Category: John Fitzgerald Kennedy

• Review of James Douglass’s New Book – Pt 2

  James Douglass, the only print journalist at the Jowers/King 1999 conspiracy trial now returns to that subject, plus the radicalization of Martin Luther King by 1968.

  Martyrs to the Unspeakable – Pt. 2

  By James W. Douglass

   

  James Douglass was the only American print journalist in attendance at the entire civil trial in Memphis on the King case in 1999. He was there as a correspondent for Probe Magazine. Court TV was originally going to cover that proceeding, but according to Douglass, they pulled out just a couple of days before. The Memphis Commercial Appeal’s reporter on the King case was not allowed to attend. So he waited each day for Douglass to emerge in order to get the rundown on what happened. The jury in that trial found for the plaintiffs, the King family, against defendant Loyd Jowers. They decided that the King murder was the result of a conspiracy in which local tavern owner Jowers took part. Jim’s report was first published in Probe, and then excerpted in the anthology The Assassinations.

  As with Malcolm X, J. Edgar Hoover was obsessed with the so-called rise of a Black Messiah. Therefore, he did everything he could to discredit King. The first charge was that King was really a secret communist who had infiltrators from Moscow amid his entourage. In fact, Stanley Levison was a private businessman who contributed to the CPUSA but had halted his contributions by late 1956. The FBI knew this, and they also knew that his evolving interest was in the civil rights movement. He was now going to turn his fundraising abilities to that cause. So the FBI tried to get him to return to the party as their informant. He turned them down. (p. 141) So Hoover tried another track: Levison was steering the civil rights movement for Moscow.

  The other target for Hoover was Jack O’Dell. Again, O’Dell was a former member of the CPUSA who went to work for King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Beginning in 1961, he was an associate editor for Freedomways, an African-American political journal. He was a good office organizer for the SCLC, especially out of New York.

  As many commentators–like the late Harris Wofford–have noted, Hoover used these accusations of communist influence to drive a wedge between the Kennedys and King. As Douglass notes, the constant harangue by Hoover to expose King as a pinko with communist influences in his camp was, at least, partly successful. President Kennedy told King that if Hoover could prove he had two communists working for him, “…he won’t hesitate to leak it. He’ll use it to wreck the civil rights bill.” (p. 155). Kennedy had fallen for what was at least partly disinformation on Hoover’s part, and he asked King to jettison both men. The president was very sensitive to what Hoover could do to both himself and King. He said in a private conference, “If they shoot you down, they’ll shoot us down too. So we’re asking you to be careful.” (p. 156) King resisted this request on Levison and left the decision up to him. They decided to keep the relationship on a private basis. In 1963, he asked O’Dell to resign, which he did. But King continued to consult with him occasionally.

  What makes this more interesting is that both men fully understood the pressure being brought to bear on all three men: both Kennedys and King. And they understood that whatever they could do for the SCLC, what the Kennedys could do was more important.

  II

  The problem was that the Kennedys had backed the March on Washington. Which turned out to be a smashing success. (pp. 160-61) This had been preceded by President Kennedy’s June 11, 1963, televised declaration on civil rights, the most powerful statement on the matter by any president since Lincoln. In other words, King’s actions, in tandem with the Kennedys, were becoming very potent on a national level. After a thorough study of the FBI files, writer Kenneth O’Reilly stated that the FBI’s,

  …decision to destroy King was not made until the March on Washington demonstrated that the civil rights movement had finally muscled its way onto the nation’s political agenda. (p. 163)

  Under even further pressure from Hoover, he got Robert Kennedy to approve a wiretap on the SCLC’s and King’s phones out of Atlanta. Why did RFK agree to do this? The deal was for thirty days. So “If the taps proved King innocent of Communist associations, then the FBI would have to leave him and Kennedy both alone.” (p. 164). The problem was, as RFK’s personal liaison with the FBI, Courtney Evans, noted:

  …That the assassination of President Kennedy followed these events reasonably close in point of time, and this disrupted the operation of the Office of the Attorney General. ((p. 165)

  If anything, that was an understatement. What happened after JFK’s murder is that Hoover ripped out Bobby Kennedy’s private line to his office. He knew that RFK would not be around very much longer. The rabid racist also knew that his neighbor, Lyndon Johnson, would now allow him much more freedom in his vendetta against King.

  On December 23, 1963, a nine-hour meeting was held at FBI HQ to plan an intensive campaign against King. The aim was to use any technique in order to discredit the man. This included planting a good-looking female in his office:

  We will at the proper time, when it can be done without embarrassment to the Bureau, expose King as an opportunist who is not a sincere person but is exploiting the racial situation for personal gain…. (p. 165)

  The Church Committee adduced testimony that the aim was plain and simple: character assassination. Quite literally, no holds were barred. It was as if King were a dangerous KGB agent. And because Hoover oversaw the Bureau as a monarch, no one dared raise any questions of legality or ethics. It was all made worse when King was named Time magazine’s Man of the Year at the end of 1963. Now, with no one’s permission, the Bureau began to install hidden microphones in the rooms King would stay at on the road. (p. 168). In the spring of 1964, Hoover also got the influential syndicated writer Joseph Alsop to write a communist smear column against King. This was followed a week later by a similar article in the New York Times. (p. 170)

  As he had been warned by President Kennedy, who was not around anymore, King immediately suspected Hoover was behind both pieces. At an airport press conference in San Francisco, he pretty much threw down the gauntlet:

  It would be encouraging to us if Mr. Hoover and the FBI would be as diligent in apprehending those responsible for bombing churches and killing little children, as they are in seeking out allegedly Communist infiltration in the civil rights movement. (p. 171)

  Hoover responded in kind. The tactic now shifted from the Levison/O’Dell angle—which proved to be pretty much a dry well—to the wiretaps and bugs in the hotels. Hoover began this practice at the Willard Hotel in Washington, DC in January of 1964. This campaign was ratcheted up even further when it was announced that King would be given the Nobel Peace Prize for 1964. In other words, one of the highest international honors was being bestowed on Hoover’s beta noire. Hoover retaliated in public against this by calling King “the most notorious liar in the country.” His assistant urged him to qualify that remark as being “off the record”, but Hoover would not. Hoover then doubled down and said King was “one of the lowest characters in the country” and he was being “controlled” by his communist advisors. (p. 173)

  III

  When King was alerted to this attack, he was on vacation in Bimini, preparing his Nobel Prize address. He replied with:

  I cannot conceive of Mr. Hoover making a statement like this without being under extreme pressure. He has apparently faltered under the awesome burden, complexities and responsibilities of his office. (ibid)

  That reply initiated the infamous blackmail tape and letter sent to the Atlanta SCLC HQ in late November of 1964. The entire letter was not found until 2014 by Yale historian Beverly Gage, and Douglass prints it in his book. (pp. 174-75) It is six paragraphs long. The letter is clearly complementary to the alleged taping. In the 4^th paragraph, it says the following:

  No person can overcome facts, not even a fraud like yourself. Lend your sexually psychotic ear to the enclosure. You will find yourself and in all your dirt, filth, evil and moronic talk exposed on the record for all time. I repeat—no person can argue successfully against facts. You are finished. You will find on the record for all time your filthy, dirty, evil companions, male and females giving expression with you to your hideous abnormalities….It is all there on the record, your sexual orgies…This one is but a tiny sample….King you are done. (pp. 174-75)

  Toward the end, the letter states: “You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal, fraudulent self is bared to the nation.” (p. 175 ) The FBI mailed it from Miami about five days before Thanksgiving of 1964. But the package sat at the Atlanta headquarters for over a month. It was not opened until after King received his Nobel Prize in Oslo. And it was opened by King’s wife Coretta. She notified her husband, and he and his advisors immediately realized it was from the FBI.

  There has been an ongoing debate over two matters in the package. The letter gave King a deadline of 34 days to act. Some believe that, considering when the package was mailed, this would mean Christmas. Others say it was timed for the Nobel Peace Prize honor, which was about two weeks earlier. The second matter was the aim of the package. The SCLC maintained it was for King to take his own life. The FBI, in the person of William Sullivan, who oversaw the composition of the letter, said they wanted King to resign, as they were already grooming his successor, one Samuel Pierce. (p. 169)

  Whatever the timing, whatever the goal, King concluded correctly that the FBI was out to break him. Through their surveillance, the FBI knew he knew and told Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach that “King was emotionally distraught and feared public exposure.” (p. 179)

  King decided to continue in his efforts, knowing that neither of the Kennedys was now in office and Hoover’s venom was virtually unfettered. He must have felt even more forlorn when Malcolm X was killed the next month. As some have noted, Malcolm was killed just two weeks before President Johnson sent the first combat troops to Vietnam.

  IV

  Johnson had escalated the war in Vietnam to heights that President Kennedy would have found appalling. By early 1967 there were nearly 400,000 American combat troops in theater. Johnson had activated the air campaign, Operation Rolling Thunder, to complement the combat troops. There ended up being more bomb tonnage dropped in Indochina than had been disposed of during World War II; by a factor of 3-1, the ratio was not even close. The problem was that the bombing campaign inevitably included civilians, since, unlike Germany, Vietnam did not have a highly concentrated industrial base.

  In January of 1967, King was looking at a Ramparts magazine photo/essay entitled “The Children of Vietnam”. Many of the pictures showed little children in a hideously burned state. The article was by attorney William Pepper. King then met with him, and Pepper showed him more photos. It moved King to now begin a sustained assault on Johnson’s prosecution of the war. His first speech was in Los Angeles on February 27^th, called “The Casualties of the War in Vietnam”. This was followed up by the more famous address at New York’s Riverside Church on April 4, 1967. As Douglass appropriately notes, a year later, King was dead.

  There were those—like Ralph Bunche– who advised against King taking on the war. But King thought it was hypocritical to send African-American troops to fight in Vietnam for rights that some did not have at home; and to kill so many innocent civilians along the way.

  Another aspect that made King determined to speak out on Indochina was that he had done so in 1965, and then backtracked. At that time, he said that Johnson had a serious problem in this regard because “The war in Vietnam is accomplishing nothing.” (p. 351) About a month and a half later, in April of 1965, he told some journalists in Boston that the United States should end the war. On July 2, 1965, in Petersburg, Virginia, King said that the war must be halted and a negotiated settlement should be achieved. (p. 352). But the SCLC board members did not want King to continue in this vein.

  So King instead had a meeting with UN Ambassador Arthur Goldberg in September to voice his concerns and urge Johnson to negotiate a truce. King even suggested that it would be possible to bring the Chinese into the negotiations. Both Goldberg and Senator Thomas Dodd voiced opposition to these types of talks. (pp. 355-57) And Dodd went further by saying King had no knowledge to speak on matters so complex as Indochina, and further, he was undermining Johnson’s foreign policy. King thought Johnson had put Dodd up to this criticism.

  As others, Douglass sees King’s decision to return to the Vietnam issue, coupled with the stirrings of the Poor People’s March, as raising his targeting from character assassination to outright elimination. As per the latter, what King ultimately hoped to gain from the Washington demonstrations was the following:

  1. A full employment program
  2. Guaranteed Annual Income
  3. Funding for 500,000 annual units of low-cost housing (p. 310)

  King wanted to do in Washington what he did in Birmingham. Through peaceful civil disobedience, he would tie up the city and force its leaders to act on his proposals. But King was going to go even further and unite the two goals:

  After we get to DC and stay a few days we’ll call the peace movement in and let them go on the other side of the Potomac and try to close down the Pentagon, if that can he done. (p. 311)

  King was now talking about closing down both Congress and the Pentagon. The reader should recall that this is on FBI tapings. As Bernard LaFayette, a coordinator of the Poor People’s Campaign, later said, “You see, the Poor People’s Campaign was clearly economic rights. Now, it’s not low volume; it’s high volume.” (ibid). Or as Vincent Harding, the man who drafted King’s Riverside speech, later said: King was moving in “some radical directions that few of us had been prepared for.” He clearly suggested that this necessitated his assassination. (p. 314)

  V

  James Earl Ray escaped from prison in late April of 1967. After working as a dishwasher for a couple of months, he stashed enough money to buy an old car and crossed the border to Montreal, Canada. There, at the Neptune Tavern, he met a man he knew simply as Raul. Although Ray had been attacked for creating this character, a witness who testified at the 1999 King trial confirmed it. Seaman Sidney Carthew also met Raul at the same bar. And he saw him with Ray. (pp. 339-40)

  As Douglass describes it, Ray’s partnership with Raul ended up being a minor gun-running and drug-smuggling operation. It went from Canada to the USA, particularly California, and then to Mexico, and back to the southern part of the USA, ending with Ray being asked by Raul to go to Memphis and buy a rifle. But it was the wrong one. So Raul ordered him to go back and buy another one. As attorney Arthur Hanes testified at the King trial, it was that rifle which was dropped at the door of Canipe’s novelty shop a few minutes before the actual assassination. And that would be the weapon Ray was charged with in killing King. (p. 340) Even though that rifle was never calibrated for accuracy.

  Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Ray’s journeys after his escape is his use of multiple identities, i.e., Eric Galt, Ramon George Sneyd, Paul Bridgeman and John Willard. As Philip Melanson originally noted, all four lived in a suburban area of Toronto; and within a five-mile radius of each other. But beyond that, three of the aliases—Galt, Bridgeman, Sneyd—approximated Ray’s general appearance, that is, in height, weight and hair color. Further, there is no evidence that Ray had been to Toronto before the assassination of King.

  What makes this even more startling is that Ray signed the Galt alias with the wrong middle name of ‘Starvo’, which came from a scrawl Eric used for ‘St. V’, which actually stood for St. Vincent. But here is the capper: “When Galt shortened it to the initial ‘S’ Ray… did the same.” (p. 341) As Douglass concludes, only someone with access to Galt’s security file at Union Carbide, where he worked, could have known about these nuances.

  Douglass now moves to the preparations made for the King’s murder. First, King’s normal all-African-American security team was removed the morning of his arrival. The replacement team of caucasian guards was then removed late in the afternoon, about an hour before the shooting. Two black officers from the fire station across the street were reassigned to different stations for that day. The tactical police units around the Lorriane Motel, where King stayed, were moved back earlier on April 4^th. The first three negated any security, and the last made it easier for an escape. (pp. 343-44)

  Was it even more prepared for than that? The reason King returned to Memphis was because, in his first visit there, about a week earlier, there was a raucous disturbance in the demonstration. That disturbance was caused by the Invaders, an African American youth group modeled on the Black Panthers. (p. 448) A prominent member of that group was Marrell McCullough, who was later uncovered as a police informant and then worked a long career as a CIA officer.

  When King decided to return, the FBI then put out a story that on his original visit, he ignored the Lorraine, which was black owned. He had stayed at the Holiday Inn motel, which was white owned. Therefore, King was initially booked into an interior courtyard room at the Lorraine for his return. Someone, no one knows who, had that room switched to a street-level room. It would have been difficult to assassinate King in that first room. The room on the street made it easier. (pp. 448-49)

  On the day of the murder, Raul delivered a rifle to Loyd Jowers’ eatery, Jim’s Grill. The back door opened up to a bush area across from the Lorraine. There is a dispute as to where the shot that killed King originated. At least two credible witnesses say it did not come from the flophouse where Ray was booked at. It came from that bushy area, and Douglass agrees with that. But the point remains, those bushes were inexplicably cut down early the next morning. (p. 455)

  As the reader can see, there is good reason that the MSM did not cover the Jowers/King trial in 1999. Because they suspected that the King family would win out. Which they did. Jim Douglass does a good job presenting that evidence, which helped Bill Pepper win a judgment.

  Next: JFK and RFK are eliminated. Click here to read part 3.

  October 18, 2025

• Review of James Douglass’s New Book – Pt 1

  Jim DiEugenio begins his three-part review of James Douglass’ important new book on all four assassinations of the Sixties, Martyrs to the Unspeakable. A worthy successor to JFK and the Unspeakable.

