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What Arnold Rowland saw
The bulk of the evidence in the Kennedy assassination was fabricated with a view to incriminating Lee Oswald, while evidence conflicting with that conclusion was suppressed. Unfortunately, the suppressed evidence does not harmonize into a coherent, alternative version of the assassination. However, among the few facts at variance with the official explanation of the crime which can be regarded as proven beyond reasonable doubt is that in the fifteen minutes prior to the assassination two men, one of whom was holding a rifle, were seen on the same floor of the TSBD.
It is almost certainly the case that the two men were situated on the sixth floor of the TSBD. One eyewitness, Carolyn Walther, who was standing on the east side of Houston St. with her friend Pearl Springer, says she saw the two men 'on either the fourth or fifth floors.' She insists that the window in which she saw them standing close together was 'not as high as the sixth floor.' (CE2086) However, Springer, who acknowledges that she was with Walther at the time, says 'she noticed no one standing in the windows on the upper floors of the Texas School Book Depository building,' nor did Mrs Walther 'mention to her anything about seeing a man standing in a window of that building holding a rifle.' (CE2087) Mrs Walther, clearly, cannot be trusted in matters of detail.
The eyewitness who provided the most detailed description of the two men was 18 year-old student Arnold Louis Rowland, who was standing with his wife Barbara near the corner of Houston and Main Streets. Rowland, who observed the TSBD windows carefully for fifteen minutes while waiting for the motorcade to pass the spot, noticed that one of the men was black and the other white. He first saw the coloured man 'hanging out' the infamous southeast window on the sixth floor of the Depository. (2H174-75) Rowland didn't pay much attention to the 'elderly Negro' at the time (2H176), because a good many TSBD windows had negroes 'hanging out' of them. (He observed only one white man doing the same.) Nonetheless he was able to recall the man's appearance quite well when asked to do so by the Warren Commission. 'He was very thin, an elderly gentleman, bald or practically bald, very thin hair if he wasn't bald. Had on a plaid shirt. I think it was red and green, very bright color, that is why I remember it.' The man was aged between 50 and 60, was between 5' and 5'10" tall, and 'very slender, very thin.' His complexion was '[v]ery dark or fairly dark, not real dark compared to some Negroes, but fairly dark.' Furthermore, his face was either 'very wrinkled or marked in some way.' (2H188) The man remained in the southeast window from 12.15 to about 12.25, when he vanished.
The question inevitably arises as to whether the man could have been Bonnie Ray Williams, who tells us that he ate a chicken sandwich lunch on the sixth floor between noon and an unspecified time afterwards. Williams told the Warren Commission that he left the sixth floor when he heard noises coming from the fifth floor below; assuming that they were being made by Jarman and Norman, he went down there to watch the parade together with his friends. Perhaps, then, he passed the entire period between noon and 12.25 'hanging out' the sixth floor window. Since Jarman and Norman apparently did not reach the fifth floor until after 12.25, Williams would not have vacated the sixth floor until after 12.25, which is precisely when Rowland says the elderly negro disappeared from view for several minutes. However, Williams could not have been the man. First, he was much too young to have been mistaken for a man in his 50s. (Of the three African Americans who allegedly watched the presidential motorcade from the fifth floor, Jarman was the oldest - and he was only 34.) Second, he did not possess a bald spot. Third, he did not eat his lunch at the window. He sat on a trolley a considerable distance from the southeast. Last, it is extremely unlikely that he spent as much as 25 minutes on the sixth floor. In his earliest statement, he indicated that he had spent as little as 3 minutes there. In another statement, he indicated that he wentdown to the fifth floor at about 12.15. By the time Rowland noticed the elderly negro, therefore, Williams had either just gone down to the fifth floor or had been absent from the sixth floor for as many as twelve minutes.
