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Jimmy Darnell Film

The Lone Gunman Podcast Explosive New Evidence and Timeline Tweaks About The Interrogations

I had the pleasure to talk with Rob Clark on his Lone Gunman Podcast for two hours no less on Lee Oswald’s interrogations, it flew by as I had such fun.

Thank you Rob.

Ep. 157 ~ Explosive New Evidence and Timeline Tweaks About The Interrogations. 

In case the audio volume is too low for you I have uploaded the file HERE (150 MB to d/l) which sounds a lot better than the Spreaker upload.

Jimmy Darnell Footage

Jimmy Darnell Footage

 

Updated:

Sept. 13 2019.

March 13 2021.

Denis Morissette pointed out on FB these two videos of Jimmy Darnell being interviewed and filmed while in the basement of KXAS. The videos have been recently released via the UNT site and are from the WBAP later to become KXAS and these days known as NBC5.

In the first clip you can see Darnell looking at a strip of 16MM film on a reel, this strip is of the front of the T.S.B.D. segment. Now this may not even be his film, but Dave Wiegman’s instead. I am simply amazed that he is looking at this film, which supposedly disappeared into NBC’s archives in N.Y. Yet here we are looking at an original or a very good copy of it.

This is the film no one knows where it is, by the looks of it from this segment and the next the copy they have digitised for these videos looks of great quality. Question is at what resolution did they digitise the film? And where is it now?

Click to enlarge.

In the second clip (skip to 01:05) Darnell is doing narration of him running ‘this is where I bail’, but the Wiegman film is on the monitor and more importantly Dave Wiegman ran on the pavement on the right side of Elm St. whereas Jimmy Darnell ran on the grassy left side of Elm where he eventually filmed as the press buss passed in front of him.

Jimmy Darnell, on the far left, after he got out of Camera Car 3.

Jimmy Darnell in Wilma Bond 5 filming while the press bus passes in front of him. Click to enlarge.

There is also a third clip.

Take a good look at this video compilation of Darnell footage by Denis Morissette and you will see that he is on the left side of Elm.

Wiegman was in Cam Car 1, whereas Darnell was in Cam Car 3. His footage is roughly 10-15 seconds after Wiegman shot his segment of the front of the T.S.B.D.

Both these two segments are odd as NBC5 used the Wiegman film assuming it was Darnell’s. But more importantly NBC5 had a 16MM copy of the Wiegman film!

The same Wiegman segment is used in a remembrance  news feature after Jimmy Darnell’s passing.

 

The Darnell film at the 6th floor museum

The Darnell film at the 6th floor museum

  

Click picture to enlarge.

 

During and shortly after the recent Lancer conference I was in contact with two individuals, who would try to get in touch with Stephen Fagin of the 6th Floor Museum and ask about the Jimmy Darnell film.  It was the late Gary Mack who mentioned a first generation copy in the museum’s possession from 2008. His last mention was shortly before he passed away in 2015. You can read more about this in the huge post I made a couple of years ago.

To some the answer to proving, as in cherry on top, that Prayer Man is actually Lee Harvey Oswald lies in the Darnell film, to me not a chance in hell unless there happens to be a sharp frame in the roughly 5 seconds of that particular film sequence. The film, and especially the happenings on the stairs, offer some value in those frames. Some of the detail has been washed out and is too blurry to actually identify all people on those steps. S some individuals could be recognised with a better copy, but when it comes to ID-ing Lee Oswald being there on the first step below the landing is doubtful.

Alan Dale asked Stephen Fagin after a talk during the Lancer Conference in Nov. 2018 about whether the 6th Floor Museum had a copy of the Darnell film and if so when could scholars get access to it?

This then got the reply: “Funny as you mention this we are about to give access to a digital 2K copy of the Darnell film in our reading room”. That is partial good news, its existence has been acknowledged, but 2K is not 4K which it should have been. Since this film could give a lot of info on T.S.B.D. employees I would have not spared any money to get the best optimal result from the 16 mm film.

Stu Wexler had one of his friends go there and I asked Scott Reid to pay the Museum a visit as he happened to be in Dallas at that time. Sadly neither could give me anything conclusive and on top of that Scott managed to tell me that he could only stop and start the movie, not zoom in nor go for a slow motion setting either, so overall that was not very helpful.

