Reclaiming History (363 page)

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Ruth Paine, after discussing the previous weekend of November 2 and 3, testified, “Then he told me, it must have been the following weekend, that same weekend of the 9th.” At this point, instead of letting her say what Oswald told her about the note he had left at the FBI office and trying to firm up the date, Warren Commission counsel completely changed the subject by asking her, “Did he say anything when you gave him Agent Hosty’s name on the telephone?” (Paine had
handed
Oswald the paper with Hosty’s name and phone number on it, not told him over the phone.) “No,” Ruth said. Question: “Nothing at all?” “I don’t recall anything Lee said.” Paine then returned, on her own, to relating what Oswald had told her about the note. (3 H 18)

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He didn’t miss a day of work from the day he started, October 16, through November 22 (CE 1949, 23 H 749–751).

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Though we were not present in the garage, when we look at all the evidence, we can know, with every confidence, that each of the above actions took place precisely as stated, for the simple reason they
had
to take place.

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In a handwritten narrative prepared by Marina at the request of the Warren Commission, Marina, again displaying her brutal honesty, lamented, “Of course, if I had known what was going to happen, I would have agreed without further thought. Perhaps (if Lee was planning anything) he staked everything on a card. That is, if I agreed to his proposal to go with him to Dallas, he would not do what he planned, and, if I did not, then he would” (CE 994, 18 H 638).
One well-recognized exception to the rule of evidence that hearsay (a statement made outside of court that is offered into evidence to prove not merely that the statement was made but that it is true) is not admissible in a legal proceeding because of its untrustworthiness (not under oath, not subject to cross-examination at the time the statement was made) is when the statement made is against the declarant’s own interest, the reasoning being that people may lie to hurt others, but not themselves, thereby investing the statement with an inherent trustworthiness. If saying something (as Marina did) that, in effect, places the blame for the murder of a president on your shoulders is not a sufficient reason to believe it, few other things would be. And if we believe Marina’s rendition of what took place the evening before the president’s murder, as all sensible people must, then two things would necessarily seem to follow: one, that Oswald’s decision to kill Kennedy was tentative—that he would not have killed Kennedy if Marina had agreed to come back to him; and two,
by this fact alone
, the likelihood of his being a part of a conspiracy to murder Kennedy, in which others got him to do what he did, is virtually nonexistent.

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At the London trial, Ruth Paine testified that when she entered the garage around 9:00 p.m. and saw the overhead light on, she knew it wasn’t she who had left it on because she hadn’t been in the garage earlier in the evening. What about the possibility of Marina? I asked. She answered, “It couldn’t have been Marina. She was very good at turning out the lights whenever she went in there, and then I could hear her moving about. I knew where she was during the evening. So as I walked into the garage and found the light on, it was my clear impression that Oswald had been there and left it on carelessly.” (Transcript of
On Trial
, July 24, 1986, pp.617–618)

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In America, the caliber of a firearm is the diameter of the interior of its barrel, and with American weapons it is expressed in inches. Thus, a .30 caliber weapon is one whose interior barrel is thirty-hundredths, or three-tenths, of one inch in diameter. The caliber of continental European weapons like Oswald’s is measured not in inches but in millimeters. Therefore, his 6.5-millimeter Carcano would be the same as an American .257 caliber weapon, the interior barrel diameter being about one-fourth of an inch.
Oswald’s bolt-action, clip-fed military rifle had many markings on it, among which were “MADE IN ITALY”; “TERNI,” referring to being manufactured and tested at the Terni Army Plant in Terni, Italy; “CAL. 6.5,” to the rifle’s caliber; “1940” and “40,” to the year of manufacture; and “2766,” to the weapon’s serial number. The scope was stamped “4 × 18 COATED,” “ORDNANCE OPTICS INC,” “HOLLYWOOD CALIFORNIA,” and “MADE IN JAPAN.” The ammunition clip, which did not come with the rifle, bore the letters “SMI” (for “Soc. Metallurgica Italiana”) and the number “952” (a part of the full code number “Partita No. 1A/1/1952”).
After the Second World War, when the Italian army switched to a different rifle, the Carcano was imported into this country from Italy as surplus military equipment and was fairly common in America at the time. (WR, pp.81, 553–555; 3 H 392–396, 398, WCT Robert A. Frazier; Trask,
Pictures of the Pain
, pp.549–550; clip did not come with rifle: 3 H 398, WCT Robert A. Frazier); Fuhrman,
Simple Act of Murder
, p.46)

