Who Really Killed Kennedy?: 50 Years Later: Stunning New Revelations About the JFK Assassination (10 page)

But for the full advantages of multiple shooting to be gained, the shooting had to be timed perfectly. Random shooting by will from multiple shooters would convey to onlookers the impression of crossfire, making it difficult, if not impossible, to pin the shooting on a fall guy—a “patsy” as Oswald described himself. If Oswald was to be framed as the lone shooter, it was imperative the gunshots had to be timed so that onlookers would assume that one gunman was firing three shots when the reality might be that three gunmen were firing three shots each, for a total of nine shots. To achieve the effect of synchronized shooting, the team had to have a fixed signal or target point for when the shooting was to begin. From the first shot fired, each shooter could count—one one thousand shoot, two one thousand shoot, three one thousand shoot—so that each shooter would have sufficient time to chamber the next round and aim. If the shooters had a spotter, the spotter could receive the signal to shoot by walkie-talkie, to keep the shooter in sequence. Synchronized shooting from multiple concealed locations was a solution that made Dealey Plaza an ideal kill zone, provided each shooter also had an accomplice to assist with communications, sighting, and escape. Professionally planned, Dealey Plaza quickly transformed from a nearly impossible kill zone for an amateur acting alone into a near-sure thing for a team of world-class marksmen.

The one final element needed was experience. This could not be the first kill for any of the shooters or their accomplices. The adrenalin flow in seeing JFK alive and knowing you were about to assassinate the president of the United States required steely nerves only a proven sniper with a track record of success would have. An accurate sniper shot requires
a smooth and precise trigger pull. Only shooters with the demonstrated ability to remain dispassionate and calculating—a skill not reliable without a proven track record—could get this particular job done. An amateur could be expected to fumble with the bolt-action loading an old World War II Italian Army rifle. Moreover, a high-powered scope that filled the shooter’s vision with a highly magnified vision of a small part of the target’s body might make finding and locking on the target more difficult for an amateur. One foul-up and the target might be wounded but not killed, or the shooter might be detected and brought into custody. A professional team would not take amateur risks.

Taking the shots after the limo passed the Stemmons Freeway sign would take advantage of a relaxed entourage. It was the last leg of a long motorcade that began at Love Field and wound through downtown Dallas. The VIPs in the JFK limo would be looking forward to getting out of the sun and into the ample shade under the triple underpass. They were anticipating getting to the Trade Center where JFK was to give a luncheon address and a cool drink and something to eat would be waiting. The crowd was expected to thin as the limo traveled Elm Street as it was assumed spectators would prefer downtown vantage points where the passage of the limo would be slower. After successfully negotiating downtown without an incident, the Secret Service and Dallas police accompanying the motorcade were likely also to be ready to relax their guard. An advantageous aspect of the JFK assassination from a sniper’s point of view was that the shooting started when the motorcade was just about finished—at the tail end of the planned route, where security personnel were least likely to suspect danger—especially once the tall buildings back on Houston and Elm, including the School Book Depository—were receding in the distance.

The ballistics evidence supports the multiple shooter assumption. The first shots that hit JFK were obviously the least powerful. The neck wound from the front did not exit JFK’s body. The back entrance wound penetrated less than one joint of a doctor’s little finger, as measured at the autopsy. Yet, the headshot or headshots shattered JFK’s skull and splattered brain tissue in a mist that reached a foot or more in the air and wafted back to bathe the motorcycle police immediately tailing the limo. This difference in ballistic impact on the target would suggest each shooter had a different type of ammunition and very likely a different
weapon. It is hard to imagine requiring shooters to change weapons and/or ammunition as the kill proceeded. But it appears each shot had a different impact. This would imply each shooter could have had in mind or had been assigned a particular kind of shot that required a particular weapon and type of ammunition.

