The JFK Murder (page 3 of 4)

Reopening the Investigation

The conspiracy theories persisted. While leading journalists defended the lone-gunman theory, Kennedy's successor, Lyndon Johnson, privately speculated that JFK had been targeted in a Cold War-fueled conspiracy linked to Cuba. Another theory -- that the murder was a mob hit -- grew out of Ruby's organized crime ties. It didn't fade when he died in 1967, having hinted he never told all he knew.

By 1991, the debate over Oliver Stone's conspiracy-minded film JFK prompted the government to declassify a vast trove of assassination-related documents. And though the lone-gunman theory has believers -- Gerald Posner's 1993 book Case Closed argued for it forcefully -- a 2001 Gallup Poll found that just 13 percent of Americans accepted it.

That Dictabelt No. 10 even exists is one of those odd occurrences that make history so compelling. After the assassination, Dallas detectives listened to many of the police Dictabelts from that day without detecting the sound of gunfire. The FBI examined the recordings in early 1964, and came up similarly empty-handed. The recordings sat in a police department file cabinet until 1969, when Officer Paul McCaghren was called in to identify them -- and ordered to hide them "in a safe place."

Meanwhile, public skepticism about the lone-gunman theory mounted. Though Life magazine had published still images from the so-called Zapruder film within days of the assassination, nagging questions about what really happened bubbled back to the surface of public consciousness when ABC News broadcast the home movie for the first time in March 1975. The footage, taken by businessman Abraham Zapruder, showed Kennedy's head snapping backward as if hit by a gunshot from in front. Congress soon voted to reopen the JFK investigation.

In 1977, Mary Ferrell, a Dallas legal secretary and tireless JFK researcher, told the newly created House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) that she'd heard an audiotape of Dallas police radio traffic around the time Kennedy died. That led the panel to retrieve the Dictabelts in May 1978. By then, the science of acoustic analysis had come a long way. The HSCA's general counsel, ex-federal prosecutor G. Robert Blakey, chose James Barger, a prominent audio scientist, to assess the recordings' value as evidence.

Barger decided to compare the sound impulses on the recordings with the sound of real gunfire. In August 1978, he led a team to Dallas for a series of elaborate ballistics tests. Setting up 36 microphones along the Dealey Plaza motorcade route, he recorded shots fired from the sixth-floor book depository window where Oswald was said to have fired, and from the grassy knoll. Barger compared the resulting sound patterns with the impulses on the Dictabelt. His findings contrasted with those of the Warren Commission, which ruled that Oswald fired three shots at Kennedy's limousine.

Barger identified at least four sound-wave patterns that he said closely resembled the muzzle blasts of gunshots in his test firing. Three of them closely resembled shots fired from the sixth-floor window. One resembled a shot from the grassy knoll, he said. Two other acoustic experts retained by the HSCA supported Barger's conclusion. The acoustic evidence became the keystone of the House panel's finding in January 1979 that Kennedy had "probably" been killed by conspirators who, besides Oswald, couldn't be identified.

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