May 23, 1964 - Billy Lovelady, an employee of the Texas Schoolbook Depository, identified himself today as the man seen in a doorway in a photo moments after President Kennedy was shot.
“I recall standing in the doorway, and I have about 20 witnesses who were there near me,” he said. “They will verify it was me.”
Many newspapers in Europe published in weekend editions an American photograph taken a split second after Kennedy was shot last Nov. 22. The picture purported to show a man who looked like Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin, standing in the doorway of the depository building.
Newspaper descriptions said the man “bears an extraordinary resemblance” to Oswald, who was shot two days later by Jack Ruby.
Authorities said that minutes after the shooting, Oswald was seen in a second-floor lunchroom of the building. The shots were fired from the sixth floor.
The newspapers asked, “If the man in the doorway was Oswald, who then fired the bullets which killed the President?”
Mr. Lovelady, a stock clerk, said he had given testimony about the photo to agents of the Warren Commission investigating the assassination. He said he had also cooperated with the FBI.
He said that investigators for both the FBI and the Warren Commission were satisfied it was he and not Oswald in the doorway.
Mr. Lovelady said the FBI had taken pictures of him from various angles and that he had been shown a three-by-four-foot blowup of the doorway picture and asked if he was in it.
“I immediately pointed to myself in the doorway,” Mr. Lovelady said.
He said he was about 15 to 20 pounds heavier than Oswald and about three inches shorter. Asked whether there was any resemblance to Oswald, he replied, “I’m fatter in the face.”
“It was me in the doorway,” he said. “If anyone doesn’t believe it, they will just have to take my word.”
Dallas authorities said the photographs had been examined carefully after the assassination.
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