THE MAN WHO DIDN’T TALK

And other tales from the new Kennedy assassination files

When Congress reopened the JFK case in 1976, congressional investigators asked the best-known acoustic scientist in the country, James E. Barger, to analyze them. He arranged a series of test shots in Dealey Plaza and used recordings of these shots to compare with signals on the DPD recordings. He found a series of sound impulses that he thought might be gunfire. The sequence was 10 seconds long and it occurred almost exactly two minutes into the motorcycle segment, at about 12:30. The sequence contained five or six impulse patterns which he thought might be gunshots.

Applying his techniques of echo correlation, Barger concluded that Channel I contained five impulses probably caused by the gunshots, with a 50 percent probability that one shot came from the grassy knoll in front of the president. The HSCA asked two other nationally known acoustic scientists, Mark Weiss and Ernest Aschkenasy, to examine Barger's data, focusing on the alleged from the grassy knoll. They found that the pattern of impulses closely matched the pattern from the Dictabelt. They concluded there was a 95 percent probability of a shot from the grassy knoll.

This finding confirmed what a substantial minority of the people at the crime scene thought. The book reviewers don't seem to know it but at the very least a significant minority of eyewitnesses thought at least one gun shot came from in front of JFK's motorcade. One of the more judicious surveys of statements given by people in the crowd in the vicinity of the motorcade found that 40 out of 103 bystanders said that at least some of the gunfire came from behind a stockade fence atop the knoll. The tally was done by John McAdams, a Marquette University professor who runs a reliable website that debunks JFK conspiracy theories.

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One of the people who thought a shot might have come from the knoll was Dallas County Sheriff Bill Decker, who was riding in the presidential motorcade. His voice can be heard on Dallas Police Department recordings, shouting, "Get your men up there" -- meaning the area around the stockade fence -- "and hold everything secure." This certainly corresponds to what Bill Newman said. In 1963, he was a 22-year-old apprentice electrician standing with his wife and two children waving at the Kennedys. He was about 20 feet away from Kennedy when the fatal bullet hit. Today, Bill Newman is a 65-year-old retired electrician and grandfather and he's still saying the same thing. "I think the shot came from behind me," he told me, "because of the way Kennedy was thrown backward."

The timing of the alleged shots on Dictabelt #10 was first questioned by an alert JFK assassination researcher named Steve Barber. When the Dallas Police Department recordings first surfaced in the late 1970s, Gallery magazine recorded them onto acetate disks inserted into every copy of the July 1979 issue. Barber slapped his on a turntable and listened to the passage when the gunshots supposedly occurred. He heard faint traces of a voice that was identified as that of Dallas County Sheriff Bill Decker who was traveling with the motorcade in front of the presidential limousine. Decker could be heard ordering his men to go to the railroad yard behind the stockade fence on the knoll. "Hold everything secure until we can get homicide investigators up there," he shouted.

As O'Dell puts it: "The impulses Don says are shots cannot possibly be from the sound of gunfire because they occurred at a point on the tape that is simultaneous to police officers already reacting to the gunfire."

The Order of the Data

Don Thomas is not shaken. He still believes in his 2001 article and its politically loaded conclusion: that Dictabelt #10 captures the sound of a muzzle blast of a gun fired at Kennedy's limousine from the grassy knoll.

"We don't know exactly how the 'hold everything secure' transmission was deposited on the Channel I," he explains. "But we do know there are of lot of skips and jumps caused by the stylus of the dictagraph bouncing out of the groove. You also have to remember the two channels are not synchronized: Channel I is recording constantly from the open microphone on the motorcycle while Channel II is voice activated." This makes determining the timing of all sounds on the recording difficult, if not impossible.

Thomas thinks his critics are straining. "Think about the reality of what they're saying," he says. "They say the grassy knoll shot identified on the recordings is found at the exact moment that Assistant Chief Decker is saying, 'Hold everything secure until we can get homicide investigators up there.' So that must not be the sound of a gunshot. Decker is telling his men, get your ass up on the knoll and see what happened. And these guys are citing that as proof there was no shot from the knoll."

Thomas admits he cannot say exactly how the "hold everything secure" came to be recorded almost simultaneously with the alleged gunshots, but he says Garwin's paper does not change his mind. James Barger, still one the nation's top acoustic scientists, stands by his original findings. "They're talking about corroborative evidence," he says of his critics. "I'm talking about core evidence. I'm trying to explain the five impulses that are on the Dictabelt. We've spent a lot of time debating the timing issues and we'll probably spend a lot more. What they're not talking about is the diabolical coincidence that those impulses matched Barger's recreation both in time and space."

Because the sound matches that Barger found in his Dealey Plaza sound experiment followed a certain pattern, there is an "order of the data" argument that Thomas believes is his trump card. Here's how he puts it in a recent online essay for www.maryferrell.org.