Sandra Styles Story

Fri 08 Jan 2021, 8:25 pm

From the book The Lone Star Speaks.

THE VOICE OF SANDRA STYLES
“Neither of us heard anyone walking down the staircase from
the floors above, and, yes, those stairs were extremely
squeaky.”

[size=40]While [/size] Buell Frazier and Billy Lovelady watched the presidential motorcade from the front steps of the Depository, Sandra Styles and Victoria Adams watched from the fourth floor. One of the most troublesome aspects of the story told by Victoria Adams is that someone altered her testimony in the Warren Report. This alteration changed the timeline Adams described so
Oswald had time to escape from the sixth floor of the Depository without being seen or heard. This change would not have been necessary if everything had been as simple and truthful as the story presented in the Warren Report.

Victoria Adams signed a deposition stating that she and co-worker Sandra Styles descended the stairs from the fourth floor of the Depository at about the same time that Oswald or anyone else who might have been on the sixth floor should have been exiting. Neither she nor Styles observed Billy Lovelady or William Shelley, Lovelady’s supervisor, on reaching the first floor. And, yet, Adams’ deposition, printed in Volume VI of the Warren Report, states that the women saw both men in the hallway at the bottom of the stairs.

This error might not seem important, but it is, because it changes the timeline, placing Styles and Adams on the first floor several minutes later than they actually arrived. All of this is crucial when determining whether any assassin could have shot the President from the sixth floor and run down
the stairs as quickly as the FBI claimed Oswald had.

Victoria Adams retold her story to author Barry Ernest. Included in his book The Girl on the Stairs is an interview with Adams’ co-worker, Sandra Styles. In 2016, Styles also spoke with the authors about November 22,1963. Like Adams, she was single in 1963 and working for the Scott-Foresman Textbook Company. After attending Baylor University in Waco, Texas, Styles moved to Dallas in May 1963. She was living in an apartment in Irving and commuting to downtown Dallas at the time of the assassination.

She recalled that she and the other women who worked on the fourth floor of the Depository were excited that the President’s motorcade was scheduled to pass beneath their windows. Styles had no idea how important her and Adams’ memories of the minutes following the assassination would become.

Styles explained that student textbooks were delivered to the warehouse section of the Depository. Storage for these books was on the first floor of the building. In the less automated day and age of the 1960s, Texas schools would order textbooks directly from the Depository. Additional educational materials had to be physically attached to the various book orders. It was part of Styles’ job to place the teachers’ materials next to the book orders so they could all be delivered to the schools together.

The fourth floor of the Depository was a combination of Scott-Foresman offices and storage area for these extra educational materials. Styles and Adams interacted briefly with workers like Lee Harvey Oswald as they added the extra materials to various orders.

Styles recalled years later: “The workers [like Oswald] all wore jeans and work shirts with their shirt sleeves rolled up. Some would wear khakis or other kinds of work pants.” Other Depository employees like Styles and Adams, who worked for professional companies, dressed in office attire— dresses or skirts, blouses, sweaters, nylons, and heels. “There was no airconditioning in the building except in the offices,” Styles added.When asked about Lee Harvey Oswald, Styles explained, “I did not know until later that he lived in Irving. It was mostly apartment houses in my area of Irving.” When it came to a social life, Styles added, “We didn’t venture out into Irving for entertainment. We went to Dallas. It was so close, you see.” Styles paused for a moment as she thought back to those post-college days.

“We went to the clubs,” she began, but she quickly added, “dance clubs!Yes, I had heard of the Carousel Club.” Styles made it clear that she and her friends did not frequent clubs like the Carousel.

“Our favorite place was the Levee. People played banjos and sang songs from the 1930s and ’40s. It was on Cedar Springs Street.” Styles chuckled as she recalled, “They had four guys who played in a group there. The youngest had lots of hair and the oldest was bald.” But Styles remembered that in the early 1960s, most people her age “gathered in each other’s apartments and played games.” In 1963, she happened to have four roommates with whom she shared her apartment. To make ends meet, Styles worked more than one job. “I worked three nights a week and on Saturdays at Sanger-Harris, a department store.”

