Oswald in the doorway: the blog of the Oswald Innocence Campaign, by Ralph Cinque

This is the Johnston photo, the third iconic photo from the Oswald shooting, the other two being Beers and Jackson. I'm sure they doctored Oswald's hair in this image. It's like they coiffed it. In no other image, does his hair look like this. So again I have to ask: did they have a hair salon up at that 5th floor jail?

But, I want to talk about Oswald's change of clothes. Reportedly, that black sweater and the black pants he was wearing were his own clothes, obtained from his boarding room on Beckley. And the story goes that he chose the clothes himself. But frankly, I think they deliberately sought a lot of color contrast between him and Jim Leavelle, who is wearing his Easter suit in late November. Two men just got brutally murdered, one of whom Leavelle knew well: JD Tippit. But, he decided to wear an Easter suit, did he? 

But, why was there any thought of changing Oswald's clothes? They were just walking him 30 feet to a car to drive him to the County Jail. That's all. And at the County Jail, he was immediately going to be issued convict clothes, a prisoner uniform. 

And why go to his house and get his personal clothes? They didn't do that for Jack Ruby. For Ruby, they issued this Cabana outfit, making him look like a Cuban waiter. Where the heck did they get it from? I called the Dallas City Jail myself and spoke to a female officer. I asked her if they issued clothing to their detainees, and she said no, that they remained in their own clothes. I asked her if it has always been the policy to do that, even back in the 1960s, and she said yes, although at that point, she was getting irritated with me. I think she had other things to do. 

So, it certainly wasn't normal for them to put Jack Ruby in a Cabana outfit, and it was absolutely wacky for them to go to Oswald's residence to get him clothes to wear for a 30 foot walk to a car and then a short drive to the County Jail. 

But, this was going to be more than that, and they knew that. This was going to be a "wag the dog" spectacle for television. And he had to be appropriately dressed. 

They knew that if they just told the public that Oswald was shot during a jail transfer, that many wouldn't believe it, that many would react the way people recently when they announced that Jeffrey Epstein hung himself in his jail cell. So, they knew they had to show Oswald being shot. And so they put on this spectacle. It wasn't real. They needed a precision shot, a very carefully placed bullet that would do maximum damage, rupturing his major blood vessels, assuring that he would bleed out. They couldn't get that in the garage. I think that most likely, once Oswald was scurried inside during the pandemonium which followed the shooting, that he was quickly sedated. Maybe someone thrust a hypodermic needle in his thigh. Then, they took him to a sound-proof room and lied him down on a table, and then using a .38 with a silencer, they administered the lethal shot with great precision. I mean surgical precision. 

And that's why in the Jackson photo, you've got arms akimbo- Oswald's and Leavelle's. They were covering up the area of impact because there was no impact. There was no hole in him, and there was no hole in his clothes, and there was no blood. And that's why they needed this: it was literally a cover-up.