End of November. The limo is traveling NNW on Houston St., turning to SW on Elm. The sun wouldn’t have been a problem for either shot.
There were/are some trees along the west edge of Houston that might have prevented Oswald from getting an early bead on the president’s limo after it had turned onto Houston. There are also some trees between the book depository and Elm that might have interfered with shooting shortly after the turn onto Elm. All speculation on my part, of course. I’m sure someone has worked it out in painstaking detail. Though of course, according to this, the trees are rather larger now than they were back in 1963.
What’s more, if you look at the geometry of the situation from the map you included (& Google Maps imagery of the area), the motion of the limo up Houston would create a greater apparent angular speed with respect to where Oswald was than in the case of the shots he ended up taking when the limo was on Elm. So it may well have been easier for him to aim where the assassination eventually happened.
And, of course, there’s the psychological aspects. He might have taken a while to psych himself up to point of pulling the trigger to end another human’s life, and only steeled himself to shoot at the point when he thought his chance was slipping away. (That, by the way, is pure speculation on my part.)
But I argue this only to point out that just because a reason seems like a bad one in hindsight doesn’t mean it wasn’t a motivation for how things came out. People tend to diminish Oswald’s possible reasons for doing things the way he did to bolster their conception of a conspiracy - “a real assassin in LHO’s position would have done it this way, so LHO must have not done it” - but without more direct understanding of his rationale (we can’t ask him or cross-examine him) we’re limited to our own suppositions, which simply aren’t definitive. Either way. Which is why, IMHO, it’s better to look at what happened than to ask why something else didn’t happen.
This is a good way of stating it. There were literally a million different permutations of things that I personally could have done from the time I woke up at 6am until now (8:53am). I ultimately did the one thing that I ultimately did. Maybe there are good questions as to why some other of those permutations were not taken, but in the end, one of those millions has to be what happened. That doesn’t mean anything nefarious.
A question that has just occurred to me: why did Ruby have his gun on him the day he killed LHO? Did he usually walk around armed?
Well, it is Texas.
That’s not really an answer, but it’s one of those questions that has a million possible answers and the only one who could really tell us is in no position to do so (and, by most accounts, liable to give a self-serving, self-aggrandizing answer even then).
IIRC, he transported a lot of money from his nightclubs to the bank so he got in the habit of regularly carrying a gun.
In addition, I believe that he was at home and got a phone call from a former dancer at one of his clubs who gave him a sob story saying how she needed money. Ruby drove across town to the Western Union office (which just happened to be next to the city jail) and wired her some money. It was only the that he noticed the commotion around the jail and went in to see Oswald being transported.
This alone destroys any theory that Ruby killed Oswald to silence him. But for the phone call and the fortuitous timing of Oswald’s transport, Ruby is nowhere near Oswald.
A likely story! (Sorry, I couldn’t resist.)
Ruby ran a sleazy strip joint above a cheap barbecue joint in a bad neighborhood. He dealt in cash. According to one story, he had $900 cash locked in his car trunk the day of the shooting. I’d be more surprised if he didn’t carry a gun.
Conspiracies can bend time and space! That’s the first secret you learn when you sign up for your conspiracy handbook!
It’s not so much a handbook as it is a “Choose Your Own Adventure” book.
That’s genius, man!
I always thought the first secret you learn in conspiracy handbook is…YOU DON’T TALK ABOUT CONSPIRACY HANDBOOK!!
Everybody in a conspiracy eventually talks.
It’s kind of necessary, if you think about it. People who never discuss a plot to commit a crime can’t exactly conspire - it’s sort of fundamental to the process. So once the crime is done, now we think that they are going to be able to successfully do an about face, and become all quiet about their plans? Puh-leaze.
As for Oswald, as I’ve been digging through stuff in response to this thread, I came across a darkly amusing anecdote:
Apparently, Marina, his wife, is still alive, and if you asked her today whether Lee killed Kennedy, she’d likely say no, because a lifetime of having people gaslight your life will do that to you.
But in the moment she was a very young mother to two baby daughters and the victim of an abusive and erratic husband. The abuse was so obvious that a friend let her stay in the suburbs, apart from Lee, who only visited on weekends.
Lee Harvey Oswald, though, was such a loner with no connections that he involved her in his deranged ideas. She, for example, was the one who took the infamous picture of him holding a rifle and communist leaflets.
Anyway, at one point in the months before the assassination, he got the idea to hijack a plane and fly it to Cuba.
Since Lee wasn’t able to conspire with anybody, he told Marina - who was pregnant with a baby on her hip - that she had to help. He’d sit in the front of the plane, and at some point he’d get up and threaten the pilot with a gun, demanding they redirect to Cuba.
