5/9/2015 Was Lee Oswald Standing in the Depository Doorway?

Was Oswald in the Doorway of the Depository at the time of the

JFK Assassination?
By Magen Knuth

For a brief while, it looked like an air-tight alibi for Oswald.

Just a few seconds after the first shot at President Kennedy was fired, James Altgens of the Associated
Press snapped a photograph of the President on Elm Street with the Texas School Book Depository in the
background. The photo shows a man who looks uncannily similar to Oswald standing in the doorway.
The New York Herald Tribune on May 24, 1964, publicized the claim of researcher Jones Harris that the
man indeed was Oswald.

The Herald Tribune was not some supermarket tabloid, but rather a widely respected newspaper. Further,
the "Oswald figure" had been noticed and investigated even before the article appeared, so the
Commission devoted considerable attention to the claim. They quickly identified Billy Nolan Lovelady as
the man in the doorway, and questioned several people about the whereabouts of themselves and
Lovelady as the motorcade passed. William Shelley (6H328, CE 1381 pp. 84), Sarah Stanton (CE 1381
pp. 89), Wesley Frazier (2H233-4, 22H 647), Billy Lovelady (6H338-9, CE 1381 pp. 62), and Danny
Arce (6H365, 367) all testified and/or signed an affidavit stating Lovelady was standing outside the
Depository doors as the motorcade passed (1). Harold Norman (3H189) and James Jarman, Jr. (3H202)
testified they saw Lovelady in the doorway minutes before the motorcade passed and they left to watch
from the fifth floor of the Depository. Frazier (2H242), Arce (3H367), and Mrs. Donald Baker (7H515)
all identified Lovelady as the "Oswald" look-alike in the photograph. Lovelady, of course, identified
himself (6H339, Commission Document 457 pp. 2, 4-5). Frazier states that he does not see himself in the
photo because he was farther back than Lovelady and thus in the black area of the photograph (2H242).
The other people with whom Lovelady was standing, Shelley and Stanton, were also farther back than
him and so are also not shown in the picture. This is why Lovelady appears to be standing alone.

On the basis of all this evidence, the Commission concluded that the man was Lovelady, not Oswald
(WCR, pp. 147-149). This should have settled the issue forever, but alas in this case issues are rarely ever
"settled." The issue was revived, not due to some research done by conspiracists, but rather because of an
FBI mistake.

In a report to the Warren Commission on the man in the doorway, the FBI stated:

On February 29, 1964, Billy Nolan Lovelady was photographed by Special Agents of the FBI
at Dallas, Texas. On this occasion, Lovelady advised that on the day of the assassination of
President John F. Kennedy, November 22, 1963, at the time of the assassination, and shortly
before, he was standing in the doorway of the front entrance to the TSBD where he is
employed. He stated he was wearing a red and white vertical striped shirt and blue-jeans (CD
457, pp. 4-5).

The FBI photos show Lovelady in a red and white vertical striped, short sleeved shirt, but the man in the
doorway is clearly wearing a long-sleeved, checkered shirt. The Commission never checked the two
photographs but simply believed Lovelady when he told the FBI he was in the doorway. This FBI report,
along with the photographs of Lovelady, only fed the controversy.

The controversy
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shouldn't have lasted

for long. In 1967
Josiah Thompson
published the best-
selling book Six
Seconds in Dallas. He
discussed the
controversy over the
man in the doorway,
and took note of the
Warren Commission
testimony and the FBI
report. On the issue of
why Lovelady was
photographed by the
FBI on February 29,
1964 wearing a red-
Jerry Organ
and-white vertical-
striped shirt with short sleeves while the man in the doorway was wearing a long-sleeved shirt, Thompson
noted that Lovelady told CBS News "Well, when the FBI took me in the shirt, I told them it wasn't the
same shirt [worn on the day of the assassination]." Thompson added that "The shirt Lovelady now claims
to have worn on November 22 is long-sleeved and patterned in large squares" (pp. 225-227).

At that point, the issue should have been solved, but in typical fashion, conspiracy authors simply ignored
inconvenient evidence. Gary Shaw, in his 1976 book, Cover-Up, claimed that the question of who was in
the doorway had not been adequately answered. He wrote, "we believe the identity of the man in the
doorway is still open to question. There is as much, if not more, evidence to indicate that the accused
assassin was exactly where he said he was on the first floor of the Depository"(p. 42). Shaw also
claimed that no one on the Commission ever saw Lovelady and there is no published photo of Lovelady
in the Commission's exhibits or documents.

