Not in Your Lifetime: The Defining Book on the J.F.K. Assassination (9 page)

This could suggest, some believe, that Oswald was now merely masquerading as a Marxist while working to some other secret purpose. In that case, if the pictures were genuine, they may have been a private joke to be shared with some unknown second party.
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Alternatively, the pictures may be evidence of a clumsy operation designed to discredit the vocal left as a whole.

Those possibilities, as the unfolding story will show, lie at the very heart of the assassination mystery. Meanwhile, photographic
specialists disagreed, police inefficiency was apparent, and Marina’s true knowledge of the backyard pictures remained obscure. The controversy over the photographs sputtered on.

Of the material evidence concerning Oswald and the rifle, some points to Oswald having handled the rifle, such as the fibers caught in the rifle butt and the blanket in which the weapon had allegedly been wrapped at the Paine house. These items were circumstantially persuasive, but the FBI did not claim they were forensically conclusive.

There is a point to make about the fibers found on the rifle butt, which the FBI felt “could have come” from the shirt Oswald was wearing when arrested. Oswald himself remarked while in custody, and long before the forensic import of the shirt was known, that he had changed his shirt at his rooming house after the assassination. If that was true, then the fibers tend to link Oswald to the rifle through a shirt he was not wearing at the time of the murder. They may indicate that he had previously handled the rifle, while perhaps making it less probable that he used it in the Book Depository. The same applies to the partial fingerprints and the palm print allegedly found on the gun.

The partial prints found near the trigger-guard of the rifle were too vestigial to be linked firmly to Oswald. It is not true, as was suggested on national television in 1993, that an independent analysis made it “very likely” they were Oswald’s. Experts disagree, again, and we are left with the 1963 verdict of the FBI laboratory, which said the partial prints were useless for identification purposes.

The palm print allegedly found on the underside of the rifle was positively identified as Oswald’s. It could not be detected on the rifle, however, when it reached FBI headquarters. It was produced only days later, by Lieutenant Carl Day, the officer who first
processed the weapon in Dallas, as a “lift” he said he had made on the night of the assassination.
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In terms of evidence, the most significant feature of the palm print is its location. According to Day, it was on the bottom side of the metal barrel—at a place accessible only when the wooden stock was removed. In other words, the print had been impressed on the rifle when the weapon was disassembled. What is more, it was an old print. “I would say,” Day recalled, “that this print had been on the gun several weeks or months.” If the print was authentic, it indicated only that Oswald had handled the rifle at some time. It was not proof that he used it to shoot the President.

What, then, of the allegation that Oswald carried the Mannlicher-Carcano to the Depository on November 22?

The “Curtain Rods” Story

Oswald did admit to having brought a package of some sort to work with him on the morning of the assassination, but strenuously denied it contained a rifle. He claimed it was merely a bag containing his lunch, made up of a cheese sandwich and an apple. When asked the size of the package, Oswald replied, “Oh, I don’t recall. It may have been a small sack or a large sack. You don’t always find one that just fits your sandwiches.” When he gave this evasive answer, the prisoner was well aware the police had already heard the ominous story about curtain rods from Buell Frazier, the workmate who had driven Oswald to his wife’s place the night before the assassination, then back to work the next morning.

The Commission would dismiss the curtain rods factor as a fabrication, quoting Oswald’s landlady as saying his apartment needed neither curtains nor rods and saying that no rods had been found at the Depository. Yet photographs of curtain rods have
turned up in the Dallas police files on the assassination. A press photographer, Gene Daniels of the Black Star agency, moreover, recalled that Oswald’s landlady asked him not to take photos in Oswald’s room until she had “the curtains back up.” In fact, he took pictures as curtain rods were being hammered into position over the uncurtained windows. This was within twenty-four hours of the assassination.

The curtain rods story, then, may not have been a total fiction. In custody, however, Oswald denied having told Frazier he intended fetching rods for his rented room—even insisted that he had not carried a long package, nor placed it on the backseat of Frazier’s car, on the morning of the murder. Both denials are implausible, because there is no reason to doubt the word of either Frazier or that of his sister, who also saw Oswald with the long package. Ironically, it was Frazier and his sister who created a slight doubt that Oswald had, in fact, been carrying the murder weapon rather than his “curtain rods.”

