The Kennedy Assassination: A Tale of Two Curtain Rods
Threading the Needle of Conspiracy and Cover-up
The case analysis for the Lone Gunman Theory of the Kennedy Assassination is essentially an exercise of disproval through “reductio ad absurdum.” Multiple sets of stacked absurdities must be accepted for the Lone Gunman Theory to be true. The sheer number of absurdities required in this belief is itself another additional absurdity. These absurdities intersect with one another, creating yet greater levels of interlocking absurdities, exponentially compounding through these interactions to the point of genuine impossibility.
These absurdities have been addressed in the previous articles in this series, culminating in The JFK Assassination: What Didn’t Happen, Part Two, wherein the conclusion is reached that Kennedy was shot at by multiple gunmen from in front and behind, Lee Harvey Oswald was not one of these gunmen, and the plotters of Kennedy’s assassination selected Oswald at least several months earlier as the man they would frame for the crime as a patsy.
Aside from the ballistic and medical evidence showing that Kennedy was fired upon by multiple gunmen, the evidence for conspiracy in the assassination is primarily evident in the setting up of Oswald. This includes the sheep-dipping of Oswald by establishing his public persona as a radical leftist and Castro sympathizer, the Oswald impersonations, and the fraudulence of the backyard photos. The evidence for the post-assassination cover-up is found in the actions of the FBI, Dallas Police Department (DPD), the Warren Commission, and other official investigatory bodies.
In seeking to make sense of and solve the Kennedy Assassination, the heart of understanding in this case is found in the places where the conspiracy to enact the crime intersects with the cover-up that followed. This concept is illustrated in the diagram below. The planning phase is represented by a backward C, and the aftermath is represented by a forward C. The horizontal arrow is the through-line that connects them. The overlapping area between the two C’s represents the time period of November 22–November 24, 1963, beginning with Kennedy’s assassination and ending with Oswald’s assassination. During this time the cover-up was already under way, but the criminal activities planned for in the conspiracy were not yet complete: Oswald was still alive.
Two tales told by two two men, Ralph Leon Yates and Buell Wesley Frazier, provide a unique snapshot of the through-line that connects conspiracy and cover-up in the Kennedy Assassination. Each man told a story of Lee Harvey Oswald bringing a package to the Texas School Book Depository (TSBD), said by Oswald to contain curtain rods but presumed to actually contain a rifle. By tracing the origins, development, and disposition of both stories it can be seen that prior to the assassination, the story about Oswald’s curtain rods had already been conceived of and implemented by those setting Oswald up as the patsy. As the cover-up commenced on November 22, this pre-existing story was placed in the mouth of Buell Frazier under duress. The curtain rods story represents a clear link between the planners of the assassination and the conductors of the cover-up.
Whoever provided Frazier with that story was either one of the planners of the Kennedy Assassination or received that story from the planners. This article will scrutinize the reports of both Yates and Frazier, including the context surrounding those reports and the aftermath that followed their entry into the record. All possible explanations for how these two men both submitted testimonies that mirrored each other so precisely will be considered and analyzed.
This process will enable the derivation of valuable insights on the conduct of the plot to assassinate Kennedy and frame Oswald. It will also demonstrate that the cover-up of this crime was not simply a matter of investigators who settled on the Oswald-as-lone-gunman narrative to avoid opening a gigantic can of worms. Key members of law enforcement who took control of the cover-up on the very day of Kennedy’s assassination must also have been members of the conspiracy to kill Kennedy before the fact.
These men can be exposed by following the curtain rods.
The Ralph Yates Incident
The story of Ralph Yates entered the record on Tuesday, November 26, 1963, when Mr. Yates approached the FBI and submitted his account of an encounter with a man he believed to be Lee Harvey Oswald. Yates was initially uncertain whether this encounter occurred on Wednesday, November 20, or Thursday, November 21. (On December 10, Yates returned to the FBI and confirmed the encounter must have occurred on the 20th.) Kennedy was assassinated on Friday the 22nd, Oswald was assassinated on Sunday the 24th, and Yates submitted his report on Tuesday the 26th.
The key aspects of Yates’s initial report are as follows: The hitchhiker was picked up in the Oak Cliff neighborhood of Dallas and dropped off at the corner of Houston and Elm (the location of the TSBD). The passenger was carrying a long package that he claimed contained curtain rods. The passenger asked Yates whether a person could assassinate the President from the top of a building or high up. The passenger discussed the President’s motorcade route and whether it might be changed. The passenger looked identical to Lee Harvey Oswald (according to Yates after comparing his memory of the hitchhiker’s appearance to images of Oswald after his arrest). Yates told his coworker Dempsey Jones about this encounter prior to Kennedy’s assassination.
The FBI summary of Yates’s November 26 report is shown below:
The day after Yates submitted his report, the FBI interviewed his coworker Dempsey Jones, who corroborated Yates’s account. I have included the FBI report of Dempsey Jones’s interview as well:
The key aspects of Jones’s account are as follows: Yates told Jones about the hitchhiker immediately after the incident happened (at about 11:00–11:30am, half an hour to an hour after the 10:30am time of the hitchhiking incident cited by Yates). Jones recalls Yates sharing the location he brought the hitchhiker to (the corner of Houston and Elm), and that the passenger boarded Yates’s vehicle in Oak Cliff. Yates told Jones the passenger was carrying a package, and that the passenger discussed shooting the President from a building as the motorcade passed by.
Dempsey Jones does not seem to be collaborating with Yates in a lie. If anything, Jones is attempting to downplay the importance of Yates’s testimony by describing Yates as “a big talker who always talks about a lot of foolishness.” Despite this disclaimer, Jones nonetheless corroborates Yates’s account. Note that Jones does not describe Yates as a liar. “Big talk,” or “talking about a lot of foolishness” could describe foolishly reporting to the FBI about a suspicious encounter related to Kennedy’s assassination. A less foolish person might have kept his mouth shut. As shall be seen, Jones was probably right about Yates being foolish in reporting this story; these reports led to a sequence of events that destroyed Yates’s life.
At first glance, Yates’s story seems like a barely relevant side show in the investigation of Kennedy’s assassination. Yates would later be committed to a mental institution. Any witness can be accused of lying, but it could also be argued that Yates is an unreliable witness due to mental instability.
At second glance, however, Yates’s testimony cannot be so easily dismissed. The first reason for this is because Dempsey Jones’s testimony provides concrete corroboration of Yates’s account. If Yates had merely told Jones he picked up a hitchhiker who talked about killing the president, suspicions regarding that hitchhiker’s involvement in Kennedy’s subsequent assassination would certainly be warranted—but it would still lie in the realm of possibility that Yates made up a fanciful story, and Kennedy’s assassination was coincidental. It could also be argued that even if the encounter did occur, the hitchhiker’s reference to Kennedy’s assassination was the coincidence.
But Yates provided details specific to Oswald and Kennedy’s future assassination in his account. He could not have made these details up or known about them prior to the assassination: his reference to Oak Cliff and the corner of Houston and Elm (the neighborhood of Oswald’s rooming house and his precise place of employment, respectively), the reference to Kennedy’s assassination by a sniper firing at the motorcade from a building, and the fact that Yates dropped the hitchhiker off at intersection of the specific building some of the shots were fired from two days later.
Even if Yates is dismissed as insane or prone to lying, his account must be recognized as true unless Dempsey Jones is also dismissed as a liar. Unless Jones and Yates both collaborated to tell the FBI a false story about Yates’s hitchhiker, the Yates account provides proof of a plot to kill Kennedy and frame Oswald for the crime by planting evidence against him with an impersonator. This encounter is established as an Oswald impersonation because Lee Harvey Oswald was known to be elsewhere at the time of the incident (in this case, he had been working at the TSBD for several hours already that morning). The impersonator also drew attention to himself—ensuring he would be remembered—while making statements meant to incriminate Oswald in Kennedy’s assassination. All three of these elements mirrored the elements found in several other Oswald impersonation encounters, as covered in The JFK Assassination: What Didn’t Happen, Part Two.
Many students of the assassination have attempted to dismiss Yates as insane, a liar, or both—but I have never heard any dismissal of Yates’s testimony that is able to explain why Dempsey Jones would have joined Yates in lying to the FBI about this matter. Every indication from Jones’s report shows that Jones was not interested in getting involved further. If Yates had been lying, Jones could have put the whole matter to rest by simply telling the truth. Jones did not go on to seek or receive further attention as a result of his testimony, nor did he have anything else to gain by corroborating Yates’s statement. Only a desire to report his account truthfully to the FBI explains why Dempsey Jones would testify as such.
On the Epistemology of Curtain Rods
Good reasons exist to accept Yates’s account as accurate—unless any plausible evidence or reasoning can explain why Jones would corroborate a false account by Yates in his own statement to the FBI. Lacking such evidence or reasoning, Yates’s account further corroborates other witness reports of an Oswald impersonator taking action to frame Lee Harvey Oswald for Kennedy’s assassination in the months leading up to November 22nd. In addition, an even greater significance to Yates’s report to the FBI is found in his reference to “curtain rods.”
As summarized in The JFK Assassination: What Didn’t Happen, Part Two, Oswald’s coworker Buell Wesley Frazier testified that Oswald brought a package to work on November 22, telling Frazier the package contained curtain rods. Ralph Yates provided a separate account of Oswald receiving a ride to the TSBD and bringing a package with him he described as containing curtain rods. This ride occurred on November 20th instead of the 22nd, and the driver was Yates instead of Frazier. Yates described the package as “4 feet to 4½ feet long” (long enough to contain the Mannlicher Carcano rifle), whereas Frazier described Oswald’s package as 2–2¼ feet long—long enough to contain curtain rods but not long enough to contain the rifle—even in the rifle’s disassembled state.
This fact pattern raises the following key question:
How is it possible for the words “curtain rods” to come from the mouths of both Frazier and Yates?
If Yates’s hitchhiker really did tell Yates his package contained curtain rods, then a clear and identifiable link is established between the plotters (through the Oswald impersonator) and whoever first mentioned “curtain rods” to Buell Frazier (whether that person was really Lee Harvey Oswald or someone else).
The first recorded appearance of Frazier’s reference to Oswald saying his package contained curtain rods occurred in Frazier’s statement to law enforcement on November 22. The first recorded appearance of Yates’s reference to “curtain rods” occurred in his statement to the FBI on November 26. Dempsey Jones confirmed that Yates mentioned the package to him before the assassination but did not elaborate to Jones about the hitchhiker’s claims regarding this package until after the assassination. Although Jones used the term “window shades” to refer to Yates’s description of what the hitchhiker said, Yates’s November 26 account clearly refers to “curtain rods.”
Is it possible that Yates heard about Buell Frazier’s curtain rods story sometime between November 23–26 and worked the curtain rods reference into his own account?
If Yates had heard about Frazier’s curtain rods beforehand, it is hard to understand why he would insert this reference into his account. Nevertheless, to determine whether it could have been possible for Yates to do so, I scoured the press record for references to “curtain rods” in describing the package Oswald supposedly brought to work on the 22nd. I attempted numerous searches through web browsers and large language model engines, neither of which yielded results. I had better luck with targeted searches of newspaper articles through newspapers.com.
The earliest two references I could find to the curtain rods story appeared in print on November 26—the day of Yates’s testimony. Neither of these were found in an article distributed through a wire service such as the Associated Press, and both were published in newspapers unavailable in the Dallas area where Yates lived. One was from a Newsday article written by John Cummings and Harvey Aronson and published on November 26 (Suffolk edition; Melville, NY; page 14). Curiously, this article does not reference the Buell Frazier story, but references an “elevator operator” who told police he took Oswald to the 6th floor in an elevator and that Oswald was carrying a package with him, claiming it contained a “curtain rod” (singular, not plural).
This tale of the elevator operator disappeared, never to return. The article indicates the story reached Newsday through a member of the Dallas Police. As will be shown, Police Chief Jesse Curry passed on inaccurate information to the press on November 23 about an elevator porter taking Oswald to the 6th floor. This untrue account seems to have been combined with Frazier’s curtain rods story, but the specific source of the curtain rods reference is unclear.
