Vince Bugliosi's timeline from Reclaiming History
Vince made an attempt at providing a narrative timeline in his book. The relevant components appear below with his timestamps.
I do not know why Bugliosi claimed the "elevator Race took place at 11.47am. Those involved claimed it was after Shelley had departed for the first floor, presumably by the west elevator. He would need to shut the gates to allow it to be called up for the flooring crew to access it. Shelley saw Oswald shortly after his return to the first floor about 11.50am. Oswald was observed on the fifth floor by the workers as they descended. Perhaps Oswald took the west elevator up to the fifth floor about 11.50am and shut the gates, allowing it to be "called" by those above? In any event at least a minute or two would pass before the "elevator race" could start after Shelly's departure from the 6th floor for lunch. Most likely 11.55am is a more accurate estimate for this event.
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11:47 a.m. (The Elevator Race)
Some of the stock boys in the Texas School Book Depository Building are laying new flooring up on the sixth floor. The schoolbook business is a little slow this late in the year, and rather than lay the boys off entirely, Bill Shelley, a Depository manager, put them to work resurfacing the upper floors, where most of the books are stored.* Half a dozen of them are at it-Bill Shelley himself, Bonnie Ray Williams, Charles Givens, Danny Arce, Billy Lovelady, and occasionally Harold Norman, when he has time to give them a hand. The work is pretty straightforward. They have to move the heavy cartons of books from one side of the floor to the other, then back, as they lay new flooring over the old planks. It took them about three weeks to do the fifth floor, and they're just starting in on the sixth, moving as many cartons as they can from the west side of the open floor over to the east. Given the number of books they have to move, they aren't very far along.
They 're still working on the first section, on the westernmost portion of the sixth floor.121 At one point, Bonnie Ray Williams thought he saw Lee Oswald, though he is not sure, messing around with some cartons near the easternmost freight elevator on the sixth floor, during the half hour before noon. He didn't pay much attention though. Oswald is always messing around, kicking and shoving cartons around.122 The warehouse crew usually knocks off about five minutes before noon to give themselves time to wash up for lunch, but today, anxious to see the president, they quit a little earlier. In high spirits, the young men commandeer both of the big freight elevators for a mock race to the bottom. Bonnie Ray, Billy, Danny, and Charlie all pile into the east elevator and head for the bottom. The rest of them take the west elevator. It isn't really much of a race. The east elevator is faster, and they all know it.123
Charlie Givens notices Lee Oswald in front of the elevator shaft on the fifth floor as they flash past on their way to the ground floor. 124 "Guys!" Oswald calls after them. "How about an elevator?" Givens tosses his head back as the freight elevator plunges down. "Come on, boy!" Givens calls out, suggesting Oswald come down to the bottom floor too, though apparently not on their moving elevator. "Close the gate on the elevator," Oswald shouts down the shaft, "and send the elevator back up."125 Oswald means the west elevator. The east elevator has to be manned, but the west one can be summoned from any floor if its gate is closed.126 When they get to the first floor, however, no one bothers with Oswald's request.
12:00 p.m. (Cigarette Trip)
At the Book Depository, some of the stock boys wade into their lunches in the small, first floor employee's lounge, which the architects designated as the recreation room and which employees call the "domino room," after their favorite pastime, while others eat while standing in front of the building. Charlie Givens discovers he left his cigarettes in the pocket of his jacket up on the sixth floor. The thirty-eight-year-old navy veteran goes back up on the elevator. The sixth floor appears deserted as he crosses the wide space they cleared for the new flooring, but when he gets back to the elevator with the cigarettes and prepares to go down, he is startled to see Lee Oswald, whom he had seen a few minutes earlier on the fifth floor, now on the sixth floor, walking along the east aisle, away from the southeast corner of the room, clipboard in hand. "Boy, are you going downstairs?" Givens calls out. "It's near lunchtime."
"No, sir," Oswald replies. Oddly, he again asks for the west elevator gate to be closed when Givens gets back downstairs.
