Walker Shooting

[Robert Prudhomme]

SA Robert A. Frazier of the FBI, the FBI's resident firearms expert, testified to the Warren Commission about his investigation into the Walker shooting and, specifically, CE 573 or the "Walker" bullet. Here is a short excerpt from that testimony:

"MR. EISENBERG -- "Can you think of any reason why someone might have

called this a steel-jacketed bullet?"

MR. FRAZIER -- "No, sir; except that some individuals commonly refer
to rifle bullets as steel-jacketed bullets, when they actually in fact
just have a copper-alloy jacket." ...."

Mr. Frazier either knows only a fraction of what is credited to him on the topic of ammunition, or he is deliberately misleading the WC.

[Paul Trejo]

"Nevertheless, Robert, nobody on this side insisted that OSWALD used his own rifle when he shot at Edwin Walker on 10 April 1963."

On reflection, I find this an odd thing for you to state, Paul. What precisely do you mean by "this side"? If the particular side you are referring to includes the Warren Commission, they most certainly did claim that Oswald shot at Walker with a 6.5mm Carcano rifle, and the bullet they present in evidence is most certainly jacketed in a copper coloured alloy. The whole basis of the WC's case is that the bullet recovered from Edwin Walker's home was a bullet made by the Western Cartridge Co. and all the bullets made by this company to shoot in the 6.5mm Carcano were jacketed in a copper coloured alloy known as "gilder's metal".

OK, Robert, first things first. You first want to know what I meant by "this side." I certainly DON'T mean the Warren Commission, since I sharply disagree with the CONCLUSION of the Warren Commission, that Lee Harvey OSWALD was a "Lone Nut."

I was referring to your phrase, "the Dark Side," as you were trying to be clever. On my side, I want to re-affirm, I never said that OSWALD used his own rifle when he shot at Edwin Walker.

Therefore, your resurrection of the many mistakes made by the Warren Commission in their obsession to prove a "Lone Nut" killer of JFK, has little relevance in my theory.

I disagree sharply with the WC, but I agree with Edwin Walker when he says that the evidence shows that there were TWO SHOOTERS that night, and that they sped away in a car parked at the Mormon Church across the alley.

I say that OSWALD finally made it home (by car) and he was indeed pale and sweaty as Marina said. Marina told the TRUTH about what she saw and heard -- although to be fair to Marina, Lee OSWALD lied and lied and lied to her.

He never did this alone -- he had accomplices. He never buried his rifle -- it was probably still in the trunk of his accomplices' car. He never traveled on foot or bus -- because his accomplice had a good car.

As for the nonsense about the steel-jacket versus the copper alloy -- yes, that is about the only thing that COULD be said about that mutilated bullet, which otherwise (except for the bare metal) could not be identified with regard to manufacturer.

The WC lied about it several times, no doubt, as they backtracked their lies and added lies to their lies -- which was par for the course of the WC (that is, when it came to defending the "Lone Nut" theory, there was no lie that was too outrageous, as millions of people have already seen).

But I have nothing to do with those lies. The TRUTH is that OSWALD was inspired (if not sent) to kill WALKER by George De Mohrenschildt, Volkmar Schmidt, Michael Paine and their rich oil engineer and helicopter engineer friends in Dallas.

As for WALKER's complaint about Robert Blakey, you have bent it so it fits your theory, Robert, but you didn't quote WALKER himself, and I know that WALKER was only complaining about a TV presentation, and not about the "metal alloy" of the bullet in question.

Regards,

--Paul :Trejo

Edited April 28, 2015 by Paul Trejo

[Robert Prudhomme]

Interesting point of view, Paul.

If we discard the rifle as evidence, all we have left to tie Oswald to the Walker shooting is the word of his wife Marina.

If you believe LHO was present at the Walker shooting, but with accomplices, do you see him having a similar role in the JFK shooting?

[Paul Trejo]

Interesting point of view, Paul.

If we discard the rifle as evidence, all we have left to tie Oswald to the Walker shooting is the word of his wife Marina.

If you believe LHO was present at the Walker shooting, but with accomplices, do you see him having a similar role in the JFK shooting?

Well, Robert, your first point is not precisely correct. We also have George and Jeanne De Mohrenschildt's certainty about OSWALD's role in the WALKER shooting.

Granted, they were not eye-witnesses at the scene of the crime or the hours afterwards; however, they did worry furiously about the news they heard the following morning -- almost certainly because they realized their own role in the shooting.

That is, they never told OSWALD to kill WALKER (as George and Volkmar insisted), but they knew very well that they had goaded OSWALD for weeks to hate, hate, hate Edwin WALKER. So, George bore real guilt in the WALKER shooting, and he knew it.

