THE CRIME SCENE

"We don't have any proof that Oswald fired the rifle, and never did. Nobody's yet been able to put him in that building with a gun in his hand."

— Jesse Curry Chief of Police Dallas, Texas

INTRODUCTION

Among the estimated 400 people who were in Dealey Plaza at the time of the assassination, eleven reported seeing a gunman, or a gun protruding from, a window on the upper floor of a building on the northeast corner of the plaza at or near the time of the shooting. The Texas School Book Depository was a seven story warehouse at the corner of Elm and Houston streets. The "grassy knoll" at the northwest corner of the plaza was not included in the Dallas police investigation although some witnesses reported seeing suspicious individuals behind the fence atop the knoll. It was discovered only much later that a majority of the Warren Commission's witnesses thought that gunfire had come from the knoll.

The primary crime scene investigated by the Dallas police was the sixth floor of the book depository. Police discovered a secluded perch next to the southeast corner window of the sixth floor; a shooters blind which has come to be known as the "sniper's nest." Within minutes of the assassination police inspector Herbert J. Sawyer had set up a command post at the entrance to the building, established radio contact with police headquarters, and had begun coordinating interviews with witnesses. At 12:44 p.m. Sawyer radioed a report of an eyewitness description of a suspect in the shooting. The description was for a white male about 30 years old, 5 feet-10 inches in height, about 165 pounds in weight, and last seen carrying a .30-30 rifle. The first Secret Service agent on the scene, Forrest Sorrells, arrived shortly after one o'clock and began cooperating with police in the interview of witnesses. By this time the book depository was sealed off and a search of the premises was underway. By shortly after 1:00 p.m., Dallas County Sheriff's Deputies had discovered the alleged murder weapon and expended cartridges on the sixth floor of the book depository. At approximately 1:15 p.m. Captain Will Fritz, Chief of the Homicide Bureau, arrived on the sixth floor and was followed minutes later by Lieutenant Carl Day of the Dallas police crime scene unit. Lieutenant Day and his assistants photographed the scene, dusted for prints, and took custody of the weapon and the other evidentiary materials. The latter included spent rifle cartridge cases, a paper wrapper in the form of a gun case, book cartons, and, what may be the most revealing evidence, the remnants of a chicken dinner. These evidentiary materials and supporting testimony are the crime scene items that were alleged to link the suspect, Lee Harvey Oswald, to the assassination. Ballistic tests of the weapon and fingerprint evidence from these items are discussed in separate chapters.

Lee Harvey Oswald was taken into custody at approximately 1:50 p.m. that afternoon in connection with the murder of a Dallas policeman about four miles from Dealey Plaza. He quickly came under suspicion as the President's assassin when it was realized that he was an employee of the book depository where the rifle was found. Items on Oswald's person would also form evidence linking him to the assassination including his burgundy plaid shirt, a bus transfer in his pocket, and a false ID card found in his wallet. Over the weekend there would be a search of a private residence in Irving Texas, the home of Mrs. Ruth Paine, where Oswald's wife and young children were living. This search would turn up various incriminating items including letters, photographs and the blanket in which Oswald had wrapped his rifle.

The new President, Lyndon B. Johnson, requested that the FBI provide assistance with the investigation and by agreement with Dallas Police Chief Jesse Curry, much, but not all of the crime scene evidence was turned over to the FBI at around midnight. Special Agent Vincent J. Drain personally carried the materials to Washington D.C., arriving at the FBI's laboratories in the early morning hours of Saturday, the 23rd of November. The FBI's forensic specialists began processing the evidence immediately.

But not all of the evidence was turned over to the FBI. One of the uglier truths that the Warren Commission failed to reveal to the public is that virtually all of the physical evidence in this case was compromised by Dallas law enforcement authorities. The death of Lee Harvey Oswald at the hands of Jack Ruby precluded a trial that might have determined his guilt or innocence. Without the prospect of a trial, the evidence in the case devolved to the status of historical artifact and souvenir, rather than exhibits to be produced in a legal hearing. Much of it quickly disappeared. This included not just personal items confiscated from Lee Harvey Oswald, but crime scene materials as well. When the Warren Commission began its probe, FBI agents were sent scurrying to recover these souvenirs from the private homes, desk drawers and back pockets of the Dallas cops. Consequently, a proper chain of possession, as would be required in a court of law, was not maintained for most of the evidence in this case. Not only did the Warren Commission fail to acknowledge the dubious provenance of some of the evidence, it accepted and promoted evidence it knew to be false when it suited its purpose.

