Oswald was framed

As most researchers familiar with the case are aware, the overall tendency of the evidence favours the view Oswald was set up as the 'patsy' for the crime, as he declared himself. He was murdered by Jack Ruby on November 24, 1963, not necessarily because he knew anything about the assassination plot, but because he probably would have been able to prove his innocence if the case went to trial. Because Oswald's innocence - or rather, the lack of evidence against him that would stand up in court - has been conclusively demonstrated by a host of authors with an intimate knowledge of the case from Mark Lane to Jim Fetzer, the arguments laid out in this section are not intended as a comprehensive defence of the view that Oswald had little or nothing to do with the assassination. My aim is instead to present what seem to me the strongest arguments in favour of this position as a preparation for the true subject of this website, which is a fresh look at what happened in the TSBD that day - a look that reveals the hitherto neglected racist dimension of the assassination plot.

Oswald did not own the alleged murder weapon

Perhaps the first circumstance that needs to be taken into consideration is how remarkably unsuspicious Oswald's behaviour was in the four hours before he allegedly planned to shoot the president. None of Oswald's co-workers in the TSBD attributes to him the slightest deviation from his normal demeanour or a single suspicious action. The most incriminating statement on the record is that around 11.55am he was observed on the sixth floor, the floor from which shots were allegedly fired at l2.30pm. Although there is nothing unusual about an order filler like Oswald going to the sixth floor in any case, the fact is that his presence there just before the 12 o'clock lunch break is a story that was concocted purely for the benefit of the Warren Commission, which desperately needed to associate Oswald with a floor which he is not otherwise known to have visited that day. Statements affirming Oswald's presence on the sixth floor are conspicuously absent from depositions taken in the weeks following the assassination, however.
Even if Oswald had been on the sixth floor shortly before noon, it scarcely matters. Two TSBD employees who claim to have visited the sixth floor between noon and the time the shots rang out told the Warren Commission that they saw no one else there. These two employees were Bonnie Ray Williams, who says he ate his lunch on the sixth floor between noon and twelve (or so) minutes afterwards, and Jack Edwin Dougherty, who says he was on the sixth floor briefly before going down to the fifth floor, which is where he says he was when he heard a gunshot. (6H378-380) Dougherty's testimony alone would have been sufficient to exonerate Oswald, if the Warren Commission had been interested in establishing the truth.
Admittedly, there are reasons to suspect that both Williams and Dougherty were lying. If so, they may have been covering for Oswald. However, they could not have been doing so, for we know that he was elsewhere in the building at the time. A witness whose word there is no reason to doubt, TSBD secretary Carolyn Arnold, saw Oswald in the second floor lunchroom of the TSBD sometime between 12.15 and 12.25pm, as she confirmed to researcher Anthony Summers in 1978. (Conspiracy, 1980, p. 108) If Oswald intended to fire at the president he should have been in the sniper's perch by 12.25, which is when the motorcade was expected to pass through Dealey Plaza. Because the time Arnold saw Oswald cannot be established more precisely than this ten-minute period, it is possible that Oswald was in position by 12.25, but it would seem highly unlikely that a potential assassin would leave it so late to reach his shooting location.
In any case, during the same ten minutes, two gunmen were already observed by many eyewitnesses on the sixth floor. As will be explained in the next webpage, one was a negro in his 50s with a pronounced bald spot and the other was a white man in his early 30s who wore a light-coloured shirt. Whatever took place in the TSBD prior to and up to including the assassination itself can therefore be explained without reference to Oswald. His participation would have been superfluous. Why would he have been needed at all if two gunmen were already involved? And what reason is there to think that 24 year-old Oswald was the white man identified by those who saw him as in his early 30s or that Oswald, who wore a dark shirt to work that day, was the same as the man who was universally described by witnesses as wearing a light coloured shirt?
