Where is the CHECK/MO for Oswald's $10

[Duke Lane]

btw - is this yet ANOTHER thread where DVP gets his hat handed to him and skulks off to lick wounds and regroup?

At the end of the day there is still

No idea how the coupon and $10 bill got to Seaport

No accounting for the $10 other than the internal ORDER FORM

No accounting for the $19.95 to or from REA

No accounting of the $1.27 received and deposited by REA

No proof as to how the murder weapon gets from Hill to Davenport and into evidence

So to be straight here... the pistol is much more a mystery than the rifle... and the bullets had gunk on them as if they were taken from an ammo belt...

and the vast majority of DPD officers use 38 Specials...

The only questions that are material, really, are those related to the delivery of and payment for the weapon.

David wants to promote the notion that "it doesn't matter" because you can infer a connection based on the handwriting on the order slip at one end, and possession of the weapon on arrest at the other. While that might "make sense," it is not legally sufficient and is probably not even admissible because it "calls for a conclusion" that's not based on established fact.

The oddity in all of this is that, while it had all the information it needed to establish the facts through REA, no apparent effort was made to do so. Why did the Seattle FO not drive over to REA's office to get copies of their paperwork at the shipping end, and the Dallas FO do the same at the receiving end, particularly the means and documentation of final delivery?

It is particularly inexplicable in light of the length that the FBI went to establish the provenance of an unemployment check, even to knowing which train it was transported on. Nobody killed anyone with a check, but nothing near to that level of apparent effort went into establishing the provenance of a purported murder weapon.

In any criminal investigation, the standard is not "we didn't feel we needed to," but only that "we were unable to." In this case, and especially in light of the efforts put forth to squelch any "dirty rumors" of conspiracy, the FBI apparently did nothing to show that Oswald had no confederates, in particular that there was nobody else in custody of the murder weapon and that only Oswald had possessed it beyond reasonable doubt.

The complete lack of apparent investigation of this entire link in the chain of custody leaves open the possibility that someone else picked up the weapon from REA, a hole one would think the FBI would want to close. That there is no mention of any investigation of this leg of the pistol's journey can suggest either that (a) the FBI didn't even think to nail this down - a presumption belied by its tracing of the unemployment check's journey from Austin to New Orleans (why could they not have been satisfied that "the check was mailed and then was cashed," each on a particular date to prove that Oswald had, in fact, received this innocuous bit of the puzzle?) - or ( that they did investigate it and got results that ran counter to its expected or intended conclusion.

If they'd investigated it and been unable to make any determinations, they'd have said so.

After all, even presuming that Oswald lied about having any knowledge of or involvement in any shootings, that doesn't preclude that he was involved with someone else. One would think that, absent a confession of both being involved and acting completely alone, there would be a presumption that others might have been involved, and an investigation into who that might have been, vice an effort to prove that nobody else was involved.

The absolute fact remains that, once Oswald was in custody, all search for and investigation of others was immediately halted, and DPD stood down as if there was never any doubt whatsoever that they had gotten their one and only man, not only in the shooting of one of their own - the only thing that Oswald was supposedly in custody for - but for the shooting of the President as well. That a man "missing" from the TSBD had been taken into custody for one crime hardly means that he was absolutely, positively the perpetrator of another crime to the extent that any search for others involved could or should have been called off.

After all, Oswald hadn't been caught red-handed (all anyone knew at the time - at best - was that he had a weapon and Tippit was killed by one) and hadn't confessed, so why would anyone have cause to believe that there was no further need to search for anyone else on either count?