The Girl on the Stairs

See the latest website about The Girl on the Stairs by Barry Ernest, who spoke at COPA in 2011. Here is a short excerpt below. Pelican Press has picked it up for a new edition.
http://mysite.verizon.net/restu5kb/

The Hartford Books Examiner is a regular online column offering news and reviews of books plus interviews with authors. In a recent week-long series titled, “JFK Assassination Revisited,” writer John Valeri devoted a segment to “The Girl on the Stairs.” (See: http://www.examiner.com/books-in-hartford/john-valeri). My thanks to him for the opportunity to share the following responses:

1) Tell us a bit about Victoria Adams and how your discovery of her, after 35 years of searching, inspired you to write THE GIRL ON THE STAIRS…

Actually, The Girl on the Stairs was underway before I found Vicki Adams. The idea for it came from Harold Weisberg in 1999. I had stopped at his home on my way back from the National Archives where I had just found a document that proved the truthfulness of Miss Adams, a witness I had been searching for since 1967. Weisberg recognized the significance of the discovery and suggested I write a book about my efforts to find Vicki and what all I had discovered along the way.

My initial reaction was that it wouldn’t be much of a story; after all, the missing witness was still missing. But I started to pull some things together and struggled with some early chapters. Then in 2002 I got lucky and found Vicki.

What she revealed gave me the direction I needed.

As background, when she was 11 Vicki was abandoned by her parents. Much of her early life was spent in foster homes and was influenced by fear. She studied to become a nun after high school and taught at several Catholic schools before ending up in Dallas. At the young age of 22 she was thrown into the nightmare of the JFK assassination.

She was hounded by authorities, yet remained very consistent with what she told them she had seen and done following the assassination. But no one believed her and, despite her pleas for ways to have her story corroborated, no attempts were made to verify her statements. She was automatically disbelieved and discredited, then humiliated and, for lack of a better term, branded a liar. Her fears returned as a result and she basically went underground with her side of the story. Even her best friends were unaware of her involvement.

Not long after I got to know her, she said to me that all she ever wanted in this was for people to know that she had told the truth.

That comment gave me the inspiration.

2) What was your first introduction to the idea of conspiracy in the JFK assassination? To what (or whom) do you credit with sustaining your interest in the case for more than four decades?

I was a firm believer in the Warren Report. One day at college, a classmate in my U.S. History course asked me why? I told him I had read the Report (twice actually) and found it to be a convincing account of how the assassination had occurred. He handed me a copy of that month’s Playboy magazine, the February 1967 issue which had an interview with author and critic Mark Lane. I was curious and read it immediately. Lane raised some points that I had never heard before and, although I was skeptical of his comments, I went out that afternoon and bought his book, Rush to Judgment, as well as Edward Epstein’s Inquest.

The next thing I knew I was interviewing witnesses in Dallas and rummaging through documents in the National Archives.

Without doubt, the man who sustained my interest throughout these many years was Harold Weisberg. I met him at the National Archives very early in my research efforts. He taught me how to do this the right way — relying on facts and documentation rather than speculation and conjecture — and I have tried to follow his guidance ever since. He used to give me what he called “assignments” to do for him when I went to Dallas or the Archives. Writing The Girl on the Stairs ended up being his last assignment for me.

3) If asked to summarize the absolute essential evidence that you believe invalidates the Warren Commission’s findings in one paragraph, how would you respond?

In my opinion, what invalidates the Warren Commission’s findings is the very evidence it used to support those findings. One does not lead to the other. This is a hard concept to accept and it was certainly a hard pill for me to swallow. But if you go beyond just reading the Warren Report — the foundation to all this mess — and you look at the evidence the Commission used ostensibly to uphold its conclusions, you find the opposite. It is unnerving to see that much contradiction in an official publication regarding such a historic event. Smart men like those on the Commission are not supposed to make these kinds of errors.