Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  Oswald’s claim that he went out to Irving on Thursday to get some curtain rods turns out to be another of the many lies he told both before and after the assassination. His rented room on North Beckley was already fitted with curtains and rods, and his landlady testified that Oswald never discussed redecorating with her.84 Nor did Oswald mention curtain rods to either Marina or Ruth Paine.85 Mrs. Paine did in fact have two curtain rods in the garage among her stored household goods, but they were still there after the assassination.86 Additionally, no curtain rods were ever discovered in the Texas School Book Depository Building.87

  Starting with Oswald’s journey out to Irving on Thursday night, an odd departure from his routine of going out only on the weekends, all of the evidence points toward his going there to retrieve his rifle from its place of storage in Ruth Paine’s garage and carrying it to the Depository the next morning in a bag he constructed himself from materials evidently taken from his place of employment. The Warren Commission also gave weight to the fact that Oswald lied twice to Wesley Frazier, since he neither went to Irving for curtain rods nor returned with curtain rods the next morning.88*

  Lee Harvey Oswald’s ownership and possession of the rifle found on the sixth floor is further demonstrated by the fact that he physically handled it, as evidenced by his right palm print being found on it. Like everything else in the case against Oswald, though, this palm print was to become embroiled in controversy. And there were fingerprint problems too.

  Shortly after the rifle was discovered, Lieutenant J. C. Day of the Dallas police crime lab pulled it carefully from its hiding spot, grabbing it by the wooden stock, which he had determined was too rough to hold fingerprints. After examining the polished surface of the bolt knob with a magnifying glass and determining that it contained no prints, Day allowed homicide captain Will Fritz to grab the bolt knob and pull it, ejecting a live round from the firing chamber. Day then turned his attention to the trigger housing, dusting the metal surface with a fine, black fingerprint powder. He quickly noticed traces of three fingerprints on the left side of the trigger housing, two of which showed ridge patterns. He turned to Captain Fritz and told him he wanted to take the rifle to the crime lab, where he had the proper equipment to develop the fingerprint traces.89

  Lieutenant Day carried the rifle from the building around 2:00 p.m. and took it to the fourth-floor crime lab in the Identification Bureau at police headquarters, where he locked it in an evidence box until later that evening. Day returned to the Depository and supervised the taking of fifty photographs of the southeast corner of the sixth floor, the dusting of the boxes in the sniper’s nest for fingerprints, and the drawing of a scale map of the sixth-floor crime scene.90

  Returning to the crime lab about 7:00 p.m., Day began examining the fingerprint traces he had seen on the trigger housing earlier that afternoon. Despite the fingerprint powder adhering to them, the traces were still unclear. Day decided to photograph them rather than try to lift them with an adhesive material similar to Scotch tape, since the latter actually removes some of the oil, dust, and fingerprint powder making up the visible print.91 Day later testified that because the prints were only “traces” and “unclear,” he “could not positively identify them.” However, Day added he “thought” the fingerprints “appeared to be the right middle and right ring finger” of Lee Harvey Oswald.92 (Day, long since retired, told me that “the general pattern of the two prints were the same as Oswald’s but the ridges just were not clear enough for me to say they were his.”)93

  Day then began dusting the rest of the rifle and noticed a print on the bottom of the barrel, partially covered by the wooden stock. Taking the stock off, it looked to him like a palm print, and he could tell by the way the powder was sticking to the print that it had been there quite a while. Day placed a strip of two-inch cellophane tape over the print, then peeled the tape off, lifting “a faint palm print” off the barrel. He made a quick comparison between the palm print lifted from the rifle and Oswald’s palm prints taken earlier in Captain Fritz’s office94 and tentatively identified the palm print on the rifle as Oswald’s, but he wanted to do some more work before declaring that he had a positive match. He did, however, tell both Captain Fritz and Chief Curry that night that he had a tentative match.95

  After doing the lift, Day was about to photograph what remained of the palm print on the barrel when he was interrupted by crime-lab captain George M. Doughty, who instructed him to stop working on the rifle and prepare to release it to the FBI. Arrangements had been made for FBI agent Vince Drain to fly the rifle and other pieces of important evidence to the FBI laboratory in Washington, D.C., that night.96*

