To expand on John McAdams' comment about Buddy Walthers' remarks that
appeared in the Waco newspaper on 12/14/67, here are additional excerpts
from that article:
[Quote On:]
"DALLAS (UPI) ---- A deputy sheriff who appears in a picture which New
Orleans Dist. Atty. Jim Garrison claims shows a federal agent picking up a
bullet near the Kennedy assassination site said Wednesday [12/13/67] he
doubted the object was anything of the kind.
"It was nothing significant," said Dallas deputy Buddy Walthers. "If it
had been a bullet, it would have been significant."
Walthers appears, standing alongside a uniformed Dallas policeman and
watching another man in civilian clothes picking something up from the
grass near the assassination site.
Garrison produced the picture on a television program in Dallas last week,
along with another showing the unidentified man holding something in his
hand and walking away. The New Orleans district attorney said the man was
picking up a 45-caliber bullet.
[...]
"This city officer and I were standing by watching this man pick up
something," Walthers said. "It was what appeared to be blood. You've seen
blood that has hit grass. If it was anything it was a piece of skull. It
was nothing significant. If it had been a bullet, it would have been
significant."
Walthers said the photograph was taken about 10 minutes after the
assassination. At the time, he was not sure anybody had been wounded
though the blood indicated somebody had been.
Immediately after the three shots and the President's car had roared off,
Walthers started looking for whoever fired the shots. It occurred to him
that a man who had just shot at the President would not walk around
carrying a rifle, so he started looking for evidence.
"If he (man in the photograph) had found a bullet, he certainly would have
yelled, 'Look, a bullet!' or something like that," Walthers said. "Because
a bullet was what we were looking for.""
[End 12/14/67 Newspaper Quotes.]
So, unless there are other interviews with Buddy Walthers that indicate
otherwise, it would appear that it's not a correct assumption to say that
Walthers HIMSELF ever picked up a bone fragment in Dealey Plaza on
11/22/63. Because Walthers is quite clear in that Waco newspaper article
when he said this -- "This city officer and I were standing by watching
this man pick up something."
So I'm wondering where the story came from which suggests that Walthers
himself actually picked up the bone fragment? ~shrug~
But that inaccuracy (re: Walthers himself handling the object that was
picked up) is not nearly as important when compared to what Walthers
revealed about the object that was apparently picked up by somebody else
in Dealey Plaza. It's clear from Walthers' 1967 statements that the object
was surrounded by BLOOD, which would indicate the likelihood that the
object being retrieved was a skull (bone) fragment from President
Kennedy's head rather than being a bullet of any kind.
But I'm a little puzzled as to why Deputy Walthers would think that
finding a chunk of the President's head on the ground could be classified
as being "nothing significant". It would seem to me that finding a portion
of JFK's head lying in the grass would rise to the level of at least
"somewhat significant", wouldn't you think?
But I suppose when compared to finding a BULLET in the grass right after a
Presidential assassination attempt, perhaps the discovery of merely
finding a piece of skull in the Plaza could be looked upon as being of
LESS significance to the police officers who were searching for ballistics
type evidence at that time. ~shrug~
Now, the question remains: What happened to that skull fragment? And why
wasn't it handed over to somebody for further examination and testing
after it was found in Dealey Plaza? Those questions remain unanswered, and
can probably never be answered. But from Buddy Walthers' statements that
we find in that Waco article, I'm satisfied that if an object was
recovered from the grass in Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963, that object
was very likely NOT a "45-caliber bullet", as suggested by Jim Garrison.
(And I wonder how Garrison could possibly know exactly what caliber the
bullet was? He must have some great eyes.)
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