ABC News will air a special this month examining the Kennedy assassination.
Using a computer imaging process roughly akin to video games, ABC News has constructed a forensic tableau that it says proves Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in assassinating President John F. Kennedy.
“What it does is prove unequivocally that Oswald was the only person in Dealy Plaza that day to fire,” ABC anchor Peter Jennings said Wednesday.
The digital reconstruction, created for the upcoming special “Peter Jennings Reporting: The Kennedy Assassination – Beyond Conspiracy,” was the result of a decade of work by author and animator Dale Myers.
Using maps, blueprints of Kennedy’s limousine, measurements, about 500 photographs and each frame of the 16mm amateur film shot by Abraham Zapruder in Dealy Plaza, Myers created a virtual reconstruction of the assassination that can be viewed from multiple viewpoints.
The technique is based on new imaging technology and is beginning to be applied as an evidentiary tool in courts. ABC said Myers’ assassination reconstruction was independently evaluated and endorsed by other forensic analysts.
By viewing the assassination from multiple perspectives, it is an “inescapable conclusion” that the shots that killed Kennedy and wounded Texas Gov. John Connally came from Oswald’s perch in the Dallas School Book Depository, said Tom Yellin, executive producer of the special.
“It answers the simple questions about the trajectory,” said Yellin, who ruled out any shots coming from the Grassy Knoll.
In the video re-creation, only Kennedy and Connally are shown in the open limousine they rode in Nov. 22, 1963. Their wives and spectators along the motorcade route were digitally removed to isolate focus on the shooting itself, but the degree of detail is still sobering, Jennings told The Charlotte Observer in a telephone interview from New York.
“It will be shocking to people to see it. It is not our intent to shock people or use this gratuitously,” he said.
“But in order to have people understand the point we’re making – that Oswald acted alone in Dealy Plaza that day, to use this to prove what we are able now to prove – this technique is indispensable,” he said. “I am amazed how the animation invokes the real event.”
Although the Warren Commission concluded in 1964 that Oswald acted on his own, the Kennedy assassination has been the focus of conspiracy speculation for four decades and has spawned about 500 books. Part of the reason for the public’s suspicion is because of government secrecy that for years shrouded details of the event, Jennings said.
For the two-hour Nov. 20 special, timed to coincide with the 40th anniversary of Kennedy’s death, ABC News interviewed about 70 people who were witnesses to the assassination or who knew Oswald or the man who killed him at police headquarters, Jack Ruby. Also interviewed were former CIA, FBI and KGB officials.
The network also examined newly declassified government files on the assassination, which comprise more than 4 million pages.
Prominent conspiracy theories examined by the network did not stand up to scrutiny, Yellin said. “Stuff that people refer to as evidence is often conjecture,” he said.
Some evidence cited by conspiracy theorists – including a police audio recording of the assassination – was found to be contradictory or wrong, Yellin said.
The so-called “magic bullet” theory, which holds that one bullet passed through both Kennedy and Connolly, will be examined in the special, Jennings said, but he would not disclose what conclusion was reached about it.
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Mark Washburn: (704) 358-5007; mwashburncharlotteobserver.com.
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AP-NY-10-31-03 1028EST
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