The grassy knoll

S. M. Holland, a railroad signal supervisor standing on the triple underpass, told the Commission he heard four shots and saw “a puff of smoke came out about 6 or 8 feet above the ground right out from under those trees.” [1]

Lee Bowers, in a railroad tower behind the knoll, said he noticed two men near the fence before the shots: one middle-aged and heavy-set in a white shirt, one younger in a plaid shirt or jacket. They were 10 or 15 feet apart and did not seem to be together. He heard three shots and said they came either from the Depository or from near the mouth of the underpass; he could not tell which. [2]

At the time of the shots he saw “something out of the ordinary, a sort of milling around, but something occurred in this particular spot which was out of the ordinary, which attracted my eye for some reason, which I could not identify.” He told the Commission about three cars that drove into the closed parking area before noon. [2]

The House committee’s count of 178 witnesses found 21 who placed shots at the knoll. Holland and others ran to the fence afterward and found footprints and people but no gunman. [3]

The House committee’s photographic panel enhanced the Willis, Moorman, Nix and Zapruder pictures of the knoll. In Phil Willis’s slide No. 5, taken about frame 202, it found an object “most probably an adult person standing behind the wall,” the concrete retaining wall, not the fence. A later Willis slide no longer showed it. Near the hands was a straight-line feature, but the image was so blurred that the panel “could reach no conclusion as to the existence of a rifle.” [1]

The panel found no evidence of a person in the Moorman Polaroid at the retaining wall, did not enhance its fence area, and said that photo should be re-examined in light of the acoustics. It concluded there was “no definitive visible evidence of any gunmen” in or around Dealey Plaza, “nor was any evidence discerned of a flash of light or puff of smoke.” The “classic gunman” shape in the Nix film was judged light and shadow. [1]

In 1982 Gary Mack and Jack White enhanced a copy of the Moorman photo and saw what they called “Badge Man,” a figure that seemed to wear a police uniform, behind the fence. It reached a wide audience in the 1988 British documentary The Men Who Killed Kennedy. Teams at MIT, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Itek found the photo not sharp enough to say. Researcher Dale Myers calculated that a real person of average size at that spot would have to be 32 feet behind the fence and 4.5 feet off the ground. [2]

Photos show a man standing near the Stemmons Freeway sign who opened a black umbrella as the motorcade passed, on a clear day. Theories called it a signal or a dart gun. [1]

In 1978 Louie Steven Witt came forward and testified to the House committee with the umbrella. He said he brought it “to heckle the President’s motorcade,” because a co-worker had told him the umbrella was a sore spot with the Kennedy family. Committee members explained the reference: Joseph Kennedy, as ambassador in London, had backed Neville Chamberlain, whose umbrella became the symbol of appeasement. “Being a conservative-type fellow,” he said, he wanted to do “a little heckling.” [1]

In the Zapruder film Kennedy’s head moves slightly forward at frame 313 and then sharply back and to the left. To most viewers that looks like a shot from the front. [1]

The House committee asked a wound-ballistics expert, Dr. Alfred Olivier, who had shot goats, gelatin-filled skulls and melons for the Army. He testified that animals “fell toward the weapon as” often “as fell away,” that the slight first movement was “in the correct direction if the bullet came from the book depository,” and that “most of the movement you see of the President moving backwards and his body moving sideward I believe is a neuromuscular reaction.” The committee concluded the motion was “not fundamentally inconsistent with a bullet striking from the rear.” [1][2]

In 2018 physicist Nicholas Nalli published a peer-reviewed model finding the motion consistent with a high-speed bullet from behind. Critics replied that the model depends on its assumptions. [3][4]

The pathology panel, with one dissent, found no entry wound in the front of the head. [1]