Oswald in the doorway: the blog of the Oswald Innocence Campaign, by Ralph Cinque

I learned today that Officer Marrion Baker is dead. He died in 2011. So neither I nor anyone else will get to ask him about his affidavit of November 22, 1963, in which he referred to the 3rd or 4th floor and said nothing about the snack room.

I take it as an error and attribute no malice to him.  

However, I watched his testimony in the mock trial of Lee Harvey Oswald from 1984, and in it, though he described what happened, and he used a map of the 2nd floor to do it, he never actually referred to the room in which he encountered Oswald as the snack room. He didn't referred to it as anything.  He just used words like "here," "there," and "through that door," etc. Vincent Bugliosi filled in the gaps, and he referred to the room as the snack room. 

But, it was when the defense counsel Gerry Spence got up that it really got interesting. The first thing that Gerry did was call up the Altgens photo and hone-in on the "Man in the Door," as he called him. He asked Marrion Baker if he recognized him, and Baker answered honestly that he resembled Oswald. 

Now let's consider: this was 1984, so just 5 years after the HSCA Final Report came out. And didn't they present Robert Groden's photographic comparisons, you know, the ones that did not include a single image of Oswald? And didn't it include the work of the anthropologists who, for some reason, were given an image of Lovelady from the 1950s to use instead of one closer in time to the assassination, such as the FBI photos taken only 3 months later? And didn't they do an "anthropometric" comparison of Oswald and Lovelady but did not include Doorman because his image was too blurry? It makes you wonder why they even bothered if they couldn't include him. I guess they were just showing off. But then at the end, they did make some "general observations" that Doorman's hairline matched Lovelady's. (Dah! They moved his hairline over). And they also made some claims that weren't even true, such as that Doorman's chin matched Lovelady's as well. And then, just to make it difficult for us to check their work, the HSCA flipped the image of Lovelady so that everything was opposite: the mirror image.  

But, it looks like Gerry Spence didn't buy any of it because 5 years later, he was asking Marrion Baker about Doorman with vested interest.  

So, what can we gather from this? I think we can say that either Gerry Spence staunchly believed that Oswald was the Man in the Doorway or he thought there was a damn good possibility that he was. If he didn't think that, why would he bring it up? He didn't have to. Lawyers only bring up stuff that they think is beneficial to their client. He wouldn't bring up something that he thought the other side could disprove. 

Here is the link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMvncE8BOP8