To Be Continued

Fri 08 Jan 2021, 8:29 pm

On that infamous Friday in November, Styles’ day began like most other days, except that the employees knew they might get a chance to see the President of the United States and the First Lady during their lunch hour. The employees on the fourth floor would have a good view of the presidential motorcade from their windows. Like each floor of the Depository, the fourth
floor had seven large double windows. Styles and Adams positioned themselves in front of an open window, waiting eagerly for the presidential motorcade.

“The limousine turned onto Elm Street and passed in front of us. The shots were fired. The limo slowed down. There were trees obstructing our view, but I could see movement of Mrs. Kennedy because of her hot-pink suit.” Styles then added a statement that Victoria Adams may not have been aware of. Adams told author Barry Ernest that immediately after the shots
were fired, she said to Styles, “I want to see what is going on.”

Adams may not have realized that her co-worker decided to check out the other windows for a better view of the street below her. According to Styles, “That was when I went to other windows to get a better view. I did not go to the manager’s corner office, but I did try to see out of Mrs. Garner’s [her supervisor’s] office. I don’t know what Vickie was doing while I was moving around.”

Styles continued by describing how the Scott-Foresman area of the fourth floor looked that day. Besides the two administrative offices, there was a large open room. “There was a partial wall between us and the stacks where teachers’ aids and other free materials were kept. Just to the west of the stacks was the break room, which was really just a table for eating and assembling packets to send out. The door to the stairs was in the back of the break room.”

Styles was uncertain how long it took her to check out the five windows she had access to on her floor. However, based on an experiment the authors made using the windows on the sixth floor of the Depository, this probably did not take more than thirty seconds. While Styles was peering through various windows, any assassin on the sixth floor would have been frantically hiding his rifle and carefully tiptoeing down a creaking staircase, hoping that the employees on every other floor did not see or hear him.

Styles’ story continued: “At some point she [Adams] suggested we go down to see what was going on, and we went to the public elevator. When it did not come right away, Vickie proposed going down the back stairs. We went across the full width of the office and down the back stairs. I am thinking all that took at least a minute, maybe closer to two.” Styles then
addressed what she felt was a discrepancy between her memories and Victoria Adams’. This is something she admitted not mentioning to author Barry Ernest.

“The discrepancy is in Vicky’s insistence that we went down immediately upon hearing the shots and mine that we did not. My theory is that Oswald was ahead of us on the stairs, and others are trying to prove that he would have been behind us; therein lies the rub.”Styles admitted, “Neither of us heard anyone walking down the staircase from the floors above, and yes, those stairs were extremely squeaky.” No one else on the fourth or fifth floors ever reported hearing anyone descending the
staircase before or after the assassination, either, and there were people on both floors.

To Be Continued

Fri 08 Jan 2021, 8:33 pm

What Styles did not know at the time is that her supervisor, Dorothy Garner, followed her and Adams to the office doorway leading to the staircase. Garner told Ernest she could hear the women’s heels clicking on the staircase as they descended. She was still standing at the doorway when Officer Marion Baker of the Dallas Police Department and Depository
administrator Roy Truly ran up the stairs to inspect the upper floors. No one passed her doorway before Baker and Truly.

Sandra Styles apparently misjudged how quickly she joined Victoria Adams on the staircase.Like Adams, Styles contradicted a statement that someone on the Warren Commission attributed to Victoria Adams. The report quoted Adams as saying that she and Styles saw fellow employee Billy Lovelady and his supervisor, William Shelley, standing on the first floor just as they finished descending the staircase. Both Adams and Styles agreed separately that this was untrue.

However, there may have been a strategic reason for someone to add this erroneous statement to Adams’ testimony. Both Shelley and Lovelady testified that they had run towards the grassy knoll area after the motorcade disappeared from sight. If Adams and Styles had, indeed, entered the first floor in time to see these two men, it would have lengthened the amount of
time the two women spent exiting the fourth floor. There seems to be no other credible reason for why this information was added to Adams’ testimony without her knowledge.

Another problem affecting the timeline for an assassin’s escape was the testimony of Bonnie Ray Williams. Williams was also employed by the Depository, and on November 22 he was helping lay new flooring on the sixth floor. Williams’ lunch that day became linked to Lee Harvey Oswald.

