Impossible: The Case Against Lee Harvey Oswald (36 page)

So, in that statement, Williams corroborated the report by Brennan. The FBI gave their report of their interview with him, which confirmed the statement (“FBI Gemberling Report of 30 Nov 1963 re: Oswald,” CD 5, p. 330):
15

But, as we will see over and over in this book, early testimony confirming a conspiracy hypothesis is later replaced with testimony that confirms the lone assassin hypothesis, whether it is a back wound that becomes a neck wound, or a shot which lodges in the body that becomes a shot which passes through a body, or a shot at the base of the head which becomes a shot to the top of the head, or a shot from the front which becomes a shot from the back, etc. etc. This is no different: later testimony by Williams provides a shift from two shots to three shots (3 H 179):
16

Readers familiar with the case will notice a problem with the next to the last sentence in that paragraph of testimony, which we will cover after focusing on another paragraph providing more significant details regarding the shots (3 H 175):
17

One detail immediately jumps out. Williams changed his story to say that three shots were fired, but he could only positively state that
two
of them were fired from the Depository — yet to confirm the element of the Warren Commission,
all
three shots had to be fired from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, where Oswald was said to have been located at the time of the shooting. Now, if you read this testimony closely, you can see that the testimony is highly unlikely to support that conclusion! Think about it: he didn’t “pay any attention to” the first shot, but the second and third shots were so loud and so powerful that they “shook the building” to the extent that cement fell on Williams’ head. Could a building-shaking, cement-crumbling, head-dusting shot be something that Williams would not pay “attention to,” as he indicated in his testimony related to the first shot?

If the facts of the preceding do not smell like one or more continuity errors to you, another significant problem with the story should trigger the alarm. The story has to conform with the timing of the shots that the Warren Commission told us had to take place based on test firing with rifle. According to the Commission, 2.3 seconds had to elapse between shots (WR 97):
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If this test data is valid, we would expect the following pattern to be heard by Williams, with a 2.3 second interval designated by the ellipses:

BANG! . . . . . . . BANG! . . . . . . . BANG!

But the Williams testimony (“There was two real quick”) indicates that the shots were more like the following pattern:

bang! . . . . . . . BANG! . BANG!

The timing of the second and third shots is an important issue, and numerous witnesses heard the same pattern by Williams, indicating that the distance in time between shots was extremely brief, certainly much less than 2.3 seconds. So, if Williams actually
did
hear that pattern above his head, the shots in all likelihood
were
not
— and indeed,
could not have been
— fired from the Mannlicher-Carcano said to have been in the possession of Oswald.

Another continuity error? Most definitely!!

This testimony, by both Brennan and Williams, with its several inconsistencies, indicates that witness testimony cannot always be relied on. Luckily, there are other ways to discover the truth, which hopefully will take us out of the world of continuity errors and into the world of the reality we expect to find.

One way, and perhaps the best way, is to follow the receipt trail left by the shells which were discovered on the sixth floor. At every step of the way, for the most part, the passing of the shells was recorded on paper. When we look at that paper trail, we make some interesting discoveries that tell us, ultimately, everything we need to know.

Some foreshadowing of what is to come was indicated by CE 3145, which tells us that after the shells were discovered, Lieutenant J. C. (“Carl”) Day, who had possession of the shells, was driven to City Hall by FBI Special Agent Bardwell Odum,
not
by a member of the Dallas Police Department (26 H 830):
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When Day arrived at City Hall, he completed the earliest known document logging the discovery of this evidence (a Crime Scene Search [CSS] form from the Dallas Identification Bureau written by Lieutenant Day dated November 22, 1963, submitted between 1:30 pm and 2:15 pm CST, within two hours of the assassination). This document, which at first glance appears innocuous enough, turns out to be one of the most critical documents Kennedy assassination research has ever unearthed, a document whose first known appearance (to this author) was in the book
Searching The Shadows
by Steven Airhart, published in 1993 (this document can also be found in the
Dallas Municipal Archives
, Box 9, Folder 4, Item 31).
20
Like many of the documents in the Kennedy case, the primary significance of this document is really best seen in the context of other documents (which we are subsequently to examine), and when we do examine those documents, we find that this CSS form can truly be said to be the Rosetta Stone of the Kennedy assassination: