The Couple on the Grassy Knoll
In search of two young African-Americans who witnessed JFK's assassination--and vanished from history.
They are the most important JFK witnesses who were never heard from, a couple of kids sitting on the grassy knoll who vanished into history.
They were two young African-Americans, a man and a woman, sitting on a park bench in Dealey Plaza eating a bag lunch, drinking Cokes and waiting to see the president of the United States and the First Lady pass by. As the buzz of crowd swelled, Marilyn Sitzman, secretary to Abraham Zapruder, noticed them. She had just helped her boss climb up onto a concrete abutment for a better vantage point to film the presidential motorcade with his home movie camera. Sitzman looked to her right and saw the couple. She guessed they were 18 to 21 years old.
The couple on the knoll saw the long snake-like train of black cars make the wide turn onto Elm Street. They heard the cheering the crowd. Lots of black people were there, waving to the first American president since Ulysses Grant to forthrightly advocate equal rights for people of color. They saw the President and First Lady waving back.
The couple on the knoll heard sounds like firecrackers that were actually gunshots, one, another and a third. They saw President Kennedy’s head explode in a corona of blood and bone as a bullet blasted him backwards into his wife’s arms. They saw in real time what the world would see in Abraham Zapruder’s film: the murder of the president.
"The main reason I remember 'em,” Sitzman later told Josiah Thompson, “is after the last shot I recall hearing and the car went under the triple underpass, there, I heard a crush of glass and I looked over there, and the kids had thrown down their Coke bottles, just threw them down, and just started running towards the back ... " They ran to the parking lot behind the grassy knoll and disappeared.
By the time bystander Wilma Bond took this photo less than 30 seconds later, the couple on the knoll had fled the crime scene.
Later in the afternoon of November 22, Johnny Flynn, a photographer for the Dallas Morning News, captured two Dallas plainclothes detectives looking at the park bench where the couple sat and examining the bag lunch they left behind. The photo confirms the details in Sitzman’s account, and begs the question: what happened to the couple on the knoll?
The couple never came forward to recount what they saw. They were never interviewed by investigators. They were never found by JFK researchers. They have never been identified as far as I know.
You can well understand why they didn’t come forward. In 1963, Dallas was still a Jim Crow town. Young black people could not expect a fair hearing from city authorities, much less the Secret Service or FBI. To the contrary, they could expect to be insulted, or ignored. The notion that African-Americans deserved equal rights under law was controversial in Texas at the time. An ambitious young politician named George Herbert Walker Bush was in Dallas that day, running for the U.S. Senate while touting his opposition to Kennedy’s proposed Civil Rights Act.
Well-Positioned
The couple on the knoll are important JFK witnesses because they sat in the middle of the area known as “the grassy knoll.” They sat about 30 feet from the stockade fence and the parking lot at the back of the knoll
If a gunshot came from that area, as dozens of spectators said, they were perhaps the witnesses closest to the muzzle blast. If no shots came from the grassy knoll—if all the shots came from the Texas School Book Depository, as many other spectators and the Warren Commission said—they would have been several hundred feet from the muzzle blast. In short, virtually no one in Dealey Plaza was better positioned to judge the origins of the gunfire that took the president’s life. Their impressions of that day would have been—and might still be—invaluable to understanding JFK’s assassination.
In Search of
That’s why I’m looking for the couple on the knoll. One or both might well still be alive. They would be roughly 79-81 years old. If one or both have passed away, they might have told family or friends what they saw and heard that terrible day. If fear and racism once discouraged them from coming forward, those days are long since over. If possible, they should be restored to their rightful place in the JFK story and in American history.
Incidentally, the physical landscape of Dealey Plaza is virtually unchanged since November 22, 1963—with one notable exception. The park bench where the couple on the knoll sat has been removed. Not only did the couple on the knoll vanish from history, but their vantage point has been physically effaced as well. Their story may be lost forever. Let’s hope that it is not.
If you have any relevant information about the couple on the knoll, please send me an email or DM me @jeffersonmorley. All messages will be held in confidence.
This is good detective work. Hopefully these young (now old) people would surely add to the body of evidence concerning the origin of the 313 fatal shot. As you said, they may not be alive now, but probably mentioned their observations to family and friends. I hope you can spread the word when you visit Dallas next week.
In addition to the Zapruder film and DPD audio recording evidence, the fact that Abraham Zapruder had a 3 frame delay in responding to the TSBD shots (the "jiggle effect"), but jiggled his camera immediately after 313 suggests the muzzle blast was very near to his location - on the knoll.
And, BTW, thank you for referring to the STOCKADE fence on the knoll. It is often called a "picket" fence, but "stockade" is the proper term. The fence, which is still there, is over six feet high.
I have often wondered about this young black couple as well as the long line of black, mostly female, spectators to the east of the first lamp post that was east of the Stemmons sign who were captured in the Croft photo. Neither the DPD nor FBI ever made any effort it seems to contact them and none of them came forward voluntarily most likely due to the racism of the era (DPD Lt. George Butler revealed 50% of the DPD were in the KKK!) Only 2 of the women ever came forward, and testified to the HSCA - Annie Ruth Moore and Irma Jean Vanzan, who both worked at the Daltex. The only reason they came forward was because Junior Jarman identified his aunt, Irma Jean Vanzan to HSCA investigators. FYI...Denis Morissette tracked down their HSCA audio interviews at NARA, and copied & uploaded them to his youtube channel. I think someone should take out a full page ad in the DMN, before they are all gone, asking for them to come forward to be interviewed. Also radio/tv requests would be a good idea. I wonder if that would produce any results? Also remember the young black couple had a baby with them who they more than likely shared their story with. He or she would be about 60 or 61 now...and likely alive.