Victoria Adams on the Stairs: Brouhaha Edition

Another rift among Kennedy assassination researchers has erupted within the past month over the integrity of Victoria Adams' testimony given to the criminal Warren Commission. While it could remain a matter of relative inconsequence, these matters rarely stay that way. Our view is that Adams' original published testimony is the canonical and best version.

The background to the argument between researchers John Armstrong and Barry Ernest starts with the latter's important book published in 2011, The Girl on the Stairs. Its author explains that its protagonist's descent down the stairs of the Texas School Book Depository from the 4th floor excludes the possibility that anyone else could have used that route to flee from the 6th floor. Only in the fertile imagination of the criminal Warren Commission could Oswald have been the president's assassin and then flee down the stairs at precisely the time he allegedly did so. There would have been a traffic jam as that stairway was the only path out. Recall that the criminal Warren Commission had Oswald racing at warp speed to get his Coke in the 2d floor lunch room so that he could casually and calmly encounter Dallas police officer Marion Baker and TSBD building manager Roy Truly.

As far as I can discern, there seems to be no disagreement over this general play of events, namely that it would be impossible for both parties to use the stairway without running into each other.

An additional, but important, detail attaches to the story regarding whom Ms Adams saw once she descended with co-workers Sylvia Styles and Dorothy Gardner, the latter the office manager of the Scott Foresman company office occupying part of the 4th floor.

In her testimony to the Warren Commission, Adams stated that she saw two men near the rear elevator on the first floor, which was the only elevator access to the 6th floor. Her testimony stated that she arrived there within seconds - 1 minute tops - of hearing the sniper bullets. These two men are significant in a number of ways, and submerging them under the sediment of history is an important objective of the continuing cover-up of the murder of the president.

Ernest upsets 40 years of silence on this matter by averring that he interviewed Victoria Adams in 2002 who then stated that she saw no men at the bottom of the stairwell. When Armstrong took issue with this development in 2021, Ernest issued a rebuttal on Kennedys and King, a website edited by fellow researcher Jim DiEugenio.

Ernest contends that Adams told him that she did not see two men near the elevator, thus leaving us the options of 1. recantation by Adams 2. Obstruction of Justice by altering her testimony. Ernest enlists the support of Sylvia Styles, still living, to rebut the testimony, and his Boy Scouts' honor that Adams made these confessions. He also suggests that Adams' missing testimony from the criminal Warren Commission archive is a sign of foul play and might vindicate his assertions about Ms Adams who died in 2007.

For his part, Armstrong cites Adams' Warren Commission testimony, Marion Baker's testimony, Billy Lovelady's testimony, and Bill Shelly's testimony to support the general idea that two men were standing near the elevator at the time Adams and her entourage reached the first floor. One would think that this marshalling of testimony was sufficient, but things are never this simple.

The irony of ironies is that Kennedys and King even published Ernest's rebuttal. Given DiEugenio's many castigations of other authors' flimsy and even fake evidence, why did he submit this to the court, so to speak?

To put a point on it, during a moment of insomnia, your Chronicler read one of DiEugenio's  slams, written in 2008, of the likes of James Fetzer, Peter Janney, and Gregory Douglas for using questionable, unverifiable, and 3d hand hearsay as evidence, precisely the methods used by Ernest in his rebuttal.

In 2002, when electronic recording equipment was plentiful and abundant, and when notary publics abounded, Barry Ernest did not bother to document the testimony of a critical witness very troublesome to the criminal Warren Commission. This lapse is unacceptable. We are not left with any substantive evidence that Ms Adams recanted her testimony, made any allegations of discrepancies, or was the victim of obstruction of justice.

Armstrong reports that Adams was given a copy of her testimony to approve and/or make corrections. She made a few grammatical corrections, signed it, and that was the end of it. Ernest reported his attempt to find the original commission transcripts in order settle the matter once and for all, but came up empty handed. So that leaves us with only the 1964 published interview of Adams as found in the criminal Warren Commission's fable known as the Warren Commission Report.

However, Baker's report that he saw "two white men" near the elevator corresponds very nicely with Adams' testimony in which she placed two men near the elevator, using a diagram supplied by the criminal Warren Commission.

Bill Shelley was a CIA agent or operative, and we wouldn't give his testimony any time other than to analyze how he twisted it to conform to the criminal Warren Commission's lies.

The reason that it is so important to bury the "two white men", and Ernest confirms it, is that it provides substantiation for Armstrong's thesis that the 6th floor snipers escaped down the elevator which was stationed just below the 6th floor where it was boarded for escape, aided by Bill Shelley and Billy Lovelady. It was Shelly's job to turn off the electricity to keep the elevator out of service until needed.

So why does Ernest wish to make the "two white men" disappear? That is a rabbit hole I prefer to avoid, but he pretty much shows his hand when he somewhat dismissively refers to Armstrong's escape thesis.

We suspect that more will be said about this disagreement, but for now, that's our story and we're sticking to it until some substantive verifiable evidence dissuades us.

Reference

John Armstrong, Oswald DID NOT Run Down the Stairs, Harvey and Lee (website), nd, accessed(Oswald DID NOT Run Down the Stairs (harveyandlee.net), accessed 3/13/20201)

Barry Ernest, Barry Ernest Replies to John Armstrong, Re: Victoria Adams, Kennedys and King (website), February 27, 2021, accessed( Kennedys And King - Barry Ernest Replies to John Armstrong, RE: Victoria Adams, accessed 3/13/2021)

Copyright 2021 Tony Bonn. All rights reserved.

Who Is Doorway Man?

New evidence from multiple researchers finally settles the question of the identity of the man known as Doorway man in the famous Altgens6 photograph taken by Ike Altgens of the Associated Press at the time President Kennedy’s motorcade passed in front of the Texas School Book Depository at 12:30 PM on November 22, 1963. If you guessed Lee Oswald you are correct.

