Alan, I've reread the "second floor lunchroom" tale in the W.R. ( pages 149-156) and there certainly seems to be major problems with Baker's story.... Particularly with his tale of spotting Lee walking east in the small vestibule which was at the west end of the lunchroom. That vestibule was so small ( about 4 feet across) that it could be traversed with about two normal steps.... Baker said that he caught a fleeting glimpse of a man walking across the vestibule so he walked across the area at the top of the stairs to the west door into the lunch room and saw the man (Lee Oswald) walking toward the rear ( east end) of the lunchroom, and ordered him to "come here". Problem.....If Lee was a fleeing killer he could easily have exited out the north door (which was just a couple of feet east of the Coke machine) of the lunchroom, before Baker could have crossed the second floor landing....
The distance from the door at the west end of the lunchroom to the door just east of the coke machine was about 12 feet, while the distance from the top of the stairs to the door at the west end of the lunchroom was about 25 feet and Baker had to open the vestibule door .
Bottom line:... In reality, If Lee had been a fleeing assassin and there was any validity to the tale....Lee wouldn't have been in that lunchroom.... He would have exited the lunchroom through the north door, before Baker could have reached the Vestibule door.
It appears that you may be onto a major flaw in the official tale.... Can you post some of the info from the WR...
Both Officer Baker and Mr Truly are all over the place in their accounts.
But again, Mr Cakebread, I think the core issue is much simpler---------------
---> Officer Baker confronting a man walking away from the stairway a number of floors up the building makes sense; his turning that man loose constitutes a MAJOR error of judgment.
---> Officer Baker confronting a man he has spotted behind a closed door by a lunchroom a mere one floor up makes no sense; but at least turning
that man loose would amount to no more than an unfortunate but completely understandable judgment call (a lot more understandable in fact than his having bothered to go after him in the first place!).
The whole
point of the invented lunchroom story is to explain away two real encounters (one Oswaldian, one non-Oswaldian), both disastrous to the Oswald-Did-It accusation, by merging them into a single Oswaldian encounter located in a place that
both---------------a) makes it
possible, with a little finessing of timelines etc, to convince folks that Mr Oswald could have done the dread deed on six
---------------b) saves Officer Baker (and by extension the DPD) from utter embarrassment (incl. NB! culpability in the death of Officer Tippit).
