Thought experiment!
Imagine if things had gone down differently in the Depository building that day:
----photographic evidence existed proving that a man named Lee Harvey Oswald shot JFK from the sixth-floor window
----after LHO's escape from the building, the stabbed body of fellow employee Jack Dougherty was found in the storage room at the front of the first floor
----only one real mystery remained in the case:
Where was Jack Dougherty at the time of the assassination? Had he been upstairs helping LHO, only to be betrayed by him when the two of them got downstairs?
----LNers argue that LHO acted alone and that Dougherty must have been downstairs somewhere at the time of the shooting; LHO must have had an altercation with him just before making his exit
----CTers argue that Dougherty was with LHO on the sixth floor
Now, for this thought experiment to work, we must also imagine that LHO was black, and the only known photo of Jack Dougherty is this:
THEN! A figure is spotted standing alone on the west side of the doorway in two sets of footage taken at the time of, and just after, the shooting:
This figure is dubbed 'Prayer Man'.
The LNers get excited. Could this possibly be the elusive proof they have been seeking all these years that Jack Dougherty was NOT with LHO up on the sixth floor?
The CTers go crazy. The statements of every single Depository employee are carefully gone through in the hope of finding an alternative candidate for Prayer Man. The photographic record is painstakingly scrutinised. Relatives of long-deceased employees are even contacted in the hope of finding a viable fit.
Result? The more information comes in, the worse things get for the CTers. No even halfway realistic candidate other than Jack Dougherty remains.
The LNers smile in triumph. A hard core of fanatical CTers, however, refuses to move past their state of denial. They throw ever more irrational objections at what has become perfectly obvious to everyone else: Dougherty is Prayer Man and so could not have been with LHO on the sixth floor. Weirdly, these reality-denying CTers are joined----led, even-----by a peculiar cabal of LNers who refuse to accept that Dougherty is Prayer Man for no better reason than that a) this would destroy their own pet theory of where Dougherty was at the time of the assassination, b) they don't, in their heart of hearts, want the Dougherty mystery to be solved as it would deprive them of their favorite hobby.
Mutatis mutandis, friends, the above describes the absurdity of the current Prayer Man 'impasse'.
