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The Sniper's Nest: How Oswald Got to That Window
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Before the shots rang out in Dealey Plaza, a mail-order rifle, a fake identity, and a casual conversation about a job opening set everything in motion. This episode traces the physical evidence that placed Lee Harvey Oswald on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository on November 22, 1963.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Most people come to this story backwards. They start with the gunshots, the blood, the motorcade frozen in chaos.
In March of nineteen sixty-three, a man named A. Hidell mailed an order form to a firearms dealer in Chicago.
The rifle being purchased is one piece. Oswald being employed at the Book Depository is another.
By twelve-thirty that afternoon, multiple witnesses in Dealey Plaza looked up at the southeast corner window on the sixth floor of the Depository and saw a man with a rifle. Howard Brennan, positioned across the street on a low concrete wall, described what he saw clearly enough that his account was used as the basis for a police description broadcast within minutes of the shooting.
The rifle, the nest, the cartridge cases, the prints. That's the physical case.
The magic bullet theory, more formally called the single bullet theory, is the most debated forensic claim in the entire case. The Warren Commission needed it to be true.
Fifteen years after Dallas, a different kind of evidence entered the picture. In nineteen seventy-eight, the House Select Committee on Assassinations retrieved recordings from the Dallas Police Department's dispatch system.
Whatever the acoustic record says, Oswald didn't stay in the building to be found. He left before police sealed the exits.
Here's what the physical record establishes without serious challenge. Oswald purchased the rifle.
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