Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  Suffice it to say that anyone who can actually see human figures at the aforementioned encircled points in the Moorman photograph, or anywhere else in the background of the photo, should be thoughtful enough to bequeath his or her eyes to the scientific and medical communities for study and analysis.

  It is important to note that the HSCA photographic panel examined several other photos that conspiracy theorists have maintained, throughout the years, show the outline and existence of a gunman on the grassy knoll or in the retaining wall area on the north side of Elm Street. Its conclusion was that “we find no [photographic] evidence [emphasis by panel] to support the contention that there were [other] gunmen in the Dealey Plaza area…We believe that the best available science and technology in photography and computer manipulation of images was utilized in preparing the evidence that led to the above conclusion.”31

  Let’s briefly set forth the points that not only conclusively prove that the shots did not come from the grassy knoll, but also show that if conspirators had indeed set out to murder the president, selecting the grassy knoll as the place where they would position their triggerman would make absolutely no sense at all. I want to emphasize that most of these points, all by themselves and independently of the others, alone demonstrate the obvious invalidity and absurdity of the conspiracy theorists’ grassy knoll argument.

  During the discussion of these points the reader should remember that the three cartridge cases, which we know were ejected from Oswald’s rifle, were found on the floor beneath the southeasternmost window on the sixth floor of the Book Depository Building shortly after the shooting. Indeed, without even knowing who Lee Harvey Oswald was, without even having heard his name or knowing he existed and worked at the Book Depository Building, within minutes of the shooting in Dealey Plaza law enforcement primarily focused not on the grassy knoll, but on the Book Depository Building, specifically the sixth floor.

  1. Although the conspiracy theorists have written countless words about the grassy knoll and presented all manner of theories, at the end of the day, as the expression goes, the cold hard fact remains that no witness saw any human, with or without a rifle, standing behind the picket fence on the grassy knoll at the time the president’s limousine proceeded down Elm Street, and although many people, ran to the knoll after the shooting to investigate, they didn’t see anyone, with or without a rifle, running or even walking away from behind the picket fence after the shots rang out. Certainly, no reasonable person would say that people like Virgil Hoffman and Jean Hill, who said for the first time, fifteen to twenty years after the assassination, they saw someone with a rifle behind the fence (and even then in complete contradiction with their earlier statements that they saw nothing), should be considered as refuting this assertion.

  Lee Bowers, the Union Terminal Railroad switchman who was up inside the north tower 120 yards or so behind the picket fence at the time of the shooting, was looking “directly towards” the picket fence area as he watched the motorcade go by. He had a view of the entire rail yard area behind the fence,* the only route of escape for an assassin behind the fence, and he saw no one running or even walking away from behind the fence after the shooting, much less someone holding a rifle or any other type of weapon.32 Right after the shooting, Dallas County deputy sheriff Eugene Boone ran behind the picket fence into the parking lot in the railroad yards, and he told the Warren Commission that he “searched the freight yards” behind the fence and was “unable to find anything.” He also said he asked a man “up in the tower [obviously, Bowers]…if he had seen anybody running out there in the freight yards” and the man said he “hadn’t seen anybody racing around out there in the yard.”33 At the London trial, after Boone repeated all of this, I asked him to elaborate on the search behind the picket fence. He said there were flower beds behind the fence and the soil had recently been turned over. He said he checked the entire area for footprints because someone firing from behind the picket fence “would have had to stand in the flower bed,” but he found “no footprints” at all.† Neither did he find “any powder burns or anything like that on any of the foliage” near there.34

  Additionally, although the many people standing on the railroad overpass above Elm, Main, and Commerce streets would not have been able to see directly behind the picket fence on the grassy knoll (since the overpass is at approximately the same height as the fence), they would have had a clear view of anyone running away from behind the fence into the parking lot and railroad yards to the rear, and there’s no evidence they saw anyone. Austin Miller, one of the people on the railroad overpass, said that after the shots “I stepped back [since, as indicated, he was at the same level as the fence] and looked on the tracks to see if anybody [was running] across the railroad tracks, and there was nobody running across the railroad tracks.”35 S. M. Holland, who was also standing on top of the railroad overpass and thought a shot may have come from the grassy knoll, told the Warren Commission that “immediately” after the shots were fired, he ran to his left off the overpass “to see if I could see anyone up there behind the [picket] fence,” but he saw no one.35 Holland said that he and several policemen and plainclothesmen “looked for empty shells around there for quite awhile,” but found none.36

  As already indicated, the gunman would have had to flee through the railroad parking lot and over the tracks and would have easily been observed and noticed by many people. Yet no one saw such a figure. Indeed, Dallas deputy sheriff W. W. “Bo” Mabra said that right after the shots he went to the rail yards and parking area “behind the knoll behind a wooden fence” and “helped search this area.” He said that while in the area behind the picket fence, “I talked to a [uniformed Dallas police] officer who said ‘I was stationed in the rail yards and had this entire area in view. Nobody came this way.’” In an interview later, Mabra said the officer added, “There hasn’t been a thing move back here in a hour or more because I’ve been here all that time.”37 True, there were some cars in the parking lot, but Dallas police officer Joe Smith said, “I checked all the cars. I looked into all the cars.”38