After the assassination, a Dallas police officer was photographed proudly displaying a brown lunch sack and an empty Dr. Pepper bottle. In various books, including Four Days, the caption under this photograph read: “A lunch bag and a pop bottle, held here by a Dallas Police technician, and three spent shell casings were found by the sixth-floor window. The sniper had
dined on fried chicken and pop while waiting patiently to shoot thePresident.”

It was not long before the investigators discovered that the lunch in question actually belonged to one of Oswald’s co-workers, Bonnie Ray Williams, not to Oswald. Williams had no reason to hide the fact that sat and waited patiently for the President’s motorcade. When questioned, he said he planned on watching the motorcade from the sixth floor. Williams and other co-workers who had been working all morning on that particular floor took the elevator down at about 11:50 a.m.

Williams retrieved his sack lunch and returned to the sixth floor. He thought his co-workers would meet him there to watch the motorcade. He admitted sitting near what eventually became known as the “sniper’s nest” until about 12:20 p.m. At no time did he see or speak to Oswald or to anyone else.A fact that is not commonly known is that Williams did not leave the
remnants of his lunch on the sixth floor. The chicken and Dr. Pepper were originally found on the fifth floor; they were brought upstairs and placed near the sniper’s nest. This detail was finally revealed by news photographer Tom Alyea. Alyea followed the first group of officers from floor to floor in the Depository. He filmed the various floors and the officers as they searched for an assassin and evidence.

Alyea told fellow reporter Connie Kritzberg: “There were no chicken bones on the sixth floor. We covered every inch of it and I filmed everything that could possibly be suspected as evidence. There definitely were no chicken bones on or near the barricade or boxes at the window.”

Alyea also saw Capt. Will Fritz pick up the three casings found on the sixth floor before being photographed in their original location or processed for fingerprints. His film footage of the boxes scattered around the west side of the sixth floor is the only photographic evidence of how the area originally looked because the search team began moving boxes before any other
photographer could take still photos. This explains the numerous fingerprints of law enforcement found on boxes that should not have been touched so quickly. Alyea’s footage is also proof that evidence like the food items were manipulated, and that several “official” photographs of the crime scene were staged. Now that this fact has been established, the question that
comes to mind is: Could the rifle have been placed on the sixth floor by someone other than the accused assassin?

To Be Continued

Fri 08 Jan 2021, 8:47 pm

Other questions about how Oswald could have managed to shoot from the sixth floor must also be considered. How did investigators think Oswald managed to retrieve the rifle he supposedly brought to work that morning from wherever he hid it, reassemble it, and hide himself and the rifle on the same floor where Bonnie Ray Williams sat enjoying his lunch?

If Oswald planned on shooting the President from the sixth floor, he could not have guaranteed that no other employees would return to the sixth floor to watch the motorcade, just as Bonnie Ray Williams had. Surely he did not huddle between stacks of books with the rifle next to him. If he decided to hide on the seventh floor, he probably could have heard Williams riding the elevator down to the fifth floor at about 12:20 p.m.

Williams was repeatedly asked by officials about the exact time he finished his lunch and left the sixth floor to go down to the fifth floor. He never appeared positive about the specific time. Without a watch, Williams was unsure of when he took the elevator back to the sixth floor, how long he sat eating his lunch, and exactly when he gave up on any of his co-workers
joining him on the sixth floor.

There was no way Williams could have known exactly what time he took the elevator down to the fifth floor to see if his co-workers were waiting there. He did say he thought he was on the sixth floor 10 to 12 minutes. He told the Commission members that he believed he went down to the fifth floor around 12:20 p.m. Williams also mentioned his assumption that he was alone on the sixth floor because it had been so quiet.

If Oswald were hiding on the seventh floor, it is highly unlikely he would have enough time to walk carefully down the stairs, work his way to the front window of the sixth floor, and arrange the so-called “sniper’s nest,” which apparently did not exist when Williams was on the sixth floor. Photographs of the sixth floor, taken thirty minutes or so after the assassination, show the east side of the sixth floor stacked with cardboard boxes, some full of heavy textbooks. Because of Tom Alyea, researchers now know that these photos show boxes which were not in their original positions. Neither Williams nor
his two co-workers on the fifth floor heard anyone above them moving boxes.