The big let down is the fact that the film can only be seen in the Reading Room inside the 6th floor museum, you have to physically be there. Copies cannot be made for copyright reasons. I have asked whether it would be possible to get some still copies and that might still be possible, the powers that be will need to give their consent before this happens, whenever that may be. Will keep you posted.

 

The sun plane

The last week there has been some debate about an old myth: The Sun Plane in the Prayer Man images.

Originally brought up by Brian Doyle in his many word salad postings a couple of years ago, and in that whole period Doyle has never brought forward how it is supposed to look or give a rough estimation of it. So like a flat earther he ended up posting “his findings” on the net and everybody else would have to believe his “research” on his say so.

This tactic doesn’t work very well for Doyle, people are smarter than that. And yes Doyle = Cinque, there is no doubt about that.

Then there was Barry Pollard who posted  an image of Billy Lovelady going down the steps in the Wiegman film and claimed that Lovelady wore a black jacket as he could not explain the shadow on the left half on Lovelady’s (2) torso.

Yet with Bill Shelley (3) in the background it could be that Lovelady walks exactly halfway in the shadow and the sun. Be aware that this is an enlargement of a small detail of a 16 mm film shot with a wide angle lens. The steps occupants look much closer together due to these factors.

Prayer Man = 1, Billy Lovelady = 2 and Bill Shelley = 3. Click pic to enlarge.

Click to enlarge.

Take a look at the shadow of the people at the front and the sharp angle it is coming at, granted they may not stand exactly parallel to the people on the steps, but for a rough indication this ought to show that the shadow is much longer than originally discussed.

I can pinpoint it even more precise.

Take a look at Buell Wesley Frazier in the Darnell film. And you will see the shadow of the top left corner of the wall (just underneath the TSBD sign) creates a shadow of a 90 degree-ish angle on him, his head is in the shade no less. Above Frazier and JoeMolina is a glass pane and that is partially illuminated and so is the glass on the far eastern side. This illumination is from a reflection of the eastern wall.

Click pic. to enlarge.

Look at Maddie Reese in both images, in Wiegman standing southwesterly below Lovelady in Wiegman and Frazier in Darnell.

Click to enlarge.

So now anyone drawing the TSBD steps in 3D is able to pinpoint how the sun plane is actually going correctly as so far no one has done this as it ought to be. The shadow ends up way more Eastwards than has been shown so far. And honestly I trust the photos more. Furthermore the three people that have started to make 3d drawings of the steps of the T.S.B.D. put the shadowline in as a 2d object, whereas the shadow would resemble some sort of half a sphere instead.

Thanks to Brian Kelshaw.

Thanks to Brian Kelshaw.

You are welcome Brian Doyle!

James Darnell RIP

Fellow ROKC member Vinny brought me up to date with Jimmy Darnell’s death. It happened late Sept and was unnoticed until now.

See a brief video HERE

There’s a brief shot of Jimmy Darnell along the east side of the TSBD.

I managed to get hold of him on the telephone last year, but he was not up for talking about that day.

R.I.P. Jimmy Darnell

 

Richard Bernabei

Richard Bernarbei (1933-1979) was a college professor at Queens University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada.

Richard Bernabei (1951). Thanks to Mati Bernabei.

About a year and a half ago I was wondering whether anyone else had noticed Prayer Man in the Wiegman and/or Darnell films before Sean Murphy started his quest less than ten years ago. I was already loosely checking out where this all originated from but I could not find anything from before the millennium until I came across Bernabei’s name  while trawling through Harold Weisberg’s archive. I read his correspondence from the late 60’s, between them and Richard Sprague and almost fell off my chair and made mention of this after I regained my composure  at ROKC. There is quite a bit of correspondence in this archive.

And by chance I came across his discovery of another person on those steps besides doorway man (a.k.a. Billy Lovelady). I shall post some of these pages of his correspondence below. These pages are the first signs of discovery of Prayer Man, although he was not named as such, that credit belongs to Sean Murphy.

Knowing that Richard Bernabei’s material was held at his workplace in Kingston  I emailed Queens University in June last year and was told that the archives were not indexed nor digitised, so a dead end for me unless I or one of my fellow ROKCers made their way over there.

I left the whole thing for what it was, as I had plenty to go on until I emailed roughly 6 months ago to see if I could get a local person to investigate for me instead. Little did I know that an individual by the name of Sean Adessky had gone through all of Bernabei’s  archive a few months before and had made an index. From that index one section jumped out to me.