Meanwhile, she’d be sitting in the back of the plane. When he corralled the pilot, she was to get up with a gun of her own and tell the people to remain calm while the plane changed trajectories.
Marina laughed at Lee. Paraphrasing, she told him, “I don’t speak English. How exactly am I supposed to talk to this plane full of people?”
His plan was foiled.
And this is the person some people want to insist was part of some grand conspiracy to kill the president.
Why does hearsay like this seem to always pass muster, but any hearsay from someone that contradicts the official narrative gets mocked and otherwise attacked like there’s a personal vendetta against it? Funny how that works.
And this pretty much repeats the criticism I gave up thread (which was attacked with some lame out of context responses). For this statement to hold water it means that there is no such thing as a conspiracy that was not discovered yet. Is that your position?
Whoosh.
It is true, though, that your position equates to saying that as long as there is a secret in the world then every statement by everyone must be given equal probability.
If we put the two of them side by side and had to pick one, I know which I’d take.
In what universe is any of that “hearsay”? Those are documented facts supported by testimony and other documentary evidence (such as the time stamp at the Western Union office) and the fact that Ruby left his dog in the car.
Now, maybe you can say that was all part of the plan, leaving the dog in the car so it looks spontaneous. But the dancer can verify all of the reasons for needing the money and the steps taken and why she called Ruby when she did. And you could say that she was a mafia plant and that they coordinated that timing so it could be a reason to let Ruby off the hook, but then you look at other evidence such as the fact that Oswald’s transfer was delayed for unrelated reasons including Oswald himself, and you could say that was also part of the grand scheme.
But at some point (and IMHO way before that) you have to recognize reality. If given those facts, no jury in the country would convict Ruby of being a part of a conspiracy to silence Oswald.
Those are not equivalent, but I think you know that, and I’ve not made any claim like that.
Repeatedly in this thread the assertion is that conspiracies are impossible to keep secret because people talk. This is somehow treated as evidence that any supposed JFK conspiracy, ranging from the massive government cover up and collusion with the mob to something simple like a second person having discussed with, encouraged or financed Oswald in some minor way, is complete lunacy and IMPOSSIBLE because “everyone talks”. This doesn’t even pass the sniff test. Of course there are crimes in which conspirators never are caught and which people do in fact clam up. It’s an everyday challenge of every single gang crime, witnesses, victims and accomplices who will not talk to police. There are unsolved murders in every city and not all of them are “lone nuts”.
Am I howling at the moon because I think that using examples of known conspiracies as evidence that there could not possibly be an unknown conspiracy is a flawed argument? Yet it keeps being repeated as fact here. And no…this does not mean that I think one conspiracy proves another happened, so save that strawman for another time.
Perhaps my use of the term hearsay was imperfect, but the point stands. Oswald’s transfer was a scheduled event. There were national TV news cameras on site and millions of people watched it live. Lots of reporters we there ready and waiting. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to assume that Ruby did not exactly “stumble” upon the happening. Ruby also had been at the police station multiple times in the days that Oswald was held there. He impersonated a new reporter at another planned press event in which Oswald was interviewed and testified that he was armed then too.
I don’t even particularly believe that Ruby was involved in any conspiracy. Ruby comes across as a guy who was conspiracy minded in his own right at the time and was clearly more than a little wrapped up in Oswald. He confessed that the killing was in fact premeditated and was initially convicted on that which casts additional doubt on the idea that Ruby just stumbled upon the event and killed Oswald on some emotional outburst. Ruby repeatedly claimed that he had additional information to give to the Warren Commission. Maybe this is just a bit of gamesmanship on his part to avoid or delay the proceedings but it calls into question this narrative that it was just happenstance.
Ruby’s attorney states the details in a 1992 article: FILM DISTORTS TRUTH ABOUT JACK RUBY
Oswald’s transfer was a “scheduled event” and if Ruby had planned to kill him, he would have been hanging out at the police station a couple of hours earlier because the schedule did not happen as planned; it was delayed.
If you just take that fact alone, it makes a conspiracy with Ruby impossible, unless you believe that Ruby somehow knew of the internal delays inside the police department, largely caused by Oswald himself.
Totally unrelated, but I like those windows on the second floor. I know it’s a sleazy place, but it looks somehow grimly charming in a detective-novel kind of way.
Re: Omniscient-I’ll buy that Ruby wanted to kill Oswald for whatever reason and just lucked into it, but I don’t that there was any bigger idea or plot than that, sorry. What’s he get out of it?