I've thought about this some and I think John Mytton is right. At a glance at the two photographs, it doesn't seem right. That this could be a picture of the same set of boxes, unmoved.
However, looking at the two photographs, they seem to be taken from a similar angle .But looking at Don Roberdeau's excellent map at:
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Loginone can see that Dillard's and Powell's positions were quite different. Both were to the east of that window.
Horizontally, the line from the east edge of the window to Dillard was 12 degrees off a perpendicular line to the wall. In contrast, Powell was 57 degrees away from such a perpendicular line. Horizontally, they were 45 degrees different from each other.
Because both were east of the eastern edge of the window, and if the line of boxes was 36 inches away from the window, both could see a few inches to the left of the western edge of the open window.
Dillard could see:
tan(12)*36 = 8 inches to the left.
Powell could see:
tan(57)*36 = 56 inches.
The sun is 23 degrees off of perpendicular. A shadow would be
tan(23)*36 = 15 inches to the right.
What does this mean?
The eastern (right) half (of Oswald's window was open. The western (left) half was closed. Most of the boxes visible in the Powell window were actually 3 feet back and directly behind the closed, western window.
The tall box, which John has labeled #1 is roughly lined up with the vertical separator that is a foot wide, between the closed and open window. 3 feet back from the window, the shadow would be offset by 15 inches. The shadow of the separator is cast just to the right of box #1, and so it is not visible.
Below is a crude drawing:
--------- -------
| | | box |
| box | | # |
| | | 1 |
--------- -------
| |||||
thin wide
shadow shadow
closed window open window
*************** +++++ ---------------
| wide
narrow separator
slate
(*)
Powell
(*)
Dillard
From Dillard's angle, only Box #1 could be seen. The box to it's right was behind the wide vertical slate and the closed window. But from where Powell was, he could see an additional 4 feet to the left, of a line of boxes 3 feet from the window. So Powell could see that box to the left of Box #1.
I tried seeing up my own open window on top of a chest of drawers, using 3 cardboard tubes that used to hold paper towels. I placed a box behind it. The top of the box appeared higher, closer to the horizontal cardboard tube, from the Powell angle than it did from the Dillard angle.
I would guess the top of Box # 1 was about a foot higher than the bottom of the open window.
****************************************
While my initial reaction was, "I'm not certain John is right", I am now quite confident that John does have it exactly right.
The Inspector Lestrades of the HSCA were baffled by the Mystery of the Self Moving Boxes but a true Sherlock Holmes would see that there is no real Mystery at all. It's just a matter of looking at the problem from the proper perspective.
