HSCA Staff Access Request, December 1976
Record Number 180-10073-10321 | Agency: HSCA | Date: December 3, 1976
Not every declassified document contains a bombshell. Some of them are a single letter about a building access problem. But those documents matter too, because they show us something no headline ever captures: the unglamorous, bureaucratic machinery that had to exist before any real investigation could begin.
This is one of those documents.
What the Document Is
Record Number 180-10073-10321 is a one-page letter, dated December 3, 1976, written on official Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) letterhead. It was sent by Thomas N. Downing, the committee's first chairman, to C.M. Bates, the Superintendent of Buildings for the U.S. House of Representatives. The subject is simple and practical: 13 staff members of the newly formed committee had not yet been issued their official House identification cards, and Downing was asking Bates to let them into the committee's rooms anyway.
The rooms in question were located in House Office Building Annex 2, Room 3342. The letter requests that staffers be allowed access after-hours, with identity verified by name and social security number. One social security number in the document is redacted under JFK Act Section 6(3), a standard privacy protection. Another notation reads "Will furnish Social Security at later date," which tells us at least one staff member had not yet provided that information at all.
The thirteen staffers named in the letter are: Mrs. Edyth Baish, Ms. Sheryl Bonifer, Ms. Linda Connor, Steven Fallis, Thomas Gannon, Gerald Hamilton, Thomas Howarth, Belford Lawson, Alvin Lewis, Ralph Locke, Denise McCrea, Andy Purdy, and James Wolfe.
What It Tells Us About the Investigation
The HSCA was formally established in September 1976, just three months before this letter was written. December 1976 was, in every practical sense, the very beginning of the operation. The committee had a mandate to investigate not only the assassination of President Kennedy but also the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It was standing up an investigative staff from scratch, inside a federal bureaucracy that moved at its own pace regardless of urgency.
This letter is a window into that moment. It tells us that in early December 1976, staff were already showing up to work at the HSCA before the paperwork had caught up with them. They could not get into their own offices after hours without a letter from the chairman. That is not a failure of the investigation. That is what it looks like when a new government body is being built in real time.
Several of the names on this list went on to play meaningful roles in the investigation. Andy Purdy, for example, became one of the committee's staff counsel and was heavily involved in witness interviews and investigation of the CIA's pre-assassination knowledge of Lee Harvey Oswald. Seeing his name on a routine access request in December 1976 is a reminder that the people who would later produce the HSCA's controversial findings were, at this moment, just trying to get through the door.
How It Fits the Bigger Picture
The HSCA investigation is one of the most significant official inquiries into the Kennedy assassination, second only to the Warren Commission itself. Unlike the Warren Commission, which concluded in 1964 that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, the HSCA reached a different conclusion in its 1979 final report: that Kennedy was "probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy," based in part on acoustic evidence from Dealey Plaza. That finding has been disputed and debated ever since.
Understanding what the HSCA actually found, and how credible those findings are, requires understanding the full arc of the committee's work, from its chaotic first weeks in late 1976 all the way to its final report in 1979. Documents like this one, administrative and mundane as they appear, are part of that arc. They establish who was on the team from the beginning. They show us the scale of the organizational challenge. And they create a paper trail that, when read alongside the investigative documents that came later, helps us understand the full context of how this inquiry was built.
It is also worth noting what the document's metadata tells us. The record was reviewed by the government in June 1993, and its current status was listed as "Withhold" at that time, meaning it was not released to the public until later declassification efforts. Its release as part of the 2018 JFK records disclosure means it sat in a restricted file for over four decades. For a letter about building access, that may seem surprising. The most likely explanation is simply that it contained personally identifiable information, specifically social security numbers, which are subject to standard privacy protections regardless of the document's investigative significance.
The Bottom Line
Document 32245763 does not tell us who killed John F. Kennedy. It does not reveal a conspiracy or clear anyone's name. What it does is give us a precise timestamp on the beginning of a major federal investigation, a roster of the people who were there at the start, and a reminder that even the most consequential inquiries in American history begin with paperwork, logistics, and a letter asking someone to please let the staff through the door.
In the context of this series, that matters. Reading these records means reading all of them, not just the ones with dramatic revelations. The full picture only comes into focus when you understand how the investigation was built, who built it, and what constraints they were working under from day one.
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