The situation was this -- in late January 1963, WALKER was acquitted by a Mississippi Grand Jury for his role in the deadly race riot at Ole Miss University on 30 September 1962, for which WALKER had been detained for a 90-day psychiatric evaluation at Springfield Mental Hospital in Missouri by RFK and JFK. The ACLU and psychiatrist Thomas Szasz got WALKER released after only three days.

After a month of rest in Dallas, WALKER went back to Mississippi to face a Grand Jury for those riots. His lawyers (Watts and Morris) argued only one case -- whether WALKER was insane or not. Finding him to be sane, the Grand Jury also acquitted WALKER of all charges.

The few Liberals in Dallas, like George and Jeanne, also the Paines and Schmidt, were outraged because WALKER's riot at Ole Miss resulted in hundreds of woundings and two deaths -- all because James Meredith wanted to be the first Black American to attend Ole Miss University. WALKER walked in late January 1963.

At a engineer's party in Dallas in February, these few liberal yuppies -- groupies of the dapper playboy, George De Mohrenschildt -- decided to watch Volkmar Schmidt (whose parents were both psychologists) perform a psychological procedure on OSWALD which took perhaps three hours (see George's book, I'm A Patsy!). Volkmar would transfer OSWALD's open hatred of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, to a hatred of WALKER.

It worked. Within days, OSWALD purchased weapons, made one Backyard Photograph of himself, and several Fakes (for plausible deniability) at his place of employment -- and many photographs of Walker's house in Dallas. (Jack White identified the body-double of OSWALD in the Backyard Photographs as Roscoe White, so there is some question whether Roscoe was OSWALD's accomplice for the WALKER shooting.)

In any case, on the early morning of Thursday 11 April 1963 when news of the WALKER shooting was broadcast all over Dallas, George and Jeanne De Mohrenschildt worried themselves sick that OSWALD was the shooter. They worried for three days, and then they devised a plan late on Saturday.

They would take a toy bunny to baby June, and while there, Jeanne would insist on "seeing" their new apartment (though she could not recall under questioning if she had ever been to the OSWALD's new apartment before). So, at 10pm on Saturday 13 April 1963, George and Jeanne got Lee and Marina out of bed to celebrate Easter. George kept Lee busy in one room as Jeanne asked Marina to show her around the apartment. Jeanne opened doors on her own, until she found a rifle with a scope on it. She shouted this out to George.

At this point, George famously made a joke to Lee about the WALKER shooting -- "were YOU the one who took a potshot at WALKER, Lee? How could you miss?" Lee just froze and Marina also froze. It was an awkward moment until George burst out laughing, and then Lee and Marina laughed, and that was the end of the evening. George and Jeanne left, never to see the OSWALDs ever again.

Their stories were retold five different times in the Warren Commission volumes, probably because Marina's ESL made it sound worse that it was. But the implication was fairly clear to me -- George and Jeanne felt guilty about the WALKER shooting.

Volkmar Schmidt also admitted his central role in the farce -- but was never called before the Warren Commission.

In any case, Robert, we have more than the word of Marina -- we also have the word of George and Jeanne De Mohrenschildt, and we also have the word of Volkmar Schmidt.

If we count the research done by Dick Russell (TMWKTM, 1992), we also have the word of Mr. and Mrs. Igor Voshinin, two good friends of George and Jeanne. Early on Easter Sunday, George visited the Voshinins, and told them all about his fears that OSWALD had been WALKER's shooter -- and that he and Jeanne had seen the rifle.

Mrs. Voshinin was outraged -- she never liked OSWALD. She demanded that George call the police or the FBI. George refused. So, after George left, Mrs. Voshinin call the FBI immediately and told them what George said. If Dick Russell is correct, then we have the source that WALKER always spoke about for the rest of his life, when he claimed that only days after the shooting, somebody in a high government post told him that OSWALD had probably been his shooter.

OK, sorry about the length, but I want to clarify that Marina wasn't the only source of the story that OSWALD was WALKER's shooter.

Now as to your second question, Robert, you ask if I think that OSWALD played a similar role in the JFK shooting. My answer is, no. In the WALKER shooting, OSWALD was trying to please his new, rich friends. In the JFK shooting, OSWALD was taken by surprise.

Exactly as OSWALD figured out shortly before his own violent death, he had been the Patsy of a JFK plot that was way over his head. In my theory, OSWALD believed that the Team he was working with had been planning to kill Fidel Castro. That's why he had been persuaded to play along with them to the degree that he did -- from April to September 1963 (almost exactly as Jim Garrison reported it. Garrison knew little about the JFK plot, but he knew a lot about his own people in New Orleans).

Regards,

--Paul Trejo

<edit grammar>

Edited April 29, 2015 by Paul Trejo

[Robert Prudhomme]

I understand your analysis of this matter now. I must say, you make very persuasive and logical arguments, and things may very well have occurred exactly as you say they did.