  Martyrs to the Unspeakable – Pt. 1

  By James W. Douglass

   

  In 2008, James Douglass published JFK and the Unspeakable. That book became, more or less, an instant classic in the field. One reason being that Douglass did something quite unusual. Instead of having Kennedy’s presidency as a backdrop to his assassination, he made his assassination a backdrop to his presidency. But, beyond that, Douglass delved deeper into that presidency than virtually anyone in the field had done. He brought in things that had not been studied before, and he dug further into aspects that had been gone over previously. With those explorations, he made the case as to why President Kennedy was assassinated.

  Douglass appropriately ended his fine book with the fact that both Bobby Kennedy and Jackie Kennedy knew what happened to JFK. And, through envoy William Walton, they communicated to Moscow that the John Kennedy/Nikita Khrushchev attempt at détente would now have to be placed on hold; but Bobby Kennedy would soon resign, run for office, and then run for the presidency. At that time, the quest could be resumed.

  The Douglass book struck a chord with the public. After Oliver Stone endorsed it on television, sales zoomed upwards. It was then picked up by Touchstone, which was a division of Simon and Schuster. In all formats, it has sold well over 100,000 copies. It is the rarest of JFK books in that it was both a critical and commercial success. (Click here for my review https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-reviews/jfk-and-the-unspeakable-by-james-w-douglass)

  At the time of that book’s publication, Douglass was supposed to pen a trilogy about the major assassinations of the sixties. The second book was going to be about the Malcolm X and Martin Luther King assassinations. The third was going to focus on the Robert Kennedy murder. Since the road to completion took 17 years—interrupted by his book on the life and death of Gandhi–the decision was made to collapse them into one volume. So we now have Martyrs to the Unspeakable.

  II

  Douglass begins the book with a pungent quote from Malcolm X:

  It’s a time for martyrs now. And if I’m to be one, it will be in the cause of brotherhood. That’s the only thing that can save this country. I’ve learned it the hard way. But I’ve learned it. And that’s the significant thing. (p. xvii, p. 459)

  This is one of the sub-themes of the book. One lurking not far below the surface and infrequently but explicitly mentioned: Namely, that all four men understood that they were in danger, they were gambling with their lives in advocating the paths they were taking. Malcolm, with his UN resolution condemning America for human rights violations against African-Americans; King, in his organizing of the Poor People’s March on Washington; JFK, in his quest for détente with Cuba and Moscow; and Bobby Kennedy, with his impending victory in the Democratic primary and his pledge to end the Vietnam War. (Douglass points out the little-known fact that the Poor People’s March was Bobby Kennedy’s idea. p. 90)

  Explicitly, Bobby Kennedy told Walter Fauntroy that “…there were guns between me and the White House.” (p. 97). He said about his brother that if the Russians did not meet his attempts at détente halfway, “…his enemies may go to any length, including killing him….” (p. 502)

  JFK said the same thing about himself. He was once asked why he did not move faster for a rapprochement with Moscow. He replied: “You don’t understand this country. If I move too fast on US/Soviet relations, I’ll either be thrown into an insane asylum or be killed.” (p. 503)

  I do not have to tell the reader about King predicting his own death the night before he was assassinated. Why was there this impending doom? Douglass underscores that what these four men were striving for was simply too radical for the national security complex to tolerate. Therefore, they had to be done away with before they could succeed. It is important to note that it was only during John Kennedy’s presidency that all four men were alive and operating at their peaks. As I have noted elsewhere, there was more done on civil rights in those three years than had been achieved in the prior three decades. (Click here and scroll down https://www.kennedysandking.com/reviews/the-kennedys-and-civil-rights-how-the-msm-continues-to-distort-history-part-3) For that reason 1.) There could be no Kennedy dynasty, and 2.) There could be no confederation, which was impending, between Malcolm and King.

  III

  The book is structured into three major headings. Part One is called The Witness. Part Two is called The Way. Part Three is titled The Why.

  In the first part, we see certain policies being advocated by the four major players. For instance, Malcolm going international with a meeting with Achmed Sukarno in 1957 (p. 113); hearing Patrice Lumumba speak at Howard University in July of 1960 (p. 123); his arrangement to have Castro take a room at the Hotel Theresa, and his meeting there with him after midnight on September 19, 1960. (p. 125) This last caused quite an uproar in Harlem since the Cuban leader was going to be charged a $20,000 deposit at the Shelburne Hotel. By the time Malcolm made the arrangements to switch hotels, there were 2,000 people waiting in the rain, fully understanding why the Cuban leader was being forced out of downtown:

  To Harlem’s oppressed ghetto dwellers, Castro was that bearded revolutionary who had thrown the nation’s rascals out and who had told white America to go to hell. (p. 125)

  What these instances did was to broaden both the appeal of Malcolm, and also his intellectual horizons. Malcolm was now not just a regional figure in the USA, but he was seen as associating with figures on the world stage. And these men happened to be striking figures in the rising Third World. But then this was all topped. Because Nikita Khrushchev happened to be in New York, and he decided to join Castro at the Hotel Theresa:

  By going to a Negro hotel, in a Negro district, we would be making a double demonstration: against the discriminatory policies of the United States of America toward Negroes, as well as toward Cuba. (p. 126)

  Malcolm had helped arrange a slap across the face to the Establishment. And make no mistake, they did not like it.

  The Cuban leader’s diplomatic triumph over the US government in Harlem was a dramatic counterpoint to his UN speech. It was facilitated by Malcolm X. When US intelligence agencies focused their attention on Fidel Castro in New York, they discovered Malcolm X standing right beside him, welcoming Fidel and the Cuban revolution to Harlem. By joining forces with Fidel, Malcolm, too, had become a target. (p. 129)

  As Douglass notes, the CIA/Mafia plots to kill Castro began around this time. (p. 128) But as someone close to Malcolm also noted, this meeting with Castro began to divert Malcolm’s thinking away from the narrow restrictions of his loyal service to the Nation of Islam and its leader, Elijah Muhammad, e.g., black power, black nationalism, and racial separation. He began to see that there were other oppressed groups like American Indians, Chicanos and Hispanics, and theirs could be a common struggle. (ibid)

  There were two other elements that began the notorious split between Malcolm and the Nation of Islam (NOI). There was the matter of Malcolm’s inquiries about Elijah Muhammad’s numerous infidelities. (p. 254) Which Malcolm felt were unbecoming for a Holy Man. And there was his Hajj, which ended up lasting much longer than planned, and with Malcolm visiting countries outside the Middle East, including France and Egypt. He then visited Africa again. All told, he went to Africa three times. He became a member of the Organization of African Unity, and adapted it in the USA as the Organization of Afro-American Unity. Which he saw as a Pan African group extending to the USA. (p. 242) Further, he could use their leaders to facilitate his aim at bringing about a UN resolution condemning American treatment of blacks. As he said:

  You must realize that what I am trying to do is very dangerous, because it is a direct threat to the entire international system of racist exploitation. It is a threat to discrimination in all its international forms. (p. 244)

  IV

  One last element that had caused Malcolm’s split from NOI was his suspension after his perceived inappropriate remarks upon the murder of President Kennedy, which he called the chickens coming home to roost. This suspension was originally for 90 days. But it lasted longer, and Malcolm tended to look at it as personal since he was getting more attention as a NOI representative than Elijah was.

  When Malcolm went on his Hajj, he now began to see that there were all kinds of people visiting Mecca, many of them Caucasian with blonde hair and blue eyes. Which also began to make him question the fundamental tenets of NOI and whether it really was Muslim at all. So he decided not just to split from NOI but to convert to Sunni Islam and form the Muslim Mosque. All these elements did not endear him to Elijah or his followers, like Louis Farrakhan.

  In fact, he wrote a letter to a NY Times reporter where he noted that he now regretted the 12 years he had spent in NOI, and called it a “pseudo-religious philosophy”. He then capped that with this:

  I shall never rest until I have undone the harm I did to so many well-meaning, innocent Negroes, who through my own evangelistic zeal, now believe him more fanatically and more blindly than I did. (pp. 245-46)

  It is appropriate to note that years before he became Vice President, Lyndon Johnson had a talk with J Edgar Hoover of the FBI. Hoover said they would not have a problem if they could get these black leaders fighting among themselves to the point they would kill each other off. (p. 241) Although they were likely speaking of King and Malcolm, there is no doubt that Hoover later adapted this divide-and-conquer philosophy to other African American groups, most successfully with the Black Panthers. In fact, there is plentiful evidence that Hoover used this technique in exacerbating and inflaming the split between the NOI and Malcolm. This was done through placing informants in both camps and a clear agent provocateur against Malcolm in the NOI camp. The latter was John Ali. (pp. 249-250)

  Ali began with Malcolm in New York in 1958. The next year, Malcolm recommended him to the NOI headquarters in Chicago. That was a recommendation that he came to strongly regret. When Elijah Muhammad moved to Phoenix for health reasons, Ali essentially took over the Chicago HQ. He even got Malcolm’s brother to read a prepared statement denouncing Malcolm and accusing him of being mentally unbalanced. (p. 272) Elijah essentially called for his elimination with this: “Elijah Muhammad said they had better close his eyes.” In early 1964, the message went out that Malcolm had to be liquidated. (p. 256)

  But this could not have succeeded without help from the CIA, the FBI and the NYPD. The last was through their undercover intelligence group called BOSSI. Douglass does a nice job outlining all of this. There was a previous attempt to murder Malcolm by poison in Cairo. Malcolm was rushed to the hospital and had his stomach pumped. Malcolm had retroactively recognized his waiter, who afterwards had disappeared. Malcolm concluded, “I know that our Muslims don’t have the resources to finance a worldwide spy network.” (p. 427). But further, after an engagement in London on February 9^th, he flew to Paris to make another speech. At Orly Airport, the French police intercepted him and said he was not allowed to enter France. Why? Because French intelligence had been told, “That the CIA planned Malcolm’s murder, and France feared he might be liquidated on its soil”, and they did not want that to occur on their watch. (p. 437)

  On February 14, 1965, Malcolm’s home in Queens, which was in dispute between him and the NOI, was firebombed. A day later, BOSSI undercover agent Gene Roberts witnessed a dress rehearsal for Malcolm’s murder. Roberts then predicted to his superiors that the real assassination would take place the following Sunday. Hoover had Malcolm monitored for the last 17 days of his life and had an agent at BOSSI each and every day during that time. He had to know this. (pp. 440-41, p. 450)

  V

  As Douglass notes, one of the most tragic aspects about the murder of Malcolm is that not only was he breaking from NOI, he was trying to forge a relationship with King. One complaint Malcolm had with Elijah Muhammad was that the Nation of Islam would not do anything in public unless it impacted one of their own. They basically sat out the whole civil rights movement. So once he split with the Nation of Islam, Malcolm journeyed to the epochal Selma demonstration in early February of 1965. The talk that he was coming had barely started when he arrived at a meeting of the SCLC and SNCC workers. Coretta King was in attendance while her husband was in jail. He told her, “I have not come to Selma to cause difficulty for Dr. King. I only want to show support.” (p. 435)

  When Malcolm spoke at the Brown Chapel that afternoon, he leaned over the podium and said to the media in front, “You had better listen to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., or you will have to listen to me. Dr. King wants the same thing I want—Freedom!” (p. 436) Unfortunately, this was not to be. For Malcom would be dead in a little more than two weeks.

  On the morning of February 21^st, Malcolm was on the phone with his sister. He said, “Ask Allah to guide me, because I feel they may have me doomed for this day.” She said, “Not this day.” Malcolm replied, “Yes, this day.” (p. 451) Making this even more prophetic, Malcolm refused to allow his guards to search people coming into his talks. One of his escorts resigned over this policy after telling him he was going to be killed.

  Once the warning came in from Roberts about the dress rehearsal and the day it would occur, the NYPD should have been in the Audubon ballroom and ready to detect and stop the attempt. They were not and did not. They placed their men in rooms away from the ballroom. And they were not allowed to move in that direction unless given radio permission to do so. But when the shots rang out, the walkie-talkies went dead. Therefore, the police ended up entering the scene fifteen minutes after the murder. (pp. 449-450)

  In other words, egged on by the FBI and allowed to proceed by the NYPD, Malcolm was killed by a NOI plan that the authorities specifically knew about in advance. In other words, it was allowed to happen. Douglass has done a fine job on the relatively ignored case of the assassination of Malcolm.

  Next: The Murder of Martin Luther King. Click here to read part 2.

  October 16, 2025

• Letter to Congresswoman Luna Concerning JFK Records Collection Act

  How can the Luna Committee make a lasting impact in fulfilling the great promise of the JFK Records Collection Act and finally attain full disclosure on what happened to President Kennedy? This letter to Congresswoman Luna outlines what she can do in that regard.

  September 29, 2025

  Via Federal Express Overnight Courier & Email

  U.S. House Representative Anna Paulina Luna
  Florida’s Thirteenth Congressional District
  9200 113th St. N., Office Suite 305
  Seminole, Florida 33772

  U.S. House Representative Anna Paulina Luna
  226 Cannon House Office Building
  Washington, D.C. 20515

  Re:   Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets (“Task Force”) – Compliance with JFK Records Act

  Dear Congresswoman Luna,

  We applaud the vital work of your Task Force on the Declassification of Government Secrets, especially the recent release of over 2,500 JFK records. While these are invaluable steps forward, we are writing to address critical issues of non-compliance with the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 (“the JFK Act” or “Act”). The issues discussed herein have festered and grown for almost 27 years due to actions and inactions by the National Archives and Records Administration (“NARA”), the conduct of the Archivist of the United States (“Archivist”), along with a glaring lack of Congressional oversight. We believe it is essential for the final report of the Task Force (“Final Report”) to include recommendations designed in the public’s interest to reinvigorate compliance with the Act, and address requirements of the Act that have clearly been violated.

  The JFK Act was unanimously passed by Congress as a clear mandate from the people to create an “enforceable, independent, and accountable” process for public disclosure. We have prepared the following recap of the Act’s unique powers, followed by our observations and recommendations that we believe will correct almost three decades of improper administration and restore the integrity of the JFK Records Collection (“Collection”).

  I. Critical Elements of the Act That Seemingly Have Been Forgotten

  The JFK Act is a unique and powerful piece of legislation, purpose-built by Congress because traditional processes impinged by unguarded influence from agencies had been deemed by Congress to prevent transparency and the timely disclosure of assassination records. The JFK Act’s exceptional legal framework established a distinct status for this Collection that seems to have been forgotten. Key elements include:

  • A Presumption of Full Disclosure: The Act reversed the standard government posture of secrecy, creating an immediate presumption that every assassination record would be released, except in the rarest of cases.

  • Binding and Enforceable Orders: The Assassination Records Review Board (“ARRB”) was granted unprecedented declassification powers that resulted in the issuance of approximately 27,000 Final Determination Notifications (FDNs), which are final and legally binding and enforceable agency orders, not mere recommendations. FDNs are carefully crafted orders setting forth how each individual record in the Collection was to be released, and when. The ARRB staff, some thirty years ago and in consultation with agencies, crafted final disclosure decisions and disclosure criteria for each individual postponed record. This fact, along with the existence of the FDNs themselves, has seemingly been lost in recent discussions on the status of the Collection, and at a critical point in time. FDNs are assassination records and are thus mandated by the Act to be publicly disclosed in the Collection at NARA. As of today, virtually all of the FDNs are not publicly available, despite multiple FOIA requests. Increasing the concern and urgency is the fact that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals recognized that, without the FDNs, the public has effectively been denied its right to judicial review of actions taken (or required to be taken) under the JFK Act.

  • A Ministerial Duty for the Archivist: The Act stripped the Archivist of any discretionary power, assigning a purely “ministerial and non–discretionary duty” limited to periodically reviewing and releasing records on the dates mandated by the ARRB under the stipulations set forth in the FDNs. This was a very important part of the Act.

  • Supremacy Over Other Laws: The JFK Act was designed to reign supreme over all other statutes, court decisions and executive orders that would otherwise prohibit the transmission or disclosure of assassination records [See §11(a), JFK Act].

  With the above in mind:

  II. Ten Observations About the Current State of the JFK Records Act

  This section summarizes the critical problems preventing the JFK Act from functioning as Congress intended.

  1. The Act’s Core Principles Are Not Being Followed: The Act created a framework for an “enforceable, independent, and accountable” process. The lack of oversight since the ARRB ceased operations in 1998 has undermined these core tenets and led to unauthorized delays and a lack of transparency. Many examples of how these principles have been violated are self-evident, as noted throughout this document.

