Reclaiming History (225 page)

35. Firearms experts determined that the three expended cartridge shells found on the floor beneath the southeasternmost window on the sixth floor of the Book Depository Building were fired in and ejected from Oswald’s Mannlicher-Carcano rifle to the exclusion of all other weapons.
†

So we know, not just beyond a reasonable doubt, but beyond all doubt, that Oswald’s rifle was the murder weapon, the weapon that fired the bullets that struck down the thirty-fifth president of the United States. If there were no other evidence against Oswald, the fact that the murder weapon belonged to him, and that there was no evidence or even likelihood that anyone else had come into possession of the weapon, would be devastating evidence of his guilt.

But likewise, it should be realized that even if, hypothetically, Oswald had succeeded in secreting his weapon and law enforcement never found it, and hence, the murder weapon could never be connected to him, as can be seen from all the preceding pages and those that follow, the evidence against him would still be much more than enough to prove his guilt beyond all doubt. Convictions are secured every day without the prosecution finding the murder weapon.

36. A large brown handmade bag of wrapping paper and tape of the appropriate size to contain Oswald’s disassembled Carcano rifle, undoubtedly the bag Wesley Frazier saw Oswald carry into the Book Depository Building on the morning of the assassination, was found inside the sniper’s nest on the sixth floor close to the three cartridge cases ejected from Oswald’s rifle. Oswald’s left index fingerprint and right palm print were found on the bag.
⁸⁰

37. Oswald’s left palm print and right index fingerprint were found on top of a book carton next to the windowsill of the southeasternmost window on the sixth floor of the Book Depository Building. The carton appeared to have been arranged as a convenient gun rest. Both prints were pointing in a southwesterly direction, the same direction the presidential limousine was proceeding down Elm Street.
⁸¹
A print of his right palm was found on top of the northwest corner of another carton just to the rear of the gunrest carton.
⁸²

38. The revolver in Oswald’s possession at the time of his arrest at the Texas Theater was a Smith & Wesson .38 Special caliber revolver, serial number V510210. Handwriting experts found that the mail-order coupon for the revolver contained the handwriting of Lee Harvey Oswald, and the seller of the revolver sent it to Oswald’s post office box in Dallas.

39. Four bullets were recovered from the body of Officer Tippit. A firearms identification expert for the Warren Commission concluded that one of the four bullets was fired from Oswald’s revolver to the exclusion of all other weapons, and another expert acknowledged that all four bullets “could have been” fired from the revolver, since the bullets recovered from Tippit had the same general characteristic as those test-fired from Oswald’s revolver—five lands and grooves (including the same width of the lands and grooves) with a right twist. (Recall that the bullets were .38 Special bullets, not .38 Smith & Wesson bullets, and the barrel of Oswald’s revolver was slightly oversized for such a bullet. Therefore, during the passage of these slightly smaller bullets through the barrel, the barrel did not clearly imprint its signature striations or markings on the sides of the bullets to enable a positive identification.)

40. Four expended cartridge cases were found near the site of the Tippit killing. Firearms experts from the Warren Commission and the HSCA concluded that all four were fired in and ejected from Oswald’s Smith & Wesson revolver to the exclusion of all other weapons. At the time of his arrest, then, Oswald owned and had in his possession the revolver used to kill Tippit. Also at the time of his arrest, he was carrying in one of his pockets five live .38 Special cartridges.
*

So we know that not only was Oswald the owner and possessor of the rifle that killed Kennedy, but he was also the owner and possessor of the revolver that killed Tippit
. In a city of more than 700,000 people, what is the probability of one of them being the owner and possessor of the weapons that murdered both Kennedy and Tippit, and yet still be innocent of both murders? Aren’t we talking about DNA numbers here, like one out of several billion or trillion? Is there a mathematician in the house?

41. Dallas police performed a paraffin test on Oswald’s hands at the time of his interrogation to determine if he had recently fired a revolver, and the results were positive, indicating the presence of nitrates from gunpowder residue on his hands.
⁸³

42. When Oswald left the Book Depository Building within minutes after the shooting in Dealey Plaza, he left his blue jacket behind, the jacket being found on December 6, 1963, in a depressed area beneath the windowsill in the domino room on the first floor.
⁸⁴
Marina Oswald identified the jacket as one of two he owned, the other being a light-colored gray jacket.
⁸⁵
Several brown head hairs found inside the blue jacket had the same microscopic characteristics as a sample of hair taken from Oswald.
⁸⁶
Leaving one’s jacket behind, particularly where Oswald did, can only go in the direction—though certainly not conclusively—of a consciousness of guilt, not innocence.