The other November 26 reference to curtain rods was found in the editorial column of the Wichita (Kansas) Beacon, Page 10A. This editorial states, “It was reported that he entered the building Friday morning carrying the wrapped death weapon and told others it was curtain rods.” The editorial does not state where this was reported, but indicates that this story was reported somewhere prior to the publishing of this editorial on November 26. The Wichita Beacon was an evening newspaper in 1963, so the reference to curtain rods it invokes could have been publicized as late as the 26th, earlier that day.
Like the Newsday article, this editorial does not reference Oswald’s ride to work, but implies Oswald’s statements about curtain rods were given to employees at the TSBD who saw Oswald carry the package into the building. The first press reference available in the newspapers.com database that avoided these errors and combined all aspects of what became the official curtain rods account did not appear until the following day, November 27. This article, written by Jean Campbell, appeared in the London, UK paper The Evening Standard. In it, Campbell explains that she personally visited the TSBD, and she met and interviewed Buell Wesley Frazier there. In this interview, Frazier references Oswald’s ride to work, the package he carried with him, and Oswald’s declaration that it contained curtain rods. A clip from that article is displayed below:
I was unable to locate any earlier press reports that mentioned Oswald’s package in terms of curtain rods—neither in print, nor in available clips of television or radio news coverage. Prior to the 26th, the only references I could find to Oswald’s package described Oswald as claiming the package contained “window shades.” This mistaken substitution of “window shades” for “curtain rods” originated from a press interview given by Dallas Police Chief Jesse Curry. On November 23, Curry spoke to the press and publicized the story of Oswald receiving a ride to work, including reports of Oswald carrying a package he claimed contained “window shades.”
Curry’s statements were widely reported in newspapers across the country beginning with evening editions on the 23rd. Curry’s mistaken reference to “window shades” was then duplicated the following day in a press conference given by Dallas District Attorney Henry Wade in the hours following the murder of Oswald. In Wade’s November 24 summary of the evidence against Oswald, he mentioned the story about Oswald’s ride to work and his package, stating that Oswald claimed the package contained, “window curtains, I believe, or window shades.” This statement by Wade can be heard at the 2:45 minute time stamp in the film of the press conference linked below, or the transcript can be read in the Warren Report on page 820 of volume 24, exhibit 2168.
The replication of press reports referencing Oswald’s package in terms of “window shades” persisted throughout the week, with hundreds of examples found in newspapers.com database searches, mainly from identical articles distributed through news agencies like the Associated Press. A sample of these articles mentioning window shades are shown in press clippings below for reference, the first quoting Curry, the second quoting Wade:
In Jean Campbell’s November 27 piece for the Evening Standard, she avoided the mistaken window shades reference by finding Buell Frazier at work at the TSBD and interviewing him personally. This must have occurred on November 25th or 26th. Frazier was not working on Saturday or Sunday (the 23rd or 24th), and due to the 6 hour time difference, Campbell must have had her piece finished by the morning of the 27th for it to make the evening edition in London.
Since the Curry and Wade interviews of the 23rd and 24th were responsible for the prominent window shades references, it follows that references to curtain rods only began to appear after Buell Frazier was accessible to the press for interviews beginning on November 25th—his first day back at work. This explains why no references to curtain rods appeared in print until the 26th, and why there were so few of them. Only reporters like Campbell, who managed to personally locate the obscure figure of Frazier while working at the TSBD, would have stumbled across his reference to curtain rods and have been able to report it.
A picture begins to develop, tracing the entry of “window shades,” Oswald’s package, and “curtain rods” into the press record beginning November 23rd. Curry gives several press interviews that day, variously mentioning Oswald’s package, his ride to work, the inaccurate reference to window shades, and the inaccurate reference to the elevator porter taking Oswald to the 6th floor. Wade repeats the inaccurate reference to window shades on the 24th in his televised press conference.
These reports are the only ones available through the 25th. On that day, Buell Frazier returns to work and any journalists who visit the TSBD personally are able to find him and interview him. The first reference to a curtain rod appears in print on November 26, combined with Curry’s previous inaccurate statement about the elevator porter. Only on November 27, the day after Ralph Yates’s FBI report, do all the elements of Oswald’s ride to work, his package, and the curtain rods reference come together—as a result of an interview with Buell Wesley Frazier himself.
Scrutinizing the Press Record for References to Window Shades and Curtain Rods
The newspapers.com database does not contain every single American newspaper printed in 1963, but its collection is substantial. By my count, their database contains 412 newspaper articles referencing Oswald’s package in terms of “window shades” prior to Yates’s FBI report on the 26th, and exactly 0 articles referencing Oswald’s package in terms of “curtain rods” during that time.
Indeed, for the entire month of November, 1963, only 4 articles in the newspapers.com database referenced Oswald’s package in terms of curtain rods (the 3 articles already referenced, and one more that was published on November 28th). In contrast, 639 articles referenced the package in terms of window shades during November. This is a large enough sample size to get a sense of the ratio of American press reports mentioning window shades as opposed to curtain rods at that time. From the newspapers.com database sample, 99.4% of articles published in November, 1963 mentioned window shades and 0.6% of articles mentioned curtain rods (none of which were published prior to Yates’s FBI statement).
This overwhelming disparity was clearly a result of the “window shades” references issued to the press by Police Chief Curry and District Attorney Wade on November 23rd and 24th. As the story died down and the news media began to correct the record regarding Buell Frazier’s story, this ratio began evening out. Even so, articles reporting on the story were still more likely to reference window shades than curtain rods during the entirety of the first month following Kennedy’s assassination. Only 35.7% of articles published from December 1–December 22 referenced curtain rods, while 64.3% referenced window shades (25 curtain rods articles and 45 window shades articles).
All told, in the first month following Kennedy’s assassination—from November 22, 1963 to December 22, 1963—the newspapers.com database contains 713 articles (by my count) referencing Oswald’s supposed package. Of these, 684 have Oswald claiming the package contained window shades and 29 have him claiming the package contained curtain rods. Assuming this ratio offers a fairly accurate representation of American newspaper articles during the first month, 96% of the newspaper coverage referenced window shades while only 4% referenced curtain rods.
As shown earlier, this ratio was even more heavily weighted toward window shades in the month of November (99.4% of stories referenced window shades and 06.% referenced curtain rods). The ratio vanishes entirely during the time prior to Yates’s statement to the FBI: Of 412 articles referencing the question of Oswald’s package prior to November 26, 100% of them referenced window shades and 0% of them referenced curtain rods.
This overwhelming disparity highlights the extraordinary nature of Yates’s own reference to curtain rods in his November 26 testimony to the FBI. If Yates had inexplicably inserted this obscure detail from media coverage of Oswald into his own story, he would almost certainly have inserted a reference to “window shades” not “curtain rods,” matching the information available in the overwhelming majority of news reports at the time. The likelihood that Yates even encountered a report mentioning "curtain rods” would seem vanishingly remote—if indeed any newspaper stories mentioning curtain rods even existed prior to that time.
Reviewing radio and televised press coverage on this matter from November 22nd to 26th proved more difficult than reviewing newspaper coverage of the story. The content of such reports is not available in a searchable database. I did locate a repository of over 150 hours of video and audio clips of television and radio coverage of the assassination from those five days, which is available on The JFK Assassination As It Happened website, and are also posted on the site’s companion YouTube channel.
I listened through each and every clip available in this collection from November 23–26, ears perked for any mention of Oswald’s package, his ride to work, window shades, or curtain rods. This process took many hours. When finished, I had not found any references to Oswald’s package in terms of curtain rods. I found only one reference to the package in terms of window shades: the previously linked District Attorney Wade press conference.
Aside from that reference, I discovered only three other references to Oswald bringing the rifle to work, all of them from November 23rd. None of these mentioned either windows shades or curtain rods. The first two can be viewed on this compilation of Police Chief Curry’s televised statements to the press at time stamps 10:15 and 37:45. Both clips are from November 23. In the first clip, Curry merely states that Oswald “was seen carrying a package to the building,” and claims that, “I don’t think it was disassembled—the package was large enough for the rifle to be in the package . . . wrapped in paper.”
In the second clip, Curry told a reporter, “A man brought him [Oswald] to work yesterday morning—he had a large package with him which we believe to be the rifle. The next we know of him, a porter in the building took him up to the sixth floor shortly after twelve o’clock.” The third reference came from an NBC radio report (at time stamp 25:55) that stated the Dallas Police “cleared an unidentified man who drove Oswald to work yesterday. He did volunteer and took a lie detector test.” This brief reference did not give Buell Frazier’s name nor mention the package Frazier claimed Oswald carried with him to work.
That’s all there is. As with the newspaper accounts, the factoid about Oswald’s package was treated as a very minor detail that received only passing and infrequent mention in the radio and television reports at the time. If there were any references to curtain rods in the radio and television coverage of the assassination prior to Yates’s FBI statement, they did not appear among the 150 hours of press coverage I was able to find and review. Interestingly, Curry’s statement about Oswald being taken to the 6th floor by an elevator porter mirrors the very first reference to a “curtain rod” that appeared in print on the November 26 Newsday article (previously addressed). Although Curry mentioned Oswald’s package twice to television reporters on November 23rd, his reference to window shades—reported widely in newspaper articles—was apparently not captured on camera.
Dempsey Jones’s FBI statement, given on November 27, makes sense in light of the absence of “curtain rods” references in the press, and the availability of “window shades” references to those who were following the news coverage closely. Jones heard only a secondhand account from Yates about the hitchhiker claiming his package contained curtain rods, and he inaccurately converted “curtain rods” to “window shades” in his own FBI report. This points to the likelihood that Jones’s memory was influenced by press reports about window shades.
Curtain rods and window shades are distinct items (although both items are hung above windows). The mistaken pronouncements of Police Chief Curry and District Attorney Wade—converting curtain rods into window shades—is a specific and anomalous error originating from within the Dallas Police Department. There is no reason to believe Dempsey Jones would independently duplicate that error. Since press reports quoting the statements of Curry and Wade about “window shades” were available at the time, it follows that Jones made the same mistake, converting Yates’s reference to curtain rods into a window shades reference. Press reports about curtain rods were either entirely nonexistent prior to November 26, or they were so rare they do not appear in the available press record. Instead, the existing press reports about window shades would have stuck in Jones’s memory, leading to this conversion.
Since Yates’s FBI statement referenced curtain rods, a reference unavailable in the press prior the the 26th, we can surmise that Yates could not have plucked this reference from newspapers, television, or radio. If he had done so, he would have inserted a “window shades” reference as Dempsey Jones did (apparently unable to remember precisely what Yates had told him).
Is it possible that Yates really did say “window shades” in his November 26 report? One might speculate that the FBI agent taking down Yates’s statement could have inadvertently altered Yates’s report to read “curtain rods” instead of “window shades.” If so, the agent who interviewed Yates would have to have known Buell Frazier had actually referenced curtain rods in his own earlier statement. Even if this were the case, however, it is hard to imagine any reason why that agent would change Yates’s statement to match Frazier’s.
In searching for information about Ben Harrison, the FBI agent who took Yates’s statement, I located an oral history interview with Harrison conducted by the 6th Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza. Harrison reported that he was stationed in Lubbock, Texas at the time of the assassination. He was not called upon to report to Dallas and support the FBI’s investigation until after Lee Harvey Oswald was assassinated on the 24th. Harrison arrived in Dallas late that night and began his work on the case on the 25th. He interviewed Yates on the 26th, which was only his second day on the job. Harrison reports that his initial duties on the case consisted of sorting through the possessions confiscated from Ruth Paine’s home, and processing witness statements (as he did with Yates).
As a side note, Harrison mentions in his oral interview that the FBI was interested in exploring evidence that might implicate Mrs. Paine or Marina Oswald as conspiring with Lee Harvey Oswald. This recollection provides insight on the pressure Ruth Paine and Marina Oswald were subjected to following the Kennedy Assassination. This may help explain why both of them turned on Lee Oswald and became the two witnesses who did the most to assist authorities in branding him as Kennedy’s assassin. As shall be seen, this pattern of threatening witnesses with charges of conspiring with Oswald was also used against Buell Frazier, who became another crucial witness in implicating Oswald with his curtain rods story.
