Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  Wolf: “In the three frames following 313 he reversed his direction and came back where he was before. It took him three frames to do it, so he’s moving considerably slower moving back than he moved forward.”

  Rather: “That’s not the impression one gets just sitting in a room and looking at the film.”

  Wolf: “That, of course, is the whole point of doing this kind of [analysis]. It’s to get away from the subjective impressions that are developed by looking at a blurred motion picture.”166

  Remarkably, the twenty-six volumes of the Warren Commission contain only one reference to the absolutely critical and paramount fact of the president’s head being propelled forward, and it’s not by any member of the Commission or its staff. Associated Press photographer James W. Altgens, in testifying about the shot to Kennedy’s head, said, “What made me almost certain that the shot came from behind was because at the time I was looking at the president, just as he was struck, it caused him to move a bit forward.”167 And there is only one sentence and four additional words on the subject in the entire twelve volumes of the HSCA.168 The official investigations treated the matter so dismissively that neither of their final reports mentioned the forward movement of the president’s head at all.

  Watching the Zapruder film in my study, I could not discern the slight forward movement at Z313, one-eighteenth of a second before the head snap to the rear. But looking at the individual frames, I could see that from Z312 to Z313 the forward movement, though slight, was distinct and unmistakable.169 (See Z312 and Z313 for the forward movement and Z314–321 for the head snap to rear in the photo section.) I now had, for the first time, clear, photographic evidence to present to the London jury that Kennedy was struck by a bullet from the rear—powerful evidence I very much needed as a counterpoint to the defense’s evidence indicating a shot from the front.

  One other point, often overlooked, worked in my favor. The president’s head was pushed not only forward at impact but also downward. Only a shot from a high elevation (the sixth-floor sniper’s nest) could be expected to push the head downward to the degree it was. A shot from the much lower grassy knoll could be expected to push the president’s head to his left, not downward.

  On May 24, 1986, I flew to Phoenix, Arizona, to spend the day working with my photographic expert, Cecil Kirk, on a multiplicity of photographic issues. Kirk, who helped me understand the intricacies of the Zapruder film, had been the sergeant who headed the Mobile Crime Lab and Photographic Services Unit for the Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia. This unit was responsible for the preparation of the photographic exhibits for the HSCA hearings and final report. Retired from the force in 1980, Kirk, considered one of the nation’s leading experts in forensic photography and forensic crime-scene technology, and a former lecturer on forensic crime photography at the FBI Academy, was now director of the Support Services Bureau for the Scottsdale Police Department. On the dining room table of his suburban home, I witnessed an enormous mound of photographs from the HSCA’s investigation of the Kennedy assassination. The photographs were all mixed up, with no discernible pattern. Five or so minutes into my necessarily indiscriminate perusal of the photographs, one photograph suddenly stood out, startlingly so.

  “What in the hell is this?” I asked in amazement.

  He answered, “A high-contrast photo of frame 313.”*I asked, “This is an absolutely incredible photo. I’ve never seen it before. Why wasn’t it published in the volumes?”

  He said, “I don’t know,” that he had nothing to do with the determination of what photographs appeared in the volumes.

  I asked why wouldn’t a similar photo have been in the Warren Commission volumes.

  “They didn’t have the necessary photographic image enhancement technology to do this back then,” Kirk answered.

  It had to be pure oversight on the part of someone at the HSCA to not publish this enhanced reproduction of Z313 (see Itek’s high-contrast enhancement of Zapruder frame 313 in the photo section), for this reproduction is almost, if not equally, as dramatic as that of the head snap to the rear, only it shows vivid, graphic evidence that the fatal shot to the head at Z312–313 was fired from the rear. As can be clearly seen, the terrible spray of blood, shell fragments, and brain matter a millisecond after the president was shot appears to be to the front.†

  I now had more than enough evidence, of every species I would possibly need, to demonstrate to the jury that at the all-important moment of impact, Kennedy’s head was pushed forward, not backward, proving the head shot came from the rear. As I indicated earlier, if I hadn’t been prepared to prove this fact to the jury, the verdict most likely would have been different. That my opposition, Gerry Spence, knew it was a pivotal issue at the trial was demonstrated when Spence, being the devil of a great advocate that he is, had the head snap portion of the film shown to the jury (without objection from me) five times at the very beginning of his cross-examination of one of my first witnesses, Charles Brehm, even though Brehm was merely a Dealey Plaza witness and not my photographic expert. Spence made the commentary (proper only in summation) during his cross-examination, which I elected not to object to, that the head snap to the rear “looked as if somebody walked right up to the president with a baseball bat and took a full swing as hard as they could, like Babe Ruth, and hit him right square in the middle of the forehead and knocked his head back.”170 But the Sultan of Swat actually struck out in this case.

