Dorothy Ann Garner
Dorothy Ann Garner (also known as May) was standing behind a fourth-floor window of the TSBD when she heard the shots.Along with her on the fourth floor were Elsie Dorman, Sandra Styles, and Victoria Adams. Mrs. Garner was an office supervisor for the Scott, Foresman Co., publishers of textbooks, with its headquarters in Chicago. She had been employed there for more than 10 years.
Her employees would describe her as a very dedicated, professional woman. According to Victoria Adams she was “detail-oriented” and “never missed a thing.” “She demanded the best, watched the clock like a hawk and tolerated no nonsense or talking when she ruled her kingdom,” Victoria Adams would say. “If you can picture an old fashioned prim librarian telling everyone to ‘shush,’ you have an idea of the power and demeanor of Dorothy Garner.”
Dorothy Ann Garner took a break from her duties and joined the three other women to watch as the presidential motorcade passed below. Elsie Dorman sat on the floor behind a window that had been partially opened for her benefit; she was filming the event with her husband’s recently purchased video camera.
In Barry Ernest’s The Girl On The Stairs he manages to track her down in 2011 and she describes the aftermath. “It was total confusion. The Dallas Police, FBI, Secret Service, were coming up the stairs, in the elevators, in all the offices. The news media, workers and outsiders were going everywhere.” The DPD took over the phones (which they also did inside the 2nd floor office where Geneva Hine was present!). “They wouldn’t allow any personal calls to go out. After the employees were allowed to leave, I went to a nearby diner and called my husband”.
Dororthy Ann Garner is important to this case for a couple of reasons:
1/ She confirms that Victoria Adams and Sandra Styles left almost right away. “I remember them being there and the next thing I knew , they were gone. They had left very quickly…within a matter of moments. There was this warehouse or storage area behind our offices, out by the freight elevators and the rear stairway, and I went out there”. Garner went to this area immediately after Adams and Styles had left and although she did not see them enter the stairwell she could hear them as the stairs were very noisy.
She stayed at that spot alone until other office workers joined her to have a look outside the West facing windows to see what was happening in the railroad yard area and more importantly the area around the grassy knoll and the picket fence where many bystanders had converged at. The gathering of these office workers is confirmed by Bonnie Ray Williams’ testimony as he arrived on the 4th floor (from the 5th floor ) “where we saw all these women looking out of the window”. This tiny element by itself confirms Adams’ and Styles’ immediate descent down those stairs in contradiction to the W.C. version. Garner herself was in the perfect position who came up and who went down those stairs and when asked whether she saw Lee Oswald coming down those stairs she laughed at the question: “No, I don’t remember that. I don’t remember seeing him at all that day…except on TV”.
Dorothy Ann Garner wouldn’t be such an important witness if the Martha Joe Stroud document had not been found by Barry Ernest in 1999. This document states that she saw Truly and Baker come up after Victoria Adams and Sandra Styles had gone down. Although Dorothy Garner does not state how Roy Truly and Marrion Baker came up (lift or stairs), the fact that she observed them come up after the girls went down is important from a time factor perspective.
This letter makes mention of an interview that has never seen the light of day! It also shows that Victoria Adams DID make corrections to her statement, which is in direct contradiction to what her statement said where she had waived it!!
Dorothy Ann Garner passed away on Dec 29th 2012.