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On November 22, 1963 in Dallas, Texas, "the Crime of the Century" took place. President John F. Kennedy was shot in Dealey Plaza while touring through the city in his open-roof limousine. After the shots were fired, police began looking for suspects.
One hour after the shooting, Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested for murdering a police officer. One hour after that he was charged with killing the President. Was Lee Harvey Oswald the real killer, or was he merely the scapegoat hired by some agency outside of the United States, to take the blame. There are a lot of known and unknown facts about this case.
Many people believe that there were more people than Lee Harvey Oswald firing the shots even though the Warren Commission will deny any possibility that there was more than one assassin. The purpose of this paper is to state the facts about this case and let you decide for yourself whether or not Lee Harvey Oswald was quality. Early in the morning, on November 22, 1963, Julia Ann Mercer was driving past the Texas School Book Depository on her way to work. Just past the Depository, about half-way from the railway overpass, she saw a green truck parked illegally on the side of the road. Because it was blocking traffic, she had to stop and wait for the other lane to clear before she could go. She noticed that there were two men in the truck.
The back of the truck said "Air-conditioning. The passenger of the truck got out and pulled out of the toolbox, located on the back of the truck, what appeared to be a gun case. The many pulled the gun case out and started walking towards the grassy knoll just up the hill. As she drove on, she noticed three policemen standing a little ways down the road talking apparently not seeing the man with the gun case. Miss Mercer wrote out a full report on what she saw and gave it to the Warren Commission, however, none of it was spoken of or even mentioned in the Warren Commission's Report. There is the possibility that the gun case was empty, but the policemen should have taken more precaution considering that they know the President would be visiting the city that day.
That same day, a Mr. Lee Bowers Jr. , a railroad tower man for the Union Terminal Company, was on duty and had the best view of the area directly behind the fence on the grassy knoll. He testified that there were three cars that passed through the area at least one-half hour before the shooting. All three appeared to be looking for something or someone.
One of the cars was there at just seven or nine minutes before the shooting. Mr. Bowers also testified that there were two men standing behind the fence just before the shooting occurred. The description he gave of the two men was very similar to that of Miss Mercer's description given in her report. Also, at the time of the shooting, a Mr.
J. C. Price was on the other side of the Plaza at the top of the Terminal Annex Building watching the president. He said that after the shooting he saw a man with something in his hand running across the railroad tracks to the railroad cars. His description of the man was almost the same as Mr. Bower's description and Miss Mercer's.
After the shooting, approximately fifteen people, ten of which were police officers, began searching the area behind the fence on the grassy knoll for suspects. One policeman apprehended a man. when the man showed him that he worked for the CIA, he had to let him go. They also found a car backed up to the fence with shoe prints and mud on the bumper suggesting that someone had been standing on the bumper to look over the fence. These are just a few of the reports that have been given describing how people saw what appeared to be other people involved in the shooting. All of the information just given, however, was not given full recognition by the Warren Commission because there is no mention of it in the Warren Commission's Report.
After the shooting, the rifle was found on the sixth floor of the Book Depository and was assumed to be Oswald's gun. A fingerprint expert, Lieutenant J. C. Day of the Dallas Police, was called in to dust for fingerprints. He lifted a palm print from the underside of the rifle with a piece of scotch tape, and photographed other fingerprints on the gun itself, which were blurred in the photographs taken. He stated that the palm print was still on the rifle after he lifted it, but when the gun was reexamined by a fingerprint expert of the FBI, Sebastian Latona, there were no traces of fingerprints or dust on the gun.
The gun gave no evidence of even being dusted for fingerprints. The palm print on the tape, assumed to be Oswald's, was flat, but had it been Oswald's print off the gun, it would have had to have been curved since he had to curve his hand to hold the rifle. One week before the shooting, a friend of Lee Harvey Oswald's drove Oswald to the Book Depository. He was carrying a brown paper bag the size of which could have contained a broken down gun. The friend asked him what the bag contained.
Oswald replied that it only contained drapes. The day of the shooting, a brown paper bag was said to have been found on the sixth floor of the Book Depository. Numerous photographs were taken of the room that showed the rifle and the place where the paper bag was apparently found on the floor, but not one photograph actually shows the paper bag itself in that room. The first six police officers who entered the sixth floor, after the shooting, do not remember seeing a bag located on the floor anywhere in the room.
There are many photographs showing Officer Day retrieving the gun from the room, but not one shows a brown bag anywhere in the room. Also, in that same room, three bullet casings were found on the floor that were assumed to have been fired from Oswald's gun. Two of the bullet casings, however, had incorrect markings on them. When any empty casing is released from the chamber of a gun, a certain mark is left on the casing...
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Research essay sample on Lee Harvey Oswald Killer Or Scapegoat
