The Third Bullet

A Note on Method

Readers should be assured that I’ve made a good-faith effort to play fair by the data established in The Warren Commission Report, Case Closed by Gerald Posner, and Reclaiming History by Vincent Bugliosi. Lee Harvey Oswald is always where those volumes say he was, and he always does what they say he did. All “conspiratorial business” takes place in times uncovered by any of the foregoing works. In my effort to construct a legitimate alternate narrative to the WC, I alter no known facts in order to make my argument tighter. I do reserve the novelist’s right to reinterpret motive and reason.

For a demonstration of my method, take as an example the shooting from the Book Depository and Oswald’s last run. I accept as factual the following: that he took three shots, that he cocked a last live cartridge into his chamber, that he walked across the ninety feet of the sixth floor, rifle in hand, that he hid the rifle at the head of the stairway down, that he escaped north up Elm and took a bus south down Elm, then a cab to his roominghouse on North Beckley in Oak Cliff, where he secured his revolver. Fifteen minutes later and a mile distant, he shot Officer Tippit, including a coup de grâce to the head. He was arrested in the Texas Theatre fifteen or so minutes after that. The Warren Commission, Posner, and Bugliosi agree on that.

To that historical record, I added motives and reasonable conjectures – that he planned to shoot when Kennedy was just below the sixth-floor window but somehow botched the opportunity; that he hurried all three shots at a diminishing target (exacerbating exponentially the likelihood of a miss on his last shot); that he was driven by a more pungent fear of his betrayers than he was of law enforcement, which drove him to an extremely foolhardy trip through the assassination zone to recover his .38; that he administered the final brain shot to Officer Tippit out of rage at his betrayal.

I should also add that all the firearms and reloading data in the book have been tested by myself and colleagues; it is possible to fire a Carcano bullet from the .264 Winchester Magnum case in a Model 70, with great velocity and accuracy. (NOTE: Firing a jacketed .267 Carcano bullet throught a .264 bore is not a recommended reloading practice, and the fact that we were able to do it without incident does not mean you will.) There are some tweaks I purposely left out to keep non-gun culture people from slipping into a coma, but in general, it is easily accomplished as I have described it.

I should add that I have deliberately avoided conspiracy books and have stayed out of assassination-community culture in hopes of not inadvertently picking up somebody else’s intellectual property. If I have accidentally absorbed something by osmosis or random white noise, I do apologize. I mean to steal no one’s bread.

I should also add that I made no inquiries into the state of the Abercrombie & Fitch firearms records and my account of their location and disposition is entirely fictitious.