Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy (94 page)

Other vital evidence was destroyed. After receiving Governor Connally's
bloodstained clothing at Parkland Hospital, Congressman Henry Gonzales
kept this potential evidence in a closet in his Washington office. Several
months later, while Gonzales was home in Texas, Clifton Carter, an aide
to Lyndon Johnson, notified a Gonzales secretary that the Secret Service
was coming to pick up Connally's clothing.

Some time later, this clothing was presented as evidence to the Warren
Commission. But by this time, it had been cleaned and pressed, thereby
eliminating metal traces at the bullet holes that could have been studied to
determine the type of ammunition and the direction of shots.

(It was Gonzales who formally called for a reopening of the assassination investigation in 1975, which led to the forming of the House Select
Committee on Assassinations.)

But the one piece of evidence that did more than all others to convict
Oswald as the assassin in the minds of the American public was the
famous backyard photographs depicting Oswald with a Mannlicher-Carcano
rifle and communist publications.

Dallas police claim to have discovered two prints and one negative of
pictures showing Lee Harvey Oswald standing in his backyard wearing a
holstered pistol and holding a rifle and some communist literature.

According to police reports, these photos were found among Oswald's
possessions in the garage of the Paine home in Irving, Texas, on Saturday,
November 23, 1963, although a search the day before failed to turn up
such photos.

One of these photos became the cover of the February 21, 1964 issue of
Life magazine. This now-famous issue was seen by millions around the
world.

The Warren Commission heard from Oswald's accommodating wife, Marina, that she had taken the snapshots with a hand-held Imperial Reflex
camera at the insistence of her husband. The Commission, based on
Marina's testimony and the order form for Oswald's rifle, pinpointed the
date as March 31, 1963. She said she took one shot then handed the
camera back to Oswald, who advanced the film and had her take another
picture.

The Commission asserted that the rifle in the picture is the same rifle
found on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository.

Yet when shown the photographs by Dallas police, Capt. Will Fritz said
Oswald made the following comments:

He said the picture was not his, that the face was his face, but that this
picture had been made by someone superimposing his face, the other
part of the picture was not him at all and that he had never seen the
picture before. . . . He told me that he understood photography real
well, and that in time, he would be able to show that it was not his
picture, and that it had been made by someone else.

Of course, Oswald never got the time to explain the backyard photos.
But various researchers have spent years studying this incriminating evidence, and today almost all are convinced Oswald was truthful about the
pictures being fabricated.

To begin with, it appears there were actually four backyard pictures.
One was described by Marguerite Oswald as depicting her son holding a
rifle above his head with both hands. She was shown this photo by Marina
at the Paine's Irving home the night of the assassination. On Marguerite's
insistence, the incriminating photo was burned and flushed down a toilet.

In 1976 the Senate Intelligence Committee discovered yet a fourth
backyard photo in the hands of the widow of a Dallas policeman. Mrs.
Roscoe White said her husband once told her the picture would be very
valuable some day. In this heretofore unknown version of the backyard
photo, Oswald is depicted holding the rifle in his left hand and the
communist material in his right. This is the same pose used by Dallas
police in reenacting the photo for the Warren Commission-strong evidence that authorities were aware of the suppressed picture long before it
became known to the public.

Photo experts told the House Select Committee on Assassinations that
the most famous backyard picture-the one used on the cover of Life
magazine-was obviously made from the original negative while in the
hands of Dallas authorities. Yet this negative was never accounted for by
the Dallas police. The Committee noted: "There is no official record
explaining why the Dallas Police Department failed to give the Warren
Commission the other original negative."

To further cloud this issue, two Dallas commercial photographic processors have told this author they saw copies of the backyard photo the night of the assassination-more than twelve hours before they were reported
found in the Paine garage.

Robert Hester, who was called from home on November 22, 1963. to
help process assassination-related photographs for the FBI and Dallas
police at National Photo, said he saw an FBI agent with a color transparency of one of these pictures and that one of the backyard photos he
processed showed no figure in the picture. Hester's claim was corroborated
by his wife, Patricia, who also helped process film on the day of the
assassination.

There is also considerable question regarding the camera reportedly used
to make these photographs. Oswald's brother Robert claimed to have
obtained the camera from the Paine home on December 8, 1963. He did
not mention it to authorities because he didn't realize anyone would be
interested.

Robert was only told the camera belonged to his brother by Ruth Paine
and the FBI did not receive the camera until February 24, 1964. About that
time, Marina was shown two cameras but failed to identify either as
belonging to her husband.

When the government got the camera, it was inoperable. FBI photographic expert Lyndal L. Shaneyfelt told the Warren Commission: "In
order to be able to make a photograph with the camera, I had to make
slight repairs to the shutter lever, which had been bent. I straightened it
and cleaned the lens in order to remove the dirt which had accumulated."

Finally, in June 1964, Marina identified the camera as the one she used
to take the photographs. Marina, who originally claimed to have only
taken one picture, revised this statement in her testimony to the Commission in February 1964. She said: "I had even forgotten that I had taken
two photographs. I thought there was only one. I thought there were two
identical pictures, but they turned out to be two different poses."

She, of course, never mentioned the other two photographs. But then
this incident was not the only time Marina's testimony reflected inconsistencies and rehearsal.

An objective viewing of the three available backyard photographs reveals
internal problems aplenty. Although all three pictures were reportedly
taken with a hand-held camera, the background of all three is identical
when brought to the same size. That is, though cropped differently in the
three photos, the elements of the background-shadows, leaves, branches,
stairs, etc.-are exactly identical. This sameness of background could be
produced with a stationary camera on a heavy tripod but is almost impossible with a hand-held camera.