"Okay," Givens shrugs.142
When he returns to the first floor on the east elevator, he turns to close the west elevator gate, as Oswald requested, but finds it missing-it's up on some other floor.143 After eating lunch in front of the building, he joins Harold Norman and James Jarman inside at a first-floor window looking onto Elm Street, but after a bit they decide to go outside for the motorcade. Later, Norman and Jarman change their minds and go back in to watch from the fifth floor, while Givens walks over to the corner of Main and Record to watch the motorcade with a couple of friends.144
12:06 p.m. (Williams arrives on the 6th Floor)
At the Book Depository Building, Bonnie Ray Williams had picked up his lunch in the domino room on the first floor, gotten a Dr. Pepper from the soda machine, and taken the east levator back up to the sixth floor, expecting to find some of the other guys up there. Billy Lovelady said he was going to watch the motorcade from there, and Bonnie had more or less agreed with Danny Arce that they would too-but he doesn't see anyone on the sixth floor when he gets there. Bonnie settles down anyway, in front of the third double-window from the southeast corner overlooking Elm Street, to eat his lunch-a piece of chicken on the bone, two slices of bread, and a bag of Fritos. No one else shows up. After a while he gets up and erches on a "two-wheeler," one of the hand trucks they use to buck the heavy boxes of books around. It's dead quiet up here, nothing moving but specks of dust in the air. To his right
he can see the west wall, because that's where they cleared the books out to resurface the floor. His view to the left is blocked by the unusually high piles of boxes the workers moved there in preparation for the reflooring job. It's so quiet he can hear the pigeons on the roof above and someone moving around on the floor below-someone walking, then moving a window. He hears the traffic and growing murmur of the crowd in the street below. It's finally clear that no one else is coming up to watch from the sixth floor. He finishes off his Dr. Pepper, puts the chicken bones back in the paper sack, leaves the bottle and sack there, and goes back to the elevator to see who's on the floor below.146
12:15 p.m. (Rowland sights a Gunman)
Arnold Rowland and his wife Barbara find a place to watch the motorcade on the sidewalk in front of the Criminal Courts Building on Houston Street, near the west entrance to Sheriff Decker's office. T he young couple are still students at Dallas's Adamson High School, but both got off early today and came downtown to shop for a while before Arnold goes to his job at the Pizza Inn on West Davis Avenue. 148 A hundred yards to the west the Rowlands can see policemen on the railroad bridge over the Triple Underpass and another two-dozen or so uniformed officers in the streets around the plaza. Arnold and Barbara remember the nasty incidents involving Adlai Stevenson and Lyndon Johnson not too long ago and understand that security will be tight for the motorcade. 149 Arnold knows the building on the next corner very well several times he has been to the Texas School Book Depository to get books, including a physics notebook he bought there two or three weeks ago.150 He and his wife take note of a number of people looking out the windows of the building, including a black man hanging out of one of the southeast corner windows. 151 A nearby police radio squawks out the progress of the motorcade.
"What's the location?" Inspector J. H. Sawyer asks.
"Now turning onto Cedar Springs Road off of Turtle Creek," the dispatcher informs him.
"Ten-four," Sawyer replies.152
Arnold Rowland can tell from the conversation that the motorcade is about two miles away now.153 As he continues to scan the upper floors of the Depository, Rowland would later say he spotted a man holding a high-powered rifle at port arms (across his chest) in the window at the west end of the sixth floor.T hat's some distance away, but Arnold knows his way around guns, and he can tell by the relative proportion of the scope to the rifle that it's a heavy piece, no .22 caliber. Though the rifleman is a couple of feet back in the shadows, Arnold, whose eyesight is better than 20/20,154 sees him very clearly, a slender man in his early thirties, with a light complexion and either well-combed or close-cut dark hair, wearing a light-colored, open-collared shirt over a T-shirt.155
"Hey, you want to see a Secret Service man?" he asks his wife Barbara.
"Where?" she asks, staring intently at a commotion developing across the street.
"In the building there," Arnold says, pointing back up at the Depository. His wife, however, is paying no attention and instead directs him to look across the street at a couple of police officers assisting a young black man who's having some sort of epileptic fit. By the time Arnold gets his wife's attention and points out the open window, the man with the rifle has disappeared.
"What did he look like?" she asks, disappointed to have missed him. Arnold describes the man and how he was holding a rifle with a scope.
"Oh," she sighs, "I wish I could have seen him. He's probably in another part of the building now, watching people."
