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

I recently watched the 1976 movie, God Told Me To. It's about a New York City police detective who is investigating a series of random murders in which a shooter just started randomly killing people for no reason. The first was a young man who perched himself on top of a water tower and just started picking people off on the crowded street below with a high-powered rifle.

I like it when movies start with something that grabs you right away, that pulls you in, and this one certainly did.

It was rattling to see people dropping like flies on the street below as he shot them dead. And what really came across vividly was the psychopathology of it all, just how totally insane the assassin was.

And I began thinking about Oswald and realizing that he would have had to be as insane as that. Even though he knew of Kennedy, what he purportedly did was just as insane as what this guy did. Really, there is no difference.

Could Oswald have been that insane? He spent 3 years in Russia where he got very involved with people. He was social. He was engaging. So unlike how he was in Dallas at the Depository. And nobody in Russia described him as being violent or unstable or the least bit crazy. And several said afterwards that they could not believe that he did it, that he was capable of it. 

So, what about during the year and a half after he returned from Russia and before the assassination? Did he turn insane then? Did anyone report him acting insane? 

The answer is no. I don't mean Marina Oswald saying after the assassination that he shot at Walker and sought to shoot at Nixon. The fact is that she never said anything about those things at the time or afterwards. And if you look at her written correspondences from the period there isn't a hint of her being aware of any such things.

The whole case against Oswald hinges on him being psycho- as psycho as the man in the movie, perched on the water tower and picking people off. And the plotters knew that it was going to be a hard-sell to say that he suddenly went psycho without any antecedents, without a progressive descent into madness. And that's why they got Marina to say those things about him shooting at Walker and beating her. But again: she never said anything about those things at the time. To anybody. So, why should we believe her?