I still remember being surprised in the early days of my research into the JFK case to see Norman Mailer say in a TV interview that he could have gotten Oswald acquitted in a trial. In 2015, Jeremy Gunn, the former general counsel for the Assassination Records Review Board, said he believed Oswald would have been acquitted--found not guilty--if he had stood trial. Said Gunn,
If we actually ask the question was Oswald guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, I am convinced that Oswald would have been found not guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. To me there is just no question he is not guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.What led Mailer and Gunn to say these things? Answer: There are gaping holes and numerous problems with the evidence against Lee Harvey Oswald. Here are just a few of them:
-- The Dallas post office where the alleged murder rifle was supposedly picked up should have retained the signature of the person who picked up the rifle for four years. However, the FBI said the signature form was "missing" when they tried to obtain it from the post office.
-- The alleged murder rifle was ordered under the name "A. Hidell." Yet, Oswald stipulated on his PO Box form that "Lee H. Oswald" was the only person authorized to receive mail from his box. Moreover, U.S. Postal regulations required that "Mail addressed to a person at a PO Box who is not authorized to receive mail shall be endorsed 'addressee unknown' and returned to sender."
It should also be pointed out that the FBI was unable to find anyone at the post office who recalled giving Oswald the large package that contained the mail-order rifle. Additionally, the money order that was allegedly used to buy the rifle was purchased at a time when Oswald was at work.
-- Oswald supposedly carried his disassembled rifle into the TSBD in a long paper bag that he allegedly made from wrapping paper and tape from the TSBD. However, no such bag appears in any of the official crime scene photos of the sixth-floor sniper's nest, and the first police officers on the scene did not see it there. For example, Sergeant Gerald Hill told the WC that the only paper bag he saw was a "small lunch sack" and said, "... if it was found up there on the sixth floor, if it was there, I didn't see it" (7 H 65).
DPD Detective R.D. Lewis showed Buell Wesley Frazier the long paper bag supposedly found in the sniper's nest. Frazier told him "he did not think that it resembled ... the crinkly brown paper sack that Oswald had when he rode to work with him that morning..." (FBI 105-82555 Oswald HQ File, Section 17, p. 100) Frazier got the best look at the bag that Oswald carried that morning.
WC defenders not that Oswald's partial right palmprint and partial left index fingerprint were found on the bag. Yet, this raises an obvious question: How could Oswald have left only two partial prints on the bag when he supposedly made it himself using paper and tape from the TSBD, carried it with him to the Paine home, used it to wrap his rifle, carried it into the TSBD, and unwrapped it off his rifle on the sixth floor?
Oswald worked at the TSBD and handled boxes and wrapping paper as part of his job. It is likely that the DPD either found wrapping paper that Oswald had touched and used it to make the large paper bag or they made the large paper back and manipulated Oswald into handling it during one of his interrogations. Either scenario would explain why only two partial Oswald prints were found on the bag.
If Oswald had actually made the bag and carried it as claimed by the WC, his prints would have been all over it--he certainly would have left more than just two partial prints on it.
Oswald told the police that the bag was a regular small brown grocery bag from a grocery store and that it merely contained his lunch and nothing else. There are compelling reasons to believe he was telling the truth.
-- WC defenders point out that Marina Oswald "identified the rifle in testimony to the Warren Commission during its 1964 hearings." When asked, "Is that the scope that it had on it, as far as you know?", Marine said "Yes" (1 H 119). However, when she was interviewed months earlier by the Secret Service, Marina said the only rifle her husband ever owned did
not have a scope. In fact, she said that before she saw the sixth-floor rifle on TV, "she did not know that rifles with scopes existed" (CD 344, p. 24).
Needless to say, this also calls into question the backyard rifle photos, which Marina allegedly took (although in later years she insisted they were not the photos she took). Thus, it is no surprise that the backyard photos contain impossible variant shadows that no one has ever been able to duplicate, despite repeated attempts.
-- WC defenders note that the FBI said it found a "tuft of cotton fibers ... clinging to the butt of the rifle" and that the fibers "matched those in the shirt worn by Oswald the day of the assassination." However, the shirt to which the fibers were "matched" was the one Oswald was wearing when he was arrested, but this was not the shirt he wore to work that day.
During his interrogations, when he knew nothing about any fibers found on the rifle, Oswald told police that between the time of the shooting and the time of his arrest, he returned to his rooming house and changed his shirt and pants. Oswald's statement was corroborated by Dallas Policeman Marrion Baker. Baker saw Oswald on the second floor of the TSBD less than two minutes after the shooting and saw him again at the police station a few hours later. Baker told the WC that when he saw Oswald the second time, "He looked as though he did not have the same thing on" (3 H 262).
In other words, an FBI man, not realizing that Oswald had changed shirts after he left the TSBD, took the shirt he was wearing when he was arrested and rubbed the butt of the alleged murder rifle into the shirt to plant fiber evidence against Oswald.
-- WC defenders claim that Oswald's palmprint was found on the barrel of the alleged murder weapon and that this proves he was the assassin. Leaving aside the highly doubtful, extremely suspicious circumstances of the alleged discovery of the latent palmprint, it should be pointed out that the man who supposedly (and belatedly) found the palmprint, Lt. J. C. Day, told the WC the print was an "old dry print" (26 H 831) and said in a 1994 interview that the print "had been on the gun several weeks or months" Anthony Summers,
Not In Your Lifetime, p. 84).
Suffice it to say that when the FBI's fingerprint expert, Sebastian Latona, examined the rifle a few days later, he found no indication that the rifle had even been processed for prints and saw no prints on the rifle barrel, even though Lt. Day claimed the palmprint was still visible on the barrel after he allegedly lifted it.
-- We still here some WC apologists cite Vincent Scalice's 1993 claim that he positively identified the fragmentary fingerprints on the alleged murder rifle's trigger guard as Oswald's prints. Scalice claimed he found 18 "points of identity" by using a composite of four enhanced Dallas police photos.
Yet, when Scalice examined the trigger-guard prints for the HSCA, he said they were "of no value for identification purposes" (8 HSCA 248). Moreover, when FBI latent print expert George Bonebrake reviewed the prints for the PBS documentary
Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald?, he concluded the prints were "simply not clear enough to make an identification." In addition, in 2003, an FBI laboratory computer software analysis of the prints failed to match the prints with Oswald's prints (Donald Thomas, [i[Hear No Evil[/i], p. 85).
-- Voice stress analysis (VSA) of Oswald's declarations of innocence while in police custody indicate he was telling the truth when he said he didn't shoot anybody. VSA polygraphs are more effective than traditional polygraphs because they can be administered without the person's knowledge and/or can be administered after the fact from recordings of the person's statements. George O'Toole, an ex-CIA agent, discussed the VSA results of Oswald's statements in his book
The Assassination Tapes.
A forensic psychologist who is also an expert in body language has likewise concluded from video footage of Oswald in police custody that Oswald was telling the truth when he said he didn't shoot anybody:
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