Authors: Jerome Corsi
If Brennan was a source of information about the shooter, why was Sawyer so vague about what floor of the School Depository was involved? Brennan claimed to have seen the shooter so that he could describe his physical characteristics and his actions in detail, commenting even that when Oswald had fired his last shot, he paused to contemplate the scene with satisfaction. Why didn’t Sawyer have this detailed information if Brennan was his source? Sawyer recalled that the description of the suspect that he called in, the description that was broadcast over the Dallas Police Department radio at 12:45 p.m. came “from one witness who claimed to have seen the rifle barrel in the fifth or sixth floor of the building, and claimed to have been able to see the man up there.”
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Sawyer could not remember the man’s name and he could not provide a physical description of the witness, except to say he was around thirty-five years old.
Brennan was forty-five years old on November 22, 1963, and he was wearing a white construction hard hat in Dealey Plaza during the motorcade. Sawyer remembered none of these details about the man who gave him the suspect description. Sawyer testified he never saw the man again, not even at the line-ups the Dallas Police Department held that evening with Oswald. Sawyer further testified that during the entire time he was at the Texas School Book Depository after the shooting “between 25 to 50 people came up with information of one kind or another.”
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Certainly, Sawyer would have focused on and remembered any witness like Brennan who could give a precise physical description of the suspect and could relate the man’s physical position at the sixth floor window and the actions he took in shooting.
“A faithful rendition of the evidence should have led the Commission to say, rather, that Brennan almost certainly was not the source of the description and that the witness who really provided the description has remained unidentified,” concluded Sylvia Meagher, in her book,
Accessories After the Fact
.
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Brennan also testified that he gave his story to Secret Service Agent Forrest V. Sorrels, the head of the Dallas Secret Service office. This, Sorrels confirmed, but Brennan spoke to Sorrels only after Sorrels returned to the Texas School Book Depository from Parkland Hospital considerably after the 12:45 p.m. DPD radio broadcast that contained the suspect’s physical description.
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While Brennan claimed to have an excellent vantage point from
which to observe the assassination, the Warren Commission published a photograph as Commission Exhibit 479, which appears to be frame 188 of the Zapruder film, showing Brennan observing the motorcade from the concrete wall at the southwest corner of Houston and Elm as he claimed.
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The problem is that Commission Exhibit 479 clearly shows Brennan was sitting on the concrete wall facing Houston and Main, such that his back was to the Texas School Book Depository. In Commission Exhibit 479, Brennan is twisted around to his left, supporting his twisted body by bracing his left hand, palm down, on the top of the concrete wall. Brennan has his back still facing Zapruder’s camera, watching JFK as the limousine disappears behind the Stemmons Freeway sign. This evidence clearly suggests that as the last shot was being fired, Brennan was watching the motorcade, not looking up at the shooter in sixth floor corner window of the Texas School Book Depository.
Examining the Zapruder film frame by frame, Brennan can be seen in the Zapruder film from frame 133, the first frame of the Zapruder film in which the JFK limo appears after it has turned onto Elm from Houston, through frame 208, when the limo is heading down Elm and JFK’s head is all that can be seen above the Stemmons Freeway sign. In this entire sequence, never once does Brennan turn his body around to face the Texas School Book Depository squarely. Never once does Brennan look at the sixth floor window. With his back turned to the book depository throughout the shooting sequence, it is hard to see how Brennan could have observed as much as he claims to have seen. Brennan further testified that at the moment of the third shot, he was “diving off that firewall and to the right for bullet protection of this stone wall that is a little higher on the Houston side.”
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Yet, sitting with his back to the book depository and then diving for cover, Brennan claims to have seen the shooter shoulder the gun, take aim, fire, draw the gun back, move the gun to his side, and pause to make sure he hit his mark.
