Instead, photographs of the bullets have been made available to researchers. Researchers or investigators sometimes inquire about seeing the assassination bullets, but NARA officials rarely release them for physical examination. Edwin Walker and the two bullets that the FBI test-fired from Oswald’s rifle after the Kennedy assassination. These items are closely controlled by NARA experts, as are a bullet that the assassin Lee Harvey Oswald fired from the same rifle seven months earlier in his attempt to assassinate retired Maj. John Connally are housed at the National Archives in a secure and climate-controlled environment. In addition to many other items collected during the investigations that followed the assassination, the bullet and two bullet fragments that killed Kennedy and injured Texas Gov. Little did I know how intimate I would someday become with the physical objects that ended the president’s life. My own sadness was paired with the anxiety and sadness of my father and mother, who were concerned that the assassination might have been perpetrated by an enemy nation, and, if so, the NATO base where my father worked might be called upon to send out its fighter-bombers in retaliation. Thus, the outpouring of grief was probably as strong in Germany as it was in the U.S. It was typical to see his portrait in German households. response to East Germany building the Berlin Wall in 1961. President Kennedy was revered by the German populace, primarily due to the U.S. I was 8 years old, and my family lived in a village just outside the base. Air Force and was stationed at a USAF-NATO airbase. My family found out about it the next day via a Voice of America radio broadcast where we lived in West Germany. I distinctly remember where I was when I heard that President Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas on Nov. My former crime-laboratory supervisor at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives recommended me and our NIST forensic research team to help NARA preserve the JFK assassination bullets - by transforming them into a virtual form.Ī Bit of International and Personal History These were the bullet artifacts from the John F. However, what was not typical, and somewhat alien for me, was the setting: a secure room at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in College Park, Maryland.Īlthough the fired bullets were not unusual looking, they were extraordinary historically. These items were very typical of firearm evidence that I examined in my 30 years as a forensic scientist. Alongside the bullets were bullet fragments that revealed the contorted deformation of the lead and jacket metal when they expended a huge amount of energy upon impact. The gun-barrel rifling impressions on their sides were typical of a bullet fired from a military weapon: four grooves and the resulting ridges called lands - all these marks twisted toward the right by the barrel’s internal rifling. Their copper metal jackets had the dull color of a worn penny, giving testimony to their age. They were long, round-nosed rifle bullets.
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