  2. Binding Legal Orders: Final Determination Notifications (FDNs) Are Critical and Almost Completely Hidden: The ARRB issued approximately 27,000 separate binding orders (FDNs) specifying when postponed records must be released. These FDNs are the legal backbone for enforcing the Act. Remarkably, NARA has made less than 2% of them public, making a full audit of compliance impossible and possibly complicating the identification of missing records.

  3. Congressional Oversight Has Been Absent: The JFK Act explicitly mandates that House and Senate committees have “continuing oversight jurisdiction”. [1] Despite this, in over 30 years, these committees have failed to hold a single hearing on the matter. As a result, failures of the Archivist to perform mandatory ministerial duties required by the Act have gone undetected and unchallenged, resulting in decades of disclosure delays and public mistrust.

  4. Recent Presidential Actions Are Insufficient Without the JFK Act: While President Trump’s Executive Order 14176 (January 23, 2025, the “Executive Order”) resulted in the release of over 2,500 records, it is not a complete solution. The Executive Order lacks the enforceable mechanisms of the JFK Act and cannot ensure full disclosure without a complete audit of the JFK Collection, which begins with locating and disclosing the ARRB’s FDNs and the mandatory creation of a searchable directory and index. Certain audit procedures would be highly beneficial and are further discussed below.

  5. A Complete, Searchable Directory and Index is Urgently Needed: One of the most critical failures to date, is the Archivist’s duty to publish a comprehensive, searchable directory and index of all assassination records ever transmitted to NARA. No such directory or index is known to exist, and if it does, it has not been publicly disclosed. This would reveal what has been released, what is withheld, and what may have been suppressed or buried for whatever reason. An audit should be conducted which reconciles a final comprehensive index of records produced by the ARRB–at the moment the ARRB handed its reviewed collection over to NARA–to a similar index maintained at NARA. This is a critical step in accounting for all known records and how they were handled. It most certainly would reveal records currently missing from the Collection that were present at the sunset of the ARRB, as well as detecting specific records that were withheld from ARRB review.

  6. Thousands of Records Were Never Reviewed by the Independent ARRB: Testimony from former ARRB Chairman Judge John Tunheim on May 20, 2025 reveals that many recently released records were never shown to the ARRB. Agencies appear to have transferred these records to NARA after the ARRB ceased operations in 1998, circumventing the independent review process mandated by Congress. We have identified assassination records with Record Identification Form (RIF) numbers and identification aids that corroborate Judge Tunheim’s important testimony. [2]

  7. Perceived Lack of Clarity on Enforcement of Remaining Withheld Records. Certain records in the Collection were never subject to a review by the ARRB. Many of these records are still being withheld by NARA. President Trump’s Executive Order has now declared that continued withholding of any Assassination Record is not in the public interest, and that full disclosure is long overdue. By virtue of their delivery to NARA, these records are deemed Assassination Records. Therefore, in our opinion, the current enforcement mechanisms of the JFK Act apply.

  8. The Archivist’s Role is Ministerial, Not Discretionary: The JFK Act bestows upon the Archivist a “ministerial and non-discretionary duty” to release records according to the dates and stipulations mandated in the ARRB’s FDNs. NARA’s authority under the JFK Act is limited to periodic review of the ARRB’s final release decisions as certified by President Clinton. NARA’s authority does not include handling postponement requests from agencies or negotiations with agencies regarding postponements.

  9. The JFK Act Reigns Supreme: The Act takes precedence over all other laws, court decisions and executive orders regarding the disclosure of assassination records. Presidential authority to override an ARRB determination expired 30 days after the ARRB issued an FDN, and President Clinton waived this right entirely. Under section 9(d)(1) of the Act, President Clinton was the only President with the time-limited authority to override an ARRB Final Determination and he did not do so.

  10. The Collection Cannot Be Certified as Complete: Until a full directory and index is created and all records are released according to the law, the Archivist of the United States cannot legally certify to the President and Congress under the JFK Act that all assassination records have been made available to the public. The Act must therefore remain in full force and effect. The failure to provide a full and complete directory and index of records makes such a certification legally impossible.

  III. Ten Recommendations for Action

  Based on these observations and findings, we respectfully request that the Final Report of the Task Force include the following recommendations to ensure that NARA achieves full compliance with the JFK Act.

  1. Publish All Final Determination Notifications (FDNs): Require the Archivist to comply with the law and to immediately locate and release digital copies of all FDNs issued by the ARRB (approximately 27,000). This is an essential first step for any audit of compliance.

  2. Create and Publish a Comprehensive, Searchable Directory and Index: Require the Archivist to comply with the law and produce and publish a complete, uniform digital directory and index of each assassination record ever transmitted to NARA. This is a mandatory and non-discretionary duty under the Act.

  3. Ensure the Directory and Index Accounts for All Record Groups: The directory and index must identify records transferred to NARA a) before the Act was passed; b) those reviewed during the ARRB’s operation; and c) those transferred to NARA after the ARRB terminated operations in 1998.

  4. Release a Full Directory and Index of All Identification Aids: Require the Archivist to comply with the law and release a complete digital directory and index of up-to-date Identification Aids for each record, which are face sheets containing important tracking and status elements.

  5. Cease Unauthorized Coordination with Agencies: Reaffirm that NARA’s role is ministerial and that it has no authority to collaborate or negotiate with originating agencies on postponements, a practice that violates the independent framework of the Act.

  6. Identify All Records That Were Never Reviewed by the ARRB: The comprehensive directory and index must clearly identify all records in the JFK Collection that circumvented the ARRB’s independent review.

  7. Establish a Framework for the Enforcement of Remaining Withheld Records: Records that were never seen by the ARRB must be brought under the enforcement mechanisms mandated by the JFK Act. This is one of the most important enforcement matters to be undertaken by the oversight committees and is in the spirit of President Trump’s Executive Order regarding full disclosure. As a reminder, Congress has special jurisdiction over its own records, and oversight committees should call for the immediate release of all congressional records specifically identified in the Act. [3] Going forward, any newly discovered records must be expeditiously transmitted to NARA, included in the Collection, and publicly disclosed as required by section 2(b)(2) of the Act.

  8. Enforce Congressional Oversight: Call on the designated House and Senate committees to finally exercise their “continuing oversight jurisdiction” as mandated in sections 4(e) and 7(l)(1) of the Act.

  9. Hold NARA Accountable: The Task Force should require the Archivist or senior NARA staff to testify and account for a) why the FDNs remain hidden and not fully enforced; and b) what steps are being taken to create the legally required public directory and index. Limited audit procedures should be applied to ensure that every Assassination Record handled by the ARRB is now present in the publicly available Collection housed at NARA.

  10. Withhold Final Certification: The Final Report must state clearly that the Archivist cannot certify the JFK Collection as complete and fully disclosed to the public under section 12(b) of the Act until all FDNs are released, a full public directory and index is published, and all records are made available in accordance with the law.

  We strongly urge the Task Force to address these fundamental problems in the operation of the JFK Act. The lack of oversight has already caused inexcusable harm. Your diligence in addressing these matters in the Final Report will greatly strengthen the endorsement and support from a broad coalition of influential researchers and the public.

  To ensure the Final Report achieves the full promise of the Act, we formally request a meeting to discuss these critical issues of statutory compliance and oversight. We are prepared to make ourselves available to collaborate in any way that would be helpful, as you prepare your final recommendations.

  Thank you for your historic work and your consideration of these vital matters.

  Sincerely,

  

  Jeff Crudele, Andrew Iler and Mark Adamczyk

  Cc (email only):
  U.S. Senator Rick Scott
  U.S. House Rep. James Comer
  The Honorable John R. Tunheim
  U.S. House Rep. Tim Burchett
  U.S. House Rep. Eric Burlison
  U.S. House Rep. Elijah Crane
  William Christian
  Jake Greenberg

  ————

  1. Sections 4(e) and 7(l)(1) specifically state the oversight jurisdiction of the House and Senate committees. These committees have jurisdiction over the JFK Collection as a whole, and also over the disposition of postponed records after the termination of the ARRB and records held or created by the ARRB.

  2. A February 10, 1992 CIA memo, titled “Survey of CIA’s Records from House Selection Committee on Assassinations Investigation”, further demonstrates an intention to circumvent an independent review and declassification process for sensitive records transmitted to NARA. This CIA memo can be viewed at the following link: https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/2021/docid-32404131.pdf.

  3. This includes without limitation the records of the Church Committee, Pike Committee, and House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA).

  [Editor’s note: page footnotes convert to endnotes for web presentation]

  October 10, 2025

• Gary Aguilar’s Rebuttal to Robert Wagner

  Gary Aguilar does a point by point, detailed, and illustrated rebuttal to Robert Wagner’s defense of Gary’s criticisms of his book.

  Gary Aguilar Rebuts Robert Wagner

  By Gary L. Aguilar, MD

   

  Self-described “open-minded” Bob Wagner’s riposte (click here) to my review of his book is a showcase of how closed the minds of Warren Commission loyalists are to evidence that threatens J. Edgar Hoover’s no conspiracy verdict. The imperious and notoriously corrupt Bureau Chief, who instilled fear in all, including the Warren Commissioners and LBJ,^[1] pronounced Oswald the sole assassin within hours of the ex-marine’s arrest. ^[2] He controlled the investigation, pressing his remarkable epiphany on the public^[3] as well as on the hapless Warren Commissioners whom he cowed. (“[N]ot one of its seven members had any investigative experience.”^[4]) The Commissioners bent the knee, as the Church Committee and the House Select Committee later determined.^[5] With good reason.

  Hoover had them file-checked them for “derogatory information.” Commissioner Gerald Ford spied for Hoover and helped him block Earl Warren’s preferred choice for Chief Counsel, Warren Olney.^[6] The lawyer Hoover preferred, Chief Counsel J. Lee Rankin, later admitted: “Who could protest against what Mr. Hoover did back in those days?” It’s pretty clear that at the time, no one could, not the U. S. Chief Justice nor Congressmen and Senators. Assistant FBI Director William Sullivan understood how things worked: “Only if one unwritten but iron rule was unfailingly observed: The Director was always right.”^[7] Predictably, the Warren Commission proved Sullivan was right.

  Bob Wagner shows that, even in these days, some remain who seem unmoved by the government’s myriad, proven lies and bad faith, and I stand with Hoover’s pre-investigation epiphany. In doing so, Wagner repeatedly violates Occam’s principle that the simplest explanation – in this case, the one that requires the fewest assumptions, the fewest exceptions to the rule, the fewest leaps of faith – is most likely the correct one. Wagner shows his hostility to Lord Occam in his take on “clearly the central theme,” and the “primary point of his analysis”: the location of Kennedy’s skull wound. (Wagner’s emphasis)

  Wagner relentlessly campaigns to discredit Parkland Hospital’s Dr. Robert McClelland’s sworn testimony: “[The] right posterior portion of [JFK’s] skull had been extremely blasted.”^[8] His description matched those of other Parkland doctors. Wagner argued, “if Dr. McClelland, having several minutes to observe the wound, could get this wrong, why wouldn’t others do the same?”^[9] (He dodged a question I’d put to him: How did the two neurosurgery professors who lifted JFK’s skull and examined the head wound also get it wrong, describing it much as McClelland and the others had?)

  KENNEDY’S HEAD WOUND – WERE THE DALLAS DOCTORS WRONG?

  “The large wound was on the top of the head,” Wagner insists. So, the doctors were wrong. Wagner’s proof? “Alternate substantive evidence.” (Sounds almost Trumpian.) His alternative evidence is threefold.

  One: The autopsy said Kennedy’s head wound was “chiefly the parietal bone but extending somewhat into the temporal and occipital regions.”^[10]

  Two: A 4 x 2.5-inch skull fragment was ejected from the top of JFK’s skull and found in the limousine – the so-called “triangular” or “Delta” fragment.

  Three: An autopsy photo shows what Wagner says is a bullet hole in the low, occipital bone, with missing bone above it at the top of JFK’s skull.

  The Texas crew missed the damage to the top of JFK’s head. And I blew it because I never “addressed how head wound witnesses at Parkland (and Bethesda) (sic) failed to note this large area of skull missing from the top of the president’s (sic) head.” He’s wrong.

  First, there’s much more about Kennedy’s head wound than Wagner’s quotes from the autopsy report. Moreover, I have discussed the obvious and common-sensical reason that both Parkland and Bethesda witnesses didn’t notice that a bone was missing from the top of JFK’s skull. He ignored it.

  J. Thornton Boswell’s much-discussed “face sheet” diagram of JFK’s skull, prepared during the autopsy, is primary evidence. It’s superior to the official autopsy report that was written, rewritten, and typed up later, and which says that Kennedy’s skull defect measured “13 cm. in greatest diameter.”^[11] The House Select Committee’s (HSCA) Dr. Michael Baden asked Boswell about an important discrepancy in this diagram:

  Baden: “Could you explain the diagram on the back [of Boswell’s face sheet]?”

  Boswell: “Well, this was an attempt to illustrate the magnitude of the [skull] wound again. And as you can see it’s 10 centimeters from right to left, 17 centimeters from posterior to anterior.”^[12] (Fig. 1)

  

  Figure 1. Dr. Boswell’s “face sheet” diagram of JFK’s skull. In the center of the image, Boswell wrote “17” and “missing,” with an arrow pointing front-to-back. He also wrote “10” next to an arrow pointing right-to-left. The official autopsy report says Kennedy’s skull defect measured “13 cm. in greatest diameter.”

  How did a 17-cm skull defect on the night of the autopsy shrink in the autopsy report? Boswell told the HSCA, the Assassinations Records Review Board (ARRB), and me that JFK’s skull defect measured 17 cm at the outset of the autopsy. But after a late-arriving bone fragment was replaced into the bottom rear of JFK’s skull, into the “occiput,” the remaining gap then measured “only” 13 cm, the dimension specified in the autopsy report.^[13]

  Two important things follow. Not only was bone ejected from the top of JFK’s skull, the Delta fragment, but bone was also ejected from the rear, from the low, occipital bone. (Fig. 2)

  

  Figure 2. Diagram of human skull viewed from the right side.

  Secondly, JFK’s skull defect ran per force from the low, occipital bone in the skull’s rear to roughly the parietal-frontal bone region in the front. That’s what Boswell depicted on a human skull that he had marked for the ARRB. Both Boswell’s face sheet and ARRB diagrams are in sharp contrast to what the Warren Commission presented to the public, the Rydberg diagram. It depicts a small (bullet) hole in the rear of JFK’s skull in an otherwise intact plate of bone, and a skull defect that is well above that hole. (Fig. 3)

  

  Figure 3. Left: Photo of a skull marked by Dr. Boswell depicting the size of JFK’s skull defect at autopsy.[14] Notice that the defect extends deeply into the bottom of “JFK’s” low occipital bone. Center: a two-dimensional rendering of the markings Boswell made on the human skull for the ARRB. It shows the shape and dimension of Kennedy’s skull defect at autopsy.^[15]

  Right: Warren Commission Exhibit 386 shows a small occipital entrance wound, which is distinct from the large right-sided skull defect. Boswell told the HSCA in 1977 and the ARRB in 1996 that the entrance hole was not in an intact plate of bone. They actually inferred it was a wound of entrance from the beveling present on a late-arriving bone fragment, which fit into a wound that was initially much larger than shown here, and which extended down to the entrance hole. (See CE # 386.^[16] Also see Boswell’s HSCA interview,^[17] and Dr. Boswell’s ARRB deposition, p. 79 ff.^[18])

  The reason Parkland’s trauma surgeons, neurosurgery professors, and autopsy witnesses said JFK’s skull wound was occipital has an obvious, simple explanation. Wagner says I never addressed this. I have, several times, starting decades ago.