Further, Brennan said he observed two African-Americans he thought were watching the motorcade from the fifth floor window below the sniper’s nest. He also testified that he saw the shooter take his last shot from a standing position, and that he could see the shooter from the belt up, watching as he took his third shot.
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What Brennan did not appreciate was how low to the floor are the bottoms of the windows in the
Texas School Book Depository. Commission Exhibit 486 shows the two African-Americans from the inside of the building, doing a re-enactment of their positions at the time of the shooting.
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Both are crouching down on their haunches, knees bent forward, to enable them to look out the windows as seen from the photographs of the Texas School Book Depository taken as the motorcade passed. Commission Exhibit 887 shows a re-enactment shooter kneeling down at the sixth floor window to take shots at the motorcade.
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These photos, along with Commission Exhibits 1310, 1311, and 1312 showing a man with a ruler standing and sitting by the sixth floor window, make it clear that the bottom windowsill is only about one foot above the floor.
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The corner window in the so-called “sniper’s nest” was opened only another foot-and-a-half. Shooting through this narrow opening so low to the floor, a standing shooter would have a difficult time getting the angle needed to hit the motorcade as the limo passed the Stemmons Freeway sign on Elm Street. This is illustrated by Commission Exhibit 1312, which shows the man sitting on a box to look out the open window, down at the path of the motorcade along Elm Street. Furthermore, the obviously dirty windows would have made it, difficult if not impossible, to identify a standing man with any clarity from his belt up. The shape of a man might have been visible, but the dirty windows would have obscured any details.
When bystanders rushed the grassy knoll, with many going behind the picket fence to examine the parking lot and railroad yard, several people reported encountering Secret Service agents, even though no Secret Service agents were assigned duty in Dealey Plaza that day. Seymour Weitzman, a Dallas County deputy constable who played a major role in the search of Dealey Plaza immediately after the assassination, was one such bystander. Testifying to the Warren Commission in Dallas on April 1, 1964, Weitzman explained he encountered Secret Service in the railroad yards.
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Weitzman’s recollection of the Secret Service being there is particularly vivid because it involves a fragment of JFK’s skull. Responding to questions posed by Warren Commission assistant counsel Joseph A. Ball, Weitzman testified as follows:
Mr. Ball
: What did you notice in the railroad yards?
Mr. Weitzman
: We noticed numerous kinds of footprints that did not make any sense because they were going different directions.
Mr. Ball
: Were there other people there besides you?
Mr. Weitzman
. Yes, sir; other officers, Secret Service as well, and somebody started, there was something red in the street and I went back over the wall and somebody brought me a piece of what he thought to be a firecracker and it turned out to be, I believe, I wouldn’t quote this, but I turned it over to one of the secret Service men and I told them it should go to the lab because it looked to me like human bone. I later found out it was supposedly a portion of the President’s skull.
Mr. Ball
: That you picked up off the street?
Mr. Weitzman
: Yes.
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Note that Weitzman did not testify the Secret Service agents he found in the railroad after the shooting showed him any identification.
Dallas Police Department Sergeant D. V. Harkness went around to the back of the Texas School Book Depository around 12:36 p.m., some six minutes after the shooting, to make sure the building was sealed off. Testifying to the Warren Commission in Dallas on April 9, 1964, Harkness responded to a question from Warren Commission counsel David Belin as follows:
Mr. Belin
: Was anyone around in the back [of the Texas School Book Depository] when you got there?
Mr. Harkness
: There were some Secret Service agents there. I didn’t get them identified. They told me they were Secret Service.
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Note once again, Harkness also did not ask the Secret Service agents to show their identification. He, like Weitzman, simply took their word.
Joe Marshall Smith, a Dallas Police Department uniformed officer, gave similar testimony, answering assistant counsel Wesley Liebeler’s questions in Dallas on July 23, 1964:
Mr. Smith
: Yes, sir; and this woman came up to me and she was just in hysterics. She told me, “They are shooting the President from the bushes.” So I immediately proceed up there.
