Two of the three "tramps" arrested in Dallas shortly after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 have told the FBI that they had nothing to do with it and were not on the scene until after the shooting.
Oliver B. Revell, agent in charge of the FBI's Dallas office, said yesterday that John F. Gedney and Harold Doyle were found and questioned in recent days after years of anonymity. The third, Gus W. Abrams, probably is dead, Revell said.
Their arrest sheets were found recently among Dallas police records on the assassination.
"We're not reopening the Kennedy case per se, but we are factually checking out any leads that do not appear to have been adequately handled," Revell said in a telephone interview.
Many conspiracy theorists have said the tramps, long known only by news photographs taken of them after they were arrested, were involved in the killing. Clean-shaven and relatively well-groomed, they were found in a freight car near the assassination site not long after Kennedy was killed Nov. 22, 1963.
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They were held as "investigative" prisoners on vagrancy charges and released four days later, according to their arrest records.
Gedney, of Melbourne, Fla., and Doyle, of Klamath Falls, Ore., told the FBI that "they had spent the night at the rescue mission and were treated very nicely," Revell said.
"Both commented that they had gotten fresh clothes, showered, shaved and had a meal. They headed back to the railroad yard when they heard all the commotion and sirens and everything, and they asked what happened. They were told the president had been shot."
The FBI also plans new image enhancement of an 8-mm film taken six or seven minutes before the assassination that seems to show movement in the sixth-floor windows of the Texas School Book Depository, from which Lee Harvey Oswald is said to have fired the fatal shots.
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