Still on the Case
Conspiracy Buffs live in a world of uncertainty, haunted by goat’s heads, a pristine bullet, and bouncing skulls. But the most haunting uncertainty of all is this: who was Lee Harvey Oswald?
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But then this dashing Englishman swept into town and away went her meticulous scholarly neutrality. “This Eddowes was some character,” one rival buff remarked. “He had his own Rolls-Royce flown over from England. He’d chauffeur Mary around. Then she’d fly over to England, and he’d drive her around London in Rolls-Royces.
It was the old story. Mary Ferrell ended up enlisting in the exhumation cause, drawing a flotilla of Dallas buffs behind her. They were all convinced that the authorities would never let the body be exhumed because of the terrible dual-identity secret it would reveal.
Then in 1981 Oswald’s wife, Marina, was somehow enticed into the exhumation battle, and it was Marina’s lawsuit that finally opened the tomb. And so out they went to Rose Hill Cemetery with cape and shovel to see just who was buried there.
The body they dug up seemed to have Oswald’s teeth—the American Marine Oswald’s teeth—down to the tiniest detail. The medical examiner said that the Oswald buried in Oswald’s grave was the same Oswald who had been in the Marines before he defected to Russia. The second-body buffs weren’t satisfied, of course (they’re still demanding a ruling), but the credibility of the whole Dallas buff community went right down the tubes.
Arrive in Dallas with a suitcase full of current buff literature, most of it newsletters. I’ve got the Grassy Knoll Gazette, put out by Robert Cutler. I’ve got Penn Jones’ Continuing Inquiry. I’ve got Paul Hoch’s Echoes of Conspiracy. And I’ve got Coverups! From Gary Mack of Forth Worth.
The last is new to me. But buried in a buff gossip column, there’s a tip-off that it, too, I s product of Dallas-buff fratricide: “Gary Mack and Jack White were dismissed by Penn Jones as consultants to The Continuing Inquiry. No explanation was given.”
I’ve heard a lot about Gary Mack. He is the industrious young turk of the new heneration of high-tech audiovisual aids buffs who have supplanted the old-style document-indexing types. Over the years, they’ve blown up, enhanced, and assiduously analyzed every square millimeter of film and tape taken that day, and they’ve discerned lurking in the grainy shadows shapes and forms they say are gunmen. Leafing through Mack’s newsletters, I come upon a fascinating photo-montage of Grass Knoll Gunmen on the front page of Coverups! There is a Black Dog Man — I’ve seen him before — and a new one to me: Badge Man. I am familiar with various suspicious characters of their genre, such as the Babbushka Lady and the Umbrella Man, to whom the photographic buffs have attributed various mysterious roles. I decide to call Gary Mack and check these guys out.
Black Dog Man. At first he was a furry shadow on top of the concrete wall behind the grassy knoll. Certain audiovisual-aids types saw in blowups of that furry shadow a manlike shape. In some blowups, they said, they could see a man firing a gun. Skeptical photo analysts on the staff of the House Select Committee on Assassinations through that the furry shadow looked more canine than conspiratorial and dubbed the dark apparition Black Dog Man.
And there he is on the front page of the October issue of Gary Mack’s newsletter. Next to Black Dog Man is Badge Man; an extreme blowup of a tiny square of what seems to be a tree shadow is accompanied by a visual aid, “a sketch of what he might look like if this photo is computer-enhanced.” And suddenly — in the sketch at least — Badge Man leaps out of the shadows and takes explicit human form. He’s a man in the uniform of a Dallas police officer, complete with badge and shoulder patch. He appears to be firing a rifle concealed by what looks like a flare from a muzzle blast. In the foreground of the Polaroid from which this blowup was made, the Kennedy limousine is passing the grassy knoll and the president is beginning to collapse. It is less than a second after the fatal head shot. Am I watching Badge Man fire it? The House Select committee photo panel reported, “Although it is extremely unlikely that further enhancement of any kind would be successful, this particular photo should be re-examined in light of the findings of the acoustics analysis,” which placed a gunman behind the grassy knoll.
What does your guide, El Exigente, make of a Black Dog Man and Badge Man? Much as I would like to have an enhanced portrait of the assassin at the moment he fired the fatal shot, I’m afraid my instinct is that these photos must be classified as an artifact of the Beatles-in-the-trees variety. Recall that when Bob Dylan’s John Wesley Harding album came out — the first one after Dylan’s near-fatal motorcycle accident — there were stories of cryptic messages embedded in the album-cover photograph? There was supposed to be a group shot of the Beatles—their four heads anyway — hidden in the shadows of the trees. I saw the Beatles in the trees once they were pointed out to me. But I don’t think they were there, if you know what I mean. That same can be said for the thereness of Black Dog Man.