Returning to the matter of Ralph Yates, Special Agent Harrison’s oral history indicates that his previous involvement with the case was minimal at the time he took Yates’s deposition. There is no reason to believe he would have done anything other than record Yates’s testimony as given, without alterations. Given the fact that Yates’s testimony eventually became problematic enough to warrant the urgent attention of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, there is no reason to believe any FBI agent would have altered Yates’s testimony to read curtain rods instead of window shades. If that had happened, this mistake surely would have been identified and corrected.
Indeed, Ralph Yates was consistent over the course of multiple FBI statements regarding the curtain rods reference. It follows that if any FBI agents mistakenly altered a reference to Oswald’s package, it would likely have been in the case of Dempsey Jones, who was only interviewed once, leaving no opportunity to correct the record. In other words, Yates’s consistency suggests that he correctly passed on the curtain rods reference to Jones as well as to the FBI. Then, due to the media reports about “window shades,” either Jones or Special Agent Arthur Carter (who took Jones’s statement) accidentally converted this to curtain rods.
Narrative Frame Comparison of Yates’s Account
The possibilities to explain Yates’s reference to curtain rods can be broken down as follows:
Yates made up the whole encounter and convinced Dempsey Jones to join him in lying to the FBI.
Yates was truthful about the encounter, as corroborated by Jones, but Yates inserted the untruthful reference to curtain rods into the otherwise true account.
Yates reported his encounter truthfully, and the hitchhiker he met did claim his package contained curtain rods.
For either of the first two frames to be true, it must be explained how and why Yates inserted the reference to curtain rods into his account. I cannot think of any reason why he would do so. As for how he could have come by the curtain rods reference, here are the possible sub-frames:
Yates learned about the curtain rods through media reports.
Yates actually did describe the encounter in terms of window shades, but FBI Agent Harrison inadvertently changed this to curtain rods.
Yates learned about the curtain rods reference from an inside connection with law enforcement, the TSBD, or the assassination plot itself.
Analysis of available press reports at the time suggest it was highly unlikely (perhaps impossible) that Yates would have come across a reference to curtain rods in the news media prior to submitting his statement. If such a report were even available to Yates, it would have been overwhelmingly outweighed by press reports referencing “window shades” instead of “curtain rods.” Yates would have to have encountered one of the vanishingly rare references to curtain rods and chosen to insert this obscure reference instead of the prominent window shades reference.
It is also highly unlikely that Yates inserted a reference to window shades and FBI Agent Harrison altered this reference to read “curtain rods.” Agent Harrison would not have done this deliberately, as it did not serve the FBI’s purposes to do so. By November 26, the FBI was unquestionably committed to the Oswald-as-lone-gunman narrative, which Yates’s report undermined by showing that Oswald was being framed by an impersonator. If Harrison inserted the curtain rods reference by accident, the FBI surely would have corrected the record. But when Yates returned on December 10 to submit a signed report to the FBI in his own words, his reference to curtain rods was unchanged. As shown above, even by December 10 newspaper articles were still more likely to reference window shades than curtain rods in their reports on Oswald’s package.
If Yates did not actually have an encounter with a hitchhiker impersonating Oswald who mentioned “curtain rods,” the only other way to explain Yates’s FBI statement (short of telepathic or psychic powers) is an elaborate scenario where Yates obtained inside information about the curtain rods from a law enforcement contact or from a TSBD employee. Absurdly, Yates would have to have used this inside information to accomplish one and only one objective: to juice up his story with a reference to curtain rods—for no apparent purpose. It could also be posited that Yates accessed the curtain rods reference through contact with one of the plotters against Kennedy. Ironically, that is precisely what his FBI statement describes: an encounter with a plotter against Kennedy who impersonated Oswald and supplied Yates with the curtain rods reference.
Dempsey Jones verified that Yates told him about the hitchhiker prior to Kennedy’s assassination. In order to believe Yates fabricated his entire account about the hitchhiker, it is necessary to believe that Yates also convinced Dempsey Jones to lie to the FBI for him. Were it not for extensive reports of encounters with an Oswald impersonator by other witnesses, the unlikely scenario of Yates and Jones conspiring to hoax the FBI might seem plausible. But because witness reports of other encounters with an Oswald impersonator corroborate Yates’s account, only willful conjecture can support the dismissal of Jones’s further corroboration of Yates’s account as a deliberate hoax.
As shown above in painstaking detail, it is highly unlikely that on November 26, 1963, Yates would have had access to reports about Oswald carrying a package said to contain curtain rods. Even in a speculative scenario in which Yates did have this knowledge, Yates’s story would not become more believable by duplicating the details of Buell Frazier’s account about Oswald’s package—nor would this benefit Yates in any other possible way. Again, only willful conjecture can support the thesis that Yates gained this tidbit of information and inserted it into his account. The only likely and reasonable explanation for Yates’s curtain rods reference is that he heard it from the mouth of the hitchhiker, just like he said he did.
Ralph Yates Lacked a Motive to Fabricate His Report
The full context of the circumstances surrounding Yates’s report to the FBI shows that Yates had nothing to gain and everything to lose in submitting his report. He specifically requested that he not receive any publicity through making this report in his initial FBI statement. This demonstrates that Yates lacked any motive to gain attention or notoriety. Yates did not publicize his encounter anywhere in the remaining years of his life. Indeed, Ralph Yates’s report remained buried in the National Archives for 40 years—virtually unknown even to most JFK Assassination researchers—before it was unearthed and included in researcher John Armstrong’s 2003 Kennedy Assassination book, Harvey and Lee.
After submitting his second statement on December 10, Ralph Yates’s account soon reached the attention of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover himself. On January 2, 1964, Hoover issued an urgent teletype to the Dallas FBI office, insisting Yates be called in for a third interview immediately—this time with a lie detector. Yates was brought in for the interview on January 4. The interview questions were preserved in the FBI’s file on Yates.
Interestingly, after the FBI asked Yates “Did this hitchhiker tell you he had curtain rods in the package?” they then asked him “Did you answer that last question truthfully?” This was the only question asked twice during the interview, indicating keen awareness on the part of Sepcial Agents C. Ray Hall and Warren DeBrueys (who conducted the interview) as to the heightened importance of the “curtain rods” element of Yates’s testimony.
According to the FBI’s analysis of the lie detector test taken by Yates, he showed no physiological response to any of the interview questions, which would normally be considered evidence of truthfulness. In this case, however, Yates showed no physiological response to the control questions either. These are questions in which the interview subject is instructed to lie, allowing the interviewer to discern between the subject’s respsonses when lying and telling the truth. Since Yates produced no physiological response when answering any of the questions, it was impossible to utilize the polygraph results to determine whether he was lying or telling the truth in response to any question.
In later interviews with author James Douglass, as recounted in his book JFK and the Unspeakable, Ralph Yates’s wife Dorothy recalled that the FBI suggested Ralph’s lack of response on the polygraph machine indicated mental health issues and recommended he immediately seek psychiatric treatment. She stated that Ralph followed their recommendation and was referred to Woodlawn Hospital for the mentally ill in Dallas. According to Dorothy Yates, her husband escaped from the hospital several days later in a state of psychological and emotional collapse, referencing malign treatment and motives on the part of the Woodlawn doctors.
A discrepancy exists between Dorothy Yates’s recollections and the FBI’s documentation of contact with Yates in the following week. Their reports suggest that they did not refer him for psychiatric treatment until January 15, after Yates’s mental collapse had already occurred. But the FBI record does concur with Dorothy Yates’s recollection that Ralph displayed no signs of mental disturbance from November 26–January 4. According to the FBI documents, Ralph Yates’s erratic behavior began with a frantic telephone call to the FBI on January 8, and regressed to an apparent state of full psychiatric decompensation by January 15, when Yates appeared at the FBI office and submitted a lengthy and incoherent statement, referencing concerns about the medications he had been given by his doctors.
Either Dorothy Yates’s recollection is inaccurate and her husband’s collapse occured prior to either checking in at Woodlawn or receiving a referral to do so by the FBI—or the FBI records are inaccurate about the sequence of events leading to Yates’s collapse and their role in referring him for treatment. In this case, though, the FBI reports are fairly specific, and seem more reliable than Dorothy Yates’s memory.
In either case, it is clear that the FBI subjected Ralph Yates to considerable pressure after he submitted his voluntary statement on November 26, 1963. They never investigated the lead he presented to them; their sole response was to investigate Yates himself. The FBI attempted to disprove or discredit his testimony by interrogating his employers and coworkers—and by calling Yates back multiple times to repeat his testimony and subject him to a polygraph examination.
This pressure apparently activated a latent vulnerability to psychiatric decompensation in Yates’s psyche. His wife Dorothy stated that Ralph had never suffered mental disturbances in the past—but he never recovered from the mental breakdown he incurred in January, 1964. Ralph Yates spent most of his remaining life in mental institutions and endured over 40 shock treatments before passing away from heart failure at age 39 in 1975. To his dying day, Yates never once recanted his testimony about the hitchhiker he picked up on November 20, 1963.
Ralph Yates’s mental collapse conveniently allowed the FBI to dismiss and bury his testimony. Had his testimony not been neutralized, it would have been damaging to the FBI’s case because Oswald was confirmed as working at the TSBD during the time of Yates’s encounter. Yates must have picked up an Oswald impersonator if his story was true—and the truth of his story was corroborated by Dempsey Jones. Oswald could not have been a lone gunman if an impersonator was setting him up.
As early as November 23, 1963, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had reached the conclusion that Oswald had been impersonated in Mexico City in late September, which is verified by the transcript of a telephone call between Hoover and President Johnson on that date. Indeed, Hoover had been investigating the possibility that Oswald was being impersonated as far back as 1960, when Oswald was still in the Soviet Union—as demonstrated in this Hoover memo from June 3, 1960. These documents show that Hoover was personally aware of the possible gravity of Ralph Yates’s encounter with an Oswald impersonator.
Furthermore, since the hitchhiker told Yates his package contained curtain rods, the competing curtain rods story given by Buell Frazier provided further proof that Oswald had been set up. As shall be shown, the most likely source for Frazier’s curtain rods story was either the Dallas Police or the FBI itself. If Yates’s account could not be discredited, either the Dallas Police, the FBI, or both of these entities would be exposed as setting up Oswald by putting false testimony in the mouth of Buell Frazier. Not only that, they would also be exposed as having internal links to the plot to kill Kennedy. The Oswald impersonator encountered by Yates had used the same false curtain rods cover story recounted by Buell Frazier. If the DPD or FBI put this story in the mouth of Buell Frazier, they must have received that story from the same source as that Oswald impersonator.
The FBI attempted to refute Yates’s testimony by examining Yates’s work records on November 20–21 to show he could not have picked up the hitchhiker. They were unsuccessful in these efforts. Next, they tried to refute Yates by calling him in to submit his statement a second time, threatening him with prosecution if they found him to be lying. Several weeks later, they found it necessary to pressure Yates further by calling him in for a third time and subjecting his testimony to a lie detector.
Although Dorothy Yates may have been mistaken in remembering that her husband’s mental collapse occurred only after he checked into Woodlawn Hospital at the FBI’s suggestion, it is possible that the FBI did plant the seed of doubt in Ralph Yates’s mind in regards to his own sanity following his polygraph examination on January 4. His mental collapse only commenced in the four days that followed. Once that occurred, the FBI was able to discredit Yates as psychologically unstable—ignoring both Dempsey Jones’s corroboration, and the question of how both Yates and Frazier could both have testified to curtain rod encounters.
The attempt to discredit witnesses as psychologically unstable (often including imprisonment in psychiatric facilities) was employed numerous times in the JFK Assassination case, especially with witnesses whose testimony threatened to seriously damage the credibility of the official Lone Gunman narrative. Some examples include Silvia Odio, Jack Ruby, Roger Craig, Rose Cheramie, Richard Case Nagell, Abraham Bolden, and Eugene Dinkins.
