New JFK Footage Could Unveil More Answers

Footage of President John F. Kennedy being rushed to hospital as his life ebbed away could hold new clues to the unanswered questions that still swirl around his slaying.

Newly emerged film of the motorcade speeding down a Dallas freeway toward a hospital after he was fatally wounded was sold at auction last month for $137,500, Knewz.com reports.

Now academics are lining up to review the 10 seconds of celluloid for pointers that could shed new light on theories that Lee Harvey Oswald wasn’t the only shooter operating a rifle on that fateful day in November 1963.

A government official stated: “Everyone has an opinion on the JFK assassination and they don’t always match. There has been a lot of interest in the footage and now it has been sold, academics want to look through it frame by frame to see if there are any clues that point towards a second shooter.”

President Kennedy, Texas Gov. John Connally, and their wives were riding in a slow, open motorcade through Dallas when at 12:30 p.m., as the car turned onto Dealey Plaza, three gunshots rang out.

Kennedy and Connally were both shot. The car sped to a nearby hospital, where the president was pronounced dead and the governor treated for wounds.

Oswald was arrested as the suspected gunman and was himself shot to death days later.

President Lyndon Johnson appointed a commission, chaired by Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, to investigate the assassination.

The Warren Report concluded that Oswald had fired all three shots from a window on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, where he worked.

But the case was far from closed.

A man named Abraham Zapruder, one of thousands of people standing along the motorcade route that day in Dallas, captured the shootings on his 8mm home movie camera.

At 26 seconds and 486 frames, it would come to be one of the most thoroughly examined films in history—and a prime piece of evidence for the Warren Commission and the subsequent conspiracy theories.

At first, it was assumed that Kennedy and Connally had been hit by separate bullets.

But the Zapruder film threw a wrench in that notion. The Warren Commission’s analysts concluded that JFK was shot sometime between Frames 210 and 225 (a street billboard blocked Zapruder’s view at the crucial moment), while Connally was hit no later than Frame 240.

In other words, the two men were hit no more than 30 frames apart.

However, FBI tests revealed that Oswald’s rifle could be fired no faster than once every 2.25 seconds—which, on Zapruder’s camera, translated, to 40 or 41 frames.

In short, there wasn’t enough time for Oswald to fire one bullet at Kennedy, and then another at Connally.

The inference was inescapable. Either there were at least two gunmen—or Kennedy and Connally were hit by the same bullet.

The Warren Report argued the latter and the Magic Bullet Theory was born. Experts say the new find wasn’t necessarily surprising, even over 60 years after the assassination, and there could be more footage out there.”

These images, these films, and photographs, a lot of times they are still out there. They are still being discovered or rediscovered in attics or garages,” said Stephen Fagin, curator at The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, which tells the story of the assassination on Nov. 22, 1963.

RR Auction sold the 8 mm home film in Boston on Sept. 28.

It begins with Dale Carpenter Sr. just missing the limousine carrying the president and first lady Jacqueline Kennedy but capturing other vehicles in the motorcade as it traveled down Lemmon Avenue toward downtown.

The film then picks up after Kennedy has been shot, with Carpenter rolling as the motorcade roars down Interstate 35.”This is remarkable, in color, and you can feel the 80 mph,” said Bobby Livingston, executive vice president of the auction house.

The footage from I-35 — which lasts about 10 seconds — shows Secret Service Agent Clint Hill, who famously jumped onto the back of the limousine as the shots rang out, hovering in a standing position over the president and Jacqueline Kennedy, whose pink suit can be seen.

“I did not know that there were not any more shots coming,” Hill said

“I had a vision that, yes, there probably were going to be more shots when I got up there as I did.

“The shots had been fired as the motorcade passed through Dealey Plaza in front of the Texas School Book Depository, where it was later found that assassin Lee Harvey Oswald had positioned himself from a sniper’s perch on the sixth floor.

Mart.Carpenter’s grandson, James Gates, said that while it was known in his family that his grandfather had film from that day, it wasn’t talked about often.

So Gates said that when the film, stored along with other family films in a milk crate, was eventually passed on to him, he wasn’t sure exactly what his grandfather, who died in 1991 at age 77, had captured.

Projecting it onto his bedroom wall around 2010, the footage from I-35 played out before his eyes. “That was shocking,” he said.