  “Wounds picked apart during an autopsy examination,” I wrote 25 years ago, “are often found to be larger than they first appeared to emergency personnel. In Kennedy’s case, moreover, Jackie Kennedy testified that she tried to hold the top of JFK’s head down as they raced from Dealey Plaza to Parkland Hospital. It is not hard to imagine that during the time it took the Presidential limousine to get to Parkland Hospital, a clot had formed, gluing the top portion of JFK’s disrupted scalp down, making JFK’s skull defect appear smaller to treating surgeons than it later would to autopsy surgeons.”^[19]

  Jackie has said as much herself. ” ’He had his hand out, I could see a piece of his skull coming off, and I can see this perfectly clean piece detaching itself from his head . . . I kept holding the top of his head down, trying to keep the brains in,’ she said on Nov. 29, 1963.^[20]” (my emphasis)

  In his rebuttal, Wagner offers autopsy witness FBI agent James Sibert in support of his claim that the overlooked Delta fragment proves the Dallas error. But in a taped interview, Sibert described what he saw when Kennedy’s head was unwrapped at autopsy: “… there was a sheet unwrapped off the head. There was a big gaping hole in the right rear of the head back here … .”^[21] (my emphasis) (Fig. 4) Sibert also diagrammed the wound he saw for the ARRB. Sibert thus confirms that JFK’s head wound at autopsy looked eerily like, if not as large as, the wound Dr. McClelland saw at Parkland.^[22] Many other autopsy witnesses described it in similar terms, and so were just as “mistaken” as Dallas neurosurgeons and the FBI Agent were.^[23]

  

  Figure 4. Left: screenshot of witness James Sibert showing where JFK’s wound was when they unwrapped his head at autopsy. Center: MD 188 – Sketch made by FBI agent James W. Sibert for the ARRB – Anatomical Drawing of Wound in President Kennedy’s Head (Executed on September 11, 1997). Right: “McClelland diagram” attested to by Dr. McClelland in 1998.

  Jackie held the top of JFK’s head down on the way to Parkland; a blood clot kept his scalp down; and the full extent of his skull defect wasn’t apparent until the surgeons at Bethesda lifted his scalp to examine his huge skull defect. My reply to Wagner’s claim of: “The large wound was on the top of the head, not lower on the back of the head” is clear. Kennedy’s wound was so large that it involved both the top of his head as well as the back of his head.

  But what about the autopsy photograph that shows the backside of JFK’s head intact and undamaged? Does this not prove Dr. McClelland, neurosurgeon Dr. Kemp Clark, Agent Sibert, etc., were wrong? (Fig. 5) The ARRB asked Boswell about this very photograph.

  Q. Okay. Could we turn to the sixth view, which is described as “wound of entrance in right posterior occipital region”? That corresponds to black and white photos Nos. 15 and 16, and color photos Nos. 42 and 43. Do these photographs appear to you, Dr. Boswell, to be accurate representations of photographs taken during the autopsy of President Kennedy?

  A. Yes.

  Q. In that photograph, is the scalp of President Kennedy being pulled forward?

  A. Yes.

  Q. For what purpose was it being pulled forward?

  A. In order to take the photograph, because if it wasn’t pulled forward, this would just–the scalp would come down and cover the wound of entrance here. And this was necessary to demonstrate the wound here. ^[24]

  In other words, the photo of the back of JFK’s head doesn’t show the rearward extent of the head wound because JFK was lying on his left side, not upright, as his scalp was pulled forward over the back of his skull to show a bullet wound in the scalp. (Fig.5)

  

  Figure 5. Left: Autopsy photo as it’s usually displayed. Kennedy is upright; the backside of JFK’s head is intact and undamaged. Center: diagram of the wound that Parkland’s Dr. Robert McClelland said he saw. Right: proper orientation of the photo as it was taken. JFK is lying on his left side, and an autopsist (Boswell?) is holding JFK’s rearward scalp forward over the right-rear portion of Kennedy’s skull wound.

  WAGNER’S CLAIM: AN AUTOPSY PHOTO PROVES OCCIPITAL INSHOOT

  Re Wagner’s last bit of ‘alternate evidence,’ an autopsy photo commonly called the ”mystery photo”. It is so badly shot and composed that many could not understand what it was. I do not accept his “special plea” that he knows what it is and what it means, when even the autopsy surgeons and the HSCA’s Forensic Pathology Panel were uncertain about its proper orientation or meaning. Besides, as I originally wrote, Dr. Pierre Finck, who held JFK’s skull in his hands, as Wagner put it, said that this is not the photo Wagner says it is.

  This “mystery photo” (sic) is of the “occipital wound of entrance,” he says, “How could it be otherwise?” It’s otherwise for at least two good reasons. First, in his 1965 memo to General Blumberg, Finck wrote that “I found a through-and-through wound of the occipital bone, with a crater visible from the inside. This wound showed no crater when viewed from the outside.”^[25] (my emphasis)

  The wound in the photo, as I discussed in my original review, and as anyone can see, is beveling. But it’s beveled outside, not inside, and it’s plainly visible, even in this bootleg “mystery photograph.” (Fig. 6) The outside beveling makes this photo more likely one of an outshoot, not Wagner’s occipital inshoot. 

  

  Figure 6. “Mystery photo” from JFK’s autopsy.

  Wagner says this “mystery photo” (taken from my slide show) shows the entrance point of a bullet low in the back of JFK’s skull, in occipital bone, the area specified in the autopsy report. The red arrow points to a semicircular notch, Wagner’s supposed entrance wound. But the “beveling” is on the outside of the skull, not the inside, where Dr. Finck said it was. This, therefore, is not the photo of the entrance wound that Finck meant.

  The HSCA’s Charles Petty, MD, asked Finck: “If I understand you correctly, Dr. Finck, you wanted particularly to have a photograph made of the external aspect of the skull from the back to show that there was no cratering to the outside of the skull … Did you ever see such a photograph?” (my emphasis)

  Finck: “I don’t think so and I brought with me memorandum referring to the examination of photographs in 1967… and as I can recall I never saw pictures of the outer aspect of the wound of entry in the back of the head and inner aspect in the skull in order to show a crater … I don’t remember seeing those photographs.”^[26] Finck examined this photograph, which does show cratering on the outside, and he denied it was the occipital entrance photo. So how can Wagner, not a forensic pathologist, not a physician, and who wasn’t present, say that Finck, a forensic pathologist, who was there, who held JFK’s head in his hands, is wrong, and that he is right.

  WAGNER AND KENNEDY’S PHYSICAL AND X-RAY EVIDENCE

  Perhaps Wagner’s most desperate assaults on Lord Occam have to do with the physical evidence: Kennedy’s response to the shot that killed him, and the autopsy X-rays. By his lights, what we see happen to JFK’s head, what we see in the Zapruder film, and what’s visible in JFK’s X-rays, mesh smoothly with Hoover’s scenario. They don’t.

  Put simply, we know from government duplication experiments done for the Warren Commission that, when human skulls are struck with Mannlicher ammo, they move differently than JFK’s did; the skull injuries are vastly different; and the X-ray findings are worlds apart. I ran through them in detail in my original review.

  Briefly:

  High-speed photos show that when struck with MCC rounds in the government’s tests, 10 out of 10 skulls moved away from the shooter, not back toward the shooter as Wagner argues Kennedy’s did. The photos also show that, like all “closed vessels,” the first reaction to bullet penetration is an explosion back out through the point of entrance.^[27] Milliseconds later, there’s a burst through the outshoot on the opposite side of the skull, or “closed vessel.” (JFK’s skull showed no such rearward ejecta in the Z film.) Shot in accordance with the official theory, the test skull’s right forehead, entire right orbit, and right cheek were blown away. JFK suffered no such injuries.

  There’s no small irony that the official experiments intended to “duplicate” what happened when Oswald shot JFK not only failed, they pretty much proved Oswald didn’t do it. (Fig. 7) The pictures below illustrate what I said about ejecta and facial damage.

  

  JFK’s X-rays can’t keep Wagner’s ship afloat. A test skull shot with a Carcano round showed no “dust-like,” no “snowstorm,” of minuscule fragments. Wagner’s own expert, Larry Sturdivan, testified in detail why: jacketed bullets like Oswald’s don’t leave a “snowstorm” of minuscule fragments after blasting through bone.^[28]

  But in fact, there is a “snowstorm” of minuscule bullet fragments in the right front quadrant of JFK’s skull X-ray. They are clearly visible in JFK’s original, unenhanced X-rays, and their existence in that location was attested to by expert radiologists.^[29] But they’re blotted out and are not visible in the poor quality, “enhanced” films available to the public.

  Moreover, jacketed shells like Oswald’s don’t deviate much from their original flight path. Why? Because, as Larry Sturdivan testified, the jacketed “Mannlicher-Carcano bullet is much more stable, the yaw begins to grow much more slowly (than non-jacketed, military rounds do) … .”^[30] (my emphasis)

  Wagner asks us to believe that Oswald shot downward toward JFK’s receding skull, striking it low with a jacketed slug. It was then somehow deflected way upward to the top of JFK’s skull, leaving fragments high in the skull. (Figs.7&8)

  

  Figure 8. Left: Sturdivan reproduced an X-ray of a test skull shot with a Mannlicher round at the Biophysics Lab.^[31] The fragments are small, but not “dust-like.” Not like the “snowstorm” of fragments visible in the right-front quadrant of Kennedy’s still-secret, original and unenhanced, lateral X-ray. (Which is evidence JFK was killed with a non-jacketed bullet. For “dust-like” fragments are quickly stopped by brain tissue, and so lodge close to the point of entry.) Moreover, the test skull’s fragment trail closely follows a low, little-deviated flight path across the skull, precisely as Larry Sturdivan said happens with MCC rounds.

  * Right: JFK’s “enhanced” lateral X-ray: small fragments are visible only along the top of the skull. Wagner says that, unlike the test skull, Oswald’s bullet was fired downward, struck JFK’s skull low, then popped up to the top of his skull, broke apart, and blew out of the right side of his head.

  MOMENTUM – WHAT DROVE KENNEDY “BACK AND TO THE LEFT”?

  Wagner offers no explanation for JFK’s rearward lunge. Except a “grassy knoll” shot did not do it. Why? Because JFK’s body is visibly “lifted against gravity” after Z-313. It’s something that Kennedy’s rearward head movement could not have accomplished. (He carefully avoids admitting it, but if not “momentum transfer” from a “grassy knoll” shot, his sole remaining pro-Hoover explanation for the rearward lunge is a “neuromuscular” reaction, one that lacks medical/scientific foundation, and that has been debunked.^[32])

  The proof Wagner is wrong is in the Zapruder film. The motion of JFK’s head appears to have been enough to pull his back along with it. For as JFK’s head moves, so does his upper body, and it does so in two different directions. Following Z-327, when an acoustics- and Z-film-corroborated shot hit him from behind, Kennedy’s head lunges frontward and his back moves forward with it. The opposite thing happens after Z-313: his head flies backward, and his back follows. So just as JFK’s back is “lifted against gravity” backward when his head jolts rearward after Z-313, his back is similarly “lifted against gravity” forward as the President’s head ploughs ahead after Z-327. (Fig. 9)

  

  Figure 9. Kennedy’s “upper body” is “lifted against gravity” backward by the motion of his head after Z-313, just as it is similarly “lifted against gravity” forward after Z-327. (Image taken from a PowerPoint slide.)

  THE “DEBRIS FIELD”

  Josiah Thompson, Dr. Doug Desalles and I have repeatedly pointed out that the “debris field” – the region toward which most of Kennedy’s skull and brain matter flew – was “back and to the left” of Kennedy, consistent with a shot from the grassy knoll. Wagner counters that some “human matter” was also located forward of JFK. He’s right on that.

  The explosion of JFK’s head at Z-313 would likely have sent some debris forward. As previously shown (Fig.7), some debris flies back toward the shooter when any closed vessel is struck. But most of the debris from the Z-312-313 shot clearly flew back to the left. Some of the forward-driven material likely flew due to a bullet strike to JFK’s head from the rear at Z-327-8. That strike drove JFK’s head and upper body rapidly forward after Z-327. It also abruptly changed the anterior-top portion of his skull, driving the “debris” that is seen falling down across his face a half-second later. High-quality Z-frames make this clear. (Fig. 10)

  As final, corroborative points, an acoustics waveform suggested a shot was fired from behind at Z-327-8. And Z-frames 331 and 332 are “jiggled,” which fulfills the Alvarez-proposed, 3-frame delay for the sound of an Oswald shot at Z-327-8 to reach Zapruder and jostle his camera.[33]

  

  Figure 10. Between Z-frame 327 and 337, Kennedy’s head is driven swiftly forward and downward; his back follows. The anterior portion of his head changes dramatically, and debris can be seen spilling down across his face. (If he was struck from behind at Z-327, why is there no rearward gush of ejecta seen as occurred in the government’s skull shooting tests, Fig. 7? Simply, by Z-327 the President’s skull was no longer a “closed vessel.”)

  THE MAGIC BULLET – COMMISSION EXHIBIT #399

  Wagner tries to salvage the dubious bona fides of the so-called “magic bullet” by eliding key facts. First, the FBI lied in Commission Exhibit #2011 when it reported that Parkland employees Tomlinson and Wright claimed #399 resembled the bullet they found on 11.22.63.[34] They never said that. The early, and only, report from the Bureau’s Dallas field office in 1964 reported that neither Tomlinson nor Wright could identify #399. Period. And, as Wagner admits, in 1966 O.P. Wright handed Thompson a bullet from his own desk that he said looked like the bullet they’d found. It had a pointed tip, not at all like the round-tipped #399. (As a former Dallas Sheriff, he would have known the difference.)

  The FBI also lied, claiming that it was agent Bardwell Odum who had gotten the Tomlinson-Wright admission that there was a bullet resemblance. In person, in his own living room, Odum emphatically denied to Thompson and me that he’d gotten any such admission. He never talked with Tomlinson and Wright, or had #399 in his possession. The Bureau’s own internal records back up Odum’s unequivocal denials to us. Odum’s name is nowhere to be found in any FBI files regarding #399, according to searches done by skeptics as well as by the government.

  It should not be ignored that #399 is “magical” in other ways as well. It’s supposed to have passed through JFK’s jacket and shirt on the way in, through his neck, his shirt again on the way out. It then nicked his tie, tore through Governor Connally’s jacket and shirt, blew completely through his chest, breaking a rib, and out through his shirt. Then it passed, butt-first, backward through the governor’s wrist, transected his trousers, before finally lodging in his leg, only later to fall out. And yet there are no fabric striations on the unblemished nose of #399. Nor is there any residuum of blood or tissue on this negligibly deformed missile. And it’s skeptics who are fools for not buying this?

  ACOUSTICS

  As I pointed out in my review, Wagner says that one should trust authorities “who are truly expert in the field in which they offer opinions.” He didn’t do that with the acoustics, nor with much else for that matter. The U.S. Justice Department didn’t either. Wagner omits any mention of a well-known, acoustics-related scandal.

  When the HSCA went out of business, two of the committee members appropriately recommended that the pro-conspiracy acoustic evidence needed to be reexamined. They specified that acoustics experts should do the restudy.^[35] As I discussed in my review, in typical fashion, the Justice Department ignored the HSCA’s directive. Justice first turned to a Bureau agent, B. E. Koenig, whose credentials consisted of his completing a quickie “Gee Whiz!” course in acoustics. His paper “refuting” the HSCA’s acoustics was promptly debunked and discredited.^[36]

  DOJ then turned to Nobel Prize winner, Luis Alvarez. He’d previously put out a false scientific finding that pleased the Carter Administration. His work on the so-called Vela incident proved nothing except that he could be relied upon to uphold a necessary government myth. [37][38]

  U.S. officials needed a fixer for the acoustics. But Alvarez didn’t chair the reexamination. Instead, he arranged the panel. The selectees were all physicists known to Alvarez. None had any acoustics training or expertise. Not even the chair, Harvard’s Norman Ramsey, with whom Alvarez had long collaborated on prior government projects. He also picked Richard Garwin and F. Williams Sarles, both trusted alumni of Alvarez’s Vela fiasco. It was like picking pediatricians to do a hip replacement, except that the pediatricians I have personally known would never do what Alvarez and his appointees did.

  Alvarez sat in and worked closely with his “Ramsey Panel,” and, lo and behold, they disproved the HSCA’s acoustics! Wagner shows no concern about this arrangement: progovernment, anticonspiracist Alvarez hand-picked non-experts who issued a progovernment opinion in a field in which they had no experience or expertise, and which supposedly disproved the findings of government-appointed scientists with proven experience and expertise. And it’s skeptics who are fools for not buying this?

