Marilyn Sitzman

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Marilyn Sitzman (14 December 1939 – 11 August 1993, Dallas, Texas) was a witness to the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963. She was with her boss, Abraham Zapruder, as he made the Zapruder film, the most studied record of the assassination.

Zapruder's clothing company, Jennifer Juniors, was one block from Dealey Plaza, through which the presidential motorcade would be passing on Nov. 22. When Zapruder arrived at work that morning without his 8 mm movie camera, his secretary Lillian Rogers encouraged him to go home to retrieve it. Zapruder, with Sitzman his receptionist standing behind him to steady him, filmed the presidential motorcade as both were standing on a 4-foot (1.2 m) high pedestal which extends from a retaining wall that was part of the John Neely Bryan concrete pergola on the grassy knoll north of Elm Street, in Dealey Plaza. The fatal head shot struck President Kennedy as his limousine passed almost directly in front of their position, 65 feet (20 m) from the center of Elm Street.

Sitzman; Emmett Hudson, who was standing on a stairway going up the grassy knoll; and Charles Hester, who was sitting on the grass in front of the pergola; were the only witnesses on the knoll who gave testimony about the direction of the shots they heard. All three said the shots came from the direction of the Texas School Book Depository.^[1] Sitzman rejected the theory that one or more shots came from behind the 5-foot (1.5 m) high picket fence atop the knoll:

“

And I'm sure that if the second shot would have come from a different place — and the supposed theory is they would have been much closer to me and on the right side — I would have heard the sounding of the gun much closer, and I probably had a ringing in my head because the fence was quite close to where we were standing, very close.

”

Between Sitzman and the picket fence was a 3.3-foot (1 m) high, L-shaped concrete alcove along the path from the stairway up the knoll to the area behind the pergola. Some assassination researchers, studying vague shapes in a photograph taken by Mary Moorman from across the street just after the fatal head shot, saw the so-called "badge man" aiming a rifle from this area. Another person, Gordon Arnold, came forth in 1978 to claim that he had been standing in that area taking a film of the motorcade.

However, in a long-forgotten interview from 1966, rediscovered in 1985, Sitzman gave eyewitness testimony to who was in the alcove below her and about nine yards (8.2 m) to her right: a young black couple was sitting on a bench, eating lunch and drinking sodas. When the shots rang out, the couple ran along the path to the area behind the pergola. Sitzman was asked if she saw anyone else in this area between the concrete wall and the picket fence; she said no, only the couple.