In other words, it is conceivable the various shots taken during the assassination could well have been designed to have different effects. The first two shots to hit JFK—in the neck and the back—may have been set-up shots. JFK was only wounded by these shots and the surprise of being shot was obvious on his face. Security personnel and others in the car could be expected to react relatively slowly, or so it would seem to shooters in the slow-motion bubble that surrounds professional snipers at the moment of their kill. After the first shots hit JFK and Connally, the Secret Service agents in the front seat—driver William Greer and Roy Kellerman—turned around to look back at JFK. Films taken during the assassination, especially the film taken by Orville Nix, show that Greer applied the brakes, slowing down enough to bring the limo to a near halt. It was after the fatal shot when Greer finally turned around to look forward, hunkered down behind the steering wheel, and released the brakes, so he could accelerate the vehicle along the last few yards of Elm Street through the triple underpass.
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Shots that missed may have been planned to miss, as diversionary shots, or to create confusion so as to facilitate the escape.

Ironically, the therapeutic back-brace that JFK habitually wore was wrapped tightly around his torso under his shirt that day. An experienced sniper designing the assassination may have known the back-brace JFK habitually wore would hold his torso upright and straight, provided the bullets selected to hit his neck and back were a sufficiently low caliber. A wounded JFK was partially immobilized, held upright, and struggling to react—a perfect set-up for the final headshot, or headshots, to end his life. Each shooter on the team could have been given a particular objective, a particular weapon, and a particular shot to achieve a particular effect. Attempting the fatal headshot from the rear was risky because that shot was the most difficult. The only way it made sense for shooters positioned in the buildings behind the limo to attempt a head shot was if their head shots were designed as a back-up to the more sure-fire head shots planned to be taken by the shooters planned at the front of the motorcade.

The first shots that entered JFK’s back from behind and his throat from the front involved lower-powered ammunition most likely fired by low-powered weapons. There is no proof either shot exited JFK’s body. These two shots might have been aimed as head shots, but a .22-caliber bullet that entered the head might not have sufficient velocity or power to exit the skull. A .22 caliber bullet would have most likely done irreparable damage to JFK’s brain, but not nearly as much damage as a higher-caliber bullet or a custom-designed explosive bullet. Consider that the headshot from the back that blew out the head-flap at JFK’s forehead or the headshot from the front that blew out the back of JFK’s head may have been done with a custom-designed bullet where the point had been hollowed out, or filled with mercury, and sealed with paraffin or some other type of sealant to keep the mercury contained within the shell. A modified hollow-point bullet was the favorite of many assassins because it explodes upon impact and causes massive damage. An exploding, hollow-point bullet could explain the fracture damage seen in the autopsy photos of JFK’s skull, as well as the plume of brain tissue and blood that shot out of JFK’s head on impact.

In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, witnesses in Dealey Plaza rushed the grassy knoll, searching for the killers. No one rushed the Texas School Book Depository. From the movies and still photographs taken at the time, there is little doubt in-person witnesses to the assassination thought the shots came from behind the picket fence on the grassy knoll or from the railroad yard and parking lot that filled the area behind the grassy knoll, stretching from the railroad yard on the west near the triple underpass to the Texas School Book Depository on the right.

In 1966 attorney Mark Lane’s book,
Rush to Judgment,
began a critical re-examination of the Warren Commission’s conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman who assassinated JFK.
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Lane created a sensation with his interview with Lee E. Bowers Jr., a Union Terminal Company employee who was working in the north tower in the railroad yard the day of the assassination. From his location on the second floor of the railroad tower, some twelve to fourteen feet above the ground, Bowers
had a clear vantage point on all four sides, providing him a commanding view of everything that went on in the railroad yard and in the parking lot that stretched from the railroad yard to the Texas School Book Depository. Lane was extremely critical of the interview the Warren Commission had conducted with Bowers in Dallas on April 2, 1964.
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Bowers testified to the Warren Commission that he observed three suspicious automobiles enter the area in the half-hour preceding the assassination. The first car was a 1959 blue-and-white Oldsmobile, with an out-of-state license plate, and a “Goldwater for President” bumper sticker. Bowers testified that around 12:10 p.m., about twenty minutes before the assassination, the car passed down across two or three railroad tracks, and circled to the west of the tower as if the driver “was searching for a way out, or was checking the area.” The car exited the way it came in, the only outlet by the school depository.
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The second car, a 1957 black Ford with a Texas license plate, driven by a white male that was driving with one hand while holding what looked like a microphone with his other hand, entered the area around 12:20 p.m., some ten minutes after the first car. Bowers explained the black Ford came in from the extension of Elm Street in front of the school depository and left after three or four minutes. The third car, a 1961 or 1962 four-door white Chevrolet Impala with an out-of-state license plate and driven by a white male, circled the area and probed one spot right at the tower in an attempt to get out. Failing to find an exit, the car backed out a considerable distance. Bowers was too busy to watch to see if the car left the area, but the last he remembered, the car paused just above the assassination site. Bowers also observed the first and third car were covered with a red mud.

