How to make a rifle disappear

[Guest Mark Valenti]

If I wanted to get rid of a rifle in that building on that day, I'd disassemble it, pack it in a box full of school books and ship the whole thing to a prearranged address.

I haven't been able to locate any Dallas PD information about anyone opening every box and examining their contents. Can it be possible they didn't do this?

MV

[Pat Speer]

If I wanted to get rid of a rifle in that building on that day, I'd disassemble it, pack it in a box full of school books and ship the whole thing to a prearranged address.

I haven't been able to locate any Dallas PD information about anyone opening every box and examining their contents. Can it be possible they didn't do this?

MV

I can pretty much guarantee you that nothing of this sort was done. Once they found the rifle on the sixth floor, I'm pretty sure they stopped searching other locations (e.g. downstairs offices, the Dal-Tex Building). I've found nothing to inidcate a true and thorough search was ever conducted. Two days before the assassination Warren Caster brought two rifles into the building. He showed them to people on the way in but there is no evidence whatsoever that the rifles were actually in their cases when he took the cases back out. What's worse, while he told the FBI where he was during the assassination, and that he'd taken the rifles home after showing them off at work. he acknowledged to a researcher many years later that the FBI NEVER bothered to double-check his story with his family or his alibi. They had Oswald. They had Oswald's rifle. And that was all they wanted to know about.

Edited September 19, 2006 by Pat Speer

[Guest Mark Valenti]

I can pretty much guarantee you that nothing of this sort was done. Once they found the rifle on the sixth floor, I'm pretty sure they stopped searching other locations (e.g. downstairs offices, the Dal-Tex Building). I've found nothing to inidcate a true and thorough search was ever conducted. Two days before the assassination Warren Caster brought two rifles into the building. He showed them to people on the way in but there is no evidence whatsoever that the rifles were actually in their cases when he took the cases back out. What's worse, while he told the FBI where he was during the assassination, and that he'd taken the rifles home after showing them off at work. he acknowledged to a researcher many years later that the FBI NEVER bothered to double-check his story with his family or his alibi. They had Oswald. They had Oswald's rifle. And that was all they wanted to know about.

I would guess it would take about fifteen seconds to disassemble a rifle, put the pieces in a pre-set box, tape it shut and stack it. Hiding in plain sight.

[Guest Stephen Turner]

According to the Dallas Times Herald 11/22/63.

"Police announced that their search of the book depository was finished by 2.30pm." That sounds VERY extensive......

[Pat Speer]

According to the Dallas Times Herald 11/22/63.

"Police announced that their search of the book depository was finished by 2.30pm." That sounds VERY extensive......

As evidence of their incredible effort, here's a section of the Warren Report,

"Additional testimony linking Oswald with the point from which the shots were fired was provided by the testimony of Charles Givens, who was the last known employee to see Oswald inside the building prior to the assassination. During the morning of November 22, Givens was working with the floor-laying crew in the southwest section of the sixth floor.233 At about. 11:45 a.m. the. floor-laying crew used both elevators to come down from the sixth floor. The employees raced the elevators to the first floor.234 Givens saw Oswald standing at the gate on the fifth floor as the elevator went by.235 Givens testified that after reaching the first floor, "I discovered I left my cigarettes in my jacket pocket upstairs, and I took the elevator back upstairs to get my jacket with my cigarettes in it." 236 He saw Oswald, a clipboard in hand, walking from the southeast corner of the sixth floor toward the elevator.237 (See Commission Exhibit No. 2707, p. 142.) Givens said to Oswald, "Boy are you going downstairs? ... It's near lunch time." Oswald said, "No, sir. When you get downstairs, close the gate to the elevator." 238 Oswald was referring to the west elevator which operates by pushbutton and only with the gate closed.239 Givens said, "Okay," and rode down in the east elevator. When he reached the first floor, the west elevator--the one with the gate was not there. Givens thought this was about 11:55 a.m.240 None of the Depository employees is known to have seen Oswald again until after the shooting.241

The significance of Givens' observation that Oswald was carrying his clipboard became apparent on December 2, 1963, when an employee, Frankie Kaiser, found a clipboard hidden by book cartons in the northwest corner of the sixth floor at the west wall a few feet from where the rifle had been found.242 This clipboard had been made by Kaiser and had his name on it.243 Kaiser identified it as the clipboard which Oswald had appropriated from him when Oswald came to work at the Depository.244 Three invoices on this clipboard, each dated November 22, were for Scott-Foresman books, located on the first and sixth floors.245 Oswald had not filled any of the three orders.246

"

THERE WAS A CLIPBOARD NEAR THE RIFLE THAT NO ONE NOTICED FOR 10 DAYS! One gets the feeling there could have been a box with the words "Fragile: assassination rifle enclosed!" sitting there just as long...

Edited September 19, 2006 by Pat Speer