The Floor-Laying Crew

[Alan Ford]

Just because someone says something, it doesn’t automatically make it true. Practically all of the occupants of the limousine said that JFK didn’t say anything after he was shot through the neck. And I think that he probably couldn’t have spoken with a hole in his trachea below the larynx. But Kellerman said that he believed he heard JFK say “I’ve been hit”. Based on all of the evidence, Kellerman had to have been mistaken. I think that he might have heard JBC say that. And that JBC would have sounded different with a collapsed lung. This of course doesn’t mean that Kellerman is unreliable and everything he says is wrong. Likewise we do not have to believe everything that Arnold Rowland says. In his 11/22/63 affidavit, he only claimed seeing one man with a rifle. That's believable to me. Later embellishments when he testified to the WC are highly suspect and contradict the other evidence.

~Grin~

All of which is a long way of saying: I like to cherry-pick according to my convenience

 

[Alan Ford]

Imagine----------------for example-----------------this light-brown-jacket-wearing man was the actual man described in Officer Baker's affidavit:



He looks rather like Mr. Oswald. Might Mr. Truly get away with a switcheroo?

 

Now!

If (arguendo) the following (columns 4 & 5) from Kent Biffle (Dallas Morning News) reflects a real event:



: then we can supplement our posited sequence of events for an innocent Mr. Roy Truly:

----------At first, he doesn't think the shots even came from his building
----------But he runs in and offers to show the policeman up the building
----------Before they take to the stairs, they see Mr. Lee Harvey Oswald in a small storage room: Mr. Truly vouches for him as a worker
----------Several floors up, the officer catches a man walking away from the rear stairway
----------Mr. Truly recognizes the man as one of the outside crew that has been working on the floors upstairs, and tells the officer that he's okay, he works here
----------Later on, Mr. Truly puts the pieces together: that outside carpentry crew were not what they seemed, and that man by the rear stairway was making an escape

Mr. Truly soon realises he has to explain away the man Officer Baker caught on the stairs = the man he (Mr. Truly) vouched for (truthfully) as someone who worked there. Otherwise he could find himself in very deep trouble, as the man who brought that crew in in the first place.

He remembers the encounter with Mr. Oswald on the first floor, and this gives him an idea: pretend it was Oswald they ran into by the rear stairway several floors up. That gives them an employee to focus on rather than a member of the outside crew.

Why Mr. Oswald? Because he looks rather like the escaping man; and (crucially) he appears to have been inside the building at the time of the shooting. So the switcheroo just might stick.

Desperate times, desperate measures.

It is only once Mr. Truly has worked out this solution, no doubt in consultation with Mr. Shelley, that he goes to Captain Fritz with his 'I've an employee missing' schtick...................

 

[Alan Ford]

He remembers the encounter with Mr. Oswald on the first floor, and this gives him an idea: pretend it was Oswald they ran into by the rear stairway several floors up. That gives them an employee to focus on rather than a member of the outside crew.

Why Mr. Oswald? Because he looks rather like the escaping man; and (crucially) he appears to have been inside the building at the time of the shooting.

Desperate times, desperate measures.

It is only once Mr. Truly has worked out this solution, no doubt in consultation with Mr. Shelley, that he goes to Captain Fritz with his 'I've an employee missing' schtick...................

 

But! The switcheroo causes awful complications. Because it is soon established that Mr. Oswald actually went outside to watch the P. Parade, and must have then come back inside in time to be seen in the (front-of-house) storage room. Mr. Truly, in feeding the cops a Mr. Oswald caught walking away from the rear stairway several floors up, has given them not just a major suspect but a major headache. There is every chance that compelling evidence could emerge any moment proving Mr. Oswald's front-entrance alibi.

And so is born the second-floor lunchroom fairytale. It is an adaptation of the actual rear stairway encounter, but relocated to a place that is theoretically compatible with TWO very different scenarios:
1. Mr. Oswald fired the shots and then came down from six
2. Mr. Oswald was out front and then came in and went up to the lunchroom.

All because Mr. Truly needed to hide the fact of an outside crew he had brought in to lay some new floors-----------the crew that turned out to be an assassination team

 

[Alan Ford]

But! The switcheroo causes awful complications. Because it is soon established that Mr. Oswald actually went outside to watch the P. Parade, and must have then come back inside in time to be seen in the (front-of-house) storage room. Mr. Truly, in feeding the cops an Mr. Oswald caught walking away from the rear stairway several floors up, has given them a major headache. There is every chance that compelling evidence could emerge any moment proving Mr. Oswald's front-entrance alibi.

And so is born the second-floor lunchroom fairytale. It is an adaptation of the actual rear stairway encounter, but relocated to a place that is theoretically compatible with TWO very different scenarios:
1. Mr. Oswald fired the shots and then came down from six
2. Mr. Oswald was out front and then came in and went up to the lunchroom.

