The Walker Bullet: Does This Look "Steel Jacketed"?

[Benjamin Cole]

1 hour ago, Mark Ulrik said:

Cunningham's "JH"?

Wow, fancy green lines. 

In this photo it is obvious that CE573 is copper-jacketed.

How could seven guys from the DPD think it was steel-jacketed? 

[Tom Gram]

5 hours ago, Gil Jesus said:

This whole issue of the Walker Bullet could have been resolved had the Commission called ANY of the witnesses who handled the bullet and asked them to identify it.

The names of six witnesses who either saw, handled or in whose care the bullet was ( McElroy, Norvell, Tucker, B.G. Brown, Alexander and Anderson ) do not appear on the list of 552 witnesses who were called to give testimony. ( Report, Appendix V, pgs. 483-500 )

They were never called to testify, let alone identify CE 573 as the bullet they handled.

General Walker saw the bullet the night it was recovered and was called to testify, but was never shown CE 573 and asked to identify it.

An eighth witness, McElroy’s partner Ira Van Cleve, also saw the bullet and described it in his report on the crime. He also was never called to give testimony and identify CE 573.

B.G. Brown claimed he marked the bullet they recovered from Walker's house. ( Osw 201 file, vol 44, sec. 7, pg. 5 )

So the question becomes does the bullet currently in evidence have his mark ?

It’s unconscionable that the Commission omitted eight witnesses who either saw, handled or in whose possession the Walker bullet was.

That's a lot of witnesses to omit for it to be an innocent oversight.

It just seems to me that if you're building a case against a suspect, if you recovered a bullet, you'd want the officers who found the bullet to identify the bullet in evidence as the bullet they found.

Especially if it was marked.
 

I was wondering about this - I hadn’t read the relevant testimony in forever. If a bullet discovered at a crime scene with chain of custody markings was never authenticated under oath by those who handled it, that bullet is essentially worthless as evidence. 

It looks like FBI showed the bullet to Norvell based on the WC request to trace certain items of physical evidence that led to CE2011. Norvell supposedly identified the bullet and his initials, but it does seem a bit odd that the FBI didn’t show the bullet to anyone else. Maybe they did and didn’t like the answers? Or worse? Norvell was also off the force at the time of the FBI interview according to CE2011, which is kind of interesting. 

That said, it does look like the initials B.B. are possibly visible in the lower left corner of that photograph. However, any initials on the bullet are useless without a sworn identification from the initialer, so I think it’s fair to say that the record on the authenticity of the Walker bullet is questionable at best. 

[Tom Gram]

3 hours ago, Mark Ulrik said:

Cunningham's "JH"?

I think you’re right, but Cunningham was FBI and probably initialed the bullet when it came into the lab, so that doesn’t really help with the authenticity issue.

[Lawrence Schnapf]

The handling of the Walker bullet by WC is just another example of how the historic record was manufactured. The prosecutor does not call witnesses who could undermine the preferred narrative which in this case is that Oswald fired at Walker.  The WC felt this shooting was "probative" because it showed a propensity of Oswald to engage in violent acts. As it was, the bullet in evidence could not be traced to the alleged assassination rifle to the exclusion of all other rifles.

If the DPD witnesses testified the bullet was steel jacketed and was a 30.06 caliber, that undermines the "probative" value of the Walker shooting and then the case relies on the shaky testimony of Marina Oswald.  

[Gil Jesus]

35 minutes ago, Tom Gram said:

It looks like FBI showed the bullet to Norvell based on the WC request to trace certain items of physical evidence that led to CE2011. Norvell supposedly identified the bullet and his initials, but it does seem a bit odd that the FBI didn’t show the bullet to anyone else. Maybe they did and didn’t like the answers? Or worse? Norvell was also off the force at the time of the FBI interview according to CE2011, which is kind of interesting. 

 

You're right. Fourteen months after the shooting, the FBI reported that Norvell was shown the CE 573 and identified it as the bullet he found. What a shock.

I wonder why he wasn't asked to identify it under oath .

[Lawrence Schnapf]

Not to mention that Neutron Activiation Analysis is no longer considered a scientifically reliable methodolgy for performing Comparative Lead Bullet Analysis. 

[Tom Gram]

23 minutes ago, Gil Jesus said:

You're right. Fourteen months after the shooting, the FBI reported that Norvell was shown the CE 573 and identified it as the bullet he found. What a shock.

I wonder why he wasn't asked to identify it under oath .

That the WC did this kind of thing is inexcusable, IMO. This was a group of very smart lawyers concerned with maintaining a “clean record” at the expense of conducting a thorough investigation.

J. Lee Rankin’s letter to the FBI that resulted in CE2011 stated that “it is unnecessary to trace the chain of possession forward past the first person who can identify the item by inspection”, and specified that the only goal of the request was to establish “where and by whom these items were found following the assassination”. 

https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=62229#relPageId=119

DVP will like this, but Rankin also specified that the request be handled in a “separate, self contained report”, which I hadn’t noticed before and ties into the FBI airtel telling agents not to put the results of the interviews into report form. 

Norvell found the bullet, so the FBI just followed Rankin’s instructions, but that doesn’t really make it any better, or any less questionable. 

