When asked how tall Oswald was, Bogard said that since he was 5 foot 9, Oswald had to be at least three inches shorter. Bogard believed the man was Oswald. Both Bogard and employee Oran Brown wrote down the name "Lee Oswald".
Bogard's testimony was corroborated by two other employees, Oran Brown and Frank Pizzo. Pizzo said the man looked like Oswald but had a different hairline. Ruth Paine said it was not possible, as she was with Oswald in Irving, Texas all day long that Saturday.
Yet another employee at the dealership, Jack Allan Carroll Lawrence, left work at about 11:30 am on November 22, and returned at 1 pm, with an immediate spell of violent vomiting in the rest room. Lawrence was very upset, and claimed that he told the FBI the next day that the dealership was withholding information about Oswald from the Bureau.
There is no record of any such report to the FBI by Lawrence. Lawrence was passionately anti-Castro. He left town soon after the assassination, and claimed to have a meticulous memory thirty years later in responding to researchers accusing him of playing a prominent role in the assassination. His story, however, was a rat's nest of anomalies.
Applying Occam's razor, there's little evidence that Lawrence was involved in killing the President -- but did he know a little more than he let on?
Garland Slack at the Sports Drome rifle range
Johnny King, the editor of the Dallas Morning News, reported that Paine drove Oswald to a rifle range a few days before the assassination. When asked about the story, the editor refused to reveal his source, describing him as "an investigator".
Bob Odum asked Paine if it was true. Paine denied it. The story never went any further.
Lee's brother Robert Oswald said shortly after the assassination that "I still do not know why or how, but Mr. and Mrs. Paine are somehow involved in this affair." When asked to explain, Robert told the Warren Commission that he had read in the paper about a man passing a rifle to Oswald over a fence where he was standing inside the rifle range. "As I read this description in the newspaper, I reached the conclusion from that description that it was Mr. Paine." Robert recalled Paine as about 6 feet tall and weighing 160-165 pounds.
After Lee's arrest, Robert says that he told his brother at the jail house that "I don't think they're any friends of yours." According to Robert, Lee told him, "Yes, they are."
The incident under discussion appears to be at the Sports Drome in Grand Prairie, Texas, where Oswald supposedly engaged in target practice on November 9, 10 and 17, with someone handing Oswald his rifle over the fence on at least one occasion. Grand Prairie is the town where Michael Paine moved to after his break-up with Ruth.
What I find so intriguing about the reports by Johnny King and Robert Oswald is that a gun owner named Garland Slack reported that on November 17, 1963, a man who looked like Oswald was firing at his target at the Sports Drome. Slack reported that accompanying Oswald was a man identified as "Frazier, from Irving, Texas".
Buell Frazier was a co-worker of Oswald's at the depository. Frazier testified that he drove Oswald to the Paine residence virtually every weekend, right up until the day before the assassination where the pattern was shifted by Oswald coming out on the evening of Thursday, November 21. Frazier said that he saw Oswald carry a large brown bag to work the day of the assassination, although he denied that it was big enough to carry a rifle.
As a result of this observation, Frazier was taken into custody during the evening of November 22 and accused by homicide captain Will Fritz of being an accomplice of Oswald. There had been reports of two men at the sixth floor window, and the authorities spent much of the first day trying to determine if there was an Oswald accomplice.
These alleged sightings of Oswald
with Frazier and Oswald with Paine provide one of the most telling events in
the days preceding the assassination. Was someone impersonating Oswald? Was
someone impersonating Frazier as Oswald's sidekick? Was someone impersonating Michael Paine as the man who handed the rifle over the fence at the rifle range?
A theory has been floated that Jack
Lawrence, the missing man at the auto dealership, was the "Second Frazier". Lawrence is hardly a match for Buell Frazier,
but a comparison of the ages and faces of the two men illustrates that Lawrence might be able to
pass on paper as a double for Frazier.
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