(Seriously) off topic -- grassy knoll / JFK update.
March 26, 2001
Article Supports Grassy Knoll Shots
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 7:09 p.m. ET
LONDON (AP) -- Sounds heard on police recordings from the killing of President
Kennedy are consistent with a shot being fired from Dallas' famed grassy knoll,
according to a new scientific article.
Recordings of police radio traffic at the time of the 1963 assassination include loud
noises which some investigators believe were gunfire. There has also been persistent
speculation about the possibility that someone fired from the knoll in front of the
president, instead of the sixth-floor window behind him used by Lee Harvey Oswald,
identified by the Warren Commission as the sole assassin.
``Whatever their origin, the gunshot-like sounds occur exactly synchronous with the
shooting,'' says the author, D.B. Thomas, who works for the U.S. Department of
Agriculture in Weslaco, Texas. Thomas has a doctorate in entomology and focuses his
research on fruit fly ecology, according to the USDA.
His article was published in the Science & Justice, the journal of Britain's Forensic
Science Society.
Kennedy was killed Nov. 22, 1963, as his motorcade wound past Dealey Plaza in Dallas.
The 1964 report by an official commission headed by Earl Warren, then chief justice of
the Supreme Court, concluded at least two shots were fired at Kennedy, both by Oswald
from the Texas School Book Depository building, located behind the motorcade.
The commission rejected the suggestion that anyone other than Oswald had fired.
``There is no credible evidence that the shots were fired from the Triple Underpass,
ahead of the motorcade, or from any other location,'' the Warren Commission said. The
underpass is near the grassy knoll.
The police recordings have a number of loud noises which might be identified as gunfire.
Thomas says there are five sounds ``that have the acoustic waveform of Dealey Plaza
gunfire.''
``One of the sounds matches the echo pattern of a test shot fired from the grassy knoll,''
he wrote.
Thomas' analysis is the latest done on the recorded police radio transmissions. The
transmissions were on two channels: One, for routine calls, was preserved on a
sound-activated Dictaphone belt. A second frequency, dedicated to the motorcade, was
recorded on a sound-activated disc machine, Thomas wrote.
In 1978, the House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations hired a
Massachusetts agency to analyze the police recordings. Specialists fired test shots in
Dealey Plaza, with 36 microphones placed in various locations to examine the possibility
of a shot from the knoll.
The committee concluded that sounds heard on an open microphone, apparently on a
police motorcycle, could be shots from the grassy knoll.
The Computer Sciences Department of City University, New York, also examined the
recordings and concluded the sound could be a shot.
In 1980, the Justice Department asked the National Research Council to analyze the data
again. That review concluded there was a 78 percent probability that at least one of the
bangs was a gunshot from the knoll. But the review also concluded the suspect noises
were a minute later than the time Kennedy was shot.
Thomas argues the National Research Council reached that conclusion because it erred in
its attempts to synchronize the two police recordings.
He says the council used a phrase -- ``hold everything secure'' -- which is heard on both
tapes -- to synchronize the timing of events. But he said that phrase was a poor marker
because problems with one of the tapes make it unclear.
Thomas worked from another, clearer bit of talk from Dallas patrolman S.Q. Bellah, who
is heard asking: ``You want me to hold this traffic on Stemmons until we find out
something, or let it go?''
That phrase appears 180 seconds after the suspected shots on one recording, and 171
seconds later on the other recording. Allowing for a difference in tape speed of 5
percent, Thomas says the recordings match.
Thomas could not be reached for comment at his office Monday.
Copyright 2001 The Associated Press |