Throughout the whole saga, Ralph Yates did not show any indication of understanding why his testimony was so damaging to the FBI’s case. Far from embellishing his story with reports about curtain rods through hypothetical inside contacts or obscure press reports, Yates showed no signs of knowing anything about Buell Frazier’s competing curtain rods story. Nor did he seem to know that Oswald was accounted for at the TSBD when the encounter with the hitchhiker occurred. In contrast, Yates’s wife Dorothy and other relatives reported to James Douglass that for the rest of his life, Yates was haunted by his belief that he transported Oswald and his rifle to the TSBD, inadvertently abetting Kennedy’s assassination.
Ralph Yates cannot be discredited as a liar, nor can he be discredited as unreliable due to his later mental breakdown. Even if either or both of those things were true, his testimony about picking up the hitchhiker is concretely corroborated by Dempsey Jones, who confirmed Yates told him about the incident before Kennedy was assassinated. Furthermore, Yates’s account is also concretely corroborated by his report that the hitchhiker claimed his package contained curtain rods. Yates had nothing to gain by submitting a false story to the FBI, and he had even less to gain by working a false curtain rods reference into this story. Even if it is believed that Yates was crazy enough to do things that made no sense, his story must still be accepted as true unless Dempsey Jones was also crazy enough to join Yates in doing things that made no sense.
If it is believed that Yates was truthful in his account about the hitchhiker but only inserted one false detail about curtain rods, some accounting must be given for why he would do this. I cannot think of any possible reason. An account would also need to be given to explain how Yates heard about Frazier’s curtain rods, given that press reports at the time overwhelmingly referenced window shades in conjunction with Oswald’s package, not curtain rods. By far the most likely source for Yates’s reference to curtain rods was simply the Oswald impersonator Yates reported picking up.
Unless a grounded analysis can explain how Yates’s report about the hitchhiker and the curtain rods could be false, it should be accepted as true. The truth of Yates’s encounter with the hitchhiker is corroborated by other reports of Oswald impersonator encounters. In fact, just 30 minutes prior to Yates’s encounter with the hitchhiker, another sighting of an Oswald lookalike occurred in the very same Oak Cliff neighborhood where Yates picked up the hitchhiker—at the Dobbs House restaurant. The FBI’s efforts to discredit Yates rather than investigate the lead he gave them only lends more credence to his account.
The Tale of Buell Wesley Frazier
Buell Frazier’s account about giving Lee Harvey Oswald a ride to the TSBD on November 22 has been a longstanding source of consternation for believers in the Lone Gunman narrative of the Kennedy assassination as well as for those who do not believe the Lone Gunman narrative. Frazier’s story about the package Oswald supposedly brought with him is meant to show how Oswald snuck his rifle into the TSBD that morning. But Frazier and his sister Linnie Mae Randle—the only two people who ever claimed to witness this package—both insisted the package was between 24 to 27 inches in length. This is too short for it to have contained the Mannlicher Carcano rifle, which measured 34 inches in even its disassembled state. They were both adamant about this length, and neither of them identified the paper bag in evidence as the bag they saw Oswald carrying.
Much like the 2nd floor lunchroom encounter (discussed in The JFK Assassination: What Didn’t Happen, Part Two), Frazier’s curtain rods story actually renders the official narrative impossible. Frazier claims Oswald carried the package tucked into the top of his armpit with the bottom of the package cupped in his hand below. In measuring my own arms (I am about an inch shorter than Oswald was), the maximum length of a package I could carry that way would be 24 inches. My arms would have to extend halfway down my shins for me to carry a 34-inch package the way Frazier described.
Because of this, many researchers who reject the Lone Gunman narrative have been willing to accept Frazier’s account (and because Frazier comes across as a warm, pleasant, and amiable witness that few wish to accuse of lying). Of course, no actual curtain rods were ever found at the TSBD, nor did any witness other than Buell Frazier ever claim to hear Oswald discuss curtain rods in any context (other than Ralph Yates, who believed he encountered Oswald but seems to have actually encountered an Oswald impersonator).
Accepting Frazier’s story represents a classic case of splitting the difference, when false aspects of an opposing narrative are accepted as true and incorporated into a fusion narrative. This is sometimes done because those elements of the opposing narrative lead to implications that are actually favorable to one’s own narrative. Other times it is done because those elements of the opposing narrative are inconsequential to the main conclusions of one’s own narrative, and they are incorporated in hopes of making one’s narrative more palatable to people who believe the truth is probably found “somewhere in the middle.”
This strategy almost always backfires. The absurd and incongruent elements of the false narrative end up polluting the integrity of the true narrative. For instance, once Frazier’s story is accepted as true, but no evidence of Oswald’s curtain rods ever emerges—defenders of Oswald’s innocence look really silly arguing that Oswald actually did bring curtain rods to work. The desire to reject this silliness then leads to the tendency to assume that Frazier and Randle were simply mistaken about the bag and the length of Oswald’s package, and that Oswald really did bring a rifle to work.
Like the 2nd floor lunchroom encounter, the evidence indicates that Frazier’s account is simply not true. Neither Ruth Paine nor Marina Oswald saw Oswald carrying a package when he left Mrs. Paine’s home that morning or the night before. Essie Williams (Frazier and Randle’s mother) stated she saw Oswald crossing the street as he approached their house that morning, but she did not see him carrying a package. TSBD employee Jack Dougherty saw Oswald entering the building at the beginning of the work day, and he reported that Oswald was not carrying a package. No one else at the TSBD saw Oswald carrying a package either. According to Oswald’s interrogators, Oswald also denied carrying a package to work that day, and he denied ever saying anything to Buell Frazier about curtain rods. Oswald did reportedly say that he brought a cheese sandwich and an apple to work in a small lunch sack, but that was all.
There are numerous elements of the curtain rods story offered by Frazier and Randle that cause it to crumble. Frazier stated that he observed Oswald carrying his package on the way to the TSBD while Frazier walked behind him. But TSBD employee Ed Shields reported to the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) that Frazier parked his car alone that day and that Frazier told another employee he dropped Oswald off at the building entrance. If Shields is correct, Frazier’s story about seeing Oswald walking ahead of him and carrying his package from Frazier’s car to the TSBD is not true.
More issues abound in considering Linnie Mae Randle’s testomony. She claimed she saw Oswald approach Frazier’s car while she was attending to chores in her kitchen the morning of the 22nd. Then Oswald supposedly opened Frazier’s car door and placed his package inside. Here is a photo of Linnie Mae posing for the Warren Commission in her kitchen.
The photo below shows the location Frazier parked his car at while living at the Randle household (on the lawn to the left of the carport). Linnie Mae Randle’s kitchen is on the right side of the carport (the kitchen window she is standing in front of above is the same window just to the right of the carport).
Next, we see a photo that shows the the view from the kitchen door that leads to the inside of the carport. The wall in the background of the photo below is the far wall of the carport. Frazier’s car was parked outside on the grass on the far side of this wall.
Randle was supposed to have poked her head through that kitchen door to spy on Oswald as he approached Frazier’s car. (Even then, she knew he must have been up to something suspicious!) Through the wall slats shown in the top picture, she is supposed to have seen Oswald open Frazier’s car door (on the far side of the car from Randle) and place the package inside. Below is another photo of Randle posing for the Warren Commission to demonstrate how she poked her head through the door and saw Oswald on the far side of Frazier’s car through the tiny slats in the carport wall.
One look at the slats on the carport wall shows Randle could not have seen what Oswald was doing through the wall, not even if he had been on the near side of Frazier’s car. In his book The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today, Kennedy Assassination researcher Jim DiEugenio offers the following observations that further undermine her story: In Randle’s description of how Oswald carried his package, she claimed he was “clutching the bag from the top and it almost touched the ground as he carried it.” Then, when the Warren Commission asked her how Oswald was dressed, she stated she could only describe the shirt he was wearing since she only saw him from the waist up. She clearly could not have seen him carry a bag held below his waist if she could only see him from the waist up.
DiEugenio also points out that Randle did not notify her brother that his coworker had arrived for their morning carpool. Instead, Frazier and Randle’s mother Essie Williams told him. This tends to suggest that Randle didn’t see Oswald at all. Essie Williams, who did not see Oswald carrying a bag, was the one who saw him, and she was the one to notify Frazier. DiEugenio also points out that in Frazier’s interview with HSCA investigator Jack Moriarty, “he said he always locked his car since it was situated outside, not inside a garage. The problem then became, how did Oswald get the package into the back door if it was locked? Wesley now said that that particular door was broken. Moriarty was so puzzled by this that he said to Frazier: ‘You figure that one out OK?’”
Tracing the Origins of Frazier’s Curtain Rods Story
Dallas Police Detectives Rose, Stovall, and Adamcik visited Ruth Paine’s home on the afternoon of November 22, 1963, following Lee Harvey Oswald’s arrest. These detectives later issued a joint report in which they asserted that Detective Adamcik was approached by Linnie Mae Randle outside Ruth Paine’s home. Randle then told Detective Adamcik she saw Oswald place an object in the back seat of Frazier’s car, which she described as “long and wrapped in paper or a box,” and that this observation made Randle suspicious of Oswald. She then told Adamcik that Frazier was visiting their stepfather at Parkland Hospital and they could reach him there.
If Adamcik’s report is accurate, Randle’s statements to him undermine future versions of her testimony in several ways. Based on the detailed reports she later gave about how Oswald was carrying the package and how large the package was, she could not have believed his package might have been “a box.” In addition, Randle later testified that the night before (on the 21st), Frazier told her Oswald was visiting the Paine home that evening in order to retrieve curtain rods. If this is true, she would not have grounds for suspicion upon seeing Oswald carrying a package to Frazier’s car. She would have known Oswald was merely loading the curtain rods into the car.
Frazier was not actually at Parkland Hospital as Randle reportedly had said. The DPD claimed they were forced to systematically call every hospital and medical center in the area before they located him at Irving Medical Center, where he was visiting Randle’s and Frazier’s stepfather, David Williams. Surely Randle knew the correct location her stepfather was hospitalized at. Her misleading report to Detective Adamcik raises questions—unless it is Adamcik’s report that is actually misleading. Either way, Frazier was reportedly arrested at the Irving Medical Center around 6:45pm.
Buell Frazier has provided multiple conflicting accounts regarding his whereabouts and the course of events immediately following the assassination. He consistently reports having left the TSBD around 1:30pm. In one account, he claims to have driven directly to the medical center where he was arrested shortly after arriving. In this version of the story, Frazier claims the police found him there after having searched Linnie Mae Randle’s house and finding his .303 Enfield rifle and ammunition. This version of Frazier’s account can be heard at the time stamp of 1:26:30 in this 2002 interview. It conflicts with DPD reports of Frazier’s arrest occurring about 4 hours later and that the search of Mrs. Randle’s house occurred only after the arrest, and in the presence of Frazier.
In a different version of events on the afternoon of November 22, Frazier claims to have driven home before departing for the medical center. If he did so, this would explain how Randle knew where he was (her false report directing the Dallas Police to Parkland Hospital notwithstanding). As far as I am aware, solid evidence to establish the true sequence of events leading to Frazier’s arrest is unavailable. Only the official DPD reports and Frazier’s conflicting accounts provide any clues. It is unclear if Frazier first drove to Randle’s house, and if so, how long he remained there—or whether he drove directly to the medical center or made another undisclosed stop before arriving there. It is unclear how long he had been visiting his stepfather prior to his arrest, whether Randle approached Adamcik with info about Frazier, whether the detectives approached her, whether the search of her house occurred before or after Frazier’s arrest, or exactly what time he was arrested.
In sorting through these conflicting accounts, the timeline given by Detectives Stovall, Rose, and Adamcik appears more reliable than Frazier’s contradictory recollections, as it fits in with the timing sequence of Oswald’s arrest, the search of Ruth Paine’s home, and the transportation of Mrs. Oswald and Ruth and Michael Paine to DPD headquarters by the detectives. Frazier may be hiding something, but perhaps his memory is simply impaired due to the traumatic nature of his experiences that evening. One way or another, the Dallas Police did conduct a search at Linnie Mae Randle’s house where they confiscated Frazier’s .303 Enfield rifle and his ammunition. They then brought Frazier to Dallas Police headquarters for questioning.