  Conclusion

  A reasonable corollary of Lord Occam’s principle might be to reject a complex theory that requires suspending disbelief and embracing complex improbabilities if there is a simpler, less complex, less improbable theory that requires less suspension of disbelief. The evidence is so against Wagner that he asks us to suspend disbelief and accept complex improbabilities.

  • That numerous percipient trauma surgeons, neurosurgery professors, FBI agent eye witnesses were wrong that Kennedy had a rearward skull wound;
  • That nonphysician Wagner is right that the “mystery photo” in Fig. 6 is Kennedy’s occipital entrance wound from Oswald’s fatal bullet, and that JFK’s examining forensic pathologist Finck, who said it isn’t, is wrong;
  • That JFK’s head flew backward toward Oswald’s rifle when all 10 test skulls that were similarly fired upon in government tests flew away from the shooter;
  • That Oswald’s bullet entered Kennedy’s skull low on a downward trajectory, yet was wildly deflected upward. Which is in defiance of the expressed claims of Wagner’s experienced, government ballistics expert, Larry Sturdivan, whose opinion was confirmed in a government duplication test that showed that a Mannlicher shell was not deflected as it passed through a human skull;
  • That Oswald’s jacketed MCC bullet left a “snowstorm” of minuscule fragments in the right front quadrant of JFK’s head when “snowstorms” in X-rays are not seen with jacketed bullets, but only with non-jacketed rounds. [Nor was a “snowstorm” seen in the X-ray of a test skull shot with an MCC shell in a government test. (Fig.8)]
  • That the “debris field” that flew back to the left of JFK, and the skull fragments that flew leftward, were all driven backward and leftward by Oswald’s bullet that supposedly entered the right rear of Kennedy’s skull and blew out of the right front part of his head;
  • That there is nothing noteworthy about the fact that none of the first four people in the chain of possession of the Parkland stretcher bullet were later able to identify #399 as that same bullet. Nor is it noteworthy that the FBI lied about #399 in official records. Nor that there was neither the marking of the shell’s having passed through fabric nor any tissue residues on the near-pristine bullet that is supposed to have been so destructive of fabric, flesh and bone;
  • That a group of untrained, acoustics-ignorant physicists, appointed by an acoustics-ignorant, proven government toady and anticonspiracist (Luis Alvarez), definitively debunked the findings of three of the most highly regarded acoustics authorities in the country.
  • That the debunked “neuromuscular reaction” and/or “jet effect” explain(s) Kennedy’s rearward lunge, and that the momentum imparted to JFK’s skull from a grassy knoll shot does not.

  For Wagner, it’s always, well, under normal circumstances, a, b, c, … x, y, and z do not happen. But this time it’s different. As improbable as it may seem, folks, in this unique case, all these unlikely things did happen, and they happened just the way the government said they did … . And it’s the skeptics who are fools for not buying this? Well, we don’t buy it. Because we have long had a far less complicated theory than J. Edgar Hoover about what happened in Dealey Plaza. And it’s one that fits the evidence and is not in defiance of it. It explains things like JFK’s rearward lunge, which an Oswald shot does not; it explains things like ejecta backward; why the motorcycle cops were hit with blood and tissue while riding to JFK’s right; why there is a snowstorm of dust-like bullet fragments in the right front of Kennedy’s forehead. I could go on and on with this, but I think the reader gets the point by now.

  If the government had been telling us the truth all along, there’d have been no need for intimidating witnesses, for destroying evidence, and for continuing to withhold evidence to this day.

  So why does Wagner remain faithful to those who have endlessly lied and acted in such extraordinarily bad faith? How many more proven official malefactions would it take to shake his faith? I keep thinking of something Jeff Morley pointed out that’s worth repeating:

  “In civil law, when one party does not disclose evidence in its possession, a jury is allowed to draw an adverse inference that the missing information destroyed or not produced was unfavorable.” Now, 60+ years after Kennedy was assassinated, it’s more than fair to draw the adverse inference that the missing information destroyed or not produced by the FBI, the CIA,^[39] and the Secret Service was unfavorable to the government’s claim Oswald acted alone.^[40]

  One might have hoped that the government’s proven dishonesty and bad faith in the Kennedy case, which Jim Dieugenio, Jeff Morley, and others have shown have no limit and no end, would force a reckoning among Warren loyalists. There’s little doubt but that it has, among some. But from what he’s written in his books and in his riposte, it seems that there’s nothing that’s likely to ever shake Bob Wagner’s “patriotic” faith. And it’s skeptics who are fools for not buying this?

  Click here to read the article by Robert Wagner that Gary Aguilar is responding to.

  Editor’s note: Robert Wagner and Gary Aguilar have both been given space on this site to present their latest retorts on this ongoing debate. At this point, we have no plans to publish further discussion between the two researchers regarding this debate.

  ————

  1. Curt Gentry. J. Edgar Hoover – the Man and the Secrets. New York. W.W. Norton & Co., 1991, p. 553, and p. 558. (Hoover kept a file on LBJ.)

  2. See Hoover memo from 11.22.63 saying Oswald was the culprit: https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=62251#relPageId=97

  3. JFK assassination files: Hoover said FBI must “convince the public” Oswald acted alone. CBS News. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jfk-assassination-files-hoover-said-fbi-must-convince-the-public-oswald-acted-alone/

  4. Curt Gentry. J. Edgar Hoover – the Man and the Secrets. New York. W.W. Norton & Co., 1991, p. 548 and p. 553.

  5. See: Aguilar G. Warren Commission Counsels Burt Griffin and Howard Willens Attempt the Impossible: Shoring up the Tottering Credibility of Earl Warren’s Investigation. https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/warren-commission-counsels-burt-griffin-and-howard-willens-attempt-the-impossible-shoring-up-the-tottering-credibility-of-earl-warren-s-investigation

  6. Sources at: Aguilar G. Warren Commission Counsels Burt Griffin and Howard Willens Attempt the Impossible: Shoring up the Tottering Credibility of Earl Warren’s Investigation https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/warren-commission-counsels-burt-griffin-and-howard-willens-attempt-the-impossible-shoring-up-the-tottering-credibility-of-earl-warren-s-investigation

  7. Gerald D. McKnight. Breach of Trust – How the Warren Commission Failed the Nation and Why. Lawrence, Kansas: Kansas University Press, 2005, p. 150.

  8. Warren Commission testimony of Robert McClelland, Hearings Vol. 6, p. 33. Hereafter 6H33.

  9. Wagner, R. JFK Assassisnated – In the Courtroom Debating the Critical Research Community. Mill City Press, 2023, p. 210.

  10. Warren Commission Exhibit #387, Autopsy Report and Supplemental Report, p. 3. https://aarclibrary.org/publib/jfk/wc/wr/pdf/WR_A9_AutopsyReport.pdf

  11. Warren Commission Exhibit #387, Autopsy Report and Supplemental Report, p. 3. https://aarclibrary.org/publib/jfk/wc/wr/pdf/WR_A9_AutopsyReport.pdf

  12. House Select Committee (HSCA) testimony of J. Thornton Boswell, MD. V7:253 https://history-matters.com/archive/jfk/hsca/reportvols/vol7/html/HSCA_Vol7_0132a.htm

  13. HSCA memo of conversation with J. T. Boswell, HSCA record # 180-10093-10430-, agency file number 002071, p. 6. Also reproduced in ARRB Medical Document #26, see p. 6. See also my discussion of this 33 years ago:

      Aguilar G, Cunningham K. HOW FIVE INVESTIGATIONS INTO JFK’S MEDICAL/AUTOPSY EVIDENCE GOT IT WRONG – DISCUSSION. https://history-matters.com/essays/jfkmed/How5Investigations/How5InvestigationsGotItWrong_6.htm

  14. Image available at: Mantik D. The Omissions and Miscalculations of Nicholas Nalli

      https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/the-omissions-and-miscalculations-of-nicholas-nalli

  15. ARRB Master Set of Medical Exhibits, MD 29. https://history-matters.com/archive/jfk/arrb/master_med_set/md209/html/md209_0001a.htm

  16. https://history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh16/html/WH_Vol16_0501a.htm

  17. HSCA V. 7:246. https://history-matters.com/archive/jfk/hsca/reportvols/vol7/html/HSCA_Vol7_0128b.htm

  18. https://history-matters.com/archive/jfk/arrb/medical_testimony/Boswell_2-26-96/html/Boswell_0045b.htm

  19. Aguilar G. The Converging Medical Case for Conspiracy in the Death of JFK. In: Fetzer J, ed. Murder in Dealey Plaza, Part III. Chicago: Catfeet Press, 2000, p. 187.

  20. Seattle Times, May 27, 1995. Jackie’s Memories Of JFK’s Death — In 1963 Interview, She Talked Of Seeing Husband Shot. https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/19950527/2123253/jackies-memories-of-jfks-death—-in-1963-interview-she-talked-of-seeing-husband-shot

  21. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7cimeXvqLA

  22. https://aarclibrary.org/publib/jfk/arrb/master_med_set/md188/html/md188_0001a.htm

  23. See my 1994 compilation of witness statements: JOHN F. KENNEDY’S FATAL WOUNDS: THE WITNESSES AND THE INTERPRETATIONS FROM 1963 TO THE PRESENT http://assassinationweb.com/ag6.htm

  24. ARRB testimony of J. Thornton Boswell, p. 160-161. https://www.jfk-assassination.net/russ/testimony/boswella.htm

  25. MD 28 – Reports From Lt. Col Finck to Gen. Blumberg (1/25/65 and 2/1/65). See Summary page: https://aarclibrary.org/publib/jfk/arrb/master_med_set/md28/html/Image19.htm

  26. HSCA testimony of Pierre Finck, MD. https://www.jfk-assassination.net/russ/testimony/finckhsca.htm

  27. Besides the photos from the government’s Biophysics Lab, a posted video of extremely high speed videos of eggs being shot with bullets that repeatedly show that the first egress of debris exits the point of entrance. See “Cory Santos” videos posted online in an “Education Forum” discussion of “jet effect.” https://educationforum.ipbhost.com/topic/27768-video-destroying-the-jet-effect/

  28. See: Aguilar G. Is Robert Wagner the New Paul Hoch? – Part 2, “Snowstorm.” https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/is-robert-wagner-the-new-paul-hoch-part-2

  29. See: Aguilar G. The X-Ray Evidence: Enhanced vs Unenhanced. In: Is Robert Wagner the New Paul Hoch? – Part 2 https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/is-robert-wagner-the-new-paul-hoch-part-2

  30. Sturdivan, L. Testimony HSCA Vol. 1:394. https://aarclibrary.org/publib/jfk/hsca/reportvols/vol1/pdf/HSCA_Vol1_0908_3_Sturdivan.pdf

  31. Sturdivan, L S. The JFK Myths. St. Paul. MN. Paragon House, 2005, p. 173.

  32. * See: Aguilar G, Wecht CH. Dr. Nalli and Neuromuscular Reaction. In: Nicholas Nalli and the JFK Case, Part 2. https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/nicholas-nalli-and-the-jfk-case-part-2

      * See: Aguilar G, Wecht CH. AFTE Journal — Volume 47 Number 3 — Summer 2015, p. 134-135. Available here: https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-reviews/nova-s-cold-case-jfk-junk-science-pbs

      * See: Aguilar G. Wecht CH. AFTE Journal — Volume 48 Number 2 — Spring 2016, p. 72. Available here: https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-reviews/nova-s-cold-case-jfk-junk-science-pbs

  33. Alvarez J. A physicist examines the Kennedy assassination film. Am. J. Physics, V.4, # 9. Sept. 1976. https://aarclibrary.org/publib/jfk/hsca/reportvols/vol1/pdf/HSCA_Vol1_0908_4_Alvarez.pdf

  34. See Commission Exhibit #2011: https://www.history-matters.com/essays/frameup/EvenMoreMagical/images/Slide2.GIF

  35. * HSCA Final Report, p. 486. https://www.history-matters.com/archive/jfk/hsca/report/pdf/HSCA_Report_4_Remarks.pdf

      * DISSENTING VIEWS BT HON. ROBERT W. EDGAR TO THE FINAL REPORT, p. 499. https://www.history-matters.com/archive/jfk/hsca/report/pdf/HSCA_Report_4_Remarks.pdf

  36. * Koenig, BE. Acoustic Gunshot Analysis – The Kennedy Assassination and Beyond (Conclusion) https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/acoustic-gunshot-analysis-kennedy-assassination-and-beyond

      * Thompson. J. Last Second in Dallas. Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2023, p. 275-300.

      * See also memo from HSCA Chief Counsel, Robert Blakey, to the FBI’s William Webster dated 4.2/1981 that included a technical refutation of FBI Agent Koenig’s acoustics analysis written by James Barger and the acoustics authorities at Bold, Beranak and Newman, Inc. Cambridge, Mass: http://jfk.hood.edu/Collection/FBI Records/062-117290/062-117290 Volume 25/62-117290P25b.pdf

  37. Thompson. J. Last Second in Dallas. Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2023.

  38. * https://scienceandglobalsecurity.org/archive/sgs25wright.pdf

      * Thompson. J. Last Second in Dallas. Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2023, p. 280-284. 

      *See also” “The Vela Incident Nuclear Test or Meteoroid? Documents Show Significant Disagreement with Presidential Panel Concerning Cause of September 22, 1979 Vela “Double-Flash” Detection.” National Security Archives, 5/5/2006. Available here: https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB190/index.htm

      *A good summary of government evidence proving a nuclear blast in the Vela Incident is available in: Report on the 1979 Vela Incident. Available here. [“(Investigative journalist Seymour) Hersh reports interviewing several members of the Nuclear Intelligence Panel (NIP), which had conducted their own investigation of the event. Those interviewed included its leader Donald M. Kerr, Jr. and eminent nuclear weapons program veteran Harold M. Agnew. The NIP members concluded unanimously that it was a definite nuclear test. Another member—Louis H. Roddis, Jr.—concluded that ‘the South African-Israeli test had taken place on a barge, or on one of the islands in the South Indian Ocean archipelago.’” [Hersh 1991; pg. 280-281. Available here. He also cited internal CIA estimates made in 1979 and 1980 which concluded that it had been a nuclear test. “The U.S. Naval Research Laboratory conducted a comprehensive analysis, including the hydroacoustic data, and issued a 300-page report concluding that there had been a nuclear event near Prince Edward Island or Antarctica [Albright 1994b].”

  39. CIA Hid Key Oswald Ties from JFK Investigators, New Docs Confirm

      July 14, 2025 https://rockymountainvoice.com/2025/07/14/cia-hid-key-oswald-ties-from-jfk-investigators-new-docs-confirm/

  40. Jeff Morley. JFK Facts. https://jfkfacts.substack.com/p/a-trail-of-destruction-followed-faucis?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=315632&post_id=145391771&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=false&r=1e6chw&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

  October 4, 2025

• Robert Wagner Replies to Gary Aguilar

  Author Robert Wagner replies to Dr. Gary Aguilar’s critique of his last book, thereby updating and restating the case for the lone assassin.

  Robert Wagner Replies to Gary Aguilar

   

  Introduction

  In December 2024, Kennedys and King published Dr. Gary Aguilar’s review of my book JFK Assassinated – In the Courtroom: Debating the Critical Research Community (“JFKA”). JFK was my second book about the assassination of President Kennedy. My first book, The Assassination of JFK: Perspectives Half a Century Later, was published in 2016. I met Gary in November 2017 at the Houston mock trial of Lee Harvey Oswald, where I served as a prosecution expert consultant. Having since exchanged a few hundred emails and engaged on private group threads, Gary and I are familiar with each other’s views on this subject. While we have significant disagreements, I have always admired Gary’s dedication and enormous contributions to this case.

  Gary addresses six topics. Below I address them individually and then conclude with important overall context discussed in JFKA not mentioned by Gary. Space for my reply is limited, so I can only address high points. There is much more supporting detail offered in JFKA.