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Handwriting identification, though not as conclusive as fingerprint identification, is nonetheless considered to be definitive when done by qualified experts, and is “based upon the principle that every handwriting is distinctive.” However, since any
single
distinctive characteristic in handwriting as well as hand printing may not be unique to one person, in order to make an identification the handwriting expert (normally referred to as a “questioned-documents” expert or examiner) must find a sufficient number of corresponding distinctive characteristics (and a general absence of distinctive differences) between the
known
writing of the person and the writing on the document in question. The possibility that one person can imitate the handwriting of another and successfully deceive an expert document examiner is considered to be very remote, though it has been done. Not only does the forger have the problem of simulating every distinctive characteristic, but the forger is drawing, not writing. Forged writing is therefore distinguished by defects such as “tremor, waver, patching, retouching, noncontinuous lines, [and] pen lifts in awkward and unusual places.” (4 H 364, 372, WCT Alwyn Cole)
The two experts who compared handwriting and printing exemplars or “standards” of Oswald’s (i.e., known writing of Oswald’s, such as endorsements on his payroll checks, applications for employment, for a passport, for membership in the American Civil Liberties Union, and letters to the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Marine Corps, the State Department, and the American embassy in Russia) with the writing on the postal money order were Alwyn Cole, a questioned-documents examiner for the U.S. Treasury Department with twenty-eight years of experience, and James C. Cadigan, an FBI agent and examiner of questioned documents in the FBI laboratory in Washington, D.C., for over twenty-three years. (WR, pp.566, 569)

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In one of the leading books on rifles and other small arms, the author writes that the Mannlicher-Carcano is even “known occasionally as the Mauser Paravicino” and is, in fact, “a modified Mauser” (Smith,
Small Arms of the World
, p.474). FBI firearms expert Robert A. Frazier testified that “the Mauser was one of the earliest, if not the earliest,” of “bolt-action” rifles “from which many others were copied. And since [the Mannlicher-Carcano] uses the same type of bolt system, it may have been [erroneously] referred to as a Mauser for that reason” (3 H 394, WCT Robert A. Frazier).

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Although the HSCA did not exclude Oswald, the committee was unable to conclude whether it was he, Marina, or de Mohrenschildt who had written the phrase “Hunter of Fascists, ha, ha, ha” (12 HSCA 52–53).

† The HSCA was careful to point out that Groden was “not a member of the committee’s photographic evidence panel,” but was a consultant (unpaid at that) providing background information on the issues that had been raised by Warren Commission critics in the area of photographic evidence (6 HSCA 294; unpaid: Trask,
National Nightmare
, p.208).

‡ The killer of Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman had left bloody shoe prints as he walked away from the murder scene on the evening of June 12, 1994. The shoe (sole) prints were those of the rare, Italian-made Bruno Magli shoe.

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Simpson’s dismissive characterization of the shoes, saying he’d never wear such shoes.

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The only other time Oswald had come out to Irving on a day other than Friday was on Monday, October 21, but that was when he visited Marina in the hospital after the birth of their second child (3 H 40, WCT Ruth Hyde Paine).

† The overall length of the Carcano rifle, when fully assembled, is 40
¹
/
₅
inches (3 H 395, WCT Robert A. Frazier).