Frazier asserts that during this interrogation he was heavily pressured by the police, who attempted to elicit a confession from Frazier. According to Frazier, Chief of Homicide Will Fritz even threatened to strike him as he pressured Frazier to admit to being Oswald’s accomplice. Frazier further asserts that the Dallas Police typed up a confession, placed it in front of him, and pressured him to sign it. Frazier did not sign the confession, but by the end of the night he had signed an affidavit containing the first incarnation of his curtain rods story. Linnie Mae Randle was also brought down to police headquarters that evening and also signed an affidavit which included her story about seeing Oswald place a package in Frazier’s car.
In yet another mystery about what really happened that night, the DPD claimed that as they were driving Frazier and Randle back to their home in Irving, they were contacted by radio and were ordered to return to police headquarters so Frazier could take a lie detector test about his testimony—which Frazier reportedly passed. If this polygraph test indeed occurred, the results of the test disappeared from DPD records. Years later, the officer who conducted polygraph tests for the Dallas Police at that time denied ever having given such a test to Frazier. This mysterious and high-pressure polygraph test represents yet another similarity between the stories of Frazier and Ralph Yates, who would be subjected to his own high pressure polygraph exam 6 weeks later, with an equally mysterious and controversial outcome.
The numerous contradictions in the record of Frazier’s activities and arrest that evening invites heightened scrutiny in considering the origins of Frazier’s curtain rods story that same evening. The seizure of Frazier’s .303 Enfield rifle also raises eyebrows. At about 2:15pm on November 22, the first press report about the rifle found by Dallas Police in the TSBD maintained it was a .303 Enfield. The Enfield soon became a Mauser and then remained a Mauser for a full day before morphing into a Mannlicher Carcano.
As mentioned in The JFK Assassination: What Didn’t Happen, Part Two, witness Garland Slack reported encountering a man at the Sports Drome Rifle Range several days before the assassination whose appearance matched that of Lee Harvey Oswald, but was likely an Oswald impersonator since Oswald’s whereabouts were otherwise accounted for. This man fired at Slack’s target, leading to a quarrel. Slack reported the range shooter was accompanied by another man identified as Frazier from Irving, Texas.
Slack’s report about a man identified as Frazier, coupled with initial reports of a .303 Enfield being found in the TSBD (the type of gun Frazier owned), constitute two curious links between Buell Frazier and rifle-related evidence in the Kennedy Assassination case. Frazier’s story about Oswald’s curtain rods package represents a third. This leads to speculation that Frazier may have been targeted by plotters as a potential backup patsy prior to the assassination. Alternatively, Frazier may have been targeted as a witness who could be pressured into implicating Oswald with the pre-established curtain rods story. If so, the tidbits tying Frazier to Oswald and the rifle through the .303 Enfield and rifle range impersonation may have been planted as elements that could be used to elevate the pressure against Frazier after the assassination.
The possibility that the plotters knew about Frazier’s connection to Oswald and selected him for that reason is strengthened by the fact that Oswald’s very employment at the TSBD was indirectly linked to both Buell Frazier and Linnie Mae Randle. It was Ruth Paine who procured the job for Oswald following a social function attended by Randle in which Paine pressed Randle for ideas about where Oswald might find a job. Randle mentioned several possibilities, but Paine’s attention zeroed in on the TSBD after Randle remarked that her brother Buell Frazier worked there.
Randle insisted to the Warren Commission that she knew of no openings at the TSBD and had said so to Ruth Paine at the time. Nonetheless, Mrs. Paine took it upon herself to telephone the TSBD personally after first pressuring Linnie Mae Randle to do so, which Randle refused to do. Paine spoke to superintendent Roy Truly on the phone and immediately secured an interview for Oswald. When Oswald showed up for an interview on October 15, six weeks prior to Kennedy’s assassination, Truly promptly hired Oswald on the spot.
The impersonations of Oswald establish that he was selected as the fall guy for Kennedy’s assassination at least several months before the fact. Other evidence, such as the backyard photos, the circumstances surrounding the alleged Edwin Walker assassination attempt, and Oswald’s supposed trip to Mexico City also establish that Oswald was set up in advance. Ruth Paine supplied evidence against Oswald in all three of these areas. Due to her role in procuring Oswald a job at the TSBD, and in light of the family connections with the CIA shared by Ruth and her husband Michael, Ruth Paine is a prime suspect as a participant in the framing of Oswald.
Given the level of complexity and care given to setting Oswald up as the patsy, his employment at the TSBD (and its location adjacent to the hairpin turn on Kennedy’s motorcade route) cannot merely be dismissed as a happy coincidence for the plotters. Any analysis of how the plot was organized must account for how Oswald came to be employed at that building. That analysis points directly at Ruth Paine as the agent who arranged this. Randle and Frazier stand out as figures who were roped into the circumstances of Oswald’s employment there, and it stands to reason they were also roped into their role in supplying evidence against Oswald to explain how he supposedly smuggled the rifle into the building.
Gordon Slack’s reports about a man identified as Frazier from Irving Texas accompanying the Oswald impersonator to the rifle range may or may not be accurate. Likewise, it may or may not have been a coincidence that Frazier possessed a .303 Enfield rifle—the same model of rifle first reported as having been found by police at the TSBD. Whether or not steps were taken ahead of time to implicate Buell Frazier alongside Oswald, Frazier’s reports do indicate that the Dallas Police were poised to railroad him as Oswald’s accomplice. This helps explain why Frazier would have succumbed to the pressure and submitted a false account of Oswald bringing a package to work, claiming it contained curtain rods. Linnie Mae Randle’s role in Ruth Paine’s procurement of Oswald’s TSBD employment would also expose her to pressure. This, along with the desire to protect her brother, could account for her corroboration of Frazier’s curtain rods story.
If so, Detective Adamcik’s report of Mrs. Randle being the first person to inform him about Oswald’s supposed package is highly suspect. Inconsistencies in Randle’s testimony suggest she never saw Oswald carrying a package to Frazier’s car that morning at all. In light of that, her comment to Adamcik either indicates that Randle was proactively stepping forward to frame Oswald, or that Adamcik’s report of the encounter was fabricated. If Frazier’s report is true about the threats and pressure he received at the hands of the DPD, it stands to reason that they may have taken the additional corrupt step of pressuring him to throw Oswald under the bus with the curtain rods story. By falsely reporting that Linnie Mae Randle first alerted the DPD to Oswald’s package, the Dallas Police could conceal the fact that the existence of this package was a DPD fabrication in its origins.
However it came to pass, the following can be stated with certainty: Under considerable pressure from the Dallas Police later that evening, Frazier and Randle agreed to sign affidavits stating that they witnessed Oswald carrying a package to work. The Dallas Police then presented this as evidence to explain how Oswald brought the rifle into the TSBD.
Linking the Curtain Rods Stories of Ralph Yates and Buell Frazier
As demonstrated earlier in this article, Ralph Yates’s account of picking up a hitchhiker with a package claimed to contain curtain rods can only be false if a number of absurdities and/or highly unlikely circumstances are accepted as true.
In contrast, Buell Frazier’s curtain rods story can only be true if a number of absurdities and highly unlikely circumstances are also true. Every other person (besides Linnie Mae Randle) who saw Oswald that morning must have been lying or blindly mistaken about Oswald not carrying a package. Randle must have been able to simultaneously see Oswald’s body below the waist and not be able to see Oswald’s body below the waist as he approached her house. Randle must also have possessed superhuman vision in order to see what Oswald was doing on the other side of the wall of her carport, on the far side of Frazier’s car. Randle must also have observed Oswald’s package astutely, noting various details about its composition and form, while simultaneously being unsure whether or not it was actually a box.
If Frazier and Randle’s stories are true, they must have both been wildly mistaken about the length of his package and the way he was carrying it (if it contained the broken-down Mannlicher Carcano). If Oswald really brought a package containing curtain rods to work, he must have left these curtain rods behind when he departed the TSBD that afternoon, after which they promptly disappeared. Then Oswald must have lied to police about not bringing the curtain rods rather than telling the police where he left the curtain rods so his story could be corroborated. If Oswald had told his interrogators he really did bring curtain rods to work, it seems unlikely they would have altered this statement even if they were trying to frame him: Since no curtain rods were found at the TSBD and entered into evidence, Frazier’s story would merely be strengthened if Oswald had corroborated it, and Oswald would be branded as lying about the contents of the package to cover up his crime.
If Frazier and Randle’s stories are false, none of the absurdities listed above have to be true anymore. Unlike Ralph Yates, Frazier and Randle had discernible reasons for fabricating their stories due to the intense pressure Frazier faced from the Dallas Police. It makes sense why they would claim Oswald carried his package in the manner described (cupped in his hand, and gripping the top of the bag in Frazier’s and Randle’s accounts respectively). If Oswald actually carried a small lunch sack with him as he claimed, it would be normal to carry that sack in either of these ways. If he were carrying a bag with either a rifle or curtain rods in it, both methods of carrying the bag would be highly unusual.
If Frazier and Randle both gave false accounts of Oswald’s package, only one element of their stories is difficult to explain. Given the fact that Yates’s Oswald-impersonating hitchhiker also carried a package said to contain curtain rods, Frazier could not have personally invented “curtain rods” as Oswald’s excuse for the package. At the very least, it is highly unlikely (to the point of absurdity) for Frazier to have independently concocted this coincidental narrative. Instead, someone else must have provided Frazier with the curtain rods story. Whoever supplied Frazier with the curtain rods reference must have been linked to the same plotters who supplied the Oswald impersonator with the same reference.
Locating the source for Frazier’s curtain rods reference hinges on Detective Adamcik’s report of first hearing about Oswald’s package from Linnie Mae Randle. If his report was false, the most likely source for the curtain rods reference is the DPD itself, having supplied Frazier with this reference during his interrogation. If Adamcik’s report was accurate, Frazier must have been recruited to frame Oswald with the curtain rods story by someone else, and Linnie Mae Randle would have to have joined him in this resolve prior to her encounter with Adamcik.
The narrative frame comparison breaks down like this:
Frazier and Randle were involved in the plot to frame Oswald prior to the assassination, presumably either in conjunction with Ruth Paine, members of the plot who worked at the TSBD, or both. The curtain rods story was supplied to Frazier and Randle ahead of time, and they faithfully deployed it the day of the assassination. Adamcik’s report about first hearing this story from Mrs. Randle is accurate.
Frazier was coerced into cooperating with efforts to frame Oswald in the aftermath of the assassination, but before he left the TSBD. Frazier agreed to this, fearing that otherwise he would be implicated as Oswald’s co-conspirator since he drove Oswald to work that morning. Frazier drove home and informed Linnie Mae Randle about the need to frame Oswald before heading to the Irving Medical Center. Again, Adamcik’s report about first hearing this story from Mrs. Randle is accurate.
The Dallas Police or FBI supplied Frazier with the curtain rods story during his interrogation. Detective Adamcik fabricated his report about Linnie Mae Randle informing him about Oswald’s package. He did this to cover up the true source of the story.
The first frame suffers from appearing outlandish on its face. While Ruth Paine’s family ties to the CIA arouse suspicion (as do many of her other activities), there is little evidence to suggest that either Linnie Mae Randle or Buell Frazier had motive or connections that would implicate them in the plot to kill Kennedy. There is no indication that either of them had strong political motivations, nor connections with rabid anti-Kennedy political groups, organized crime, or intelligence operatives (other than Ruth Paine, perhaps).
If Frazier had been involved in the plot and was supplied with his curtain rods narrative ahead of time, one would expect him to have delivered his curtain rods story immediately after the assassination. His decision to delay implicating Oswald until he was tracked down and arrested at the Irving Medical Center 6 hours later would make little to no sense.