Perhaps the “sniper’s nest” was nothing more than a corner with boxes of books shoved into it.Hundreds of man hours were spent reenacting how an assassin could easily kill the President from the east corner of the Depository’s sixth floor.Some experts claim even the best marksman would have had problems with accuracy because an Italian-Carcano rifle was such an inadequate weapon.

Other experts are quite sure that any decent marksman could have made the shot easily. What is interesting is that the testimonies of Victoria Adams,Sandra Styles, Dorothy Garner, and Bonnie Williams create such problems with the official timeline that the real question is: Did anyone have enough time to set-up a “sniper’s nest” on the sixth floor from which to shoot thePresident?

There is also the question: How much “evidence” was tainted and/or altered by Dallas law enforcement? If Capt. Will Fritz could make the mistake of handling evidence before it had been processed, obviously, other officers could have, too.The strongest eyewitness to place anyone on the sixth floor during the President’s assassination was Howard Brennan. He was seated about 93 feet away from the Depository, directly in front of it. When asked to identify the person he saw standing with a rifle pointed at Elm Street, Brennan said that only Oswald, whose photo he had already seen on television that afternoon,most closely resembled the man he spotted standing at the sixth-floor window.

Later, after Oswald was safely dead and buried, Brennan claimed he could have positively identified Oswald on the evening of November 22, 1963, if he had not been afraid to do so. Once he felt free to talk, Brennan conveniently provided numerous details about the “man in the window.” He described him as being in his early thirties with a fair complexion, slender and neat, possibly 5-feet, 10 inches, and about 160 to 170 pounds. He had no memory at all of hair color.The Oswald arrested at the Texas Theatre on November 22, 1963, was 5-feet, 9 inches, and weighed about 135 pounds. That morning at the
Depository, he was wearing a brown, button-down, long-sleeved shirt with a white t-shirt underneath. If Brennan could actually see as well as he claimed,then the man he saw standing in the window of the sixth floor was heavier than Lee Harvey Oswald and not wearing the same type of clothes.

If Oswald was firing a rifle, then he was most certainly not standing. The window sills on the sixth floor were approximately twelve inches from the floor and the window itself, based on photographs, opened only about twelve inches that day. Anyone firing a rifle from that spot would have had to lie on his stomach or crouch on his knees. Photographs of reenactments show the window fully opened and the rifle attached to a tripod. One reenactment took place from a platform placed outside of the window rather than from the sixth floor itself.

No matter how many experts have duplicated the assassin’s shots, none of them have experienced the same emotions, the same adrenaline rush, or the same fear of being captured that an assassin would have felt. A professional assassin might have been so calm and well-prepared that he could handle a narrow window of opportunity, the realization that Bonnie Ray Williams might return to the sixth floor, and/or the possibility that any other employee might return from lunch ten minutes early. Lee Harvey Oswald was certainly not a professional assassin. There is no record he had ever killed anyone in his life. His military service had not included any type of combat. If Howard Brennan did see a man dressed in khaki who resembled”Oswald standing with a rifle on the sixth floor, perhaps that person remained hidden on the sixth floor until Dallas officials began their search. He might have blended in with various law enforcement officials, who would have simply assumed he was one of them.

One thing is certain: Lee Harvey Oswald could not have blended in with police personnel, and the testimony of Victoria Adams and Sandra Styles indicates that he probably did not descend from an upper level of the Depository in time to meet Officer Baker and Roy Truly face-to-face only minutes after the assassination.

Thu 21 Jan 2021, 3:59 am

Fascinating stuff, Vinny. It strikes me that the mechanics of how any alleged assassin got from the sixth floor to the first (ground) floor in the aftermath of the shooting without being seen is a key to the whole thing, and yet has never really been pinned down or - with few exceptions - given the in-depth attention by investigators and researchers it warrants.

Discounting Oswald as the shooter, it beggars belief that any 'stranger' could gain access to the building - presumably with a rifle - happily build a 'sniper's nest' and pot away at the president. Or if the rifle was 'hidden' in the building beforehand, how was that achieved? There would surely have needed to be 'insiders' in on the plot.

We know a rifle was in the building a week or so beforehand, and was 'shown off' to workers. But that's hardly something any serious wannabe assassin would do, logically.

