Believe it or not, Lee Harvey Oswald was shot by an FBI agent impersonating Jack Ruby (Part 2)

JAMES FETZER

EXPOSING FALSEHOODS AND REVEALING TRUTHS

MONDAY, OCTOBER 24, 2016

Believe it or not, Lee Harvey Oswald was shot by an FBI agent impersonating Jack Ruby (Part 2)

by Ralph Cinque with Jim Fetzer

Part 2

In Part 1, we have addressed the reasons why the garage shooter of Lee Oswald cannot have been Jack Ruby: he was too short, had different ears and was razor clean on the back of his neck. Since they would have been one and the same only if they had the same features at the time, the shooter was not Jack Ruby. In Part 2, we provide reasons for concluding the man who shot Lee Oswald was instead an FBI agent by the name of "James Bookhout".

Ralph was initially apprised of the issue from a video sent to him that features James Bookhout. The source shall go unnamed out of concern about his safety. Bear in mind that, at least officially, there are no images of James Bookhout from the time of the assassination or thereafter. Which is strange considering that Bookhout attended more Oswald interrogations than anyone else apart from Captain Will Fritz, who was conducting them. 

The only confirmed images we have of Bookhout, therefore, are school pictures of him from when he was much younger. Since that is all we have, that is what we have to use, where further finds of other photos may provide further proof or disconfirmation. First, let's take a look at the video. It's not very long.

It shows Oswald and his interrogators filing into Fritz' office for the Saturday 6:30 PM interrogation. But in the hallway, you see Oswald go up to Bookhout and say something to him. You hear Oswald remark, "What have you got against (something)?" You can't make out the last word, but it might well be "me". Here is the frame in which Oswald is speaking to him:

So, that's Bookhout on the left. He is a short guy, like the garage shooter, as we explained in Part 1. Note that there are some obfuscations, which appear to be intentional. Were his eyes really closed? Probably not. Did he have hair growing over his ear? Definitely not. He was an FBI agent, not a hippie. And look at the next frame:

We trust that you will accept that he should not have a blank or entirely missing face. That means this is not a normal photograph. They clearly did not want us to see his face to make him difficult to identify as James Bookhout and, indeed, impossible on the basis of this image alone.Then, we see them filing into the office, where you can see how short Bookhout was:

That this has to be Bookhout follows from an argument by elimination. They were going to that Saturday evening interrogation, where we can account for everyone else who attended: Will Fritz; several of his detectives; Secret Service Agent Thomas Kelley; US Marshall Robert Nash; and FBI Agent James Bookhout. We know that, unlike Bookhout, none of those other men were short. Here is an excerpt from James Hosty's book, Assignment Oswald:

That is in reference to the first interrogation on Friday afternoon, but James Bookhout had to find something to stand on (which Hosty called "a pedestal") in order to spot Hosty amid the crowd of reporters in the hall. And that, of course, was because Bookhout was short.  Here's another last look at him from the film. Notice how well he matches the garage shooter from behind:

We mentioned that the only images we have of Bookhout are from his school days. We accept these images, but with reservations that they were altered in certain respects. But here is an image from his ROTC days in high school, which we do not accept at all (because it provides a false identification):

That rather tall fellow on the far right is said to be Bookhout, where his height rules him out. Bookhout is present in the photograph, but that young man was named "Tommy Collins". And we know that because there is another copy of the photo in which Tommy put his signature on it and wrote directly over himself. In other words, he autographed it for somebody:

We have confirmed it independently by finding other images of Tommy Collins:

The left is from the same photo. The middle is an image of him from the Silver Sabre Club, to which he belonged. And on the right is an image of him from a one-act play in which he performed. They are all the same young man, Tommy Collins. So that tall guy was definitely Tommy Collins and not James Bookhout. By going back to the ROTC photo, we have correctly identified James Bookhout:

That is him, James Bookhout at the age of 17, as a student at Woodrow Wilson High School in Dallas. And that image compares very well with other images of Bookhout that would follow:

So, there it goes from 1931 to 1937, and you see the progression. On the left, we believe that an attempt was made to broaden his narrow nose with flim-flam. Look how much wider his nose is on the right than the left. That's our right and left, viewing the photo, which of course were his left and right side. 

So, that's artificial. Nobody's nose would be that unbalanced absent plastic surgery. The fact is that James Bookhout had a narrow nose and pinched nostrils. But otherwise, the match is very good; and note that there is no one else in the ROTC photo that even comes close. Once Tommy Collins has been ruled out, as we have, all you are left with is candidate to be James Bookhout. 

