Oswald Was In Doorway After All! with Richard Hooke

Those who have been following the “JFK Special: Oswald was in the doorway, after all!”series are familiar with much of the evidence that has established that Lee Harvey Oswald, the alleged assassin of JFK, actually had a cast iron alibi, because he was captured in a famous photograph taken by AP photographer James “Ike” Altgens, which appeared in most papers the following day, but in some cases, such as The Sheboygan Press, which is now a morning paper but was then published in the afternoon–assuming that this is the actual issue that was published and not a substitute–appeared on Friday, 22 November 1963, the day of the assassination itself:

Because Altgens shot a sequence of photographs that day, they are commonly referred to by their number in the sequence.  Thus, the photograph we have been discussing and analyzing, which is seen on the left, is also known as “Altgens6”, while another photograph, which is also attributed to him, known as “Altgens7”, was published along side of it in The Sheboygan Press.  Although it is not widely known, Altgens7, which shows Clint Hill on the running board at the back of the limousine, appears to be a fabricated photograph.

By Clint Hill’s own testimony, written and spoken, for nearly 50 years now, he had stepped onto the back step, pushed Jackie down, and laid across both of their bodies, while peering into a fist-sized blow-out at the back of JFK’s head, which in turn caused him to turn to his colleagues and give them a “thumbs down”, all before the limousine had reached the Triple Underpass, whose shadow can been seen in Altgens7.  That he was lying across their bodies was confirmed by Roy Kellerman in his testimony to the Warren Commission:

Now Winston Lawson was in the pilot car driven by Chief of Police Jesse Curry and was already ahead of the limousine around the Triple Underpass at the time.  So when Roy Kellerman describes seeing Clint Hill “lying right across the trunk of car with Mrs. Kennedy on the left rear”, given what we know from Clint Hill himself, he was lying across their bodies, with JFK beneath him and Jackie to the left of the rear seat.  But that means he was not still on the back steps of the limousine and that Altgens7 is a fabricated photograph.

That Clint Hill is never shown prone, moreover, is further proof that the home movies of the assassination were revised to remove the limo stop, where William Greer, the driver, had pulled the limo to the left and to a halt to make sure that JFK would be killed, during a brief 3-4 or more seconds interval, he was hit in the back of the head and fell forward, but Jackie eased him back, where she was looking him in the face when he was hit in the right temple with a frangible bullet that blew his brains out the back of his head to the left/rear.

That some rather obscure newspapers, like The Sheboygan Press, should have run Altgens6 when major newspapers did not until the next day or even later has raised the suspicion in my mind that some of those issues may have been redone and replaced for an occasion like this one.  Since there was enough time for Altgens7 to have been fabricated, however, there should be no serious doubt that there was enough time to also tweak Altgens6, where the proof that we have adduced that Altgens6 was indeed altered has become simply overwhelming.

The reason for explaining how we know that Altgens7 appears to be a fabricated photo–which had to be faked because, once the removed the limo stop, which was such an obvious indication of Secret Service complicity in setting up JFK for the hit–there was no time for Clint Hill’s activities.  But many witnesses had seen him climb up on the limousine, so they kept that part in and removed other events, including Officer James Chaney, who was riding on the right/rear, motoring forward to notify Chief Curry that the president had been shot.

This, of course, is far from the only indication that we have that the film has been faked, since the “flurry of shots” that Roy Kellerman described to the Warren Commission had to be removed as well.  Although there are some who want to insist that the time-line precluded the alteration of the Zapruder film, thanks to the brilliant work of Douglas Horne, we know much better today, where I have recently published his studies of the two events at the NPIC, where a film was brought there on Saturday, but its replacement was brought on Sunday.

One of the oddities of Altgens6, moreover, is that several of the Secret Service agents riding on the right-side of the Queen Mary, as the agents’ Cadillac limousine was affectionately called, were looking toward the doorway of the Texas School Book Depository.  Since we have more than 15 indications of Secret Service complicity in setting JFK up for the hit, they may well have known that the designated “patsy” was Lee Harvey Oswald, which might easily have drawn their attention, when they observed him peering out of the doorway of the building.

That is not take for granted that it was Lee, but the evidence we have marshaled in our earlier studies, “JFK Special”, “JFK Special 2”, and “JFK Special 3”, makes that inference a highly plausible one.  The would-be alleged assassin would have had a cast iron alibi had he been featured in this photograph, which was taken at the time of the shooting.  Insofar as the photograph shows signs of alteration, when the only reason to have altered it would have been if someone had been there who should not have been, the circumstantial case is highly plausible.