Folder, “Man in the TSBD Doorway” 

–      Documents relating to the individuals seen in the doorway of the TSBD at the time of the shooting.

–      Photographs, commission documents, sketches, few pages of handwritten notes.

Totalling 35 pages I was dying to get hold of all of this material, which they promptly helped me with. The whole document is more focused on Doorway Man (Billy Lovelady) but by researching it from every possible angle he also deals with Prayer Man for  about 4-5 pages. These pages are very valuable since they contain sketches made by Richard Bernabei and  diagrams as well of the people on the front steps of the Texas School Book Depository. This material is the first hard evidence of someone actually recognising a person in that shadowy area of those front steps of the Texas School Book Depository when JFK was assassinated and also actively documenting it. How he did this is a bit of an enigma, since the material of Wiegman he had in his collection there is not much to see there. Check for yourselves in the picture gallery below.

Bear in mind that at that time no one had gotten hold of the Jimmy Darnell film where Prayer Man is seen a lot clearer than in the Dave Wiegman film. The other sources, regarding this particular segment of the case, Bernabei had were Altgens 6 and the Hughes film.

Great stuff indeed, not just from a find p.o.v. but also what else he wrote inside that document. He followed the same ‘tactic’ Sean Murphy and Richard Hocking used. Not only did he study the film and photo material but he also looked at all the available testimonies and brought Oswald’s interrogations and whereabouts and TSBD employees Carolyn Arnold and Victoria Adams into the fold. Furthermore I plaster some scans of the images he had during his research. Two copies of Altgens 6, Willis 4, 8 & 10, Wiegman, Towner and Bell.

The letter below is from Richard E. Sprague who writes in good detail about Wiegman and his film to Richard Bernarbei.

  • Sprague managed to buy a copy of the film on 35 mm, where this film is, is not known at this time. He also mentions that he has clipped some of the frames out of his film, therefor the possibility exists that the film was kept in a cut up state.
  • He explains the many generations of the film.
  • Wiegman had not seen his film at the time of their telephone interview.

The large format negatives Sprague is talking about are at the National Archives in Washington, we at ROKC managed to get copies of these.

And then the trail went dead, for almost 40 years………………..why?

 

Addendum Dec 30th 2016:

Mati Bernabei (Richard’s daughter) contacted me through Facebook and shared the following info with me, which she has allowed me to share:

She was 14 years old when he died in 1979. He was very unwell the last two years due to alcohol related deterioration of body and mind.

” I knew that he was deeply interested in JFK, I didn’t understand what he was working on. I was too young. Close to the time of his death (when he, and everyone, understood that his death was imminent), my mother and other friends of his convinced him to donate his JFK files to the Archives at Queen’s University. They didn’t want the work to be lost”

“. I’ve always imagined that his work would remain in dusty boxes in the Archives forever, so I am truly delighted that you found it useful . My father was an artist, heart and soul (before academia, he studied art), hence his drawings, and his understanding of visual perspective, light and shadow, etc. I’m sure he would be deeply gratified that his work is still of interest in some way. Very interesting for me to read your analysis too! Thank you!”

“When looking for the photo I reread a short bio of my father that my mom wrote in the 1990s when she doing a hobby genealogy project (for my sister and I). That mentions the donation to the archives, and I remembered more details. My father was a true mess in the last two years of his life. He had a heart murmur due to childhood rheumatic fever, thus the collapse of his body due to chain smoking and alcohol was accelerated. In June of 1979 my uncle (his brother) came to visit — by that time it was clear that there was no turning back – organ failure was occurring, and father would die soon (he died 2 months later). At that time my uncle and my mom convinced Pa to donate the JFK material. My father had already destroyed much of his artwork, in a fit of self loathing, I think. So, my mom and uncle rightly worried that he might do the same with his JFK documents.”

“My father’s struggles were obvious to people who knew him in the last few years, thus there was no need or purpose in in trying to create a facade. And, he talked and wrote about too. He was a kind, loving, tragically self-destructive person in those last years.”

*****

 

Special thanks to Heather Home and Susan Office at Queens University.

Mati Bernabei for the portrait and the additional info.

And many thanks as well to Francesca Brzezicki for making the Bernabei correspondence and photo scans for me.

Wiegman scans by ROKC from the Richard E. Sprague archive at the National Archives in Wa.

