The JFK Murder (page 4 of 4)

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Adding Clarity to the Debate

Other experts disputed the findings. In 1980, the Justice Department turned to the National Research Council, a government think tank. In May 1982, a 12-scientist NRC panel unanimously ruled that Barger's supposed gunshots were something else and "came too late to be attributed to assassination shots." (A Court TV analysis last year found essentially the same thing.)

Dictabelt No. 10 then went back to a file cabinet at the Justice Department. It was subsequently transferred to the National Archives. Then, in early 2001, Donald Thomas, a government scientist interested in the Kennedy assassination, published in a British forensics journal an article based on a mathematical review of all the acoustic evidence. Thomas's conclusion: Five shots had been fired at Kennedy's motorcade from two different directions.

At issue now: Can a digital map of the Dictabelt add clarity to the debate by decisively confirming or refuting the existence of a second gunman?

Duplicating the original poses major challenges. A Dictabelt groove is 75 microns wide -- about as wide as three human hairs -- and five microns deep. It's also asymmetric, with a steep wall on one side and a sloping one on the other. The unique shape complicates the job of writing the algorithms needed to describe it for computer simulation. But Haber and Fadeyev are cautiously confident they'll succeed with the Dictabelt as they did with "Goodnight Irene." Their next step: prepare a "proof of concept" paper for the National Archives. If the concept proves valid, the recording will be made available for scanning.

Paul Horowitz, a Harvard physics professor and member of the NRC panel that dismissed Dictabelt No. 10, says such scanning won't add to the assassination debate. Horowitz says he and several colleagues have finished a reply to Thomas's article. He says the as-yet-unpublished paper shows that Thomas and Barger mistook random sounds for gunshots: "Digital playback of the Dictabelt is not going to change that conclusion."

Don Thomas disagrees. He says the timing of the Dictabelt's sound impulses matches the Zapruder film's visual indications of gunfire. He cites a 4.8-second gap on the Dictabelt between what he views as the third and fourth shots. "On the Zapruder film, the gap between the crucial two shots is 4.8 seconds. Would random noises occur with that exact same timing?"

Vitaliy Fadeyev says it's possible that a high-quality digital map of Dictabelt No. 10 could clarify a key JFK forensics issue: the "acoustic fingerprints" of the alleged gunshots.

"When the first studies [of Dictabelt No. 10] were done, the waveform analysis was fairly primitive," he says. Now the science of analyzing patterns made by sound waves is "much more sophisticated because we have so much more computing power." Researchers, he adds, should have "a much greater ability to confirm or refute whether those sound impulses actually match the acoustic fingerprints of rifle shots, or come from something else."

So, if all goes according to plan, Dictabelt No. 10 will be transported across the country to the Lawrence Berkeley lab later this year. Once there, it will go under the confocal microscope. Within a few months, a digital replica could be produced -- a modern version of an old piece of evidence that may shed new light on one of the country's most enduring mysteries.