Reflecting Back on an Old Obsession

It has been quite a while since I’ve written on the Kennedy assassination, but I’ve still been interested in and have studied it for around 20 years now (yes, going back to the bouncy age of 7). I’ve been focusing on school and getting a career going in film, but recently I’ve started pulling up some of those old JFK documentaries and glancing over them again and getting a bit of a refreshment back into a story that I know all too well. As one researcher put it, and I’m paraphrasing, “If I was to give you advice about looking into the Kennedy Assassination I would say, ‘Don’t do it!’ It makes you too critical, it takes up too much of your time and there is probably something inherently unhealthy about knowing more about a day from 40+ years ago than you do about yesterday.” I guess I’m just one of those crazy times that just can’t help but be endlessly intrigued by what happened on that day almost fifty years ago. 

This brief re-emersion into the case was sparked after I went online and was looking up some videos on the the assassination via YouTube, and sometimes I just can’t avoid looking at the comments people post and how heated the arguments become. And just in reading the ways in which these arguments go nowhere and glancing over the poor presentation of ideas and bad grammar a simple truth, that should already be blatantly obvious, comes about; that truth is that if you are using YouTube commentary as the place for arguing your perspective on the Kennedy Assassination, you are probably not well versed in the event. But sometimes YouTube commentary is a guilty pleasure for us all. In going through much of these commentaries of course the focus of the fight is conspiracy theories against those who don’t believe in a conspiracy. And in most cases I have found that those who argue against a conspiracy in the assassination (of which, and I’m sure it’s no surprise now, I support the notion that there was a conspiracy in the assassination of the president) often have little to defend their argument. They seldom ever present any credible evidence of their case (which is not to say there isn’t any defense against a conspiracy), but it seems to me again that many people have a novice knowledge at best of all the evidence involved in the shooting of President Kennedy. Furthermore, if they already have preconceived notions or beliefs on the case, they will be more adept to side with one side of the argument or another without really knowing why. It’s my opinion that if you don’t know the details of the case, ad nausem, then you’re not in any place to be arguing for one side or another. And that goes for anything else - if you don’t know enough about a subject, don’t chatter on like you’re an expert because you’re just going to make a fool of yourself. So in most cases these people who don’t believe there was a conspiracy don’t use evidence to back their claims, but go the other way by arguing the lack of evidence of a conspiracy.

Now, to play the devil’s advocate briefly, in the fifty years since Kennedy’s death conspiracy theorists have many times performed in such ways that damage their cause. First of all, there are an excess of theories about the case that point fingers at everyone from President Lyndon Johnson, future President’s RIchard Nixon and George Bush, the FBI, the CIA, the Soviet Union, Cuba, right wing extremists, the Mafia, the Military Industrial Complex, and these are just the well known theories. There are many more, most of which breach absurdity and parody including the theory that Kennedy’s driver shot him (which has endlessly been disproven). This has watered down the credibility of the notion of conspiracy because obviously not everyone or every group that has been fingered could have been involved or there would have been some 50+ people there opening fire on the President. I would find it difficult to believe there were more than three possible shooters, who were obviously put in place by specific individuals who were likely representatives of a major organization such as the CIA or the FBI. I don’t put much credence into the idea that there was a Communist conspiracy and that individuals from the Soviet Union or Cuba carried out the assassination. First of all, Kennedy was constantly criticized in America for being a Communist (of which I don’t believe, but America’s enemies had to know that Vice President Johnson was much more hard-nosed than Kennedy, so in killing Kennedy they would have put a more threatening character in the position of the leader of America). Even Fidel Castro said, and honestly as I believe, that it would have been madness for a tiny nation like Cuba to kill President Kennedy as it would have given them total legitimacy in declaring war on the small nation in which we most certainly would have blasted their country back into the Stone Age. And also Castro stated in an interview during the 70s that you don’t create change in another nation by killing their leaders because they will just put someone else much like them in their place. 

To me, this watering down of conspiracy theories is primarily the result of two things. One, being the desire for certain people to gain prominence by taking advantage of an manipulating a national tragedy. These include individuals who want to take advantage of a theory that exists but hasn’t really been argued (often because the theory doesn’t hold much water). So these people take a shaky theory and blow it out of proportion using a series of coincidences to make a theory seem more probable than it really is. In most cases these theories are incredibly transparent, poorly argued, and yet those professing them claim to have solved the case when all is said and done. And two, the simple truth is that Kennedy had enemies everywhere, both internationally and domestically. There were various reasons for members of the FBI, the CIA, the Military Industrial Complex, the Mafia, and Communist enemies in other nations to possibly want to kill Kennedy. And more than likely during this time there were plenty of people in high positions who disliked the President who spouted off in anger words to the effect of, “We ought to just kill that SOB” or words to that effect. In practically every conspiracy theory there seem to be multiple cases wherein dozens upon dozens of individuals were heard to make comments of hatred or to suggest violence be taken against the President. Unfortunately, this is something we all do. There’s not a person alive who hasn’t, at the height of anger, said, “I want to kill that %#($(%()$”. The fact of the matter is at least 90% of the time, these are idle threats. However, conspiracy theorists have used issues such as this to try and argue that these individuals could have been responsible. So because there was so much hostility against the President from just about every major national and governmental organization in the country (as well as enemies abroad) there are legitimate reasons to suggest any of them could have been involved in killing him. This has also opened the floodgates for a variety of different theories to come out. This makes for such a wide variety of theories that it’s difficult to wade through them and to find which ones are plausible and which one’s are just insane. Because of this it is quite understandable, again especially for someone with a novice knowledge of the assassination as a whole, that people would sit and argue that there is very little legitimacy in the notion of a conspiracy. And certainly now a days many people still cling to the idea of conspiracy not because they know the facts but because we are so distrustful of our government now that it is so easy to believe that they just lied to us again with regards to who killed President Kennedy. But once again, reasoning like that relies more on what we choose to believe about our government and not specifically what we know about the assassination.

