to find employment at the Depository. When Oswald started working there, Frazier, who lived only a half block away from the Paines, offered to drive Oswald to and from Irving whenever he was going to stay at the Paines' home.24 Although Oswald's request for a ride to Irving on Thursday, November 21, was a departure from the normal weekend pattern, Oswald gave the explanation that he needed to obtain curtain rods for an "apartment" in Dallas.25 This served also to explain the long package which he took with him from Irving to the Depository Building the next morning.26 Further, there is no evidence that Ruth Paine or Marina Oswald had reason to believe that Oswald's return was in any way related to an attempt to shoot the President the next day. Although his visit was a surprise, since he arrived on Thursday instead of Friday for his usual weekend visit, both women testified that they thought he had come to patch up a quarrel which he had with his wife a few days earlier when she learned that he was living in Dallas under an assumed name.27

It has also been shown that Oswald had the opportunity to work in the Paines' garage on Thursday evening and prepare the rifle by dis-assembling it, if it were not already disassembled, and packing it in the brown bag. 28 It has been demonstrated that the paper and tape from which the bag was made came from the shipping room of the Texas School Book Depository and that Oswald had access to this material.29 Neither Ruth Paine nor Marina Oswald saw the paper bag or the paper and tape out of which the bag was constructed.30 Oswald actually prepared the bag in the Depository out of materials available to him there, he could have concealed it in the jacket or shirt which he was wearing. 31 The Commission has found no evidence which suggests that Oswald required or in fact received any assistance in bringing the rifle into the building other than the innocent assistance provided by Frazier in the form of the ride to work.

Accomplices at the Scene of the Assassination

The arrangement of boxes at the window from which the shots were fired was studied to determine whether Oswald required any assistance in moving the cartons to the window. Cartons had been stacked on the floor, a few feet behind the window, thus shielding Oswald from the view of anyone on the sixth floor who did not attempt to go behind them.32 (See Commission Exhibit No. 723, p. 80.) Most of those cartons had been moved there by other employees to dear an area for laying a new flooring on the west end of the sixth floor.33 Superintendent Roy Truly testified that the floor-laying crew moved a long row of books parallel to the windows on the south side and had "quite a lot of cartons" in the southeast corner of the building.34 He said that there was not any particular pattern that the men used in putting them there. "They were just piled up there more or less at that time." 35 According to Truly, "several cartons" which had been in the extreme southeast corner had been placed on top of the ones that had been piled in front of the southeast corner window.36