Free Not in Your Lifetime: The Defining Book on the J.F.K. Assassination by Anthony Summers Page B

Gordon Arnold, the soldier who claimed he found himself virtually in the line of fire during the shooting, said he, too, encountered a “Secret Service agent” just before the assassination. Another Dallas witness, Malcolm Summers, spoke of seeing a man with a gun when he approached the knoll after the shooting.
    Former Dallas Police Chief Jesse Curry said in 1977 that he thought the “Secret Service agent” on the knoll “must have been bogus … Certainly, the suspicion would point to the man as being involved, some way or other, in the shooting, since he was in an area immediately adjacent to where the shots were—and the fact that he had a badge that purported him to be Secret Service would make it seem all the more suspicious.”
    Within minutes of the assassination, an off-duty Dallas policeman, Tom Tilson, happened to be driving with his daughter on the road beyond the railway tracks. From there, just after hearing first word of the shooting on the car radio, he saw a man “slipping and sliding” down the railway embankment. Tilson said in 1978 that the man “came down that grassy slope on the west side of the triple underpass … had a car parked there, a black car. He threw something in the backseat and went around the fronthurriedly and got in the car and took off. I saw all of this and I said, ‘That doesn’t make sense, everybody running to the scene and one person running from it.’ ”
    Officer Tilson said his seventeen years of police experience, coupled with the news by then pouring over the radio, prompted him to give chase. He lost his quarry after a while, but—as his daughter confirmed—managed to get the license number of the car. He reported the incident, and the number, to Dallas Police Homicide that afternoon.
    Officer Tilson’s account appears to have been passed over in the chaos of the hours that followed, and there is no record of the car number he noted. There were other reports in Dallas that afternoon about speeding cars, one of them carrying stolen Georgia plates.
    In Dealey Plaza, within minutes of the shooting, the focus had shifted from the grassy knoll. Before and during the shooting, people in the crowd had noticed a man, or a man with a gun, in a window of the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. Some said they saw two men.
    Fifteen minutes before the assassination, a bystander named Arnold Rowland asked his wife if she would like to see a Secret Service agent and pointed to a window on the sixth floor. He had noticed, he said, “a man back from the window—he was standing and holding a rifle … we thought momentarily that maybe we should tell someone, but then the thought came to us that it [was] a security agent.”
    Rowland testified that he had seen the rifle clearly enough to make out the telescopic sight and realize it was a high-powered weapon. The man he saw was not in the famous window, at the right-hand end of the sixth floor, but in the far left -hand window. Rowland also said that, at the same time, he spotted a second figure, at the famous right-hand window (see Photo 4).The second man was dark-complexioned, leading Rowland to think he was black.
    The Warren inquiry rejected Rowland’s comments about a second man, even though a deputy sheriff confirmed that the witness had mentioned the man right after the shooting. When he told FBI agents about the second man, Rowland said, “They told me it didn’t have any bearing or such on the case right then. In fact, they just the same as told me to ‘forget it now.’ … They didn’t seem interested at all. They didn’t pursue this point. They didn’t take it down in the notation as such.”
    The Warren Commission Report ignored and omitted altogether statements the FBI took from two other witnesses. These also referred to two men, and the first of them seems to corroborate what Rowland said.
    Shortly before the assassination, bystander Ruby Henderson saw two men standing back from a window on one