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

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

Just as I did, he [the man at whom Smith had been pointing his weapon] showed me he was a Secret Service agent." There is only one problem. The Secret Service's own records show there were no Secret Service men on the grassy knoll.

Indeed, a lot of people were where they shouldn't have been that day. Winston Lawson, the Secret Service agent responsible for the choice of the Kennedy motorcade route, later reported that motorcycle outriders were posted on "the left and right flanks of the President's car" (a position that would have made a cross-fire more difficult). But, as the films of the motorcade clearly indicate, the motorcycles were posted well to the rear of the President's car and, according to the Dallas police, were positioned there at Lawson's own instructions. After the shooting, when the doors of the School Book Depository were sealed, a man was "trapped inside" who didn't belong there. He was James W. Powell, an Army intelligence agent.

Across the street from the Book Depository is the Dal-Tex Building, and assassination theorists have long speculated that some of the shots on the motorcade could have come from there as well as from the Book Depository. The cops evidently had the same idea, too, because, after the shooting, they picked up a young man who had been in the building "without a good excuse," as the police report puts it. Just who the young man was is impossible to say. While the records show he was taken to the sheriff's of

fice, his name does not appear, nor does any alibi. Evidently, he just disappeared.

The debate over what did or did not go on at both the grassy knoll and the Dal-Tex Building might well be resolved by a thorough examination of the wounds in President Kennedy's brain. Just for this reason, the brain was removed after the autopsy and "set" in Formalin. Eventually, it was transported, along with other medical evidence, to the National Archives. When Dr. Cyril Wecht, the coroner of Allegheny County, Pa., and one of the few independent experts to examine the autopsy photographs and X-rays, sought to locate the brain at the archives, he made a grisly discovery. It, too, had disappeared.

## The Oswald Connection

In fixing blame for the assassination, the commission ignored the testimony of eyewitnesses and settled instead on a 24-year-old former Marine named Lee Harvey Oswald. For a country still shaken by the Cold War, Oswald fit the bill perfectly. He was a self-proclaimed Marquis who had, several years before the assassination, "defected" to the Soviet Union. When he returned, he brought a Russian wife with him. As it happened, her uncle was an official in the Soviet Secret Police. Oswald had been born in New Orleans but had grown up in the Dallas area, and it was to Dallas that he returned. One month before the assassination, he had gone to work as a stockboy in the School Book Depository.

Oswald was arrested 75 minutes after the President's murder, as he was sitting in a movie theater. Eventually, he was charged with the murders of President Kennedy and J.D. Tippit. a Dallas police officer who was shot to death not many blocks from the theater within an hour of the assassination. The evidence that Oswald committed either crime is tenuous at best.

Physical evidence linking Oswald to the assassination was strangely inconclusive. A paraffin test turned up traces of nitrates on his hands but not on his cheek, and was ultimately dismissed by both the FBI and the commission as unreliable. A partial palm print was found on the weapon, but police were unable to prove it was Oswald's. The gun itself had been purchased through the mail by an A. Hidell. Dallas police claimed that they found Oswald carrying phony identification for an A. Hidell, yet the accompanying photograph does not look like Lee Harvey Oswald.

The day of the assassination, while rummaging through a garage where Oswald kept some of his things, the police also uncovered two snapshots of Oswald standing in a back yard, a revolver strapped around his hip. In one hand he holds some socialist propaganda literature. In the other he hefts a long, scope-mounted rifle. The FBI, however, was unable to determine whether the rifle was the Carcano. Other researchers, notably Sylvia Meagher, assert that the gun Oswald holds is 2.4 inches longer than the Carcano.

In any case, there is serious question whether the man holding the rifle is Lee Harvey Oswald at all. Several professional photo analysts have flatly branded the picture as a fake. They point out that the V-shaped shadow under the nose is identical in both photos, even though Oswald's head is tilted in one and erect in another. In the first photo Oswald is standing at an angle so oddly out of kilter that, in trying to duplicate it, one invariably falls over. Other photo analysis techniques, such as the red-blue transparency test, find a disparity in the skin tones of Oswald's head and those of his arm and hands. A comparison of the head in the photograph and Oswald's head in booking photos from the Dallas Police Department reveals that the Oswald arrested in Dallas had a rather narrow, pointed chin. The chin of the man standing in the back yard seems decidedly broad and squarish, leading critics of the Warren Commission to speculate that the back yard photo is of another man, with a cropped head shot of Lee Oswald laid atop it just above the chin. Finally.