WHY OSAWLD IS INNOCENT

LEE HARVEY OSWALD - ASSASSIN OR PATSY?

Can you give Lee Harvey Oswald a break?

Can you give the accused assassin of President Kennedy the benefit of the doubt?

Do you support the time honored constitutional tradition of presumption of innocence - that is not the assumption of guilt, but presupposes suspects are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law?

Well Oswald was never convicted of anything in a court of law - other than disturbing the peace in New Orleans for giving out pro-Castro leaflets, and he was murdered while in police custody, which greatly reflects on the law enforcement officers who first considered Oswald a suspect.

Most people assume Oswald was either innocent and was framed as a patsy, as he claimed, or was a pawn in a larger conspiracy. Those few who still maintain that Oswald was the lone assassin also attribute to him the motive of seeking fame, as Judge Tunheim puts it, “I think his motivation is he thought he was supposed to be someone famous in his own mind, and if he did this he would be viewed with great glory in the Soviet Union and Cuba,” which belies the fact that he denied the deed.

Those predisposed to Oswald’s singular guilt also list the hard and circumstantial evidence that indicates - and proves to them, that Oswald shot the president from the Sixth Floor Sniper’s lair, even though no witness can place him there, as Dallas Chief Curry famously said, “we can’t place Oswald in that window.”

And those who did eyeball the sniper exonerate Oswald as they unanimously agree the gunman had a white shirt, while Oswald was wearing a distinctively brown one.

The evidence that Oswald shot the president consists of his rifle, found by the stairs on the Sixth Floor, which was sold through the mails to A.J. Hidell, an alias associated with Oswald, a clean, nearly complete bullet found at Parkland hospital that was shot through the barrel of that rifle, to the exclusion of all other rifles, and three shells found by the sniper’s window that were ejected from that rifle.

A palm print belatedly found beneath the rifle stock and on the box by the window were attributed to Oswald, but considered circumstantial because it was his rifle and it should have had his prints on it and he worked with the boxes so they don’t prove that he committed the crime.

One witness who actually saw the Sixth Floor Sniper in the white shirt also say he had a very distinctive bald spot on the top of his head, not Oswald, and other witnesses say that the gunman was in no hurry after firing the last shot, but instead stood back and viewed the chaos on the street.

A court clerk in an office diagonally across the street said she saw a man moving around in the Sixth Floor Sniper’s nest window three to five minutes AFTER the last shot was fired, definitely not Oswald as less than two minutes after the shooting he was seen in the second floor lunchroom.

Actually the witnesses who place Oswald in the second floor lunchroom ninety seconds after the last shot completely and positively exonerate Oswald as being the Sixth Floor Sniper, that is if you believe Dallas policeman Marion Baker and Texas School Book Depository (TSBD) supervisor Roy Truly. 

Baker stopped and parked his motorcycle in front of the TSBD and ran in the front door with gun drawn. There Truly identified himself and led Baker to the back elevators, but since they were parked together on the fifth floor, they began to ascend the stairs.

On the second floor they had to make a left hand turn to continue up to the third floor, but in making that turn, Baker said he saw the head of a man through the two by two foot glass door window. Proceeding to that door while Truly continued up the steps, Baker approached the door and saw a man walking away, towards the lunchroom soda machine.

Baker opened the door as Truly noticed that Baker wasn’t behind him and turned around and followed Baker into the lunchroom foyer.

On the other side of the door with the glass window was a small foyer that had a second door that led south towards the offices and restrooms.

Baker stopped the man, who turned around and looked quiscally at the policeman with his gun trained at him, when Truly arrived and said that the man - Lee Harvey Oswald, was an employee and okay. Both men agreed that Oswald was calm and not excited or out of breath, as he would have been if he had just got off three shots at the president, disposed of the rifle and ran down four flights of stairs in the past ninety seconds.

The proof of Oswald’s innocence of being the Sixth Floor Sniper is the fact that Baker saw Oswald’s head profile through the two foot by two foot - 24” x 24” door window.

If that is the case, then the door would have had to have been closed for Baker to have seen Oswald because if Oswald had gone through that door, the door would have been partially open and the size of the window decreased so you wouldn’t be able to see through it.

That door was closed when Baker saw Oswald walk past the window, having entered the foyer through the south door, which led to offices and an elevator and stairs that went down to the first floor and first floor “Domino Room,” where Oswald said he was eating his lunch at the time of the assassination. Oswald said that while there, there were two black men he worked with, and they testified that they were indeed there when Oswald said he saw them.

That Oswald didn’t walk through the door when Baker saw him through the window is further supported by the testimony of Roy Truly and x, a secretary who descended from the fourth floor at the same time Oswald would have had to been on the same stairway if he had run down the steps from the Sixth Floor.

If Oswald had gone through the door through which Baker saw him, then Roy Truly should have seen Oswald first, as he was ahead of Baker going up the stairs, but he didn’t see Oswald go through that door. If Oswald didn’t run down those steps and didn’t go through that door, he wasn’t the Sixth Floor Sniper.

Proof that the Secret Service was aware of this fact is evident in that Truly was recalled to testify under oath a second time, in the offices at the Post Office Annex just across Dealey Plaza from the TSBD, and asked only one question - was there an automatic door closing device on the door that Oswald is alleged to have gone through if he was the Sixth Floor Sniper and descended the steps immediately after the shooting but somehow avoided being seen by the fourth floor secretaries descending the same flight of stairs or Truly, who was ahead of Baker and should have seen Oswald if he did go through that door but didn’t.

The answer, which the WC attorneys could have learned by walking over to the TSBD and inspecting the door themselves, is yes, the door with the window through which Officer Baker saw the head of Oswald does have an automatic door closing device.

Although they twice tried to recreate the assassination as it allegedly happened, with Oswald hiding the rifle and descending the stairs in the ninety seconds before he is seen through the door window by Baker, they stop at that point - the Second Floor Lunchroom door, and don’t even try to recreate the roundabout path Oswald allegedly took to his rooming house, getting him to Tenth and Patton in time to kill Officer Tippit and then to the theater for his arrest.

That the door with the window through which Baker saw Oswald was closed is proof that Oswald didn’t go through that door, did not descend the steps from the Sixth Floor and was not the Sixth Floor Sniper in the white shirt and bald spot, who at the time Baker and Truly were confronting Oswald in the Second Floor Lunchroom, was still seen in the Sixth Floor window re-arranging boxes around, and therefore was not Oswald.

[Note: These observations were first documented by Michael Roffman in “Presumed Guilty,” which is available on line at Dave Ratcliff’s Rathouse.com ]