The one particular comment that caught my attention was from someone who said that there is little reason to believe in conspiracy because they all just argue “possibilities”, meaning not a single one provides a solid, unbreakable resolution as to who and how the President was killed. Well of course that’s true because nobody knows exactly what happened. That’s why the case still intrigues us. Even President Johnson would later state that nobody, including he, would probably ever know everything pertaining to the assassination (even though the Presidential Commission he appointed reached the conclusions “without a doubt” that they had solved the case and that a young 24-year old named Lee Harvey Oswald had, acting alone, shot the President to death). However, acknowledging the fact that the case is still wide open and still hasn’t been solved (in the opinions of the many - including the general public as well as those who have studied and examined the case), not only casts doubt on the many conspiracy theories that exist out there but also the official government case. If there was no doubt as to the legitimacy of the workings of the Commission brought together by the President (The Warren Commission) to solve the case then there wouldn’t be so much doubt and suspicion now, as there has been for the better part of the past 50 years. 

As a matter of fact, and this has been openly admitted by many who were involved in the workings of the Commission, they were not brought together in an effort to objectively solve the crime, but had the biased agenda to examine the evidence in such a way as to prove the initial argument that Oswald killed the President by himself. Even within 24 hours of the assassination the Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach had written in a document that the American people would have to be convinced that Oswald killed the President and that all of the evidence would have proven such had he gone to trial (Oswald was killed two days after the assassination when he was gunned down by Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby in the basement of the Dallas Police Department). Colonel Fletcher Prouty, who had worked with President Kennedy, read in a New Zealand newspaper, less than a day after the assassination a front page story in which Oswald had essentially been proven guilty and the story bore out his whole life story. As he said, so much info in a news story like that only hours after the assassination could have resulted from one thing: it was a cover story, preprepared before the assassination even took place! And finally, within hours of the assassination FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover contacted Kennedy’s brother Robert to tell him that Oswald had been captured and that he was definitely the killer of the President. All of these events occurred only within hours of Oswald being arrested for the crime. He had not admitted to killing the President and the effort to even collect evidence in the case had just started. Nevertheless, there were numerous efforts out of the gate by high up political figures to argue that Oswald did it. It was this perspective that carried the day when the Warren Commission was brought together. This certainly doesn’t automatically in and of itself state that Oswald was innocent, but it also shows that the effort to solve the murder of the President of the United States was not carried out objectively, nor was it done in an effort to properly solve the case. 

Because of this, as I mentioned earlier with regards to one YouTuber’s commentary wherein he stated that he disbelieves in most conspiracy theories because they rely on possibilities, the Warren Commission also had to rely on possibilities. This has been more and more proven over the years as many aspects as to the actions they took and the conclusions they reached have been shown to be untrue. For instance, a strong argument by conspiracy theorists is the fact that Oswald officially shot the President from the sixth floor of his workplace, the Texas School Book Depository. He was reportedly first seen about ninety seconds after the assassination in the lunchroom on the second floor of the Depository. He was seen at this time by Dallas Officer Marion Baker, who saw a flock of pigeons fly off the roof of the Depository when he heard the shots. This attracted his attention to that building right away. Film of the scene shows him running into the Depository within ten seconds of the shooting and everyone who saw him inside stated that he was running and moving as fast as possible to gain access upstairs. He then saw Oswald only one floor up from there. All things considered, Baker should have been able to make it up to the second floor where Oswald was seen within 45 to 60 seconds at the most. However, in having Baker recreate his movements they had him go at a small jogging pace, in which he reached the second floor in roughly 75 to 80 seconds. Then they had him do it again at a walking pace, in which he covered the distance in 90 seconds.Therefore, the Commission used time figures of Baker moving at a walking place (while all visual and eyewitness evidence states that he was running) to determine how long it took for Baker to reach the second floor lunchroom. Interestingly, the testing they did for how long it would have taken Oswald to get from his sniper’s nest, ditch his rifle and get down to the second floor of the Depository was between 70 and 80 seconds. Therefore, to argue that Oswald made it to the second floor lunchroom and wasn’t seen till he was already inside, they had to argue that it took longer for Officer Baker to reach that scene even though all evidence points to the contrary. Furthermore, there were two female employees on the staircase of which Oswald would have had to pass to get down there; and these two women never saw him. Photographs show boxes in Oswald’s “sniper’s nest” show boxes were moved within 30 seconds of the shooting and therefore Oswald would have had to move boxes around, which would have taken him even longer to get downstairs. Furthermore, when seen by Officer Baker, Oswald had a partially drank Coke (suggesting he had been there awhile) in his hand and was not short of breath (even though he had just supposedly shot the President of the United States and sprinted across a floor and sprinted down four flights of stairs only seconds before). This is just one example of the Warren Commission behaving with a biased agenda wherein they had to make unfounded presumptions about what happened that day.

