Reclaiming History? or Re-framing Oswald?

Bugliosi Fails the Paraffin Test

by Pat Speer

On Page 964 of Reclaiming History, as part of his list of evidence proving Lee Harvey Oswald killed President Kennedy, Vincent Bugliosi states:

"Dallas Police performed a paraffin test on Oswald's hands at the time of his interrogation to determine if he had recently fired a revolver, and the results were positive, indicating the presence of nitrates from gunpowder residue on his hands."

This statement is incredibly deceptive.  By including this statement in his list, Bugliosi is clearly suggesting that this evidence is indicative of Oswald's guilt, even though he readily admits 800 pages earlier that "the paraffin test is not conclusive...mere handling of a weapon may leave nitrates of the skin, even without firing it." (p. 164)  Even worse, when one looks at the results of another test, performed on the paraffin casts of Oswald's cheek, one can only conclude they suggest that Oswald did not fire the shots that killed Kennedy.  You see, while the tests of Oswald's hands were positive, the tests for Oswald's cheek were negative.  This suggests that he did not fire a rifle on November 22, 1963.

Bugliosi tries to tackle this problem. In a footnote on page 165, Bugliosi states "Predictably, the paraffin cast for Oswald's right cheek showed no reaction." Predictably? He explains by asserting that there is no gap through which residue from a rifle could leak onto the cheek.  He then cites the Warren Commission testimony of FBI Special Agent Cortlandt Cunningham to support this supposition. On page 79 of his endnotes (available on a separate cd-rom) he acknowledges that former FBI agent William Turner reported that he'd spoken to Dr. Vincent Guinn about tests performed by Guinn, and that Guinn had found nitrates in abundance on casts of the cheeks of men who'd fired rifles like the one owned by Oswald. Bugliosi dismisses Turner's assertion, however, essentially calling him a liar, by stating "There is simply no way to square this with the testimony and experience of the Dallas Police and FBI."  Bugliosi then explains that two Dallas Police officers testified that they didn't think a test of the cheek would read positive for a man firing a rifle, and that Cunningham testified that an FBI agent had fired the rifle three times but that tests for his cheek had come up negative. Bugliosi begs of his readers "Why in the world would these two Dallas officers lie under oath about something like this?" and that "No one could really believe this is perjured testimony, if for no other reason that no professional would lie under oath on a matter that he knows other experts could easily refute him on." (endnotes, p. 80)

But what Bugliosi misses, or simply chooses to ignore, is that these men were discussing the standard paraffin test performed in the 1960's, and that Turner asked Guinn about a different test entirely involving neutron activation analysis of the paraffin casts.  Bugliosi, who elsewhere cites conversations with Guinn, never mentions discussing this with Guinn himself, nor of Guinn denying that he'd conducted such tests.  He never mentions that, as exposed in Professor Gerald McKnight's Breach of Trust, Guinn called the FBI in 1964 suggesting they conduct these tests (McKnight, Breach of Trust, p.211) and that, per the testimony of the FBI's John Gallagher—the last testimony taken by the Warren Commission—the FBI had indeed conducted neutron activation analysis on the paraffin cast of Oswald’s cheek.

It seems more than a coincidence that Bugliosi keeps the results of this test from his readers Gallagher testified that there was more gunshot residue on the outside of the paraffin cast than on the side exposed to Oswald’s cheek and that he could therefore reach no conclusion as to whether Oswald had fired a rifle. He stated furthermore that “I found that there was more barium and antimony on the inside surface of the cast than you would find on the cheek of an individual who had recently washed his cheek” without explaining why anyone should assume Oswald had just washed his cheek. (While the casts had reportedly been washed, nothing was offered to substantiate that rinsing a wax cast would have nearly the effect on the levels of residue as Oswald’s washing his face.) (15WH751)

This unexpected result, which suggests that the gunshot residue levels were too low to conclude Oswald had recently fired a rifle, becomes even more intriguing when one considers that researcher Harold Weisberg, through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, received the controls for this test and found that gunshot residue was always present on the cheeks of those firing a rifle like Oswald’s (Weisberg, Post Mortem, p. 437).  These controls, moreover, confirmed what Guinn had told the FBI in his phone call, (the FBI document describing this phone call is listed in McKnight’s book as R.M Jevons to Conrad 2/27/64 memo), what Guinn told an August 1964 conference (Lane, Rush to Judgment, p. 153), what Guinn published in an October 1964 article in the Journal of the Forensic Science Society (p. 189), and what Guinn later told Turner (Turner, Invisible Witness, p. 76).

Also of significance is that, unlike the paraffin tests originally performed on Oswald, the Neutron Activation Analysis performed by Gallagher only gained in respectability in the years following the assassination (Scientific Evidence in Criminal Cases, 1986, p.255), and is considered to be a reliable indicator of whether a suspect has fired a rifle.  Larry Ragle, a retired Director of Forensic Sciences for Santa Ana, California, in his 1995 book Crime Scene, explains: “By design, revolvers can leak…Rifles, depending on their construction and wear, can also leak.  There is only one way to determine the leakage capacity of any weapon and that is to collect samples from the hands or face firing the weapon under controlled conditions while using the corresponding ammunition.” (Ragle, Crime Scene, p. 172) Of course, this is precisely the kind of test performed by Guinn and Gallagher in 1964.

