Category: John Fitzgerald Kennedy

It is worth noting that in the decades that followed the release of the HSCA report, other medical experts such as neuropathologist Dr. Joseph Riley and forensic pathologist Dr. Peter Cummings have viewed the autopsy materials and agreed with the original entry location proposed by the autopsy surgeons. On the other hand, the three forensic specialists who viewed the photographs and X-rays on behalf of the ARRB could find no entry hole anywhere in the rear of the head. (Doug Horne, Inside the ARRB, pgs. 584-586) Additionally, in his fine book, Hear No Evil: Social Constructivism & the Forensic Evidence in the Kennedy Assassination, Dr. Donald Thomas makes the argument that Humes and Boswell had not found a through-and-through entry hole in the skull but had, in fact, found a semi-circular, bevelled notch on the margins of the large defect that they had mistakenly interpreted as a portion of a wound of entrance. Whichever of these arguments about the rear entry wound is correct, the fact remains that the trail of bullet fragments in the top of the head could most likely not have been the result of a bullet entering the rear since the pattern of their dispersal indicates the reverse.

Front to Back

When a bullet disintegrates on striking a skull, the smaller and more dust-like fragments are found closer to the point of entrance whereas the larger particles are found closer to the exit. This is because the larger fragments, having greater mass, have greater momentum and are carried further away from the point of entry. It can be clearly seen in JFK’s post-mortem X-rays that the smallest metallic fragments are located in the right temple area and the largest are found in the top rear of the skull. Therefore, the bullet appears to have been travelling from front to back.

This evidence of a frontal shot not only further validates the acoustics evidence and the witnesses who heard a shot from the grassy knoll, but it also fits well with the President’s reaction as shown on the Zapruder film. Few observers can fail to be struck by the way Kennedy’s head is slammed backwards by the fatal shot. Celebrated American novelist Don DeLillo once commented on the “confusion and horror” that result from viewing this portion of the film, asking, “Are you the willing victim of some enormous lie of the state―a lie, a wish, a dream? Or did the shot simply come from the front, as every cell in your body tells you it did?” (Thompson, Last Second in Dallas, p. 353) Indeed, the film is so persuasive in this regard that its first showing on national television in 1975 led directly to the formation of the House Select Committee on Assassinations.

Alvarez and Sturdivan Hijinks

Warren Commission defenders like Posner, of course, maintain that JFK’s backward motion means nothing. He quotes HSCA forensic pathology panel chairman Dr. Michael Baden as stating that “People have no conception of how real life works with bullet wounds. It’s not like Hollywood, where someone gets shot and falls over backwards. Reactions are different on each shot and on each person.” (p. 315) Posner then offers two theories to explain away the backward motion: the “jet effect” and the “neuromuscular spasm.” Neither of these theories is viable in 2023.

The “jet effect” was the brainchild of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Luis Alverez who had previously undertaken a “jiggle analysis” of the Zapruder film and suggested that there were three episodes of blurring on the film, demonstrating that the Warren Commission was correct in saying only three shots had been fired. Like Ramsey Clark, Alvarez had been disturbed enough by what he saw in Six Seconds in Dallas that he set out to find a “real explanation” for the backward movement of Kennedy’s head. In the end, what Alvarez offered was the hypothesis that the explosive exiting of blood and brain matter from the right side of JFK’s skull had thrust it in the opposite direction. As Posner tells it, Alvarez established [the jet effect] both through physical experiments that recreated the head shot and extensive laboratory calculations.” (p. 316) The problem, as Josiah Thompson discovered decades later, was that Alvarez had rigged his tests and hidden important aspects of his results.

Seven years after first seeing Thompson’s book, Alvarez reported on an experiment he had conducted by firing rifle bullets into melons, stating that six out of seven of them had moved back towards the shooter as a result of the “jet effect,” thus validating his theory. Yet, as Thompson discovered when he got his hands on the raw data from Alvarez’s shooting tests, Alvarez had failed to disclose the fact that there had been two earlier rounds of shooting which had achieved very different results. During those earlier firings, Alvarez had used larger, heavier melons which apparently did not behave the way he wanted them to. So, in later tests, he reduced their size by half and jacked up the velocity of his bullets to 3000 feet per second. Alvarez had also fired at a variety of other objects besides melons. There were coconuts filled with jello which were blown 39 feet forward; a plastic jug of water which went 6 feet downrange; and 5 rubber balls filled with gelatin; all of which were blown away from the rifle. It was not until he settled on melons that weighed half as much as a human head and increased the velocity of the rifle by more than 1,000 feet per second above that of the Mannlicher Carcano rifle that Alvarez finally achieved the desired effect (see Thompson’s presentation at the Passing the Torch symposium in 2013 on YouTube.) Whilst Alvarez may have succeeded in demonstrating the already established existence of the “jet effect,” he had in no way shown it to be relevant to the motion of President Kennedy’s head.

Larry Sturdivan, who writes that “The jet effect, though real, is not enough to throw the president’s body into the back of the car,” (Sturdivan, p. 164). He advanced instead the other hypothesis that Posner cites: the neuromuscular reaction theory. In a nutshell, Sturdivan postulates that the disruption to Kennedy’s brain “caused a massive amount of nerve stimulation to go down his spine. Every nerve in his body was stimulated…since the back muscles are stronger than the abdominal muscles, that meant that Kennedy arched dramatically backwards.” (NOVA Cold Case: JFK, PBS broadcast in 2013) Yet Sturdivan’s postulate, which he based on what he observed from shooting experiments conducted on anesthetised goats, suffers from an anomalous understanding of human anatomy.

As Dr. Thomas writes, “In any normal person the antagonistic muscles of the limbs are balanced, and regardless of the relative size of the muscles, the musculature is arranged to move the limbs upward, outward, and forward. Backward extension of the limbs is unnatural and awkward; certainly not reflexive. Likewise, the largest muscle in the back, the ‘erector spinae’, functions exactly as its name implies, keeping the spinal column straight and upright. Neither the erector spinae, or any other muscles in the back are capable of causing a backward lunge of the body by their contraction.” (Thomas, p. 341) Additionally, the type of reaction Sturdivan posits is simply not in keeping with what we see on the Zapruder film. President Kennedy’s movement did not begin with the arching of his back. Rather, as the ITEK corporation noted following extensive slow motion study of the Zapruder film, his head snapped backwards first, “then his whole body followed the backward movement.” (ITEK report, p. 64)

In summary, Posner cites two theories dreamed up by two different scientists who do not even agree with one another. One of those was a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who rigged his experiments and cherrypicked his results. The other was a ballistics specialist who confused the reactions of goats with those of human beings and, in so doing, offered a theory that was anatomically impossible―on top of being contradicted by JFK’s actual reaction as seen on the Zapruder film. It can be confidently stated, then, that neither hypothesis truly explains why Kennedy was sent hurtling backwards and leftwards by the bullet that struck his skull. There is one straight forward explanation, however, that does not rely on rigged shooting experiments or misunderstanding of human physiology. Namely, a shot from the grassy knoll.

Posner and the Magic Bullet

The number and direction of bullets striking President Kennedy’s head will likely be debated ad nauseum unless and until some new or definitive evidence emerges. But there is one debate related to the shooting that should have ended decades ago because there really is no serious discussion to be had. Namely, the debate over The Single Bullet Theory―or “Magic Bullet Theory” as it was aptly dubbed by the first-generation critics of the Warren Report. The SBT is a scientific absurdity that was fabricated solely to prop up the Warren Commission’s faulty lone gunman conclusion and was almost entirely debunked within two years of publication of the Commission’s report. The only reason it continues to be defended to this day is because it is, as Cyril Wecht has repeatedly stated, the “sine qua non” of the official story. It is the keystone of the government’s central conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. Commission lawyer Norman Redlich once candidly admitted to author Edward Epstein that “To say that they [President Kennedy and Governor Connally] were hit by separate bullets, is synonymous with saying that there were two assassins.” (Epstein, Inquest, p. 38) Indeed, as critics and researchers have maintained ever since the publication of the Warren Report, without the SBT there could not have been a single gunman whether it was Oswald or anybody else. It is not surprising, therefore, that Posner spends virtually an entire chapter trying to lend the SBT a legitimacy it does not deserve.

The premise of the SBT is that a bullet, dubbed Commission Exhibit (CE) 399, entered the back of JFK’s neck heading downwards and leftwards and exited his throat just below the Adam’s apple, hitting no boney structures along the way. It then went on to strike Governor Connally in the back of his right armpit, sailed along his fifth rib, smashing four inches of it, before exiting his chest below the right nipple. It pulverized the radius of Connally’s right wrist then entered his left thigh just above the knee, depositing a fragment on the femur, before miraculously popping back out to be found in near-pristine condition on an unattended stretcher in Parkland Hospital. The problems with this outlandish hypothesis are myriad and begin at the very start of its imaginary journey.

As noted earlier in this review, neither CE399 nor any other bullet could have entered the back of Kennedy’s neck and ranged downward out of his throatbecause there was no bullet wound anywhere in the posterior neck. The rear entrance wound was in the President’s upper back, at a point that was anatomically lower than the wound in his throat. The HSCA forensic pathology panel made clear that, given the true location of the back wound, the only way a downward trajectory to the throat would have been possible was if JFK had been leaning drastically forward at the instant he was hit, which is something that is not seen in the Zapruder film. The absolute necessity of the forward lean was confirmed in 1998 during experiments conducted in Dealey Plaza using precision test lasers.

Furthermore, when the Discovery Channel attempted to simulate the SBT by shooting at replica human torsos from a crane set at the height of the sixth-floor window, it wound up demonstrating that a bullet striking the upper back of an upright-seated individual and continuing on a downward trajectory of 20 degrees, would―as common-sense dictates―exit not through the throat but through the chest.

And as if this was not enough by itself to invalidate the SBT, the lateral trajectory through the torso is equally destructive. Dr. John Nichols, a pathology professor to whom Posner makes only a single passing reference, conducted extensive tests with Carcano ammunition and human cadavers and concluded in 1973 that a straight-line from the back wound to the alleged exit in the throat had to pass directly through the hard bone of the spine. (The Practitioner, p. 631-632, November, 1973) Dr. Nichols’s work was fully validated in 1998 by radiation oncologist Dr. David Mantik via a cross-sectional CAT scan of a patient with the same upper body dimensions as President Kennedy.

What the above clearly demonstrates is that a straight-line, downward trajectory through President Kennedy’s torso is a virtual impossibility and, therefore, the SBT is rendered null and void before CE399 is even able to complete the first leg of its fictional journey. Nonetheless, for the sake of thoroughness, let us continue to analyse some of the salient points in Posner’s attempted validation of the Warren Commission’s most infamous fabrication.

Posner pinpoints Zapruder frame 224 as the moment “the bullet, with an initial muzzle velocity of more than 2,000 feet per second, passed through [JFK and Connally] almost simultaneously…” (p. 330) As previously noted, he bases this on the apparent flipping up of Connally’s jacket lapel. But what Posner fails to disclose is that the bullet hole in Connally’s jacket was not in the lapel, it was several inches below it.

Therefore, it is very much debatable whether the lapel movement is in any way related to the passage of a bullet. An even bigger problem for Posner, however, is that at frame 224 Kennedy’s hands are already pulling in towards his chest in reaction to being shot. If Kennedy is already reacting to a gunshot at the very moment CE399 is supposed to be exiting Connally’s chest, then frame 224 provides further evidence that they were struck by separate bullets.

For many critics, the most indigestible facet of the SBT is the remarkable condition of CE399 itself. To the naked eye, the bullet appears in near-pristine condition with almost no deformity besides a very slight flattening of the base. It looks remarkably like bullets the FBI test-fired into tubes of cotton waste and to ones that author Henry Hurt fired into water. In fact, the test bullet pictured in Hurt’s book looks almost exactly like CE399, slightly flattened base-end and all. This raises an obvious question: How is it possible that CE399 could have pierced seven layers of skin and flesh and broken two bones and emerged almost indistinguishable from bullets fired into nothing more than cotton or water?

For the better part of six decades, critics have challenged Commission defenders to produce a single documented example of a bullet that was able to do what they say CE399 did, yet no such bullet has been produced. In a spirited dissent from the HSCA findings, Dr. Cyril Wecht made sure that this fact was entered into the historical record.

For the past 12 or 13 years,” he testified, “I have repeatedly, limited to the context of the forensic pathologist, numerous times implored, beseeched, urged, in writing, orally, privately, collectively, my colleagues; to come up with one bullet, that has done this. I am not talking about 50 percent of the time plus one, 5 percent or 1 percent―just one bullet that has done this…at no time did any of my colleagues ever bring in a bullet from a documented case…and say here is a bullet…there is the crime lab report, it broke two bones in some human being, and look at it, its condition, it is pristine. (1HSCA337)

Dr. Milton Helpern, who was Chief Medical Examiner of New York City for twenty years and conducted more than 10,000 autopsies on gunshot victims, joined Dr Wecht in his skepticism.