  At 11:45 p.m., the rifle and film negatives of the prints were turned over to the FBI’s Vince Drain. In a 1984 interview, Day said that he pointed out to the FBI man the area where the palm print was, adding that he “cautioned Drain to be sure the area was not disturbed.”97 Though Drain denied that Day showed him the palm print,98 crime-lab detective R. W. “Rusty” Livingston, who was standing nearby, recalled that another FBI agent was there pressuring Drain to leave. “Drain was half listening to Lieutenant Day and half to the other FBI man and evidently didn’t get the word about the palm print at that time.”99 (The FBI agents were in a hurry to catch a C-135 jet tanker, its crew waiting on the runway at Carswell Air Force Base in Fort Worth to fly the evidence to Washington.)100 Also, Day told me that technically he didn’t “show” Drain where the print was because “you couldn’t see it. It was under the stock. But I told him where it was.”101

  The morning after the assassination (November 23), FBI fingerprint expert Sebastian Latona examined the rifle in Washington. His attention was first drawn to the cellophane used to protect the surface of the trigger housing. Removing the cellophane, he could see “faint ridge formations.” Latona testified before the Warren Commission that he then took a look at the three film negatives of the trigger housing that Day had enclosed, but he didn’t think the photographs were of any help in clarifying the ridge formations. Latona had an experienced photographer rephotograph the trigger housing in hopes of improving the condition of the fingerprint traces, but the effort was unsuccessful. Although Latona could see that the pattern formations were consistent with those on Oswald’s hands, they were “insufficient” to make a definitive determination. The lack of detail forced Latona to conclude that the fingerprint “fragments” were of “no value” in determining with certainty who had handled the rifle.102

  Latona then proceeded to dust the entire rifle for prints, including the clip, the bolt, and the underside of the barrel, where, according to Lieutenant Day, traces of the palm print he had lifted remained. Despite a careful examination, Latona was unable to find any identifiable print.103 The rifle was returned from Washington, by the FBI’s Drain, to the Dallas police on Sunday morning, November 24, around the same time Oswald was being rushed to Parkland Hospital after having being fatally shot by Jack Ruby. Lieutenant Day told me the FBI put the Carcano in a box in his office “and I was instructed not to do anything with it. The FBI had pretty well taken over the case.”104 Five days later, on November 29, the card containing the palm print that Day had lifted on the night of November 22, along with the notation “off underside of gun barrel near end of foregrip C 2766”—the serial number of Oswald’s Mannlicher-Carcano—reached the FBI crime lab.105

  Though he had been unable to see or lift any palm print of Oswald’s on his own at the FBI crime lab on November 23, Latona told the Warren Commission that when he received Day’s actual lift card on November 29, “the palm print which appears on the lift was identified by me as the right palm print of Lee Harvey Oswald.”106

  Lee Harvey Oswald, if he had lived, was now precluded from making the argument that even if the ownership of the Carcano was linked to him, he had never been in possession of the weapon. This is so because fingerprint and palm print evidence is conclusive. There has been no reported case of two people having the same finger or palm
prints. Desperate attempts by criminals to destroy or alter their fingerprints, for instance, by burning or filing the skin, have proved unsuccessful. The original patterns reappear with the healing of the epidermis (outer layer of skin), the most famous FBI case like this being of fugitive Roscoe Pitts. Only skin grafts have worked.107*

  Lieutenant Day, in looking back on the event, told me, “I don’t fault the FBI for not being able to find the palm print. It was already faint when I lifted it, and it’s even more difficult to lift the same print a second time because some of the detail has been removed from the first lifting of the print.”108

  For the great numbers of conspiracy theorists who maintain that the Carcano did not belong to Oswald and was planted on the sixth floor, how do they then explain Oswald’s right palm print being found on the weapon? How did it get there if he wasn’t in possession of it?