Mr. Liebeler
: You proceeded up to an area immediately behind the concrete structure here that is described by Elm Street and the street that runs immediately in front of the Texas School Book Depository, is that right?
Mr. Smith
: I was checking all the bushes and I checked all the cars in the parking lot.
Mr. Liebeler
: There is a parking lot in behind this grassy area back from Elm Street toward the railroad tracks, and you went down to the parking lot and looked around?
Mr. Smith
: Yes, sir; I checked all the cars. I looked into all the cars and checked around the bushes. Of course, I wasn’t alone. There was some deputy sheriff with me, and I believe one Secret Service man when I got down there.
I got to make this statement, too. I felt awfully silly, but after the shot and this woman, I pulled my pistol from my holster, and I thought, this is silly. I don’t know who I am looking for, and I put it back. Just as I did, he showed me that he was a Secret Service agent.
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Sylvia Meagher strongly suspected this man was one of the assassins with false credentials. Meagher went back to Dallas Secret Service records and concluded there were no Secret Service agents in Dealey Plaza or the vicinity until Forrest Sorrels, the head of the Dallas Secret Service office, returned to Elm Street and entered the Book Depository at 12:50 or 12:55 p.m. Sorrels rode in the lead car of the motorcade, and he stayed with the motorcade to Parkland Hospital, at which time he went back to Dealey Plaza to join in the criminal investigation. Who were the men who claimed to be but could not have been Secret Service? Was there any conceivable reason for such impersonation? Meagher felt so strongly about the evidence she wrote two paragraphs castigating the Warren Commission on this issue:
Few mysteries in the case are as important as this one, and it is appalling that the Commission ignored or failed to recognize the grounds here for serious suspicion of a well-planned conspiracy at work. It seems inconceivable that none of the many investigators and lawyers saw the significance of the reports made by these witnesses or realized that assassins positioned on the grassy knoll—behind the fence or trees—might have been armed with forged Secret Service credentials and lost themselves in the crowd that surged into the area.
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As noted at the start of the chapter, a professional sniper plans both to shoot undetected and to escape. Dealey Plaza was at the end of the motorcade route, with the entrance to Stemmons Freeway just beyond the triple underpass. Within minutes of the shooting, the sparse crowd in Dealey Plaza was enlarged by a surge of onlookers who rushed from downtown in the vicinity of Houston and Main to see if they could find out what had happened. The photographs of the Dealey Plaza area immediately after the shooting show large numbers of people climbing the grassy knoll to mill around in the parking lot and railroad yard beyond. An assassin handing off a rifle for deposit in a case or the trunk of a parked car, could easily walk away, mixing in with the crowd.
If a person looked official enough, perhaps dressed in a suit and tie and claimed to be a Secret Service agent, he could have easily slipped away. Nor does it seem even experienced Dallas Police officers took the time or trouble to study credentials even when they were presented. The escape strategy for a professional team of assassins in Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963, was simple—blend into the crowd and walk away. If stopped and questioned, claim to be a Secret Service agent and flash what looked like credentials.
In the interview with James Tague, the bystander whose cheek was nicked by a bullet that ricocheted in the shooting, Warren Commission Liebeler acknowledged this exact point. Consider the following exchange that closed out Tague’s interview:
Mr. Liebeler
: Other than that, is there anything that you can think of that you think the Commission should know about of what you heard and saw that day?
Mr. Tague
: No; I don’t know a thing. The only thing that I saw that I thought was wrong was that there was about 5 or 6 or 7 minutes in there before anybody done anything about anything.
Mr. Liebeler
: That was after the shots were fired?
Mr. Tague
: That was after the shots were fired.
Mr. Liebeler
: What do you mean, “Before they did anything”?
Mr. Tague
: There was no action taken except for the one policeman that I could see that stopped his motorcycle, and it fell over on him at first, and he got it standing upright and drew his gun, and he was the only one doing anything about it.