Here is the way they "solved" the Rowland problem. They asked Shelley to comment and constricted him to the specific description supplied by Rowland.
The clothing description was of no value due to Shelley's memory. Also he had no recollection of either leaving the first floor! The problem with this was that he had no knowledge over the period in question......12.15-12.33pm as he was outside on the steps before the shots and then wandering down to the rail tracks afterwards...... making his statement effectively meaningless. They never showed any photos to Rowland!
To resolve their headache they simply ignored the obvious candidate at that point in time. I believe primarily because of the late exit by Williams from the SN and the implications of an "unfinished" chicken piece.
But this is just the problem, it seems to me---the WC
didn't resolve their headache, in fact they made it worse by
not pushing Mr Williams as Mr Rowland's 'elderly Negro'!
Mr Rowland's sighting of a black man at the SN window was very... tricky for the official story, yes?
Least worst option
by far?
Get him explained away as Mr Williams!This would have had the
very large advantage of
---------------IDing the black man as an innocent employee
---------------tying in with Mr Williams' own declared timeline of having innocently left the window as soon as Messrs Jarman & Norman arrived on five (approx. 12.25).
Problem solved!
As for the chicken bones , the WC could
very easily have gotten Mr Williams to say he'd had his fill of chicken-on-the-bone-sandwich (
a pretty weird-sounding victual btw, as though Mr Williams doesn't quite know what they want from him here!) and that was why he just left it there as soon as he heard his friends arriving a floor below.
This for me is the real question:
Why didn't the WC actively push the line that Mr Williams was Mr Rowland's 'elderly Negro'?It seems to me the answer may be:
Because they knew it wasn't true and wouldn't wash (age, hair, shirt), and that Mr Rowland would take one look at a photo of Mr Williams and say, 'No, sir, definitely not him'.
This may also be the reason why they didn't show Mr Rowland the photo of the (physiognomically) much more promising candidate from the pool of Depository employees: Mr Eddie Piper. If Mr Rowland said no to him too, then only one conclusion remained:
The 'elderly Negro' wasn't a Depository employee. A non-employee at the SN window at the same time as a man holding a rifle? Disaster!
So...................... they tried to character assassinate Mr Rowland instead.
And so we come back to the difficulty with the theory that Mr Rowland's 'elderly Negro' was Mr Williams. This requires us to believe that
a) Mr Williams hung out at the SN window knowing that an armed man was over on the other side of the room
b) Mr Williams was allowed to leave in response to the happenstance of Messrs Norman & Jarman arriving on the floor below.
I still believe we should seriously consider the following counter-scenario:
1) The 'elderly Negro' was Mr Piper, whose own story of where he waited for and watched the motorcade from (the
opaque frosted glass of the first-floor windows!) is clearly a bunch of hooey
2) Mr Piper was the one who ate & left chicken bones
3) Mr Williams ate his sandwich (no bones!) on the three-wheeler a couple of windows down and did
not have a line of sight to the armed man by the southwest window-----as far as he knew, the only other person on the floor was Mr Piper, which fact was hardly cause for confusion or alarm
4) Mr Williams was allowed to leave because he was completely oblivious to the presence of an armed man or a non-employee on the sixth floor
5) The Thayer Waldo story had its origin in
Eddie Piper; so too did the very early 'porter' who 'brought Oswald up to the sixth floor' story.