In light of Frazier’s arrest by the DPD, the second frame seems more plausible. The official Kennedy Assassination narrative holds that sometime around 12:45pm–1:30pm, TSBD supervisor Bill Shelly informed superintendent Roy Truly that Lee Oswald had gone missing. Truly then held a roll call, confirmed that Oswald was the only missing employee, and notified the Dallas Police of this. Oswald jumped to the top of the suspect list at this time, just prior to his subsequent arrest at the Texas Theater for the murder of JD Tippit.
This narrative cannot be entirely accurate, as many TSBD employees had actually left the building by the time of the supposed roll call. The police had sealed off the building, preventing any employees who were still outside from getting back in. It is true, however, that Oswald was one of only two absent employees who worked on the 6th floor that day (the other was Charles Givens), so it does make sense that he would have come to the attention of the Dallas Police as someone to locate and question once the rifle and shell casings were reportedly discovered on the 6th floor.
Some have argued that if Oswald was truly identified as a prime suspect at this time, it indicates that either Bill Shelley or Roy Truly (or both) were privy to the plot to assassinate Kennedy and frame Oswald. Their role in identifying Oswald as a suspect to the Dallas Police would be in keeping with their foreknowledge of Oswald’s assigned role as the patsy. In accordance with this narrative frame, they may have selected Buell Frazier to deliver the curtain rods story because Frazier was known to give Oswald rides to work. Either Truly or Shelley would have applied this pressure to Frazier after alerting the Dallas Police to Oswald’s absence (unless he had been recruited ahead of time, in accordance with the first narrative frame).
It does seem likely that at least a few personnel at the TSBD had foreknowledge of the plot. The actual assassination team would likely have needed assistance to gain access to the building and safely escape undetected after the shooting. If so, there are reasons to consider Shelley and Truly as candidates for the TSBD suspect list. They both had a long history of employment with the firm, which was owned and run by men with strident right-wing beliefs and connections—consistent with a motive to act against the liberal Kennedy. In particular, DH Byrd was the owner of the building the TSBD occupied, and strong reasons exist to suspect Byrd as an active participant in facilitating the assassination.
The case against Byrd will be examined in a future article in this series, but if Byrd or others at the TSBD did facilitate Kennedy’s assassination, it is logical to take a look at Shelley and Truly as suspects. As the two main supervisors of basic labor activities at the TSBD, they would have the ability to either enable the entry, setup, and escape of a shooting team—or to overlook the presence of such a shooting team. Roy Truly was on record as sharing the hard right convictions held by the owners of the TSBD and the building it occupied, he aided in establishing various elements of the Oswald-did-it narrative, and was seen handling two rifles in his office just prior to the assassination (more on that later). As for Bill Shelley, journalist Elzie Glaze reported that over the course of successive interviews, Shelley confirmed that he had been an intelligence officer during World War II and had established and maintained CIA connections after the war.
None of these facts implicate either Truly or Shelley as conspirators, but reasons certainly exist to examine them as possible suspects. In contrast, there is little reason to place Buell Frazier on the suspect list other than pure conjecture. He was just a 19-year-old kid at the time who had recently moved to Dallas from a small town, starting work at the TSBD only a few months before. If Frazier and Randle were part of the plot against Kennedy from the beginning, it would certainly clarify their roles in procuring Oswald’s TSBD employment as well as their testimony about his curtain rods package. Despite this, is frankly hard to imagine that a young newcomer like Frazier—who did not evince any interest in political action, radical-right or otherwise—would have been brought into the plot, let alone his sister, Linnie Mae.
It is hard to imagine that Frazier would have been recruited into the plot ahead of time, but it is also hard to imagine that plotters inside the TSBD would have pressured an unwitting Frazier into implicating Oswald with the curtain rods story in the minutes directly following the shooting. This would be a risky exposure for the plotters. It would make much more sense for this pressure to have come from Frazier’s interrogators after his arrest.
It may come down to a coin toss as to whether one believes it is more likely for Frazier to have been a member of the plot ahead of time (narrative frame one) or to have been pressured by plotters at the TSBD in the minutes following the shooting (narrative frame two). In any case, the coherency of the second narrative frame suffers for the same reason as that of the first narrative frame. If someone like Bill Shelley confronted Frazier after the assassination and coerced him into implicating Oswald, one would expect Frazier to do so right away by approaching the Dallas Police who were already present at the TSBD. A fair number of TSBD employees were brought to Dallas Police Headquarters to answer questions and submit statements that afternoon, including Shelley and Truly—but not Frazier.
Instead, this narrative frame requires Frazier to have driven home to bring his sister up to speed on the curtain rods story, giving her instructions to approach the police with this information once they arrived at Ruth Paine’s house. Then Frazier would have jaunted off to visit his stepfather at the Irving Medical Center to wait for the Dallas Police to come and arrest him. This makes little sense, other than as a result of Frazier devolving into a blind panic and inadvertently taking actions that would cast suspicion on him, undermine his credibility, and get himself arrested—within a hair’s breadth of being charged as Oswald’s accomplice.
For multiple reasons, the first two narrative frames both fail to make much sense. In addition, neither of these two narrative frames seem plausible in light of Frazier and Randle’s dogged insistence that Oswald’s package was too short to contain the rifle. After Oswald was killed and solidly branded as the lone assassin, both Frazier and Randle were repeatedly pressured by the FBI to alter their accounts and describe the package as longer than they originally claimed, using the excuse that they had merely been mistaken in their original recollections. They were given every opportunity to do so, but they never did. If Frazier had been recruited to tell this story by someone on the inside of the plot at the TSBD, he would be putting himself at risk by refusing to fulfill his role by sticking to his story of the too-short package. The other plotters might see this halfway effort as a betrayal or a sign of possible betrayal in the future.
On the other hand, if Frazier had been fed this story by his interrogators at Dallas Police Headquarters, he would no longer be in danger after Oswald’s death if he stuck to his original story. The narrative of Oswald-as-lone-gunman became firmly established within days of Frazier’s initial affadavit, and Frazier was no longer under threat of being charged as Oswald’s co-conspirator. Frazier consistently recounts his treatment by the Dallas Police on November 22 with an air of injury and bitterness in later interviews. In light of Frazier’s resentment, it is understandable why he would refuse to cooperate further by altering his claims about the length of the package to bury Oswald deeper still.
Buell Frazier has gradually become more vocal in his belief that Oswald was not guilty of killing Kennedy and did not bring a rifle to work that morning. In recounting his memories of Oswald, Frazier typically becomes emotional as he describes Oswald’s warm relationship with the children in his neighborhood. It is clear that Frazier personally liked Oswald. Frazier has never taken back his story about the curtain rods package, but if he was indeed pressured by his interrogators to fabricate that story to protect himself, he would likely feel significant guilt and remorse for his role in implicating a man he liked and believed was innocent. This would account for Frazier’s emotional endorsements of Oswald’s character, as well as his refusal to describe the package as long enough to hold the rifle—even though Frazier has saved face all these years by standing by his story.
The Dallas Police Supplied Frazier with the Curtain Rods Story
If Buell Frazier had been given the curtain rods story before he left the TSBD on the day of the assassination, it would be necessary to believe that he immediately behaved in bizarre and nonsensical ways. In contrast, if he was given the curtain rods story while being interrogated at Dallas Police Headquarters, his actions make much more sense. If that is what happened, Detective Adamcik’s report about Linnie Mae Randle telling him about Oswald’s package in front of Ruth Paine’s house must be a fabrication. This would also make sense. If the Dallas Police pressured Frazier (and Randle) to endorse a false story about Oswald bringing a package to work, it would be in their interest to conceal having done so by falsely reporting that they first learned about Oswald’s package from Mrs. Randle herself.
This narrative frame also makes sense due to the ample evidence showing the Dallas Police framed Oswald in other ways. As I demonstrated in The JFK Assassination: What Didn’t Happen, Part Two, strong evidence exists to implicate members of the Dallas Police in framing Oswald after the fact (i.e., planting fingerprint evidence, distorting his statements during interrogation to erase his alibi, denying him an attorney, fabricating the paper bag as evidence, and allowing Jack Ruby to assassinate him). In addition, as my article JFK and the Doorways to Perception, Part Two demonstrates, one or more members of the Dallas Police were almost certainly involved in procuring the forged backyard photos of Oswald, which were created prior to the assassination. The officers that did so were part of the plot to frame Oswald prior to his arrest and prior to Kennedy’s death. Knowledge about the curtain rods story and its role in creating a narrative for how Oswald smuggled the rifle into the building would have been available to members of the plot involved at that level.
In the next article in this series, I will further demonstrate how circumstances related to the murder of police officer JD Tippit and the arrest of Oswald implicate several members of the Dallas Police as having foreknowledge of the plot to kill Kennedy and frame Oswald—as well as in assisting Jack Ruby to assassinate Oswald and abetting the murder of Officer Tippit. Evidence points to the involvement of Captain Westbrook, Captain Fritz, Reserve Officer Croy, and Sergeant Jerry Hill at the least. Because of the extensive involvement of these Dallas Police officers in on-the-ground coordination of activities in framing Oswald and facilitating his assassination, and due to Detective Adamcik’s report about Linnie Mae Randle approaching him with the story about Oswald’s package, I find it much more likely that the curtain rods story came to Buell Frazier through the DPD rather than through other interrogators such as the FBI.
In The JFK Assassination: What Didn’t Happen, Part Two, I presented evidence supporting the likelihood that the Dallas Police falsified their reports of finding the “rifle bag” on the 6th floor of the TSBD, and may have actually constructed the bag themselves at the TSBD less than three hours after Kennedy’s assassination. If insiders in the plot to assassinate Kennedy were present on the Dallas Police force, it helps explain how Dallas Police investigators knew they would need to locate a rifle bag as evidence against Oswald prior to Linnie Mae Randle supposedly telling Detective Adamcik about Oswald’s suspicious package.
In that article, I established the Dallas Police Department’s track record of falsifying evidence in the Kennedy case, as well as in other cases over the course of years. This includes Gus Rose, one of the three detectives responsible for arresting and interrogating Buell Frazier. He is also the detective credited with discovering the backyard photos. Rose was featured in Errol Morris’s 1988 film the Thin Blue Line as one of the orchestrators of the wrongful murder conviction of Randall Dale Adams in 1978, who was framed by the Dallas Police for killing a police officer.
It would only take a few men occupying key positions within the Dallas Police to provide instructions and hints about how the falsification of evidence should proceed. Officers of senior rank such as Captain Westbrook and Captain Fritz (heads of the personnel and homicide departments, respectively) would be able to direct sensitive aspects of how Oswald was to be framed. Officers of lower rank could conduct the regular procedures of framing and cover-up without any knowledge of or participation in the plot to kill Kennedy. For them it would just be business as usual.
There are a few different ways the generation of Frazier’s curtain rods story might have played out. The following sequence of events seems most likely to me:
The bag claimed by Dallas Police to have concealed the Mannlicher Carcano rifle is either found or (more likely) constructed by police officers during their search of the TSBD. This bag is transported to police headquarters at about 3:00pm.
Detectives Stovall, Rose, and Adamcik drive to Ruth Paine’s house in Irving after Oswald’s arrest, whose address is listed in Oswald’s TSBD employment records. They begin questioning Ruth Paine and Marina Oswald at the Paine household sometime between 2:30pm and 3:30pm. The detectives are aware that a bag was found at the TSBD and the suspect (Oswald) is believed to have brought the rifle to work in that makeshift bag.
The detectives ask Ruth Paine and Marina how Oswald got to work that morning and whether he brought a bag or a package. They learn that he received a ride with his neighbor and coworker Buell Frazier who lives a few houses away. They learn that neither Ruth nor Marina saw Oswald carrying a package.
Detective Adamcik’s account of Linnie Mae Randle driving up to Ruth Paine’s house to tell the detectives about Oswald’s suspicious package seems suspicious in and of itself. Why would she take it upon herself to approach the police and send them off to arrest her brother? Given the information the detectives received from Randle about Frazier’s hospital visit, it does seem likely that Adamcik encountered her, but it seems much more likely to me that the detectives approached her—not the other way around. Ruth Paine would have told the detectives about Frazier driving Oswald to work, and the detectives would have followed this lead and approached Mrs. Randle themselves.