Moreover, notes from Lee’s interrogation by Homicide Detective Will Fritz showed that, when questioned about what he was doing during the motorcade, Lee told him he had been “out with Bill Shelley in front”, which makes a great deal of sense.  He had been observed in the lunch room by Carolyn Arnold as late as 12:25, he had already had his lunch, and it would have been most peculiar for him to have remained there while a motorcade carrying the President of the United States and his glamorous wife drove by, when he could walk a few steps and watch.

A conflict has now long endured over whether the man to the left/center is this photograph was Lee Harvey Oswald or a co-worker by the name of Billy Lovelady.  Notice several odd features right off the bat:  (1) to the right/front of the man in the doorway, to whom we shall refer as “Doorway Man” or, for short, “Doorman”, a figure has had his face obscured as well as his shirt.  Moreover, (2) a man to the left in this photo, who is wearing a Fedora hat, has his own face completely obscured by the presence of a child, who is wearing a wool cap and his mother.

That is not the least of the oddities here, since (3) half-way down Doorman’s torso, the half-face of a black man (by his right profile) extends out as though from the wall to cover that part of his shirt and body, while (4) his shoulder appears to be completely missing and his right arm appears to be abnormally long and extended in a most peculiar manner.  His right shoulder, moreover, (5) seems to be overlaid by the image of a man in a black tie, who simultaneously appears to be both in front of him and behind him, reminiscent of an Escher cube.

The first question to address, therefore, is whether Doorman more closely resembles Lee Oswald or Billy Lovelady.  Here are images of the both, with Lovelady on the left and Lee on the right, where Doorman is in between them.  Initially, most of us would probably suppose that, although it’s a close call, his face more closely resembles that of Billy Lovelady than it does the face of Lee Oswald.  That was even the conclusion of Oliver Stone, the director of “JFK”, when he gave the matter his professional consideration.  He thought it was Billy, too.

And that was even my conclusion when I first discovered the Fritz notes and that the man to Doorman’s right/front had had his face and shirt obscured.  I drew the inference Oswald’s face and shirt that had probably been taken out of the photo in “JFK: What we know now that we didn’t know then”.  But Ralph Cinque, a chiropractor experienced in dealing with bodies and clothing, convinced me the shirts and bodies outweighed the faces, where, unless Lovelady was wearing Lee’s shirt, Lee had to be Doorman.  Richard Hooke has summarized some of the key findings that support this opinion:

Although Billy reportedly confirmed that he was Doorman very early on, he would subsequently visit the FBI to show them the red-and-white vertically striped shirt he told them he had been wearing that day, which contradicted what had previously been reported.  The FBI, intriguigly, photographed him in his red-and-white vertically striped shirt and, in their formal report back to FBI Headquarters, duely reported both that he had been wearing this shirt but also that they had identified him as Doorman, which was inconsistent with their own evidence:

Richard has taken Billy’s report, which we believe to be true, and has compared it with the Altgens6, where anyone can see that Doorman is not wearing a red-and-white vertically striped shirt.  We infer, therefore, that, having been given explicit instructions to show that Lovelady was Doorman, they went as far as they could go by photographing him and then attributing to Billy Lovelady as having identified himself as Doorman, which no doubt circumvented the problem of having proven the opposite and not wanting to incur the wrath of J. Edgar Hoover, who ran the FBI with an iron hand:

So here you have a photograph of Billy Lovelady, wearing the shirt he said he had worn on 22 November 1963, which is obviously not the shirt being worn by Doorman; yet being cited here as having “immediately identified the picture of the individual on the far left side olf the doorway of the TSBD as being his photograph”.  That was an ingenious solution to an insuperable problem since now, if Edgar was not pleased with their work, they could attribute responsibility to Billy Lovelady himself rather than to themselves, even though they had to realize there was a problem here:

So Richard took the image where I had assumed Oswald’s face and shirt had been obscured and tweaked it by restoring Doorman’s missing left shoulder but also by introducing the image of a man in a red-and-white vertically striped shirt, which yielded an visual impression that was far less anomalous than the original but where multiple features remained unaccounted for.  Richard proved so adept at analyzing this photograph and offering suggestions for how it may have been rearranged I wanted to showcase his work–which I regard as quite brilliant–to show how it was probably done:

Another huge problem with Altgens6–and the strongest proof that it was altered–is the anomalous shoulder, which is at once missing and overlapped by the man with the black tie, who is ostensibly standing behind him.  One member of The Education Forum, where a battle has raged over these findings, which were bitterly contested, took his own photograph to show that it was possible to replicate Doorman’s pose, but as Larry Rivera shows here (on the left), that was only done by ignoring the extreme slope of what remained of the shoulder and would be impossible for anyone who has one:

But there can be no serious doubt that, for anyone with a clavicle, this position is anatomically impossible, where, in my opinion, none of those who were disputing our discoveries ever actually succeeded in showing we had anything wrong:

What could be a more stunning proof of the alteration of Altgens6 than that the most important figure is standing in a position that would be anatomically impossible unless he were missing one of his skeleton’s most important bones?  But Richard was not done yet, and began speculating on how that image itself could have been created using the figure we will call Black-Tie-Man.