I cannot accept the premise that this bullet thrashed around in all that bony tissue and lost only 1.4 to 2.4 grains of its original weight. I cannot believe either that this bullet is going to emerge miraculously unscathed, without any deformity, and with its lands and grooves intact…You must remember that next to bone, the skin offers greater resistance to a bullet in its course through the body than any other kind of tissue…The single bullet theory asks us to believe that this bullet went through seven layers of skin, tough, elastic, resistant skin…this bullet passed through other layers of soft tissue; and then shattered bones! I just can’t believe that this bullet had the force to do what [the Commission] has demanded of it; and I don’t think they have really stopped to think out carefully what they have asked of this bullet. (Robert Groden & Harrison Livingstone, High Treason, p. 66)

CE 399 and John Lattimer’s Trail Of Deception

Posner’s response to this problem is to exaggerate the very slight amount of damage to CE399 by quoting Howard Donahue―creator of the bizarre and ridiculous theory that JFK’s fatal head shot was the result of an accidental discharge by a Secret Service agent―describing the bullet as “somewhat bent and severely flattened.” (p. 335) He goes on to quote John Lattimer as explaining that the reason CE399 appears relatively undamaged is because it tumbled, lost velocity, and struck Connally’s bones side-on. “When it exited the President,” Lattimer says, “it begun tumbling [rotating] and that is evident by the elongated entry wound on the Governor’s back.” (p. 336) In his own book, Kennedy and Lincoln: Medical & Ballistic Comparisons of Their Assassinations, Lattimer writes that “The wound of entry into Connally’s back was 3 cm long (one and one-fourth inches long, the exact length of bullet 399) …” (Lattimer, p. 268) This claim, that the bullet was already tumbling when it struck Connally, is doubly useful for Commission apologists, not only because it can it be used to slow CE399 down but it also suggests that the bullet had been destabilized by striking something else before it hit Connally. Unfortunately for Posner and his lone nut cohorts, the claim is based on Lattimer’s own lie.

The wound in Governor Connally’s back was not 3 cm in length. Rather, as Connally’s thoracic surgeon Dr Robert Shaw explained to the Warren Commission, 3 cm was the length of the wound after it was surgically enlarged. Its original size was only 1.5 cm, half the length Lattimer claimed it was. (WC Vol. 6 p.85)Shaw’s testimony is proven to be accurate by the holes in Governor Connally’s jacket and shirt which measured 1.7 cm and 1.3 cm respectively. (HSCA Vol. 7, pp. 138-41) Of course, at 1.5 cm the wound would still be considered somewhat elongated, but this does not, by itself, constitute evidence that the bullet was tumbling. As Milicent Cranor has pointed out, the wound in the back of Kennedy’s scalp also measured 1.5 cm in length and no one is suggesting that the bulletwhich caused it was tumbling. Rather, as Dr. Shaw explained, the type of elongated or “elliptical” wound seen in the Governor’s back often occurs when the “the bullet enters at a right angle or a tangent. If it enters at a tangent there will be some length to the wound of entrance.” (WC Vol. 6, p.95) One of the Commission’s wound ballistics experts, Dr. Frederick Light, agreed that the bullet “could have produced that wound even though it hadn’t hit the President or any other person or object first.” (WC Vol. 5 p. 95) He explained that the “obliquity” was the result of “the nature of the way the shoulder is built.” (Ibid 97)

Dr. Shaw did not believe the bullet was tumbling as it passed through the Governor’s chest and made special note of “the neat way in which it stripped the rib out without doing much damage to the muscles that lay on either side of it.” (WC. Vol. 4 p.116) Further support for Shaw’s contention comes from the aforementioned experiment the Discovery Channel conducted for its 2004 television special JFK: Beyond the Magic Bullet. The Discovery Channel’s bullet tumbled its way through the “Connally” torso and in so doing it struck two ribs, not one. Furthermore, their test provided additional support for the case against the SBT when their bullet emerged severely bent, looking drastically different to CE399.

When the Warren Commission showed CE399 to its medical experts, none of them believed it could have passed through the radius bone of Connally’s right wrist. The Governor’s wrist surgeon, Dr. Charles F. Gregory, explained in his testimony that the amount of cloth and debris carried into the wrist indicated it had been struck by “an irregular missile.” In his second appearance before the Commission, Dr. Gregory expanded on this point, noting “that dorsal branch of the radial nerve, a sensory nerve in the immediate vicinity was partially transected together with one tendon leading to the thumb, which was totally transected.” This, he said, “is more in keeping with an irregular surface which would tend to catch and tear a structure rather than push it aside.” (WC Vol. 4 p.124) Posner claims that Dr Gregory “agreed that based on examination of the wrist’s entry wound, the bullet had been tumbling and entered backward.” (p. 336) This is a blatant distortion of Gregory’s testimony. When shown the remarkably undeformed CE399 and asked whether it could have produced the wrist wound he had seen and remained so intact, Dr Gregory replied, “The only way that this missile could have produced this wound in my view, was to have entered the wrist backward…That is the only possible explanation I could offer to correlate this missile with this particular wound.” (WC Vol. 4, p.121) However, Dr Gregory clearly did not consider the idea very likely. In fact, later in his testimony he noted that the two mangled bullet fragments found on the floor of the limousine were much more likely the type of missile “that could conceivably have produced the injury which the Governor incurred in the wrist.” (Ibid, p. 128)

At Edgewood Arsenal, the Commission’s experts fired bullets through the wrists of human cadavers and Dr Alfred Olivier later testified to having closely replicated the entrance and exit wounds to Connally’s wrist. When shown an X-ray from one such test Dr Olivier stated that it was “for all purposes identical” to the X-rays of the Governor’s wrist. (WC Vol. 5 p.81) Yet when asked to compare the condition of the test bullet which created the wound to that of CE399 he noted, “It is not like it at all. I mean, Commission Exhibit 399 is not flattened on the end. This one is very severely flattened on the end.” (Ibid 82)

Fackler and Guinn

Posner’s means of getting around all of this is to reference an experiment conducted by wound ballistics specialist Dr. Martin Fackler, who managed to fire a Carcano round through a cadaver’s wrist and have it emerge virtually unscathed by slowing its velocity to 1,100 feet per second. (p. 339) But the relevance of this experiment to the assassination is questionable to say the very least. Firstly, Fackler’s bullet had not already pierced four layers of skin and flesh and smashed a rib as CE399 is alleged to have done. Therefore, the accumulative effect of all this was eliminated from his experiment. And secondly, the average muzzle velocity of the sixth floor Carcano was 2,165 feet per second and its average striking velocity at 60 yards was 1,904 feet per second. (WC Vol. 5 p.77) According to the results of the Commission’s tests, the bullet would have lost a little over 100 feet per second passing through JFK’s back/neck and around 400 feet per second in Connally’s torso. (Ibid 86) All of which means it would have struck the wrist at approximately 1,400 feet per second, a much greater velocity than was utilized in Fackler’s experiment and one at which the bullet would undoubtedly have suffered distortion.

The inexplicable condition of CE399, and the convenience of its alleged discovery on an unattended stretcher at Parkland Hospital, led many early critics to believe it had been planted to complete the frame up of Lee Harvey Oswald. Posner claims, however, that such speculation was ended in 1979 by Dr. Vincent Guinn, a chemist who had performed a sophisticated process known as Neutron Activation Analysis (NAA) on all available bullet fragments and provided “indisputable evidence that [CE399] had travelled through Connally’s body, leaving behind fragments [in the wrist].” (p. 342) Unfortunately for Posner, while the type of comparative bullet lead analysis (CBLA) Guinn conducted was still very much in use when Case Closed was first published in 1993, it has since been abandoned by investigating authorities. In fact, it is widely considered to be “junk science” today.

Guinn’s conclusions rested on his claim, as explained by Posner, that the Western Cartridge Co. bullets made for the Carcano were different from any of the other bullets he had tested during twenty years…the most striking feature, and most useful for identification purposes, was that ‘there seems to be uniformity within a production lot.’” (p. 341) Guinn told the HSCA that the Carcano bullets were virtuallyunique amongst unhardened lead bullets in that they contained varying amounts of antimony. He further suggested that the antimony levels in an individual bullet remained constant but different to the levels found in other bullets from the same box. This, he claimed, meant it was possible to trace a fragment to the individual bullet of origin and distinguish it from all others even if they came from the same box. Thus, he was able to prove that the fragments recovered from Kennedy’s skull and those found on the floor of the limousine all came from one bullet, while the fragments removed from Connally’s wrist came from CE399. Or so he said.

In July 2006, two scientists from the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, metallurgist Erik Randich, Ph.D, and chemist Pat Grant, Ph.D, thoroughly debunked Guinn’s claims in an article published in the Journal of Forensic Science. Randich, and several colleagues who had begun to have grave doubts about CBLA, had already published a serious critique of the process four years earlier, which had led to a review by the National Academy of Sciences and ultimately compelled the FBI to shut down its CBLA lab and order its agents not to testify on the issue in future. Specifically addressing Guinn’s NAA, Randich and Grant showed that Dr Guinn was wrong to suggest that the varying levels of antimony present in Carcano bullets made them unique. They noted that for his comparison tests Guinn had used non-jacketed ammunition which has strictly controlled levels of antimony because the hardness of the round is determined by the amount of antimony mixed into the lead. This, however, is not true of jacketed rifle bullets. As a result, Randich and Grant reported that the assassination bullets and fragments “need not necessarily have originated from MC ammunition. Indeed, the antimony compositions of the evidentiary specimens are consistent with any number of jacketed ammunitions containing unhardened lead.”

Dr. Guinn’s other crucial assertion, that the antimony content of individual Carcano rounds remained constant, was also shown to be erroneous. By presenting highly detailed photomicrographs of Carcano bullets cut in cross-section, Randich and Grant showed how the antimony tends to “microsegregate” around crystals of lead during cooling. This means that a sample taken from one portion of a bullet can have a level of antimony that is entirely different from another sample taken from the same bullet. “The end result of these metallurgical considerations”, Randich and Grant explained, “is that from the antimony concentrations measured by [Guinn] from the specimens in the JFK assassination, there is no justification for concluding that two, and only two, bullets were represented by the evidence…the recovered bullet fragments could be reflective of anywhere between two and five different rounds fired in Dealey Plaza that day.”

It was thanks to Randich and Grant that, as Josiah Thompson puts it, “CBLA was formally thrown into the dust bin of junked theories and bogus methodologies.” (Last Second in Dallas, p. 191) In 2023, then, Vincent Guinn’s NAA can no longer be reasonably used as evidence that CE399 passed through Governor Connally’s wrist or to prove that the first-generation Warren Commission critics were wrong to speculate that the bullet had been planted at Parkland Hospital. That said, fewer critics make the latter argument today because an alternative scenario has since emerged.

CE 399 and the FBI

Although Posner claims that CE399 was found by Parkland Hospital’s senior engineer Darrell Tomlinson when he bumped into Connally’s stretcher, causing the bullet to roll onto the floor, Tomlinson himself was less certain that the stretcher in question was indeed the one that had been used to transport the governor. In his 1967 classic Six Seconds in Dallas, Josiah Thompson made a persuasive case for the bullet Tomlinson found having come from a stretcher that was last occupied by young boy named Ronald Fuller. (Six Seconds in Dallas, pgs. 154-165) But more intriguingly, Thompson noted that when Tomlinson and Parkland Personnel Director O.P. Wright―the man to whom Tomlinson had handed the bullet―were later shown CE399 by the FBI, “both declined to identify it as the bullet they each handled on November 22.” (Ibid, p. 156) Furthermore, the FBI reported that bothSecret Service Agent Richard Johnsen and Secret Service Chief James Rowley, the next two individuals in CE399’s supposed chain of possession, “could not identify this bullet as the one” (WC Vol. 24, p.412)

When Thompson interviewed Tomlinson and Wright, Tomlinson was seemingly unsure of what the bullet he handled had really looked like. Wright was adamant that it had had a pointed tip. Thompson showed him pictures of CE399 and the FBI’s comparison Carcano rounds. But Wright, a law enforcement officer with considerable firearms experience, “rejected all of these as resembling the bullet Tomlinson found on the stretcher.” (Six Seconds in Dallas, p. 175) Thompson did not know what to do with Wright’s recollection at the time and mentioned it only in a footnote where he labelled it “an appalling piece of information” because, if accurate, it suggested that “CE399 must have been switched for the real bullet sometime later in the transmission chain.” (Ibid, p. 176) But three decades later, Gary Aguilar―with Thompson’s help―wound up lending considerable weight to Thompson’s incredulous speculation.

The FBI’s July 7, 1964, report had named Bardwell Odum as the Special Agent who had shown CE399 to Tomlinson and Wright. And so, knowing thatit was standard practice for an FBI Agent to submit a FD-302 reporting his field investigation, Aguilar requested the National Archives search for any reports written by FBI Agent Odum concerning his contacts with Tomlinson and Wright. After a vigorous search, however, he was informed that no such report could be found and that the serial numbers on the FBI documents ran concurrently with no gaps, indicating that no material was missing from the files. Dr Aguilar then decided to seek out Odum himself and in 2002 he tape-recorded the following exchange:

AGUILAR: …From what I could gather from the records after the assassination, you went into Parkland and showed (CE399 to) a couple of employees there.
ODUM: Oh, I never went into Parkland Hospital at all. I don’t know where you got that. … I didn’t show it to anybody at Parkland. I didn’t have any bullet. I don’t know where you got that but it is wrong.
AGUILAR: Oh, so you never took a bullet. You were never given a bullet…
ODUM: You are talking about the bullet they found at Parkland?
AGUILAR: Right.
ODUM: I don’t think I ever saw it even.

Recognizing the significance of Odum’s remarks, Aguilar suggested that perhaps the retired agent had simply forgotten the whole episode. “Answering somewhat stiffly,” Aguilar writes, “he said that he doubted he would have ever forgotten investigating so important a piece of evidence in the Kennedy case. But even if he had forgotten, he said he would certainly have turned in the customary 302 field report covering something that important and he dared us to find it. The files support Odum; as noted above, there are no 302s in what the National Archives states is the complete file on #399.” (Aguilar & Thompson, The Magic Bullet: Even More Magical Than We Knew?)

To summarise the above: Darrell Tomlinson, the person alleged to have discovered CE399 after it rolled off of a stretcher at Parkland Hospital was unable to positively identify it as the one he found. The man to whom he handed the bullet, O.P. Wright, not only denied CE399 was the bullet Tomlinson gave him but insisted that the one he personally handled had had a pointed tip. The next two links in the chain of possession, Secret Service Agent Johnsen and Chief Rowley, could not identify CE399 as the bullet they handled. And another crucial link in the chain, FBI Agent Odum, denied that he had ever even seen the Parkland bullet let alone performed the actions described in the July 7 FBI report and what’s more, the record supports his recollection. If you can believe it, things get even worse for old CE399.