  In fact, behind the picket fence on the grassy knoll would have been such a bad location for any assassin to have placed himself that when Warren Commission counsel asked Dallas deputy sheriff Buddy Walthers (who was standing in front of the sheriff’s office on Main Street at the time of the shooting) if he thought of it as the source of the shots, Walthers said, “No, it never even entered my mind…Knowing how this thing is arranged, and I have chased a couple of escapees across the thing before, and knowing what was over there, the thought that anyone was shooting from [there]—I’ve heard some people say he was behind the fence, and I’m telling you, it just can’t be, because it’s a wide open…area as far as you can go…The thought that anyone would be shooting off of there would almost be an impossible thing. There’s no place for him to go. There’s nothing.”39

  Also, no rifle was found behind the picket fence or nearby. For that matter, other than Oswald’s Carcano rifle found inside the Book Depository Building, no other rifle or weapon was found anywhere in Dealey Plaza following the assassination.* In addition, as indicated, no expended cartridge cases ejected from any rifle were found on the ground anywhere near the area. As Walter Cronkite, in the 1967 CBS special on the assassination, put it so cogently, to accept the grassy knoll theory we’d have to believe that an assassin “materialized out of thin air [behind the fence], fired a shot, and then vanished again into thin air, leaving behind no trace of himself, his rifle, his bullet, or any other sign of [his] existence*…If the demands for certainty that are made upon the [Warren] Commission were applied to its critics, the theory of a second assassin [on the grassy knoll] would vanish before it was spoken.”40

  We know that among other evidence, a gunman was seen in the sixth-floor window, Oswald’s finger and palm prints were found on boxes and a large bag in the sniper’s nest, and his rifle, as well as expended cartridge casings from the rifle, were found on
the sixth floor. So we have the incredible irony that the grassy knoll assassin is so completely incompetent that he can’t even hit the presidential limousine (see later text), yet he impeccably vaporizes into thin air without leaving any evidence whatsoever that he was there, whereas Oswald, in the sixth-floor window, is competent enough to hit Kennedy twice but litters his shooting site with all kinds of evidence of his presence.

  Or as former Dallas sheriff Jim Bowles persuasively observed, “Isn’t it strange that an assassin firing from a concealed position up on the sixth floor and inside a building was observed by several people, but the supposed second assassin, comparatively out in the open and in front of the action in the line of sight of many bystanders and photographers, was not seen before, during or after by a single living soul?”41 In other words, there is no eyewitness evidence and no physical evidence of any kind whatsoever that any gunman fired at the president from the grassy knoll, and because of this reality, there’s really not too much more to say.

  But for the record, there are a host of other reasons why the grassy knoll theory is completely barren of evidence as well as common sense.

  2. As discussed in depth earlier, every one of the pathologists who examined the president’s wounds and/or photographs and X-rays of the wounds, even Dr. Cyril Wecht, concluded that there was no entrance wound to the front or right front of the president’s body, thereby eliminating not only the grassy knoll as the source of the bullets but also any other position to the president’s front. I mean, if the president were shot from the right front, as the conspiracy theorists allege, why weren’t there any entrance wounds to the front or right front of his body? As Dr. Pierre Finck, one of the autopsy surgeons, put it in less-than-impressive prose, “Although there had been rumors that shots came from the front, I did not see any evidence on the dead body of President Kennedy of wounds of entry in the front portions of the cadaver.”42

  3. We know from all the medical evidence that the throat wound to the president was an exit wound, although the conspiracy theorists allege that it was an entrance wound caused by a bullet fired from the right front. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that it was an entrance wound. Then where was the exit wound for that bullet? As can be seen from the sketch in the photo section of this book, if the throat wound was caused by a bullet fired from the grassy knoll, since the knoll was to the president’s right front, the bullet would be traveling from his right to his left. Hence, the exit wound would have to have been to the left upper back of the president. But there was no bullet hole, entrance or exit, to the left upper back or to any other place on the left side of his body.

  What I am saying, of course, presupposes that the bullet passed through soft tissue in the president’s body and was not deflected, which all the medical evidence, discussed earlier, shows to be the case.43 Even the conspiracy theorists have never disputed that the bullet causing the throat wound passed through soft tissue on a straight line through the president’s body.* They only disagree on the direction the bullet was traveling. The only wound to the president’s back, as we know, was an entrance wound to his upper right back, and the conspiracy theorists cannot use this wound as an exit wound since a bullet fired from the grassy knoll to the president’s right front and passing through soft tissue could never end up on the right side of the president’s body, only his left side. For the bullet to exit where we know the entrance wound is, the president’s upper right back, the gunman would have to have been located across the street from the knoll to the president’s left front, standing in full view of everyone without even a picket fence to hide behind.

