Image of the Dallas County Criminal Courts Building, Slide #9

The slides are numbered sequentially starting at #4 and going through #36, skipping #20, for a total of 32 slides. They were donated to the Museum like this, and it is unknown what happened to the missing slides from this sequence.   - Stephanie Allen-Givens, Collections and Exhibits Manager

Look closely at this photo and you might notice at least two inmates in the upper left window of the Dallas County Jail. In 1978, Dallas Morning News reporter Earl Golz wrote a story about "witnesses overlooked" in the assassination investigation. Golz interviewed Johnny L. Powell, who was a seventeen-year-old inmate on the sixth floor of the Dallas County Jail at the time of the assassination. Although Mr. Powell waited a little more than fifteen years to share his eyewitness account, he told Golz that he saw two men with a rifle in the southeast corner window of the sixth floor of the Depository about six minutes before the assassination. In 1978, Powell claimed that "quite a few of us" in the cell noticed the two men on the sixth floor, though no one else ever came forward. When this photograph by Jerry Mainer was taken the day after the assassination, Powell was among those incarcerated on the sixth floor. Powell's story gained renewed attention when he was included as a character in Oliver Stone's 1991 film, JFK. Even though Powell waited until 1978 to share his eyewitness account, he is depicted in the film (played by actor Bill Bolender) as testifying at the Clay Shaw trial in New Orleans in 1969. - Stephen Fagin, Curator