As for exiting the building after the act, again, surely not possible without being recognised. There is a suggestion the shooter might have disguised himself as a Dallas cop and merged with the post-shooting chaos. A fiendishly clever idea. But how would this 'Dallas cop' have got into the building without being noticed and commented on? This was a busy, crowded office building with people coming and going, up and down stairs and lifts, all the time. Even if an assassin - in disguise or not - had managed to get to the sixth floor 'invisibly', would taking such a risk fit with any kind of rational forward planning? I think not.

With all this in mind, I took another look at the Hughes film. It's a fuzzy, low-grade image. Even so, it's clear there is a figure in the sixth floor window. The odd thing is that, moving it forward frame by frame (or as close to as is possible on Youtube), the figure does not seem to move. Whoever it is is facing forward, looking out. But by the last split second of the sequence, as the president's security detail is rounding the corner onto Elm, the figure in the window hasn't moved.

But with only two or three seconds before the shooting starts, surely this mystery figure would be readying, adopting a shooter's position, even if not actually sticking a barrel out of the window. Odd.

And yet the two workers just below, on the fifth floor, later testified that right after the shots they could hear ejected cartridges hitting the floor above them. Again, I find that questionable. Were any tests ever done to establish whether the sound of cartridges hitting the floor would be audible? How thick was the floor? And what about the peripheral sounds of crowds cheering, a motorcade going past, etc. And what did these two workers do afterwards? Just sit there looking out of the window? Did they try and get to the sixth floor? Maybe wise not to. I know I would have kept my head down, rather than be a dead hero. That said, if their hearing was so acute they presumably would have heard footsteps rushing across the sixth floor above towards the stairwell, followed by footsteps clattering down the notoriously creaky stairs. But it seems they did not.

So in terms of exiting the building unnoticed, everything I've read to date suggests this would have been so tricky and unpredictable that any professional assassin worth his or her salt would have crossed the TSBD off the list of potential sniping options right away. The idea was to shoot the president and NOT get caught. No value in the act otherwise, assuming the shooter was part of a team of paid hit persons. So in a way you can understand why so many fingers are happily pointed at Oswald. He ticks so many convenient boxes.

But for the sake of argument, let's assume the figure in the Hughes film was the assassin. Is there any other way he could have exited? Via the fire escape on the Houston side of the building? Too visible, and besides there was a Dallas cop right there almost immediately after the shots were fired. Was escape onto the roof an option? Any hiding places up there? How soon after the assassination was the roof searched? The thing is, all these options get back to the same thing. As a location for shooting at the president - despite being an ideal spot in so many ways - the TSBD was massively problematic.

That said, we still don't know who the figure in the Hughes film was. No TSBD worker, to my knowledge, has confessed to being on the sixth floor as the president passed by. But then, if it was you, would you?

To me, the roof of the Dal-Tex building makes a lot more sense. Assuming you could get up there without being noticed. In other words, how easy was it to access Dal-Tex? Was that ever looked into?

Looking at an aerial shot of Dealey Plaza from the afternoon of the assassination, you can see that Dal-Tex was part of or closely adjoined to another building (or another part of Dal-Tex) not quite as high as Dal-Tex itself. That corner overlooking Elm and Houston looks ideal; an even better vantage point than the TSBD. Conceivably, you could fire off a couple shots, walk across the roof (avoiding the 'well'' in the centre) to the far side, jump or climb down onto the adjoining roof and either exit through that building, or down a fire escape if there was one.

The advantage would be that you would already be well away from the action on the Plaza. And there two car parks just a little further up Houston, offering perfect getaway options. Checking on Google Streetview, it looks like that that Dal-Tex has been revamped and the car parks long gone. But if the contemporaneous aerial shot is anything to go by, this surely has to be a serious contender for how the shots from the rear and subsequent getaway were achieved.

And if that's true, then the TSBD starts to look increasingly like a massive red herring. It doesn't solve the question of who the figure on the sixth floor was. An anonymous TSBD worker? Some sort of 'coordinator' for the 'team'? It also doesn't answer precisely how the frontal shot or shots were done. But it does, I think, offer a more believable part-scenario than the Alice's rabbit hole of the TSBD. And then there's the intriguing discovery of a spent cartridge on the Dal-Tex roof years later. OK, maybe not 100% a smoking gun. But really, what are the chances? And were any feasibility re-enactments ever done from Dal-Tex? It would be interesting to know.