FBI technician RobertFrazier had marked the time he received CE399 on his November 22 laboratory worksheet as “7:30 PM,” and he put the same time on a handwritten note he titled “History of Evidence” which was presumably used as a memory aid during his Commission testimony. And yet, Todd had also made a note of the time he received the stretcher bullet, writing it on the outside of the envelope in which it was held. The time he wrote was “8:50 PM.” This raises a crucial question: how could Frazier receive a bullet from Todd at FBI HQ one hour and 20 minutes before Todd was handed the same bullet at the White House by Chief Rowley? The obvious answer is that he could not. And when we consider this alongside the everything else noted, it leads to the almost inescapable conclusion: that Josiah Thompson’s 1967 speculation was right on the mark.It may well be that the real Parkland bullet was made to disappear and was substituted for one that could be used to pin the blame squarely on the shoulders of Lee Harvey Oswald.

Requiem Mass for Posner

It would be impossible to respond to every false claim, every example of cherry picking, or every instance of deceptive reporting in Posner’s account of the assassination of President Kennedy without writing a book of epic length. What the above hopefully does, however, is get to the core of his case for Oswald as lone gunman and show how and why, despite the accolades he received for his attempt, Posner cannot make an argument in its favor without resorting to the type of trickery of which he accuses the Warren Commission critics.

Putting Oswald in the sniper’s nest requires Posner to ignore his own advice regarding witness testimony and select the latter accounts of witnesses who originally did not recall seeing Oswald on the sixth floor or who claimed to have seen Oswald fire the shots but failed to pick him out of a line-up. It also requires that he ignore the type of mishandling of evidence by the Dallas police that would almost undoubtedly have seen key items excluded from trial had Oswald lived to face his day in court. Most egregious of all, making a case against Oswald compels Posner to invent his own solipsistic record, such as saying that Linnie Mae Randle saw Oswald with a package tucked under his arm that did not quite reach the ground, or that Troy West had been in the depository lunchroom at the time of the assassination and not seen Oswald there as he allegedly claimed to have been. None of this would be necessary if the evidence against the accused assassin was as “overwhelming” as Posner laughably says it is.

But whether one believes Oswald acted as part of the conspiracy or was merely its innocent pawn, there is and always has been overwhelming evidence that the assassination was the work of more than one gunman. And whilst Posner was able to effectively rubbish or hide some of that evidence in 1993, such is simply not possible in 2023. A key tenant of his position, the Neutron Activation Analysis of Vincent Guinn, has been thoroughly discredited, and the very process he used has been abandoned by investigating authorities. Conversely, the acoustical evidence of a gunshot from the grassy knoll that Posner so confidently dismissed has gotten more persuasive over the last two decades, with the major objections to it having been neutered. There is also a much better understanding of what remains of the medical evidence today, with more independent experts having cast their gaze across the materials and made special note of the trail of bullet fragments in JFK’s skull that simply could not have been left behind by a bullet entering the rear of the skull in either of the locations proposed by the Warren Commission and its defenders.

The lynchpin of Posner’s lone gunman scenario, the Single Bullet Theory, was considered absurd by many when first proposed in 1964 and yet somehow still manages to look worse today. Posner makes much of a 3-D computer animation created by Failure Analysis Associates that, he says, not only demonstrated that one bullet could have passed through both President Kennedy and Governor Connally but also, using “reverse projection,” supposedly showed that the shot came from the sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository. (p. 334-335) But real-life experiments that have been performed utilising lasers in the actual environment of Dealey Plaza or involved firing real Carcano bullets through mock torsos have demonstrated otherwise. In fact, together with the CAT scan provided by Dr David Mantik, they have ended the debate once and for all in the minds of all reasonable people.

Gary Aguilar, Josiah Thompson, and John Hunt have hammered the final nail into the coffin for the SBT by demonstrating that CE399―the bullet that was absurdly claimed to have caused all seven non-fatal wounds and then conveniently shown up on a stretcher at Parkland Hospital looking magically unaffected by the bones it broke―has not even a semblance of a chain of evidence. Not only did the first four people who supposedly handled the round fail to recognise it as the one; not only did one of those individuals deny it resembled the bullet he actually handled; but contemporaneous documents place the stretcher bullet in the hands of the Chief of the Secret Service one hour and twenty minutes after the FBI’s Robert Frazier, to whom Chief Rowley handed the missile, had already received CE399! The conclusion that there were two bullets in Washington that day and one of them, the pointed-tip round found by Darrell Tomlinson, was deep-sixed in favour of one that was fired from the sixth-floor rifle is almost impossible to resist or refute. And recall, Posner is a lawyer so he knows all about chain of custody and inadmissible evidence.

Case Closed failed to live up to its title in 1993 because of its author’s blatant and overwhelming bias. Whilst the uninformed academics and journalists who had spent decades looking in the other direction and avoiding criticism of the government’s conclusions may have been taken in by Posner’s artfully constructed prosecution brief, those who had taken the time to study and understand the evidence recognized the book for what it was and recognized Posner for what he is. And Posner did a wonderful job of affirming his incredible bias shortly after the book’s publication when he made apparently ersatz claims before a congressional committee and then stonewalled when asked to provide the proof of his assertions.

Furthermore, thanks to the work of the Assassination Records Review Board―which shed light on numerous issues related to the life and background of Lee Harvey Oswald, the official investigations of the assassination, and the circumstances surrounding the President’s autopsy―and to the diligence and dedication of private researchers such as Gary Aguilar, Josiah Thompson, John Hunt, Russell Kent, Barry Ernest, Donald Thomas, David Mantik, Jim DiEugenio and many others, Case Closed looks even worse today. Oswald has been revealed as a far more complex and interesting individual than Posner gave him credit for being, and the impossibility of the assassination having been the work of a lone individual has been so thoroughly demonstrated that no amount of denialism, no matter how cleverly presented, can prop up the central conclusions of Case Closed in 2023.

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The Acoustics in Dealey Plaza

Although these eyewitness accounts point us in the right direction, the most important piece of evidence establishing the presence of a gunman on the grassy knoll—aside from the autopsy materials, which we will come to shortly—is the Dallas police dicatbelt recording. This was a recording of police radio communications that first came to light during the HSCA investigation and compelled the committee to conclude that there was “a high probability that two gunmen fired at President John F. Kennedy.” (HSCA Report, p. 3) The HSCA had tasked the top acoustic scientists in the United States with analyzing the recording to see if a police motorcycle officer whose microphone was believed to have become stuck in the “on” position while travelling as part of the motorcade through Dealey Plaza, had inadvertently picked up the sounds of gunfire. After discovering several suspect impulses on the tape, the experts conducted test firings in the plaza, shooting rifle bullets into sandbags from both the Texas School Book Depository and the grassy knoll, and recording each one at a series of microphones placed along Houston and Elm streets. Comparing the test shots to the suspect impulses on the dictabelt recording, the experts found that five of the impulses showed the precise echo patterns of rifle shots fired in the specific environs of Dealey Plaza. (HSCA Vol. 8, p.101) One of them, the fourth in sequence, matched a shot fired from the grassy knoll. (Ibid, p. 10)

Posner’s attempt to shoot down this evidence is, like most other attempted critiques of the acoustics, laughably inept. He starts by saying that “there are no sounds of gunfire, or even what could be remotely construed as popping sounds, on the dictabelt recordings.” (p. 239) Whilst this is essentially true it is also the very reason that experts were utilised by the committee in the first place. If the sounds of gunfire were immediately obvious on the recording, we would not need acoustic scientists to tell us how many there were. Nonetheless, it is not technically correct to say, as Posner does, that the suspect impulses are “inaudible.” (Ibid) It is more accurate to say that they are mixed in with other white noises, making them indiscernible to the human ear. As the HSCA experts stated, “To the ear, these sounds resemble static, not gunshots.” (HSCA Vol. 8, p.11) This is an unfortunate by-product of the equipment used by the Dallas police to record its voice communications, which was low fidelity even by 1963 standards, and by a feature of the motorcycle microphones known as “automatic gain control” which decreased the amplitude of loud noises.

The conclusions of the HSCA’s experts were reliant on a police motorcycle with a stuck microphone having been approximately 141 feet behind the Presidential limousine at the time of the grassy knoll shot. When the committee’s photographic consultant Robert Groden searched all available footage of the motorcade, he found that there was no film or photograph that showed the acoustically required position for the motorcycle during the shooting. However, he found that one officer’s positions before and after the assassination were such that he could have been where the microphone was predicted to have been. When that officer, H.B. McClain, was called to testify for the HSCA, he identified himself in the relevant pictures and confirmed that the microphone on his bike did indeed have a history of becoming stuck in the “on” position. (HSCA Vol. 5 p.628, 637)

Unfortunately, shortly after he appeared before the committee, McClain began to distance himself from the acoustics evidence by making statements that contradicted his sworn testimony. For example, although he told the HSCA that he had followed the motorcade from Houston Street onto Elm and said that he did know whether his microphone had been switched to channel one or two, (Ibid p. 630), he later claimed to have stopped his motorcycle on Houston Street and insisted that he could not possibly have been tuned to channel one, which was the channel on which the shots were recorded. (Don Thomas, Hear No Evil, p. 669) Posner, of course, uses McClain’s latter-day claims to insist that the dictabelt recording is not consistent with his actions. But the reality is that it is McClain’s revised story that is not consistent with the evidence.

Posner writes that “the dictabelt recording reveals the engine on the cycle in question idling” when McClain “was speeding toward Parkland…” (p. 241) In fact, the sound of the motorcycle “idling” occurs at the same time a series of photographs show that McClain travelled slowly on Elm Street until motorcycle officer Jimmy Courson, who had been riding several car lengths behind him, caught up with McClain and the pair then sped off to Parkland together. Therefore, the motorcycle noise on the recording is entirely consistent with McClain’s actions. Furthermore, Courson recalled that he was making the turn from Houston onto Elm when he saw Jackie Kennedy climbing onto the trunk of the limousine to grab a piece of her husband’s skull. (Thomas, p. 683) If Courson’s recollection is correct then there is no question that McClain was further down Elm Street and, therefore, could not possibly have stopped on Houston as he later claimed he did.

Suggesting that the motorcycle with the open microphone was really at the Trade Mart and not in Dealey Plaza, Posner notes that the dictabelt recording contains “the single toll of a bell, which was nowhere near Dealey Plaza.” (p. 241) In point of fact, a recording made in Dealey Plaza by KXAS TV-News in 1964 captured the sound of a carillon bell, demonstrating that such a sound was audible in the plaza. But even if this was not the case, the HSCA reported that “the radio system used by the Dallas Police Department permitted more than one transmitter to operate at the same time, and this frequently occurred.” (HSCA Report, p. 78) Therefore a separate microphone could have picked up the sound of the bell from elsewhere and deposited it on the recording at the same time McClain’s bike was transmitting from Dealey Plaza. Posner also cites the lack of identifiable crowd noise as evidence that the motorcycle was not in the plaza. Yet this was likely another by-product of the microphone’s automatic gain control function.

Having tried and failed to establish that McClain’s bike was not in the acoustically required position, Posner alleges that the putative gunshots on the dictabelt recording appear “one minute after the actual assassination.” (p. 241) This, of course, was the conclusion of the Ramsey Panel, a panel of scientists commissioned by the Justice Department a few months after the publication of the HSCA report. The Ad Hoc Committee on Ballistic Acoustics, as it was formally known, acted under the auspices of the National Academy of Sciences and issued a report in 1982 concluding that the impulses identified by the HSCA’s experts were not, in fact, gunshots. The panel’s conclusion was based not on any meaningful analysis of its own but on the discovery of a 25-year-old musician from Ohio named Steve Barber. To understand Barber’s discovery, it is important to understand that on the day of the assassination, the Dallas police had used two radio channels that were recorded on antiquated equipment. Channel One, which was for routine police communications, was recorded on a Dictaphone belt recorder. Channel Two, which was reserved on November 22 for the president’s motorcycle escort, used a Gray Audograph disc recorder. Both were eccentric pieces of equipment that used a stylus cutting an acoustical groove into a soft vinyl surface to make recordings.

As Posner explains it, Barber had “purchased an adult magazine, Gallery, which included a plastic insert recording of the dictabelt evidence.” After repeated listening, “Barber heard the barely audible words ‘Hold everything secure…’ That matched with ‘Hold everything secure until the homicide and other investigators can get there…’―words spoken by Sheriff Bill Decker…on police Channel Two. The Decker transmission had crossed over to Channel One. But Decker spoke those words nearly one minute after the assassination, when he was instructing his officers what to do at Dealey Plaza.” (Ibid) When Barber brought this discovery to the attention of the Ramsey Panel, which was on a mission to shoot down the acoustics, the panel seized it with both hands. The Decker broadcast that Barber had found was, according to the Ramsey Panel, an instance of “crosstalk,” a phenomenon that occurred when an open police microphone came close enough to another police radio receiver to pick up and record its transmission. The only way the Decker broadcast could have been deposited on the Channel One recording, the panel claimed, was if the police motorcycle with the stuck microphone had been close enough to another police radio at the time the broadcast was made to pick it up. Therefore, the suspect impulses identified by the HSCA experts could not be the gunshots that killed Kennedy because they occurred one minute after the assassination. Although the Ramsey Panel’s report was still being touted as the “last word” on the acoustics evidence when Case Closed was first published in 1993, that position is untenable today.