Both insisted Oswald’s parcel had been a good eight inches shorter than the disassembled Mannlicher-Carcano. Frazier demonstrated this by showing that Oswald could not physically have carried a 35-inch rifle tucked into his armpit with the base cupped in his hand, as Frazier remembered. He could have done so only if the package was shorter. Yet the Commission thought Frazier and his sister were mistaken. To bolster the notion that Oswald did carry the rifle to the Depository, they had the 38-inch paper bag that had been found by the window on the sixth floor. The bag was firmly linked to Oswald by a fingerprint and a palm print, although it was free from scratches or oil—odd, as the rifle had been oiled when found.

All the same, the preponderance of the evidence strongly suggests that Oswald owned the Mannlicher-Carcano and did bring it to work on the day of the assassination. But did he, using that rifle, fire three shots at the
President on November 22, 1963?

The Cartridge Cases on the Sixth Floor

Few have disputed the fact that three used cartridge cases were found near the famous sixth-floor window, and one live round in the breech of the rifle. Rarely, however, has anyone raised the troublesome fact that
only
these were found—anywhere. Not a single spare bullet for the Mannlicher-Carcano was found on Oswald’s person, at his rooming house, or among his effects stored at the house where his wife was living. No prints were found on the spent shells nor on the live round remaining in the chamber.

Intensive inquiry traced only two stores in the area where a man could buy ammunition suitable for the rifle.
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One of these was well outside Dallas itself, and both gun shops were sure they had never had Oswald as a customer. In any case, ammunition is normally sold in hundreds or dozens of bullets, not by the handful.

The conventional account of the assassination thus assumes improbably that Oswald had previously exhausted his supply of ammunition—all save the four bullets accounted for at the Book Depository. It suggests, too, that he set off to shoot the President of the United States confident that he would use only those bullets that day. The four lonely exhibits on the sixth floor justify more thought than they have been given. For some, they nourish the suspicion that they were planted to incriminate Oswald.

All the technical evidence shows that the three used cartridge cases had been fired from the Mannlicher-Carcano. It is reasonable to suppose, then, that the rifle on the sixth floor was used to fire two shots at the President. The presence of a third cartridge,
however, does not, necessarily mean that the rifle was used for a third shot at the motorcade.

The reason for doubt was spotted by Assassinations Committee Congressman Christopher Dodd, struggling to interpret the acoustics evidence that seemed to suggest how rapidly the Depository shots had been fired. Dodd realized that there was an apparent contradiction. In his view, the brevity of the pause between the first and second shots meant a likelihood that
two
rifles were at work to the rear of the President that day. Since scientific evidence indicated that the second shot hit both the President and the Governor and was fired from the Mannlicher-Carcano, Dodd reasoned that the first shot must have been fired by his hypothetical second gun. On that basis, Dodd could attribute only two of the recovered cartridge cases to shots fired in the assassination—the one credited with hitting the President and the Governor and the one presumed to have caused the fatal wound to the President’s head.

What, then, to make of the third used cartridge case on the sixth floor? Congressman Dodd noted that the ballistics evidence showed merely that the cartridge cases were fired in the rifle at some point in time. Any or all of them could have been fired at some previous date. In this case, Dodd suggested, the third cartridge case could have been left in the breech after a firing previous to the assassination and ejected on the sixth floor only to make way for the bullets actually used in the murder. It is a tortuous thought, but, as Dodd explained it, logical enough. If his theory is right, the ballistics evidence in the case against Oswald is reduced—but only by one bullet. The fact remains that an apparently damning chain of evidence still appears to link him to the crime.

It is time to recap: The remnants of two bullets came from a rifle ordered in the name of Hidell but in handwriting attributed to
Oswald. Fingerprint evidence showed that Oswald had handled that rifle, at least when disassembled. He brought a package to work on the day of the assassination, and a paper bag bearing his prints was found near the sixth-floor window. It is easy to conclude that it was Oswald—whoever and however many his accomplices—who fired the two shots that killed the President and wounded Governor Connally. Pause, however, once more.

