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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The Psychedelic Oswald hypothesis might go a long way toward explaining some of the mysteries of Oswald’s strange summer in New Orleans — those months before the assassination when he began playing the dangerous game of pro- and anti-Castro politics and which climaxed with his mysterious pre-assassination trip to Mexico City.
New Orleans. The French Quarter’s decaying fringe. 544 Camp Street, to be specific. The most intriguing address in the whole JFK case. Only it’s not here anymore. I came all the way to this steamy, sweaty late August swamp of a city to enter the building at 544 Camp Street because some buff or other told me it was still here. Because, of all the shrines in the story of O., this one might hold the clue to what was going on in his mind in the summer of 1963, when he fled Dallas, arrived here, and began to act weird.
One thing almost all conspiracy theorists, even the Warren Commission defenders, agree on is that though the assassination was an act executed in Dallas, it was conceived in the contagion of intrigue that infected the mind of Oswald that August in New Orleans.
The mind of Oswald. I’m beginning to feel some inkling of the turmoil therein as I stand before the curious sculpture that has replaced the now-demolished building at 544 Camp Street.
I fled Dallas yesterday, sick of brain and body. A bad case of food poisoning got to my body. So bad that for a while I thought I’d end up as a number 189 in Penn Jones’ list of suspicious casualties of the case. (Of course, how could they know I would stuff myself with barbecue in that particular place on Mockingbird Lane?)
It was Gary Mack’s assassination film festival that got to my brain. Drove me out of town. Not the goat’s head hypothesis, not the eyestrain from the Bronson-film blowups. No, it was the Oswald craniotomy controversy that took me out of the merely maddening world of Blow-Up right into Texas Chainsaw Massacre horror.
Should I tell you about this experience, or will you think it too ghoulish, too gruesome?
Notes on the assassination film festival. Arrived Gary Mack’s lovely suburban Fort Worth tract home. Eager to see the Bronson film, but first there was Gary’s critique of the goat’s-head hypothesis.
The goat’s-head hypothesis is the official explanation of the most horrible moment in that horror-filled home movie known as the Zapruder film. The moment when the fatal head shot appeared to slam the president back into the seat of his car as though it had been a frontal hit.
Gary ran and reran that moment for me on his home projector and screen set.
Not that I objected. After all, it could be argued that if you haven’t seen the Zapruder film, you haven’t actually experienced the assassination. You know a president was shot, and office vacated, but you haven’t seen the man’s head brutally blown apart, you haven’t seen John Kennedy die, and so perhaps you haven’t had a chance to confront the loss.
It was the sudden appearance in the seventies of bootleg copies of the Zapruder film and the showing of high-quality copies to congressmen that did more than anything to get the Senate and the House to launch their own investigations of the shooting.
Because, watching that shot knock Kennedy backward, all the senses cry out that it came from the front. But Oswald, we know, was behind. Which would mean a second gunman and therefore a conspiracy.
And yet from a restudy of the autopsy evidence the House Select Committee concluded — just as the Warren Commission had — that the head shot was fired from behind.
“How could that be?” I asked Gary Mack.
“Well, they cited the films of the goat’s-head test,” Gary said. “Back in the 1948 the Army did filmed studies of the impact of bullets on goats’ heads that demonstrated what they called a neuromuscular reaction, which in certain circumstances will cause a backward motion even with a shot from behind.”
“And do you accept that?” I asked.
“Well, the thing they fail to take note of,” he told me, “is that in the neuromuscular reaction, the extremities are supposed to go rigid. Now if you look closely at the president at the moment he’s hit — here, I’ll slow it down so you can see that doesn’t happen to Kennedy; he’s all loose and wobbly.”
Next, the Bronson film. Real Blow-Up stuff. There was the limo turning the corner onto Elm Street right below the Book Depository, beginning to head downhill toward the Triple Underpass and the spot a hundred yards farther down Elm, where the shots would hit. The real mystery of that particular moment, a mystery that becomes apparent once you’ve walked the motorcade’s route in Dealey Plaza, past the Book Depository and down toward the fatal spot, a mystery neither the official inquiries nor the amateur critics have satisfactorily explained or even addressed, is this: why didn’t Oswald, or whoever was up in the Book Depository, shoot the president when he was coming right toward the sniper’s-nest window, when he was heading down Houston Street straight into his gunsight, a mere thirty yards away? Why did the assassin wait until the president’s car turned the corner onto Elm Street and began pulling away? Was there an inner struggle, some crisis of conscience going on in the assassin’s mind? Did he almost decide to let his target slip away unharmed?