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Further evidence showing that Oswald was in physical possession of the Carcano is that a tuft of several cotton fibers of dark blue, gray-black, and orange-yellow shades were found in the crevice of the butt plate of the rifle, and the FBI laboratory found that the colors and even the twist of the fibers matched perfectly with the shirt Oswald was wearing at the time of his arrest, the same shirt the Warren Commission believed he was wearing when he was on the sixth floor in the sniper’s nest.
The FBI expert testified that the fibers “were clean, they had good color to them, there was no grease on them and they were not fragmented,” causing him to conclude they “had just been picked up…in the recent past,” although at another point he couldn’t categorically say they had not been there for a long time. However, the Warren Commission noted that “the fact that on the morning of the assassination Oswald was wearing the shirt from which these relatively fresh fibers most probably originated provides some evidence that they transferred to the rifle
that day
since there was limited, if any, opportunity for Oswald to handle the weapon during the two months prior to November 22.” (WR, pp.124–125; 4 H 82–87, WCT Paul Morgan Stombaugh; CE 673, 17 H 330; CE 674, 17 H 331) Indeed, when Marina was first asked whether she knew what shirt her husband was wearing on the morning of the assassination, she answered, “I don’t remember.” But when she was shown Commission Exhibit No. 150, the shirt he was wearing at the time of his arrest, and was asked if she recalled him wearing it on the morning of November 22, she answered, “Yes, it was a dark shirt” (which Commission Exhibit No. 150 is). Question: “You think that was the one?” Answer: “Yes.” (1 H 121, WCT Marina N. Oswald) In any event, the tufts of fibers certainly are further substantive evidence that Oswald was at least in possession of the Carcano at some point, as opposed to merely owning it.

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It’s no secret that the Dallas police were put off by the intrusion of federal law enforcement and the federal request to turn over all of the physical evidence to the FBI for analysis. The implication, of course, was that the federal government thought the Dallas police were not equipped to resolve the basic facts of the assassination, or worse, were incompetent. Early in the afternoon of the assassination, Dallas crime-lab detective W. E. “Pete” Barnes said he was approached by a Secret Service agent who wanted Barnes to turn the rifle over to him “to make sure we didn’t mess up the prints on it.” Barnes told him, “Pardner, I’ll bet I’ve dusted more fingerprint powder than you’ve ever seen in your lifetime.” (Savage,
JFK First Day Evidence
, pp.80–81) Later in the evening, and before Day received instructions from Captain Doughty, Secret Service agent Forrest Sorrels approached Day and warned him, “The FBI is trying to get that gun.” Day told him it was fine with him if they wanted to work on it. Yet the request must have been a blow to the twenty-three-year veteran crime-lab lieutenant who had amassed fifteen years of experience reading fingerprints for the Dallas Police Department’s Identification Bureau. (4 H 249–250, WCT J. C. Day)

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Fingerprint analysis in this country dates back to 1903 in New York. The FBI “went into the fingerprint business in 1924.” The French (with its famous Bertillon system), British, and Argentinians were into fingerprint analysis as early as the 1880s, and the first article believed to have been published on establishing identity by fingerprints was written by a Scottish doctor in 1880 and titled, “On the Skin-Furrows of the Hand.” (Moenssens and Inbau,
Scientific Evidence in Criminal Cases,
pp.350–351; 1903 and 1924 dates: 4 H 14–15, WCT Sebastian F. Latona)
Latent fingerprints
(as opposed to a fingerprint
exemplar
, which is the model for comparison taken in ink at the police station) is the technical term for fingerprints left on everyday objects. These prints are transmitted to the surfaces of objects by a residue of oil secreted from the body, and are eventually “lifted” from the objects by fingerprint specialists. Contrary to popular belief, the perspiration from one’s fingers and palms contains no such oily substance. The fingers and palms acquire that residue of oil when they come into contact with parts of the body that do have such secretions, such as the hair and face. Fingerprints are more popularly known than palm prints, most likely because people generally touch objects with their fingers rather than their palms.
Most American law enforcement agencies consider ten “points of similarity” (between the latent prints and those on the exemplar) enough for a fingerprint expert to give an unqualified conclusion. In Europe, the minimum requirements are usually higher, going all the way up to sixteen at Scotland Yard. The FBI has never accepted the minimum-requirement doctrine, and the FBI expert in the Kennedy case, Sebastian F. Latona, told the Warren Commission he has given an opinion in court as to identity with as few as seven points of similarity. Arthur Mandella, a fingerprint expert for the New York Police Department who also compared the latent prints in the Kennedy assassination with Oswald’s exemplar, also said that no given minimum number of points of similarity is necessary for a conclusion. “A sufficient amount determined by the expert is the important factor,” he said, though he added that the usual range for him has been between eight and twelve. (4 H 13–14, WCT Sebastian F. Latona; 4 H 53, WCT Arthur Mandella; WR, p.563)
The FBI found twelve points of similarity between Oswald’s right-palm-print exemplar and the latent palm print found “off underside gun barrel near end of foregrip” (CE 640, 17 H 292).