11/22/63

It's Thursday, November twenty first, nineteen sixty three. Lee Harvey Oswald is visiting his wife, Marina, who's living with Ruth Payne in Irving, Texas. He and Marina were separated, and he had taken a room in a boarding house not far from his job at the Texas school Book Depository in Dallas. He would normally visit Marina in June on the weekends, but this is a Thursday, and it's unexpected. President Kennedy and the First Lady will arrive in Dallas

This is who killed JFK. Sixty years later, what can we uncover about the greatest murder mystery in American history? And why does it still matter today? I'm your host, Solidad O'Brien.

At this point in our investigation, we've established that there were more than three shots fired at Kennedy, and not all from behind. We've presented evidence that Oswald, the alleged loan shooter, had a connection to the CIA and was likely unknowingly being set up for a plan that would motivate an invasion of Cuba. We've also established who had both the motive and the means to carry out the crime, rogue elements of the CIA, anti Castro Cuban exiles, and

A member of the president's security team later told researcher Vince Palmara, quote, we were getting all sorts of rumors that the president was going to be assassinated in Dallas. He then shares these threats with Kennedy that morning.

Kennedy says back to him, quote, Marty, you worry about me too much. The Secret Service told me they have everything taken care of. There's nothing to worry about. Okay, let's talk specifically about what happened on that day.

Oswald wakes up not knowing exactly what he's part of, but he knows that he's part of something important. Marina is sleeping. Before saying goodbye to her, he takes off his wedding ring and places it in a cup on her bedside table. He whispers to Marina that there's money in the dresser, one hundred and seventy dollars, a sizeable sum for the Oswalts. Marina goes back to sleep. Oswald exits the house and meets Buell Fraser, his coworker at

That morning was unusual.

Most of the times I would pick lee up walking down the sidewalk toward my sister's home.

All right, have to put up in front of the house and blow on the horn. But that morning was different.

That's Buell Fraser. He was nineteen at the time, and we interviewed him in twenty twenty three, sixty years after that fateful morning. He remembers it like it was yesterday.

He walked down the half a block across the street, and with it he had a fact. So he goes over to my car and he puts a package in on the back seat, on the fashion side. And so I said, what's in the package?

Lee?

And he said, don't you remember we talked about this shoes.

Today, I'm going to bring some curtain rods to work. And I said, that's right, you did tell me that.

Now the package that Fraser mentions has become something of a fascination for JFK researchers.

Is the package the gun?

Well?

I asked Fraser about that. Nobody ever has determined what exactly was in that package? Have they?

To my knowledge? That is correct?

I have not. What I would like to tell you was I have a friend called Josiah Thompson. Josiah has Aigan Carno rifle.

This was the type of rifle Oswald allegedly used to kill Kennedy.

I says, can we measure this rifle? He said absolute. So we measured the rifle. We measured to stop, and we measured the barrel. There's no way that it would fit in the package that was on the backseat of my car, right, And so That really made me feel good because a lot of people have said I have told the truth about that.

Well, I'm telling you all I know.

So what was it?

Nobody knows for sure. All we know is that Oswald had a bag that, according to Buell Frasier, wasn't big enough to hold even a broken down Carcanell rifle.

Okay, what happens next?

So we get into we start to drive off.

When we get to the parking lot, they gets the package out of the back seat, and so he turns around and starts walking towards the building where we would be working.

During the course of the day. Did you see Oswald at all?

I did run into him. I know he went up to the fifth and sixth floor.

You saw Lee on the fifth and sixth floor at some point.

Yeah.

It was a pry and it had been a hard way. It is a road Jay.

Nothing about that day would be normal. Let's jump ahead a few hours to eleven thirty seven am. Air Force one lands at Dallas love Field. The Kennedys arrived to an adoring crowd.

And here is the President of the United States.

How the crowd is after they're going wild?

They get into the open limousine and they sit right behind Governor Connolly and his wife Nellie. The Secret Service car is directly behind them, followed by Vice President Lyndon Johnson and Ladybird. They start their ten mile ride through the streets of Dallas, with onlookers cheering along the way. Nellie Connolly turns back and says, you can't tell me that the people of Dallas don't love you, mister President,

Two witnesses also place him there. They say they saw Oswald in or near the second floor lunch room around the time of the shootings. One witness is a woman named Carolyn Arnold, a secretary at the Texas School Book Depository.

She said that she was on her way out of the building around twelve twenty five when she saw Oswald in the lunch room.

She said, quote, he was alone as usual and appeared to be having lunch. I do not recall that he was doing anything. I just recall that he was sitting there in one of the booth seats on the right hand side of the room as you go in.