The V-shaped shadow under Oswald's nose remains the same in all
three pictures, although his head is tilted in different directions.

And the photos all show a discernible line marking a break in the print's
emulsion across Oswald's face just above a flat, broad chin. In Dallas
police photos, it is clear that Oswald had a sharply pointed, cleft chin.

And when all three photos are brought to the same size and placed on
top of each other as transparencies, nothing matches except the face of Lee
Harvey Oswald-strong evidence that he was telling the truth when he said
his face had been superimposed on another body.

Oswald's assessment that the photos are superimposed fakes has been
confirmed by two foreign authorities. In 1977, Maj. John Pickard, commander of the photographic department at the Canadian Defense Department, made these statements after studying the backyard pictures:

The pictures have the earmarks of being faked. The shadows fall in
conflicting directions. The shadow of Oswald's nose falls in one direction and that of his body in another. The photos were shot from a
slightly different angle, a different distance, with the gun in a different
hand. So, if one photo is laid on top of another, nothing could match
exactly. Yet, impossibly, while one body is bigger, in the other the
heads match perfectly, bearing out Oswald's charge that his head was
pasted on an incriminating photograph.

Author and British Broadcasting Corporation investigative reporter Anthony Summers had the photos studied by retired Detective Superintendent
Malcolm Thompson, a past president of the Institute of Incorporated
Photographers in England. Thompson said he detected retouching in the
photos around the area of Oswald's head and on the butt of the rifle. He
also noted inconsistencies in the location of shadows and the different chin
on Oswald. Thompson stated: "One can only conclude that Oswald's head
has been stuck on to a chin which is not Oswald's chin. . . . My opinion is
that those photographs are faked. . . . I consider the pictures to be the
result of a montage."

However, neither Pickard nor Thompson studied the original photos.
The Photographic Evidence Panel of the House Select Committee on
Assassinations, which did study the originals, concluded in 1978 that it
could find no evidence of fakery in the backyard photos.

This conclusion rested primarily on studies that showed markings on the
edges of the negative of one of the original photographs were identical to
markings on other photographs made by the Imperial Reflex camera. This
ballistics-type evidence convinced the panel that the photos must be genuine.

However, Texas graphics expert Jack White pointed out that if a knowledgeable person wanted to fake the backyard pictures, it would have been
a simple matter to produce a high-quality montage photograph using one
backyard scene, a figure with rifle and papers and a head shot of Oswald,
which then could be photocopied using the Imperial Reflex camera. This
procedure would produce a backyard photo that could be proven to have
come from the camera traced to Oswald.

Another method to achieve the same results, according to White, would
be to make an exposure through the Imperial Reflex camera that would include the markings on the edge but nothing else. Then, when the
composite photo is combined with this, the markings become part of the
negative.

Asked to study the sameness of the different photos' backgrounds, the
House Committee's experts said they measured the distances between
certain objects in the pictures-such as wooden fence posts-and determined differences in distance, indicating that the photos were indeed
separate shots.

White, on the other hand, claimed that the differences were simply the
result of "keystoning" or tilting the easel on which the photograph was
exposed in an enlarger. He said he, too, had been concerned with what
appeared to be differences in the photos but discovered that by simply
tilting the photographic print in an enlarger's easel, the backgrounds of the
supposedly separate pictures overlapped and matched perfectly.

Furthermore, in recent years White has discovered other problems with
the backyard photos. In one picture, the tips of Oswald's fingers appear to
be missing as does one end of the rifle's telescopic scope. White claims
this is due to sloppy airbrushing on the part of whoever faked the picture.

In one photo, the figure can be seen to be wearing a large ring on his
right hand, yet the ring is missing in the other photos.

Sameness of backgrounds and Oswald's face, conflicting shadows and
distances, loss of portions of the photos-again, a vital piece of evidence
remains in "controversy" despite the inconsistencies that can be viewed
by any layman and the studied opinions of experts.

Yet the federal government continues to vouch for the authenticity of the
incriminating photos. The reason for this steadfast support may have been
voiced by House Committee chief counsel Robert Blakey, who told the
Committee:

If [the backyard photographs] are invalid, how they were produced
poses far-reaching questions in the area of conspiracy, for they evince a
degree of technical sophistication that would almost necessarily raise the
possibility that [someone] conspired not only to kill the President, but to
make Oswald a patsy.

In light of the many questions that surround the physical evidence
attempting to link Lee Harvey Oswald to the assassination, the Warren
Commission tried to strengthen the case against the ex-Marine through the
use of reenactments.

However, the results of these reenactments has been questioned by at
least two of the participants.

Chester Breneman, a surveyor who participated in two separate reenactments of the Kennedy assassination, said the studies proved that
more than one man was involved in the shooting. Breneman, who went on
to become county surveyor of Eastland County, Texas, told this author in
1978 that distance and time figures published by the Warren Commission
were "at odds" with figures obtained in the reenactment staged for the
FBI and Secret Service in 1964.

Breneman's story was confirmed by Dallas County surveyor Bob West,
who also participated in both reenactments. Both men were in West's
office on the Monday following the assassination when a man entered.
Breneman recalled:

[He] said he was a special investigator for Life magazine. He asked if
we would make an investigation down there [in Dealey Plaza] and see if
any other bullets were fired and from which direction they came. They
were aware at that time that something was haywire. . . . So, we went
down there and roped the area off. I stood on the parapet where
[Abraham] Zapruder stood and took those pictures. They had still
pictures of all the frames of Zapruder's film. [Reportedly Life did not
take possession of the Zapruder film until that same day.]