The most serious blow against the view that Oswald was Kennedy's assassin is the fact that he was seen on the second floor of the Depository by no less than three witnesses (Officer Marrion L. Baker, Roy S. Truly and Elizabeth Reid) within a minute and a half and two minutes of the last gunshot. The circumstances, which include the fact that Oswald was holding a Coke that he had apparently just purchased from the nearby vending machine, made it virtually impossible for him to have fired the shots from the southeast window of the sixth floor and reached the second floor in time to be encountered there by anybody. Even if he had an assistant who took the rifle from him and concealed it while he departed the sixth floor and the Coke bottle was sitting in the second floor lunchroom ready for him to pick up when he re-entered the room, Oswald could not have descended the steps to the second floor without being seen doing so.
What's more, Baker, Truly and Reid all recall meeting someone who was behaving in an entirely normal fashion. It is all but impossible to imagine even a person who played a minor role in committing a crime behaving so calmly when confronted by a policeman within seconds of the crime itself without resorting to the far-fetched theory that he was a mind-controlled 'Manchurian candidate.'
It is true that a scenario can be devised that would allow for Oswald's involvement. He could, for instance, have fired from a location nearer the second floor lunchroom and the two gunmen on the sixth floor could have been decoys whose only function was to distract attention from the real shots fired by Oswald from a lower window. The problem is not that a scenario cannot be devised that would make Oswald's commission of the crime possible, but that further circumstances make it abundantly clear that an effort was made to frame him by linking him to the gun allegedly used in the assassination, a Model 91/38, 6.5mm Mannlicher Carcano. Not only is there no evidence that this particular weapon was used to execute the crime - Jim Fetzer argues persuasively that a Mannlicher Carcano was insufficient for the achievement credited to it - there is no evidence that Oswald ever owned this gun or that, if he did own it, he bought it with a view to actually using it.
Oswald is supposed to have ordered the weapon by mail on March 12, 1963, long before he could have known that Kennedy would ever be coming to Dallas or that, stripped of the usual presidential protections, Kennedy would take part in a motorcade that would pass by his place of employment - a place where he would not even be employed until October. Even if Oswald's decision to purchase the gun was prompted by the idea of shooting at General Edwin Walker, which he is alleged to have done with days of the rifle being shipped to him, he would not have been so foolish as to order a weapon by mail order. By ordering his intended firearm by this means, he was only creating a paper trail that would link him to the crime. It is true that he is supposed to have ordered it under an alias, A.J. Hidell. But not only did Oswald have to supply a money order to purchase the rifle, the package was to be delivered to a downtown Dallas mail box he kept in his own name. Why would someone planning to commit a crime with the weapon take such the risk of betraying his tracks, when he could purchase a similar (or superior) weapon anywhere in Texas for no more money without creating such a paper trail? And why, since he is alleged to have used the name 'A.J. Hidell' on a number of occasions, would he have ordered the rifle with an alias that could easily be connected with him rather than a completely fictitious name that no one could ever prove had anything to do with him?
What's more, according to the brief notes which remain of his interrogations, Oswald denied owning a gun at all. Numerous circumstances that support this claim, not least the fact that after the assassination his wife, Marina, admitted that she had not known that Oswald owned a rifle or a pistol. (Mark Lane, Plausible Denial, p. 343) A major problem with the view of Oswald as assassin is the unsatisfactory state of the documentary record of his alleged purchase of the weapon supposedly used to execute the crime. First, the 40-inch Mannlicher Carcano in the National Archives was never advertised for sale by the company from which it was allegedly ordered, Klein's Sporting Goods of Chicago. According to the Warren Report, Oswald responded to an advertisement in the February issue of the National Rifle Association's American Rifleman magazine. However, the American Rifleman ad was for a 36-inch 'carbine' with scope. If the mail-order coupon is authentic, where is the documentation explaining why the customer was supplied with a 40-inch weapon instead?