When I reach Gary Mack, he says he has something exciting to show me if I visit his Fort Worth home and investigatory headquarters: a beautiful blown-up enhancement of the Bronson film.
The Bronson film. The last, best hope that we’ll get a motion picture of the “other assassins.” Sort of the Shroud of Turin of the buff faith. Dallas onlooker Charles Bronson was taking home movies in Dealey Plaza that day. He caught the assassination in color. Showed it to the FBI. Nothing of interest, they said. Fifteen years later an assassination researcher name Robert Ranftel came across an FBI report, buried in 100,000 pages of declassified documents, about this film. Dogged Dallas assassination reporter Earl Golz tracked down Bronson — now in Ada, Oklahoma — checked out the film, and discovered something no one noticed before. Up there in the left-hand corner of the frame, the Bronson camera had caught the sixth-floor windows of the Texas School Book Depository. Not just the sniper’s-nest window on the corner where Oswald was said to be perched but also the two adjacent windows. It’s those two windows that Gary Mack wants me to see.
He also fills me in on his continuing struggle to rescue the Dallas police tape from being reconsigned to the dustbin of history. Gary thinks he can save it. I’m not so sure. For a glorious period of about three years, the Dallas police tape represented a triumphant official vindication of everything — well, almost everything — assassination buffs had been saying since 1964. The tape (actually a Dictabelt made of transmission from a motorcycle cop’s open mike to police headquarters on November 22) was excavated from a box in a retired police intelligence officer’s closet in 1978, after Mary Ferrell reminded the House Select Committee of its possible existence and probative value.
Acoustical analysis of the sound patterns submerged in the static on the police tape led the House Select committee to the spectacular conclusion that “scientific acoustical evidence establishes a high probability that two gunmen fired at President Kennedy” and that the assassination was “probably a result of a conspiracy.”
Not only that. The highly respected acoustics scientists who analyzed the tape concluded from their reconstruction of echo patterns and test firings in Dealey Plaza that the second gunman was actually on the grassy knoll. Yes, the much ridiculed assassination-buff obsession, the grass knoll. The longest, most thorough official government investigation of the JFK assassination concluded that the buffs were right all along.
The vindication was short-lived, though. In 1982 a new panel of acoustics experts, this one convened at the request of the Justice Department by the National Academy of Sciences and known as the Ramsey Panel, blasted the police-tape findings out of the water. Its determination was that the so-called shots heard on the Dictabelt, including the grassy-knoll shot, took place a full minute after the shootings in the Dealey Plaza that day and thus couldn’t be shots at all.
And so we’re back to square one. The acoustical evidence doesn’t rule out a grassy-knoll gunman or a conspiracy or even the nine gunmen Penn Jones posits. But the mantle of scientific proof the buffs had downed now seems to be in shreds.
Not so, says Gary Mack. “Are you familiar with automatic gain control, Ron?” he asks me, and he launches into a highly complex, technical critique of the Ramsey Panel critique of the House Select Committee acoustics report. The Ramsey Panel misinterpreted automatic gain control in their retiming thesis, he says. They neglected to analyze the sixty-cycle power hum to see if the Dictabelt in question had been rerecorded. They neglected certain anomalies of the Dictabelt that could be cleared up by further analysis of echo-pattern matching and corroborated by a more precise jiggle analysis of another gruesome home movie, the one taken by Dallas dressmaker Abraham Zapruder.
Gary sounds like he knows what he’s talking about, and perhaps he can make his case. But listening to his technobuff talk, I get a distinct sinking feelings that the Dallas police tape — like almost every other piece of “definitive” evidence in the case — is now forever lost in that limbo of ambiguity, that endless swamp of dispute that swallows up any certainty in the Kennedy case.
This morass of technobuff ambiguity leaves me utterly exhausted and depressed, but Gary Mack shifts the conversation to a missing-witness story. It isn’t the greatest missing-witness story I’ve heard. Nothing like the classic Earlene-Roberts-rooming-house story. Nothing like the second-Oswald-car-salesman story. But it has enough of that misterioso provocativeness to give me a little thrill of that old-time buff fever and remind me why the whole hopeless confusing case has continued to fascinate me for two decades.
My Library