 

The photograph has been a point of contention because the individual shown in the photograph bears resemblance to both Lee Oswald and Billy Lovelady, another employee of the TSBD. The reason for the contention is that the Lone Nut Theory requires that Oswald be on the 6^th floor of the TSBD at the time of the shooting. Without that flimsy bit of "evidence," the wheels come flying off the Warren Commission’s go-cart of lies.

 

Jim Fetzer, Ralph Cinque, and Clare Kuehn provided various insights into the resolution of Oswald’s identity, but it was not intuitively obvious to the most casual observer. Part of the problem is that there are at least 4 versions of the Altgen6 photo when only 1 is expected. The other problem is that in addition to a faint resemblance between Lovelady and Oswald, there is also a Lovelady imposter. Isolating the various components of the photographic fraud required the contributions of several investigators, but their conclusions are groundbreaking.

 

The starting point for unraveling the mystery is Oswald’s own statement about where he was at the time of the ambush of President Kennedy. One of the conspirators in the murder, Captain Will Fritz of the Dallas Police Department, took notes of his interview with Oswald which were recently discovered which reveal Oswald’s statement of his whereabouts. Oswald told Fritz that he was “out with Bill Shelley in front,” meaning that there were witnesses to his location and that he could not be on the 6^th floor even though his presence on the 6^th floor would prove absolutely nothing other than he was on the 6^th floor.

 

William Shelley, a CIA agent like Oswald, adamantly denied being with Oswald when he said “At no time during the shooting did I see Lee Harvey Oswald.” As Dr Cinque notes, the 3 name code for Oswald was a giveaway that Shelley was lying about a man with whom he worked. Shelley also withheld critical information from the Warren Commission about his work on the 6^th floor of the TSBD on the morning of 11/22. His genuineness as a truthful witness is lacking, especially considering his involvement with the agency even prior to its legal inception after World War 2.

 

But the nail in the coffin for the lying Shelley is Victoria Adam’s testimony when she said that after she went down the stairs immediately after the gun fire, she saw Oswald and Shelley standing by the elevator and Jack Ruby standing outside.

 

In addition to the eye witness testimony, we have the photographic witness of Ike Altgens, which requires a bit of explanation before proceeding with the findings. The conspirators, especially the FBI, were very anxious about the clothes Lovelady and Oswald were wearing that day because they realized that some evidence had to be altered using people who were not appropriately attired. The reason the evidence had to be altered is because it showed Oswald where he told Fritz that he was standing. To alter evidence, the CIA and FBI required an Oswald imposter, in this case Billy Lovelady.

 

Lovelady told the FBI at the time of the Kennedy murder that he wore a red vertically striped red and white shirt and blue jeans. Indeed, the FBI took a photograph of Lovelady in such attire in March 1964 because that is what Lovelady was wearing. However, this was not even close to the type of shirt which Oswald wore which had a very distinctive cut and fabric pattern.

 

So the FBI photographed a Lovelady imposter in a plaid or checked shirt which more closely resembled Oswald’s shirt than the red and white striped shirt Lovelady wore on the 22d. Then the CIA took elements of Lovelady’s face to superimpose on Oswald’s face, and then physically altered the photograph to make Oswald’s shirt look more like the new Lovelady shirt. They also covered up the man in the Fedora with a toddler, the former of whom was Jack Ruby. Bill Shelley had to be wiped out, which is probably the person with a white splotch over his face, and Lovelady had to be obscured which may be the man with his arms over his head. Numerous rearrangements of Altgen6 were made to create the fraud that Lovelady was the man in the doorway.

 

Dr Cinque began to unravel the fraud as he examined the body and shirt with known images of Oswald, especially of those taken at the police station. As a chiropractor, he noticed that the body position and lay of the shirt of the man in the doorway matched Oswald. The shirt which was given to Lovelady ex-post facto contained too many anomalies, not the least of which were lay, construction, and fabric.

 

More significantly, the person known as Black Tie Man standing next to Oswald is shown in a physically impossible position as he appears both in front of and behind Oswald at the same time. The problem is that his image, pasted in, obscures much of Oswald’s left arm and shoulder – yet he is supposed to be behind Oswald.

 

One finding which we offer is that Oswald’s missing arm and shoulder are found on the left side of Black Tie Man’s jacket. If someone would move that element back to Oswald, we would see part of Oswald’s missing arm. We are also doubtful that Black Tie Man is real, but that is not critical to the main story.

 

Other observers, including a dentist comparing jaw structure, noticed difficulties with the conspirators’ hoax. The man in the doorway had to be Oswald. Dr Jim Fetzer published these findings in a 5 part series of articles in 2012 highlighting the work of Cinque and other collaborators who deconstructed the Altgens photo fraud perpetrated by the CIA.

 

One other interesting observation the authors made was the fact that 2 Secret Service agents were looking back at Oswald as was Jack Ruby. Why would attention be on an obscure no-name warehouse worker? The answer that we provide is that Oswald was not at his assigned post on the 6^th floor. The patsy decided that he did not want to be the patsy.

 

The findings of the researchers are historic and ground breaking as they obliterate the last of the Warren Commission Lies to be exposed. For those wanting a fuller explanation of Cinque’s analysis, please follow the links in the Reference section with parts 2 and 5 being the most valuable.

Reference

Jim Fetzer, et. al., JFK Special 2: Oswald was in the doorway, after all!, Veterans Today, April 13, 2012, http://www.veteranstoday.com/2012/04/13/jfk-special-2-oswald-was-in-the-doorway-after-all/

Copyright 2013 Tony Bonn. All rights reserved.