Nonetheless, for the purposes of this account, the evidence is assumed to be authentic except where compelling evidence indicates otherwise. The authenticity issues pertaining to specific items will be discussed where they arise in the text. Obviously it is facile to discard evidence simply because it fails to fit one's preconception of events. Suffice it to say that the authenticity of the evidence is a fundamental issue and that in many instances suspicions are unresolved. Perhaps worse, important and authentic evidence was discarded. For example, out of dismay and perhaps post-traumatic stress, bewildered Secret Service agents attempted to clean the blood from the interior of the limousine while it was parked outside Parkland Hospital. Thus, "the crime scene" was disturbed before it could be studied by forensic experts. The pattern of wound splatter can provide evidence relative to the direction of fire. The car was flown back that evening to Washington D.C. and examined by Secret Service and FBI agents who recovered bone and bullet fragments from the car's interior. But soon afterwards the Secret Service dismantled the car in the process of rebuilding it to new security specifications before forensic examinations could be completed, and as a consequence, questions about damage from bullet strikes remain unanswered. The evidence reviewed in this chapter is critical for establishing context for the scientific analysis of evidence treated in succeeding chapters. The handling and official representation of the crime scene evidence is also of fundamental importance for establishing the identity of the assassin(s), the competence of Dallas Police detectives, the thoroughness of the FBI investigation, and the veracity of the Warren Report. With the exception of the firearms and fingerprint evidence which are dealt with in succeeding chapters, the evidence in this chapter outlines the Warren Commission's case against Lee Harvey Oswald. A summary of this case is given here in order to place the analyses of the evidence in context.

The Warren Commission obtained statements from ten eyewitnesses who had seen a man with a rifle in, or a rifle protruding from, the southeast corner window of the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. An eleventh witness saw the gunman on the same floor but at a different window somewhat earlier than the others. Three of the witnesses actually saw the man fire the rifle, and six were able to give at least a partial description of the gunman. Although none of the witnesses could make a positive identification of Lee Harvey Oswald as this gunman, their descriptions generally matched the physical characteristics of Lee Harvey Oswald; that is, of a young white male, slender to medium build, with dark hair. After attending a line-up, one of these witnesses, a construction worker named Howard Brennan, told the FBI that Oswald closely resembled the man he saw firing a gun from the sixth floor of the book depository and testified to the Warren Commission that he believed that they were one and the same man.

The forensic evidence in the case is described in chapter four of the Warren Report and summarized here. Sheriff's deputies found three expended rifle cartridges behind a shield of boxes on the floor next to the southeast corner window where the witnesses had seen the shooter. Later, on the same floor near the stairs, a 6.5 mm Mannlicher-Carcano rifle was found hidden among and below some book cartons. The three expended cartridges were determined by firearms experts to have been fired from this rifle, to the exclusion of all other weapons. A nearly whole bullet, and fragments representing a second bullet, were recovered from the shooting and were conclusively matched to this same rifle. Lee Harvey Oswald's palm-print was found on this rifle. Textile fibers trapped between the butt plate and stock of the rifle matched fibers from the burgundy plaid shirt worn by Oswald when he was arrested one hour and twenty minutes after the shooting. Several eyewitnesses recalled that Oswald was wearing the same burgundy plaid shirt at work that day. Their testimony was corroborated by the presence of a bus transfer in the pocket of this same shirt dated November 22nd and bearing the individual punch-mark of Cecil McWatters, city bus driver of the Lakewood-Marsalis route. Mary Bledsoe, a woman aboard the same downtown bus, recognized Oswald when he boarded approximately ten minutes after the assassination. Bledsoe had been Oswald's landlady the previous October. She identified the burgundy plaid shirt by a hole torn in the elbow.

A trace run on the serial number of the rifle, C-2766, led federal investigators to Klein's mail order house in Chicago which had shipped the gun to Dallas post office box 2915 rented to Lee Harvey Oswald. The gun had been purchased with a money order in the name of "A. Hidell." Oswald's billfold contained a forged identification card with his own photograph but in the name of "Alec James Hidell." The possession of a bogus ID card and the purchase of the weapon using an assumed name were evidence of wrongful intent. Hand-writing experts concurred that the writing on the money order was that of Lee Harvey Oswald.

The night before the assassination Oswald had gone to the Irving residence of Mrs. Ruth Paine where his wife and children were staying. After Oswald's arrest, detectives went to the Paine house in search of physical evidence that might hold clues to Oswald's motives and associations. Marina Oswald was asked if her husband owned a rifle. Detective Gus Rose recalled that although Marina spoke no English, she was cooperative.

"She pointed to the blanket and said something in Russian and Ruth Paine was standing right there beside her and she interpreted for me — she said, "that's where her husband's rifle is."

"It was sort of rolled up, but it was flattened out from laying down and tied near the middle, I would say with a cord, and so I went and picked the blanket up, but it was empty, — it didn't have the rifle in it."

