A few points in reply to various comments about the rifle palmprint:
* Keep in mind that Hoover’s September 4 memo, which claimed that irregularities from the rifle barrel could be seen in the palmprint lift, came a week after Liebeler’s August 28 memo. After Liebeler wrote the August 28 memo expressing doubts about the palmprint, Rankin wrote to the FBI on September 1 requesting additional information about the palmprint. Hoover’s September 4 memo was written in reply to Rankin’s request.
* We know from an internal FBI memo released in 1978 that before Rankin sent his September 1 memo to the FBI, he warned the FBI on August 28 that there was “a serious question in the minds of the Commission” about whether or not the palmprint was a “legitimate latent palm impression removed from the rifle barrel or whether it was obtained from some other source,” and that “this matter needs to be resolved.”
* In his September 4 reply, Hoover claimed that FBI “laboratory examiners” determined that the palmprint came from the rifle barrel because they said that irregularities on the rifle barrel could be seen in the palmprint lift. Let us state a few obvious facts about this claim:
-- The unnamed lab examiners were never called to testify about this alleged finding.
-- Hoover’s memo was not a sworn statement, and the lab examiners provided no sworn statement either.
-- Hoover did not address the issue of how and when the palmprint allegedly got on the rifle before it was supposedly lifted.
-- The WC made no effort to independently verify Hoover’s claim.
-- Vincent Scalice, the HSCA fingerprint expert who claimed he examined the original palmprint lift, said nothing about finding impressions of irregularities from the barrel on the palmprint lift. Not one word.
* Sylvia Meagher’s critique of Hoover’s claim is one of the best ever written. I quote a sizable part of it in my article “Was Oswald’s Palmprint Planted on the Alleged Murder Weapon?” Rather than quote it here, I refer interested readers to my article:
https://miketgriffith.com/files/palmprint.htm* But let us assume for the sake of argument that the palmprint came from the rifle barrel. This would not automatically prove the print to be incriminating. Why? Because the FBI sent the rifle back to Dallas on 11/24, so the rifle was available in Dallas from 11/24 until Lt. Day handed it over for the second and final time to the FBI on 11/26. And we know that FBI agents took fingerprints and palmprints from Oswald’s body in the morgue on 11/24, a fact that Agent Drain found baffling and suspicious.
* Why did the FBI send the rifle back to Dallas on 11/24 only take it again on 11/26? Why? What was up with that? Why send it back for two days and then pick it up again? Why? Because Oswald’s palmprint needed to be planted on it?
* The fact that FBI agents spent a long time with Oswald’s body on 11/24 and took prints from it is well documented. This suspicious excursion was reported in the local press (Fort Worth Press), and the funeral home director, Paul Groody, confirmed the strange visit in multiple interviews.
* Therefore, at some point between the rifle’s return to Dallas on 11/24 and Oswald’s burial the next day, the rifle could have been taken to the morgue and the barrel could have been pressed and rolled against Oswald’s palm (although, as Meagher noted, Latona gave no indication that the palmprint he examined had any of the disruptions and omissions that one would see in a palmprint created by a hand holding a rifle barrel).
* Another way the palmprint could have been planted on the rifle barrel would have been to take a fresh Oswald palmprint lift and place it on the barrel. Forensic experts have known since the 1930s that lifts can be placed on other surfaces, not just on fingerprint cards. The differences between a real print and a planted one are not always readily apparent, and sometimes the differences can only be detected by microscopic examination:
Later we learned that a genuine latent impression could be picked up bodily and transplanted by means of a surprisingly simple transfer material. This looked formidable at first, but on examining the transferred impressions microscopically it was discovered that they differed in two aspects from the genuine. . . . .
While the problem of planting forged finger-prints at the site of crime is probably not quite so simple as Wehde implies, we have no doubt that in practice it could be done so skillfully as to escape detection and permit the forgeries to pass for genuine. (C.D. Lee, “Fingerprints Can Be Forged,” Police Science, Winter 1934, volume 25, pp. 672-673, available at https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2507&context=jclc)
* Interestingly, Agent Drain suggested that the palmprint was planted on the rifle by taking one of Oswald’s palmprint cards and putting the impression on the rifle: “You could take the print off Oswald's card and put it on the rifle. Something like that happened” (Henry Hurt,
Reasonable Doubt, p. 109).
