Accidental History:The Girl on the Stairs
by Barry Ernest
Reviewed by Joseph E. Green and Jim DiEugenio

At
first she thought it was firecrackers. But when she saw the chaos and
the terror on all the faces below, she knew it was something far worse.
She turned from the window and grabbed the arm of a co-worker. “Come
on.” She whispered. “Let’s find out what’s going on down there.” In this
split second, her innocence—and that of a nation’s—came to an end.

The above is how Barry Ernest
begins his interesting and unusual book, The Girl on the Stairs. The
JFK assassination, like any historical event, had a ripple effect on the
history of the country and, indeed, the world. And while many of these
effects were foreseeable—for example, the expansion of the war in
Vietnam—there were an infinite number of others that were not. Some of
the most tragic stories that emerged in the wake of the assassination
concern the deaths of those who became accidental players by hearing and
seeing things they were not supposed to, and whose documentation began
with Penn Jones in his Forgive My Grief series. Still others involved
those who were not murdered, but instead were forced into a life of
hiding and jumping at shadows.

Barry Ernest’s
book tells two stories. One is about himself: his journey from being a
believer in the Warren Report to that of being a fierce critic of that
now, quite discredited, volume. Therefore he begins the book at a rather
appropriate place and time. In fact, it is actually beyond appropriate.
It is almost symbolic. Barry was a student at Kent State in 1967. This
is the college where the expansion of the Vietnam War would, in three
short years, lead to the infamous shooting of students by the National
Guard and produce one of the most iconic photographs of that tumultuous
era. The first scene of the book is him sitting outside the cafeteria. A
fellow student named Terry approaches and asks him about a dialogue
from a previous class where Barry actually defended the Warren Report.
The student then asks Barry if he had ever seen or heard of the Zapruder
film, and if he had read the entire 26 volumes of the Warren
Commission. Barry said no to each. The student left him a copy of an
interview by Mark Lane, and said, “Read this.” Barry did—right then and
there. Hours later, in twilight, he then went to a bookstore and
searched for Lane’s book, Rush to Judgment. This is how the first
story—that of personal discovery and evolution—begins.

And it was
through Lane’s book that Barry was introduced to the heroine of the
second story he will tell. That second story is about the plight of one
of these ordinary people who was swept up by events: Victoria Adams, the
notable “girl on the stairs.” She was an employee who worked in the
same building as one Lee Harvey Oswald. The problem caused by her
presence is very simple and easily summarized. Adams, along with her
friend Sandra Styles, stood on the fourth floor of the Texas School Book
Depository at the moment of the murder. She testified to hearing three
shots, which from her vantage point appeared to be coming from the right
of the building (i.e., from the grassy knoll). She and Styles then ran
to the stairs to head down. This was the only set of stairs that went
all the way to the top of the building. Both she and her friend took
them down to the ground floor. She did not see or hear Oswald. Yet, she
should have if he were on the sixth floor traveling downwards. Which is
what the Commission said he did after he shot Kennedy.

This is
the first problem, in a nutshell. Why did Adams not see a scrambling
Oswald, flying down the stairs in pursuit of his Coca-Cola? Because of
the Warren Commission’s timeline, we know Oswald had to have gone down
the stairs during this period in order to be accosted in time by a
motorcycle policeman. In addition, as we are later to discover, Adams
also reports seeing Jack Ruby on the corner of Houston and Elm,
“questioning people as though he were a policeman.” ...
rigorousintuition.ca :: Silencing Sandy Serrano (the RFK killing)

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