(5 of 6)
But then Blakey, its chief counsel, found an acoustics expert who examined a police Dictabelt recording made of one of the two radio channels used during the motorcade. After tests in Dealey Plaza, the scientist concluded that sounds on the belt came from an escorting motorcycle with its microphone stuck open, that four shots could be detected on the belt and that there was a fifty-fifty probability that one of them came from the knoll. Blakey called in two other experts, who raised the estimate to 95%. The committee then concluded that a conspiracy was "probable."
In 1982, however, the National Academy of Sciences examined the same recording. Its experts detected cross talk from the other police channel on the belt, chatter that it identified as occurring one minute after the shooting. "The acoustic analyses," the Academy experts reported, "do not demonstrate that there was a grassy-knoll shot." Moreover, three panels of independent experts examined the materials from Kennedy's autopsy. All concluded that he had been hit only by shots fired from behind him.
One conspiracy writer, David Lifton, offered a way out of these inconvenient findings: in his 1981 book, Best Evidence, he contended that conspirators had altered the President's body to conceal evidence of an entry wound from the front. Others note that Kennedy's brain has not been examined by anyone, except superficially by the autopsy doctors. Robert Kennedy did not turn it over to the National Archives with other autopsy evidence in 1966. He presumably did not want it preserved as a grisly artifact.
The timing of Ruby's assault on Oswald also fails to fit any tidy conspiracy. If he had been stalking Oswald, why was he in a Western Union office wiring $25 to one of his strippers, Karen Carlin, at 11:17 a.m. that Sunday? Not even the Dallas police knew when their interrogation of Oswald would end and when he would be transferred to custody of the county sheriff. In fact, a U.S. postal inspector had unexpectedly dropped in on the questioning and joined the quizzing. That held up the transfer by at least half an hour; without the delay, Ruby would have been too late. His televised shooting of Oswald occurred at 11:21 a.m.
The resourceful Warren Commission critics have a solution to that dilemma too. They note credible reports that Ruby visited police headquarters, where Oswald was being held, twice on the night of the assassination, even attending a press conference at which Oswald was exposed to photographers. Ruby sat at the back of the room, allegedly carrying his handgun. He was spotted in a crowd outside the building about 3 p.m. on Saturday, when the transfer originally had been scheduled. On Sunday morning, three TV technicians reported seeing him near their van overlooking the transfer ramp well before 11 a.m.
This pattern, these writers say, fits a stalking of Oswald. But why did Ruby go off to Western Union at a crucial moment? It was a prearranged plan to make the killing look spontaneous, they reply. Someone signaled Ruby when Oswald's move began. They imply that a cop did this; they do not say how.