A Candle Burned on the Table

Just for chuckles, here's part 1 of my Lancer talk; the relevant photos are on page 8 of my "Piper of Potemkin Village" essay.

ESCAPE FROM THE ELEVATOR ESCAPE THEORY

There is no escape from the Elevator Escape Theory. I speak from personal experience on this. You can run, you can hide- but wherever you go- no matter how you shelter your weary head- it will seek you and surely find you, and you will succumb to its relentless clutches.

I want to cover some of the items that got missed in the forum discussions. (Show Powell photo 7th-floor blowup w/diagram)

Let's start with the 7th-floor storeroom in the James Powell photo. Why are these electric lights burning, in broad daylight, at 12:30?

They got turned on and left on during that morning. They weren't left on all night, because the building was periodically checked by the Smith Detective Agency & Nightwatch Service, and was right down the block from the Sheriff's. Even a pedestrian would have remembered seeing those lights on, on the eve of the assassination. (Show photo of 7th-floor storeroom)

When we look inside, we can see that the room receives a fair amount of sunlight. A good reason to flick on the light in daytime would be to retrieve something hidden in some dingy place amongst all this stuff. It would be a good place to hide a rifle for a day or two, in preparation for the assassination. Notice the ceiling lamp in the corner. (Return to Powell 7th-floor blowup)

The Powell photo captures a different ceiling lamp, closer to the storeroom door. The diagram shows that this door swings out into the warehouse. The switch to flick on the ceiling lamps is located on one side or the other of the storeroom door.

Why is this table lamp on? It's set up close to the windowsill, and can be seen by someone outside, on the perpendicular, among the spectators on the Houston/Elm corner. A photo of the upper floors, taken after the fact, could record this lamp.

It's only academic, whether this table lamp was switched on separately, after the ceiling lamps. It may or may not6 have gone on at the same time. It had been set up there for occasional reading.

But was it used on this day for a different purpose?

There are no recorded sightings of Lee Harvey Oswald between approximately noon and 12:15. He had been left upstairs after the elevator race, and he would have been available then for any arriving stranger- any sniper- to show him where the rifle was.

I submit that Lee led this stranger to the storeroom, flicked on the lights, and was the last one to leave the room. He left the lights on deliberately. We don't know where he was when the shots went off, but it's beginning to look like he was in the 2nd-floor office.

"A candle burned on the table, a candle burned..."

That's a well-known line from Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak's masterpiece about the Russian revolution.

Lee left us a candle burning in that window... the table lamp.

It was a message for the future- however long that might be.