It seems likely to me that that Detective Adamcik pressed Mrs. Randle regarding her observations of Oswald that morning and whether he brought a package. If Mrs. Randle did see Oswald carrying his lunch sack, she might have said she saw him carrying something, which the detectives jumped on. This would explain how she got roped into corroborating Buell Frazier’s story later at the police station. It seems unlikely she would have volunteered this information unprompted, knowing this would increase the heat on her brother, Buell. She would have noted that the detectives were currently smelling blood regarding Frazier’s possible role as Oswald’s accomplice. Perhaps this explains why she misinformed them about Frazier being at Parkland, hoping to buy him some time.
The Dallas Police locate and arrest Buell Frazier. They search Mrs. Randle’s house and confiscate Frazier’s .303 Enfield and his ammunition. The police then begin interrogating Frazier when he is brought to Dallas Police Headquarters. They tell him Randle witnessed Oswald bringing a package to work that morning. Frazier, who saw Oswald carrying his lunch sack, confirms that Oswald did bring a bag with him to work.
The Dallas Police begin pressuring Frazier to admit that Oswald brought the rifle to work in the package and insinuate that Frazier is covering for Oswald. They threaten to charge Frazier with Kennedy’s assassination as Oswald’s accomplice.
Next, the curtain rods idea would have been introduced in the following manner: One of the Dallas Police officers on the inside of the Kennedy assassination plot starts a rumor with the officers interrogating Frazier. According to this rumor, witness reports have surfaced of Oswald carrying a package into the building, claiming it contained curtain rods. Perhaps this is the origin of Police Chief Curry’s inaccurate statements from November 23 about an elevator porter bringing Oswald to the 6th floor while Oswald carried the package.
Frazier’s interrogators try this rumor out on Frazier, stating that other witnesses are reporting that Oswald brought a package to work, or was seen with a package at work, and that Oswald claimed it contained curtain rods. They increase the pressure on Frazier.
Frazier agrees to give the Dallas Police and the FBI what they want. But he also crafts his story to protect himself. Frazier simply makes a modification to the lunch sack Oswald actually brought to work that day, essentially just increasing the length of the bag from about 1 foot, like a regular lunch sack, to 2 feet—long enough to contain curtain rods.
Under intense pressure, Frazier continues to insist that the bag is no longer than this. It is unclear whether Frazier was actually brought back to the police station to take a polygraph test, or whether he was brought back so Frazier could be pressured to increase the length of the bag he saw in his testimony. Either way, Frazier remained resolute. An FBI report regarding Randle’s testimony that evening indicates that she claimed the package was 3 feet long, but her handwritten affidavit does not include an estimate of its length. In any case, Randle’s later statements corresponded with Frazier’s insistence that Oswald’s package could not have exceeded 27 inches, or 28 at the very longest.
At some later date (their report is undated) Detectives Rose, Stovall, and Adamcik issue a joint report about their actions on November 22. They include a fabricated account of Linne Mae Randle driving up to Ruth Paine’s house to tell Adamcik that Oswald was carrying a large package, and to also tell them where they can find her brother. This is done to conceal the fact that the DPD pressured Randle and Frazier into giving fabricated testimony.
As for the question of who might have coordinated the curtain rods story between the Oswald impersonator and conspirators in the DPD, I would nominate Jack Ruby as the most logical candidate. He was a highly involved member of the plot, numerous witness reports place Ruby in repeated contact with an Oswald look-alike, and he had extensive and well-established contacts with dozens of DPD officers. Someone besides Ruby could have fulfilled this role, but Ruby is worth mentioning because he fits the bill so well. It becomes much easier to see the full picture of the two curtain rods stories when Jack Ruby is proposed as the figure who links them together.
The outline offered above includes speculation, as it must. As with many areas of the Kennedy assassination, conflicting witness accounts, fact patterns that don’t add up, and indications of evidentiary fabrication result in numerous uncertainties about what really happened. The framework detailed above is not offered as a definitive narrative of conclusive certainty in this matter. It represents the best of my own reasoning and inferences, taking into context all of the evidence relevant to the testimonies of both Ralph Yates and Buell Frazier. In short, after eliminating competing narrative frames through reductio ad absurdum, this is the remaining narrative that provides a coherent and sensibly grounded account of what actually occurred.
Through this process, my conclusion is that the curtain rods element of Frazier’s story was likely introduced by a Dallas Police officer on the inside of the plot in adherence to the previously agreed upon narrative. The Kennedy Assassination was a complex and compartmentalized plot. The duplication of curtain rods stories planted with Ralph Yates and Buell Frazier point to a breakdown in communication over the smaller details of that plot in the lead-up to the assassination and the frenzy of activity on November, 22nd.
In other words, having settled on the Oswald-curtain rods narrative, the determination of whether to plant this narrative through the Oswald impersonator or by pressuring Frazier may have remained up in the air. It seems likely that getting Frazier to testify to this narrative would have been preferred. The hitchhiker incident would have been implemented as a backup plan in case efforts to elicit this testimony from Frazier fell through. Perhaps this also helps explain the reference to the .303 Enfield that was leaked to the press and Garland Slack’s encounter with a man using the name Frazier who accompanied the Oswald impersonator to the firing range. These details could be weaponized against Frazier in threatening to charge him as Oswald’s accomplice and ensure his cooperation.
By the time Ralph Yates did submit his report about encountering a hitchhiker with a package said to contain curtain rods, Frazier’s and Randle’s stories were already established. If publicized, Yates’s testimony could have exposed the fraudulence of Frazier’s curtain rods testimony, verified the existence of a plot to kill Kennedy and frame Oswald through use of an impersonator, and drawn attention to the possibility that the FBI and Dallas Police deliberately facilitated the framing of Oswald.
It is ultimately a matter of speculation whether the implementation of both curtain rods stories was intentional, or whether the plotters mistakenly deployed both stories instead of just one. Either scenario is plausible and sensible. Whatever the case, the FBI was able to discount, suppress, and bury Yates’s testimony with relative ease.
If Buell Frazier was pressured to agree that Oswald carried a bag he claimed contained curtain rods, that is exactly what he offered to the Dallas Police and FBI, and he offered no more than that. Frazier was in a tough spot. He would have known that his story would survive scrutiny better if he could keep it as close to the truth as possible. Frazier would also desire to protect himself from allegations that he knew or should have known Oswald was carrying a rifle.
Frazier could still have been charged as an accomplice in the assassination unless his description of Oswald’s bag was perfectly consistent with that of a bag actually containing curtain rods. Hence, lengthening his observation of Oswald’s lunch sack just enough so it could have contained curtain rods was probably the best solution available to him. After Frazier escaped from the clutches of the Dallas Police, he and Randle tightened up their stories to protect each other. They remained steadfast thereafter, impervious to future pressure applied by the FBI and the Warren Commission, or by anyone else.
Narrative frame comparison is unable to conclusively establish whether Frazier received the curtain rods story from his interrogators or from conspirators against Kennedy and Oswald at the TSBD. A true investigation into the personnel at the TSBD and their networked connections was never undertaken. But by comparing the facts of the case against these parallel frames (and other competing frames), the likelihood that Buell Frazier and Linnie Mae Randle were roped into their roles unwittingly and coerced into false testimony by members of the DPD and/or FBI provides the best evidentiary and rational fit.
Warren Caster and the Additional Rifles
One narrative frame I did not explore in this article is the possibility that Lee Harvey Oswald, although ignorant of the plot to kill Kennedy, was following instructions that day from a handler who was part of the plot—and who instructed Oswald to bring a package to work that day and tell Frazier it contained curtain rods. Under this narrative frame, Oswald unwittingly obeyed, setting himself up, and Buell Frazier’s story is actually true. Oswald’s story about curtain rods was fed to him by the same people who supplied the Oswald impersonator with the curtain rods story.
This narrative is very far-fetched and makes little sense. If Oswald’s handler was setting him up, why not get him to take a package to work that was long enough to have contained a rifle? If Oswald wasn’t part of the plot, how could he be convinced to take this package to work that day? What was in the package? Why did he leave it behind when he left the building? For what purpose did he think he was bringing it? For what purpose did he think he was lying to Frazier about it? Or if Oswald’s handler instructed him to actually fetch real curtain rods that morning, for what earthly purpose did Oswald think he was doing this? None of these questions yield answers of a coherent or sensible nature.
Alternatively, it could be argued that Oswald really was part of the plot and brought something to work that morning as part of that plot—not the Mannlicher Carcano, as it was too long to fit in the package—but some other item, either a shorter gun or some other piece of equipment. While we’re at it, we could speculate that Ralph Yates did not actually give a ride to an Oswald impersonator, but picked up the real Lee Harvey Oswald. Yates described the hitchhiker’s package as 4–4½ feet long, long enough to carry the Carcano. We can have Oswald as the mule for the assassination, bringing the Carcano in, bringing other guns and other equipment in, and just telling everyone he was bringing curtain rods every time. Just for fun, Oswald says a bunch of self-incriminating things to Yates, wanting to keep things lively.
I find this scenario fairly laughable, although foolishly fun to imagine. But it must be fairly considered, if only to eliminate it as an impossibility. Although Oswald was accounted for at the TSBD the morning of Yates’s encounter with the hitchhiker, speculative inquiries could posit that Oswald’s absence from work that morning may have gone unnoticed. This is hard to imagine, though—he would have been missing for several hours, and surely his supervisors, Bill Shelley and Roy Truly, would have realized that. The scenario that has Lee Harvey Oswald absconding from work to smuggle in the rifle via a hitched ride is fairly absurd. The likelihood that he would be caught doing so would be enormous, and Oswald would surely have known that.
The only way Oswald (or anyone else) would take such a risk is if Shelley and Truly were in on the plot to kill Kennedy along with him. Previously in this article, I mentioned that it seems likely there were insiders to the plot working at the TSBD, and that Shelley and Truly would be included on the list of suspects if this were the case. But setting wild speculation aside for the moment, the problem with this narrative frame is the same problem I brought up in In The JFK Assassination: What Didn’t Happen, Part Two. It makes no sense for Oswald to have been part of the assassination plot.
In addition to completely lacking a motive to kill Kennedy, Oswald did nothing to firmly establish an alibi at the time of the shooting. Although his alibi can be established (as demonstrated in the aforementioned article), and as such he could not have been a shooter, Oswald took no steps to strengthen this alibi. If he were part of the plot, he assuredly would have done so. He would have known his background as a defector to the Soviet Union would immediately make him a prime suspect in a presidential assassination conducted from the building he worked at. If I were Oswald and knew Kennedy was about to be assassinated, I would have been out on the sidewalk in front of the building saying hello to every person I knew, drawing obnoxious attention to myself, and sticking my face in front of every camera I saw.
It would also make no sense for the actual plotters to have included Oswald in their plans. Steps were taken to frame Oswald as the patsy ahead of time. Bringing Oswald into the plot would have brought no benefit to the plotters, and it would have burdened them with a high risk of exposure if something went wrong. No, the only narrative frame that makes coherent sense is that Oswald was unwitting of the plot to kill Kennedy, and he took no packages to the TSBD—not on November 20, and not on November 22. The first package was taken there by an impersonator to plant evidence against Oswald, and the second package never existed. It was a story fed to Buell Frazier under duress to plant evidence against Oswald.
It is possible, however, that in addition to planting evidence against Oswald through his statements to Ralph Yates, Oswald’s impersonator was also bringing an actual rifle to the TSBD. As it turns out, the very day Yates encountered the hitchhiker, two rifles were brought into the building. This evidence was brought to the attention of the Dallas Police by none other than Lee Harvey Oswald himself. During his interrogations, Oswald was asked if he ever observed any firearms in the TSBD, and Oswald answered in the affirmative. On November 20, he had observed Roy Truly handling two rifles in his office.
