Collection of Assorted Newspaper and Magazine Clippings: Jfk Assassination, Conspiracy Theories, Etc

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

Manufacturer was starting with his secretary on a concrete pedestal immediately adjacent to the grass known on November 22, 1983. A supporter of the President, Japouder Sad brought his Sam movie camera to record the motioncade. What he saw through the viewholder instead was the most horrifying moment in modern American history.

Though a few frames are unacountably missing, and though the film has been spiced twice, the 22-second Zapruder film is startling enough. We see the lead motorcycles turning onto Elm Street, and behind them the President's blue Lincoln. Kennedy is smiling, waving to the crowds. Then, for a few seconds, the car disappears behind a freeway sign. When it emerges, Kennedy has been hit. His hands are clenched, and he is bringing his arms up to his throat. Connally, apparently unhurt, turns back to his right trying to see what has happened. He turns around and is beginning to turn to his left when his cheeks suddenly puff, his hair goes askew, and he is driven downward in the car. In the rear seat Mrs. Kennedy has now begun to lean over her stricken husband, who has begun to fall forward, and to the left. The car continues on, almost coasting down the hill. Seconds pass. One one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand, four one thousand, five one thousand, six . . . And then, for a fraction of an instant, the President's head is thrown forward a few inches, a blur, lost in the sudden violent impact that tears away the right side of his head in a shower of blood and brains and throws him backward in the car at a speed of 104 miles per hour.

Until recently, these pictures have been seen by a comparative handful of people. Life magazine, which bought Zapruder's film for $25,000, suppressed the fatal frames for reasons of "taste." To most researchers who have seen the Zapruder film, the conclusion is obvious: the final shot comes from the right and to the front, and can only have been fired from the grassy knoll, Josiah Thompson, a Haverford College Professor who was hired by Life to work on its investigation of the assassination (and then left when the editors would not accept his evidence of a conspiracy), has studied the Zapruder film more closely and longer than anyone. His conclusion, based on the film, is that there were at least four shots. The first, fired from the School Book Depository, which struck the President in the back. The second, fired from the roof of the nearby County Records Building, which hit Connally. And a final, double impact a third shot, which hits the President in the back of the head, and a fourth,

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The man's claim is based on more than a simple assertion of New York's that law of motion every action has an equal and opposite reaction. When bodies are hit in the rear, they move forward. When hit from the front, they move backward. This is precisely what occurs in the Zaprouz film. The commission ignored it. To accept it would have been to say there had been a conspiracy.

Zapruder himself thought there had been one. He later resisted that he had heard shots whistle past his right ear. His film, according to some investigators, not only records the assassination but one of the killers. The "Figure" is seen in frame 413, toward the end of the film, as the presidential limousine disappears behind some bushes before entering the tunnel. In those bushes is a dark shadow that, to some, appears to be the head and arms of a man, who appears to be pointing a title. There are many doubts, even among conspiracy theorists, over whether

## Taken together, these happenings form a mosaic of a man in, around, aided and abetted by intelligence agencies through the last six years of his life

the shadow is actually a man. Final proof or disproof awaits image enhancement tests, which are currently being conducted at Cornell University.

A clearer image of a man pointing what seems to be a gun, appears in a film taken by Orville Nix, who was standing across Elm Street from Zapreder at the time of the assassination. Extreme blow-ups of the Simm frame, though very hazy, seem to show a man pointing what could be a long-barreled, sighted pistol from behind a cream-colored Rambler station wagon parked behind the grassy knoll. Later, the picture was shown to Lee Rowers, a railroad worker, who witnessed the assassination from a nearby switching tower and told the Warren Commission he had seen unusual "commission" near the stockade fence just as the shots rang out. "That's exactly what I saw," Rowers said of the picture. A few months later,

flowers a is used when his ca stude a bridge ammert. He has been driving in disguise, on a open road and at moderate speed, when his car suddenly swerved off the side of the road. The victim was one of 17 witnesses connected to the incident. Observed or J.D. Hunt murder to the under strange circumstances within three years of the assassination. Five died of what were officially listed as "natural" causes; the other 12 were victims of murder, accidents or suicide. The actuarial odds of such a string of deaths have been reckoned at 100 trillion to 1.1

The Grassy Knoll and Other Curiosities

If the commission was willing to credit Oswald with extraordinary gifts of marksmanship and mobility, it was not quite prepared to admit he had the power of bi-location as well. Thus the possibility of an assassin or assassins firing on the motorcade from the direction of the grassy knoll to the right of Elm Street was ruled out.

To rule it out, the commission had to discount the testimony of more than 50 witnesses, nearly a score more than those who reported shots coming from the School Book Depository. By and large, the grassy knoll witnesses were, like Lee Bowers, quite positive about what they saw or heard. More importantly, many of their stories coincided in crucial details, and the details were quite specific. S. M. Holland, who observed the scene from the overpass, reported seeing a puff of smoke near the stockade fence immediately after the shots; Bowers noted the presence of several strange cars in the parking lot in back of the knoll. In one of the cars, Bowers said, a man seemed to be speaking into something that resembled a microphone.

Films back up some of the stories. The Nix film, for instance, shows people running in the direction of the knoll immediately after the shots, while two people on the knoll itself throw themselves to the ground, to avoid being hit by more shots. The film also shows the two motorcycle officers who had been riding behind the presidential limousine dismounting and one of them running up the knoll, gun drawn.

Another policeman who ran to the knoll was Joe Smith, who had been directing traffic at the corner of Houston and Elm when he was summoned by a woman who cried. "They are shooting the President from the bushes." What Smith discovered on the knoll is the most chilling story of all. As he related his story to the FBI: "I pulled my gun from my holster and I thought, 'This is silly. I don't know who I am looking for,' and I put it back.