43. When Oswald left his rooming house around 1:00 p.m. on the day of the assassination, the housekeeper noticed that he was zipping up his jacket, which he had not been wearing a few minutes earlier when he arrived at the rooming house. When he was arrested around forty-five minutes later, he did not have a jacket. Shortly after Tippit’s murder and after Oswald was seen running toward the rear of a Texaco gas station on Jefferson Boulevard, police found a light-colored jacket with a zipper under one of the cars in the parking lot behind the gas station. The last time anyone saw Oswald before he appeared near the Texas Theater was when Mary Brock, the wife of an employee at the gas station, saw him, wearing a light-colored jacket, walk past her into the parking lot at a fast pace.
⁸⁷
Marina Oswald later identified the jacket as being the second one her husband owned.
⁸⁸
What is additionally damning to Oswald is that the jacket was found along the path (from Tenth and Patton, south on Patton to Jefferson, then right or west on Jefferson, with a slight detour behind the gas station, then on to the Texas Theater) we know the murderer of Officer Tippit took after the slaying. Finally, dark blue, gray-black, and orange-yellow cotton fibers were found in the inside areas of the sleeves of the jacket, and their microscopic characteristics matched those of the dark blue, gray-black, and orange-yellow cotton fibers composing the brownish shirt that Oswald was wearing at the time of his arrest.
⁸⁹

44. Oswald’s clipboard was found on the sixth floor after the assassination. Three orders for Scott, Foresman & Company books were on the clipboard, all dated November 22, 1963. Oswald had not filled any of the orders.
⁹⁰

Oswald’s Own Words during His Interrogation

I told the jury in London that during his interrogation, “Oswald, from his own lips, told us he was guilty. Almost the same as if he had said, ‘I murdered President Kennedy.’ How did he tell us? Well, the lies he told, one after another, showed an unmistakable consciousness of guilt.”
⁹¹
Oswald tried very hard to lie his way out of the quickly developing evidence against him. Let’s look at some of the more important lies he told, each of which, alone and by itself, is evidence of his guilt because if he were innocent, he wouldn’t have had any reason to tell even one of the lies. More often than not in a criminal case, the means a criminal employs to conceal his guilt (here, Oswald’s words) are the precise means that reveal his culpability.

45. Oswald lied when he denied purchasing the Carcano rifle from Klein’s Sporting Goods Company in Chicago. He even denied owning any rifle at all.
⁹²
Since Oswald knew he had killed Kennedy with that Carcano rifle, he knew he had no choice but to deny that the rifle was his. (It’s interesting to note that although Oswald himself knew the obvious, that ownership of the murder weapon was tantamount to identifying himself as Kennedy’s killer, his countless defenders in the conspiracy community apparently do not realize this.)

46. When Oswald was shown a backyard photograph of himself holding the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle, he lied and said it was not he holding the rifle, that someone had superimposed his face on someone else’s body.
⁹³

47. He also lied when he said he had never seen the photograph before, even though handwriting experts concluded it was Oswald’s handwriting on the back of a copy of the photograph that was found among the personal effects of a friend of Oswald’s who later died.
⁹⁴

48. Oswald consciously tried to distance himself from the murder weapon so much that he apparently even went to the following extreme: He and Marina and their daughter June lived at the apartment on Elsbeth Street in Dallas for exactly four months (November 3, 1962, to March 3, 1963),
⁹⁵
and then moved to the apartment on Neely Street for close to two months (March 3, 1963, to April 24, 1963).
⁹⁶
However, when he was asked to furnish all of his previous residences since his return from Russia, and the approximate time he lived at each, he gave all of them (including his residences in Fort Worth and New Orleans) with one notable exception. He omitted any reference to the Neely residence, the residence, of course, where he knew his wife had photographed him with the murder weapon in the backyard. He cleverly accounted for the close to two months at Neely by saying he lived
seven
months (not the actual four) at Elsbeth.
⁹⁷
And when Captain Fritz, during his interrogation of Oswald, asked Oswald about the Neely address, Oswald flat-out denied ever living there.
⁹⁸
All of this, of course, shows a consciousness of guilt on Oswald’s part.