Two witnesses testified that Oswald carried a brown-paper package to work that morning. A long brown paper wrapper with Oswald's fingerprints was found next to the sniper's nest window on the sixth floor. Fibers on the wrapper matched fibers from the blanket in Paine's garage. Also at that window were cartons stacked in a configuration suggesting a gun-rest and another box which could have been used by someone sitting while aiming the rifle out of the window. Lee Harvey Oswald's palm prints were found on two of these boxes.

When questioned by the Dallas Police, Oswald claimed that he had been eating lunch with fellow employees during the assassination, but neither these employees nor anyone else who worked in the book depository could recall seeing Oswald anywhere during the lunch hour. The last persons to see Oswald before the assassination had seen him on the sixth floor as they left to go to lunch.

In the absence of any credible evidence of accomplices, Earl Warren declared that, had the suspect lived to stand trial, "... the case against Oswald could have been tried in two or three days with little likelihood of any but one result."

Asked if he was sure he had the right man, Captain Will Fritz, the Dallas Police officer in charge of the investigation asserted that the case was "cinched." The prosector who would have tried Oswald, Dallas District Attorney Henry Wade stated,

"I would say without any doubt he's the killer — the law says beyond a reasonable doubt and to a moral certainty which I — there's no question that he was the killer of President Kennedy."

For his part, Lee Harvey Oswald told reporters that he was a "patsy" and that the truth about the "conspiracy" would come out in his trial. Thanks to Jack Ruby, such trial never occurred.

Nearly all of the Warren Commission's assertions are disputed. The purpose of this chapter is to present the evidence and to clarify the basis for these disputes, particularly with respect to the items found at the crime scene on the sixth floor of the book depository, the so-called "sniper's nest." The crime scene evidence was of paramount importance in the media incrimination of Lee Harvey Oswald in the days and weeks immediately following the assassination. In light of the contradictory assertions among the Dallas authorities, specifically, those of Police Chief Jesse Curry as opposed to those of District Attorney Henry Wade, it is essential that this evidence be given close scrutiny. The available evidence, outlined in this chapter, suggests that Oswald may not have been the sixth floor gunman — "available" being the operational word here because it appears that some evidence has been suppressed, and it seems unlikely that such evidence would have been withheld by the authorities if it were incriminating of Lee Harvey Oswald.

Three individuals played a key role in the handling of the evidence found in the Book Depository: Captain Will Fritz, the chief of the homicide bureau; Lieutenant Carl Day, who led the crime scene unit; and Robert Studebaker, Day's assistant. Although he had no formal training and only three weeks on the job, Studebaker was assigned to essential chores which included photographing the crime scene. Fritz was the officer in charge of the Dallas Police investigation of Kennedy's murder. Immediately following the publication of the Warren Report the Dallas Police Department sealed their records and issued orders prohibiting officers from discussing the assassination with outsiders. Subsequently, a largely fanciful account of the police investigation, written with the cooperation of the Dallas Police Department, a book entitled Investigation of a Homicide (Bonner 1969), concluded that the police did, "A damn good job." The evidence presented in this and succeeding chapters will suggest otherwise.

THE BURGUNDY PLAID SHIRT

Tiny fibers wedged into a narrow crevice between the stock and the butt-plate of the rifle found hidden on the sixth floor were found to match fibers of the plaid shirt worn by Lee Harvey Oswald at the time of his arrest (Fig. 1.1). The FBI's textile expert, Paul Stombaugh, could not say that the fibers from the butt-plate matched Oswald's store-bought shirt to the exclusion of all other shirts by the same manufacturer; nor could he say how long they might have been trapped in the butt plate of the rifle. And, although the match to these fibers strengthened the evidence linking Oswald to the murder weapon, it also exposed the weakness of the case against Oswald as the shooter. None of the eyewitnesses described the shooter as wearing a dark or plaid shirt.

The Warren Report described the eyewitness testimony against Oswald as "probative," meaning "highly probable" even though none were able to pick Oswald out of a lineup.

"Their testimony is of probative value, however, because their limited description is consistent with that of the man who has been found by the Commission, based on other evidence, to have fired the shots from the window."

On the contrary, the eyewitness accounts were not consistent with the appearance of the Commission's suspect. Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested wearing black slacks and the dark "burgundy-plaid" shirt. Yet all of the Dealey Plaza witnesses cited by the Warren Commission uniformly described the sixth floor shooter as a man wearing light colored clothing. Carolyn Walther said the man, "was wearing a white shirt." Arnold Rowland testified that, "He had on a light shirt, a very light-colored shirt, white or a light blue or a color such as that." Howard Brennan told the FBI the man was dressed in, "light color clothes in the khaki line." Ronald Fischer told the Dallas Police that the man was wearing an open-neck shirt, "It was light in color; probably white ..." Robert Edwards testified that the shooter was wearing a "Light colored shirt, short sleeve and open neck." No eyewitness described the suspect as wearing dark colored clothing, as was Lee Harvey Oswald.