THE LADY IN RED TALKS FOR THE RECORD JEAN HILL, THE CLOSEST WITNESS TO THE KENNEDY ASSASSINATION , STILL SWEARS THE SHOTS CAME FROM THE GRASSY KNOLL

BY C.D. STELZER (first published in the Riverfront Times)

Between questions, Jean Hill removes one of her large gold costume
earrings Saturday morning, and places it on top of the photo image
of Dealey Plaza, which lays on the conference room table at the
RFT offices. She gazes out the 9th floor win dow the imposing
gargoyles of the Christ Church Cathedral and her red fingernails
instinctively massage a sore earlobe. By her account, the first
time Hill heard some of these same queries was on a November day
almost 29 years ago as she looked out on another urban panorama.
The windows in the third-floor room of the Dallas County Criminal
Courts Building provided a perfect proscenium arch for the
tragedy, which had just transpired in the plaza below. From that
theater like vantage point, Hill would first recall to anonymous
federal interrogators what she had witnessed. Earlier on this warm
sunny Friday afternoon in the Indian summer of 1963, Hill, then a
32-year-old substitute school teacher, rode to the western edge of
downtown in a friend's Thunderbird to watch a presidential parade
pass by on Elm Street. The two convinced a police officer to allow
them beyond the barricades so they could snap Polaroid
photographs. In so doing, Hill and her companion, Mary Moorman,
became two of the closest eye witnesses to the assassination of
President John F. Kennedy. "I replay this assassination tape in my
brain all the time," says Hill. Her presence in Dallas that day,
of course, predates videotape, but Hill was captured on Abraham
Zapruder's now-famous eight-millimeter home movie. From that cameo
appearance, she became known as the "lady in red." True to her
legendary image, Hill wears a red blouse with black brocade
Saturday morning. The 61-year-old blonde also flaunts a button
that says: JFK, release the files. Using the photocopies of Dealey
Plaza as a reference, she recites in a Southern drawl her
movements that fateful day to Kevin Belford, the RFT's free-lance
illustrator. Hill came to St. Louis to promote her new book, JFK,
The Last Dissenting Witness, which she co-authored with former
Dallas Times Herald reporter Bill Sloan. Later, she replays the
same sequence of occurrences to Kenn Thomas and Phil Gounis of
KDHX radio KDHX, who will air a the interview on July 1 at 7 p.m.
Although Hill's recollections do not completely correspond with a
statement she gave the Dallas County Sheriff's Department at the
time of the assassination, the essentials have remained constant.
"I did see a muzzle flash and a puff of smoke at the moment that
Kennedy's head exploded," says Hill. But the eye witness's
attention was not drawn to the sixth-floor of the Texas School
Book Depository, where the Warren Commission concluded Lee Harvey
Oswald fired alone. Instead, Hill and others ran to the fence at
the top of the grassy knoll across the street. More than one
source has claimed that Hill herself invented the phrase, which
now defines one of the most intriguing locations in American
history. What is not an invention, according to Hill, is her
steadfast recollection of events. From the very beginning, Hill
has maintained there were four to six shots fired, not the three
reported in the Warren Commission report. Once she reached the
parking area behind the fence, Hill says she saw a policeman, who
appeared to be holding either a rifle or a shotgun. But perhaps
what is most interesting about Hill's story involves the man in a
brown coat she says she saw running from the area of the School
Book Depository toward the knoll. According to Hill, within 48
hours, she saw someone on TV who looked exactly like that fleeting
figure. "The man that I chased, the man running back toward the
shooter, I saw again as I walked toward my TV on Sunday morning,"
says Hill. "I was going to turn it off and leave the house. And I
started yelling to my daughter: `Come quick. This is the man that
I was chasing down on the knoll.' ... Of course, it turned out
later that the man's name was Jack Ruby." Hill soon learned that
Ruby, the nightclub owner who shot Oswald to death on national
television, knew both his victim and J.D. Tippit, the Dallas
police officer purportedly murdered by Oswald on the same day as
the assassination. A clue to the source of Hill's inside
information is the gold necklace she is wearing at the interview
Saturday. It is a replica of a turtle charm given to her by a
Dallas motorcycle cop with whom she was intimately involved in
1963. The officer, also an assassination witness, is identified in
the book as J.B. Marshall, a pseudonym for the late B.J. Martin.