All because Mr. Truly needed to hide the fact that the outside crew he had brought in to lay some new floors had been an assassination team

 

Note! The above scenario does not require the 'investigating' authorities to ever know anything about the existence of an outside crew in charge of the floor-laying project. Rather, it has them needing to go to the most extraordinary lengths to pin the shooting on the patsy whom Mr. Truly, in panicked improvisation, has fed them.

[Bill Brown]

If Oswald expected the motorcade to pass TSBD at the scheduled time, he would've needed to be in the sniper's nest at the time when BRW (or someone else) was there. Unless he had a radio and was listening to the parade at the time, he couldn't have known that he had a few more minutes to get into his firing position. (he also couldn't have known that BRW would leave shortly before the motorcade arrived or been able to prevent anyone else from coming to the Sixth floor).

Consider that Oswald was over at the west end long before the motorcade was set to arrive but could not get back over to the sniper's nest until after Williams had left for the firth floor.

In other words, if the motorcade was set to arrive at 12:25 and Oswald was over at the west end around 12:15 (or even a few minutes earlier), then your point (above) is entirely invalid.

[Charles Collins]

~Grin~

All of which is a long way of saying: I like to cherry-pick according to my convenience

 

No, it is explaining legitimate reasons to discount witness accounts that conflict with the rest of the evidence.

[Charles Collins]

Consider that Oswald was over at the west end long before the motorcade was set to arrive but could not get back over to the sniper's nest until after Williams had left for the firth floor.

In other words, if the motorcade was set to arrive at 12:25 and Oswald was over at the west end around 12:15 (or even a few minutes earlier), then your point (above) is entirely invalid.

Consider that LHO could have fired his shots from the open windows on the west end of the sixth floor if need be (ie: BRW had stayed on the sixth floor). As long as LHO was stealthy and remained undetected by BRW until the shots began, he had no reason to have to know exactly when the motorcade would arrive in Dealey Plaza.

[Alan Ford]

Note! The above scenario does not require the 'investigating' authorities to ever know anything about the existence of an outside crew in charge of the floor-laying project. Rather, it has them needing to go to the most extraordinary lengths to pin the shooting on the patsy whom Mr. Truly, in panicked improvisation, has fed them.

Mr. Truly has to explain his having vouched for a white man caught walking away from the rear stairway several floors up. The information which Mr. Harold Norman gives us allows us to consider a scenario in which the man really did work there (as Mr. Truly said), but in which his presence in the building now needed to be hushed up----------because it would mean having to reveal the presence of the outside crew Mr. Truly had brought in.

Mr. Truly's options are horribly limited here. Unless he can find an alternative 'worker', he has to admit that the assassination team was the external crew which he himself brought in to lay the floor. He needs an alternative 'worker'. But who might fit the bill? Not one of the three black workers who watched the P. Parade from the fifth floor. Not Mr. Jack Dougherty, who does fit the bill location-wise but just doesn't fit the description the motorcycle officer will be giving. Not Mr. Billy Lovelady, who might fit the bill description-wise, but doesn't location-wise (Mr. Truly knows he was out front for the P. Parade).

There is only one option: Mr. Oswald. Mr. Truly, at the time he feeds Mr. Oswald's name to the cops, thinks (erroneously) he is on safe (if deeply unethical) ground, because he saw Mr. Oswald inside the building just after the shooting (small storage room on the first floor). In sacrificing Mr. Oswald, he pushes the 'investigating' authorities into full cover-up and hoax mode. That his patsy turns out to have a commie past only intensifies the monomaniacal focus on him as a suspect. And the Lone Nut story that informs the hoax gets Mr. Truly off the hook: a Lone Nut scenario is the only one that doesn't implicate the man who hired Mr. Oswald. Such would certainly not be the case for an entire team of men brought in on Mr. Truly's initiative.

Again, all of the above supposes for argument's sake NO foreknowledge by Mr. Truly of the assassination plot. And it obviously has him mention to Mr. Ochus Campbell his sighting of Mr. Oswald in the first-floor storage room BEFORE he has thought to turn the man caught walking away from the rear stairway several floors up into Mr. Oswald.

On this scenario, the 'investigating' authorities know that Mr. Oswald didn't do the shooting, and wasn't the man Officer Baker caught by the rear stairway. Mr. Truly tells them he honestly thought it was Mr. Oswald--------and now has no idea who it can have been. The authorities don't really believe him, but all efforts must now go into pinning the crime on Mr. Oswald. FBI cooks up the lunchroom story, and Mr. Truly comes on board as a compliant witness.

It is said that Mr. Truly spent the rest of his life in great fear of the authorities. He knew that they knew he had lied about the man by the rear stairway. They just didn't know-------and didn't really want to know-------what exactly he was hiding.