I received original editions of the Dallas Morning News and the Dallas Times Herald from November 24, 1963. The DMN did not contain the Moorman photo, nor did it mention it. The DTH did.
However, they didn't even admit to the extreme retouching that was done. The following Moorman photo was processed by Tink Thompason and is supposedly the best, meaning the clearest.
Of course, it's cropped, making the Kennedys more centered. But, most of it looks more like art than photography. And that's in sharp contrast to the other papers which published extremely dark and scuzzy versions of the photo. This really is the exception. But, it makes no sense for Mary Moorman to have taken the photo, since she saw them coming and was fully prepared to take their picture before they reached her, and I mean with her finger on the shutter. Why would she let them pass? Why would she even let them get even with her? Their faces were what she wanted, and you can only catch their faces if you shoot before they reach you. She even said so. She said, in reference to her waiting, poised to take their picture, that "I wanted to make sure they were looking at me."
How do you reconcile that with this?
Imagine how much she would have had to turn to take the picture we see on the right.
So, I believe she did snap that picture as they were approaching her, and that it looked nothing like the Moorman photo of fame.
She did say that they kept here there at the Sheriff Office for many hours as they worked with her photo. Finally, after dark, they returned it to her and let her go home. But then, they stormed her house, later that night, at midnight, and demanded it back again. And she gave it to them. She respected authority. Then she said they kept borrowing her photo, over and over again: the Secret Service, the FBI, the CIA. It was after the second time the FBI borrowed it that they returned it with the thumbprint.
But, when did they swap out her photo with Babushka's? Let me speculate. Since they did publish Babushka's that very weekend, in place of hers, they obviously decided right away to go that route. Therefore, I think it's likely that they replaced her photo right away. In other words: they sent her home with Babushka's. Because: if they knew they were doing that, and they sent her home with her own photo that she could look at, study, pour over, show to others, or even copy, that was perilous. They were trying to contain the thing; nip it in the bud; not let it blow up. She had just taken it, and no doubt barely had time to look at it, when Jim Featherstone got to her and pressured her to turn it over to the Sheriff's office.
Yes, as I think about it, since they published Babushka's photo that weekend, they were committed to it, which meant that Mary's real photo didn't exist, and it never happened. They never would have sent her home with it.
However, all the papers meddled with the Babushka image, usually by degrading it, as I demonstrated here:
https://oswaldinthedoorway.blogspot.com/2022/11/i-now-have-handle-on-circulation-of.html
They went about it in various ways, but it always involved removing BJ Martin, the outside motorcycle cop, from the photo. So, perhaps their continued borrowing of the photo from Mary had to do with that. I say that because they finally decided to use the white thumbprint to remove him. They probably did other things prior to that, but it gave them no peace of mind. The thumbprint is what nailed the coffin lid on BJ.
But, the way we should look at it is from Mary's perspective as an eager spectator. She wanted a dazzling picture of Jack and Jackie, and she never, in a million years, would have let them pass her, only to shoot the back of their heads. There is zero chance that Mary Moorman took this photo.
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