The debate over the dictabelt was reignited in 2001 by a paper published in the British forensic journal Science & Justice. Its author, US federal government scientist Donald Thomas PhD, pointed out that the Ramsey Panel had overlooked a second instance of crosstalk, the “Bellah broadcast,” and that synchronizing the transmissions using this second broadcast placed the suspect impulses “at the exact instant that John F. Kennedy was assassinated.” [Thomas.pdf (jfklancer.com)] Dr Thomas also suggested that “the barely audible fragment of Decker’s broadcast could be an overdub; the result of the recording needle jumping backward in its track.” This overdub supposition was confirmed in 2021 with the publication of Josiah Thompson’s sublime work, Last Second in Dallas. Thompson had reached out to the HSCA’s lead acoustic scientist, James Barger, who had in turn put Thompson in contact with a veteran engineer and inventor name Richard Mullen. What Mullen did was to examine the various background hum frequencies on both the Channel One and Channel Two recordings.

Antique analogue recorders like the Dictaphone and Audograph produced a 60-Hz background hum, and since both machines could be played back at varying speeds, if they were played back to a tape recorder using anything other than the exact, original recording speed, this would generate a unique hum frequency which would remain on all subsequent copies. Furthermore, a tape recording made from this second-generation copy would contain a secondary hum frequency that would, in turn, appear on all future copies. Analyzing the background frequencies on both Dallas police channel recordings, Mullen found two different secondary hums on Channel Two that were of the precise same frequency as those found on Channel One, demonstrating that the tapes came from a second generation Audograph disc and proving that the Decker “crosstalk” was overdubbed onto Channel One. (Thompson, Last Second in Dallas, p. 346) And with that confirmation, the Ramsey Panel conclusion was entirely debunked.

Posner finishes off his attack on the acoustics evidence with an obviously phoney tale about a WFAA radio reporter named Travis Linn who, he says, heard a recording of the assassination that no one else heard. As we might expect, the alleged recording―which obviously contained only three shots―could not be produced because it had conveniently been accidently erased almost immediately before anyone else could listen to it. (p. 243-245) Posner wastes two pages on this fabricated nonsense yet can find no space anywhere in his book to present a discussion of the evidence that convinced the acoustic scientists that they had a genuine recording of the gunshots that killed Kennedy. Let us do that now.

As previously noted, when the dictabelt was brought to the attention of the HSCA in 1978, it sought out the top acoustics experts in the country to undertake an analysis. The Acoustical Society of America recommended the Cambridge, Massachusetts firm of Bolt, Baranek and Newman (BBN), headed by Dr. James Barger. It is fair to say that Dr. Barger is a giant in his field. After earning his PhD from Harvard University, he went on to pioneer some of the world’s most sophisticated acoustical and telecommunications technologies. Barger is recognised as an expert in sonar and underwater noise detection and has patents on numerous inventions related to the detection of shooter locations. Barger’s team at BBN designed and built the Boomerang anti-sniper defense system that enables the U.S. military to precisely locate a sniper’s position. For the HSCA, his work focused on comparing the unique and complex pattern of echoes produced by a test shot reflecting and refracting off the buildings in Dealey Plaza with the suspect impulses he had identified on the police recording. When his analysis revealed that not only were there more than the three shots Oswald was alleged to have fired from the Book Depository, but that one appeared to have been fired from the grassy knoll, the HSCA contracted a second team of experts to perform a more refined analysis of the alleged knoll shot.

The team of Queens College Professor Mark Weiss and his associate Ernest Aschkenasy also came recommended by the Acoustical Society of America. A few years earlier, Weiss had been called upon to examine the Watergate tapes, and his determination that they had been tampered with led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon. Weiss and Aschkenasy began by reviewing and confirming the work of BBN and then utilised what Weiss called “fundamental principles in acoustics” to further analyse the impulse BBN had matched to a test shot fired from the knoll. Taking into consideration every variable that they could think of from air temperature and humidity to the distortion of the microphone and the position of the motorcycle’s windshield, Weiss and Aschkenasy concluded that “with a probability of 95% or better, there was indeed a shot fired from the grassy knoll.” (HSCA Vol. 5, p.556) Aschkenasy testified to the committee that “the numbers could not be refuted…[they] just came back again and again the same way, pointing only in one direction as to what these findings were.” (Ibid, p. 593) Weiss added that:

if somebody were to tell me that the motorcycle was not at Dealey Plaza―and he was in fact somewhere else and he was transmitting from another location―my response to him at that time was that I would ask to be told where that location is, and once told where it is, I would go there, and one thing I would expect to find is a replica of Dealey Plaza at that location. That is the only way it can come out. (Ibid, p. 592)

The certainty of the acoustic scientists in their conclusions was not determined solely by the precise matching of the echo patterns. In fact, there was a secondary aspect to BBN’s analysis that added an extra level of confidence. While it is theoretically possible that some unknown, unidentifiable source created five static clusters that just so happened to coincide with the very moment that Kennedy was killed and coincidentally mimicked the precise echo patterns of gunshots fired from two separate locations in the specific acoustic environment of Dealey Plaza, the order in the acoustic data renders this unlikely notion virtually null and void.

As previously noted, BBN’s onsite testing involved placing 36 microphones along the Presidential parade route on Houston and Elm Streets, recording test shots from the Depository and the knoll at each of those microphones, and then comparing them to the suspect impulses on the dictabelt recording. Dr Barger understood that if the five sounds on the police tape were not, in fact, gunfire recorded by a motorcycle traveling as part of the motorcade, then any matches he achieved would be false positives that were as likely to occur at the first microphone as the last and could have fallen in any one of 125 different random sequences. But the matches did not fall in a random order, they fell in the only correct 1-2-3-4-5 order for a microphone travelling north on Houston Street and West on Elm Street [see below].

Furthermore, the spacing of the matching microphones was a remarkable fit with the times between the suspect impulses on the dicatbelt.The first impulse matched to a test shot recorded on a microphone on Houston Street near the intersection with Elm; the second to a microphone 18 ft north on Houston; the third to a microphone at the intersection; the fourth to a microphone on Elm; and the fifth to the next microphone to the west. The very same pattern was evident on the police tape.The first three impulses were clustered together, falling approximately 1.7 and 1.1 seconds apart. This was followed by a space of 4.8 seconds before the final two impulses arrived very close together, just 0.7 seconds apart.

As if the above was not compelling enough, BBN found that the distance from the first matching microphone to the last was 143 feet and the time between the first and last suspect impulse on the tape was 8.3 seconds. For McClain’s bike to have travelled 143 feet in 8.3 seconds, it would have needed to have been moving at a relatively slow pace of 11.7 mph. As it turned out, this fit almost precisely with the speed of the Presidential limousine as determined by the FBI from its analysis of the Zapruder film. During the assassination, the Bureau found, the limousine had been travelling at an average speed of 11.3 mph. (Warren Report, p. 49) In every conceivable way, then, the data validated the hypothesis that the dictabelt recording had indeed captured the sounds of gunfire recorded by a police motorcycle heading north on Houston Street and west on Elm as part of the Presidential motorcade.

For a scientist, the concordance of his results with other evidence is of prime importance. In that regard, the final confirmation of the validity of the acoustics evidence comes from its remarkable synchronization with the Zapruder film. Although interpretation of the events shown in Abraham Zapruder’s 8mm home movie contains a degree of subjectivity, most observers would agree that JFK was likely first hit from behind when partially or entirely hidden by the Stemmons Freeway sign between frames 204 and 224, and that Governor Connally was probably struck from the rear shortly before his right shoulder is seen to drop dramatically at frame 238. Correlation between the dictabelt and the film can only be approximate due to the estimated real-time characteristics of the recording and the average running time of the film, but when the grassy knoll shot on the dictabelt is synchronized with the vivid explosion of Kennedy’s head at frame 313, the preceding two shots―both fired from behind―fall at or very close to frames 205 and 224. It is worth noting here that Posner himself argues, based on what he claims is the flipping up of Connally’s jacket lapel as the result of a bullet’s passage, that the Zapruder film establishes frame 224 as the moment he was struck. (p. 329-330) If Posner is correct then it means that the exact same 4.8 second gap between a shot from the rear and a shot from the front occurs on both the audio and visual evidence.

There is a very good reason why authors like Posner and, indeed, virtually all other critics of the HSCA’s acoustic evidence do not disclose any of the above. And that is because it is almost impossible for anyone, no matter how impressive their credentials, to refute. Any suggestion that the precise matching of echoes, the remarkable order in the data, and the near-perfect concordance with the Zapruder film is all mere coincidence is, in my view, not worthy of serious consideration. As NASA scientist G. Paul Chambers has pointed out, the odds against it are astronomical. “Syncing the final head shot from the grassy knoll to frame 312…” Chambers explains,

The probability of finding the shot that hit Connally to within five frames…is about one in a hundred….Matching up the first shot to the frames before Kennedy reaches the Stemmons Freeway s sign and the second shot to a strike of Kennedy behind the sign is another one chance in a hundred times for a one in ten thousand chance for an accidental match.

Furthermore, multiplying all this by the probability of all shot origins falling in the correct order is another one chance in sixteen, “yielding a one-in-sixteen-million chance that the acoustic analysis could match up the timing and shot sequence in the Zapruder film by chance.” Going even further and multiplying the probability of both the order in the data and the synchronization of the audio and film being random together, “it is readily established that there is only one chance in eleven billion that both correlations could occur as the result of random noise.” (Chambers, Head Shot, pgs. 142-143)

Posner on JFK’s Autopsy

In cases of violent death, a thorough post-mortem examination of the victim is almost always crucial to figuring out precisely what happened. Yet, in many ways, President Kennedy’s autopsy raised more questions than it answered. This was the result of his body having been illegally removed from Dallas and taken to Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland where the autopsy was conducted under strict military control by two underqualified and inexperienced hospital pathologists.Neither Commander James J. Humes nor Colonel J. Thornton Boswell was an expert in gunshots wounds. And although they were joined over an hour into the autopsy by a third prosector, Army Colonel Pierre Finck, he too had never conducted an autopsy on a victim of gunshot wounds. To make matters worse, Jackie Kennedy was sitting upstairs in a seventeenth-floor suite with the President’s brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, refusing to leave the hospital without his body. Furthermore, the autopsy room was crowded with hospital administrators, orderlies, technicians, photographers, military brass, and agents of the FBI and Secret Service, some of whom, according to Dr. Boswell, “…were in such a high emotional state that they were running around like chickens with their heads off…” (Boswell ARRB deposition, p 101-102) Dr. Humes would later concede that the scene in the morgue was “somewhat like trying to do delicate neurosurgery in a three-ring circus.” (Journal of the American Medical Association, May 27, 1992) And as if the pressure the above conditions placed on the autopsy surgeons during their examination was not enough to ensure mistakes would be made, Humes was then forced to write his report without further access to body or to the autopsy photographs and x-rays.

The result of all this was an autopsy report that included blatant guesswork, as well as conclusions that were contradicted by the very evidence on which it was ostensibly based. For example, the report describes the wound in JFK’s throat as “presumably of exit.” Yet, as Posner admits, the doctors did not know about or personally observe this wound because it had been obscured by a tracheotomy performed during attempts to save Kennedy’s life at Parkland Hospital. At the close of the autopsy, Humes, Boswell and Finck were of the belief that a bullet had entered the back at a downward angle of 45 to 60 degrees and worked its way back out during external cardiac massage. It was not until after the body had been taken out of the morgue that Dr. Humes placed a phone call to Dr. Malcom Perry in Dallas and discovered that there had been a small, neat wound in the throat. At that point, Dr. Humes hastily revised his conclusion to account for the wound he had missed, now suggesting that the bullet which entered the back had, in fact, exited the throat. But this idea was flatly contradicted by attempts to physically probe the back wound during the autopsy which had led Dr. Finck to state, “There are no lanes for an outlet of this entry in this man’s shoulder.” (WC Vol. 2, p.93) The inability to probe the wound more than a finger’s length is precisely what led the doctors to conclude that the bullet had worked its way back out.

What other conclusions Dr. Humes may have revised we will likely never know because, as he testified to the Warren Commission, on the morning of November 24, 1963, he took the first draft of his report, and the notes on which it was based, and burned them in the fireplace of his recreation room. (WC Vol. 2 p.373) As unbelievable as this action was, Posner attempts to excuse it by stating that Humes “had gotten the President’s blood on his autopsy notes” and feared “the bloodstained notes might become part of a future public display.” (p. 308n) He does not, however, attempt to explain how this excuse applies to the first draft of the report which was written in Humes’s home and, therefore, could not have had Kennedy’s blood on it. Dr. Humes himself also failed to provide a reason for his action when he was questioned years later by the Assassination Records Review Board.

Unsurprisingly, Humes’s revised report and the post-mortem examination itself have been roundly criticised. Posner quotes world-renowned forensic pathologist Dr. Cyril Wecht as calling it one of the “worst and most botched autopsies ever―the autopsy work was a piece of crap.” (p. 303) However, Posner tries to mitigate this by suggesting that “subsequent panels of leading forensic specialists” have “found faults with the autopsy” but also “confirmed its findings, and held that JFK was struck only by two bullets from behind.” (p. 304) He also states that the autopsy photographs and x-rays “provide proof positive of the President’s wounds” and “support the conclusion that the President was shot by two bullets from the rear…” (p. 302) All of which is utter nonsense.

To begin with, it should come as little surprise that panels that were convened by the government reached government-friendly conclusions. As Don Thomas has written, “science is a social process and…scientific conclusions are in fact, social constructs. The consequences of the results, as much if not more than the empirical evidence itself, will often steer the scientist to one conclusion over the other.” (Thomas, p. 8) Indeed, the consequences of going against officially sanctioned conclusions related to the Kennedy assassination have undoubtedly weighed heavily upon those tasked with reviewing the facts years later. For example, when the results of the acoustical analysis showed that more than three shots were fired, Dr. Barger admitted to HSCA Chief Counsel Robert Blakey that he “felt sick to his stomach.” (Thompson, Last Second in Dallas, p. 152) In fact, Barger was so disturbed by the significance of what he had found that he would initially only attach a confidence level of 50% to his own findings. It was not until Weiss and Aschkensay confirmed the validity of his results that Dr. Barger was willing to admit to the strength of the evidence. That said, the fact that subsequent official reviews of the JFK autopsy evidence all supported the official story probably had less to do with historical significance than with financial interest, peer pressure, and the widespread influence that a certain forensic pathologist had amongst his colleagues.

