The Handgun, Part II

[Gil Jesus]

The Commission's "expert"


As it did in the shipping of the rifle, the Commission failed to hear testimony from the person responsible for shipping the handgun.

For its expert, it chose Heinz Michaelis, an office manager who did not work for Seaport Traders but instead worked for their mail order management company called Merchanteers. ( 7 H 373 )

In addition, Michaelis was not in the office manager's position at the time of this transaction. ( 7 H 375 ) He didn't take over his office duties until September-October, 1963, when the woman who was doing the job left. ( ibid. )


Mr BALL. So you have no personal knowledge, then, of the transaction by which the gun was shipped and sold ?

Mr. MICHAELIS Not prior to the first investigation. ( 7 H 376 )


So Michaelis had no idea about this transaction until he was approached by the FBI on November 30, 1963.

But there WAS someone who did and she was the person who handled it.

Her name was Emma Vaughn. ( ibid. )

You won't find her name anywhere in the 26 volumes except in the testimony of Heinz Michaelis.

Not only was she never called to testify, she was never even interviewed by the FBI.

It seems to me that in the course of an investigation, you would want to interview the person responsible for doing the shipping to explain the process and verify that the documentation is the documentation they provided with the order.

But the Commission didn't do that. Instead, they had someone who didn't even handle the Seaport Traders account until later that year to explain what their records showed.

Michaelis was not only used to testify about the documents from Seaport Traders, he was used to testify about the paperwork from REA Express, for whom he did not work.

Michaelis couldn't testify to anything that was related to that transaction specifically, only to that which was process-related and what the paperwork showed.

Coming in Part III: Shipping and receiving the handgun

Edited June 24, 2022 by Gil Jesus

[George Govus]

Dog and pony show. Another demonstration of WC contrivance. Thanks, Gil.

[Joseph McBride]

Oswald didn't own a gun.

[Gene Kelly]

The following should tell you all that you need to know about this mythical handgun:

Two of the gun mail-order houses were the ones from which Oswald ordered his Smith and Wesson .38 revolver (Seaport Traders of Los Angeles) and his Mannlicher-Carcano rifle (Klein's of Chicago). Oswald allegedly ordered his pistol two days before Christopher Dodd's subcommittee began hearings on the matter on January 29, 1963. The subcommittee’s sample statistics later showed a purchase in Texas made from Seaport Traders.

An investigator looking into interstate firearms sales at this time was Manuel Pena, the Los Angeles police lieutenant who was later one of the pivotal officers investigating Robert Kennedy's assassination. It was Pena who traced Oswald's telescopic sight to a California gun shop. Pena was the notorious LAPD officer (another recent addition to the LAPD just before RFK was killed) who controlled the police investigation and intimidated witnesses after the RFK murder. Pena was the trusted courier of key evidence being supplied to the FBI ... and he was affiliated with the same mercenaries and cut-outs used by JMWave operatives in various operations -- Saigon, El Salvador, Uruguay, Phoenix -- who were employed by cover with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).