Much of the book revolves around the recreated dialogue between
Hill and the police officer. Sloan, the writer who accompanied
Hill on her St. Louis tour, expresses no qualms about employing
such a novelistic approach to his non-fiction work. "Dialogue has
always been one of my strong suits, whether it was a feature story
for a newspaper or ... a magazine article. The collaborators were
aided by the fact that Hill still lives in the same house she
occupied then. "I'm sure that we're not totally accurate. But I
think that, as far as a representation of what happened, what was
said between the two of them, I feel comfortable. ..." Sloan has
also written a novel about the Kennedy slaying called The Other
Assassin. The writer, who once was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize
for local reporting, has also contributed articles to super market
tabloids such as The National Enquirer, Globe and Star. The
sensational reputations of those publications and Sloan's literary
license may be enough to cast doubt on the biographical account of
the assassination witness. But the accuracy of Hill's
recollections themselves have long been questioned by critics. A
deposition taken the day of the assassination and bearing Hill's
signature does not mention being collared by plainclothesmen and
taken to an office on the third-floor of the Dallas County
Criminal Courts Building. Instead, it states she was escorted by a
reporter to the press room of the sheriff's department. And in a
TV interview immediately following the assassination, Hill
mistakenly identified a bouquet in Jackie Kennedy's lap as a dog.
David Belin, a former Warren Commission counsel, has attempted to
use the error to discredit the rest of Hill's account for years.
According to Hill, federal authorities began trying to twist her
story from the moment they first interrogated her following the
assassination. Two men, one of whom identified himself as a Secret
Service agent, apprehended Hill after she slipped behind the fence
at the top of the knoll, she says. Hill says they then confiscated
the Polaroid photos she had in her pocket and took her to the
Dallas County Criminal Courts Building. "I was probably in there
and out of there (within) 15 or 20 minutes of the assassination,"
says Hill, recalling her questioning. Hill suspects her early
release was brought about because she refused to tell the
officials what they wanted to hear. She doggedly maintained she
heard from four to six reports. They kept telling me I was hearing
echoes and firecrackers," says Hills. "Finally, they got angry and
said: `We've got three bullets, so three shots are all we're going
to say right now.' They hadn't even had time to get up to the
sixth floor and find the sniper's nest," adds Hill. After the
assassination, Hill was kept under FBI surveillance for 15 months.
She received numerous death threats in the mail and over the
phone. She also believes her house was burglarized and that her
automobile was sabotaged. Hill's identification of the man she saw
running from the Book Depository has since been corroborated by
Julia Ann Mercer, who places Ruby in the vicinity of Dealey Plaza
an hour before the arrival of the motorcade. Also, there is now
speculation that the police officer Hill saw behind the fence was
the late Roscoe White, a former Marine with an intelligence
background. White has been implicated in the assassination plot by
his son Ricky. Hill now says the unidentified police officer she
saw could have been White, but she can't be certain of it. Like
many of those somehow connected to the assassination, White met an
untimely death. In another case, Sloan remembers a fellow Dallas
Times Herald reporter Jim Koethe, who was killed by a karate chop
within 10 months of searching Jack Ruby's apartment. As a member
of the media, Sloane holds himself partially responsible. "Even
when Koethe was killed, there was no connection made in the
press," he says. "We were all totally brainwashed by the FBI and
the federal authorities. We thought they were good guys." He sees
no excuse for that degree of naivete now, however. "I have a hard
time understanding why the national media is so adamant, so
bitter, so unwilling to accept that there might be another
scenario here that we ought to be thinking about. ... Any thinking
person has got to start giving some credence to these other
ideas," says Sloane. Since the publication of the book in April,
Hill says she has received two new death threats. In the long run,
however, the reactionaries may have more to fear from her role as
a teacher. Hill still instructs inner-city third-graders at the
H.S. Thomson Learning Center in Dallas. Each year, she holds a
mock press conference at the school, and the students ask
questions based on their studies of the assassination. "It gives
them a sense that history is a living, ongoing thing, and that
they are definitely a part of it, and they can actually change
history," says Hill. "We tell them they are our hope for
tomorrow."