Booze wrote: ↑Sat Jan 17, 2026 11:20 pm
Scott wrote: ↑Fri Oct 17, 2025 5:45 am
Oswald was the only one missing from his place of employment after the shooting
That is an often repeated claim. In slogan form it's usually said that he was "the only employee not accounted for"
It has no basis in fact.
I haven't taken interest in the JFK assassination for years, but this claim was being circulated back then too.
Unless something new regarding this has come out in recent years, there was no 'roll call' of employees, or anything of the sort, conducted by the police.
A supervisor by the name of Truly, who found the sniper's nest, then proceeded to go through the building and the surrounding area to see which employees who were working on the upper floors were still on the scene. He didn't find Oswald and he communicated his suspicions to the police. He gave them Oswald's employment file which they used for a description, putting out an APB.
This all took place about a half hour after the shooting and by then there were several employees who were no longer on the scene.
Oswald was the only employee not accounted for on Truly's short suspect list and the police acted on Truly's suspicion of guilt flight. This seems to be the historic basis of the slogan..."Oswald was the only one not accounted for"
Fair enough, but it is a distinction without a difference.
Manson Family Los Angeles prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi goes into it in detail in his tome but I don't own it so can't easily check.
Anyway, something may be true on precise details but it is in essence true in fact. Real life is messy on the details that would otherwise make a crisp screenplay. It is important in law to construct paradigms that conveniently and truthfully model reality but do not alter the arguments.
"History as it really was," as
Leopold von Ranke would say, is a balancing act. Historiography must also reconcile many different points of view.
Oswald was indeed the only TSBD employee not reasonably accounted for who would make a reasonable suspect, which is how his vague description went out, which Officer J.D. Tippit likely heard.
After Oswald's arrest, he gave the police a lame story that he knew there would be no more work at the TSBD that day after the shooting, so he just went home (without telling his boss, no less) and then just "went to a movie."
Buell Wesley Frazier ─ Oswald's 19-year-old coworker from Irving, Texas who knew Mrs. Paine in their Irving neighborhood and helped Oswald get the job at the TSBD in the first place, and was the guy who drove Oswald to work that fateful morning (Friday) ─ testified that he saw Oswald leave right after the shooting, heading East on Elm Street.
Frazier, who the police suspected early on as an accomplice, thought that Lee was just leaving work to go eat, since he had not brought a sack lunch that day and had come with his "curtain rods" instead. This was weird anyway because Oswald stayed with Marina at Mrs. Paine's on Thursday night and went to work with Frazier on Friday morning, instead of coming out with Frazier in his car to the Irving suburb on Friday evening and staying the weekend as Oswald usually did.
Oswald left a cryptic breakup note with Marina in Irving, where she was staying with Mrs. Paine, the letter talking about being killed or captured ─ plus he left what little cash remained from his paycheck, and his wedding ring.
After Oswald's arrest, at first Marina wanted to dispose of some the "resume" photos of Revolutionary Lee that she had taken of her husband sporting Communist literature and his rifle and pistol at their Oak Cliff neighborhood house on
W. Neely Street ─ near both the future boarding house and the Texas Theater. But after the arrest, she could not get instructions from her husband about what to do with them, so they were not destroyed, and she testified to the Warren Commission that she had taken the photos herself, of which there were several poses. Oswald had told told the police that the
incriminating photo was faked somehow.
Marina also knew that here husband had perpetrated the earlier General Walker shooting and attempted assassination, which the FBI and the Dallas police had not figured out. The FBI in 1963 Dallas before Dealey Plaza was more interested in going after suspected Klansmen than solving the attempted assassination of a retired general and far-Right politician like Ted Walker, whom the Kennedies hated.
Oswald only had a small amount of cash on him when he was captured in the Texas Theater on Jefferson Ave. after shooting Tippit, and he probably had no serious escape plan. Oswald had tried to go home two-miles away to his boarding house on Beckley Ave. by bus, but that got was stuck in a traffic jam around Dealey Plaza after the shooting, and so Oswald took a cab from the Greyhound station on Commerce and Lamar Street (
LINK) for a whole 99 cents. Oswald had the cab driver let him off a substantial distance from his boarding house so that the driver did not know where he actually lived.
At Oswald's nearby Beckley Ave. boarding house in the Dallas Oak Cliff neighborhood, Oswald was only there long enough to change his shirt, retrieve his .38 revolver, and start hoofing it to a bus stop not far from where Tippit was shot on Patton Ave. and 10th Street. Oswald was probably hoping to still use the transfer pass from the unused bus ticket that would expire shortly, and maybe try to get out of town and make it to the Mexican border somehow.
Oswald had likely had not been able to make any friends in the pro-Castro Cuba "community" that might have helped him escape, so the odds were not good he would get away when Tippit thought he looked suspicious and got out of his patrol car to chat with him. Officer Tippit was shot four times, once in the head, and Oswald ejected the spent shell casings before running off with multiple witnesses nearby including a cab driver at 10th and Patton who thought that he might get carjacked. Since Oswald was armed, nobody wanted to chase him too closely but he went off in the direction of the Texas Theater on Jefferson Ave. Bystanders tried to use the radio in Tippit's patrol car to summon help, but other neighbors phoned it in as well.
The bullets in Tippit's body were too damaged to match the rifling in Oswald's modified gun with its cut-down barrel, but the shell casings did matcvh since the bore size of the more powerful .38 Special is slightly smaller (0.357 inches) than the .38 S&W caliber (0.361 inches) that the Lend-Lease model (0.38/200) S&W revolver was originally chambered for, and the spent shell casings would have expanded slightly in the cylinders when fired. Oswald's .38 Special ammunition on his person was just a grab bag gleaned from pawn shops. This was a guy one paycheck away from poverty and could not support his family of four. He wanted to send Marina and the kids back to Russia but she didn't want to go.
The Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas has an
Oral History Project with an amazing collection of interviews from as many people as possible while they were still alive who were in any way connected to the event ─ including Frazier, who hates Captain Fritz and doesn't really want to believe that the "curtain rods" that Oswald retrieved from Mrs. Paine's garage were a disassembled Carcano rifle, nor that Oswald is guilty of the JFK shooting in any case since he never had the benefit of a trial.
Buell Wesley Frazier
In 1963, Frazier was a nineteen-year-old order filler at the Texas School Book Depository. He trained fellow employee Lee Harvey Oswald and drove Oswald to work occasionally, including on November 22, 1963. After witnessing the Kennedy assassination, Frazier was detained and questioned by Dallas police. He later testified at length before the Warren Commission, particularly regarding the package he observed Oswald carrying on the morning of the assassination. Recorded June 19 and 21, 2002, July 13, 2013, August 9 and November 22, 2021.
Oh, and I should mention also that at no time before the Tippit shooting and the capture of Oswald shortly afterward at the Texas Theater ─ where Oswald had snuck in without buying a ticket, observed by the Hudson's Shoes store manager, who had been listening to the news on the radio and saw a very suspicious Oswald lurking outside and alerted the theater manager to call the police ─ did the police announce on the police radio or to the broadcast media the name of Lee Harvey Oswald as the JFK shooting suspect.
They only gave a vague description of Oswald as their person of interest. Officer Tippit likely found Oswald power-walking at 10th and Patton and decided to check him out. Oswald panicked and fired, and then fled to the theater as the police came roaring down Jefferson Ave. with Oswald skulking outside the shoe store, then darting into the Texas Theater without paying.