The Bronson-film blowup that Gary Mack showed me that afternoon did not address that question. The Bronson film was really a kind of ghost story. Because in the early footage, six minutes before the limo reached the fatal turn on to Elm Street, there, up in the corner of the frame, in the windows six floors above the street, pale, ghostly, evanescent shapes flickered.
Gary had blowups of the crucial frames. They showed dim gleams of shadowy shapes in the corner sniper’s next window. And pale, ghostly presences moving, blotches and blurs, in the two windows next to that. Windows that should have been empty at the time of the shooting, according to the lone-assassin theory.
Assassins? Or artifacts in the photo-sensitive emulsion?
Gary Mack thinks they’re men wearing pale green and magenta shirts. They could be. They could John, Paul, George, and Ringo, for all I can tell. As a matter of fact, does anyone know exactly where the Fab Four were that day? If we go by the cui bono, or who-benefits, theory of assassination, the finger of guilt could well swing toward the lovable Liverpuddlian lads, since it’s always been my belief that the Beatlemania that swept America just eight weeks after the assassination was really a hysterical transference of repressed JFK-assassination shock and grief. The link being the hair — both John Kennedy and John Lennon being loved for the look of their locks.
I refrained from exploring this theory with Gary, but he had convincing technical answers to my other objections. He was certain that he had prima facie evidence of conspiracy right there on his screen, the kind of evidence no goat’s head shoots can refute, and that costly computer enhancement, which we can’t afford, might even show us human features as well as the shirts of the assassins.
But scientific evidence alone is not enough here. This case requires what Kierkegaard called a leap of faith. The existence of God, K. argued, can never be proved by constructing a scaffolding of rational argument. Faith can only come through a leap from that scaffolding into the realm of what he called the absurd. And El Exigente here is not ready to make that leap. He is troubled also by the question of what happened to the green and magenta men and, if they were up there shooting, what happened to their rifles and bullets?
No leap of faith required in the craniotomy controversy, though. No, this one requires a leap back into the grave. Oswald’s grave. Or, as Gary prefers, the grave of Oswald’s impostor. Because Gary had new evidence that very well might be enough to cause people to open up Oswald’s grave again. That’s right. Just two years after the notorious Eddowes-Marina exhumations seemed to establish that Oswald was the guy buried in Oswald’s grave, Gary came upon a key discrepancy in the exhumation evidence.
He began to explain the thing to me in great and gruesome detail, a tale that might be called the Clue of the Assassin’s Skull.
To understand the importance of his new discovery, Gary said, you have to know what they did to Oswald’s skull during his first autopsy back in 1963.
“It’s part of the record they did a craniotomy on him, back then,” Gary told me. They sawed off the top of his skull with a power saw. They reached underneath the brain, cut it off, and lifted it out, and they noted in the official record that a craniotomy had been done.
“Now, when they did the exhumation this time, no mention was made of a craniotomy. And then Paul Groody, the mortician, said it had suddenly struck him after they had reburied the corpse that he hadn’t noticed that a craniotomy had been done on the skull of whoever it was buried in Oswald’s grave. The skin had rotted away, leaving a naked skull. But with a craniotomy, the top of the skull should have fallen off. It didn’t. In fact, there are videotapes of the exhumation showing them handling the skull, even holding it upside down, and nothing falls off. And at one point they severed the head and placed it on a metal stand. Somebody bumped it and it rolled onto the table, but the top still didn’t fall off. Which proves that it can’t be Oswald’s skull down there, that it must be an imposter. Wouldn’t you like to see that tape, Ron?”
At that point I made an excuse and fled town.
And so I am here at 544 Camp Street. Trying to forget about Oswald’s skull. Trying to get inside his head. Let me explain why this particular address is so important.
Shortly after Oswald arrived in New Orleans in April 1963, he embarked on a mystifying campaign of dangerous and duplicitous political intrigue whose motive is still obscure. One of his first acts was to contact the national headquarters of the pro-Castro Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC) to get a charter to set up a New Orleans chapter. He gave the name “A. J. Hidell,” one of his false identities, as president and only member of the chapter.
My Library
