Impossible: The Case Against Lee Harvey Oswald (47 page)

Lieutenant Day, with his twenty-three years experience (4 H 249), and who supposedly fingerprinted this cartridge at least once, perhaps twice, didn’t remember noticing this? Well, others did: three separate sources identifying a dent clearly present.

Needless to say, this dent is a key identifying detail, one which neither of the other hulls possessed (according to all available evidence), thus enabling discrimination from the other two cartridge cases.

Now, when we put all these three properties together:

1. The marking by Day
   so small/faint/nondescript that it cannot be seen
   without a magnifying glass and a good light, WITH
   
2. The initials “
   GD
   ” scratched on the case, WITH
   
3. The case being
   dented
   on the end,
   

we can see there is
no other
empty cartridge case which has this
unique
combination of properties, and that
only
CE
543
possesses them.

In this manner, and for these combined three reasons, CE 543 is just as different from the other two as a circle is different from a square and a triangle.

Likewise, CE
545
also has a unique property: for all of the differences indicated between the April 22 testimony and the July 23 affidavit, there is area on which those two disparate testimonies agree:
it is the
only
one of the three empty cartridge cases which did
not
have the initials “GD” inscribed
, as we can see when we take a look at our models side-by-side again, focusing on the CE 545 column:

So, CE 545, for a different reason, is likewise unique. Two cartridges, as different as night and day — or as GD and Day. Consequently, we realize that there is no misidentification possible here either.

Now that we know that, let us summarize everything we have learned in a table (even though Day did not say that he confused
544
with 543, I’m including it also in the table so that you can see he did not confuse 543 with 544 either):

As you can see, from an identification perspective, shells
543
and
545
are as different as “YES” is from “NO” . . .

Accordingly, when we re-examine the disastrous (for The Case Against Oswald) April 22 Belin/Day exchanges related to CE
543
, the first describing Properties
1
(
invisible Day
) and
2
(
GD
),

and the second describing Property
3
(
flattened/dented
),

we see that there is
no way
CE
543
could have been, in those exchanges, confused with CE
545
:

CE
543
was the
only
shell with
all
3 properties identified in the testimony above (and therefore the shell identified as CE 543
had
to be CE 543), AND CE
545
did not have “G.D.” inscribed on it (and therefore the shell identified as CE 543
could not
be CD 545)!

Either of those two reasons alone would have sufficed to demonstrate that confusion was impossible, but when seen together, mutually confirm what logic invariably dictates.

So, the desperate attempt to manufacture a new reality was fatally flawed, and now here comes the repercussion:

This attempt not only failed to establish the legitimacy of a shell that desperately needed it, but it had the unintended consequence of utterly destroying the chain of custody said to have tied the bullets supposedly found on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository with the bullets fired from the Mannlicher-Carcano (also said to have been found on the sixth floor, and said to be Oswald’s) — not only for one shell,
but all of them
!

We discover this when we see that the attempted revised model implicit in the June 23 affidavit

is incorrect from the “Sent to Washington” perspective, and actually must be adjusted in relation to the impossibility factor which tells us that the April 22 Day testimony — and not the June 23 Day affidavit — was that which was to be utilized to decide which shell was sent to Fritz, and which shells were sent to Washington.

When we overlay with a gray highlight in the table below the shells which Washington claimed to have received
from
Dallas (24 H 262) comparing to that underneath which was claimed to have been sent
to
Washington by Dallas according to the April 22 testimony (4 H 255), the problem (with the adjustment made) is dramatically apparent:

And now, at long last, we can see the implications inherent in the
only model derivable from all the evidence
. So here they are: