Lucy's Bones, Sacred Stones, & Einstein's Brain

by Harvey Rachlin

  Shortly after the C2766 rifle was shipped by Klein’s on March 20, 1963, Oswald asked his wife, Marina, a twenty-one-year-old woman from Russia, to take a photograph of him holding a rifle and some other objects. At the time the Oswald family—the couple had a young daughter—was renting a house on Neely Street in Dallas, and Oswald, as Marina later testified, had not owned any other rifle since she immigrated to the United States with him in 1962. Marina took two photographs of him, which since the assassination have been reproduced in a plethora of publications. The pictures show Oswald holding his rifle, as well as two different newspapers (they were radical political newspapers sold by subscription), and having a gun at his right side in a holster. From the dates of the newspapers, mailing intervals, and Marina’s testimony, it was determined that the photos were taken around the end of March 1963. An FBI agent with expertise in photography took pictures of the C2766 rifle duplicating its position and the lighting conditions of the photos taken by Marina Oswald, and concluded that the rifle Oswald held was either the same rifle recovered at the Depository after the assassination or another 6.5-millimeter Mannlicher-Carcano just like it. Comparing a negative of a picture he snapped with a camera that Marina Oswald testified she used to take the two pictures of her husband holding the rifle, and the surviving negative of one of the two Marina Oswald photographs, the agent concluded also that Marina’s photos came from the camera she testified she used and that her two photos were not retouched.

  Other evidence was examined by leading investigators to identify Lee Harvey Oswald as JFK’s assassin. On the day of the assassination Oswald was seen carrying a paper bag (presumably with the disassembled rifle) into the Texas School Book Depository; a paper bag found near the alleged shooting window contained Oswald’s fingerprint and palm print; Oswald’s fingerprints were found on cartons near the same window. For two months prior to the day of the assassination, Oswald kept his rifle wrapped in a blanket in the garage of Ruth Paine, a woman who lived near Dallas with whom Marina had been staying. When police came to the Paine home and looked at the blanket in the garage, the rifle was missing.

  Of course the C2766 was examined for fingerprints. Dallas police found it and dusted it for prints before forwarding the rifle to the FBI. An FBI latent print expert concluded that the fragments of fingerprints he lifted were insufficient for identification purposes, but a palm print had been lifted by a Dallas police lieutenant and it was positively identified as the palm print of Lee Harvey Oswald. (Palm prints, like fingerprints, are unique to individuals and can be used for identification purposes.)

  Additionally, a comparison was made of fibers found on the rifle and on the shirt Lee Harvey Oswald was wearing when he was arrested, and an expert concluded that based on color, fabric, freshness, and other characteristics, they could have come from the same shirt. (A definite match can normally not be made in such circumstances; since more than one shirt of a certain kind is normally manufactured, one cannot say that fibers found as evidence came from a specific item of clothing.)

  Ballistics tests were carried out by firearms experts (mostly from the FBI) to determine if the bullet fragments, cartridge cases, and an almost intact single bullet that were recovered came from the rifle found on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. When a rifle discharges a bullet, it leaves a unique imprint, or signature, on it that may be compared to those of bullets known to have been fired from the same weapon. If the markings on the bullets (or fragment of the bullet in question) match, the bullets can be positively identified as emanating from the same weapon. Cartridge cases may be tested in the same way, for they are also left with distinctive markings on their bases after being fired. Various items were recovered: three spent cartridge shells from the floor around the sixth-floor southeast corner window; bullet fragments from the vehicle the president rode in; a nearly intact bullet that presumably fell out of the stretcher on which Governor Connally was carried into Parkland Memorial Hospital. Ballistics tests revealed that the recovered materials were fired from the Mannlicher-Carcano C2766 rifle found on the sixth floor.

  Using a 16-millimeter motion picture camera mounted on the rifle allegedly used by Lee Harvey Oswald to shoot President Kennedy, Special Agent Lyndal Shaneyfelt photographs the street scene below during a reenactment of the assassination conducted by the FBI on May 24, 1964.

  There were bullet wounds in the back and side of Kennedy’s head and in the back of his neck (the wound at the front of his neck had been obliterated by the tracheotomy performed at Parkland Memorial Hospital). It is important for law enforcement authorities to know which wounds are points where a bullet entered the body and which are points where a bullet exited, because this information can be helpful in revealing the location of the shooter, as well as in disputing locations of shooters alleged by witnesses or others. Experts determined that the rear head and rear neck wounds on President Kennedy were points of entry, and the side head wound was where the bullet that entered his skull exited, leading them to conclude that the president was shot from behind. Based on various series of tests, experts also concluded that John Kennedy’s head wounds were consistent with those produced by 6.5-millimeter bullets, and the alleged assassination weapon, and from the distance of the window from which the shots were allegedly fired.

  Two bullets struck President Kennedy, and one hit Governor Connally, allegedly from the sixth-floor southeast corner window of the Depository. To confirm the trajectory of the bullets and the location of the victims—as supported by medical evidence, eyewitness accounts, and films taken on home movie cameras by some bystanders, the most famous of which is the 8-millimeter film taken by Abraham Zapruder—the assassination scene was re-created. A similar vehicle substituted for the original, stand-ins appeared for President Kennedy in the rear seat and Governor Connally in front of him, and the C2766 rifle with a motion picture camera attached to it was positioned at the sixth-floor southeast corner window of the Texas School Book Depository. Frames of the Zapruder film enabled law enforcement authorities to determine when the victims were struck. With the rifle and camera focused on the wounds of the “victims” (the stand-ins with wounds marked on their bodies in the spots where Kennedy and Connally were hit), the angles were measured and were shown to match the trajectories of the bullets that caused the wounds of the real-life victims.

  As mentioned, an analysis of the Zapruder film showed the approximate frames when President Kennedy was struck by each bullet. It also helped show that the bullet that struck Governor Connally was the same one that pierced the back of the president’s neck. According to firing tests made with the C2766, this bullet exited the front of Kennedy’s neck at a velocity of almost 1,800 feet per second, before striking Connally, who was sitting in the jump seat. These findings were also confirmed by the reenactment.

  The number of shots fired varied according to the eyewitnesses, ranging from two to six. Various acoustical phenomena resulting from the firing of a weapon can account for people perceiving more shots fired than were actually discharged, and tests, film analyses, and other factors led experts to conclude that at least two shots were fired, each hitting President Kennedy (one of which struck Governor Connally), and that probably a third shot was fired, missing all the occupants of the vehicle. The order of the shots—which one missed the occupants, which struck the president in the back of the neck, and which one hit him in the back of the head— could not be determined.

  In contemplating the immensity of the crime allegedly perpetrated by Lee Harvey Oswald, one might consider the unlikelihood of a number of serendipitous events in his favor: the serendipity that led him to the location where he pulled the trigger, the serendipity that the Secret Service did not prevent him from shooting the president, the accurate precision with which he hit his target six stories down on the street below.

  Regarding the firing of deadly shots from the sixth floor, firearms experts testified that that would not be difficult for a sharpshooter, which was what Oswald
had become when in the marines in the 1950s. The distance from the rifle pointed out the sixth-floor southeast corner window to the spot where Kennedy was sitting—determined through eyewitness accounts and an analysis of the frames of the motion pictures taken by bystanders at the time the shots were fired—was calculated to be just over 265 feet. Although his target was moving slowly, Oswald, as a sharpshooter, should have had no difficulty hitting a mark under three hundred feet with the aid of a telescopic sight.

  Law enforcement guidelines are often made after a terrible event, and at the time of the assassination Secret Service agents did not make thorough searches of buildings for potential dangers to the president, nor was it against policy for the president to ride in an open-top limousine. President Kennedy, in fact, had ridden in open-top limousines in motorcades on several previous occasions—both in the United States and in foreign countries—sometimes standing or sitting high out of the rear of the vehicle. Although Kennedy was aware of the potential danger of this routine, he accepted it as a necessary hazard of politicking.

  Among the more remarkable, if not downright bizarre, circumstances of the assassination is the extraordinary coincidence that led Oswald to be working at the Texas School Book Depository at the very time when the motorcade route was being planned. One could conceivably pick any point in a person’s life to begin an examination of the random occurrences that led the person to a certain place at a certain time, but an apt point to focus on for purposes of a cursory examination of Oswald would be October 14, 1963. In a way, this is a pivotal date in the random occurrences that led President Kennedy’s assassin to the post from which he would carry out his execution.

  It was on October 14, 1963, that Ruth Paine of Irving, Texas, informed the unemployed Lee Harvey Oswald that he might be able to find a job at the Texas School Book Depository on Elm Street in Dallas. At the time, Oswald’s wife, Marina, was staying with Paine until he found work. But while Oswald was ostensibly looking for work—the previous April he went to New Orleans and found a menial job—he was also carrying on questionable political activities. In New Orleans he handed out literature supporting Fidel Castro (as a result of this he got into a fight and was arrested, and he even requested an interview with the FBI), and in September he took a bus to Mexico City and visited the Cuban and Soviet embassies there to obtain visas to travel to these two countries.

  Unsuccessful in obtaining the visas, Oswald returned to Dallas, where he continued his job search and rented a room in a boardinghouse, visiting his wife, who would continue to stay at the Paine house until he could find employment. Marina was a Russian whom Oswald had met in the Soviet Union early in 1961 after he was granted permission to stay in the country—he attempted to commit suicide there the previous October after being denied Soviet citizenship—and married a short time later. After the Oswalds resettled in Dallas, where Lee’s mother and brother lived, they met Ruth Paine, who took a liking to Marina and wanted to help her while her husband was unemployed.

  On October 14, after having been told by a friend of a possible job opening, Ruth Paine called the Texas School Book Depository to inquire about it. She told Oswald, who interviewed for the job the next day; two days later, on October 16, he began work there as a shipping clerk.

  When Oswald started working at the Depository he may have already harbored a desire to kill the president. (It would not be his first attempt at murder. On April 10, 1963, Oswald had fired a shot into the ground-floor window of a retired army general and devout anti-Communist, General Edwin A. Walker.) But whether he had the idea or not, at some point between October 16 and November 22, he firmly decided that he wanted to kill John F. Kennedy. Undoubtedly the decision was hastened by the announcement that the president was coming to Dallas, but regardless of when the idea materialized, it was sheer serendipity for Oswald, if you will, that he was only recently hired to work in a building that happened to be along the motorcade route chosen for President Kennedy when he was in town.

  As mentioned earlier, over the years elaborate conspiracy theories for the assassination of President Kennedy have been put forward, advancing the involvement of gangsters, heads of foreign governments, secret police, and high-level U.S. government officials and officeholders. But what if the assassination was all the work of one person? It is disconcerting to think that in modern times such a tremendous crime could be perpetrated by a single determined, if deranged, individual. But while the question of whether others were involved will undoubtedly continue to be debated—the various theories set forth embraced by members of the public—there has been no hardcore, concrete evidence to dispute the findings of the Warren Commission. The evidence as it stands overwhelmingly points to President John Fitzgerald Kennedy being shot from the sixth-floor southeast corner window of the Texas School Book Depository by Lee Harvey Oswald, who took aim through his $7.17 nightscope and fired with his $12.78 Mannlicher-Carcano 6.5-millimeter rifle.

  Today the C2766 rifle, along with the clothes John F. Kennedy wore on November 22, 1963, Abraham Zapruder’s motion picture camera, a piece of the curbstone along Elm Street which is believed to have been struck by a bullet that missed Kennedy, and numerous other remnants of one of the grimmest episodes of American history, lies sequestered in a locked shelving section within a locked room that may only be accessed by certain National Archives staff members. The rifle is stored in a custom-made acid-free box built by National Archives conservators and will not shift around and possibly sustain damage when the box is handled.*

  LOCATION: National Archives, College Park, Maryland.

  Footnotes

  *After a long dispute over who owned the gun used to kill Oswald, a .38-caliber Colt Cobra, a jury in November 1990 awarded the weapon to the Ruby family. The executor of Ruby’s estate, Jules Mayer, claimed the gun belonged to him. In December 1991 Ruby’s gun was sold at an auction in New York City for $220,000 to a private collector.

  *Abraham Zapruder’s 8-millimeter color film of the assassination is maintained in cold storage in a separate vault with limited access at the National Archives.

  VOYAGER 1 AND VOYAGER 2’S GOLD-PLATED PHONOGRAPH RECORD FOR EXTRATERRESTRIALS

  DATE: 1977

  WHAT IT IS: A two-sided metal record containing pictures, music, Earth sounds, and multilingual Earth greetings for any creature or civilization that may find it in outer space and thereby gain an understanding of life on Earth in the twentieth century. All the information is encoded on a single disk playable at 16⅔ revolutions per minute. The same record is aboard the spacecraft Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 and is accompanied on each ship by a stylus and cartridge.

  WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE: The record has a diameter of twelve inches and is made of copper and coated with gold. It is actually two metal discs pressed together to form a single record. An aluminum jacket protects the record, which is mounted to the outside of the spacecraft.

  As time marches on here on Earth, twin spacecraft are speeding through the cosmos bearing not just the normal complement of scientific instruments but also a very special cargo: a quintessential collection of images and sounds of life on Earth. The phonograph record on which these are encoded is intended to serve as an emissary of the human race in the event that the spacecraft are encountered sometime in the future by the intelligent inhabitants of a distant solar system.

  The vehicles bearing this ambassador to the cosmos are two identical robotic spacecraft that were launched in 1977 to survey the solar system’s four large outer planets—Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune—and their moons, rings, and magnetic fields. The mission took advantage of an uncommon alignment of the outer planets at the time, enabling the spacecraft to use a technique called “gravity assist” to go from one planet to the next in a relatively short period. With this technique, a spacecraft’s path is bent as it flies by a planet, and its speed increased to send it to the next heavenly body in its flight path.

  Voyager 2 was launched first, on August 20, followed by Voyager 1 on Septem
ber 5. Voyager 2 encountered Jupiter on July 9, 1979, Saturn on August 25, 1981, Uranus on January 24, 1986, and Neptune on August 25, 1989. Voyager 1 made its closest approach to Jupiter on March 5, 1979, and Saturn on November 12, 1980; then its trajectory caused its path to be bent, and it ejected from the plane in which the planets orbit the sun. The spacecraft performed their missions superbly, sending back to Earth data and pictures of their encounters with the planets and their satellite systems, and gave scientists the opportunity to make some spectacular discoveries.

  Greetings from Earth! As each second passes, the spacecraft carrying this metal record embodying images and sounds of life on the third planet travel deeper into space.

  The Voyagers are the creation of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is managed by the California Institute of Technology. About eight months before the launch of Voyager 2, Dr. Carl Sagan, a distinguished astronomer, author, and professor at Cornell University who was responsible for the interstellar messages put on the plaques placed aboard the Jupiter-probing spacecraft Pioneers 10 and 11 in the early 1970s, was assigned the prodigious task of collecting the images that, in the limited space of a two-hour long-playing phonograph record, would reveal to interested extraterrestrial life-forms the nature and history of humans and the planet we live on.

  Sagan and his team of compilers and consultants enthusiastically embraced the project. They needed all their enthusiasm because the entire collection had to be assembled within such a short time. The challenge was to make a representative selection of the vast visual and audio repertoire of Earth and its inhabitants. Sagan and his collaborators decided to include information in four categories: music, natural Earth sounds, pictures, and greetings.