In 1967, when Attorney General Ramsey Clark got his hands on the galley proofs to Josiah Thompson’s Six Seconds in Dallas, he was mightily disturbed by the serious questions it raised about the nature of Kennedy’s wounds. So much so that he turned to Baltimore’s Chief Medical Examiner, Dr Russell Fisher, and told him that he wanted Fisher to chair a panel that would, in Fisher’s own words, “refute some of the junk that was in [Thompson’s] book.” (Gary Aguilar and Kathy Cunningham, How Five Investigations into JFK’s Medical Evidence Got It Wrong, Part III) It should be obvious that an expert being told what he is expected to refute is not being tasked with making an honest and objective assessment. For that reason, Fisher’s mission was corrupt from the get-go.

In the singularly original and meticulously researched 2022 book JFK: Medical Betrayal, British physiologist Russell Kent points out that Dr Fisher was a well-known figure in Washington circles who could be relied upon to “tell the Government’s version of the truth because he was financed by them.” (Kent, p. 73) The same was true of Fisher’s colleagues on the Clark Panel, two of whom worked at John Hopkins University which “was then and is now a research university that constantly seeks funding.” (Ibid) For these medical professionals, biting the hand that feeds would obviously not have been considered a sensible course of action. And for Fisher, as Kent reveals, it was not just his “reliance on Government money that made him the perfect choice to hold the line on the JFK assassination…his motives for maintaining the status quo went deeper still. He was friends with Humes and Boswell.” (Ibid) Little wonder, then, that Fisher’s report, though containing some important revisions, did not stray from Humes’s central conclusion that JFK was hit solely by two bullets fired from above and behind.

The ramifications of Fisher’s rubber-stamping of the official story would be felt on the subsequent reviews of the medical evidence. Because, as Kent details, not only was Fisher considered to be a giant in his field―and his co-edited book Medicolegal Investigation of Death often called the bible of forensic pathology―but he had mentored and/or maintained close relationships with almost every expert who followed him. “A close look at the HSCA Forensic Pathology Panel,” writes Kent, “reveals a tangled web of subservience to Fisher. Seven of the nine doctors had either worked with or published with Fisher.” (Ibid, p. 264) Even the HSCA panel’s lone dissenting member, Dr Wecht, worked under Fisher in the Baltimore Medical Examiner’s Office, and his testimony to the committee suggests he well understood the loyalty his fellow panel members felt towards Dr Fisher, as well as to each other. Asked why he thought his colleagues had taken a position in support of the lone gunman theory Dr Wecht responded, “There are some things involving some present and former professional relationships and things between some of them, and some people who have served on previous panels.” (HSCA Vol. 1, p.354) Years later he added that “many of these same people had a long-standing involvement with the federal government—many had received federal grants for research and appointments to various influential government boards. To be highly critical of a government action could end that friendly relationship with Uncle Sam.” (Wecht, Cause of Death, p. 43-44)

Should one decide that none of the above considerations are important and choose to have faith in the ability of the government’s carefully selected experts to rise above all personal considerations, one is nonetheless stuck with the reality that by the time these reviews of the autopsy record took place, important materials had been removed from the archive, never to be seen again. An undeniably relevant point that Posner fails to reveal in Case Closed is that key photographs, X-rays, tissue slides, and even the President’s brain have all mysteriously disappeared and are no longer available for examination. Additionally, the photographs that remain were described by the HSCA forensic pathology panel as “generally of rather poor photographic quality…Some, particularly closeups, were taken in such a manner that it is nearly impossible to anatomically orient the direction of view…In many, scalar references are entirely lacking, or when present, were positioned in such a manner to make it difficult or impossible to obtain accurate measurements of critical features (such as the wound in the upper back) from anatomical landmarks.” (HSCA Vol. 7 p.46)

The X-rays have proven to be similarly flawed and open to interpretation. For example, the Clark Panel believed the X-rays of Kennedy’s neck showed bullet fragments “just to the right of the cervical spine immediately above the apex of the right lung…” (Clark Panel Report, p. 13) A consulting radiologist for the HSCA, however, believed these to be “screen artifacts.” (HSCA Vol. 7 p.225) The Clark Panel found “no evidence of fracture…of any of the cervical and thoracic vertebrae,” (Clark Panel report, p. 13) whereas another of the HSCA’s consultants saw “an undisplaced fracture” of the transverse process of the first thoracic vertebra (T1). (HSCA Vol. 7, p.219) On the other hand, an expert for the ARRB thought there might be a break in the transverse process of T2, (Kent, p. 239) while Posner quotes Dr John Lattimer as saying he saw injury to the transverse process of the sixth cervical vertebra, with “small splinters of bone at the point of trauma.” (p. 328) What these varying and mutually exclusive opinions do is highlight the deficiencies of the existing medical record. They also fly in the face of Posner’s assertion that the autopsy photographs and x-rays “provide proof positive of the President’s wounds…”

This is not to suggest that there is nothing meaningful to be drawn from the existing autopsy record. On the contrary, it can be confidently stated that the evidence as it stands does not support the conclusions of the autopsy surgeons, the Clark and HSCA panels, or indeed Gerald Posner. Simply put, the medical evidence cannot be honestly and accurately reconciled with a lone gunman firing from above and behind.

Let us start by looking at what Posner erroneously refers to as “the neck wound” but was, in reality, a wound to the upper back. This wound was described in the autopsy report as being “14cm below the tip of the right mastoid process” which is the small, boney bump behind the ear.

But as these photos show, depending on the position of the head, 14cm below the mastoid process can be close to the base of the neck or considerably further down the back.

The HSCA criticized the autopsy doctors for this very reason, stating that the mastoid process is a moveable point and “should not have been used.” (HSCA Vol. 7 p.17) They concluded that the bullet had entered at the approximate level of T1 based largely on the previously noted belief that the X-rays showed a fracture of the transverse process. And yet, not only is there much debate amongst the experts about the location, and even the very existence, of any such fracture but there is also reason to believe that the bullet entered even lower. The official death certificate signed by Kennedy’s personal physician, Dr. George Burkley―who was present at the autopsy―statesthat the wound of “the posterior back” was situated “at about the level of the third thoracic vertebra.” This lower position is seemingly corroborated by the holes in Kennedy’s shirt and coat which are approximately 5 ½ inches below the collar. That said, Burkely’s language, “about the level of,” is admittedly imprecise and the exact relationship of Kennedy’s clothing to his body at the time he was shot is unclear. Nonetheless, whether the wound was as high as T1 or as low as T3, it is clear from the autopsy face sheet, the photographs, and the holes in the clothing that it was in the back, not the neck.

In describing the wound as being “at the base of the President’s neck,” Posner is following the Warren Commission’s lead and attempting to create the impression that the back wound was higher than the hole in the throat so that readers will believe a bullet fired from the sixth-floor window could have struck JFK and followed a downward trajectory out of the throat. But it is abundantly clear from the evidence that the back wound was the lower of the two. And as the HSCA forensic pathology panel made clear, this means that a downward trajectory through Kennedy was only possible if he was leaning markedly forward at the instant he was struck, which is something he is not seen to do in the Zapruder film.

A further problem for Posner is that exit wounds tend to be larger and more ragged than entrance wounds. Clearly understanding this general principle, he tries to create the impression that the appearance of Kennedy’s wounds was consistent with a back-to-front trajectory by writing that the hole in the front of Kennedy’s neck was 5mm to 8mm (p. 306) and that the one in his back was “even smaller…” (p. 305) But the back wound was described in the autopsy report as a “7 x 4 millimeter oval wound” and the throat wound was initially described by Dr Perry as approximately 3 to 5mm. (17H29) Furthermore, Perry confirmed in his testimony that the hole was “roughly spherical to oval in shape, not a punched-out wound, actually, nor was it particularly ragged. It was rather clean cut.” (6H9) This description does not comport well with the exit wounds created by Oswald’s rifle during tests performed on behalf of the Warren Commission. When the alleged murder weapon was fired from 180 feet―the approximate distance of the Book Depository to Kennedy’s back at Zapruder frame 224―exit holes measured 10 to 15mm, as much as five times the size of Kennedy’s throat wound. (5H77, 17H846)

To explain away the small size and remarkably neat appearance of the anterior wound, Posner cites experiments conducted by John Lattimer who found that exit wounds “remained small and tight if the bullet exited near the collar band of the shirt, where the buttoned collar and the knotted tie firmly pushed the neck muscles together.” (p. 306) He then asserts, supposedly based on an interview of Parkland’s Dr Charles Carrico, that “[Kennedy’s] neck wound was right at the collar band and tie knot.” (Ibid) What Posner is describing is what is usually referred to by experts as a “shored” exit wound. But suggesting this as an explanation for the appearance of JFK’s throat hole has two major problems: Firstly, and despite what Dr Carrico allegedly told Posner, the damage to JFK’s shirt is below the collar and the area where the shoring pressures would have been greatest. And secondly, shored exit wounds tend to have a large abrasion ring surrounding their margins. Yet not one doctor at Parkland Hospital saw any such bruising around JFK’s throat wound nor is one visible in the autopsy photos.

Of course, the fact that the throat wound did not have the typical appearance of an exit wound does not prove it was not one. Forensic pathologists do not determine entrance from exit based solely on size and shape. Nonetheless, there is clear reason for doubting such a conclusion, especially when the wound’s small, neat appearance is considered alongside the shallow probing of the back wound at autopsy.

Bethesda autopsy technician James Curtis Jenkins recalled from observing the postmortem that the back wound was “very shallow…it didn’t enter the peritoneal (chest) cavity.” He remembered that the doctors had extensively probed the wound with a metal probe, “approximately eight inches long”, and that it was only able to go in at a “…fairly drastic downward angle so as not to enter the cavity.” (ARRB MD65) Jenkins’s colleague Paul O’Connor said much the same thing, stating that “it did not seem” to him “that the doctors ever considered the possibility that the bullet had exited through the front of the neck.” (ARRB MD64) O’Connor told author William Law that “…we also realized [during the autopsy] that this bullet―that hit him in the back―is what we called in the military a ‘short shot,’ which means that the powder in the bullet was defective so it didn’t have the power to push the projectile―the bullet―clear through the body. If it had been a full shot at the angle he was shot, it would have come out through his heart and through his sternum.” (William Matson Law, In the Eye of History, p. 41)

Many critics believe, based on the above, that the wound in the throat was an entrance for a bullet fired from the front. But this would appear to be an equally if not less likely prospect than its having been an exit for a bullet fired from the rear. Not only because there was no bullet found in the body and no corresponding exit wound in the back, but also because no one at Bethesda recalled seeing any damage to the spine which there would almost certainly have had to have been had a missile entered Kennedy’s throat near the midline.

President Kennedy’s Head Wounds

Posner does all he can to hide it, but similar uncertainties exist about the nature of President Kennedy’s head wounds. He claims that “The evidence of the head wound was a textbook example of entrance and exit for a bullet” and describes a small entrance in the rear of the skull accompanied by a “nearly six-inch hole on the right side” which he presumes was a wound of exit. (p. 307) He then spends several pages arguing that the Parkland doctors were “mistaken” in their belief that they saw a “gaping wound in the rear of JFK’s head,” a position he is forced to take because, in Posner’s own words, if the Parkland physicians had been correct in their observations, “this not only contradicted the findings of the autopsy team but was evidence that the President was probably shot from the front, with a large exit hole in the rear of the head.” Thus, Posner reveals that he has no meaningful understanding of wound ballistics.

Over the last six decades, far too many words have been wasted arguing about the location of the large hole in Kennedy’s skull by those like Posner who mistakenly believe it was a wound of exit and, therefore, that its position tells us something about the direction in which the bullet was travelling. It was not and it does not. Larry Sturdivan, a ballistics expert whom Posner himself quotes, has explained that the question of “whether the explosion was more to the side or back is completely irrelevant.” This, he says, is because “the center of the blown-out area of the president’s skull was at the midpoint of the trajectory; not at the exit point.” (Sturdivan, The JFK Myths, p. 171) Indeed, the explosion of skull, blood, and brain matter seen so vividly in frame 313 of the Zapruder film, and the massive hole it left in the right side of Kennedy’s skull, was the result of a temporary cavity that was created not by the exiting of a missile but by the hydraulic pressure its passage applied to the inside of the cranium which caused it to burst open. As Sturdivan explains, a “similar explosion would have taken place” whichever direction the bullet was travelling. (Ibid, p. 171) This characteristic is sometimes referred to as cavitation.

Many critics of the official story will know Sturdivan as a vocal defender of the lone nut theory and, for that reason, may feel inclined to dismiss his writings on the assassination. But the phenomenon to which he is referring here is one that is firmly established in the forensic literature. In fact, Sturdivan himself is able to demonstrate it in his book using stills from films made at the Biophysics laboratory at Edgewood Arsenal in 1964. There, rifle bullets were fired into numerous rehydrated skulls filled with brain simulant and these experiments were filmed using a high-speed camera. Describing a typical example Sturdivan writes, “The bullet entered the back of the skull and exited in a small spray at the front in the space of one frame of the high-speed movie. Only after the bullet was far down-range did the internal pressure generated by its passage split open the skull and relieve the pressure inside by spewing the contents through the cracks.” (Ibid)

The proper way to assess the direction of travel of the bullet or bullets that struck the skull is through identification and careful examination of both the point of entrance and the point of exit. This, however, was not done by JFK’s autopsy surgeons. Dr. Humes told the Warren Commission that he and his colleagues had found a through-and-through hole, low down in the back of the skull, which exhibited the “coning effect” that established it as a wound of entrance. (WC Vol. 2 p.352) They did not, however, find the point of exit. As Humes told the Warren Commission, “…careful examination of the margins of the large bone defect at that point…failed to disclose a portion of the skull bearing again a wound of―a point of impact on the skull of this fragment of the missile, remembering, of course, that this area was devoid of any scalp or skull at this present time. We did not have the bone.” (Ibid, 353) Nonetheless, Dr Humes said that X-rays of the skull revealed multiple bullet fragments “traversing a line” from the wound he found in the rear to a point “just above the right eye.” This, then, laid out the alleged path of the bullet [see diagrams below, prepared at Dr. Humes’s direction].