Something that people who argue against the case for conspiracy, and in particular arguing against the transparency of most of the theories in this case, have to keep in mind is that if the official case can be proven wrong it doesn’t matter what conspiracies one may come up with because it proves beyond any doubt that a conspiracy took place. What is the definition of conspiracy? In its simplest form, a conspiracy is: a secret plan by a group to do something unlawful or harmful. If the governments conclusions can be argued to be inaccurate, even though they argue them to be inexplicably true, then this means that the President was killed by some other means of which the government was either unwilling to consider or was unwilling to divulge. If it was not Oswald acting alone, then the President was killed by other means. And since to this day those means have never been fully understood, the circumstances surrounding his assassination have to be considered secretive, and without a doubt the action that took place was both harmful and unlawful. Therefore, if the Commission and the governments conclusions can be proven wrong then a conspiracy too place, regardless of who was behind it the most or how many wacky theories are out there. That is very important to understand.

And to grasp this concept you must be able to argue that the Commission was wrong in their conclusions. This is paramount, because it completely disregards any anti-conspiracy commentary or rhetoric. This is also critical for anyone who believes in a conspiracy for if you are to argue the government was wrong in their conclusions you have to be able to prove it and discuss why. Nobody is in any position to argue the notion of conspiracy if you cannot prove first that the official story was wrong. Now in the case of all the evidence existing with regards to the Kennedy Assassination I would be here for weeks if I decided to discuss all aspects of it. But to keep it simple, disproving the governments case is as simple as proving that their lone assassin could not have done it alone (and potentially wasn’t a shooter at all). As far as I am concerned, the best way to address this issue is to look at the core pieces of evidence that were used against Oswald. In this I mean solid pieces of evidence; not coincidences, not possibilities, not probabilities, but real evidence. 

Therefore, the crux of the whole situation is the sniper’s nest that Oswald is described as having used to assassinate the President from. Everything leads to that location. There were about nine known witnesses to the goings on of the sniper’s nest in the seconds and minutes surrounding the assassination. What they have had to say casts strong credibility to the idea that someone was shooting from that location, but also casts great doubt on the idea that it was Lee Harvey Oswald that was shooting from there. Of all the witnesses, only one of them offered up an eyewitness account that suggested the individual there was Oswald. This was Howard Brennan, who of course became one of the Warren Commission’s star witnesses seeing as he was the only one in this instance who supported their conclusions. And Brennan even refused to identify Oswald in a police line up later on. In a book he wrote later he outlandishly claimed that he feared he would be killed if he identified Oswald, believing that he was a member of a Communist plot, but later claimed that he felt identifying Oswald was unnecessary seeing as there was so much evidence already piled up against him. However, at the time of going to the line up the police were still in the early stages of collecting evidence and how much they found or what it suggested was unknown at that time. There were also many issues with Brennan’s identification of Oswald; most notably that he said Oswald loomed by the window for several seconds after the shooting, as though admiring his feat. However, as I have already discussed, the time in which Oswald had to get down to the second story lunchroom had already been compromised to allow him to arrive there before being seen by Officer Baker. Their time tests did not include several seconds at the start for these seconds that Brennan claimed Oswald stood there. Secondly, Brennan claimed that he watched the gun as it fired the headshot and that he also turned and saw the bullet strike the President’s head. This means that he claimed he was able to turn his head faster than a bullet, something that is anatomically impossible.

This was the only witness who remotely defended the idea that the man seen shooting from the sixth floor of the Book Depository, and his testimony is about as unreliable as any witness to the assassination all together. All other eyewitness accounts either suggest someone else fired from there or that there were two men working together. Several witnesses saw two men in the sniper’s nest, one of which was holding a gun. At least two witnesses claimed the man with the gun was heavy set and wore a sports coat. Oswald was anything but heavy set and he was wearing a modest brown shirt. Another witness, Richard Randolph Carr, even said the man with the gun wore glasses. Two other witnesses in the Dal-Tex Building directly across the street saw someone on the sixth floor near the sniper’s nest who had blond hair. Oswald’s hair was dark brown. Fifteen minutes before the assassination, 18-year old Arnold Rowland saw a dark colored individual in the sniper’s nest window and then saw another individual in a window on the complete opposite end of the floor. This man was holding a rifle. Rowland assumed he was working security for the President. Interestingly enough, years later a photograph taken right after the assassination, and shooting right up the side of the Depository, showed the vision of a man’s face as he was crouching by this window that Rowland saw a man with a gun. Therefore, there is credible evidence not only that there were more than one person upstairs, but that there may have been a shooter at another location on the floor. Multiple witnesses at the Dallas County Jail, which stood diagonally from the Book Depository saw two men on the sixth floor with a gun as well. A young man, 15-year old Amos Euins, saw the man aiming the rifle and claimed that the individual he saw had a bald spot. There was even one more witness, Lillian Mooneyham, who claimed to see a man in the sixth floor sniper’s nest some three to five minutes after the assassination. This is highly significant because this means if the Commission is correct about Oswald and he left the sixth floor immediately after the shooting, there is no way to account for this other individual. Furthermore, by this time the police had not yet reached the sixth floor as they examined the building floor by floor (it even took them some fifteen minutes just to seal the building). So who was this individual? An assassin that was not Oswald?