The DPD and FBI put the question to Truly and he confirmed that Warren Caster, a manager of Southwestern Publishing with offices on the second floor of the TSBD building brought two rifles into work that day. Caster showed the rifles to Truly—a .22 Remington and a 30.06 sporterized Mauser—and Truly picked up the Mauser to get a feel for it and admire it. Oswald witnessed the incident, as did some of the other employees. Roy Truly stated that in 29 years of working for the TSBD (he was originally hired in 1934), it was the only occasion any rifles were ever present in the workplace.
Warren Caster was questioned, and he claimed he purchased the Remington that day during his lunch hour as a present for his son and picked up the Mauser at the same time. He had been thinking about purchasing a deer rifle for himself for several years, and that just happened to be the day Caster accomplished this long-standing desire. Caster claimed he brought both rifles back home with him that evening, and his account was accepted by investigators without question. Caster was reportedly out of town on November 22 on a business trip, and was thus absent the day of the assassination.
There may be nothing to the Warren Caster incident; perhaps Caster really did just happen to buy two rifles two days before Kennedy’s assassination and just happened to bring them into the TSBD that day. If so, the intersecting coincidences are enough to make one’s hair stand on end. Not only did this occur two days before Kennedy was assassinated—at which time some of the shots fired at Kennedy came from that very building—it was the only time any rifles had ever been brought to the TSBD, according to Roy Truly.
Not only that, Caster’s show-and-tell with the rifles occurred on the very same day that an Oswald impersonator brought a gun-sized package to the very street corner the TSBD was located on. Not only that, investigators would have never even learned about it unless Lee Harvey Oswald, the man framed for Kennedy’s assassination, informed them of the incident. Not only that, the first law enforcement officers to identify the rifle they found in the TSBD after the assassination identified it as a Mauser, the same kind of rifle brought in by Caster.
Whether Caster brought in the rifles handed off to him by the Oswald impersonator during his lunch hour, whether Caster volunteered to cover for Truly by claiming the rifles were his, or whether the whole incident really was just a genuine synchronicity—we can no longer verify. It’s a lead that was never investigated, like almost every lead that didn’t aid in implicating Oswald as Kennedy’s killer. No further evidence or information is available about Warren Caster and his rifles. But it certainly provides food for thought about the possibility of inside involvement in Kennedy’s assassination at the TSBD—inside involvement that did not include Lee Harvey Oswald.
Further Research
In an upcoming companion piece to this article, I will more deeply explore every remaining nook and cranny of the Yates-Frazier-curtain-rods rabbit hole for the benefit of the highly dedicated. This exploration will include every official document regarding Ralph Yates I am aware of, and it will include additional points, counter-points, and scrutiny regarding everything known about Ralph Yates, more possibilities regarding Buell Frazier, the specter of Jack Ruby, Linnie Mae’s husband Bill, and his connection to another gentleman named Caster. I’m intending this companion piece to serve as a one-stop-shop for future Ralph Yates research.
That said, none of the additional information related to this corner of the Kennedy case alters the narrative frame comparison presented in this article, and the conclusions reached through that process. Yates’s reference to curtain rods in his initial report corroborates the authenticity of his account. Frazier’s curtain rods story has multiple holes in it, as does Randle’s, and Frazier’s reference to curtain rods shows the influence of the plotters against Kennedy in the crafting of his story. This influence most likely reached Frazier via the Dallas Police.
Frazier and Yates—Final Thoughts
When Buell Frazier published his memoirs in 2021, he bizarrely chose the title Steering Truth for this account of his life. The irony inherent in this title should be obvious: Truth cannot be steered. Something only needs to be steered if it would proceed in a direction one doesn’t wish it to go without intervention. If truth is steered, it ceases to be the truth. This title raises tantalizing questions about the directions Frazier steered truth in his life, rather than allowing truth to run its natural course. In these memoirs, Frazier disclosed that his childhood nickname was “The Weasel” because, in his words, “I had the uncanny ability to do something bad to someone and not get caught.”
Sometimes I feel that real life is a farcical parody of life as it ought to be. It’s almost incomprehensible that Frazier would approve the title Steering Truth for his memoirs and include an anecdote in its pages about his own deceptive nature—a character trait recognized widely enough by others to garner him the moniker of “The Weasel.” Frazier’s solitary claim to fame is his story about Lee Harvey Oswald and the curtain rods package. I can only imagine that Frazier longs to come clean with us but just can’t bring himself to actually do it. Instead he provides us with hints, winks, and nods to the fraudulent nature of his story—stopping just short of admitting the truth.
As of this writing in 2025, Frazier is 81 years old. It’s totally understandable why he told that curtain rods story, and why he kept telling it all these years. And it’s laudable that he told the story in such a way that if his story is believed, Oswald could not have brought the Mannlicher Carcano to the TSBD that day. My guess is most people would empathize with Frazier and the tight spot he was in. I know I do. There is forgiveness in my heart for Buell Frazier, and I presume he would find forgiveness from others as well. I just hope he finally gives the world the truth before he passes.
Unless additional information comes to light that alters the case analysis in this matter, the process of narrative frame comparison demonstrates that Ralph Yates did adhere to the truth in his account, and in his reference to curtain rods. His reward was to be subjected to incessant gaslighting and pressure from the FBI until his psyche broke under the strain. The remainder of his life consisted of perennial commitment to mental institutions, mind-altering medications, and electroshock therapy until his heart finally gave out and he died at age 39. Where is justice for Ralph Yates? Where is justice for Lee Harvey Oswald? Where is justice for John F. Kennedy?
If his account is false, Yates must have lied to the FBI for no personal benefit and no discernible purpose of any kind. He must have convinced his coworker Dempsey Jones to join him in lying to the FBI, also for no discernible purpose or benefit to Jones. Yates must have studied available details in press reports about the assassination and decided—again, for no discernible purpose—to parrot Buell Frazier’s account of Oswald carrying a package containing curtain rods by inserting this identical tidbit into his own fabricated account.
In doing so, Yates must have ignored the overwhelming press reports that referenced window shades, not curtain rods. Instead, Yates must have located one of the few reports to mention curtain rods, although no direct evidence even shows that any such reports were available to him in the press. Failing this, Yates must have had an insider contact who informed him that reports in the press about window shades were incorrect, and that Frazier’s actual report made reference to curtain rods. Under intense pressure from the FBI, Yates inexplicably refused to recant this fabricated testimony for the remainder of his life—not even to say something like, “I may have been mistaken in some of the details in my report. The hitchhiker didn’t really look all that similar to Oswald, and he probably never mentioned curtain rods after all.”
If Yates’s report is true, his decision to truthfully submit his testimony to the FBI makes sense. It also makes sense that Yates never recanted this testimony, and it makes sense why Dempsey Jones would corroborate his report. It also makes sense that Yates did encounter an Oswald impersonator planting witness evidence to frame Oswald; numerous other witnesses also encountered an Oswald impersonator planting evidence against Oswald. In sum, it makes sense why Yates’s report contained the reference to curtain rods—because the Oswald impersonator really did say his package contained curtain rods.
A grounded analysis of the facts and circumstances linking the twin curtain rods reports demands an explanation for the nonsensical fact patterns required for Yates’s story to be false and Frazier’s story to be true. No such explanation is forthcoming. Through narrative frame comparison and concrete corroboration, Yates’s story must be regarded as true and Frazier’s as false. Only this conclusion can account for the full context of facts in this case without reliance on bizarre improbabilities and absurdities stacked on top of absurdities.
In the words of the French Enlightenment thinker, Voltaire:
"Formerly there were those who said: You believe things that are incomprehensible, inconsistent, impossible because we have commanded you to believe them; go then and do what is injust because we command it. Such people show admirable reasoning. Truly, whoever can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. If the God-given understanding of your mind does not resist a demand to believe what is impossible, then you will not resist a demand to do wrong to that God-given sense of justice in your heart."
Yates’s encounter with the hitchhiker indicates that the plotters had selected a narrative for framing Oswald in which Oswald would accept a ride to the TSBD, and on that ride he would bring the rifle to the building in a package he claimed contained curtain rods. If the Dallas Police had been unsuccessful in pressuring Frazier to produce this story, Yates’s encounter with the Oswald impersonator would have produced the story instead. Those crafting the official narrative would have come up with a way to deny Oswald was working at the TSBD at the time of the encounter (much as they came up with ways to erase Oswald’s alibi at the time of the shooting). Because Frazier did come through with the needed story, Yates’s account was suppressed and dismissed instead.
In seeking justice for Ralph Yates, Lee Harvey Oswald, John F. Kennedy, and many others who were harmed by this assassination plot, we must resist the temptation to steer truth. Let truth steer us instead. Let truth be our beacon, and let us discover the realms of promise it may guide us toward with awe, wonder, and gratitude. In search of belated justice for these three men, and justice for the millions of others whose lives have been destroyed by falsehoods and deception, let us be guided by truth. And let us do so for ourselves—for the lives we might lead—and for the lives of our children and those future generations not yet born.
There is still time for truth. Indeed, it is never too late for truth. When we become people of the lie, the world becomes our prison.
May Truth set us free.
Relendra’s series of Kennedy Assassination Articles
While it is outside the scope of this series of articles to provide footnotes or citations for much of the evidence presented here, I have compiled a resource guide to encourage readers to verify the facts of the case for themselves: a compendium of the books, websites, podcasts, films, and methods of research available in researching or learning about the Kennedy case, complete with links.
An intro to the discipline and benefits of understanding the assassination of John F. Kennedy—with reference to its utility and applicability in understanding power dynamics and narrative reasoning on the macro scale of history and global politics, now and then, as well as in one’s personal relationships and spiritual journey.
An introduction to three images that open the mind to the Kennedy Assassination—and a guide to the process of encountering the doors of perception and the keys that unlock them.
A deeper exploration of the path beyond the initial doorways of the Kennedy case through narrative frame comparison, guidance in the use of narrative reasoning tools, and identification of reasoning pitfalls and narrative fallacies. The backyard photos and the circumstances surrounding them are held to particular scrutiny. The case for seriously questioning the official narrative of the assassination is firmly established.
An exploration of the medical and ballistic evidence in the Kennedy Assassination, using narrative frame comparison to eliminate impossibilities in two competing narrative frames: Kennedy was assassinated by a single gunman, or Kennedy was assassinated by multiple gunmen.
In continuing the process of eliminating impossibilities through narrative frame comparison, the evidence against Lee Harvey Oswald is examined in detail. Through this examination, the exoneration of Oswald is established. Oswald did not fire any shots at Kennedy, nor did he participate in the assassination. Multiple gunmen fired at Kennedy, but Oswald was not one of them.
Two men, Ralph Yates and Buell Frazier, both testified to transporting Lee Harvey Oswald to the Texas School Book Depository—and that Oswald bore a package with him he described as containing curtain rods. In examining the reports of both men through narrative frame comparison, it can be established that Yates did transport a hitchhiker claiming to carry curtain rods, but it wasn’t Oswald; and Frazier did transport Oswald, but Oswald didn’t carry a curtain rods package. The intersection of these stories provides strong evidence that Oswald was framed for Kennedy’s Assassination prior to its occurrence and that members Dallas Police Department assisted in framing Oswald, possessing foreknowledge of the plot.
A glossary of terms to aid in the process of contextual narrative reasoning. Includes descriptions of narrative fallacies and narrative reasoning tools, with examples and application to the Kennedy assassination case.
I'm rather late in reading your JFK articles. But I did want to thank you for all of your excellent work. The bits about the competing narrative frames (especially the frontloading ones) have been very helpful.
One thing stood out for me here: "Ralph Yates did as the FBI suggested. Within days of checking in at the hospital, his mental health rapidly deteriorated."
Mental hospitals are notorious for drugging their inmates (who are essentially prisoners) with mind- and soul-destroying chemicals, so his rapid decline doesn't surprise me at all. And then the electroshock treatments made things even worse. It's a sad story, and one that is not unique by any means. I'm sure the FBI knew that getting Yates into a mental hospital would be the end of him.
This is an excellent article. I'm fascinated to know who messed up between generating the Yates incident pre-11/22 and conjuring the need to press Frazier for his curating rods account on 11/22. To me, the clear inference is that the DPD were either largely or only used by the plotters in the cover-up... not the planning prior to Dealey Plaza.