Who, then, was the elderly negro? Curiously, no one fitting the elderly negro's description was seen escaping from the building. Although about ten minutes after the assassination Deputy Sheriff Roger Craig observed a man driving a light green Rambler station wagon on Elm St. who he seems to have assumed was the darker of the two men various witnesses had seen on the sixth floor, he describes him as a 'husky looking Latin, with dark wavy hair.' If Craig's opinion was that the man was actually a negro (Jim Garrison, On the Trail of the Assassins, p. 95), the elderly negro's distinctive features (his age, bald spot) are missing. A not unreasonable assumption, therefore, is that like Lee Oswald the man seen on the sixth floor was an insider. If he was a TSBD employee, the two obvious candidates are 56-year-old mail wrapper Troy Eugene West and 56-year-old janitor Eddie Piper, neither of whom has an alibi for his whereabouts between noon and 12.30. Both claim, rather improbably, to have been on the first floor the entire time and to have seen no one else at all, not even each other. Most important, it is not possible to verify their respective claims to have been on the first floor when the shots were fired.
Troy West, who had been employed by the TSBD for some 16 or 17 years, told the Warren Commission that between noon and the time the police arrived in the building a minute or two after the shots he was in his first floor office eating his lunch and 'making coffee for the employees.' He says he did not see a single person the whole time, even though several people crossed the first floor on their way out of the building and he was apparently making coffee for others besides himself. He did not hear the shots and the first thing that took his attention away from his lunch was the sudden entry of TSBD building supervisor Roy Truly and a 'bunch' of police officers and FBI men a minute or so later. (6H361-2) Since Truly and Baker apparently entered the building alone - no FBI agents or police officers are known to have entered the building for at least another five minutes - the question has to be asked whether West really saw this event. Since Eddie Piper claims also to have seen Truly and Baker enter the first floor, the question also has to be asked why Piper and West did not at least see other. Furthermore, local reporter Pierce Allman, who entered the TSBD only a minute or so after Truly and Baker, says that apart from Lee Oswald, who was just then leaving the building, he saw no one on the first floor at all. Why did Allman not see West or Piper, and why did West and/or Piper not see Oswald and/or Pierce? In fact, the earliest confirmed sighting of West on the first floor came at least five minutes after the shots when Jarman reached the first floor from the fifth. (It could even have been later because Norman and Jarman disagree in their estimates as to how many minutes passed before they went down to the first floor.)
Eddie Piper's story is similar, but even more problematic. Like West, Piper claims to have seen Truly and Baker enter the building about a minute or so after the shots. This story is not easily reconciled with the fact that Piper does not mention having seen West, Allman or anyone else. What's more, the first confirmed sighting of Piper on the first floor was as late as ten minutes after the assassination. William Shelley, who had watched the motorcade from the street, re-entered the TSBD through a side door about ten minutes after the shots had been fired. When Shelley arrived, Piper was just 'coming back from where he was watching the motorcade in the southwest corner of the shipping room.' (CE 1381, p. 84) If Shelley did not lay eyes on Piper until more than ten minutes after the assassination, then Piper could very well have been anywhere in the building when the shots were fired. There is a discrepancy in his story that makes Piper particularly suspicious. Shelley says that when he arrived back in the TSBD, Piper was 'coming back from where he was watching the motorcade.' However, Piper says he moved from this spot immediately after the shots. (6H386) If Shelley arrived back in the building ten minutes after the assassination, Piper had long since moved from his spot at the window. Piper is clearly as bereft of an alibi as West, for much the same reasons, while the indications that he is lying seem even clearer. Either West or Piper, therefore, could have been the 'elderly negro' Rowland saw hanging out the sixth floor window, with Piper being the more suspicious of the two men.