  Predictably, many conspiracy authors have drawn sinister implications from these events, strongly suggesting that the Dallas police had framed Oswald by fabricating the palm print and its connection to the Oswald rifle after the FBI’s expert fingerprint examiner was unable to find any identifiable prints on the rifle.109 Apart from the absurd notion that for some reason Lieutenant Day would decide to frame Lee Harvey Oswald for Kennedy’s assassination, as he told me in 2002, “I don’t even think such a thing [transferring Oswald’s prints on the finger and palm print samples, or exemplars, he gave to the Dallas Police Department, onto the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle] could be done. In this day and age they might be able to figure out some way to transfer the ink print on the card to the weapon, but I wouldn’t know how to do it myself. Sounds like an impossible task to me.”110

  Conspiracy author Mark Lane also alleged that an investigation by the Warren Commission of this issue raised more questions than it answered.111 In the finest traditions of the conspiracy theorists’ profession, Lane neglected to tell his readers that the central question of whether the palm print originated from the rifle was answered, conclusively, by that very inquiry. Warren Commission assistant counsel Wesley Liebeler told the HSCA that in “late August or September” of 1964, he suggested questioning Day further in an attempt to resolve the multitude of questions that remained surrounding the discovery of the palm print. It had occurred to Liebeler and a few other assistant counsels, as it would later to Mark Lane, that perhaps the palm print didn’t come from the rifle at all. The Commission, at that time, only had Day’s word for it. It wanted something stronger. But when Liebeler approached Chief Counsel J. Lee Rankin about it, he objected. “Mr. Rankin was not terribly enthusiastic about having a couple of Commission lawyers go down to Dallas and start questioning the Dallas Police Department,” Liebeler told the HSCA in 1978. “Quite frankly…it would have raised all kinds of questions at that time as to what in the hell was going on, what are we doing going down and taking depositions from the Dallas Police Department two months after the report was supposed to be out?”112

  But Liebler said they realized the problem could be resolved “in another way.” Several Commission assistant counsels subsequently met with FBI inspector James R. Malley, the bureau’s liaison with the Commission, and FBI fingerprint expert Sebastian Latona. Liebeler asked Latona whether there was a way to prove that the lift came from the rifle. Latona reexamined the lift submitted by Lieutenant Day and noticed pits, marks, and rust spots on it that corresponded to identical areas on the underside of the rifle barrel—the very spot from which Day said the print had been lifted.113 J. Edgar Hoover sent a letter by courier to the Commission on September 4 to confirm this finding, along with a photograph showing the corresponding marks on the barrel and the lift.114 Liebeler was satisfied. Now, there was no doubt whatsoever—the palm print Day had lifted had come from Oswald’s rifle.115

  Lost amid all of the controversy and politics swirling around the palm print lift are the fingerprint traces that Day had first discovered on the trigger housing. Dallas police crime-lab detective Rusty Livingston was with Lieutenant Day during the evening of the assassination and managed to squirrel away a set of first-generation photographic prints from five negatives Day had taken of the Carcano’s trigger housing. Photographic prints from three of the five negatives were never seen by the Warren Commission or the HSCA. In 1991, Livingston turned the five photographs over to his nephew, Gary Savage, who in turn asked Captain Jerry Powdrill, a fingerprint expert from Savage’s hometown of West Monroe, Louisiana, to compare fingerprint traces on the Mannlicher-Carcano’s trigger housing, as seen in the photographs, with a known fingerprint exemplar of Oswald’s. Powdrill only found three matching “points of identity” (in earlier years, the term was points of similarity and my sense is that the earlier term was more accurate) and said he was unable to conclude that the latent prints in the photographs belonged to Oswald, adding, however, that there were “enough similarities to suggest” that they possibly did.116

  In 1993, Savage turned the photographs over to Frontline for its thirtieth-anniversary special on the assassination. Frontline asked Vincent J. Scalice, the leading fingerprint expert for the New York City Police Department who had also been the HSCA’s fingerprint expert, to compare the latent prints in Livingston’s photographs with fingerprint exemplars of Oswald’s. Scalice had already examined two of the five Dallas police photos depicting the latent fingerprints on the trigger guard for the HSCA in 1978. At that time, he agreed with the FBI and Warren Commission that the photographs of the latent prints were not clear enough to make an identification.117 After examining all five photographs for the first time in 1993 for Frontline, he said, “I found that by maneuvering the photographs in different positions, I was able to pick up some details [of the fingerprints] on one photograph and some details on another photograph. Using all of the photographs at different contrasts, I was able to find in the neighborhood of about 18 points of identity…These are definitely the fingerprints of Lee Harvey Oswald and…they are on the rifle. There is no doubt about it.”118

