Reclaiming History (189 page)

A 6.5-millimeter Mannlicher-Carcano rifle found on the sixth floor of the Book Depository Building was ultimately determined by the authorities to have been the weapon that fired the bullets that killed Kennedy. If it belonged to Oswald, that fact alone would almost conclusively make him the assassin, since the alternative inference that some third party had gotten possession of Oswald’s rifle without his knowledge (in his interrogation, Oswald never made any such claim, denying even owning a rifle) and killed Kennedy with it stretches credulity. Thus, the need to examine this issue in depth. The reader will recognize some of the matters being discussed as having been touched on in the “Four Days in November” section of this book.

Approximately a half hour after the shooting in Dealey Plaza, Dallas deputy sheriff Luke Mooney squeezed between stacks of boxes clustered around the southeast corner window of the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository and discovered what looked to him like a sniper’s nest. He saw three expended cartridges on the floor and a stack of boxes at the window, and noticed a “slight crease” on the top of one box that he thought might have been used for a gun rest.
¹
He noted that the crease was “at the same angle that the shots were fired from.” No more than twenty-five minutes later, on the same floor, Dallas deputy sheriff Eugene Boone and deputy constable Seymour Weitzman found a bolt-action rifle with a telescopic sight partly hidden between stacks of boxes in the northwest corner near the stairs. Neither of them touched it. Instead, they called it to the attention of senior officers.
²
Initially thought to be a 7.65-millimeter Mauser, investigators later determined that the rifle stuffed behind the boxes was a 6.5-millimeter Mannlicher-Carcano military carbine, model 91/38, manufactured for the Italian military in 1940 and stamped with serial number C2766.
³
*
FBI expert Robert Frazier told the Commission that the original rifle, designed in 1891 by Ferdinand Ritter von Mannlicher and M. Carcano,
⁴
was a 6.5-millimeter caliber weapon, but a later model 38, designed shortly before the outbreak of World War II, was 7.35 millimeters. Early in the war, the Italian government discovered that it had far more 6.5-millimeter ammunition than rifles, so a number of model 38s, like Oswald’s, were manufactured in the Italian army with the smaller barrel, and were in every respect (other than the barrel) identical to the 7.35-millimeter model 38.
⁵

As previously indicated, it didn’t take long for police to link the rifle to Oswald. At four o’clock in the morning on November 23, less than sixteen hours after the assassination, agents of the FBI discovered that the Mannlicher-Carcano, serial number C2766 (Klein’s control number VC-836, catalog number C20-T750), had been shipped from Klein’s Sporting Goods of Chicago on March 20, 1963, to one “A. Hidell, P.O. Box 2915, Dallas, Texas.”
⁶
Indeed, in a search pursuant to a search warrant by Dallas Police Department detectives of Oswald’s belongings in Ruth Paine’s garage on November 23, 1963, portions of two Klein’s magazine ads for the rifle were found inside a box.
⁷

The rifle, without the scope, cost $12.78.
⁸
With the four-power telescopic sight that Oswald ordered, the cost was $19.95, and shipping charges were $1.50, for a total of $21.45.
⁹
The rifle was designated by the Warren Commission in 1964 as Commission Exhibit No. 139. Expert document examiners from the Treasury Department and the FBI determined that the
hand printing
on the mail-order coupon (“A. Hidell, P.O. Box 2915, Dallas, Texas,” etc.) clipped from a February 1963 advertisement by Klein’s in
American Rifleman
magazine touting the “fast loading and fast firing” weapon, and the
handwriting
on the envelope (name and address of addressee, Klein’s store in Chicago, and name and return address of sender, A. Hidell in Dallas), which was postmarked March 12, 1963, were those of Lee Harvey Oswald.
¹⁰

The rifle and its cheap Japanese telescopic sight had been paid for with a $21.45 postal money order purchased on March 12, 1963. The written words designating the payee as “Klein’s Sporting Goods,” and the purchaser of the money order and his address as “A. Hidell, P.O. Box 2915, Dallas, Texas,” were all determined to be in Oswald’s handwriting.
¹¹
*
Klein’s shipped the rifle by parcel post to A. Hidell’s post office box in Dallas on March 20, 1963. The post office box that the rifle had been sent to was rented by Oswald, who was receiving periodicals through it at the time the rifle was shipped.
¹²
One would think that with this kind of evidence, no reasonable person could ever doubt that Oswald bought the weapon found on the sixth floor of the Book Depository. But then, conspiracy theorists, for the most part, are not reasonable people when it comes to the Kennedy case.

