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

It started when I realized that there were NO images of James Bookhout from the JFK assassination. What? How could that be when he followed Oswald around like his shadow the whole weekend? Then, I discovered that there were no images of James Bookhout, period. What? Alarms went off in my head. "He's fleeing the interview! He's fleeing the interview!"

I'm a filmmaker, and that's a reference to a great movie, Fargo, by the Coen Brothers, when the nifty, wily, pregnant female sheriff realizes that William H Macy's character was the culprit. Two of my films are streaming for free on Tubi. My Stretch of Texas Ground is the first and only anti-war feature film of the 21st century. You really should watch it because it will pull you in. 

https://tubitv.com/search/My%20Stretch%20of%20Texas%20Ground 

But, returning to James Bookhout, my next thought was to check his obituary for an image of him there. There wasn't one!

https://obits.dallasnews.com/us/obituaries/dallasmorningnews/name/james-bookhout-obituary?id=24232344

So, that started me on a dogged search for an image of James Bookhout. After general online searching failed, I turned to Ancestry dot com. I tried using their search functions, but that didn't find anything. So, I contacted their help desk and explained the situation, and they suggested that I hire their researchers to search for me. So, I did. It's just money, right? And they found something. What they found were his school yearbooks, starting with the one from Woodrow Wilson High School in Dallas, where he was in ROTC, and it went through his graduation from SMU law school in 1937.

Now, before I show you what they found, there's something else I found, on a lark. It was from a 1993 NBC 30 year retrospective on the killing of Oswald. It included a shot of "Ruby" huddled with detectives next to the elevator on the 3rd floor of the Police Department. This, of course, was after the Oswald shooting. The detectives were Boyd Webb and Richard Sims, both of whom did security for Lyndon Johnson whenever he came to Dallas. They had done it for him that previous April, and there is a picture of the three of them together (LBJ, Webb, and Sims) that I have seen. But, in the picture I'm talking about, the detectives look concerned and troubled that the picture was happening, whilst "Ruby" looks calm as a cucumber. You would never know that he was in a scuffle with police officers just a few minutes before. But, what jumped out at me right away was that he was not Jack Ruby, and I can't imagine that anyone of sound mind would think that he was Jack Ruby. 

So, I made a collage of James Bookhout from 1937, his law school graduation photo, with the photo of the Shooter from the NBC retrospective.  And this is what I got:

Now, keep in mind that both images were altered and manipulated. For instance, the wavy eyebrows on the left aren't even anatomical. In other words, it's impossible for anyone to have eyebrows like that. So, that was added. And on the right, they did all kinds of stuff. They blackened out his eyes. If you saw the whole photo, you'd see the eyes of the detectives showed up fine. Clear as a bell. So, why shouldn't his? Then, they created a deviation in his nose, like it was broken. And then there was the general blurring of the image. But still, that is the Garage Shooter on the right: the same round face and short neck, and you can see in the whole image that he was a short man. But, he was NOT Jack Ruby. Ruby's face was NOT round like that. Ruby's neck was NOT short like that. Ruby's nose wasn't narrow like that. But, those two men, the young and the middle-aged, are the same man. Any doctor worth his salt will tell you that that is the same guy, separated by 26 years of time. Look at the identical spacing of the eyes. Look at the same narrow nose (although, again, they put a little deviation in the Shooter's nose just to deceive). There are the same relatively slight lips of equal width; the same short neck; and the same fullness of the face. That IS the same man. And if you try to deny it, then you need to explain why Jack Ruby should look so much like young James Bookhout. 

That 1993 NBC retrospective on the Oswald shooting is no longer on Youtube, and I'm not surprised. But, the genie is out of the bottle, and there is no getting her back in. James W. Bookhout WAS the Garage Shooter of Lee Harvey Oswald, and this proves it.  Now, go watch My Stretch of Texas Ground because you will be enthralled.