  Scalice told the press that had he seen all of the photographs in 1978 (not just two of them), “I would have been able to make an identification at that point in time.” After consulting with Scalice, Captain Jerry Powdrill also agreed with Scalice’s judgment—that the fingerprints on the trigger guard were those of Oswald.119

  So, in addition to Oswald’s palm print being found on the underside of the Carcano’s barrel, we know that Oswald’s fingerprints were found within an inch of the trigger of the rifle found on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository Building. The evidence is clear and unimpeachable—Lee Harvey Oswald bought, owned, and handled the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle found on the sixth floor. And as you’re about to see, it was this weapon that was used to murder John F. Kennedy.

  Identification of the Murder Weapon

  In addition to the unfired cartridge found in the chamber of Oswald’s Mannlicher-Carcano, you will recall that police also found three 6.5-millimeter cartridge cases1—or casings, shells, or “hulls,” as the Dallas police frequently called them—scattered on the floor of the sniper’s nest in the southeast corner of the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository Building. Two of the empty shells were lying directly under the sniper’s window, about six inches apart and a foot or so west of the two book cartons that had been used as a gun rest. The other shell was another yard farther west, lying about sixteen inches back from the window.2 (See photo section.) Two firearms experts, Robert A. Frazier of the FBI’s Washington laboratory, and Joseph D. Nicol, superintendent of the Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation for the state of Illinois, examined these spent shells for the Warren Commission.3 By comparing the individual microscopic marks and impressions that the bolt (or breech) face and firing pin of the rifle left on the head (base) of the expended cartridge cases with those on the cases of cartridges test-fired in Oswald’s rifle, both experts concluded that all three cartridge cases found on the sixth floor had been fired in Oswald’s Mannlicher-Carcano to the exclusion of all
other weapons in the world.4 Fifteen years later, the firearms panel of the HSCA reached an identical conclusion.5

  In their bid to exonerate Oswald, critics have attacked these rock-solid conclusions by suggesting that the three cartridge cases were neatly planted to frame the hapless ex-marine. The suggestion that there might have been hanky-panky with the three hulls arose during a 1968 interview with former Dallas deputy sheriff Roger Craig,* who told the Los Angeles Free Press, “The shells found on the floor in front of the window—I saw ’em—they were laying, all the shells were facing the same direction—there was not one of them more than ¾ of an inch apart, and I’ve fired many a bolt action rifle and I have never had two shells land in the same place.”6 Craig embellished the tale further in his unpublished 1971 manuscript, “When They Kill a President”: “Luke Mooney and I reached the southeast corner at the same time. We immediately found three rifle cartridges [actually, cartridge cases] laying in such a way that they looked as though they had been carefully and deliberately placed there—in plain sight on the floor to the right of the southeast corner window. Mooney and I examined the cartridges very carefully and remarked how close together they were. The three of them were no more than one inch apart* and all were facing the same direction, a feat very difficult to achieve with a bolt action rifle—or any rifle for that matter.”7

  Roger Craig’s embellishments could have easily been exposed early on had anyone bothered to look at his sworn testimony to the Warren Commission in 1964. When asked whether he saw the cartridge cases at the time they were found, Craig said that he was at the far north end of the building when someone yelled across the room, “Here’s the shells!”8 Craig said that after “a couple of minutes” he went over to the sniper’s nest and saw three shells lying about a foot away from the window. Craig said that he didn’t get “too close” and went back to where he was because he didn’t want to bother the area.9 Asked if he recalled any of the shells being up against the wall, Craig replied, “No, I don’t. I didn’t look that close.”10 So much for Craig’s immediate discovery and careful examination of the shells. It should be added that when the FBI conducted tests to see where shells ejected from the Carcano at the window would land, the test landings were found to be “consistent” with where the three shells were found after the assassination, all at right angles from the ejection port on the rifle and all ricocheting in a random pattern within a forty-seven-inch circle.11 And Luke Mooney, the Dallas deputy sheriff who first discovered the shells, said they “appeared as though they had been ejected from the rifle and had possibly bounced off the cartons of the books to the rear.”12