So this leaves the possibility Day saw the bag in the sniper's nest upon his first arrival, and that he thought he'd get back to it upon his return from the crime lab. But this fails the smell test, seeing as none of those arriving at the sniper's nest before Day's arrival had any recollection of a gun case/bag sitting on the floor of the sniper's nest, and no pictures were taken of it in the sniper's nest, and neither Montgomery nor Day (the two possible finders of the bag) could tell a consistent story regarding where the bag was "discovered."
News reporter Kent Biffle states the bag was discovered before the rifle was located. He mentions "We", this can only be assumed to be the various detectives,
Taken from Biffle's notes page 6 and 7:
It didn't take the policemen long to find the cartridges by the ambush window. We all stood around staring at the brown wrapping paper found nearby. It was a reasonable conclusion that it held the rifle.
An officer in the northwest corner of the room yelled: "Over here!"
I ran over, dodging down narrow alleys in the stacks of packing crates. I was secure in the knowledge that my theory was materializing. They'd found the body of the gunman, I guessed.
I was let down when the policeman pointed among a jumble of boxes at the hidden rifle. The muzzle and the steel butt plate were barely visible.
Biffle was almost certainly thinking of the lunch sack. From chapter 4c:
Kent Biffle, the only newsman besides Alyea to witness the search of the building, may also have seen this sack. Unlike Weatherford, however, he seems to have confused it with the bag purportedly found in the sniper's nest. In an account purportedly written in March 1964, and subsequently published in the Fall 1998 issue of Legacies, a History Journal For Dallas and North Texas, Biffle claimed that after the rifle shells were found by the "ambush window", "We all stood around staring at the brown wrapping paper found nearby. It was a reasonable conclusion that it held the rifle." Note that he says it was found "nearby," and not right by the window, as later purported by Studebaker. Note also that he says "we all stood around staring" at the wrapping paper, an impossibility if the wrapping paper was sitting folded on the far side of the box purportedly used as a seat by the assassin, in the southeast corner of the building. As shown on the Blind Detective slide, this was an incredibly confined space behind stacks of boxes. The "wrapping paper," should it actually have been found in this location, would not have been visible to more than a few people at a time. Perhaps, then, Biffle saw the bag sometime after it had originally been "found." Perhaps, after its initial "discovery" by Montgomery, wherever it was "discovered," Studebaker placed the bag on the floor in a more accessible location, where it was subsequently viewed by Biffle.
But there's a problem with this scenario as well. In his account, Biffle presents his observation of the bag before he presents the discovery of the rifle. Well, if this was so, why didn't Mooney, Walters, Hill, Craig, Faulkner, Boyd, Fritz or Alyea remember seeing the bag? Was it "found" after they left the area but before the rifle was found?
No, it was not. Det. Marvin Johnson, whose partner L.D. Montgomery was credited with the discovery of the bag, claimed the bag was discovered after he'd witnessed the dusting of the area around the lunch sack. And the record is clear that this didn't occur until after the discovery of the rifle.
So...was Biffle simply mistaken about the bag? Was the sack he'd observed the lunch sack observed by others, only with 20-200 hindsight in which it morphed into the "sack" purported to have held the rifle?
It sure seems so. A Biffle-authored story was published in the 11-23-63 Dallas Morning News. There, he mentioned that a "gnawed piece of fried chicken" and an "empty cold drink bottle"--items found near the lunch bag-- were found near the sniper's nest, but made no mention of a large bag or wrapping paper.
There's also this. Below is an image, (taken from the Owens film), showing the reporters invited up to the sixth floor on the afternoon of the 22nd gathering around the window where Bonnie Ray Williams ate his lunch. They appear to be looking down at something. The man with the tie, in particular, appears to be looking down at where the lunch bag was a few minutes before, before Det.s Johnson and Montgomery took the lunch sack, cigarette pack, and pop bottle to the crime lab.
Well. I'm pretty sure this man is Kent Biffle, pointing out to the other reporters where the lunch sack they'd just seen taken from the building had first been discovered.
Here's a photo of Biffle from 1963.
And finally... Biffle's latter-day story, written months after the shooting, does not begin with his entering the school book depository. Before that, he discusses his racing over to the grassy knoll after the shots. He then relates "The other side of the fence held no gunman. There was just a maze of railroad tracks and three dazed winos. 'What happened?' one asked me." Well, this is just not credible. None of the police officers claiming to have raced back behind the fence after the shots saw these "winos." If Biffle had talked to one of them, and had not bothered to point this man out to a police officer as a possible witness, then he was not much of a citizen, let alone a reporter. The so-called "three tramps" found in a railroad car passing through town, it should be noted, were not discovered till almost 2:00, an hour and a half after the shooting, and were not arrested until a few minutes later. It only follows then that Biffle had used "artistic license" to incorporate them into his story, and that he may have used this same "license" to add the bag into his story. One certainly can't accept his account as credible when he says "we all" stood around staring at the bag, when none of those to first observe the sniper's nest, including his fellow newsman Tom Alyea, had ANY recollection of the bag. It seems probable the bag Biffle was thinking of, then, was not the bag or sack supposedly used to carry Oswald's rifle, but the other bag or sack reportedly found in the building, the lunch bag, which most all the sniper's nest witnesses remembered, and which Biffle alluded to in his initial article in which he mentioned the gnawed chicken and empty bottle.
