Lee mumbled something in reply, seemingly “very calm.” Both of them kept on walking, and that was the end of the encounter.[20]
Lee crossed the second floor, walked down the stairs to the ground floor, and left the building by the main entrance. Outside, a crew-cut young man, who Lee thought was from the Secret Service but who may have been Robert MacNeil, a reporter for NBC, dashed up to ask where he could find a telephone. Very calmly, Lee pointed to the building and told the man that he thought he could find a pay phone inside. About three minutes had elapsed since the last shot had been fired.
Lee walked seven short blocks east on Elm Street and boarded a bus that was headed back toward the School Book Depository en route to Oak Cliff. He was spotted immediately by Mrs. Mary Bledsoe, his reluctant landlady during the week of October 7, as he passed her to take a seat in the middle of the bus. Later she said that he looked “like a maniac.” “He looked so bad in the face,” his face was “distorted.” He was dirty, he had a hole in his right shirtsleeve, and the buttons had been torn off his shirt.[21]
“The president has been shot,” the bus driver said, and the passengers started talking about it. “Hope they don’t shoot us,” someone said. Traffic was in a hopeless snarl, and in four minutes the bus had gone only two blocks. Lee slipped out the front, not neglecting, as he went, to pick up a transfer to another bus bound for Oak Cliff.
He had so far tried two means of escape that he had used after the Walker attempt, his own feet and the bus. Now he tried something else. Four blocks from the place where he left the bus, he went up to a cab that was standing near the Greyhound Station. The driver, William Whaley, was about to get out to buy himself a pack of cigarettes. He later remembered that a man dressed in work clothes approached, asked politely, “May I have this cab?” and, Russian fashion, climbed into the front seat beside him.
Just then an elderly lady stuck her head in the window past the passenger and asked the driver to call her a cab.
Very politely, the passenger started opening the door and said, “I will let you have this one.”
“No,” said the lady, “the driver can call me one.”
The passenger told Whaley he wanted to go to 500 North Beckley. Everything around them was in turmoil, sirens wailing, police cars crisscrossing in all directions. “What the hell,” Whaley said. “I wonder what the hell is the uproar?” The passenger did not volunteer anything. “I figured he was one of these people who don’t like to talk so I never said any more to him.”[22]
The man left the cab at the corner of Beckley and Neely. He handed the driver $1 for a 95 cent fare, got out, and closed the door. Whaley later identified his passenger as Lee Harvey Oswald.
It was about a six-minute walk, or a five-minute trot, to Lee’s rooming house at 1026 North Beckley. He was going to get his pistol and a jacket. He arrived at 1:00 P.M. “Oh, you are in a hurry,” Mrs. Roberts, the housekeeper, said. She was watching television and wanted to talk about the shooting. But Lee did not answer her. He went straight to his room and stayed there three or four minutes. He picked up his pistol and a jacket and was zipping up the jacket as he went out the front door. Just a few moments before, at Parkland Memorial Hospital, President John F. Kennedy had been pronounced dead of a massive injury to the head.
Back at the book depository, Roy Truly and Patrolman Baker had completed their search. They had looked through every floor except the sixth and had inspected the roof, especially the west side, the direction from which Mr. Truly thought the shots had come.
As they walked back down to the seventh floor, Baker said: “Be careful. This man will blow your head off.”
“I think we are wasting our time up here,” Truly answered. “I don’t believe the shots came from this building.”[23] But because of the way he had seen the pigeons scatter, Baker thought they did.
When the two men returned to the first floor, Truly saw policemen in clumps taking down the names of men who worked in the building. He glanced from one group to another and noticed that Lee Oswald was missing. He knew nothing about Oswald—neither that he had been to Russia and had a Russian wife nor that he was a “Marxist.” Lee had told him that he was straight out of the Marine Corps. But Truly had Oswald on his mind because he had seen him just a few minutes before in the lunchroom, and now he was not with the other men.[24]
Quietly, he turned to Bill Shelley, Oswald’s supervisor, and asked if he had seen him. Shelley glanced from group to group and said no. Truly picked up a phone and called the warehouse where the job application forms were kept. He obtained Oswald’s full name, an accurate physical description, and his telephone number and address at the Paines’.
