Victoria Elizabeth Adams.
Victoria Adams had been abandoned by her parents when she was eleven and raised within the Catholic Church. One of her first jobs was that of a sixth grade teacher at the Immaculate Heart of Mary School in Atlanta Ga.
Victoria Adams movements after the assassination went below radar when Oliver Stone made JFK.
Her descent down the stairs of the T.S.B.D., along with Sandra Styles creates an issue not only for Oswald’s so called escape from the sixth floor sniper’s nest but also for the second floor lunch room encounter, which supposedly happened very shortly the killing of The President.
Her testimony, which took roughly half an hour, stated that she and Sandra Styles left the fourth-floor window shortly after the shots were fired and descended the back stairs to the first floor. From there they left via a back exit and both ladies made their way to the railroad yards where they encountered a police officer who told them to go back to their workplace, which they did. When they did return to the front of the building Miss Adams saw Joe Molina and spoke with Avery Davis (a.k.a. Mrs Charles Davis) who were on the front steps.
The timing of their movement is pivotal. These two ladies would have been on those stairs at the same time Lee Oswald supposedly was, as he hurried down those creaky and loud stairs from the sixth floor. But Victoria Adams, nor her colleague Sandra Styles had seen and heard no one. Add on Dorothy Garner, their supervisor who followed Adams and Styles to the stairwell and could hear them going down.
Interesting side note is that during her testimony she was handed a diagram of the first floor of the TSBD by David Belin (CE 496), on which she supposedly indicated where she saw Bill Shelley and Billy Lovelady. The problem with CE 496 is that this is Oswald’s application for a job at the TSBD.
Victoria Adams’ testimony (starting at page 10) became a grave threat to the official account of the Warren Commission.
She is being interviewed
Victoria Adams was not involved in any of the re-enactments by the FBI, Secret Service or even more importantly the Warren Commission that involved Oswald’s descent from the 6th floor and the so called Truly and Baker ascend for them all to meet at the second floor lunchroom.
Researcher Barry Ernest has dug into the story of Victoria Adams and wrote a great book about it: The Girl on the Stairs : The Search for a Missing Witness to the JFK Assassination.
David Belin’s insertion of fraudulent statements into Adams’ testimony. As she told Barry Ernest, she saw a young African-American employee at the bottom of the stairs, not, Bill Shelley and Billy Lovelady as per her printed WC testimony! This, unbelievable as it seems, is not the first time the W.C. or the FBI suppressed evidence or just altered it.
The original statement and her FBI statement (CE 1381) are near identical
Sandra Styles confirmed the fraud when she told Ernest that she too did NOT see Lovelady or Shelley upon reaching the first floor. Victoria Adams stated in Barry Ernest’s book that the Shelley/Lovelady passage had been inserted into her testimony. She said those were not her words, they didn’t sound at all like the way she would have said it, and the passage was NOT in the original testimony she examined in her office that afternoon. No mention was made of the Shelley/Lovelady encounter in any of the other interviews she did with authorities except for the one with Det. Leavelle of the DPD.
Whether Lovelady’s claim to have spotted “Vicky” at the bottom of the rear stairs after coming into the rear of the TSBD 3-4 minutes after the shooting was prompted off-the-record during his testimony or fraudulently inserted afterward by Belin or Joseph Ball is anyone’s guess. But it didn’t happen.
The only logical conclusion that can be reached is that Adams and Dorothy Garner accurately related the speed of Adams’ flight with Styles down the stairs: it occurred almost immediately after the shooting, and the women reached the bottom of the stairs before Truly and Baker did. If this were not the case, Belin would not have had to manufacture an encounter with two TSBD employees who were known to have spent several minutes outside before returning to the building near the back stairs.
In his HSCA interview Lovelady stated it took him 20-25 minutes before he was back at the TSBD.
The Warren Commission concluded that Oswald was on the stairs at that time and if Miss Adams did not see or hear him, then she was wrong. She must have come down the stairs later than she thought, the Report surmised, after Oswald had passed the fourth floor going down, after the lunchroom encounter had occurred, and after Baker and Truly had continued beyond the fourth floor going up to the roof, Baker’s original destination.
Dorothy Ann Garner’s testimony refutes this as you can see in her chapter.
I quote Barry Ernest here as he is the one who found this document: the referenced letter was neither a Commission Document nor a Commission Exhibit. It was therefore not a part of the public record. It is not in the Mary Ferrell database either, that I am aware of. A copy of it exists in the Harold Weisberg collection, which is actually a copy that I gave him shortly after discovering it in the National Archives. It was contained within a box of correspondence and other miscellaneous paperwork sent from the DOJ office in Dallas to the WC. It is a June 2, 1964, air mail, registered letter sent by Stroud to Rankin in which she lists several changes Miss Adams requested be made to her testimony, none of which were actually done by the way. The final paragraph, and I will quote this verbatim including the spelling errors, reads:
“Mr. Bellin was questioning Miss Adams about whether or not she saw anyone as she was running down the stairs. Miss Garner, Miss Adams’ supervisor, stated this morning that after Miss Adams went downstairs she (Miss Garner) saw Mr. Truly and the policeman come up.”
In Victoria Adams’ WC testimony.
Blackop Radio episode 15 Victoria Adams narrated by Barry Ernest.