One of the reasons so many researchers doubt the authenticity of the backyard rifle photos is that the official account of their alleged discovery and of the discovery of the camera contains suspicious claims and odd contradictions. Here are some of those claims and conntradictions:
* The Dallas Police Department (DPD) claimed they found two negatives of the backyard photos in Ruth Paine’s garage, but the DPD only gave one negative to the Warren Commission (WC), and the other negative disappeared without explanation. Can you imagine how a police department could “misplace” one of the two most important negatives in the history of crime?
* The backyard photos were not found until the day after the assassination. Somehow the multiple waves of DPD officers and federal agents who searched Ruth Paine’s home hours after the assassination “missed” them.
* 133-C-Dees, the backyard photo that Roscoe White’s widow Geneva Dees gave to the Senate Intelligence Committee in 1976, was judged by the HSCA PEP to be a first-generation print, which would mean the DPD must have had the picture’s negative. However, that negative has also gone “missing.”
* The pose of the backyard figure in 133-C-Dees is different from the poses in the two other backyard photos, yet we learned in 1992 that one week after the assassination, DPD officers took backyard rifle photos in Oswald’s backyard, during which one of the officers struck the same pose seen in 133-C-Dees. We know this because some of the photos from this photo shoot were released in 1992.
* Robert Hester, a photographer who worked at the National Photo Lab in Dallas and who helped process assassination-related film for the Dallas police and the FBI on 11/22, reported in a 1970 interview that he saw an FBI agent with a transparency of one of the backyard pictures on 11/22, which was the day before the police said they "found" the photos. Moreover, one of the backyard photos Hester processed showed no figure in the picture, just like one of the DPD prints that were discovered in 1992. Obviously, Hester could not have known about the DPD print that shows a silhouette instead of the Oswald figure because it was not released until 1992.
* The Imperial Reflex camera, the camera that was allegedly used to take the backyard photos, was not included in the inventories of Oswald’s possessions seized by the DPD.
* The Imperial Reflex camera was not “found” until nearly three months after the assassination.
* On February 24, 1964, Oswald’s brother Robert gave the Imperial Reflex camera to law enforcement authorities. Robert claimed that he did not hand over “this cheap camera” sooner “because he had never been asked for it previously” and because “it had never occurred to him that anyone would be interested in the camera.” But federal agents had asked Robert about his Lee’s cameras and showed him pictures of cameras on February 16.
* Perhaps realizing that Robert Oswald’s story sounded suspicious (assuming it even was his story and not a story that he was coerced into telling), many months after the assassination, the FBI produced a report that claimed that Detective John McCabe of the Irving Police Department saw the Imperial Reflex camera in a gray metal box in Ruth Paine’s garage on 11/23, but that McCabe did not take the camera because he did not think it was important! Right, so none of the waves of police and federal agents who searched that garage on 11/22 and 11/23 saw the camera, but McCabe saw it, and then ignored it.
* The gray box in which McCabe belatedly claimed he saw the Imperial Reflex camera on 11/23 had already been itemized by the FBI. The FBI itemization said the box contained 13 books and some random items—no camera was listed. The 11/23 DPD inventory of the gray box likewise did not mention a camera.
* Police officers and detectives gave conflicting stories about who found the backyard rifle photos (see Meagher’s detailed discussion on this in Accessories After the Fact, pp. 200-209).
* The WC described the Imperial Reflex camera as “a relatively inexpensive, fixed-focus, one-shutter speed, box-type camera, made in the United States” (WCR 593). Even that was being generous. The camera had a cheap plastic body and a basic set of flimsy elements within. It was one of the cheapest, most basic cameras you could buy at the time.
* Incidentally, regarding the HSCA PEP’s admission that there are only “small,” “very small,” “slight” differences in the distances between objects in the backgrounds of the backyard photos, we should pause to consider how those photos would have been taken with the Imperial Reflex camera:
The camera’s viewer was on top of the camera, so the camera had to be held at mid-body rather than held to the eye. Moreover, in order to snap a picture, one had to push down on a lever rather than simply press a button. These facts make it all the more impossible that the backyard photos could have been taken in the manner alleged. Even a skilled photographer could not have used this camera without a tripod and produced pictures that contained only incredibly tiny differences in the distances between objects in the backgrounds.
* Jeff Carter, a filmmaker and audio technician, notes that none of the Oswald-taken photos taken during Oswald’s time in Dallas have the dimensions and borders of 133-A and 133-B:
From the record, excluding the backyard photos, there appear to be only six Oswald family-type snapshots from the first months of 1963 and, from the record, very few others from Oswald’s entire stay in Dallas in 1962-63. . . .
None of the photos in the record from this time period, including the photos of the Walker house attributed to Oswald, have the dimensions or borders of the backyard photos known as 133-A and 133-B. The “drugstore” finishing is unique to these photos. (https://kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/a-new-look-at-the-enigma-of-the-backyard-photographs-parts-1-3)
* A note on British photographic expert Malcolm Thompson and his “deferring” to the HSCA PEP on the authenticity of the backyard photos: First of all, Thompson was indeed a genuine forensic photography expert. He ran the Police Forensic Science Laboratory Identification Bureau for 25 years. He was also a president of the Evidence Photographers International Council and a fellow of the Institute of Incorporated Photographers, the Royal Photographic Society, and the Institute of Professional Investigators.
Lone-gunman theorists usually overstate the degree to which Thompson deferred to the HSCA PEP. Thompson told the PEP that he still believed that the backyard figure’s chin was “suspiciously different” from Oswald’s chin. He also said that he doubted that even computer analysis (on which the PEP relied heavily) could detect a fake photo that was a photocopied composite:
Thomson did, however, reserve his opinion that the chin in the backyard pictures was suspiciously different from the chin that he had observed in the Dallas arrest photographs of Oswald. He also remained skeptical as to the ability of a computer to detect a photocopied composite photograph. (6 HSCA 177)
So, in other words, Thompson told the PEP that they did a great and thorough job and that he deferred to their conclusions about fakery, but in the next breath he said that he rejected the PEP’s explanation for the most glaring indication of fakery in the photos and that he doubted that computer analysis could detect a composite picture that had been photocopied.
If anyone wants to read the extensive interview that Thompson gave on the backyard photos, I include the entire interview in the section on the photos in my article “Faulty Evidence: Problems with the Case Against Lee Harvey Oswald” and in chapter 5 of my free online book Hasty Judgment:
https://miketgriffith.com/files/faulty.htmhttps://miketgriffith.com/files/hastyjudgmentbook.pdf* Finally, there are three issues that the PEP simply ignored: the fact that the ring visible on the backyard figure’s left hand in 133-B is not visible in 133-A (so he took off his ring for one picture but left it on for the others?); the fact that the rifle sling in the backyard photos is a rope sling, whereas the alleged murder weapon had a leather sling; and the fact that the backyard figure is wearing clothing that was never found among Oswald’s possessions.