49. Oswald denied telling Wesley Frazier that the reason he came to Irving on Thursday night was to get curtain rods for his Dallas apartment.
⁹⁹

50. He also denied putting any kind of long package or bag on the backseat of Frazier’s car on the morning of the assassination, saying he only brought a cheese sandwich and some fruit to work with him. But unfortunately for Oswald, not only did Frazier see him put the long package in the car, but Frazier’s sister, Linnie Mae Randle, also saw him put such a package in the car.
¹⁰⁰
Oswald also denied carrying any long package or bag into the Book Depository Building, which Frazier saw him do.
¹⁰¹
He also denied telling Frazier that curtain rods were inside the large bag.
¹⁰²

Warren Commission critics and defenders of Oswald have always steadfastly maintained that the brown paper bag was too short to contain even a disassembled Carcano. But if the Carcano was not in the bag that Frazier and his sister, Linnie Mae Randle, saw Oswald place in the backseat, and something nonincriminating was, instead of lying and saying he never placed a large bag or any other bag on the backseat, why didn’t Oswald admit placing the bag there and simply tell Captain Fritz what
was
in the bag? To put it succinctly, if Oswald’s rifle wasn’t in that bag, he wouldn’t have had any reason to lie and say that he did not put the bag on the backseat of Frazier’s car and did not carry it into the building that day.

51. Oswald told Fritz that the only thing he brought to work on the morning of the assassination was his lunch, but we know from Frazier that this was the only day he noticed that Oswald did not bring his lunch.
¹⁰³

52. Oswald told Fritz that at the time the president was shot, he was having lunch on the first floor with “Junior” (James Jarman Jr.) and another employee he did not identify, but Jarman testified that he did not have lunch with Oswald, that he ate alone.
¹⁰⁴

53. Oswald told Fritz he had bought his .38 caliber Smith & Wesson revolver in Fort Worth,
¹⁰⁵
when he actually purchased it from a mail-order house in Los Angeles.
¹⁰⁶

N
ot that the case against Oswald, which is already absolutely conclusive, needs any more strengthening, but the fact that Oswald never was able to offer any evidence at all to exonerate himself is itself evidence of his guilt. For instance, if, as the conspiracy theorists allege, Oswald was set up, and he knew he had been, then surely he would have known or at least have had some idea who framed him. Yet as we’ve seen, during his time in custody, instead of trying to clear himself by pointing to the identity of those who allegedly framed him, Oswald dug an even deeper hole for himself by telling one provable lie after another, showing a consciousness of guilt. Is that believable? Obviously, not. Oswald never put the hat on anyone because the hat only fit him. Even if he had no idea at all who framed him (which would be unlikely), if he knew he didn’t kill Kennedy with the Carcano rifle, why didn’t he, in anger, say something like this to the police questioning him: “Yes, the Carcano is my rifle, but someone stole it from where I had it in Ruth Paine’s garage. Find the SOB who stole my rifle and you’ll have the person who shot and killed Kennedy.”

It should also be noted that after more than four decades of searching by the conspiracy theorists, they haven’t been able to come up with one speck of credible evidence that some
other
person killed Kennedy, which is additional circumstantial evidence of Oswald’s guilt. As Warren Commission member Allen Dulles told
Look
magazine in 1966, “If the Commission critics have found another assassin, let them name names and produce their evidence.” Author Jim Moore asks simply, “If Oswald is innocent, who did shoot President Kennedy and officer Tippit?”
¹⁰⁷

If Oswald didn’t kill Kennedy and someone else did, how is it possible that there are, as I’ve set forth,
fifty-three
pieces of evidence pointing toward his guilt, and after close to forty-four years of an enormously massive investigation, not one single piece of evidence pointing toward the guilt of anyone else? Indeed, even though, as we’ve seen, everything Oswald did and said reeked of guilt,
who else in Dallas that day was acting and talking guilty
? No one. No one at all except Lee Harvey Oswald. By the way, knowing the conspiracy theorists as I have come to know them, I can assure you that if any one of the fifty-three pieces of evidence against Oswald presented here existed against some third party, that one piece, all by its lonesome, would be more than enough to convince the conspiracy community that he, not Oswald, was the killer of Kennedy.