Soon afterward, at about 3 p.m., police officers arrived and searched the house. Mrs. Paine pointed out that most of the Oswalds’ possessions were in the garage.[C4-140] With Ruth Paine acting as an interpreter, Detective Rose asked Marina whether her husband had a rifle. Mrs. Paine, who had no knowledge of the rifle, first said “No,” but when the question was translated, Marina Oswald replied “Yes.”[C4-141] She pointed to the blanket which was on the floor very close to where Ruth Paine was standing. Mrs. Paine testified:
As she [Marina] told me about it I stepped onto the blanket roll. * * * And she indicated to me that she had peered into this roll and saw a portion of what she took to be a gun she knew her husband to have, a rifle. And I then translated this to the officers that she knew that her husband had a gun that he had stored in here. * * * I then stepped off of it and the officer picked it up in the middle and it bent so. * * *[C4-142]
Mrs. Paine had the actual blanket before her as she testified and she indicated that the blanket hung limp in the officer’s hand.[C4-143] Marina Oswald testified that this was her first knowledge that the rifle was not in its accustomed place.[C4-144]
On the morning of November 22, 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald left the Paine house in Irving at approximately 7:15 a.m., while Marina Oswald was still in bed.[C4-145] Neither she nor Mrs. Paine saw him leave the house.[C4-146] About half-a-block away from the Paine house was the residence of Mrs. Linnie Mae Randle, the sister of the man with whom Oswald drove to work--Buell Wesley Frazier. Mrs. Randle stated that on the morning of November 22, while her brother was eating breakfast, she looked out the breakfast-room window and saw Oswald cross the street and walk toward the driveway where her brother parked his car near the carport. He carried a “heavy brown bag.”[C4-147] Oswald gripped the bag in his right hand near the top. “It tapered like this as he hugged it in his hand. It was * * * more bulky toward the bottom” than toward the top.[C4-148] She then opened the kitchen door and saw Oswald open the right rear door of her brother’s car and place the package in the back of the car.[C4-149] Mrs. Randle estimated that the package was approximately 28 inches long and about 8 inches wide.[C4-150] She thought that its color was similar to that of the bag found on the sixth floor of the School Book Depository after the assassination.[C4-151]