Prayer Man on Dutch TV and Radio-1

Monday the 14th I joined Monique Sleiderink  of TV Oost (that’s the local Dutch TV channel for the East of the country) for an interview about Prayer Man. I had a great time, simple as that. Hope to join them again when the book is out. There is a nice page made up on RTV Oost’s website. In Chrome right click and choose translate. Here are some pictures taken during the TV show, one with Monique outside in the corridor and some screenshots of the video itself.

And on the 22nd I did an interview for KRO/NCRV’s Groot Op 5.  They had picked up on my TV oost appearance and wanted to do an interview the next day, but I was travelling back then, so we postponed until the 22nd. Again a short interview about 4 minutes which was great to do.

Both interviews have taught me a bit about trying to get the message across in a short amount of time, as if I were to put the evidence forward I would need at least 4 hours :-)

I have been given both recordings and I shall supply the videos with subtitles and upload to YouTube in due time.

Peggy Joyce Hawkins

Peggy Joyce Bibbler – Hawkins

Peggy Joyce Hawkins (maiden name Bibbler) met her husband at the TSBD along with her child, she stood roughly 50 feet away from the Texas School Book Depository when the shots rang out and she hid behind the retaining wall. After realising no more shots were being fired and  returning to the TSBD she saw a policeman stand there, and heard some remarks about the railroad yard through the police radio.

Truly and Baker, leg sticking out behind tall fella. Click pic. to enlarge.

The Darnell film only shows Baker’s run, it does not show him going up the steps, it has been automatically assumed he dashed up the stairs before Roy Truly could catch up with him. The story of them going up the stairs together has always been met with disbelief. You can see Truly in the Darnell film slowly turning and making his way towards the front steps, but at a slow speed compared to Baker. Then again the steps were pretty filled up with employees, some had left but others were returning and the whole east side of the steps was filled with mostly women looking out and discussing what had happened and Joe Molina stood at the very top. Buell Wesley Frazier stood dead centre.

But Peggy Joyce Hawkins. statement puts some doubt into this. This you can see at the bottom of page 1 of her FBI statement. She walked back to the TSBD and saw a motorcycle police officer in front of the building. Now unless some other motorcycle police officer went there it could be assumed that Marrion L. Baker stood longer outside than has been assumed.

The radio transmission she speaks of is Jesse Curry’s who said this while the cars were passing the triple underpass.

At 12:30 Have my office move all available men out of my office into the railroad yard to try to determine what happened in there and hold everything secure until Homicide and other investigators should get there.

She also made her way back into the building, and this is confirmed by the so called roll call sheet. This roll call sheet itself isn’t much from an evidentiary p.o.v., as Geraldine Reid is mentioned twice, Charles Douglas Givens is missing and Lee Oswald is right at the top (which points more to his name being taken down from the word go than him being the missing person!).

What doesn’t help is the second page of her FBI statement that she doesn’t remember who she encountered while making her way back. And let’s face it, this is a black hole overall with most statements from that day.

But then there is Robert Mac Neil, a journalist, who was part of the motorcade and who went into the TSBD to make a phone call. This call being logged at 12:36 and him stating that he did not see any police inside the building while making the call, and this has a ring of truth to it, since his head office reported the time, but also looking at the radio transmissions and the prders of going to the TSBD and investigate further.

At 12:34 I just talked to a guy up here who was standing close to it and the best he could tell it came from the Texas School Book Depository Building here with that Hertz Renting sign on top.

At 12:36 Witness says shots came from fifth floor, Texas Book Depository Store and Houston and Elm. I have him with me now and we are sealing off the building.

At 12:37 Get some men up here to cover this school depository building. It’s believed the shot came from, as you see it on Elm Street, it would be upper right hand corner, second window from the end.

 


Peggy Joyce Hawkins-1

Peggy Joyce Hawkins-2

Peggy Joyce Bibbler - Hawkins Roll Call

Robert Mac Neil FBI Statement

 

I am now pretty convinced Baker and Truly stood outside, this witness testimony in conjunction with Chris Davidson’s gif which shows Baker veering further to the right than the actual steps.

 

 

Add on Jan 30th

This might be Peggy Bibbler Hawkins standing and holding her child. If this is her then she had an excellent vantage point to hear the motorcycle belonging to Marrion Baker and look towards the front entrance of the Texas School Book Depository.

 

Peggy Bibbler Hawkins

Click picture to enlarge.