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> In trying to reconstruct Oswald's flight from the sniper's nest in the Book Depository Building, the commission allowed for a near miraculous series of coincidences and split-second timing. In the 46 minutes between the assassination at 12:30 and the first report of Officer Tippit's slaying, Oswald is supposed to have dashed down six flights, slipped out of the building, walked seven blocks, boarded a bus, got off, found a taxicab, returned to his rooming house, donned a jacket, then turned up nearly a mile away and killed Tippit.
> Although no record was kept of Oswald's interrogation during the 45 ½ hours he was in custody, the commission leaned heavily on the word of Dallas police—who had made a horrible botch of the case in almost every respect—that Oswald "repeatedly and blatantly lied."
Such facts do give pause and, considered alone, raise some doubt about Oswald's guilt. But the commission was not trying Oswald in a court of law. It was neither bound by rigid rules of evidence nor, since Oswald was dead, restricted to the judicial pursuit of getting a final verdict. The commission sought only to get the truth, and in so doing borrowed from both the techniques of the trial lawyer's adversary system (crossexamination and critical interrogation) and the historian's approach (applying logic, intuition and intellect to reach deductions from a mass of often uncorrelated facts). In this milieu, the critics' claims of Oswald's innocence are impressive only when they stand apart from the massive structure of other evidence unearthed by the commission.
The commission had more than enough material to overcome all its own doubts. Four people saw from the street below what appeared to be a rifle barrel protruding from the sixth-floor window an instant after the shots. Three employees watching from a window directly below heard the shots from overhead. Oswald's rifle (traced to him through his writing on the mail-order blank) was found near the sixth-floor window; so were three cartridges that experts proved had been fired by his rifle. Tests proved that cotton fibers snagged on the rifle matched the shirt Oswald was wearing that day. Bullet fragments found in the President's car came from Oswald's rifle. As for the slaying of Tippit, two people saw Oswald shoot the officer, and seven others saw him running in the vicinity with his revolver in his hand. All positively identified him later.
Any total exoneration of Oswald thus fails the test of logic, but that is only half the story. Another, even more pervasive, theory has arisen, holding that there was at least one other assassin. This theory rests on the premises that 1) there may have been a shot fired from in front of the limousine, and 2) such crucial evidence as the autopsy report on Kennedy was altered to conceal the second killer.