Oswald kept changing seats in an empty theater, as if waiting for someone who never came

The Texas Theater in Dallas seats about 900 people. On the afternoon of Nov. 22, 1963, only about 20 were inside for the matinee. A young man who had slipped in without paying walked past rows of empty seats and sat down right next to 18-year-old Jack Davis.

The man was Lee Harvey Oswald, a 24-year-old warehouse worker. Hours earlier, President John F. Kennedy had been shot while riding in a motorcade through Dallas, and Dallas patrolman J. D. Tippit had been shot dead on a residential street.

Some researchers who question the official account point to what Oswald did next as evidence that he was not trying to hide. A man trying to disappear in a nearly empty theater would sit alone in a dark corner. Oswald kept seeking company, and those researchers suggest he may have been looking for a contact who was supposed to meet him.

After sitting beside Davis, Oswald got up and moved across the aisle to sit beside someone else. A few minutes later he got up again and strolled to the lobby, where he bought popcorn. The seller later remembered the sale as happening at 1:15 p.m., one minute before Tippit's killing was logged at 1:16 p.m. That timing adds to questions around the case because the record on Tippit is muddled. Eyewitness accounts conflict over whether Tippit stopped Oswald, someone else, or two people, and no one has definitively proven who shot Tippit.

Back inside the theater, Oswald sat beside a woman expecting a child. The researchers interpret the seat hopping as a search from person to person for a familiar face. Their idea is that the theater may have served as a fallback rendezvous, where an ally was meant to guide him into hiding and then help him leave Dallas. They describe that kind of backup meeting place as standard practice when an intelligence plan goes wrong.

No one in the theater responded to him. After approaching stranger after stranger, Oswald went to sit alone at the back. Within minutes, Dallas police arrived, the house lights went on, and officers closed in for a struggle and an arrest.