Just came across this......from "The Oswald Affair" by Léo Sauvage March 1964. Note the date, it precedes Ball and Belin‘s trip to Dallas to "sort things out".
https://www.kenrahn.com/JFK/The_critics/Sauvage/The_Oswald_Affair/Oswald_Affair.html"3. The Chicken Bones
Entering the storage room on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, the police found, near the window from which the shots had been fired, an empty cigarette pack and the remains of a meal: a piece of partly eaten fried chicken, some chicken bones in a paper bag, and an empty Coca-Cola bottle.
Officially announced Friday afternoon on television by Captain Fritz, this discovery was published in every newspaper around the world and taken as an indication of the cold-bloodedness of the assassin who had calmly waited, eating chicken and smoking cigarettes (though there was no mention of cigarette butts), for the moment to shoot. Nobody doubted that the person who had eaten the chicken was the assassin, and some expected the police to pump Oswald’s stomach in order to prove that he was that person. Chief Curry, however, denied that there had ever been any such intention. He had enough evidence against, Oswald, he said, to dispense with stomach pumps. But like Captain Fritz, Curry seemed perfectly convinced that the chicken was Oswald’s, and
on Sunday the FBI agent on the scene, Gordon Shanklin, made it final by informing Fred Powledge of the New York Times that a print of Oswald’s left index finger had been found on the paper bag containing the chicken bones. Meanwhile, in his eagerness to establish that Lee Oswald had been in the Elm Street building at the time of the murder, Captain Fritz had triumphantly announced to press and television that no fewer than six witnesses had seen Oswald there shortly before the shooting. One of these witnesses, Captain Fritz said, had invited Oswald to come outside with him to watch the approaching motorcade from the street, and Fritz seemed to attach great importance to the fact that Oswald, after refusing the invitation, had asked that witness to send the freight elevator back up to him.
The chief of the Dallas Homicide Bureau did not explain how a hand-operated freight elevator could be sent anywhere without an operator in it, but in any event, side by side with the news of Oswald’s chicken lunch, the papers printed the story of his having been seen by several witnesses only so short a time before the crime that the Presidential motorcade was already approaching. The contradiction was obvious, and significant, for if Oswald hadn’t had enough time to have eaten that chicken between the departure of Captain Fritz’s witnesses and the assassination, was someone else waiting—and eating chicken—near the sixth-floor window from which President Kennedy was shot? Was that second man Oswald’s accomplice? Or was he perhaps the real assassin in whose place Lee Harvey Oswald had been arrested?
I do not know whether the Dallas investigators spent any time pondering these dramatic questions. Nor do I know what laboratory tests—if any—were made on the remaining piece of chicken and the bones, in order, for example, to find tooth marks. (Captain Fritz could have learned about these possibilities in Söderman and O’Connell’s handbook, Modern Criminal Investigation without waiting for Soviet criminologist I. Karpets to remind him of them). Nor, again, do I know whether anyone in the Dallas Police Department thought of making plaster casts, or at least taking photographs, of the chicken leftovers before throwing them away.
What is certain is that from Monday the 25th on, the chicken bones were never mentioned again. When, the following Wednesday, I expressed my concern over the question to Assistant District Attorney James Bowie in Dallas, he seemed not to share it at all. According to Mr. Bowie, Oswald was not the person who ate the chicken. This I had already assumed from Captain Fritz’s witnesses. Moreover, Mr. Bowie said—and this I had not previously heard—it had been discovered that
the chicken was eaten and discarded near the window the day before the President was shot. Had the police found the man who had eaten it? Mr. Bowie didn’t know. This was on November 27. On
December 8, the New York Journal American published a “step by stealthy step” account of a copyrighted story by Gene Roberts originally published in the Detroit Free Press and then syndicated to various other newspapers across the country. Somewhere in the middle of that story, the following lines appeared:
“The storage room seemed made to order for an assassin. It was cluttered with rows of book cartons, some of them in stacks six feet high. Five depository employees had worked in the storage room until noon, covering its floor with plywood. One of them,
Bonnie Ray Williams, walked near the window at the 10 o’clock smoking break, downed a bottle of pop, chewed on a piece of chicken. This killed the theory that the assassin had eaten chicken while waiting in ambush.” This was the first I (or anyone else, I believe) had heard of Bonnie Ray Williams and the four other men who were working in the sixth-floor storage room until noon on the morning of the assassination. Neither Jack C. Cason, president of the Texas School Book Depository, nor Roy S. Truly, its manager, had ever mentioned them. On the day of the murder, indeed, Mr. Cason was quoted by the Dallas Morning News as saying that “President Kennedy’s killer could have been holed up in that sixth floor hideaway for as long as four days without anyone bothering him.” Nevertheless, Mr. Truly has since confirmed Gene Roberts’s modestly hidden scoop. “Maybe I left out a few things, talking to reporters,” he remarked when I reminded him on the phone that he had never spoken of the workmen before. “Yes, I may have forgotten about it, there were so many things to think of, and everybody was so upset.”
Well, maybe. But how is it that the police found Oswald’s palm print, but no other, on a carton, which it now develops, must have been shifted back and forth during the morning by several different hands? And since it now also appears that Oswald could not, because of the exceptional activity going on there all morning, have used the convenient hiding places of the sixth floor, where did he keep his rifle from sight until noon? When did he take it out from where he had hidden it? How did he get it to the sixth-floor window in time for the murder without being seen?
Moreover, if Gene Roberts’s story represents—as it seems to do—the present position of the Dallas authorities, one wonders how Bonnie Ray Williams convinced Assistant District Attorney Bowie that at the 10 o’clock smoking break on November 22, he was chewing chicken bones which, according to what Mr. Bowie himself told me, were already a day old."
Some interesting stuff there.....seems a mishmash of a number of statements. Remember Williams first official statement that provided any detail about the lunch occurred on December 2.
Did Williams originally try to say the chicken was left there at 10am? Or is there simply confusion with the Shelley claim that it was Givens who was eating at the smoke break?