Indeed, one more indication that Lee had been set up was that Bill Shelley did not vouch for him, after he told Will Fritz that he had been “out with Bill Shelley in front”.  Richard has also noticed that he may have been right where Lee said he had been–and why would Lee have said such a thing were it not true?  Shelley turns out to have been a member of the Civilian Air Patrol, which was founded by D. H. Byrd, the oil tycoon who owned the Texas School Book Depository, and Shelley had known Lee and David Ferrie in an earlier life.  He was almost certainly one of those keeping tabs on Lee.

What Richard realized–in a series of steps–was, first, that Black-Tie-Man had been deployed to conceal more of the shirt that Lee had been wearing, just as the half-face of the black man at mid-torso had been used to do the same, where, in that case, it was the open lower part of the distinctive shirt he had been wearing, which was completely different from the checkered shirt that those responsible were using as a replacement.  It was not the red-and-white vertically stripped shirt that Billy had said he was wearing–which was even short-sleeved, but it was available from a member of the crowd:

What Richard also realized–as he considered this further–was that, in order to make the alteration subtle enough to by and large escape casual detection, they needed to use elements that were present in the original photograph, especially if they could thereby solve more than one problem at a time.  He conjectured–and the fit is too perfect for Richard to be wrong–that they had take the shirt and tie off of the man wearing the Fedora–who looks a great deal like Jack Ruby–and shift it to conceal the shoulder they wanted to obscure, while moving the image of a woman and child in front of him:

While we have not figured out where the woman holding the child was found, since it is no longer in the extant image, we cannot resolve that question. But no doubt it was there originally, since the texture, focus, and other qualities of the image would have given the fabrication away, had they not used original material from the same approximate location. Here is another way in which the shift may have been made, where both appear to accommodate the crucial desideratum of covering up Doorman’s shirt and, we believe, removing Jack Ruby from close and visible proximity to a dark place:

For those who do not know the natty dresser who went by the name “Jack Ruby”, here is a photograph of him at the Friday evening press conference, where he does not appear to have changed his clothes.  Jack and Lee knew each other, not only in Dallas but also in New Orleans.  Beverly Oliver has told me how she had come to Jack’s Carousel Club after her own performance as a singer at another near-by night club, when Jack called her over and introduced her to “Lee Oswald of the CIA”.  That they would be in close proximity at the TSBD is not really that surprising, since Jack was not doubt also keeping tabs on Lee.

When you reinsert Billy in his short-sleeved, red-and-white vertically stripped shirt, then the series of moves that those who were altering Altgens6 appear to have made are represented here, where the original obfuscation of the face and the shirt that I surmised must have been Lee Oswald were more probably required to obliterate the distinctive shirt that Billy was wearing, which, had it surfaced early on, would have given the game away.  I therefore believe that Richard has done a brilliant job of reconstruction of how the original was converted into the anomalous image we have available today:

A residual issue, which Ralph Cinque has been relentlessly pursuing, is how the Lovelady impostor was introduced into footage that was purportedly made in the Dallas Police Department, which appears to have been done to reinforce the impression that Billy Lovelady was wearing a checkered shirt that day rather than his red-and-white vertically striped shirt, where you can see the impostor in the crowd outside the TSBD shortly after the shooting and in the footage from the DPD on the right hand side, but where the differences between him and Billy Lovelady even extend to their ears:

Ears are as distinctive as fingerprints, which has left all of us astonished that the members of The Education Forum who were opposing us so furiously would not even acknowledge were distinct.  The gross differences in their appearance even caused me to describe the impostor as looking like a gorilla, while Billy himself had a relatively normal and even passive appearance.  But that Lee Oswald was on the steps of the depository must not be allowed to make its way into the public domain as the simplest possible proof that our government has been lying to us for 50 years about the death of JFK.

James H. Fetzer, a former Marine Corps officer, is McKnight Professor Emeritus at the University of Minnesota Duluth and a columnist for Veterans Today, where his most recent studies of the assassination of JFK can be found.  [NOTE: This is one in a series of articles being republished since veterans today.com deleted them in a dispute with its Senior Editor, Gordon Duff, about which I have since written several articles.]