Oswald’s actions before the assassination hardly suggest someone who was preparing to kill the President. The last time he was seen before the assassination was at approximately 12:15 (fifteen minutes before the President’s arrival) in either the lunchroom on the second floor or in a domino room on the first floor. The woman who saw him, Caroline Arnold, claimed she saw him on the second floor, but because she worked on the first floor there is the possibility that she really saw him on the first floor. Either way, the last time Oswald was seen he was sitting quietly eating by himself, and this was only fifteen minutes before the President’s arrival. And as a matter of fact, the President’s approximate scheduled time of arrival in Dealey Plaza where the shooting occurred was around 12:24. So, as far as Oswald knew, the President was less than ten minutes away. Furthermore, another Depository employee, Bonnie Ray Williams, sat at the sniper’s nest area eating his lunch up until around 12:20. When he got up and left he claimed to have seen no one. This means that it would have been 12:21 at the earliest in which Oswald could have arrived on the sixth floor, leaving him practically no preparation time to get set for the shooting. The next time he would be seen with any legitimate certainty was around 12:32 when he had his encounter with Officer Baker on the second floor (which was the last location in which he was claimed to have been seen before the assassination). It is logical to infer that Oswald may have been in the lunchroom the whole time. One may argue that if Oswald stayed in that same place all this time, then why didn’t anyone else see him? Well, with the President driving right past his place of employment and with it being around lunchtime for everyone, practically everyone was outside of the building trying to catch a glimpse of the passing President. 

The idea that he just sat in the lunchroom during the President’s visit is, admittedly, troubling to me, because while I personally do not believe he fired a shot I don’t believe that he didn’t have a connection in some way to those who did fire the shots. Certainly we have Oswald’s background in which he was associated with an interesting mix of characters, particularly in New Orleans during the summer of 1963. He is believed to have connections to the CIA, FBI, the Office of Naval Intelligence, and of course he left America to live in the Soviet Union for an extended period of time (and was then allowed to easily return to America even though he had expressed the desire to defect from America and divulge to them anything he knows or learned while he served in the military). He certainly was not this wandering nobody that the Warren Commission tried to claim that he was in order to suggest that he was a pitiful loser who sought out attention by carrying out an act of assassination. With all of these connection it is rather far-fetched then to suggest he had no connection whatsoever to the assassination. What are the odds that the assassination would just happen to take place right next to the place where he worked? And most significantly, if Oswald had no real connection to the killing then why would he have been selected as the patsy. Because if the official conclusion is wrong, then it has to be argued that Oswald was selected to take the fall. So I believe he was involved at some level. But if such is the case, and Oswald at least had a reason to believe that President Kennedy might be assassinated that day in his city, why would he just be sitting there in the lunchroom? Why wouldn’t he at least poke his head outside. There is a photograph taken right around the time of the first shot shooting towards the main entrance to the Book Depository where there is a man poking his head out of the entrance who looks remarkably like Oswald. However, being from a 60s photograph and with the man being a good distance away, the definition of the man’s face in the picture is very blurred. There are good arguments on both sides for it being Oswald and it not being Oswald. The issue came to the Warren Commission, who argued that it was another Depository employee named Billy Lovelady who was standing in the doorway. If I were to venture to guess, I would say the image looks more like Lovelady than Oswald. At the same time though, Lovelady claimed he was sitting on the steps of the Depository when the President came through and that he was wearing a button up shirt (of which the man in the picture is not wearing). So the debate remains open on that. I am still, to an extent, troubled by the idea that Oswald would just be sitting in the lunchroom when the President came through, at least unless he had been told to be there by a connection of his. Many people have argued that Oswald intentionally went to the Texas Theatre, where he would later be arrested, to meet with a connection that never arrived. So possibly Oswald was acting on the directives of someone else. The fact that he was spotted on his way to the theatre and that one call to the police resulted in some fifteen police cars arriving on the scene suggests premeditation; that Oswald had been set up and led to the theatre to be captured. There were various men all over the Dallas-Fort Worth area who bore a resemblance to the police description of the assassin, but not one single other individual brought in on the case was pursued with the fervency that Oswald was. 

