On Saturday, August 26, 2023 at 9:13:56 PM UTC-4, donald willis wrote:
Hill's 6th-floor holler proves just the opposite of what was intended
The two window shout-outs from upstairs in the depository played hob with re-creations of the scene(s). Very awkwardly, the Warren Report tried to have it both ways: It granted Mooney his "around 1pm", but just for the discovery of the "nest" (p79).
Then, it had Mooney take 10 minutes squeezing between two boxes and seeing the shells at... "approximately 1:12" (p79). The 10-minute squeeze. It based the second time on Insp. Sawyer's 1:12 transmission re shells. In "Four Days in November", Vincent
Bugliosi compromised. Like the WR, Bugliosi skips Mooney's shout and puts Sgt. Hill's at 1:06 (p116), then footnotes this time by citing Sims Exhibit A, which (page 2) actually put the timing of the finding of the shells at... 1:15 (p2). Where Bugliosi
got "1:06" from is a mystery.
Mooney is the only one who got anything right here--Sgt. Harkness' call to the Crime Lab at about 12:59, and DPD Crime Lab Lt. Day's pegging of the call "shortly before 1 o'clock" (v4p249) confirm Mooney's estimate. Hill actually hollered about 1:10:
He testified that just after that, he ran downstairs and bumped into Day coming in. Day testified that he had gotten to the depository at 1:12. So, although Hill and Bugliosi both have Hill hollering just after the finding of the shells, he actually
waited about 10 minutes. Why?
Something happened in-between Mooney's holler and Hill's. The two were pretty-widely-separated incidents. Curiously, Mooney's occurred at just about the time that Homicide Capt. Fritz entered the depository, 12:58. Which makes impossible the Fritz/Sims/
Boyd tale that, upon entering the building, they checked out every floor from the 2nd to the 7th, and then and only then, heard the shouting surrounding the discovery of the shells. Not possible. Another big--and pretty obviously not unrelated--Why?
Curiouser and curiouser: Hill testified that, after hollering, he started on his way out front, and ran into "Captain Fritz and his men... coming up on the elevator". (v7p47) Meanwhile, Bugliosi has Hill run into Fritz & co. coming *down* from the 7th
floor (p116). Amazing that Fritz, Boyd, and Sims didn't run into Fritz, Boyd, and Sims. A tangled web--tangleder and tangleder.
The Fritz, Sims, and Boyd onwards-and-upwards, or downwards, story seems meant just to push forward the time of the finding of the shells to about the time of Hill's holler. Thus do the three paper over the time discrepancy, and "fix" the When of Hill.
But that doesn't even begin to answer the Why of Hill. Why concoct such a tortuous tale?
There were two key elements to the Hill end of this fiction-writing: the time and the place. The timing is clearly wrong for the actual 12:58 time for the finding of the shells. It's wrong, but, as far as explanation goes, it's a dead end. That leaves
place. In place lies the explanation.
Where is Hill? On the sixth floor pointing to the area of the "nest". The Hill/Fritz/Sims/Boyd extravaganza is all about place. It says that the shells had just been found in the "nest", that Hill's holler was a news flash. It was not. The time was
wrong, but, okay, yes, so what? Move on to place, then--it must have been wrong, too, or Fritz, Hill & co. contorted themselves, and the facts, for no reason. Wrong time, wrong place. The labored contrivance of it all, time-wise, from the Hill end to the
Homicide end, says that the place the shells were found was not Hill's sixth floor, not the "nest". That Hill's 10-minutes-too-late holler, from the sixth floor, was meant to counter Mooney's--from another floor.
As Mooney saw Fritz down below at 12:58, so, too, Fritz--like Harkness and Deputy Sheriff Allan Sweatt--must have seen Mooney above. And saw that he was on the fifth floor, as Sweatt reported, later, and Harkness radioed, earlier. Not the "nest" floor.
Not part of the plan, which plan becomes evident with the presence of Too Late Hill on the sixth floor... 12 minutes later, one floor off. Close enough for government work, though.
dcw
You do a nice job of putting it together to mean what you want it to mean, but I think the time is the point, not the place. That's why they changed the time, because the time is the thing they wanted to change. The evidence for the changing of the place
is arbitrary. It might be true, but it is not proven. The evidence for changing the time is not arbitrary. The time was changed. That is a fact. Why would they change the time if their point was to change the place? Any time would work for the place. But
the time of 1:15 works for giving a Hill an alibi for the time of the shooting on 10th Street. That would be a reason for doing what we know they did, change the time.
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