Unfortunately for Dr Humes, his characterization of the head wound is contradicted by the very evidence on which it is supposedly based. When the Clark Panel reviewed the autopsy materials in 1968, it encountered a serious problem. The bullet fragments that Humes had spoken of were, in fact, located in the very top of the skull. As the panel no doubt understood, a bullet entering low down in the occipital bone―where Humes said the entry wound was―could not have left a trail of fragments along a path it never took in the top of the head and, therefore, the evidence indicated the skull had been struck by two separate missiles. Undeterred, the Clark Panel found a creative solution to this conundrum and simply moved the entrance wound four inches up the back of the head to bring it closer to, although still not in line with, the trail of metallic debris. A decade later, the HSCA forensic panel, in deference to Russell Fisher, accepted this revised location over the strenuous objections of the autopsy surgeons who, not unreasonably, believed that the first-hand observations of the physicians who had the actual body in front of them should take precedence over those of individuals looking at photos and X-rays years later.

Posner deals with this issue by ignoring their objections and writing in a footnote that Humes and Boswell had “misplaced” the entry wound “by four inches” because they had not had access to the photographs and X-rays “when making their autopsy report…” (p. 308n) But this argument ignores the fact that numerous other witnesses at the autopsy, including Secret Service Agent Roy Kellerman, FBI Agent Francis O’Neil, and Bethesda photographer John Stringer, all recalled that the wound was low down on the back of the head, not high up in the “cowlick” area where the Clark and HSCA experts claimed it was. In fact, not a single witness recalled seeing an entrance wound in the top of the head.

Several months after the initial publication of Case Closed, Posner told the House Committee on Government Operations that he had interviewed Humes and Boswell and that both now agreed they had been mistaken about the location of the entrance wound. When asked if he would be willing to hand over any notes or tape recordings of his interviews, Posner responded, “I would be happy, Mr Chairman, to ask Drs. Humes and Boswell if they would agree for their notes to be released to the National Archives.” (ARRB Report, p. 134) No such notes were ever rendered. Assassination researcher Dr. Gary Aguilar, who knew full well that both autopsy surgeons had vociferously objected to the revising of the wound’s location by the Clark and HSCA panels, then contacted Humes and Boswell to see if Posner’s declaration before Congress was accurate. But not only did they both deny telling Posner they had changed their minds, Boswell denied ever having spoken to Posner in the first place. Dr. Aguilar gave copies of his tape-recorded conversations with Humes and Boswell to the ARRB who then contacted Posner asking, once again, for substantiation of his allegation. As the Review Board later reported, it “never received a response to a second letter of request for the notes.” (Ibid)

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Oswald and the Paper Bag

As bad as Posner’s portrait of Oswald is, his chapters dealing with the assassination of President Kennedy and the evidence implicating Oswald are even worse. While it is probably not possible to make an honest case for the lone gunman theory and have it be in any way compelling, the fact is that Posner doesn’t even try. He continues to behave like an unscrupulous lawyer, carefully presenting only what suits his purposes and misrepresenting that which does not. He plays games with eyewitness testimony, creating consensus where there is none and hiding conflict where it exists. And in a failed attempt to make it appear possible that the assassination was the work of a single assassin he relies, as all Warren Commission apologists must, on the single bullet theory—a scientifically absurd hypothesis which was never in accordance with the evidence―and on a technique of comparative bullet lead analysis that has since been dropped by the forensic community because it has been demonstrated to be nothing more than “junk science.”

Posner begins his narrative of November 22, 1963, by telling readers that Lee Oswald left the Paine residence that morning and walked to the home of his co-worker, Buell Frazier. As Oswald approached the house he was noticed by Frazier’s sister, Linnie Mae Randle, “carrying a long package parallel to his body. He held one end of the brown-paper-wrapped object tucked under his armpit, and the other end did not quite touch the ground. Randle later recalled it appeared to contain something heavy. (p. 224) Randle watched as Oswald laid the package on the backseat of Frazier’s car then walked up to the house, which, Posner implies, was unusual because Frazier “always drove the one block to pick Oswald up at Ruth Paine’s home.” (Ibid) When Frazier joined Oswald at the car, he noticed the package on his backseat and asked what it was. Oswald told him it contained “curtain rods.” With no reason to doubt Oswald’s assertion, Frazier paid no more attention to the brown paper bag and drove to the Texas School Book Depository. Once they arrived, rather than walking into the building together as was their usual routine, “Oswald quickly left the car and walked ahead. Frazier watched him enter the Depository, carrying the package next to his body.” (Ibid)

With the above narrative, Posner creates the impression that Oswald was in an unusual haste that morning because he desperately wanted to sneak his rifle―disguised as curtain rods―into the Book Depository. However, the author is up to his usual trick of cherry-picking the details he likes and ignoring or misrepresenting the rest. Because not only do the testimonies of Frazier and Randle refute the notion that Oswald was in an unusual hurry that morning, but they also demonstrate that whatever was in the package he carried, it very likely could not have been the rifle.

To begin with, Randle did not say that Oswald carried the package with one end under his armpit and the other not quite touching the ground. What she really said was that he carried it down by his side, with his hand at the top,”and it almost touched the ground as he carried it.” (WC Vol. 2 p.248) Had the brown-paper-package contained the rifle it would have been impossible for Oswald to have carried it in this way because, even when broken down, the Mannlicher Carcano was 34.8 inches long. (WR p. 133) This is precisely why Posner threw in the idea that Randle saw one end of it “tucked under his armpit.” But she was clear in her testimony, not only about the way Oswald held the package, but also about its length. When the FBI presented Randle with a “replica” brown paper bag and asked her to fold it over until it reached “the proper length of the sack as seen by her on November 22, 1963,” her estimate was measured at 27 inches long. (WC Vol. 24 pp.407-8) Months later, when she appeared before the Warren Commission, she was asked to repeat the experiment. On that occasion, the resultant length was 28 ½ inches. (WC Vol. 2 pp. 248-50) It is entirely clear that Randle did not recall seeing a bag that was long enough to hold the rifle. Furthermore, she did not say, as Posner alleges, that the package “appeared to contain something heavy.” What she said was that the bag was made from “a heavy type of wrapping paper.” (WC Vol. 2 p. 249) Which makes a big difference.

Frazier also took part in experiments that helped establish that the bag Oswald had with him that day was between 27 and 28 inches in length. For example, on December 1, 1963, Frazier was asked by FBI agents to mark the point on the back seat of his car that the bag had reached when Oswald had put it there with one end against the door. The FBI “determined that this spot was 27 inches from the inside of the right rear door.” (WC Vol. 24, pp. 408-9) Frazier was also certainthat, when Oswald walked into the depository, he had carried the package with one end cupped in his hand and the other tucked under his arm. This was not possible with the Mannlicher Carcano. During his Warren Commission testimony, Frazier was presented with the disassembled rifle inside a paper bag and asked to demonstrate how Oswald had held the package. When he preceded to cup the bottom end in his hand, the top extended several inches above his shoulder, almost up to the level of his eye. But Frazier made clear that none of the bag he saw Oswald carrying had been sticking up above his shoulder and he was certain the bottom end had been cupped in his hand. “From what I seen, walking behind,” Frazier testified, “he had it under his arm and you couldn’t tell he had a package from the back.” (WC Vol. 2, p.243)

Posner alludes to the above in a footnote. Completely ignoring the experiments Frazier and Randle conducted for the FBI and the Commission, he writes that “Initially, Randle said the package was approximately 27 inches long, and Frazier estimated a little over two feet.” He then tries to nullify their fully corroborative testimonies by stating that “Frazier later admitted the package could have been longer than he originally thought.” Posner sources this assertion to a televised mock trial of Lee Harvey Oswald in which, he claims, Frazier said, “[Oswald] had the package parallel to his body, and it’s true it could have extended beyond his body and I wouldn’t have noticed it.” (p. 224-224n)

This is a blatant distortion of what Frazier said. For starters, what Posner presents as a direct quote from Frazier is no such thing. In fact, he is passing off the words used by lawyer Vincent Bugliosi in his questioning as if they were spoken by Frazier during his answers. More crucially, Frazier never agreed that the package was longer than he had previously said it was, he only agreed that it could have been “protruding out in front of [Oswald’s] body” without him seeing it. To this day, Frazier insists the package he saw was around two feet long and that Oswald carried it with one end cupped in his hand and the other tucked under his arm.

As to the implication in Case Closed that by turning up at Frazier’s house and then walking ahead of him into the Book Depository Oswald showed himself to have been in an unusual hurry that day, Frazier’s testimony puts the lie to this.

Firstly, despite Posner’s assertion, Frazier did not say that he “always drove the one block to pick Oswald up at Ruth Paine’s home.” He said, “I usually picked him up around the corner there,” but “once in a while I picked him up at the house and another time he was already coming down the sidewalk to the house when I was fixing to pick him up…” (WC Vol. 2, p.225) Furthermore, when Oswald’s face appeared at the window, Frazier looked at the clock and realised “I was the one who was running a little bit late…it was later than I thought it was.” (Ibid)

Secondly, when they arrived at the Book Depository, Frazier watched as Oswald “put the package he had…up under his arm” and got out of the car. Frazier himself stayed inside the car, “letting my engine run and getting to charge up my battery.” (Ibid, 227) When Oswald noticed that Frazier was not with him, he stopped and stood “at the end of the cyclone fence waiting for me to get out of the car.” (Ibid, 228) Once Frazier shut off the engine and exited the car, Oswald carried on walking and Frazier “followed him in.” (Ibid) Oswald gradually got further ahead of him, Frazier said, because he lagged behind to watch the nearby railroad tracks. “I just like to watch them switch the cars,” he testified, “…so I just took my time walking up there.” (Ibid) There is, then, no reason whatsoever to believe there was anything at all unusual about Oswald’s behaviour that morning.

The Sixth Floor

To lay the groundwork for his argument that Oswald was on the sixth floor of the Depository at 12:30 pm firing the shots that killed Kennedy, Posner claims that two employees saw him there shortly before noon. One of those workers, Bonnie Ray Williams, “spotted Oswald on the east side of that floor, near the windows overlooking Dealey Plaza” at 11:40 am. About five minutes later, Posner says, Charles Givens saw Oswald by the very window from which the shots were allegedly fired. (p. 225) Yet, as those who have studied the subject in detail know, the statements and testimonies of the Texas School Book Depository employees constitute a morass of confused and conflicting recollections that establish very little with certainty. In presenting Williams and Givens as placing Oswald on the sixth floor, Posner is not only cherry-picking from that overall morass, but he is cherry-picking from the variegating statements of those two witnesses.

When Williams gave his first statement to the FBI on November 23, 1963, he said that he saw Oswald on the first floor of the building at 8:00 am “filling orders.” The next time he saw Oswald was at approximately 11:30 when, Williams said, “he went down on an elevator from the sixth floor to the first floor…Charles Givens was on the other elevator, descending at the same time. As they were going down, he saw Lee [Oswald] on the fifth floor” Williams added that “while working on the sixth floor until 11:30 am on November 22, 1963, he did not see Lee or anyone else in the southeast corner of the building.” (Commission Document 5, p. 330) The next time he spoke to the Bureau, on March 19, 1964, he gave a completely different version of events. “The last time I saw Lee Harvey Oswald,” he said, “…was at about 11:40 am. At that time, Oswald was on the sixth floor on the east side of the building.” (WC Vol. 22 p.681)

Five days later, when he gave a deposition for the Warren Commission, Williams gave a third version, saying that, “The only time I saw [Oswald] that morning was a little after eight” on the first floor. (WC Vol. 3 p.164) When Commission lawyer Joseph Ball asked Williams if he saw Oswald on the sixth floor he replied, “I am not sure. I think I saw him once messing around with some cartons or something, back over on the east side of the building…as I said before, I am not sure that he really was on the sixth floor.” (Ibid 165-166) In any honest assessment, the best that can be said about Bonnie Ray Williams is that he was unsure of where and when he really saw Oswald that day.

Charles Givens is equally, if not more, unreliable. In his Dallas police affidavit of November 22, Givens made no mention of seeing Oswald at all. “I worked up on the sixth floor until about 11:30 am,” he said. “Then I went downstairs and into the bathroom. At twelve o’clock I took my lunch period.” (WC Vol. 24 p.210) The following day, Givens gave a statement to the FBI in which he repeated his previous assertion that he went to the first floor by elevator at 11:30, “where he used the rest room at about 11:35 am or 11:40 am” then “walked around on the first floor until 12 o’clock noon.” This time, however, he added that he had seen Oswald “working on the fifth floor during the morning filling orders. Lee was standing by the elevator in the building at 11:30 am when Givens went to the first floor.” Givens further stated that he had “observed Lee reading a newspaper in the [first floor] domino room where the employees eat lunch about 11:50 am.” (Commission Document 5, p. 329)

Several weeks later, on January 8, 1964, Givens told the Secret Service an entirely different story, claiming that he had seen Oswald “on the sixth floor at about 11:45 am…carrying a clipboard that appeared to have some orders on it…Shortly thereafter, Givens and the other employees working on the floor-laying project quit for lunch…” (Commission Document 87, p. 780)

Finally, on April 8, 1964, Givens told the Warren Commission he had left the sixth floor around 11:45 by elevator and seen Oswald “standing at the gate on the fifth floor.” When he got to the first floor, Givens claimed, he realised he had forgotten his cigarettes and so he went back up to the sixth floor to retrieve them. “When I got back upstairs, he [Oswald] was on the sixth floor” coming from “the window up front where the shots were fired from.” (WC Vol. 6 p.349)

Considering that the stories he told are mutually exclusive, it should be obvious that Charles Givens was a truly undependable witness. In fact, Lieutenant Jack Revill of the Dallas Police Special Service Bureau cautioned the FBI that, based on his office’s prior experience with Givens, he believed that Givens was the type of witness who would “change his story for money.” (Commission Document 735, p. 296) It is for that reason that I see little value in attempting to offer a judgement as to which of his conflicting accounts is most accurate. It is noteworthy, however, that Posner cautions elsewhere in Case Closed that “Testimony closer to the event must be given greater weight…” (p. 235). And yet he ignores his own advice entirely when it suits his purposes, as it does with Williams and Givens.

