JFK: Case Re-Opened

More than forty years after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, a British newspaper reports that new research has given new life to an old idea: Lee Harvey Oswald was not the lone gunman. A new investigation could stir up a can of worms and pose a threat to official orthodoxy.

A complete investigation of the murder of JFK must begin anew, taking into consideration the possiblity that much of the evidence that has managed to survive has most probably been tampered with. That would include still photographs taken by amateurs in Dealy Plaza as well as the famous Zapruder film, in which the President's head is clearly seen to lurch backward upon a bullet's impact.

Doubt Cast On JFK ‘Lone Assassin’ Theory

From The Independent UK
By Andrew Buncombe

More than 40 years after he was fatally shot in Dallas, researchers have added fresh fuel to the speculation over who was involved in the assassination of President John F Kennedy by claiming the original bullet analysis was flawed and cannot rule out that a second gunman was involved.

Using new scientific techniques not available to previous researchers and analysing bullets from the same batch purportedly used by Lee Harvey Oswald, the team has argued that it cannot be assumed that Oswald was the only assassin involved. While they do not claim evidence to prove a second gunman participated, they say the original fragments of the bullets recovered from the scene of the shooting should be re-examined.

“Given the significance and impact of the JFK assassination, it is scientifically desirable for fragments to be re-analysed,” the researchers write in the journal Annals of Applied Statistics.

Kennedy, the 35th US president, was fatally shot as his motorcade passed through Dealey Plaza in Dallas on 22 November 1963. The official Warren commission that investigated the killing concluded the following year that the president had been killed by two of three shots fired by Oswald - his first shot having missed - from the 6th floor of the Texas School Book Depository.

-- Read More Doubt   

I would hope that a new investigation of the assassination of JFK will begin with a clean slate. The first piece of hard evidence to be considered is the film shot by Abraham Zapruder using an 8mm Bell and Howell Camera from a vantage point on the north side of Elm Street. Long before we saw the film, Dallas viewers saw the interview.

EDDIE BARKER: At the time of the assassination, I was the news director for KRLD radio and KRLD television, the CBS affiliates in Dallas...

Zapruder was in a position to film the approaching motocade, following it with his camera as a fatal bullet was seen blasting away portions of the President's skull.

You may not have noticed, near the beginning of the film, a little girl running along the south side of Elm Street. Known to history as "the little girl in the red dress", her name, until she married, was Rosemary Willis. Her father, Phillip Willis, was taking 35mm color slides that day. He too can be seen in the film, looking forward at his daughter, perhaps calling to her. She appears to have been following the motorcade and suddenly stops.

Years later, I met and interviewed her. Her story, however fascinating, has been all but ignored by the mainstream media. When we met, she produced several boxes of color slides that had been taken by her father that day in Dealy Plaza. I put them on a light table and examined them with a loupe. I immediately recognized Dealy Plaza, the limoousine, the motorcade, the Texas School Book Depository, the Pergola, the Grassy Knoll, the Triple Underpass, place names now burned into the consciousness of a scarred nation.

One Phillip Willis took a series of 12 photos of Dealey Plaza, where Kennedy was shot, in the minutes before and after the assassination. Mr. Willis' photos and testimony before the Commission appear in the report.

He was not questioned about the eighth photo, a shot of the Book Depository entrance shortly after the shooting. As Willis later pointed out, one of the men in the photo "looks so much like (Jack Ruby), it's pitiful". F.B.I. agents questioning Willis agreed with him that the man bore a powerful resemblance to Ruby. When Willis mentioned this to the Commission, no interest was shown. When the photo was published in the Warren Report, a considerable part of the Ruby lookalike's face had been cropped away. 

        Referred to in the literature of the assassination as the "little girl in the red dress", she can be              seen in the Zapruder film above, running along the south side of Elm Street. She runs and then            stops suddenly just as the Presidential limousine is partially blocked by a sign between the                   mortocade and Abraham Zapruder's camera.

         
        --JFK Conspiracy Theory

At last, Rosemary (if I may be so familiar) pointed out some especially interesting slides. One of them was a shot of the Pergola, above the grassy knoll, taken from her father's position on the south side of Elm Street. Through the columns, all was clear. Then Rosemary produced an old copy of Look Magazine and turned to a double page spread. Reproduced over facing pages was her father's photograph of the limousine with the Pergola behind it.
"Do you notice anything unusual?" she aksed.

Sure enough. In the magazine spread, a train locomotive could plainly be seen between the columns. Indeed, there are railroad tracks in that area to this day as any Google maps search will reveal. Those tracks were there in 1963 as well. It was in that railyard that three "tramps" had been arrested prior to the Kennedy assassination. [See: JFK Conspirator Wanted Every Kennedy Dead ]

But why was a locomotive in the published picture but no locomotive in the "slide"? Rosemary explained that after Look Magazine published her father's pictures, FBI agents took all her father's slides. As I recall, the slides were kept for several years. When they were returned at last, every slide that had depicted the train had been doctored. The train was gone.