While Oswald was supposedly making the effort to flee from the assassination scene the search began in the Depository of which the six most critical pieces of evidence were recovered. But even the accounts of the recovering of these items is suspect. A witness very critical to the events in Dealey Plaza that day, who remained a critical witness long after the Warren Commission’s report was issued was Roger Craig. Craig was a Dallas officer who provided several accounts that countered what the Warren Commission claimed. He claimed a bullet was recovered from the grass alongside the street where the President was shot. The Commission denied this, but a photograph was taken of an officer picking this bullet up from the grass. Craig also claimed to have seen Oswald flee the scene by hoping into a car with an accomplice. This claim was bolstered by at least six other witnesses who saw a man who looked exactly like Oswald dive into a car that quickly fled the area. The Warren Commission denied this, wanting to avoid the idea that Oswald had any accomplices. They instead claimed that Oswald hopped a bus a few blocks from Dealey Plaza (a bus that was driving back towards the assassination scene), but when the bus got stranded in traffic he hopped off and rode a cab the rest of the way to near his rooming house about four miles from Dealey Plaza. The only credible evidence to suggest that Oswald did this was the testimony of one woman, Mary Bledsoe, and a bus transfer reportedly found on Oswald. Bledsoe had been Oswald’s landlady for a week during October of 1963. However, her description of the Oswald she saw was a man who was edgy and frantic, completely opposite of how Oswald was seen to behave that day, even after he was arrested. Her description of time and events even suggests she was on a completely different bus from the one that Oswald reportedly took. The transfer also reportedly found on Oswald was punched for a time when Oswald wasn’t even on there and was discovered in pristine condition. This is after Oswald had walked a good distance with it in his pocket, then reportedly shot Dallas Officer J.D. Tippit and then got into a scuffle with Dallas Police when they tried to arrest him. Once again, what little credible evidence there is, it has all sorts of problems.

Beyond these observations, Officer Craig was also deeply involved in the search of the sixth floor of the Book Depository. He was one of the officers who found the ejected rifle shells on the floor of the sniper’s nest. While officially the way these shells were spread on the floor was that two were right at the base of the window where Oswald shot from and another one was a short distance to the right of them. Craig said that these three shells were found evenly spaced on the floor right next to each other, almost like they had been set up like that, like a set of three dominoes. Whatever the case, both of these set ups are suspect, as far as the potential that they were planted there to incriminate Oswald. The rifle that was claimed to have been used, an Italian Mannlicher-Carcano, ejects shells very erratically, often throwing them back over the shooters right shoulder where it would bounce loosely to the ground. Yet in both of these cases at least two of the shells sat side-by-side right at where the assassin’s feet would have been. 

The three shells were ultimately tied to having been fired from a Mannlicher-Carcano that was discovered between some book boxes a short distance away on the sixth floor. The Warren Commission had a field day with this, however they ignored many problems with these shells. For instance, more than one of the shells showed markings from the rifle’s magazine - markings such as this only occur with the last round loaded from a rifle clip (and with the rapid fire that occurred when Kennedy was killed, Oswald most definitely would have had to have a clip loaded into the rifle). However, in this case multiple shells showed these markings. Interesting as well is that in early photographs taken of collected evidence by the Dallas Police show only two rifle shells. There are more than one photograph depicting this, which asks how many shells really were found? And if three were found, then why were there only two officially in evidence in the earliest photographs taken of this evidence. 

What is of further interest is that not all of these shells showed markings from the rifle’s firing pen, thus showing that they were never fired from the rifle. What is most paramount in this case is a dent that was found to be in one of the shells. When examined, it was determined by those who looked it over that a dent such as this would not have allowed a rifle round to be loaded inside of it. The fact that the shell was discovered in this condition, there is no way it could have had a round loaded it on the day of the assassination. This calls into question how this shell ended up among the others, a shell that couldn’t have possibly been involved in the shooting. What makes this even more significant is the fact that the Warren Commission had to argue that there were only three bullets fired in the assassination seeing as it was widespread information that only three shells were discovered in the sniper’s nest. It is known that at least two shots hit Kennedy, one through the throat and one in the head. Texas Governor John Connolly was also struck, wounded in seven different places. And finally, at least one shot is known to have missed the vehicle all together, striking bystander James Tague a short distance ahead of the President’s motorcade. Such is what forced them to establish the single bullet theory (better known as the “magic bullet theory”). Many people assume there was a great deal of evidence to back the single bullet theory from the get go, when the reality is that the Commission initially argued that three bullets were fired; two hit Kennedy and one hit Connolly. But with the Tague revelation, they had to argue that two bullets caused all of his and Connolly’s injuries. And since two bullets had to have struck Kennedy, one bullet must have hit both. So no, it is a misnomer that the single bullet theory was credibly established from day one. The reality is the Warren Commission had to create it to prevent considering the possibility of conspiracy by acknowledging that more than three bullets were fired in the assassination. However, now we must acknowledge that only two shots could have been fired from that sniper’s nest, which makes the prospect of a lone assassin an impossibility. This dented shell is one of the obscure but forever changing pieces of evidence in the Kennedy assassination. Now we must consider that weather or not Oswald was an assassin, he definitely was not acting alone. 