  This new evidence I now possessed, that the head shot to the president was fired from the rear, still did not negate, by itself, the far-fetched conspiracy argument that the president was struck by a second head shot perhaps a millisecond after the shot from the rear, and it was that head shot that caused the violent head snap to the rear. To furnish scientific support for the head snap to the rear being caused by a projectile (i.e., a bullet), the grassy knoll advocates invariably cite Newton’s second law of motion, to wit, that the rate of change of momentum is proportional to the impressed force, and is in the direction in which the force acts. Thompson asserts,

  Basically, the law says that an object hit by a projectile will be given a motion that has the same direction as that of the projectile. At a shooting gallery, for instance, the ducks fall away from the marksman, not toward him…Applying Newton’s Second Law to the case in question and supposing that a bullet fired from the rear struck the President’s head, we would expect to see his head and body driven forward…We [do] see the beginning of such a movement at Z312–313…If we account for the sudden forward movement as a consequence of the bullet’s impact, only a similar hypothesis could account for the equally sudden backward movement. What we see on the Zapruder film are the effects of a double transfer of momentum—one forward, the other backward. At Z313 we witness the effect of a virtually simultaneous double impact on the President’s head. One shot was fired from the rear, and the other from the right front.171

  The italicized language, referring to the movement of the president’s head to the rear, which we know was considerable, is what immediately caught my eye and attention. It was only at this point that I asked myself, how does a human body react to being hit by a bullet? Though I had tried quite a few murder and ADW (assault with a deadly weapon) cases in my career, I was embarrassed to learn I had no idea. I had never witnessed an actual shooting of a human being, and the issue had simply never arisen in any case in my career. The only issue was whether the defendant shot and killed the victim, not how did the victim’s body react at the precise moment it was struck by the bullet. Now, suddenly, it appeared to be perhaps the critical issue at the trial in London.

  In early May of 1986, I drove down to the University of California at Irvine and spent the entire day with Dr. Vincent Guinn, a professor of chemistry at the university. Guinn was the nation’s leading authority on neutron activation analysis (NAA) and was to be one of my key expert witnesses in London. At dinner that evening, after we left the complex subject of NAA, I casu
ally mentioned to the doctor and his young assistant the problem I was having with the head snap to the rear issue:

  “Doctor,” I asked, “this is probably outside your expertise, but if a bullet hits the head of a human being, do you have any idea how much the head would be moved in the direction the bullet was traveling?”

  “Rudimentary physics will tell you that the head would move very slightly,” Dr. Guinn said.

  I asked, “Why is that?”

  Dr. Guinn replied, “The weight of the bullet as compared to the weight of the human head.”

  I said, “Let’s take the Kennedy case.”

  He said, “Okay. As you know, the Western Cartridge Company bullet that struck the president weighed approximately 161 grains, about a third of an ounce. If Kennedy’s head was a normal head, it weighed between ten and fourteen pounds. Also, heads don’t just lie on top of our torso unattached. There is muscular resistance to the head being propelled in the same direction in which the bullet is traveling. One-third of an ounce striking a resistant ten to fourteen pounds, particularly where there is penetration, as there was here, with a resulting loss of momentum, is going to move those ten to fourteen pounds very slightly.” (In other words, the transference of momentum onto the head from the bullet has got to be small because of the very small weight or mass—only one-third of an ounce—of the bullet.)

  When I told Dr. Guinn about the slight forward movement of Kennedy’s head at Z313, which he had been unaware of, he said this was precisely how much he would have expected the president’s head to move.

  “So, the head snap to the rear could not possibly have been caused by the force of a bullet from the front?” I asked.

  He replied, “That’s correct. Kennedy’s head simply would not be pushed anywhere near that far back by one-third of an ounce, even traveling in excess of two thousand feet per second.”

  I told the doctor that although I had avoided taking physics in high school, millions upon millions of Americans who have taken physics have seen the dramatic head snap to the rear in the Zapruder film, and been convinced it was caused by a shot from the front. “Why is this?” I asked.

  He said, “I haven’t the faintest idea.”

  Dr. Guinn had given me exceedingly valuable information which, if correct, was the precise type of commonsense fact I could give the jury to support my medical evidence that a shot from the front could not have caused the president’s head snap to the rear, and that the sole shot that struck the president’s head entered from the rear.*

  During a telephone conversation the next day, Dr. Charles Petty in Dallas confirmed what Guinn had told me, saying that the reaction of a head of a human struck by a bullet would be “roughly similar to that of firing a bullet through a half-open door. The door, on hinges, is penetrated, but would move very slightly to the rear.” I asked Dr. Petty if he knew of any shooting of a human recorded on film that I could show the jury in London to support what Guinn and he had told me. Petty said that during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Mao had a number of major drug dealers lined up and executed by a firing squad. They were all shot in the head, and the film of this was shown on worldwide television. Dr. Petty said he had seen the footage and distinctly recalled that the heads of the victims hardly moved upon the bullet’s impact. I immediately called Mark Redhead in London and told him it was very important that his staff get this film for me. He said the London Weekend Television (LWT) film library was immense, but that if the library did not contain the footage, they could get it elsewhere. (As it turned out, LWT never did come up with the film footage.) However, during the trial, after establishing for the jury through Dr. Petty the fact that a bullet weighing one-third of an ounce was simply incapable of having propelled the president’s head backward the way the jury saw it on the Zapruder film, that it would only move his head very slightly, I asked him, “So the killings that people see on television and in the movies, which is the only type of killings most people ever see, where the person struck by the bullet very frequently is visibly and dramatically propelled backward by the force of a bullet [sometimes to the point of toppling over] is not what happens in life when a bullet hits a human being?”