  Response

   

  1. The Fatal Head Wound – Especially the Parkland Hospital Recollections

  Gary complains that I rely on Dr. McClelland’s recollection, extrapolating it to every doctor and layperson in Trauma Room 1 at Parkland. Gary criticizes me for neglecting sufficient discussion of the reports of two neurosurgeons, Kemp Clark and (allegedly) Robert Grossman.[1] This critique completely sidesteps the primary point of my analysis.

  This issue is principally about considering where on the president’s head that adults—many of them doctors, some of them laypeople—say they saw a sizable hole, and addressing the differences between their recollections and the autopsy evidence. Gary’s well-known survey of Parkland (and Bethesda) witnesses includes mostly laypeople and medical doctors who are not neurosurgeons.[2] Gary implicitly trusted such witnesses to accurately report their observations about the location of a large wound somewhere on a human head. So, the issue is not that neurosurgical credentials are necessary to accurately report what was seen. The issue is distilled to this: When witness observations conflict with autopsy evidence, is there alternate substantive evidence that provides value in determining where to grant greater weight as to reliability?

  McClelland’s authorized sketch has been seized upon by the critic community as “Exhibit A” of the location of the area of missing skull. I quoted Doug Horne (p. 206), when describing the whereabouts of the location of the area of missing skull, which Horne says was attested to “virtually unanimously” by Parkland treatment physicians: “It was approximately fist sized, or baseball sized, or perhaps even a little smaller—the size of a very large egg or a small orange; … it was in the right rear of the head behind the right ear.”[3] Horne’s summary description matches well with the McClelland drawing:

  

  The Parkland witnesses do not describe the wound in the same detail from person to person, but in any case, their descriptions of the wound location are noticeably at odds with that described at autopsy as: “chiefly the parietal bone but extending somewhat into the temporal and occipital regions”[4] (emphasis added). By and large, the Parkland witnesses described the wound location as chiefly occipital.

  There is persuasive evidence nullifying the accuracy of those recollections, and it is not blind reliance on autopsy doctors, but on evidence not in dispute: the large triangular fragment recovered from the limousine and brought to the Bethesda morgue late into the autopsy. The triangular (“delta”) fragment measured about 4 inches by 2.5 inches. Researcher John Hunt considered anatomical locations just in front of, or behind, the president’s right coronal suture; locations that are generally agreed to be the possibilities for the fragment’s origin. Regardless, no one claims this fragment is occipital bone from the back of the president’s head [5]:

  

  Gary has not addressed how head wound witnesses at Parkland (and Bethesda) failed to note this large area of skull missing from the top of the president’s head—coincidentally more or less the same size of the area of missing skull according to McClelland.[6] Unlike at Parkland, the Bethesda witnesses, early in the autopsy, would have observed enlargement of that wound as the autopsy doctors reflected the president’s scalp and portions of the skull adhered to the reflected scalp and also fell away from the head, enlarging the span of missing skull (p. 288) such that no significant sawing (if any) was needed to extract the president’s brain (the brain could not have been extracted from the area of missing bone represented by the McClelland sketch).[7]

  That Parkland witnesses failed to note the large hole in the top of the president’s skull is irreconcilable to the “delta fragment” evidence.[8] Further, those witnesses do not describe a second large hole (this one on the top of the head, either in back of, or in front of, the right coronal suture), nor a contiguous larger wound extending from occipital bone forward to the coronal suture anterior on the parietal bone, even with the due examination by the Parkland doctors, as mentioned by Gary. The large wound was on the top of the head, not lower on the back of the head.

  That the area of missing skull was at the top of the president’s head is confirmed by one of the autopsy photographs (“views”)—taken from behind the president showing the large wound on top of his head, which autopsy assistant James Jenkins described as having brain matter visible.[9] When FBI Agent James Sibert was shown this autopsy photograph by William Law, he said, “I definitely remember that. That’s just the way it looked.”[10] When, for Law and Debra Conway, Sibert sketched the dimensions of the delta fragment, Conway commented, That’s huge! I mean, that’s the top of your head.”[11] Gary’s review omits these issues as presented in JFKA, yet this is clearly the central theme of my analysis, not McClelland’s singular reporting.

  How could Parkland witnesses have been mistaken? We know Bethesda witness Sibert appeared on Gary’s surveyed list of “right rear” witnesses and confirmed that location verbally to Law, yet also authenticated an autopsy photograph—taken before any autopsy manipulations were performed—that very clearly shows the wound on the top of the president’s head.[12] Reports of visible cerebellar brain tissue (e.g., neurosurgeon Clark and anesthesiologist Jenkins) are also in conflict with this evidence, although as Gary has previously written, the “external occipital protuberance (EOP), overlies the upper margin of the cerebellum which lies beneath it.”[13] It follows that because the autopsy reported location of the inshoot was “slightly above” the EOP,[14] the bullet could have missed the cerebellum (defecting up, to be discussed), which brain pictures from the supplemental autopsy confirm.

   

  2. The Entry Wound on the Back of the President’s Head

  Here, Gary notes Pierre Finck’s autopsy commentary, which he contends I ignore or misinterpret. Neither assertion is true. Consider the so-called “mystery photo.” That view is one of three extant pictures (views) to document bullet wounds.[15] Noteworthy is that Finck told his boss, General Blumberg, that he directed only three pictures (views) be taken: “the occipital wound (external and internal aspects), as well as the wound in the back” (pp. 222, 254). Gary mistakenly notes that I omitted a key part of Finck’s description, namely, “I found a through-and-through wound of the occipital bone, with a crater visible from the inside of the cranial cavity. This bone wound showed no crater when viewed from outside the skull” (emphasis added).[16] Not only do I quote this phrase (p. 221), but I devote significant narrative to its meaning in context because it is key to understanding the “mystery photo” (pp. 221-223; 251-258).

  Gary points to the semi-circular notch in the “mystery photo” and claims “outside beveling is plainly visible,” concluding that this is evidence of outshoot. Importantly, Finck never claimed there was any evidence of outshoot anywhere on the intact skull, and he had that skull in his hands.[17] Finck clearly had something else in mind. As discussed in JFKA (pp. 255-257), critic researcher Don Thomas warned of wrongly interpreting beveling features: “when dealing with fragments or margins of bone, and not through-and-through holes [as is the case here], all bets are off. This is because the laminate nature of cranial bone lends itself to chipping that can easily be confused with beveling.”[18] I also quoted Vincent Di Maio: “Chips of bone can flake off the edge of an entrance hole.”[19] One of Gary’s seminal published works is also relevant to this point, relating, “…there are numerous cases from the scientific literature in which the documented beveling characteristics were the reverse of what might be expected from the known direction of wounding”[20] (emphasis added). As expressed in JFKA (p. 256), even though Finck told Blumberg otherwise, there is no extant photograph showing the internal aspect of the skull for the entry wound, the partner to what we see in the semi-circular notch in the “mystery photo.” As Finck related to Blumberg, the portion of a “crater”[21] was “obvious” on the internal aspect. Although this involves speculation, it finds support because, again, Finck never claimed to have seen outshoot evidence anywhere on the intact skull and, again, Finck held that skull in his hands.

  Finck said he directed pictures be taken of the occipital wound of entrance (not parietal, as Gary now claims), both internal and external aspects. I propose that the “mystery photo” was the picture of the external aspect. Finck never said generalized pictures were taken of the skull. The most reasonable conclusion is that the “mystery photo” was a particularized picture – one of just three views directed, meaning that each had targeted purpose from Finck’s perspective. For the “mystery photo,” then a targeted, particularized picture of what? The occipital wound of entrance, just as Finck related to Blumberg. How could it be otherwise? It could only be otherwise if one were to disconnect his intention from the outcome, which would not be reasonable. In JFKA chapters 9 and 10, I discuss confusion posed by the “mystery photo” among researchers and all three autopsy doctors (see particularly p. 229). The autopsy doctors, Finck included, saw the pictures for the first time a few years after the autopsy—then setting the table for confusion—and understandably even more hazy recollections fifteen years later as to the HSCA, and three decades later to the ARRB. These impediments should not override what Finck told Blumberg in early 1965 before he ever saw the autopsy pictures, although total clarity is indeed lacking.[22]

  While researchers disagree about whether a noticeable forward head movement at Z312-Z313 is because of a rearward bullet strike (it was, as notable members of the critic community acknowledge) or, alternatively, Zapruder film blur artifacts (as Gary believes), or that Puppe’s Rule (a secondary fracture of the president’s skull terminated when meeting a prior fracture) establishes that a low shot to the back of the president’s head was the first trauma inflicted to his head, as argued by Randy Robertson and Michael Chesser (both recognized by the critical community as having radiology interpretation expertise[23]); the evidentiary weight confirms that the president was at Z312-Z313 struck low on the back of the head in occipital bone (not parietal, as Gary maintains as occurring at circa Z327), just as Finck and other autopsy doctors concluded.

   

  3. The “Back and to the Left” Lunge

  Gary says I concluded that “either a ‘jet effect’ or a ‘neuromuscular reaction’ or both, best explain(s) Kennedy’s rearward jolt.” That is not at all what I wrote. In JFKA, I simply rejected the effects of bullet momentum as an explanation for the “lunge” (pp. 335-336).

  In long-ago private conversation, Gary scolded me for my claim of the effect of the Z312-Z313 shot lifting the president’s torso against gravity, but no more. (In response, I pointed out that Tink Thompson recognized this “lifting” effect in Last Second in Dallas.[24]) I place weight on the expertise of Larry Sturdivan (degree in physics) to the extent of his contention that a penetrating bullet strike to the head would not lift a torso against gravity, as it must have just after Z312-Z313, but physics Ph.D. David Mantik had also so concluded.[25] Now, the retort from Gary is that a similar effect can be seen from the effect of a supposed rear head strike just after circa Z327. I will leave the readers to determine for themselves if a forward torso lunge occurs just after circa Z327 akin to the rearward torso lunge just after Z312-Z313, but I cannot make that reach.[26] Gary says these lunges (just after Z313 and Z327) were both caused by the president’s head as it “tugged” his torso in the same direction. The notion that the lifting of the president’s entire torso just after Z313 was caused by the “tugging” of the president’s head finds objection by two physics-trained researchers, one pro-conspiracy and one anti-conspiracy. I also note that even Tink described the post Z313 event as “lifts and throws his body backward and to the left …” (emphasis added), which is accurate and connotates something more severe than a “tug.” Finally, while we all agree that such an effect occurred after Z312-Z313, Randy Robertson and Don Thomas, both critic researchers and important believers of a shot fired at circa Z327 (like Tink, in support of the acoustics case), deny that this shot even struck the president.[27]

  Gary notes that “the debris field” (matter ejected from the president’s head) went “principally to the president’s left-rear.” It is also well-known, however, that Agents Greer and Kellerman, riding two rows in front of the president, were sprayed with human matter[28]; some human matter was located as far forward as on the hood of the car[29]; and the Harper bone fragment was reportedly found by its namesake well forward location of the limousine at Z313.[30] Human matter was jettisoned in many directions (plainly visible at Z313, and not at circa Z327), as hydraulic cavitation from the sheer force of the shot caused the president’s head to explode.[31]

   

  4. Provenance of CE 399

  Gary’s criticism relates to the government’s documentation of the chain of possession of CE 399, particularly of O.P. Wright’s claim that the recovered bullet had a pointed tip, rather than a rounded nose, as does CE 399[32]:

  

  In Last Second in Dallas, Tink relates details of his 1966 conversation, and of testing Wright on his recollection of seeing a pointed tip bullet. Wright forcefully implied that such a mistake was not possible.[33] For Wright, one could evidently not mistake the difference between the two types of bullets.

  In a long-ago email exchange, Gary confirmed that he had no reason to suspect that the two middle intermediaries in the six-person transmission chain of CE 399, Secret Service Agent Richard Johnsen, and Secret Service Chief James Rowley, took part in evidence manipulation. According to documentation Gary cites, neither Johnsen nor Rowley could many months later positively identify CE 399 as the bullet they handled on November 22, 1963. Wouldn’t it be reasonable to conclude, however, that Johnsen and Rowley, when later presented with CE 399 for identification, would not have merely claimed they were unable to identify it, but would have instead said, consistent with Wright, that CE 399 was positively not the bullet? (As mentioned in JFKA, p.120, without identifying markings it would not be realistic for either Johnsen or Rowley months later to distinguish one round-nosed bullet from another.) Wouldn’t Wright have said the same thing in 1964 to Gordon Shanklin? Would Shanklin have risked tampering with witness accounts, like Wright’s, in the larger ongoing investigation in which such impropriety could be easily exposed? From this analysis one must be skeptical of Gary’s and Tink’s argument, if not reject it, as I do, for this and other reasons explained in JFKA.

   

  5. Directionality of the Fatal Shot

  Gary takes issue with my assertion that a bullet entered low on the president’s head, in occipital bone, and exited high on the top/top right side of the present’s head upon deflection. Noteworthy is Don Thomas’ admonition in Hear No Evil, that bullets will deflect as he took to task the HSCA’s bullet trajectory analysis: “There was no good reason to believe that the bullet track through the skull would be anywhere close to the same as that prior to impact. On the contrary, the bullet would almost certainly deflect … This is why a knowledgeable (and honest) person would not undertake such an analysis in the first place” (emphasis added).[34] It follows that the path of bullet (or bullet fragments) deflection through a skull is a unique event, difficult if not impossible to replicate on any human head, much less a cadaver skull.

  This issue highlights a certain line of demarcation: did the shot that struck the president in the back of the head do so in occipital bone as the first head strike (my position, with this event being the sole shot to the head), or did the shot strike much higher–about four inches higher than reported at autopsy–in parietal bone as a second head strike (Gary)? As to the bullet strike to the back of the head, the weight of the evidence (as previously discussed) supports the lower occipital location, and that there was no head trauma prior to that strike. That being the case, then a bullet (or bullet fragments) upward deflection is self-evident from the visible damaged and undamaged (e.g., undamaged face and forehead) portions of the president’s head, as shown in the autopsy pictures. In turn, this leads to the next issue.

  As to the “lead storm” fragment pattern seen on the autopsy X-rays, the questions posed are the directionality of a bullet causing that pattern, as well as the interpretation of the pattern. I recognize this issue is complex and, especially in isolation, hazardous for lone shooter supporters, but there are issues beyond what Gary has addressed.

  There were at least two impacts on the skull by a bullet (or bullet fragments) on entry and then on exit. A disintegrating jacketed bullet can shed at least larger fragments as it passes through the head (shown on the Biophysics Lab test featured by Gary and JFKA, p. 318). A bullet (or bullet fragments) can also shed fragments upon exit from collision with the skull and for that proposition there is evidence: an X-ray of the delta fragment (formerly located in the right front quadrant of the president’s skull in the same region where there are also tiny fragments visible in the X-rays) shows tiny metallic fragments on that bone at the exit (not entrance) site. In Tink Thompson’s reconstruction, he acknowledges that a Mannlicher-Carcano–alleged Oswald bullet–struck the president in the back of the head,[35] as I believe Gary does, and so do I, although we disagree on the timing and location, as mentioned. As the first shot, however, at least two large and visibly mangled M-C bullet fragments (CE 567 and CE 569) collided with the president’s skull upon exit – producing evidence of that exit on the delta fragment (recall, from the top of the president’s head) and accompanying tiny fragments (pp. 282-283, 321-323), which, according to James Humes, were “similar in character to the particles seen within the skull (emphasis added).[36] Additionally, the president’s head was attached to a living human body unlike a shooting test on a cadaver skull. The chaos resulting from hydraulic cavitation (visible explosion) of the president’s living head is relevant to any consideration of the fragment pattern. As researcher Pat Speer notes, with evidence, it appears that many of these tiny fragments are outside of the skull, in the scalp.[37]

  Gary’s notes that Massad Ayoob concluded, “The explosion of the president’s head as seen in frame 313 … is far more consistent with an explosive wound of entry with a small-bore hyper-velocity rifle bullet …” As discussed in JFKA, Ayoob also concluded, in the same article, “It is entirely possible that he [Oswald] also shot JFK in the back of the head with another bullet, which for unexplainable reasons did damage out of proportion to its ballistic capability as most of us would perceive that to be.”[38] Entirely possible. Vincent Di Maio also allowed for an Oswald bullet to have struck the president in the head. (In JFKA, I explained Gary’s concerns with Di Maio’s conclusions.[39]) The simple point is that two prominent gunshot wound experts allowed for the lone shooter theory.

