The minimum physical evidence must all be genuine

Less than 15 pieces of physical evidence are needed to establish that all the damage at the assassination was done by Lee Harvey Oswald’s rifle. This evidence is coherent and redundant—it all points to the same picture, with each of its parts supported by multiple pieces of independent evidence. Consequently, it is either all genuine or all altered. It is all genuine because it could not all have been altered in the short time allowed after the assassination.

The physical evidence from the JFK assassination, if genuine, establishes that Lee Harvey Oswald’s rifle created all the wounds in Kennedy and Connally, all the damage to the car, and all the fragments that were found. It also allows much of the confusion in the medical evidence to be sidestepped. But is the physical evidence genuine? This question has always been subject to doubts by critics who refuse to trust agencies such as the Dallas Police Department, the FBI, and the Secret Service, who handled the evidence at one time or another. These doubts are easy to raise and difficult to answer to everyone’s satisfaction. But the interlocking, redundant nature of the physical evidence, one of its aspects whose importance has yet not been fully appreciated, requires that it be accepted or rejected in toto. Given the practical impossibility of planting or altering the entire suite of physical evidence, especially in the few brief hours after the assassination as would have been required, the evidence is all genuine and Oswald’s rifle did all the damage.

The minimum physical evidence
What is the minimum suite of physical evidence? It is that which establishes these three high-level pieces of evidence: (1) Only two bullets hit. (2) Both came from the rear. (3) Both came from Lee Harvey Oswald’s rifle. The following outline proceeds downward from these three propositions to the most basic physical evidence:

1)      Only two bullets hit.
a)      Only two wounds to Kennedy.
      i)      Four wounds. (Autopsy)
     ii)      One pair in body, one in head. (Autopsy)
    iii)     No bullets found in body. (Autopsy)
    iv)     Therefore must be two entrances and two exits.
b)      Connally wounded by one of the same bullets (SBT).
      i)      Men aligned at the right time. (FBI)
     ii)       Downward trajectory of body shot would take it into Connally or car.
        (1)   No damage found to rear of car. (FBI, SS)
        (2)   Trajectory through Connally similar to that through Kennedy. (Autopsy)
   iii)     Connally’s damage too weak to be from a pristine bullet. (Autopsy, FBI)
c)      Only two bullets found.
      i)      One whole bullet and two large fragments found. (FBI, SS)
        (1)   From two or three bullets.
        (2)   Required starting point is two.
     ii)      Chemically, all fragments make two groups. (FBI, AEC, Prof. Guinn)

2)      Both from the rear.
a)      Back wound
      i)      Fibers in jacket and shirt bent forward. (FBI)
     ii)      Back wound has characteristics of entrance. (Autopsy)
    iii)      Line of internal damage between back and throat. (Autopsy)
    iv)     Nick in tie. (FBI)
     v)     Fibers in shirt near collar bent forward. (FBI)
    vi)     No bullet found in body. (Autopsy)
b)      Head wound
      i)      Small, beveled entrance hole in rear. (Autopsy)
     ii)      Other wound is larger and forward; beveled forward. (Autopsy)
    iii)     Line of lead fragments between wound in back and larger hole. (Autopsy)
    iv)     Head snaps forward when hit. (Z film)

3)      Both from the same rifle.
a)     All three large fragments traced ballistically to Oswald’s rifle.
b)     Chemical composition of tiny fragments falls into same two groups as made by the two large fragments. (FBI, AEC, Prof. Guinn)
c)     That composition consistent with MC ammunition and inconsistent with nearly all other ammunitions. (Prof. Guinn)

The most basic pieces of basic physical evidence extracted from the above outline are:

    1.      Four wounds.
    2.      Two obvious pairs, one in head and one in body.
    3.      No bullets found in body.
    4.      One whole bullet and two large fragments found.
    5.      All three large fragments traced ballistically to Oswald’s rifle.
    6.      Chemical composition of tiny fragments falls into same two groups as made by the two large fragments.
    7.      That composition consistent with MC ammunition and inconsistent with nearly all other ammunitions.
    8.      Fibers in jacket and shirt bent forward.
    9.      Back wound has characteristics of entrance.
    10. Line of internal damage between back and throat.
    11. Nick in tie
    12. Small, beveled entrance wound in rear of head.
    13. Large, forward-beveled wound of exit and explosion to front right of entrance wound.
    14. Line of lead fragments between wound in back and larger hole.
    15. Head snaps forward when hit.