Also in the 1970s, the LA Free Press and Argosy published the claim, using blown up photos to show the
resemblance.

The House Select

Committee on
Assassinations felt that
this issue needed more
investigation. They took a
two-pronged approach.
The HSCA first had its
photographic evidence
panel examine CE 203
and 369, photos of
Oswald, and of Lovelady.
They used the tools of
forensic anthropology, by
which the metric and
morphological
characteristics of the
human face can be
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analyzed. Going far

beyond the causal and
subjective "looks like"
kind of analysis, they used
the Penrose distance
statistic to show that the
man in the doorway had
features very different
from Oswald's. Based on
the analysis of the
photographic evidence
panel, "the committee
concluded that it was
highly improbable that the
man in the doorway was
Oswald and highly
probable that he was
Lovelady" (The Report of
the Select Committee on
Assassinations, pp. 58).

The other approach was

that of Robert Groden,
who had a good Jerry Organ
knowledge of all the photographic evidence in the case. Groden analyzed three films the John Martin
film, the Robert Hughes film, and the Mark Bell film. These films showed a man in the doorway, wearing
a shirt identical in appearance to the shirt on the man in the Altgens photo. But these films showed that
the man wasn't Oswald, but rather was Lovelady.

Indeed, Groden contacted Lovelady, asked him to don the shirt he had worn on November 22, 1963, and
photographed him in it. The shirt, of course, was entirely consistent with all the photos from the day of
the assassination (Robert Groden, The Killing of a President, pp. 186-187).

Groden, a man responsible for many silly conspiracy factoids, had in

fact scored a solid research coup. "The committee
concluded that it was
As of today, most conspiracy theorists will admit that the man in the highly improbable that the
doorway was Billy Lovelady. Even Jim Marrs states in his book man in the doorway was
Crossfire that "most researchers today are ready to concede that the Oswald and highly
man may have been Lovelady" (p. 46). probable that he was
Lovelady."
May have been?

Yet, some conspiracy theorists still cling to this factoid. The web site Best of Kennedy Assassination
Links shows the picture of "Oswald" in the doorway next to a photo of Oswald and asserts "the man in
the doorway was in fact Lee Harvey Oswald."

Professor James Fetzer's edited book Murder in Dealey Plaza claims the following:

A man many people think strongly resembles Lee Harvey Oswald is pictured standing in the
front entrance of the Book Depository Building. If it is, in fact, Oswald, he could not have
been on the sixth floor of the building when the shots were fired. The Warren Commission
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will discount any possibility that the figure is Oswald, and instead identifies the man as Billy
Nolan Lovelady, another building employee. The man in the photo is wearing a dark, heavy-
textured shirt open halfway to the waist over a white undershirt. Lovelady later tells reporters
that he was wearing a red-and-white-striped sport shirt that day. The identity of the man in
the photo has never been clearly established. (pp. 34-35)

The most bizarre thing about all this is that Oswald himself admitted to being inside the building. He told
the officers who interrogated him that he was in the first floor lunchroom eating his lunch at the time of
the shooting. Then there is the following exchange with reporters in the hallway of the Dallas Police
Department:

Reporter: Did you shoot the President?

Oswald: I work in that building.

Reporter: Were you in that building at the time?

Oswald: Naturally if I work in that building, yes sir.

(Source: Video "The Men Who Killed Kennedy," Reel 4, "The Patsy")

Thus we have conspiracists claiming an alibi for Oswald that flatly contradicts his own statements. Not to
speak of contradicting all the evidence.

1. The site, the "Best of Kennedy Assassination Links," claims that Shelly testified that Lovelady was
sitting on the steps. The page cites Shelley's Warren Commission testimony, in which, Shelley does not
say Lovelady was sitting. Gary Shaw in his book Cover-Up also claims that Shelley said Lovelady was
sitting. He sites the source Commission Document 1347 page 120. This source discusses a threat on the
President's life that was not connected with the assassination. The real source for Shelley's statement is
Commission Exhibit 1381 page 84. Shelley signed the affidavit which states, "At the time President John
F. Kennedy was shot I was standing at this same place [in front of the depository]. Billy N. Lovelady who
works under my supervision on the Texas School Book Depository was seated on the entrance steps just
in front of me." It may well be that Shelley did not intend for it to sound as though Lovelady was sitting
on the steps as the motorcade passed, but either way, his affidavit is reconciled by the testimony of other
witnesses and the photograph.

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