapping station in the TSBD – but when and why? Why take this risk? Ostensibly, he took it to Irving, presumably folded inside his shirt or jacket. But neither Frazier nor Marina heard or saw anything suggesting a crinkly paper bag. He would’ve had to do something with it before playing with June on the lawn, which was apparently minutes after his arrival – but what? We then have Frazier’s and Randle’s stubborn insistence that the bag they saw in the morning was too short (yes, I know, Randle may have originally said three feet), as well as the controversy surrounding the finding of the bag in the TSBD and its oil-free condition.

I don’t say these are deal-killers for the LN narrative, but they are certainly genuine puzzles that can’t just be waved away. Oswald simply doesn’t sound at all like someone who was contemplating a Presidential assassination in a matter of hours. This seems like a rather big deal to me. Instead of counting sheep, one of my favorite sleep-inducing exercises is to try to picture what Oswald actually did – not in broad terms but in very detailed terms – from the morning of November 21 through to the moment of the JFKA. It isn’t as easy to do as the LN narrative makes it sound.