This evidence falls into five basic groups: wounds, classical ballistics (markings on bullets), chemical composition of lead in bullets, clothing, and the Zapruder film.

Problems in accepting this evidence
To accept this suite of physical evidence, one must accept the word of the military autopsy physicians, the FBI, the Secret Service, the Zapruder film, the Atomic Energy Commission, and Prof. Vincent Guinn of the University of California. So far, no solid reasons have emerged not to believe them. But many critics still claim that some of the physical evidence has been planted or altered, most notably the photographs and X-rays from the autopsy. Other critics refuse to trust the FBI, the Secret Service, or even the Warren Commission, and dismiss the physical evidence out of hand. It is easy to raise such doubts and very difficult to refute them to everyone’s satisfaction. Many critics quite casually accuse individuals and agencies of lying and altering, and remain unmoved by the usual arguments in their defense. I believe there is a conclusive argument—a proof of lack of alteration that has not yet been exploited. Its simplest version consists of these three steps: (1) the minimum physical evidence is so interlocking and self-consistent that it all stands or fall together; (2) most of the physical evidence must be genuine (cannot have been altered); (3) therefore all of it is genuine. The next sections elaborate these steps.

All or nothing
It is not widely recognized that the physical evidence is highly self-consistent and interlocked, or redundant—the wounds, the clothing, the bullets, the fragments, the rifle, and the Zapruder film all present a unified, consistent picture with multiple lines of independent evidence supporting each of the three steps in the argument. To see this high degree of interlocking, consider the redundancies listed below:

The implications of this redundancy and interlocking are profound. If the head wounds were altered, then so were the Zapruder film, the fragments, and the spray of tissue over the car. If CE 399 is invalid (planted), then so are the other fragments, both large and small, the wounds, the clothing, and the Zapruder film. Because all the physical evidence hangs together so strongly, it forms an indivisible group that is either all genuine or all altered.

Can’t be all falsified because most of the evidence could not be
But the practical problems of altering all this evidence in the short time available are staggering. All the altered evidence must have been substituted for the originals at various times within the first hours, maybe even minutes, after the assassination. Some, such as the clothing, would also have to be created based on detailed knowledge of what exactly happened, and then substituted within minutes to hours. At least the following agencies would have been involved: the FBI, the Secret Service, and probably the Dallas Police Department. How would the conspirators have known in advance how many bullets were going to hit whom and just where they would hit? Given the uncertainties of shooting at a moving target from 50–100 yards in a strange location without the chance to practice, they could not have known. They would even have had to anticipate the single-bullet theory in advance and prepare for its possibility. Such a scenario is clearly impossible. Furthermore, the Warren Commission would have had to be been completely fooled by the fake evidence, and none of the conspirators in any of the agencies would have talked to this day, nor would any whistleblower have emerged to accuse anyone of the largest conspiracy in history. Impossible.
Furthermore, all the detailed decisions about exactly how to alter the evidence would have been based solely on the visual impressions of the shooting and the reactions of the people in the car, because the Zapruder film did not become available until the next day. Then for the next 37 years, everybody in the three major governmental investigative agencies who knew that huge, terrible secret would have had to keep everyone else from it and keep themselves from having a change of heart and telling all to the world.

