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

 This is in response to Dale Bochte. If Oswald wasn't shot in the garage during the Spectacle (and he wasn't) what happened to him? Was he shot afterwards, or was he scurried away and allowed to go on living?

We'll start with this image of Oswald making eye contact with James Bookhout in the garage seconds before the Spectacle began. I think he was communicating, "I'm ready."

Oswald was definitely shot and killed, just not during the Spectacle. The Oswald that was brought to Parkland Hospial, near death, was really him. They have never shown us any real pictures of him moribund, and I think it's because he must have looked so ghastly that it might have generated sympathy for him. Just think: doctors gave him a total body transfusion. They actually transfused more than that. So, they considered him exsanguinated, which means totally bled out. He would have looked ghastily, white as a sheet.

When my son was in high school, his tennis partner died in a car crash. Drunk, the boy had slammed his race car into a telephone pole going over 100 miles an hour. It happened very close to their home in the country, and when his father got to the wreck, he was struck by his son's ghastly appearance because his aorta had ruptured and he had bled out. The boy was 17 years old, and really, he was a nice kid. It was only when he drank that he got wild. It involved a high speed car chase by the police. They provoked him to drive that fast, and it went to court.

And it also went into my film, My Stretch Of Texas Ground, when the Sheriff was arguing with the County Attorney about it.

And if you haven't seen My Stretch Of Texas Ground, you really should. It is a great film, the only anti-war feature film of the 21st century. It's a gripping, clash of titans story between Sheriff Joe Haladin and ace assassin Abdul Latif Hassan. It won many awards, and you can watch it for free on Tubi:

My Stretch Of Texas Ground

But, back to Oswald, the bullet ruptured his aorta, his vena cava, and his superior mesenteric artery, which is another large artery. It also went through his pancreas and his right kidney, which are very vascular organs. So, the last image of Oswald, which is him on a stretcher clenching his fist, is surely fake; a reenactment. An exsanguinated man would not be able to make a fist. And how could Michael Hardin, the ambulance driver, be pushing that stretcher if Detective Charles Dhority is clutching Oswald's hand? Isn't this a little overdramatic? And note the absence of Harold Wayne Wolfe, who was Hearden's assistant. He wasn't there for the reenactment. Maybe he was unwilling to do it. And note that both Hearden and Wolfe, who were both young men, died in the 1970s. That rattles me- a lot. If they'd kill them, they'd kill me.

But, when and where was Oswald shot? I believe he was shot in the jail office right after the Spectacle. They needed to get a bullet in him ASAP to give him time to bleed out. It he died in the ambulance and was pronounced dead at the hospital, that would have been perfect. The crucial thing was that he not survive.

So, the sooner they planted the bullet in him the better.

Oswald was part of the ruse. They must have told him,

"Lee, we believe you that you are innocent, that you are an intelligence asset of the FBI and CIA and that you know people who will vouch for you. The problem is that, no matter what we say, millions of people will still think you did it, and some of them may come gunning for you. It only takes one to kill you. So, the best way to protect you is to fake your death. That way, no one will be gunning for you. We'll just have to funnel you away, keep you under wraps, and then change your look and get you a new identity. Eventually, you'll be reunited with your family, but right now, we have to establish that Lee Harvey Oswald is dead."

Oswald believed them, and he went along with the ruse. I believe he was shot in the Jail Office after he was scurried inside. He moved on his own power. They didn't have to carry him since he wasn't really shot. But, they had to shield him- from eyes and cameras. Once inside, someone probably jabbed him with a hypodermic needle containing a sedative, which knocked him out. Then they took him to a room that was sound-proofed, and then using a 38 with a silencer, they placed the bullet with surgical precision. I suspect they took the shot with him recumbent, lying down.

There is a story element that supports this hypothesis. J. Edgar Hoover wrote a document afterwards damning the Dallas Police for their incompetence. (It was all a ruse because Hoover was in on it himself. The killling of Oswald was a joint DPD/FBI operation.) But, the story element is that Hoover observed that for 2 minutes, the Dallas Police kept the doors closed and would not allow press into the Jail Office. Then after that, they let in the local WFAA team but no one else. We never saw Oswald on the floor. We see policeman standing around looking down at him, but we never see him.

I'll leave you with this image of Oswald being rolled out of the jail office back in the garage heading for the ambulance to be loaded. At the top left, you see James Bookhout, back in his own identity after having performed as the Garage Shooter during the Spectacle. Notice that he's looking down. It's because he's nervous. He knows there are cameras. Why didn't Bookhout go to the hospital? He followed Oswald around like his shadow the whole weekend, so why didn't he follow him to the hospital? It's because he didn't want to be seen. Do you know how many images we have of Bookhout after this? Zero. Even in his obituary in 2009, there was no image of him.