Posner writes that many critics have tried to prove Oswald was not on the sixth floor by “relying on his protestations, after his arrest and during his police interrogation, that he had been in the first-floor lunch room with ‘Junior’ Jarman, and gone to the second floor to buy a Coke near the time of the assassination.” (p. 227) Posner claims, however, that “contemporaneous statements of other workers who were in both lunch rooms say Oswald was in neither.” He goes on to state that Junior Jarman “denied ever seeing him during his lunch break” and “Troy West was inside the first-floor domino room eating lunch from 12:00 to nearly 12:30 and did not see Oswald during that half hour.”

To address the above it is important to note, as Posner does not, that the Dallas Police did not tape record a single word of Oswald’s numerous interrogations. As a result, critics and apologists alike have always been forced to rely upon the hearsay accounts of those who questioned him, rather than any verifiable, objective record. The officer who led the interrogations, Captain Will Fritz, told the Warren Commission that Oswald’s alibi was that he had had been eating lunch with two black employees, one known to him as “Junior” and another whose name Oswald did not remember. (WC Vol 4 p.224) Fritz claimed not to have kept any notes of the interrogations but this was proven to be false when a set of his brief, handwritten notes was donated to the National Archives a few years after the publication of Case Closed. What these notes revealed was that Fritz’s commission testimony was a somewhat distorted version of what Oswald told him. On page one of his notes, we find the following notation: “two negr, came in, one Jr.-+ short negro-.” These words appear to align much more closely with the report of FBI agent James Bookhout than they do with Fritz’s testimony.

Bookhout’s November 23, 1963, report of the first day of Oswald’s interrogations reveals that, rather than claiming to have eaten lunch with Junior, what Oswald really said was that,

…he had eaten lunch in the lunch room at the Texas School Book Depository alone, but recalled possibly two Negro employees walking through the room during this period. He stated possibly one of these employees was called ‘Junior’ and the other was a short individual whose name he could not recall… (R622)

What makes this doubly interesting is that both Junior Jarman and another, shorter, black employee named Harold Norman separately confirmed that they had indeed passed through the first-floor lunchroom around the time Oswald said he was there. (WC Vol. 3 p.201, p.189) And Norman further stated that he thought there had been someone else in the lunchroom while he was there but could not recall who it was. (WC Vol. 3 p.189) It is fair to say, then, that the testimony of Jarman and Norman tends to confirm rather than refute Oswald’s account of his whereabouts.

Posner treats readers to another of his own magic shows when he says that employee Troy West ate his own lunch in the first-floor lunchroom without seeing Oswald. West, who was a mail wrapper at the Depository, testified that he was in the habit of spending virtually his entire workday at his own workstation on the west side of the first floor, and November 22 was no different. He said he had quit for lunch “about 12 o’clock,” made himself some coffee “right there close to the wrapping mail table where I wrap mail,” and then “sat down to eat my lunch.” He was still there, eating his lunch, when police officers entered the building moments after the assassination. (WC Vol. 6 p.361) There is nothing in his testimony to even suggest that he spent his lunch break in the first-floor lunchroom. Posner’s retelling of West’s testimony is one more example of the author’s myth making.

Posner claims that “reliable testimony from the Depository places Oswald, alone, on the sixth floor by noon…” (p. 288) But he produces none. He goes on to allege that there was one witness with the “gift of super-eyesight” (p. 250) who saw Oswald in the sixth-floor window firing the shots and was able to positively identify him. The witness to whom he is referring is Howard Brennan, an obvious prevaricator upon whom no serious investigator would rely.

Quoting liberally from a book Brennan wrote decades after the assassination, Posner writes that he was “leaning against a four-foot-high retaining wall on the corner of Houston and Elm, directly across the street from the School Book Depository.” A few minutes before the assassination, Brennan “noticed a man in the southeast corner of the sixth floor…he was five feet eight to five feet ten inches tall, white, slender, with dark-brown hair, and between twenty-five and thirty-five years of age.” When the shooting began, Brennan looked up and saw “the same young man” with “a rifle in his hands, pointing toward the Presidential car.” (p. 247-248) Minutes later, he gave a description of this man to a uniformed police officer. Brennan was subsequently taken to police headquarters to view a line-up where he failed to identify Oswald as the man in the window.

How does Posner deal with the fact that Brennan did not identify Oswald on the evening of the assassination? He writes, “Brennan could have picked Oswald from the line-up, but did not do so because he feared others might be involved in the assassination, and if word leaked out that he was the only one who could identify the trigger man, his life would be in danger.” (p. 249) This is indeed the excuse Brennan later dreamed up. It is also nonsense. As Mark Lane pointed out in his penetrating, ground-breaking book Rush to Judgment, Brennan’s excuse is invalidated by the fact that he most certainly knew of at least one other eyewitness, Amos Euins, because Brennan himself had pointed him out to Secret Service Agent Forrest Sorrels. (WC Vol. 7, p.349) Furthermore, as Lane noted, “Brennan’s anxiety about himself and his family did not prevent him from speaking to reporters on November 22, when he gave not only his impressions as an eyewitness but also his name.” (Lane, Rush to Judgment, p. 92)

Brennan’s real reason for failing to identify Oswald on the evening of the assassination had nothing to do with fear of reprisal. As he admitted in a statement to the FBI on January 10, 1964,

…after his first interview at the Sheriff’s Office…he left and went home at about 2 P.M. While he was at home, and before he returned to view a line-up, which included the possible assassin of President Kennedy, he observed Lee Harvey Oswald’s picture on television. Mr. Brennan stated that this, of course, did not help him retain the original impression of the man in the window with the rifle…(WC Vol. 24 p.406)

Based on this admission alone, Brennan’s latter-day claims are completely worthless.

It is also very telling that Brennan refused to cooperate with the House Select Committee on Assassinations when it reinvestigated the assassination fifteen years later. In March 1978, Committee staff contacted Brennan hoping to talk quietly with him at his home in Texas, but Brennan stated that the only way he would talk to anyone was if he was subpoenaed. A month later the Committee asked him to reconsider but he refused and was subsequently informed that he would be subpoenaed to testify on May 2. According to a HSCA staff report, Brennan then said that he “would not come to Washington and that he would fight any subpoena.” And, in fact, Brennan was belligerent about not testifying. He stated that he would avoid any subpoena by getting his doctor to state that it would be bad for his health to testify about the assassination. He further told them that even if he was forced to come to Washington he would simply not testify if he didn’t want to. (HSCA contact report, 4/20/78, Record No. 180-10068-10381) Between May 15 and May 19, 1978, Committee staffers made eleven separate attempts to present Brennan with previous statements he had made to try to get him to simply sign a form asserting that these previous statements were accurate. He refused. Even after the committee took the extra step of granting Brennan immunity from prosecution he would not budge. Of course, none of this appears in Case Closed.

Posner and the Sniper’s Nest

In 1969, Dallas Police Chief Jesse Curry candidly admitted to the paucity of evidence placing Oswald in the so-called “sniper’s nest,” stating that “No one has ever been able to put him in the Texas School Book Depository with a rifle in his hand.” (Dallas Morning News, Nov 6, 1969) Despite much hyperbole, Posner does nothing to prove Curry wrong. He claims that Oswald was responsible for creating the sniper’s nest, a “three-sided shield” made from cartons of books that “protected the sniper from being observed by anyone who wandered onto the sixth floor.” (p. 226) Yet, as Posner himself admits, the boxes were piled up in front of the sixth-floor window by the workers who were laying a new floor. Furthermore, one of Posner’s own witnesses, Bonnie Ray Williams, was part of the floor-laying crew and his testimony indicates that the so-called “three-sided shield” was simply a result of the way they placed the boxes. “We moved these books kind of like in a row like that,” he said, “kind of winding them around.” (WC Vol. 3 p.166) As author Don Thomas has suggested, the fact that a pack of cigarettes was found in the corner suggests that what the floor crew had created was a hidden space to sneak a quick smoke without being observed by their supervisor. (Hear No Evil, p. 36)

Posner attempts to attach special significance to the fact that Oswald’s palmprint and fingerprints were found on two of the boxes in the window area. But given that his job involved handling those very boxes, the presence of his prints upon them is neither surprising nor particularly noteworthy. Posner also quotes Luke Mooney, the deputy sheriff who discovered the “sniper’s nest,” as stating that one of the boxes “looked to be a rest for the weapon” because it showed “a very slight crease…where the rifle could have lain―at the same angle that the shots were fired from.” (p. 269) This was refuted, however, by crime scene detective Carl Day who said that although he initially “thought the recoil of the gun had caused that” crease, he “later decided that it was in the wrong direction.” (WC Vol. 4, p.271) Indeed, crime scene photographs show that the crease points towards Houston Street, not Elm. (WC Vol. 21, p.643)

The Rifle and the Shells

The most incriminating evidence against Oswald is the fact that the 6.5 mm Mannlicher Carcano rifle he had allegedly ordered through his P.O. box, and three rifle shells fired from that weapon, were said to have been found on the sixth floor a little over forty-five minutes after the assassination. Posner admits in a footnote that the rifle was originally identified as a 7.65 Mauser and many critics have argued that this suggests the weapons were swapped in order to incriminate Oswald. But for the sake of argument, I will accept Posner’s assertion that the “initial misidentification” was a mistake that occurred as a result of the “considerable similarities between a bolt-action Mauser and a Carcano.” (p. 271n) In the end, the question that needs to be asked is what evidence is there that Oswald himself handled that rifle on the day of the assassination? The answer is none.

Posner writes that when Lieutenant Day inspected the Carcano at the Dallas police crime lab later that evening, he found Oswald’s right palmprint on the wooden stock. (p. 283) Yet when the rifle was turned over to the FBI and examined hours later by Supervisor of the Bureau’s Latent Fingerprint Section, Sebastian Latona, he found no trace of any such print. (WC Vol. 4, p. 24) And, in fact, the FBI was not informed of Day’s alleged lifting of the print until November 29―seven days after he allegedly discovered it and five days after Oswald was murdered in the basement of police headquarters. (Ibid 24-25) Neither Day nor anyone else ever offered an adequate explanation for this delay, leading to speculation that the print was obtained by some unscrupulous means after Oswald’s death. Posner tries to get around this by quoting from his own personal interview with Day in which the former police lieutenant claimed to have told FBI agent Vincent Drain of the print at the time he handed the rifle over on the night of November 22. But not only was this flatly disputed by Drain, Day made no such claim during his Warren Commission testimony. Nor in his written report of January 8, 1964. Again, Posner in ignoring his own rule about testimony near the time of the incident.

Putting these evidentiary issues aside for a moment, and again assuming Day’s account is accurate, what does the print tell us about Oswald’s guilt or innocence in the assassination? In truth, it is more suggestive of the former than the latter. Because even Lt. Day did not claim that the print, which was only visible in its entirety when the rifle was disassembled, could be said to place the Carcano in Oswald’s hands on November 22nd In fact, he described the palmprint as an “old dry print” that “had been on the gun several weeks or months.” (WC Vol. 26 p.831; Anthony Summers, Conspiracy, p. 54) So accepting the palmprint as genuine only places the disassembled rifle in Oswald’s hands “weeks or months” before the assassination.And this fact takes on added significance when considering Posner’s suggestion that Oswald reassembled the rifle while on the sixth floor, likely without the use of a screwdriver since none was found. It seems highly improbable that Oswald could have handled the weapon so heavily that day without leaving any new prints. Therefore, when considered alongside the fact that the rifle was known not to have been in his possession for at least two months before the assassination, and in conjunction with the firm belief of Frazier and Randle that whatever package Oswald may have carried that day it was too small to hold the rifle, the state’s own evidence strongly suggests that he did not touch the Mannlicher Carcano at all on November 22.

Turning our attention to the three bullet shells found in the sniper’s nest, their handling by the Dallas police is a prime example of why so much suspicion has been cast on the investigating authorities in this case. Posner claims that the hulls were first observed by deputy sheriff Mooney; that Lt. Day “photographed the three bullet shells in their original position;” (p. 269) and that the photographs show they were found “in a random pattern.” (p. 270n) This, however, is provably false. A news cameraman for WFAA-TV in Dallas named Tom Alyea told Gary Mack in 1985 that, before the crime scene unit arrived, Captain Fritz had picked up the shells and held them up for Alyea to see before throwing them back down on the floor. (Jim Marrs, Crossfire, p. 437-438) Alyea’s account may sound unbelievable, but it is, in fact, corroborated by the Warren Commission testimony of deputy sheriff Mooney. Mooney told the commission, “I stood and watched him [Fritz] go over and pick them up and look at them.” Additionally, when shown the crime scene photographs, Mooney noted that they showed the shells to be “further apart than they actually were.” (WC Vol. 3 p.286)

As if the above mishandling of the cartridge cases was not bad enough, Lt. Day testified that he picked the shells back up off the floor of the sniper’s nest, placed all three in an envelope, and handed the envelope to another detective. Then, at 10:00 that evening, the envelope was handed back to him with only two hulls in it. Unbelievably, as Day confessed, the envelope had not been sealed and neither himself nor anyone else had marked the shells found at the scene with their initials. (WC Vol. 4 pp.253-254) This failure to properly record the chain of evidence in accordance with standard police procedure left the evidence vulnerable to tampering. For that reason, it is hard to believe that the rifle shells could have been entered into evidence had Oswald lived to face trial. Any defence attorney worth his salt would have demanded they be thrown out for lack of proof and, assuming the law was followed, the judge would have had little choice but to comply. Of course, Posner mentions none of this in his “brilliant and meticulous,” Pulitzer Prize-nominated account.