However, it is still my argument that Oswald was not involved in the assassination. The story of his rifle only bolsters that argument to me. The rifle found in the Book Depository was an only World War II Italian-made rifle called a Mannlicher-Carcano. The authorities quickly tied the rifle to Oswald when they discovered that the rifle had been ordered from Chicago by an “A. Hidell”. Even after being searched multiple times, it would be a search after Oswald had been in custody for more than two hours when suddenly an identification card with the name “Alek Hidell” was found on him. Oswald provided no explanation for this piece of identification, but the authorities used this as proof that Oswald purchased the rifle and owned it. It’s presence then in the Book Depository proves he shot at the President. However, things are not quite so cut and dry. It was found that in Oswald’s post office application he gave no authorization for any packages that were not sent specifically to him, “Lee Harvey Oswald”, to be placed in his post office box. This is significant because on the purchase slip said for the rifle to be mailed to a post office box. But since it was purchased under a name different from Oswald’s, under postal regulations, the package would not have been placed in Oswald’s box and would, in fact, have been returned to sender. No postal employee recalled Oswald coming to them to obtain this package and the rifle was not returned to the sporting goods store in Chicago where it was purchased from. Therefore, had the rifle been mailed to Oswald’s box there is no way he could have obtained it. 

Of further interest, the Commission claimed to have found a copy of the ad for the rifle that Oswald purchased. The Carcano that was discovered was 40.2 inches long and the advertisement they found was for a 40 inch rifle. They claimed this was a copy of the original, but it was not the original. This is because it was later found that the ad for this 40 inch long rifle was from a different magazine and from a different month than the one Oswald could have purchased the rifle from. The actual ad that Oswald must have purchased a rifle from advertised a 36 inch long rifle. So, once again, there are all sorts of problems with this close knit official story. The only person who acknowledged that Oswald owned a rifle was his wife Marina. This was only after several meetings with the FBI and Secret Service in which she denied repeatedly that her husband owned a rifle. However, when the police arrived at the home where Marina was living with a woman named Ruth Paine, they asked her if Oswald had owned a gun. She reportedly confirmed that he did and led them out to the garage, directing them to a rolled up blanket where he kept it. The officers picked up the blanket and it fell limp, showing there was no rifle in it. Simply put, Oswald must have taken it with him to work where it was later found. 

But once again, everything is not quite so simple. It is remarkable to me that Oswald simply left this rifle in the Paine garage for a prolonged period of time and yet no one stumbled upon it. Paine’s husband, Michael, who had served in Korea and was somewhat of a gun expert had picked up that blanket and moved it. When asked about it he claimed that he thought there were poles for setting up a tent wrapped in it. So this man, who was experienced with guns, confused a rifle for camping poles? It’s an absurd prospect. This blanket was also a flannel-type blanket with lots of lose fibers all over it. When the rifle was found and examined there was not a single fiber or mark from this blanket on it, even though it was supposedly wrapped and moved at least once within it. This is absurd to believe that not one fiber would be found on the gun. Furthermore, conversely, not a single marking of any kind from the rifle was found on the blanket (even though the rifle was well oiled when it was discovered; but not a drop of oil was found on the blanket). Other than Marina’s shaky claim that her husband kept a gun wrapped in a blanket, there is no evidence that most certainly would have been there to corroborate her story. 

It is remarkable that Oswald would have purchased this gun to use as any sort of weapon whether he was planning on using it to kill the President or to just simply use it for target practice. Mannlicher-Carcano’s were cheaply made in bulk in Italy during World War II to help in the war effort. They were made to only be used for short term. They were mediocre weapons even in their best condition. It was actually dubbed as a “humanitarian weapon” because it was such a pathetic weapon that often misfired and was not a particularly lethal weapon by comparison to other types of rifles. It wasn’t even a high velocity weapon, but rather a medium velocity weapon. This is significant when we consider the brutal and explosive way in which the President was shot. The final headshot practically blew the right side of his head off, spraying blood and brain matter several feet above the car and splattering those who rode directly behind his vehicle. Practically everyone involved in the case with a strong knowledge of guns have argued that there is no way a weapon like a Mannlicher-Carcano could have caused the violent damage that both Kennedy and Connally received. 

Oswald’s Carcano was in particularly bad shape as well. When it was recovered and later used for practice shots the firing pin had to be reinforced because it was rusted to the point of almost falling off. Many who handled the gun right after its recovered doubted the firing pin would have lasted long enough for Oswald to even fire those three shots. Various other parts of the gun were worn down as well and the scope to the rifle was not only misaligned but also loaded for a left-handed shooter. Oswald was right-handed. With all of these absurd issues and complications it is remarkable that anyone thinks someone as intelligent as Lee Harvey Oswald would have used such a battered and worn down weapon. In his book on the assassination. Gerald Posner posed a strong number of unfounded stories about why the rifle was in such bizarre condition. He even claimed that Marine had witnessed Oswald sitting on their porch practicing repeatedly with the weapon. He even claimed that Oswald intentionally had a misaligned scope and that he had lots of practice in working with the rifle in that condition. The key question then is “Why?” Why in God’s name would he practice with a rifle with a misaligned scope. Why would he adjust any past experience he had working with guns to adapt to this scope instead of having it adjusted into proper position? The condition of the gun suggests it had a history of harsh usage and treatment, but little suggests the weapon had been taken care of at any time. Many investigators have wondered, if the rifle was purchased from a sporting goods store, which much have put it into fairly decent working condition before trying to sell it, and then it was, for the most part, just left in a blanket leading up to the assassination, they why was it so battered and worn out when it was found by Dallas Police. And in searches of the Paine home and Oswald’s rooming house there were no gun-related items found. No ammunition, no extra parts, no cleaning supplies... nothing. Yeah, quite the practiced rifleman. 

