Mr. Ball. What about the interview itself?
Mr. Fritz. Now the interview itself inside, of course, we did have a lot of people in the office there to be interviewing a man. It is much better, and you can keep a man's attention and his thoughts on what you are talking to him about better I think if there are not more than two or three people.
But in a case of this nature as bad as this case was, we certainly couldn't tell the Secret Service and the FBI we didn't want them to work on it because they would have the same interest we would have, they would want to do anything they could do, so we, of course, invited them in too but it did make a pretty big crowd.
Mr. Ball. Did you have any tape recorder?
Mr. Fritz. No, sir; I don't have a tape recorder. We need one, if we had one at this time we could have handled these conversations far better.
Mr. Ball. The Dallas Police Department doesn't have one?
Mr. Fritz. No, sir; I have requested one several times but so far they haven't gotten me one.
Mr. Ball. And you had quite a few interruptions, too, during the questioning, didn't you?
Mr. Fritz. Yes, sir; we had quite a lot of interruptions. I wish we had had—under the circumstances, I don't think there is much that could have been done because I saw it as it was there and I don't think there was a lot that could have been done other than move that crowd out of there, but I think it would have been more apt to get a confession out of it or get more true facts from him if I could have got him to sit down and quietly talked with him.
Mr. Ball. While he was in your custody up to this time at 11:15, when he left your office what precautions did you take for his safety in custody?