The identification of the rifle as a Mannlicher-Carcano, and not a Mauser, as the earliest news accounts reported, caught the attention of the earliest conspiracy theorists, particularly attorney Mark Lane, who brought up the issue during his testimony before the Warren Commission
¹³
and later devoted an entire chapter of his 1966 book,
Rush to Judgment
, to it. To hear Lane tell it, the police switched the “real” murder weapon (a Mauser) with one traceable to Oswald (the Mannlicher-Carcano). Most of the smoke and mirrors that Lane, and others, have used to sell this story originate with a remark made to the press by one of the men who discovered the rifle.

The rumor that a Mauser was found in the Depository began when Captain John Will Fritz of the Dallas Police Department, while waiting for Lieutenant J. C. Day of the police crime lab to photograph the rifle as it lay on the floor between stacks of boxes, remarked that he thought it looked like a 7.65-millimeter Mauser. Deputies Boone and Weitzman, who were present, agreed and later repeated it.
¹⁴
Neither Weitzman nor Boone ever touched the rifle, and Weitzman said he only had “a glance” at it.
¹⁵
Weitzman, formerly in the sporting goods business,
¹⁶
included the misinformation in an affidavit filed the following day.
¹⁷
Within hours, a Dallas radio station reported the misidentification, attributing the story to “sheriff’s deputies.”
¹⁸
Lieutenant Day recalled in 1987 that as he came out the door of the Depository carrying the rifle, a reporter asked, “Is that a Mauser?” Day didn’t answer, but about thirty minutes later radio and television stations were reporting that a Mauser had been found. The story was picked up by the television networks and quickly spread. Late Friday night, during an impromptu press conference, District Attorney Henry Wade seemed to add weight to the reports when he told a reporter asking about the make of the gun, “It’s a Mauser, I believe.”
¹⁹
What the press couldn’t have known is that Wade, at the time, didn’t have a firm grasp on many of the details about the official investigation and, in fact, didn’t know much more about the investigation than what had been reported by the media—including the “fact” that a Mauser had been found.

The suggestion that the early reports of a German-made Mauser being found is evidence of a “police switch” has not worn well. To begin with, it is easy to confuse the Italian-made Mannlicher-Carcano with the German Mauser
*
as well as with several other European military rifles. Firearms expert Monty C. Lutz prepared an exhibit for the HSCA showing five European-made rifles—the German Mauser among them—of very similar shape and size, all containing the same right-sided bolt handle (common on all bolt-action rifles), an ammunition magazine protruding below the receiver (immediately in front of the trigger guard), and bayonet studs (allowing a bayonet knife to be attached to the barrel of the rifle).
²⁰
Lutz testified that “many of these rifles could very easily have been confused with the [Italian-made] Mannlicher-Carcano to the person who did not make a complete and thorough examination of that particular rifle.”
²¹
Further, Lutz noted that the difference in caliber between the Italian Carcano and the German Mauser, about forty-thousandths of an inch, could hardly be determined by the naked eye.
²²

While Lane argued that a rifle clearly marked “CAL. 6.5” couldn’t possibly be misidentified by seasoned police officers,
²³
there is no evidence to suggest that the officers peering down at the weapon between two stacks of boxes ever read the rifle’s markings. Moreover, the legend “CAL. 6.5” was stamped across the rear iron sight, which was partly obscured by the scope sight mounted above it, and therefore hardly visible to Boone and Weitzman.
²⁴

In a 1967 interview, Weitzman said he had “no doubt” that the rifle identified by the Dallas Police Department as being a 6.5-millimeter Carcano, and as having been found on the sixth floor of the Book Depository Building, is “the rifle we found. It was strictly a mistaken identity which anybody could make. If you know anything about guns, a Mauser is a Mauser. What make it is, what country it was made in, can easily be misidentified because mostly your Mauser mechanism looks very similar.” Weitzman went on to say that the Carcano “was a Mauser-action rifle” and really was “an Italian Mauser.”
²⁵
Although the evidence clearly shows, then, that the early reports of a Mauser being found were mistakes, in the world of conspiracy theorists there are no mistakes, only sinister implications.