Thu 21 Jan 2021, 8:17 am

This is a good post and reply. I always thought the clinking bullets hitting the floor was bullshit. First, there was a large crowd down there and I'm sure it swelled up as the car was going by with people yelling and cheering, as well as X number of noisy motorcycles.

We're not talking about cheap plywood. The flooring was thick wood to support the tons of books and products sitting around.

And the two guys who claimed this were black living and working in a racist hate-filled city like Dallas in the early 60's.

Thu 21 Jan 2021, 10:45 am

Orange and JFK case, if you haven't already I suggest taking a look at this excellent thread created by Ed.

https://reopenkennedycase.forumotion.net/t1116-no-shots-fired-from-the-tsbd

My personal view is that any figure caught on camera at the sixth-floor window at around the time of the shooting was Jack Dougherty.

Fri 22 Jan 2021, 1:42 am

Thanks Orangebicycle and JFK Case.

Mick I agree that were no shots from the sixth floor window. I think it is possible that Howard Brennan saw JD.

Fri 22 Jan 2021, 2:41 am

I'll be sure to read Mick's link. And check this out:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxFWV4zexJk

What a crock of shit - "Yes, uh, you see Oswald moving into position for the shot." OMG. A bunch of blobs in the movie. Even the two black guys look like blobs yet, they say yep, that's Oswald "...getting into position..."

That show was made by the Smithsonian BTW, which is the logo you see in the upper left.

Even the people commenting on the above know it's a crock.

Mon 25 Jan 2021, 4:50 am

Done a bit more digging into Dal-Tex. Turns out the adjoining building address was 509 Elm St. It butts straight onto Dal-Tex. It's a storey lower, but easily jumpable or scalable. There was possibly even a fixed ladder in place linking one roof to the other.

I dug up an application for historic status for the whole area from 1978. It includes a photo of 509 Elm (see attached) showing the side facing North Record St, and interestingly there was a fire escape on that side, well out of sight of Dealey Plaza. Any individual, perhaps disguised as a Dallas cop, or carrying fake ID, could have been on North Record and away within two minutes, possibly less.

The more I think about this, the more it makes sense. If you were a professional assassin, you would not want to be firing from inside an office block. The noise and reverberations alone would make this a no-no.

A hypothetical scenario: the shooter gets into position on the roof of Dal-Tex via the North Record fire escape in the early hours of the 22nd and lies low until he gets the go-ahead via walkie-talkie, possibly from Eugene Brading on the fourth floor. He pops up, fires off his rounds, dismantles his rifle, stuffs it into a shoulder bag and races across the roof, climbs down onto 309, then across that roof to the fire-escape on North Record. Once on the street he gets into a waiting getaway vehicle or heads to one of two car parks nearby where a vehicle would be waiting.

Another option would be he passes the dismantled rifle through a car window to a waiting accomplice, then walks down Houston or South Market and Wood St to Dallas Union Station, just a two-minute walk away, and gets on a train. The station has direct rail links to Chicago, Los Angeles and San Antonio.

Keep in mind, all attention at this point would be on Dealey Plaza. My guess is the shooters would have been out of Dallas and quite possibly out of the country within a couple of hours.

There are unanswered questions, like who planted the rifle and the cartridges on the 6th floor, how and when this was done. There's also some dispute about the angle of fire. I've read an argument that the shooter must have been on the second floor of Dal-Tex or even lower. I don't get the logic there, given the relative height of the TSBD sixth floor. And with Dal-Tex being further back along Elm, I'm not convinced the angle argument carries much logic.

And then, of course, there's the curious presence of Eugene B. at a hotel near the Ambassador on the night RFK was assassinated.

Attachments

: 509 Elm Capture scaled.JPG You don't have permission to download attachments.(38 Kb) Downloaded 0 times

Sandra Styles Story

Sandra Styles Story

Re: Sandra Styles Story

Re: Sandra Styles Story

Re: Sandra Styles Story

Re: Sandra Styles Story

Re: Sandra Styles Story

Re: Sandra Styles Story

Re: Sandra Styles Story

Re: Sandra Styles Story

Re: Sandra Styles Story

Re: Sandra Styles Story