  4. If the fatal shot to the president’s head was fired, as the conspiracy theorists allege, from the grassy knoll—that is, from the president’s right front—it would be traveling toward the president’s left rear. Yet the two large bullet fragments found inside the presidential limousine were found on or near the front seat of the limousine—that is, in front of the president, not behind him as one would expect if the bullet were fired from the front of the president. Indeed, even the three small lead fragments found in the limousine were found on the rug beneath the left jump seat, which again would be in front of the president, not behind him. As author John Canal writes, “I’ve heard of ‘frangible’ and ‘explosive’ bullets, but not ‘bouncing’ bullets.”44 In other words, did the bullet hit the president from the front, as the grassy knoll devotees maintain, and bounce backward after impact instead of continuing to proceed forward toward the president’s rear? Not too likely. Additionally, even if it was slightly deflected by bone in the president’s skull, a bullet traveling at 2,000 feet per second and entering the right front of the president’s head would have inevitably passed through to the left side of the president’s brain, yet we know from the autopsy report and X-rays that the left hemisphere of the president’s brain was “intact.”45

  5. The triggerman, who the conspiracy theorists want us to believe fired from the grassy knoll, would have to have had a proven record as an expert shot, or the mob, CIA, KGB, et cetera, obviously would never have employed him to get the job done. But if this were so, how come this high-powered triggerman, this top professional assassin, turned out to be so bad a shot that not only couldn’t he hit any part of the president’s body at a close range (“the shot from the grassy knoll missed President Kennedy,” the HSCA reported),46he couldn’t even hit the very large presidential limousine? No bullet struck any part of the car. To emphasize the absurdity of it all, I should point out that Kennedy would have been only fifty-seven and thirty-five yards from the grassy knoll gunman at the time of the head shot, and less than sixty (around fifty-eight) yards at the time of the first shot that struck him (see scaled map in photo section of book),47 both relatively close shots. And if either shot had been fired at the president from the grassy knoll and missed both him and the car, what happened to the bullet? Not only do we know it did not go on to hit anyone† in the crowd on the south side of Elm, but also after many years have gone by, no one has ever found a bullet anywhere on the south side of Elm Street.

  6. Each of the aforementioned reasons provides solid, concrete evidence that proves to the satisfaction of any unbiased observer that no shots were fired at the president from the grassy knoll. But even if we were to throw all this evidence out the window, there are several points of simple common sense that tell us that someone shooting at the president would do so when we know the assassin did, and from the Book Depository Building as opposed to the grassy knoll. Yet conspiracy theorists as well as independent impartial observers have stated a great many times that one point militating against the conclusion that Oswald shot the president is that if he were at the southeasternmost window on the sixth floor of the Book Depository Building (as the evidence shows he was), “the perfect shot [for him] would have been when the limousine was on Houston Street, heading north toward the Book Depository.”48 But nothing could be further from the truth. In the first place, if Oswald had taken such a shot as the limousine was proceeding northbound, most of the president’s body would have been shielded by Governor Connally’s body even though Connally was not seated directly in front of the president, and so the gunman would not have had a clear, unobstructed view of the president. But there’s a more important reason why such a shot would have made no sense at all. Whoever killed the president—forget about Oswald for the moment—was a sniper. How do we know he was a sniper? That’s simple. He didn’t want to get caught.* In fact, the headline in the New York Times the day following the president’s murder read, “Kennedy Is Killed by Sniper as He Rides in Car in Dallas.” The Los Angeles Times headline said, “Sniper’s Bullet Kills President in Dallas.” Now, if you’re a sniper who doesn’t want to get caught, why in the world would you fire any shots at the president from a position directly in front of him and with all eyes looking in your direction? Obviously, you wouldn’t.† What you would do is exactly what we know Oswald did—wait until the presidential limousine had turned onto Elm Street and
then, with most eyes to the front, shoot the president from behind with an unobstructed view.

  7. For the very same reason that a sniper at the sixth-floor window wouldn’t shoot the president while he was proceeding northbound on Houston, no sniper in possession of his faculties would decide to position himself on the grassy knoll to the president’s right front, since he would know he would easily be within the range of vision of all eyes (and potential cameras) looking to the front. So the notion of some group like organized crime, the CIA, or the military-industrial complex positioning their gunman on the grassy knoll is irrational beyond belief.

  8. As is well known, Oswald was up on the sixth floor of the Book Depository Building. The relevance of this is that the overwhelming majority of people down in Dealey Plaza were only looking—as would be expected—at people and objects at the ground level. They would not be looking up to the top floors of buildings. And because of this, one could expect a sniper to be where Oswald was, high above, not where he would be more likely to be observed, at ground level.

  If you were a conspirator and you were planning the assassination of the president of the United States, since you obviously would not want the existence of your conspiracy to become known, would you place a second gunman (or a sole gunman, for that matter) on the ground level (the grassy knoll) where there is a good chance that either he or his rifle would be captured on film or photographs by at least one and maybe more of the many people you know are going to be filming and photographing the event in Dealey Plaza? Since people with a camera, like a regular eyewitness, could be expected to be photographing and filming things almost exclusively at ground level, the obvious answer is no. You’d place him high above, where the likelihood of a photograph or film capturing him would be dramatically reduced.