There has been controversy down the years about Oswald’s proficiency as a marksman. The official inquiry noted that Oswald’s Marine Corps shooting record revealed him—at different times—as a “fairly good shot” and a “rather poor shot.” The Warren Report omitted entirely, however, the recollection of Oswald’s marksmanship by one of his former marine comrades that “we were on line together, the same time, not firing at the same position, but at the same time, and I remember seeing his shooting. It was a pretty big joke because he got a lot of ‘Maggie’s drawers’—you know, a lot of misses, but he didn’t give a darn.” There is no evidence that Oswald’s marksmanship improved dramatically between his career in the U.S. Marines and the time of the assassination.

The answer to the question “Could Oswald have done it with the Mannlicher-Carcano?” is short and unsatisfying. It is: “Maybe or maybe not.”

There is a more important question, of great relevance to a judgment about Oswald’s guilt. Was Oswald actually on the sixth floor and in a position to shoot at the President at 12:30 p.m. on November 22? In 1979, new evidence increased the uncertainty.

Oswald—Sniping at the President or Eating His Lunch Downstairs?

Predictably enough, Oswald told his interrogators he was nowhere near the sixth floor when the President was shot. As the head of the
Dallas Police Homicide Bureau reported: “I asked him what part of the building he was in at the time the President was shot, and he said that he was having lunch about that time on the first floor.”
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His snack, said Oswald, also took him to the second-floor lunchroom, but he claimed he had been on the first floor at the moment the President passed by. Unlike some of Oswald’s denials, this cannot be dismissed out of hand.

The official inquiry found it impossible to prove anything about Oswald’s whereabouts at the time of the shooting. Three of Oswald’s prints were found on book cartons found near the suspect window, but that proved nothing. Oswald had legitimately worked on the sixth floor, and his were not the only prints found on the cartons. One identifiable palm print was found, but never linked to any individual. It did not belong to any of the employees known to have worked with the boxes, nor to official investigators who handled them after the assassination.
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It remains possible that the prints belonged to an unknown assassin who did fire from the sixth floor. A chemical test on Oswald’s right cheek, to identify possible deposits resulting from firing a rifle, proved negative.
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In the end, the Warren Report gave weight to a flimsy claim that Oswald was still on the sixth floor at 11:55 a.m., a full thirty-five minutes before the assassination. This assertion was based on the 1964 testimony of Charles Givens, a Depository worker who said he returned from lunch to fetch cigarettes from the sixth floor and saw Oswald then and spoke with him. It has since emerged from Warren Commission documents, however, that
Givens was sought by the police after the assassination because he had a police record—involving narcotics—and was missing from the Depository.

When picked up and questioned, he mentioned nothing about having seen Oswald upstairs after everyone else had left. On the contrary, he said he “observed Lee reading a newspaper in the domino room where the employees eat lunch about 11:50 a.m.” The “domino room” was on the
first
floor of the Depository. Even if what he said later is true—about seeing Oswald just five minutes later on the sixth floor—it would signify little that Oswald was upstairs more than half an hour before the assassination.

Other evidence suggests that Oswald not only declared his intention of going downstairs to lunch, but actually did so. It is evidence which, with disregard for the facts, official inquiries have either probed little or ignored.

When Oswald’s coworkers left the sixth floor for their lunch break around 11:45 a.m., they left behind them an Oswald vocally impatient to come down and join them. Two, Bonnie Ray Williams and Billie Lovelady, remembered Oswald shouting to them as they went down in the elevator, “Guys! How about an elevator?” and adding words to the effect: “Close the gate on the elevator” or “Send one of the elevators back up.” Sometime after this, around noon, Bonnie Ray Williams went back to the sixth floor to eat his own lunch in peace and quiet. Later, his lunch bag, chicken bones, and empty pop bottle were found there to prove it. Williams stayed on the sixth floor until at least 12:15 p.m., perhaps until 12:20. He saw nobody, certainly not Oswald.