A minute or so after he first noticed the elderly negro, Rowland observed a second man at the other end of the same floor. 'I noticed on the sixth floor of the building that there was a man back from the window, not hanging out the window. - this was on the west corner of the building, the sixth floor, the first floor - second floor down from the top. (2H169) This man was white. Rowland described him to the Warren Commission as 'slender in proportion with his width,' either 'a light Latin or a Caucasian,' with hair that 'was either well-combed or close cut.' He was wearing 'a very light-colored shirt' open at the collar' worn on top of 'a regular T-shirt' or 'polo shirt and 'dark slacks or blue jeans.' (2H171) His weight he estimated at 140-150 pounds and, as for his age, he 'appeared in his early thirties.' (2H172) The striking fact about this man was that he was holding a gun. 'He was standing and holding a rifle. This appeared to me to be a fairly high-powered rifle because of the scope and the relative proportion of the scope to the rifle.' Rowland told his wife Barbara about the man, who initially caused him some concern. '[W]e thought momentarily that maybe we should tell someone but then the thought came to us that it is a security agent.' (2H169) Although Rowland watched the window constantly so that he could point him out to to Barbara, the gunman seems never to have reappeared.
Although Rowland's impression that the shots had come from the railroad tracks prevented him from focusing on the TSBD windows during the gunshots (2H180), after the assassination it was clear that he had witnessed something extremely important. He soon found himself at the Sheriff's Department where, between 1 and 2pm, he provided a reasonably detailed description of the man he had observed on the sixth floor. His statement recorded the sighting of a 'white man [who] appeared to have light coloured shirt on, open at the neck.' Even at this early stage, however, there is evidence of official resistance to eyewitness testimony that did not conform to the theory that the shots had been fired from the southeast window of the sixth floor. Presumably because Rowland could not be prevailed upon to say that he had seen the white man at the southeast window, the issue of which window Rowland saw the man at was bypassed altogether. The statement says only that Rowland saw him at 'two adjoining windows which were wide open,' a phrase which applied to the casements at both ends of the floor. (16H953).
The following day, however, Rowland decided to tell a pair of FBI agents who visited him at home about the elderly negro but 'they just the same as told me to forget it now' (2H183). He says that he mentioned the negro to no less than six different pairs of FBI officers who interviewed him about the case in the following weeks, but encountered complete disinterest. (2H184-85) On November 24, Rowland was visited by FBI agents James W. Swinford and Paul E. Wulff. Although Rowland's statement conveyed the impression, once again, that he had only seen one gunman on the sixth floor, the statement is important because it stated explicitly that Rowland had seen the man in the 'two rectangular windows at the extreme west end' of the TSBD. (16H954) The November 24 statement therefore betrays the fact that, whatever Rowland had seen in the easternmost window, the FBI was not interested in writing it down. This is indirect evidence that Rowland was not lying when he told the Warren Commission that he had persistently tried to raise the subject of the elderly negro with the FBI.
Although he was the only witness who saw a gunman and an accomplice in the TSBD windows to have been deposed by the Warren Commission, large elements of Rowland's testimony are corroborated by other witnesses. Although there are glaring discrepanices in the various accounts which are impossible to reconcile, there is general agreement that, of the two men, one had a significantly darker complexion that the other. Those witnesses who corroborate Rowland on this point include Carolyn Walther, Toney Henderson and John Powell, an inmate of a sixth floor cell in the County Jail directly opposite the TSBD who says that he saw the two men fiddling with the scope of a rifle. Although all witnesses were not certain that the gunman was African American - Carolyn Walther thought he could have been Mexican while others state simply that the complexion of one man was darker than the other - the testimony of all witnesses who noticed activity on the sixth floor prior to the assassination supports the conclusion that one of the men seen on the sixth floor was the 'elderly negro' so closely observed by Arnold Rowland.
THE POWELL PHOTO
Corroboration for the participation of a negro in the assassination comes from James W. Powell, a military intelligence officer assigned to the 112th Intelligence Corps Group's Field Office in Dallas, who took an important photograph of the TSBD approximately thirty seconds after the shots were fired. Powell's 35mm colour slide photograph was supplied to the FBI on January 2, 1964. Predictably, however, the FBI could detect nothing of significance in it. In a memo written by Special Agent George T. Binney dated the next day, it is stated that Powell had told the FBI that the photo showed a human figure: 'on about the fifth floor, a Negro male was observed in one of the windows,' a statement that was presumably worded so imprecisely ('on about'?) in order to invite the conclusion that the picture captured nothing more significant than the image of one of the two African American who had been watching the motorcade from the fifth floor window immediately below the sniper's perch (Norman and Williams). However, the FBI ignored the question of the negro altogether and on January 8, 1964, returned the slide photo to Powell on the basis that it only showed 'boxes stacked in a formation similar to that which has been recorded in other photographs made of this window.'