Truly walked over to a chief of the Dallas Police Department, who was standing a few feet away. “I don’t know if it amounts to anything or not,” he said, “but I have a boy missing over here.”
“Just a minute,” the chief said. “We will tell Captain Fritz.”
They took an elevator to the sixth floor, where Captain J. W. Fritz, chief of the homicide bureau of the Dallas Police Department, appeared to be occupied by the stairway. Truly told Fritz that he had a boy missing and handed him the slip of paper on which he had written Oswald’s address in Irving, his telephone number, and description.
“Thank you, Mr. Truly. We will take care of it.”[25]
Captain Fritz at that moment knew something Mr. Truly did not know. Three empty brass cartridges had been found by the southeast corner window of the sixth floor. And a rifle had been found near the stairway.[26]
Fritz left the building almost as soon as he heard about the missing man. He drove to City Hall to see if the man had a criminal record. And there he got news that a police officer had been shot.
About 1:00 P.M. Dallas patrolman J. D. Tippit was cruising the Oak Cliff area. Over his police car radio he had heard about the shooting of the president and a description of the suspect, which had been broadcast four times.[27] About 1:15, nine-tenths of a mile from the rooming house at 1026 North Beckley, Tippit spotted a man who bore a resemblance to the description. The man was rapidly walking east. Tippit slowed down and drove parallel and very close to the man. The man kept walking. Finally, when the police car was nearly grazing the curb, the man stopped. He leaned into the car, rested his arms on the open window ledge on the far side from Tippit, and the two men exchanged a few words.
The man stepped back. Meanwhile, Tippit opened his door, climbed out slowly, and walked toward the front of the car. He was at the left front wheel when the other man, who was near the windshield on the right, pulled out a revolver and fired. He hit the patrolman four times, and Tippit instantly fell to the ground, dead. His cap skipped a little onto the street. The gunman started away in a trot, ejecting the empty cartridge cases from his pistol and reloading as he went. It was just after 1:16 P.M.
An automobile repairman, Domingo Benavides, was parked in his pickup truck fifteen feet away when he heard three shots, watched Tippet fall to the ground, and saw the gunman empty his gun and toss the shells into some bushes as he jogged away. Benavides went to the fallen patrolman and, using Tippit’s radio, reported the shooting to police headquarters. Several other bystanders had also seen the shooting and the fleeing gunman, and by 1:29 P.M. the police radio noted a similarity between the descriptions of the man who had shot Tippit and the suspect in the Kennedy shooting.
27
The description broadcast on Tippit’s radio was of a slender white male, about thirty, 5 feet 10 inches in height and weighing about 165 pounds (Oswald weighed between 140 and 150 pounds). The description came from a steamfitter, Howard Leslie Brennan, who watched the motorcade from a retaining wall facing, and just across the street from, the southeast corner of the book depository. Brennan twice saw a man, the same man, in the sixth-floor corner window. Once, before the motorcade’s approach, Brennan watched him sit sideways on the window sill, thus seeing the man from the waist up. Brennan next saw the man as he took aim for his final shot. He appeared to be standing, resting against the window sill, holding the gun in his left hand and against his right shoulder. Brennan estimated that he took a couple of seconds to aim and fire, then drew back and paused for a second, as if to be sure that he had hit his mark. Brennan claims to have seen 70 to 85 percent of the gun.
Immediately afterward, Brennan saw everyone, including the police, running in the wrong direction, toward the west side of the building. He went to a policeman in front of the building and was taken to Forrest Sorrels, a Secret Service man who was parked in front in a car, and then to the sheriff’s office. At 12:45 P.M., the description he gave of the man he had seen in the window went out on police car radios. It was this description that presumably caused Tippit to stop and question Oswald. That night, however, Brennan refused to identify Oswald positively in a police lineup as the man he had seen that day. He later told the Warren Commission that he refused out of fear: the shooting might be part of a conspiracy, and he and his family could be in danger if he were the sole eyewitness. Once Oswald was dead, Brennan felt the danger was over and he could safely identify him as the man he had seen in the window. (Testimony of Howard Leslie Brennan, Vol. 3, pp. 140–161, and Vol. 11, pp. 206–207.)