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The Magic Bullet, the Zapruder Film, and the Shot That Split History
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Six seconds, three shots, one nearly pristine bullet — and sixty years of argument that still hasn't ended. This episode breaks down the physical evidence at the heart of the JFK assassination: the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle, the magic bullet, and what the Zapruder film actually shows.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
There are exactly six seconds in question. Six seconds of sound and motion in a public plaza in Dallas, Texas, on a Friday afternoon in November nineteen sixty-three.
The motorcade route through downtown Dallas wasn't unusual by the standards of the time. Presidential visits were public events, and the Secret Service selected a path that would move the president's car through the heart of the city before reaching the Trade Mart for a luncheon.
In March of nineteen sixty-three, a man calling himself A. Hidell sent a mail-order coupon to a firearms dealer and purchased a Mannlicher-Carcano rifle, serial number C two seven six six.
The Commission's reconstruction required that bullet to enter Kennedy's upper back, exit through his throat, then strike Connally in the back, exit his chest, pass through his wrist, and lodge in his thigh. The trajectory works mathematically if you account for the relative positions of the two men and the angle from the sixth floor.
Abraham Zapruder was standing on a concrete pedestal near the grassy knoll, filming the motorcade with a home movie camera. He captured everything.
Oswald left the Book Depository before police sealed the exits. He walked several blocks, caught a bus, took a cab to his rooming house in Oak Cliff, retrieved a handgun, and left again.
The Warren Commission was appointed by President Lyndon Johnson within a week of the assassination. Chief Justice Earl Warren led it.
Fourteen years later, Congress tried again. The House Select Committee on Assassinations convened in the late nineteen seventies and revisited the physical evidence with new tools.
Here's where the case genuinely stands, stripped of speculation. Oswald owned the rifle.
What makes this case so resistant to resolution isn't a lack of evidence. It's a surplus of contested evidence filtered through institutional failures, damaged recordings, degraded memories, and two official investigations that couldn't agree.
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