Which types of physical evidence could have been altered?
    Let us now consider which of the five types of basic physical evidence could have been altered. To be generous, we separately consider alteration in principle and in practice. We summarize the results in the table below.
    Any scenario of altering wounds has to deal with two exceedingly improbable, if not outright impossible, scenarios: it must have been done in the short period between Andrews Air Force Base and the Bethesda Naval Medical Hospital, and in such a sophisticated manner that the three autopsy pathologists would completely miss them. This pipe dream has been advanced only twice, first by Fred Newcomb and Perry Adams in Murder From Within and a subsequent article in Skeptic Magazine, and years later by David Lifton in Best Evidence. No serious researcher considers it remotely possible. The wound-alteration scenario also requires that the medical personnel at Parkland did not photograph the wounds or examine them closely, something that could not have been guaranteed beforehand. In short, the wounds could not have been altered in principle or in practice. It didn’t happen. It then follows from the all-or-nothing nature of the collective physical evidence that none of it was altered. In theory, this is all we need to know in order to reject any alterations to the basic physical evidence. For completeness, however, we discuss the other four types.
    Ballistic markings on bullets can in principle be altered in two ways, both of which require the bullet to be originally fired from the rifle to be implicated: by planting (substituting) bullets after the fact and by shooting sabots (bullets fired once from a rifle to pick up its marking, and then fired from a larger-bore rifle to make it appear that it had come from the original rifle). While CE 399 could have been planted because conspirators would have had more than an hour to find the original and replace it with the plant, it does seem quite a stretch because they would not have known where it would wind up (it could just as well have been found in the operating room or fallen into the limousine as wound up on a stretcher in the hallway). And how would the conspirators have known it would survive intact? They would have had to carry quite a collection of bullets for this task, it seems, with various states of damage and broken into fragments of various sizes. But even if we grant them considerable luck with CE 399, they would have had a much harder time duplicating the two large fragments from the head shot, whose sizes and degrees of damage (to say nothing of their very existences) would have been impossible to predict. But let us be generous and allow that CE 399 could have been planted with the right ballistic markings.
    Could the three large fragments have come from sabots? Probably, but this kind of alteration would have been limited to a “modest” conspiracy, with a shooter in or near the Depository, because wounds pointing to a frontal shot could not have been altered to point to the rear. Thus sabots could not have been used to hide a shooter from the knoll or any other forward position. Nevertheless, we grant that sabots might have been used, and we give a yes to alteration of ballistics in principle and a partial yes to it in practice.
    But alteration of ballistic markings also carries the need to alter the chemical composition of the lead fragments to make them match the appropriate cores of the planted bullets. This task would have been impossible because it appears that in 1963 no one in the world knew about the special characteristics of Mannlicher-Carcano bullets, namely that their composition varied by the bullet rather than by the lot. The first report on the detailed chemical composition of bullet lead seems to have been published by H. R. Lukens and V. P. Guinn in 1967, and it did not cover MC bullets. Lukens and Guinn published their first detailed report on trace elements in bullet lead in 1971, and it still did not deal with MC bullets. Guinn reported in 1979 that he first analyzed MC bullets in 1972–1976, a decade after the assassination. Since these are the only such reports in the literature, we can state fairly that conspirators in 1963 would not have realized that they had to match antimony in lead in addition to ballistic marking when planting bullets and fragments. The chance of them randomly matching the chemistry of the five fragments found in the front and rear of the car, the hospital, Kennedy’s brain, and Connally’s wrist would be vanishingly small. Thus we conclude that the chemical composition of the lead fragments could not have been altered either in principle or in practice in 1963. It also didn’t happen.
    Although blood stains and holes in clothing can in principle be altered when enough time is available, they could not have been in this case, for the simple reason that the wounds could not have been altered. Even forgetting this limitation, conspirators would not have known where to place the holes in the back of the shirt and coat (in order to match them to the entry wound in the President’s back) until they knew the location of the hole in Kennedy’s back, which was not known even informally until the autopsy (remember that he was not turned over in Dallas), by which point the clothing was being sent by courier to the FBI Laboratory in Washington. Since the autopsy report was not available until the following week and the FBI documented the locations of the holes the night of the assassination, the conspirators (a) would have had to be in the FBI; (b) could have only used informal reports to locate their fake holes; and (c) would have had essentially no time to do it because the FBI documented the clothing the same night it arrived. Furthermore, the conspirators could not have been assured that the Dallas police had not measured the holes in the clothing first (assuming of course that they were not part of the conspiracy). All these problems provide a second conclusive reason why the holes in the clothing must be real. Thus although damage to clothing can be altered in principle, the holes in the President’s shirt and jacket could not have been altered in practice. It also didn’t happen.
    Lastly, could the Zapruder film have been altered? The answer again is a resounding no. The address by Josiah Thompson entitled “Why the Zapruder film is authentic” provides reasons every bit as strong as those why the clothing wasn’t altered. Although the film could have been altered in principle (at least according to Thompson), it could not have been in practice. The reasons amount to lack of possession, lack of time, and the necessity to similarly alter all other films of the assassination. Although Thompson didn't mention lack of technology, this is also a safe bet. Anyone who thinks the Zapruder film was altered is seriously misguided.
    The summary table on alteration is given immediately below. Of the five basic types of physical evidence, only two or two and one-half could have been altered in principle (ballistic markings, clothing (but not in this case), and possibly the Zapruder film), and only one half of one could have been altered in practice (ballistic markings on CE 399). But since the others weren’t altered and the basic physical evidence goes all or nothing, CE 399 wasn’t falsified.
    In conclusion, we can rest easy that all of the basic physical evidence is genuine. The arguments for alteration don’t even come close to meeting the necessary standard. Alteration in the JFK assassination is thus a nonissue.