  “No, of course not.”172

  Author Josiah Thompson clearly was unaware of this reality. He wrote in his book, “Supposing that a bullet fired from the rear struck the President’s head. We would expect to see his head and body driven forward, the force of the impact perhaps forcing him out of the rear seat onto the floor.”173 But this is not what happens in real life. Further demonstrative evidence that a human body is not substantially propelled by the force of a bullet in the direction in which the projectile is traveling is the Zapruder film itself, which does not show either Kennedy or Governor Connally, when struck in their backs by the other bullet from their rear, being pushed noticeably forward in their seats in the presidential limousine. Though one’s back admittedly would provide more resistance to such a thrust than one’s head, it obviously wouldn’t be to the point of completely negating Thompson’s proposition.

  So in the final analysis, even if one were forced to rely only on the Zapruder film, we have seen that from the film alone, there is strong evidence of three, and only three shots, fired during the assassination. This is completely consistent with all the physical evidence in the case, and flies in the face of over four decades of allegations made by conspiracy theorists that the film contains conclusive “proof” of two or more assassins.

  With respect to the second shot fired in Dealey Plaza, the “single-bullet theory” is an obvious misnomer. Though in its incipient stages it was but a theory, the indisputable evidence is that it is now a proven fact, a wholly supported conclusion. As one of the authors of the single-bullet theory, Arlen Specter, says, “It began as a theory, but when a theory is established by the facts, it deserves to be called a conclusion.”174 And no sensible mind that is also informed can plausibly make the case that the bullet that struck President Kennedy in the upper right part of his back did not go on to hit Governor Connally.

  Left with evidence of only three shots, the next obvious question is whether Oswald, using the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle found on the sixth floor of the Depository Building, could have gotten off two out of three shots with accuracy in the time period shown in the Zapruder film. Critics of the Warren Report have argued from day one that it couldn’t be done, not by Oswald or any other lone gunman. The main reason they normally cite is that a bolt-action rifle takes too much time to operate between each shot. Though it does sound as if the hand movements of the firer, on paper, are time-consuming—after a shot, he has to push the bolt handle up, pull the bolt to the rear (which ejects the shell), push the bolt forward (which positions the next cartridge in the chamber), and then turn down the bolt handle to lock the bolt in place—these are not really four separate steps in the true sense of the word. As a Los Angeles Police Department firearms expert told me, “They [the steps] are all done in one continuous action; for instance, like turning a door knob, pushing it forward, and walking in. The operation of the bolt by an experienced rifleman is very fast.”175

  Early press reports “guesstimated,” without the benefit of the Zapruder film, that the assassination occurred in a span of only 5 seconds, which helped make the general public predisposed to accept the critics’ argument. In attempting to resolve this issue, the Warren Commission cited the FBI’s conclusion (based on test-firing the Mannlicher-Carcano) that with telescopic sight, “the minimum time” for a person to fire two “successive, well-aimed” shots with the weapon was “approximately two and a quarter [2.25] seconds,”176 which is usually rounded out to 2.3 seconds. What this means is that the “minimum firing time between shots was 2.3 seconds”177—that is, after a shot, it takes a minimum of 2.3 seconds to operate the bolt, reaim, and fire the second shot.* This firing time was based on the premise, which I believe to be false (see following), that Oswald must have used the telescopic sight.

  The HSCA later foun
d that Oswald’s rifle, using the iron sights rather than the scope, could be fired twice in a shorter time than 2.3 seconds. “The Committee test-fired a Mannlicher-Carcano rifle using the open iron sights. It found that it was possible for two shots to be fired within 1.66 seconds.”178 Monty Lutz of the HSCA firearms panel, and my firearms expert at the London trial, told me that “at distances below a hundred yards [Kennedy was about sixty yards from the sixth-floor window at the time the first shot hit him and almost precisely eighty-eight yards for the head shot], a shooter can not only fire faster with the open iron sights, which he can do at any distance, but, if rapid firing, more accurately. My assumption is that Oswald would know this and that he used the iron sights.”179*

  The one small piece of circumstantial evidence, which could easily be a coincidence, that Oswald used the telescopic sight is that the FBI found the scope to be defective, causing shots to land “high and slightly to the right.”180 The two shots that struck the president from behind hit slightly to the right of the center of the president’s body. However, assistant Warren Commission counsel Arlen Specter believes that the scope (irrespective of the issue of whether Oswald used it when he shot Kennedy) may very well have become misaligned when Oswald dropped it in haste onto the sixth floor of the Depository Building during his quick getaway. “A very reasonable inference,” Specter says, is that Oswald “most assuredly didn’t place it [his Carcano] on the ground with great care to preserve it for its next use; he gave it a pretty good toss,…[and] that could have damaged the sight.”181 FBI agent James Hosty made the same assumption as Specter.182