Rousing the ghosts of Kennedy, Oswald et al

ROGER FRANKLIN on the latest in a long line of breakthroughs from a grassy knoll in Dallas.

NEW YORK - At a glance, the latest "evidence" that says Lee Harvey Oswald was not the sole assassin of John F. Kennedy is less than inspiring: two furry caterpillars of ragged ink that spike and shuffle across twin strips of graph paper.

They look like matching printouts from a pair of synchronised lie detectors, or, maybe, the seismic records of an earthquake. And perhaps they may yet turn out to be both of those things.

But this week, when the quarterly journal of Britain's Forensic Science Society published a new analysis of Dallas Police Department tapes that were accidentally recorded on that mild and bright autumn day in November 1963, the fuzzy lines of acoustic analysis were a necromancer's charms to summon the troubling ghosts of Kennedy, Oswald and their supporting cast of riddles and enigmas.

According to the author of this latest report, assassination researcher D.B. Thomas, those ragged lines prove what conspiracy buffs and many average citizens have believed almost since the moment that pieces of the President's skull were sprayed on to the boot lid of his limousine: there were four shots, not three, and one of them really did come from the infamous grassy knoll.

Almost 37 years after the murder and the Warren Commission's 26-volume subsequent explanation that Oswald acted alone, Thomas' dense and technical, 4000-word research paper may, or may not, prove the existence of a conspiracy - though that is certainly the author's implied conclusion. The experts, most of them self-appointed, will have to debate the issue, just as they have done for nearly four decades

But in the meantime, Thomas' findings make compulsive reading.

The first thing to note is that there is nothing really new about the case that Thomas advances. The 1978 United States House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations also placed a sniper on the grassy knoll when its three-man team of audio analysts officially endorsed the suspicion that at least two guns had been trained on Kennedy.

But then, a couple of months later, pro-Warren congressmen ordered the US National Institute of Science to re-examine the tapes, which had been recorded by a pair of motorcycle cops who had inadvertently left their microphones open while escorting the motorcade. After several months of research, the NIS experts ruled that the "gunshots" were nothing more than random pops of static.

Like all the other questions that defy easy answers - from the truth about Oswald's sojourn in the Soviet Union, to his ability to squeeze off three shots from a badly scoped, bolt-action rifle in less than seven seconds - the issue lapsed into an uneasy limbo.

To the true believers, the NIS was just one more cog in the giant conspiracy machine.

Now comes Thomas, who resurrects the original contention by matching the two original tapes with a test audio of gunshots recorded in Dealey Plaza by the congressional panel in 1978. Thomas, who was variously described in press reports as British, an engineer, and a forensic audio expert, claims that one of the police tapes was distorted because it was recorded on a machine that was running slow. By speeding it up and cueing the tapes so that common background noises match - things like sirens and the dispatchers' comments - he claims to have established with "96.3 per cent probability" that the fourth and fatal bullet came from a second shooter.

As he lays it all out in his paper, it is a neat and dovetailed scenario - so tightly organised and argued it is difficult for the layman to disagree.

But then come the nagging doubts to niggle at the mind of anyone who has followed the ebb and flow of all the past theories, many of which also seemed iron-tight at the time they were first floated.

Consider, for example, the speculation about the slain President's missing brain. To conspiracy spotters, its disappearance from the archive of official evidence proved that the fix was in. It had been spirited away, they said, because any objective evaluation of the damage would surely prove that the fatal bullet entered from the front. For years that theory was an article of faith among Warren Commission sceptics - until it was revealed that Bobby Kennedy had taken and disposed of his brother's brain.

Or what about the President's tie? According to another hot theory, that was supposed to represent the conclusive demolition of the Warren Commission's credibility, the third bullet - the so-called magic one that passed through Kennedy, changed course, and fractured the right wrist of Texas Governor John Connally - bore traces of fabric from Kennedy's clothing. If that was the case, if there was a trace of silk from Kennedy's tie on the tip, it could not have passed through the President's skull.

So in 1998, the FBI authorised a new series of tests. The result: the bullet was contaminated with human tissue and paper dust from an envelope in which it had been stored. But of silk, there was not a trace. The conspiracists subsided again to await the next eruption of suppressed "evidence," which Thomas has now given them.

But here is the rub: While the initial reports depicted Thomas as an expert of unimpeachable credentials, the truth turns out to be rather different.

First, he is neither an Englishman nor an acoustics expert but an American agricultural researcher from Texas who specialises in insect-borne diseases affecting sub-tropical cash crops.

When Thomas' revelations have been dissected, there is not much chance his report will emerge as the final and definitive word. There will still be scores of reasons to doubt the Warren Commission and to wonder how Oswald, a man whom the Marines classified as a poor marksmen, could have been so quick and accurate with his $US20 ($49) rifle.