Even if the problems with the mail-order paperwork could be resolved, there is no evidence that Oswald ever received the gun in the mail. As a rifle would have been too large to have been left for him to find in his mail box, he would have been left a card telling him to collect the package from inside the post office. However, no such card exists and no post office employee recalls handing Oswald a package large enough to have been a gun.
Two circumstances prove that, even if Oswald did order and receive the gun, he did so without the least intention of using it. First, like all firearms, the Mannlicher Carcano requires bullets to be fired. There is no evidence that Oswald ever purchased any. Second, the weapon was never cared for. After the assassination, investigators never found any gun cleaning equipment among Oswald's posssessions. Oswald would have taken care of his rifle, if he had actually intended to use it. Instead, according to the Warren Commission, for many weeks before the assassination he left it lying around the garage of Mrs Ruth Hyde Paine in Irving, Texas. The neglected condition of the gun is indirectly attested by the fact that FBI experts asked to test it initially declined to do so on the grounds that its firing pin was so badly rusted it could not be fired safely. A rifle in such disrepair undoubtedly posed more of a threat to the person firing it than fired upon.
Even if Oswald did own the Mannlicher Carcano, obtained ammunition by covert means and was stupid enough to think that a badly maintained piece of junk could be used to pull off the crime of the century, we cannot assume that he even brought his weapon into the TSBD. The official story of how Oswald is supposed to have smuggled the rifle inside the TSBD is risible. The only two persons who claim to have seen him bring a long package to work with him that day, Buell Wesley Frazier and his sister Linnie Mae Randle, described a package some two feet long - too short to have been a disassembled Mannlicher Carcano. Since no one else saw Oswald carry such a package and Frazier was himself arrested by Dallas police on the evening of November 22, 1963 on suspicion of having been involved in the assassination, the likelihood is that Frazier's testimony was fraudulent. Frazier seems to have made a deal to concoct a story incriminating Oswald in return for the suppression of information about his own role in the assassination.
In any case, the weapon's presence in the TSBD does not prove that Oswald was the person who brought it there. At any stage - including after the assassination itself - the rifle could have been removed from the Paine garage and taken into the TSBD by persons seeking to implicate Oswald in the assassination. Paine says that on the night of November 21 someone had been in the garage but left without turning the light off. (3H47) If the story is true (which I rather doubt), the person in the garage could have been Oswald, as she assumed, but it could just as well have been someone else.
Given that the case against him is a house of cards - unproven allegations stacked one upon the other - the only reasonable conclusion is that Oswald did not fire any shots at President Kennedy on November 22, 1963. If he was involved in the assassination plot at all, he can only have played an ancillary role. Perhaps his function had been to introduce a gun into the building or to sound the alarm if he saw someone making for the sixth floor.
To be sure, a theory exists that would account for most of the problems with the evidence. Assassination reseacher William Weston posits that the poor quality of the evidence against Oswald was intentional, so that the case against him would promptly collapse when he was brought to trial. (He argues, for example, that the infamous backyard photos that helped frame Oswald in the public mind were faked, but that Oswald colluded in the process.) However, this theory, ingenious as it is, strikes me as impossible to swallow, not least because the labour of constructing a cleverly flawed case against Oswald would have been undone by a single piece of hard evidence, such an inadvertently placed fingerprint, or a sighting of Oswald in the act. Prior to the commission of the crime, no one could be sure that someone would not, for instance, take a photograph showing him clearly and unambiguously in the sniper's perch.
All serious students of the case have to concede that, in the last resort, the case against Oswald is weak because it involves implicating someone in the crime who was never seen shooting at Kennedy by anyone. What is important, clearly, is to focus on somebody who actually was.

To go to the next section, 'The Mystery of the Elderly Negro,' use the menu in the top lefthand corner.

For a complete presentation of the evidence for Oswald's innocence
www.ratical.com/ratville/jfk/pg/pg.html

For Mark Lane's pioneering critique of the flawed case against Oswald
www.kenrahn.com/JFK/The_critics/Lane/Natl-Guardian/Natl_Guardian.html