Why would the FBI find it necessary to remove a train? What did the FBI find threatening about a train? I've speculated that the train was the egress, the perfect getaway for the assassins who fired the fatal shot from the grassy knoll just as Mark Lane had theorized years ago. That raises the question: why would the FBI protect an assassins get-away? Unless the FBI was a part of the plot, lately called a coup d'etat, it would not.

However speculative my thoughts, it is fair to say that when you have uncovered the FBI's motive for removing the seemingly innocent picture of a train, you will have gone a long way toward explaining why the Warren Commission insisted upon the theory that the fatal shot came from the rear when any examination of the Zapruder film will reveal otherwise. Gerald Posner's absurd theory of "jet effects" nothwithstanding.

It was in 1993 that author Gerald Posner published a book entitled Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK [New York: Random House, 1993. Pp. xvi, 607. ISBN 0-679-41825-3.] in which he posited the now infamous "jet effect".

The fact that Posner finds it necessary to posit a "jet effect", however bogus and elusive the effect has proven to be in experiment, is an admission that JFK's head does, in fact, jerk backward upon being struck by a bullet on frame 313. If the backward motion were not real, why posit a "theory" to explain it. It is also interesting that those who debunk "conspiracy theorists" are themselves the purveyors of the most outrageous and convoluted theories. The "jet effects" is just such a theory, concocted to explain a version of events that has never conformed to observed reality. One of the most brilliant refutations of Posner - specifically the experimental results that demolished the mythical "jet effect" - can be found in Skeptic Magazine, Volume 6, Number 4.

Posner embraced the dubious single, "magic bullet" which he says struck Kennedy in the upper back exited the throat, passed through Governor John Connally only to emerge in near mint condition.

The theory is dubious from the outset because the weight of the evidence indicates that the magic bullet was not the object that injured Connally's thigh. According to the Parkland doctors and the WC, the object that injured Connally's thigh deposited a fragment in the femur bone. But did a bullet strike the thigh? Or was it just a fragment? The initial police report on the thigh wound, citing Parkland doctors, stated that it was caused by a fragment. Connally's own press secretary, Bill Stinson, said the same thing on the afternoon of the assassination. Dr. Malcolm Perry, who assisted with the surgery on the thigh, told Harold Weisberg that the thigh wound was caused by a fragment, not by a whole missile. And Dr. Robert Shaw, Connally's chest surgeon, has likewise said that only a fragment struck the thigh.
- Dr. John Nichols, professor of pathology; note: the bullet is officially labeled as Commission Exhibit (CE) 399.argued that the missile's alleged journey could NOT have produced the amount of flattening that the bullet suffered, even though it appears to be rather slight). [quoted in Hasty Judgement: A Republy to Gerald Posner 'Why the JFK Case is Not Closed!]   

Lately other theorists, perhaps to cover over the difficulties Posner got into by positing in violation of Occam's Razor a "jet effect", have said that JFK's head actually moves forward upon being struck by the fatal bullet. For a start, that is counter-intuitive. Secondly, the film itself disproves it. Examined frame by frame, JFK's indeed moves forward from just before frame 310 until the bullet strikes precisely on frame 313. From frame 313, the head clearly moves backward and quite dramatically. This is obviously the result of having been struck by the fatal shot fired from the front and most certainly the vicinity of the grassy knoll.

It would appear that not only "trains" were removed from still photos, but the famous Zapruder film itself may have been doctored while in the "protective custody" of the government of the United States.

The dissapearing train is one of many unexplained anomolies surrounding the murder of JFK. Another is the apparent dismissal of JFK's Secret Service protection.

The only motivation that I can attribute to whomever wanted to doctor the Willis photos and the Zapruder rilm must be to cover up or obscure the significance of the Grassy Knoll, the Pergola and, of course, the train and tracks behind them.

I am a signal supervisor for the Union Terminal and I was inspecting signal and switches and stopped to watch the parade. I was standing on top of the triple underpass and the President's car was coming down Elm Street and when they got just about to the Arcade I heard what I thought for the moment was a fire cracker and he slumped over and I looked over toward the arcade and trees and saw a puff of smoke come from the trees and I heard three more shots after the first shot but that was the only puff of smoke I saw.
I immediately ran around to where I could see behind the arcade and did not see anyone running from there. But the puff of smoke I saw definitely came fromm behind the arcade through the trees. After the first shot the President slumped over and Mrs. Kennedy jumped up and tried to get over in the back seat to him and then the second shot rang out. After the first shot the secret service man raised up in the seat with a machine gun and then dropped back down in the seat. And they immediately sped off. Everything is spinning in my head and if I remember anything else later I will come back and tell Bill.  

--Statement of S. M. Holland, WCH 19, p. 473, taken 11/22/63

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