Witnesses

Photographs

Heikes, Darryl

Moorman, Mary

Hill, Jean

Dallas County Sheriff's Department

Dallas Times Herald

United Press International (UPI)

Dallas

Film

15/16 x 1 7/16 in. (2.4 x 3.6 cm)

Darryl Heikes, photographer, Dallas Times Herald Collection/The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza

According to her affidavit of November 22, 1963, Jean Hill and her friend, Mary Moorman, were taken to the press room at the Dallas County Sheriff's Department by reporter Jim Featherston of the Dallas Times Herald. In her later testimony to the Warren Commission, Hill indicated that Featherston had intimidated her and tried to convince her to change her eyewitness account of the assassination. Years later, in both her 1989 oral history with The Sixth Floor Museum and her controversial autobiography, JFK: The Last Dissenting Witness (1992), Hill expanded her story and said that she was roughly taken by men claiming to be Secret Service agents to the nearby county courts building. There she was allegedly told by these agents that only three shots were fired instead of the four to six shots that Hill believed she heard in Dealey Plaza.Reporter Jim Featherston later gave his account of the situation, explaining that Hill and Moorman had voluntarily accompanied him to the press room at the sheriff's department so that he could hear their eyewitness accounts and examine Moorman's Polaroid photos from Dealey Plaza. In 1994, he said, "Before long, the pressroom became filled with other newsmen. Mrs. Hill told her story over and over again for television and radio. Each time, she would embellish it a bit until her version began to sound like Dodge City at high noon." - Stephen Fagin, Curator

Jean Hill (left) and Mary Moorman (right) were two Dallas friends and housewives who knew at least two of the Dallas Police motorcycle officers assigned to the motorcade and wanted to see both them and President Kennedy. Moorman knew Officer Glen McBride from high school and George Lumpkin; Hill knew Officer Billy Joe Martin. They stood on the south side of Elm Street and Moorman took a series of Polaroid photos before and during the shooting, the last of which shows the moment of the fatal head shot and the grassy knoll in the background. Their stories are extensively recounted in Richard Trask’s Pictures of the Pain and Hill testified to the Warren Commission. Moorman was also asked to testify but, as she told me years later, she had twisted her ankle and asked for a delay; it was granted but she was never recalled. – Gary Mack, Curator