Rankin appears to have used the FBI in a half-baked attempt to establish each item of physical evidence as “unique evidence”, i.e. evidence for which the prosecution would not have needed to establish a chain of custody to admit at trial based on readily identifiable characteristics like serial numbers, initials, etc. Either way, CE2011 is worthless as a legal document since none of the identifications were made under oath. 

Assuming that Norvell would have authenticated the Walker bullet under oath, which is a very big assumption, the defense would’ve needed to get one of the other officers to testify that CE148 was not the same bullet to challenge it. Of course, there was no trial, but the WC should have established a full chain of custody anyway. The absolute bare minimum of bulls*** is not what should happened in an investigation into the President’s murder, and the provenance of some of the evidence “authenticated” through CE2011  remains enduringly suspicious because the WC were either freakishly lazy or afraid to place certain witnesses under oath. I suspect the latter.  

[Lawrence Schnapf]

The WC lawyers knew exactly what they were doing. they used selective evidence to build a case. this is called manufacturing the historic record.

[Lawrence Schnapf]

another yet another explanation why 6 of the 7 mock trials held by law schools or bar associations since 1967 have resulted in either hung juries or acquitals. One or 2 could have been written off as specific to how that event was staged but 6 of 7 is quite a statement 

[Benjamin Cole]

Egads--and who (Norvell that is) could ID a lump of misshapen metal after 14 months? If the proper initials are scratched onto the lump....

Rankin was the guy who also strictly limited the search of Ruby's phone records (per the HSCA findings). Hooo-boy. Rankin appears to have been on a mission.

Government investigations are essentially kangaroo courts.

The government selects the witnesses, the evidence, allows hearsay evidence, can make conjectures and accusations sound like fact. The government controls the narrative through a compliant media.

In a government investigation, there is no defense counsel to introduce exculpatory evidence, witnesses, or other narratives. 

 

 

 

 

[Chris Bristow]

18 hours ago, Benjamin Cole said:

The DPD report actually specifies a "high powered rifle." 

The bullet nicked the bottom edge of a window pane, then passed through a wall, which I believe was the old -fashioned wood slats and plaster variety. 

Whether that would take a high-powered rifle or not...probably conjecture. Did the Walker bullet strike a wooden slat, or upright 2x4? Electrical conduit? 

It is true, most handguns shoot at about one-half the velocity of a high-powered rifle bullets. But there are many exceptions. 

A 30.06 shoots at 3,400 fps. That is among the most powerful commonly available rifles. 

If memory serves, a Mannlicher Carcano fires at 1,800 fps (by some definitions, not a true high-powered rifle).

A .357 Magnum handgun can achieve very similar fps to the Mannlicher Carcano. 

That Walker was shot at with a rifle...seems largely conjecture. 

 

 

The Carcano velocity is about 2,000 ft per second out of the barrel. that well-known Myers test where they fired into a bunch of pine boards left the barrel at 2050 frames per second. I know very little about the Walker shooting but it may be possible that the Bullet Hole represented something closer to 1800 ft per second which would eliminate a handgun. I still don't know if they can even estimate that so I'm just tossing it out there.

[Benjamin Cole]

27 minutes ago, Chris Bristow said:

The Carcano velocity is about 2,000 ft per second out of the barrel. that well-known Myers test where they fired into a bunch of pine boards left the barrel at 2050 frames per second. I know very little about the Walker shooting but it may be possible that the Bullet Hole represented something closer to 1800 ft per second which would eliminate a handgun. I still don't know if they can even estimate that so I'm just tossing it out there.

Some .357 Magnum rounds get 1,500 feet per second. 

Of course, no one ever tested the plaster walls of Walker' home with additional gunshots, or probed the Walker bullet hole to find out if the slug had passed through a wooden slat, a 2x4, or even electrical conduit etc.  

If the Walker bullet had merely passed through plaster, almost any gun could have produced the result. 

In the end, I think I am safe in saying that a powerful handgun would have sufficed to produce the damage seen in the Walker home. I do not rule out a rifle. 

The detective on the Walker scene almost immediately conjectured a powerful bullet had produced the damage, further conjectured a rifle must have been used, but then mis-identified the bullet as "steel jacketed." 

So it goes....let us say I am not convinced a rifle was used. I rather suspect a handgun, as no one saw a rifle that night. 

 

[Stu Wexler]

8 hours ago, Lawrence Schnapf said:

Not to mention that Neutron Activiation Analysis is no longer considered a scientifically reliable methodolgy for performing Comparative Lead Bullet Analysis. 

There is no scientifically reliable method for CLBA. The entire premise behind the application is bogus.

[Lawrence Schnapf]

@Stu Wexler yes, I thought i said that. I was trying to distinguish that NAA may be used for other applications but not CLBA. 

[Gil Jesus]

12 hours ago, Tom Gram said:

J. Lee Rankin’s letter to the FBI that resulted in CE2011 stated that “it is unnecessary to trace the chain of possession forward past the first person who can identify the item by inspection”, ....

https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=62229#relPageId=119

 

Under that circumstance, can we assume then that the chain-of-possession of CE 399 begins with Elmer Todd ?