   

  6. Acoustics Evidence

  Gary’s assertion that I rely on the Ramsey Panel is wrong. Throughout more than forty pages (pp. 162-195, 416-428) of related analysis and discussion, not once do I substantively refer to the Ramsey Panel’s work. It is only an endnote (197, p. 423) where such reference is made, and then only to acknowledge criticisms of the panel’s work by Don Thomas and Tink Thompson. Gary has the reader of his review believe my acoustics analysis is superficial, which is entirely wrong. Gary again sidesteps the basis for my conclusions.

  Acoustics evidence, especially as to supporting the theory of a shot from the grassy knoll, is built upon three prongs: (1) reconstruction tests conducted in Dealey Plaza in 1978 and related waveform comparison analysis done by HSCA experts, (2) alleged instances of crosstalk on two police frequencies, and (3) evidence that motorcycle cop H.B. McLain was in the right locations in Dealey Plaza as shots were fired. In addition, for the acoustics evidence to be valid, all agree that McLain’s microphone had to be the microphone in question, picking up gunshot sounds as he was accompanying the motorcade. I have no ability to directly opine on waveform science or crosstalk that both supporters and detractors of the acoustics evidence use to make their case, although I explain strengths and weaknesses of both sides in relation to each of these issues in JFKA. Rather, I dispute the assertion that McLain’s was the open microphone, referring to it as a “deal-killer” for the acoustics case (p. 175; see also p. 336). In JFKA, I relate my several strands of reasoning, covering many pages of analysis. Not once in Gary’s review is the name “McLain” mentioned, nor my related analysis. Also, the HSCA report said that McLain asked a reasonable question, one for which the only reasonable answer further invalidates the acoustics case: “If it was my radio on my motorcycle, why did it [channel 1, the frequency purportedly containing evidence of gunshots] not record the revving up at high speed plus my siren when we immediately took off for Parkland Hospital?”[40] Channel 1 did not pick up engine revving and siren sounds because McLain’s radio was switched to channel 2 – the frequency devoted to the presidential motorcade, which it was McLain’s job to be monitoring.

  Gary objects to my reference to Michael O’Dell as an acoustics evidence expert. But it was Tink Thompson that acknowledged O’Dell’s expertise. In Last Second in Dallas, he writes, “The universe of people really knowledgeable about the acoustic evidence is vanishingly small: James Barger, Don Thomas, Chris Scally, and one other person, Michael O’Dell.”[41] O’Dell informs me he reached out and then was invited to consult with James Barger and Tink for a year or two prior to publication of Last Second in Dallas, raising the issues noted in JFKA, and others. As described in chapter 7 of JFKA, O’Dell questions technical (waveform) aspects and the interpretation of crosstalk relied on by Barger and, by extension, Tink. O’Dell raises valid issues not addressed in Last Second in Dallas. In JFKA I wrote that O’Dell’s work impinges the acoustics evidence (p. 191). I am unaware of any rebuttal to O’Dell’s criticisms. Gary says that I cite, in extenso, Michael O’Dell’s work and incorrectly implies that O’Dell and the Ramsey Panel are the basis for my conclusion. Rather than simply recite my book index, as Gary did, for O’Dell page references (several containing name references only, and one of those pages cited by Gary – my error – was an incorrect page reference), it is not hard to see that less than ten percent of the word count of this topic relates to O’Dell. And it is certainly not O’Dell’s work in extenso.

  Concluding Remarks

  In both books I emphasize an important theme that should guide anyone’s analysis of the assassination: Oswald’s movements in the depository were not controlled. If there was a sophisticated conspiracy to frame an innocent patsy, it would have been job one to make sure the patsy could not produce an alibi. For all that supposed conspirators could know, Oswald would be in the company of coworkers as the shots rang out. After the release of JFKA, Vince Palamara noted on the JFK Education Forum, “Wagner believes the greatest challenge to those who believe there was a conspiracy is the following: there is no evidence that Oswald’s movements were controlled in any fashion on 11/22/63 to PREVENT HIM FROM HAVING AN ALIBI. As an open-minded author/researcher, I myself cannot think of a good counterargument to this challenge” (emphasis in the original).[42] I propose to Vince and others that there is no good counterargument. This should give any researcher pause. As noted in both books, if Oswald was a shooter (not a patsy), then the notion of a Mafia or some (direct or indirect) government involvement in the assassination is realistically precluded. A conspiracy involving Oswald and other rogue types is possible, however, although anyone partnering with Oswald in murdering the president would have taken on considerable risk given Oswald’s high-profile activities earlier in 1963. I am not dogmatic, however. I have said for years that I am an Oswald (probably) did it guy. Probably.

  Click here to read Gary Aguilar’s response to this article.

   

  —————

  1. In 2003, David Lifton authored an article questioning whether Dr. Grossman was even in Trauma Room 1 during the president’s treatment: “That is the issue: not what Dr. Grossman alleges he saw; not his interpretations; but whether he was there.” https://www.jfk-assassination.net/grossman.htm. Thus, contrary to Gary’s assertion, and respecting Lifton’s analysis, I will not give weight to Dr. Grossman’s representations out of a proper abundance of caution.

  2. https://history-matters.com/essays/jfkmed/How5Investigations/How5InvestigationsGotItWrong_tabfig.htm#Table_1.

  3. Doug Horne, Inside the Assassination Records Review Board: The U.S. Government’s Final Attempt to Reconcile the Conflicting Medical Evidence in the Assassination of JFK – Volume 1, (2009), p. 69.

  4. CE 387 of the Warren Commission hearings. Material quoted and discussed in JFKA, pp. 276-282.

  5. “A Demonstrable Impossibility: The HSCA Forensic Pathology Panel’s Misrepresentation of the Kennedy Assassination Medical Evidence,” https://www.history-matters.com/essays/jfkmed/ADemonstrableImpossibility/ADemonstrableImpossibility.htm.

  6. In a 50^th anniversary interview in 2013, Dr. McClelland said the wound was “at least five inches in diameter.” https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?q=jfk+robert+mcclelland+interview+with+hsca&mid=4D55662CC464643168B34D55662CC464643168B3&FORM=VIRE. See just after the six-minute mark.

  7. James Humes, Warren Commission testimony (2H 354): “We had to do virtually no work with a saw to remove these portions of the skull, they came apart in our hands very easily …” See also James Jenkins, At The Cold Shoulder of History, (2018), pp. 26-27. The pertinent material is quoted in JFKA at pp. 211-212.

  8. If one concludes (as I do) that the so-called Harper fragment was also parietal bone (not from the rear of the head), then the actual span of missing skull (ejected from the top/top right of the president’s head) is even larger. The trapezoidal Harper fragment measured about 2.75 by 2.2 inches. See JFKA, pp. 440-441 (endnote 224).

  9. At The Cold Shoulder of History, (2018), p. 141. Material discussed in JFKA, pp. 209-210.

  10. In the Eye of History, (2015), pp. 376-377. Material is quoted in JFKA at p. 210.

  11. In the Eye of History, (2015), pp. 395, 479. Material is quoted in JFKA at pp. 210, 441 (endnote 225).

  12. ARRB, view #3. Although there were thirty-eight individual pictures taken at the autopsy (Doug Horne, Inside the Assassination Records Review Board – Volume 1, (2009), Illustrations section (Figure 57), many of those black and white and color pictures taken were of the same “view;” there are just seven views corresponding to those many individual pictures. Four of the views were pictures taken of the body (including view #3 – Figure 61) prior to any autopsy manipulations being performed.

  13. “The Converging Medical Case for Conspiracy,” Murder in Dealey Plaza, (2000), p. 181. Material quoted and discussed in JFKA, pp. 258-259. In his review of JFKA, Gary refers to November 1977 HSCA interview notes (7 HSCA 286), indicating that Dr. Jenkins “believes he was … the only one who knew the extent of the head wound” (emphasis added). How could that be if it were Clark and/or (allegedly) Grossman that lifted and inspected the president’s head (according to Grossman or Dulaney)? Which doctor should be relied upon?

  14. CE 387 of the Warren Commission hearings.

  15. ARRB, view #7 (Doug Horne, Inside the Assassination Records Review Board – Volume 1, (2009), Illustrations section (Figure 66).

  16. January 25, 1965, Finck letter to Blumberg and accompanying February 1, 1965, notes, ARRB Medical Exhibit 28, see particularly pp. 327, 332.

  17. See, for example, February 1, 1965, Finck notes to Blumberg, ARRB Medical Exhibit 28, see particularly p. 331: “No EXIT wound is identifiable at this time in the skull …” (emphasis in the original). Finck then relates that it was upon receipt of the late-arriving fragments (including the delta fragment) that provided evidence of a bullet exit. Material quoted and discussed in JFKA at pp. 255-258.

  18. Hear No Evil, (2010), p. 273. Thomas’ comments related to the beveling on the delta fragment.

  19. Gunshot Wounds (3^rd ed.), (2016), pp. 100-101. Material quoted in JFKA at p. 448 (endnote 250).

  20. https://history-matters.com/essays/jfkmed/How5Investigations/How5InvestigationsGotItWrong_6.htm. See footnote 352. Material quoted and discussed in JFKA at pp. 255-258.

  21. February 1, 1965, Finck notes to Blumberg, ARRB Medical Exhibit 28, see particularly p. 331: “I also noticed another scalp wound, possibly of entrance, in the right occipital region … Corresponding to that wound, the skull shows a portion of a crater (emphasis added), the beveling of which is obvious on the internal aspect of the bone; on that basis, I told the prosectors and Admiral Galloway that this occipital wound is a wound of ENTRANCE” (emphasis in the original). Material quoted in JFKA, p. 221.

  22. Finck told Blumberg there were three pictures capturing specific wounds, and on that he is correct. While it would have made sense that a picture of the internal aspect of the skull would have been taken to document the inshoot beveling that Finck said he saw, such a picture is not extant in the official collection. Instead, the controversial “back of the head” view is extant as a third picture view.

  23. Robertson: see for example his review of Tink Thompson’s book Last Second in Dallas at https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-reviews/a-review-of-last-second-in-dallas-by-josiah-thompson; Chesser: see James Jenkins’ book, At The Cold Shoulder of History, (2018), pp. 156-157. Material related to discussion in JFKA at p. 130.

  24. Last Second in Dallas, (2021), pp. 354-356. Material discussed in JFKA at p. 143.

  25. “The Zapruder Film Controversy,” Murder in Dealey Plaza, (2000), p. 343. Mantik apparently believes the lurch we see on the Zapruder film just after Z313 is the effect of film alteration. Material discussed in JFKA, pp. 139-143, 396-397 (endnote 149), 410 (endnote 154).

  26. See slow motion version of the Zapruder film at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zwG3QdPLfw&rco=1. Note that at around Z327, and then the few frames following, Jackie, with her right hand on the president’s back, begins the movement to the trunk of the car. By far it is better to study the slow-motion film than to try to interpret still frames.

  27. Hear No Evil, (2010), p. 717. See, for example, Randy Robertson’s analysis published on the Kennedys and King website, in which Robertson describes a direct impact at 328 on the limousine windshield (“A whole bullet directly struck the windshield frame at 328 …”), allegedly shown by a flare in the windshield. Robertson believes that, without that flare, “there is no convincing visual evidence for an impact at 328…” https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-reviews/a-review-of-last-second-in-dallas-by-josiah-thompson. Material related to discussion in JFKA at p. 142.

  28. FBI Agent Frank O’Neill September 12, 1997, ARRB deposition transcript at p. 74.

  29. See FBI Agent Robert Frazier’s February 22, 1969, testimony at the Clay Shaw trial, https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=1297#relPageId=11.

  30. See David Mantik’s book JFK’s Head Wounds, (2015), pp. 54-61; Mantik’s book The Final Analysis (2024), pp. 219-226.

  31. For example, see Sherry Fiester’s analysis in Enemy of the Truth (2012) (pp. 250-251). Fiester explains that projectile fragmentation creates a certain chaos, such that, “Since the brain is encased by the closed and inflexible structure of the skull, only breaking the skull open can relieve the temporary cavity pressure. The fractured skull may or may not remain intact. If the scalp tears from the force of temporary cavitation, bone fragments may be ejected from the skull. In this event, blood and tissue will forcefully exit from the opening created by the missing bone fragment. If a portion of the scalp adheres to the dislodged bone fragment, a bone avulsion is produced (emphasis added). (Material quoted and discussed in chapter 11 of JFKA.) As such, there is more to the analysis of the “debris field” than an angle of a shot.

  32. The pointed tip bullet at right is a picture adapted from Tink’s book Six Seconds in Dallas, (1967), p.175.

  33. Last Second in Dallas, (2021), pp. 23-26. Material quoted and discussed in JFKA, pp. 117-121, 391-392 (endnote 130).

  34. Hear No Evil, (2010), pp. 434-437. Material quoted in JFKA at p. 302.

  35. Last Second in Dallas, (2021), p. 230.

  36. James Humes Warren Commission testimony, 2H 354-355. Less than half of that bullet’s mass was ever recovered. Whatever happened to most of that bullet’s mass can only be speculated, including perhaps explaining the controversial Tague curb strike. JFKA, pp. 463-464 (endnote 291).

  37. Chapter 18 of Speer’s online book (https://www.patspeer.com/chapter18x-rayspecs ). Material, including personal communication with Speer, quoted in JFKA, pp. 311-312. For example, Speer cites an August 23, 1978, report of Dr. David Davis (HSCA radiology consultant), who reported, “It is not possible to totally explain the metallic fragment pattern that is present from some of the metallic fragments located superiorly in the region of the parietal bone, or at least projecting on the parietal bone, are actually in the scalp.” (7 HSCA 222-225, particularly at 224)

  38. American Handgunner, March/April 1993, p. 106. Material quoted in JFKA at p. 324.

  39. Gunshot Wounds (3^rd ed.), (2016), p. 166. Material quoted and explained in JFKA at pp. 323-324.

  40. HSCA report, pp. 492-493 (comments offered by Representatives Devine and Edgar).

  41. Last Second in Dallas, (2021) p. 339. Material quoted in JFKA, p. 186.

  42. JFK Education Forum, May 3, 2024, post.

  October 2, 2025

• The Wrong Bus Transfer – Part 2

  Did Will Fritz and the Dallas Police create the Marsalis bus transfer story to neutralize the corroborated testimony of Roger Craig seeing Oswald leave Dealey Plaza in a car?

  How Did Oswald Get the Wrong Bus Transfer? – Part 2

  Taking the transfer at face value, it is obvious it was punched for someone disembarking from Line 23, the Lakewood line and not Line 30, the Marsalis line. Which is what the Warren Report would have the reader believe. Officer Dhority gave this undated internal police written account of his activity on November 22, 1963.

  “About 6:00pm, Lt. Wells gave C. W. Brown and myself information that Mr. C. J. McWatters was driving Piedmont Bus and was due at Commerce and Harwood at 6:15 PM. We met Mr. McWatters and carried him to the Detail Room. At 6:30 PM, Mr. McWatters made identification of Oswald as 12 man in four man line up.

  Mr. Mc Watters gave me an affidavit in the Homicide Office and identified the transfer that he had given Oswald positively.

  
  
  The photos above indicate that a Lakewood bus line transfer (right photo) is irrelevant to a southbound Marsalis bus from downtown’s Union Station (left photo).
  

  Brown said in a similar account.

  “At approximately 6:00 pm Lt. T. P. Wells gave my partner, C. N. Dhority, and myself information that the bus driver that picked up Oswald near the scene of the President’s murder was driving the Piedmont bus #50 and would be at the Intersection of Commerce and Harwood at 6:15 pm.”

  The fact that McWatters switched lines and was approached at around 6:15 pm on November 22 by the Dallas police is relevant to unpacking the confusion. It can be deduced in several ways that the transfer DPD presented as evidence of Oswald getting off the Marsalis bus at 12:43 pm on Elm Street had instead been issued hours later when McWatters was driving the 23 Lakewood line.