I
n addition to the documentary record of his purchase of the Carcano rifle, some of the most damning pieces of evidence against Oswald, demonstrating his actual possession, as opposed to mere ownership, of the weapon used to murder John F. Kennedy, are three photographs, taken well before the assassination, that depict Oswald posing (in two different poses) in his backyard with a rifle, a pistol (believed to be the one he used to murder Officer J. D. Tippit), and two Communist newspapers—the
Militant
and the
Worker.
²⁶
Together, these pictures have become known as the “backyard photographs.”

On November 23, 1963, police discovered at least two prints and one negative (from which one of the prints had been made) during a search of the Oswalds’ possessions in Mrs. Paine’s garage.
²⁷
Taken to police headquarters, one of the pictures was enlarged and shown to Oswald that evening by Captain Fritz. As previously indicated, Oswald declared it a fake, that he had never seen it before, and that someone had superimposed his head on someone else’s body. Fritz then showed him the small, original photograph found in the garage. Oswald claimed it too was a trick photo, adding that he knew a lot about photography and would, in time, prove that they were fakes.
²⁸

Marina Oswald later told the Warren Commission in 1964 that she had taken the photos, at Oswald’s request,
²⁹
with his Imperial Reflex camera
³⁰
while they were living at a small rented house on Neely Street.

One of the backyard photographs, later designated as Commission Exhibit No. 133-A, appeared on the cover of the February 21, 1964, edition of
Life
magazine,
³¹
which had purchased the rights to the photo for $5,000 through Marina Oswald’s business manager at the time. Other copies also appeared in the
New York Times
and several other publications.
³²

In 1964, FBI photography expert Lyndal L. Shaneyfelt testified that he determined, by comparing the negative of one of the other backyard photographs (Commission Exhibit No. 133-B) with test pictures taken with the Imperial Reflex camera, that the negative had been exposed in Oswald’s camera
to the exclusion of all other cameras
.
³³
Although he could not test the other known photograph (Commission Exhibit No. 133-A), since the negative was never recovered,
³⁴
he did note that both pictures were nearly identical, containing similar backgrounds and lighting, and based on the shadows, both had been taken at about the same angle.
³⁵
Consequently, the Warren Commission was reasonably certain that both images had been taken with the same camera and at the same time, as Marina Oswald had testified.
³⁶
Shaneyfelt was also reasonably certain that the photographs were not composites, and that Oswald’s face had not been pasted on someone else’s body, as Oswald had claimed. Shaneyfelt testified that his opinion, based on the expertise and technology available in 1964, contained “very, very minor” reservations, “because I cannot entirely eliminate an extremely expert composite.” He did add, however, that a composite can “nearly always be detected under magnification,” and that in his magnifications he “found no such characteristics in these pictures.”
³⁷

Finally, Shaneyfelt compared the actual rifle with the rifle depicted in backyard photograph 133-A, as well as with five new prints of 133-A that were produced to provide greater detail, and found them to have “the same general configuration. All appearances were the same,” and he found “no differences.” However, he “did not find any really specific peculiarities” (other than “one notch” on the stock “that appears very faintly in the photograph”) from which he could make a “positive identification” that the rifle seen in the backyard photographs was the rifle found on the sixth floor “to the exclusion of all other rifles of the same general configuration.”
³⁸

Despite the Warren Commission’s best efforts to dispel questions about their authenticity, the backyard photographs spawned an entire branch of Kennedy assassinology. As G. Robert Blakey, chief counsel and staff director of the HSCA, pointed out in public hearings in 1978, “If the backyard photographs are valid, they are highly incriminatory of Oswald, and they tend to strongly corroborate the basic story told by Marina Oswald. If they are invalid, how they were produced poses far-reaching questions in the area of conspiracy for they evince a degree of technical sophistication that would almost necessarily raise the possibility that more than private parties conspired not only to kill the president, but to make Oswald a patsy.”
³⁹