In sum, the gunshot residue tests conducted by Guinn and Gallagher create real doubt that Oswald fired the rifle found in the Book Depository.  Rather than acknowledge this, Bugliosi dismisses these tests as a William Turner pipe dream.  That he is outraged that anyone might think FBI agent Cortlandt Cunningham a liar, while simultaneously implying that William Turner—a man who left the FBI after he'd had enough of J. Edgar Hoover's misuse of the agency—is a liar, is outrageous. Perhaps Bugliosi's blind hatred of all suggestions of Oswald's innocence has blinded his thinking. In any event, his research simply can not be trusted.

For more information on the paraffin tests and their significance, see chapter 4 at patspeer.com.

See also Pat Speer's blog on Vincent Bugliosi's book, Reclaiming History from Reclaiming History.

Rewriting History: Bugliosi Parses the Testimony

by Don Thomas

When Jesse Curry retired as police chief of Dallas, Texas, he wrote a book called "JFK Assassination File." In a 1969 interview for the Dallas Morning News around the time of publication, Curry stated,

''We don't have any proof that Oswald fired the rifle, and never did.
''Nobody's yet been able to put him in that building with a gun in his hand."

Curry’s statement is as true now as it was then, a problem which would not be obvious to a reader of Warren Commission apologist Vincent Bugliosi’s new book “Reclaiming History.”  According to Bugliosi there is...

'“a mountain of evidence conclusively proving that Oswald shot Kennedy,” (p. 832)

and he invokes this assertion whenever he needs an excuse to dismiss evidence to the contrary. The fact is the totality of the evidence that Oswald shot Kennedy amounts to little more than the proverbial molehill. The eyewitness testimony, for what it was worth, indicated that someone other than Oswald did the shooting. In this regard, one of the more shameful aspects of the Warren Commission investigation was its handling of the African-American witnesses. These individuals were among the Book Depository employees closest to Lee Harvey Oswald. Because they often ate lunch with him (Givens: [6WH354], Arce: [6WH364], Jarman: [3WH200]) they had a special perspective on Oswald’s whereabouts during the lunch hour on the day of the assassination. The accounts of these witnesses tended to exculpate Oswald, but the Warren Commission took advantage of their status as second class citizens to ignore or distort, and in some cases, manipulate their statements. Bugliosi argues around, but never comes to grips with these problems, instead preferring to denigrate not the Warren Commission, but the Warren Commission’s critics.

The official mythology holds that during the lunch hour Lee Harvey Oswald was hiding in the sniper’s nest on the sixth floor awaiting the President’s motorcade and was there to shoot the President at 12:30 Dallas time. In his interrogation Oswald insisted that he was on the first floor of the building when the President’s motorcade went by. To counter Oswald’s alibi the Warren Commission and Bugliosi relied on the testimony of Dallas Police Captain Will Fritz who led the interrogation. Fritz was not only underqualified for his job (admitting to the Warren Commission that he had no formal training in forensics [4WH203]) but demonstrably incompetent. His investigation of Kennedy’s murder was a succession of blunders, not the least of which was a failure to protect the crime scene. It was Fritz who was responsible for the misidentification of the murder weapon widely reported in the press as a Mauser rifle. It was Fritz who refused to allow the suspect access to legal counsel. It was Fritz who told Louisiana law enforcement officials that he didn’t need their witnesses because he already knew who killed the President [editor's note: the Rose Cherami incident]. Fritz picked up the evidence cartridges before they could be checked for prints and then pilfered one, apparently for a souvenir, and then returned it damaged. At the time of his testimony to the Warren Commission Fritz was still unaware that the remains of a chicken dinner found in the sniper’s nest belonged to a key witness to that days events, thinking that they were leftovers from days and weeks previous. In testifying to the Warren Commission ''a capella'', that is, without notes, Fritz gave a distorted version of Oswald’s alibi, claiming that Oswald had said that he had eaten lunch with two of the black employees, “Junior” and a “short fellow” [4WH213, 224]. Fritz’ brief handwritten notes, donated to the National Archives thirty years after the fact, do not reflect that version, noting only,

''two negr. came in, one Jr.- + short negro-." [Fritz Notes, p. 1]

The Warren Commission and Bugliosi cite the two employees, Junior Jarman and Harold Norman, as denying that they ate lunch with Oswald, and therefore that Oswald’s alibi was a lie [WR180, 195]. In doing so they ignored the account of the two FBI agents who were present during the interrogation and who, unlike Fritz, had filed a written report on Oswald’s statements. According to the FBI report, Oswald had actually said that he had eaten lunch alone.

''On November 22, 1963, he had eaten lunch in the lunch room alone, but recalled possibly two Negro employees walking through the room during this period. He stated possibly one of these employees was called "Junior" and the other was a short individual whose name he could not recall but whom he would be able to recognize." [WR622]

In fact, during their Warren Commission testimony, Junior Jarman and Harold Norman separately confirmed that they had "walked through" the first floor lounge, known as the domino room, to retrieve their sandwiches, thus independently corroborating Oswald's account. Significantly, Harold Norman testified that usually some of the employees, including himself, would play dominos in this room during the lunch hour, but on this particular day, because of the pending passage of the Presidential motorcade, no one was playing dominos [3WH189]. When asked if anyone else was in the domino room, Norman, who did eat his sandwich in the lounge before joining his friends to watch the motorcade, responded that in fact somebody else was present, but he could not remember who it was [3WH189]. Hence Oswald had somehow correctly guessed not only the people who had been in the lunchroom that day, but their actions, even though they were different from the usual. Thus, the statements by the black employees which actually corroborated Oswald’s alibi, is twisted by Bugliosi to make it appear that Oswald had lied.

Read the full essay at www.maryferrell.org.