RICH POPE SAID:
Bugliosi verified there was a Dr. Pepper machine on the 1st floor. The second-floor Coke incident never happened.
RON BULMAN SAID:
How did Bugliosi verify this? He is a questionable resource for some readers/researchers.
DAVID VON PEIN SAID:
Vincent Bugliosi verified it by looking at an FBI photo that appears in Commission Document No. 496 [shown below], which shows the Dr. Pepper machine near the stairs on the first floor.
That particular picture, available to the public for many years (although not in the Warren Commission's 26 volumes), had apparently never been noticed by any researcher prior to Bugliosi, not even by the very thorough Gary Mack.
Plus....
Bugliosi also confirmed the existence of the first-floor Dr. Pepper machine when he talked with Buell Wesley Frazier on the telephone on March 24, 2004. Here are the excerpts from Vince's book concerning that topic....
"Indeed there was a Coca-Cola machine in the [second-floor lunch] room. But to my knowledge, there is no direct reference in the assassination literature to a second soft drink machine in the Book Depository Building.
[...]
Neither [Bonnie Ray] Williams nor [Wesley] Frazier expressly said what floor this [second soda] machine was on. .... Through a few phone calls I was able to reach Wesley Frazier, whom I hadn't talked to since 1986, when he testified for me at the London trial. Still living in Dallas, he told me that "there was a Dr. Pepper machine on the first floor." Where, specifically, was it? [Frazier:] "It was located by the double freight elevator near the back of the building."
[...]
And indeed, I subsequently found proof of the existence of the machine, with the words "Dr. Pepper" near the top front of it, in an FBI photo taken for the Warren Commission of the northwest corner of the first floor, and it is located right next to the refrigerator.
[...]
So we see that apart from all the conclusive evidence that Oswald shot Kennedy from the sniper's nest, and therefore had to have descended from there to the second floor, his story about going up to the second floor to get a Coke doesn't even make sense. Why go up to the second floor to get a drink for your lunch when there's a soft drink machine on the first floor, the floor you say you are already on, particularly when the apparent drink of your choice [Dr. Pepper by all accounts] is on this first floor, not the second floor?" -- Vincent Bugliosi; Pages 957-958 of "Reclaiming History"
David Von Pein
January 14, 2019
