Articles-The Second Oswald: the Case for a Conspiracy Theory

Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.

negative ones on his cheek. All of this indicates that Perry Mason, Melvin Belli, or maybe even Mark Lane, could have caused jurors to have reasonable doubts that Oswald did the shooting, or did all of the shooting. But none of this shows absolutely that Oswald could not have done it. He might have had fantastic skill and miraculous luck that day, and might have outdone the experts. He had an amazing talent for getting from place to place unobserved and unaccountably, and it could have been successfully employed at this time. The cut and the Commission tell us a paraffin test is inconclusive (but then why do police forces use it?).

The "hard" data relied on by the Commission are that Kennedy was hit twice and Connally at least once; that Oswald's rifle was found on the sixth floor; that three shells ejected from Oswald's rifle were found by the southeast window of the sixth floor; that Oswald's palm print is on an unexposed portion of the rifle; that his prints are on some of the boxes found near the window; that ballistics experts say that the distorted bullet fragments found in Kennedy's car are from Oswald's rifle; that the almost complete bullet No. 399 found in Parkland Hospital (whose strange history and role will be discussed later) was definitely shot from Oswald's rifle; that Oswald was observed by at least five people in the adding between 12:00 and 12:30, plus r minutes a few minutes—two saw him on the first floor around noon, two rest him on the fifth and sixth floor round this time, and Baker saw him right after the assassination on the second floor; and that Oswald left the building

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and its occupants and wounded a spectator.

Asatent) As Epstein shows, this fact, and the evidence of the Zapruder film, forced the Commission to reconsider the problem. For the film established the time when Kennedy could have been hit, and Connally could have been hit. The speed of Zapruder's camera is 18.3 frames per second and his film shows that Kennedy was hit between frames 208 and 225. (For reasons never explained, the Commission omitted frames 208-211 from its reproduction of the series in the Report.) It is clear from the medical and photographic evidence that Connally was shot between frames 231 and 240. (The shot that struck Kennedy on the side of the head and killed him was at frame 313.) This leaves less than 2.3 seconds between shots one and two; and the Commission found that it is physically impossible to pull the bolt and reload Oswald's rifle faster than once every 2.3 seconds (without aiming). Therefore it was impossible for Oswald

of the President's body revealed that one of the bullets had entered just below his shoulder to the right of the spinal column at an angle of 45 to 60 degrees downward, that there was no point of exit, and that the bullet was not in the body."

If the TBI notes are correct, then Kennedy and Connally were hit by separate bullets and the time interval between these shots is much too short (less than two seconds) for both to have been fired from Oswald's rifle. Hence, either another gun was employed, or two different marksmen were shooting. In either case, the Commission theory is no longer tenable, nor, in view of the time-interval problem, is the theory of the rum that all the shots came from Oswald's rifle.

In response to Epstein's book, Commission staff members have stated that the two 1st reports of December 9th and January 13th are wrong about the wounds, while spokesmen for the 1st

cember 9th but report an accurate account of what the doctors found from their one and only look at the body on November 22? Is the doctor's later report based only on inferences from a wound they never saw? (It is interesting that Knebel indicates the final autopsy may be wrong: "The doctors may well have erred in their autopsy finding." On what? Where the entrance wound was, perhaps?)

This explanation, which the IMT seems willing to underwrite, indicates a high degree of incompetence. The IMT says its first reports "were merely to chart a course and were not designed to be conclusive" (Look). Does that mean they were supposed to be inaccurate? They were prepared at the request of the President to get the basic facts, at a time when the IMT was the only official investigative agency dealing with the case. The reports were considered to be of "principal importance" by the Warren Commission when it started out. And how can the IMT explain that after receiving the autopsy report on December 23 it still issued a supplemental report on January 13, 1964, containing false information on the most substantive question Where did the first bullet hit Kennedy and where did this bullet go?

THE FBI HAS NOT AS YET tried to explain why its report of January 13 contradicts the autopsy report. In the Los Angeles Times of May 30, 1960, Robert Donovan quotes an FBI spokesman as saying only that "the FBI was wrong when it said there was no point of exit."

The ant agents were not doctors, but were merely quoting doctors, the