How I investigated President John F. Kennedy's
assassination
By John T. Orr
I remember clearly what
I was doing the moment President Kennedy was assassinated. I was a 17-year-old
college freshman, throwing a football with a friend outside my dorm.
Someone came out on the
second floor landing and said the president had been shot. We ran up the steps
and into his room and watched Walter Cronkite on the small black-and-white TV
as the tragic events unfolded.
Two days later, on
Sunday morning, I was watching live
televisioncoverage of Lee Harvey Oswald being brought out into the basement
garage of the Dallas police building and stared at the screen in disbelief as
Jack Ruby pointed a pistol at Oswald's chest and murdered him. Those moments
that weekend are forever burned in my memory.
The report proves beyond
a reasonable doubt that four shots were fired during the assassination.
The August 30, 1993,
issue of U.S. News & World Report carried a cover story on "Case Closed
,"
a new book by Gerald Posner. The book, like the Warren Commission report,
concluded that Oswald assassinated the president acting alone.
,"
a new book by Gerald Posner. The book, like the Warren Commission report,
concluded that Oswald assassinated the president acting alone.
Based on the casual
research I had done to that point, I believed that there had to have been at
least two shooters firing into the limousine.
It was disturbing that a
respected news magazine was proclaiming "Case Closed" to be the
ultimate truth about the assassination and trying very hard to close the book
on the subject once and for all.
After reading the
article, and the book itself, I set out on a personal odyssey that consumed me
for over 18 months.
On my own time,
completely separate from my Justice Department job, and using my own money, I
began a research project with the goal of uncovering every speck of original,
raw evidence that existed of the gunshots in Dealey Plaza.
If I did not accomplish
that goal, I came very close.
I went to Dallas and
walked around Dealey Plaza, inspecting it from every angle, including from
Oswald's sixth floor window, from the roof of a nearby building, and from the
grassy knoll.
I made numerous trips to
the National Archives and
read every document and studied every photo they had related to the events in
Dealey Plaza.
Based on a preliminary
report of my analysis of the gunshot trajectories, I became one of the few
private citizens ever allowed by the Archives to examine in person original
pieces of evidence in the case--the president's bloody shirt, coat, and tie,
the magic bullet, the bullet fragments from the limousine, and the section of
curb that a bullet struck.
I also read thousands
and thousands of pages of private books, magazines, and reports on the
assassination.
On April 17, 1995, I
mailed a 72-page report on the final results of my research project to Attorney
General Janet Reno.
It presented what was
then, and I believe still is, the only completevisual
reconstruction of the gunshots together with all of the evidence supporting
it.
The report proves beyond
a reasonable doubt that four shots were fired during the assassination.
Oswald fired three
shots--the first wounding the President in the back and neck, the second
missing the President completely and hitting Governor Connally in the back,
chest, and thigh, and the third missing the 25-foot-long limousine entirely.
While Oswald was
spraying bullets wildly, another shooter, an expert marksman on the top of
another building, fired a fourth shot, a near-perfect fatal hit at the center
of the back of the president's head that exited the right side of the head and
struck the governor's right wrist.
In the report, I
recommended a number of things the Justice Department could do to further
confirm my analysis.
The Department directed
the FBI to do only one of those things -- examine important forensic evidence I
had pointed out on one of the bullet fragments found in the limousine. It took
about five years to complete that examination and report the results.
In the end, the FBI did
only a portion of the fragment examination I had requested, and the results
were incomplete and inconclusive. The Department permanently shut down any
further investigation of my analysis.
John
T. Orr is the author of "Analysis of Gunshots in Dealey Plaza." Orr's
independent research convinced the FBI to conduct additional testing on JFK
evidence as late as 1997. Results were inconclusive, but he suggests that even
more testing should be done.
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