OK, now we need to look at another film. It's called The Killing of Lee Harvey Oswald. It was a retrospective made 30 years later, in 1993, and it was made by the same man who produced the NBC "live" footage of the Lee Oswald shooting, Fred Rheinstein. Here is the video:

That film contains this image, which appears to have been taken inadvertently:

Officials claim the man in the white shirt is Jack Ruby shortly after his arrest, but it is clearly not Jack. It appears to be Bookhout. Compare him with Ruby:

Ruby had a longer face; Bookhout had a rounder. Ruby had a long forehead; Bookhout had a short forehead. Ruby had a pyramidal-shaped nose with wide visible nostrils; Bookhout a narrow nose with hardly visible nostrils. These are two different men. And the image on the right compares well with Bookhout's known images:

We believe they gave young Bookhout on the left those "drag queen" eyebrows to undermine identifications. And it looks as though they gave him an "elf ear", too. And on the right, they blackened his eyes. But nonetheless, those images compare very favorably. Here is another comparison from a few years earlier:

And here is one more that is even earlier yet:

We suspect they build his hair up on top. It probably didn't stick up that much. But otherwise, that is a very good comparison of their similarities. And it is a very plausible biological progression: the manifestation of aging in one person. 

Now let's look at it circumstantially. Bookhout claimed to have attended the final interrogation of Oswald shortly before the shooting. However, he said he arrived late and watched it through the glass partition in Fritz' office. Is that true? Should we believe it? 

Doesn't it seem more likely that he would have entered regardless? How many people have arrived at meetings late? They still go in. Fritz listed the people who attended, and it doesn't include Bookhout. He added "et al." It's the only time that he did. Was Bookhout the "et al."?

Bookhout also claimed that he didn't go down to watch the jail transfer. He said he hung around Fritz' office instead.But why? It wasn't his office. It was Fritz' office. Bookhout didn't have an office there. And why wasn't he interested in watching the jail transfer? He was interested in everything else that Oswald did. 

Bookhout said when word arrived that Oswald had been shot, he went down there, and he got to see Oswald being loaded into the ambulance. But then, without explaining why, he said that he did not go to Parkland Hospital. Why not? Again, he had been sticking to Oswald like glue for two days. And now he wasn't interested in learning Oswald's fate? 

It isn't credible. On the other hand, if he was the garage shooter and he lied about being up in Fritz' office at the time, then we can understand why he would want to deny having been present. And note that there is ample footage of Oswald being loaded into the ambulance where you don't see Bookhout in the vicinity. So he appears to have lied about that, too.

Immediately following the assassination, James Bookhout took off work from the FBI for a full year. He was granted an extended leave of absence, which you might describe as a very long, paid vacation. There are no images of him from the assassination, nor after the assassination or for the rest of his life. And when he died in 2009, no images of him were published. Here is his obituary:

He seems to have had a photograph-avoidance complex. We doubt anybody else was as "camera sky" as James Bookhout--other than the assassins in Dealey Plaza, of course.

And remember that we have established independently that Jack Ruby was not the shooter. But we have evidence that Oswald knew the shooter, which is an inference from his having glanced at the shooter as though he knew him:

It's unlikely that Oswald would have looked at a stranger that way. He knew the man who would shoot him. And James Bookhout was the one he had spent the most time with the preceding two days--even more than Fritz because, between interviews, Fritz turned Oswald over to his detectives to take him wherever. He didn't follow him around, but Bookhout did. Recall the image in the hallway:

There you have Oswald talking--in a very friendly manner--to James Bookhout.

Once you rule Ruby out, and you can, there is no one else the shooter could have been but James Bookhout. And think about the implications. If a U.S. government agent shot Lee Harvey Oswald, how could it not be the case that the assassination of President John F. Kennedy was under government control?

Could there be a more important development in JFK assassination research than this? It has the potential to refashion the JFK landscape and decimate "the official account" of the assassination. The 53rd observance of his death is only weeks away. What better way to affirm the conspiracy and the cover up than to acknowledge that the man who shot Lee Oswald was in fact not Jack Ruby but an FBI Agent named "James Bookhout"? 

Ralph Cinque, a chiropractor by profession, has been instrumental in securing the identification of Lee Oswald as "the man in the doorway" by emphasizing that his height, weight, build and clothing were the key rather than his facial features. He is also the founder of the Oswald Innocence Campaign.

Jim Fetzer, a former Marine Corps officer and McKnight Professor Emeritus at the University of Minnesota Duluth, has published extensively on the death of JFK and has chaired or co-chaired five national conferences on the conspiracy and cover up in the assassination of our 35th president.