Gordon Arnold
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Gordon Leslie Arnold (August 14, 1941 – October 15, 1997, Dallas, Texas) is a man who claimed to be a witness to the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas.
Arnold served three years in the United States Army, after enlisting in 1963. After being discharged from the Army, Arnold married in 1966 (one living son as of 2004) and became employed with the Dallas Department of Consumer Affairs in Dallas, Texas.
In 1978 Arnold first publicly claimed to have been a witness to the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dealey Plaza in Dallas. He claimed that minutes before the assassination he was twice approached by a business suited CIA or Secret Service agent who demanded he move away from behind the picket fence of the Dealey Plaza north grassy knoll. He claimed he moved just south of the picket fence and then filmed the assassination with a movie camera from a few feet north of a 3.3-feet (1 m) high cement retaining wall on the grassy knoll, and that a bullet passed extremely close to his left ear, then he dove to the ground. Arnold said that very soon after the end of the attack a man armed with a revolver and dressed in a Dallas police uniform kicked him while Arnold was still lying on the ground then demanded his movie film while another man armed with a rifle and also dressed in a Dallas police uniform and wearing yellow lens tinted "shooter's glasses" stood closeby crying, shaking, and waving his rifle around. Arnold claimed he gave the revolver armed police officer his movie camera, the police officer removed the film, then returned the camera to Arnold (now with the policeman's fresh fingerprints).
Three days later Arnold said he reported for his pre-assassination-scheduled transfer to the U.S. Army's Fort Wainwright in Alaska.
Despite his claims being made public some five months before the House Select Committee on Assassinations investigation ended, the HSCA, which did learn of his claims, decided not to interview him.
After 1978 Arnold provided his claims to only a few assassination researchers and book authors. Arnold has not been found in any of the photographs or films of the assassination and no witnesses report seeing him, including Abraham Zapruder and his assistant Marilyn Sitzman, who were very near where Arnold claimed to be that day, or seeing his alleged confrontation with two police officers, one crying and waving a rifle, on the grassy knoll moments after the assassination. Nor in any of his accounts did Arnold mention a young black couple whom Sitzman reported were sitting on a bench behind the same retaining wall where Arnold claimed to have been. Some researchers claim to have photographically enhanced his U.S. Army uniformed image in a Polaroid photograph taken by Mary Moorman during the assassination, while others claim this is actually the theorized "Badge Man" or simply just a tree or shadow.
Arnold elaborated on his claims in the 1988 documentary The Men Who Killed Kennedy and in a 1989 interview with the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza. The transcript of that 1989 interview was eventually made available to the public in 2004.