Type of physical evidence	Alterable in principle?	Alterable in practice?
Wounds	No	No
Bullets: markings from rifle	Yes	Yes (at least CE 399)
Bullets: chemical composition of lead core	No	No
Clothing	Yes (but not for JFK)	No
Zapruder film	Maybe	No

Little reason to alter the evidence
To repeat a thought begun briefly above, there is little or no reason to alter any of the basic physical evidence once it is accepted that the wounds (or any of the other types of evidence) cannot be altered. The fact that neither the wounds nor the chemistry of the bullets nor the Zapruder film could be altered in principle provides three such reasons (each conclusive) for not altering any of the rest of the physical evidence.

The rest of the story
    Thus the only possible view of the physical evidence is that it is all genuine and means that the two bullets that hit Kennedy and Connally were fired from Lee Harvey Oswald’s rifle to the exclusion of all other rifles. Of this we can be certain (100% probability).
    Only one real question then remains: who fired the rifle? Although the answer is not conclusive, the only scenario for which any significant evidence has been generated in the 37 years since the assassination was that Oswald himself fired it. It was his rifle, he had deviated form his normal routine by going to Irving the night before and by bringing the rifle to work that morning, he had been on the sixth floor within 35 minutes of the shooting, he was in the Depository at the time of the shooting, a figure looking very much like him was sighted at the sixth-floor window firing either the last shot or the last two shots, his fresh fingerprint and palmprint were found on the rifle, his fresh palm print was found on one of the book cartons that formed the “sniper’s nest” and with indications that he had pushed hard enough on the carton to rearrange it, he left the building within minutes of the shooting and headed for his rooming house on an unusual bus, he shot Patrolman Tippit in cold blood with the pistol that was found on him in the Texas Theatre, he attempted to shoot a policeman in the scuffle while he was being arrested, and then he denied ordering or owning the rifle. For no other suspected shooter has even the tiniest fraction of the above kind of evidence been generated in 37 years.
    The only reasonable interpretation of the above evidence, i.e., the only reasonable working hypothesis for the assassination, must be that Lee Harvey Oswald murdered President Kennedy. This simple, straightforward scenario should come as a great relief to every American who cares about our country. All the damage that day was done by one troubled young man with a history of violence and a desperate need to make a statement of his worth to a multitude of people in three countries who had spurned him from his early childhood right through the previous night. Moreover, he almost certainly would have acted alone, given the total lack of validated evidence over 37 years for anyone’s having worked with him. In short, our government didn’t kill Kennedy, nor did the Mafia, Texas oil, the military-industrial complex, anti-Castro Cubans, Cuba itself, the Soviet Union, or any other major group or combination of groups that one can name. The only defensible conclusion from the physical evidence is that Lee Harvey Oswald did it by himself, just as the much-maligned authorities in Dallas and Washington concluded within hours after the deed.