Just prior to the shooting, Bowers observed two men standing behind the picket fence toward the mouth of the underpass. Bowers described one of the men as “middle-aged, or slightly older, fairly heavy set,” and wearing a white shirt and fairly dark trousers. The second, younger man was in his mid-twenties, wearing either a plaid shirt or plaid coat or jacket. Bowers observed the two men were within ten or fifteen feet of each other, facing the motorcade as it approached. “These were the only two strangers in the area,” Bowers testified. All the others Bowers saw in the area, he knew, including two policemen standing on the overpass, a railroad signal man, two welders, a labor’s assistant helping the welders, and a couple of
parking lot attendees. Bowers testified he heard three shots: “One, then a slight pause, then two very close together. Also reverberation from the shots.”
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He further testified, “The sounds came either from up against the School Depository or near the mouth of the triple underpass,” but he was not able to tell which.
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The critical part of Bower’s testimony came when he said at the time of the shooting there seemed to be “some commotion.” Warren Commission assistant legal counsel Joseph Ball followed up with a question:

Mr. Ball
: When you said there was a commotion, what do you mean by that? What did it look like to you when you were looking at the commotion?

Mr. Bowers
: I just am unable to describe rather than it was something out of the ordinary, a sort of milling around, but something occurred in this particular spot which was out of the ordinary, which attracted my eye for some reason, which I could not identify.

Mr. Ball
: You couldn’t describe it?

Mr. Bowers
: Nothing that I could pinpoint as having happened that—
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Here attorney Ball cut Bowers off. Mark noted that Ball’s interruption prevented Bowers from concluding his most important sentence in which Bowers would have explained what it was in the area behind the fence that caught his attention at the time JFK was shot. Lane corrected this in a filmed interview with Bowers.

Mr. Bowers
: At the time of the shooting, in the vicinity of where the two men I have described were, there was a flash of light or, as far as I am concerned, something I could not identify, but there was something I could not identify, but there was something which occurred which caught my eye in this immediate area on the embankment. Now, what this was, I could not state at that time and at this time I could not identify it, other than there was some unusual occurrence—a flash of light or smoke or something which caused me to feel like something out of the ordinary had occurred there.

Lane
: In reading your testimony, Mr. Bowers, it appears that just as you were about to make that statement, you were interrupted in the middle of the sentence by the Commission counsel, who then went into another area.

Mr. Bowers
: Well, that’s correct. I mean. I was simply trying to answer his questions, and he seemed to be satisfied with the answer to that one and did not care for me to elaborate.
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Both Vincent Bugliosi and Gerald Posner discount the testimony of Lee Bowers, arguing that echoes in Dealey Plaza made difficult the determination of where shots came from. Bowers had testified he thought the source of the shots was either “up against the School Depository or near the mouth of the triple underpass.” He was not able to tell which. Bowers explained: “I had worked this same tower for some ten or twelve years, and was there during the time they were renovating the School Depository Building, and had noticed at that time the similarity of sounds occurring in either of these two locations.”
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Bowers elaborated, “There is a similarity of sound, because there is a reverberation which takes place from either location.”
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Former Los Angeles County prosecutor Bugliosi subtly reframed Bowers’ answer to claim Bowers “testified it was difficult to tell where the source of any loud sound was coming from, ‘because there is a reverberation that takes place’ in the plaza.”
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What Bowers said in his testimony was precisely that it was hard to distinguish whether a sound came from the Depository or from the area of the grassy knoll closest to the underpass, but he did not doubt the shots he heard came from one or the other. Posner was more accurate in his description of Bowers’ testimony, but he took Bowers’ inability to determine if the shots came from closer to the underpass or the Depository as proof that echoes made “ear-witness” testimony inherently unreliable in Dealey Plaza.
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Still, neither Bugliosi nor Posner had any explanation for the cars Bowers observed prior to the assassination or for the suspicious behavior of the two men Bowers saw before the shooting behind the picket fence on the grassy knoll.