Her attention returns back to the action across the street, where an ambulance arrives to take the epileptic to Parkland Hospital. Although Arnold continues to scan the upper floors of the Depository every thirty seconds or so, hoping to catch another glimpse of the man he assumes is a Secret Service agent so that he can point him out to his wife, he
doesn't see the rifleman again. Nor, to his later regret, does he bother to mention what he saw to a nearby police officer.156
12:15 p.m. (Williams arrives on the 5th Floor)
Bonnie Ray Williams steps off the elevator onto the fifth floor of the Depository. He discovers Harold Norman and James "Junior" Jarman there.157 With seven big doublewindows
across the Elm Street face of the building, there's plenty of room for the three of them to watch the motorcade. Harold squats at the window in the southeast corner, and Bonnie Ray joins him there, taking the second window of the pair. Junior kneels at the second double-window, leaning over the low sill. If they lean out far enough, they can talk to each other outside. The view is terrific, since from their perch they can see south to the corner of Houston and Main and beyond, as well as all the way west down the curving sweep of Elm to the Triple Underpass, with nothing in their line of sight but the thick foliage clustered on the branches of an oak tree158 nearly right below them along the north side of Elm. Except for that oak, they will get a pretty good view of the motorcade from Four Days in November the moment it turns off Main Street until it disappears into the shadow of the underpass
leading to the Stemmons Freeway. 159
12:22 p.m. (Motorcade reaches Main)
Deputy Chief Lumpkin turns the pilot car right off Harwood onto Main Street and gets his first good look at the crowds awaiting the motorcade. "Crowd on Main Street's in real good shape," he tells Chief Curry over the police radio. "They've got 'em back off on the curb."
"Good shape," Curry says, barely audible over the shrieks and screams of the cheering crowds. "We're just about to cross Live Oak."
"Ten-four," Lumpkin replies.163
12:23 p.m. (Brennan takes position)
Howard Brennan's hunch was right-he does indeed find a great spot, at the corner of Houston and Elm, right across the street from the Book Depository. He even has a seat, a low, ornamental wall curving around the end of the long reflecting pool-or "lagoon," as Dallas folk call it-along the west side of Houston Street. His aluminum hardhat shields his head from the sun, and he reckons he will have, in a couple of minutes, a good view of the First Family. His eyes rove over the swelling crowd. There's quite a bunch on the steps of the Depository Building across the street, and more people turning up every moment. If the crowd gets too thick he can always stand up on top of the low wall to see well over their heads. He notices quite a few people in the windows of the Texas School Book Depository, in particular three black men on the fifth floor near the southeasternmost side of the building, leaning way out of their windows to chatter to each other, and a fellow just above them on the sixth floor, who for a moment sits sideways on the low windowsill.171 It strikes Brennan as odd that this guy is alone, while almost everyone else is with someone. The man in the sixth-floor window seems to be in his own little world, unsmiling, calm, with no trace of excitement. Brennan, who is farsighted, has especially good vision at a distance, and sees him very clearly.
12.28 p.m (Fisher and Edwards see man in 6th floor window)
On the southwest corner of Elm and Houston, directly across the street from the Book Depository, Ronald Fischer, a young auditor for Dallas County, and Bob Edwards, a utility clerk from the same office, wait at the curb for the motorcade. Edwards notices a white man, on the thin side, among the boxes at the sixth-floor southeast corner window of the Depository Building. "Hey, look at that guy in the window," Edwards says, poking Fischer. "He looks like he's uncomfortable."178 He does look uncomfortable, Fischer thinks, when he spots the man in the window, a slender man with brown hair in his early twenties, casually dressed. Oddly enough, even though the motorcade is likely to appear at any moment now, this guy isn't watching out for it. Instead of looking south toward the corner of Main and Houston like most of the crowd, he's staring west toward the Triple Underpass, or maybe even beyond to the Trinity River. He is curiously still too, not moving his head or anything else. He appears to be kneeling or sitting on something, literally boxed in by the high wall of boxes behind him.
Edwards laughs, wondering who the guy is hiding from. Fischer goes on watching him for a while, but never sees a movement. The man seems "transfixed." It's very strange.179