There is practically no evidence that Oswald used a rifle at all from the time he left the military in 1959 up until the day of the assassination in November, 1963. There were a few encounters people had with a man calling himself Oswald firing at various rifle ranges. However, the real Oswald was known to have been working during these encounters. Finally there is the statements of Officers Roger Craig and Seymour Weitzman, who found and examined the rifle. Weitzman was an expert rifleman and when he examined the rifle that was covered he said it was a German Mauser rifle. He later wrote this in his affidavit of the events that day. Officer Craig was there when he made this identification and he himself looked the weapon over and saw the word “Mauser” stamped on the rifle. While these identifications and Weitzman’s affidavit exist, there is no photograph on the sixth floor that showed the discovered weapon as being other than a Mannlicher-Carcano. It has been claimed however that the discovery of the rifle was recreated for film cameras. It is possible that the Mauser was switched out in place of a weapon that could better be tied to Oswald, but it’s hard to say since there is no solid evidence that this occurred. But the story that a Mauser rifle was recovered was spread enough that many initial news reports on the progress of the police search stated the weapon found was a German-made Mauser. Overall, no matter what model of rifle was found, there is nothing to suggest that he put this rifle through great use, had he owned it at all. When all is said and done, the only solid evidence that tied the Mannlicher-Carcano, or any rifle at all, to Oswald is that statements of his wife Marina, who changed what she said on this matter numerous times under pressure from various elements of our government institutions. And to this day she has taken back everything she said against her husband back when the Warren Commission was grilling her, and she has gone to great lengths to clear Oswald’s name. 

Another suspect piece of evidence, that is seldom given the attention it deserves, is the clip from Oswald’s rifle. Remember, due to the rapid fire that occurred when President Kennedy was shot, if Oswald was firing he had to be using a rifle with a clip in it. When the gun was found, another observation that Officer Craig had was that there was no clip on the rifle. When it was checked there was one round loaded into the chamber, thus suggesting it must have been the last round loaded from a clip. Now, in the structure of Mannlicher-Carcano rifles, one of their characteristics is that when the last round is loaded from a clip the clip falls off. This is very interesting because there are a mix of stories between officers that were on the scene as to whether or not a clip was found. It was Craig’s argument that no clip was found. What makes things even more interesting is that of all the film and photographs taken of the rifle in the moments surrounding its discovery and removal from the Book Depository there is only one picture that shows a clip with the rifle, but it’s still loaded in the rifle, suggesting there was more than one round left. But there is no doubt that when the Carcano rifle connected to Oswald was found there was only one round left, and thus a clip on that rifle should have fallen off. This begs all sorts of questions. Why would the clip still be loaded in the rifle after its discovery? Why, in all other film and photographs, did the Carcano not have a clip loaded in it? Other than this one picture of an officer holding the rifle with a clip in it there is no evidence of this clip. And since the photograph is of an officer holding the rifle outside of the Depository, it’s not too much of a stretch that this was a different weapon, especially if one prescribes to the notion of a conspiracy, in which things would have been set up and preprepared. It would make sense if this was a different gun. It would make sense why the clip didn’t fall out (presuming this gun had more than one round left). It would explain why all other photographs show the gun without a clip in it. When asked why the clip would still be in the rifle it the last round was loaded, witnesses before the Warren Commission argued that the walls in the rifle that hold the clip in place got bent or damaged and thus the clip got stuck on the rifle. Others have dismissed this however, arguing that had the clip become jammed in such a way it would have been unlikely that it would have fired a single round without the gun getting jammed. All in all, there is an “official” rifle clip in the national archives, but once again there are so many problems with the official story. 