Yet the crucial fact is that Binney's formula 'on about the fifth floor' signalled the FBI's intention to evade the question of the actual location of the negro Powell had been trying to draw attention to. In fact, Powell must have been trying to draw the FBI's attention to the presence of a negro at a higher location than the fifth floor. That much can be determined from the fact that he did not let the matter rest, as he surely would have done if there was reason to think that his photo showed only Norman or Williams. In 1975, Powell told Jim Johnston of the Church Committee that an enlargement of the slide clearly shows 'a figure of a Negro male looking out the sixth floor window directly above the one containing the boxes.' In another statement in the same memo, Johnston states that Powell told him that the photo 'clearly shows' a negro male. The problem with Powell's claim, which we have only in Johnston's paraphrase, is that the window 'containing the boxes' has to be a reference to the sniper's perch: no window on the fifth floor contained boxes. What this mean, no less, is that the negro Powell could clearly see in his slide was standing in the window immediately ABOVE the infamous southeast window, that is to say, in the easternmost window of the SEVENTH floor.
Although we don't know what the Church Committee made of Powell's photo, an 'enhanced' version was examined by the House Committee in 1977. Strikingly, however, the HSCA determined that in neither the Powell photo nor the Dillard photo taken a few seconds earlier 'did the processing operations reveal any sign of a human face or form in the open sixth floor or adjoining windows.' What the HSCA's discussion of both the Dillard and the Powell photos reveals is that it construed its brief very narrowly as determining whether human faces or forms were visible in the southeast window of the sixth floor or those adjoining it. The problem, though - if we leave aside the questions of whether the HSCA's 'processing operations' were actually intended to reveal rather than conceal - is that Powell was not saying that there was a human form to be seen in the infamous sixth floor window, which he referred to as 'the one containing the boxes.' As we saw, he was saying that the negro was to be seen in the one directly above it. And, in fact, if we examine the Powell photo, a black and white version of which is posted below, there are two apparent spots which could well be remnants of a human figure, spots which may be all that was left of Powell's negro male after he had been reprocessed by HSCA photographic experts into virtual invisibility. In short, there is good reason to believe that Powell's photo once did show a clear image of a negro male on the seventh floor of the TSBD. It is hard to account for Powell's insistence, both in 1964 and 1975, that his photo 'clearly' showed the figure of a negro, if it did not in fact do so. Why would anyone persist in such a view if it could easily be disconfirmed by inspecting the photo itself? If Powell had been withholding access from a photo about which he was making extraordinary claims, then it would be a rather different matter and it would be fair to assume that he was engaged in some kind of a deception. Yet Powell seems to have been quite happy to show his photo to anyone who might want to see it. What complicates matters is primarily that Powell cannot have been referring to the negro - probably Williams - who can be seen looking out of the fifth floor window below the sniper's perch. Since it is an acknowledged fact that at the time of the assassination several negroes were looking out of various fifth floor windows, he would not have been telling anybody anything they did not already know. The conclusion I feel is to be drawn from the strange story of the Powell photo is that sometime between 1975, when Powell passed it to the Church Committee, and 1977-78, when it entered the hands of the HSCA, it was subjected to retouching that almost entirely eliminated the presence of the negro man Powell says it had shown well enough. In short, the FBI evaded the question of the negro figure in 1964 and the figure was almost entirely 'disappeared' in the course of the HCSA investigation in the late 1970s. What we should trust, surely, are the words of the man who had the original photo in his possession for at least twelve years. It is greatly to be regretted that when Powell was interviewed by the ARRB in the 1990s, it solicited recollections of his experiences on November 22, 1963, rather than a discussion of the problems raised by his photograph. It would be interesting to know what he would have said about the HSCA's inability to find a human face or form in its 'enhanced' version of his photo.
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