One maddening thing, at least to me, anyways, about the Walker shooting is that the two investigating officers were never asked just HOW they arrived at the conclusion the bullet they found was steel jacketed.

It has long been maintained, although never verified, AFAIK, that the Walker bullet was not only steel jacketed but, 30-06 calibre as well. This combination is entirely possible, in US military ammo, but it is a little more complicated than this. Beginning in WW II, when faced with a possible copper shortage, the US military embarked on two programs; one being to make rifle and pistol cartridges out of steel instead of brass, and the other being to replace part of the copper alloy (brass) in the jackets of rifle bullets. The steel cartridge cases were not very successful, and never used by the US in combat, but the steel/brass rifle jackets are used to this day.

The copper alloy in rifle bullet jackets is a type of brass known as "gilder's metal". In a very complicated process, a thin layer of steel was bonded under extremely high pressure between two layers of gilder's metal. Discs were cut from the resulting sheet, and bullet jackets formed from these discs. Why such a complicated process was employed is something I have been unable to find out. I have been able to glean that the riflings in the barrel did not cut deeply enough into the jacket of the bullet to expose the steel layer beneath the gilder's metal layer.

The experts I have spoken to feel that such a bullet would have to be exposed to a tremendous outside force in order to separate the steel jacket layer from the gilder's metal layers to the point the steel layer would have been visible to DPD officers.

Steel bullet jackets are for more common in Europe and Asia, and do not go through such a complicated manufacturing process. The bullet is jacketed in mild steel, and a thin coating of another metal is applied externally, to prevent corrosion of the steel. If the coating was copper, the steel jacket would be visible once the jacket and bullet separated. If the coating was zinc or cupro-nickel (copper/nickel alloy), the jacket would look like steel before AND after hitting the brickwork of Walker's home.

Now, this leads us to something interesting about the 6.5mm Carcano, allegedly owned by Oswald. The following info regarding Carcano military rounds was obtained from this site:

http://personal.stevens.edu/~gliberat/carcano/ammo/history.html

"6.5mm Carcano cartridge

Overview
The 6.5mm Carcano cartridge (6.5X52mm) is a rimless, necked smokeless powder military cartridge that was developed in Italy C.1890 as a service cartridge and was used in both world wars. It was also used as a secondary service round by Greece and Ethiopia and likely Albania and Libia as well. Cartridge cases have been made of both brass and steel, and both berdan and boxer primers have been used. It has been loaded for military use in Italy, Austria and the United States. Sporting ammo has been loaded in Sweden and the United States.

The cartridge cases made in Italy have several unusual features. They use a unique primer dia of .204" ( aprox. 5mm), and there is a shoulder inside the neck of the case under the bullet to support it. The earliest cartridges, before about 1895, were headstamped in the conventional manner, but on later cartridges a deep groove is pressed into the head of the cartridge case around the primer and the headstamp appears as raised figures inside this groove. Some sources state that this was done for decorative effect, but stamping the headstamp in this way would also workharden the case and strengthen it in this critical area.

Performance of the standard ball load is a 162 grain (10.5 gram) full metal jacket, round nose bullet at aprox. 2300 fps (700 mps) muzzle velocity from the barrel of a short rifle, a carbine will give a slightly lower and a long rifle a slightly higher figure. Maximum trajectory height for a 300 yard zero would be aprox. 10".

Loads

Ball "Cartucce a pallottola" or "Cartuccia a palla ordinaria" Round nose, full metal jacket bullet with lead core, jacket materials include copper-nickle, gliding metal, copper-nickle plated steel and gilding metal plated steel.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Could a 6.5mm Carcano have been fired at Walker, shooting one of the above Italian military bullets?

Italian military issue 6.5mm Carcano cupro-nickel coated (jacketed?) bullet on extreme left, armour piercing bullet next to it. Mistaken for steel jacketed?

Edited April 29, 2015 by Robert Prudhomme

[Paul Trejo]

I understand your analysis of this matter now. I must say, you make very persuasive and logical arguments, and things may very well have occurred exactly as you say they did.

One maddening thing, at least to me, anyways, about the Walker shooting is that the two investigating officers were never asked just HOW they arrived at the conclusion the bullet they found was steel jacketed.

It has long been maintained, although never verified, AFAIK, that the Walker bullet was not only steel jacketed but, 30-06 calibre as well. This combination is entirely possible, in US military ammo, but it is a little more complicated than this. Beginning in WW II, when faced with a possible copper shortage, the US military embarked on two programs; one being to make rifle and pistol cartridges out of steel instead of brass, and the other being to replace part of the copper alloy (brass) in the jackets of rifle bullets. The steel cartridge cases were not very successful, and never used by the US in combat, but the steel/brass rifle jackets are used to this day.