  Firstly, because that is what, at face value, the transfer states.

  Secondly, McWatters’ schedule, set out in CE358, taken with the FBI route map, shows that when he was to finish his Marsalis 30 run, there is a coincident section of overlap where he would have been able to take on the Lakewood 23 run, which goes past City Hall, Downtown and back. With his Marsalis run being 40-50 minutes late, he would have finished that at approximately 3 pm, and he was then on the Piedmont Line 50 run at City Hall at 6:15 pm.

  Third, when asked by Ball about the lineup when McWatters was taken to identify Oswald, he said that the transfer was for the Lakewood trip.

  Mr. McWATTERS. They brought four men out. In other words, four men under the lights; in other words, they was all—

  Mr. BALL. All the same age?

  McWATTERS. No, sir; they were different ages, different sizes and different heights. And they asked me if I could identify any man in particular there, and I told them that I couldn’t identify any man in particular, but there was one man there that was about the size of the man. Now, I was referring back, after they done showed me this transfer at that time and I knew which trip, that I went through town on at that time, in other words, on the Lakewood trip and just like I recalled, I only put out two transfers and I told them that there was one man in the lineup was about the size and the height and complexion of a man that got on my bus, but as far as positively identifying the man I could not do it.

  Fourth, McWatters’ receipt transfer for the noontime start of his day is number 004451. As McWatters stated above, “I only put out two transfers”. Then he said it again.

  “Mr. McWatters. I only gave two transfers going through town on that trip and that was at the one stop of where I gave the lady and the gentleman that got off the bus, I issued two transfers. But that was the only two transfers that were issued.”

  And,

  “So, I said, “I sure will.” So I gave her a transfer and opened the door and as she was going out the gentleman I had picked up about 2 blocks asked for a transfer and got off at the same place in the middle of the block where the lady did.”

  Roy Milton Jones said that when he got on the bus on Elm near the Capri Theater, he was the only passenger on the bus. Then, when the bus was stopped and held up by the police, about 15 people were on it.

  Transfer 004459 is the eighth issue from that book of transfers. That is not one of only two transfers issued on the bus at the Lamar transfer point at 12:40 pm, for which one should have had number 004453 and the other 004452.

  Fifth, and the most obvious of all. Someone getting off a bus stuck in traffic isn’t going to need a transfer if their objective is to get a cab.

  I. DISCREPANCY ON TIME

  A Globe transfer can’t be altered to make it valid for longer. But a ticket can be tampered with to an earlier time by cutting off some of it. If – as the evidence suggests – DPD obtained a transfer cut for later in the afternoon from McWatters, by then driving a Line 23 bus, a 1:00 pm position could be achieved by cutting everything else off to leave a stub, just like 004459.

  For the CE381–a transfer to fit with the Commission’s timeline–Oswald would have needed to get off the bus before 12:45 pm. And it should have been punched at 12:45 pm with a 15-minute validity from then. That anomaly caused Gerald Ford to ask this.

  Representative Ford. It is 10:25 now. How would you cut it right now?

  Mr. McWATTERS. At 10:25.

  Representative Ford. Why don’t you cut one?

  Mr. McWATTERS. I have a regular cutter, you see; let’s see if he can get something that would-in other words, 10:25, I will just cut it, in other words, cut across there, and cut it, in other words, at 10:30, in other words, it would show at 10:30.

  That answer rules out cutting for 1:00 pm if someone had gotten off before 12:45 pm. Ball picked up on that, too.

  Mr. Ball. … Now, I show you this document which is the bus schedule of Marsalis-Ramona-Elwood-Munger, and it shows you leave St. Paul at 12:36 and you arrive at Lamar 12:40. The bus transfers are punched you told me for 1 o’clock. We have a transfer here that you have seen or we will show you in a few minutes as soon as it gets here, which has a punch mark of 1 o’clock. You told Senator Cooper that you usually punched within 15 minutes of the time you reached the transfer points?

  Mr. McWatters. Yes.

  Mr. Ball. If that is the case, what——

  Mr. McWatters. You mean why did I have it punched at 1 o’clock?

  Mr. Ball. Yes.

  Mr. McWatters. Because I punch it p.m. In other words, I have a punch, I am going to Lakewood, I mean I am going Marsalis and I am going back Lakewood, so I just take me two books of transfers. Instead of punching one of them a.m. and one p.m. I just punched them p.m.

  Mr. Ball. Do you punch within 15 minutes of the time you reach the transfer points?

  Mr. McWatters. That is the way that the transfers are supposed to be cut.

  Further:

  Representative Ford. This is the practice you have used for 2 years approximately?

  Mr. McWatters. That is right, when I worked that run, in other words, when I am going one way at 1 o’clock, coming back from the other end of the line I set them at 2. I am back in there at, my next trip I am back in there at Lamar Street, I think it is 1:38 but I always just set them at 2 o’clock.

  Once again, McWatters slipped out of Lakewood. But he still did not explain why a 12:40 pm arrival would be cut to 1:00 pm rather than 12:45 pm.

  II. SORTING IT ALL OUT

  From the evidence, Oswald was not identified by McWatters or Milton Jones on the Marsalis bus. And the transfer was not issued on that run, but after 2:30 pm, when McWatters was driving the Lakewood 23 run.

  Planting a transfer on Oswald with a line 23 Lakewood transfer appears to have been a blunder, caused by McWatters changing lines. But from the time of his 22 November affidavit, McWatters’ transfer number 004459 set out in the affidavit – for the wrong line – was locked in as evidence.

  The full text of that affidavit is.

  “Today, November 22, 1963 about 12:40p.m. I was driving Marsalis Bus No. 1213. I picked up a man on the lower end of town on Elm around Houston. I went on out Marsalis and picked up a woman. I asked her if she knew the President had been shot and she thought I was kidding. I told her if she did not believe me to ask the man behind her that he had told me the President was shot in the temple. This man was grinning and never did say anything. The woman said that it was not a grinning matter. I don’t remember where I let this man off. This man looks like the #2 man I saw in a line-up tonight. The transfer #004459 is a transfer from my bus with my punch mark.”

  To summarize McWatters’ pressure points, he:

  • retracted in front of the Commission itself his “positive” ID of Oswald.
  • could not give a credible reason why someone on the Marsalis 30 Line would punch Lakewood 23.
  • did not refer to the police getting on the bus on Elm Street.
  • other than indirectly, via the Dallas Morning News, did not refer to the delay on Elm being 40-50 minutes.
  • indirectly, slipped out in his testimony that other buses were being let through when he was held up on Elm.
  • could not give a credible reason why a transfer would be cut for 1:00 pm.
  • the transfer serial number is the eighth from the book, when one issued at the requisite time on Elm would have been first or second.
  • was held at the police department until 1am.

People have long speculated why Oswald would board a Marsalis bus if he was heading to 1026 N Beckley, rather than a Beckley bus, one of which was right behind and stopped right outside 1026. And where he was last seen by his landlady after leaving his room, after the assassination.

If Oswald was being framed for being on a bus to return home, then a Beckley bus might seem the obvious choice for a frame. But Oswald used the Beckley bus to get to work for 5 weeks prior. There would be the risk that a regular driver would know the real Oswald and know that he was not on his bus, especially as there was a stop right outside 1026 N. Beckley.

My assumption, based on the evidence, is that prior to November 22, 1963, the script was that Oswald was to be framed as being on a bus on the Marsalis 30 line. By the afternoon of November 22, Fritz knew that, and that is why Roger Craig’s competing story was so inconvenient and needed to be rapidly rebutted.

My prior articles for this site have implicated Sgt Gerry Hill, Sgt Davis, and Reserve Sgt. Croy, in pre-planned assassination assistance, with Captain Westbrook in overall command. I cannot assume that should taint all other cops involved in the aftermath. However, the events after Oswald’s arrest demonstrate something very wrong with Fritz’s behavior. Dallas County District Attorney Henry Wade stated this to the Commission, at Volume V, regarding Captain Fritz:

“But Fritz runs a kind of a one-man operation there where nobody else knows what he is doing. Even me, for instance, he is reluctant to tell me, either, but I don’t mean that disparagingly. I will say Captain Fritz is about as good a man at solving a crime as I ever saw, to find out who did it but he is poorest in the getting evidence that I know, and I am more interested in getting evidence, and there is where our major conflict comes in.”

Fritz was the Detective in charge of the Venice Parker murder case. Tommy Lee Walker was an African American executed in 1956 for the murder. It was later found to be a miscarriage of justice involving a forced confession. Wade had been the prosecutor.

My prior articles also set out my assumption that Oswald was supposed to have been killed at the Texas Theater. Had Oswald been killed at the Texas Theatre, then Craig would not have had the opportunity to see him in Fritz’s office. A transfer was needed as the pressure was on to give some substance to the bus side of the storyline.

An evidence-planting cop – getting “evidence” for Fritz – knowing he was looking for McWatters, might assume he was still on the same bus route, and got a transfer. Hence, McWatters was traced via the bus company. But by 6:15 pm, McWatters had twice switched lines and a transfer from a Lakewood 23 bus – the eighth he’d issued that day – was punched for the wrong line for the purpose of framing Oswald. A confusion possibly enhanced by the fact that there is a similar-sounding Lake Cliff in Oak Cliff on the Marsalis route. With a frame-up happening and with so many moving parts, it is necessary to look at the whole picture.

If the Marsalis bus McWatters was driving was not relevant at all, then why was it important to find McWatters? Things point towards McWatters’ bus being relevant because there was something to hide regarding it being singled out and boarded by the police and held up for 40-50 minutes.

It was that bus I posited that Officer Tippit was waiting for at Gloco on the south end of the Houston Street viaduct to assist a decoy on that bus. (The Beckley bus used the Commerce St Viaduct). In my other articles, I set out a scenario of Tippit ruining the plans and the impromptu killing of him that ensued, which led to deviations from the plan that resulted in an improvised planting of defective evidence. Tippit’s death was the first of several ‘cleanup’ murders.

If the departure from the bus of a person impersonating Oswald was not scripted, then an outcome of that would be that McWatters would have to be pressured not to mention how the bus was stopped by police within minutes of Kennedy’s assassination. By the time he testified to the Commission, McWatters did refer to a man and woman getting off his bus when held up in traffic on Elm.

Mr. MCWATTERS. Well, I left there that day on time because coming into town that day, I guess everybody done went to, down to, see the parade, I didn’t have over four or five passengers coming into downtown. and that was at the one stop of where I gave the lady and the gentleman that got off the bus, I issued two transfers. But that was the only two transfers that were issued.

Mr. BALL. What did the man look like who knocked on your door and got on your bus?

Mr. MCWATTERS. Well, I didn’t pay any particular attention to him. He was to me just dressed in what I would call work clothes, just some type of little old jacket on, and I didn’t pay any particular attention to the man when he got on.

And, the FBI said this of Milton Jones.

JONES advised that the bus proceeded in the direction of Houston Street and, approximately four blocks before Houston Street, was completely stopped by traffic which was backed up in this area. He recalled that at this time a policeman notified the driver the President had been shot and he told the driver no one was to leave the bus until police officers had talked to each passenger. JONES estimated that there were about fifteen people on the bus at this time and two police officers boarded the bus and checked each passenger to see if any were carrying firearms.

JONES advised that before the bus was stopped the driver made his last passenger pickup approximately six blocks before Houston Street, that one was a blonde-haired woman and the other was a dark-haired man. He said the man sat in the seat directly behind him and the woman occupied the seat further to the rear of the bus. JONES advised that when the bus was stopped by traffic, and prior to the appearance of the police officers, the woman left the bus by the rear door and the man who was sitting behind him left the bus by the front door while it was held up in the middle of the block. JONES stated he did not observe this man closely since he sat behind him in the bus, but, on the following Monday when he caught the same bus going home from school with the same driver, the driver told him he thought the man might have been LEE HARVEY OSWALD.

JONES said that after the driver mentioned this, and from his recollection of OSWALD’s picture as it appeared on television and in the newspapers, he thought it was possible it could have been OSWALD. He emphasized, however, that he did not have a good view of this man at any time and could not positively identify him as being identical with LEE HARVEY OSWALD. He said he was inclined to think it might have been OSWALD only because the bus driver told him so.

So, digesting all of that. On November 22 and 23 (Friday and Saturday), McWatters had not identified Oswald in the line-up as the person who got on and then off in Elm, but misidentified Milton Jones, who rode to near the end of the line.

But by March 1964, McWatters for the Commission and Milton Jones for the FBI did give an indistinct description of a dark-haired man who had gotten off the bus on Elm near Lamar.

A question arises whether Mary Bledsoe was on that same bus.

Both Bledsoe and McWatters referred to a man stopping the bus to tell the driver the President had been shot. Milton Jones said the man was a policeman. She also said the bus she was on was stuck, so she got onto the one behind. That fits with Milton Jones’ description of a delay and McWatters saying so, indirectly, as he said other buses were let through.

III. THE LINE-UPS

From my assumptions above, the bus transfer would have had to have been introduced as evidence sometime between approximately 3 pm and 6:30 pm. When and how?

The ‘fillers’ from one of the lineups

There were three line-ups (WC Vol XXIV, p. 247) that Oswald was in on November 22. The first at 4:35 pm for Helen Markham from the Tippit murder scene. The second, around 6:30 pm, which included McWatters, Guinyard and Callaway—the last two witnesses were from the Tippit scene. The third, at 7:50 pm, were with Barbara and Virginia Davis. Detective Simms was purported to have found the transfer just before the first line-up.

From what McWatters said. The line-ups weren’t set up to achieve a positive identification. But instead, who looked the most similar? The above photograph of fillers, with two wearing suits and ties, discredits that approach.

The transfer was supposedly found in Oswald’s shirt chest pocket. But FBI agent James Bookhout, on November 23, 1963, stated that Oswald had changed his shirt:  “…that after arriving at his apartment, he changed his shirt and trousers, because they were dirty. He described his dirty clothes as being a reddish colored, long-sleeved shirt with a button-down collar and gray colored trousers”. 

If McWatters wasn’t found until 6:15 pm, then one possibility is that he punched 004459 after then, and it was not planted on Oswald until after 6:15 pm. However, by then, he was driving a Piedmont 50 bus, and by the testimonies of Dhority and McWatters, he wasn’t asked to look at the transfer until after he had “identified” Oswald in the 6:30 pm lineup.

That would explain how the McWatters situation could get out of hand if the transfer was planted before 4:35 pm, and the problem with it only emerged later. Suggesting that someone else had taken a transfer from McWatters before 4:35 pm, but after 3:00 pm, posing as a normal passenger on the Lakewood line.

The testimony of Detective Simms, who said he found the ticket on Oswald at 4:05 pm, needs to be read to get the flavor of it. The first part is clear and decisive, where he described being allocated duties at the Trade Mart for Kennedy’s luncheon speech; he then went to the Depository and then to City Hall as Oswald arrived for interrogation.

Oswald was kept in Fritz’s office rather than the neighboring interrogation room from 2:20 pm to 4:35 pm. Simms consistently pleaded a memory block of that interrogation. But Simms’ memory wasn’t lacking for the three line-ups and for the arrival of Judge Johnson for charging Oswald for the murder of Tippit.

Simms was evasive as to whether he looked at the transfer for dates and time. He just said he signed it. Ball asked Simms if he had taken contemporaneous notes, given that he had put specific details in the undated memorandum. But all he would say was that the memorandum was created in the week after Jack Ruby shot Oswald. It reads as if he either wasn’t there to observe anything or he was there but didn’t want to perjure himself by saying what he knew was untrue.

Conclusion

The Commission’s final report (Chapter 4) stated.

“When Oswald was apprehended, a bus transfer marked for the Lakewood-Marsalis route was found in his shirt pocket”

That is patently untrue. The transfer is marked for the Line 23 Lakewood (and back to Lakewood) route. To have been the Lakewood-Marsalis route, it would have had to have been marked 30 Marsalis.

If it is accepted that what Roger Craig saw was Oswald cooperating – unknowingly – in a move in which Oswald was being set up, then it is apparent there would have had to have been a decoy operation to give a counter account of Oswald’s movements.

Something Fritz was aware of by mid-afternoon of November 22, 1964.

Click here to read part 1.