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Papers of Capt. Will Fritz


Dallas Police Captain Will Fritz donated these documents to the National Archives in the 1990s during the tenure of the Assassination Archives Review Board. They contain many fascinating original documents, including arrest warrants for Oswald and Ruby, a typed statement of "Admissions of Jack Leon Ruby on 11-24-63" (which did not include Ruby's later assertion that he killed Oswald so that Mrs. Kennedy would not have to return for trial), and typed statements regarding interviews with Lee Harvey Oswald which took place in Fritz' office, along with other materials such as some evidence photographs.

Probably most fascinating is Fritz' original hardwritten notes of interrogations of Oswald, of extra importance since the interviews were not taped or transcribed. The first page of these includes the notation "two negr. came in.....one Jr. + short negro." This simple notation can be plausibly interpreted as an alibi for Oswald for near the time of the shooting. It corroborates FBI Agent Bookhout's account, and contradicts other accounts including that of Fritz himself that Oswald had said he had eaten lunch with two negros (see Fritz's Interrogation of Lee Harvey Oswald, p.7 in these papers, and also in the Warren Report, p.605). Indeed black employees Junior Jarman and the shorter Harold Norman did enter the lunchroom as Oswald stated. Harold Weisberg first wrote about this potential alibi in 1965 in Whitewash, without knowing that Fritz' own notes would later provide corroboration.

How could Oswald have known that Junior Jarman and a shorter black employee had entered the room during lunchtime, unless he had been there?


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