The copper alloy in rifle bullet jackets is a type of brass known as "gilder's metal". In a very complicated process, a thin layer of steel was bonded under extremely high pressure between two layers of gilder's metal. Discs were cut from the resulting sheet, and bullet jackets formed from these discs. Why such a complicated process was employed is something I have been unable to find out. I have been able to glean that the riflings in the barrel did not cut deeply enough into the jacket of the bullet to expose the steel layer beneath the gilder's metal layer.

The experts I have spoken to feel that such a bullet would have to be exposed to a tremendous outside force in order to separate the steel jacket layer from the gilder's metal layers to the point the steel layer would have been visible to DPD officers...

Yes, Robert, it's a good question. The Warren Commission analysts -- though prevented from contradicting the "Lone Nut" theory, were nevertheless encouraged, IMHO, to produce tons of details in order to suggest a massive search for the truth.

So we should not be surprised to learn that the FBI and other Intelligence communities in the USA were drafted to analyze the WALKER bullet in great detail.

For example, among WALKER's personal papers, I found one stray page of an FBI report on the WALKER bullet. It's ID number is on the bottom left, but I didn't find the matching pages in the boxes. Here's the page in question:

http://www.pet880.com/images/19630411_Walker_bullet_mismatch.JPG

I subsequently found that it belongs to this document group:

http://www.history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh24/pdf/WH24_CE_2001.pdf

In summary, the document group can be identified as follows:

SUBJECT: SHOOTING INTO HOME OF EDWIN A. WALKER, APRIL 10, 1963

Reference: Letter 12/2/63

Examination Requested by: FBI, Dallas

FBI File Number: 62-109060

Examination requested: Firearms - Spectrographic

Results of investigation: Q188 Bullet from Edwin A. Walker's residence

LAB No. PC-78378 BX HB

It's about the 14th page in the series.

Regards,

--Paul Trejo

Edited April 29, 2015 by Paul Trejo

[Robert Prudhomme]

Have you ever read the thread I started about SA Robert Frazier's analysis of the Walker bullet?

[Paul Trejo]

Have you ever read the thread I started about SA Robert Frazier's analysis of the Walker bullet?

Well, Robert, you're probably referring to the thread that you started last January, which turned out to be an intelligent dialog with Jon Tidd, entitled: The Most Important Error the FBI told the Warren Commission about the Rifle.

I'm completely unqualified to participate in any scientific conversation about ballistics, but I did find that thread fascinating.

IMHO, such a revelation would have been more valuable in the 1960's than today, because in 1979 the HSCA concluded that JFK "was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy," and so all the "Lone Nut" lies that the FBI told in the WC Report lack the impact and the force that they had before 1979.

It is fascinating to consider that Robert R. Frazier was -- very possibly -- sending a message to the elite scientific community that, "this is all baloney." If so, then the error wasn't his, but the FBI's error, since they allowed his deliberate scientific sarcasm to pass by their censors. That part of your thread was fascinating.

Yet IMHO we should stop beating this dead horse, this "Lone Nut" theory, and shift our focus to explaining exactly why our US Government absolutely had to lie. Is it not ultimately a question of Patriotic duty?

Earl Warren told us the Truth about lying to us. It was all about National Security, he said, and the Truth was being preserved for 75 years, when it would finally be told.

So, should we really be surprised that the WC is so full of lies? Should we really be surprised that some honest FBI agent would want to communicate the truth in such a clandestine manner?

Because, after all, all our scientific arguments against the "Lone Nut" theorists out there always fails to address their central motive -- which is less about Logic and more about Patriotic duty of standing by the US Government in questions of National Security.

Loyalty can be even more stubborn than Logic. Nevertheless, even President GHW Bush decided to shave 22 years away from Warren's 75 year silence. The Whole Truth (we hope) about the JFK murder and Lee Harvey OSWALD, will finally be revealed on 26 October 2017, thanks to the JFK Records Act of 1992.

On that date -- I predict -- we will learn that Edwin WALKER and the Dallas Police Department (with some minor help by CIA rogues and their Bay of Pigs comrades) proved that even the US Government cannot control every nuance of grass-roots politics.

Regards,

--Paul Trejo

Edited April 29, 2015 by Paul Trejo

[Paul Trejo]

To get back to the WALKER shooting itself, here is a series of documents that reveal the exact reasons why WALKER strongly objected to Robert Blakey's "substitution" of the WALKER bullet.

http://www.pet880.com/images/19790621_Walker_Blakey_TV.pdf

(It may be best to read these documents from the bottom up, as they are currently arranged with the latest documents at the top.)

These several documents trace an episode of WALKER's lawyer pursuing Blakey and the HSCA for "substituting" his precious bullet before a TV camera. It's almost comical in its pathos.

Regards,

--Paul Trejo