"On The Trail Of The Assassins"
by Jim Garrisson.
~snip~
"...The bullets found in Officer Tippit's body and the cartridges found
at the scene of his murder yielded further evidence of the frameup. The
Dallas coroner had conducted an autopsy on Tippit's body and had
removed four bullets from it. Three of them, it turned out, were
copper-coated and had been manufactured by the Winchester Western
company. The fourth, however, was a lead bullet made by the
Remington-Peters company
This was awfully strange, I thought, because bullets were never sold
in mixed lots. Gun users bought either a box of all Winchesters or one
of all Remingtons, but not some of each. The discovery of two different
makes of bullets in Tippit's body indicated to me and would indicate
to most experienced police officers a likelihood that two different
gunmen did the shooting. This was consistent with the eyewitness
testimony of Acquilla Clemons and Mr. and Mrs. Wright.
When a homicide occurs, it is standard operating procedure for the
police homicide division to send off the bullets and cartridges to the
F.B.I. Iaboratory in Washington, D.C. for study and possible identi-
fication of the gun that fired them. In this case, the Dallas homicide
unit, understandably shy about advertising the coroner's discovery,
sent only one bullet to the F.B.I. Iab, informing the Bureau that this
was the only bullet found in Tippit's body.
To everyone's surprise, the Bureau lab found that the bullet did not
match Oswald's revolver. When it discovered this oddity, the Warren
Commission was inspired to look for other bullets that might match
up better. Although the Commission never received a copy of Tippit's
autopsy report, somehow it found out that four bullets rather than
merely one had been found in Tippit's body. The ordinarily incu-
rious Commission asked the F.B.I. to inquire about the three missing
bullets, and they were found after four months gathering dust in
the files of the Dallas homicide division.
These bullets were sent to the F.B.I. Iab. But Special Agent Court-
landt Cunningham, the ballistics expert from the lab, testified before
the Commission that the lab was unable to conclude that any of the
four bullets found in Tippit's body had been fired by the revolver taken
from Lee Oswald..."
~snip~
