Robert Oswald, "Lee" pages 224-227:
While I am ready at any time to be convinced that the Warren commission was wrong, I have not yet read or heard or seen any evidence that has shaken my conviction that Lee and Lee alone fired the shots that woulded Governor Connally and killed the President of the United States.
I base my own judgment largely on the physical evidence and on the words spoken to me by Lieutenant Cunningham and Henry Wade in the first twenty-four hours after the assassination. Cunningham's account of Lee's strange behavior at the Texas Theatre and reports by both Cunningham and Wade of what various eyewitnesses had said made me impatient to hear some explanation from Lee. When I saw him on Saturday, he offered no explanation.
Despite the blunders by the Dallas police and the errors and omissions of the Warren Commission, I am convinced:
1. Lee ordered the 6.5-millimeter Mannlicher-Carcano from Klein's Sporting Goods Company in Chicago in March, 1963. Handwriting experts told the Commission that the mail-order form and the money order were in Lee's handwriting.
2. Lee received the rifle. It was mailed to Post Office Box 2915, Dallas, and this was the last address Lee gave to me for his mail. While he denied that he owned any rifle, Marina's testimony and the photographs found in the Paine garage on the afternoon of November 23 prove that he did own one.
3. The rifle was taken from the Paine garage sometime before November 22, 1963. I believe it was taken by Lee when he made his unusual Thursday evening visit to the Paine home on November 21, 1963.
4. Lee did have a package with him when he went to the Texas School Book Depository on Friday morning, November 22, 1963. If the package actually contained curtain rods - as he told Buell Wesley Frazier, the neighbor who drove him to work - then those curtain rods have never turned up after the most intensive search of the Depository building.
5. Lee did have the general opportunity to shoot at the President without being seen by anyone else at the Depository. charles Givens, who was working with a floor-laying crew on the sixth floor, saw Lee on the fifth floor around 11:50 or 11:55 a.m. on November 22, 1963. Lee was then carrying a clipboard which was found ten days after the assassination hidden on the sixth floor. No one has ever come forward with any testimony that proves that Lee was not in that general part of the Depository building at the time of the assassination.
6. The 6.5-millimeter Mannlicher-Carcano, serial number C2766, was found on the sixth floor of the Depository building about 1:22 p.m. on November 22, 1963. The rifle still had one live round in it. About ten minutes earlier three empty cartridge cases had been discovered near the window in the southeast corner of the sixth floor. Unfortunately, an officer - Deputy Constable Seymour Weitzman - said the weapon was a 7.65 Mauser bolt-action rifle. He made that statement before he had taken the trouble to examine the weapon closely, and he was wrong - as he later admitted. Actually, there are certain resemblances between the 7.65 Mauser bolt-action rifle and the 6.5 Mannlicher-Carcano, and under ordinary circumstances the officer's casual statement would have been treated as an unfortunate but unimportant error - as though he had said a suspect was "about 5 feet 9 inches" when he was actually 5 feet 8 inches. The error Weitzman made does not alter the fact: Less than an hour after the assassination, the Dallas police had found in the Texas School Book Depository Building the rifle mailed to Lee from Chicago about seven months earlier.
7. Lee did leave the Depository building almost immediately after the assassination.
8. Lee did return to the rooming house at 1026 North Beckley about one o'clock on November 22, 1963, and left three or four minutes later.
9. Police Officer J. D. Tippit was shot near the intersection of Tenth and Patton, a few blocks from the rooming house, at approximately 1:16 p.m.
10. When Lee was arrested at the Texas Theatre, about eight blocks from the spot where Tippit was shot, between 1:45 and 1:50 p.m., he had a Smith & Wesson .38 Special caliber revolver, serial number V510210. Four cartridge cases found a few minutes later in the shrubbery at the corner of Tenth and Patton by three eyewitnesses had ben fired from that particular pistol, according to expert testimony.
11. Lee had ordered that revolver in January or February, 1963, from Seaport Traders, Inc., of Los Angeles. He had used the alias "A. J. Hidell," and had used the same address he gave me and later used in ordering the rifle - Box 2915, Dallas, Texas.
12. Five different people picked out Lee as the man they had seen shoot J. D. Tippit or run from the scene of the shooting, emptying his revolver as he ran.
I do not believe any one of these twelve statements can be disproved, and I find only one explanation for this sequence of events: Lee shot President Kennedy, Governor Connally, and Officer J. D. Tippit. I kept my mind open for other explanations as long as I could, and I am ready at any time to be proven wrong. But those who chip away at details in the twenty-six volumes issued by the Warren Commission seem to me to accomplish nothing unless they can offer some alternate explanation for this series of actions by Lee between January, 1963, and November 22, 1963.
Robert's list is not a complete list, but is what he believed was enough to convince him. He is, like most lone gunman believers that I have encountered, "ready at any time to be proven wrong." It has been over 59-years and still nothing...