Okay, Oswald said he was eating lunch, went to the second floor. There are two witnesses that place him there all around twelve twenty five when the motorcade passes by. That seems pretty solid to me.

Except for the fact that the motorcade was running five minutes late. It didn't arrive at Daily Plaza until twelve thirty.

So if it was Oswald who fired the gun, couldn't he have been on the second floor at twelve twenty five and then run up to the sixth floor by twelve thirty.

Okay, let's go at that for a moment. A man is planning to assassinate the president of the United States, who was supposed to be arriving at twelve twenty five, Now, wouldn't he already be in position at that point? I mean not casually sitting in the second floor lunch room drinking a coke.

Marion Baker is a Dallas police officer who was riding a motorcycle in the motorcade that just entered Daley Plaza when.

The shots rang out.

He said he saw pigeons fly off the roof of the Texas School Book Depository, and without hesitation, he hopped off his bike and ran into the building. Video shows him entering within fifteen seconds of the shooting.

He immediately runs into Roy Trully, the manager of the building, and Trully and Baker start up the stairs.

They reached the second floor lunch room at twelve thirty two pm. Baker confirmed it was ninety seconds after the shots were fired.

And guess who they see sitting in the lunch room Oswald with a coke in his hand. Truly tells Baker that Oswald works in the building, so they continue past them. This is ninety seconds after the shooting.

Couldn't Oswald have fired three shots then sprinted down to the second floor within ninety seconds, where he runs into Baker.

Well, the Warrant Commission had the same question, so they re enacted the time it would take Oswald to go from the sixth floor sniper net down to the second floor, and they timed that ad around seventy five.

Seconds, So tight but definitely plausible.

Sure if you don't allot any time for Oswald to wipe down the gun, which he had to have done because none of his fingerprints were found on the gun. It also does include the time it would take Oswalt to hide the gun behind some boxes, which is how it was found.

He would have had to have been in the lunch room at twelve twenty five, run up the stairs to the sniper's nest, got his rifle into position, fired three shots with incredible accuracy, and then wipe the gun clean of fingerprints hidden it, then run back down the four flights of stairs to the second floor in less than ninety seconds.

So that would be quite the athletic endeavor.

Officer Baker testified that Oswald seemed and I quote calm and collected when he encountered him, and that it didn't appear that he had been running. But there is another piece of evidence that makes this even more unlikely. Victoria Adams worked on the fourth floor of the building, and after the assassination, she gave a brief deposition to the Warren Commission, and then disappeared. She was afraid of what her testimony might mean and she didn't want to get

Adams was on the fourth floor with three female colleagues when the President's motorcade drove through Dealey Plaza. They heard gunshots, and they watched the President's limo race off. She and co worker Sandra Styles ran to the staircase and headed down.

And what she says next is important.

She testified that they did not see or hear in anyone else on the stairwell at that time until they reached the first floor. And yes, it was the only stairwell.

So Oswald would have had to have used the same stairwell to get down to the lunch room.

Right. So not only would Oswald have to fire three shots, clean and hide the gun, he would somehow have to manage to go unnoticed by Victoria Adams and Sandra Stiles as he raced down the stairs to the second floor lunch room. Now you can believe that or the eyewitnesses who saw Oswald on the second floor the entire time.

So you're saying you don't believe that Oswald was even on the sixth floor when those shots were fired.

Well, let me tell you what the Dallas Police chief concluded later that day. He said, quote, the physical evidence and eyewitness accounts do not clearly indicate what took place on the sixth floor of the Texas school Book Depository at the time that John F. Kennedy was a set fascinated.

And when Oswald was later arrested, the police did a paraffin test on his cheek. It tests for contaminants from gun residue, and the test on Oswald's cheek was negative.

So my answer is no, I don't think there's any evidence that Oswald was on the sixth floor at the time of the shooting. Yet everything changes for him once those shots were fired.

Kennedy apparently got ahead, he fell a down in backdat of his car.

When the shots by gad to ring out, people really began to.

Pay That's Buell Fraser Oswald's coworker who drove him to work the morning of the assassination. He had stepped outside the Texas Schoolbook Depository building to watch the motorcade go by and pep up.

Again to Ron had followed out, and people will cried and hollered and screaming at his. One lady come walking up and she said they shot the president.

And I said, what did that woman say? She said, they have shot the president.

It's just after twelve thirty five pm.

What does Oswald do next?

Well, according to Fraser, he left the building.

Alongside the building was Lee himself.

And what was he doing?

They just walk all very casually. Then he turned right and crossed Elm Street. Someone said something. I turned to see he was talking to me, and when I turned back I had lost him in the crowd.