And finally there is one more key issue to address. How did the rifle make its way from a blanket in the Paine garage to the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository? There is a simple solution: Well... Oswald took it from that home to work with him. Once again... not so clean cut. As the official story goes, Oswald wrapped the rifle up in a brown paper package, claiming that he had placed curtain rods inside it to put up curtains at his place. It is interesting that there have been ongoing arguments about the validity of this story, even though Oswald himself denied it. A photograph taken at his rooming house shortly after the assassination showed that he did not have curtains in his room. A friend and work colleague, Buell Wesley Frazier, gave Oswald a ride home to the Paine home and on the following day he hitched a ride back to work with Frazier. According to Frazier and his sister, Oswald approached their home with a brown paper package in his possession. According to Frazier the package was approximately two feet long (or 24 inches). When speaking before the Warren Commission he made the concession that the package may have been as long as 27 or 28 inches, but not an inch longer. This provided a problem for the Commission because, even when broken down, a Mannlicher-Carcano is 35 inches long. Therefore, there is no way Oswald could have fit this style of weapon into a package only two or so feet long. Frazier’s contention is bolstered by his description of what Oswald did after they arrived at work. After stepping from the car, Oswald tucked the package under his armpit, holding the other end up against his side with his hand. Now Oswald was approximately 5’9 to 5’10” tall. I’m 5’9 3/4” and thus more or less the same height and dimensions as Oswald. To test this, I took a yardstick and placed it up against my armpit, measuring down 35 inches to see how far down a package that long would have been. Interestingly enough, in measuring the distance from my armpit to the middle of my palm I measured in at 25 inches; almost the exact length Frazier claimed Oswald’s package was. In measure 35 inches down I found that a package that long would have stretched all the way down to the base of my knees.

This would have been a long, bulky package, and impossible for anyone who saw Oswald to miss. And yet not a single Depository besides Frazier saw Oswald with a package of any kind that day other than a small paper bag that contained his lunch. Even Depository employee Jack Daugherty, who saw Oswald when he entered the Depository that day for work, did not see any brown paper package in his possession. So somehow Oswald magically transported a bulky three foot long package around work and up six floors without a single person seeing it. This is absurd, especially since it is known that several employees encountered Oswald in those early morning hours. When all is said and done, the only person in the world who can substantiate the brown paper package story is Frazier and his sister, and both of them claimed the package was much too short to have held the rifle. 

The story behind the discovery of the package is very shaky much like the story of the elusive rifle clip. This is another item that Officer Craig claimed was not there. In fact, not a single officer said initially that this package was there. The only package they found was a small sack with chicken bones inside; the remains of Bonnie Ray Williams’ lunch he had there before leaving the nest at 12:20. And again, this was a bulky three-foot long package. When the search of the sniper’s nest began Dallas Police Captain Will Fritz told the officers involved in the search not to move a thing until they were photographed. And yet Captain Fritz himself was seen picking up one of the shells off the floor before it was photographed. Even with his orders, and the fact that everything found in the Depository there was photographed, there is not a single photograph that included this brown paper package. Officially there it was right there in the sniper’s nest and various photographs were taken of that area, primarily to capture the three shells on the floor. Even in the final report released by the Warren Commission they didn’t include any photographs with the paper package in it, but used a picture that was taken of a recreated sniper’s nest and drew a dotted line around the “location where the package was found”. There is even less credence to this discovery of a bulky paper package than there is for the clip that supposedly got stuck in the rifle. Once again, there is one isolated photograph showing an officer holding what is officially the brown package found. And once again, this is a photograph taken outside of the depository. So somehow this big package was found and once again played a vanishing game as it must have done when it was in Oswald’s possession and made it down from the sixth floor and out of the building without anyone seeing it.

Finally, with regards to this mysterious brown package, as with the blanket, there was no evidence upon examination that the rifle had been inside of it. There was not a single marking or oil stain from the rifle on the package, again, something that would be impossible had this gun been in there. Furthermore, there were no paper fibers found on the rifle. As with the blanket, the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle cannot be tied in anyway, scientifically, to this brown paper package. The question then becomes, if the rifle wasn’t wrapped in this package and it was wrapped in that blanket at the Paine garage, where the heck was it all of that time?

When all is said and done, these few items are the key pieces of evidence against Oswald; the direct artifacts that tie him to that sniper’s nest and tie him in as an assassin. Despite the various likelihood of other shots being fired from other shooters in different locations if one wants to argue the case for Lee Harvey Oswald, one needs not go beyond these few basic pieces of evidence that I feel exonerate him at least as a lone killer or from having even fired a weapon. Not in the case of one piece of evidence, or even in the case of a few pieces of evidence, but in the case of every piece of evidence that puts Lee Harvey Oswald on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository on November 22, 1963 firing all by himself from a shoddy Italian-made rifle and killing the President of the United States, there are holes everywhere, and these are not simple coincidences or merely circumstantial arguments, but they are observations that blow away any credibility to the arguments that have been maintained by the government of this country that President Kennedy was killed by one man. There is proof he could only have fired two shots at best. There is a lack of proof that he had any of the items he supposedly used to kill the President in his possession at any time. So this is my brief rebuttal to those who argue against the idea of a conspiracy merely becomes a lot of the theories are shaky. Once again, how shaky a given theory is irrelevant in the overall discussion of a conspiracy if it can be proven that the official story of what happened is untrue. Just in focusing in on the core pieces of evidence in the case against Oswald I have practically splintered the Warren Commission’s conclusions, and there is so much more to be discussed with regards to Lee Harvey Oswald and other events that happened that day that point to others being involved in the shooting. But I will let things lie for now. Just remember, there is no purpose in arguing for a conspiracy until after you have proven the official story wrong first.