Marrion Baker and The Girl on the Stairs

Oswald’s known whereabouts and his demeanour approximately ninety seconds after the assassination also provide compelling reason to believe he had not been on the sixth floor firing the rifle. As Posner details, a police motorcycle officer named Marrion Baker, who had been riding in the Presidential motorcade, had run into the Book Depository within seconds of the assassination, believing the shots may have been fired from the building’s roof. When he entered the building, he quickly made his way up the stairs accompanied by building manager Roy Truly. Catching sight of Oswald through the window in the second-floor lunchroom door, Baker halted his ascent, burst into the room with pistol in hand, and demanded Oswald identify himself. AfterTruly informed Baker that Oswald was an employee, the pair continued their dash up the stairs. Oswald, meanwhile, bought himself a Coke from the soda machine and strolled calmly through the offices and down to the first floor.

Baker later told the Warren Commission that Oswald appeared calm, collected, and “normal” during their encounter. (WC Vol. 3 p.252) Truly concurred, stating that Oswald “didn’t seem to be excited or overly afraid or anything. He might have been a bit startled, like I might have been if somebody confronted me. But I cannot recall any change in expression of any kind on his face.” (Ibid, 225) Is it likely that, having rapidly fired three shots at the President of the United States, hidden the murder weapon, weaved his way between stacks of boxes, and ran down four flights of stairs―all in less than ninety seconds―Oswald would have appeared cool, calm, and expressionless when confronted by a police officer with his pistol drawn? And having managed to escape arrest at that moment, is it reasonable to suggest his first thought was not to get out of the building as quickly as possible but to buy himself a Coca Cola? If I was on Oswald’s jury, these questions would weigh heavily on my mind.

Perhaps more important than Oswald’s calm demeanour is the fact that two other employees,Vicki Adams and her friend Sandra Styles-who had both watched the assassination from a fourth-floor window of the depository building–were very likely on the noisy, old, wooden steps at the same time Oswald was supposed to have run down them. And neither woman saw nor heard any sign of& him. Posner tries to dispose of this problem by following the Warren Commission’s lead in asserting that “although [Adams and Styles] thought they came down quickly, they actually did not arrive on the first floor until at least four to five minutes after the third shot.” (p. 264) The author may have just about gotten away with this argument in 1993, but it no longer appears to have any viability today.

In 2012, author Barry Ernest published a landmark book titled The Girl on the Stairs. In it, the author focussed primarily on his search for Vicki Adams and the evidence that would corroborate or refute her story. He tracked down Adams and her colleagues, asking questions that had never been asked before, and made trips to the National Archives looking for crucial documents. In 1999, Ernest discovered a bombshell document in the Archives in the form of a June 2, 1964, letter written by Assistant United States Attorney, Martha Joe Stroud, to Warren Commission Chief Counsel, J. Lee Rankin. This letter contains the only known reference in the Commission’s files to an interview with Dorothy Garner, Adams’s supervisor who had stood with her at the fourth-floor window when the shots were fired. The letter says, “Miss Garner…stated this morning that after Miss Adams went downstairs she (Miss Garner) saw Mr. Truly and the policeman come up.”

Recognizing the importance of this statement, Ernest tracked Garner down to see if her recollection would corroborate the Stroud letter. When he interviewed her, Garner confirmed that Adams and Styles had left the window immediately after the shots were fired, with her “right behind” them. She further stated that she had not descended the stairs with her colleagues but had gone to a storage area by the stairway. She stayed there long enough to see Baker and Truly coming up the stairs after their encounter with Oswald in the second-floor lunchroom. What she did not see in the intervening seconds was Oswald descending from the sixth floor. (Ernest, The Girl on the Stairs, pp. 267-268) This is hugely significant because Oswald could not possibly have got down those stairs ahead of Styles and Adams, and if he did not walk down them in between the time Adams and Styles went down and Baker came up, then he could not have been on the sixth floor at the time of the assassination. The corroborative accounts of Adams, Styles, and Garner are, therefore, much less consistent with Oswald being present on the sixth floor during the assassination than with his own claim to have been on the first floor eating lunch and making his way upstairs to buy a Coke.

The Murder of Kennedy

Ernest is careful not to overstate what his research reveals, admitting that “What puts Oswald in a place other than the sixth floor is indeed circumstantial.” Yet, as he also notes, “it is no more circumstantial than everything that has been used to put him on the sixth floor.” (Ernest, p. 282) Indeed, we cannot say for absolute certain where Oswald was during those crucial seconds and, at this late stage, it is unlikely that definitive proof will emerge either way. But the most important question is not whether Oswald was on the sixth floor firing a rifle, it is whether it was even possible for one, lone gunman to have accomplished the assassination. And the truth is that, despite Posner’s protestations, the evidence demonstrates overwhelmingly that the shooting had to have been the work of multiple gunmen.

Posner, of course, argues that only three shots were fired, all from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. In discussing the “ear-witnesses,” he notes that of the “nearly two hundred witnesses who expressed an opinion…over 88 percent heard three shots.” He also uses his own set of statistics to downplay the significant number of bystanders who thought the shots were fired from the general area of the “grassy knoll,” to the right front of the Presidential limousine, and claims that the “echo patterns in Dealey [Plaza] make locating the direction of the shots more difficult…” And finally, he makes much of the fact that only “2 percent” of witnesses “thought [shots] came from more than one direction.” This, he says, “is a critical blow to most conspiracy theories, since those who charge there was a second gunman usually place the additional shooter…on the grassy knoll. But even these writers acknowledge that most of the shots came from the rear.” (pp. 236-237)

Posner’s first point, the number of witnesses who reported hearing three shots is, to my mind, more curious than it is compelling. If one accepts Posner’s postulate that witnesses were confusing echoes with actual gunshots, then is it not reasonable to expect those witnesses to report hearing more than the three shots the author says were fired? Of course, Posner is―as all those who support the official story must―overstating the effect of echoes in Dealey Plaza to diminish the testimony of those who thought shots came from the knoll. The author quotes Dr. David Green, an acoustics expert hired by the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), as saying he found it “hard to believe a rifle was fired from the knoll.” (p. 237) But he does not reveal the fact that the HSCA retainedDr Green and two other psychoacoustic experts, Dr. Dennis McFadden and Professor Frederick Wightman, to be present in Dealey Plaza while three sequences of test shots were fired from the Book Depository and the knoll. These experts placed themselves at various locations in the plaza and recorded their impressions as to the origin of the sounds, and the results were unambiguous. Shots fired from the Depository sounded like they came from the Depository and shots from the knoll sounded like shots from the knoll. (HSCA Vol. 8, p.144)

There is no doubt that the spectators to President Kennedy’s brutal execution were caught by surprise and few if any were likely to have been counting the number of shots they heard. In Reclaiming History, Vincent Bugliosi cites the textbook Firearms Investigation, Identifications, and Evidence, which rightly cautions that “little credence…should be put in what anyone says about a shot or even the number of shots. These things coming upon him suddenly are generally inaccurately recorded in his memory.” (Bugliosi, p. 848) With this advice in mind, what is one to make of the apparent three-shot consensus to which Posner refers? The most likely answer is that the consensus is a result of a type of groupthink. As the Warren Commission reported, “Soon after the three empty cartridges were found, officials at the scene decided that three shots were fired, and that conclusion was widely circulated by the press. The eyewitness testimony may be subconsciously colored by the extensive publicity given the conclusion that three shots were fired.” (WR pp.110-111)

As to Posner’s point that only a tiny percentage of witnesses thought shots came from more than one direction, this is hardly the slam dunk the author thinks it is. The results of the HSCA’s psychoacoustic tests showed that shots from the Depository and shots from the knoll were distinct from one another. And yet, it is worth noting that the HSCA experts admitted that”The emotional condition of our observers during the test and the emotional condition of the people during the assassination were undoubtedly quite different.” (HSCA Vol. 8, p.146) Indeed, the surprising nature of the event, and the ensuing shock and confusion, should not be underestimated. A definitive answer as to why more witnesses did not report hearing shots from multiple directions remains elusive. However, it is certainly reasonable to suggest that, for many of the ear-witnesses, their impression as to the source of the shots was informed by only one of the shots they heard, and they naturally assumed that the other sounds were coming from the same direction.

One of the few witnesses who recalled hearing shots from two directions was also one of the most important, not just because of what he heard, but because of what he saw and did. S.M. Holland, who was standing on the railroad overpass facing the plaza when the shooting began, heard at least three shots from the corner of Houston and Elm streets and one from the grassy knoll. As he told the Warren Commission, when the sound of a “report” drew Holland’s gaze to the trees in front of the fence on the knoll, he saw “a puff of smoke come out from under those trees…” (WC Vol. 6, p.244) Holland was so sure of what he saw and heard that he “run around the end of the overpass, behind the fence to see if I could see anyone up there behind the fence.” (Ibid) James Simmons, who was not called to testify for the commission, told author Mark Lane in a filmed interview that he toohad heard a sound like a “loud firecracker or a gunshot” coming from behind the wooden fence, accompanied by “a puff of smoke that came underneath the trees on the embankment.” Simmons joined Holland in his dash to the area behind the wooden fence, but because it took them a minimum of two minutes to reach the area, they found no one there. As Holland noted, if there had been a gunman there, “They could have easily have gotten away before I got there”. (Mark Lane, Rush to Judgment, p. 35)Although they did not find an assassin, as Simmons recalled, they did find”footprints in the mud around the fence, and…on the wooden two-by-four railing on the fence” as well as “on a car bumper there, as if someone had stood up there looking over the fence”. (Ibid, p. 34)

Several other witnesses on the overpass such as Richard Dodd, Austin Miller, and Thomas Murphy saw the same as Holland and Simmons, a fact that is most inconvenient to Posner. He tries to nullify one of them, Austin Miller, by writing that Miller “thought the smoke he saw was ‘steam.’” (p. 256) But in the very statement Posner cites, Miller is quoted as saying that he saw “something which I thought was smoke or steam [my emphasis] coming from a group of trees north of Elm off the railroad tracks.” (WC Vol. 19, p.485) Posner being Posner simply excises the word “smoke” from his quotation. He tries the very same trick with Simmons, writing that Simmons saw “exhaust fumes” from the embankment. (p. 256) When, in fact, what Simmons’s affidavit really says is that “he thought he saw exhaust fumes of smoke near the embankment.” (WC Vol. 22 p.833)

To make these troublesome observations disappear, Posner resorts to claiming that “since modern ammunition is smokeless, it seldom creates even a wisp of smoke”. This assertion is easily disproven by visiting a rifle range or simply googling the words “rifle smoke.” In 2023, it is not difficult to find pictures like the one below.

As firearms expert Monty Lutz told the HSCA, “both ‘smokeless’ and smoke producing ammunition may leave a trace of smoke that would be visible to the eye in sunlight. That is because even with smokeless ammunition, when the weapon is fired, nitrocellulose bases in the powder which are impregnated with nitroglycerin may give off smoke, albeit less smoke than black or smoke-producing ammunition. In addition, residue remaining in the weapon from previous firings, as well as cleaning solution which might have been used on the weapon, could cause even more smoke to be discharged in subsequent firings of the weapon.”(HSCA Vol. 12, p. 24-25)

Posner makes a last-ditch attempt at nullifying the eyewitness evidence of smoke on the knoll by stating that “in 1963, there was a steam pipe along the wooden fence near the edge of the Triple Underpass…If there was smoke, it is most likely that Austin Miller was right, and it was from the pipe.” (p. 256) Why smoke would come from a steam pipe is something Posner never attempts to explain. Regardless, although he is correct that there was such a pipe near the underpass—it can be seen in the documentary film Rush to Judgment—what he fails to reveal is that this pipe was nowhere near the area in which the smoke was observed. In fact, it was over 100 feet away. Therefore, it cannot be said to account for the smoke observed by witnesses during the shooting.

An important witness to whom Posner omits any reference in his text is Joe Marshall Smith, a Dallas police officer who ran to the knoll area after the shooting because a bystander told him “They are shooting the President from the bushes.” (WC Vol. 7, p.535) When he got to the parking lot behind the fence, he spotted a man standing by a car and so pulled his pistol from its holster. “Just as I did,” Smith told the Warren Commission, “[the man] showed me that he was a Secret Service agent.” (Ibid) As a result, he let the stranger go and went about checking the cars in the parking lot. The problem here, as the Commission knew but did not tell Officer Smith, is that there were no genuine Secret Service agents in Dealey Plaza at that time because they had all accompanied the Presidential limousine in its race to Parkland Hospital. (HSCA Vol. 5, p.589)

Posner refers obliquely to allegations of a Secret Service impersonator, suggesting that witnesses to any such individual were “mistaken,” and claims that he “reviewed the 1963 badges” for the ATF, IRS, Army Intelligence, and other such organizations, and found that “several look alike.” (p. 269n) But Posner’s subjective assessment as to the similarity of these various badges does not address the fact that Smith specifically said that he had “seen those [Secret Service] credentials before” November 22, and that the identification he was shown by the man behind the fence “satisfied” both Smith and a deputy sheriff that accompanied him. (Summers, Conspiracy, p. 81) As he later admitted, Officer Smith came to deeply regret letting the man go, recalling that,

He looked like an auto mechanic. He had on a sports shirt and sports pants. But he had dirty fingernails, it looked like, and hands that looked like an auto mechanic’s hands. And afterwards it didn’t ring true for the Secret Service…I should have checked that man closer, but at the time I didn’t snap on it… (Ibid)

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