As Oswald walked away from the building, I believe that is when he started to realize that something had gone wrong and that maybe what Richard K. S. Nagel had told him was true, that he was being set up.

You might remember Nate Goal as the intelligence agent who warned Oswald that he was being used by people around him.

Right now, Daily Plaza is in total chaos. People are saying the President is gonna die, and Oswald begins to act as though his life is in danger.

So what does he do.

He crosses Houston Street and witnesses see him get on a bus. But because of all this chaos, the bus wasn't moving. It was stuck in traffic. So the same witnesses who saw him get on the bus saw him get off. And the next thing we know is he finds a taxi cab and tells the cab driver to take him towards his boarding house. How do we know this because the cab driver testified that Oswald told him to drop him off a couple of blocks away from his boarding house.

He's obviously concerned or suspicious, trying to hide his tracks make sure he isn't being followed.

At twelve forty five pm, just fifteen minutes after the President was shot, the Dallas PD had already rais out a description white male five foot ten, one hundred and sixty five pounds in his early thirties. And this was all based on the account of one man who was standing across the street and said he saw a man of this description fire a rifle from the sixth floor.

So now they begin their search for a man who roughly looks like Oswald.

It's now almost one pm. Oswald gets out of the cab and walks to the boarding house. The woman who runs the boarding house, Arlene Roberts, said that Oswald went into his room, grabbed his jacket and hurried out. And at some point during that time he grabbed his revolver and he left the boarding house and he started walking

And it's never been definitely proven who did it.

Nope. Eyewitness testimony from the incident is all over the place. The Tippet murder may be the subject of another podcast. But what we do know for sure is what Oswald does next. He goes to the movies, the movies. How do we know he goes to the movies because someone saw him slipping into the now famous Texas Theater without paying and they called the police. So now I want

I would hide in a dark corner somewhere.

That makes sense. Now to understand, I've been to the Texas Theater and it's big, it's its seats around nine hundred people. That afternoon there were only twenty people in the theater. And now he could go anywhere. So what does he do? He sits right down next to an eighteen year old boy named Jack Davis. Now, I don't know about you, but when I'm in a virtually empty movie theater and a stranger comes in, they don't typically sit right next to you. They leave you some space.

Yeah, that would be normal.

Yeah, right, But not Oswald. In a nearly empty theater, he sits right next to someone that's weird. Yeah, it is weird, and it gets weirder. After sitting next to this eighteen year old Jack Davis, Oswell gets up and he moves across the aisle and he sits down next to somebody else, and a few minutes later he gets up and he just strolls to the lobby.

In the lobby, he buys popcorn, and the man selling him the popcorn testified that this was at one point fifteen PM.

But we know Tippett was killed at one sixteen he was, so.

Either Oswald didn't kill Tippett or the popcorn guy is way off on his time. Anyway, Oswald goes back into the theater and according to researches, he sits down next to a pregnant woman.

What do you think he's doing going from person to person to person?

You know, I think he is looking for his contact.

His contact.

The theater could have been a planned meeting spot where someone would be waiting to get him to a safe house and then ultimately out of Dallas.

This is straight out of the intelligence operation playbooks. If a plan goes wrong, go to your pre arranged meetup spot. Except that after sitting next to all these people. None of them respond, so he goes to the back of the theater and sits there alone. Within minutes, the Dallas PD arrives, the lights go on in the theater. The officers spot Oswald. Oswald pulls his gun, but before he can fire, a struggle ensues. Oswald is subdued. They place him under rest, and they put him in a squad car.

It's been a little while since we've heard about him.

He was that local Dallas nightclub owner and low level mobster. Any of the officers would frequent his club. They knew him, and they didn't think much of him being there. But like we said in our first episode, if you pull on the Jack Ruby thread, a lot will come loose. In the next episode, we'll give that thread another tug and reveal who sent Ruby to take care of Oswald.

On the next episode of Who Killed JFK?

He called me about four or five o'clock and asked me to go down to the police station and check on Watch Security if any there was around Lee, Harvey or Wall.

We take a look at who Jack Ruby really was.

Every line from Jack Ruby goes back to the mob, and the mob kills people who can tell the true story.

Who Killed JFK is hosted by Rob Reiner and me Solidad O'Brien and Our executive producers are Rob Reiner, Michelle Reiner, Matt George, Jason English, David Hoffman, and me Solidad O'Brien. Our writer is David Hoffman, with research by Dick Russell. Our story editors are Rob Reiner and Julie Pineto. Our senior producer is Julie Pinneto. Our producers are Tristan Nash, Dick Russell, Michelle Goldfein, and Amari Lee. Our editors are Tristan Nash, Julie Pinneto, and Marcus de Lauro. Our project